The Pulse: Community Catch Up | 2WC 4 Sept

[konsta]

Cool UI and brand development guys, just a question do y’all have a strategy for generating players? For who  is this UI meant for? Because for the older players it won’t really matter to us, I’m in touch with some of the old guys and what we all have in common is we have a busy and different lifestyle than what we had. We got families, careers, small business, military, volunteering, etc. We might hop on once or twice a week every now and then but what’s gonna be done for bringing new players? How are you gonna attract them and retain them without a running server?

So, I feel like a lot of this was covered in the Future of FL thread, but the primary part which is relevant here is reducing the learning curve. At the moment, for new players, joining FL has the learning curve of a overhanging cliff. Multiple sets of systems, (/commands, !commands, C menu, context click, fists, F1, F2, F3), all of which do different things, some overlapping. Having good quality guides which can teach key systems can help reduce that cognative load. It's not a replacement for having a single primary self-explanitory system, which we're doing with the interaction system, but it reduces the cognative load for more complex systems, such as meth or contraband.

There's also other ways we're working on this, such as with the rule crap-removal™️, where we don't need paragraphs of prose to make basic rules clear. Nobody wants to join a server and be bombarded with a 17 page document of rules.

Hopefully this explains how the guide panel ties into this, and the original thread explains other parts in more detail, cheers.

TLDR Below

I'm sorry for being blunt but I totally forgot about that thread as it was posted on November 26, 2022. We're now about to touch October 2023. It's been almost a year, without a server bringing any new players.

Personally, to me this year is the most transformative and overwhelming period of my life. Things that I never thought would happen or I'd do, happened, and I did. I rarely touch any video games anymore, and when I do it's only for a couple of hours once every couple of weeks and that gets boring fast. That will apply the same for FL if I ever hop on. After an invitiation from a friend I'd just dip after a few hours, not to be seen for sometime.

I'm just one guy right? Who cares. But think of all the others, going through a similar pace, that would have otherwise taken some time from their lives aside and spend it into FL. That just doesn't happen because there's no server to play anymore. Because of that, now it's just about to be a forgotten phase of our lives. I remember FL only when someone send something in an old snapchat group, or I talk to Prosto or meet up with him somewhere in Kyiv every now and then. 

The only time you guys post anything after a gap of inactivity since I heard there was a hype of FL coming back in early May, it's about a UI for a server that doesn't have a player base for almost a year. Update after update, same applausing comments from the same people, it's the same nonsense pattern which doesn't take a genius to see that. I browse the forums once in a very long time and I can see what's going on by reading some old announcements.

Where are your priorities man? I appreciate the passion and all but the reasoning behind your response just doesn't seem very logical considering we all went through the same rules, the same / commands which can be found in most gamemodes and servers in case you forgot, and the same learning curve. These are non sense.

These solutions aren't solving any problems, the problem is you got no player base. There's no server to generate new leads. An overwhelming amount of the old members forgot about FL and moved on to live, because we're old after all, and even if you run the servers back up, we might hop in just for the old days sake for a few days after someone invites us to play with them, and that's it we dip out because of our own priorities in life. Not to mention there are short videos all over TikTok and Youtube of the upcoming S&Box which apparently releases later this year on fall, and it doesn't use Lua, but C#. How many players will switch from Gmod to S&Box for good is unknown, but I'm 100% sure that in the very beginning it will be noticable provided if there's enough public servers to host players, and FL is definitely not gonna be among those public servers because you cannot transfer this gamemode running on an old engine coded with Lua to Source 2 that reads C#. 

I just don't see the point of keeping the servers closed. FL already went through a UI change before, an inventory rehaul, remap of the rules, and so many other changes that's far more demanding. I don't recall these things requiring the server being switched off for almost a year, I recall them being down for 30 minutes for implementation and switched back on for deployment.

The only thing I can conclude from all of this, and I can totally understand, is you guys are building your portfolio. I can respect the hustle but I don't respect how you guys are doing this because I noticed there are some sad people that have nothing going on in their lives in this community, and they're just waiting for something that's literally dead for a year to come back and think everything will go back to normal.

Time is money, I thought a business advisor of a Gmod server that legally ran on donations would know that. Instead, you have a crippling community without a server for almost a year, with its value dipping like it's a Chinese penny stock. If a company doesn't make any money and it has no clients who do you think is gonna buy it? They might be developing some new technology or have a new patent but is it really worth $300 million when it's really worth $900K just in assets and in cash? This concept applies the same for this community that used to run on donations, all that extra coding, scripts, and content might add a few dollars for the sale but you're still gonna sell it on a loss. An idea isn't worth anything if it's doesn't start making any money.



TLDR
Your job is to attract new players and retain them, not to make FL absent and come back thinking people who were attached to you and missed your presence will come back. That works with women with daddy issues in trauma bonds, not with grown a** men with lives. That's just a bad idea and toxic, there is no return on investment in this.