I'm finally suggesting this because I don't want to be misinterpreted, and it seems that no one else will.
Simply put, VIPs are overpowered and complacent. It's blatantly obvious that we have access to overpowered weapons, most of us simply for paying a few bucks years ago. Most games I play offer paid weapons that aren't all-around better, but give someone abilities that allow them to play differently, but don't necessarily make them much more powerful, if at all.
It used to be more this way, pre-lagcomp. Snipers were useful if someone was standing around, but that was about it. Even if you were very good at lead-aiming, they simply weren't that great. Chainsaws remain the same; they still require aiming ahead and a target that either makes a costly mistake or is unlucky. Back then, I wanted to be a VIP because I wanted to mod my cars.
This is no longer the case. The elephant in the room in this debate is the sniper. It went from "meh" to "dominate most people in range without one" once lagcomp was enabled. I don't like lag-comped snipers. I don't care who has them, I think they're way too overpowered. Few VIPs seem to see this as a problem, because "hey that's what we paid for, right?". The sniper is basically impossible to escape except by getting out of line-of-sight if someone has reasonable aim, it takes down way too much health, it stuns you on foot so you get hit even more when you're trying to escape, it pops tires with a shot, this list goes on and on. There is no real disadvantage.
This is fucked up. The point of having VIPs is to fund the server, and in exchange, give the people funding it some cool stuff. The ideal VIP donor (not customer) wants the server to succeed and grow, and the donation system rewards that without fucking up the server. The current VIP system doesn't do this. It allow the subset of players which has money to waste to become far more powerful than the rest. The server may gain funding, but for the wrong reasons and with bad effects. Instead of having a nicely-funded, fair server, we have a nicely-funded server with some non-VIPs for the VIPs to use as sniper target practice, and other VIPs for the VIPs to play against. Yes, it's possible to play as a non-VIP against VIPs, but it's not fun (unless you're like me, and enjoy being at a disadvantage) and often makes it painfully obvious that "paying for VIP" often means "paying for success"
We also have a VIP section on the forum, in which additional toys and advantages are suggested for players who contributed once to the server, without any input from the players they'd like to use them against. This is what we've created:
I had a friend who tried PTP out because I asked him time and time again. And he did. And he quit, because according to him, the VIPs are "too OP".
When discussing the possible removal of TransFender ingame, I was told
We are making those features disable for other player to increase the demand of VIP
We now have VIPs spouting bullshit to basically keep the advantages to themselves, as (1)[H]nZ88 points out.
In my opinion, this is the wrong approach. I've seen talk of removing /holiday eng and decreasing the M4 skill for the police, which all just stinks of people trying to get snipers even stronger than they already are. With every change one should make sure that players are on a somewhat level playing field. If that is not the case, the non-vip playerbase will decrease and keep decreasing. If there's no non-vips then there's noone left to buy VIP, if that makes sense. I've dealt with the same issue in other games and I've seen servers where they massively overbuff VIPs which leads to a declining playerbase.
I am the one who suggested removing /holiday eng and decreasing M4 skill, and while I still stand behind those suggestions, I agree that we need bigger changes before we can even get into making smaller adjustments like those. While I resent being lumped in as someone looking to increase VIP vs. non-VIP inequality, I'm not surprised that it happened, given the VIP culture nowadays. (1)[H]nZ88 is right- we should be trying to fix the inequality issue, and I have been part of the problem by dancing around it in my suggestions. If we don't, at a basic level it just mean and small-minded, but at a higher level, we hurt the server that our donations were intended to help.
TL;DR:What do I think we should do about the unfairness? I think we have at least two reasonable courses of action for the weapons problem:
- Make overpowered weapons less powerful through scripting and/or by turning them into pickups so they aren't always available.
OR
- Disable lagcomp, since it doesn't make sense with the gamemode anyway and made the sniper extremely overpowered.
I know removing fast skins was also proposed and nixed by Jonne, but I think they're pretty obviously unfair and I think that it should be reconsidered. If anyone's got other ideas, post them below. If anyone thinks that it's unreasonable to remove or make some VIP features more fair, remember that the purpose of donation is to help the server, not to help you. Also keep in mind that while you may be a fantastic player, it doesn't really show it off that well if you frequently use an obviously overpowered VIP feature that you paid for against players who don't have access to it.
