Because I was SD before you even joined the community and I cannot tell you how close we came multiple times to outright dying. We started off great - but then we had multiple huge dips because RebelRP was dead in the water and the majority of people played nothing but rebels. We were forced to swap maps five times in as many months to try and draw people back. This repeated every month and a half for the next three years, with the mild exception of C24 and during event periods. Otherwise? We dropped. We tanked, and we tanked hard.
Since I joined, in August 2016, throughout the year and next one, I can't recall any dips in RebelRP that were nearly as bad as what we have right now.
The map changes were never about rebelRP complaining or playercount death but by simple popular demand of people getting bored of the map, I believe if we had the same activity as back then on server we would also have people clamoring for map change right now (already we had one).
People don't like to hear it because they don't like the direction we decided to go with Helix and it isn't their cup of tea (or want to somehow prove "Helix killed HL2RP"), but somehow "70 players on a wednesday night is bad" or that even sixty is bad, but the numbers don't lie. We'd be down to 20-30 people at peak times on weekends every so often and we'd be forced to drag out a map switch to try and keep people happy.
I don't blame Helix as a framework at all, (outside of the known issue with drop in server rankings due to name change), I blame things i cited in my post.
I don't understand what are you trying to say, we'd be down to 20-30 people if what? If we stayed on CW or if we had the same lore/rules/enviroment as back on CW? Cause I disagree with both, completely.
I cannot tell you the last time we spent three months on a map without seriously worrying. That was the reality of CW, that was something I came to accept within the first six months of it.
More activity, more people, more people clamoring for a map change due to being bored due to spending so much time on the map, due to said activity. I don't see what you're trying to credit as to have stopped map change desire either, and I'm 100% sure it's simply less people playing, and the map-change-demand being a mere fad (to which high activity contributed) that died.
We've ransacked HL2 since LP. We've done shit like this since LP. This is absolutely no different - actually this is remarkably tamer than what we did both on LP and CW.
I don't care at all about LP, I think the order of things from 2016-17 CW was the best one. Please recall one thing from that era that was ransacked from HL2.
I get why certain people want to try and use this event to jackknife the lore back to the way it was, and they've made no bones about saying so - but if you genuinely, honestly cannot look beyond your nostalgia to the frequent map swaps and dead-in-the-water playercounts CW suffered from for most of its early life and see that people are more engaged now than ever. Yeah, I get the fact you and others don't like the moral grey but it literally took events to make the kind of engagement we've seen since launch.
Yes I can look past nostalgia goggles, the issues are so glaring my eyes hurt yet people still will like to proclaim 'nostalgia goggles' or strawman us as 'muh dystopia' or whatever.
I do like moral grey, I don't complain about that. What I do complain is the manner which it was introduced, with subtlety of a hammer and essentially swinging the pendulum more so to morally white.
Finally, one brutal truth of life, effort, no matter how huge, does not justify something as being right. Maybe people worked hard, maybe they realy cared and put insane amounts of effort, and praise to them, but that does not guarantee that outcome of said effort would be great or even good.