Yesterday I asked Vander for an interview and luckily he agreed to answer my questions. You know Vander if you’ve ever played on Syndicate’s servers. But if you never did then you definitely should try one in BOS as soon as you can, and I bet you’ll figure out why it’s so popular.

1) Please introduce yourself

Hi, my name is Pieter aka SYN_Vander. I live in the Netherlands and I'm 45 years old. I have been interested in flight simming for a long time. My first flight simulator must have been "F-15 Strike Eagle" on the Commodore 64 in the late eighties! After a period of racing I returned to flight sims when I found out about the original IL2 game and I had bought my first TrackIR.

2) Tell us who's behind the SYN server idea? Who's actually making this greatly popular server?

The Syndicate squadron is now 15 years old and started as a small Irish "clan" playing FPS games online. One of the original founders, SYN_Jedders is still an active member and does a great job of keeping the squadron together as well as feed us with new ideas. When I joined the Syndicate in 2010 the server was already running missions for "Rise of Flight" but pretty quickly I was heavily involved in mission creation and server maintenance. Back then we had to learn a lot of stuff the hard way! Nowadays I'm happy to say that we have multiple members running our server and making missions: SYN_Blackrat does an excellent job keeping both our servers running for Rise of Flight and Battle of Stalingrad (which is not always easy if the software is still in beta!). SYN_Haashashin has learned to build missions for RoF which he now puts to good use for BoS and SYN_Per manages our donations and keeps track of costs since without money there would be no server. Of course the list is not complete as we have several other members that help with organizing events and occasional fund-raising.

3) The service you're providing is of really impressive quality. Is this anything like you're doing for living? How much time does the SYN server take from your daily spare time?

In real life I work in IT as an enterprise architect so yes I have a good knowledge of computers and networks, but most of the stuff I need for running the server I have learned along the way. Luckily the internet is an excellent resource for anything IT related and you can always find helpful individuals in our community. In the early days the server took quite some time to manage, but nowadays we have a lot of automated scripts running; to automatically restart the server for instance.  

4) What do you personally enjoy most in your project? BTW do all SYN members fly on their servers and play these missions?

As soon as I realized the great potential of Rise of Flight with its Digital Nature engine and high fidelity simulation of flight, I hoped to one day see WW2 era aircraft in the sim. Although I must admit I have become quite attached to the WW1 era of flight and it's unique atmosphere, a WW2 flight simulator potentially has a much larger scope, both in number of aircraft types and theaters of operations. The number of interesting mission scenarios you can create is huge!
Most of our SYN member fly BoS as well as RoF. Others are waiting for it to be finished first.

5) Describe your perfect multiplayer mission? What is it like and do you think, can it be created?

I have always tried to focus on team based game play. Nothing beats flying online together with and against organized groups of people. It really brings a flight simulation to life as you get a brief glimpse of how it may have been in real life. Although you may be sitting safe and sound behind your computer, as soon as you meet an enemy flight and "mix it up" the adrenaline will start pumping and your hands get sweaty! Something I never experience when playing single player missions.

My perfect MP mission is when groups of players are working together to achieve realistic goals, preferably set in a historical scenario. Ideally, the mission goals should be part of a larger online campaign with a persistent environment. Think of having not a number of independent servers running totally different missions, but one "campaign server" and several connected servers that offer missions from a central mission pool. The results of the individual server missions will then decide the direction of the campaign.
Because I have a busy job and a family I find it difficult to commit to scheduled, longer missions. So ideally, some sort of match making logic should be present where you can sign-up for a particular flight and sortie. This also to make sure not everyone is flying on his own, but is always part of a flight having one clear objective. I think the tools and technology are already there to achieve this, but we need some talented individuals working together to make this a reality.

6) What improvements are coming to the SYN BOS server next? What should players be expecting?

I think we just scratched the surface really. Just as the game itself is still in development, so are our missions. Most of the missions are us testing various aspects of game play: Are the airfields to close together? Is there enough AAA? Are the targets visible from the air? etc. Our short term goals are as follows: For weekdays, when we expect not everyone has a huge amount of time to play, we want to create a simplified "online campaign". This means we'll have a set of pre-defined missions, each with a specific objective for one of the factions, e.g. capture airfield "A". The actual outcome of the mission will decide which mission will be loaded next. This will give the player an idea that the mission goals are actually worth achieving and we should see different missions every night. For weekends or special occasions we want to create more historical mission scenarios. Players will then have to prepare more and have to be willing to participate in organized flights. This is something we have done several times for Rise of Flight and in a sense is what we are doing every Sunday with our "Vintage Mission" night. I would like to stress that anyone who has created an interesting mission can always contact us and we may run it on a weekend!
 
7) Is there anything you'd like to suggest other players who are eager to be involved in mission creating? A couple of advice from a SYN pro.

A lot of people keep saying that the mission editor for RoF / BoS is too complex to use. I will admit that it may be daunting at first, but I think once you have overcome the first hurdles and understood the basics it is actually pretty straightforward. It just needs some patience and determination. There are several youtube tutorials (for RoF) to help you on your way.
But getting to grasp with the various functions in the editor is not the hardest thing of mission making. You need to design the actual game play. Anyone can make a simple dogfight/dual mission where everyone meets up in the middle of the map. But how to create objectives that actually motivate players? How to give the player a feeling that he is part of something bigger, part of on-going battle? What conditions should be met to achieve victory? How long can the mission last before it gets boring? All these questions are actually quite hard to answer. The good thing is that creative people in our community can already think about this and share this in our forums without understanding the editor at all. We will most certainly listen to any interesting idea!