Hey everyone,

As the discussions about custom faces flared up again, the moderation team sat together to brainstorm.
The result was, we will be allowing custom faces again. There however will be rules to that, which will be detailed later. We also talked about a curated custom faces mod, which was also discussed a few times. The result there was, we might explore that in the future to create custom faces which the vanilla custom face feature cannot cover.

Now the rules, you are allowed to use a custom face if the face does match all of the following rules:
- Does not contain hate group symbols, cropped ones also not allowed
- Does not contain shock images, cropped ones also not allowed
- Does not contain extreme political statements, from any political view
- Does not contain pornographic content, cropped also not allowed
- Does not contain obscene content, such as gore
- Does not contain targeted harassment at one or more of our members

In short, the rules are “Don’t be a ♥♥♥♥” and “Don’t be stupid”.
Moderation will enforce these rules. They will also hold the right to determine if a face is unfit at a later date. Players can report people with faces violating these rules via discord DM or directly in-game with the whisper menu. Violators of these rules will be banned, permanently. However, you can appeal once and only once.

This will be a trial period to see the how the community can handle this and hopefully not devolve into complete anarchy. The trial period will end after the OP on the 7th February.

Please note if you are creating a custom face, there is a hard 100kb limit. You cannot connect to the server with a face file larger than that.

-diwako

Hey everyone,

Corresponding with the major updates we're rolling out, we're also implementing some changes regarding server settings and requirements for Sunday, as well as further clarifications regarding some things.

Due to complaints about radio protocols and conduct, we are defaulting to half-duplex on ACRE. Mission makers will be allowed to config full-duplex radios if they so desire but we recommend you stick to half-duplex.

The requirements for Sunday main missions have been updated. The minimum structure is as follows:
* x1 platoon team with at least PLT and 2IC
* x2 rifle squads with min. 6 and max. 8 infantrymen, with 1 SQL equipped with a UHF radio. Rifle squads should all be identical no matter the amount of rifle squads
* at least one medic
* 343 PR Radio is now optional
Additional units may be whatever is required by the mission maker. Even if it's a 20 man seabob magnum water shadow 730 froggers unit
It is also important to clarify that only sunday 19:00 UTC is reserved for main operations. This serves to permit maximum attendance and quality for the mainline weekly events. Outside of that time slot you may run any blended mission you would like.

We are also introducing the @mission-tester role on the official discord, as well as the #mission_testing channel. It's a restricted channel where only MM's, MT's, and the admin team have access. This channel exists to make quality control of missions more organized, transparent and extensive. Beware of long commentary lists and spoilers galore. We are also figuring out the workflow but don't worry about that too much.
You cannot get the @mission-tester role on your own, you have to request access for it from the mod team. The reason behind this is that mission testing is srs bzns and we want people that absolutely feel like they're up for the task of digging through people's missions.

The changes above will take effect starting on the week of Monday 18th.

- Cro

hi guys, the repo updates are finally complete! Mission Makers are finally able to be sure of what content is final, and players can play with the finalized new content now.

While we're very excited to be announcing this, there is also a grand disappointment for some of you with this announcement. Please read diwako's write-up about it here, it concerns all of the community.[docs.google.com]

- Exabit

This announcement serves as a sort of extension of the prior one. For proper discussion, please consider joining the official group discord and post in the #2021-feedback-channel or contacting one of the moderators if you would like to talk about it in private.

With that out of the way, I'd like to talk to everyone about things not related to the modpack. Namely, pointers which were sent to us via repo shuffle surveys. The moderator team all felt that they're necessary to talk about and I'd like to hear more feedback & debate regarding them. As such, I've prepared a brief summary of each:

1) Promoting the group. The player numbers are somewhat stagnant, and we are relying exclusively on word of mouth and sharing of hot twitch clips. But we don't want to force people into doing that, so the question is, should we - and how would we - have to promote FPA online?

2) Reforming player staff. Simply put, a lot of moderators and Staff don't do anything, so revising the roles and maybe finding one more active moderator would help us immensely.

3) Curbing the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Generally there appears to be an atmosphere of lax moderation where we're assumed to be allowing certain "bad actors" to be detrimental to the group, even on Sundays.

4) Radio etiquette. The 148 radios have been a mess of bad comms, arguing, and occasional harassment. We think that a way of fixing that would be spawning admins and moderators with a 148 radio, use half-duplex, and making a comms guide.

5) More downtime missions. Prep missions, TVTs, and light coop missions like Domination and Antistasi.

6) Team building, AKA activities outside of ops & discord. The idea is to encourage social events outside of Arma. A short list of potential games has already been sent to me and I may share them later.

7) Mission Making Seminars 2: The Return. AKA I teach you how to make not bloated missions.

8) Relaxing Sunday requirements. We want to: allow squads to have between 6 to 8 players and a SL with radio, optional 343s and squad medics, and a requirement of only 2 squads and 1 medic per mission. This basically kills the template, except in preserving consistent squad sizes and NATO callsigns.

9) Stop treating FPA like a dictatorship. :helicopterman:

10) Remove Kerama. Discuss.

Hey everyone,

The Moderation Team and by extension The Staff and Big Boss Cuel Himself would like to wish everyone who is a part of this group a happy 2021. We are super thankful that you participated in all the operations which took place throughout 2020 and that we were able to keep you all entertained and invested in various insane military scenarios we threw at you over the course of the year.

Of course, that's not to say that things were all that well. The pandemic and all the miserable events that happened this year definitely took a toll on people. From a more relevant side of things, player burnout and Arma being Arma generally afflicted our playercount. Times are a changin', and so must we.

But more on policy in a while, lets talk about what you've all been waiting for: the repo shuffle.

First of all, i'd like everyone to welcome the Lingor, Ruegen and Virolahti terrains, as well as AH1 Cobra, Chest Rig Backpacks, RNT Trenches, SSh-68 Helmets, PLP Fences, IDF helmets, Merkava UGV, and the TB68M battle rifle mods to the Main repo. This represents an overall 3GB shift from Main to Blended.

However, I would like to explicitly set a point by saying that we've had to carefully manage and cut down on content size from the suggestions you've sent us. Unfortunately, not everything could make it in for a variety of reasons, often due to limited use cases, duplicates, problematic behavior, compatibility, etc. This has significantly narrowed our available content.

However we hope that you will be satisfied with what we've got lined up for you. Here's a very, very limited glimpses of newly added assets. thankfully we've had just enough room to include the Seabob™️ Magnum©️ Water Shadow 730™️ and the Titus APC MRAP thing. As a result, we've increased the total size requirement for all of our mods by 16GB.

Oh yeah and IFA made it in. Here's a very brief glimpse of the content that has been added, as well as a table of content.[cdn.discordapp.com]

Here is the full changelist.[cdn.discordapp.com]

Other tidbits:

• IFA Lite & Flying Legends added. Enjoy forever WW2 missions in Blended.
  
• CLAFGHAN IS BACK BABY!!!!
  
• HELVANTIS IS BACK BABY!!!!!!
  
• THIRSK IS BACK BABY!!!!!!
  
• ALIABAD IS BACK BABY!!!!!!
  
• Celle is back I guess. Also MBG Buildings 3 is added in as a dependency.
  
• Also Rosche. Rosche is back.
  
• There's also a new set of maps added in. Notable ones are Krasnorus, GOS N'Ziwasogo, Tria, Wake Island, and MULL OF KINTYRE WITH WW2 BAGPIPE MUSIC FOR IFA SCOTLAND FOREVERRR
  
• Service & Supply, a cold war US army gear mod is being added.
  
• YueMod is having all of its gear added into Blended.
  
• You can now fire missiles while prone.
  
• You can now have a partial map.
  
• You swim faster.
  
• You can see planes farther.
  
• You can now punch people.
  
• The AC130 is added so you can disintegrate unsuspecting insurgents.
  
• The Seabob™️ Magnum©️ Water Shadow 730™️
  
• We have went out of our way to fix the Unimog, Clafghan, map errors, LAGO melee, ACE3 animations, and the redundancies in S&S and IFA.

We're aiming to release this update sometime in January, when the stars are right, we have free time, and there aren't any earthquakes.