How to make Fearless great again

[MrFinnConlon]

You are fighting a hard battle, fearless has seen a decline mostly because there is a decreasing player base for Garry mod and as people grow old they lose interest in fearless. In order for it to stay fresh and young we must look to keeping our new players, teaching them how to roleplay, teaching them the rules so that they have the tools to enjoy themselves.

To achieve this goal I see two approaches, the first approach is to ban and blacklist rule breakers and minges the try to get them to stop breaking rules. In recent times staff have been less harsh with their punishment in an attempt to discredit people from never returning.
The second approach is to teach new players how to role play, show them what good roleplays are like (they are beginning to become far and few between). The teacher team is also needed to help guide new players, giving them the tools that helps them to roleplay well.

We currently have adopted the first method and it is doing alright but there is still a sense that it fearless is going into decline.
It is clear to me that there we need to adopt a new approach, encouraging and teaching roleplay.

Reading through the previous posts here are a few suggestions I believe will help:
-Creation of a quick guide to the basics of fearless, preferably a video (Community lead?).
-Reduced stigma will RPPs, their purpose should be to encourage roleplay, a point is a point and they are an effective tool say 'welldone'. I think that their worth should stop being inflated
-I do not agree with Limitations on items and jobs, someone with 40hours can still minge and all they limitations do are restrict new (possibly good roleplayers) and many even prevent them from staying on fearless.
- Small tweaks need to be made to attitude from staff. E.G. if somebody is breaking fearRP, picking them up with a physics gun saying 'don't break fearRP' and then putting them back down without giving them any understanding of what they did wrong helps nobody. I understand that it requires more effort but in the long run I think it will help tackle rule breakage.
-The teacher team needs a rethink, there are currently few active teachers thus there isn't enough support coming from this perspective.
-Updates are good but they are not the key to longterm sustainability of the server's running, this has to be a players and staff effort.
-Yes, fearless could do with a rebranding and that process has begun but rebranding isn't the answer to the declining player base, no new player looks at the forums before they join the server. On that point I think the loading screens could do with a fix and more variation would be nice, even integration with a gallery section on the forums could work well.

Edit: - There was a suggestion about making V2D a map that requires users to be whitelisted and I have been pondering on the idea for sometime. I am not sure about whitelisting it but maybe making a map that is going to heavily support passive RP or even just for passiveRP. I like the idea because it really separates FL from DarkRP. When I see new players the first thing they do is buy a gun. It takes time to teach people that the is even a thing called passiveRP and a separate server would help that balance I think. Take V33x and V2d there was on for passive and one for minges, could this work? 

For the moment that is all that comes to mind but I will add more as I think of it.