Lets talk about our population...

[PraetorDon 485]

I'm unable to edit my post with the quote, (on mobile, lol).]

 

9 hours ago, Moabkilr45 said:

While I understand Sims and tryouts are up to the officers of 2GA & Army, The thing is with 2GA, Our officers are either demotivated, burnt out, just bored of the server or inactive; And as for Army, I can't speak on their behave because I don't go over there. Their is only so much we can do during peacetime that eventually we would have done what can be done and it just gets boring, and enlisted members on both sides can only entertain themselves for so long that they either leave or Mass RDM.

Then those officers need to resign/be removed. Your job as Marshal is to ensure 2GA officers are doing their jobs. When I got burnt out from leading GRU, I didn't half-ass lead my faction and watch it die, I left. In addition, I had officers resign because they couldn't meet my (high) activity requirements, it happens.

Edited July 6, 2020 by PraetorDon

[Normal Hooman 161]

Being someone who recently left with the main reasons being - Combat doesn't feel fun or unique with the third person updates. Sure I know it's not immersive and retarded in nature but at the same time it was really fun experience. Which leads me to my next reason is the seeming identity crisis of the server with people saying they want more RP but when presented with it on the server it just never really happens and when it does it is pretty garbage most of the time. Why are people trying to be something they're not? Most of the player base are teenagers and young adults that just wanna fuck around on a gmod server. Another big issue I saw was the attitude of people. It was very easy to find people who blamed everyone else for the problems of the server and never try to look into themselves and do the best they could personally. Also the rules put in place that were the lazy solution such as base camping rules and reserve rules. People having trouble with base campers? Train them on how to deal with it. People abusing reserves? Remove the people who are abusing reserves. Last thing is there is really no one that is super charismatic and that can create fun out of nothing in leadership positions. The main thing that keeps other players to the server in the end is the other players.

[Cold Soldier 184]

While some suggestions like making the server less PTW is in my opinion, a decent one that could be implemented. I feel like almost any suggestion like that would not matter because of the problems with faction leadership, staff inactivity and incompetency, and nobody doing anything about it. I'll be addressing these points just made.

 

Faction Leadership: To put it simply, factions in general across the server are simply not doing anything to help their faction most of the time by not getting on the server, whether SOC or base. This is mainly in base, but I've seen it manifest in SOC as well. For example, in rangers, they had a lot of players on that just joined around 2 or so weeks ago, most of which are decent players, and I have never seen many of them on since. There is just a lack of motivation for them to get on and I understand that but it just translates to them getting inactive and hurting their faction. I think @PraetorDon addressed the issues with base factions nicely so I wont regurgitate what he said. However, I will add that I notice that nobody, whether base or SOC want to actually work to help their faction, and it almost seems like they just want it done for them so they could do whatever. I'm going to recall this one time, when I worked my ass off for around 3-4 hours doing shit with 2GA, effectively getting a full page of 2GA on the server at once. And it's only when the page of PVTs was on that the officers got on too, and I got off for the night. I had little-to-no help from much of anyone getting on, and this just proves my point that officers in particular, dont go out of their way to improve their faction. 

 

Staff inactivity and incompetency: There are very little staff that are on and handle not only sits but general shit on the server. Most staff I see on are afk. A few days ago, there were 10 staff on, and nobody was active, they were all afk, some of which were fucking admins, which is sad that nobody was on to help the server. A little less than a week ago, there was a 2GA PVT massing, and it took a few minutes to get him banned, giving him a sizeable feed. I had to scream in TS to finally get someone on to ban him which is frustrating in on itself (keep in mind, this was around 8 PM CST). When I have to ask staff in TS or report someone literally getting a FEED, it shows me that staff dont even care about their own server enough to stay on it. In general, the staff team needs to start doing shit, rather than AFKing for that prestige.

 

The lack of initiative: This  is the worst part of the server. Everybody knows there's problems, and everybody knows THE problems, but the main problem I see is nobody is doing shit about it. The issues mentioned above are so easy to fix on an individual level, get on and motivate yourself, if you cant, then resign, whether this is staff or officer/ leader of a faction. One example for this is GB leadership. The faction is literally dead. And I'm not going to beat around the bush about it. The leader of GB is inactive and doesn't do anything to help the faction, and the results show as much. I've advocated to put another person in his place that's active and seems more qualified, but this still hasn't happened. Which shows that a simple fix isn't even being taken. This also ties into the lack of motivation for SOC players to get on and do something on the server as well, which kills player count too. 

 

In the end, before we add anything else on the server, we need to fix the problems mentioned before, since if we add things or switch maps, new/ old players might come, but these problems will more than likely drive them away. There is a simple fix for these problems. Actually feel motivated to get on the server and help it, that fueled me to help 2GA, but in the end, I got burnt out from doing shit on my own. If you're thinking how to get motivated, just think of the good days on MRP, and just think of that want to recreate it.  And while in some places I was toxic in this post, I dont really care, these are problems I've seen that need to be addressed. 

[Toyto 79]

In my opinion one of the main problems with MRP like VBSA talked about is an identity problem. The server can't decide if it's an RP server of a war server. While you are able to have both I feel as it's much harder to continually update and maintain both aspects and as a result they both suffer. If the server chose to be a war server then the combat would be fun. If the server chose to be RP then the RP would be fun. I recently left due to this problem. The majority of players want the server to be a war server based off their behavior of mostly playing during was and playing other shooters during peacetime. So when I got bored of the war system as there is only so much variability in the experiences at the moment I turned to RP. I tried doing trainings and raids and patrols with army. I tried making my own events. The problem was A) people were uninterested [OOC] Event Helper: PDSS really out here doing sims during an event [OOC] Event Helper: smh [OOC] PDSS Person: rp sims? [OOC] Vega Person: who cares [OOC] PDSS Person 2: I play to click on heads. B) As Jake said "There is only so much theatre of the mind you can do before you get bored.". The solution in my opinion is for the development of the server to cater to either a "combat" experience or a "RP" experience. That way, whichever is chosen will be fun instead of both being average and boring. I think the new war types Garnet is working is an amazing step in the right direction as that's what I think the server wants. Finally I want to add that this change doesn't have to be 100%. You could still have "RP" interactions in a combat server and you obviously will have combat encounters in a RP server but the new additions and majority of changes should reflect the desire to be one of the other. There are obviously other problems going on with MRP but I believed they have already been addressed thoroughly.

Edit - I'm also not saying this has to be a permanent thing, but getting lets say combat into a good place fast is better then slowly getting both aspects into a good place. This way people are more likely to come back as there is something desirable  instead of the promise that there will be.

Edited July 6, 2020 by Toyto

[Lex_ 506]

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.

[Nutter 15,181]

I will unfortunately be locking this thread seeing as genuinely, I feel as though alot of the responses I've received aren't what I'm looking for. Just about everybody is pointing their fingers at different directions (some with no explanation what so ever as to their thinking) and many others are simply stating "things need to change" or "I would like to see something added that we can do during peacetime" and leaving their response very open ended. Unfortunately saying "i want you to add something" really doesn't help much, and suggestions for content are always looked at in the suggestions area.

When it comes to an echoing criticism of myself and my "lack of trust" for others or "reluctancy to get help", I find that hilarious to see because I have reached out to a dozen developers to no avail in the past 2-3 years, and I have upright offered people cash to help me in leading the servers. Proggy denied payment to manage our DarkRP server, and the only applicant we've gotten for Rust is unfortunately not a good candidate according to the majority of players who know them. I cannot just "create" an executive member to handle the server, I can't just get help from people who do not exist. Phantom/Duel/Tayler/Jackal or whoever else you'd like to bring up are no longer active members of the community, and haven't been in a long time.

I will try my best to scatter through this thread and find some useful information I could use to move forward.

Again, if anybody wishes to contribute, whether it be development/management or any content in general, my inbox is always open. Thank you very much!

 

 

Edit: to point out some of the posts i'm in reference to: 

 

14 hours ago, PraetorDon said:

When it comes to staff, for six days in a row now, there's been someone massing/minging/breaking rules, and there have been zero staff on to deal with it, There are plenty of staff AFK however.

I am unfortunately unable to create staff, it comes down to players who wish to help the server applying.

8 hours ago, Torch said:

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.

Well, where these trustworthy people I need to do that work? there is not a magical developer stepping forward

8 hours ago, Torch said:

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.

so please point me in the direction of somebody who would be willing to help out?

14 hours ago, 0zzy said:

If you can step into our shoes for a second, you made a post on January 7th staying you were on the cusp of introducing weapon skins. Fast forward half a year later and there hasn’t been any update (I don’t mean implementation, I genuinely mean a status update). So I don’t think it’s too harsh for the community to think the project was scrapped. That’s why I feel like status updates on the projects are a win-win. The community gets informed about the progress, and you don’t have the community losing faith.

Again, this is in reference to donator content which doesn't affect the great majority of our server. It is infact complete, I just don't see a purpose in implementing an entire update that is LITERALLY a cash grab (weapon skins). Do you genuinely believe that adding weapons skins with no gameplay mechanic changes would bring back everyday users to our server?

21 hours ago, Redacted said:

Back when you used to be able to crouch spam, it made pvp challenging for other players. They had to actually adapt and learn how to the server played and it added that extra commitment to really improve yourself as a pvp main within the server

You are quite literally pointing out a game-breaking feature which deterred new players from playing the server (as it literally made PvP gameplay unfair) as a reason for our dip?