What happened to the server?

[Rossi]

I just think the gamemode itself is incredibly dull and offers nothing of value. Because the core community has just heavily lost interest in it, roleplaying, or gmod in general, there is nothing to sustain players on the server. The meta slowly shifted from people popping up stores and small events, to people just spawning in houses and farming while talking to other players like it was discord, or just going afk. Stores stopped being visited, people stopped roleplaying the jobs at all. The quality has gone down the drain and I do think it is heavily because of a community shift over time. People come and go, and what we ended up with were players who dont want to roleplay or are veterans of the community who stick around but are too burnt out to join the same gamemode that hasnt been drastically changed in its lifetime. There are many other roleplay servers in gmod that are more modern and with better gameplay. Sadly we do not have the development effort to create the gamemode we need, because that is 1) expensive and 2) requires motivation. When a lot of efforts to bring back players within our means keeps failing, it gets very demotivating.

I would definitely agree and unfortunately, it's not just FL that has died. I always have just looked at FL and the rapid decline in role play and players, however, FL is not alone. Take a look back, FL's player base declines rapidly due to no excitement in the game mode anymore. LimeLight died just last year for roughly the same reason, and then MonolithServers, the huge, fastest growing, most popular server at the time completely falls. They barely have any players anymore and by the look on their forums, they moved away from their beautiful map back to Rockford because it was way too big for the player-base now.

It's not JUST an FL thing. These "Semi-Serious" and "SeriousRP" communities on Gmod are just dying out. They were once a very popular category, but now people would prefer to join DarkRP to mess around with friends and have a good time, easy, quick fun, rather than joining FL and having it feel like a project trying to make fun happen and player interaction. And if you really wanted something semi-serious or serious, that's what GTA 5 RP is for. You get a way bigger map, better vehicles and content for run ins with others and so on.

To further (Maybe) prove my point, there are successful, player heavy game modes still on Gmod. However, they're the game modes that you CAN'T have on GTA 5, such as StarwarsRP, 1942RP, etc. They would not fit on there and that's the reason why I believe they are still popular game modes as they're fun to mess around in. One could argue that DarkRP is still popular when there are "DarkRP" servers on GTA 5 RP as well. I think it's more of the close quarters of maps on Gmod and the lack of restricting rules so people can truly mess around and have fun. 

My conclusion is, it'd be a shame to see FL close the server, but how much longer are you going to go down this road of revival? LimeLight understood that and you think they didn't try as hard as possible to differentiate themselves from FL and try new ways to bring players when they were dying? They did, and it still didn't work out. FL has been trying for quite some time now to bring players and nothing has worked to actually MAINTAIN a player base. Either FL needs to completely drift from semi serious rp and try another category like 1942 or whatever it may be, or transfer the semi serious GM to GTA or whatever else. People aren't joining anymore to RP seriously in a regular city life game mode, so why not change the category and re do the content?  That's me spitballing ideas, they're just ideas weather you agree with them or not, I think we can all say that if FL keeps up the current road it's going down, it'll be done for good.