Locking my squad was as it was for clan members to join, some of them had slower loading times and people would join filling it up, so we unlocked it once he finished loading.    And the kicking was for someone AFK, when a "good" player wanted to join.

I can't help my essentially optimistic nature. It's what brought me back to 1.2 after the debacle of the first release...

So, I've been in the SL position in that situation and have felt your frustration John.  What I do is keep my BF friends list to people who I know aren't retarded and who play for the team, so that way I try to setup a squad with my "safe list" of players each round.

We've done our best to focus the defence to singular important points and to make sure no one gets the miserable defending jobs (because they no longer exist).  Beyond that you're on your own.

yeah, a team can prepare a point to make it easier to defend and resupply themselves, throwing out scan beacons at a distance to see approaching enemies so you can draw down etc before they get to you blah blah blah. But then, as Ty has said, you can't MAKE people do what you want, thats half my frustration as SL and I fully understand it when Ty says he will kick people for not making a team effort.

I think First Strike's problem is that people don't understand the concept and idea of the game. I think we need to take a look at some other mods. For example, Project Reality. It pretty much FORCES teamwork on you, and most people comply. AND its the most popular mod for BF2. But why? I'm not sure myself, but if we figure it out we may be able to have everyone play FS the way its meant to be played.

I think that the difference is that PR advertises itself as nothing but a realism/teamwork mod. FS, too, is a teamwork-oriented mod, but doesn't in any way advertise itself outward as such, and therefore players don't get that first impression. I was driving around in Mos Espa on a local server with a Combat Speeder, and my brother and a friend of his saw me play. Their comment? "That looks like Battlefront".

I've commented earlier that a lot of players "think of FS as a kind of Battlefront 3", and I think there's some truth in that. It's been a while since the X-Wing series, and they were really the only thing I can think of that was close realistic or teamwork-oriented. Now it's Battlefront and Force Unleashed, which are lone-wolf run-and-gun games. SW fans come straight from those games and expect FS to be more of the same, then get frustrated when the game won't let them do whatever they want. The worst thing is that I can understand their frustration.

It just dawned on me... you're not really supposed to just sit and defend. You're supposed to patrol, lay mines, set up a Repeater fire base, lay homing beacons, prepare bacta canisters and ammo boxes at strategic locations, perhaps send out one or two players to scout for approaching enemies... really, if you have a teamwork-oriented squad, you should have plenty to do.

Not that it's possible to do all this, of course, but if you have VOIP (I'm looking at people like Twigs, Ty, and Jafar), I think it's possible to keep players busy so they don't get bored defending .

Then you have the odd couple that just dont understand the concept, yet no matter how many times you tell them a popint can't be recapped they still stand there asking why its not running down. I've seen three or four people sitting in Ewok village an entire round spamming the com asking why they cant cap.

However, it's not a criticism of the mod, nor even a whinge at the players; it's just me being helpful and offering a suggestion that they may like to take note of if they like winning.

Is this really a FS related problem or more a tard-related one?

I cant quite follow...

If you are on the defending team on a push-mode map, 'Defend this position' is the most important order of all, so why is it the hardest squad order to get players to comply with?

On a large map like Bestine or Endor, the distance between CPs makes it easy for a squad to slip past a team that's pushed too far from its last CP, take it and have the next one greyed out before the other team can get back to save the day. I've taken advantage of this laxity on many occasions, but more often I've won by getting a squad to dig in deeper than an Alabama mule tick and watching the other team's tickets bleed.

'Defend this position' means stay within the flag capture circumference, or at most not more than a few metres from it. Players within flag radii keep the flags; pushing forward to spawncamp the other team's forward UCB loses flags. It really is that simple.

I realise that proper, sit-and-wait-for-them-to-come defending is not some player's favourite style, but can assure you that it is a winning style and therefore well worth trying.