The Pulse: Community Catch Up | 2WC 17 Apr

[Haarek]

I am too old and disappointed to even care. I wished FL was a place I could play sometimes in the holidays, but I lost that hope long ago. Just stop edging the remaining community with promises of magnificent updates. We are long past that. Just put in work. Or give up and give the community to someone else.

It won't be the final attempt for revival, because there are still people here that care, even after you give up.

[Haarek]

And just for the record. I am grateful that updates are still being made, and that there is an effort here.
Obviously it isn't easy, and we should be appreciative of the effort that IS being made.

But I think it is a ridiculous mentality to be preparing to give up. As it seems like you sometimes are.

[Doctor Internet]

But I think it is a ridiculous mentality to be preparing to give up. As it seems like you sometimes are.

There's no "preparing to give up". There's realism that, if this fails, there's no plan to go forward with CityRP, but that's not preparing to give up.

Preparing to give up is the people who crawl out the woodwork at every opportunity to scream, piss themselves, shit on the floor and cry about how bad we are and how it'd be better if we all killed ourselves; yelling about how the community is lost and how we don't care; because we didn't wave the magic developer wand and rewrite FL in 2 days and create a 200/200 pop server with 5000 FPS and 2 ping.

The people who come here and demand we stop "saying how good a job we're doing", when the only place that's written is inside their own head.

The people who demanded we be more open with what's going on, and what we're doing, but complain whenever we do.

The people who ignore the fact that FL was dead months before the management changes, under Divey even, but pin that blame soley on us.



Look at this thread honestly, and ask yourself one question: Why would someone want to keep working for this community, when this is what the community is? When the only reasonable responses have been from Archer and Rocky, and everyone is just trying to practice for their pro-dom humillation session.

[Boonan]

'The people who ignore the fact that FL was dead months before the management changes, under Divey even, but pin that blame soley on us.'

Weird to think that people can't seem to understand that this was actually the case. Sure a lot of well received progress was made under Conn and the management at the time, however the follow up was the reason as to why the initial boost from the economy refactor update a few months ago halted completely. Yet people are quick to blame (as Doc pointed out) how its the fault of the current management team as it stands today, despite there being roughly 2 years of FL's decay prior to the current management team.

Also odd how people still slander the current vision for FL despite being well received a few months ago, and the current plan, as stated many times across multiple threads is to expand and enhance on the economy refactor update which is being worked on now. Yet there are still calls from many who believe a total revert to the 2017 gamemode or something will instantly fix the issue? This was tried and it failed. The majority of players on were staff during the 'reset' and it was as dead as it was before the reset. If anything the playercount was worse as people didn't have something to do - as you can't exactly 'RP' with 1 other person, sure you can but it just doesn't work in the slightest.

The main issue IMO is the fact that the drive for general RP has dwindled over the years, long before I joined FL and the flame has now finally burned out. Re-establishing an old gamemode where RP was present everywhere you went won't fix the issue, the server has to evolve by encompassing new elements that the majority of Gmod players want (notably something to grind for, GTA style). This was again done through NEW updates such as MESKA which came along after the economy refactor update a few months prior.

[Pollux]

I was going to reply with yet another wall of text, but I realise we've already done that several times already and we've probably covered everything at least twice. So here's another, different wall of text about toxicity:

I realise there's a bit of a cycle here, which has actually been here for years. Those who care will read the responses, but those actually being toxic won't and it'll likely lead to this post being closed as has happened a few times now in different threads. The forums have become a mess I realise that it's our fault for tolerating it. A few have asked me why we even allow it to keep happening, and that's a good question. Let's go over this:

What do we gain from such players?

Positives:

• More activity on the forums, drama has always been good for FLs forum activity
  

Negatives:

• The forums become a toxic mess
  
• Actual players don't want to post, as it's a toxic mess
  
• The community looks like it's only filled with toxic people saying the server is dead and there's no hope
  
• Anyone who actually cares is demotivated from toxicity, so they stop caring
  

The worst part is those who are being toxic don't even want to play. Conn proved this by making every single change requested by them, and none of them joined. It only lasted a few hours: https://fearlessrp.net/showthread.php?tid=100256

So lets think about it, if you owned a community and had some people who: 

a) Don't want to ever play, no matter what you do or change
b) Stop actual players from wanting to be here by being toxic
c) Result in your community being known for toxic players
d) Make those actually trying question why they're even bothering

What would you do? I think if any of you were in my position, you would've gotten rid of them ages ago. I'm being fully transparent about it here because it's something we really don't take lightly, and it's why we haven't done anything about it till now. Like actually, why would anyone want to stay in a community that seems this toxic if you were just a regular player? If you think we're making a big mistake, I'd love to hear why. Let me know if I'm missing something here. We've banned a few people for this before, so this isn't a random thing we're deciding to enforce out of nowhere. 

This is really something we should've tackled years ago, and it's probably a big reason why we're even in this situation today, as this constant cycle isn't healthy. All we've been doing is amplifying toxicity. I want to be clear I'm not talking about almost all of you. I welcome criticism and I've always responded to it, as seen both here and elsewhere. I encourage you all to tell us if we're doing something wrong as I don't want this to just be an echo chamber. I'm only referring to who attack anyone who still cares and then continue to argue in bad faith even after we respond. Those who blatantly lie about anything just to further their point and seem correct. It doesn't matter what we respond with. It doesn't matter if we show evidence showing it's not true. They won't read it, they'll just maintain you're definitely wrong and ask a few friends to back them up. So why should we bother even trying to respond to that? We just end up repeating ourselves constantly and make less progress to actually getting things done, which sucks for everyone as I'm sure it's all many of you want us to do - make more progress (which we have, as these small posts show!).

For the majority who care, I'm sorry the forums are like this and I'm sorry that we've been slow at getting things done. In the end it's our fault for not dealing with it sooner. I can't do anything about how slow things have been up to this point apart from apologise. It's true that we were meant to be done by now, we're not because we didn't plan properly. I've changed how inventory works twice now and it'll be a three times before it's actually done. I could've done it once and left it at that, but half-doing things is why FL is currently dead and why the attempt last summer failed. There's definitely a middle ground though, and I really hope we can finish everything we wanted before the summer where FL usually sees its peak. We wouldn't have changed over 20,000 lines of code in the last month or so if we didn't care or didn't want to try. For context, that's probably more than there has been in the past few years. It does suck to then have to come onto the forums and see blatant lies about what we're doing, it makes everyone consider why they're even bothering and that's not okay.

We'll keep having these progress reports every two weeks, we'll try find something so we can actually make use of the teasers channel at some point and once inventory is done the dev blog will go up. If you have any questions you can ping or DM me on discord to ask. I've had nice conversations with some of you, it's just a shame about all the noise on the forums. I'll leave this thread open too, but the forums isn't great for actual conversations.

tl;dr: Forums are a mess, I'm sorry, we're cleaning it up. If you think we're taking the wrong approach, let us know why. Things have been slow, my fault for not planning properly and we're trying to make up for it. I can't change what has happened so far, all I can do is keep trying. Join discord, it's better. Ping or DM me if you have any questions, I always answer them. I'll leave this thread open.

[Haarek]

User has been warned for this post. Reason: You're just proving my point. This is just a small gaming community in the end, all we're trying to do is keep it around for a bit longer. No one benefits from pointless attacks like this. (Toxicity)

I'll leave this thread open.

You must be a changed man?

[Archer]

I'll leave this thread open.

You must be a changed man?

What do you actually gain by constantly making snarky, snide comments without much substance? I don't mean to start a flamewar here but by God, man, what even is your goal? Whenever I see you it's endless whining over and over again.

[Forgee]

Honestly the forums are so outdated, I think archiving and moving entirely to discord is the way forward.

[Doctor Internet]

Honestly the forums are so outdated, I think archiving and moving entirely to discord is the way forward.

Discord is nice, but discoverability, archivable and searchabiity is a bit meh, especially for longer running discussions such as suggestions or rule changes.

[Haarek]

But I think it is a ridiculous mentality to be preparing to give up. As it seems like you sometimes are.

Look at this thread honestly, and ask yourself one question: Why would someone want to keep working for this community, when this is what the community is? When the only reasonable responses have been from Archer and Rocky, and everyone is just trying to practice for their pro-dom humillation session.

Isn't the whole point of this whole ordeal that you are trying to build a new community with an entirely new playerbase? You aren't working for any of us, you are working for entirely unknown people. If you don't do a good job nobody will join, isn't that motivation enough?

Or does the praise of an old playerbase who doesn't play anymore really matter to the teams motivation to such a great extent?

Yes, I agree my "snarky" comment to Pollux was un-needed, but it was meant as a joke. I don't see the reason to be so uptight and take everything so personal. How do you expect people to want to join a community where you have to walk on eggshells constantly?

The work you are doing is great. But I am going to be honest and say the past months of management has been shit, and a string of bad decisions has been made over several months. That's my genuine opinion from my point of view. There's not even a server up and running. Seriously, what the fuck, right?

That's not to say things can't change. I support you guys, I truly do. The work you are doing is fantastic and you are doing a good job.

However opinions are as they are, I am annoyed with certain things, many people are.