There's been talk before about having a server with no rules on RDM and a stricter karma ban threshold, the way TTT was intended to be played. Instead of monitoring every kill to decide if it's valid, you get karma bans before hitting 600 and you have to be careful who you kill. You'll still have an incentive to not kill random people because of karma bans, but you'll have more freedom to kill people who act suspicious.
Could be tested on a one time event server or as a special event on the main server to see how people like it and adjust the karma threshold/karma ban length to fit the gameplay.
I have proposed running a test server to see how this would play out. The creator of TTT, Bad King Urgrain, stated in a post
here.
"
This has always been a challenge in designing the game because on one hand I want to encourage chaos, because it can be funny as hell. At the same time, if a random person just shoots everyone they see every round it stops being fun very quickly. I’ve tried to strike a balance there with the Karma system to let the game do some moderation of its own, but most public servers have very strict rules going on that I don’t particularly like. It cuts off some interesting gameplay if you just have an admin slay everyone who shoots the wrong person. At the same time, servers have to deal with trolls and bad players. It’s a problem I have not been able to solve [...]"
I think it would be interesting to spin up a separate server, with a lot of the rules stripped (GBA, no killing on sus, etc.) and seeing how it plays out and getting feedback from players about the gameplay experience. In TTT, you ARE supposed to kill based off of suspicion. Now does that mean we have to draw a line somewhere where there is "reasonable suspicion"? Maybe just killing someone and saying "you were sus" is still a slay but if a player died since a reasonable amount of time and has the same weapon, maybe allow that. People who t-bait are allowed, thats what adds to the "chaos" that TTT was designed with. If people are constantly t-baiting however and runing the karma of others, do we then ban for toxic gameplay? This is where the problem starts to come from. Then again, the karma system is meant to handle these type of trigger-happy players. Do we simply only slay for obvious RDM? DarkRP has the same problem with things like NLR and FailRP. FPtje has said DarkRP is meant to be messed around with, not super serious. At one point he had a message print in the console of every player who joined with a rant expressing his frustration with how DarkRP is hyper-moderated with admin sits and server MOTDs with a forum thread with multi-post list of rules. Like Bad King Urgrain stated, I think there needs to be a healthy balance since as we know, GMod can bring some great players but also some bad apples.
I imagine a lot of the backlash comes from the fact that if you are picked as a Traitor, these type of suspicion-based kills is going to bring about a bad day. However I propose a counterpoint, which is that we all feel this way because we've only played TTT like this. It also comes from a single-point perspective, where we feel that if the rules are reduced, that it will only affect us. However with a rule revision, it will affect the entire gameplay and feel of the server and not single a single person out. If everyone is playing a more relaxed enviorment rather than constantly worrying if they can kill based on GBA, no single person will feel targetted and maybe everyone would adjust to this new gameplay style.
This is the way TTT was created, and it is interesting to think about how most servers have made TTT (as well as other gamemodes like DarkRP) into this super-serious, rule based, X Y Z gameplay style. Our community is really great, but playing TTT with a list of rules isn't the same as coming home, hopping on Battlefield/Fortnite/CoD and being able to shoot, kill, and play the game without a laundry-list of rules. Thats why they are games people like to play when they get home; they're simple and to the point, no fear of punishment based on your play style.
I really would like to run this experiment. If the time ever comes, I think it would be great to revise rules based off what we see.
