I’ve started wondering todays.
It’s true lots of people including me appreciate huge new things like lobby 3 and I’d never mean to discard them to return to older ones.
The thing is that actually such huge things like lobby 2 which lasted for years and meant a lot for lots of people as well matter too, and it is somewhat upsetting that now they are just in past and can’t be accessed anyhow.
Like, in real life many things in the world around us change and it’s often completely impossible to go back to just observe some old stuff.
But in terms of the games, it is kind of possible.
So I was thinking, like, what if devs could maybe make an exclusive TU server with the lobby 2? Just one, somewhere in US probably. It’s not necessary to make support for casino, laser tag, bowling and even minigames or condo lobby, I think, because these all are things we can (or will be able to in case with the condo lobby) experience in the regular Plaza.
UPD part here: considering what devs think about supporting it as a built-in part of the game, I may suggest that it could be a feature a player can enable by downloading the map via the workshop, and then run it with the warning in the servers list about it being a deprecated map with bugs and bad optimization, or have another work-around in that area developers might come up with.
But what’s important is that we’ll be able to observe the map itself, and I think everyone can agree that the map itself was a huge thing, and it was also beautiful and interesting in its own aspects. Being able to observe such big and old things, like we can do now in GMod Tower: Reunion, means a lot to me and, I suppose, to lots of other players who may be curious about what the big and mighty Plaza or GMT lobby looked like or have seen it and would like to see it again more than just having it their memories forever.
It could receive the christmas and/or halloween updates the same time as the regular Plaza or have it other ways devs would find easier, though even if holidays updates would not be presented, having at least its standard version to observe and explore would mean a lot.
So, like GMT:R nowadays, it could serve as at least a museum we could visit to observe things which were big and meaningful in past, and, I think, in this case it is one of most awesome things a game developing team can do for the players.
Thanks to anyone who has read this for the attention `:)
Lobby 2 was replaced for many reasons. It was incredibly unoptimised, barren, and large. The size of the map was made with the larger GMT servers and Source mobility in mind and thus did not transfer over well to Tower Unite. Not to mention that literally half the island was a barren wasteland (some of which being made of Textureless materials).
It was so overly large and weirdly laid out that Launchpads were installed to throw players across the Plaza so you didn’t have to spend two minutes walking.
While I know new players who missed Lobby 2 want to visit it, hosting a server for it 24/7 takes more resources than it’s worth imo. If anything, we’ll get a Lobby 2 Condo similar to Resort, but it may even be too large to function as a Condo map.
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I mean, of course I know why lobby 2 was bad as a map for Plaza. I was never asking to replace current one with it; what I talked about was having it preserved for the museum values, so that it wouldn’t be lost for everyone forever.
Your argument about hosting a server taking resources has a point. I think I was coming out of a thought that there are a lot of official servers which means that hosting just one wouldn’t be a lot of a trouble, but it may be, sure.
I think that if cost for hosting a server like this is an issue, it would be great if players could host it themselves, like a dedicated plaza server which is possible with lobby 3 right now. This way the game would only need to have the map itself installed in it. I think that if having a lobby 2 map installed in the client additionally would be a big cost memory-wise, it could be presented via the workshop for ones who wishes to visit it. This way the developers wouldn’t have problems like keeping the server up constantly or making the game heavier for everyone, I believe.
And of course I get that it is a certain amount of work to be done. But I would not need it to be done instantly, of course; it would be great if this would be just planned for the future, and someday we’d get the opportunity to visit this map again.
I’d like if Lobby 2 came back in some way, but it does seem like a lot of work for a throwback to a thing that was removed because the devs thought it wasn’t great
Also I think Caboose has already stated on the Discord that they’re not gonna do that because it’d be too much work to convert it into a condo
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Caboose made a great job on explaining it well enough. Unfortunately I didn’t get to ask about the last option I had in my head, so I decided to put it here through editing the thread (I only altered the name and added the edited part into the text, didn’t remove anything from it), which is about, er… making it through a workshop and giving a warning in the game?
Either way, of course I’m not trying to push some bad ideas and if devs think that this is a bad idea then they must be right. If something like what I am trying to suggest works out in the future, that will be stunning.