After-Action Review

Discussion in 'ARMA' started by Aspius, Jan 8, 2017.

  1. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    The after-action review is a process by which players discuss a mission or series of missions post-session, in order to share their experiences and tell their side of the story, see how the mission(s) played out and why things happened the way they did, as well as distill lesson-learned and find ways to improve teamwork and gameplay in the future.

    AARs are critical towards learning lessons as a group, as well as showing the variety of experiences that occur in each and every mission. Being able to see how the actions of a seemingly unrelated player impacted your experience in a mission is always rather interesting, and the lessons that can be learned from the group discussions that result can provide great material for players and leaders alike to learn from.

    After Action Review Goals
    • Tell fun and interesting "war stories". This is simply the act of telling what happened to you during the mission, what you saw, cool events, etc. "War stories" are conveyed through multiple media types:
      • Written descriptions of the events as you saw them. You don't have to be Shakespeare to write a good AAR - just think of what happened, what was neat about it all, and tell your story as best you can.
      • Screenshots taken during the mission.
      • Video footage.
    • Identify what was supposed to happen in given missions. What was the original plan, as you understood it? What was your role supposed to be?
    • Identify what actually ended up happening, what the difference between the expected and actual outcomes were, and attempt to figure out and explain why it happened the way it did, based on your observations. For example, was there a key event that seemed to make the battle shift course unexpectedly?
    • Distill lessons-learned from all of the above points. The intent with lessons-learned is to discover ways to improve future teamplay and coordination, based on the experiences of the session. This is your chance to tell everyone what you learned from the mission personally, as well as what you think the group could learn from things collectively.
    • Single out and praise those players who you felt did well. The idea here is to foster positive reinforcement and reward people for doing a good job in-game. Everyone benefits when praise and compliments are given in response to those things that help to make our playerbase such a great group of people to game with. A few kind words from a senior player make a great impression on a junior players and are worth their weight in gold.

    Some Tips


    • For everything negative, say something positive. It's always important to stress the good things that happened, without shying away from talking about mistakes and times where things didn't go as well as desired. As long as a healthy balance is maintained, positive results will come from the discussion.
    • Assume good faith. We're all in it to have fun! If someone says something that seems like it may be a bit harsh, take a step back and recognize that they're attempting to help, even if they may have worded things poorly. Give them the benefit of the doubt and things will generally go more smoothly.
    • Work to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust at all times. We want to have a playerbase that is as open and honest with each other as we are about our accomplishments as well as mistakes. Continuing to encourage this honesty fosters an atmosphere of trust that further enhances the feedback cycle.


     
    Last edited: Jan 21, 2017
  2. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR of the session on 21st January

    First i want to thank Trevnor, Ravandar and Tzeentch.

    I can say that i had alot of fun playing again. We started off with familiarising ourselvers with the controls again using the bootcamp mission. From there we moved on to play a mission called Stress Fortress which is about defending a location against waves of AI. Overall it went fine. It was our first session in a long time so it was mostly just about getting started again.

    Something that we could improve is making sure that everyone have all they need and are prepared to start before the designated time.

    Again, it was alot of fun and i'm looking forward to the next time.
     
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  3. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR about 4th March.

    We had a total of 7 players over the session.

    This was the first time we played something that wasn't a training mission or stress fortress. Overall, things went well. The bits that were will mostly solve themselves as we get back in Arma shape. The other bits will be through practice and experience.
     
  4. TheoC

    TheoC Made Some Friends Viking

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    Had a lot of fun with this, looking forward to the next one! I think the best "story" out of it was when we left our trucks in the open and they got blown up by a chopper...With Aspius almost inside. Lesson learned: take more AA.

    I think there were only a couple of things I would do differently: First, I personally had no idea what I was doing for the most part (other than killing the occasional baddy). I got turned around, got lost etc. This I am sure will go much more smoothly by simple experience, playing more of the game and being more familiar with the controls, but I do think it would be better if the loadouts were better set up from the start. I had too many things to choose from and ended up carrying some useless stuff for the most part. Also very silly was that when I went down, nobody could access the medikit in my trouser pocket (so lesson learned, keep that in the backpack at all times!).
    The other thing I wasn't crazy about was that in a separate scenario there seemed to be permadeath (or I was unlucky enough to get a headshot?) as the medic couldn't revive me once I was dropped. I think this is maybe too hardcore for our current level, and given how long missions seem to take, I think it would be an acceptable sacrifice for the simulation enthusiasts among us to at least let the less experienced players be revived by the medic (provided of course he is still alive to do so). I think that was just us diving into the scenario blind though, and anyway at that point I was pretty much arma'd out and had to go to sleep.

    Overall: 9/10 would ARMA again with you guys, looking forward to the 18th!
     
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  5. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR of session on the 15th April.

    Overall not much to say. There were 4 of us playing which was expected since it was easter as well.

    We warmed up with some CQB which included lots of dead hostages ( supposed to rescue) and lots of exploding cars.

    Second mission had us clearing a factory compound from terrorist. We had to focus alot more on this one as we only had 1 respawn each compared to the unlimited amount in the first mission. We did well, we were successful in clearing out all terrorist and only one of us had to use their respawn.

    Third mission and the main mission of the evening had us completing multiple tasks at Oreokastro. This mission also had my most memorable moment. Trevnor, even though he had no idea of how to do it, he got tasked with clearing mines. It was fun to watch him and he was successful without even dying once.
     
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  6. Trevnor

    Trevnor Tokin' Canadian Staff Member Jarl SC Huscarl

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    I was waiting for gunfire to erupt from those houses the entire time. Just cut me down while I was crawling on mah belly to get some mines
     
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  7. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR of the session on 22nd April.

    Things started off looking abit grim with some of our players being unable to make it. Once we reached the staring time there were 3 of us. We made an attempt at joining a king of the hill server. That didn't go so well, when we finally found a server it suffered from instability. When the server was stable enough we had issued reaching the AO due to players having cut off the road between our spawn and the AO. After the second complete crash we left to go back to our own thing as Benjamin the rogue was preparing to join us.

    The mission we loaded up was way longer then I thought so we only ended up completing the first part. Here we learnt something. Make sure that the objective is completed before we move on. This time it was my fault, I forgot to touch off the explosives. I got abit stressed as it was getting late and we were taking way to long loading up supplies that we were most likely not going to need. There is nothing wrong with making sure you have enough supplies but we need to get better at taking the mission in account for how much supplies to take.

    The lessons that we can take from this is making sure that missions are completed and that we need to get better at managing our supplies.

    It's always fun to play with you guys and even more fun to see more people joining us in the form of Benjamin the rogue. Hopefully he will join us more in the future.
     
  8. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR of 20th May

    This session looked very promising at the start with 7 people ready to play. However the first hour ended up with alot of problems. For me it ended up being a learning experience so things should be better in the future. As we approached the 1,5 hour mark we took a 10 min break. Up until this break things had not been going well, we had suffered alot from server and scenario issues. The break ended up being a restart and afterwards it went much better.

    As the session was coming towards a close we joined a King of the Hill server. First server suffered alot from vehicle spamming with artillery, tanks and gunships. It made it difficult to do anything so we switched over to a server that was infantry only. In my opinion, that was alot better. We suffered abit from snipers there but that is to be expected when you take control of one of the towers that can clearly be seen from everywhere.

    In short, the start was bad while the ending was good. Next time we will try to make sure that the entire thing is good.
     
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  9. MostlyHarmless

    MostlyHarmless Master of Recruits Staff Member Jarl SC Huscarl

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    As people left the King of the Hill server was getting a bit tiring so a number of us bailed and went to a wasteland server that we used to play on ages ago. We ended up having more people join back in and managed to hold a small town for several hours while wrecking anything that came by. Currently Fless has been back at it most of the day and I'm about to rejoin again for the second time today to continue our shenanigans.
     
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  10. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    AAR of 5th August.

    first campaign mission:
    I enjoyed it. First time i played as the zeus properly. So it was a learning experience for me. Some things took longer then planned plus a few mistakes here and there (Which some got to see) but i learnt from it and hope to do better in the future.

    For the second mission which was just a random mission where we were hunting for a communication device. Took time but we eventually found the objective. All it took was me climbung to the roof of the tallest building. I looked out over the city and saw a tall radio antenna on top off a roof that did not look like it belonged there. So i ran up to the house with the radio antenna, i entered and there was the objective. Let's mention the fact that someone had previously entered the building, killed a hostile, walked past the objective and out on the other side :commissar:
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2017
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  11. Flessar

    Flessar Well Liked Viking

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    Fuck you, I wasn't the only one.
     
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  12. Aspius

    Aspius Well Liked Hirdman

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    First time i played that mission and found it in a room. I stopped, looked at it and went: "What is that?". I checked the mission description, looked at it again, fired a shot at the screen and got mission complete.