What happened to the server?

[Pollux]

Whenever peopel come up with ideas on how to save FL (v2d, FiveM, revert changes, do this, do that etc) all you do is decline, and tell why it would kill FL.

I really need to ask if you're aware of the situation? Theres 0 PLAYERS rigth now. It's dead. Fearless right now, is as when you describe CPR on someone who's dead.. You cannot do anything wrong, it's already dead.. The only wrong thing to do, is nothing. WHATEVER you do from this point, will only increase chances of survival.

How about you stop being in this sick denial and try to come up with some rescue plan, or try to listen to the few active users that remains, and listen to their ideas?

The past year or so has been constant recovery attempts driven by community ideas, and they all do work temporarily. The issue is FL isn't sustainable without constant intervention and that's a much, much bigger and complex issue than just getting people on. It's also something which I've also not seen any idea really address at all, because it's such a difficult thing to try fix. Ultimately every revival idea by anyone is just a best guess at what may work, and we don't have the ability to try them all. We have to prioritise guesses which have the highest chance of working, which is exactly what we've done by asking the community and talking to people with a lot of experience. We already had our biggest attempt, which did work with bringing players on but we failed in trying to make it more sustainable.

I really wish the solution to everything was as easy as reverting back to what FL was, but that doesn't help FL be sustainable (if anything, it reverts all the things done to make FL less reliant on a high player count. I don't see how that helps?). It'll help bring players on initially, but nostalgia wears off after a day or two - something we saw the last time we tried V2D. A lot of people are also forgetting that almost every single change we've ever done to the gamemode has always been a reaction to what players want to keep FL alive, we've never been proactive with it or changed things because we personally think it's a good idea but rather always look at what our data tells us. FL would've died a long time ago if it wasn't for some of the changes we made. Often updates are the thing that gives it that revival, such as farming reviving the server back when that was released.

Nostalgia is obviously extremely strong as shown in this thread, but even if we went back to a 2015 version of the gamemode nothing would fundamentally change as the gamemode has never been a defining part of FL; players have always defined what FL is and what happens on the server. A good example is the clan scene, which was at its biggest years ago not because of gamemode features or because it made you money but because it's what players wanted to do. Back then you'd literally just set a clan name the same as your job or description, but the lack of gamemode features didn't matter at all. The freedom is still here the same as it was years ago, it's just players on gmod now want a different experience to what FL was made for. We tried to adapt to the shift, but ultimately it's hard to change something that is as old as FL and it obviously creates controversy between those who are somewhat nostalgic.

I don't think anyone should really be looking back with regret or anger and there's really no point in playing the blame game either. It's extremely impressive that FL has gone for over a decade with what is fundamentally the same concept and gamemode, driven by nothing but players wanting to do something cool and unique. There really isn't much that could've been done without drastically altering what FL once was. At that point you'd just be trying to keep the cityrp gamemode alive for the sake of it rather than delivering something unique and you could argue as to how much longer it'd even last for with those changes.

Sure we could keep trying over and over with revival attempts, but at some point you need to realise nothing lasts forever and if it's ultimately the end then that's fine. I'd also personally much rather let it rest with some dignity left rather than just YOLOing everything and making the end bitter, something which I've seen a few of you also agree with. We also don't have the time or money to keep throwing random attempts in either. This is obviously a decision up to Conn in the end, one I'm sure he's going to spend the next few days thinking about. There should be a post by him sometime this week explaining what's going to be happening going forward, just wait on that. We did get an early 2015 version of the game mode somewhat working over the past few days, which would be a nice send-off if it came to it and would likely be a nice nostalgic fix for many.