Jack
Pokimane is my e-girl.
Hi everyone,
There have been a few suggestions going around mentioning the idea of whitelisting the server. I have decided to make this post to clear up what affect I personally believe this will have on the community as a whole.
The Pro's
People tend to feel that a whitelist is more of a privileged, we have found that people that "get whitelisted" on a server tend to behave more appropriately and by the book in order to keep that whitelist, compared to a public server where you are automatically granted access and only risk losing it.
Its the idea of valuing something you put more work into compared to something you don't put as much work into, regardless of physical value.
We all do it, even if you don't realise it! This usually allows us to aim for a much higher quality of roleplay.
Queue times would be reduced as well as the chances that of a hacker causing havoc would drop (as they would have to go through an interview process and then not get caught by the anticheat on top of that).
The Con's
Server growth would plummet. Many of you say "oh we are already hitting full slots every day of the week in our peaks, we don't need to grow anymore", this is where I have to tell you - your wrong.
For a company, community or project to be successful continuous growth is a requirement. Whitelisted servers that we compare ourselves to on the regular do this through good social media engagement, streaming or sometimes the servers are outright owned or reimbursed by someone with a large influence sphere.
Requiring new players to submit a application to be able to get on the server would hinder our server list intake (which for the record makes up around 94% of all new player traffic as of making this post). Many people ask what is the need for new players to join, we have enough people to fill up the server now anyway - it is imperative for people to see new people and new ideas enter the community. A server of the same people day-in, day-out will result in stale, boring and repetitive roleplay which can leave a long lasting effect on the community.
The amount of labour it requires is astronomical compared to what we are doing right now. The public server currently takes an administration team of 4 + a development team of 4 as well as a moderator team of 15+ people to ensure that we are bringing decent response times to everything you guys ask from us. Introducing another forum page or application process would only add to this never-ending task. If we did go forward with such an idea we could put into place a "trusted community members" system to allow you guys to keep up with the applications along with the staff team.
Conclusion
Lifetime Roleplay/Interactive/India/Whatever we want to class this as now - is growing at a rapid rate, we are all excited for it and i'm really proud to be part of the project and pushing it to what I can see as a bright future.
I'm not trying to hide the fact whitelisted is always an end goal of ours. However we cant just "jump" into it without ensuring we are absolutely ready, some of the old players know we tried this before and it flopped pretty well, introducing consequences that we never really recovered from.
This is an open discussion because I want to hear your opinions and supposed fixes for the issues I have brought up as well as the ones that other people mention however please don't ask if opening two servers (a whitelisted and non-whitelisted variant) that card isn't on the table simply because splitting a big community makes two smaller communities making the issues I raise above much, much more apparent.
But to clarify, we will not be making a move to whitelisted until both the staff team and community are on board and are ready for the tasks it will bring.
There have been a few suggestions going around mentioning the idea of whitelisting the server. I have decided to make this post to clear up what affect I personally believe this will have on the community as a whole.
The Pro's
People tend to feel that a whitelist is more of a privileged, we have found that people that "get whitelisted" on a server tend to behave more appropriately and by the book in order to keep that whitelist, compared to a public server where you are automatically granted access and only risk losing it.
Its the idea of valuing something you put more work into compared to something you don't put as much work into, regardless of physical value.
We all do it, even if you don't realise it! This usually allows us to aim for a much higher quality of roleplay.
Queue times would be reduced as well as the chances that of a hacker causing havoc would drop (as they would have to go through an interview process and then not get caught by the anticheat on top of that).
The Con's
Server growth would plummet. Many of you say "oh we are already hitting full slots every day of the week in our peaks, we don't need to grow anymore", this is where I have to tell you - your wrong.
For a company, community or project to be successful continuous growth is a requirement. Whitelisted servers that we compare ourselves to on the regular do this through good social media engagement, streaming or sometimes the servers are outright owned or reimbursed by someone with a large influence sphere.
Requiring new players to submit a application to be able to get on the server would hinder our server list intake (which for the record makes up around 94% of all new player traffic as of making this post). Many people ask what is the need for new players to join, we have enough people to fill up the server now anyway - it is imperative for people to see new people and new ideas enter the community. A server of the same people day-in, day-out will result in stale, boring and repetitive roleplay which can leave a long lasting effect on the community.
The amount of labour it requires is astronomical compared to what we are doing right now. The public server currently takes an administration team of 4 + a development team of 4 as well as a moderator team of 15+ people to ensure that we are bringing decent response times to everything you guys ask from us. Introducing another forum page or application process would only add to this never-ending task. If we did go forward with such an idea we could put into place a "trusted community members" system to allow you guys to keep up with the applications along with the staff team.
Conclusion
Lifetime Roleplay/Interactive/India/Whatever we want to class this as now - is growing at a rapid rate, we are all excited for it and i'm really proud to be part of the project and pushing it to what I can see as a bright future.
I'm not trying to hide the fact whitelisted is always an end goal of ours. However we cant just "jump" into it without ensuring we are absolutely ready, some of the old players know we tried this before and it flopped pretty well, introducing consequences that we never really recovered from.
This is an open discussion because I want to hear your opinions and supposed fixes for the issues I have brought up as well as the ones that other people mention however please don't ask if opening two servers (a whitelisted and non-whitelisted variant) that card isn't on the table simply because splitting a big community makes two smaller communities making the issues I raise above much, much more apparent.
But to clarify, we will not be making a move to whitelisted until both the staff team and community are on board and are ready for the tasks it will bring.