Thoughts on server whitelist

[ford-michigan]

I believe that having a whitelist to play the server will heavily restrict the flow of new players. It should be not that hard to make a small questionnaire in-game rather than an application that has to be manually cleared by staff before you can even connect to the server and figure out things.
If there still will be some form of quiz required to join it should at least be provided on character creation. It should also be stated that people that just join and grief people or run around causing trouble does not happen enough to warrant making the server even less accessible to new people.
What really should be done is either have staff to continue what they have been doing perfectly fine so far, which is to catch those that are just running around and saying slurs and such, or to just have a small in-game questionnaire provided when you first attempt to create a character.

 

[FungletheBungle]

First, the application needs to be in-game. The player should not be booted out of the server upon his attempt at joining. That comes across unwelcoming. It should instead be put before the player when he joins, alongside his excitement at having successfully joined the server -- another subtle and positive marketing trick. The player has decided to click Willard on the server list and join the server --> you've got him! Now he needs to be reeled in! so why tf would you boot him from the server?! Terrible, terrible![/FONT][/SIZE]

The devs have done a number of third-party things in the server (connecting your Steam account to your forums account while in-game for instance), so I'm sure they can figure out how to create an application system that sends that to a website or to the review team after being filled out in the in-game UI. Reduce the number of hurdles the player has to surmount to get into the server.

Second, the player should still be afforded their right of creating a character and playing while their application is pending review. Further action can be taken against the player if their app is not up to scratch ("join our Discord to learn about Willard and re-do your application" for example). This compromise is necessary if you want to maintain the quality control benefit while not flipping the bird to mildly-interested people.

If you wanted something a little more grounded, you could even create a "trial period" (you can only play for 1 hour whilst your application is pending). I find even that a little too oppressive but any compromise is better than straight-up disallowing the player from doing literally anything. I'm not sure why it needs to be so oppressive and forcing the player to go through so many loops that crushes their excitement.


Sorry for the long post.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks.

I like this quite a bit actually, some very good points.

 

[ItsLiam]

I was talking to a friend of mine about getting them into Willard, because they study literature and are quite able to write interesting pieces. He said he was interested in the server, considering the fact that getting into it was easy. No Whitelist, just a few questions when you join in the in-game thing, GMOD is not a game that takes much of his PC, etc.

He has no experience in HL2, or RP, and I think making him write an application will kill most of the motivation he has. In my own experience, joining other Roleplay servers is just such a drag considering the fact that I don't know if I'm going to like something, and I'd rather have the ability to just join --> check it out --> see if I like it / not like it.

We have 'Quality Control Auditors' to specifically go against the fact that some people might show bad RP, and then we make a Whitelist, while also having this team. It's just bloat, and I don't think it's going to serve an already dying genre.

 

[RileyTheRoomba]

I'm gay.

I have read neither any longform essays nor TLDRs included for my specific convenience.

There's nothing wrong with a whitelist and every point against it is just hot air or vibes-based. There is no sense in me sitting here and trying to debunk nonsense. AIDs was fearmongered less than the potential of a server whitelist. I'm going back to masturbing now have a good day,.

 

[Lab]

I +support you being a strong independent gay man but -support everything else you said

 

[Inspector Orlok]

I'm gay.

I have read neither any longform essays nor TLDRs included for my specific convenience.

There's nothing wrong with a whitelist and every point against it is just hot air or vibes-based. There is no sense in me sitting here and trying to debunk nonsense. AIDs was fearmongered less than the potential of a server whitelist. I'm going back to masturbing now have a good day,.

I think your people should be locked up.

 

[Lost Coast Chanties]

Foreword: Long ass post! (sorry!) If you want to read the solution to the problem (and skip all the boring polemics) skip to the last subheading "The sensible compromise".

-

This idea is good conceptually but its execution seems quite bad and will lead to the worst possible outcomes with minimal benefit for no good reason. Let's go through the points one by one.


Servers have tried this. It'll be bad for Willard
The two current (or recent) servers that have employed a proper whitelist system have been Lancer and Exodious.

Lancer was high calibre when it came to QOL and consistent development, but it peaked at like 10 players on a good day precisely because its closed-door policy choked the pool of potential joiners -- being forced to hop on the Discord and fill out an application, and then waiting for it to be reviewed. The players were pickily elected through an onerous process and the lack of population fed further into a lack of incentive to hop on and play, fuelling the low activity.

Exodious has around 20-30 players at any point in a given cycle and it relies on event-heavy narrative and dedicated creative direction to keep those players engaged (they don't do CityRP). Because of this it can close for weeks and has unpredictable opening times. It relies on a similar application system but is actually more lenient and informal than the one being proposed for Willard. It works for Exodious, as their server design centres around a smaller, far more manageable group of tightly-knit players rather than letting in new randoms.

Willard's structure (presumably open consistently 5 days a week with AP as it was in V2) requires an open-door policy to sustain itself. Why? Because the longer you're open, the more variables there are that contribute to player boredom, while conversely it becomes more difficult to keep the playerbase engaged through organised events. So, if we're already tight on creative injunction (which we can't rely on with this structure), why would we then restrict the server population further and contribute to reduced player variety, reduced freshness?


This is a Marketing 101 failure.
One of the benefits of being open so frequently and consistently is that there's a larger "fishnet" to catch new players that might idly browse the Gmod gamemode list. Willard, and Gmod servers in general, are already in the tough spot of having poor exposure due a lack of tools to advertise effectively outside the server list. The immediacy of being able to join the server once it's available on the list is thus an incredibly important feature, and one of the only features that equalises the ratio of players that see Willard on the list and those who do and end up playing within the hour.

At first I thought the application would be in-game, embedded into the server upon joining. But these three features make it bad:

1. The application is NOT in-game (the new player is required to travel to a third-party website)
2. The player is completely blocked from even joining the server
3. The applicant will have to WAIT to be accepted before they can play

This is not a good concept execution, because it fundamentally misunderstands the basic psychology of how new players are attracted to a Gmod server, or for that matter, any online hobby. Let's talk about that:

The "Browser" Disposition
Most new players decide to try a hobby like HL2RP with an initial stage of passive impetus akin to "browsing". The same sort of attitude one has when walking down an aisle in a library -- not looking for anything in particular, just seeing what catches their eye. They pick up a book, admire the front cover, read the blurb. If their interest piques, they loan the book. If not, they put it back.

By putting a hurdle on the customer with the proposed application system, you effectively eliminate the chances they'll try the server by starving them of a quick-and-easy sample of the server they want to try. It would be germane to taping over the blurb of a book whilst its on the shelf. If they're already in this low-effort, medium-level-of-interest "browsing" stage, they're not going to go to such lengths to fill out an application and wait hours+ (let's be honest here, if admins don't respond to in-game tickets in a timely manner, they're not going to respond to third-party applications in a timely manner either) to join for a taste to see if their middling intrigue is impressed or not.

This passive "browsing" attitude demands of us to hook a new player in by showing off how active and engaged the server community is (at least in an in-game capacity).

But this lengthy and inhospitable induction process assumes that every player on the server browser is at a high-level of intrigue -- that they're willing to go this extra mile. Which is wrong. Nobody is going to bring a book up to the counter and ask for the blurb, and very few people are going to fill out an application just to "see what's going on" with this server they found.


Where Willard stands right now in terms of population
From what I've seen from Battlemetrics, Willard is averaging around 50-60 players with the benefit of only recently launching. This is already comparatively small to its release in early 2025 where the server trended over 100 players for the first few days after launch, then sat at a comfortable 80 during peak hours for a few weeks before dipping to the expected 40-50.

Mathmetically extrapolating this likely isn't going to lead to accurate results but if we were to extrapolate, we should expect Willard to at least halve in population during peak hours within a few months of V3's actual launch, meaning 30 or so players. Combining this with a system that gut-punches new players by making them fill in an application AND wait spells a population disaster for the server in the not too distance future.

Again, what will happen likely won't align with what we can mathematically calculate, but we should still expect that this opposition to growth will exacerbate shrinkages.

It's been stated that we should "expect a population drop resultant from this policy" (paraphrased) and handwaved that disadvantage. I think this is a downside that needs to be more carefully considered.

As a side-note, I saw Aspect make a big announcement addressing counter-arguments. I thought it was interesting that he had to address 43 separate arguments (and still didn't address all of them) was illustrative of how this system creates a multi-angled plethora of compounding problems. Bro literally had to address a Martin Luther's dispupational theses worth of problems. I appreciate his honesty and thoroughness -- but doesn't his addressing this sheer volume of counterarguments evince the weight of problems this idea carries?

View attachment 52663​

Anyways, moving on.


"Quality vs. Quantity" is a trap

"We are sacrificing quantity to ensure quality."
(essence paraphrased from Aspect's dissertation).
​

A knee-jerk judgement will say that statement is fair and principally sound: that taking harsher stances at the expense of quantity will naturally lead to a refinement of quality. It's common alongside the "growth for the sake of growth leads to poorer standards" argument. However, I think this principle is not only deeply flawed, it's also damaging.

There are many factors that determine overall roleplay quality. Some examples are, but not limited to: in-game features and mechanics; aesthetic quality and grounding; fairness; universe believability; non-text / visual character expression; novelty and freshness; cultural rub; player relationships; rules and their implementation; social capital between players and admins; and exposure to quality.

Let's pick out the three most relevant factors:

• Novelty and freshness - the desire to roleplay with quality is excited by novel experiences. If someone witnesses the same thing repetitively, they are less willing to put effort into that experience or explore it further.
• Cultural rub - the desire to roleplay with quality, as well as the desire to participate, is influenced by the perceived cultural health, relevance, and number of likeminded participants in an activity.
• Exposure to quality - the desire to roleplay with quality is encouraged by witnessing quality roleplay.

With this policy, the first two factors (novelty and freshness, cultural rub) are attacked and diminished, with the hope of improving the nature of the third factor (exposure to quality). Again, on the surface this might seem acceptable, but the problem is that all factors are part of this multi-factorial body of influence on why any one individual might roleplay with a given level of quality.

By diminishing novelty and freshness by outright (and openly admitting to) restricting the number of new players into the server, you affect people's incentive to roleplay with quality.

By diminishing the cultural rub by deliberately choosing to be less welcoming, naturally suspicious of new players, and endorsing a lower population, you sour people's perceptions of the culture and their incentive to roleplay with quality.

These outweigh the minimal benefits of increasing the last point.

People get bored quickly of roleplaying with the same people -- yes, we want new faces. Sometimes, I want to roleplay with someone who mightn't have the best roleplay ability, because its fresh. It's interesting. It's a new experience with a new player. And if I'm a good roleplayer and I'm exposing them to good roleplay, I'm encouraging them to come up to my level.

People also want to be part of a community and a cultural experience -- Halo 3 was a highly played game because it was a cultural phenomenon that attracted millions of people - people wanted to play because millions of people of their ilk were playing, not only because it was a "good game". Sidenote if you're reading this post in full you're cool and have a huge cock. People are not just in Willard for roleplay, they enjoy the extra-server experience, welcoming spirit (that we should foster), and other interesting aspects of our community.

Good roleplayers need not be concerned that their quality will decline permanently because they are exposed to "mediocre" roleplay. Roleplay quality tends with upward momentum --> average roleplayers are bolstered to improve, while excellent roleplayers already remain at their level. Exposure to average roleplay does not bastardise a good roleplayer's quality. And poor roleplay is already punished (by admins), and criticised on forums and LOOC, so we already have a culture that encourages this upward momentum of quality.

Lastly, quantity increases the number of potential reactions and player-driven narratives which thus increases the potential for good roleplay. A group of 5 excellent roleplayers alone are very limited in their RP potential because there is such a small quantity and creative variables are small, compared to a group of 7 excellent roleplayers and 20 average roleplayers. It isn't always quality vs. quantity, very often quantity directly improves quality potential.

The TLDR of this section is that seeking to improve quality directly by sloughing off the "average-to-poorer" roleplayer is not really how it works, and is quite damaging. Poor quantity can also lead to poor quality, as it affects many of the factors aforementioned.

An open-door policy is in our advantage!

View attachment 52662​

The sensible compromise
I've harped on long enough critiquing this policy, now let's talk about the solution.
This idea can still work, but it needs to be less punishing.

First, the application needs to be in-game. The player should not be booted out of the server upon his attempt at joining. That comes across unwelcoming. It should instead be put before the player when he joins, alongside his excitement at having successfully joined the server -- another subtle and positive marketing trick. The player has decided to click Willard on the server list and join the server --> you've got him! Now he needs to be reeled in! so why tf would you boot him from the server?! Terrible, terrible!

The devs have done a number of third-party things in the server (connecting your Steam account to your forums account while in-game for instance), so I'm sure they can figure out how to create an application system that sends that to a website or to the review team after being filled out in the in-game UI. Reduce the number of hurdles the player has to surmount to get into the server.

Second, the player should still be afforded their right of creating a character and playing while their application is pending review. Further action can be taken against the player if their app is not up to scratch ("join our Discord to learn about Willard and re-do your application" for example). This compromise is necessary if you want to maintain the quality control benefit while not flipping the bird to mildly-interested people.

If you wanted something a little more grounded, you could even create a "trial period" (you can only play for 1 hour whilst your application is pending). I find even that a little too oppressive but any compromise is better than straight-up disallowing the player from doing literally anything. I'm not sure why it needs to be so oppressive and forcing the player to go through so many loops that crushes their excitement.


Sorry for the long post.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks.

 

[ford-michigan]

Elite reference.