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Tye

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I am making this discussion to try and speak freely about this issue, the decline of player count right now is insane and anyone can easily tell the difference, this thread isnt intended to shit all over staff or to "incite drama" its to let people say what they think is causing the issue, ive never seen player counts that are this low consistently, well ever. Ive been playing since June 2019 and again this is the lowest player counts that last more then a few days, that ive seen happening. I hope that 2.0 will bring players back but mono will not survive if the pop stays this low. Mono just isnt rly fun right now with this little ppl still playing.

A few things that i think have had a factor in causing this are :


1) Staff being way too harsh with players.

2) Police just not getting treated to the same standard.

3) The quantity over quality attitude of recruiting new staff/mentors.

4) General burnout.

5) Lack of new content.


Im interested to see what the community thinks about this stuff, if i get warned or smth for saying what i said then idrc at that point, it would more just prove what im saying. (tho im positive i wont) So anyways feel free to reply to this and speak about whatever as long as it is related to the lack of players.

EDIT : If you are a player who has stopped/doesn't play as much anymore this is the perfect place to say why. + KEEP THIS SHIT CIVIL.
 
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D

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The reason I have stopped playing consistently can be showed simply by the timestamps in my screenshots here, even with staff on your reports don't get taken.
Screenshot (31).png

Screenshot (32).png

Screenshot (33).png

Almost 45 minutes and not even a response to the report, it happens way too often and having to report people on forums is just so annoying when staff are literally on.
This is not the only example, @Broken can contest I had a report open for 1 hour and 20 minutes one time and had to apologize to me for it taking so long.

EDIT: It went past 45 minutes. I ended up having to make a forum PR with 2 active staff.
 

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Tye

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The reason I have stopped playing consistently can be showed simply by the timestamps in my screenshots here, even with staff on your reports don't get taken.



Almost 45 minutes and not even a response to the report, it happens way too often and having to report people on forums is just so annoying when staff are literally on.
Agreed, even with 5 mods on some times reports stay left open, again this is because of quantity V quality recruitment
 

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Staff response time is a joke, constant nerfs and un needed changes, one cm that has a hate boner for me, just burnout overall. thats why i stopped being a regular player.
 

FreeSpy

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2) Police just not getting treated to the same standard.
can i get a bitm more description here




3) The quantity over quality attitude of recruiting new staff/mentors.
holy shit when i played in 2018 with boris and the likes back then you'd have your reports taken rlly quickly

people get promoted fast and staff usually dont care enough to take reports. even if on duty
 

StewartJames

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I think its the result of heavy punishments for death and crime - high insurance costs, high death timers, high prison time that wasn't the case before. It tried to make us more serious but just made the game less fun.

Staff ticket times are slower so I'll try and speed it up.

I also think we should give more freedom to players. Other servers allow props to be spawned in by players to very little problems. Even if they have to pay for props, surely giving players access to say, a moving door tool or light tools to make their bases and shops wouldn't be bad.

Culture needs a change too. No one interacts with anyone outside of their org and people hardly go out into the street for fear of being killed or worse. The lack of interaction due to fear of death is compounded by fear of those high costs of loss. People bunker down.

That has caused issues with the PD. The trouble is the city is pretty much unpoliceable with no communication or trust from players due to this fear of arrest or death, meaning even if the PD was perfect there would be little reward for the officers making the effort.

We're a semi serious RP server with the mechanics of a serious one, and management would benefit from reconsidering this approach of policing players through game mechanics.

Perhaps a weird way of doing that would be rewriting the rules for clarity instead of "this staff member said" as a way of making the rules, and removing restrictions on players in terms of gameplay so they can be more creative. It isn't fun grinding and getting shot and losing it all while waiting for staff members to spawn stuff in or issue whitelists or take reports or build events. Some of these powers could easily be put in the hands of the players.
 
D

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Perhaps a weird way of doing that would be rewriting the rules for clarity instead of "this staff member said" as a way of making the rules,
I legit have been told by one staff one thing, then the next day I get told by a CM it's not true. I literally have resulted to only asking @Thy about in-depth rules and grey areas now, because any other staff member just goes on a long book about how it "could" be considered something and then the next day I am told different. I swear it's like they take things out of context instead of actually reading the rules. They need to be quizzed on things from time to time, it's just crazy how most staff (and players alike) are out of touch with the rules because they don't actually read them. I've read the rules at least 10-20 times over and it is always a surprise to me in some sits the staff end up having to ask "higher ranks" about it first.

Either it is against the rules, or it's not. No in-between bullshit.

I also believe it is a ridiculous incentive, to recruit people to the staff team who have been on the server for only a month or two. I often catch mentors even not knowing the gamemode.

I realize we are all not perfect, but the imperfections at this point have passed the line from being a person legitimately being confused or forgetting a rule. To them just not knowing because they don't bother reading the rules.
 
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Alphadef

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I'm gonna be honest, I dont see how staff can somehow be too harsh on players but also too lenient on Police? When police potentially face harsher punishments?
 

Tye

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I'm gonna be honest, I dont see how staff can somehow be too harsh on players but also too lenient on Police? When police potentially face harsher punishments?
They just dont tho? I havent seen you on in a while and i havent been in a sit with u that involves police. Police just do get punished less harshly and less frequent
 

Tye

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can i get a bitm more description here
Cops get punished less harshly and less frequently, ik you havent played in a while but ask anyone who isnt a cop main.
 

tazdevil335

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@Tye

I think you raise some good points, and I know that you make a decent number of these threads and one of the few members that do to spark an actual conversation, so as a staff member it's hard to sometimes see how the players feel with wait times and such forth. So for that, you will not be punished for simply reaching out to the community, it's more appreciated than not.

With some things you mentioned it is also fair to look at it through a staffs perspective as well, which I think a lot of players fail to do, and then blame staff for all the issues, which was previous stated as "We are not perfect" and nowhere close it. So let's take some of your concerns and see if we come up with a solution, here are my thoughts at least through my perspective and ill try my best to explain, and then from there, we can see if we can help solve the issues.

I do ask instead of broad topics that you try and share personal experiences or things you have seen so we can better address the issue because I do not want to guess at the issues you are trying to bring to light in your option.

1.With your first concern of staff being too harsh. With this, I do see it happen sometimes, and when I do it does become corrected like I said every situation is different when a sit is taken. A player who has been on the server since 2018 and has pages and pages of negative notes will NOT be receiving the punishment of a player who joined last week, and I think this is where many of the issues from a player perspective comes from. I see if often when players constantly abuse the rules and get off with warnings and verbals where it is clear that they will just constantly break the rules again. This is the only situation where "Harsh" punishment should take place, to those players who do not want to RP on the server and just want to go around doing whatever they want, which has a negative connotation on the players who follow the rules.

And the issue is sometimes players are only going to see the harsh punishments, you only see the sits that are taken when you are a part of them, or maybe the bans that you saw in chat when online, but what you couldn't possibly see is maybe the 3-4 times that this player was already warned when you were offline, or maybe this player has been banned 3 times in the past 2 months for this same issue. And that's at no fault to the community. (Like I said it's hard to reply with a broad statement)

2. I cannot comment on police standards because I have not seen this happen, in my experience when police break the rules they tend to be semi-minor, (Not gathering enough evidence which leads to avoided raid, baton abuse, or aggressive behavior and abusing power) which are all very easily corrected mistakes that are made and police do get reported and dealt with appropriately, Some players have served longer blacklist to those who abuse those powers as police.

3. As the Recruitment Lead, 99% of all new staff hires are hired by me with a few other recruitment team members (along with 25% of mentor hires are by me), and I get this statement a lot and it is kind of a double-ended sword no matter which way I fall with staffing policy one party will always be upset. Now within this same post, we already have people commenting about the response time, and that's a common issue I see and yet in the same post, we have quality v quantity. Well, I'm sorry, but both ways just won't happen unless players follow the rules and want to join staff apply. The staff in this server are not paid and dedicate their *FREE* time to help with reports, which are met with the same players harassing them with "Oh You're a Staff member for a Gmod server" yet they want to come and cry to the admins every time a player breaks the rules or complain about the poor response time. Yet these are the same players who tend to have a long list of rule breaks and constantly go around abusing the rules and find it funny saying "oh it's just a gmod server ban me for a week IDC". Then we have players who want to become staff/mentors yet when the chance is given to them even after their extremely long poor history in this server, we find that rules end up being broken within a couple of weeks. These same people also then tend to complain that mentors break the rules all the time yet the same people complaining have been banned/warned / and blacklisted on multiple accounts, it is hardly ever from someone who follows the rules.

There is so much more that goes into staffing that was not in this post simply because it's just too much to explain. But the bottom line is, I do not hire random players on the sidewalks of the monolith, but those who deserve a staffing position in this server to better the community, and yes that might mean we deny a lot and that might mean report times will suffer, but we hope that this creates fair treatment within players. If you think a staff member is not doing their job appropriately then by all means please feel free to report it as a staff report.

4. This seems more like a personal thing, I cannot really control other players' burnout? So if you are willing to expand on this maybe I can better understand.

5. I am not in development, however, I do know we have a very small team, and mark, pmx, devt + a few others spend a lot of time developing new content for the server, that everyone would enjoy. This takes time, testing, error, more testing, etc... if you want to look for anyone or know anyone that's interested I'm sure the dev team is always looking for new devs (don't quote me on that) 2.0 provides a LOT of new content so look forward to that!

I know the response time on tickets is sometimes lacking, even when staff is online, but let's remember that staff doesn't want to join monolith servers to just take hours out of their day to take tickets of players yelling at them, and the same players being reported again and again. And sometimes staff come online after work and want to relax on the server, maybe they are the only staff in the server but there not on duty does this mean after working 4-9 hours they should have to hop on-duty just to start taking tickets? If they want to then by all means, and if there's a ton of reports I would love for them to help close some of those but I will not be forcing any members to do so in that situation because then that leads to staff burnout and lower staffing numbers, and once you clear these tickets, more just follow.

And reducing the waiting time we could also use help from the community, if video proof is uploaded or ready before the report is made/taken, then we won't have to look in logs or wait for it to be uploaded or anything, and can reduce the time if there are a ton of tickets. Players can also double-check to find the rules in the rule book to ensure that what they're reporting is a violation.
 

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I think staff has gotten a lot stricter, almost like they are tired of the job they do. It feels like they are annoyed to take sits. I noticed that before I got banned. Besides the point, it is the same stuff every time, and the server can get very repetitive. 1,4,5 are very valid.
 

braidan

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one of the reasons i'm taking a break from the server, but not the main reason. the server gets boring quick as I've stated in a rant post, but 2.0 will absolutely bring many old and bring in new players, if you haven't already seen the development channel in the discord has lots of astounding pictures which will help towards the gamemode it seems, maybe even some sort of new machine that mines bitcoin. I've also noticed the lack of playerbase and it's sad to see. honestly just be patient and we'll have new content soon
 

braidan

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I think staff has gotten a lot stricter, almost like they are tired of the job they do. It feels like they are annoyed to take sits. I noticed that before I got banned. Besides the point, it is the same stuff every time, and the server can get very repetitive. 1,4,5 are very valid.
i was staff at one point and I feel happy and proud to say some players truly piss you off and ruin your mood, because of constant lying and blatant rulebreaks, and many more. These staff dedicate hours freely to the server as taz said and it gets frustrating quickly, I enjoyed taking sits it's just certain ones and certain situations that gets annoying because it gets complicated, I also felt that I was never fully up to date with the rules. I always felt there were some hidden rules that weren't in the rulebook which always confused me as every staff member should know them easily.
 

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@Tye

I think you raise some good points, and I know that you make a decent number of these threads and one of the few members that do to spark an actual conversation, so as a staff member it's hard to sometimes see how the players feel with wait times and such forth. So for that, you will not be punished for simply reaching out to the community, it's more appreciated than not.

With some things you mentioned it is also fair to look at it through a staffs perspective as well, which I think a lot of players fail to do, and then blame staff for all the issues, which was previous stated as "We are not perfect" and nowhere close it. So let's take some of your concerns and see if we come up with a solution, here are my thoughts at least through my perspective and ill try my best to explain, and then from there, we can see if we can help solve the issues.

I do ask instead of broad topics that you try and share personal experiences or things you have seen so we can better address the issue because I do not want to guess at the issues you are trying to bring to light in your option.

1.With your first concern of staff being too harsh. With this, I do see it happen sometimes, and when I do it does become corrected like I said every situation is different when a sit is taken. A player who has been on the server since 2018 and has pages and pages of negative notes will NOT be receiving the punishment of a player who joined last week, and I think this is where many of the issues from a player perspective comes from. I see if often when players constantly abuse the rules and get off with warnings and verbals where it is clear that they will just constantly break the rules again. This is the only situation where "Harsh" punishment should take place, to those players who do not want to RP on the server and just want to go around doing whatever they want, which has a negative connotation on the players who follow the rules.

And the issue is sometimes players are only going to see the harsh punishments, you only see the sits that are taken when you are a part of them, or maybe the bans that you saw in chat when online, but what you couldn't possibly see is maybe the 3-4 times that this player was already warned when you were offline, or maybe this player has been banned 3 times in the past 2 months for this same issue. And that's at no fault to the community. (Like I said it's hard to reply with a broad statement)

2. I cannot comment on police standards because I have not seen this happen, in my experience when police break the rules they tend to be semi-minor, (Not gathering enough evidence which leads to avoided raid, baton abuse, or aggressive behavior and abusing power) which are all very easily corrected mistakes that are made and police do get reported and dealt with appropriately, Some players have served longer blacklist to those who abuse those powers as police.

3. As the Recruitment Lead, 99% of all new staff hires are hired by me with a few other recruitment team members (along with 25% of mentor hires are by me), and I get this statement a lot and it is kind of a double-ended sword no matter which way I fall with staffing policy one party will always be upset. Now within this same post, we already have people commenting about the response time, and that's a common issue I see and yet in the same post, we have quality v quantity. Well, I'm sorry, but both ways just won't happen unless players follow the rules and want to join staff apply. The staff in this server are not paid and dedicate their *FREE* time to help with reports, which are met with the same players harassing them with "Oh You're a Staff member for a Gmod server" yet they want to come and cry to the admins every time a player breaks the rules or complain about the poor response time. Yet these are the same players who tend to have a long list of rule breaks and constantly go around abusing the rules and find it funny saying "oh it's just a gmod server ban me for a week IDC". Then we have players who want to become staff/mentors yet when the chance is given to them even after their extremely long poor history in this server, we find that rules end up being broken within a couple of weeks. These same people also then tend to complain that mentors break the rules all the time yet the same people complaining have been banned/warned / and blacklisted on multiple accounts, it is hardly ever from someone who follows the rules.

There is so much more that goes into staffing that was not in this post simply because it's just too much to explain. But the bottom line is, I do not hire random players on the sidewalks of the monolith, but those who deserve a staffing position in this server to better the community, and yes that might mean we deny a lot and that might mean report times will suffer, but we hope that this creates fair treatment within players. If you think a staff member is not doing their job appropriately then by all means please feel free to report it as a staff report.

4. This seems more like a personal thing, I cannot really control other players' burnout? So if you are willing to expand on this maybe I can better understand.

5. I am not in development, however, I do know we have a very small team, and mark, pmx, devt + a few others spend a lot of time developing new content for the server, that everyone would enjoy. This takes time, testing, error, more testing, etc... if you want to look for anyone or know anyone that's interested I'm sure the dev team is always looking for new devs (don't quote me on that) 2.0 provides a LOT of new content so look forward to that!

I know the response time on tickets is sometimes lacking, even when staff is online, but let's remember that staff doesn't want to join monolith servers to just take hours out of their day to take tickets of players yelling at them, and the same players being reported again and again. And sometimes staff come online after work and want to relax on the server, maybe they are the only staff in the server but there not on duty does this mean after working 4-9 hours they should have to hop on-duty just to start taking tickets? If they want to then by all means, and if there's a ton of reports I would love for them to help close some of those but I will not be forcing any members to do so in that situation because then that leads to staff burnout and lower staffing numbers, and once you clear these tickets, more just follow.

And reducing the waiting time we could also use help from the community, if video proof is uploaded or ready before the report is made/taken, then we won't have to look in logs or wait for it to be uploaded or anything, and can reduce the time if there are a ton of tickets. Players can also double-check to find the rules in the rule book to ensure that what they're reporting is a violation.
Dude i had to wait 5 hours for my report to be taken last month.
 

puvz

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If you are a player who has stopped/doesn't play as much anymore this is the perfect place to say why
I mean I am banned. But I got myself banned to take a break. Mono just does not hit like it used to. hopefully when I come back I'll feel that way towards it again.
 

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The server is really dying hasn't hit 100+ players in months like it use to. 30 players use to be morning number now its starting to be a number in the afternoon. I don't think I'd continue to buy premium at this rate as its not as fun like it use to, considering their isn't much players anymore to play with.
 

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its easy to say that players are dedicating their free time to staff on the server but i dont see it from like 70% of staff. its like they get staff only for the benefits and not to help players. we have staff members that come on once every 2 months and take 3 reports and thats acceptable? why are people applying to be something they only want for the clout? ofc not all staff is like this its just a few that need to wake up or step down.
 

iaosham

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The lack of players has had an big affect too, as Organizations don't thrive like they use to, as well as events don't have much people to attend them anymore. The lack of a sufficient Player base has made me stop playing as much as its harder to be satisified when playing the game.
 

braidan

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its easy to say that players are dedicating their free time to staff on the server but i dont see it from like 70% of staff. its like they get staff only for the benefits and not to help players. we have staff members that come on once every 2 months and take 3 reports and thats acceptable? why are people applying to be something they only want for the clout? ofc not all staff is like this its just a few that need to wake up or step down.
I also see that and when I was staff myself I didn't understand how admins+ can just rarely show up. But to your part about benefits, what exactly do you think they get?? Not sure if I'm allowed to say but only marketing team get's "benefits" and thats because they're literally helping to get more players on the server. Also they don't get paid IRL money unless your a dev. There is NO benefits.
 
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