Imo...
Military should be long dead.
I'm going to do something stupid right now.
I'm going to draw comparisons. A comparison between FTRP, and a beloved Comic Book I read, called Crossed.
In FTRP, it's, if I remember, one year after the initial outbreak. What's happening?
Well, the military are still running rampant and weapons are still commonly used, commonly found and commonly acquired. The infected aren't feared per say, they're just hated, despised, disliked, a passing "ugh" at the mention of them.
Alright, let's compare this to Crossed.
Crossed is a comic book in which 99.9% of the world's population is infected with a virus that forces them to lose all sense of morals and gives them, for lack of a better term, a sexual enjoyment out of causing uninfected harm in any way possible.
A particular comic called Crossed: Wish You Were Here takes place roughly one year after initial infection, if I recall. What's happening there?
The military are dead. All of them. Or infected. Guns are still lying around, but no one dares touch them, because they're worried they might be infected. No one likes guns anyway, they make too much noise, attract infected for miles. People shudder at the mention of the Crossed, because the moment you hear it, every vile, despicable act that you saw them do flashes through your mind once again, PTSD-ridden maggots in your brain, eating away at your sanity. Any contact with bodily fluids and you had 10 seconds before you're happily skull-fucking your wife with your stump hand that you gnawed off becuase you were bored.
I'm not saying we should make the mutants like the Crossed.
But I think, if an infection is strong enough to take down America in a few weeks, (The Crossed managed to do it in a day, I think) then surely the infection is capable of taking on the rest of the world? And surely the survivors know how dangerous this thing is because of that.
Survivors shouldn't be handheld by this big daddy military guys with guns. No one finds that fun. The military are gone, dead, finito. Majority died, the rest fucked off into nuclear bunkers to hide away. Okay? Okay.
Survivors should make IC groups, and that was the best part of FTRP, that was what made it fun. People making groups.
@Frankus Dankus owned a group if I recall, and he owned the biggest group entirely on his own, just because he, as the player, had the initiative to do so. Everyone knew his character at the time, he was the biggest trader, biggest man in town. No admin did that for him. He just did it.
Mutants shouldn't have tiers if it takes place a year in the future. Why in the hell would your mutant abilities only manifest one year after you were given them? Applications for mutants are Tier 5 automatically, but there're on par with OTA applications when it comes to difficulty. And it won't just be your application, your behaviour, reputation and overall attitude should affect that.
No Frundtech applicants. Staff only, or at the very least, handpicked. The amount of leaking done by Frundtech scientists was insane, and no project was under wraps when we were actively encouraged to publically post about it on the forums. No mutant FrundSec, either. That's fucking dumb. They're supposed to be the big bad villains, not the fucking justice league.
The reason why FTRP failed was because everyone expected it to be a "Hardcore, no one lives longer than a week" kind of RP, which is why I wanted it to be. You shouldn't get attached to your characters, because literally anything can kill them. Any IC death should've been a PK, if this was established from the start, no one would've complained. What we ended up with was a military telling us what we can and can't do, and when the survivors actually began an uprising to overthrow the military, if I remember, the staff team came in and basically said "No you can't do that."
They TRIED to fix it near the end, by making Military lives permanent, once you die, no one takes your place, until the MilRems died out. But they never died, because they were all too busy jerking eachother off to die in their little base, thinking they had a government when the world was collapsing before them, what kind of insane fuckwit would try that?
FTRP as an idea is good. Great, even. I know this because there's another server that's doing a similar thing, and it's succeeding. So when you say FTRP is a flawed idea, I'd like to say you're wrong. What's flawed with FTRP isn't the gamemode, it's us. We don't have the motivation to continue it, because we don't, or we can't be bothered to put the work in. As
@Dallas said before back when activity was low on other servers, people come up with excuses. "Oh, it's exam week, it'll be back soon." Except you stumped the growth of the server. That's what kills it off. One week with 0 people, and no one's willing to come back on.
If you truly want FTRP back, here's what you'll do, and you'll try your fucking damnedest to do it right:
- Remain Active, both as a player and as staff.
- Contribute with your ideas, whether or not you think they're good, someone will take that idea and polish it up.
- Remember that it's all a story. You're not going to enjoy yourself if you're trying to play standard Gmod. You're playing as a character. You need to be that character. Even if you're alone, go through the motions, get your character in gear, ready for when the shit hits the fan.
- Let the infected be a threat. These things took over America, they're not a damn nuisance to your damn day, they're an extinction event and the staff team should treat them that way.
- Let the survivors be more of a threat. Let gangs war, let thugs kill, let muggers mug. The food chain always balances itself out.
- Get an SD that gives a damn.
- Get a staff team that's active. Hell, one of the oaths you have to take as a staff member is promising to always stick with the community through hardships, yet the majority just upped and left the moment the playerbase dipped.
At the end of the day, FTRP didn't kill itself. We killed it. If you want to bring it back to life, it ain't gonna come back on your Christmas Wish. Get to work making it work, or it won't work.
Simple as that.