How we can revive TotalFreedom

Please Note: The TotalFreedom Forum has now been put into a read-only mode. Total Freedom has now closed down and will not be returning in any way, shape or form. It has been a pleasure to lead this community and I wish you all the best for your futures.

    It’s become undeniable in the past month, our server is dying.

    I remember in 2016-2017 there were an average of 30-50 players on at a time, at peak hours nowadays we can barely scrape 8.

    I have many times said," oh it’s school hours, oh it’s night in America," but honestly it doesn’t matter, there are 3 players online the majority of the day, and that isn’t good enough for a community that intends to grow at all.

    right now as I write this there are 4 online, and half of them are admins.

    What I propose we do, is find a moderate sized youtuber, 200k subscribers or so, get in contact with them and convince them, or even pay them to make a video on TF.

    another point is there is not much content on YouTube anymore of totalfreedom, and the largest video about our server was taken down a few months ago.

    Doing this would give more attention to the server, and would allow for more new people to find out about us, it would bring new life, new culture, and it would boost every aspect of the server.
    A youtuber of the size of 200,000 subscribers would probably bring Atleast 30 new players on average at a time, which in a grand scheme isn’t much, but it is a major boost from what we have now.

    I’ve said this in chat before as somewhat of a joke but it’s starting to look like a ghost town all hours of the day, and I don’t think we can ignore this any longer.

    There just isn’t enough people to keep the server alive and we need to fix that.

    Trust me as someone who has done some work in the social media industry its a lot harder than just contacting a youtuber and getting them to play on the server most of them just wont its not worth their time plus its not a good video wont do well on the platform.

    So for other peoples reference, this was the conversation that I replied to you earlier today WRT this topic

    TF for the most part has always been word of mouth, and I think while a large YTer / Streamer might bring us some players in the short term, I'm not entirely convinced that paying the hundreds of dollars that would be required to actually get a good sponsored video out of one, is going to bring us what we would actually need to keep growing the server.

    I'm very keen to hear what the ESL team think on this topic, as from my perspective we should be in a position to be pulling in more players than we currently are, and while there is still a lot of stuff we've got to do technically to make the player experience better, actually what we're offering should still be generally attractive to a reasonably sized potential player base...

    For context on the technical side of things, we've currently for 87 tickets outstanding in Jira, with around 20 of those which we've "Selected for Development" meaning they're what we're doing next, and a lot of those are around fixing bugs and trying to improve the stability, and looking at some of the commands that are currently blocked which potentially no longer need to be.

    I'm open to peoples suggestions, but as James has said, getting a content creator to make video's about the server is going to be hard unless they as a creator genuinely enjoy playing on the server, otherwise it's a lot of $$$ for probably very little return on investment.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    Here's my thoughts on this problem.

    We are called TotalFreedom, however although we are advertised as free-op, we are not actually free-op, according to our ESL.

    If we're not actually 'free op' then why the hell are we advertising it like that? It's false advertising and it's something we need to either enhance or let go. If we want even a chance at getting a stable player base once again we really need to sort out what our server is actually meant to be, because it's not what it's advertised as.

    An issue I've noticed is players get sanctioned for things that don't even harm the server. This is why I opened the suggestion regarding 'spamming commands' - if we didn't punish OPs for things that don't harm the server, I'm sure our playerbase would be more stable. The sanctions should be lighter in my opinion, instead of 24 hours it should be a simple time of 3-6 hours, before a full 24 is done for things like griefing.

    Our ESL team isn't even doing well, I'm sorry to hate on you guys but I really don't think our current ESL team is good for right now, when we need an increase in players. The fact that Luke had to ask Wild about the ESL log to be updated just indicates that nothing is actually being done. Darth keeps complaining of no funds, well why not try to raise some? Yes this job isn't easy but if you're not gonna do anything why not get someone else to take over? We need a better, temporary ESL team for now up until our player base is steady at ~30+ players. I find it strange how it takes just one week for a new server like URF to hit the same amount of daily new players as TF. It's clear that not enough, if any work, is being done to help the playerbase.

    That's just my two cents on the issue.

    Quote

    @Ashaz#5703 We are called TotalFreedom, however although we are advertised as free-op, we are not actually free-op, according to our ESL.

    I mean we are, at least from the backend side, every player is actually opped. It's not false advertisement.

    @Panther#5786

    Your idea is decent but I feel that HD heads are just another trend right now. If we can market it quick enough, we can maybe achieve a good amount of players.

    One issue we have is that we keep advertising the small trends and not the main picture. We keep advertising plugins like carz, worldedit and bending but we don't have a solid view of TF. We're selling the idea of a fun server with a lot to do but.. what fun can you actually do?