Ow and just one little thing, its still mostly Jelly and me that work on the servers, i've been active on the servers since pretty much the start of LZ and i mostly am still the same person. I do have some things comming up for LZ but time is my biggest enemy and i still prefer to play a game now and then.
Personally I have grown a bit tired of TF2. You tend to do that after almost 4000 hours These days I play alot of GMod RP
I play some Ark too these days.. when i have the time, i still need to redo the forum more, but time is an issue. Too bad we don't have more linux/xenforo/sourcemod/bash scripting experts.
1) GET NEW MAPS - I don't want to eat the same food every day Not possible. 2) Do something against rage spamming. Nothing is more frustrating than getting killed EVERY round. You may say "Hale needs rage if he can't kill anybody". But you should only rage if you get ALOT of dmg and can't go out of a difficult situation. Thats the main reason why to use rage isn't it? Thats part of the VSH player balancing logic that destroyed the server. I will explain why later. Therefore: No. 3) IMO vsh servers never got boring the last years. I joined in 2011 and I played vsh almost every single day, without losing the fun in this mode. But the last months were horrible. I don't know why, but playing vsh was never that boring. I dont wanna blame Jelly here. But way too much was added, and Jelly was the one who did it. Not because he's a bad person, but because I feel hes too easily influenced by the servers players who have absolutely no idea of game balance. 4) Admins - Stop banning for no good reason. Do not punish people for not being a good player. Instead try to help them improve? We've had much worse admins. Remember Snobgoblin? Yeah me too. Before I removed him. 5) Remove all the "useless" plugins and wepon "nerfs" or "buffs" This I believe is of core importance. 6) Add something funny like a "Fun Round". Every player is invisible but has beacon enabled (no engineers) Might work. 7) Add an additional boss. I know blabla not freak fortress, but FF is also dead, no? I got a lot of Flak for that when I asked for this a few months ago. I guess now that the servers are dying its time to listen to new ideas that arent bullshit? The most important factor here is that the servers have been running for years now. YEARS, I became VSH admin... I don't even know, long ago. The community was way more active back then, and a lot of those people left. Communication has gone down to 0 between admins and as a result everyone does his own thing without receiving proper feedback and having discussions. This mainly applies to Jelly's attempts to make the mod more interesting and more balanced. The only feedback he receives is that of people who play the mod way too much. A vocal minority that would break the mod with its ideals and impressions. Thats what we have now. Flying meds, reviving meds, tagging sniper rifles, raging is considered "noob" behavoir (well thats not jellys thing) but anti rage sappers, homing missile sentries, etc. Most of the issues revolve around the Medics though. VSH is not Minecraft. Minecraft is not more fun with tons of mods either. Mods require maintenance. Mods break things, too many mods with reduce the fun and overcomplicate the game. VSH is a casual mod in a casual game. Fucking treat it as such. Now the question is if we can still save the VSH servers. I doubt it. Currently they're pretty much FUBAR. Whats the alternative? Move to CS:GO. We are missing out on the biggest game on STEAM right now. Mostly lack of communcation is to blame here really. I see it being the root cause.
This. Gmod server anyone? We shouldn't abandon TF2 just yet, it might be a dying game but there could be some pontential if we stop fucking things up.
Lol. Jelly is doing good with plug ins but he should not decide above the community on what goes in/ out. Extra plug ins alone put me off playing hale, and they're too intimidating for new players. Servers started to die down when jelly came in guns blazing with plug ins. But I am not saying he is in the wrong, he just wants to help and can carry on doing so Also at weekends and last week when most schools had 1 week holiday the server did have 20+ people on. But advertisement is a focus i think, reminding those who follow via social media and steam group that we are still going. I mean the steam group has 124k people.... the population of a small city. Start doing more announcements and events. I liked the halloween suggestions made earlier but people leave for other games, but those games will also become boring, just need to grapple hook em back in
Back to basics then? Seems like a good idea to me. But coming back to the topic "lack of communication": How about someone who is actually admin in the main Steam group post some announcements, events or similar stuff? Like Comedian said, 124 THOUSAND people are in the group. While most of them aren't even playing TF2 (anymore), that still leaves at least 10 thousand people which will get alerted that, "Oh, Lethal Zone is not dead, I could actually play on their servers." As far as I saw it in the time I was in the Steam group (which is for over 2 years), I saw maybe 3 (!) announcements and those were mostly by Chride about some free games or similar stuff. I mean, really? Everyone complains about missing players and the Steam group with enough people in it to fill 5 thousand servers to the brim isn't even considered. While it might seem harsh on @rswallen's hard work on the VSH servers, the people posting about the over-modding of the servers have a point. I'm kind of sad to see all the mods creating a challenge to play as the bosses gone, but I'd be more than willing to sacrifice part of my fun to getting more players on the server.
We had several attempts on GMOD servers. Didn't work, but if someone feels dedicated enough I'm willing to help.
The thing is people play on the server for like a week or so, then people grow tired and the server dies. Has happend every time so far.
I for one think that jelly's work has been top notch, if he wasn't around stuff would have died sooner. Its not because of the plugins that the server is dying, its the lack of players. If you check X3 Orange, a server that is usually full now also barely is full even though we have not changed that concept AT ALL. Which means there are fewer numbers. If you take into account vacation and new updates from tf2 it self (contracts and all) that really took a big chunk of players too. Once the server has a few player, people come.. but we need more people willing to fill up. In the past it would start at 11:00 in the morning, now we can be happy if it starts somewhere 16:00 when people are done with school/whatever. Don't forget, that a lot of nerfs where introduced because of regular players finding "clever ways" of utilising certain ways of doing massive damage to hale. The rocketme was changed to slap you at the end because of Osksis and me domination players as heavy/medic. After that the knockback was reduced when ubered because we kept pushing him in a corner, now the knockback on hale with a crit rocket does.. euh nothing? This last change is also new for me.. but if you want to give hale a fair chance he needs it and people that cant jump away should just play different. Regular players on a server = hale dies in 2 seconds New players/not so regular = hale wins barely Noobs playing = hale wins always Its the regulars that want changes.. which i understand and we listen too them too. But we cannot keep everyone happy. I see the server as good, if not better then other hale servers. Heck if i go on another server its boring and i can kill any hale without too much hassle, what is the point in that.
Jelly most certainly has brought the server forth a great deal. I still disagree. Flying medics, reviving medics, uber on hit, tagging, heavies healing with shotguns, I could go on here, all destroyed, I mean utterly destroyed the joy in playing hale. When there are a lot of regulars on the server, nobody wants to play hale. Which basically turns this into a PvE mod. And that loses its charme very quickly. You should ask yourself why players are leaving, because the player base of tf2 hasnt really gone down. http://steamcharts.com/app/440#1y Well it actually has the past 2 weeks or so, for whatever reason. Servers ahve been dead for longer though. The core of VSH was and always will be that the boss is controlled by a player that is chosen at random. At the beginning, people wanted to play the boss. It was naturally overpowered, it was fun to own everyone, and players had to work hard to kill him at all. Point systems were around since forever, so they have no impact on this. At best they even encourage playing the boss. What you did was absolutely demolishing the fun in playing the boss to the point where nobody wants to do it anymore. In other words you broke the whole principle of the mod. And yes thats due to all the crap that was installed in the past year. What youre missing is that people ONLY come to play with other regulars/friends anymore. Not because they wanna play the mod. Since November '14 the Player count has been dropping constantly. Not really sure if you want me to add a trend line here. The often cited argument "its the time of the year" also cant be right, we had an increase in players during summer. Peak time was last years november, following the current trent it will become all year low this time around. If you also look at the list of most played maps, hale is usually in the heavy disadvantage: http://gameme.lethal.zone/maps/tf2 So if data doesn't seem convincing, lets just go for deduction: Most popular map is crevice. Always has been, always will be. You may wanna ask yourself why players like it that much. Its very open, gives you a lot of variety in things you can do both as hale and as player. It would still require a lot of improvements to work properly for the mod but lets just take that for now. All "balance" changes that have been made were inherently counter intuitive for this playstyle. They exponentially boosted the players on this map. The only way to even do any way on that map was using weightdown. And that was kinda shit too. Not to mention an average player cant really land it that well or does even know how to use it. This lead to a situation where new players were forced to play the boss and constantly lost. Resulting in "leavers" or "suiciders" WHO YOU ACTUALLY PUNISHED EVEN MORE. Then you integrated to haletoggle thingy, where players could decide if they even want to become the boss. Naturally, if the server was full of regs, nobody would even bother ticking yes on most maps. That should have given you more than a hint. Nobody apparently cared. Since regulars kept crying about lag compensation, accused of scripts, and whatever bullshit. Satisfaction was only given for players if they destroyed hale. There wasnt and there still is no middle ground. There is no metagame. "Rage noob" was a problem from the start too. Regulars dont wanna use rage because they think its rubbish. Maybe think about that too. Rage has been a core mechanic of the mod from the beginning. Over time it was considered rubbish. Rubbish things are usually broken in some way. Instead of counteracting "rage spam" you need to counteract players stacking onto each other doing too much damage. Again, you tried exactly the wrong approach. Then lastly, theres the problem of lacking variety. A new boss would greatly contribute to that. That boss might have a mechanic that allows dead players to participate in the match too. Like zombies or whatever. No offense guys, but this seems all blindingly obvious to me. And statistics currently support my point. Again im not blaming jelly. Im blaming this community as a whole.
Ok, but now take the last thing into account. I am a regular but i barely see you play, how can you come to all these conslusions? Don't you know that Jelly and me try to do all kinds of stuff to make it interesting, there is nog magic here.. we had a bunch of regulars which filled it up quickly and since the moved to other games its now not doing that anymore. No offence here too, but you do know the community mostly consists on 2 people when it comes to tf2 (Jelly and me) on which we do try to make things better, heck we are regular players too. So blaming the community is a bit harsh. If LethalZone would be fantastic we would have several people coming to me saying "i can do this and that, or i would like to learn this and that to make the community better" If you believe you have the magic solution by all means just take saxton #2 and make it in such a way that you think it will work just fine. That way you can test your theory and if its full all the time and #1 is not then i'll bend over and take one for the community for you
Youre making two very basic mistakes here. Two of which im very tired right now, because my points arent new, and that "how would you know" is very old. Game balance is a very basic concept. The Mod is asymmetrical. Balancing asymmetrical games is hard enough as it is. The more factors you add to the equation, the harder it gets to balance. You might overtune one, and the scale dips to one side heavily. And thats one thing that happened. By making the mod more "interesting" you added way too many factors. The problem, I admit, is that you didnt have a good team of mature people that could discuss changes and analyze them with you. Because that is mandatory for asymmetric balance too. There is no magic here, just statistics. Im not even sure VSH can really be saved at all anymore. Im seeing it going the same way AM1 did. The problem is really, that you should have asked these questions before you introduced all these changes. But we already had near 0 communication between admins anymore at that point. I dont think I could have expected any such thing. This is just very very basic deduction, so thats how I come to these conclusions. The only thing I'm really hoping to achieve here is learning for the future. We still have you around Snel, as long as thats the case, we can still branch out to other games and maybe we get lucky and successful in a new title. UT4, who knows, CS:GO who knows, we will see. It's just something I wanted to make clear, and to avoid further going down the wrong road here.
Ok, sure you have some points, but i see your messages as the glass is half empty where as i see it as half full. We are no money makers and we don't have too, servers are payed for and nobody needs to help out for that (donations are welcome but only to show support) so yes there is enough to branch towards, and no i will not leave. I make something and i'll support it untill the end of days. Indeed, do some cs:go too, perhaps a proper 7dtd too, if everthing can be AUTOMATED then we have a good chance of getting the stuff running correctly. Back to VSH, feel free to give your example on how you thikn we should make saxton2.
I'm pretty sure he stated that above clearly: Revert the mod back to standard. While I agree to some degree that this would be a good idea, I do believe that the scoring system has an influence on the people playing (or not playing, in this case). It was a while ago and I don't remember completely when it was, but the scoring system got moved from HLstats to game.me (I think it was for payment reasons?). While they both are valid scoring systems to use on the server, HLstats was way more rewarding when it came to points or awards, therefore making the player feel like getting better and better. Game.me on the other hand is, as Jelly said in an earlier thread, much more punishing and the players are supposed to find a level of points they will stay on (see spolier below). That is, IMO at least, a really stupid approach for a scoring system, since it lacks the rewards (in the form of getting more and more points). Quote from another thread: Spoiler @Panromir I'm not sure if you noticed the change from HLstats to game.me, but there definitly has been a change with the scoring systems.
Regarding game.me , its a payed service, mostly because of too many database calls to our database server and HLX not being supported/updated for ages and always staying behind. Game.me is still updated and your skill is something else then your points in total, points can still go up meaning you get a higher place, that doesn't mean your rank has increased. As far as i know points still determine your rank on the server, so you should be ok on that. Reverting back to normal hale would involve nerfing al the good stuff too, do you want heavy's with ubers to crit against hale in a corner? Do you want endless pyro blasting? But like i said, i'll turn it over and we can make saxton the way people want without the additions (we could just do saxton2 as it is, but without the extra plugins for engy (homing) , metal, heavy with health, etc etc.. @jelly, you perhaps can take a look?
I agree to set back the Saxton 2 server to it's old way. I personally had the best time in TF2 with the old saxton servers. The few but awesome mods (gain metal, health,....) were just the "top of the ice mountain" as we say in german. I also feel that you guys are waaaay too harsh to jelly.... He spent so much time doing all the stuff that WE wanted but in the end everybody is complaining that he did everything wrong. We should thank Jelly for what he has done instead of criticize him. Do YOU really think you are able to design a flying sapper which turns into smoke when somebody walks over it?! I don't think so. To finish, I believe we should create new topic where we could vote about the mods which should stay in the new (old) server (gain health with shotgun, homing rockets,......) and what to remove. Having a "normal" saxton hale server with fewer but awesome mods should be more "special" than a server with 100 mods which breaks the server monthly and nobody is able to use or understand.
The downside of a system where you only gain points is that the top10 will consist of those who play 24/7, with points getting higher and higher (making it impossible for others to catch up)