Survey - FL Interest

[Pollux]

In short, we don't want the criminal role-play to be simply a mediocre option - it needs to be the best option available to make money by far. Or else you are simply breaking down the meta of the gamemode.

I feel you hit the nail on it's head here. Even though I always refrained from AgressiveRP, cause frankly I am not very good at it. It's what made playing on FL interesting. I surely do remember using contraband to save up for a car, with the chance of getting caught being very addicting. And it's what playing rebel, Corleone or president made my adrenaline pump and encourage me to come back. 

I agree with Haarek here that turning FL into "just another RPG" where interacting with other players is "an option" does break FL's purpose in my opinion. Countering this with passive ways of making money without player interaction solves the issue of the unstable playerbase, but does indeed breek the core.

I find it very tough to be able to fix the balance while keeping the core intact, as it requires an active playerbase.

I know it breaks the core but it's the only option as we've already tried everything else. We know from our time on the server last year and the countless surveys we've done that players don't really want to roleplay in the same way they used to. Players that spend time making nice dupes or RPs for others to participate in are extremely rare now and can't be relied on as it used to be years ago. AggRP has always not relied too much on others anyway, it has mostly been a choice if you've wanted to raid others or just sit in the corner of the map alone. Giving more options to the other jobs is all we're really doing, you can still do things the old way if you want to.

I think a misconception Haarek and others have is that if we give players nothing to do they'd actually interact and RP. This isn't true at all, they just won't do anything and eventually disconnect. Farming wasn't the issue, it was extremely popular even after the massive nerf because some players just wanted to chill and grow some plants. We can't force players to interact with eachother and it's very clear not everyone wants to, turning it into more of an RPG is the only way it can survive. We don't want to remove player interaction entirely, just make it less essential to being able to be stuff such as merchant or chef.

The short version of it is the old core of FL doesn't work with newer players and if we don't try change it in some way it'll never work. We're not getting rid of options, we're just adding more. I don't think player choice is a bad thing and if you want to do things the old way you still mostly can. I think it's better to just wait and see what we do rather than talking about hypotheticals though, as it's much easier to show. Some of it probably sounds worse than it actually is.

Also, the hard part is definitely implementing ideas. Most bad ideas in the past are due to compromises as the better stuff wasn't possible. There are probably as many abandoned cool updates as there are ones that were actually done, if not more if you count the ones that couldn't even be started due to the lack of resources (clan update comes to mind, was in dev hell for over 5 years with three different versions made). Even now most things are primarily just being developed by me with some help by Internet for more backend stuff, as we just don't have the resources to do more simultaneously. That's a big part of why things have been slow.

EDIT: Just want to really stress that we're not removing player interaction entirely, the only time it will be gone is when it literally isn't possible (for example, very few players online). The amount of player interaction required will depend on how many are on and what they're doing. It's hard to explain with words but the system is quite cool, hopefully we can show it off more in the new year.