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.
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.
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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