DISCLAIMER: this thread is not to beef with anyone, to shittalk the staff or whatever it is just bringing up some problems that in my eyes are one of the factors causing perp to "die"
I personally do not want to get involved in any of those "bandwagon" threads but I feel like I have kept myself silent for too long now.
I personally think this server and community is dy
ing, yes, looking at the statistics Feng provided this server is in fact having a decrease of players compared to last year. but it is not
Dead...
Do I think this is solely the fault of PerpHeads itself? no. it is partially but not completely the fault of the perpheads community
@Jordan @John Daymon and a lot of people claim that this decrease comes with holidays and school and such, but looking at the stats we were fine around this period last year... the decrease can be due to a shitton of factors; for exemple, what noone mentioned before, Gmod as a whole is less popular than it used to be. so how them both are claiming this is not the entire fault of the community, I agree to that.
However, we have had some communication issues between staff and users, I personally feel like that the gap we already between the staff and users has only grown since last year. let me give you some examples for this aswell;
Rules being enforced way more strictly, is this sincerely a bad thing?
no ofcourse not. but it could be a reason for players to lose interest and therefor not join the community(anymore), which is what this entire thread is all about.
Staff having different opinions on rules and therefor punishing differently. this reply is not intended to attack the staff team or anything and I get why this happens since
staff are also just people... but people, just like myself, are generally sensitive for injustice and if there is confusion of the rules and staff are having different point of views on it then it is much easier to make a ban feel unjustified than feeling like a staff member is completely right with this point of view of the rules, looking at the worst case scenario where one staff member agrees and the other disagrees on the ban.
People feeling like they are not being heard, is this completely true?
probably not. but people feel like this. example of this is the infamous thread
@Sneaky once made about him disagreeing and feeling rule 3.5 should be reverted and this thread being closed almost instantly
https://perpheads.com/threads/suggestion-nlr-should-never-apply-when-rejoining.28058/#post-171091.
People feeling like bans are way too harsh, is this true?
I think yes.
but that's my opinion and I wouldn't know personally because I am not in the situations myself where an admin was going to exclude me from ingame for some time. this "problem" is completely opinionised by people that found themselves in positions where they got banned or where their friends got banned. now I do agree that staff are banning people too harsh for some extend because one of my best mates got excluded from the entire community because he knew someone was cheating and failed to report it. did he deserve to be banned, well yeah he did break rules and has a bad history with it but not community wide banned. now this can be solved by both staff and users, make staff complaints or let someone else do it for you. but it is also something that should be, if not done already, brought up in staff meetings
now as I do not know if there is anything already be done to those problems staff sided ( if
@MrLewis or anyone else could inform me if you guys have some sort of solution for the problems the players of the community encounter) did I not write this entire thing to just tell us things we already know about the problems.
we have a shitton of sollutions for the "harsh banning" which is, for example, the suggestion with the point system
@Slayerduck brought up.
maybe you could do an internal meeting where you all get it cleared up what is a rule breakage and how a rule gets broken which should solve the point of staff seeing rules slightly differently.
maybe have a person between staff and users that is neutral on both sides? maybe have a team of it that closes the gap somewhat we have between staff and users...
these are just some ideas I have had...
TL: DR it's not the entire fault of PH that the playercount is decreasing however it has a part in it. and i feel like the communication between staff and users should be better.
