2012 Q1 News Archive

Arctic Front and Edelweiss have been added to the PG-HQ Library. If you have old records for these games, or are inexplicably playing these obsolete modules in modern times, by all means go add them! :-)

Special thanks to your PG-HQ staff members rerathbun and plloyd1010 who did the data entry.

While the starving citizens of Leningrad were being treated to their first fresh meals in years, the remaining German forces on the Western front were making one last desperate push for the Atlantic.

Fortunately for history, campsawyer was in command of one of the surprise attack's focal points, and by February 29th he had deftly turned away the German onslaught in what would eventually become known as Battle of the Bulge at Elsenborn Ridge.

campsawyer, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

After the march, the siege began... Leningrad must fall.

But finally, on February 15th, beast013's relief force broke through the German stranglehold and the Siege of Leningrad, was lifted.

beast013, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

One could hardly call it a war, seeing how it began and ended in only a week, but the forceful inclusion of Hyderabad into the new nation of India was a critical bit of history all the same.

Under mike perryman's deft command, the Indian forces blew through the pitiful Hyderabad defense, eliminating the last bit of opposition on January 31st.

mike perryman, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

India has been made whole!

I've just applied a large patch to our Bounty System. Details follow:

Late Payments

A bug in the recent site play and record system upgrade caused AAR bounties to be skipped more or less randomly. One play bounty was also dropped. All "late payments" have been paid in full. My apologies to the following members:

• armyduck95
• CravenDumps35
• PatC
• RNYE
• splat99
• von wildensee
• waynebaumber

All debts have been paid off!

Shared Bounties

Previously it was possible for two people playing head-to-head to receive different play or AAR bounties. If one player logged a play or AAR right before a bounty recalculation, and the other player logged afterwards, the second guy could receive a bounty worth up to 40% less than his playing partner just because he was a bit late.

My original approach was to set the recalculation to a 48 hour interval, reasoning that people would have plenty of warning. Well, some folks were still getting cut off, so we've scrapped that.

Starting now, the first person to log a shared play or AAR "locks in" those bounty values for all other shared play members. Even if you link your play weeks later, you'll still get the original bounty your partner claimed.

This change has already been applied retroactively to all existing shared plays. So everyone is even.

Rolling Recalc

Now that shared bounties are standardized, there's no reason to wait 48 hours between recalculations. The bounty calculator has been adjusted to run on a trigger - it'll grind to life no more than 30 minutes after a new play or AAR is recorded and recalculate all affected scenarios.

A Few Stats More

Profile pages now contain two additional datapoints at the bottom of the main statistics table, Average Play Bounty and Average AAR Bounty. Furthermore, all-time and last 30 day top ten rankings have been added to the PG-HQ's Most Wanted page to highlight those players who are seeking out and tackling the most valuable scenarios.

But what if I don't care about bounties?

Well, some people do! ;-)

I have come into possession of a nice camera and tripod. My annual PG scenario play is coming up (ha) and I was considering setting up the tripod with the camera directly over the map shooting downwards and doing a time-lapse sequence as an article for PG-HQ.

Does anyone have a scenario recommendation? I figure a square, 2x2 layout is probably going to look the best. Ideally with lots of counters so you can see them coursing across the terrain...

Have a look at my collection and if you have an idea lemme know in the comments...

It has just come to my attention that AAR bounties are not being consistently awarded. Some of you are getting them, others aren't.

This only affects AARs written with our new system... so since late January.

Until I say otherwise, please keep a close eye on your Bounty Total before and after writing new AARs. If it does not immediately change, please email me!

My email address is at the bottom of every single page of PG-HQ!

I apologize for the trouble, and will find and fix this problem AND award back bounties ASAP.

Update

I've tracked down who is missing bounties, and you will be credited shortly. I've also found the bug but only time will tell if the patch is successful.

What I have done is set up an auto-reporter for any failed AAR bounties. So you needn't watch your stats. If you don't get paid I'll know before you do ;-)

The PG-HQ General Staff have finished adding Airborne and Airborne - Remastered to the Library.

Airborne - Remastered is our name for the 3rd edition of Airborne currently for sale in PDF and printed book format by Avalanche Press.

If you don't own any of the 3 Airborne games, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Airborne - Remastered. If you already own Airborne or Airborne - Introductory Edition, there is still a surprising amount of new content in the third edition. Have a look through our game data and see if it whets your appetite.

I admit to being skeptical when it was announced, but having read through the scenarios myself it's clear Air v3 isn't a simple cash-grab by AP.

Special thanks to rerathbun, campsawyer, and plloyd1010 who did the data entry heavy-lifting on this one!

The last nail in the coffin of our recent round of upgrades is me taking a moment to explain what the hell has actually changed, and how that affects you!

So brew up a nice, hot cup of coffee and head on over to read PG-HQ Evolved...

PG-HQ is on shared hosting. This means that our website is located on a server (in Texas, as it happens) that is also home to many other unrelated customers.

Early this morning (my time) one of those other customers did something stupid and brought down our server. If you visited during that time you probably received a white page with the notice 500 Internal Server Error.

Everything has been repaired and PG-HQ itself suffered no damage or dataloss, just a bit of downtime.

These are the perils of shared hosting. However, renting shared server space is between 1/15th and 1/20th the cost of renting a dedicated PG-HQ server, so for the time being that's what we need to do! :-)

Starting now, when you begin a new AAR PG-HQ will automatically set the AAR language to the same language you used for the last AAR you wrote.

This will result in the correct language being set automatically for each user 99.9% of the time, without taking the heavy-handed approach of nailing down a default AAR language that a minority of users will need to adjust every time.

So if you write in English, you'll always get English. And if you write in Polski you will always get Polski... ;-)

I've made a small but significant improvement to the following pages:

• Modify Existing Play
• New After Action Report
• Modify Existing AAR

Thank you to Alan for the improvement suggestion, and my apologies to those of you who have broken the scroll wheels on your mice the past few days...

We're nearing the 1,500 AAR mark...

While that is, in and of itself, incredible ... the sheer volume of AARs demanded a better way to read them.

I've just upgraded our After Action Reports page. It now has a heavy-duty filter tool with all sorts of interesting options.

In the near future I will be expanding the comment system we have for news posts to include AARs as well. That particular filter option (comments/no comments) obviously does nothing at present.

For the time being, I need to go back to the play system upgrade and clean up a few minor bugs.

Hope you find it useful! Feedback is always welcome in the comments!

While I was busy hammering out our play system upgrade, some of our most decorated veterans were busy knocking down campaigns left and right. Time to pin some medals!

On January 13th mike perryman added to his rapidly expanding list of decorations when he completed the War on the Equator tour.

mike perryman, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

Not to be outdone, and apparently still sane after conquering Eastern Front, beast013 wrapped up March on Leningrad on January 16th. This new ribbon is based on the Defense of Leningrad medal's colors.

beast013, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

Last but not least McKinley - our current king of collection completion percentage - finished off the one-map grind that is the Airborne - Introductory Edition tour, also on January 16th. Your ability to both buy and play games puts us all to shame, my friend.

McKinley, in recognition and commemoration of your accomplishment, you are hereby awarded this ribbon:

Upgrade complete!

Only one minor hiccup, but it looks like everything is running ok. We won't know for sure until everyone starts using the new play and AAR tools, but so far so good!

What should you do now?

If you have recorded plays in the past that were not solo plays you should modify them to become shared plays so that you can begin benefiting from our new multiplayer tracking. All existing plays have been set to "solo" since the majority are. Please begin updating your records if they are not solo!

If you have written AARs that were not in English you should modify them to change the language to the proper setting. All existing AARs have been set to "English" by default. Please update your non-English AARs to the proper language!

If you find a problem?

Let me know in the comments section for this news item.

PG-HQ backs up its database automatically every 24 hours. In the extremely unlikely event that this update destroys the site, it will be trivially easy for us to roll back the clock to immediately before the update was applied.

Help me!

Besides adding real multiplayer support, the primary goal of this update was streamlining the record and AAR submission process. I have tried to make the various forms as intuitive and easy to use as possible.

With that goal in mind, as you're using the new system if you see something that has room for improvement please let me know in the comments section!

That's all for now...

Time for your humble site admin to get some rest, and then celebrate Lunar New Year. Post-Spring Festival I'll be back with a more thorough explanation of our new structure and the site's future development path.

Here's hoping you like your upgrade!

Hold onto your butts!

The new Records & AARs system is ready. We will go live after the next bounty recalculation. So just after:

• 2012/01/21 06:05:00 UTC
• 2012/01/21 01:05:00 U.S. EST
• 2012/01/21 14:05:00 China
• 2012/01/21 17:05:00 AUS Sydney

I will begin updating the site code. The entire process should take less than 5 minutes.

What will change? My PG-HQ, all of it.

This is by far the most substantial change we've made to the site since launch. The play and AAR record system is the core of PG-HQ. Almost every single page of the site - ~5,000 in all at this point - draw upon your plays and AARs to create statistics.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it! True. But it has never been easy to use, and it desperately needed new features. What features? You'll see tomorrow!

Lastly, three of our members have recently completed tours of duty. I have not forgotten about you lads! I just don't want your awards announcement to be buried in an avalanche of site upgrade announcements. You'll get your medals once the dust has settled from this upgrade.

Apart from the initial confirmation email, PG-HQ has a very loose policy on email - you can change your address whenever you please, and no further attempts are made to verify its existence.

That's going to change.

Starting March 1st, if PG-HQ tries to send you an email and delivery fails because the address is bogus, your account will be placed on double secret probation and you will not be allowed to log in again until you provide a working address.

The reason is simple: 2012 will see a variety of tools added to PG-HQ that depend on reliable communication with the members using them.

If you wish to maintain radio silence, you will have the ability to opt-out of all site emails.

This warning is going up ~6 weeks before the Email Cop goes online in order to give all of you plenty of time to verify that your account email is usable.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments!