Hi there, I'm Mimepride. Long time lurker, first time poster.
Let me start off by suggesting the most sapient post in this entire thread, for anyone who is interested:
► Show Spoiler
Reasons I believe tanked Sybil:
- QC bans also taking the friends of the QC banned with them, reducing population far more than intended
- Weighted random and pop requirements for specific maps leading to death spirals of unpopular maps, which for the most part also have not changed
- Sybil admins are gone, current candidate system makes it hard to get new ones / Sybil's population doesn't want be admins for the most part or have been rejected
- Wallening
- Lack of interesting shake-ups to gameplay in quite a while, widespread public perception that coders don't care what LRP players want and will actively change the game to please MRP / spite LRP (gas mask fov was a big one)
- Low pop begets low pop
- No Manuel discord server equivalent to organize voices in order to get behind one banner to push for changes (I don't want a Sybilcord, but Manuelcord certainly does have its leverages)
Its also not like these people are gone either, because in the short duration Wallstation was up a lot of Sybil players were present. Its pretty clear to me Sybil players are actively waiting in the wings waiting for something to go their way for once, I don't think anything will. Ideally, server leadership opens up discussions with the Sybil playerbase and specifically the Sybil playerbase to air grievances and maybe we can find some compromise of sorts. Problem is, half of these issues are code-related, which is separated from the server and thus it would be a matter of convincing head-coders/maintainers to agree to make changes as well.
The above post is straight facts. So let me continue with some facts from last year: Last summer sybil would often reach 100 players on a weekend, and every single weeknight usually had between 40-70 people playing at various times of the night. For the first time last week, I saw 0 people playing on Sybil on a weeknight during what was once peak hours. How can anyone who knows just how utterly popular sybil once was not say "Man. What happened?"
Well a lot, actually. But first let me counter a common narrative I've heard from XZero314, Dendy, and in this particular thread ItzRhiums: that it was the LRP culture of rule 4 antags which actively contributed to the migration of some Sybil regulars to Manuel. Well, the way I see the loss of XZero and ItzRhiums to Manuel is not in a negative way whatsoever:
We were always going to lose people who think the way you guys do; I call that acceptable losses, because me? Personally? I transitioned from Fulp MRP to Sybl LRP and I can tell you, that I HATE restricted antagonists(and I refuse to do anything on manuel besides observe or play some ghost role where I know I won't get bwoinked). I've been there and done that, and this freewheeling spirit--the desire to do whatever the fuck you want with your antagonist round without having to ask for divine permission from Admins, is the very spirit of LRP at it's core. If you feel differently, then MRP is and always was going to be the place for you.
That really didn't address why that argument doesn't actually hold water when it comes to broad population loss though. In fact, this assumption rests on the fact that murderboning PVP elite gaymers are killing the fun and RP out of the game. That's pretty funny considering that Sybil's pop decline began AFTER one of Sybil's most notorious murderboners got got by the admemes. Pop somehow managed to survive the murderbones of Reider, Axle, Dean, William Dornan, Komidore Amiga(ta), Gay Johnson, Alec Petrov, etc., for quite literally years. Moreover, the fact that Terry remains at a higher pop than Manuel regularly does again suggests that murderboning isn't a major contributor with respect to long term player loss(short term player loss is another story), since it too has a cast of murderboning characters that we all love to attempt to survive, kill or watch while dead. So yeah, I just don't buy it Rhiumz, sorry. Pop-chasing, weighted-random and perceived injustice regarding QC bans are all more convincing explanations as to why Sybil declined.
The first real sign of decline WAS directly after the Axle and Pepper blacklist. Suddenly Sybil lost it's afternoon and early evening player corps--going from ~20-30 people to just 10-20. Kendrickorium stopped playing about that time,for example. You could still catch a decent pop in the night time though. After Christmas and the establishment of the very much hated Weighted Random map voting system Sybil steadily declined. Stuck in an endless death spiral of Icebox, Birdshit, Tram--sometimes Meta. A lot of fucking birdshit--sometimes birdshit back to back for 3 hours total. Towards the end of spring, almost every single person in 25 pop Sybil would complain about Weighted Random voting for birdshit--and yet we would be gaslit and shown graphs showing that "It doesn't hurt pop guys--really!". Well, there is a statistic called satisfaction, and it can be rated and measured. Politicians literally live and die by voter approval--but here on this server? If the overwhelming majority of a server DOESNT want to play a particular map(or doesn't like a particular feature, more broadly), they are in fact entitled and just shitting on all the other maps. You only like Meta and Delta anyway, you dummies--didn't you know that without Weighted Random that only Meta and Delta would run? Before this glorious institution, you lived in the blindness of player choice--but we know better! BESIDES! The popular maps will still run for most of the time, so it's ok that the system is unfair, hated and in general pure fucking bullshit.
I remember how much fun I used to have trying to sabotage Kendrickorium's Icebox votes. They, likewise, would sabotage whatever map I'd vote for in order to try and get ricebox to win. It was good clean fun. It's amazing how much the voting system changed to spite players. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this was the order in which things occurred: first they removed rock the vote, so you were stuck with whatever map won first(regardless of the timing of the vote), then they switched to weighted random which robbed players of real agency(weighted random is the illusion of choice--it isn't real choice and that matters), then multiple map voting was removed, and THEN because people were getting upset by the obvious unfairness caused by a totally shitty map-voting system(where one person voting for a map can cause it to win), they began hiding the map voting results because they KNOW it's unfair and were sick of people complaining about it(spoiler: people still complain even though they can't see the %s anymore). I don't believe for a second that I'm being entitled when I say that those consecutive actions felt like a slap in the face to the player base. Weighted random sucks so much donkey dick that it would literally be more fair and more equitable to have absolutely no voting system, and instead for each map to play one after the other in sequence. But as MSO said, it's never going away--so whatever I guess.
Despite all this bullshit(by the way, it felt like Sybil was being targeted by the 2nd Admin term of 2023-2024, all of whom I still view negatively--just sayin'), there was cause to be optimistic. On the odd night, for maybe about 1-2 hours Sybil would sometimes reach 30-40 pop. In July, before the wallening merge, I played a sybil round with 50+ people, like in the good ol' days. It seemed like Sybil was slowly recovering, getting a sort of a new rhythm. Then the Wallening came. It's funny that people are saying that we should be happy that the players got such a massive W with respect to the Wallening controversy, because I don't feel like a winner. Sybil's pop has not recovered since the Wallening broadly damaged this server's population.
Sorry for the long post, but nobody had given a timeline of Sybil's decline yet, and you can't really do that in two sentences--regardless of how much people hate walls of text around these parts.
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. I'm not sure if this reply helped answer your question or if I did a poor job of even answering it at all. I'm hoping it's the former but if not, I'm willing to have a go at it again to see if I can explain it better.
