I hate typing up these essays but here I go anyway
Communication is a big one. For a long time now, staff have left the community in the dark. I'm not sure how things are on other servers like wasteland/I&A/and the other games like SE and rust which straya run. But with Alits Life, its as if staff just don't want to communicate. But, I have seen a slight improvement on this in the past few days. Myself and a few other guys have been using community lounge lately, and often some AL staff would come down and chat, and they gave us info on things regarding the update, which was good. I personally would like to see more of that. But if I were to do it, instead of only coming on TS for it, I would prefer if staff did forum posts. A forum post that says around when to expect an update, for example - In May expect an update. And also hyping the community up about it. Maybe start doing more update videos like they did with one of the update last year, that was good. I understand sometimes its hard to give a time on an update, because staff cant focus on things like that 24/7, because of IRL things, and that's understandable. But I don't think it would hurt if a staff member just made a quick forum post which would say "yeah were working on an update, were currently looking into adding this content". I don't expect staff to give an exact date on an update, but just knowing that something is being worked on, is nice to know. But yeah more communication would be good, and keeping it consistent as well.
Lack of players. Yeah this has been an issue for quite some time now. Unfortunately a very large chunk of the community have left over the past few months. The community right now basically consists of 2 small syd gangs, and 4 - 6 cops. With these numbers, all that's been happening is a quick and boring game of cops vs robbers in Sydney. Now I believe there's many different issues for the lack of players. No enjoyable content for civs/rebels, lack of updates/communication, no end goal for rebels, some cases where people get banned for the smallest rule breaks, people breaking rules and getting themselves banned, people going up to HD every second to get people banned, no enjoyable combat/rp for rebels/civs. And I'm sure there's heaps more, because if you've played this server long enough, you'll know its had and still has lots of issues. If I were to suggest anything to fix it, I would say start with releasing this new update ASAP, and then staff need to establish certain routines. Start with a post that asks for suggestions from the community. Then gather a list of a few of those suggestions, and make a poll for it. See what the community wants. Polls have been done before and they worked quite well. Letting the community as a whole decide what to put in, is good. Yes there will be some suggestions not everyone will agree on. But from the way I see it, as long as your giving content to all factions, then it should work. Give rebels their content for combat, and give civs their content for their rp, same with cops and medics. There's so much that can be added, and people can come up with some great ideas, so actively listening to the community's requests and suggestions is a really good start. Those polls should be done at least 2-3 times each month. Doesn't have to be an update every 2-3 weeks, but having regular polls is good, so staff can get a good idea of what everyone wants. I understand sometimes updates cant be done in certain time periods cause of certain reasons staff may have, and that's understandable, but It doesn't take long to read some suggestions, and make a poll for. Its a nice quick way of getting suggestions for a future update.
These sorts of posts come up every year. There's always a stage where the player base goes down. But this round has been one of the worst from what I know. Unfortunately most people have given up on the server, which I can understand, I've been tempted to do the same. But I don't want the server to shut down, because it used to be a great server, and I would like to continue playing on it when I do have some spare time. But there needs to be some serious changes, if the server is going to survive. So I hope staff take these suggestions into consideration, and make use of it.