Missions Depot - Back on Track

[Cheetah]

Finally! The Missions Depot has almost overcome the problems brought up by the Big CrashTM and Small CrashTM. You, OFPEC members/guests deserve to know what we have in store for you and what happened in the past to the MD. The purpose of this announcement is to pull the MD out of the foggy meadows to your fridge. Enabling you to have spicy, tasty missions for breakfast!

The Past

The OFP Editing Center, a popular and well visited website during the good ol' OFP years, boasted a large amount of missions, scripts, tutorials, addons and functions. Missions could be submitted to the Missions Depot by a simple form and would go into the pending status. After thorough playing, scanning huge scripts and spending countless hours writing at night, the review would be published. Pushing the mission in the OFPEC Approved (Reviewed) missions list. Of course, searchable with an advanced search engine, just like the pending missions. However - quite often, a pending mission would be tagged with a warning in bold: Rejected, back to beta. With a sentence below in a tiny font.. Beta testing before submitting does wonders!. With this I want to stress the importance of Beta Testing!

Interested in taking a look at how the old Missions Depot worked years ago, during the golden era of OFP? Do so here.
Back in 2003, the MD Staff list was huge! The MD could have easily participed in any football match with their around 15-men strong team.

However, most of this was lost.. the crashes pushed us back, hard. What meant that a lot of effort had to be put in getting a website back up and filling it with content.

The Present

Getting the MD back on track. That has always been my main goal. Even a few months ago, when there were only a few active MD Staffers to keep the beta testing and reviewing going. Most staffers were hunting crocodiles, chased by woman  and others were confronted with malfunctioning hardware.

Getting us back on track could only be achieved by getting more staffers. Right now we have two very active staffers in LCD and Denz. Who both have published and beta tested actively the past week. With Denz being the all-in-1 guy, capable of doing ArmA, Xbox and OFP missions, and LCD as the ArmA workhorse. At these times, quality is important, and with the current staff we can make the MD grow to serve you a tasty mission at breakfast. However, the current number of reviewers (MD Staff) is certainly not the limit, we are constantly on the lookout for eligible MD Staff.

Reviews have to be handled on the forums, instead of with a MD submission system. Beta missions are handled the same way, with the Beta Boards functioning as a gate to the Reviewers. Essential in the beta boards is that ideally, for every beta report you receive, you do two or three in return. That way, there will be a steady amount of people looking at your mission. Keeping you happy as they help you with your mission, while repaying the favour to others.

At the present, frontpage news postings are meanly done to promote the missions which have been reviewed. This is to enable any visitors who don't bother looking at the forums know what missions can be found in our forums.

Things are about to change...

The Future

Changes? Plans? Activities?

• Promotion 1 There will be an event coming up within a week, keep an eye out for it on the frontpage. It involves helping mission authors and promoting beta testing.
• Promotion 2 Newsposts concerning the MD will take place regularly to allow guests and members to keep up to date. This will include making the Missions News easier to reach for the mass.
• Submission The method for submissions will change within a few months, a system to combine hosting and reviewing will be completed as soon as possible. Keep an eye out for it! If you are as interested in a working system as I am, poke MachoMan and JerryHopper to ensure it's fast completion. With it, you can easily search through all of our beta and reviewed missions.
• Recruitment We are constantly on the lookout for members who have a talent for reviewing. Interested? Go to the Beta Board and show what you've got by testing missions put up by the authors for testing! That is the place where we look for members eligible for a MD Staff position. Expect even more additions to our staff soon..
• Beta Testing Essential for good missions to be made, reviewed and published. I want to encourage everyone who enjoys playing the great games made by BIS to check the OFP and ArmA Beta Boards.
• Reviewing We're busy processing all the missions left waiting to be reviewed, we should have all of them either done or rejected within two weeks. After that, I'll make sure that any missions put up will be reviewed when ready to be reviewed as soon as possible.
• Forum Section Changes to the forum sections will be made soon. It will be easier for people to find, download, play and enjoy missions for OFP or ArmA.

Conclusion

There is a lot coming up, so be sure to check the news of OFPEC regularly in order not to miss out on any missions by the community, for the community.


Cheetah, MD Admin