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FRG - Taken too seriously?

#1
Brace yourselves, a wall of text incoming.


So after giving this a lot of thought, and after pondering about why the player counts have been lacking (no GMOD is not dying that quickly. It's still fairly high up on steamcharts) and why the influx of new players that stick around has been slowing down a lot too..

I've got a few ideas, but I'd like to get the communities thoughts on these.(not including the Toxicity on the server)

FRG was created to be a somewhat more balanced, expanded TTT experience. From the outside, being more balanced may seem like its a good thing for everyone. But the more you look at our community, the more you start to wonder if it actually is better in the end to focus that much on balancing. (now I'm not saying we are the most balanced server on the planet, and we have 0 OP items or anything, but I do personally tend to focus and put a lot of thought into balancing stuff, and always try to listen to the communities thoughts on balancing via threads/pms)

Why? Well it seems most people(from my experience)who play TTT are more 'casual'. They don't really want to take the game TOO seriously. When you tend to focus on balancing, you inadvertently create a more competitive environment, now not everyone will be as competitive in said environment, but it tends to be more serious.

When you're more serious, things can be more stressful, more tense, and less fun. Without you even realizing it. You get mad when you die to something that you feel isn't 'balanced' properly, and it just doesn't feel good.

I have noticed how serious a lot of you tend to take TTT now days, and it's drastically more serious than when we first started, and when I used to "actively" play. I feel like this is partially to blame for passively just repelling players, and making our TTT experience more stale. We are very limited to what we can do or add because we focus on balance more than fun. (I'm not blaming any of you for this, just to be clear)

I try to find a balance our current playerbase is happy with, but it usually just ends up with the item being hollowed out and becoming a shell of its former-self, and not really being fun to use at all anymore. There's things I simply wont make or add because I know people would complain about them being too OP, but other servers have them and no one cares. (1 hit knife for instance)

Plenty of servers have bear traps, and barnacles the way they were previously. But I doubt anyone there cares about dying on an innocent round to actually complain enough to get them changed. I've never in my life seen so many people get so upset about dying to a traitor on TTT to their special equipment.

So if a server doesn't quite focus on balance as much, and has a bunch of goofy T/D items, and goofy minigames/weapons, would people there be as serious? Would balance matter to them as much as it does here? Doubtful, however It would likely scare away some people at the least.


Which leads me to my main point:

I think the general atmosphere of FRG is too serious sometimes. I don't play nearly enough to say that it's ALL of the time, but in the experiences I have had recently, there's a lot of people that are very tryhard. Not a bad thing by any means.

T rounds in TTT are supposed to be the most fun on TTT. It should be one of the main attractions to a TTT server. Hell, Jake and I would go around to other TTT servers before I got into development for GMOD, and just judge servers by their T items alone. We didn't care if things were OP, we cared if they were underpowered. It was so much fun seeing all the different, super fun and quite broken T weapons each server had. The Jetpack that launched explosive barrels for instance. That thing was super fun.

Imagine if we added something like that here. I'd have 20 Pm's and there'd be 3 threads complaining about it, because they died to it on their innocent round.  it seems like some of you treat this like it's a deathmatch game. It's not.. Not at all.


TL;DR - I believe we focus too much on balance, and not enough on fun, thus setting us up to be a more competitive, stressful TTT experience - which may not be super appealing or as fun to people.


So with all of that said, I am thinking of doing some trial changes to Server 2.
  • We work to make TTT 2 more 'casual, goofy and fun' and add a wide variety of T/D items without thinking/focusing too much about balancing on there. As a test to see how it feels, and see if new/current players play and like it.
  • Add more goofy minigames to it (big heads, mini rounds, etc)
  • Open up the rules specifically on that server more, to allow a less stressful environment.
  • TTT 1 will remain the same, with the current set of T/D items.

I know what you're thinking - "But couldn't this create a split in the Community?".

Well.. Yes. But, is that such a bad thing? Is it not better to have a subset of groups all under the same bigger 'community'(plus our lobby server would be the main link between TTT 1 and TTT 2 if it does 'split the ttt community')? Think about it right now. Our community is already split up into multiple sub-groups of people who tend to mostly play together, or play other servers together. If we can get people who split off to play other servers to have 'fun' to just play on our secondary server, wouldn't it be better?  However, we do have a fairly small active player-base now(compared to before), so if new players don't join it, I don't know if we have the active player-base currently to support it.

So what do you guys think? Do you think we focus too much or not enough on balance? Or do you think it has to do with something else entirely?

I'm interested in knowing your thoughts and opinions on the matter. Please do share.
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#2
I do feel like it is taken too seriously now, there is just so many enhancable weapons on the server that brings people to being tryhard to level it up as fast as possible.

Back when I joined in 2016, there wasn't really many of those and we all just had fun just killing each other for the hell of it. Now we all do is bicker about the economy and how op something is.
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#3
I do think the current rules do also play a major factor in how casual the servers feel. I feel like if we changed the rules to say for example, allow KOS off of location (I.E hear shots come from a one-way room, walk in, and there's a guy staring out the window with a rifle), you should be allowed to kill him. People may not like it at first, but in the long run it would be much more worth it, and honestly I feel like people wouldn't even get mad about it being changed or being killed for it.

People tend to have the mindset(and they may not realize it) of "hey, if I can't do that to them, why are they doing it to me?" which causes a lot of people to get angry and the game becomes extremely competitive, and they don't even realize it. Just look at TTT now, if someone even suspects you of being a T they literally will follow you around the entire round and there's nothing you can do about it. At that point I feel like most people(including me) would rather them just kill me because they're gonna end up doing it anyways when there's a group of 6 people following you.

Rules 100% need to be revised and rewritten if we want the try-hard vibe to go away.
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#4
Just a thought to take out the enhanceable tryharding, maybe give all weapons their max EP when they drop. It would be more fun and it still allows for chosen variations on stats. Also, who likes dropping prims and godlikes with the stats of an ulikely.
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#5
(12-25-2017, 05:16 AM)SP1D3RP1G Wrote:  Just a thought to take out the enhanceable tryharding, maybe give all weapons their max EP when they drop. It would be more fun and it still allows for chosen variations on stats. Also, who likes dropping prims and godlikes with the stats of an ulikely.

I don't agree with that at all. There still has to be some way to progress. Maybe lowering the amount of kills it takes per weapon I could get with, and possibly making it so you can get EXP from doing events/boss fights, but not just giving the exp to people. That's a bit too far.
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#6
In all honesty this idea gives me hope for this server because as of late it really takes a lot out of me to do anything more than my daily Worm Queen
If we had a less serious server maybe we could focus a little more on the base game rather than "WTF JUST KILLED ME THATS A BUNCH OF HORSE***"
It would 100% make me want to play the game rather than feel obligated to everytime a friend is like "Hey there's rdmers on come get em"
or "Some guy just said the N-word" or "We have like 4 people on come and play"

I say that this will do 2 big things for this community
1. Bring more of our older "Regulars" back on
2. Bring in more new blood

TL;DR Do it and they will come
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#7
The community is very split between casual and "serious" for sure. There are a ton of casual players however that enjoy the servers contents and don't frequent the forums, hence why they are casual. I would actually argue that there are more casual players on this server than not that simply just enjoy the content and play it out.
A huge problem is those who do add you or post on the forums are mainly serious players, very few casual players would even consider to make that kind of effort. Our grouping of serious players are a very VERY loud minority, and often try to set the tone of the server to serious which then turns more people into serious members and etc.

I don't think changing the rules per server is a great idea, that would mean one server would be preferred over the other which could make it seem like an entirely new community, and being how seasonal FRG is, when one server is full I don't want to force a different experience on others. It would turn into a brawl of what each player wants, and I don't think at the end of the day that would solve anything.

I'm sure there's an in-between somewhere. People who are too serious should really tone it down and people who want FRG to be a giant meme should tighten up, but its not that easy. At the end of the day, the community is super important as are their opinions but the final call is yours - you have more experience than any of us here and we all joined because we saw something here that you added.
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- That Thrakos Noob
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#8
I like the idea of making the enhance-able weapons easier to level, I feel that this would reduce a lot of stress. I also feel that some of the requirements to get xp for some of the weapons is too difficult. I think that base xp should be off rightful kills and make the special requirements give a bonus xp. (example rightful kills gives 2xp, if you get a kill while grounded gain 4xp etc.)
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#9
I’ll type a proper response once I have access to my computer, but for now I will say that I do agree that it is definitely taken too seriously. I try to play around a bunch and just have fun but I can only do it with a group of friends normally, and not the whole server because someone will get mad about rdm or something. It’s just not very fun when all you do is walk around and say “alright kos ___” and nothing else. The rules definitely need a revision if we were to make it less try hard. The other day I was on when someone kos’d me for a body they saw me walking away from in the same direction. And to be fair, it was fairly obvious that I was a traitor. Realistically, I should have forgave the report. But even I was salty over that and stuck to the “Still rdm off of suspicion” even though it was pretty obvious I was a t.

Anyways, I have more to say, but I don’t feel like typing an essay on my phone. I’ll finish when I get back to my computer.
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#10
I propose a question to ALL OF YOU, why did you enjoy FRGs TTT when you first joined and how has that changed to the present day?

I enjoyed TTT from here when I came in April 2016 since it was another inventory server and everyone was laid back, it had a lobby server with an event that was unique just to this server. But now at the end of 2017, all of that has changed, we have a lot more unique events and a lot more content yet no one does these events for some reason, and people aren't that laid back.

We have forgotten why we came to FRG in the first place, to have fun and to enjoy ourselves. Now we just bicker over dying one single round and holding it against someone expecting punishment to be handed out like its fucking candy.
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