With no experience in this war, and finding myself back here just recently, I still feel like I want to share my 2 cents with you all as another opinion.

It's no secret that the game is not what it used to be like, and even Damen himself admits it when he commented that people will never be happy, and I'd like to talk about another point that I'm reminded of when he said

Quote:

or you want it like 2013 again but when its like 2013 again it gets boring after 2 minutes because you're not 12 anymore. People hated cz in 2013 too so nothings changed.

I want to mention what I think of the game's current state, and why it seems to be overwhelmingly on the negative side. Here, I'm talking about oldcp. Damen has created plenty other games that myself and others have enjoyed, but right now I'm talking about the main one in this community.

I also want to say that I am not just here to complain. I love this community and I'm proud of the efforts of the users and staff and developers to make everything the way that it is and was. I want to give advice as I see necessary. I'm attempting to be more constructive than anything. Not everything can be changed, nor am I trying to force change. I am grateful for this game and this community, and I don't want to sound bossy when it isn't my responsibility to be playing a game if I don't enjoy it in the first place.

Activity and Community on Oldcp

Even just coming back, I’ve had people admit that people aren’t really on unless something interesting is happening like crimezone or events, and I don’t think I need much recent experience to agree with that when I try to go to the most popular room and I have no idea where it is. Hmm are there 3 people online or 122? Where is the most popular room? Is it on the training field or in a room infested with bots on another island. I’ve literally logged on and logged off because I was that confused.

I see that activity is declining because people have either moved on, or because people like seeing that other people are online. When that declines, you see a heavy decline in activity because this place is a community, and when you focus too much on the crimezone that's happening and not on the users, you'll see that being pushed aside is not enjoyable to the average person.

Events do help out, as they gather people and allow the community to have fun together, so thats a plus. But, with a war plaguing the people, and safety not being a priority, it makes the users feel less important than they are. Oldcp is sort-of a glorified chatbox if you take away the other aspects that make it special to other games. I realized that there was a discord server for this game still, and I foolishly asked for it, as if I'm not trying to defend the idea of oldcp being a chatbox with events. But, sometimes it is even easier than hopping on to oldcp, because you can follow everything at once and also have more features that in said chatbox.

A redeeming feature of oldcp is that there are characters with outfits, moods, transforms, weapons, that you can't find on discord. But, within the time of war, where it is quite easy to die whether you want to or not. Appealing for your penguin back as an ordinary user can be difficult if there isn't enough to help your case that you are innocent or deserving of your life back. People don't want to risk losing their accounts, so they might not go on their main account, or better yet log-in at all. These people want their accounts because it means something to them, and it demotivates those people when they're pushed aside like a punching bag with no good explanation. Balancing user satisfaction and fairness is always a good idea, but you have to make it clear what you are going to do and not to do. If anything, we need to be more reasonable at the moment when it comes to our userbase, because they are the ones pushing this game still.

Well... the userbase is a little carried by Damen. I appreciate his progress and efforts for this community, but sometimes it feels like Damen is relied too much on for it to be normal.



Of course, not everyone in this picture is serious, but yeah it is a problem that a lot of users look treat damen like a daddy complex and ask a lot from him personally. He has a lot to do, and sometimes can't be bothered with everyone's nitpicks or problems, with whatever severity they have. This can become a problem because certain users will feel more important than others, and perhaps even gain quite an ego because they are given ranks or thumbs up from the man himself. A lot of people that have certain positions (mostly military ones) have been involved in fighting and crimezone for what seems like an eternity. Applications are rarer than they used to be, because there just aren't enough opportunities for people nowadays, at least with newer users. Poor new users having a tough time getting into the community because it can be confusing, or walled out by unreachable ranks. They die and are like "oh this is lame". There is so much lore, and I missed so much of it in the past couple years. Theres a lot of lore that I still don't even understand to this day.

Last part of this section I wanna mention is other content unrelated to Oldcp, but still important because it relates to the community. To start, I enjoyed Leorpg, and even had some testing with Leorpg 2, which seems to be discontinued. That is honestly unfortunate, because I've seen many side projects of Jack's become discontinued because they weren't worth the effort for the output that was being produced. Penguin Isles, Snailschat, Leorpg are some that were enjoyed for a little bit, but just abandoned eventually. I think if anything, Jack needs to really think and focus on something that he wants to make, or take his talents somewhere else, no offense. With as much heart and responsibility and persevering/diligent as he is, I think he has the ability to use his knowledge to somewhere that his contributions can be very useful. The downside to that is that unless you create a game independently, you could just become a work drone whose name in the credits is underappreciated. This community is better suited for appreciation of his work, but I think Jack needs to make a choice on what he wants the future of this community to be like, and that's entirely up to him. I know that he has a career and that even this is merely a side-job, but IF he wants to do something on the side, he needs to figure out for himself.

Community is the most important in this current case, and changes probably need to be made to adjust to the users.

Weapons and the War

I recall hearing about how pistols are just meh now and that there are so many other weapons that are just overpowered or one-shot weapons. One-shot weapons should not be readily available, as it decreases the skill gap necessary to be a good fighter. Swordfighting and pistol-fighting are honest approaching, but if some evil dude comes in with 4 arms and a lightsaber, a bazooka, a nuke, and a sniper, you're gonna be in a load of trouble. In the hands of even an experienced fighter with great minds and senses, that fighter will not be perfect and can miss sometimes, so giving them more opportunities to perfect their skill and be diligent in their practice is a smart idea.

On the other hand, when a bot wields a one-shot weapon, you can spawn in a room and get toyed with by a robopenguin with no mercy and spawnkilling abilities. The bad thing with ai is that they can be near perfect, have senses better than any human, and can decide that they literally don’t want to miss a shot. Artificial intelligence can be so much smarter than a human, but the second you give it a task that it wasn’t meant to do off the track that it was meant to be on, it doesn’t really function well.

In strategy games like chess or a fighting game, you have an opponent, and we all know that those human players can be replaced with bots, or artificial intelligence. In a game like chess, you can scale the difficulty of the opponent if it is a computer player rather than a human. The slightly worse cpu will not play as effectively as the difficult cpu. The problem with the so-called difficult cpu is that it shouldn’t make any mistakes if it truly has the abilities that it has. Especially in a game like checkers where it is simpler than chess but has a similar playstyle, you can teach an ai to be perfect at the game. You can tell it to be ruthless. The computer will know every possible move that it can take, and take the best route according to the information it is given.

Apply this practice to the war we are current enduring. Having up to 100 bots online that can destroy you with op weapons and inhuman reactions is impossible to beat. I seen those bots come towards me before I even spawn, that's wrong. Just like the impossible checkers or chess cpu, except its bots with super powerful weapons. Even with a sword or a lightsaber, the bot can just block when it detects you are attacking, just like that. It is not fun nor fair to fight against something that will obliterate you time and time again without end. There are not really any GOOD strategies to defeat these bots. In most fighting games, there can be ai that fight against you, and learn what you do. They aren't perfect, and you can defeat these ai because they have to adjust to what you do. You can become unpredictable, and even find out the playstyle of your computer opponent easily. Humans will always find a way to win in these situations as long as they are fighting this ai on a leveled playing field. While the ai can hit it's moves at the right times, you can out-strategize it and beat it because you are simply smarter than it. Ai can either be stupidly intelligent or downright stupid. It might just go in a very long string of attacks because it thinks you are at the position it's attacking, so it keeps trying to go for you, but you aren't even in range. That's what I mean when I say they are just perfect except for being literally dumb at certain points.

You cannot, and I mean cannot, out-strategize these bots when they are on a high level playing field than you are. Even if you have super strong weaponry, they most likely do too, and can just wipe you out with not missing. C'mon, it's clearly unfair and people don't like it. Bots are bad at times when you want to have skill. If there aren't ways to out-strategize a bot with your humanly smarts, then you can't beat it at all. It's the same thing with video games tbh. SCALING UP THE BOSSES DIFFICULT DOES NOT MEAN MAKING IT SO STRONG THAT YOU CANT BEAT IT PURELY BECAUSE ITS STRONG AND OVERPOWERED. Like seriously? You can play a game and not beat this mysterious boss or level for 10+ times, but once you get into the groove of it and find out the right strategy, you're golden! But knowing your strategy and not beating something because it's stronger and has unfair tactics is like going into a war knowing you're going to die. We need fairness when it comes to war, so that any side can win. If that means making it all humans and recruiting people in desperate times, then so be it. We did it once before, and we can do it again to have our citizens fight a fair battle.

Old CZ vs New CZ

When crimezone first came out, it was mysteries that the people could solve. Events would happen in real time, and the people would still be mostly safe, while tracking down clues and defeating foes through logic and battles. Back then, anyone could notify people on what they found or what they did, but nowadays its just certain people with god-given abilities that can save the people. People love and hate crimezone, for their own reasons respectably, but I think it's good to give people chances as well. Its the same people having a grand old time and people just have to watch in the background as things happen and they wish they were there. People just need more chances, like it used to be. But then again, its not like we have a not of new users these days...

Are People Just Growing Up?

Yes and No. Whilst people have found reasons to leave because of their own adulthood and maturity, I would say that its totally reasonable to stay and still be mature. If people aren't enjoying the game, but still like the community enough to want to see its future and the changes it can have, it means they're loyal and want to have a better community.

More people are going the leave, though, when they see their friends leave, and its the same thing with activity. It spirals downward when the community dies down.

It does not at all help that sometimes the community can be toxic and just not enjoyable at points. People have left because they feel like its a chore, and not them having fun. This can be due in part to growing up, but I would say that having a good, pure community is an aspect to having a damn community at all.

It isn't the good ol' days anymore, and we aren't all young. Some of that creates sparks of enjoyment for the game, and that's okay if people want to leave for that reason. That just means we need to focus on the parts that keep the users here.

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This game might not have a lot of time left, because of the downward spiral effect, because we are in a pandemic, if you haven't been told enough, and activity just isn't there. I don't know what needs to happens or what's going to happen, but the time left will be less enjoyable and shorter if we don't do something soon. Y'know I left out some things, but lord I can't write a 20 page essay right now.

I'm not gonna comment on much because you summed up exactly what I've been thinking really, really, well.

However, I will speak on the topic that is most relevant to my rank on OldCP. Old CZ vs New CZ are two VERY different things. I was a Detective when theoldway and rooms like that were first found, and honestly, solving those mysteries really made the game enjoyable for me. Nowadays, CZ speaks through messengers who don't follow a script. Like Manwe, for example, places his bots on dorval and claims we must take it back, when the Empire's focus really has never been on dorval, but more so on the pressing matters of the falling of the North and South. I personally liked the Chapek CZ with the missing signs and even Mysmuggle CZ was cool at the start until it went downhill. For me, the best CZ is when all the users come to work together to investigate things, but if there's nothing to investigate, or the things that are to be investigated are classified orders, the users working together and getting involved in crimezone won't happen. I met some of my closest friends on here through solving mysteries and stuff back in 2014 and honestly I feel as if the whole "evil vs. good" endless battle of what side can get their bots buffed more or what side can get more op users and more op weapons divides the users in the community and creates the toxic environment that you also mentioned. It is clear that there is no plot now for CZ and Damen himself has even mentioned it a few times.

Even though I have a huge role in CZ, it frustrates me sometimes because the actors are so unpredictable and there really is no foundation for any sort of rules anymore. They are hard to talk to, hard to get information out of (aside from nook), and frankly it just gets super annoying being on and trying to interest yourself in what's happening. The reality is, as you also mentioned a lot of the users who used to play and who have come back to relive the nostalgia because of the COVID-19 pandemic lose interest fast and not everyone is going to be satisfied with the events and CZ happening. You can't make everyone happy, but to conclude, I believe that a major reform needs to happen in the area of Crimezone, as this is getting out of hand.

Glad to have you back DSC!

Saber574 wrote on 31st July 2020, 11:25 PM:

I'm not gonna comment on much because you summed up exactly what I've been thinking really, really, well.
However, I will speak on the topic that is most relevant to my rank on OldCP. Old CZ vs New CZ are two VERY different things. I was a Detective when theoldway and rooms like that were first found, and honestly, solving those mysteries really made the game enjoyable for me. Nowadays, CZ speaks through messengers who don't follow a script. Like Manwe, for example, places his bots on dorval and claims we must take it back, when the Empire's focus really has never been on dorval, but more so on the pressing matters of the falling of the North and South. I personally liked the Chapek CZ with the missing signs and even Mysmuggle CZ was cool at the start until it went downhill. For me, the best CZ is when all the users come to work together to investigate things, but if there's nothing to investigate, or the things that are to be investigated are classified orders, the users working together and getting involved in crimezone won't happen. I met some of my closest friends on here through solving mysteries and stuff back in 2014 and honestly I feel as if the whole "evil vs. good" endless battle of what side can get their bots buffed more or what side can get more op users and more op weapons divides the users in the community and creates the toxic environment that you also mentioned. It is clear that there is no plot now for CZ and Damen himself has even mentioned it a few times.
Even though I have a huge role in CZ, it frustrates me sometimes because the actors are so unpredictable and there really is no foundation for any sort of rules anymore. They are hard to talk to, hard to get information out of (aside from nook), and frankly it just gets super annoying being on and trying to interest yourself in what's happening. The reality is, as you also mentioned a lot of the users who used to play and who have come back to relive the nostalgia because of the COVID-19 pandemic lose interest fast and not everyone is going to be satisfied with the events and CZ happening. You can't make everyone happy, but to conclude, I believe that a major reform needs to happen in the area of Crimezone, as this is getting out of hand.

I would like to add this as an honorary part of the post, considering that I'm not experienced enough with the CZ side of things. I honestly couldn't remember a lot of the specifics, but I know what I knew and I feel like this is very well put. I think a clear direction is where we want to go with CZ, whether it be an endless battle of good vs. evil or just people solving crimes. Even I don't think that's something that the good old days was different about when we were younger, I still would be interested in something today as long as there was some sort of clear direction, you know a satisfying ending would be nice, like chapters. It just takes a lot of head space to understand what all the background information and characters mean and I'm just not informed enough, so thank you!

Love this! Great helpful insight from an old user!