State of FL

[Pollux]

4. The main focus of FL should be getting new people in and retaining them. They're the future of the community, and they don't have the problem of burnout from 1000s of hours of playing. But, if the server's empty from a lack of engaged veterans, there's no social proof that FL's worth playing on, and, obviously, there's no one to play with.

This. This is the problem that has yet to be fixed and honestly barely attempted. Even when the server was getting populated at the beginning of this new management experiment the server still felt empty. Secluded groupings of players and no open player interaction. Why would players want to stay?

 Management team kept saying divey was holding them back in fixing the server. Still waiting to see it.

Everyone being in their own social groups is a big problem and something we did identify, the issue is it's extremely hard to fix as it's an entire attitude shift rather than a simple change. A good example is how in most nexus raids you have big groups of people raiding while being completely silent due to them talking on discord, to a new player it's almost impossible to join in as they're not going to communicate with you at all. We've already internally clamped down on metagaming within the team, encouraging those in discord together to instead mute and talk in-game and we did start to see it work. It's extremely difficult to enforce to everyone though and it's more going to be something that changes over time. We do generally plan on being more strict when it comes to metagaming, as it is part of the issue. It'll be a community effort in the end to be more welcoming towards new players and get out of their social groups a bit.

We're also looking at contracting external developers to work on features to make things a bit quicker, this is something that wasn't possible before as it really needs the owner to be a developer to work correctly. We're already reviewing people who've shown interest and have given us portfolios, so it's far along.