When cooking up a gamemode or server you generally have to take into consideration one basic thing; How will players entertain themselves without needing staff at every moment (as they won't always be online, unoccupied or motivated). Frundtech and similar concepts relied to heavily on staff to keep people entertained.
For HL2RP, it's patrolling the city as a CP, owning a store, doing dodgy shit as a rebel etc. For WW3RP it was primarily doing shit for your branch, going on patrols, standing guard, roaming around as a civilian/militia. You get my point.
If the core concept for WW1RP is going to revolve around sitting in a trench (yes, I know WW1 wasn't all trenches but that's what people come to WW1RP for as otherwise it'll just be a WW2/3 server with less technology.) and exciting things only happen when a staffmember starts a gunfight or drops a bomb, I highly doubt people are going to stick around for long.
One of the points of criticism for WW3RP was that people felt they had no freedom due to it being based on a semi-factual state of affairs in the past (despite the SU and NATO never openly engaging in conflict). Playing out things as they happened in real-life could be fun as an event or two, but I doubt there's enough substance for a full-time server. As I said, what are people going to do in between? It's not as if you can do a historical event every day or week, as you'd run out of content real soon (aside from that, you'd have to force a certain side to lose every time as otherwise your next event wouldn't be possible).
I saw something posting this in the WW2RP discussion as well. Again, one of the main point of criticism we had in the past is that people couldn't imagine themselves in a 70s-80s-90s setting. How would they ever be able to immerse themselves in a 10's-20's-40's setting?
There's also the fantasy that the majority looking for a militaryRP server wants to fully immerse themselves into the lore and setting, that's honestly only a small fraction of the actual playerbase.
Yeah basically that, there's little in the way of content to work with at the start, let alone being able to push out updates. You'll be stuck with the same weapons and 3-4 maps for the entire duration.
Honestly, it isn't. I thought I pointed out all the flaws with WW2RP server concepts in the earlier discussion we had about it, but people still seem to want to cling onto the idea.
People'll play it for the Nazis and gung-ho american stereotypes, and no matter how many wikipedia articles there are about the Wehrmacht doctrine and average joe soldier, nobody's gonna read or abide by it. Staff will have constant headaches trying to correct people hunting for jews or being big bad broad american heroes.
If you're talking gameplay concepts, there's a couple points:
Unless you want to turn it into occupational RP with civilians in a city being oppressed by the wehrmacht and helped by the resistance, you'll essentially have a watered down HL2RP. The few occupationRP servers out there generally don't last very long before rebooting again.
If you're not doing occupationalRP, you'll essentially be left with WarRP a lá WW3RP's playstyle. And when that's the case, what's the point?
You know as well as I do that there's very little people who are capable/willing to immerse themselves into a character from over 80 years ago, and once that's gone all that's left is the Nazi vs the American in patrol-styled gunfights, razzias (which probably won't happen once the civilians figure out they'd be a target for abuse 24/7). In order for a player to make it worth participating in events, you'd have to steer away from historical outcomes, which will leave you with another alternative history setting, which is hard to pull off properly.
The way WW2RP was proposed over the years basically boiled down to WW3RP with more meme potential and less weapons/items/technology and a more distant, obscure lore, thus making it harder to identify with a character and their morals/objectives in life (not that I expect a lot of people will care about 'development' beyond the usual supposed PTSD).
The time period also heavily increased certain restrictions that'd have to be enforced if done properly:
- No female soldiers (big turnoff for a lot of people even if they dont admit it, the 'females served in the soviet army!' excuse doesn't really float on this scale).
- No individual radios (The way we handled this in Generations was flawed and was being worked on, but this would certainly conflict with the teamspeak-heavy playerbase, which was virtually everyone on ww3rp)
- No multinational units (unless you want to go with some obscure army unit that served at some point, but would still be highly complex. The entire reason we went with a Red Vanguard and NATO ARRC in WW3RP was so that people could play their favorite nationalities, and EVEN THEN people complained that they couldn't play some niche east/mid-asian or some weirdo from a tiny south american island.)
I'm sure you get the general line of thought and can think of more examples yourself, we were very careful in planning out the 80s-90s lore for WW3RP as to allow as many things as possible. Sure, you can start digging for research to come up with excuses to allow any number of things in, but at that point it wouldn't really be 'authentic ww2rp' anymore.
Generations 2 was always announced as being a pilot for a possible monthly series, we developed the Generations plugin for that exact purpose (being able to swap between characters and generations content without having to rebuild the server).
People didn't read it properly as they never really do, and beyond day 1 the ship had already sailed and everyone was distributing machine guns to their buddies rather than the bolt action rifles, people were memeing etc. After day 3 nobody played anymore and the plug on the 'periodic generations storyline' was pulled.
Now, even the people so desperately pushing for a WW2RP server made little effort to play seriously, the issue of being unable to identify with a person from the 40s came up time again as well.
People eventually pushed to go back to the 1990s stating that they'd rather have their 100,000 requisition, grappling kits and modern weapons with scopes rather than basically doing the same thing with a higher chance of death (weapon damage and no armor) and less options / tools. Most of them even deleted their Generations characters straight after, some of which we had to help as they threw away all their money on the characters and really wanted a 5th militia to go s2k with.
It generally had very little to do with "character development" as there were 1-2 people who didn't play but instead continued their previous roleplay in steam chat, and it hadn't anything to do with the ongoing war if you know what I mean.
Sure, people that thought it would only last a week started minging around and were generally banned fairly quickly. But we're talking about almost the entire playerbase here, there was no realistic interaction or combat, instead we had people yelling "boi" and "my dude" to eachother while ramming eachother with tanks, noscoping eachother with bolt action rifles and entire squads running with MG42s. How would this be any different in a more permanent setting?
I might seem opposed to WW2RP, but in all honesty I don't really care. It's just that most people convinced themselves that this would be a great idea, while in reality if they think a little deeper than just the lore and take previous examples into account, it probably wouldn't be any good for a long-lasting server, rather a couple of events on an event server or switched up with something else. (Hence we planned the occassional switch to WW2RP every month or so to play for a couple days before returning to WW3RP, or set it up so that it could be used on the dev server without much work.)
