Lex_

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?

You aren't wildly shooting through a bush (you're burst firing through a large bush with dead-on shots on a moving target). Being on the other side of that bush, they were rather far from you, so footsteps aren't as loud or specific. You could not in any way know where exactly there were at PAST that large ass bush just from sound. Having watched it twice in-game (two different people in the same situation), one of these being in "your perspective" through Zachman spectating, you are pretty clearly cheating.

I don't have a clip but I was on the other side to have seen that. He was not close to the obstacle.

You don't need to provide evidence @Whiskeyyy. It's on @Zachman to provide the evidence used for your ban. +1. The evidence that Zachman has provided just doesn't scream that you were undeniably cheating for me. I skimmed through the video and ended up missing most of the sus clips. The through bush kills are pretty heavily sus and super random.

I understand you two may have been or were very clearly against confirmed cheaters from returning, but it would be biased to allow only some of those people to return even though they've essentially done the same thing. And while I do agree with you, I disagree with this idea of selective punishment that causes many people to be treated differently when they really shouldn't be. It's also strange of both of you two to return after nearly two months to shit on both Buddha and Simone (in this case) after being absent from the MRP community both in-game and on forums. And the same goes for people who were banned for Toxicity and not just cheating - although those types of bans are more easily case-by-case compared to cheating bans, which should be more general and blanket. +1. As far as we know (based on what you've said privately and when it was clear that you were cheating), you weren't doing it for very long. A lot less than some others who have been unbanned and have also openly admitted to it. Like I just said above, it shouldn't matter and all parties should be banned, but since that isn't the case here I believe you should also be unbanned.

I'd like to note that your mic is muted and missing from this, an example being at 11:36 where you say in chat you'd like to share an idea, and a few others where there is just silence as you're the only one speaking. If you're able to remember some of those portions and are willing to share, could you do that here? Or does somebody else have another recording of the meeting upload(ed/ing)?

EDIT: I can't think of a solution that isn't prone to being abusable by knowledgable people. Best bet would be to rework the level and prestige system to use its own UI, which will be able to show you your perks, level, current prestige, and so on. The previous method that I shared relying on still using the DarkRP entities table will work but be abused as there isn't an easy way to verify that player even spent money, they can just spam send netmessages and receive money. Would have to see more of how its setup to actually know, though.

Rather than us continuing to argue about a broken system, I propose a restrictive but fair compromise that fits the suggested use cases: To begin: reserves need to be recorded seperately from a faction's documents; publically or privately at the discretion of management. These new documents should be owned a manager. You can use a form to record new entries to reserves, managers can verify with leaders and then properly record. Additionally, all reserves need to meet these requirements (unless stated otherwise by management, or exceptions if you read further): You must be a current member of the faction you're getting reserves for. Reserves cannot be the first two recorded ranks of a faction. Going onto reserves requires manager permission until the community can be trusted with governing this themselves. If you have an emergency that requires you to be away for longer than a 3 weeks, you can be put onto reserves with manager approval without meeting the above requirements. Some extra restrictions to keep power in check: The max reserves rank for non-faction leaders will be the highest enlisted rank (generally E-9). The max reserves rank for faction leaders will be O-1. [With the new requirement of recording previous leaders, this should be easy to maintain] Officer reserves cannot raid, kidnap players, or accept PTE. They can still claim with permission from the current faction leader and can host a briefing/debriefing if another player or officer hasn't already claimed it, and can accept PTLs (but can also be overruled by any active duty officer; O-1+, regardless of rank) Under no circumstances should there be Warrant Officer/Junior Officer reserves. You are NOT entitled to reserves regardless of your previous rank or status. You are granted reserves by the next (or in some cases, current) faction leader. Reserves can be removed for any reason that is not discriminative or majorly biased by either a faction leader or staff. When reserves are removed, they cannot (and should not) be given back for any reason unless the player affected can prove (without giving away personal information that may identify them) that they went on reserves for an emergency. If a player lies about needing to go on reserves for an emergency and it could be proved, a manager can take their reserves for that faction. You may only have enlisted reserves rank for one faction per side. If you lead a faction, the O-1 reserves can ignore this limit, but any enlisted reserves will still be required to follow it. Before people may be potentially confused by the last point: you can still have reserves in one faction and join another [on one side]. But if you want reserves for that faction, you must give up the former. What will coming off of reserves look like? Players who return to come off of reserves will be required to play a minimum of one week (7 days, non-inclusive - so a total of 8 by date), which can be tracked by reserves document I spoke of before. When they are cleared to come off of reserves, they have an additional minimum cooldown extension of 4 days (which obviously includes their rank's normal cooldown). To come off of reserves in a faction, you must not be an active member of another faction. While some people think that dual-factioning is alright, I'm not for it and believe a system that allows it could be abused. Finally: if reserves return, it is a clean slate. We start anew and do not use old reserves lists. The only people who should be on those reserves after it's return will be current faction members and "now-resigned" faction leaders, both of which will require approval from their [new] faction leader and a manager.

The entire point of those opposing you is the fact that faction leaders had too much freedom and abused the privilege. [read below] [I'm gonna get shit for what I say here, which proves my exact point] Player count does not equal player retention. Stop basing success off the number of idle players - it's not a good metric. And coming from somebody who has taken people's reserves both rightfully and a few times just because, they bitched and whined to other people (staff and future leaders) to get their reserves back, which generally works for whatever reason, completely disregarding the opinion and work put in from previous leaders. There is and has been (as long as I've been here) a lack of consensus between the community, between manager(s) and staff, on a wide variety of topics. In this case, it could be dumbed down to How much power should faction leaders have? Many faction leaders abuse the power they get, staff tend to distance themselves before eventually getting involved, often times too late. I don't care what anybody tells me, none of the factions, regiments, or whatever the fuck you want to call them, are in a good position right now (and from what it sounded like they've never been; fun doesn't equal fuctionally sound). Strict managers are power-hungry and dictators. Managers who sit back until they're desperately needed are seen as cowards or inactive bastards. Until you can drop the childish attitudes toward authority and responsibility, none of this will be in a good state. It's just a video game my ass; ignoring the rather simple common-sense of "managing" a faction and the accompanying set of rules because it's just a game is a toxic view on responsibility and management of essentially anything. Now that the mini-rant is over, here's a pretty simple response to the actual suggestion: -1. While reserves promote older players to return, in the previous and current state (as well as the proposed states by community members), it's not a viable solution to keeping people on the server and actually improving the community. A higher player count is not gonna save anything. While it's nice to have more people on, people do eventually leave. From what I've seen (no exact numbers, basing it off of memory with a lack of quantitive data), it's very rare for a new player to return to the server after experiencing a single peacetime. The lack of activity (it's pretty lackluster to find a full server just to see that 70% of the people online are just idle and AFK) pushes them away. The imbalance in weapons and availablity of those weapons pushes them away (AR15 vs AEK/A5/Orsis/...). Here's what people actually want reserves for: - A title that means they don't have to play as an enlisted in an entry faction. - A boost in rank so that they can return and immediately be given some sort of power (which is possible without said rank). To go along with my first point in the list above, a surprising amount of people use said title (regardless of their reserves rank) to literally assert their dominance and superiority over other players, generally those in entry factions - even if the other players are officers. Of course, people continue to do this without reserves because taking this game/server seriously is a damn sin, but the point still stands. -- Also a side-note: it's ironically funny that people who are arguing against and in disagreement of the return of reserves are also people who had a ton of reserve ranks. It's almost as if they understand how outright broken and bullshit it was (and still is). But as if they'd know anything, right? They don't play MRP anymore, so their opinions should obviously be considered irrelevant and void.

If you're going to allow AFKing in the spawn room, then why disallow people being active there? If they aren't killing people, then what even is the issue? Sounds like useless staff intervention for something so absurd. I'd also like to mention that people are seemingly allowed to +right and +forward into their console to avoid the AFK slay timer. I know that Garnet has previously stated that people shouldn't be doing this, but staff haven't been enforcing that whatsoever. Not so different than people just chilling in the civ room.

Lua stealers are an impossible idea. That's not how Source handles networking, especially not how Garry's Mod handles networking and execution of Lua files. Here is the only possible way a Lua stealer would work: A backdoor on the server to process client-to-client requests, in which is not available on GG as far as we know. And as far as the scripting community knows, there isn't a recently new way to force upload and execute Lua onto the server without the use of existing backdoors and/or broken and outdated addons that haven't already been patched. All cheats eventually reach the Lua state at some point, regardless of if they start there (Lua cheats) or not (C cheats), that's just how rooted Lua is into Gmod's revision of Source. The only thing you can do with a Lua stealer is "steal" clientside Lua files that have been added to your own client by the server (through the AddCSLuaFile function; for security and logically, clientside Lua files must be uploaded to the client using this function before they can be executed). I haven't done much research on how exactly they take what they take, but my guess would be your client's Lua cache (saved locally, garrysmod/cache) that has files compressed using LZMA; all it needs to do is decompress them and you've got clientside Lua code. I'm unsure of what that final result would look like, if there is any obfuscation that goes on to speed up the Lua cache when used or not. It's also pretty scummy of people to use a single sentence against JammySpammy as if it is an admission of guilt - it isn't even close to being that incriminating and is similar to somebody being accused of burning down a store, them responding with: "I didn't burn down that store. I wouldn't ever burn down that store.", and investigators claiming they're guilty by assuming that they have intention to burn down a different building, just not that store, "Oh, but you'd burn down another store?". Doubt we'd actually get to see the evidence publicly but that's another post for another time, but as Ozzy has already said, what we got from Zephyr was definitely not what was used against you in discussion for the ban, at least I'd hope it wasn't.

It wouldn't make sense because of a single gate, but could we also have an extra ammo crate on the opposite direction of a base; say around tents for RU and [insert suggestion for US here] to lower the amount of time you spend going to grab ammo before leaving base during a war. More of a gameplay change that may help ease the difference in time it takes for sides to get to an objective from their spawn (RU base facing towards Factory and Town, US facing towards Town and Company). This. While I can't think of off the top of my head any spots that should be banned from boosting to, there are a lot of locations that seem to have been set-up on purpose as a flank route that are no longer possible or are 10x harder to complete.

Lack of motivation to do much of anything productive; started sometime late last year after my HS graduation, I was actually doing rather well up until quarantine and social distancing where that dropped off fast. I've started and stopped random projects since January, which has helped slightly but not by much since they stop generally out of laziness and getting bored of the repitition. And then there's isolation and social distancing reinforcing my social anxiety, which is gonna make it extra hard when everything opens and responsibility comes back (soon). I dropped two groups of online/IRL friends: I'm a quiet person and so one of the groups I just wasn't participating in and left, while the other had essentially met new people to chill with and stopped talking to a few of us others as often. I also haven't spoken to many people (just one or two, legit) outside of GG and my family since early April, so that's nice. While the peacefulness of isolation is nice, I'm dreading going back to stressing to find work and having to deal with other people. My earlier plans for community college (don't want loans and debt) have been put on hold until I can figure out how to do it, which is unfortunate as I was pretty hyped for it. Hope everybody else is doing well and they figure out what they need to figure out, all physical, mental, and emotional, yourself or not.

Agreed. I supported Topshot during the first ban appeal (the one with lack of real evidence, wasn't here for the second) and was also one of the people who were memeing about it in private (with him). I have noticed a change the few times that he's been in TeamSpeak but granted I haven't been very active prior to my return, as expected. So while it would be a third chance, which is a rather risky move considering the likelihood of repitition in any situation, I also wouldn't mind seeing you unbanned and rejoining the MRP community. (so technically a neutral +1?)

The bind randomly swaps from F6 and Insert (I've seen both, F6 on my desktop, Insert on a laptop), so the issue could potentially be a misunderstanding of what the bind actually is. Are there any clientside errors when using thirdperson at any point? Any errors when changing values? Asking just in case but I would have expected you to have already shared them if there were some.

Well said. Lack of leadership and authority in the wrong places promotes people to abuse such a thing, and develop habits that are unfair in gameplay by having the focus be kills rather than following orders. I'm hoping this changes over time and that the server (gameplay, combat, and roleplay) are taken more seriously, game or not, people are passionate about whatever they're passionate about and it isn't right to shame them for it (unless appropriate, such as something morally wrong but this conversation isn't one on politics and the like). Lighting, CC, and fog are all pretty powerful gameplay modifiers, so I'm excited to see what this would do in balance. As I've said before, Delta is largely an RU sided map ironically designed to be balanced for both sides. I'm glad you're not planning on dropping it and eventually revising it to be a fit map. I'm hoping to see some more change and assertion in other aspects of MRP - from addons and gunplay to staff-wise, and how they handle themselves and our community.

If you can (privately) share this method with Garnet that would be appreciated - but as far as I know it isn't possible without external Lua, at which point they're already considered cheating. -- Actually, I can think of a method to bypass it but it requires third-party software - not able to patch it, unfortunately.

+1. While I do use thirdperson for both viewing my model (habit?) and combat, it's clear that the community doesn't enjoy the effects of thirdperson on all ranges of combat. I believe the best solution would be removing thirdperson as a whole from the server. It seems so impractical to only disable thirdperson during war, as well as if somebody knew what they were doing they could bypass that. It only stops people from using it during war and not events, tryouts, and the like, too.

This suggestion is redundant as it brings up other current and already denied suggestions, although I can agree that there is a clear issue making it rather important. Here are things you bring up that I feel should happen, some ideas having been neglected: Objective wars: the center of a war should focus on and around an/the objective(s). While basecamping is an actual strategy in cutting off forces to an objective, it is not used as such. Proper weapon balancing: of all weapons, faction or from the store. I personally felt this portion to be rushed and guessed without real community feedback (we gave "its good" or "its bad" rather than "try this value as it..." and so on). I have no specifics off the top of my head as I don't currently play and would rather have discussion on suggestions from active players. Training. I disagree that the quiz system promotes more people to stay than it does cause problems. While it is rare that people fail the quiz in their attempts to be a nuisance, I also rarely see people return (granted, I haven't been on recently and this is basing it off experience back in early April and before). You shouldn't need an incentive to train people for your factions, DI/DS/RFR and officers both. If you want people to improve or to even stay, train them up. How are those things possible? For basecamping during objective wars, or well, in general, the idea is to get kills. It isn't to cut people off and it isn't being done strategically. People do it solely to get kills. To show strength and skill. Basecamping is NOT because of a skill gap (but there definitely seems to be a skill gap). Two opposing sides with two opposing objectives. One group wants to get kills because who cares about the objective, it's just Gmod. And the other only cares about the objective, likely playing solo without solid leadership (no offense US, but you need to fix that). Having played both sides when we swapped back to Delta, RU communicates a lot more in radio; outside of their TS channels, which is even better when you realize that RU SOC spend their times together in TS 90% of every war. US is entirely different, and while some US SOC chill in the Green Beret channel, there isn't much discussion in radio between the rest of their SOC and entry. For weapon balancing, I personally feel that SMGs are too fast but at the same time too manageable, making them versatile for close to middle-high ranges. Marksman rifles don't have the best optics (specifically the 2GA SKS). The sniping meta is large but thats mostly from the massive open desert of the current map lacking good cover. Of course, that isn't from somebody who is active on the server anymore and it'd be better to get fresh and current opinions on gunplay. The quiz system isn't leaving anytime soon so the best solution is to adapt to it. At the same time the quiz could be improved upon based on its questions and implementation without losing its original purpose: to get players trained enough to receive their whitelists, leaving all of the extra work up to entry factions (as it should). Changing the lack of training for recruiters and officers however, that is a complex problem. I know that people have tried adding incentives to training, they've also tried making it a requirement but nobody wants to be forced to do something on a video game. I think training needs to be reformed but the way I'd suggest doesn't work with the quiz system and isn't entirely written out yet. I could go on and on, honestly. But my response is aimed towards the things you're addressing in your original post, so I'll keep it as such.

Basecamping is an issue because people are too focused on getting kills and enjoying themsleves as if this is Call of Duty or Battlefield. That type of thinking has pushed the community to be against slower pacing no matter the amount of suggestions people create that seemingly support it. Who even cares about the roleplay aspect of the server anymore? If you have control over a virtual battlefield, why even let up when its so fun to win nothing? I've seen and heard people say they want more roleplay and less combat and then turn around and say they don't. I've done the same thing but that's because I adapted to the climate of the server, in the hopes that maybe I was wrong and would enjoy it better (I didn't). The big idea here is to make the server enjoyable for everybody and Don has provided a simple illustration and explains how this is possible. You develop ideas that aren't too expensive in effort, resolve the original issue(s), and don't take weeks to implement. Quick, efficient, and powerful improvements on many fronts. Although, that does have the potential to lead to cutting corners in things that should have higher effort and time put into them. Delta is inadvertently RU sided. However, when skilled players left RU for US in the later part of Delta, US was the one dominating. All because of skill levels, players leaving one side to balance out the other while ironically creating more imbalance. The map isn't the cause. Headglitching, while rather unbalanced, isn't the cause. Basecamping, as I've said, isn't the cause either. Those things are a side effect of a skill-based community failing to balance semi-serious roleplay in its fast-paced, softcore combat with (no offense to Garnet) half-assed mechanics and addons, that are so focused on getting kills for nothing in return. No progression, no cosmetics. No stats. Absolutely nothing. You can fix the basecamp issues by shifting the importance from "gameplay" to "roleplay", and enforcing it as such. People get away with too much individually and the excuse that it is "just a game" or that it is "just Gmod" doesn't fly. You can't create and organize something but refuse to take care of it the same way you would with something that is "more serious". Basecamping is gonna happen on every map. Headglitching will happen on every map. The best solution is to prepare players in combatting them and additionally balancing it out through map design and rules; calling for an improvement in leadership, giving newer players a base to develop their skill, and creating a fair environment for both sides. Understand that my entire last two sentences covers more than basecamping and headglitching, its implementation is decided by the community, and would be better done in phases.

While Discord does offer a much nicer and user-friendly UI/UX than TeamSpeak 3, TS3 is much more versatile. The range of roles, usergroups, and channels is far extended in TeamSpeak and much more manageable than Discord. The only thing Discord has going for it is roles and channels (with permissions) that are tedious to set-up well and working. TeamSpeak 3 (and myTeamSpeak) are free services to use, while hosting them is not. It offers many more features (like tons of customization and plugins - can tell you don't use TS3 because you said Discord is more customizable, which is laughable) for both users and staff in comparison to Discord. And best fits what this community uses it for. I actually personally prefer TS3 to Discord in audio quality; might be placebo but ohwell.

An update on my progress / bumping the thread (I would like more input, at best potential ideas - they do not have to modes and can be other features like the planned loadout system or whatever). Finally got around to redesigning the massive eyesore of a HUD that I was using for the previous revisions and setting up a basic layout for the Team Deathmatch HUD. Here's a comparison of the previous HUD to the new one: - old (February 2020) (Skirmish used to be Objectives, op) - new I've also designed it in a way to support themeing (in the future, not the main focus atm) with presets and custom themes. This is the dark purple theme, some other presets include lilac, dark red, and blue-gray. Some extra screenshots because why not:

Entirely possible, but not practical for MRP. Sounds like an interesting side project though like maybe for a gamemode competition, but I don't think it'd fit for the average size of MRP maps and player count. Definitely gonna keep that in mind though since that actually might be fun to port.

This has been an ongoing project that I've worked on since last November on and off in my spare time. I have 4 different versions trying to achieve the same thing (although one is incomplete and another is a work in progress). I have no plans on selling this nor am I making it for another community, and I'd like to get feedback and ideas on the entire project from the MRP community. I'm exploring this project for the sake of extending my knowledge in Lua and UX/UI design. I'm gonna try my best to avoid getting technical so I won't be showing any code snippets as that goes against the purpose of this post. To begin, here's a description of what I currently have as of the writing of this post (for those interested, it's rather long): And a question to the community, what sort of things would you like to see in/from this project? What sort of features, capabilities, or even war modes? I've based my current plans on what the community has suggested for GG prior, but I'd like to get a fresh take in case those have changed. I already plan on creating a loadout system that supports custom and pre-defined sets (donators), potentially a prestige system, and a squad system that everyone can use. And the modes that I have planned out are Skirmish (TDM), Domination (Objectives), and Quickpoint (Hardpoint / KOTH). And for my current plans, are there any extra ideas you may have that could develop more depth, usability, or gameplay?