Feb 7, 2018, 10:41 PM
Gonna follow your format with my opinions on the topic. I figure the more of us that give feedback, the closer to the best resolution we get. Origin is being intentionally left off. I have a lot of very negative things to say about that section that we can all agree have no bearing on the rest of the main points.
Playerbase activity.
It's Low to moderate most of the time I get to come on. High points maybe 50 people. The game is old, many of us have played this gamemode for more than a thousand hours. We're gonna bleed out old people who are bored and the game isn't on the tips of tongues anymore to new players are becoming a rarity. Best we can do to solve this is continue to get to the end goal of a "perfect" gm, then have people come back. Recently, a bunch of old friends and I came to this server after a long break from the game as a whole. Only thing that really kept us here are the advancements made from the original mode, so it's easy to say that the better everything is, the easier it'll be to get old players to come back and maybe stay a while.
Server stability.
Terrible most of the time. While the server itself doesn't crash very often, many errors and conflicts cause client crashes all the time, sometimes in waves. I still feel that largely this has to do with Atmos and VCmod and how they function with the game. Atmos is an FPS killer for many people. I have mine as disabled as I'm allowed and still medium fps (30range) with drops to the extreme low (10s) fps. While Atmos isn't solely responsible for the fps issue, it definitely contributes to the demands of the GM on the client. When VC was disabled, the server was generally stable. Now that its back, I have repeating script errors involving particle/exhaust that cannot be explained. I have all the content packs, dunno why this happens, but after 30+ minutes of it, going near UV lights and contra is a risky event, as for some reason it'll have to load something that bogs down my computer to full lag out for 3-10 seconds, before deciding it I'm going to crash to desktop or blink to wherever I should be and continue play.
Server Stability has contributed to the loss of more than a few players, as what is the point of coming on if you only get a random number between 1 and 120 minutes before a crash occurs. Others on Mac based OS are also having extreme issues involving gmod, and the server specifically. While these aren't all LL's fault, they are issues that still cause people to leave, and generally ruin play experience.
Staff activity.
Some are around all the time. Dev team is constantly working. Some aren't around at all. Here is the rule of thumb I try to keep myself to. So long as there are staff around to attempt to keep the place clean, no one should complain. There is nothing wrong with having a larger staff team instead of kicking the lower activity admins. I encourage the team to consider increasing over all numbers, you have plenty of players whom are great potentials for your team, with thousands of hours and near clear records.
Two major problems with staff.
1: People seem to have this idea that staff should be this that and the other. Staff are just players with the ability to remove bad apples. I don't believe they are compensated financially for their work, they catch a lot of extra stress from the community, and nearly all of them have been accused of being a badmin at one point or another, with and without evidence, by someone they had to action, or associates thereof. It's hard to expect someone to want to come on the server, when most of the players shit on them. Case in point, I averagely hear at least once a session, someone talking shit about Blackdog. Not his character, but him as a staff member. Runner up is Doctor Internet, followed by Daley. While I'm sure there is some reasoning to this, I seriously doubt it's more than personal, and usually it relates to a bad incident. As a community, we should try to stop bashing on staff, jokes aside, else we ain't gonna have staff, nor people who want to replace them.
2: Egos. Some people get into the job and are good with it. Some people feel it gives them something extra over others or that they are better in some way. Case in point, you can spot this when you see a quick call followed by "rule 5" spam. Staff should be approachable, just like teachers. They should take the time to fully explain when required and even be prepared to go over it without being annoyed all over again for clarity. Some of them get the job, go super active, then deflate to min hour to keep the job. This is because they over indulged and lost interest for various reasons.
While it's okay to have staff whom are rarely around (perhaps they have school, work, ect), but it's another thing to hang on to people you like who don't have a reason to never show up. If you feel like you just aren't going to come around for 5-6 months because Destiny 47 came out, perhaps you should formally leave the team on a good note, and rejoin the team when you have more time. Staff come and go, then return quite often.
Best thing I can say to the staff about number 2 is to try and identify which is which as it applies to your inactives and decide which option is a better call. Obviously the players don't like seeing inactive admins on the list when the server isn't being covered by staff when it needs to be. Not trying to be rude, just being honest about it.
Roleplay quality as a whole.
Largely opinion here. While I don't always see a roleplay I would call "quality," I do see them often. I can agree that 190 Main is the most popular spot, though there are a bunch that are outside of the city too. This question is entirely subjective to the users experiences. I want to say that in my experience, its not that there isn't quality roleplay, its that people aren't putting it all out on display. To counter this issue, I've started recording when I spot roleplay to make RP threads about it. Its not as "serious" as clockwork, but its not usually terribad either.
A proper clan roleplay initiative and interest.
I can't speak for any clan but the one I'm in. We're active but in a building phase. I've seen a bunch of LJS, FI, and a few other off names I can't remember. Most of the clans from the clans threads though, never seen them. See their members all the time, just never their clan activity. Its depressing to know that most of them are just stale names on a wall these days. I have a feeling the removal of clan suits might have a little to do with it, but probably not as much as I imagine it could be.
Forms of entertainment.
The way you approached this I'm indifferent on. I believe like Vauld did, that the community shouldn't have restricted itself to Gmod and would have been much better off expanding to other games. That is how communities stay alive these days. Example: I bought Rust back in the day. I played on a few random servers till I found a group of people I liked. The were mainly a milsim Arma 3 group who just were dicking off owning a Rust server. I got Arma 3 and joined that unit for a long time.
Pretty easy to say that if we had a few other games on our roster that like minded people might play, we'd have more overall community members and might see an increase in gmod playerbase.
Forum games are nothing but cheese on a board. Adding stuff like the playable piano, that kind of entertainment that is interactive and in game would be a better call.
Events.
I don't make it to events. Too many life things going on to be that dedicated to a game. There is a discussion that seems like it's trying to get ideas from people, which I think should just be a template system in the events section under a sub thread event ideas. I could contribute a ton of ideas that I just don't have the time to do myself.
Biggest issue with events. Nearly no one is there for the event itself. The REP system corrupts the roleplay, because people would rather work for those tokens, then work because they feel like it. Fact is, people need the prop max to do really impressive things, else they have to work together. Some of us are loners who don't like pre-scripted RP. Without the REP system, you have no real rewards system, with it the reason for roleplay is the points. Just watch how fast people scatter to go do something else after REPs are issued out, yet if they were never issued, those same people would continue till the last staff was gone. No reason to close an RP after the REPs are issued, because you can net more than one REP for a single event, if you just kept going you might have gotten more based on different criteria.
I have no idea of a better way to perform this task and my suggestion for having an area to submit a form with evidence for staff reviewed REP was declined by the community, so I hope someone else has an idea beyond "it's fine leave it" because having a biased system that makes players quit playing after being rewarded isn't "fine."
Playerbase activity.
It's Low to moderate most of the time I get to come on. High points maybe 50 people. The game is old, many of us have played this gamemode for more than a thousand hours. We're gonna bleed out old people who are bored and the game isn't on the tips of tongues anymore to new players are becoming a rarity. Best we can do to solve this is continue to get to the end goal of a "perfect" gm, then have people come back. Recently, a bunch of old friends and I came to this server after a long break from the game as a whole. Only thing that really kept us here are the advancements made from the original mode, so it's easy to say that the better everything is, the easier it'll be to get old players to come back and maybe stay a while.
Server stability.
Terrible most of the time. While the server itself doesn't crash very often, many errors and conflicts cause client crashes all the time, sometimes in waves. I still feel that largely this has to do with Atmos and VCmod and how they function with the game. Atmos is an FPS killer for many people. I have mine as disabled as I'm allowed and still medium fps (30range) with drops to the extreme low (10s) fps. While Atmos isn't solely responsible for the fps issue, it definitely contributes to the demands of the GM on the client. When VC was disabled, the server was generally stable. Now that its back, I have repeating script errors involving particle/exhaust that cannot be explained. I have all the content packs, dunno why this happens, but after 30+ minutes of it, going near UV lights and contra is a risky event, as for some reason it'll have to load something that bogs down my computer to full lag out for 3-10 seconds, before deciding it I'm going to crash to desktop or blink to wherever I should be and continue play.
Server Stability has contributed to the loss of more than a few players, as what is the point of coming on if you only get a random number between 1 and 120 minutes before a crash occurs. Others on Mac based OS are also having extreme issues involving gmod, and the server specifically. While these aren't all LL's fault, they are issues that still cause people to leave, and generally ruin play experience.
Staff activity.
Some are around all the time. Dev team is constantly working. Some aren't around at all. Here is the rule of thumb I try to keep myself to. So long as there are staff around to attempt to keep the place clean, no one should complain. There is nothing wrong with having a larger staff team instead of kicking the lower activity admins. I encourage the team to consider increasing over all numbers, you have plenty of players whom are great potentials for your team, with thousands of hours and near clear records.
Two major problems with staff.
1: People seem to have this idea that staff should be this that and the other. Staff are just players with the ability to remove bad apples. I don't believe they are compensated financially for their work, they catch a lot of extra stress from the community, and nearly all of them have been accused of being a badmin at one point or another, with and without evidence, by someone they had to action, or associates thereof. It's hard to expect someone to want to come on the server, when most of the players shit on them. Case in point, I averagely hear at least once a session, someone talking shit about Blackdog. Not his character, but him as a staff member. Runner up is Doctor Internet, followed by Daley. While I'm sure there is some reasoning to this, I seriously doubt it's more than personal, and usually it relates to a bad incident. As a community, we should try to stop bashing on staff, jokes aside, else we ain't gonna have staff, nor people who want to replace them.
2: Egos. Some people get into the job and are good with it. Some people feel it gives them something extra over others or that they are better in some way. Case in point, you can spot this when you see a quick call followed by "rule 5" spam. Staff should be approachable, just like teachers. They should take the time to fully explain when required and even be prepared to go over it without being annoyed all over again for clarity. Some of them get the job, go super active, then deflate to min hour to keep the job. This is because they over indulged and lost interest for various reasons.
While it's okay to have staff whom are rarely around (perhaps they have school, work, ect), but it's another thing to hang on to people you like who don't have a reason to never show up. If you feel like you just aren't going to come around for 5-6 months because Destiny 47 came out, perhaps you should formally leave the team on a good note, and rejoin the team when you have more time. Staff come and go, then return quite often.
Best thing I can say to the staff about number 2 is to try and identify which is which as it applies to your inactives and decide which option is a better call. Obviously the players don't like seeing inactive admins on the list when the server isn't being covered by staff when it needs to be. Not trying to be rude, just being honest about it.
Roleplay quality as a whole.
Largely opinion here. While I don't always see a roleplay I would call "quality," I do see them often. I can agree that 190 Main is the most popular spot, though there are a bunch that are outside of the city too. This question is entirely subjective to the users experiences. I want to say that in my experience, its not that there isn't quality roleplay, its that people aren't putting it all out on display. To counter this issue, I've started recording when I spot roleplay to make RP threads about it. Its not as "serious" as clockwork, but its not usually terribad either.
A proper clan roleplay initiative and interest.
I can't speak for any clan but the one I'm in. We're active but in a building phase. I've seen a bunch of LJS, FI, and a few other off names I can't remember. Most of the clans from the clans threads though, never seen them. See their members all the time, just never their clan activity. Its depressing to know that most of them are just stale names on a wall these days. I have a feeling the removal of clan suits might have a little to do with it, but probably not as much as I imagine it could be.
Forms of entertainment.
The way you approached this I'm indifferent on. I believe like Vauld did, that the community shouldn't have restricted itself to Gmod and would have been much better off expanding to other games. That is how communities stay alive these days. Example: I bought Rust back in the day. I played on a few random servers till I found a group of people I liked. The were mainly a milsim Arma 3 group who just were dicking off owning a Rust server. I got Arma 3 and joined that unit for a long time.
Pretty easy to say that if we had a few other games on our roster that like minded people might play, we'd have more overall community members and might see an increase in gmod playerbase.
Forum games are nothing but cheese on a board. Adding stuff like the playable piano, that kind of entertainment that is interactive and in game would be a better call.
Events.
I don't make it to events. Too many life things going on to be that dedicated to a game. There is a discussion that seems like it's trying to get ideas from people, which I think should just be a template system in the events section under a sub thread event ideas. I could contribute a ton of ideas that I just don't have the time to do myself.
Biggest issue with events. Nearly no one is there for the event itself. The REP system corrupts the roleplay, because people would rather work for those tokens, then work because they feel like it. Fact is, people need the prop max to do really impressive things, else they have to work together. Some of us are loners who don't like pre-scripted RP. Without the REP system, you have no real rewards system, with it the reason for roleplay is the points. Just watch how fast people scatter to go do something else after REPs are issued out, yet if they were never issued, those same people would continue till the last staff was gone. No reason to close an RP after the REPs are issued, because you can net more than one REP for a single event, if you just kept going you might have gotten more based on different criteria.
I have no idea of a better way to perform this task and my suggestion for having an area to submit a form with evidence for staff reviewed REP was declined by the community, so I hope someone else has an idea beyond "it's fine leave it" because having a biased system that makes players quit playing after being rewarded isn't "fine."