serious fl discussion ideas
#41
(08-24-2022, 06:16 AM)Marty Wrote: I wonder if Rockstar still wonder and worry about the lowering number of players playing Grand Theft Auto 4, or whether they understand that it's a game mode that is 15 years old and no longer meets the requirements of modern day gaming.

I mean, there are other games out there that surely could be utilised. There is just a reluctannce to do so. Either the current development team do not have the technical skills to carry out such a transformation, or they are just nostalgic and reluctant.

LimelightRP was mostly led by Doctor Internet and is a Fearless alternative. They chose to expand, which decimated their community even more.
Let's keep things basic with just one game. Garry's mod cannot be compared to FiveM.
If they wanted to close the gmod server, I'm sure most people would stop playing.
A reasonable answer would be for Conn to get rid of Pollux; otherwise, he'll sit back and watch his community deteriorate gradually. We don't need someone who is unable to accept criticism and is causing more conflict in the community.
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#42
(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 5. Keep general server performance awesome! I cannot stress enough how good server performance is a must. In UX it is often talked about how things that take longer to load will turn users away from your product. A website is supposed to load in less than 3 seconds but waiting 10min for the server content is justifiable? I think not. And no, it is not my RTX 2060's or i7 9700K 5 GHz's fault if my framerate drops below 60. It is your piece of shit gamemode that is still the only one in the entire server browser that cant get their priorities straight.

This one is so damn right.

All cars Etc. are so unnecessarily highly detailed, models, guns Etc. Etc.
So much frame rate is lost to things that don't bring any value to gameplay.

There is so much to be said and done in that area.
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#43
On a more serious note than my previous messages in this thread, I still think a Marketing Research plan should be use:

Below text is an example:

"1. Identify the problem(s): Drastic decrease/non-existent player presence on the server.
=> Problems to solve: How to increase server popularity ?
=> Project objectives: Regain popularity, bring new roleplay elements (example: jobs, objectives to follow, levels), create a map from scratch to attract players.
=> Research questions: Investigate the playerbase between the old and the new to determine multiple facts:
- What could bring a new player on the server and keep a player on the server ?"

If you need to build something use this:
[Image: 5-Basic-Steps-in-Process-of-Marketing-Research.png]
[Image: JmCzDqB.png]
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#44
(08-24-2022, 03:23 PM)Generation Wrote: On a more serious note than my previous messages in this thread, I still think a Marketing Research plan should be use:

Below text is an example:

"1. Identify the problem(s): Drastic decrease/non-existent player presence on the server.
=> Problems to solve: How to increase server popularity ?
=> Project objectives: Regain popularity, bring new roleplay elements (example: jobs, objectives to follow, levels), create a map from scratch to attract players.
=> Research questions: Investigate the playerbase between the old and the new to determine multiple facts:
- What could bring a new player on the server and keep a player on the server ?"

If you need to build something use this:
[Image: 5-Basic-Steps-in-Process-of-Marketing-Research.png]


While this is a good idea, you need to understand that FL is driven by a team of gamers. They're not (AFAIK) really into the buisness model, or have experience with this. They play Gmod, and they're used to the server basically run itself. 

If they had any experience with marketing, running a buisness etc, we wouldnt be in this situation as we're in right now. It's a server, powered by gamers to gamers. Which is fine.. but a soloution like this wont get us far..
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#45
(08-24-2022, 08:31 AM)Bulldogg Wrote:
(08-24-2022, 06:16 AM)Marty Wrote: I wonder if Rockstar still wonder and worry about the lowering number of players playing Grand Theft Auto 4, or whether they understand that it's a game mode that is 15 years old and no longer meets the requirements of modern day gaming.

I mean, there are other games out there that surely could be utilised. There is just a reluctannce to do so. Either the current development team do not have the technical skills to carry out such a transformation, or they are just nostalgic and reluctant.

LimelightRP was mostly led by Doctor Internet and is a Fearless alternative. They chose to expand, which decimated their community even more.

FiveM expansion, yes, that had a hugely negative impact.
Arma 3 expansion, no, that had a positive effect once the initial teething issues were sorted, and is still going stronger than ever.

It's not as black and white as "expand = bad", as much as I'd love life to be that simple.
Yours
Doctor Internet;

Developer, Systems Operator,
Data Protection Officer, Business Advisor,
Server Administrator, Community Moderator
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  • Marty
#46
(08-24-2022, 03:23 PM)Generation Wrote: On a more serious note than my previous messages in this thread, I still think a Marketing Research plan should be use:

Below text is an example:

"1. Identify the problem(s): Drastic decrease/non-existent player presence on the server.
=> Problems to solve: How to increase server popularity ?
=> Project objectives: Regain popularity, bring new roleplay elements (example: jobs, objectives to follow, levels), create a map from scratch to attract players.
=> Research questions: Investigate the playerbase between the old and the new to determine multiple facts:
- What could bring a new player on the server and keep a player on the server ?"

If you need to build something use this:
[Image: 5-Basic-Steps-in-Process-of-Marketing-Research.png]

I agree that you have good  intentions, which is great to see. However, this is a concerned approach that revolves around solving cases with anything specific to go out of.
As an example, if you claim the problem is the playercount, is it a problem in and of itself or a sign of something else? I believe it's very shallow and unspecific.
I'm in this field and a full report would require a lot more data to even come close to making these evaluations. Let me repeat it again: you can't be shallow when conducting this report; you need a particular/general problem to solve with underlying problems and a lot of data.
A shallow report is completely meaningless and a waste of effort. But, as I already stated, I can understand where your intentions are coming from.
#47
(08-23-2022, 07:10 PM)Pollux Wrote:
(08-18-2022, 08:34 AM)Falc Wrote:
(08-17-2022, 04:38 PM)Pollux Wrote:
(08-17-2022, 10:03 AM)Falc Wrote: Just let FL sink into the ocean instead of repairing one hole when 4 more appear each time, it was a good effort but left too little too late

(08-17-2022, 03:46 PM)L Y N C H Y Wrote: Put the server out its misery already, Whatever you do wont ever take back to FL`s old numbers lets be real be fun for about 2 weeks then fall back down again

No one is forcing you to stay, if you want to see it shut down then just move on and let the people who are bothered try.

The only thing you’re bothered about is being in a position of power.

Infact you’d be surprised how many people wouldn’t have left if you didn’t start making decisions lol

Smile

ah yes all the decisions I personally made myself because polluxRP!!

You can blame me or whoever you like if it makes you feel better, truth is years of inaction and general decline have been thrown onto us. We had quite a bit of success with the latest update considering we had a full server for almost a month, it just had no follow up. It's somewhat amusing how most of the vocal and anti-staff people around here are also those who are completely inactive and have been for years, it's almost like it's more about the drama than actually helping FL for some people?

You literally sum up everything people think with your sarcastic posts, then wonder why people question things.

Just because I’m inactive on the server doesn’t mean I don’t want FL to succeed or care. I’ve been around this place nearly 10 years so whether I’m active or not of course I’m going to stick around and give my views on things, whether you like it or not.

Final say from me, my post was directed completely and only to you, I didn’t comment on other staff members, so you can’t just claim people are anti staff and label them this way because they don’t agree with yourself only, it’s quite petty and somewhat again sums up why people make comments.
#48
I am also very eager to suggest things I think would help.

But there are months I have time, and others that I simply don't.
The older I get the more I realise how true that is.

That is a factor for every developer that has ever programmed on FL.


I think patience is the key with this. People are expecting immediate results from something that is a real effort, and difficult problem to solve.

There is none with a magic snap of the finger.

There is nobody who has all the answers.

Some of your are treating this as a problem for "someone else"; while in reality it should be a community effort.

Especially if you are 13 - 17 you have all the damn leisure in the world to fix FL.

But you don't.

Why?


Because it is not easy.
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#49
(08-25-2022, 12:09 PM)Haarek Wrote: I am also very eager to suggest things I think would help.

But there are months I have time, and others that I simply don't.
The older I get the more I realise how true that is.

That is a factor for every developer that has ever programmed on FL.

Very much true, and it's any issue with pretty much every community which doesn't get enough income to just hire devs full-time.

(08-25-2022, 12:09 PM)Haarek Wrote: I think patience is the key with this. People are expecting immediate results from something that is a real effort, and difficult problem to solve.

There is none with a magic snap of the finger.

There is nobody who has all the answers.

Some of your are treating this as a problem for "someone else"; while in reality it should be a community effort.

Especially if you are 13 - 17 you have all the damn leisure in the world to fix FL.

But you don't.

Why?

Because it is not easy.

It's a shame, there's a lot of complex, overlapping and ongoing issues which need resolving.
Just to name a few:
  • Poor staff activity (myself included)
  • Poor quality of RP.
  • Insular friend groups not accepting new players.
  • Steep learning curve for various systems.
  • Little incentive to play when on low-pop.

Some of those staff can fix, but quite a few of those, we can't.
Poor quality of RP, we can make events, and ECs do a good job with those, and we can promote our own RP. But aside from that, our tools for that are very limited.
But insular friend groups? We ban people for playing with their friends? That's about the extent of what we can do.

(08-25-2022, 11:33 AM)Falc Wrote:
(08-23-2022, 07:10 PM)Pollux Wrote: ah yes all the decisions I personally made myself because polluxRP!!

You can blame me or whoever you like if it makes you feel better, truth is years of inaction and general decline have been thrown onto us. We had quite a bit of success with the latest update considering we had a full server for almost a month, it just had no follow up. It's somewhat amusing how most of the vocal and anti-staff people around here are also those who are completely inactive and have been for years, it's almost like it's more about the drama than actually helping FL for some people?

You literally sum up everything people think with your sarcastic posts, then wonder why people question things.

Just because I’m inactive on the server doesn’t mean I don’t want FL to succeed or care. I’ve been around this place nearly 10 years so whether I’m active or not of course I’m going to stick around and give my views on things, whether you like it or not.

Final say from me, my post was directed completely and only to you, I didn’t comment on other staff members, so you can’t just claim people are anti staff and label them this way because they don’t agree with yourself only, it’s quite petty and somewhat again sums up why people make comments.

I'll be honest, Pollux gets a lot of blame for shit which ain't his fault.
FL's been in decline for a while, but how is he to blame for Divey's decisions?
How is he to blame for friend groups becoming more insular, when he was one of the few who did actually reach out to newer players?
How is he soley laid bare the issues of the economy rescale, when they weren't designed or implemented by him?
How is he the sacrificial lamb for the lack of follow up to the major updates, when he worked his ass off making sure we actually got the first set of updates out in the first place?

Feedback is fine, but it feels sometimes like Pollux is just used as a stand-in for everything people hate about FL, whether that's actually correct or not, and it feels like that obscures the issue sometimes.

Yeah, he writes like a prick, annoying the fuck outta people (mainly me), and has bad ideas, like literally everyone, but he's not the antichrist.




But hey, it's just staff covering for other staff again so go ahead and disregard everything i said amirite fellas high 5 up top pollux rp sussy amogus bababouyey etc etc.

(08-24-2022, 02:05 PM)Haarek Wrote:
(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 5. Keep general server performance awesome! I cannot stress enough how good server performance is a must. In UX it is often talked about how things that take longer to load will turn users away from your product. A website is supposed to load in less than 3 seconds but waiting 10min for the server content is justifiable? I think not. And no, it is not my RTX 2060's or i7 9700K 5 GHz's fault if my framerate drops below 60. It is your piece of shit gamemode that is still the only one in the entire server browser that cant get their priorities straight.

This one is so damn right.

All cars Etc. are so unnecessarily highly detailed, models, guns Etc. Etc.
So much frame rate is lost to things that don't bring any value to gameplay.

There is so much to be said and done in that area.

Out of interest, which cars, models, guns etc are overly highly detailed?
Are we talking about systems (VCMod, CW) or the models (Car Models, Gun Models)?
If it's models, for weapons, are we talking about world or view models?
Or is it just more of a general feeling?

Feel free to respond here, or DM me on discord or PM on the forums, whatever works best for you.
Cheers.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: I personally have only limited info as I do not use Steam (and thus GMod) and Discord anymore for security reasons, but the main communication probably happens over there.
Not really. There's a couple of messages, but nothing huge.
Mostly it's the stuff like humanities, which is not represented well ingame, or the announcements / changelogs.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: I could also identify a lot of dispersion among FL services.
I don't mind the Merch Shop, but there is an entire Forum for interaction and communication, Discord channels for the same and the in-game comms.
These serve different purposes.
The forum focuses on longer term, structured discussion.
Discord tends to be short-form, transient and more impulsive.
And ingame comms are about... Ingame stuff.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: The map should not spread people hindering player interaction (v5p was horrible with this. Not sure if San ranevo cuts the cake either), you have multiple servers that are online all the time, but low playercount.
There's one "live" / "gameplay" / "production" server.
Build server is for building, with very limited interaction, it's not a replacement for the live server.
There's the event server, but events take place on live most of the time now, so that's not an issue. (It's been turned off since we changed host)
There's also staging but that's a development server so we can ignore it.

So total, 4 servers. 3 public facing servers. 2 active servers. 1 game server.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 1. Get rid of Discord or limit it to announcements only. People should not check up on the Discord but the game server / forums, if they cannot play. Trying to spread the base among all 3 will cause lower average numbers consequently.
You want to keep the game server for imminent short-gratification content and forums for long-term planning and informational content.
If they cannot play, surely that already takes out the game server, which has the low playercount issue?
Maybe it'd make the forum more active, but eh.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 2. Check the map for its size. I cannot say mich about it bar what I can see from the top-down map view. If it has a good small size and features what you need, is fast to download and doesnt need a thousand other games to not turn it into pink hell, then keep it. You do not want map changes every other day. That kills off consistency and interest in prop building. FL's main point was stability back then, when they would never change maps for 8 years or so.
Nothing to disagree with here.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 3. Limit active server time! This one is crazy, but could help two problems at the same time: Have one server only have it play the main gamemode starting from say 18:00 to 20:00 (or incase there are still a lot of people on when it drops below 5 or 10).The rest of the time, make it be the build gm. Instead of spreading your entire playerbase among 24 hours, condense it into 2 hours only. This should help fight the "game is not worth waiting 2 hours for 10 people to join" if 2 hours is what ALL players will have to join. No guarantees, but I would suspect players are more likely to join and wait a little to see what is going on, if they know there is not much time to do so. Should help kickstart the server. You obviously wanna pick a sensible time for all players (average timezone is probably CET, fuck americans). Make sure to be absolutely transparent about it, so that new players know what's going on.
Could work, but could also kill off players outside that time period.
It's an interesting idea for sure.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 4. Get rid of stupid rules. You were on a good way with the rule rewrite, but there are still a lot of rules actively preventing roleplay such as FearRP, 'FailRP', Metagaming, NLR, self-supply powergaming, etc.
I will follow up with a post where I dissect each rule and why it is necessary/unnecessary.
Cutting down on rules frees interaction, removes admin supervision costs and doesnt stop the RP every 3 seconds because "see you on the forums"...
I agree with some rules being removed, but I also think that a number of rules which you disagree with need to be in-place, because of how poor the community can be.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective, where you see the best of what the community can be, and I have to deal with the worst.

(08-24-2022, 05:30 AM)Arkten Wrote: 5. Keep general server performance awesome! I cannot stress enough how good server performance is a must.
In UX it is often talked about how things that take longer to load will turn users away from your product.
A website is supposed to load in less than 3 seconds but waiting 10min for the server content is justifiable? I think not.
And no, it is not my RTX 2060's or i7 9700K 5 GHz's fault if my framerate drops below 60.
It is your piece of shit gamemode that is still the only one in the entire server browser that cant get their priorities straight.

I agree with premise, but I'll have to disagree with the specifics.
Since they're mostly technical details, I'll refrain from posting here.
Feel free to PM me on the forum.

(08-23-2022, 08:32 PM)Lewwings Wrote: You are somewhat fuelling such 'anti-staff' messages by responding to them and legitimising them as a result.

Perhaps refraining yourself could be a better strategy. Whatever the argument is, you're not going to be able to argue with feelings.

Just my two cents.

Perhaps, but it also takes two to tango, after all.
It's a shame some elements of the community act like this, but eh.
It is what it is.

(08-23-2022, 04:51 PM)god Wrote: Pollux has no life without FL and probs sells ur data to China

no i sell your data to russia, to pay for upkeep on the ipod shuffle.
my brother in christ, you need to keep up.

(08-17-2022, 04:44 PM)Cox Wrote: 2/50 people on :/ the server went downhill when they targeted groups for liking aggrp and basically morphed the rules to stop players like us playing. I know it may hurt your lil egos you have on here but little did you know groups like ours and many other groups are what kept FL alive and fun.
(08-18-2022, 01:35 PM)Marty Wrote: 100% every time you made it harder to aggressive RP your drove players away.

Everyone can build a shop, do some fishing and some farming, but there's a reason FPS and games like GTA have millions of more players than farming simulator.

You, and the previous teams got it wrong. You tried so hard to promote the little shops, and the lovely little buildings with street props and the acts and the it's and the me's you ended up pushing people away.

For my own clarity, would you be able to PM / DM me what you think makes aggressive RP hard / which rules were added to target you / etc?
Cheers.



Honestly, there's a lot of good stuff in here, and a lot of not so good stuff, eh.
Appreciate everyone giving their feedback though.
Yours
Doctor Internet;

Developer, Systems Operator,
Data Protection Officer, Business Advisor,
Server Administrator, Community Moderator
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#50
I think
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