FL's content and gamemode

[Awestruck]

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I appreciate you putting effort into your post and offering your opinion on matters like a decent human-being.

I wholly agree that load-in times can have a huge effect on new player retention and that content should indeed be kept light. The last time I did a content review was mid-2019 and although probably heavily outdated and inaccurate now, it took me 19 minutes and 21 seconds to join the server on a fresh install (averaging 2.9 MB/s download speed). However, after having all the content, the subsequent joins only took me ~49 seconds. I will likely do another one of these soon to gauge current data.

Speaking of subjectivity, the matter of vehicles is one that would require a fair amount of discussion as it's something I'm not sure everyone will agree with you on and it's a fairly large feature of the game-mode now.

I can also agree with you that having the timer in the middle of your screen like that for some of the newer functionality is clunky. It should be more inline with our UI design for a more seamless playing experience instead of looking cheap and getting in the way (sorry TASSIA). I'm not sure why that wasn't done in the first place but, there was likely some issues there (as there is with a lot of the codebase).

It's very hard to determine the reason for lower player retention yet, very easy to blame whatever. Whilst map swaps can be annoying for some, they are almost never done without community support anyway, at least not in my time. Your points about damaging factors are valid, but the premise for them perhaps not.

In regards to your advanced dupe folders, some maps have the same dimensions for some dupes. I too have had this issue where I try to spawn a dupe and it's not where I expect it to go. I can't say much else on this as it's not really a big issue but, I wouldn't say it's a case of incompetency.

Guns and combat systems are things that have been changed for the betterment of the server and to say that FL has lost a lot of it's population because of these is yet another scapegoat and a reason often used by the loud minority. Regardless of these updates there have been multiple times when we have had a full server and good population in general. Whilst I do miss abusing med-kit spamming, it was essentially game-breaking. The same goes for the Contraband-stealing which was also incredibly broken. Whilst not an out-of-picture idea, the implementation that it was given at the start was just not fit for work and was instantly abused (not by rules standard of course, but in terms of game mechanic and stupid money-gain).

I'll happily give my own personal opinion on weapons. I miss MadCow weapons. They were fun and easy to use. However, it's been a while since I've seen any sort of suggestions about reverting them. Only discussions, but never any actual suggestion to get proper input in a poll (we do have a whole setup for suggestions linked to development workflow, so the suggestions sub-forum is important).