Community Update #4
#1
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Community Update #4
3rd September


Introduction

Dear Community,

First and foremost, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to fill in the survey. We got off on a great footing following the release of the economy update and other changes, seeing a regularly full server, however, this has been short lived. We need to work on identifying key issues and focusing the attention of the team onto solving those problems wherever possible.

Unfortunately, we all have very busy lives; so many people in the team have given hundreds of hours of their time to this community for very little or no cost, and everyone has had the right intentions: to improve FL; I’d ask that people keep this in mind before launching personal attacks and start berating anyone in the team. I am however very grateful for the vast majority of people understanding this, and being respectful and constructive when discussing the current situation, suggestions, improvements, etc., and I will always try to respond to any questions or messages via Discord when I get the chance.

The Survey

The survey is intended to give us a clear overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the gamemode and roleplay style. We’ve already looked through all of the responses and have started working on what we can do to resolve many of the issues you all have. We’ve identified a few key things already, such as quality of roleplaying being the key issue rather than the gamemode itself. We intend to release an overview of the responses in the future once we’re done processing them as a team, likely in the next community update.

Actions

Development Outsourcing

Due to the nature of FL development, which works very much on peaks and troughs of motivation, we are exploring avenues of sustaining more consistent output by outsourcing some development work, providing clear decisive plans for what we would like to receive. This is in the early stages of vetting, but we hope that it will help allow us to improve upon the gamemode in a more consistent manner. Hopefully we will be able to see this come into fruition over the next month.

Recruitment and Advertisement

Once we are able to establish a peak in playercounts again, we will be looking into various avenues of player recruitment, bringing in new players via various means of advertisement. We have to accept the fact that it is unsustainable to solely rely on the current and past playerbases to survive, and we have to adapt for the future. Nothing is off-limits to try given we have the time and resources to do it, but we will work to act based on the statistics generated from the survey, rather than based purely on any vocal groups.

Map Change

As part of our changes, as suggested by the community survey, we’ve come to the decision to change the map on the server. As some of you may have noticed we’ve now moved maps to our edited version of V4B1. This map was highly popular according to the community survey and had the highest positive average rating in comparison to the other votable maps - this will coincide with our events team’s planning for map-specific events for V4B1.

Staff Changes

Lewwings and Jessixa will both be joining the event manager team, assisting with the creation of new events to help boost the player population and interaction. They both share a passion for FL and wish to help where they can by helping host quality events and raising the overall standards of RP.

Self and Wolven will be joining the management team, focusing mostly on the events and admin team respectively. Both are very passionate and well engaged in the community, having been around for over 14 years between them. Our management team is growing in size, to help more fluidity of decisions being made and more availability from management.

To combine with this, Edned will also be stepping down from his management position, to take over a sys-admin / dev-admin role.

Old Thread Encoding Fixes

On Friday, Doctor Internet, went through the old forum threads, and fixed the broken posts. In this, we’ve scanned over 800,000 posts, and fixed 85,819 encoding errors. This has made a lot of the old threads more readable.

Conclusion

I’d like to thank everyone for sticking with us. We all want the same thing for the community, and there is going to be a lot of trial and error to get there. The reality of the matter is that we are in murky waters- FL has been on a downwards slope for a long time, and there is no clear and obvious solution to resolve it. The reality is that a map change, weapon change, or any of these menial changes are not a long term solution. They may potentially help kickstart a playerbase, however, we need changes that bring the community together, bolster roleplay, and reignite the spark for creativity that FL has had in the past. We need to structure the gamemode so that it is easy to understand, gives people rewarding progression, and so that it promotes community through functions like clan and organisations with unique features.

Our survey will help us to achieve these goals, setting clear priorities for us to focus on. Surveys should become a regular occurrence as we make changes, for us to learn, adapt, and continue to make steps in the right direction. It’ll likely take us some time to get there, as there isn’t any one thing we can do that’ll make FL stable. We’ll try to keep you all involved where we can in what we’re doing to reach that point and hope you’ll join the EC team in events before we get there.

Thanks again for taking the time to read this post, I hope it provides some understanding of what our next steps will be and how they will have been formed.
Regards,
Connnnnnnn

Consider giving me a rep point here.

#2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Public_Management
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The following 1 user Likes gin's post:
  • Ausverkauft
#3
~ Equinox ~
_________________________
#4
Lewwings for Management, 2024.
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The following 2 users Like Boonan's post:
  • Lewwings, Blaz
#5
find out in city
The following 3 users Like Luna's post:
  • Self, Boonan, Nuka
#6
Epic!
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#7
Be carefull not to fill up with more management than admins, it's what typically makes buisnesses go down under
#8
(09-04-2022, 06:37 AM)Nadrickk Wrote: Be carefull not to fill up with more management than admins, it's what typically makes buisnesses go down under
he just smiled and gave me a veggiemite, sandwich
The following 6 users Like Forgee's post:
  • Self, Conn, Doctor Internet, Joe Joe, Lewwings, VIVZZ
#9
Remove the dynamic economy; it's the worst thing you could ever do to an RP server, in my opinion.
Reinstate the mentioned V4B1 (What people voted on, not the edited version) Please specify it the next time.
If you believe that short-term solutions in a videogame will have no impact on long-term solutions, then you are mistaken.

"we need changes that bring the community together, bolster roleplay, and reignite the spark for creativity that FL has had in the past"
Because the majority of the changes in the survey were for "short term solutions," I'd like to know what long-term solutions/changes you have in mind. For example, you can't boost roleplay while most goods are in short supply. Aside from what you can accomplish internally, the most of it is dependent on people, therefore it becomes external, and you have no control over if people roleplay.

This isn't meant to be a slam, but I tried to offer some criticism because I'm sure the majority just follows along.
The following 1 user Likes Bulldogg's post:
  • RaZZ
#10
(09-04-2022, 12:54 PM)Bulldogg Wrote: Remove the dynamic economy; it's the worst thing you could ever do to an RP server, in my opinion.
Reinstate the mentioned V4B1 (What people voted on, not the edited version) Please specify it the next time.
If you believe that short-term solutions in a videogame will have no impact on long-term solutions, then you are mistaken.

"we need changes that bring the community together, bolster roleplay, and reignite the spark for creativity that FL has had in the past"
Because the majority of the changes in the survey were for "short term solutions," I'd like to know what long-term solutions/changes you have in mind. For example, you can't boost roleplay while most goods are in short supply. Aside from what you can accomplish internally, the most of it is dependent on people, therefore it becomes external, and you have no control over if people roleplay.

This isn't meant to be a slam, but I tried to offer some criticism because I'm sure the majority just follows along.

The edited version of v4b1 is meant to be a straight upgrade from the original, removing minor bugs, optimising the environment, adding event box to supplement event server, replacing low-populated buildings and areas with better ones while trying to stick to original layout as much as possible for backwards compatibility with existing dupes.
~ Equinox ~
_________________________


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