What happened to FL?

[Divey]

True, there are certain ways that NPCs can bring more benefits over things for sure, however they do need to be carefully thought out before making them and these sort of things can get very stale too and people will start to lose interest after doing them for a couple of times. From reading this thread a lot of people have some very genuine and responsible reasons to have concerns, however I think people need to hold others opinions in more respect - and that goes for everyone. However, this being said, it's good to see such passion in the community and this is what gives the team a good kick into gear at times. While I am not discrediting the fact that we have a bad player count, these sort of threads happen pretty much every year. Of course, this is in no way a good thing as all concerns come out from something that is justified and you could argue that our player base is definitely the lowest it's been at, but I believe we will only really get a clear idea when it starts to get to the end of June. If we compare our stats from last year, a lot of the player base did leave in anticipation for V5P to arrive, however we still maintained a stable amount of players. I believe the problem that has occurred this time round is that unlike last years poll where there was a clear winner, this was very split, which obviously has caused a large upset within the community and is not something we want. But I'm just relaying information I am sure you are already aware of at this stage.

As for Pines being the right choice? I personally don't really like to let my opinion known about certain things within the community as I much prefer to be influenced by what the community wants, rather than risking the opportunity of people being influenced by something I say. However, I voted for Pines and I do think it's a step in the right direction. Is it the perfect map for FL? No map is perfect. Luckily Pines is something new and exciting, it's an ambitious move for sure and I'm willing to admit we made a mistake if push comes to shove and it turns out that it was a complete failure, but I don't think it's fair to criticise so early on, of course doubts are welcome but I think we all need to allow time to do it thing.

With the updates regarding clocks, etc. Of course these's aren't something that are going to blow people away, but it also doesn't hurt to add them. I personally believe people's thoughts are going in the wrong direction. We are currently lucky enough to be graced with very active Developers and Contributors who are motivated by making updates for people to enjoy and while clocks of course weren't a necessity, it's something that already existed and are something which could have been added extremely easily by our development team. You have to remember that Contributors have to be carefully watched over in regards to coding, etc. so it's more difficult for them to work on bigger updates as they have to rely more on Developers to help them, otherwise we could put our security in a dangerous position. I'm certain that if and when our Contributors become Developers we will be seeing some very exciting things come. A lot of the time we agree with what people are saying however we don't want to give away things that we're working on and so you may have an idea or a suggestion which you may think should be added, but we may have already been working on it for sometime. Obviously, this is down to us not being as transparent as we perhaps should be, but over the last year or so we've made a lot of advancements to becoming more open with you guys. And especially when it comes to Development, we've had things revealed to the community way before release which were overly hyped up and then inevitably were never released and we don't want to make false promises to you guys.

In regards to the staff team not apparently being as good as they once were obviously it's difficult for me to publicly address this, however what I can say is that, being here since 2013 I can see good things that we're missing out on from earlier days, but I can also see things that we have greatly improved upon since then and I personally am always striving to find cracks which could be improved upon. I think administration wise, everyone has their styles and should be allowed a certain freedom of what they chose to do. I stated this in another thread but although we do have certain guidelines, it's wrong to put a label on everything because it's important for us to handle things by a case by case basis. We need to look at the persons former bans, blacklists, hours, attitude and more. Obviously if I'm in a conversation with someone and I feel like someone will learn better from a warning however I'm forcibly told I need to ban this person, then that's not going to be very fulfilling for me as a staff member and that's certainly not the type of team I want to run. With this being said, this openness can bring the potential for certain bias and other factors which Awestruck and are always on the look out for. Each and every staff member has their strengths and weaknesses, am I the epitome of perfection when it comes to being staff? Absolutely not. But what's important is I try to take on board my criticisms and work on them. When it comes to setting a good example and especially when it comes to role play, being a good role player does not correlate to being a good staff member. We've had staff in the past and present who dislike role play but love the community and want to help rid of rule breakers and are genuinely good at their job. Equally, we've had staff members who are brilliant role players and really bring the community together because of this. It's all about equalling that all out and with a bigger team means more opportunities to do so.

Apologies for the big wall of text, I could write more but I'm interested in hearing more opinions on this thread.