Serious HL2RP - Moving Forward

[fofa]

And while we do still have some event makers who do good stuff (and I hope they continue to do good stuff) would those people be enough to shoulder a full setup for however long things go on?

this is the problem right here - the lack of trust in people. if it were an event server then there's nothing to lose, really - give people the chance to do something and they might genuinely surprise you with their creativity. especially if they can do whatever they want to do and come up with whatever story they want

 

[Jake]

 

[Jake]

It's time to move on

 

[Dallas]

@Dallas can't believe

that your dee pixel event detective character getting pk'd caused the downfall of CityV.

the consequences of a disproportionate police response to throwing a plastic wet floor sign at a scanner

 

[Dallas]

this is the problem right here - the lack of trust in people. if it were an event server then there's nothing to lose, really - give people the chance to do something and they might genuinely surprise you with their creativity. especially if they can do whatever they want to do and come up with whatever story they want

this was a huge problem i only found out about way later

if i wanted to run an event i could do it, i had the trust of the people who ran this place. if you were anyone else you often had a lot of limits and restrictions placed on you, a lot of hoops you had to jump through to prove you could be trusted, and that was a shame. i didn't have a lot of competition in the community of people making their own cool stuff (maybe apart from @john who got some trust too) because players weren't seen as trustworthy enough to design / GM their own events for other players

such an own goal, it created a culture of dependency, when the handful of people who did make stuff stepped away they were left with very little and had to basically start over fresh

 

[Rabid]

this is the problem right here - the lack of trust in people. if it were an event server then there's nothing to lose, really - give people the chance to do something and they might genuinely surprise you with their creativity. especially if they can do whatever they want to do and come up with whatever story they want

I have to be honest, I think this cuts both ways.

As much as people like to say otherwise or downplay it, there were reasons not to trust certain people - reasons they brought on themselves (usually by abusing commands they got via the role to help for events).

And when some of these people were the better event makers in the community, what do you do? You either ban them from events (good luck with the backlash) or you restrict what they can do without oversight. Neither are ideal, but just hoping they'd magically change their ways never seemed to work. @Dallas had the trust he had because he worked to build it and never broke that trust.

That wasn't true for quite a lot of people though, and it repeated itself over and over again.

I'll also say the playerbase built up the best event makers in their heads so nobody could compare to them which turned off a lot of people from actually making events. Being compared to "A Dallas event" (something Dallas himself fucking hated people doing) was a sign for most people to shelve their ideas and not pick them back up.

 

[fofa]

As much as people like to say otherwise or downplay it, there were reasons not to trust certain people - reasons they brought on themselves (usually by abusing commands they got via the role to help for events).

yeah, but from what i understand, you had to work VERY hard to earn the trust to even run something that altered the lore in a bigger way. trust is one thing but completely distrusting everyone is another

I'll also say the playerbase built up the best event makers in their heads so nobody could compare to them which turned off a lot of people from actually making events. Being compared to "A Dallas event" (something Dallas himself fucking hated people doing) was a sign for most people to shelve their ideas and not pick them back up.

that's natural though, isn't it? and i don't mean comparing yourself to dallas necessarily, it's just something that naturally happens when he's the only person that was given that much trust to run bigger events and nobody could really compare with him. on top of that, i honestly never met an event maker that compared themselves to dallas, i assume this was a very few isolated incidents

 

[Rabid]

yeah, but from what i understand, you had to work VERY hard to earn the trust to even run something that altered the lore in a bigger way. trust is one thing but completely distrusting everyone is another

Eh. Kinda-sorta? Its a little more complex than that; its more apt to say nobody wanted to potentially step on toes, because the only person who was known to do it well was Dallas. A good example was we never got Joseon Part 2 because someone went in and did something lore wise with an area of the world Dallas wanted to do it with, and it pissed people off when they found that out.

I'm not saying "Dallas is at fault" here, I'm saying the reverse - Dallas was seen as the golden standard by players, and that came with a lot of pressure, pressure that he didn't approve of people putting on others but it sort of became the norm.

Generally speaking, too, Dallas enjoyed a level of player respect nobody else could match. Nobody wanted to be the guy who fucked up one of his events; this wasn't something anyone else got - not even @john or @Blackquill.

tl;dr: It wasn't the restrictions that put most people off until near the end, it was the community pressure to deliver the sort of experience they'd grown to know from the best event makers.

that's natural though, isn't it? and i don't mean comparing yourself to dallas necessarily, it's just something that naturally happens when he's the only person that was given that much trust to run bigger events and nobody could really compare with him. on top of that, i honestly never met an event maker that compared themselves to dallas, i assume this was a very few isolated incidents

Again, Dallas has been doing those sorts of events for years - more than a decade. Nobody had the confidence or drive to try and match him, because failure didn't tend to get you looked at fondly by the playerbase.

And you sort of misunderstood me on the second point. Other people would compare events to those that Dallas did, and it became so routine that the only event makers who actually pushed forward where those who'd managed to build confidence in the meantime. It was a vanishingly small pool of people regardless though, and even when it became "stop comparing every event to his jfc" it didn't really help.

 

[Sil]

And you sort of misunderstood me on the second point. Other people would compare events to those that Dallas did, and it became so routine that the only event makers who actually pushed forward where those who'd managed to build confidence in the meantime. It was a vanishingly small pool of people regardless though, and even when it became "stop comparing every event to his jfc" it didn't really help.

I miss the bdb events, even if they were really weird and very japanese

 

[john]

Generally speaking, too, Dallas enjoyed a level of player respect nobody else could match. Nobody wanted to be the guy who fucked up one of his events; this wasn't something anyone else got - not even @john or @Blackquill.

events that went bad more or less had the common theme of a lack of team
any good stuff i did was always with blue wolf. the best stuff i made like where men go to die was with blue wolf helping the narrative and playing characters, afric doing all the effects and additional characters, @Limeao built pretty much every map for ambience and braker was on standby the entire time. that was 5 solid people for 3 players

the 120 slotter i did for a month and a half that got poor reception was run by 2 or 3 people mostly dropping in and out (one of them being me), an absent staff-team (there was a whole list on the staff roster but not a single one had connected for months), @Numbers hardcarrying the union side for any semblence of consistency, and additionally shared an already dying server filled with angsty people that were given very little new to work with they hadn't already seen

you cant do anything off the back of an individual anyway. @Dallas usually had an amazing team of people help him and could all tackle issues on their own and thats why it worked as well as it did, same as anything i did that panned out good

this server is never going to have a working full-server iteration again, fact. however if you have 4 buddies and a good idea, you can easily run something that people will log on for every weekend, or just for a couple of days, hosted either independently, through nebulous or through other servers hosting story-formulaic mediums

the vision being that you and your buddy can throw up an iteration and then people will share your creative vision down the line doesnt work, people flock to fully visualized ideas. i should add on the safety-net of knowing your story will have a start and a conclusion is important too. nothing is more demoralizing than a "dying" server where you've made a half-way trip across the desert and the engine turns off

 

[Rabid]

events that went bad more or less had the common theme of a lack of team

Thats fair. I do still think that, more often than not though, there was a distinct lack of respect if people thought they could get away with it. Not so much in small closed events, I'll admit, because people usually went along with whatever happened in them and tended to give a lot more leeway.

But for bigger groups, people were just more willing to put up with things and accept things depending on who said it and I think that was incredibly shitty and demoralizing.

Even in the worst case - like you said with Finus - you got flak for things that never in a million years would have been thrown around under normal circumstances, especially not to someone like you.

 

[Dallas]

A good example was we never got Joseon Part 2 because someone went in and did something lore wise with an area of the world Dallas wanted to do it with, and it pissed people off when they found that out.

just to say that this was not the reason we didnt do it, i was very happy to see @GenericPlayer make his event in china, that was cool with me

the reason we never ended up doing Once Upon a Time in Manchuria was because during Jidai era city 8 the gang shit was ruined by constant PK appeals being done, basically made it impossible for the story to progress

 

[Rabid]

just to say that this was not the reason we didnt do it, i was very happy to see @GenericPlayer make his event in china, that was cool with me

the reason we never ended up doing Once Upon a Time in Manchuria was because during Jidai era city 8 the gang shit was ruined by constant PK appeals being done, basically made it impossible for the story to progress

That's fair, sorry, I didn't think it was Generic but someone else on the Lore team.

I honestly might be getting mixed up between that and what someone tossed out as an explanation that didn't come from you about why it wasn't done.

 

[MaXenzie]

technically, i ran events on HL2RP^2

as in, i ran one event and was then barred from running events. not because the event went poorly or because i abused anything, but because there was some behind-the-scenes backlash or spat about letting me run an event, at this point not even im sure what happened because i messaged numbers asking to run an event, got the green light from numbers, and was then told later on that numbers did not want me to run an event

it predominantly went down to "the staff think you're abrasive and so we don't trust you with responsibility"
which ngl is wank.

look i'll be the first to admit i've never been staff on nebulous (ignore lead media developer, everyone else does)
but most of us are older now and years upon years of THE HL2RP EXPERIENCE has made many people cynical and jaded.

and most of the time it i would argue it is because they dont want the server to fail, and they don't want it to fail so much that they get upset and angry that they're watching another iteration go down the shitter

there are very few people. period. at this point, anyone who is having any ideas on running an iteration should probably know that they are basically stuck between the choices of:
- have a staff team that is compromised of a fair few people who are not peak material (prior abuse, argumentative, belligerent, etc)
- don't have a sufficiently large staff team

there just isn't enough manpower to continue holding everyone up to the same standards from back when we were pulling 80/80 on the regular and had a constant influx of new people. a lot of ex-staff have done stupid shit now. a lot of non-staff have done stupid shit. unfortunately, most of the people who've done stupid shit are also the people who've stuck around

 

[Valtorix]

Something else to consider - someone is making HL2RP mods for DayZ and its surprisingly good o.o

 

[Alexander The Great]

Something else to consider - someone is making HL2RP mods for DayZ and its surprisingly good o.o

ye, we its mad good.
who knew dayz can be a good sandbox rp thing

 

[Laura]

who knew dayz can be a good sandbox rp thing

I did.

 

[Generally Fruity]

GLua ain't shit, and you guys had winning ideas on the docket numerous times

wasn't no swattin' hand made you drop the ball, boy. more like greasy fingers

 

[Valtorix]

I did.

Me too. I regular a really good community on there with original content which is hard to come by these days, but not every community has experienced modders and developers on their staff lol Nebulous is lucky in that regard. Still, I'd like to get back into Hl2RP if Neb ever decides to do something again with it.

 

['77 East]

As much as people like to say otherwise or downplay it, there were reasons not to trust certain people - reasons they brought on themselves (usually by abusing commands they got via the role to help for events).

just gonna say for the record that even with those reasons we still had everyone thrown under the bus (see the event rank being stripped and hollowed out until it was virtually unusable) when shit happened and got constantly told "if you want to make events just join the staff team".

restricting certain people for being pants on head retarded is whatever, dragging everyone in the team down is just shite. to me, that's just poor etiquette. having to dredge up SA's to do bare basic work is terrible, you create a shitload of burnout and "why do x? staff are going to yell at me for stuff operators could handle" - leading to a self fulfilling cycle.

then when the staff team were the event team in later iterations, events plateaued off a cliff in frequency and quality because, surprise, barely any of them were doing it.

Nobody wanted to be the guy who fucked up one of his events

can we kill donut?

for real though I can't think of anyone who actually managed to seriously derail anything he did (but that's just off the top of my head), if anything nobody wanted to fuck up announced events period because the backlash could be absolutely brutal (see bitter lake)

closed or open, it takes a lot of boneheaded work to derail something and the few times I witnessed it (including Homicide Olympics 2, to put it out there) it was usually on the event runners not being able to account for it.