I'm all in to continue as well, but I have had life to attend to and it's tending isn't going smoothly. I've gone through another flood, and even after we fixed it I still found out that there's a leak. But that's the least of my worries because I have loan payments totaling $2k coming up in January unless I can manage to finagle something.ZergHunter wrote:
So long as people have time off we hope they'd be able to play.
The servers kind of in a freeze frame right now, we'll be discussing story progressions and the like to continue from where we're at later on, but everyone is just super busy right now and unable to really work on things. The server takes a a lot of time and dedication to keep running and I know Empty's already stated what's going on with him.
We'll figure something out, I'd personally like to keep the current story line going as is right now if possible because I enjoy a lot of the characters in the current story, and I'm not a fan of restarting every 3 months.
If the entire community would rather a restart we can consider it. I'll admit though the Gmod community isn't what I'm used to anymore. When I used to run these servers we were able to stick with one story line for well over a year, and have a map change once every like 3-6 months, if that. People seem to lose interest much faster now in a server than they did before. It still seems like compared to the majority of new servers opening we seem to be the ones that outlast all the random schema's that open and close around us. But people are more interested in jumping ship and trying to next hot game for a month before it closes down than keeping a story going, which is whatever, that's what people want, but I'd much rather keep a single story going and developing as long as we can. (And I know a lot of you guys who still frequent the forums are the same way, otherwise you wouldn't still be checking these boards )
So I don't know where I want to go with this right now. We'll see what happens over the break and go from there I guess. If you guys have any ideas or suggestions we're more than happy to listen and work on them. One reason I love ZRP is because we can have a small dedicated community and still develop an amazing storyline, we don't need 30 players to make the world still seem real.
Anyway I'm totally rambling about nothing, let us know what you guys want.
Life aside though we were going relatively strong for a good few months, I think it was a combination of time of year, IRL troubles and map selection. We're always good to continue. Zerg's right, GMOD has changed since what we have grown up with, and if you don't change unfortunately you won't grow, despite if you have players that respect your choices or not. Now we need a billion guns and everyone needs them or else we're 'doing it wrong'. We've managed, but it's weird for us (at least, for me), to delegate these things because we're dinosaurs that come from a time where a firearm was legitimately a hard earned reward you get after months of development. That, and events sink in alot of time and make things transfer from more of a freeform freetime hobby to a stressor. And don't get me wrong, even during my leave, I worked on looking up interesting dynamic maps either for events or to go to for main maps -- some of them themselves a relic of the past -- but as a co-owner I've always tried to mold things to be different from the status quo; to not simply play rp_apocalypse or to make sure have an interesting twist on our idea. And those ideas are still cataloged for the admin team to dip into at any time, it's just with a lack of players mixed with people being busy, it hasn't been easy.
There also, along with the lack of my presence and the presence of other players, is the pull-out of other admins of ours. Essentially what we've had is Zerg and Knomad. I can understand why the others decided to claim we're dead, but goddamnit ZeroHour has always been like a Phoenix and always will be-- that decision just starts with the admins. This isn't because I'm afraid to let stories go and start over; rather, it's because I want to continue as circumstances rather unfairly 'ball & chained' our server where it was. And they're welcome back if they want to be but I similarly understand if they just decided to move on to other games that aren't 15 years old.
I enjoy thoroughly our sense of community, and you guys can't know how appreciative I/we are that you guys even bother to still check the forums despite you knowing the lack of presence on server. It really feels like we're tight knit. I've known we've had something, but it's small things like that that remind you.
About the story, we're both for keeping it and simply shifting seasons (to make timelines easier for new players), or keep the past timeline (if you wish), or, if the community desires, starting all over anew. But trust me, we've had surprises and things planned that haven't made it to the surface yet. There's a reason we had the addon package we had. So ultimately, it starts with us deciding we aren't done, and ends with you deciding if we should continue. Are you in for it?
As for me, I'll still be a shadow, but I'll be around. Feel free to message me even if I'm offline, I'll definitely see it. I need to just focus on not going to whatever they have in store for me for failure to pay (I know debtor's prison hasn't existed but I don't wanna find out what replaced it).
P.S. - If you felt shafted with not knowing what was going on, don't. I've barely said a word to my team in 2 1/2 months, I've just been suuuuper high strung over my indefinite future.