Leaderboard

Current state of business as of Feb 2023. This is basically a "state of design" post that is designed to highlight what I believe are strengths, weaknesses, successes and failures of this institution. To those reading, do note that I reserve the right to be constructively critical as a whole as my intention is to identify what was done well and what can be improved upon in the days ahead. Also, I'm doing this because I KNOW FOR A FACT that no one else here has the time or the intuition on the ground to make these calls. Server Successes Strengths All role aspects of the server are reasonably balanced given a decent degree of knowledge and skill from melee to ranged to cading to zmaining. Many options exist but the majority of player options are to some degree useful. I would like to see more of the zbosses you get each wave be useful but those require a higher average pop to allow people to branch out more. We are significantly more welcoming to new players who may have no idea what is going on. This is critical as each one of these zs servers still severely lacks a good way to introduce people to playing. Given our current attrition rates, this is more important than ever. Don't expect a lot of the old players to come back, so just get new players to take their place. It will take time to "train them" so to speak, but the alternative is obviously worse. As long as our gain rate is equal to our loss rate, we will at least hold on. Weaknesses Everything is still too confusing for new players. More pointers are needed. We don't have enough experienced players at any given time to cover enough roles. We are effectively in a position where the entire server hinges upon 2-3 people, me included. This is not an acceptable position to be in for server stability. The server issues encountered from October to December caused critical damage in this and is probably the reason we are in the current situation. I only hope that people learned from this. Anyone who is looking for a "community" as the primary reason to join one of these servers effectively won't find that here. Institutional Successes While the extended maintenance was a minor shitshow, the communication towards me and everyone else was significantly better than in the past. Especially with the 2 month issue of the server not showing up in the browser, there was effectively NO communication to the general server about this, and while I'm not going to dig around archives seeing how previous devs tried to communicate with you, my guess is that it probably wasn't very good. Better user feedback. Recent decisions have made us signifcantly more receptive than in the past. The idea of giving maintenance rewards is taken from the playbook of actual game developers when they take a game down for updates. It may be a minor thing but it does say that we do care about the people who play on the server. Institutional Failures Overall lack of vision design. I know that this isn't exactly your forte in general, but these things are important for trying to really hash out priorities. We should have had the winrates problem fixed many months ago if enough pressure and support was directed towards the issue. Sometimes, it takes people being on the same page to get a gameplay priority dealt with, and I know that many of you barely have time to manage this as it is in your lives, so at least some definition of leadership objectives would be nice for everyone to acknowledge. Some roles still insufficiently designed. They were designed for a past that no longer exists. I know that if I stuck to specifically the duties outlined to me I could be taking a bench warmer role and nothing would be said about it. Still a tiny bit too insular. I know that I'm trying to be the bridge between you and everyone else, but it still leaves people making assumptions about you that can't be disproved when you aren't there to disprove them. We need to think outside the box a bit more and be more concerned about the clock and time in general. Gone are the days in the past where things just happen whenever. We're not setting hard deadlines for anything but I've seen games like Darktide take HUGE hits in playerbase count because they couldn't get their roadmap content out fast enough. On that note I have proposed our state of design objectives for the next few months We need that MOTD up for real. We need a short bullet point page telling new players what to do and where to buy weapons from. It needs to be very short and concise because I don't want people to read paragraphs to know what to do. No one looks through user agreements anyway. Just a few pointers, make them check a box to say they have read it, and move them on. Better information availability for our "newer" regulars. They shouldn't need to use trial and error nearly as often to figure out what is good for a given situation. We need new events. We can't change the core gameplay that much because there is really not much left we can change, but new events that no one has experienced before can change that dynamic significantly. The way ALL games die is that people get bored of the gameplay loop and stop. Something that changes the formula is what we need because we cannot rely on a sufficiently large community to carry us through anymore. Alright, rant over. Play nice, everyone.