Longevity

[Haarek]

What made FL a good basis for roleplay was the fact it had one of the strongest communities of roleplayers, for a non-serious roleplay community. The gamemode was a pile of shit that let you do like, two things at most, but people worked with and around it to interact and build their roleplays.

• BlackDog's prisons camps, done outside of the gamemode, the President would order police to drive to some random camp.
  
• Safira's sex / wedding RPs, literally had nothing to do with the gamemode.
  
• Vauld's server events? Almost all of that was player interaction, no use of gamemode systems apart from like, broadcasts.
  
• Killjoy / Eisehorn's Clan RPs, literally having elements which happened off-server, because it was down to interactions.
  
• Dr KuLa with his iconic "surrender now, I am heavily armed". The only gamemode system there is having a gun.
  
• ForceGhost and Co with their Givens RP, literally relying on RP interactions.
  
• So many hundreds of events, boiling down to builds and RP interaction.
  

Aha, saying the game mode was a pile of shit is simply not true. It wasn't. It didn't have all the features we now regard as inherent and it crashed and broke a lot, but it surely was completely playable.

First of all, I appreciate your humor. You can be quote poetic at times.

It's such a great gamemode when it's constantly fucking breaking and crashing. Do you hear yourself?

It was basically sandbox with cars and guns.

A solid economy with cars, suits and guns that incentivised players to create money by illegal means. Your attempt of nut shelling the game mode is flawed but completely the right idea - the game mode isn't supposed to be complicated: it is based on a simple cops and robbers premise. There is a reason all jobs on the F1 marketplace is catered towards aggressiveRP (Except the chef). Why do you think even the doctor sells items beneficial for aggressiveRP? The game mode is built around this simple premise.

You are correct in that it was the people who made FL who it was - but more than anything it was the staff team. What FL had back then was a large influx of new players that were retained.

But we didn't, we had a 19% retention rate during the peak of Garry's Mod, where Roleplaying gamemodes were popular.

And what makes you think a 20% retention rate is bad?
And what do you think the retention rate was in 2020 even? 20% sounds awfully good.

And where are you getting these numbers?

Some of the events / people you listed are (By the way) ridiculous - because we both know that is not what made FL popular - because a large majority of all FL players were aggressive RPérs basing at UM, or police or swat.

Damn, that's still the fucking community, the people. Not the gamemode. The people setting up groups and clans, building defences.

But what does the gamemode do for them?
Guns. And a raid reason (contraband, weed, whatever).

Even when you try and pull a fast one and swing around the point, you're still reinforcing what I say. That's crazy.

Honestly, I don't understand what the fuck you are trying to say here. I think we agree on this point, and I don't want to argue semantics.

However, I think it is important to keep in mind that the community is greatly affected by the meta of the gamemode. For example: you cannot expect people to be making risky bases and printing money if farming is a far more efficient way to make money. With all your fancy gamemode implementations in the hopes of attracting and retaining players you have destroyed the gameplay meta and the economy.

This dyings community persistence in catering to passiveRP is ignorant and self destructive - as passiveRP came as a reaction to the aggressive. If you performed passiveRP on FL you were regarded as special - a top of the cut - but for this to be possible you will need to have a large player base of aggressive RPérs.

Passive RP only occurs because of aggressive RP? Yeah, damn babe some vagina just got raided down the street, let's do some ERP so I can raid that fat pussy.

Though I do appreciate the humour, I think you missed my point. I am simply saying that PassiveRP is not as attractive if everyone does it. Most people have always used it as a means to stand out and get recognition in the community. However for there to be a proper schism and recognition there also needs to be a aggressiveRP community. I realise this is a subjective opinion - it is my understanding of FL´s dynamic and I am fairly confident in it. 

[/quote]

Short join time, so long as it doesn't effect content. We've removed so much shit people used for the sake of join time.

Well, good job. Remove more shit. Fucking get it done. Purge the content size. This has been a main request from me for years.

Good performance, yeah, no shit.

Good performance means in many cases to sacrifice quality models for lower quality ones. Like degrading the quality of cars and replacing them with lower polygon models. Are you willing to do that? Probably not.

You are acting like this is an easy task to do but in reality it involves making hard decisions of what should be removed and what should stay.

Visibility in the browser is literally 99% from player counts, which yet-a-fucking-gain comes back to the community.

I agree that community is a factor, but not nearly as much as you lead on. People stay because they enjoy the game mode and feel they have a reason to come back - good performance, low join time and an active server with a lot happening makes people want to keep playing.
It isn't that complicated - in the last years of FL you literally incentivised just standing still and fucking farming to make millions of dollars.

There are no rocket science solutions here - It is mostly just common sense if you understand the gamemode.
And most of all it doesn't need to be perfect.

Fixed economy is fine, but it was players constantly bitching and not supporting anything to fix the economy which prevented us from doing shit until the relaunch. People wanted VCMod, so we couldn't do anything with repairs or fuel. People shot down insurance and other costs for cars. People wanted presents, which fucked the economy more.

Newsflash. The community isn't a good metric for what needs to be done.
New additions needs to be assessed and understood to make sure they don't fuck the meta of the gamemode.

Catering towards aggressive RP meaning what? 80% of the staff team was made up of aggressive RPers, the biggest clans were all agressive, so many changes have been nutered to cater to the aggressive RPers, to the detriment of passive RP.

When I mention fronting aggressiveRP I mean to let it be the main incentive to generate funds in the game mode. Staff incentives are good, but it doesn't mean anything if the meta of the gamemode doesn't inherently front aggressiveRP.

Watch your back when you move those goal-posts, you might blow your back up.
We were talking about players. Passive RPers used the gamemode to RP on, do you disagree with that?
Or are you so blind to other people's perspective that all you can see is you tounge-punching a gun barrel?

Look, we both agree passiveRP is important - but if you want to build a server that has a strong playercount you need to cater to the majority of your playerbase. In addition, your newcomers will and always have gravitated towards aggressiveRP when first starting out.  Even Fultz, who seems to have smoked way too much marijuana lately seems to remember starting out in aggressiveRP. AggressiveRP is a very common rite of passage and is most likely the leading cause of player retention.

But that didn't happen, we lost the roleplayers, to age, to other commitments, to toxicity, for a lack of things to do.

Just a bunch of excuses. FL lost players due to countless bad decisions. Like fucking up the economy, being too strict on rules inhibiting aggressiveRP and reducing performance. All the kinky, asslicking cringe role-players stayed - the players left.

And yeah, rules like "don't make your bases give people fucking stokes when you look at them", fucking crazy rules.

I mean, I'd gladly discuss this rule with you, but realise this isn't the place nor time.

And reducing performance was because we added new systems, that people asked for in suggestions. We should have just ignored the community too, 15/10 plan from Haarek again.

I don't know what to tell you? I guess if the community told you to stick your finger up your ass with a majority vote, you would do that too?

I think you were so enclosed in a silo that all you can think about is the good old days back when all you had was guns and a physgun, but you've been willing to ignore the past 8 years to stay in that simple idea you've got in your head. Call me delusional all you like, doesn't change that.

Feel free to complicate things all you want - look where it's gotten FL. Ridiculous decisions have been taken over the years and I say it because it is true. Horrible decisions that I fear are way too late to correct.

Or are you seriously getting mad about hearing the same phrase twice in half a year?

You forgot Discord. Regardless, it is a cheap phrase to disregard what worked in the past as something that has been tried and tested to death. Resulting in never learning from past success and chucking it down to: "It can't be done - things were different before."

that only existed because the community made it so, and to try and ignore that is so fucking disrespectful to the hundreds of people who made the community what it was.

Such an obvious statement. Of course the community made it what it was. We just disagree about how the community was and what made FL great. Such a cheap stab.

An obvious statement that you ignored, trying to pin everything on the gamemode. Calling it a cheap stab when you're the one who ignored it to begin with in so fucking dishonest.

Look, I understand why you are so flustered here, and understand how I can seem contradicting.

insult on the person engaging in good faith. Crazy.

I don't care what the fuck you do in life, learn to write coherently. For fucks sake.

It's a run-on sentence, but it's understandable; the writing is coherent, put the fucking effort in.

So give your staff some fucking grammar lessons.