What happened to the server?

[Pollux]

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.

Our USP over other servers has been dupe building, and when that started to die off we were left with very little. What you've said is completely true and what we've been trying to work with. The big economy update was to try and adapt to what a lot of people like to do (which is grinding) and we did see success for about a month. The only thing that ever made FL sustainable over the years was players creating unique situations which made every day different and not boring. We lacked that in our soft relaunch which resulted in the server slowly dying out.

There isn't much we can directly do to fix it, as it's a community effort in the end. We can give tools to help encourage it (such as what the EC team gets), use RPPs as a reward incentive and host our own events to kickstart things. This is what we've been doing for now.

I don't think there's much we can do to the gamemode to make FL sustainable. Sure there's stuff we can change or add which leads to a short term pop increase, but the only thing that can make it actually sustainable is those players then RPing.

We'll probably have another group of updates with the intention to provide a spike of players. It's then just about following up on that to try make it sustainable, which is a community effort in the end. There's not much more we can do apart from that and I haven't seen any ideas on how we can make FL sustainable in any of the many threads on this topic. It does feel like a lot of people are too focused on what provides the short spike (such as map changes or updates) and not what can make it actually sustainable (likely as it's a much harder issue).