Lex_

I'm neutral on this. I don't know much about you and honestly don't think I've ever talked to you. You are a bit younger, but it seems that Zachman has recommended you to apply. I'd say you'd likely have plenty of potential. However, you don't answer the question being asked in the text that I quoted above. How would you benefit the server? What types of things can you do that could help the server? What things can you do as staff that would enhance the roleplay experience? I know people have ideas and I don't doubt that that also includes yourself. If you could edit and answer that, I can reread it and write my response from there. Last note: I know you've been on MRP for enough time, seeing as how you have nearly 250 hours of playtime and are on officer on US, but you don't seem to have had a forum account until now. There are other portions of this community, although unimportant to MRP staff, that are available here on the forums and on TeamSpeak. I don't know of your presence on RU so I'm not able to speak on that.

-1. You repeated yourself twice in the second paragaph bringing up that you have been a member of more than a few SOCs. This isn't important and is in no way a measurement of your maturity, responsibility, and is not a special skill that makes you more fit for staff. You're pretty young, while that is not the very best metric, it is a pretty good one. You said something about "knowing not to complain about irrelevant stuff" but the biggest part of being a community member is to put aside your own bias to better frame the server for new players and rearriving old ones, which sometimes requires writing, arguing, and discussing what some may deem 'irrelevant' topics. While I understand that it is very likely that staff members who are in the same faction as you will likely help you with applying by recommending you to apply, by being a referral, all three of the staff that (you say have so far) recommended you to apply are in the same faction as you, Green Beret. Overall, your application is a bit hard to follow, not grammar or language wise as it isn't difficult to assume what you are trying to say. The problem with it is: your answer to the 2 paragraph essay question is repetitive, has bits of filler and tangents, doesn't fully answer the question, mentions things that can be done without becoming a staff member, and to be honest are not qualities that I believe fit the role of staff. I understand that I'm not apart of the staff team. I'm being very critical of your application and also base this off of what I've seen of you on the server, but I do feel you could be capable in the future. Best of luck.

A couple of things: This is your first post on fourms. Your account was made (at the time of writing) 30 minutes ago. It tells you how to get an accurate count for your playtime. Typing /playtime [name] in game will print your playtime on the server in hours:minutes:seconds format. You've previously been banned for Mass RDM for 2 weeks back in January. You can always check with the public ban list here in case you aren't sure if you've been banned previously or not. I'm not active myself, and don't claim to be, but I don't think I've ever seen you on. There a couple of other things about how you answered the 2 paragraph question that don't sit right with me, but could be from a miscommunication and wrong word choice. -1. If you'd like to chase after staff; get higher into the ranks of your entry faction, talk to people on both US and RU, potentially join a special forces faction and make some friends. Get familiar with people in this community and make a name for yourself.

Disregarding the size of the vehicles, I still feel that it ruins the flow and speed of gameplay on this specific map. Echo feels small as it has tighter spaces that create rather linear pathing (valleys and such), hilly terrain, and is mostly based in a forest. Of course, it'd be an interesting change and would still be worth trying, at worst it can just be reverted.

Looks to me like they were listening for any potential footsteps. They hear you run out into the open and turn to fire at you. Not sure why they had crouch jumped, but this isn't strange behavior. It seems everybody forgets about the importance of sound in anything remotely competitive - if you can hear your enemy coming to flank and believe you have enough time to reposition, why even spend the effort watching a flank when you could be planning attack. Here's what we miss from that video. We cannot see what Pear sees the second they begin shooting. The spectator is not facing in a way that makes that visible. It doesn't sound like topshot had moved. If the banning evidence is lacking information like this, you cannot confidently say that somebody is cheating. That's just not how evidence works. You can't get a clip of somebody shooting for 15 seconds and then tell us what they're shooting at - we're forced to blindly believe you when that shouldn't be the case. Here's my play-by-play of the same thing. Pear pushes into the middle of Factory, peeks around the corner of a long shelf and rushes back into cover. They then proceed to peek again, but slower and with ADS. They take their first shot. We cannot see where the shot goes (we can hear it hit one of the cardboard boxes). We cannot see where topshot is standing before Pear takes their shot. Pear pushes up as topshot is still looking in a different direction (and at that point has already been shot was looks to be 4 times, registering as arm shots assuming they hit). Topshot then begins to run and reposition to fight Pear; in the process of doing so, topshot crouch jumps (is this allowed again?) while holding left-mouse. Pear follows topshot and begins to fire. Be it lag, aimlock, or whatever the fuck it actually is, Pear shoots 7 times, 2 of those shots are off to the right of topshot (shots 1 and 2 follow topshot but miss, shots 3, 4, and 5 are off to the right, and shot 6 is when Pear is turning back toward topshot). Godfather does not immediately say when Pear had body shot him, there is no blood splatter visible from anybody standing in the back, so another situation of taking word for it (in terms of the order; I know that you had gotten shot). What does any of that mean? Given what we have, it is not possible to conclude that Pear is cheating in that specific portion of the clip without creating an assumption that Pear is cheating - it sounds weird but if you view the entirety of the evidence already thinking that somebody is cheating, anything that is out of the norm that could be explained by other things will be seen as evidence towards them being guilty. It creates the exact bias that I referred to in my first response. If Pear is so obviously cheating, then get evidence that displays this. From what it seems like, Pear is attentive and plays like everybody else - which I have concluded based on this exact evidence. I've already made my opinion on this appeal clear. Here's the simplest conclusion: not enough evidence, just get more. Easy. Done.

EDIT: Missed the streamable link that Gythem posted. It doesn't show anything, so no change, but still wanted to note its existence. EDIT 2: And before people start talking about how Pear's story doesn't match up - is a normal tryout like this that important to you when you're not aware that they're trying to catch you cheating? +1. None of these clips are definitive. I'm beyond disappointed in how there was a TS channel full of people stacked against you discussing and communicating how you are very definitely cheating beyond a reasonable doubt without having anything concrete. You're being punished by people who already have this notion that you're guilty without even going through the evidence to verify. Clip one: To start off with, the "four headshots with no effort" is a yikes claim. All of those kills were low effort kills (targets had minimal movement, some weren't aware of Pear) and absolutely none of them were even headshot kills (you can tell by the death messages). This is general play and is entirely possible. The "must be super lucky" thing isn't a good counter, either, as this can happen frequently with most guns, especially at that range. Consistent or not, very possible and nothing out of the norm from most players. Clips two, three, and four: Factory is a poor choice of an objective to collect evidence with. Most perspectives we have in these clips are in thirdperson (minus topshot's gameplay) and lack enough information to clearly define somebody as cheating. He "pre-aimed topshot through boxes" and "immediately knew where he was at" in a few cases. You provided a clip of you testing one of those. A lot of the boxes on the shelves are not tall enough to cover the entirety of a model. The test was done in a slightly different location (closer to the center, different angle versus towards the end close to the shelf) and has potentially misleading results. You can see silhouettes, feet, tops of heads, and often times more past a majority of shelves in that room. Let's not forget about audio too, some cases where we see topshot strafing slightly or pushing up thinking he's got the jump, to find out that Pear could hear him and adjust accordingly (footsteps are loud). To be honest, this seems like very normal play to me. Even with all of the clips together, I cannot confidently say that Pear is cheating. And I'd like to reiterate how disappointed I am in how biased the collection of these clips are. They saw you as guilty before they even hit record or save, without good evidence, which is worrying coming from some pretty high staff. Some extra things:

This glitch is caused by the rolling mechanic. I don't have the addon on hand to look at it, but removing/disabling rolling (which is only there to dampen/rid of fall damage while climbing) should fix this. (Rolling, for some reason, did this slide effect that was multiplied by your initial velocity before the roll. If you did it correctly and didn't take fall damage then you could fall from a high height, roll, and then go flying with massive amounts of velocity) -1. While it isn't necessarily meant to be a feature, we can just time our jumps with the anti-bhop to gain height and climb objects. With the Climb Swep, however: experienced climbers can do A LOT with just one charge. And I'm unsure of if the climb swep is still available on the DarkRP server or not, and if it isn't there: why it had been removed.

While I agree this isn't something super important, the response of the community is an entire yikes. I get its a video game community filled with a bunch of children (and in some cases rather childish adults) but as proggy has said there was absolutely no need to be so insanely defensive and offensive about it. That type of attitude pushes people away from the community ("boohoo, their feelings got hurt, go somewhere else" is such a cool comeback) And for those who are unaware that this is possible without replacing existing class models: DarkRP allows you to set a table of models that players can choose from. The functionality of it is inside of the F4 menu, the 3D render whenever you select a job is also a button that selects a random model from the table (if any). While it is possible, figuring out what jobs should have alternate models and then going through the entire jobs.lua file to update them will take too much time than it'd be worth. If you have any ideas on what jobs should include alternate models, and the models they should have available, I'd either respond using a format and images on this post or create another suggestion at a later date when ready.

Here is where this method falters. Just get an anti-cheat already instead of trying to figure out if a clip is ban-worthy or not. We have no audio from that room, so we can't hear any footsteps if they were there. The volume of the video is a bit low, the spectator was too distant, and was also creating sound themselves. In my opinion, this seems pretty normal minus the jumpy render because complicated networking shit. If this is the only evidence that was used, then +1 to the appeal. If not, definitely gonna need those other videos.

It feels like a pattern because of how miniscule the movements are (which does make sense); so rather than bumping that up and making it unpredictable (which isn't possible with the method available in base CW 2) might do more harm than good. The way that I had shared would affect all weapons using that specific attachment and not just snipers. It's more of an annoyance than being a nerf, so I don't think putting it on everything is that great of a solution. There are other ways you can get rid of this awful sniper meta (changing the map to one that provides more cover; ie. no more deserts, weapon and attachment balancing, loadout system so players have to choose what weapons they want to use rather than being a one-man army) as opposed to using something this useless.

I believe Garnet may have modified his re-implementation of scope sway to the other sights (considering NXS still has the normal breathing amount and costs). Normally, you'd set this up within an attachment file (in lua/cw/shared/attachments/...) and then you set the breathing settings within the cw_base weapon's shared.lua file. If you want to go even more in depth you can set different settings per attachment or per weapon, but that is a bit more complicated. Personally though, I disagree with having sway added to any scope/sight. If I remember correctly, sway was supposed to combat the sniper meta by slowing down combat. You had to hold your breath or slow down your speed to make sure that you hit a shot. At the current state, it is not achieving what it was proposed to. The movement of the sway is very minimal and has a sort of a pattern that can be very easy to follow.

The blame legitimately lies on you in the end. While I agree that the MRP community that we have is super entitled for no reason, you have made questionable decisions on the basis of "keeping the average pop count up" - resorting to using bots, swapping maps for zero reason, the people you continue to put in charge (D Rose, Jim, and Aidan are excluded from this, Kendal as well). (The first two sentences above can be seen as hostile, so after writing everything else I decided to remove them but instead think it's important to keep it readable for fluidity) And the "refusing help" portion isn't made-up. Yes, people have reached out. And yes, you've utilized some of what they've given you, and you've had conversations with them on rare occassions for help tackling a problem. But a good portion of what people (at least those I've spoken too, and my own experience) provide to you is just thrown off like trash. When we initially spoke you talked down on me like I didn't know what I was doing; granted, I didn't have previous work to show you to verify and you had also been up that entire night working on MRP and DRP updates. I took the blame for my edits not working because it was easier than creating an argument (and I actually thought I fucked up), but after testing it further it had nothing to do with me and was something that I couldn't have predicted regarding the server and other addons. I don't think anybody is holding a grudge against you or has a vendetta, and I commend you for the amount of effort and time that you sink into all of this community. I don't blame you for the mistakes or choices you've made, especially when some were done under stress from your personal life and managing the community. What I, myself, blame you for is not taking credit in some of those mistakes, and your slight unwillingness to move forward with a new mindset regarding server development and management, for yourself and the people you leave in charge. It's all about peak playercount versus player retention and enjoyability of said servers. Your average playercount doesn't even matter either because people (and bots) just AFK the entire time, take slots and trap new players into thinking we're an active community when in reality we really aren't; and to clarify, I can only speak about MRP and not the other servers we have hosted. -- Here's an idea: Make a Deathmatch gamemode. Drop DarkRP as a base, it fucking sucks. It will be well worth the time, and potential money spent, on making something like that. It could be better monetized and more casual than what we currently have. The ideas for progression are nearly endless. Have a leveling system with balance-able perks for players who prestige it, subscription based VIP-tiers that provide additional things while not providing them with an advantage (and that work, sorry not sorry). Unlockable attachments (with ingame cash) and weapons (with levels), cosmetics like weapon skins and models that could be provided with ingame currency OR as a store item. Class-based system to limit this "one-man army" bullshit. Literally Gmod Battlefield, basically. It would be much easier to maintain in the end. The community wants combat over roleplay, and while roleplay is a good introduction for new players, it doesn't help when the rest of the server who is experienced doesn't want it. All of the changes you've introduced in this update, aside from the Gamemaster and staff changes, are specifically for combat - keep all of that in mind.

Using attachments rather than a standard buff through the skill tree will allow you to provide negative effects to the weapon, providing balance even if it creates competitive advantage. I'd argue that giving players the ability to increase their firerate, damage, and their magazine size using the skill tree creates an even more unbalanced competitive advantage over the unlocking of attachments. The same goes for movement speed and armor, and even further for things like Elite classes. Would the skill tree affect things on something like RPG or Juggernaut?

There should be crash logs somewhere in your gmod folder; they're in a minidump file format. You can't normally read them so you'll have to upload them to a third-party reader (the Metastruct one is probably your best/only choice; trusted + Gmod related). Sometimes they show the console and sometimes they don't, may be dependant on 32- vs 64-bit versions but I'm not really sure. Do understand that these crash logs go really in depth and provide tons of engine details both inside and outside of the Lua environment - so it's essentially useless to most people but can still help narrow down what could be causing people to crash in terms of the engine. They likely won't include any identifying information (any filepaths that lead into your User folder might not be scrubbed, cannot confirm) and provide you with links to share crash data (with an extended ability to delete and download - make sure to share the 'View only' link and not the link in your address bar).

Some extra information for those who may not be sold: For you to hit a headshot on somebody who is "headglitching" here is a super lucky shot [considering it isn't really that possible or plausible]. They have to be standing pretty far back to have their head barely crest over the hill where you had shot. It's hard to put this into an actual perspective but I went to check it out and did my best to mimic your location and where you were aiming (was a bit difficult with the difference in FOV). They're already on the edge of render to begin for you there, even further out of your render if they were that low on the terrain as they'd be standing farther back. I was already a -1 to begin with but was slightly skeptical due to how possible it is until I went and actually looked at the terrain. I have a few (3) screenshots but they aren't easily verifiable, I guess. -- Here are better screenshots that show you what I mean.

Do note that I am not in support of the ban appeal. I am sharing information that is helpful in deciding whether evidence is valid or not. Evidence like this could easily be inaccurate. Your test, while unfortunately not possible to easily do anyways, does not follow the same exact scenario. Here's what changes from your test to the evidence: - You are further up and to the left on that same hill, giving you more visibility. This helps your original evidence as the player is still not visible but leaves potential for false validation of evidence in other cases. - You turn in your test to show us where the player is standing. There is terrain behind the player, so it lowers the potential difference in distance between the two events even further. - We can only assume where Keb is standing in the original clip based on where September was aiming (head just above the hill). However, here are some things to think about: - In the original clip: Keb is not inside of your PVS. Entities outside of your PVS are generally "slowed down"; the server/engine doesn't send as many position/angle updates and your client doesn't predict, causing teleportation, as you're too far for it to matter. Meaning Keb could actually be in render for September and the server hasn't sent an update to you yet. - But in your test clip: the other player is standing where we assume Keb would be at (based on the headshot kill in the original clip; in somewhat of a headglitch over the peak of the hill) and is still not visible even with you being further up on the hill. In the future, for cases such as this where the evidence has a higher potential to be inaccurate due to lacking information, there should be more than one clip to show that beyond a reasonable doubt a player is cheating. Looking at all of the information and other key things from the two videos, it does look to be that September may likely be using an ESP or other third-party software/script.

As a general practice, SpreadPerShot should be lower than or equal to MaxSpreadInc (unless you intend to reach MaxSpreadInc in one shot; do know that it currently takes two shots to reach that value with both the AEK and the A5). MaxSpreadInc is as it sounds. It's the maximum value used when caluclating/adding spread while firing. Of course that value can be affected by a multiplier, which is almost always 1 except when using certain attachments. Keep in mind that I have no real experience in balancing weapons; I believe ARs should all have around 50% max spread and SMGs should all have around 35-40% max spread. AimSpread, HipSpread, SpreadPerShot, and SpreadCooldown might potentially need to be recalculated, but I haven't researched CW enough to really know how much of an affect all of these numbers have.

Not in your requested format or whatever, but I want to bring up something important. Go with what shrimps had suggested or completely drop RP and "create" a TDM/war based gamemode (like Insurgency or a bigger scale CS match, so on) I'd be interested in both but I can no longer see mixing the two the way that we are already doing and trying to do. It just doesn't work. Why did it work before? Because it was new and had developed in a way that had brought a "diverse" community of players. It isn't enjoyable and is a mess to manage. The fact that we're having the conversation about what we should do and that it's a discussion of many varying opinions blatantly tells us this. I will be honest, I cannot put my opinion into words and I haven't decided on what to vote for.

Not to put Garnet on blast here, but this isn't what happened - plus "many times" is actually just once. If you'd like me to explain what I think caused my changes to CW 2 to bug out (hint, it wasn't me), let me know.

Please don't spread false information again about how the Source engine (and Garry's Mod, specifically) handles PVP (weapons, damage, death). You did this last time when you tried to get rid of friendly fire and its entirely inaccurate. The laggy part about implementing something like this is calculating the player's position to verify they are on the point. This check would need to be done everytime somebody dies. Not when people take damage, and not when people shoot their guns. The way I've read what Ozzy has posted is like this: If any objective is capped for the opposing team, you get rewards based on the attacking portion of his post. If any objective isn't capped, you get rewards based on the neutral portion of his post. If any objective is capped for your team, you get rewards based on the defending portion of his post. This is the easiest thing to implement that won't kill your performance. The thing that's difficult with implementing it this way (rather than the way Garnet has originally decided) is creating it in a balanced and accurate way. We have 3 total objectives and if the rewards per kill require one objective, it could be random if one objective is capped by the opposition, one objective isn't capped, and one objective is capped by your team. Now, doing the reward per cap-tick and reward for being on point for capturing is also easy. You're already verifying the player is on the objective to modify the percentage change per tick. Giving money or experience will not add any performance strain, that is if its implemented correctly.

I feel my opinion is rather complicated and could potentially send the wrong message, so I have edited this post to make it known that I personally feel the type of gameplay we have, when done right, is perfect and unique. The main issue with that, however, is at the end of the day this is a [semi-serious] roleplay server. I've argued for the past 2 years since I've joined many different directions for this server, and after a discussion with people outside of my own thinking I have decided that I agree with Garnet's idea to go to this "all-time war" style. Some statements and issues I addressed in my original response still stand, and I will leave the unedited response below in a quote for those interested in reading it. I have ideas for how I feel the MRP community should proceed, but these ideas are not a reflection of what everybody thinks and I'd like to have a real discussion about it. My ideas aren't complete and some clash with eachother in how they should be implemented and balanced. My original response:

For MRP: Gameplay (war) has become so important that most ideas of roleplay are no longer fun to most peoples. While it isn't impossible to balance roleplay and gameplay, who wants to put that effort into it when the community is split about it - you either get called cringe or you push away a portion of the community because they dislike the changes you're proposing to make. I have more than a few issues with MRP ranging from gameplay to factions and to management (staff and faction leadership both). I've had so many conversations about it that at this point I don't want to speak about most of them, I've gotten so tired of repeating the same things that I feel its no longer worth my time to help fix it. I've offered valid solutions that I feel (and have been told) appeal to both sides in some way and allow room for more change, but have always either been ignored or disvalued for some reason by various people in power. My biggest gripe with GG is the absolute trainwreck that is development and programming. I understand that Garnet is not a developer and he doesn't claim to be, but at some point you have to trust other people to do that work. All of it piles up and eventually weighs heavy on each individual thing you do. A lot of the solutions that Garnet implements, while his choice, are half-assed and simple, and I disagree with that because it promotes such bad practice in such important work. The war system is an unoptimized, hard-to-modify and outdated mess. Squads can cause FPS drops through the use of halos (there are alternatives that look as good and sometimes even better with a fraction of the graphical cost), and are also unoptimized + use outdated and inefficient methods. The amount of stripped addons that were carelessly modified (rather than properly) on MRP is yikes. CW is a buggy mess that could easily be fixed and improved in more than a few areas. Some of these things affect gameplay and in some cases roleplay (missions) pretty heavily. S&D doesn't work (a quick look at the error would fix it so fast) and missions also don't work (granted, they were never finished to begin with). We have unnecessary addons and scripts that supposedly cause significant strain on both the client and the server: vehicles, the drowning script, and unused weapons + playermodels. And that's literally just the start of it. There are people in this community who do these things (modeling, programming, mapping) as both a hobby and some of us for a living, and we're good at it. My problem with management isn't solely on the MRP manager(s) or the faction leaders, while I still believe that is a problem, it's on the attitude of Garnet himself. I understand (from what I've been told) you've been both scammed and too trustworthy for major parts of this community, but I don't think that you should be doing ALL of it alone with the wide range of skills (and profiencies in those skills) required.

+1. You weren't banned previously. Although your reputation isn't that great (you're seen as toxic and pretty sus to some), there is no evidence that proves you are cheating nor that you were ban evading. The account that was banned [today] was the same account you played on before you had disappeared on Echo v2 while you were in Rangers.

Not to be rude, but I have absolutely no idea who you are. I've never seen you online before. With that in mind, I'm going to respond solely based on what I read from your application. I will personally disregard the other responses as they are from US mains, potentially creating a biased point of view. To begin, I would like to address that if you don't get staff, you still seem to be going places. You address what you believe staff responsibilities are and/or should be, although some of what you've described is available to you at any time without being staff. You clearly answer the 2 paragraph essay question, providing details on how you would respond to general situations. Countering that, however, is that you don't seem to be as well known as you (and a few others who have responded) think. You throw around "reluctantly" a few times in your application, likely out of misunderstanding - so I won't hold that against you but would like to make it known [to you]; reluctance means to be unwilling or hesitant. You're both confident and seem to be taking the responsibility seriously, just remember that this is a video game and your personal life should be more important, especially at your age and upcoming. I wish you the best of luck, +1.

-1. You've just recently returned. Your answer to the 2 paragraph essay question is partly stuff that you can already do as a member of the community, and partly stuff that are non-problems. You may be different now given your few month break from MRP, but you didn't have that mature of an attitude before you had left. You're also still blacklisted from staff. And the final nitpicky comment: Is your "rule of code" what you follow personally or what the current management and community wants you to follow?