Hello Team
I have been playing this server since 2016 ( check my bans, I have had a lot of fun), and I have no love for any other server than this one. It feels like home to me, as I am sure it does for a lot of you. I am sure you noticed that there are not as many players on nowadays, and not a lot of builds either. You only ever really see people basing, and bases are cool, but do not play any RP purpose for anyone who isn't raiding. Players play for the experience they have with other players.
I am suggesting the following to make TITSRP great again.
1) Server name needs to change
There are so many features unique to this server that you would never know until you play. I for one, LOVE THE BOUNTY BOARD. I have never played on a server where the COP job is as fun as it is here. There are also quests, perks, and the elephant in the room - ingame purchasable CC's and VIP. The bane of all garry's mod servers is that you have to pay to play any job that spawns with a gun. Why are we not advertising this over anything else? I have found only 1 other server ever to have in-game purchasable VIP and it was still like 100M. We need to change the server name to showcase this, tons of players will hop on just because of this fact.
2) We need more Jobs that encourage building
Like I said in the paragraphs above, there are hardly any unique builds that aren't bases. The server looks lifeless without players building and its one of the fastest ways to get a new player to find something else. We need jobs that encourage the player to build something, anything, to make the server look alive. We need bars, clubs, libraries, coffee shops, weird baby doll dungeons, just anything that makes the server look lived in. As of now there are no incentives what so ever to spend time and create any cool bases.
3) Win-Back incentives / Loyalty Incentives / Refer a Friend
I know we all look at our playtime and think "20 days ingame time? fucking noob" but to 90% of the real world population, that's a full time job and a half. We need to make it worth it for them to boot up their computer, open garry'smod and click on our server. There need's to be some sort of reward for continuous playing, and an incentive to come back to this server over others. Money is cool, but I know we could do better than that.
4) We need influencers
One thing that a lot of other servers have over us is that if you check out twitch/YT Gaming on garry's mod, they usually have someone playing on their server. Even if their viewer count is like 100, that's still a FULL gmod server. We need to encourage those of us in the community to stream, and to stream our server. Give out some free goodies to encourage people to show off our server and we should see some new players hop in. I KNOW that we will have them hooked with our awesome features, but we need to get them in the door.
5) We need to look over our banned players and start offering a second chance
At the end of the day, no matter how many times someone RDMs or NLRs, it's a video game. We should reach out to old bans and speak with them to see if they would like to come back on a probationary period to play with us. We have 17K topics in the ban and warn appeals section. If we could get .01% of those players back, we would be full every day.
6) We need to make it easier for newer players to raid, and not to be raided
We have items that are unique to our servers where keypads/lockpicks are obsolete. We should give new players "nerfed" or "beginner" raiding tools or have classes spawn with some of these items to encourage newer players to try raiding. Also, we should have a 20-Min (ingame) timer on bases before they are raided. This is the only idea I could come up with to get veteran players to stop crushing new players. These newbies do not have the ADV Dupe crazy 1 way builds we have. They have a fading door and a keypad and that's it. Maybe we could give out free ADV-Dupe beginner builds for new players to help the curve.
7) We need more roleplay intensive jobs
Jobs like Dat Boi and abomination do 1 function and even then you kinda just run around hitting people. We need more thought out jobs like Serial Killer/Mr. Bones where your imagination is the limit on what you can do and accomplish. We need jobs that require players to interact and maybe create new RP experiences that would encourage players to come back and play the job a totally different way the next day. TL;DR We need jobs that can be played more ways than one.
8 ) We should give new players a free custom CC
The gang CC has 1 model and 2 Custom slots perfect for a new player. We should give newer players a very easy way to attain their first CC. Maybe not right away, but maybe something unlocks for them at level 25. I know the response will be "They have the new guy cc. The new guy CC has guns and no description. It's an RDMer class and that's it, you can't even change the model and you lose it after awhile. The point of giving these newer players a CC is for their own pride and accomplishment, as well as if we are too lazy to come up with cool jobs, maybe they can make them their selves.
9) We need more community meetings / events
We need someone in discord to create meetings and events that gets vets and new players a sense of community with events and meetings. They will be low population at first, but over time this will have more of an impact on the community than any other topic listed here. We just need to stick with it and the fruits of this labor will come.
10) We ALL need to start being nicer.
Take that new player basing with you. Go hang out in some dumb guys "house party". Maybe don't report that crossfire. Tell Jack Johnson and Terry that they aren't shitty players. We need to come together as a community and start making this a positive place to be. In the end, we are spending our FREE TIME away from jobs/family/responsibilites here and the last thing we need after a 16 hour shift is for some retard in an anime player model to harass us, call us names, then report us for something stupid. We have lost so many good players because we allow some 14 year old to get them banned for bullshit. If you give 2 shits about this server at all, I would like all of you to think that karma exists inside video games as much as it does in real life.
Guys, I hope we can look at this list and take some things from it, or at least let this get your gears grinding in your mind about what we need to do as a community to get new players on, and make the vets have fun as well. I want to be able to play this server for many more years and if we do not encourage new players to play with us and become vets themselves, we will all logon to see "404 : server not found". It happened to my community I used to run (LevelUpGaming) and it can happen to this one. Please respond with any ideas you might have and let's work together for a brighter server.