Survey - FL Interest

[Pollux]

(FL has always required a decent amount of players on before any RP can actually be done, things like the delivery job are critical in providing something to do before more players are online).

What you need to do is get your head out of your ass, reduce content size drastically, increase performance by sacrificing visuals, fix the economy and dramatically reduce the amount of rules and restrictions for players.

Once you have done these 5 things (And you should really focus on number 1), you can start talking about improving the gamemode and saving FL - I can tell you right now your ploy of making FL playable without people is ridiculous, sorry.

We're not focusing on things like the new player experience and player count because we randomly thought of it, we know they're the biggest gamemode related issues because we have data suggesting they are.

We track how long players play for and to some extent can see what they do, and we've known for many years FL has a terrible player retention rate but didn't do anything because the player count was "good enough" and because it requires a significant amount of work to fix. There is a lot of competition within gmod now, if something isn't clear to a new player they will just disconnect and go to the next. It's one of the biggest issues, so it makes sense that we prioritise it especially with how much work is involved.

FL has also always required a critical mass of players before anything can really happen, anyone who joins before this usually does so to wait for more players to join and will leave if that doesn't happen soon after. This can end up in many waiting for more to connect before joining themselves, and is a very big issue if enough are doing the same. If there's more to do that doesn't involve having 40+ people online, then more people will connect at lower player counts which leads to a nice snowball. This isn't about removing the need for player interaction entirely, it's just adding an alternative option for when that isn't possible. Jobs such as merchant roles require player interaction, and are some of the least played roles due to how boring it is without many players online. We know most players find these jobs extremely boring, so they're an obvious target due to how essential they are to have a functional economy. We're changing a lot of related features anyway, so it makes sense to throw this in alongside that.

Performance is something that has continuously improved, just as an example the previous relaunch in spring was significantly better performance wise than before due to optimisation work we did. This has improved even more since so I don't expect it to be a major issue. It'll never be perfect on a full server (I don't think any gmod server is when full), but it should still be playable. Performance isn't really a thing you just "have" in any game anyway, it's always a compromise and many players would rather have the significant usage of vehicles and player dupes we have than perfect performance.

Our content size appears to be similar to other similar servers, this makes sense considering internet speeds are a lot quicker than they were even a few years ago. Reducing content will also break many existing dupes which is something many of players care a lot about. I'm not aware of any research done to see how long most people will wait to join, however, FLs content only takes roughly 10 minutes (likely even less now, this was done years ago) on an average internet connection which seems acceptable given how other servers are around the same number.

Your first point is somewhat valid, it has been a long time now and we still have a lot of work to do. Can't really do much to change that though. We also know the economy needs changes, we've already done a lot with the previous economy overhaul and there is more that can be done to build on that further.

We can't just do everything though which is why we have to prioritise things. We can't just do things based on random ideas and speculation because that's partly why we're even in this mess to begin with, it's much safer for us to go for things we know are likely to have the biggest impact - at least for now while FL is in its current state. Gamemode changes also aren't the only things being done, they're just the things I know the most about as I am primarily a developer.