cash-root review - deadline

Oh look, a completely unknown user making a review! Yes, hello. Considering that the discussion thread for Requiem909's new server, Deadline, has been locked before I could toss in some feedback, I'm going to tie up all my experiences and concerns / likings of this server in long textual present for users who'd like an unbiased review. I'm hopefully going to do more reviews in the future, but I've decided to do Requiem909 for now due to the controversy and concern over their staff team that I've heard tons about, and the fact I've been there since the beginning. With that being said, let's get started, shall we?

Synopsis

Deadline is supposed to be an episodic-style roleplay, based around a muddy, rushed-feeling apocalyptic scenario with no visible sign or cause, spurring thousands of non-humanoid, oddly-graphically-textured mutated creatures seemingly out of no-where. The story starts in the city of Seattle, and gradually progresses between maps. Hey, it's a good concept, so let's break it down into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good

The server is on a different framework and does have a pretty smooth feel to it OOC'ly on the plane of the framework and inventory system. It's basically vanilla a different framework with no modifications, the only scripts being the default a different framework food items and their nice gun pack. Nothing really to ogle about, it's basically just plugged-in workshop content and a free-framework with no modification if any sort, but it's ok because RP isn't focused around the coding usually, but just understand going in that there is no custom content and the server is basically beta-vanilla entity/script wise, and relies solely on PAC for creative customization. Again, interpret this how you want, it wasn't a huge issue when I played but might be for others.

The RP quality is solid, I'll give them that. There are a dozen or so people on there who really do have fleshed-out and fairly detailed RP quality, and it was fun doing some passive with them. There are some flaws with the RP quality I'll explain down below, but for what it's worth I did have some good RP.

Certain members of the staff team were really helpful, not all, but some. @retro was one, not sure if he has a forum account.

The Bad

The server has an incredibly blurry, rushed, and undocumented lore. The server cycles through a new map at least once a week at its current rate, just for the sake of it. There is no documentation of lore for those who are not on for events, leaving players who are not on from the start or who miss a couple days in the dark. They seem to just want to go through as many maps as possible just to do it, and the progression of lore is incredibly rushed.

There is an unrealistic amount of child and military characters. The balance of male to female is fine, and the server hasn't degraded into an ERP cesspool yet, but the group consists of at least 60% military or military-background characters or characters under 16. It takes a toll on immersion and the realism of the server, and wasn't taken as a concern until the situation was far too large.

The staff have a gross 'Don't like it? The door is right there!' attitude. They openly admit on the forums to being short-fused and seem to almost embrace this demeanor. (http://requiem909.com/index.php?thr...-about-the-staff-and-the-server.173/#post-997). They take a very hostile approach to any sort of critic, to the point where I would not be surprised if I get banned for bringing up some of the flaws with their community. Again, I get that staffing is stressful, but locking themselves in a private TS channel, being hostile towards critique, and not following any sort of punishment guideline and opting to hand out permanent bans like candy is a bit worrisome.

The Ugly

This can be censored how staff pleases, but deserves to be addressed. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, as since I've mildly butted heads with Jameston I could be seen as biased, yet this is sort of a collective opinion I've heard from one of their staff members and other players, as well as how I've seen him on TS, C16, and in-game. The community owner, Jameston, is both literally and figuratively a... to be blunt, he acts like a tyrannical child. Though age plays no part in my mind, he does sound no older then fourteen, and does act the part. He has one of the strongest mentalities of 'gtfo if u don't like us' ideologies I've seen in months online, and is cynical and depressed of adequate means of dealing with administrative situations without de evolving into a tantrum of yelling and high-horse power fluxaction. He does not seem like a capable owner from my experiences with him, and how he conducted himself on this website and on TeamSpeak validates my points to an extent. He has an incredibly argumentative personality and I presume holds grudges, and this will most likely be presented when he comes on here and tries to disprove or devolve this thread into an argument, though who knows. Just take his ownership and maturity-wise capabilities with a grain of salt if you intend on staying in the community long-term.

There is no roleplay of any sort of food deprivation or any visible despair or grief. Along with this, people who are heavily injured seem to magically heal when a situation arises that might put them in PK-jeopardy due to impaired mobility or functionality from their injury. This can be fleshed out more if you guys want to know more.

Summary

Great concept, poorly executed and grossly maintained.

5.5/10

 

Mind posting proof, in the form of screenshots of videos to backup your claims?

 

Most of my claims are to be taken with a grain of salt as I really didn't think of documenting much of what occurred, and most of it can be experienced simply from observing the staffs demeanor on their TS and seeing first hand the issues in game. If this is a false review due to lack of evidence, by all means lock it.

 

This seems like more of an angry review or whatever, but I don't know what happened because back in the community thread you were praising the server

 

Nope, I'm not banned and I play on the server. It's just a community that is being talked about and I thought I'd be capable of writing a review and bringing light to some serious flaws in their community, as well as the good things.

 

A decent review. From a newfag.
I don't have any sort of personal experience with the server and little to no community interaction in Requiem, so I will not take the whole review by granted.
But I have to say, anyone who can review a community without throwing it out into the open that it's "cancer", should have their opinions noted.

 

I don't necessarily agree with some of the points. But I enjoy the fact that you presented your thoughts and opinions in a well-behaved and well-spoken manner that hasn't been achieved by some other reviewers who have tried and failed here.

 

I don't know what you mean by vanilla, since the framework was customized by ourselves, mainly the character selection screen, and our developer made a few plugins for it. Maybe not visible by users but ones that benefit administrating mainly--but I see where you're coming from.

Now first, the lore. I know you may feel that there's no real documented lore, however people themselves are supposed to figure that out. At first the server is supposed to be normal life in Seattle, then a plague hits forcing citizens to evacuate and the military to "cleanse" the city. Every map change, there are talking NPC's you can find around the map to gather little bits of information from. Sometimes even terminals. On gm_fork, if you looked around well enough you would be able to find two terminals(http://requiem909.com/terminals/terminal-46/index.html and http://requiem909.com/terminals/terminal-88/) that contain some information about what's currently going on.

The child and military characters, yeah I get where you're coming from. The admins and owners alike are not really fond of the military and child characters. We've come to the decision to disallow militaristic characters temporarily, however we don't really want to disallow child characters. It's not really too out of hand at this point considering there's not really that much.

Yeah we do tell people if they don't like the server they don't have to stay. I don't see an issue with that. If someone doesn't enjoy our server then they can get off rather then complaining about it. Maybe if they were giving legitimate suggestions on how to improve nicely, then we would say something else. If they don't like our server and just give us criticism then we don't really want you. If it's constructive and you're not mean about it, sure. Don't really know what else to say.

Anyway, in general, I'm not denying some of the flaws that you have pointed out to an extent. I've stated in a previous post that this is our community's first time we've ever done a roleplay like this, of course there's going to be issues with it. I appreciate the fact that you pointed out some flaws with the community that we can hopefully fix in the future.

also off topic: you are actually banned idk why you said you're not. first time for just being a minge and admitting that you were on just to troll, idk why you were banned 2 days ago
edit: was for avoiding rp apparently

 

this is really fucking formal

 

Only lasted a week... I wanted to play but I went onto a cruise... Well, thanks for the review and the warnings.

 

I'm a developer in this community and I gotta say that I agree with many of the points, if not all.
I joined the community about two weeks ago and I'm already re-considering should I stay on board or not.
Most of the modifications to the schema were plug-ins and such, but I didn't take care for the script because I can't code, I've got used to the Vanilla-feeling of N u t s c r i p t so it didn't really personally bother me what the schema looks like. I handed some plug-ins for the owners that my friend made sometime ago, but other than that it was simple & vanilla.
After you left, I rigged one new infected model with custom animations and made an NPC out of it. I was also supposed to create customized face models for people, but I lost motivation in that due all the drama happening on the server. But yeah, that's about it, really.
Personally I thought that there's way too much useless Workshop content that really wasn't needed on the server, but I didn't mention anything about it because I didn't see it as something I should be generally concerned about.

 

Can you review EUPRP next?
They have, uh.. let's just say they have interesting methods of administration.

 

can somebody please justify the use of the sst bug pack? i don't really know the lore at all.

 

I made a joke in chat about how the server is vanilla and they permabanned me for 'nigger'.

 

http://puu.sh/nLAY7/9873661bcb.png

Enough said.

 

Well alright then, I guess I'll review it.

 

time for me to say something

i may be biased because i am an admin, but cash-root/gozmit/whatever you want to be called
you were there from the beginning yes, but you had been permabanned on one account, and after you politely asked, we gave you a second chance. and then you fucked it up again, disconnecting from RP, and doing pretty much the same thing we asked you not to do before. it might also be worth mentioning that after we had a staff meeting during launch day about you and your "gang" and how no one wanted them on the server because you had given yourself such a horrible reputation on the forums because you were rarely serious, and when you were, you were asking for scripts and items to put you at a further advantage-- but during the staff meeting, we ruled to keep you banned and while we were removing you from the teamspeak you began shouting insults and immediately became immature and began to backlash. you were lucky to be given a second chance, while your friends, dunjam for example, werent.

now, as for the lore, as ninja said, it is fleshed out. it's completely planned out and finished, and people were too lazy to go search for clues as to what happened and talk to the NPCS, and thats what created the confusion about the lore being poorly written and explained.

now, if you attended events properly, and actually roleplayed with the people who do roleplay on the server, you'd find out why we had switched maps thrice over the course of a week. like stated, the server is episodic, meaning one map is one episode. each episode lasts about a week. our first major episode was gm_fork and we were there for around a week. now, we're on a variation of ineu pass because players in our community did IC preparations to move to a safer location. as far as i know, no admins were involved in this and it was completely player decision. i guess you wouldn't know, because like before, you were aggressive on your character to the point where the playerbase exiled you again and you became a bandit, making another "antagonist" (as you'd like to call it) faction to stir up trouble ICly and OOCly.

now on the topic of jameston. he is a capable owner, seeing as how he's handled many communities in the past, and he isn't by any terms "new". he's been having several issues off-server and he made the server to be something to distract him from other things going on. instead, with the constant whining from players who wanted items, or a mapswitch, or complained endlessly without giving anything constructive, it began to get extremely annoying, and handling the server became a job. he didn't expect 40 people on launch, no one did. all of the admins were experiencing this, which is why a post was made about it. we didnt want to hear whining without reason. we didnt want to hear another person asking for items, that they can easily get ICly without having to ask an admin. for jamestons reaction in the requiem909 deadline thread, i dont want to start another argument, but i will sum it up-- jameston has had conflicting opinions on the way c16 operates and the fact that people defended and stood behind a person who stole cash from donators and didn't willingly give back their money to the point where the donators had to get cashbacks, he thought, was disgusting and he didnt want to be here.

the issues of RP consistency, yeah, it's an issue, but we're working on it. the server has been open for barely 2 weeks. we're still smoothing out things. if you don't like the way the server is now, i'm sure you'll like it (if we last) in a month or two. we apologize for your bad experiences, and we are seriously trying to smooth out our flaws. it's been said multiple times.

 

I am not here to break down your post and argue, as I am simply a messenger and reviewer, who at the time was not biased since I had no knowledge of my ban. If you want to come on here with irrelevant information and try and 'roast' me because I had the negative interest of some members of the community, then so be it. That's your maturity. Most people have discussed and agreed with most of the points in the review, but your opinions are, whether valid or not, respected despite you trying to throw me under the bus for being the messenger of both staff members on the server, a developer, and multiple players opinions.

You are biased, like you said, so if people want to try and argue they can, I am a messenger and a 3rd party conveying opinions of my own and of others, not one to start a shit-fling. I guess the fact that the server only has 11/40 people on and has declined sharply according to Gametracker statistics sort of speaks for itself, especially in a hot-time hour for the servers playbase that we are in now.

Thanks nonetheless.