>/vg/'s coders are almost all the same faces as they used to be, say, 5 years ago
Total bullshit.
You need only look on their kikehub. Out of old faces (5+ years old), only the following have commited
anything in the past year: d3athrow (the host), DeityLink, Kurfursten, ShiftyRail, SonixApache, boy2mantwicethefam, Exxion. Out of nearly a hundred contributors. And even of those, most are singular commits as opposed to the hundreds of commits yearly five years prior.
First of all, contributors page is really not an indicator of anything as it's sorted by the amount of contributions and thus an absolute majority of people actually shown there are history. People moving on and others taking their place is normal and only leads to cultural shift if said culture is not upheld by the oldfags that stuck around (which it was on /vg/).
Second of all, you are just wrong and I could already find more people than that contributing in 2024 by quickly skimming through that list (examples 1, 2, 3). There are definetly a lot of active coders, or at least enough for a server/codebase of their size.
Third of all, you didn't take into account the quality of coders itself. You can't just read through their github and accuse any one of them of trannyfying/ruining the codebase like with TG. Even the bad PRs that rarely do appear either get filtered (
all the bad faith PRs made by a french faggot admin ShiftyRail), modified post-merge (Dorms plushie vendor PR fixes
1,
2) or, at absolute worst, reverted (
Europalights that made the server unplayable for a whole month). Also a great deal of contributions comes from randoms or insignificant coders because that's how open source works.
Fourth of all, no really game-changing shit that would've made the server unrecognisable from itself just several years prior ever occured. Gamemodes changed, some balancing changed, a lot of various cool mechanics got added but nothing that would've lead to complete loss of identity like TG's over 9000 different respritings and UI changes, rebalancings, total deletions/replacements of recognisable game elements, etc. The server changed, but kept its soul.
It's a shambling corpse of a server which has completely cycled through their own userbase at least twice.
The oldfags are all gone.
[citation needed]
More importantly, they now leave the server up on the Hub, and it's safe to assume the majority of the pop comes from there now.
We too keep the server on the hub and it's not at all a problem. Gatekeeping is important, but so is preventing things from getting stale. You need to balance these things out. I'd say for now it's working out just as good for us as it is for them - majority of the players are actually regulars, with a few curious pubbies stumbling into the server and maybe sticking around.
>20-40 people
I have no idea what server you're actually playing on, because currently I see 2 people online. And that's the case for all but unscheduled peak times.
Just because they only play in a timeframe of ~4-10 PM EST doesn't mean their server is dEaD!!1 Riviera only launching once per week is not a sign of it being a dead server, it's just a sign of a smaller population that's not enough to keep the server packed 24/7. Now, whether or not that's due to things outside of staff's control or not really depends, but I'd say it's mostly due to the former. It's not /vg/station shitmins' fault that 4chan has gotten so cancerous and unusable that /ss13g/ thread can't exist on a /vg/ board anymore, just like it's not gecko's fault that Null threw in the towel with SS13 a while ago and doesn't stream it.
And it's most definetly NOT theirs or ours fault that, despite "SS13" entry on BYOND hub having a playercount as big as ever, the number of people actually playing Space Station 13 and not ERPing/playing SS13-based offshoots has undoubtedly plummeted through the bottom.
