Post by SYN_Jedders on Feb 17, 2011 19:41:03 GMT
Latest edition of Camelf*g featuring SYNDICATE:
Meet the Squadron: The Syndicate
Their name needs no introduction. Yet, while you've more than likely flown on their server at least once, you may be unaware of the squadron — and most importantly: the people behind The Syndicate. Last week, I took the liberty of taking up some of their precious flying time to have a friendly chat with them.
Syndicate, TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER!
THE HANRIOT f*g: Can you tell me about The Syndicate squadron history in a few words?
Jedders: Syndicate is a group of people that came together firstly as a first person shooter clan right about 1999 and is still going strong. Some of those people that were in that particular starting group are still with us today. We have 75 members past and present all told. Some of whom we almost don't see at all, some of whom are very active still. It's a group of likeminded individuals that have taken up enjoying flightsims predominantly.
THF: When did you guys get involved with Rise of Flight? What else were you flying?
Jedders: Repent and I got into Rise of Flight from release. Slowly but surely, the other guys started to follow in. Most of us came in when the multiplayer side of it became good, because many of the earlier members were Il-2 Sturmovik flyers. We were very used to the dedicated server dogfight form of multiplayer, instead of coop mode.
THF: Speaking of dedicated servers, how do you deal with running the server, knowing fully well that Rise of Flight is very resource hungry. Can you keep up with it for a long time to come, especially considering the financial picture?
Per: We're all stinking rich and sexy.
Jedders: We have to underline two people who look after the server. There's obviously Bliss, who set the thing up. He has been the driving force behind it. We come from an Il-2 background and we did have a server, with only mixed success because there were already established servers ran by well-organised groups. What Bliss immediately saw was an opportunity to grow The Syndicate by having a good server product. So early on, with multiplayer becoming Dogfight-oriented, he immediately took the bull by the horns and set the server up. He did all of that off his own butt. He has a very high quality server based off Chicago straight on fiber optic. It's right on the backbone itself. It's very expensive for us to run it.
We could run 20 first person shooter games off our server. We're only running one or two Rise of Flight games on it right now. We will be looking to run two Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover games on a different server, which is currently sitting idle waiting to be used for that as well as our new website.
So it's really much Bliss and that's one thing for running a server. It also takes someone to then look at the missions and create missions and we are so lucky to have Vander. He must really take the credit for most of the missions on the server and the push towards realism.
Faz: I met Vander six years ago when we joined the Joint-Ops program for Il-2. Vander made me aware at that point that he had been active in motor racing games before he got into flightsimming. He's a pretty technical guy who comes from an engineering background and he's always been into programming missions. We had a regular night where we would come together with a couple of other guys and make missions for Il-2. We bought Rise of Flight the minute it came out and Vander got straight under the hood with the mission builder. I'm not sure how we bumped into the Syndicate guys, we got taken into the fold slowly and here we are.
THF: On the topic of recruitment, can you tell us about how the recruitment of new players happens?
Mugue: Yeah, what do we do nowadays, do we just wait for people to come in here?
Jedders: We don't have an active recruiting format. We find that if someone flies in the server regularly, it isn't necessarily because they want to join The Syndicate and nor do we go looking into other servers for recruits. But it's evident that if people share the same sense of humour and make it obvious to us that they are interested, someone will quickly make contact with you.
Per: When I bumped into the Syndicate guys it was in Wings over Europe back in the Il-2 days. I was so pissed with them because I thought they were kill-stealing all the time so I got into quite a quarrel with them. Jedders recruited me right away!
MrWolf: I can't remember actually. I loved the Syndicate Rise of Flight server. I was flying there a lot and one day we just started talking.
Orion: Quite frankly, I came across Syndicate because it was one of the most populated servers in Il-2. I didn't know what I was doing and my first thought was: go in there and somebody might give me a hand. Turns out these guys have been more than helpful. Every time I asked one of them, they were willing to give me a hand. You could tell even by their typing that it was a decent bunch of guys. Eventually it was Jedders who asked me to come on Ventrilo. I sat back and listened. I've been in a few squads before and I can say this in all sincerity, not just because I'm talking in front of these guys here, by and large it's the best online group I've been associated with since I've owned a PC.
Having said that, if somebody wants to come in here and learn how to do this and somebody will work with us, you can't ask for a better place.
Blackrat: They promised me a bottle of whiskey.
Per: I think Orion got it!
Orion: No, no, he promised me dancing girls but I haven't seen them. The cost of sending those across the pond was a little extravagant.
Vintage Mission: Bapaume - August 1918 (screenshot by Vander).
THF: There's quite a few on here tonight. Is it a training night?
Jedders: We have always pushed towards Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday as our main flying nights to give people as much structure as they can towards their real life. Certainly in my experience, my wife doesn't shout so much if I keep it to three nights a week rather than floating in and out willy nilly. It focuses numbers on those two or three nights. There will be Syndicate members on every night of the week, but we try to sort of focus towards Tuesday night and Thursday night with some training and a couple of things coming up. Sunday night is obviously our big night of the week: the Vintage Mission.
THF: You talked about structure, do you employ a command structure with military ranks like many other squadrons do?
Jedders: Many, many years ago, probably 2001, we had our first Ventrilo server. We had some other squad come onto the server and shout and roar wanting to talk to our leader. We all virtually looked at each other and thought: well, who is the leader? This guy sat on the chat - and you won't be able to publish this in your interview - and he went: "WHO'S YOUR [truly respectable] LEADER?!!" over and over again. Nobody knew and that's the whole key to Syndicate. We don't have leaders, we have people that do particular jobs. Everybody supports those individuals in their jobs and we have policy makers such as Bliss, Repent who hasn't been around because of real life issues and myself. We don't dictate what others have to do but do try to push things into a certain direction. All the views are equally important. On training nights we allocate different leaders to different jobs, so everyone gets a go at it.
THF: About your videos, MrWolf, how do you go about making those along with the squad?
MrWolf: The first three I made just for fun. They were just my flight records. I love this kind of stuff, computer animation and design is my profession. With the fourth one, we wanted to make a Syndicate movie. From that moment on, we were just collecting flight records and the guys were sending them to me.
Jedders: One of the things Wolf's always nudging us about is that he's very interested in bringing the community together. He's pushing out these fantastic products and he's working on those inter-squadron training nights and competitions. From our point of view he's a great ambassador for us. One of the things he said is that he wanted to make a movie about all the guys we fly with, especially squadrons like IRFC, J5, J2, hq, all those guys that are regularly on the server. The medals is another thing. We want to give something back to the community.
THF: You talk about giving back to the community, but you must realise that you're already doing more than almost everyone else. So my question is: do you think you're getting back enough from the community?
Jedders: We could have a 10-man or a 12-man server where we can just fly ourselves. But to us, it's all about community. We want to fly with human opponents. Many of us are coming from an Il-2 background where we flew as a squadron in inter-squadron competitions, it's what gets the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. If you can do that as a group, that just answers it even more. Now what we get back from that? We have met so many great people, especially in IRFC, which we consider to be our closest friends. The great bits of work that everybody does in the community, like what you do with The Camel f*g and the fact that people want to come to our server is enough for us.
We want to create a place that people can say about: this is where the community centers. For us that's payment enough. We will always continue to do it as long as people want to use it. If somebody wants to make a small donation through our forum, they can do that, but we don't go begging for it. If some people think it's worth doing, by all means we really appreciate it. It differs some of the costs and there have been a lot of generous people who have put money up. We thank those for doing that.
If people come to enjoy the mission, enjoy the night, shoot us down, that's what we're here to do. We're not there to be a squadron of aces or anything like that. It's serious but it's fun at the same time.
The Syndicate Order of Contribution: For kindly donating to The Syndicate server upkeep.
THF: Any success is going to be paired with criticism. How do you deal with that?
MrWolf: Criticism comes from a very small group of people and the full server is proof that most people and other squads are happy with what we do.
Jedders: There's always going to be critics, but if criticism is dealt with in the right way, it can push you on to do it better. Personally, I'm like Repent, whose first reaction was to hit back harder than he was hit. There's that in me where I'm thin-skinned and I get involved with a fight on the forum. Bliss is probably the same because we come from the same Il-2 competitive background. Some of the other guys like Kollwitz are much more diplomatic in their approach and can calm us down so that we can get something beneficial out of it in the long run.
THF: Are you interested in inter-squadron tournaments and partaking in organising these? Do you think 777 Studios should deal with these themselves?
MrWolf: Just like every other squad we are interested to participate in the organisation of that, although I don't even know how many squads there are in Rise of Flight. And I do think it's meant to be a community collaborative organisation. 777 has too much on their hands to organise this. The other squads want a little bit of the same, really. Time will tell.
THF: And lastly, where is Syndicate heading for in the future?
Per: We're trying to get a server going for Cliffs of Dover as soon as possible and we've started discussing mission making and what we want to see on the server. I guess we need to discuss which plane to start learning again... I think it will be bloody hard, actually.
THF: Might I suggest the Westland Lysander?
Per: I think it'll be between Spits and 109s.
THF: Oh, okay.
Jedders: What I think will happen with Cliffs of Dover is something similar to the development of Rise of Flight in that it will not replace Rise of Flight instantly and I know we're going to maintain both a Rise of Flight server presence and a Cliffs of Dover presence. It will probably take a 12 to 18 months period before the creaser are ironed out, before the patches get rid of some of the problems, before the community get a hold and start to dictate how that's come on, in the same way that Rise of Flight has done.
I don't think Cliffs of Dover is going to be the death of Rise of Flight, but it certainly would be more appealing to the majority of our members in a Second World War environment rather than a First World War environment. How I see it, is that other squadrons like IRFC are much more interested in the First World War aspect. It's just what we're familiar with more and we will lean towards it, but it will not herald us pulling out of Rise of Flight, either in a server presence or a community presence.
Per: We'll have a Rise of Flight day and, you know, maybe two Cliffs of Dover days.
THF: Salute to you, gentlemen, may you grace the Rise of Flight skies for a long time to come!
We conclude this interview with the sheer epicness MrWolf has poured into this movie.
Meet the Squadron: The Syndicate
Their name needs no introduction. Yet, while you've more than likely flown on their server at least once, you may be unaware of the squadron — and most importantly: the people behind The Syndicate. Last week, I took the liberty of taking up some of their precious flying time to have a friendly chat with them.
Syndicate, TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER!
THE HANRIOT f*g: Can you tell me about The Syndicate squadron history in a few words?
Jedders: Syndicate is a group of people that came together firstly as a first person shooter clan right about 1999 and is still going strong. Some of those people that were in that particular starting group are still with us today. We have 75 members past and present all told. Some of whom we almost don't see at all, some of whom are very active still. It's a group of likeminded individuals that have taken up enjoying flightsims predominantly.
THF: When did you guys get involved with Rise of Flight? What else were you flying?
Jedders: Repent and I got into Rise of Flight from release. Slowly but surely, the other guys started to follow in. Most of us came in when the multiplayer side of it became good, because many of the earlier members were Il-2 Sturmovik flyers. We were very used to the dedicated server dogfight form of multiplayer, instead of coop mode.
THF: Speaking of dedicated servers, how do you deal with running the server, knowing fully well that Rise of Flight is very resource hungry. Can you keep up with it for a long time to come, especially considering the financial picture?
Per: We're all stinking rich and sexy.
Jedders: We have to underline two people who look after the server. There's obviously Bliss, who set the thing up. He has been the driving force behind it. We come from an Il-2 background and we did have a server, with only mixed success because there were already established servers ran by well-organised groups. What Bliss immediately saw was an opportunity to grow The Syndicate by having a good server product. So early on, with multiplayer becoming Dogfight-oriented, he immediately took the bull by the horns and set the server up. He did all of that off his own butt. He has a very high quality server based off Chicago straight on fiber optic. It's right on the backbone itself. It's very expensive for us to run it.
We could run 20 first person shooter games off our server. We're only running one or two Rise of Flight games on it right now. We will be looking to run two Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover games on a different server, which is currently sitting idle waiting to be used for that as well as our new website.
So it's really much Bliss and that's one thing for running a server. It also takes someone to then look at the missions and create missions and we are so lucky to have Vander. He must really take the credit for most of the missions on the server and the push towards realism.
Faz: I met Vander six years ago when we joined the Joint-Ops program for Il-2. Vander made me aware at that point that he had been active in motor racing games before he got into flightsimming. He's a pretty technical guy who comes from an engineering background and he's always been into programming missions. We had a regular night where we would come together with a couple of other guys and make missions for Il-2. We bought Rise of Flight the minute it came out and Vander got straight under the hood with the mission builder. I'm not sure how we bumped into the Syndicate guys, we got taken into the fold slowly and here we are.
THF: On the topic of recruitment, can you tell us about how the recruitment of new players happens?
Mugue: Yeah, what do we do nowadays, do we just wait for people to come in here?
Jedders: We don't have an active recruiting format. We find that if someone flies in the server regularly, it isn't necessarily because they want to join The Syndicate and nor do we go looking into other servers for recruits. But it's evident that if people share the same sense of humour and make it obvious to us that they are interested, someone will quickly make contact with you.
Per: When I bumped into the Syndicate guys it was in Wings over Europe back in the Il-2 days. I was so pissed with them because I thought they were kill-stealing all the time so I got into quite a quarrel with them. Jedders recruited me right away!
MrWolf: I can't remember actually. I loved the Syndicate Rise of Flight server. I was flying there a lot and one day we just started talking.
Orion: Quite frankly, I came across Syndicate because it was one of the most populated servers in Il-2. I didn't know what I was doing and my first thought was: go in there and somebody might give me a hand. Turns out these guys have been more than helpful. Every time I asked one of them, they were willing to give me a hand. You could tell even by their typing that it was a decent bunch of guys. Eventually it was Jedders who asked me to come on Ventrilo. I sat back and listened. I've been in a few squads before and I can say this in all sincerity, not just because I'm talking in front of these guys here, by and large it's the best online group I've been associated with since I've owned a PC.
Having said that, if somebody wants to come in here and learn how to do this and somebody will work with us, you can't ask for a better place.
Blackrat: They promised me a bottle of whiskey.
Per: I think Orion got it!
Orion: No, no, he promised me dancing girls but I haven't seen them. The cost of sending those across the pond was a little extravagant.
Vintage Mission: Bapaume - August 1918 (screenshot by Vander).
THF: There's quite a few on here tonight. Is it a training night?
Jedders: We have always pushed towards Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday as our main flying nights to give people as much structure as they can towards their real life. Certainly in my experience, my wife doesn't shout so much if I keep it to three nights a week rather than floating in and out willy nilly. It focuses numbers on those two or three nights. There will be Syndicate members on every night of the week, but we try to sort of focus towards Tuesday night and Thursday night with some training and a couple of things coming up. Sunday night is obviously our big night of the week: the Vintage Mission.
THF: You talked about structure, do you employ a command structure with military ranks like many other squadrons do?
Jedders: Many, many years ago, probably 2001, we had our first Ventrilo server. We had some other squad come onto the server and shout and roar wanting to talk to our leader. We all virtually looked at each other and thought: well, who is the leader? This guy sat on the chat - and you won't be able to publish this in your interview - and he went: "WHO'S YOUR [truly respectable] LEADER?!!" over and over again. Nobody knew and that's the whole key to Syndicate. We don't have leaders, we have people that do particular jobs. Everybody supports those individuals in their jobs and we have policy makers such as Bliss, Repent who hasn't been around because of real life issues and myself. We don't dictate what others have to do but do try to push things into a certain direction. All the views are equally important. On training nights we allocate different leaders to different jobs, so everyone gets a go at it.
THF: About your videos, MrWolf, how do you go about making those along with the squad?
MrWolf: The first three I made just for fun. They were just my flight records. I love this kind of stuff, computer animation and design is my profession. With the fourth one, we wanted to make a Syndicate movie. From that moment on, we were just collecting flight records and the guys were sending them to me.
Jedders: One of the things Wolf's always nudging us about is that he's very interested in bringing the community together. He's pushing out these fantastic products and he's working on those inter-squadron training nights and competitions. From our point of view he's a great ambassador for us. One of the things he said is that he wanted to make a movie about all the guys we fly with, especially squadrons like IRFC, J5, J2, hq, all those guys that are regularly on the server. The medals is another thing. We want to give something back to the community.
THF: You talk about giving back to the community, but you must realise that you're already doing more than almost everyone else. So my question is: do you think you're getting back enough from the community?
Jedders: We could have a 10-man or a 12-man server where we can just fly ourselves. But to us, it's all about community. We want to fly with human opponents. Many of us are coming from an Il-2 background where we flew as a squadron in inter-squadron competitions, it's what gets the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. If you can do that as a group, that just answers it even more. Now what we get back from that? We have met so many great people, especially in IRFC, which we consider to be our closest friends. The great bits of work that everybody does in the community, like what you do with The Camel f*g and the fact that people want to come to our server is enough for us.
We want to create a place that people can say about: this is where the community centers. For us that's payment enough. We will always continue to do it as long as people want to use it. If somebody wants to make a small donation through our forum, they can do that, but we don't go begging for it. If some people think it's worth doing, by all means we really appreciate it. It differs some of the costs and there have been a lot of generous people who have put money up. We thank those for doing that.
If people come to enjoy the mission, enjoy the night, shoot us down, that's what we're here to do. We're not there to be a squadron of aces or anything like that. It's serious but it's fun at the same time.
The Syndicate Order of Contribution: For kindly donating to The Syndicate server upkeep.
THF: Any success is going to be paired with criticism. How do you deal with that?
MrWolf: Criticism comes from a very small group of people and the full server is proof that most people and other squads are happy with what we do.
Jedders: There's always going to be critics, but if criticism is dealt with in the right way, it can push you on to do it better. Personally, I'm like Repent, whose first reaction was to hit back harder than he was hit. There's that in me where I'm thin-skinned and I get involved with a fight on the forum. Bliss is probably the same because we come from the same Il-2 competitive background. Some of the other guys like Kollwitz are much more diplomatic in their approach and can calm us down so that we can get something beneficial out of it in the long run.
THF: Are you interested in inter-squadron tournaments and partaking in organising these? Do you think 777 Studios should deal with these themselves?
MrWolf: Just like every other squad we are interested to participate in the organisation of that, although I don't even know how many squads there are in Rise of Flight. And I do think it's meant to be a community collaborative organisation. 777 has too much on their hands to organise this. The other squads want a little bit of the same, really. Time will tell.
THF: And lastly, where is Syndicate heading for in the future?
Per: We're trying to get a server going for Cliffs of Dover as soon as possible and we've started discussing mission making and what we want to see on the server. I guess we need to discuss which plane to start learning again... I think it will be bloody hard, actually.
THF: Might I suggest the Westland Lysander?
Per: I think it'll be between Spits and 109s.
THF: Oh, okay.
Jedders: What I think will happen with Cliffs of Dover is something similar to the development of Rise of Flight in that it will not replace Rise of Flight instantly and I know we're going to maintain both a Rise of Flight server presence and a Cliffs of Dover presence. It will probably take a 12 to 18 months period before the creaser are ironed out, before the patches get rid of some of the problems, before the community get a hold and start to dictate how that's come on, in the same way that Rise of Flight has done.
I don't think Cliffs of Dover is going to be the death of Rise of Flight, but it certainly would be more appealing to the majority of our members in a Second World War environment rather than a First World War environment. How I see it, is that other squadrons like IRFC are much more interested in the First World War aspect. It's just what we're familiar with more and we will lean towards it, but it will not herald us pulling out of Rise of Flight, either in a server presence or a community presence.
Per: We'll have a Rise of Flight day and, you know, maybe two Cliffs of Dover days.
THF: Salute to you, gentlemen, may you grace the Rise of Flight skies for a long time to come!
We conclude this interview with the sheer epicness MrWolf has poured into this movie.