My ideas for the gamemode

[Pollux]

- Let new players only download the map and the most basic models/materials. Such as only the playermodels. New people don't want to wait half an hour or more to download all content from a server they don't know. If the new player has the basic models and materials, he can get a good impression what the server is about. A popup will display: 'Subscribe to our packages at fearlessrp.net/content to see missing stuff'.
A new player should be able to join in a couple of minutes.

Could work but a lot of people won't like ugly errors everywhere when they join and then we're pretty much back to square one where they have to download all of the content and then relaunch gmod. I don't think this idea would work out great as it just adds more effort for people who don't want errors everywhere (which would be a big portion of people joining, having massive errors everywhere is a pretty good reason to just leave).

Then about the performance of the gamemode. It's a nightmare in terms of FPS. The coding is not great, but certainly not the cause of the FPS problems. When CityRP started, we've had low-polygon vehicles. I remember having a great FPS and no lag at all. Now we have extremely detailed vehicles that require a lot of rendering for just one vehicle, imagine 20 of them. Nobody wants those ugly cars back, so this is my idea:

- Remove parked cars after 5 minutes. There are a lot of unused cars that are using rendering power for no reason.

Yeah performance isn't great due to a ton of different factors. The issue is if the team was to take a break from adding content and focus completely on performance, by the time the gamemode ran well everyone would be gone from the lack of things to do on the server. It's something we should prob talk about internally as a dev meeting rather than here. I don't think removing parked cars is a good idea as it can ruin some RPs. I think it'll do more harm than good, it's best how it is atm where admins can remove unused cars if the server is lagging.

Next, due to the low player count I think we should change the map back..... We need more player interaction. With 7 people online you're walking in a ghost town. Get V2D or something back. When the popularity increases, we can always put back our custom map.

I very heavily disagree with this. The map we have right now is smaller than any other map FL has had, including V2D. We've also tried V2D what, 4 times now? After the nostalgia and new map hype runs out it's a terrible map for today's standards. I also don't think the map is an issue anyway, it's just an easy thing to blame. No matter what map we switch to, after the hype wears off it's back to the same issue of people getting bored. It's not a map issue, changing maps is more of a temporary quick fix if anything which doesn't help FL at all in the long run. 

Let's put our gamemode in a category with similar servers. We're too small at the moment to have our own category, which is completely invisible somewhere at the bottom. I dislike DarkRP, but we could profit from its popularity, or look for another category.

We're not that small to have our own category, on a full server we show up pretty close or even on the first page of gamemode results. We can also still get a full server, as shown by spikes we have after an update and from events. If we were to put ourselves into DarkRP we're fighting with thousands of servers. Due to how the gamemode listing works we may not even show up at all unless people refresh a ton due to the amount of servers in there. The gamemode listing is also a lot nicer than the individual server one.

Like here's two screenshots to compare with:




The first one is the gamemode list and the second is the DarkRP server list. I think switching to another category will bury CityRP even more. This is ignoring the fact that we're not even DarkRP in the slightest, people will join expecting a light-RP server with a familiar gamemode and we offer neither.

The community also heavily voted against this in the survey:

Give no-clip abilities to trusted builders (limited to a certain area). So that they can build at the live server.

I think giving anyone who isn't an admin no-clip on live is a bad idea. What will also determine who's a "trusted builder"?

Final idea: When we have somehow regained popularity, let's send a mass e-mail to all people reminding them of our existence. Maybe there are people out there that would give it a try and play again. But what's even more important: tell your friends about the server, ask them to join it and give it a chance. When Fearless started it was only me and a couple of friends playing it. It's the best and only way to advertise for Fearless.

That could work, I also think the steam group needs to be used a lot more for events and updates.

I'm just going to sum up what I think the issue is here, as we used to have similar things back on a HL2RP server I was part of ages ago. People join the server and wait around for something to happen, if you get the majority of the server doing this you have a ton of people connecting everyday, waiting around, getting bored eventually and then disconnecting. After this happens for a while those people will stop connecting in the first place as they're bored. The quickest solution to this is to have a group of players and staff organising things for people to do to kick start it in a way. FL didn't have a ton of players back in the day due to content, it was because players were doing things and starting roleplay themselves. The clan scene was active, you had players starting their own little roleplays all the time and others also joined in. Nowadays people are waiting around for others to start something for them. I think this is something the Teacher team was meant to solve but it hasn't done it effectively at all. If the Teacher team alongside staff can help kick start a few mini-events and such and give players something to do on the server, others may start doing their own thing too. In the end our HL2RP server did die because we started doing this way too late, but I don't think FL has reached that point yet and I do think it can still recover.