Suggestion Suggestion dump.

[Taliazure]

Hello everyone, this is a consolidated suggestion list where I’ll be sharing several ideas, all neatly organized and explained. Posting them all in one place should be more efficient than creating multiple separate threads.

Weapon Removal, Re-balancing, and Reskinning

Currently, the weapon variety in Willard is extensive, but this isn't necessarily a good thing, I believe it leads to significant imbalance. Many weapons have inconsistent damage, accuracy, recoil, and fire rates, which has pushed players to gravitate toward certain "meta" weapons, reducing the intended diversity. As a result, we often choose weapons for survival in engagements rather than preference. Need the edge to keep away the pk.

I propose:
- Reducing the number of
weapons:
Keep only the essential Combine weapons (all pulse weaponry) and limit other categories to just two options for both CP and rebels. For example:
- **Pistols**: USP and revolver
- **SMGs**: MP7 and MP5
- **Rifles**: AKM and M4
- **Snipers**: An older, civilian sniper rifle like the Mosin or Remington hunting rifle
- **Shotguns**: SPAS-12 and the MP153 hunting shotgun

To further restore diversity, I recommend reintroducing weapon attachments. Customizing weapons is a deeply satisfying aspect of games. However, there should be restrictions—rebels and CPs shouldn’t have access to overpowered attachments like thermal scopes or one-shot ammo. Attachments should be craftable through a tiered crafting system, with higher tiers being more resource and crafting level intensive.

Suggestion 2: Fixing NPC Auto Spawners

With the upcoming winter-themed update, where food scarcity will play a significant role, it’s essential to fix the NPC auto spawners. In past events, the dependency on GMs or staff for food and water killed roleplay and drove players away, specially during the low pop times when our food and water bars would be reduced forcing us to leave to avoid dying. This was one of the main complaints during the Alaska events and major main event. Player autonomy is crucial, and the community largely agrees that having to rely on staff to handle basic survival needs disrupts immersion and kills the mood. Specially when standing out in the open waiting for a ticket to be answered.

By fixing NPC auto spawners, players could hunt for food on their own, at any time, regardless of GM availability or time zone. This change would also allow GMs to create events spontaneously. Spawners could be adjusted to spawn weaker creatures in some areas and more dangerous ones in others, encouraging players to plan hunting trips together.

This ties into another suggestion of adding bows and arrows or the removal of gunpowder from crafting ammo for the air rifle thikhar, which would serve as a weaker, ranged hunting tool specially with the recent upcoming wipe.

Suggestion 3: Improving Dead Body Mechanics

The current dead body system has several issues that impact gameplay and roleplay:
- Bodies disappear too quickly, making it difficult to investigate deaths, deaths go unnoticed and it requires gms and staff to even conduct any research or identify a corpse. Once more the constant dependency on staff.

- The loot often vanishes or requires two people to carry, which is cumbersome.

To improve this, I propose merging loot with the body itself and making the ragdoll body permanent. This would enhance roleplay opportunities for Civil Protection, allowing for detective work and investigation of deaths.

When a player interacts with a corpse, several options should be available:
- **Search**: Open the dead body’s inventory.
- **Examine**: Reveal the character’s name (if F3’d) and description.
- **Analyze**: Provide a brief description of the cause of death, such as gunfire or blunt force trauma.

It must also be added that after some time that being a good while the body will simply disappear, to avoid the bloat of dead bodies and more Importantly rag dolls although this will probbaly not be the case as someone will end up running into the body and interacting with it may it be combine or citizen.


For added depth, Civil Protection could use special tools to gather more detailed information, such as the type of weapon used. This would make death more meaningful in the game, allowing for deeper roleplay as characters attempt to hide or investigate crimes without constantly relying on GMs or staff.
This is the type of events and rp we the CPs enjoyed the most, but sadly they are quite scarce or rare... Because some people come with the "it's not lore Half life dude, combine don't care how u die bro". But they afk a corner all day.

It would allow us for more enjoyment if we could autonomously respond to dead body reports and conduct our own investigations.

 

[Botulism]

All my homies hate how every interesting RP needs a game-master, all my homies love doing shit ourselves and fucking up and making mistakes constantly like dementia-ridden retards (it's realistic, I don't even mean this ironically, just let me make an IC mistake in roleplay again and not know about it, PLEASE)

 

[Fallizs]

this is my dump too:
rid of the auths and welcome back the clockwork era, you need auths for 60% of any interesting gameplay

 

[Overseer Inspector Count Reece Orlok]

Mr House here

For most if not all of this post I agree. Players should have the ability to be much more independent and not have to rely on staff or GMs, who, lets be honest, can be very unreliable when it comes to answering that one ticket you made an hour ago.

---

The only point I do disagree with is the first one, about removing weapons and lowering the number of them.

Many weapons have inconsistent damage, accuracy, recoil, and fire rates, which has pushed players to gravitate toward certain "meta" weapons, reducing the intended diversity.

Which is true, but overall doesn't matter. If, for example, we had 6 SMGs, an MP7 being the best of them all statistically, everyone would gravitate towards that gun. Now if you removed 4 of those SMGs, not including the MP7, people would still gravitate towards the MP7, so the question is, why even bother removing weapons if the end-result is the same.

You claim the issue is the variety in weapons, okay, we remove them and stick to two for each category. Then once again the issue persists with attachments, people will just run the best weapons for their categories, now with attachments, so again, back to square one.

Looking past the supposed issue with weapon variety, I don't think pushing for greater weapon customization through attachments is the way to go, especially for a roleplay server anyway. At the end of the day this isn't Call of Duty, what you find is what you get, and it should be just as that.

Maybe we should add skins too, dark matter if you manage to PK at least 10 people with the same gun, what do we think guys?

 

[Purple Knight]

Agreed on all points, but one

There's too many guns, reducing them to a simple rebel / CP system where each side has 1 or at a push, 2 guns in each category would allow for easier, and more effective balance, and stop the meta shite effectively.

Attachments;

I disagree with this one, attachments, such as sights alone can win battles, such a thing shouldn't be able to be crafted by someone, because chances are, it's going to be the rebels with all the gucci attachments every single time. I *do* agree they should make a come-back, but because of their nature, be a lot harder to obtain (expos maybe??)

Agreed with auto spawners, don't really need to elaborate on that one

Agreed with the body system, gives nothing but increased RP, and provided CP / someone else have some kind of way to remove the bodies, would prevent bloat.

 

[Taliazure]

Mr House here

For most if not all of this post I agree. Players should have the ability to be much more independent and not have to rely on staff or GMs, who, lets be honest, can be very unreliable when it comes to answering that one ticket you made an hour ago.

---

The only point I do disagree with is the first one, about removing weapons and lowering the number of them.


Which is true, but overall doesn't matter. If, for example, we had 6 SMGs, an MP7 being the best of them all statistically, everyone would gravitate towards that gun. Now if you removed 4 of those SMGs, not including the MP7, people would still gravitate towards the MP7, so the question is, why even bother removing weapons if the end-result is the same.

You claim the issue is the variety in weapons, okay, we remove them and stick to two for each category. Then once again the issue persists with attachments, people will just run the best weapons for their categories, now with attachments, so again, back to square one.

Looking past the supposed issue with weapon variety, I don't think pushing for greater weapon customization through attachments is the way to go, especially for a roleplay server anyway. At the end of the day this isn't Call of Duty, what you find is what you get, and it should be just as that.

Maybe we should add skins too, dark matter if you manage to PK at least 10 people with the same gun, what do we think guys?
View attachment 37314

I see your point, but when it comes to attachments, we should focus on keeping things realistic, using options that would be appropriate for the era. Customizing weapons can add depth to variety and customization, but it’s important that we stick to what makes sense within the Half-Life 2 universe.

As for skins, I see your joke, however hey fit within the roleplay setting. Paint and camouflage have been used on weapons throughout history, and it’s reasonable to think that a rebel group would make use of whatever paint they can find to gain an advantage, especially when it comes to staying out of sight. However, we're not here to debate what rebels might do in the real world—our focus is on improving the server experience.

Now, about removing weapons—I get where you’re coming from, and you're right that players will naturally gravitate toward the best option available. The issue right now, though, is that there are so many weapons, and only one or two are seen as viable, which means the rest are basically ignored. This creates a situation where we feel forced to choose the meta weapon.

By reducing the number of weapons in each category to just two well-balanced options, we can create a scenario where we have to choose based on personal preference rather than just picking the one that’s statistically superior. If both options are balanced, there’s no wrong choice, and we won’t feel like we're at a disadvantage for picking a weapon we like.

As it is right now, most of the lesser-used weapons only come into play when a GM’s character dies and a rebel picks it up, but even then, those weapons are quickly sold off in favor of something like the G3 or AKM. Reducing the number of weapons would help fix this.

 

[Lucaa]

I agree with this thread

 

[Robert]

Hi,

Weapons have already been on the reduction, just reduced more as of yesterday even. But essentially the only guns which exist now are as follows:

Pistols:
- M1911
- USP
- Glock

Revolvers:
- Popper
- 329PD

SMG:
- UMP-45
- MP5
- MP7
- Bastard SMG

AR:
- M16
- AK
- Mini14

Snipers (May be removed entirely, or reduced to just the T5000)
- AWP
- T5000

Shotguns:
- Spas12
- Remi 870

And of course the Tikhar and Helsing are both still around too.

(Note: Junk weapons exist to be the starting junk option as some made a good point that their must be an entry point for guns thats not comparable to any of the other modern weapons in its category)

OTA weapons are not included on the list as doesn't matter much. But they got the 4 weapons they need for function with Shotgun, AR, DMR and LMG. Though you won't see them anyway. In total we went from 42 guns to 16 + 4 if you include OTA. Attachments we did slightly increase access to but not really something we are looking to fully enable because some attachments might as well be making a well balanced pack into unbalanced chaos.

---

NPC Spawners already work fine as is. No issue, just depends on what the staff handling them sets them to spawn and how the spawner overall works. So nothing to be changed there.

---

Finally no can do on the body loot.

This has been suggested time and time again, same response each time. I will sum it up:
- Ragdolls are performance intensive when it comes to dead body loot, uses far more resources than a bag and the server stability is often low with the edict count and tickrate being so far in the dumbs. Combat drops the tickrate even lower to around a recorded lowest of 3 ticks per second.
- We do cleanups to ensure server stability and have to remove NPC and player bodies ASAP. Cant have that manually be done, automatic always has the best results for performance and functionality. Manual rarely ever works because disinterested in manual labor. The only manual cleanup we do is items.
- Everything will always eventually despawn to save on edict counts, something Willard runs extremely low on not even to the fault of GMs. We are still to this day trying to figure out where most of our drain is coming from since its always 1 week into launch that the edicts go to shit and we have to enact emergency procedures and stop any creative builds or events taking place.

Tis is just the nature of using a old run down engine and a game which is chugging its way through the modern times with outdated software unable to handle too many objects or scripts running in the background.

Ragdoll loot is just too costly and can cause more issues after long fights compared to the bag. The despawner also checks the performance to know how quick its cleanup needs to be. Investigations will always be requiring a GM as that is just the nature of roleplay like this and always has been the case for any HL2rp ever. GMs basically have a job in RP servers because of the need to sometimes require someone to give that story- though players can always make their own too without a GMs help which some people do quite successfully.

 

[MazuzaM]

I don't think reducing weapons is a good thing as many characters properly roleplay their weapon proficiency and have personal preferences on which weapons (Collectibles or to use in battle) they keep on them, not everybody just grabs the best weapon because boho more damage in S2K, cringe as hell.

Attachments aren't banned, some of them are, but not all of them, and no you shouldn't be able to craft them but get them through roleplay or expos.

 

[Taliazure]

Hi,

Weapons have already been on the reduction, just reduced more as of yesterday even. But essentially the only guns which exist now are as follows:

Pistols:
- M1911
- USP
- Glock

Revolvers:
- Popper
- 329PD

SMG:
- UMP-45
- MP5
- MP7
- Bastard SMG

AR:
- M16
- AK
- Mini14

Snipers (May be removed entirely, or reduced to just the T5000)
- AWP
- T5000

Shotguns:
- Spas12
- Remi 870

And of course the Tikhar and Helsing are both still around too.

(Note: Junk weapons exist to be the starting junk option as some made a good point that their must be an entry point for guns thats not comparable to any of the other modern weapons in its category)

OTA weapons are not included on the list as doesn't matter much. But they got the 4 weapons they need for function with Shotgun, AR, DMR and LMG. Though you won't see them anyway. In total we went from 42 guns to 16 + 4 if you include OTA. Attachments we did slightly increase access to but not really something we are looking to fully enable because some attachments might as well be making a well balanced pack into unbalanced chaos.

---

NPC Spawners already work fine as is. No issue, just depends on what the staff handling them sets them to spawn and how the spawner overall works. So nothing to be changed there.

---

Finally no can do on the body loot.

This has been suggested time and time again, same response each time. I will sum it up:
- Ragdolls are performance intensive when it comes to dead body loot, uses far more resources than a bag and the server stability is often low with the edict count and tickrate being so far in the dumbs. Combat drops the tickrate even lower to around a recorded lowest of 3 ticks per second.
- We do cleanups to ensure server stability and have to remove NPC and player bodies ASAP. Cant have that manually be done, automatic always has the best results for performance and functionality. Manual rarely ever works because disinterested in manual labor. The only manual cleanup we do is items.
- Everything will always eventually despawn to save on edict counts, something Willard runs extremely low on not even to the fault of GMs. We are still to this day trying to figure out where most of our drain is coming from since its always 1 week into launch that the edicts go to shit and we have to enact emergency procedures and stop any creative builds or events taking place.

Tis is just the nature of using a old run down engine and a game which is chugging its way through the modern times with outdated software unable to handle too many objects or scripts running in the background.

Ragdoll loot is just too costly and can cause more issues after long fights compared to the bag. The despawner also checks the performance to know how quick its cleanup needs to be. Investigations will always be requiring a GM as that is just the nature of roleplay like this and always has been the case for any HL2rp ever. GMs basically have a job in RP servers because of the need to sometimes require someone to give that story- though players can always make their own too without a GMs help which some people do quite successfully.

Thank you so much for the changes and information about the guns.

Regarding the spawners, I’ve always been told they were broken. Whenever I asked, I was simply told, "they don't work," so it's surprising to hear that they actually do. That said, I’d like to revise my suggestion to ask if we could use them more frequently instead, while of course keeping a limit on the spawn of npcs taking into attention the performance of the server.
Another request I'd like to make now that we discuss about ragdolls.
I have noticed too that the bodies of npcs often despawn and end up taking the meat with them, why not do the same with npcs bodies as we do with the humans? Reduce the timer of a npc body and when it disappears it leaves a box down that you have to strike to butcher the meat reducing the lag specially during heavy npc events?
Would that be a more performance friendly alternative?


As for the bodies, I understand the limitations, but I have to disagree on one point—other servers do handle this differently. Some servers have ragdolls that persist for a long time, with removal only possible through specific actions like CMU intervention or after an extended period.

However, I understand that our server may not have the resources to support that... As experiences many times.

Given that we're sticking with suitcases, could we perhaps enhance them to display the name, description, and other details of the person? Additionally, could we prevent the suitcases from disappearing unless they’re removed by a CMU member or destroyed by a CP in the usual contraband disposal methods? Would that be possible, as an alternative?

 

[Botulism]

 

[Divine]

Attachments aren't banned, some of them are, but not all of them, and no you shouldn't be able to craft them but get them through roleplay or expos.

You can craft optics…! Hooray!

(I will be using these sights in my efforts to gun down all Russian Civil Protection units I find)

 

[Marshall]

Attachments should be craftable like minor Attachments that is

 

[Botulism]

yo mama -- crafting recipe

1 wooden board (her personalitee)
3 boxes of screws (how many time she ask ifs we wanted to screw)
1 box of nails (cuz I nailed her last niteeee)
1 adhesive (self explanatoree)
1 bottle of vodka (aftercare)
1 paper (writing a love letter in l0ser online language 4 her an u to read ROFL)

 

[MisterMysteryMan]

One solution to the Gun problem could be to create Reskins of previous weapons, this way it's:
-Easier to Balance
-Allows for the Diversity of Weapons Rebel Crave so much.

To avoid confusion, you could disclose that A) is a reskin of B) in the short info desc. Or display stats and have A) shown to have the same Stats as B)

Someone in this thread also said, "It doesn't matter if you have 7 SMGs if one is the definitive Meta; The others are going to be ignored." This is True, it doesn't matter how cool your weapon looks if another weapon is objectively better and completely Mogs the other 6 SMGs. You're going to pick the Meta SMG. If most SMGs are reskins of each other, then there's no penalty for not picking the right choice.

I'm not saying we need to have one base stat for every sub-class of firearm. But if one weapon is very similar to another, why not just make it into a reskin? It saves the hassle of balancing it.

 

[George]

Guys... One more weapon overhaul will fix the server. Not I mean it this time guys we've got an excel sheet and everything.