u/That-Personality-878

Hello everyone. I'm writing this after finishing yet another incredibly boring session on the UHC Spearhead server.

​My main question to you guys is: what do you actually do when you log into any Spearhead server? What keeps you busy? It might sound like a comical question, but I am asking it in all seriousness.

​My journey with Spearhead started around September 2024 on the late, great "Road To Bakhmut." The hardcore mode was the exact reason I bought Arma Reforger in the first place (encouraged by YT clips, etc.). I’ve spent about 800 of my 900 total Arma hours purely on these hardcore servers. I might sound like a nostalgic boomer, but comparing Spearhead 2024 to 2026, I am, to put it mildly, disappointed and disillusioned.

​Literally since May, I’ve been playing on SH not out of pleasure, but out of necessity, simply because there are no other servers with similar mechanics. Back in 2024/2025, I’d join a server, grab my gear from the arsenal, and spawn at a teammate's rally point or an MCU. I think even back then, spawning on points was enabled, which players had to manually supply with resources just like in vanilla. Playing back then was far more enjoyable, and it was much easier to cooperate with teammates. You could actually stick with your squad, defend a base together, and fortify it. Building and delivering supplies actually made sense, and the whole game felt like a real battlefield where logistics is the king of war. The scale of the old Bakhmut map was also much better thought out, and visually it looked way nicer than today's Yunakivka, for example.

​Currently, the only things Spearhead has to offer are: spawning at main, gearing up at the arsenal (though half the gear is hidden behind a rank lock, of course), hopping into a car (preferably alone, because 80% of the time a random will wrap it around a tree after 3 minutes and kill everyone inside), and trying to reach the frontline. If by some miracle you make it—which isn't a given, since the majority of the enemy team usually just sits around setting up ambushes—the only thing left to do is run straight ahead, try to kill someone, or capture the exact same flag for the 100th time just to grind XP for better gear. And that’s it. Literally it. At most, you can play around with setting up ambushes for the enemy team yourself.

​Building fortifications or defensive points makes absolutely no sense. If you die, you aren't getting back there anytime soon, and by the time you do, you'll find out the enemy captured it 20 minutes ago. I'll even ignore the fact that if someone was stubborn enough to actually try building defenses, they couldn't anyway, because the logistics mechanics on SH were intentionally murdered.

​Playing with friends? If someone has the determination for that, I congratulate and envy you. For me, it repeatedly turned Arma into a "find your friend on a massive map" simulator. Which was risky anyway, because they could die right when you were almost there, and the whole circus would start from scratch.

​So maybe cooperating with randoms on the team? In theory, that's what Spearhead aims for. In practice, you get into a car, 2 minutes later your screen goes black, and you start back at main. And even if the driver doesn't hit a tree and manages to avoid ambushes, they will ultimately drive right into the dead center of the battle under heavy enemy fire, resulting in everyone in the vehicle dying instantly.

​Maybe being a pilot is fun? I don't know, I'm not that kind of player. Maybe using vehicles like a BTR or Bradley? Sometimes it works, but in the vast majority of cases, there is zero coordination or teamwork. The only moment you genuinely feel some cooperation for a few minutes is when 20 people simultaneously air-drop from a helicopter somewhere south of No Man's Land on Yunakivka. After that, most scatter, and the other half dies.

​In my opinion, instead of finding a golden mean and a bit of common sense, the Spearhead devs turned their beautiful creation into a dying pile of garbage.

​Arma is a tactical game, but it's still a video game. We don't have highly coordinated soldiers sitting in front of the screens; we have randoms. Because of the unrestricted gear customization and the lack of defined classes (like in Squad), cooperation becomes completely unnecessary. Anyone can become a one-man army with a machine gun, a painted sniper scope, a ghillie suit, an RPG on their back, and 20 grenades in their backpack. That last setup is what I see most often on SH servers—everyone knows how easy it is to die, so they prefer to go off alone with a whole arsenal on their back to set up ambushes rather than work together tactically. A player simply doesn't need other players. You can talk to anyone on freq 48, so there's no need to communicate specifically with your squad (Spearhead used to have a Squadleader-to-Squadleader only radio system, and you could only see your own squad members on the map, but sadly they scrapped that).

​I'll just add at the end that I realize not everything is the SH devs' fault; some of it comes down to the limitations of the game engine itself.

​I invite you to a civil discussion below. 😀

P.S :

I absolutely love all the Spearhead mechanics, the lack of which really bothers me on WCS or vanilla servers. I love the more demanding shooting and aiming, the stamina drain while aiming, the complex medical system, the absence of those damn nametags, the fact that it only takes one bullet to drop an enemy, the increased weapon recoil, identifying friend or foe based on armbands, and so on. ​(With a massive emphasis on the lack of nametags—I literally despise them).

​I also want to apologize for the emotional tone of my post, but playing on SH simply used to bring me, to put it mildly, childlike joy. It was a genuinely important part of my gaming life.