SorIe wrote:
i feel like a severely underrated issue currently within the staff across the community is the hostility towards users
example of a LT member here:
left out the name because it's of no relevancy to the issue, this isnt mean't to be a witch hunt & it's spread across a very large majority of staff members on every server - such an issue goes as far up the ranks as community owner
when i had a similar attitude when i was staff it was considered an expection and something that needs to be worked on, now such an abrasive attitude is considered the norm and i feel like as a community we severely underrate the impact of the impression that this gives to newer players
it's simply toxic and something that needs to be ironed out if we want any decent level of player retention
Couldn't agree more to be honest.
One of the issues within the community which I personally want to work on and try to solve or at least lessen is to bring back the friendly spirit that the community had back in 2016 when I first joined. The main thing that really drew me into the community, and I'm sure the same can be said for others, was how remarkably friendly everyone was, users and staff alike.
It seems like, over the years, this has really changed a lot. People don't uphold this same standard anymore and the majority of staff and Lead Team members (myself included at times) have let the toxicity really get to them, which has just caused it to spread more and more. All that this kind of attitude does is push players away, especially if it was what brought people in before.
The difficulty is that it isn't really a clear-cut thing, and can also be incredibly fragile. We can't just demote people for getting angry at people for harassing them or straight up ban people for it, or it just gets worse, as has been seen over time. If anyone does have any suggestions or specifics that they want addressed though, I'd be more than happy to discuss it over Steam or Discord (TheXnator#7954) and see what we can do to make some real progress on it.
I think one of the reasons that this has become a problem is that a lot of people have really just lost the interest and dedication that they had before, perhaps from becoming bored of the servers or the community itself and turn to trolling and pissing about instead, and issues like this can really easily trickle down from minor things higher up.
Regarding the actual content of the servers, I feel like ZARP is still a little bit old-fashioned in ways. If you take a look at other servers or gmodstore itself, there are a lot of popular addons which ZARP doesn't really have the content to match. Drug production is a massively popular aspect of DarkRP servers, and ZARP's drugs aren't very in-depth at all. A good content creator to look at would be "Zerochain" - all of his addons have a level of grinding / progression to them, and that's something which I think would really add to ZARP if we had something similar (example:
www.gmodstore.com/market/view/zero-s-grow-op-weed-script).
Things like this which require actual focus on production will most likely help out the gameplay and RP aspect but also the economy, forcing people to actually do something rather than simply sit and AFK mine (I have also given some ideas to DEADMONSTOR about mining to tackle the idea of AFK mining which I will probably add here at some point to see what people think about them or make a proper suggestion thread). If people are forced to focus on things like this too, there would be more sustenance to basing rather than sitting in front of entrances to bases whilst leaving printers to do their thing. People would be forced to come back and tend to things like drug plants and, if a raid lasted for too long, they would have to try to balance this with their defence.