The Issue of Activity

[Huntsman]

Hey there,

I haven't been the most active myself, but that's mostly due to real life stuff getting in the way. Work, studies, etc etc. However, ever since I've been trying to get in game lately, the server seems to be deserted. What happened? We used to have a nice chunk of players daily, especially by the evenings.

Now I've been hearing some criticism regarding why that happened, and one of the most common criticisms given was that the VMP server had.. a little lack on roleplay and was too "event driven" to keep it active. And I quite agree.

To be frank, whenever there was a huge portion of players online, events would be started that'd pretty much have most players attending that event and robbing others of roleplay, because there was no-one to interact with if you weren't going to the event. I believe that the server didn't put enough emphasis on the roleplay part of RPG, and a lot of people that joined from other Argonath branches were therefore driven away.

So, this is a call to all players: why not revive the server, but with a little different mentality in mind this time. Let's not focus on events, let's not focus on grinding the scripts, but let's have some good old roleplay. We need active roleplay groups in RageMP who could promote such roleplay, and there always was a huge lack of visible criminal presence in the server. I believe that people from other Argonath branches could really fill up the gap here.

I opened this topic with the purpose of attempting to revive the server and for people to voice their ideas what would help to keep it active.

Voice yourselves.

[Mac Taylor]

Hello Huntsman,

Yes, you are quite right, we have all already agreed that the server needs a clear direction to be drawn. Roleplay life definition should be the dominant and not only events. We have already made progress on the rules change, HQ will soon post two sections of the rules which had more "no" votes. Once the rules are done discussed here, it should launch immediately.

The rules mainly focus on changing the mentality of players and emphasize the meaning of roleplay between players. You may check out our discord server's #poll channel for the full rules document.

Regarding scripts, all ideas of the community were already collected and adjusted, just some minor stuff to finish as I believe and HQ will announce about full details very soon as mentioned by Wdoyle before.

It's just a matter of time, although I know we have taken toooo much time to do those changes, but we all know what happened in the middle that delayed everything 

[Nathan]

I've only recently been active on V:MP so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

You go in and it's deserted so there is no desire to continue staying unless you want to grind (which I have no desire to do so). Therefore, it ends up being a reoccurring cycle of nobody wanting to get on because their friends or people aren't on.

SA:MP, with all it's issues (and oh boy do they have some major issues), did one thing right for a little bit - limited the surface area to just one city. This forces everything to commingle with others. As a suggestion, it might be nice to perhaps limit the area for the time being to perhaps the new island or something like that.

Give people reasons to keep coming back. Forcing events and doing @here/@everyone in Discord is also the wrong approach. If anything, it annoys everyone and forces people to mute the Discord channel.

[Huntsman]

I've only recently been active on V:MP so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

You go in and it's deserted so there is no desire to continue staying unless you want to grind (which I have no desire to do so). Therefore, it ends up being a reoccurring cycle of nobody wanting to get on because their friends or people aren't on.

SA:MP, with all it's issues (and oh boy do they have some major issues), did one thing right for a little bit - limited the surface area to just one city. This forces everything to commingle with others. As a suggestion, it might be nice to perhaps limit the area for the time being to perhaps the new island or something like that.

Give people reasons to keep coming back. Forcing events and doing @here/@everyone in Discord is also the wrong approach. If anything, it annoys everyone and forces people to mute the Discord channel.

I don't think that we need to limit the play area to be frank, while it is one of the more viable solutions. What would help more is if the grinding aspects were either completely removed or nerfed greatly. I know it's hard to realize something like this, but the most viable way to earn money should be via player interaction. This is why RS4 was so successful, despite its faulty scripts. Grinding hardly even existed.

Also, Argonath really needs to market the lighter side of its roleplay aspect to the RageMP community, however. What kept me away from all of those plentiful roleplay servers in RageMP is that they're way too grindy and that you need to grind the hell out of them before you can part-take in any real real RP interaction. Argonath has always been the kind of server where you can begin roleplaying your desired character the moment you join the game - you don't need to apply to be a cop, and only have to do so if you wish to take-part in the progression system and hierarchy, you can join any criminal group if you show your roleplay skills well enough regardless of how old your account is, etc. etc. I think that we're having a shortage of players because upon seeing us on the server list the players probably think "Oh, just another RP server". And the current grinding attitude of most jobs doesn't help this at all.

[Liam Jake]

Let me tell you what I think.

I can tell you that most of the veterans/players who were here for roleplay probably moved on to a heavy RP server and only those who are unable to play heavy RP server or unable to write a proper /me sentence are left here. Moving to a Heavy roleplay server is not gonna solve the issue with the current players, I can tell you that. It'll just make it even more confusing for the guys who did not play heavy roleplay servers or never been in one. If you decide to move to Heavy RP, you'll have to get rid of these players who are unable to even write a proper /me sentence which is obviously half of Argo's community let alone adding heavy rp rules. I'm totally down for Heavy RP rules, I don't mind but I just don't think it'll work besides that, it needs lots of work ngl. I don't know why the server is inactive but I think it's just the server lacking creativity/fun content which results in new players leaving? maybe that's the issue?

[Huntsman]

Let me tell you what I think.

I can tell you that most of the veterans/players who were here for roleplay probably moved on to a heavy RP server and only those who are unable to play heavy RP server or unable to write a proper /me sentence are left here. Moving to a Heavy roleplay server is not gonna solve the issue with the current players, I can tell you that. It'll just make it even more confusing for the guys who did not play heavy roleplay servers or never been in one. If you decide to move to Heavy RP, you'll have to get rid of these players who are unable to even write a proper /me sentence which is obviously half of Argo's community let alone adding heavy rp rules. I'm totally down for Heavy RP rules, I don't mind but I just don't think it'll work besides that, it needs lots of work ngl. I don't know why the server is inactive but I think it's just the server lacking creativity/fun content which results in new players leaving? maybe that's the issue?

I think you missed my point. I'm more than against this turning into heavy RP. I would like some heavy RP rules to be introduced, yes, but only those that would make the game enjoyable for everyone, such as disallowing refusal to roleplay just because the said roleplay doesn't put you on the advantageous side.

[Huntsman]

Recently I discovered this video. While it talks about FiveM, the same applies to RageMP. I think what we didnt anticipate is that due to the realistic nature of the game, it will be oversaturated with RP servers, so Argonath just fades as just yet another RP server, therefore making people choose more populated ones. I joined this literally the only good and populated freeroam server in FiveM the other day (none of these in RageMP) and damn was it refreshing. I remember SAMP used to have these all sorts of fun Territory Capture TDM, or Area 51 infiltration servers where you could just hop in and have fun. These seem to not exist in GTA V.

Perhaps we should really reconsider the RPG in Argonath. Because to be frank, things do look kinda grim.

This wouldnt have been a problem if we still had the old community playerbase who wouldve easily populated the V server. Sadly, most have moved on. However, with the numbers we have, acheving a stable and sustainable.player count that would attract new members sounds unrealistic, not gonna lie.

[Mac Taylor]

Let me tell you what I think.

I can tell you that most of the veterans/players who were here for roleplay probably moved on to a heavy RP server and only those who are unable to play heavy RP server or unable to write a proper /me sentence are left here. Moving to a Heavy roleplay server is not gonna solve the issue with the current players, I can tell you that. It'll just make it even more confusing for the guys who did not play heavy roleplay servers or never been in one. If you decide to move to Heavy RP, you'll have to get rid of these players who are unable to even write a proper /me sentence which is obviously half of Argo's community let alone adding heavy rp rules. I'm totally down for Heavy RP rules, I don't mind but I just don't think it'll work besides that, it needs lots of work ngl. I don't know why the server is inactive but I think it's just the server lacking creativity/fun content which results in new players leaving? maybe that's the issue?

Yes, we are aware of this issue as well. First of all, we will not be introducing heavy RP rules, not all of them. Just some of the rules that improves the environment a bit and make it enjoyable for everyone. You can say, we will be on the middle ground. At least the mentality of freeroaming 24/7 should decrease till end.

The rules aren't really heavy or hard to understand, we tried our best to keep the rules easy to understand and also cover most of the small details we had problems before with.


Secondly, we already have couple of guides ready to be published as soon as the rules are launched, so those who don't understand the rules (even tho it should be easy to understand) or those who want to know more on how to actually RP can read those guides.

As always, we can't please everyone, but majority of VMP community players have already voted a yes for taking this step forward. So let's hope things work out well as planned!

[Kowalski.]

I'm not so active in-game anymore for some of the same reasons as some of my friends and some other players since the server died down, based on our experiences, however, I still try to keep up with things in V:MP.

Some of the things that have demotivated players are scenarios where people run from a scene and escape over a mountain in a high-powered supercar they earned from grinding money. Now, when you as the person involved in the roleplay, or even as an outsider, apply some common sense to a scenario like this, you know it's very unrealistic and in most cases impossible. This is just one example of why players aren't satisfied with the roleplay quality in the server.

Some stricter roleplay rules are what players want, and at one point were delayed, however, they've now been allowed. In retrospect, players want proper interaction and some real engagement, an actual reason, motivation or enjoyment to play, not just to freeroam and chase people with custom high-powered vehicles.

However, progress is being made, and I hope to see some improvements soon, same as everyone else here.

[Norrage]

"The watchers always know better than the doers"

[Huntsman]

"The watchers always know better than the doers"

Jesus fucking christ, can we cut this already? With this mentality, don't you think there might be a reason there are far more watchers than doers at this point?

[thmn]

yes It was fun  when server was active
When I used to play people were grinding money hard to buy houses cars and business players were going afk for hours and hours to get that payday money .sometime when server had like 15 players online 3 to 5 players were just statue in map being afk few players would  just refuse to rp when they find themself in disadvantage position
I feel like most of the playerbase left coz it fell more like free room grinding server then roleplay and remaining playerbase so used to play in the old style they don’t wana evolve or change 
Remember that voice chat discussion vmp had for month and month  when Developer added voice chat in game its seem like no one using it   
as soon they get houses business vehicle they want I think they also get bored and left

[Jcstodds]

We are working on a new direction for Argonath 2021 which will start with the rules change which will be enforced by our admin team and supported by the community who voted on discord. There are some rules that can be discussed here.

The development vision (scripts) we are currently working on will address nearly all of the points discussed here but it will take a little time to implement. We will release more news in the next week as we organise ourselves. If you ask around, some of this vision has been shared with the community already.