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

[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.