Recon9
Developer
Dev Team
Dev Leads
Los Santos Police Command
Los Santos NHS
Los Santos Police Trainer
Los Santos NHS Training
Los Santos Senior Firefighter
- Location
- Los Santos
Time to Purge
This year we thought we would announce it in advance as there was a lot of confusion about if and when there would be a halloween main event last time around. After a pretty successful night last year we will be hosting another purge event this year on Friday October 31st from 18:00 and it usually goes until early into the next morning. We might have a restart around midnight to help with server performance depending on how were doing. This shouldn't affect us much as items and location etc. will be persisted over that restart. From the 09:00 restart onwards, everything will be back to normal.
We've taken into account the lessons learned from last year's event and all the feedback provided on the 2024 purge aftermath thread. I can't promise that everything will be implemented exactly as mentioned, but we will do our best to make it an even more enjoyable night. If you have any further small suggestions please read the thread thoroughly before posting them to avoid duplicate or conflicting ideas.
More details will come throughout the next few days but let me already answer a few questions.
Booooring! Why the purge again?
Some people might call it the lazy option, and frankly to a degree it is, but let me clarify a little bit what I mean with that:
- We have to be somewhat sensible and balance development time with the enjoyment/value the community gets out of this. It's important to consider that a new event each year means a lot of development time spent on one night, and not everyone will be there for that night.
- A new and unique event like we did a few years ago with squid games is fun, but it took roughly a month of development and testing and we still had massive server crashes and various other issues on the night of the event because we can never test it with the player numbers that we get on the night of the event.
- I think people somewhat underestimate how much effort can go into building something completely new; especially if you want to spend the time to test and make sure it runs smoothly. For instance, taking last years purge event, bringing the code up to date with all the changes (close to 5k commits) to the server since then and adding some of the relatively small changes from the feedback we received is likely to already take about a week's worth of development time and it's nice to be able to "re-use" large parts of that invested time each year.
- The purge is tried and tested, of course there will always be issues but each year we run it, we try and gather feedback and make improvements, plus from a server performance side we have much more information when we rerun an event vs. running a new one each year.
- A lot of positive feedback from last year, I know we will never be able to please everyone at once, but we're aiming for pleasing most with a relatively low amount of work.
Why no RP event?
- We've decided to keep the events that require a lot of dev work (essentially the main halloween event) limited to what we already have in an effort to save time.
- There are always still roleplay events in the weeks before halloween, and anyone is open to still run more roleplay oriented events throughout the night.
- It's very hard to run roleplay oriented events that are fun for the whole server (especially considering a lot of people in the same place causes performance issues).
- The purge is meant to be a relaxing, fun night, that doesn't affect your usual RP story where you can kinda jump in at every moment (with progressive loot chances this year that should be even more possible).
- Though it's not the original goal of the purge we do often see that after the first 2 hours or so, people start RP'ing a little bit more and little unique scenarios and stories evolve. Please keep doing this and we will keep rewarding it with extra in-game drops and rare items. Good roleplay will still always be rewarded. I don't know if its the fact that there is no pressure to roleplay, or no consequences on character progression but last year I saw some of the funniest, creative and silly roleplay during the late hours of the Purge Event.
How do I Prepare?
- You don't, we'll as usual run off a separate database so nothing you do before the event will affect the outcome of the event and nothing you do after will affect your progression after the event is over.
- If you are a part of NHS or G6 your command will reach out to you as we will be doing a similar Combat Medic + G6 protection setup.
- It doesn't matter what character you play (unless ur G6 or NHS and want to participate from that aspect).
Hope everyone is excited!
The Devs!
