The Beta Complaint Mega Thread

[Takyon3]

Let's get to it.





Loyalism

Non-existent in both the initial launch and the beta, which is worrying. Apparently a few characters have received T1 and T2 loyalism because they participated in the work cycles, but that doesn't mean anything because loyalists don't get perks yet. I think it was a big mistake not introducing a proper loyalty system here in the beta, but I digress. I could go on about how to make loyalty appealing to the average player but that's another thread in of itself, so I'll leave it. I just want to see it on the actual launch.

CPs

There was a thread already made about this, you can find it here: https://willard.network/forums/threads/loyalist-rp-is-underwhelming-when-cp-display-inaction.1757/

CPs just go on patrols and berate people who confront them directly. They act very passively until an admin gives them the go ahead to gun down people during riots. What can I say? They're not bad by any means, and they're not good either. They seem to be there for the sake of hl2rp, and they have no goals of their own other then the enforcement of the status quo (which is passive rp and work rp by the way). They don't seem to employ any sort of tactics with how they control the population of the city, and they seem to think going on the odd patrol every now and then is enough. It's disappointing how bland and passive they are. No one is afraid of them, they are a laughing stock honestly and are mocked constantly without remorse.

CCA

The CCA, like the CPs, have no real authority over the population and its various departments are disconnected. CCA members have no access to their own office (lol) which is the same issue they had on the initial release. They really don't have anything to do other then the one or two people that make generic as fuck broadcasts. The CCA has no communication with the CPs, as @Gr4Ss said here.




No one really knows who the CA is. His character and broadcasts are not very memorable and he himself, like the CPs and the CCA, exercises no initiative to do or change any aspect of the city. It wouldn't surprise me if he was disconnected from the CCA as well.

Housing, Food, Work

Housing Is non-existent. Generally, people have an aspiration to acquire a house as they join a hl2rp server, or work for one and buy one with money. Citizens are relegated to the ration terminal building where they sleep in bunks. This whole bunk thing makes sense considering the theme of the beta, but acquiring an apartment should have been something to earn from the get go. What are the citizens even working for anyway? Food and Water is useless as you do not die from starvation or dehydration. I have brought this point up before, and the community managers are very keen not to introduce death by starvation on the server for one reason or another. In my opinion, it removes yet another thing to do. So citizens can't get a house, they don't need food and water, so what is their incentive to work? They have none. this lack of foresight for something so obvious is a big red flag for the actual launch of the server.

You can avoid work, not eat or drink, you can do nothing and you will survive this so called "dystopia". People NEED a drive otherwise the server will stagnate. People seem to forget the initial launch stagnated quite a bit before they had to pull the plug.

TL;DR​

Everything feels disconnected and isolated from each other. The CCA doesn't do much, the CPs are bog standard, maybe even sub-par, and patrolling is the most you'll see them do. Citizens work without incentive. Loyalism is not in. Housing is not in. Food and water is useless. Work rp for two weeks was a bad idea, but it had potential.

 

[Equinox]

I don't like how most of these complaint threads end up becoming an argument between players and admins. That's not a good sign.

What a big non-issue nothingburger to bring up.

 

[Stinky Rags]

I think those screenshots Sags provided highlight the prevailing problem with the staff team at Willard that, imo, was a large contributor to its brief retirement the first time around.

The good staff get absolutely thrown back by the ineptitude of the trials; coming from plenty of RP communities before it baffles me that communication can be so skewed between staff that they think they can just go do what they want without consulting any senior members of staff or exercise at least a minor degree of common sense to wonder if it's the right thing to start throwing napalm into the city streets on a whim.

Like Equinox said, it might be a beta but that's probably more reason to show off the server in a good light and make sure stuff like this doesn't happen. What sort of message does this send to players, that they can't go anywhere, can't escape anywhere, can't plan attacks as surface resistance or perhaps even underground resistance. It's up to the admins to hold your hand, but usually, it's the admins that get to have all the fun, get all the spawned grenades from q menu and go ham. I couldn't even say that what happened was because of some cool pre-meditated plan to initiate roleplay with the server, because if that was true Sags will have got their request and done some cool roleplay (they had the crafting attributes required).

This community has some fantastic roleplayers in its midst who want to create something amazing; not just rebellion stuff, but passive RP, conflicts, and interests that differ from character to character. Try giving some of the freedom to them and you'll see the server can run without constant oversight.

 

[Merlinsclaw]

Yeah I pointed this admin problem out before. Look at the C.C.A faction. It’s quite literally just an admin faction. There are some silly things that just refused to get addressed because “it doesn’t fit with the version of the server.”

I’ve been preaching that the beta doesn’t matter but yeh know, brush it off lol.

 

[Equinox]

I think those screenshots Sags provided highlight the prevailing problem with the staff team at Willard that, imo, was a large contributor to its brief retirement the first time around.

The good staff get absolutely thrown back by the ineptitude of the trials; coming from plenty of RP communities before it baffles me that communication can be so skewed between staff that they think they can just go do what they want without consulting any senior members of staff or exercise at least a minor degree of common sense to wonder if it's the right thing to start throwing napalm into the city streets on a whim.

Like Equinox said, it might be a beta but that's probably more reason to show off the server in a good light and make sure stuff like this doesn't happen. What sort of message does this send to players, that they can't go anywhere, can't escape anywhere, can't plan attacks as surface resistance or perhaps even underground resistance. It's up to the admins to hold your hand, but usually, it's the admins that get to have all the fun, get all the spawned grenades from q menu and go ham. I couldn't even say that what happened was because of some cool pre-meditated plan to initiate roleplay with the server, because if that was true Sags will have got their request and done some cool roleplay (they had the crafting attributes required).

This community has some fantastic roleplayers in its midst who want to create something amazing; not just rebellion stuff, but passive RP, conflicts, and interests that differ from character to character. Try giving some of the freedom to them and you'll see the server can run without constant oversight.

Perhaps it'd be best if some sort of oversight was placed upon admins. While I do think that admins, like any player, should be able to roleplay and be the IC change they want to see, they also shouldn't be able to do so more easily than a player would, unless of course they are making an event- in which case I am certain that we have (or at least HAD) a group of players who essentially signed up to be event characters.

 

[Sagsworth]

Perhaps it'd be best if some sort of oversight was placed upon admins. While I do think that admins, like any player, should be able to roleplay and be the IC change they want to see, they also shouldn't be able to do so more easily than a player would, unless of course they are making an event- in which case I am certain that we have (or at least HAD) a group of players who essentially signed up to be event characters.

This is one of the reasons I proposed designated gamemasters for groups, so that everyone has a contact and can actually do shit. Instead of a staff member self authing something, and someone else getting nothing for days. But to be honest, considering this was fully authed, what really needed to happen here is staff needed to do something. Presumably, because they don't know me and aren't friends with me, when they say my request for help they just ignored it. If I had been friends with any of these guys, or staff myself, or in a senior position in any faction, everything would've gone by much smoother. But no one did anything for days, until a trial* staff member decided "haha im gonna spawn in a bunch of grenades and just do this for fun lololololol"

 

[RedHotGinger]

snip

Seems to be a classic case of 'not being on the same page' in regards to staff. I was told on the night of the unveiling that we didn't want something bombastic to happen during that time (Not enough CP's on) so I just mentioned that we would not be running it for the night. Seemed easy enough. Fast forward to today, and it happens on the whims of a completely different admin - who I personally did not even know was planning to engage in the event.

Not blaming anyone though because its honestly is a universal problem we have right now. We are not as organized with events as we should be. To such an extent that entire portions of the map have been changed without even being approved by relevant staff. This seems to be the first example where our more scattered perspectives ended up blinding a collective to a players plans - accidently enacting a similar rendition without even knowing they were planning on doing so first.

So, this is entirely on us not keeping better track of events...both of players and admins. Its not done out of spite or willing disregard of you, but born of the fact we just don't have great control over all of staffs current and future event plans. Admins are spread over three different times zones and its proven difficult to wrangle these details and tie them altogether.

Staff are encouraged to host small, isolated events that encourage RP among citizens in a natural non-intrusive manner. Rather than large events that can have profound impacts. This may be part of the issue as well; too many large events being done when they should mostly be kept small.

Luckily we are having a meeting tomorrow to attempt and find a way around this issue that we have been aware of for the past day or so. Hopefully we get it figured out there.

 

[Takyon3]

Willard Networks is going down the route of Nebulous Cloud, where it's all shiny and new on the surface but the roleplay itself is so bland and generic. A sterile, chatbox environment controlled completely by admins. Events happen sometimes, after they're done, people resume their passive rp and they wait for the next isolated event. There are no survival mechanics, there is no danger, there is no dystopia. It's a habbo hotel chatroom server, where the admins occasionally orchestrate events to keep people entertained.

 

[Sagsworth]

Willard Networks is going down the route of Nebulous Cloud, where it's all shiny and new on the surface but the roleplay itself is so bland and generic. A sterile, chatbox environment controlled completely by admins. Events happen sometimes, after they're done, people resume their passive rp and they wait for the next isolated event. There are no survival mechanics, there is no danger, there is no dystopia. It's a habbo hotel chatroom server, where the admins occasionally orchestrate events to keep people entertained.View attachment 3279

fuck off

 

[Takyon3]

fuck off

​

 

[RedHotGinger]

Would like to keep things civil so we can focus on issues. This is a beta after all, and genuine well thought concerns aren't just welcome - they are needed. So that the main server can be completely free of the issues we may be overlooking otherwise.

 

[verTix]

Willard Networks is going down the route of Nebulous Cloud, where it's all shiny and new on the surface but the roleplay itself is so bland and generic. A sterile, chatbox environment controlled completely by admins. Events happen sometimes, after they're done, people resume their passive rp and they wait for the next isolated event. There are no survival mechanics, there is no danger, there is no dystopia. It's a habbo hotel chatroom server, where the admins occasionally orchestrate events to keep people entertained.View attachment 3279

some people want a hugbox and some people want hardcore dystopia where everyone is starving to death. Best is a mix between the two

 

[verTix]

I have noticed that most of the citizens are in the QZ (terranova part 2) but citizen RP is always pretty shit on every server and I’m not the one to ask how to fix it

 

[Robert]

Hello.

- snip -

I read through and was unaware myself until now that you were planning a player event. In all honesty, if a player wants to blow up a building, perform sabotage and all that good stuff, they should be able to. All they need to get is the materials to craft what they need. As long as there are CPs online, a rebel should be able to grab their equipment, place their bombs, detonate it and run away. All an admin really needs to do is carry out what the player requested and to make it actually work. They shouldn't be denying requests unless you lack the items or lack the /me's, rp or reasoning to do such. That is it.

If you have, you should be able to do it without someone telling you "lel no". Of course, I do want to say that we are having a staff meeting for the beta tomorrow (or today for me) and go over everything so far and how to improve. At the moment, communications internally are... and I won't lie.. a fuckin disaster. Events are happening left and right and no staff member really knows what is going on except for the event team themselves.

- Snip -

This community has some fantastic roleplayers in its midst who want to create something amazing; not just rebellion stuff, but passive RP, conflicts, and interests that differ from character to character. Try giving some of the freedom to them and you'll see the server can run without constant oversight.

What Fatty mentions at the bottom here is what I want to achieve essentially. Players to have the freedom to do their rebel RP, passive and conflict and interests among themselves without needing staff to get in the way or take the spotlight for themselves.

As for everything else mentioned here, I do agree that it is quite disappointing our staff are still having communication issues and it is the reason I decided to call a meeting today in about 19 hours to go over what went wrong, why did it go wrong and how to fix it as well as discuss staff and faction behaviours and the current ongoing issue with citizenRP due to the failure of the buisness/shops and the failure of staff for not just making simple chit chat characters to give citizens stuff to do in more ways which isn't walk around for the next 20 minutes. Atm a lot of staff focus too much on explosions and badass moments which tend to just take spotlights from players and fuck over everyone else in the process.

consider that it wasn't literally my character setting fire to anything on the first or second day. We actually went through a random player and had them do it. As for so much effort to get one thing to happen, I find it kind of odd. Freedom of Roleplay was meant to guarantee that someone could just do something, and staff would accomodate that by making it happen then and there.

If staff can't accomodate for players, then why even push "Freedom of Roleplay" anyways? If it's because "This is a beta event and not the actual server", then why the fuck are we running this "beta" when it's so different from the main server that it doesn't matter?

I can fully agree with this statement as well. To goal of the beta is more or less drifting too far away from any form of representation of what the Main server is meant to be. Like we made the factions slightly differ but now everything in the beta is basically becoming a polar opposite of what the main server is intended to be and thus ruining its importance and feeling more like an SS event each passing day.

Player freedom as I have stated so far is a focus which is currently being neglected in exchange for staff running around with weapons and carrying out crazy events without much comms nor auths which causes mass chaos. It worked the first 3 days, but now it is becoming a bit of a joke and an unfunny one at that.

Freedom of roleplay as I stated above is meant to allow the player to do what they want and when they want, given you got at least.. let's say 4 units around for a bomb threat and you go ahead and place those bombs, you should be able. Then you denote them, and the staff should help the player by making sure the effects of what they just did are accommodated for, not denied nor ignored.

 

[Deleted member 624]

Willard Networks is going down the route of Nebulous Cloud, where it's all shiny and new on the surface but the roleplay itself is so bland and generic. A sterile, chatbox environment controlled completely by admins. Events happen sometimes, after they're done, people resume their passive rp and they wait for the next isolated event. There are no survival mechanics, there is no danger, there is no dystopia. It's a habbo hotel chatroom server, where the admins occasionally orchestrate events to keep people entertained.View attachment 3279

This is the best quote in general that explains HL2RP state in a nutshell.

 

[Sagsworth]

All an admin really needs to do is carry out what the player requested and to make it actually work. They shouldn't be denying requests unless you lack the items or lack the /me's, rp or reasoning to do such. That is it.

If you have, you should be able to do it without someone telling you "lel no".

The problem unfortunately hasn't been people saying no unfortunately, it's just been people flat out ignoring me. I've seen the staff lists when people are online and there are plenty of people, including people who have expressed support on this thread who have been there while I've been using /help and pming with people trying to get them to do anything, and nothing happens. Nothing happens at least until the admin is actually doing the event for themself, then it's instantaneous. And I want to emphasize again, a vortigaunt just gave themselves a bunch of grenades and threw them at the building. It's beyond parody how worlds apart these approaches were.

 

[Deleted member 624]

The problem unfortunately hasn't been people saying no unfortunately, it's just been people flat out ignoring me. I've seen the staff lists when people are online and there are plenty of people, including people who have expressed support on this thread who have been there while I've been using /help and pming with people trying to get them to do anything, and nothing happens. Nothing happens at least until the admin is actually doing the event for themself, then it's instantaneous. And I want to emphasize again, a vortigaunt just gave themselves a bunch of grenades and threw them at the building. It's beyond parody how worlds apart these approaches were.

Game is played at the Mercy of our admins.

 

[Robert]

The problem unfortunately hasn't been people saying no unfortunately, it's just been people flat out ignoring me. I've seen the staff lists when people are online and there are plenty of people, including people who have expressed support on this thread who have been there while I've been using /help and pming with people trying to get them to do anything, and nothing happens. Nothing happens at least until the admin is actually doing the event for themself, then it's instantaneous. And I want to emphasize again, a vortigaunt just gave themselves a bunch of grenades and threw them at the building. It's beyond parody how worlds apart these approaches were.

I see... I will bring this up in the upcoming meeting then. I get that sometimes the staff can be busy but if they are out and about they should be able to respond at some point. I try to claim as many requests as possible when I am around but not sure if I have ever seen yours pop up.

Are you using the /help or @ symbol to send requests? If you are then all is good and admins should respond. I mainly respond to the ones using the @ symbol due to it being the easiest to find and click on myself.

 

[Stinky Rags]

due to the failure of the buisness/shops and the failure of staff for not just making simple chit chat characters to give citizens stuff to do in more ways which isn't walk around for the next 20 minutes. Atm a lot of staff focus too much on explosions and badass moments which tend to just take spotlights from players and fuck over everyone else in the process.

That's honestly such a big problem the community has faced before and right now. I understand staff are players too and they want to roleplay and I fully think they should be able to, but frankly aside from roles such as CP lead, and other things that require a temporary handler, they should work like everyone else (tbh I think them running shops is more important than them being a CA as of right now). The whole explosion thing ruined the city and destroyed those building project things; see, that would have been cool if it had been players achieving this through roleplay means rather than an admin just shitting on the work people had put in to try and repair that building. Because it's artificial and lacks any roleplay substance it immediately makes any negative effects boring.

I spoke to staff a lot back in the day about how events could possibly go, and I think a total of one involved a direct shoot-out. It's really unnecessary; what's a shootout and explosions going to mean for the citizens, that make up the vast vast majority of the player base? Combine gets a lot of fun sure, that's about it. Because Willard is City RP I thoroughly believe a lot of events should challenge the characters themselves, physically, morally, whatever. They also don't have to be big server-wide events every time either; groups of different players consistently.

Sometimes it feels like the server is so innovative with the amazing development team, plug-ins, map, and everything else, but how the Roleplay seems to be handled by staff seems really C18. There are trolls and minges in every community, but by now you all likely know which players are genuine and which aren't, and putting some trust in them to perform their RP without needing everything to be authorized through some crazy bureaucracy will go a long way. That being said, I appreciate the work that some of you do and I remember you from before, but like my previous comment, I think the bad of the staff team really shadow over what great stuff the others are doing. It feels like a thankless job sometimes.

 

[Sagsworth]

Sometimes it feels like the server is so innovative with the amazing development team, plug-ins, map, and everything else, but how the Roleplay seems to be handled by staff seems really C18. There are trolls and minges in every community, but by now you all likely know which players are genuine and which aren't, and putting some trust in them to perform their RP without needing everything to be authorized through some crazy bureaucracy will go a long way. That being said, I appreciate the work that some of you do and I remember you from before, but like my previous comment, I think the bad of the staff team really shadow over what great stuff the others are doing. It feels like a thankless job sometimes.

This is the thing that gets me. Willard has without a doubt (and only people with a huge anti willard bias can deny this) the best HL2RP schema of all time, it has great (and new) features, it's clean, it's effective, people can squabble over certain choices but the truth it's hugely ambitious and succeeds on most of its intentions. But it seems like that isn't translating in terms of the actual day-to-day running of the server has resulted in huge and constant cock-ups, and because of the relaxed management system, no one feels obliged to do anything about it. The CMs, who should be the ultimate authority, rule by council and don't want to step on each others toes, so not a single one is confident to make decisions. And this leaves the confidence to the people who know they can abuse the system, because counteracting that requires unity that doesn't exist.

 

[Bodger]

@Sagsworth

Well todays event was pulled off on a whim, as me and a few other staff were talking about vorts not having caused enough terrorism, and so with the go ahead I went on my vort, got myself some frags and was gonna chuck a few at infrastructure to cause some chaos. Then @Gr4Ss comes up with the idea of firebombing the loyalist housing scaffolding which was *intended* to just hit the loyalist housing before it was complete. Player inaction led to the fire spreading to the CMU which lead to break off fires not caused by my vort in the CWU HQ and CCA building.

It had nothing to do with seeing a player auth for firebombing something and going "fuck it, can't wait for the players we'll do it ourselves!" And personally I had no idea there was a "no fires!" order going about among staff, and I had no idea you were planning something like this. This was just gonna be a case of a vort bombing some stuff for their faction goal, which turned into what it did because the players didn't do anything about the fire before it spread to the CMU. If they had the CMU, CWU and CCA fires may never have happened.

The whole dynamic of the two week event is for the "loyalist" side to get the district built and for the "resistance" side to stop it being built. Due to how the building mats were handled (needing 40 for a building and 40 coming in for the two trains a day), all buildings were almost complete, meaning the dynamic of the event was about to shift before a week had even passed, which is why things were so hectic. The burning of the loyalist housing was supposed to be a slowing measure so that other actions could be taken later on, without a massive shift to cleaning up the IZ and rebuilding that.

I'm sorry this messed with your plan, if I had known I would have gotten you in on it.