Hey everyone,
The last month was one of the best months LS-RP had in a while. Just yesterday we broke 390 concurrent players online, which is a number we haven’t seen since March last year. That’s incredible and unexpected to say the least, especially considering the events that took place near the end of last year. I’ve taken the liberty to compare one full month before the downtime, and one full month after the downtime.
Time spent ingame in the last 2 weeks: 6 months 23 weeks 4 days 22 hours 42 minutes 35 seconds
Time spent ingame in the last 2 weeks of October 2019: 5 months 9 weeks 5 days 15 hours 21 minutes 51 seconds
That’s a roughly 27.5% increase.
While this is all great news, it’s not something we want to take for granted. I know that a lot of this traffic is people coming back to check on LS-RP because the tornado we suffered in December got a lot of people talking and curious. We plan to use this as a breath of fresh air and capitalize on this newfound motivation all around to the best of our abilities. I’m happy that LS-RP is in a “stable as it can be” state right now, we’re on a much better track than I imagined we would be by the beginning of February. It's also worth noting that we're still under heavy attack, almost every day.
We spent a lot of time over the last month reorganizing the staff team, some of its procedures and the way ideas make it to the top and out the door. I’m confident we laid out the responsibility network and pipelines more efficiently - spreading the workload across different teams with a direct focus on a given part of LS-RP, rather than the Level 4+ admins overseeing everything. My main goal was, and still is to remove Ben & myself from any unnecessary bottlenecks and make it easy for the people in charge of different teams & factions to get their requests through and fulfilled more efficiently. This is something I haven’t quite worked out yet, but I feel it’s something we’ll be able to finalize in February.
Staff Changes
I want to thank every single staff member that pulled their weight in January. This insane month wouldn’t work without your efforts. When the server was brought back up, we approached all of our staff members for feedback related to the staff team. We received dozens of replies and have gone through all of them, to see what can be improved. I’ll address this more in-depth internally at some point this month.
The admin level names are going to be changing this month, to more accurately reflect the position rather than an arbitrary number. And because I like it better.
Level 1 > Junior Admin
Level 2 > Admin
Level 3 > Senior Admin
Level 4 > Lead Admin
Level 5+ > Senior Lead Admin
New & Returning Staff
I'd like to welcome the following members to our team. Your access will be set up in the following week, we've changed the onboarding process a bit on the technical side, so it might take a few days to set up on my end.
Biskit - unlicensed shotty - Mikey - Sozza - Mitcholodolo
Kev - KennyJames - Revy. - Tadija -
SGary (Now Gary) - The Champagne Papi - Volkoff -
cap'n crunch
Returning Testers
Luke - Feenix - Carbon - Theory. - felony
Returning Junior Admins
Superb - Shepherd (Mark) - King G - KayaQue - Lawson
Junior Developer
Codsworth (already a Tester)
Welcome, everyone! I'm looking forward to see what you bring to the team.
Staff Promotions
DadoJ
Promoted to Senior Admin (Level 3)
Kane
Promoted to Admin (Level 2)
Eagle - Spectre - Iudex - Bellagio
TA (Tester to Admin) candidates
Dropper - Mood - dom - Codsworth - Narc - Psycho - Tweak - Ten- Kayayday - Sicario - Kotwica
Congratulations, everyone and once again, thank you for your hard work.
What's next?
Despite the success January's been, there's still a lot of work to do. Kane already started work on the next game update, I've been keeping busy implementing new features to the Beta site and all of our teams are more motivated than I've seen them in quite a while. The newly established Support team has already proven to be very useful and they've been working together with our Development team on improving the experience of new players and beginners. We'll be posting another couple announcements throughout the month related to not only feature updates, but also a more detailed introduction of the Outreach Team and a couple surprises we'll keep quiet about for now.
There's a lot more I could mention, but I'll leave some bits for the upcoming posts. Thank you all for supporting the server through different manners - whether directly by donating, volunteering in any of the teams, leading factions or just plain old playing. Seeing you guys in game is what keeps me and the rest of us going.
Martin