Personal opinion from someone who hasn't even touched GMOD since COVID lockdown more or less, the thing about Lemonpunch and early Neb is that nobody was trying to account for something as
as 'balancing' the social aspects of the server, genuinely trying to avoid arguments and toxicity, creating a more inclusive environment for all types of players. I think to old heads like myself, our memories of old HL2RP lead us to believe that the mode cannot be engineered to be anything but its initial binary of cops vs robbers and the cliques that form within these factions, because we come from a time where those were really the ONLY two options available. In doubling down on a fresh approach, you new peeps are striving for the complete opposite of this,
total clique death, and in my opinion, that's not a
bad thing at all. I wish you the best of luck with it, as should ALL THE OTHER OLDHEADS COMPLAINING and here's why; it's what we probably should have had the maturity to do ourselves.
Having a more even playing field, from what I can tell, putting the main cop faction on the level of civilians and leaving the real oppressors as something few and far between is in and of itself a way to actually OOCly combat some of the toxicity that we've seen in HL2RP throughout its entire history, note that only the previous faction lead is getting any form of 'nepo' here, and all the new cops are just going to be people, which means they can actually be 'touched' by even the freshest of bluesuits, that's a fucking massive green flag to me as a person that played this gamemode all the way back in Lemonpunch. It's a perfect way to stop in-groups forming, shifts the power dynamic more in favour of creating roleplay instead of having some dickhead cop main whinge like a little bitch for fucking hours that a malnourished bluesuit can't damage them with a sledgehammer to the skull and having their senior admin friend save their life after a forty minute OOC shouting match. Having a seemingly well proportioned staff team, hopefully letting some new, fresh players take a crack at leading things, all of this is exactly what we needed maybe five or so years ago.
Back then, the server was only barely held together by Dallas and co's incredible skill to construct narratives that made sense of the OOC shit flinging, chaos, toxicity and infighting that stemmed from all the OOC factions that exercised their will on the server overall, sure it added an element of IC pandemonium which spilled into the day to day events of the server at large, but for what it's worth, it was entirely dysfunctional outside of that. It was a series of engaging IC events fuelled by some of the most pointless out of pocket mid-late teens arguing you could ever imagine lensed into basically an interactive FPS movie by Marc Laidlaw's Scottish clone, a Ukrainian refugee and a schizophrenic Irishman.
I'm not going to be totally hopeful, tell you guys that it seems like it'll be different this time, but I feel that if you played this gamemode and have fond memories of it and you want to see it off you should at least hear these guys out, cause it seems like they're making an HL2RP for people over the age of 19 years old. Honestly I don't even know if half this post makes sense, I just spent the better part of a few hours rigging and modelling a sentient television for a freelance gig, but I think you guys get the idea, if they do this and it means that a different kid similar to myself starting out on this, the final iteration of this gamemode can hop on and doesn't have to navigate fifty plus racial slurs a day and an insurmountable in-group (memories which by the way I still wouldn't trade for anything, toxic as they were) then I'm all for it.
