I think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point of the Halloween event.
The purpose of the Halloween event was not to be a massive event. It was to add some new content to the server to keep the server lively until our Winter event, which is our biggest one of the year. In this regard, it went better than I'd hoped. If anyone was here for October - November 2021, they'd remember how dead the TTT server was. Getting the server past 10 players was a struggle, and there were many days where the server just didn't get popped. We've managed to avoid that so far, which makes me even more optimistic for this year's Winter event because it means we'll actually have momentum going into it.
Infected actually was fully tested on the dev server. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but sometimes shit happens. While I acknowledge that Infected had a rough rollout, it was fixed up and tuned within a few days. That's pretty good for a fun round that'll be in rotation for the rest of AHG.
As much as community members liked the Grimwon fun round, my experience with the boss battle we did last year and as a new player on SGM in October 2020 was that it's really bad for retaining new players. It's frustrating when people are trying to play TTT and every 1-2 maps there's a fun round where a lead admin just massacres the entire server. Infected is a "democratized" version of the Grimwon fun round - every player gets a chance to be in on the action, and no one is stuck sitting for 5+ minutes waiting for the round to end. Infected also encourages people to work together, just like the Grimwon fun round.
With regards to weapon skins, everyone still has 18 days to do those challenges. I maintain that they're all doable within that time frame. The rationale behind making the number of kills really high was to encourage people to chip away at the weapon skins throughout the event, rather than just sweating it up and getting 100 kills within the first few days and never logging on again. Also, "weapons that no one use"? We want to have weapon skins available for every gun. I think it's a good thing to incentivize players to use guns that they normally wouldn't have touched. I do acknowledge that the perception of the weapon skins being unachievable could be negatively affecting participation. It makes sense to me that people might get burned out of using a different weapon than they're used to. I hope, HOPE, to fix this in the winter event by having more weapon skins available
Now, in defense of using weapon kills - in my experience, weapon kills are a much better indicator of actually playing the game than SGM's approach (time spent on the server plus a high point cost). Plus, it forces you to actually use the weapon you're getting a skin for. However, there probably is a better way to do them than just weapon kills. We never really got around to doing this because it would mean rewriting the entire weapon skin achievement code. Now that there's appetite from the community for something new, I've been planning out how to accomplish this. Here's my ideas so far, and I'm open to hearing other suggestions:
- A weapon skin that is unlocked by getting a valid kill on N different maps
- A weapon skin for signing up on the forums (no premium rank required)
- A weapon skin for joining the Discord (no premium rank required)
Lastly, on custom content being lacking - it's a work in progress. I don't think people realize how much work adding
good quality custom content is. For example, adding a single player model to the server is probably about two hours of work - and that's assuming everything goes well. For just one player model, I have to
- Download the model from the workshop.
- Go through each VTF file in the model to make sure they're appropriately sized. Many of them aren't, so I have to export them to PNG, run them through an upscaling algorithm that cleans up VTF decompression artifacts, resize it and pack it back into a VTF.
- Decompile the model, then open it in HLMV to make sure the hitboxes are good. If the hitboxes aren't good, that's even more time spent.
- Upload the model to the dev server and workshop addon.
- Write the pointshop code to make the model available to players.
- Test the model on the dev server.
- Deploy it to the live server.
- Listen to people complain about the model or ask when a different model will be added.
I'm sorry our event did not meet your high standards. If you're interested in making the Winter event better, give us concrete ideas instead of just calling something a "total flop".
