A Maybe Too Honest, Too Unfunny, Too Weird Critique of Willard's Roleplaying Environment, Mindset, and Community/Gameplay. 5/22/2024

Botulism · May 23, 2024

"Barely any stories on here interest me,
'Ubisoft Syndrome.'
Great Aesthetic, No Substance."

INTRODUCTION

These are just some of the things that I've heard from other staff and players in the past few weeks to describe (or prescribe a way to cope with) the current state of the Willards Server and Community.
Willards in my opinion derives much of its' huge player base from how easy it is to access. It's not a fancy restaurant with a mandated dress code, it's like a popular diner that almost anyone can come in and get a good meal from. If we're comparing the other players you meet to the various dishes served, however, you'll find that while the aesthetic inside the diner is great and the kitchen equipment is top-notch (The graphics, interfaces, crafting system, and general music/aesthetic) the dishes (players, events, etc.) and waiters (staff team, creative team, and maybe exceptionally creative players) are uninspired, bored, and are restricted from being creative by the environment and the executives.

Long-winded neurotic analogies aside, I'll introduce you all to my playing style, so my critique comes off as a little more well-rounded. I am a Combine Main, I've mainly played on Civil Protection for the past two months or so nearly every day that the server has been up, and before that I played a small-time rebel/slummer character. I enjoy playing Civil Protection on Half Life servers because I find that not enough people can accurately and compellingly play the 'bad guy'. My main OOC goal while playing a Civil Protection Officer is to inspire as many people to have their characters rebel as possible while giving the ones that don't an interesting roleplaying experience, in the form of playing intrigue with my cop, bribing him to do their dirty work, and so much more. I play the North Korean male cop PATROL-36 right now, or as you may know him, Chollima/Moon/Park.

I'll address all of my problems with how this server runs itself in a general faction-by-faction critique, mostly dealing with how the sub-par roleplay of characters is encouraged, created, and stunted. Partially by the staff team's lack of willingness to engage with players who push the dystopian atmosphere Half Life 2 is meant to have, and partially by the general lethargy every older player I talk to seems to have.

For the critiques of factions that I haven't gone through the wringer in, I've talked to plenty of people who main those factions, from rebel RPers to newcomers and old staff members.

CITIZENS, REBEL 'ROLEPLAY', THE TRASH-BAG GAMBIT, LOYALISTS, AND THE PLAY-TO-WIN ATMOSPHERE
(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love whining in that PK Appeal)

(30 more days of doing this, and I'll have an AR2 and Kevlar in no time!)
Rebel Roleplay is easily one of the most grinding, boring things in existence. It's part of the reason why I feel like the 'Rebel' side of Willards and the 'City' side are almost two different servers at this point. The constant crafting gambit of searching trash-bags and making deals with BMDs doesn't encourage any sort of good roleplay other than holding the shift key and running around to collect scrap. Plenty of shitizens and borderline minges roam the sewers, and you'd be mistaken in thinking they're all new players. From bluesuits to geared up rebels with AR2s, nearly every single one of them has a play-to-win anti-roleplay mindset, and it really shows. A certain friend of mine I invited to play on Willards as his first roleplaying experience ever, and by just playing a self-insert of his, multiple people actually fell in love with how interesting and varied his character's responses were; he admits to me he's a shitty character-designer playing a self-insert with no real interesting qualities, yet by the current standard of Willards a lot of players thought he was atleast above-average in terms of roleplaying quality. How can that be?

Simple. When you're Playing To Win, you don't care about Roleplay. Why have a character who is anti-drug and anti-drink if those all boost your stats and help you win battles? Why bother with blabbering to a random Russian bluesuit who has interesting things to say and shares a common language with you if he has no shiny scripts on him to use? It's apart of why I stopped bothering with rebel roleplay on this server and moved to playing my cop more, I was able to care MUCH less about P2W and more about creating interesting roleplaying scenarios.

The current Willard gameplay loop for an aspiring rebel is boring as fuck. You collect shit from trash-bags until you have enough to make a semi-decent gun and ammo, you get your crafting skill up to the highest it can be... You find a BMD who (if you're lucky, barely any of them are on except to help the already-established rebel OCs) can deal you weapons and armor for a price, and from there you join a resistance group and do...Fuck-all. You're a rebel now, you're armed, you're against the system, and what is there to do? What is there to gain? Nothing. ANY small ambush you do is guaranteed to have a massive Overwatch response, even killing a few conscripts and wounding a cop will cause two Overwatch squads of giddy staff players to rush down into the sewers to PK your ass (actually happened, I was the cop). It's apart of why I don't blame the rebel players for constantly playing to win, because they get the SHORTEST end of the stick, and if they don't cut the shit and limit things like character development to being rather basic in nature, they're going to lose all their shit they grinded so hard for.

When you have to grind for things and spend actual OOC hours of just non-roleplay to get things, that doesn't encourage roleplay, that encourages maladaptive gameplay to compensate. Thus, it's no wonder why most well-known rebel players have very little care for writing stuff out in-detail, characters and realistic humans included.
To do it is to no benefit, and to forget it is no loss. They're not penalized for not roleplaying in a roleplaying game, so why bother? Fuck it, am I right? I'd do it too, so I do not mean this in a chastising way. It's how the staff and game-design encourage rebels to roleplay.

How many cops did Gordon Freeman kill in base HL2 before the Overwatch started showing up? We don't even see them until after Ravenholm, when you're definitely outside the city limits. Why, as a rebel, should I fear a bunch of non-characters rushing to kill me just because I murdered a few conscripts or cops? It's immersion-breaking and ridiculous. This is a huge city, the Overwatch are an expandable yet limited resource of transhuman cyborgs. It's clear a good portion of the staff don't even care about that, though. An OOC power-trip is most likely more on some minds. It's either that or outright lethargy and not wanting to play anymore, one's bad, and the other is just sad, since the latter are actually really good roleplayers.

LOYALISTS. I GOT NOTHING TO SUGGEST EXCEPT I WANT BETTER.

First of all, I'll start by saying that 'Collaborator' is a stupid title for Loyalists. In the real world, it's a denigrating name for someone who collaborates with a hostile, foreign government. Breen was accused of being a collaborator but only half-heartedly accepted the term to describe himself in a single one-off speech. Why would a system like the Combine, who is so openly dystopian but also keen on making things seem like they're not 'that' bad (and failing at doing so) use such an obvious term to suggest that collaboration with them is the wrong thing to do? If we're using this same stream of logic, why not call Civil Protection the Occupational Forces? See what I mean here?

Second-of-all, the encouraged mindset for Loyalists (genuinely believing the Combine to be a good force for humanity, believing the propaganda, etc.) is completely off, and either suggests that every loyalist character is insanely stupid or that people OOCly really don't know how bad the Combine really are. The Combine make the Nazis look like green-peace environmentalists. They're going to murder everyone on Planet Earth while draining its' resources, making sure that every human is either dead or transhumanized. That's their end goal. This should be blatantly obvious to most from all the early occupation massacres, the brutal Echelon Camps, and the fact that Civil Protection can and SHOULD (They would be out of character if they didn't) beat and torture you for every little thing you do wrong. SURE, you can make the argument that people collaborated during the Nazi Regime too, but it wasn't because a majority of them genuinely believed that a bitch like Hitler was going to save them from the 'evil menace' of Judeo bolshevism. Nazi collaborators all did so out of power, a belief that Hitler would win and fearing what the Nazis would do if they opposed him, antisemitism, or just plain mental illness. Being a blind collaborator and believing in the blatantly false propaganda should be an extreme outlier, yet most Loyalist characters seem to be like this. Why encourage this type of character in-game? It's boring and we can do better.

CIVIL PROTECTION - THE MOST BORING TYRANTS YET TO BE SEEN IN A HL2RP SERVER

Simply put, Civil Protection in its' current state is for the average player all of these things: Impersonal, boring, conformist, not willing to go all the way in creativity, and lazy. The Local Cop characters at their best have been some of the better Cops I've seen in HL2RP, and at worst? Racist stereotypes that cause more awkward laughs than inspire fear. The Transfer-cops provide no unique RP opportunities to the established theme of Civil Protection being a crime family in C8, and instead are a mix of boring, soulless, or immature. They actually hamper all the cool crime roleplay a lot of the new transfers have done.
Only one form of character thrives here, the relatively normal human who joined up for the rations. They're the only ones that seem to survive the wrath of their weirdly lawful neutral, rule-obsessed superiors. Why is it that the amount of cops that've been PK'ed by rebels in the past 6 months has been under half a dozen characters, while the amount of cops PK'ed by their superiors or fellow cohorts has likely been double? Isn't that an alarm-bell for the amount of rebel attacks that occur? It's silly. Death should be as common as rain in Seattle in HL2RP.

A good portion of faction leads don't care though, you rarely see them on save for Ozzekiel and 1-2 others. My character addressed a local Japanese Rank Leader as 'Taicho' (The Hogo-way to address a Rank Leader in Japanese, whomever wrote the C8 cops actually had some good ideas but sadly they were poorly executed in an attempt to placate both those who wanted to make new characters and those who wanted to keep their old ones) And he didn't even know what it meant, because he most likely didn't read the guidebook for how the faction worked now.

The amount of actually interesting characters that play higher-ranked characters are severely limited too, they conform to very few, weirdly sane archetypes (I thought species-traitor gas-masked nazis were supposed to be INsane?). If you're a cop player, you just know what I'm talking about. I can't put it into exact words because I want to keep this moving along, but anyone who could add on would be greatly appreciated. Cops should not be wholly agreeable; they're evil people and they all deserve a bullet in the head. They WORK together though, and it's just strange how morally neutral or even good they seem to be without any context as to what they're doing.

Civil Protection should be a faction made up of the sadistic, the cynical, and the cowardly. They're the biggest scumbags in human history in HL2's universe. They're not JUST the nazis, they're equivalent to the Jewish Ghetto Police in the Ghettos of Poland. When their brothers and sisters are getting sent off to the camps, they're the ones willingly making them board the trains. The acts of 'sadism' that are shown however do not come off as interesting, and instead come off as watered-down PG-13 garbage that make the character doing it look stupid at best, or at worst make the whole faction look inept.

It's insanely obvious when a character is doing something because they fear a ban for torture or something of the like, because their attempts to scare the other player go from 0 to 100. It's either just a threat to do something or outright death, rarely will they actually start breaking ribs and doing shit the Cops are 100% implied to do.
"This has to be a mistake, I got a standard relocation coupon just like EVERYBODY else!" Says the citizen in a blood-filled interrogation room.

When I played Shockcore HL2RP back in 2015, I got PK'ed as a low-ranking Civil Protection Officer because I muttered during a crowded rally that the Benefactors were above us, but not Gods like the citizens in the crowd were saying. The words went un-mentioned for 3 days, and then they told me to come into the Nexus where they promptly interrogated me, told me I was going to go to Hell, then incinerated me. Where's more of that? I've been trying to bring it back as a cop, but nobody bothers to seem to act it out with the same passion as a sadistic cop on a power-trip actually would. These are people who are DEDICATED to making your life worse, they get JOY out of it. Nearly every cop played currently doesn't even bother and seems too lazy to actually make constant arrests, searches and seizures, loyalty checks, and et cetera.

That's not fun. Cops aren't ardent morally grey rule-followers. Cops in HL2RP need to be an oppressive, corrupt force that constantly get their hands in the dirt. They need to inspire rebellion and good roleplay, yet right now very few of us I think are actually doing that.

If you want a look at what actual sadism and disgusting people look like, look no further than normal first-world American cops. These members of an organization that is far-removed from the dystopia of the Combine Empire make many of the characters in Civil Protection look like weak, non-violent pussies.

A QUICK NOTE FOR THE KAMIKOS: THE YAKUZA GAMES DON'T FIT INTO HL2RP. WHATS NEXT, JOJO?

When even the owner of the server barely plays a character and just plays a parody of the Yakuza games instead, you know the whole idea of this server being serious kind-of fell on the wayside. The Kamiko gang should be completely revamped, I want to see scummy working-class Yakuza bosses, not dyed hair and flashy suits. This is Half Life 2, not an idealized 80s Tokyo. Even in 80s Tokyo, the Yakuza weren't all that flashy, and if they were? They certainly wouldn't be sixteen years into an occupation by alien tyrants. It's really hard to take them seriously for me, but maybe I'm just looking too much into it.

Working-class Japanese men who rose to become leaders and soldiers of powerful crime organizations.

Guys who like to go to Motley Crue concerts and cross-dress in their parent's basements (instead of going out and showing it off harharhar)

STAFF TEAM SHENANIGANS, LOSING INTEREST, and MORE
(This is the part that gets me banned.)

Giving George a two-week suspension for 'toxicity' was a big, fat mistake.
Ultima should've been publically warned for his insistence on PK'ing a vortigaunt character and being toxic about it (if you know, you know. I've provided proof for this above.) Instead, George left since he was most likely tired of how unfairly the staff team currently handles things. The whole insistence on bureaucracy and management teams for every little thing (Auth teams, PK teams, etc.) is just kind-of strange. Just because Willards is one of the bigger HL2RP servers doesn't mean that everything needs to be regimented and modelled after a government entity. At this point, I don't know what's juicier; the OOC Willard intrigue or the IC Willard intrigue.

Quite frankly, it's stupid and it takes away from the RP experience. Kick out the admins who cause problems and keep the ones who don't, it's really that simple.

SENSITIVE MINDSETS AND TREATING PLAYERS LIKE CHILDREN
NOTE: HEAVILY MY PERSONAL OPINION, I expect most people to disagree with this but I couldn't shy away from including a segment that details something like this. I'm all for player freedom and I have complete trust in the maturity of people to handle topics with respect. I believe in coddling and restricting people will inspire them to break the rules in unsanitary ways.

All too often have I seen players get treated like children and have tons of roleplay options restricted because of a few bad apples. Quite frankly, it's tiresome and it shows how little regard the Staff Team holds for the maturity of the community. The discouragement or banning of mature topics like torture, racial bigotry and hatred, romantic topics, etc. Come out of an OOC fear that these topics will be taken seriously by players, and when they're banned, all you get are watered down options that make the actual real thing look preferable in comparison.

I started to play HL2RP when I was ten years old on servers that left everything free and unrestricted. I never engaged in Erotic Roleplay (Which I'm glad is banned) but I was not bothered by the more grotesque subjects of human existence. I was a very smart kid (probably smarter than I am now) and I took everything seriously. My characters' fingernails got ripped off by a Civil Protection torturer and it actually fascinated my little neurotic mind, in what other medium can I roleplay a dystopia this realistic!? I looked up how KGB Torturers did their thing and I tried to create realistic responses to what kind of agonizing pain that'd create. When my citizen finally revolted, he had no second thought about blowing a cops' head off because of what they did to him in the interrogation room. That kind of roleplay is rich in giving someone motivations and opinions and is unfortunately rarely reenacted in Willards; most players are so uninspired due to the rules and restrictions and fear a ban if they go too far. I think how lax the cops are now is actually inspiring more loyalists and Combine apologists, which is not what HL2RP is about.

What do I get now? Some cop just vaguely interrogating and threatening to kill my Latina over her knowledge of the resistance, by a cop who doesn't even follow or bother to keep up with what she's saying. She doesn't even lay a HAND on me the entire interrogation. My character made a reference to the concept of a frog in boiling water and the Officer (Who spoke English as a first language by the way, they just genuinely aren't invested in roleplay, I've seen them do this many times.) doesn't even understand what my character means, and has to ask ICly what the analogy means. I wanted to get repercussions, man! This is the Combine, give me CONSEQUENCES! Without any to speak of save for death or a beating, roleplay feels watered down like Hell and boring, and the server mindset in general needs a fix.

Other than that, OOC rambling about politics is kind-of lame and if you want to know my political leanings, I'm voting for Jeb Bush until I die. (Please clap.)
Racial bigotry and slurs of all kinds should 100% exist ICly and should be unmoderated. If someone is saying the N-Word constantly, let them be sorted out by other players. I remember when a friend of mine roleplayed a neo-nazi skinhead back in the day to see how long he'd last. He called the wrong cop (who turned out to be black) the N-word and his skinhead got CURBSTOMPED in an alleyway. It was fucking awesome, and we talked about how unexpected yet realistic it was for weeks on end.

Players can and WILL take care of the idiots themselves. You just don't trust them enough to do so, and create a mindset where players have to rely on staff constantly for everything. When you don't let players sort things out themselves, that individuality stops being cultivated, and now you just have a server full of people too bored to do anything because they think they can't change the world around them.

CONCLUSION

This critique consists of some of my, and many other players' strongly felt beliefs and opinions about how the way the server is going. I fully expect a lot of people to not agree with what I'm saying, especially since it isn't in a presentable fashion and I don't have much experience in this server to go off of other than a few months of roleplay. I've seen people who've spent two weeks on the server give better synopses than I have.

In short, from what I've seen, Willards as a whole inspires really creative and interesting players to become UNCREATIVE. The way the game works takes away the inspiration for most players to construct meaningful, interesting characters. The Staff Team doesn't do as good of a job as it should and as a whole, the game prioritizes a worship of characters who've survived a long time over those who perform the most compelling stories in the shortest amounts of time.
I've only played on it so long since it's HL2RP and I've used it as my own sandbox, doing my own things with minimal staff influence and writing characters that I want to see. When I see a lot of my friends become dissatisfied though, and no one else jumping to fight in the ring, I can't just stay silent. No matter how shitty and poor my takes are, I want to give the people who aren't putting up a formal critique a voice.

I'm putting this in the discussion section and not the complaints section since all the complaints seem rather specific and about one issue, when this one is kindof a general community-whole critique. I am not satisfied with the factions and OOC/IC atmosphere, and I think while Willards may be played often, it won't be enjoyed as much or remembered as fondly as the servers that came before it if it continues down this path.

Please leave critiques of my opinions below, or agreements, whatever you may wish. I'd love to read it and add more of my own thoughts. Thank you, and have a nice day!

Divine · May 23, 2024

Finally, some good fucking discussion.

toby · May 23, 2024

I have returned to willard, it seems that willard's not doing very well

Gutsy · May 23, 2024

Botulism said:
"Barely any stories on here interest me,
'Ubisoft Syndrome.'
Great Aesthetic, No Substance."

INTRODUCTION

These are just some of the things that I've heard from other staff and players in the past few weeks to describe (or prescribe a way to cope with) the current state of the Willards Server and Community.
Willards in my opinion derives much of its' huge player base from how easy it is to access. It's not a fancy restaurant with a mandated dress code, it's like a popular diner that almost anyone can come in and get a good meal from. If we're comparing the other players you meet to the various dishes served, however, you'll find that while the aesthetic inside the diner is great and the kitchen equipment is top-notch (The graphics, interfaces, crafting system, and general music/aesthetic) the dishes (players, events, etc.) and waiters (staff team, creative team, and maybe exceptionally creative players) are uninspired, bored, and are restricted from being creative by the environment and the executives.

Long-winded neurotic analogies aside, I'll introduce you all to my playing style, so my critique comes off as a little more well-rounded. I am a Combine Main, I've mainly played on Civil Protection for the past two months or so nearly every day that the server has been up, and before that I played a small-time rebel/slummer character. I enjoy playing Civil Protection on Half Life servers because I find that not enough people can accurately and compellingly play the 'bad guy'. My main OOC goal while playing a Civil Protection Officer is to inspire as many people to have their characters rebel as possible while giving the ones that don't an interesting roleplaying experience, in the form of playing intrigue with my cop, bribing him to do their dirty work, and so much more. I play the North Korean male cop PATROL-36 right now, or as you may know him, Chollima/Moon/Park.

I'll address all of my problems with how this server runs itself in a general faction-by-faction critique, mostly dealing with how the sub-par roleplay of characters is encouraged, created, and stunted. Partially by the staff team's lack of willingness to engage with players who push the dystopian atmosphere Half Life 2 is meant to have, and partially by the general lethargy every older player I talk to seems to have.

For the critiques of factions that I haven't gone through the wringer in, I've talked to plenty of people who main those factions, from rebel RPers to newcomers and old staff members.

CITIZENS, REBEL 'ROLEPLAY', THE TRASH-BAG GAMBIT, LOYALISTS, AND THE PLAY-TO-WIN ATMOSPHERE
(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love whining in that PK Appeal)
View attachment 35345
(30 more days of doing this, and I'll have an AR2 and Kevlar in no time!)
Rebel Roleplay is easily one of the most grinding, boring things in existence. It's part of the reason why I feel like the 'Rebel' side of Willards and the 'City' side are almost two different servers at this point. The constant crafting gambit of searching trash-bags and making deals with BMDs doesn't encourage any sort of good roleplay other than holding the shift key and running around to collect scrap. Plenty of shitizens and borderline minges roam the sewers, and you'd be mistaken in thinking they're all new players. From bluesuits to geared up rebels with AR2s, nearly every single one of them has a play-to-win anti-roleplay mindset, and it really shows. A certain friend of mine I invited to play on Willards as his first roleplaying experience ever, and by just playing a self-insert of his, multiple people actually fell in love with how interesting and varied his character's responses were; he admits to me he's a shitty character-designer playing a self-insert with no real interesting qualities, yet by the current standard of Willards a lot of players thought he was atleast above-average in terms of roleplaying quality. How can that be?

Simple. When you're Playing To Win, you don't care about Roleplay. Why have a character who is anti-drug and anti-drink if those all boost your stats and help you win battles? Why bother with blabbering to a random Russian bluesuit who has interesting things to say and shares a common language with you if he has no shiny scripts on him to use? It's apart of why I stopped bothering with rebel roleplay on this server and moved to playing my cop more, I was able to care MUCH less about P2W and more about creating interesting roleplaying scenarios.

The current Willard gameplay loop for an aspiring rebel is boring as fuck. You collect shit from trash-bags until you have enough to make a semi-decent gun and ammo, you get your crafting skill up to the highest it can be... You find a BMD who (if you're lucky, barely any of them are on except to help the already-established rebel OCs) can deal you weapons and armor for a price, and from there you join a resistance group and do...Fuck-all. You're a rebel now, you're armed, you're against the system, and what is there to do? What is there to gain? Nothing. ANY small ambush you do is guaranteed to have a massive Overwatch response, even killing a few conscripts and wounding a cop will cause two Overwatch squads of giddy staff players to rush down into the sewers to PK your ass (actually happened, I was the cop). It's apart of why I don't blame the rebel players for constantly playing to win, because they get the SHORTEST end of the stick, and if they don't cut the shit and limit things like character development to being rather basic in nature, they're going to lose all their shit they grinded so hard for.

When you have to grind for things and spend actual OOC hours of just non-roleplay to get things, that doesn't encourage roleplay, that encourages maladaptive gameplay to compensate. Thus, it's no wonder why most well-known rebel players have very little care for writing stuff out in-detail, characters and realistic humans included.
To do it is to no benefit, and to forget it is no loss. They're not penalized for not roleplaying in a roleplaying game, so why bother? Fuck it, am I right? I'd do it too, so I do not mean this in a chastising way. It's how the staff and game-design encourage rebels to roleplay.

How many cops did Gordon Freeman kill in base HL2 before the Overwatch started showing up? We don't even see them until after Ravenholm, when you're definitely outside the city limits. Why, as a rebel, should I fear a bunch of non-characters rushing to kill me just because I murdered a few conscripts or cops? It's immersion-breaking and ridiculous. This is a huge city, the Overwatch are an expandable yet limited resource of transhuman cyborgs. It's clear a good portion of the staff don't even care about that, though. An OOC power-trip is most likely more on some minds. It's either that or outright lethargy and not wanting to play anymore, one's bad, and the other is just sad, since the latter are actually really good roleplayers.

View attachment 35347

LOYALISTS. I GOT NOTHING TO SUGGEST EXCEPT I WANT BETTER.

First of all, I'll start by saying that 'Collaborator' is a stupid title for Loyalists. In the real world, it's a denigrating name for someone who collaborates with a hostile, foreign government. Breen was accused of being a collaborator but only half-heartedly accepted the term to describe himself in a single one-off speech. Why would a system like the Combine, who is so openly dystopian but also keen on making things seem like they're not 'that' bad (and failing at doing so) use such an obvious term to suggest that collaboration with them is the wrong thing to do? If we're using this same stream of logic, why not call Civil Protection the Occupational Forces? See what I mean here?

Second-of-all, the encouraged mindset for Loyalists (genuinely believing the Combine to be a good force for humanity, believing the propaganda, etc.) is completely off, and either suggests that every loyalist character is insanely stupid or that people OOCly really don't know how bad the Combine really are. The Combine make the Nazis look like green-peace environmentalists. They're going to murder everyone on Planet Earth while draining its' resources, making sure that every human is either dead or transhumanized. That's their end goal. This should be blatantly obvious to most from all the early occupation massacres, the brutal Echelon Camps, and the fact that Civil Protection can and SHOULD (They would be out of character if they didn't) beat and torture you for every little thing you do wrong. SURE, you can make the argument that people collaborated during the Nazi Regime too, but it wasn't because a majority of them genuinely believed that a bitch like Hitler was going to save them from the 'evil menace' of Judeo bolshevism. Nazi collaborators all did so out of power, a belief that Hitler would win and fearing what the Nazis would do if they opposed him, antisemitism, or just plain mental illness. Being a blind collaborator and believing in the blatantly false propaganda should be an extreme outlier, yet most Loyalist characters seem to be like this. Why encourage this type of character in-game? It's boring and we can do better.

CIVIL PROTECTION - THE MOST BORING TYRANTS YET TO BE SEEN IN A HL2RP SERVER
View attachment 35351
Simply put, Civil Protection in its' current state is for the average player all of these things: Impersonal, boring, conformist, not willing to go all the way in creativity, and lazy. The Local Cop characters at their best have been some of the better Cops I've seen in HL2RP, and at worst? Racist stereotypes that cause more awkward laughs than inspire fear. The Transfer-cops provide no unique RP opportunities to the established theme of Civil Protection being a crime family in C8, and instead are a mix of boring, soulless, or immature. They actually hamper all the cool crime roleplay a lot of the new transfers have done.
Only one form of character thrives here, the relatively normal human who joined up for the rations. They're the only ones that seem to survive the wrath of their weirdly lawful neutral, rule-obsessed superiors. Why is it that the amount of cops that've been PK'ed by rebels in the past 6 months has been under half a dozen characters, while the amount of cops PK'ed by their superiors or fellow cohorts has likely been double? Isn't that an alarm-bell for the amount of rebel attacks that occur? It's silly. Death should be as common as rain in Seattle in HL2RP.

A good portion of faction leads don't care though, you rarely see them on save for Ozzekiel and 1-2 others. My character addressed a local Japanese Rank Leader as 'Taicho' (The Hogo-way to address a Rank Leader in Japanese, whomever wrote the C8 cops actually had some good ideas but sadly they were poorly executed in an attempt to placate both those who wanted to make new characters and those who wanted to keep their old ones) And he didn't even know what it meant, because he most likely didn't read the guidebook for how the faction worked now.

The amount of actually interesting characters that play higher-ranked characters are severely limited too, they conform to very few, weirdly sane archetypes (I thought species-traitor gas-masked nazis were supposed to be INsane?). If you're a cop player, you just know what I'm talking about. I can't put it into exact words because I want to keep this moving along, but anyone who could add on would be greatly appreciated. Cops should not be wholly agreeable; they're evil people and they all deserve a bullet in the head. They WORK together though, and

Civil Protection should be a faction made up of the sadistic, the cynical, and the cowardly. They're the biggest scumbags in human history in HL2's universe. They're not JUST the nazis, they're equivalent to the Jewish Ghetto Police in the Ghettos of Poland. When their brothers and sisters are getting sent off to the camps, they're the ones willingly making them board the trains. The acts of 'sadism' that are shown however do not come off as interesting, and instead come off as watered-down PG-13 garbage that make the character doing it look stupid at best, or at worst make the whole faction look inept.

It's insanely obvious when a character is doing something because they fear a ban for torture or something of the like, because their attempts to scare the other player go from 0 to 100. It's either just a threat to do something or outright death, rarely will they actually start breaking ribs and doing shit the Cops are 100% implied to do.
"This has to be a mistake, I got a standard relocation coupon just like EVERYBODY else!" Says the citizen in a blood-filled interrogation room.

When I played Shockcore HL2RP back in 2015, I got PK'ed as a low-ranking Civil Protection Officer because I muttered during a crowded rally that the Benefactors were above us, but not Gods like the citizens in the crowd were saying. The words went un-mentioned for 3 days, and then they told me to come into the Nexus where they promptly interrogated me, told me I was going to go to Hell, then incinerated me. Where's more of that? I've been trying to bring it back as a cop, but nobody bothers to seem to act it out with the same passion as a sadistic cop on a power-trip actually would. These are people who are DEDICATED to making your life worse, they get JOY out of it. Nearly every cop played currently doesn't even bother and seems too lazy to actually make constant arrests, searches and seizures, loyalty checks, and et cetera.

That's not fun. Cops aren't ardent morally grey rule-followers. Cops in HL2RP need to be an oppressive, corrupt force that constantly get their hands in the dirt. They need to inspire rebellion and good roleplay, yet right now very few of us I think are actually doing that.

If you want a look at what actual sadism and disgusting people look like, look no further than normal first-world American cops. These members of an organization that is far-removed from the dystopia of the Combine Empire make many of the characters in Civil Protection look like weak, non-violent pussies.

A QUICK NOTE FOR THE KAMIKOS: THE YAKUZA GAMES DON'T FIT INTO HL2RP. WHATS NEXT, JOJO?

When even the owner of the server barely plays a character and just plays a parody of the Yakuza games instead, you know the whole idea of this server being serious kind-of fell on the wayside. The Kamiko gang should be completely revamped, I want to see scummy working-class Yakuza bosses, not dyed hair and flashy suits. This is Half Life 2, not an idealized 80s Tokyo. Even in 80s Tokyo, the Yakuza weren't all that flashy, and if they were? They certainly wouldn't be sixteen years into an occupation by alien tyrants. It's really hard to take them seriously for me, but maybe I'm just looking too much into it.

View attachment 35352 View attachment 35353
Working-class Japanese men who rose to become leaders and soldiers of powerful crime organizations.
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Guys who like to go to Motley Crue concerts and cross-dress in their parent's basements (instead of going out and showing it off harharhar)

STAFF TEAM SHENANIGANS, LOSING INTEREST, and MORE
(This is the part that gets me banned.)
View attachment 35355
Giving George a two-week suspension for 'toxicity' was a big, fat mistake.
Ultima should've been warned for his insistence on PK'ing a vortigaunt character and being toxic about it (if you know, you know. Feel free to message me on discord and I'll be happy to provide proof for this. I'll post it here in place of the KGB Officer once I get home.) Instead, the dude left since he was most likely tired of how unfairly the staff team currently handles things. The whole insistence on bureaucracy and management teams for every little thing (Auth teams, PK teams, etc.) is just kind-of strange. Just because Willards is one of the bigger HL2RP servers doesn't mean that everything needs to be regimented and modelled after a government entity. At this point, I don't know what's juicier; the OOC Willard intrigue or the IC Willard intrigue.

Quite frankly, it's stupid and it takes away from the RP experience. Kick out the admins who cause problems and keep the ones who don't, it's really that simple.

SENSITIVE MINDSETS AND TREATING PLAYERS LIKE CHILDREN
View attachment 35356
All too often have I seen players get treated like children and have tons of roleplay options restricted because of a few bad apples. Quite frankly, it's tiresome and it shows how little regard the Staff Team holds for the maturity of the community. The discouragement or banning of mature topics like torture, racial bigotry and hatred, romantic topics, etc. Come out of an OOC fear that these topics will be taken seriously by players, and when they're banned, all you get are watered down options that make the actual real thing look preferable in comparison.

I started to play HL2RP when I was ten years old on servers that left everything free and unrestricted. I never engaged in Erotic Roleplay (Which I'm glad is banned) but I was not bothered by the more grotesque subjects of human existence. I was a very smart kid (probably smarter than I am now) and I took everything seriously. My characters' fingernails got ripped off by a Civil Protection torturer and it actually fascinated my little neurotic mind, in what other medium can I roleplay a dystopia this realistic!? I looked up how KGB Torturers did their thing and I tried to create realistic responses to what kind of agonizing pain that'd create. When my citizen finally revolted, he had no second thought about blowing a cops' head off because of what they did to him in the interrogation room. That kind of roleplay is rich in giving someone motivations and opinions and is unfortunately rarely reenacted in Willards; most players are so uninspired due to the rules and restrictions and fear a ban if they go too far. I think how lax the cops are now is actually inspiring more loyalists and Combine apologists, which is not what HL2RP is about.

What do I get now? Some cop just vaguely interrogating and threatening to kill my Latina over her knowledge of the resistance, by a cop who doesn't even follow or bother to keep up with what she's saying. She doesn't even lay a HAND on me the entire interrogation. My character made a reference to the concept of a frog in boiling water and the Officer (Who spoke English as a first language by the way, they just genuinely aren't invested in roleplay, I've seen them do this many times.) doesn't even understand what my character means, and has to ask ICly what the analogy means. I wanted to get repercussions, man! This is the Combine, give me CONSEQUENCES! Without any to speak of save for death or a beating, roleplay feels watered down like Hell and boring, and the server mindset in general needs a fix.

Other than that, OOC rambling about politics is kind-of lame and if you want to know my political leanings, I'm voting for Jeb Bush until I die. (Please clap.)
Racial bigotry and slurs of all kinds should 100% exist ICly and should be unmoderated. If someone is saying the N-Word constantly, let them be sorted out by other players. I remember when a friend of mine roleplayed a neo-nazi skinhead back in the day to see how long he'd last. He called the wrong cop (who turned out to be black) the N-word and got curbstomped in an alleyway. It was fucking awesome, and we talked about how unexpected yet realistic it was for weeks on end.

Players can and WILL take care of the idiots themselves. You just don't trust them enough to do so, and create a mindset where players have to rely on staff constantly for everything. When you don't let players sort things out themselves, that individuality stops being cultivated, and now you just have a server full of people too bored to do anything because they think they can't change the world around them.

CONCLUSION

This critique consists of some of my, and many other players' strongly felt beliefs and opinions about how the way the server is going. I fully expect a lot of people to not agree with what I'm saying, especially since it isn't in a presentable fashion and I don't have much experience in this server to go off of other than a few months of roleplay. I've seen people who've spent two weeks on the server give better synopses than I have.

In short, from what I've seen, Willards as a whole inspires really creative and interesting players to become UNCREATIVE. The way the game works takes away the inspiration for most players to construct meaningful, interesting characters. The Staff Team doesn't do as good of a job as it should and as a whole, the game prioritizes a worship of characters who've survived a long time over those who perform the most compelling stories in the shortest amounts of time.
I've only played on it so long since it's HL2RP and I've used it as my own sandbox, doing my own things with minimal staff influence and writing characters that I want to see. When I see a lot of my friends become dissatisfied though, and no one else jumping to fight in the ring, I can't just stay silent. No matter how shitty and poor my takes are, I want to give the people who aren't putting up a formal critique a voice.

I'm putting this in the discussion section and not the complaints section since all the complaints seem rather specific and about one issue, when this one is kindof a general community-whole critique. I am not satisfied with the factions and OOC/IC atmosphere, and I think while Willards may be played often, it won't be enjoyed as much or remembered as fondly as the servers that came before it if it continues down this path.

Please leave critiques of my opinions below, or agreements, whatever you may wish. I'd love to read it and add more of my own thoughts. Thank you, and have a nice day!

In terms of the rebel scene being the Play to Win and failure to roleplay meta.... Arnt you literally the unit that watched a vort spawn in on their CP in the sewers and try and take them in during a Sweep that was against CCR ROE while you were assigned to them as punishment, you then refused to use the established rules to not spawn camp them and go "Welcome to city 8" in looc and try to force it anyway?

Yeah, I wouldn't trust you in the slightest

CP's in the current city are completely racist, even targeting non Japanese people often. And seriously, I take a 1 week break from BMD and all of a sudden BMD's are inactive? Theyre incrediably active, just seems you havnt met them. Remember this is a large server, and BMD's are feeling quite vulnerable at the moment with how rough the server is.

The "Playing to win so low rp" mindset is only a small group of players, but because they do play to win very overtly are the most public. It shows you havnt really done a deep dive and are only skimming the surface.

Rules for CP's and for Rebels are in place for a reason, simply because we have seen that without them things go rampant very fast as well

And again, onto the torture part. Me previous character literally had a manhack thrown into a bucket and pressed up against his gut, they wouldnt of gotten a ban for said things as we have things in place for stuff like that. I don't know where you got that from.

But alas, due to my first point. Frankly if you decided to do that and I was in charge of the CP faction you'd be out faster then anything else, because you're clearly a bad faith actor..

Furthermore, The reasons for Georges suspension go further then that but why should you need to know? Also Ultima has been warned, so what's the problem? Most of what you've stated here can be pulled apart when you look deeper then just a "Hot Take" a

nora · May 23, 2024

i'm going to talk about the loyalist and cop sections since im familiar with both playstyles, won't bother with staff / slur / rebel drama because those are cans of worms that i don't wanna open

on the topic of collaborators (or loyalbros as i affectionately call them), a lot of potential and talent was killed off by the bloke debacle, long stagnation caused by absent party management and continued insistance from i24s start to the very end that cca can be pk'd freely.

simply put, the corrupt aspect of the party (read, tier 4 and up) was shelved for a good while, replaced by some mild nepotism and genuine judgement of loyalty to the combine. this is something im actively working on fixing with the appropriate people (divine's chairman, beckett's cfo, furious' cca, etc etc.) in order to make loyalist and corruption rp mix together to create an engaging atmosphere and give an actual ooc reason for people to go past tier 3.

i can assure you, though, that at least half of the loyalists you see that "believe in the combine" are just liars. i can tell you for a fact that 80% of the current party roster has dirt on them, one way or another. its not as black and white as you say, though i do agree that theres a few instances of people unconditionally believing whats said despite watching burning corpses pile on the street. im doing things to address that as well, but it takes time.

also, the semantics about the name don't rlly make sense. the combine is openly dystopian and shows that it literally views humans as products and tools rather than living beings. a name as blatant as the collaborator's party isn't out of the realm of possibility.

as for cops, i have to agree that freely letting transfers in was a big, fat mistake. you have a situation where you have five transfer command units and only one local. same goes for the regular cops: for every local, theres five transfers.

regarding the edginess (or lack of) in the cops, i'd say we're at a good middle ground. a dystopia is fun to roleplay in when you fuck up. walking around, only to get dragged off the street and beaten / tortured / shot / etc. because a random i5 wanted to do grimdark misery porn rp isn't fun. it's frustrating and sometimes even derailing. similarly, refusing to act with citizens and just saying "<:: fuck off ::>" isn't a good portrayal of a totalitarian shithole.

if you want to portray a dystopia without being too on the nose? stalk people, collect information on them, ask them immensely personal questions, so on and so on. the sky's the limit and ripping off finger nails should really only be reserved for the most egregious cases.

anyway thats all. friendship is magic!

Botulism · May 23, 2024

Gutsy said:
In terms of the rebel scene being the Play to Win and failure to roleplay meta.... Arnt you literally the unit that watched a vort spawn in on their CP in the sewers and try and take them in during a Sweep that was against CCR ROE while you were assigned to them as punishment, you then refused to use the established rules to not spawn camp them and go "Welcome to city 8" in looc and try to force it anyway?

Yeah, I wouldn't trust you in the slightest

CP's in the current city are completely racist, even targeting non Japanese people often. And seriously, I take a 1 week break from BMD and all of a sudden BMD's are inactive? Theyre incrediably active, just seems you havnt met them. Remember this is a large server, and BMD's are feeling quite vulnerable at the moment with how rough the server is.

The "Playing to win so low rp" mindset is only a small group of players, but because they do play to win very overtly are the most public. It shows you havnt really done a deep dive and are only skimming the surface.

Rules for CP's and for Rebels are in place for a reason, simply because we have seen that without them things go rampant very fast as well

And again, onto the torture part. Me previous character literally had a manhack thrown into a bucket and pressed up against his gut, they wouldnt of gotten a ban for said things as we have things in place for stuff like that. I don't know where you got that from.

But alas, due to my first point. Frankly if you decided to do that and I was in charge of the CP faction you'd be out faster then anything else, because you're clearly a bad faith actor..

Furthermore, The reasons for Georges suspension go further then that but why should you need to know? Also Ultima has been warned, so what's the problem? Most of what you've stated here can be pulled apart when you look deeper then just a "Hot Take" a

As for the whole vort sweep, I saw Tuki's vort spawn right in and whispered to him in Japanese that we were just gonna pretend-search him and let him go. Three vorts approached then I told them to just send them off. OOCly I didn't really care about fucking with Tuki when he spawned right in and ICly my character felt like something bad was gonna come if he pissed off the vorts. It wasn't my plan to have them get an overwatch sweep sent their way, as I thought that was completely unfair and I even talked with some staff after the whole event to get one of the Vorts PK's voided after the fact. I don't know if I'm a bad faith actor or not, but I doubt it.

Cops are pretty racist, I've been playing the entire time and I've seen quite a few incidents. They go no further than assaulting someone verbally or beating them if they've already committed an offense. Quite frankly, the IC racism is really good for RP. I say this as a person who roleplays a North Korean who has a strong disliking or distrust of any obvious foreigner. I'm not a Korean man IRL, nor am I Asian, but I find it funny OOCly to RP a character who racistly mistrusts my own OOC race and play it in a straight/completely serious manner. once you delve into it and his motivations and his doublethink due to his non-Asian friends, it's so fun to get play out. You should honestly try playing something you find OOCly revolting.

"The "Playing to win so low rp" mindset is only a small group of players, but because they do play to win very overtly are the most public." Is the part of the problem, honestly. If the biggest players are doing this, what example does that set for everyone else?

You don't have to trust me, but this is from what I and a lot of other players have seen. A lot of people I know are reconsidering playing on the server so I felt like I needed to say something. I don't pay attention to Rebel RP and my critique on it is from a lot of rebel players who play on the server every day. I have nothing against you Gutsy, and I don't understand why you'd say I should be kicked out of a faction for being a bad faith actor. Quite frankly that comes off as defensive, and while I definitely came at this from the angle of a firebrand, I really think something should be done about the current state of what the roleplay is like right now, because for atleast a dozen people I've talked to on discord, there's nothing keeping them around save for friends or a lucky whitelist they scored.

I was going to mention an incident in this critique where you almost PK'ed one of my characters for stealing an empty backpack at gunpoint from a member of your characters' rebel cell, but I figured it was a non-issue. It's ironic you'd call me a bad faith actor when you'd happily resort to S2K and a potential PK over just.. Negotiating with a character for the item back. Quite frankly, I forgot it and didn't care up until now, your character quite literally said "Mugger, thief, dead." before shooting me, without any chance of a negotiation. Not even Civil Protection is that bad. You'd have more of a chance at survival if it was a cop taking you down, atleast you'd have a potential to get conscripted or made an informant.

All in all, I actually tried really hard to defend how the Rebels have acted so far. It's a shame that everytime Rebels even try something outside of expos, 19 squads of Overwatch soldiers have to come down and wreck any potential for roleplay.

Botulism · May 23, 2024

villeneuve said:
i'm going to talk about the loyalist and cop sections since im familiar with both playstyles, won't bother with staff / slur / rebel drama because those are cans of worms that i don't wanna open

on the topic of collaborators (or loyalbros as i affectionately call them), a lot of potential and talent was killed off by the bloke debacle, long stagnation caused by absent party management and continued insistance from i24s start to the very end that cca can be pk'd freely.

simply put, the corrupt aspect of the party (read, tier 4 and up) was shelved for a good while, replaced by some mild nepotism and genuine judgement of loyalty to the combine. this is something im actively working on fixing with the appropriate people (divine's chairman, beckett's cfo, furious' cca, etc etc.) in order to make loyalist and corruption rp mix together to create an engaging atmosphere and give an actual ooc reason for people to go past tier 3.

i can assure you, though, that at least half of the loyalists you see that "believe in the combine" are just liars. i can tell you for a fact that 80% of the current party roster has dirt on them, one way or another. its not as black and white as you say, though i do agree that theres a few instances of people unconditionally believing whats said despite watching burning corpses pile on the street. im doing things to address that as well, but it takes time.

also, the semantics about the name don't rlly make sense. the combine is openly dystopian and shows that it literally views humans as products and tools rather than living beings. a name as blatant as the collaborator's party isn't out of the realm of possibility.

as for cops, i have to agree that freely letting transfers in was a big, fat mistake. you have a situation where you have five transfer command units and only one local. same goes for the regular cops: for every local, theres five transfers.

regarding the edginess (or lack of) in the cops, i'd say we're at a good middle ground. a dystopia is fun to roleplay in when you fuck up. walking around, only to get dragged off the street and beaten / tortured / shot / etc. because a random i5 wanted to do grimdark misery porn rp isn't fun. it's frustrating and sometimes even derailing. similarly, refusing to act with citizens and just saying "<:: fuck off ::>" isn't a good portrayal of a totalitarian shithole.

if you want to portray a dystopia without being too on the nose? stalk people, collect information on them, ask them immensely personal questions, so on and so on. the sky's the limit and ripping off finger nails should really only be reserved for the most egregious cases.

anyway thats all. friendship is magic!

Couldn't have said it better myself, I'd rather load everything onto one giant critique and I think it'd be criminal if someone agreed with everything I said here, I have a lot of opinions about things that won't fit and I desire discourse about what the game could do better, and if I don't say atleast one thing that doesn't cause a rift with you, that means either you or me isn't thinking clearly.

I do not want a bunch of BDSM cops walking around and performing their own grimdark edgy hatred-style fantasies on random unsuspecting bluesuits. I guess I'm tired of the latter, cops being too lazy/tired/lethargic to actively make bluesuits lives shittier. I'm yearning for random searches, telling people to stop loitering, harassing people in a way that fits the decorum of Civil Protection, and torture when you have enough information to get something out of them. It's my personal opinion that dealing with the worst of the worst cops are the most fun whenever I'm playing a citizen, and when I've played my cop as the worst, I strangely always get DMs or PMs/LOOC messages complimenting my efforts. It's the weirdest fucking thing for some people, but for me? It makes total sense. You're like a dude with a scary costume at a halloween horror trail, if you're playing the role, it's your job to make people feel like they're playing a dystopia.

Without that, it just feels like I'm playing a DarkRP cop. I don't know, feels off. Thank you for responding though, nonetheless, Nora.

George · May 23, 2024

Gutsy said:
The reasons for Georges suspension go further then that but why should you need to know?

Yeah I'm evil and the devil. It's also none of your fucking business lol.

George · May 23, 2024

This arc could have been based if we PK'd everyones characters and forced everyone to make a local. You can writhe and scream all you want but the reality of the situation is that you don't fit in this place and the rebels constant need to make the slums "their area" is so anti-rp to the point of exhaustion. None of you will change, you'll all keep playing the same character archetype of "Erm, we're the resistance so we kill combine" until the day you die.

You aren't interesting for narrative, nor an interesting character. You're a copy paste of a copy paste of John Semper combine ultrakiller 9k from semi serious.

I don't dislike rebel roleplay. For the past 2 years on this server all of my characters were dedicated to the very topic, but some of you are so cut and dry that honestly I can see the sentiment of ultranazi PK hungry combine mains. They say rebels can't rp, and honestly at this point it's not even a joke.

I beg you all get a character that's more interesting than "We hate combine". Get off your self-insert, please and thanks.

RedHotGinger · May 23, 2024

This boi a long one. Just going to take pieces and comment on them in isolated chunks.

Nothing. ANY small ambush you do is guaranteed to have a massive Overwatch response, even killing a few conscripts and wounding a cop will cause two Overwatch squads of giddy staff players to rush down into the sewers to PK your ass (actually happened, I was the cop). It's apart of why I don't blame the rebel players for constantly playing to win, because they get the SHORTEST end of the stick, and if they don't cut the shit and limit things like character development to being rather basic in nature, they're going to lose all their shit they grinded so hard for.

So, this bit I feel is mostly attributed to bad balance and the overall Play To win mindset that exists within the CvR scene as a whole. As for balance...Vortigaunts. Holy shit, Vortigaunts. Pretty much everyone on the server agrees (I think) that they've become so bloated in abilities and power scaling, they are essentially on par with high-tier OTA in their capacity to slaughter the opposition (without the restrictions). I will imagine this is a big reason why responses are currently exaggerated as hell. A single Voritgaunt is enough to escalate any encounter to a full-scale battle, given they are tanks who can support all their allies with ease, while effectively one-shotting any and all non-OTA opposition.

Play to Win is more broad, but the CvR scene is infested with it, to some extent, by need on both sides.
For rebels, any risk of death holds the ruination of potentially weeks of progress, having to redo the completely dry 'script-grind' all over again, which I dont imagine anyone truly enjoys. Even script monkeys only like having them.
For Combine, every single loss not only carries similar debuffs, but moreover just sees the rebels become even more powerful than they were prior to winning whatever fight happened. Meaning the snowball effect is extreme for any moderate/major engagement. Historically, rebels will also almost always take advantage of wins, meaning it has the potential to just continue rolling towards our next evacuation event.

So this isn't a case of 'Combine side bad' as I see it. CvR, on Willard, inspires both sides to act in pretty 'Play to win' manners cause neither end of the aisle can trust the other to truly act in good faith once the bullets start flying. Any loss is taken advantage of to the extreme. A downed cop will often be executed for more efficient script looting. A downed rebel will often be dragged away to ensure a PK.
This is all based on my observations as a previously long-time Community manager, 'high-ranking' admin and Creative Team lead. I don't participate in CvR as my character.

I'll even say this, perhaps revealing a Combine bias on my side for some, but its honest. While on the subject of CvR one of my biggest worries for the City Eight map period is the rebels, once again, turning it into a backwater that practically exists on unrest day after day. This has been the theme almost every single map, and its very much starting to wear thin as a citizen player. A particular issue for City Eight, the most secure city the Combine have. So for me, CvR really just kinda sucks cause it just leads to the same thing historically, every single time.

CIVIL PROTECTION - THE MOST BORING TYRANTS YET TO BE SEEN IN A HL2RP SERVER

Just gonna flat out disagree with this. As a citizen, more particularly, one who spent alot of time in the previous map being used as a chew-toy for CP's, they formulated the basis for some of the better RP I experienced in that entire setting of the server. I'll break this down in sub-points.

Cops should not be wholly agreeable; they're evil people and they all deserve a bullet in the head. They WORK together though, and

Civil Protection should be a faction made up of the sadistic, the cynical, and the cowardly.

Big red buzzer on this. As a citizen, let me tell you, robocops are not a particularly beloved archetype. Nor is it enjoyable for every single cop to be some actively sadistic, psychopathic marauder. A really good example of this would be the below-average evacuation event of Industrial Twenty-four. This was a brief period where, for some odd reason, every single unit flipped a switch and suddenly became exactly what you were describing. Insane to a comical degree. While some of it was charming for RP creation within a two day period its safe to say everyone was pretty well exhausted of the gimmick.

Units are people, and they work best in this condition. Not all nice. Not all cruel. Variety is the spice, yadda yadda. Its also worth noting that focing units to play singular types of characters ensures the faction rapidly loses personality on a grand scale, which does insane damage to the overall RP quality.

When I played Shockcore HL2RP back in 2015, I got PK'ed as a low-ranking Civil Protection Officer because I muttered during a crowded rally that the Benefactors were above us, but not Gods like the citizens in the crowd were saying.

Look, I value PK's for the narrative tool that they are. However, crap like this serves to eliminate any and all RP you could ever have not only within CP factions, but all factions. This standard of hyper PK potential would have ensured almost every interaction I ever had with CP's or loyalists would simply not be possible. Even for me, this is too much and I am strictly glad we're not this crazy with PK's. They are a narrative tool to apply stakes, introduce new characters slowly, and prevent stagnation. They are not meant to prevent any off-the-line RP.

Being a blind collaborator and believing in the blatantly false propaganda should be an extreme outlier, yet most Loyalist characters seem to be like this. Why encourage this type of character in-game? It's boring and we can do better.

Quick note, as you said yourself it was a weaker critique

Loyalists don't all believe this. Many do, but there are genuine character explanations that could explain this. The Combine (in lore, not really in server) are an unstoppable entity here to stay, and for many, it could easily be seen as quite stupid to resist them in principle when doing so is just not possible. Sometimes its better to trust an improbable lie, than a fight an impossible fight. Some characters come from third-world locations. Some never experienced the SHW. Some may have suffered particularly during the storms. etc, etc. Not going to put a novel here about it.

There's lots of character varieties that provide legitimate, honest reasons for why they would submit. Doesn't make them lesser characters for it.

Racial bigotry and slurs of all kinds should 100% exist ICly and should be unmoderated.

It does and is. But a guy walking down the street leaning on the /y command shouting every slur he can think of is obviously not here to RP. They're just trying to be cute OOC. As for shit like hardcore torture, you just have to make sure they're okay with it. Most players would be. The only time it might be viewed as obstructive is if its deemed 'cringe' torture. Which, going to be brutally honest, ripping finger-nails out tends to land in that realm for many.

Torture RP mostly doesn't make an appearance because its seen as a bit 'desperate' by many. Edgy and non-creative. I think it can work, but its gotten a bad rap due to people being overly indulged within it. Being even more real, it can be quite a bit dry to sit there and just react to getting minced in the most generic ways possible.

This arc could have been based if we PK'd everyones characters and forced everyone to make a local.

No. The local/refugee dyanamic is actually pretty neat. At this point, almost completely ruined by people powergaming audiobooks, but it had serious potential. Even still, only in extreme circumstances would depriving everyone of their characters be reasonable. A staff enforced relocation is not really in that criteria.

Gutsy · May 23, 2024

Botulism said:
As for the whole vort sweep, I saw Tuki's vort spawn right in and whispered to him in Japanese that we were just gonna pretend-search him and let him go. Three vorts approached then I told them to just send them off. OOCly I didn't really care about fucking with Tuki when he spawned right in and ICly my character felt like something bad was gonna come if he pissed off the vorts. It wasn't my plan to have them get an overwatch sweep sent their way, as I thought that was completely unfair and I even talked with some staff after the whole event to get one of the Vorts PK's voided after the fact. I don't know if I'm a bad faith actor or not, but I doubt it.

Cops are pretty racist, I've been playing the entire time and I've seen quite a few incidents. They go no further than assaulting someone verbally or beating them if they've already committed an offense. Quite frankly, the IC racism is really good for RP. I say this as a person who roleplays a North Korean who has a strong disliking or distrust of any obvious foreigner. I'm not a Korean man IRL, nor am I Asian, but I find it funny OOCly to RP a character who racistly mistrusts my own OOC race and play it in a straight/completely serious manner. once you delve into it and his motivations and his doublethink due to his non-Asian friends, it's so fun to get play out. You should honestly try playing something you find OOCly revolting.

"The "Playing to win so low rp" mindset is only a small group of players, but because they do play to win very overtly are the most public." Is the part of the problem, honestly. If the biggest players are doing this, what example does that set for everyone else?

You don't have to trust me, but this is from what I and a lot of other players have seen. A lot of people I know are reconsidering playing on the server so I felt like I needed to say something. I don't pay attention to Rebel RP and my critique on it is from a lot of rebel players who play on the server every day. I have nothing against you Gutsy, and I don't understand why you'd say I should be kicked out of a faction for being a bad faith actor. Quite frankly that comes off as defensive, and while I definitely came at this from the angle of a firebrand, I really think something should be done about the current state of what the roleplay is like right now, because for atleast a dozen people I've talked to on discord, there's nothing keeping them around save for friends or a lucky whitelist they scored.

I was going to mention an incident in this critique where you almost PK'ed one of my characters for stealing an empty backpack at gunpoint from a member of your characters' rebel cell, but I figured it was a non-issue. It's ironic you'd call me a bad faith actor when you'd happily resort to S2K and a potential PK over just.. Negotiating with a character for the item back. Quite frankly, I forgot it and didn't care up until now, your character quite literally said "Mugger, thief, dead." before shooting me, without any chance of a negotiation. Not even Civil Protection is that bad. You'd have more of a chance at survival if it was a cop taking you down, atleast you'd have a potential to get conscripted or made an informant.

All in all, I actually tried really hard to defend how the Rebels have acted so far. It's a shame that everytime Rebels even try something outside of expos, 19 squads of Overwatch soldiers have to come down and wreck any potential for roleplay.

My dude, for your first paragraph. Yeah, I see that. However, the reason we have rules in place is because once again things go spiraling out of place really fast

What? Only person i've killed over a mugging was someone who literally stuck a gun into the back of Tiny? Literally inside the criteria and unfortunately you were late to a situation of people that had been mugging for weeks. You were just the last straw that broke the camels back. Frankly the amount of shit i've had to take without resorting to PK's is quite high. Matter of fact I've only PK'd two people since January when i've had reason to do so much more, I usually try to find other ways.

Furthermore they don't need to commit an offence to get beaten ICly for not being Japanese. This has happened to me as well, also, It's not the "Biggest Players" doing the play to win mindset only the loudest. Big does not always mean loud.

Botulism · May 23, 2024

RedHotGinger said:
This boi a long one. Just going to take pieces and comment on them in isolated chunks.

So, this bit I feel is mostly attributed to bad balance and the overall Play To win mindset that exists within the CvR scene as a whole. As for balance...Vortigaunts. Holy shit, Vortigaunts. Pretty much everyone on the server agrees (I think) that they've become so bloated in abilities and power scaling, they are essentially on par with high-tier OTA in their capacity to slaughter the opposition (without the restrictions). I will imagine this is a big reason why responses are currently exaggerated as hell. A single Voritgaunt is enough to escalate any encounter to a full-scale battle, given they are tanks who can support all their allies with ease, while effectively one-shotting any and all non-OTA opposition.

Play to Win is more broad, but the CvR scene is infested with it, to some extent, by need on both sides.
For rebels, any risk of death holds the ruination of potentially weeks of progress, having to redo the completely dry 'script-grind' all over again, which I dont imagine anyone truly enjoys. Even script monkeys only like having them.
For Combine, every single loss not only carries similar debuffs, but moreover just sees the rebels become even more powerful than they were prior to winning whatever fight happened. Meaning the snowball effect is extreme for any moderate/major engagement. Historically, rebels will also almost always take advantage of wins, meaning it has the potential to just continue rolling towards our next evacuation event.

So this isn't a case of 'Combine side bad' as I see it. CvR, on Willard, inspires both sides to act in pretty 'Play to win' manners cause neither end of the aisle can trust the other to truly act in good faith once the bullets start flying. Any loss is taken advantage of to the extreme. A downed cop will often be executed for more efficient script looting. A downed rebel will often be dragged away to ensure a PK.
This is all based on my observations as a previously long-time Community manager, 'high-ranking' admin and Creative Team lead. I don't participate in CvR as my character.

I'll even say this, perhaps revealing a Combine bias on my side for some, but its honest. While on the subject of CvR one of my biggest worries for the City Eight map period is the rebels, once again, turning it into a backwater that practically exists on unrest day after day. This has been the theme almost every single map, and its very much starting to wear thin as a citizen player. A particular issue for City Eight, the most secure city the Combine have. So for me, CvR really just kinda sucks cause it just leads to the same thing historically, every single time.

Just gonna flat out disagree with this. As a citizen, more particularly, one who spent alot of time in the previous map being used as a chew-toy for CP's, they formulated the basis for some of the better RP I experienced in that entire setting of the server. I'll break this down in sub-points.

Big red buzzer on this. As a citizen, let me tell you, robocops are not a particularly beloved archetype. Nor is it enjoyable for every single cop to be some actively sadistic, psychopathic marauder. A really good example of this would be the below-average evacuation event of Industrial Twenty-four. This was a brief period where, for some odd reason, every single unit flipped a switch and suddenly became exactly what you were describing. Insane to a comical degree. While some of it was charming for RP creation within a two day period its safe to say everyone was pretty well exhausted of the gimmick.

Units are people, and they work best in this condition. Not all nice. Not all cruel. Variety is the spice, yadda yadda. Its also worth noting that focing units to play singular types of characters ensures the faction rapidly loses personality on a grand scale, which does insane damage to the overall RP quality.

Look, I value PK's for the narrative tool that they are. However, crap like this serves to eliminate any and all RP you could ever have not only within CP factions, but all factions. This standard of hyper PK potential would have ensured almost every interaction I ever had with CP's or loyalists would simply not be possible. Even for me, this is too much and I am strictly glad we're not this crazy with PK's. They are a narrative tool to apply stakes, introduce new characters slowly, and prevent stagnation. They are not meant to prevent any off-the-line RP.

Quick note, as you said yourself it was a weaker critique

Loyalists don't all believe this. Many do, but there are genuine character explanations that could explain this. The Combine (in lore, not really in server) are an unstoppable entity here to stay, and for many, it could easily be seen as quite stupid to resist them in principle when doing so is just not possible. Sometimes its better to trust an improbable lie, than a fight an impossible fight. Some characters come from third-world locations. Some never experienced the SHW. Some may have suffered particularly during the storms. etc, etc. Not going to put a novel here about it.

There's lots of character varieties that provide legitimate, honest reasons for why they would submit. Doesn't make them lesser characters for it.

It does and is. But a guy walking down the street leaning on the /y command shouting every slur he can think of is obviously not here to RP. They're just trying to be cute OOC. As for shit like hardcore torture, you just have to make sure they're okay with it. Most players would be. The only time it might be viewed as obstructive is if its deemed 'cringe' torture. Which, going to be brutally honest, ripping finger-nails out tends to land in that realm for many.

Torture RP mostly doesn't make an appearance because its seen as a bit 'desperate' by many. Edgy and non-creative. I think it can work, but its gotten a bad rap due to people being overly indulged within it. Being even more real, it can be quite a bit dry to sit there and just react to getting minced in the most generic ways possible.

No. The local/refugee dyanamic is actually pretty neat. At this point, almost completely ruined by people powergaming audiobooks, but it had serious potential. Even still, only in extreme circumstances would depriving everyone of their characters be reasonable. A staff enforced relocation is not really in that criteria.

LOVE this, thank you RedHotGinger for providing the POV of someone who plays loyalist characters as always. I won't even comment on your analysis of the Combine VS Rebel play to win rabbit hole as I couldn't've said it better myself. Both factions do a lot of playing to win and it annoys the fuck out of me as someone who wants to roleplay a genuine character.

BUT, I think you MIGHT be a tiny bit biased on the note of Civil Protection and their personalities as we seem to single out your characters a lot, mostly because they're really well-made and you play a very prominent loyalist most of the time. Most characters DO NOT GET the Emiyo Marcum treatment, and honestly, a lot of them don't even get a beating at all before they go John Lawless and start sorting through trash-bins to make pipe-rifles to shoot Civil Protection Officers. I always try to get my characters to have a 1984-style treatment where the cops go 'too far' in their eyes before they start actively plotting armed rebellion. Both citizens and cop characters of mine get this treatment.

I completely understand not giving PKs out like candy like we did back in the day, but it's completely a matter of my personal opinion that I wish it happened like such. I don't expect anyone to agree, but that was my part of the critique, so I wanted to make my thoughts known lmao.

"for some odd reason, every single unit flipped a switch and suddenly became exactly what you were describing. Insane to a comical degree" HUNDRED PERCENT DOESNT MAKE SENSE For cops to be like that, I try to roleplay a cruel, definitely evil Civil Protection Officer but it's a constant for my character, who is a former Labor-camp guard and is desensitized to violence. Cop players really have a dilemma of not knowing what they want their characters to act like. Sometimes they're John Doe who joined for the rations, and as soon as they want to be cruel, they're Amon Goeth from Schindler's List. The whole 'i joined for the rations!' thing as a character motivation never made sense to me. People take that from that one line the citizen in the trainstation said in HL2, but I genuinely think that nearly every Civil Protection Officer should be evil in some way, shape or form, even if they're blissfully unaware of it. The problem with that is that every Cop player wants to be the one guy that ISNT evil. That's lame. I play cops because again, no-one can do a better bad guy than me (narcissistic flex).

As for the idea of a guy walking down the street using /y to shout slurs, it can always and will always be easily solved ICly. If a guy did that, he'd get his ass beat and potentially shot for being mentally unfit from Civil Protection's POV. Who wouldn't want to see a racist getting owned?

I guess I'm a big fan of getting my characters tortured, I might be fucked up but in every famous dystopian/action movie (1984, V for Vendetta, Rambo, Robocop, etc.) The main character has to get tortured before he goes fucking nuts and murders every oppressor he can find. The problem is is that most cops do it really lamely. It doesn't come off as brutal, real, cold or animalistic. It comes off as OOCly lazy. When I play my rebel next, I want a cop who is dedicated to making my life worse. Name something less fun to rebel from than that!

I wrote all this just to add on and make my critique sound more sane instead of a crazy hot take, but thank you as always Ginger. Your posts help enlighten and make my crazy rants a bit more broad and reasonable in scope.

Marco · May 23, 2024

HOLY SHIT!

Toby's back, willard upswing?

Marco · May 23, 2024

I do concur with the view on rebel 'roleplay'. Only about half of the rebel scene actually roleplay, how I came to this conclusion was when I deployed on a cremator character, around seven people just sprinted past me like I didn't exist because I was in the way of their 'trash grind'.

ultima · May 23, 2024

shiny colours

Kamilisha Haijulikani · May 23, 2024

First of all, I'll start by saying that 'Collaborator' is a stupid title for Loyalists. In the real world, it's a denigrating name for someone who collaborates with a hostile, foreign government. Breen was accused of being a collaborator but only half-heartedly accepted the term to describe himself in a single one-off speech. Why would a system like the Combine, who is so openly dystopian but also keen on making things seem like they're not 'that' bad (and failing at doing so) use such an obvious term to suggest that collaboration with them is the wrong thing to do? If we're using this same stream of logic, why not call Civil Protection the Occupational Forces? See what I mean here?

Second-of-all, the encouraged mindset for Loyalists (genuinely believing the Combine to be a good force for humanity, believing the propaganda, etc.) is completely off, and either suggests that every loyalist character is insanely stupid or that people OOCly really don't know how bad the Combine really are. The Combine make the Nazis look like green-peace environmentalists. They're going to murder everyone on Planet Earth while draining its' resources, making sure that every human is either dead or transhumanized. That's their end goal. This should be blatantly obvious to most from all the early occupation massacres, the brutal Echelon Camps, and the fact that Civil Protection can and SHOULD (They would be out of character if they didn't) beat and torture you for every little thing you do wrong. SURE, you can make the argument that people collaborated during the Nazi Regime too, but it wasn't because a majority of them genuinely believed that a bitch like Hitler was going to save them from the 'evil menace' of Judeo bolshevism. Nazi collaborators all did so out of power, a belief that Hitler would win and fearing what the Nazis would do if they opposed him, antisemitism, or just plain mental illness. Being a blind collaborator and believing in the blatantly false propaganda should be an extreme outlier, yet most Loyalist characters seem to be like this. Why encourage this type of character in-game? It's boring and we can do better.

this is a pretty cool read.

i'll preface this by saying that, as many others have stated before, no loyalist is truly loyal; rather, those who tend to be of an extreme fringe variety who, more often than not, are ostracized from loyalist society for their esoteric and idiosyncratic views and ironically anti-conformist sentiments.

still, with that said, they're under constant expectation and scrutiny to at-least feign loyalty to the benefactors and ingratiate themselves with representatives of the combine to succeed in life and amass some sense of comfort and political sway.

this isn't even exclusive to loyalists; not doing so would be bad optics and social suicide for anyone, something that, if pervasive enough and widely known, could just about end up with you getting killed or worse. that's why loyalists, who have the most to lose from this in a party whose management has consistently advocated against duplicitous and complacent natures, can be so apprehensive to reveal their inner dislike and distrust for the combine privately and in public. that's the power and trepidation the combine possesses, and in my opinion, conforms to an accurate portrayal reflecting how real-life collaborators, and even those in half-life 2, from what we can glean from it, behave.

over time, loyalism in Willard has shifted like a pendulum between the extreme ends of loyalism, varying from those that either believe the party should be comprised of villainous, mustache-twirling fanatics to sympathetic, opportunistic "collaborators." while the idea of a genuinely loyal party is cool and all, it almost always comes at the cost of characterization and intrigue the latter option offers, often leaving character's one-note and uninteresting, so it's something we don't think should be as prevalent as it once was.

Neonity · May 23, 2024

Botulism said:
Ultima should've been publically warned for his insistence on PK'ing a vortigaunt character and being toxic about it

This did happen. Ultima along with several others received a suspension for their behaviour. Community Management as a whole has decided to take a harsher stance on internal strife and toxicity, and the ramifications of our decision were felt just a few days ago.

Nevertheless, I feel that leaking someone's logs in a bad light and secretly distributing them among the server in an attempt to rile people up and form a clique against them is even worse than anything Ultima did. It's scummy, childish, and extremely petty. Anyone with just a few weeks of experience on the GM/staff side knows how frequently these arguments will form in these chats, especially in high-stakes situations. These arguments are commonplace and have been for years, and I do not believe them to be representative of PK-hungriness, but rather a show of frustration regarding the way they felt people weren't observing GM/staff chats as closely as they should've been while overseeing a split-second combat situation, specifically one where rapid decisions could drastically turn the tide, and anyone would want the decision they believe is right to be made at a time where it matters the most. I know many others would feel similarly agitated if their opinion was so easily dismissed by people who didn't witness the situation unfold from their perspective, especially if you believe the outcome to be so drastically affected by whether that decision is made or not.

Meticulously taking apart people's logs to specifically only show only one side of a larger argument to then distribute it among the playerbase is a terrible, outright malicious act, and whoever decided to do so should feel ashamed of themselves. We have a stern policy against leaking information posted in staff channels, and that evidently wasn't followed. For that, I am more disappointed than anything.

Botulism said:
George left since he was most likely tired of how unfairly the staff team currently handles things. The whole insistence on bureaucracy and management teams for every little thing (Auth teams, PK teams, etc.)

We need these teams because not every staff member is interested in handling every aspect of the server, and we give them the freedom to dedicate their attention to the aspects they care about the most. Just like only a handful of people were interested in overseeing PK requests and appeals, another small portion is interested in handling character authorizations. While every staff member is permitted to comment on threads and do their own research/form their own opinion on these things, they're not required to. Only the respective team members/managers are expected to, and that's because they volunteered to keep that part of the server's administration in check.
Secondly, suppose we were to have PKs become a collective staff issue to deal with. In that case, they'd all become extremely blown-up things and probably never see a resolution considering how controversial PKs tend to be.

Regardless, I do personally feel we're a little too bureaucratic at times, but I do not have any solutions in mind that could easily work. The system still works, but if you have any ideas for change aside from "simply don't be bureaucratic" I'd be glad to hear them out.

Botulism said:
Kick out the admins who cause problems and keep the ones who don't, it's really that simple.

Never thought of that one before.

In all seriousness, this is about as much as of an argument as "Simply fix the issue". If only it was that simple. Nonetheless, we've taken steps to curb internal toxicity. However, this is internal and I am not going to share any more details beyond what I already have.

Botulism said:
SENSITIVE MINDSETS AND TREATING PLAYERS LIKE CHILDREN

I hope you are aware that everything you mention here is permitted, but the only thing you require is consent from other players involved because torture RP and by (lesser) extension racist RP (ala neo-nazi skinheads) can very easily be considered cringeworthy, disgusting, or offensive (hell, I was one of those players until I grew up past my edgy phase and discovered empathy). Said it before, but I'll repeat: "If you need racial slurs to roleplay a convincing racist character, you're probably not roleplaying a convincing character in the first place." I'm sure you can live without calling someone the hard R, it's not the end of the world.

Look, the only thing we ask from you is that you consider the player behind the screen before performing any of these acts, and ensure every player is comfortable with the situation. Just because you are, doesn't mean that they are. We ask that you have the decency to respect other players' opinion and facilitate an environment that everyone is comfortable to RP in.

Reminder, we have people as young as 12 years old playing on this server (and likely even younger), and I'd rather not involuntarily expose them to gruesome torture RP just because someone a decade older than them likes to enact their (virtual) psychotic power fantasy. Everyone's guaranteed to feel different about this, which is why this very simple thing called consent exists. That is all you need to ask and respect. A little compassion goes a long way in ensuring a comfortable RP environment for everyone, not just you.

Kamilisha Haijulikani · May 23, 2024

drink & drive bitches

sigma

Botulism · May 23, 2024

Neonity said:
This did happen. Ultima along with several others received a suspension for their behaviour. Community Management as a whole has decided to take a harsher stance on internal strife and toxicity, and the ramifications of our decision were felt just a few days ago.

Nevertheless, I feel that leaking someone's logs in a bad light and secretly distributing them among the server in an attempt to rile people up and form a clique against them is even worse than anything Ultima did. It's scummy, childish, and extremely petty. Anyone with just a few weeks of experience on the GM/staff side knows how frequently these arguments will form in these chats, especially in high-stakes situations. These arguments are commonplace and have been for years, and I do not believe them to be representative of PK-hungriness, but rather a show of frustration regarding the way they felt people weren't observing GM/staff chats as closely as they should've been while overseeing a split-second combat situation, specifically one where rapid decisions could drastically turn the tide, and anyone would want the decision they believe is right to be made at a time where it matters the most. I know many others would feel similarly agitated if their opinion was so easily dismissed by people who didn't witness the situation unfold from their perspective, especially if you believe the outcome to be so drastically affected by whether that decision is made or not.

Meticulously taking apart people's logs to specifically only show only one side of a larger argument to then distribute it among the playerbase is a terrible, outright malicious act, and whoever decided to do so should feel ashamed of themselves. We have a stern policy against leaking information posted in staff channels, and that evidently wasn't followed. For that, I am more disappointed than anything.
We need these teams because not every staff member is interested in handling every aspect of the server, and we give them the freedom to dedicate their attention to the aspects they care about the most. Just like only a handful of people were interested in overseeing PK requests and appeals, another small portion is interested in handling character authorizations. While every staff member is permitted to comment on threads and do their own research/form their own opinion on these things, they're not required to. Only the respective team members/managers are expected to, and that's because they volunteered to keep that part of the server's administration in check.
Secondly, suppose we were to have PKs become a collective staff issue to deal with. In that case, they'd all become extremely blown-up things and probably never see a resolution considering how controversial PKs tend to be.

Regardless, I do personally feel we're a little too bureaucratic at times, but I do not have any solutions in mind that could easily work. The system still works, but if you have any ideas for change aside from "simply don't be bureaucratic" I'd be glad to hear them out.

Genuinely really glad to hear most of that. I have nothing against Ultima OOCly and I hope nobody else does, but if I behaved unprofessionally as a staff member I'd consider it irresponsible for my actions not to be chastised and looked at by the community. Why should I be ashamed? I did them. Nothing wrong with owning up to a mistake.

Regardless though, if I say something in-game, I 100% always imagine it being screenshotted and sent to the other player's friends. It's just the natural order of being on the internet. This is with full respect toward the players involved, but I simply think if you post in a channel accessible by dozens of people, you should expect it to be made public someway or another, and that's just the shitty truth.

As for the whole torture RP thing... I'm not a sadist IRL, I don't have power-fantasies in bad need of fulfilling, and I have a lot of empathy for other human beings. I also have believed since I was very young that HL2RP should be a gritty, thrilling experience. It was the only game I could have my character suffer real consequences, go through mental change, and then fight back and feel a real sense of redemption. I don't say these things in hopes that it'll change and that every cop'll become some evil torturer, but I merely want to state my opinion on the matter. It's not about a lack of empathy or wanting to hurt a player's feelings OOCly, it's simply about writing an engaging story. I understand people don't want to see that, but that section of my writing is more just a critique I don't expect or truly demand a solution out of, atleast on Willards as it currently stands. I desire a good writing environment no matter how unrealistic it is, and I couldn't be honest without saying what I wanted to see from a Half Life 2 Roleplaying Server. It's a personal preference and I don't expect it to change, but I'll fully abide by the current rules in place. That's obvious.

To elaborate some more on my mindset: I'm completely detached from who my character is and what he does, he's another character in the book of Half Life 2 as far as I know. When he hates? It's him hating. When he loves? It's him loving. I agree with you FULLY, BUT I think you have a misunderstanding of what that type of mindset is like. I love people and I adore the study of humanity, from the best to the worst bits. That's why I always try to RP total opposites, from really righteous people to really evil people. It's beautiful to me. It's genuinely hard to explain, I'm not sure if you're one of those people who see characters as extensions of people or not, but I've never played a self-insert and I don't intend on doing so. That's why I guess I see these things so differently, I never play myself.

Thank you for replying and elaborating nonetheless! I still believe a good critique is a good critique if it's caused a good discussion and elaboration of the past things going on in the community -- none of these questions were verified or answered until I decided to let the flood-gates open, and I'm glad it's given some understanding and discourse, and an opportunity for me to write (my favorite hobby.)

Wraygun · May 23, 2024

Neonity said:
but rather a show of frustration regarding the way they felt people weren't observing GM/staff chats as closely as they should've been while overseeing a split-second combat situation, specifically one where rapid decisions could drastically turn the tide, and anyone would want the decision they believe is right to be made at a time where it matters the most.

While this is more than a valid point - especially when you consider how limited and restricted OTA is right now - I think frustrations should be expressed in a more formal and cordial matters. I don't hold grudges nor do I have anything against Ultima but try putting yourself in the perspective of the player: how would you feel if someone had these outbursts in the staff chat, moments before your character receives the PK?

A player, who has more likely put effort into their character only for it to be greeted by a reaction like this. It's not my place to speak, but this is bad faith in my opinion. The cherry ontop, is that this comes from the PK manager, who is expected to handle things professionally.

Neonity said:
I do not believe them to be representative of PK-hungriness,

I agree with you here. I don't think Ultima is PK hungry, and it's more of a case (or lackthereof) emotional maturity, but I digress. I'm glad that something was done about this, and I'll remain hopeful that we don't get to see these types of reactions again. This is what breaks the trust of the players.

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A Maybe Too Honest, Too Unfunny, Too Weird Critique of Willard's Roleplaying Environment, Mindset, and Community/Gameplay. 5/22/2024

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