What’s your thoughts on the current situation of the server?

[Conn]

I'd like to know the same as Kappatalist – How much is being reinvested into GROWING the server/development team?

It sounds stupid but coming from a marketing background, how is the server being pushed to new people?

We are churning out the same old process of a handful of people returning, being let down because the server is quiet most of the time and slowly fading away.

There needs to be adjustments to the economy to give older players a reason to stretch beyond just jumping in as a cop or becoming a criminal (pretty much what I do).

We need some sort of referral scheme in place (e.g. refer a friend, when they reach 30 hours play time they get 30 days donator for free + their friend gets 5 days free).

It's all about incentivising new and existing players. Whatever happens in the future I'd love to be involved in this process from a player prospecting/retention strategy. It's what I do day in day out for businesses around the globe.

Quick reply as out - agree regarding to incentives. Working on some incentives for joining forum and discord hopefully to release in next week. Referrals could be added onto this system, happy to take a look at adding something like this at the same time and will bring up w team. 

Economy is being worked on, but it’s a long process to get right. As for keeping players on the server, a bigger push to keeping the server players RPing and not minging is needed, standards have dropped horrifically to the point it’s embarrassing to watch even when the server is still quite populated. Big push on consistent and more serious administration to stop the server turning to shit is needed, and is a priority for us. 

As for advertising itself, bit of a tricky one, there are probably a few things we could try, none of us are very experienced in this and afaik there’s not many gmod centric places to advertise now, so could be a bit of a money sink if not done right. 

As Pollux said, absolutely not enough money spent on or budgeted for development, we need to improve this drastically as an incentive for updates to get done and done quicker.

[Haarek]

There needs to be adjustments to the economy to give older players a reason to stretch beyond just jumping in as a cop or becoming a criminal (pretty much what I do).

Remember, the cops and criminal dynamic plays a huge part of the economy and general game mode. All vendors, even the chef, sells stuff that will benefit criminal activity. It's the main incentive for people wanting to buy things.

Point is, if you want a lot of stores and RP in the city, you need a lot of people doing criminal role-play, so that the merchants have something to sell.

[DVN]

Okay so, let's summarise.

The % allocation of donations needs re-jigging to favour growing the server instead of sucking the life out of it.

Developers need paying more to continue incentivising good/effective work.

A % of money needs to go towards a growth strategy. How do new people discover the server apart from referrals? Probably a handful of people from the server list?

Advertising or AT LEAST content creation on platforms needs to be considered. Referral scheme as Conn agreed to and some other bits.

Can anyone actually tell us what the plan is in the background here? I genuinely think we're running out of time.

[gin]

[Jessixa]

Look like a heartbeat rate lmao

[Link]

When I joined FL in September of 2012, we had two 50 slot servers. I recall a bustling atmosphere on each one lasting from around early afternoon, to well into the early hours of the European time zone, with a good 4/5 hours of that, the servers being close to full capacity (100/100 payers). Looking at the statistics collected for that year (July-December), there was an average player count of 5-11k players on Gmod per month.



(The 17,995 is 'peak' player count - not an important metric. But even with this you can see that the peak player count now is much higher than it was in 2012)

Gmod's average player count for the last 30 days has been 22.5k, and fluctuated between 21 and 25k per month between March 2021 and last month.

Taking the midpoints of both ranges, this means that Gmod's average monthly player count has seen a staggering three times increase from 8k in 2012, to 23k in 2021.

Therefore, as a comparison of our performance over almost ten years:

• 2012 - With an average monthly player count of 8k players on Gmod, FL had an assumed average peak player count of 100/100 per week.
  
• 2022 - With an average monthly player count of 23k players on Gmod, FL has an average peak player count of 34/50 per week (as per the graph quoted by Kingstone).
  

Consequently, as Gmod's average player count has tripled, Fearless' has become a third of what it once was.

Though this may be a simplification, as a more direct comparison, at Fearless' peak, let's say 2014, which had a monthly midpoint average of 29k players/month, only 6k more than now, I remember sometimes having to wait in a queue of up to 16 players to join either server; that's not even taking into account that a 3rd server running V2p was set up to help with the overflow, which I recall hovering between 10-40 players.

FL's main proposition is now that of what was our '3rd server'. This is nothing to be proud of given that the possibility that, assuming (unrealistic, but important to note) linear growth, we could have grown to up to six servers by now.

As I don't think the appetite for RP itself has diminished much, though the community might not be completely 'dead', it's sure as hell far behind where it could and should be, and any suggestions otherwise trouble me.

[Pollux]

-snip-

You're missing one very vital thing which is why we no longer have three full servers - competition. Back in 2012 it was much harder to start up a new gmod RP server. There weren't a ton of ready-to-use addons and gamemodes you could just throw onto a server and charge stupid amounts for. It wasn't extremely easy to hire devs or buy pre-made content. Servers were way more expensive and harder to maintain. It actually involved skill and effort, something which you don't need to start a gmod server now. There were significantly less servers in total due to it being a lot harder. FL was popular because of how early it was and it basically took players from another big community running the same game mode who shut down later. Even now, FL is popular because of its long history.

We're running what is essentially a game mode which is over a decade old versus newer servers who are miles ahead in terms of features than us. It isn't 2012 where the game mode was somewhat modern for its time anymore, we also can't catch up at all given our current development budget doesn't exist. It's completely unrealistic to expect more than one server and we haven't had that for many, many years now - long before many here even joined the community. The current player count isn't our goal at all though, we'd like for the one server we have to be full and we will continue working towards it. We're doing significantly better than last month though and I'm proud of all the work the team has put in to achieve that, we've had an amazing recovery so far and that's something people shouldn't ignore. Here's a few graphs for last 3 months:




We're not and were never in crisis mode where we're going to rush decisions, we're going to take things slow and make sure we're doing things correctly. Some people won't like our approach, but so far it's clear we're doing something right.

[Wolven]

-snip-

You're missing one very vital thing which is why we no longer have three full servers - competition. Back in 2012 it was much harder to start up a new gmod RP server. There weren't a ton of ready-to-use addons and gamemodes you could just throw onto a server and charge stupid amounts for. It wasn't extremely easy to hire devs or buy pre-made content. Servers were way more expensive and harder to maintain. It actually involved skill and effort, something which you don't need to start a gmod server now. There were significantly less servers in total due to it being a lot harder. FL was popular because of how early it was and it basically took players from another big community running the same game mode who shut down later. Even now, FL is popular because of its long history.

We're running what is essentially a game mode which is over a decade old versus newer servers who are miles ahead in terms of features than us. It isn't 2012 where the game mode was somewhat modern for its time anymore, we also can't catch up at all given our current development budget doesn't exist. It's completely unrealistic to expect more than one server and we haven't had that for many, many years now - long before many here even joined the community. The current player count isn't our goal at all though, we'd like for the one server we have to be full and we will continue working towards it. We're doing significantly better than last month though and I'm proud of all the work the team has put in to achieve that, we've had an amazing recovery so far and that's something people shouldn't ignore. Here's a few graphs for last 3 months:




We're not and were never in crisis mode where we're going to rush decisions, we're going to take things slow and make sure we're doing things correctly. Some people won't like our approach, but so far it's clear we're doing something right.

I think it's because my activity has increased, thank me later

[Link]

-snip-

-snip-

Hey Pollux - thanks for adding to this.

I mainly just wanted to raise awareness of what the data suggests with my last post, and did cite the linear implications as unrealistic. Though I feel you raise some good points as to why linear growth was unrealistic, I still respectfully disagree with your feeling that we're not way behind where we could and should be.

It's expected that an increase in alternatives would decrease the popularity of already established solutions. But along with the increase in competition, there's been a three times increase in players, which you'd assume would significantly dampen the impact of the increase and ease of competition.

Additionally, though it may be easier to technically set up servers, it's still as difficult to create a sense of community, and retain players. So, while other independent servers may be stealing server browser clicks, I'm unconvinced that FL has much direct competition, or that the average player retention for our competition is high, and that our competition is actually 'taking players out of the pool'. This suggests a reason for the community's decline was a failure to increase retention efforts in response to increased competition, and supports your implication that FL was only popular due to the limited alternatives. However, this is, in my opinion, so, completely fixable.

Moreover, about 6 months ago, I did a deep dive into all of the popular servers FL could class as competition. For the surprisingly few competitors that I found, I feel they all either had similar problems to FL, or were categorically worse. In fact, contrary to what you suggest, despite its flaws, I felt the FL gamemode was actually better than all of those that I tried. Maybe it's the case that I didn't find the servers worth sticking around on, but it's likely that if I couldn't find them, others couldn't either.

I've refrained from commenting on what I feel could be done to bring FL into a new golden age, because honestly, most of it has already been mentioned, and now it's up to you and your team to implement it. That said, I do appreciate that you mention you've set a goal, and are working towards it, and congratulate you guys on having increased the player count, as per your chart. Let's hope that this increase continues!

[Awestruck]

Activity has been nice lately. However, It'll be nice to see some of the faces on this thread, on the server.