02-16-2011, 09:57 PM
Wall of text incoming.
This reminds me of a topic made a while ago in another section, although I hope this topic will bring some more interest, discussion and share of ideas.
First of all, the Las Venturas Playground's script is obviously not user-friendly. Let's say a player joins our server for the first time. He hopefully will read /commands— which doesn't give any information about our new features, as it's just a mix of obsolete and old commands— and then he will try to use /register, being awarded with a 'You should register on www.sa-mp.nl, so close your game and go for it!'.
But yeah, let's say this player's a role-player (the most common kind of SA-MP user): first of all, he will try to earn moneys, which is pretty much an hard task to achieve, since our economy has dropped down, after an attempt to solve the 'inflation' of our server. What if the player was a stunter? He'd go like /stunt, /v, /vehicle and then asking in the mainchat «How can I get a car?» he will just realize it isn't a stunt-based server, leaving as soon as possible (it happened enough times already). In both cases, they end up like 'Nah, let's find something else.
So yeah, the main problem is they don't get to know the many features our gamemode offers, since they're not helped by the User Interface nor by regulars, who're just chasing around, killing newbies.
Also, our server isn't (in my opinion) not involved in the SA-MP community, maybe because of the low player count, as new players tend to join servers with a big player count —that's why I found LVP— but meh, also because we're not advertising our server, nor our features. We have potential, but we can't demonstrate it with such a low player count. The common reply-argument 'SA-MP is getting old' is true, but I still wonder why there are servers with a stable 200 player count with peaks of 400, if not even 500. So yeah, I guess because their gamemodes are more user-friendly and many players there tend to stunt and generally chilling around on their own, without getting killed.
There's one more thing. We auto-define ourselves a 'Roleplay/Deathmatch server'. We obviously tried to keep this kind of gamemode, limitating and regulating (if not even removing) many San Andreas and San Andreas: Multiplayer main features. So yeah, we should choose between roleplay, stunting and deathmatch, and since 70% of SA-MP players are roleplayers and stunters, I'd say roleplay and stunting. Obviously I'm not saying we should hand out godmode and speed hacks to every player, but gang territories and gambling, properties, car exporting don't really get on well together. We should, instead, think of an intelligent way to show off our minigames and various roleplay features, keeping deathmatch as one of the server features.
Players should also understand rules: a few months ago even crewmembers (including me) didn't understand well the shiplaming systems. Ship and deathmatch don't get well together, as said above. So yeah, better guidelines.
I'm not going through other obvious points, as I'm tired of writing and tomorrow I have school once again, but yeah, I hope you get me, and sorry for occasional non-sense or grammar mistakes, if I wrote any.
This reminds me of a topic made a while ago in another section, although I hope this topic will bring some more interest, discussion and share of ideas.
First of all, the Las Venturas Playground's script is obviously not user-friendly. Let's say a player joins our server for the first time. He hopefully will read /commands— which doesn't give any information about our new features, as it's just a mix of obsolete and old commands— and then he will try to use /register, being awarded with a 'You should register on www.sa-mp.nl, so close your game and go for it!'.
But yeah, let's say this player's a role-player (the most common kind of SA-MP user): first of all, he will try to earn moneys, which is pretty much an hard task to achieve, since our economy has dropped down, after an attempt to solve the 'inflation' of our server. What if the player was a stunter? He'd go like /stunt, /v, /vehicle and then asking in the mainchat «How can I get a car?» he will just realize it isn't a stunt-based server, leaving as soon as possible (it happened enough times already). In both cases, they end up like 'Nah, let's find something else.
So yeah, the main problem is they don't get to know the many features our gamemode offers, since they're not helped by the User Interface nor by regulars, who're just chasing around, killing newbies.
Also, our server isn't (in my opinion) not involved in the SA-MP community, maybe because of the low player count, as new players tend to join servers with a big player count —that's why I found LVP— but meh, also because we're not advertising our server, nor our features. We have potential, but we can't demonstrate it with such a low player count. The common reply-argument 'SA-MP is getting old' is true, but I still wonder why there are servers with a stable 200 player count with peaks of 400, if not even 500. So yeah, I guess because their gamemodes are more user-friendly and many players there tend to stunt and generally chilling around on their own, without getting killed.
There's one more thing. We auto-define ourselves a 'Roleplay/Deathmatch server'. We obviously tried to keep this kind of gamemode, limitating and regulating (if not even removing) many San Andreas and San Andreas: Multiplayer main features. So yeah, we should choose between roleplay, stunting and deathmatch, and since 70% of SA-MP players are roleplayers and stunters, I'd say roleplay and stunting. Obviously I'm not saying we should hand out godmode and speed hacks to every player, but gang territories and gambling, properties, car exporting don't really get on well together. We should, instead, think of an intelligent way to show off our minigames and various roleplay features, keeping deathmatch as one of the server features.
Players should also understand rules: a few months ago even crewmembers (including me) didn't understand well the shiplaming systems. Ship and deathmatch don't get well together, as said above. So yeah, better guidelines.
I'm not going through other obvious points, as I'm tired of writing and tomorrow I have school once again, but yeah, I hope you get me, and sorry for occasional non-sense or grammar mistakes, if I wrote any.