May 5, 2020, 03:29 PM
Lots of very good points have been made here. We're having serious discussions on these both within the team and now with the community input group on the best way forward. I'll try and break it into different sections, but for now the main focus is on the rules and enforcement issue:
Rules and enforcement
A few of you will remember that I've been against the vast amount of rules for quite a while, but it's always been an uphill battle to deal with. It finally feels as though there's been a real shift in staff attitudes towards this, partly due to all of the feedback, and just partly due to trying to tackle it in a smarter way (i.e. more nuanced than just replacing absolutely everything with a GM mechanic or just removing everything and not worrying about edge cases).
There's a lot of agreement that restrictive rules are definitely not a good thing, but there were several underlying reasons why these haven't been properly tackled earlier, the really key ones being:
- A small group of people taking things way too far with increased freedom and ruining other's experiences;
- Wanting to enforce rules as fairly as possible for everyone, requiring strict and well-defined rulesets for admins and players to follow. This includes avoiding issues where one admin might say something is fine then the other says its a problem;
- Trying to minimise grey areas in the rules in support of 2.
The last proposed ways to deal with these were gamemode changes so that rules are artificially enforced by gamemode mechanics, but this has been difficult to implement due to challenges at basically every step, be it failed community votes on the exact implementation, failed admin votes and resistance from staff, or just technical challenges. What we're looking towards this time is more of a two-pronged approach, with a heavy emphasis on the first prong:
- Identify what rules are these because of the issues stated above. This seems to be most of them. We can then remove or severely reduce these rules and allow increased RP flexibility and freedom so long as the edge cases can now be guarded against using 1.5 more;
- to prevent unfairness, more internal guidelines would be drafted up for admins so that there's at least a consistent approach to moderating the extreme edge cases. Otherwise, things can just continue more freely. Basically, more things at admin discretion so there's more freedom overall;
- Where possible, still aim to replace some things with gamemode mechanics. Examples could include removing all hostage rules (except perhaps don't hostage emergency services with radio bait) by having a % chance every x mins to free yourself.
The remainder of rules can then either be removed or kept as necessary. We're going through this now and will continue to do so with feedback from community input, but I'm hopeful that a vast majority of the rules can be removed or replaced in this way. Of course, it'll be quite the HR effort to make sure that this flexibility can work, but it's a much better alternative than stifling everyone with insane amounts of rules. Hopefully implementation and pushing things through the staff team won't be a huge issue, but the support now seems to be there.
The other issues
I'm not grouping everything here all together because they're less important; I'm doing so because there's a finite amount we can reasonably focus on at once and if I'm honest, the biggest thing that has killed every attempted big new project or overhaul in the past has been inflated scope, which often coincides with the person writing the scope not having any responsibilities to actually implement them. So the key focus for now is only rules and enforcement (some exceptions for optimisation as that's standard dev work). The rest will come in due time.
Economy
Mentioned a few times. Very fair points made that it's hyper-inflated. It's definitely on our radar and something a lot of people want to address but the best ways to do this still aren't clear. Quick, 'obvious' solutions just wiping the DB come with a whole other host of issues that need addressing, and again, it's often the people who don't have to implement or solve these issues who propose them so strongly. This attitude can and does genuinely cause major problems in getting things done; not just in here, but basically everywhere I've worked.
Any solution to this would probably involve steady development (i.e. using MESKA more, crafting, creating the character system we've been slowly building towards) to steadily solve issues rather than sweeping changes, but those could be considered also.
Map
We've had a million topics on this. But it's clear that map changes alone won't fix anything by now.
Performance
Many core problems with the gamemode have been worked on over the past few years and things do improve bit by bit. The next target, I believe, is improving HUD fps. Vehicles are a tricky one as they're really not suitable for Source, as Goigle said, especially with addons thrown on top. But again, we've done a lot of work here and will continue to do so - a lot of our dev funding has gone towards fixing technical debt, which brings me to..
New gamemode
Same problem with economy. Nearly every time this or similar large-scale changes are proposed, it's by people who have no development responsibility, little understanding of the technical work involved in detail, and little understanding of the many changes to core systems and technical debt improvements that have been made over the years.
This is a much bigger problem than these people ever assume, especially for a team exclusively comprising part-timers and hobbyists. It's also a pretty wasteful mentality; why ignore all the investment and work into fixing technical debt and core systems when this can now be leveraged to make significant improvements? Yes, sometimes core sub-systems do have to be ripped out in their entirety and replaced, but that's a trade-off that only developers can make with any accurate knowledge.
I've worked for a lot of project managers on a variety of technical projects, and to be honest, very few of them seemed to understand the many problems in their project management resulting from a failure to understanding technical systems. The only project managers I've worked with who genuinely did appreciate the time and cost involved with developing things have been systems engineers in the space industry; everywhere else, it's been the same problem. Unrealistic timelines, unrealistic cost and manpower budgets, minimal technical knowledge, and little personal responsibility in getting things done when blame can be shifted onto development staff with ease.
Does this mean a new gamemode is impossible? No, of course not, the volume of gamemodes out there clearly proves it is. But is the trade-off worth it when you consider the vast amount of systems we already have in place, including several years worth of core work on fixing technical debt and providing a more stable, flexible and well-documented interface with which to develop new gamemode mechanics? It's not something we'll ever dismiss entirely, but there had better be damned good proof that this is a worthwhile investment and the proof shouldn't just be rooted in the same underdeveloped project management memes every developer on the planet has heard and cringed at several times already. You need a seriously good project manager with a serious understanding of development to achieve this.
New mechanics/removing mechanics
Now this makes more sense, as we have a much-improved base to work from. Both of these are possibilities, but they'll be handled as individual dev projects. We just need to refine the roadmap so we have less of a scattergun approach.
TL;DR
- We're focusing on dramatically reducing rules for now by removing several rules or replacing with mechanics
- Edge cases and admin fairness will be mitigated by increased internal staff guidelines and rule 1.5
- There seems to be more staff support for this than before so hopefully it'll work
- Working on this now internally and with community input group
- Other issues will be considered separately because scope creep sucks and people always forget it when proposing we change tons of things. All in good time.
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