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---- > Berget 6 2008


for information about next game summer 2008!

This is the second part of our evalutation process after Berget 5, there will be a third and last one. We are sorry for the delay of this part but there has been a lot of other work that has been prioritized.


The loss of a friend and a fellow player
On Friday noon Urban was found unconscious in his tent in the Russian base. One of his friends alarmed the crew that called a doctor on call and ambulance. Even though fellow players and crew did a admirable effort assisting in the caretaking of Urban, his life could not be saved. Urban deceased in Sundsvall hospital during Friday afternoon. The cause of death is declared a cerebral haemorrhage. Berget-events and it’s Crew send our deepest condolences about Urbans departure and share the grief with his family and friends. We have talked to his family and they think that this have been taken care of in the best possible way. Berget-events will dedicate some funds to the “Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation”.

Active gametime, and early gameoff
On events of this scale we found it hard to keep a constant game flow with many strong minds and opinions as well as the huge amount of players. The best of plans can be toppled by off game occurrences, this is not something that can be foreseen and we feel we have been well prepared. Under the circumstances we the crew feel we made the right choice calling off the game after the tragic decease of Urban. We were all pretty shaken up and had to take a step back to regroup and get a handle of the situation. We want to thank the crisis management team sent by the church for their fast and competent support, we also want to thank the players who acted on site in the Soviet base starting to resuscitate Urban when he was found, the world need more people of your calibre.

The security of our participants is our number one priority. No game is worth permanent bodily injury. We felt that during Saturday evening we saw a great increase in bodily injuries. Sprained ankles, broken bones, people falling, feeling ill due to lack of sleep and dehydration became more and more frequent. The situation on the Swedish base became increasingly intense as the one of the largest airsoftbattles in history took place. Among the players we noticed that there was a growing irritation about some players not taking hits as the distances between the combatants were becoming to close. The situation was getting out of hand and we felt that due to some people’s lack of judgement we could not keep security on a reasonable level. We wanted to end the battle while most were having a great time and without any major incidents. Others may have seen the situation differently but we feel that we acted correctly according to what we saw.

As we mentioned in the first part of our evaluation we are looking at different solutions to solve the problems of players not sleeping and eating during our events. One of the suggestions is to have a fixed six hour game off during one or several nights for players to take a break and see to their personal needs. On Sunday there was no active game, this was decided after discussions with the commanders who did not see that enough players were active and ready for duty. Many players had started to go off game and return radios and other materials, transports etc, therefore our administration became overstrained. People were getting ready for the beer party and there was not enough activity among the players to get the ball rolling again. With the information given to us by the commanders we did not feel that continue playing was worthwhile.

Bases
Also with people going off game in the bases and people moving around outside the game, this also became a concern regarding security. Our solution to this is that we will supply military tents for all players in all bases. This will solve the logistical problems with players not knowing were to set up the tents and the bases will not look like a festival area. All tents will in this solution be fixed company wise and no players will have to bring their own tents and send large packages to us. Furthermore no tents will be taken down during the game and this will not be a disturbance on future Berget-games if we choose this solution.

During this event we felt that in the future we need to make all bases more self-supplying with Crew and other helpful elements. All logistical elements should be found in each base, information and contact with Crew should also be close at hand.

Players who sleep in the off game area should become fewer since this is a problem for the commanders who do not have all his soldiers in one place.

Players
It has become clear to us that the airsoft community is greatly diversified. With a great variety of players whom all expect different things we need to find solutions for all players to have as much fun as possible. We need on future events information from all players how much they intend to be part of the game and were they plan to sleep. On Berget5 we had situations were commanders could have as much as a company in the off game area or in their hotel rooms.
This could be solved by each player when they book their ticket. This information will be used by us and by the commanders so we can better balance the forces and so the commanders know who will be ready for duty during different hours of the day.

Commanders
During big games there is of great importance that everyone is on the same page concerning what we expect to get out of the game. Commanders has a great influence over the outcome and overall experience of the game. We have put a lot of time and effort into recruiting our commanders. This has been done by looking over credentials and interviewing a lot of applicants. This was not enough, even more effort needs to be put into this in the future This process needs to be refined in the future and we know now more than ever what to look for in a commander. We the Crew will demand a signed consent form from all commanders what we expect from him/her and that they understand the role and position they have been given. We need to have backup commanders for all forces in case of injury, illness or lack of cooperation or if the commander feels that he/she is not up to the challenge of being commander. All commanders, players and crew need to understand that there is the commanders’ number one concern that all players are having fun. Every commander need to give everyone the same amount of respect and not favouring some players while others are given mundane and monotonous assignments. We feel that all commanders brought something new to the table and we want to thank everyone who took a commanding role on Berget5 for their efforts. Even though we have not seen eye to eye with all commanders on all points we have learned a lot from every commander on Berget5.

Game Area
We are very glad that so many players loved the game area and found it as beautiful as we do. This was not a coincident that we choose this site for the game, much time and effort went into choosing this particular game site. We are glad that many liked the installations in the bases but regret that it was not as strategically correct as we would have liked. We found it hard and time-consuming to keep contact with a large number of landowners not to mention expensive. In the future we will try to find game areas that are owned by fewer and are less scattered. After some evaluation with the local inhabitants they are very pleased with the arrangement and with all the players. Some got lost and went into forbidden zones but no real damage was done. Some roads got damaged but overall we managed together to leave Hemso Island in the same condition we found it.

Props
We think our new generation of airsofttanks was much more realistic than the previous version and they worked great. We will continue to build more and better tanks and we think this will help develop our hobby. On another note like many of you have pointed out the AT:weapons were hard to use and the Crew who showed them to the players did not have the sufficient training to do this. We see this as a failure and will look at other solutions to make this better at our next game. During the final battle in the Swedish base we can assure you that all hits on the tanks were confirmed by GM´s. One standing by the shooter and one by the tank making sure the driver took the hit. Furthermore some players lost all the cartridges of CO2 and all bullets to the AT:weapons so those who could teach the players to use the weapons could not once this was possible.

Artillery was fun and a great element during the game, this takes a lot of game masters attention but we found that all players liked the feeling when fireworks went off around them in battle. We feel that this was secure and almost everything went according to plan.

Missions
We had numerous missions planned with props. Some of these missions did not become a reality due to miscommunication with some commanders. There was no use to send out one force on a mission when there was not opposing force to obstruct them along the way. Some missions did not become a reality since many players were out in the field doing recon missions. Again we need to stress that we need to have better communication between crew and commanders. All commanders need to know when he will receive his orders and when he needs to have all his personnel ready. We had planned a huge assault on the beach at the Swedish fortress landing troops with a ferry. With could not secure the concrete landing bridge securely enough so we called off the landing of Soviets. This was a call that was made due to security and we did not want any more injuries. We had planned to use the fortress in the Swedish base for an underground assault, due to previously named reasons we choose to call off the game before this became a reality. There were some early missions in the base were Spetsnaz managed to destroy some tactical points in the fortress.

We are right now missing 4 player-rented motorola GP340, 21 Battery´s and 4 monophones. We have signage from players that have rented but not returned their radios. Please send your rented or found equipment ASAP to:

Berget-events
Aspvägen 4
87152
Härnösand
Sweden

Put your name and ticket-ID inside and send us an email to info@berget-events.com

Last week, we sent player packages to Portugal and Nethterlands. Today player packages to United states, Canada, Spain, France and Germany left Harnosand 13:40.

Thanks for your patience!

So, you're back home after Berget 5. But did you enjoy yourself? What did we do well? Where is there room for improvement? Send us an email with your comments, and how we can do better, at our new feedback address: feedback@berget-events.com

The second part of our official summary is on its way; if your concerns weren't addressed in Part One, now's the time to get in touch.

This is the first part of our Berget 5 evaluation, and it is based on crew experience during the game and over 180 pages of feedback from player PMs and forums. Please keep in mind that this is just a brief summary and we will add more and more information, based on further discussions and feedback from you players.

First of all, we in Berget Events Crew are and have always been a non-profit organisation. We all have full-time jobs/school and have organised this event in our spare time. All crew members have been doing their best to make this event happen and many of us have been sacrificing several thousand hours of our spare time and taking numerous days off from work.

Our vision with the Berget scenarios has been to produce an annual international airsoft event, where people from different nations with the same interests can meet, have fun and play together. In our goals we have also implemented things like a beer party, invitation of retailers and manufacturers. In the end we would like this to become an international airsoft festival.

Before Berget 5 we all in the crew agreed that the most important factors to make the game a success were:

• Water
• Toilets
• Food
• Sleep
• Action/Missions

We in the crew feel that, overall, we have succeeded with at least the first three issues. As far as action and missions are concerned, we feel that we could have done better, but there are several others things that affected the outcome of this. We understand a lot of the problems that occurred during the game. In upcoming games, we will have to gather a larger crew and a larger number of game masters. Further on we will discuss this more thoroughly.

The issues that we didn’t expect, and weren’t prepared for were:

• Unexpected player transport
• Pre-game logistics / early arrivals
• Huge numbers of player requests


These issues haven’t been a problem during the other events and they had a huge effect on the game schedule and took too much time from crew. On this event participants arrived too early for us to handle, some as early as four days ahead. At this event we should have anticipated these problems and been more prepared to assist all early arrivals with better instructions. There were also more than 140 players arriving at Härnösand bus station and Midlanda airport without notifying us in advance. These unexpected problems took a lot of time and energy from the crew. Next event we will set a first arrival date, before which we will not provide for our guests. We will also clarify that we will not collect participants that have not pre-booked transport.


List of problems during Berget 5 and how we and other organizers should prevent them.

The definition of Milsim.
This is a huge problem with big international games. There is a big difference between the meaning of milsim from nation to nation. Because of this, players have different expectations of the game, and also different expectations on how other players should behave and act during the event. There could for instance be situations when players become irritated with each other when some want to sleep instead of guarding a post or someone wants to go and eat in the middle of the game. Players who roleplay can inadvertently insult players who don't, and so on. However we have come to the conclusion not to call Berget games Milsim just to avoid misunderstandings. There are of course a lot of parts that should be considered as milsim, but also some parts that are not. The game will stay on course but we will not call it milsim in the future.

Airsoft as a competition.
Airsoft is not, and should not be a competition. In airsoft there should only be winners. When commanders and players believe that the game is possible to win, they develop a competitive spirit that is bad for the game and makes many people more likely to not take their hits and break other rules just to gain an advantage in the game. We believe that the winners are the people that are having a great time among friends, and not the ones going out like winners of a particular battle. We feel that many players became frustrated when they felt they could not win; in our opinion, in airsoft it is the experience that counts rather than the outcome.

The gameflow
Before the start of Berget 5 the crew had not scripted a winner. Both sides had of course different conditions at the start, for example the defending faction was scattered and had to cooperate and interact to solve different missions. We understand that during the game, some parts of the flow felt scripted to some players. This is something that we as crew need to consider in future events because it’s very important to us that the players do not feel overly controlled. But some elements of the gameflow need to be gently directed (because of the massive amount of players) without losing real game feeling.

Language at international games.
There were some problems during the event with players not understanding each other, as well as crew and players not understanding each other. Therefore we believe that all players participating in the game should be able to speak and understand basic English, and the ingame lingo. To make this clear as day all team leaders should carry a pocket version of the rules. This is of great importance especially when it comes to safety aspects, like understanding the rules. In the future we will try to make sure that all players speak acceptable basic English, before they book their tickets.

Safety.
In our experience safety is more important on bigger events since people tend to disappear in the crowd. Before the game we therefore prepared for different scenarios that could occur during the event. First of all, we had a doctor on site throughout to take care of people in need of medical attention. All crew members also had basic training in CPR.

During Berget 5, the heads of the police and the local rescue service had participated in all security meetings and had complete information about the event. These meetings produced our safety rules for the event. When it comes to thefts and fights between players, the only thing we can do is to contact Swedish police and let them take care of the incident. We have no right according to Swedish law to take care of this kind of things ourselves!

One possible solution to this is to have a unique number, clearly visible on each armband to make identification easier. Of course, the best would be that none of these things would happen, and it could in many cases be prevented with more and better information and stricter control by personnel in each camp.

Information flow.
Communications between commanders and crew must be much better, and radios are not reliable enough; therefore all commanders should be provided with cellphones pre-programmed with numbers to crew. There should also be information boards in each base to keep players updated with offgame information as the event progresses.

There must be better ways to contact crew on future events. During Berget 5 we had problems with people spreading rumours rather than talking to some of us directly, which made it very difficult to address the specific problem. Of course there were players that contacted us directly which made it easier to solve the problems. At future events, we will have more personnel out in the bases to make this contact easier.

Micro logistics.
During Berget 5, we experienced problems with people coming to us with different kinds of problems that we shouldn’t be bothered with. For instance people missing battery chargers, people missing weapons due to problems with shipping or customs, weapon malfunctions and such. We made the mistake of trying to help all these people which disturbed our more important crew work. In the future, we must be clearer about which kinds of problems we will assist with, and we must have our priorities in order.

Sleeping.
Both players and crew need to sleep. Therefore we plan to restrict our future big games with off game times between 0300 and 0900. There must be time for people to rest and sleep. This is mostly for safety reasons; tired people make mistakes that can hurt both themselves and others. We also believe that a person who is rested will enjoy the event more than a person who is tired.

Hygiene.
Our goal during Berget 5 was that all participants would have easy access to toilets. We used algorithms used by festival organizers, along with past experience, to calculate the required number of toilets. However, providing toilets during airsoft events is usually not as simple as at festivals or sporting events because of the terrain in which such events take place. Therefore we chose not to have any toilets in the Russian base, but in the safe zone; the toilets weren’t many minutes away from the Russian base by foot. The toilets could have been driven out to the Russian base, but the 24-ton truck that is supposed to empty the toilets would have been unable to reach the base. We thought that the toilets worked fine during the event, and they were emptied twice.

About the water issue, we used military and festival calculations for how much water would be required. There were however problems with having enough water tanks ready before the game, and it is both time-consuming and expensive to refill the tanks during the event. Nevertheless, we consider that the water was no problem during Berget 5. Every player had water near their base. We had enough water in place in the bases to last the whole event; all that was needed was to fill some of the small tanks with water from the bigger ones.

Showers may seem like a luxury, and there were no showers in the Berget 5 game area, but we have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to increase the experience of the event. Showers help to keep diseases at a minimum as well as help players to feel more fresh and comfortable. This will help players to have more fun during the event. Of course this will cost a lot more, both economically and in terms of organizing, but we think it will be worth it.

Cheating.
There tends to be more cheating on bigger games. There was obviously some cheating during Berget 5. There is however no easy way to solve this since it’s up to the individual players. At future events we will make sure that we have a lot more game masters out in the field. Both game masters in crew vests and hidden players with no signs of their crew assignment. These undercover game masters will have the same rights as regular game masters to give warnings and ban people from the event. These players will be selected before the game, and will be trusted and experienced players. Armbands with unique numbers will also make it easier for game masters and players to track down cheating players.

Accidents and deaths during airsoft events.
Bigger games with more players naturally result in a higher risk of serious accidents and even deaths. This isn’t restricted to airsoft; it happens at other big events also, such as festivals and sports events. The organizers have a great responsibility to set rules and make sure that people follow them. But it’s also up to the players to know their own limitations, and if somebody suffers from any significant medical conditions, then they must let both crew and their own team know. For the next event we will evaluate whether or not we can have a registered nurse in every base.

Use of alcohol and drugs during the event.
As we stated before the game, alcohol and airsoft shouldn’t be mixed. We don’t want people to drink alcohol during the event, but it’s not illegal according to Swedish law. During berget 5 there were people breaking our rules (not the law). Whenever we were informed that people were drinking alcohol, we sent out personnel to check; however, as we never saw anybody drinking or indeed any evidence, there was nothing we could do about it. In future events we will equip personnel with breathalyzers to find those who have been drinking. It is also important that players who see somebody drinking alcohol remembers the unique armband number and pass the information to crew. We understand that people want to relax and take a drink before going to bed, but this is not acceptable when it can affect in-game safety. Instead of drinking within the game area, attend the beer party instead; it was a huge success following Berget 5.

The Crew.
The hardest thing about organizing big games is getting trustworthy people that are both competent and ready to work a lot for free. We had too few staff, particularly marshals, during Berget 5, and many people that had promised to help us either didn’t show up or couldn’t participate fully during the event. Our goal is to outsource key tasks, like catering, transport, and utilities management to local companies. This way, service should be better and Crew can concentrate on more game-related assignments.

Crew must also be trained prior to the game to prepare them for the various crises that may arise, and must also be more thoroughly briefed on their authority to ban players. We must be quicker and stricter in our reactions when players misbehave. Our calculations with support from our military adviser and festival organizers we must have 1 crew for each 20 participants. To gather this number of crew, we have already talked to regional airsoft associations to help us with upcoming events.

Pre-game information
We have learned that there were problems getting information to all players before the game. A lot of information was stated on the website and on the forum months before the game, but for some reason a large proportion of players didn't read either. We have decided to try to send more detailed information directly to players by a email system and open the phone service earlier before the game. We must work closer with commanders on all sides, and provide more and clearer information. Maps should be released earlier, and maps with vital information like respawns will be posted on the information boards in each base.

Blacklist.
Further on, Berget Events will have a Blacklist. On the Blacklist we will have names and information on people or teams that have misbehaved on events. They will be excluded from future events. Information about players or teams on the list will be strictly confidential.

Finally
We would like to thank all the players and all others who made Berget 5 possible. We are now in the progress of planning future events. This summer we will host Crossroads II; more news about this game will be posted on the website further on.

More releases about Berget 5 will be posted as they are completed.


//Berget Crew

We are right now very occupied with cleaning up after the event and returning all rented and borrowed stuff.

Summary, information and more is to be expected in 3-5 days.

Thanks, Berget-crew

As of Monday, all contact with Berget crew will be possible only through our telephone customer service.

The number to dial is: +46 60 60 60 014
If you are in Sweden: 060 60 60 014

The number above will be the official player service number to call during the event. There is a voicemenu to help you contact the right crewmember or operator.

If you didn't buy one from us, dont forget to make and bring one to the game. We will not allow any player on the field without proper armband. Check the rules section for more info.

Note! We are not selling any at checkin.

When you arrive at the game site on thursday:

1. Park your car at the designated parking field, bergetcrew will be there to direct you.

2. Leave your gear/weapons/packing in the car.

3. Proceed to main safezone, bring only your passport/photo-id.

4. Take your place in a line - if there are any, aproach the checkin tables directly if no.

5. Have your ticket-id written down or memorize it, tell/show it to the checkin personel together with your passport/photo-id.

6. Receive stuff you ordered like radio, armband, food tickets, etc..

7. Return to the car.

8. Head for your side's main base camp with your gear, if the gear is too heavy for one trip you may take your car. (Drive back to the parking field immidiately after unpacking.)

9. Chrone your weapons at the base. (this can be done after game-start as well, if you arrive late)

10. Return to the main safezone for briefing and pre-game information.

If you arrive on wednesday or earlier, you will get base direction at main safezone. If checkin is closed you may enter your base and checkin as soon as it opens.