Leaderboard

We will be allowing people to upload their own textures for vests when they become verified. This has already been in talks inside the Faction Team and already have a plan in place and a lot of the MC faction leaders are already aware of the plans the modding and faction team have ☺️

Hey everyone, Hope everyone's doing well and getting ready for the holiday season. December was always special around LS-RP, I remember all the treasure hunts and winter/Christmas events we used to hold. I'm looking forward to seeing something like that in-game again as we celebrate the season... next year. It's been quite challenging over the last few months to keep track of the remaining work. Trying to keep tabs on all the features in my brain has proven quite inefficient, so instead of trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing and which features are left to develop or test, we made a list. This list itemized every single outstanding feature or activity we've yet to complete before the server is launch-ready. As I was compiling this list a few weeks ago I realized that even that isn't enough. Really, is the trucking system the same as a phone call? Much different; so we started adding estimates to everything. 4 hours to finish phone calls, 16 hours to finish trucking, 2 hours here 4 there and so on. I've done estimations on an enterprise level in the past and it's a known secret that at the start of the project, unless you have a thorough specification, they're just made up numbers. Nobody knows and everyone's guess is meaningless, you're just working in a ballpark. Since we're nearing the end of the initial development, we're in a different position and it's much easier for us to list out all the things we've yet to do. So we've done that, and estimated how much it'll take. Based on these numbers, we realized that we've underestimated the amount of work remaining when we scheduled the release for Q4 2021. With the rest of the leadership, we were facing the following options: Option 1: Release in Q4 2021. We release in Q4 2021, as late as possible, but still meet the deadline. This gives us the pros of keeping up on our promise and taking advantage of the hype the LS-RP project currently has. The downside of this option is that we'd be releasing a game mode without a lot of important features and with a lot of potential bugs, since we'd have to be adding new features all the way to the launch date. Lacking features and bugs will result in a disappointed community and a potential loss of players. Option 2: Postpone the release for the 2nd time. We delay the release a bit. This allows us to work on features we deem essential but didn't manage to complete just yet. We have enough time to properly test these features (shoutout to our staff by the way - you've done amazing job testing so far). The dreaded disadvantage of going with this option is that we won't deliver on our promise that we'd release Q4, which can lead to the community being disappointed, leading to a potential loss of players. Which one would you choose? Let me know. Since we started deliberating postponing again, I had to go back and read my statement when we had to postpone to Q4. Here's a quote from that post: As I'm reading that I realize that we're in the very same situation now - how come though? Did nothing change since September? There's been no major inactivity for any of the devs or leads, or any "major roadblocks" I could think of that'd cause this delay. I tried to identify the reasons why we're delaying again and this is what I got: - We underestimated the amount of work remaining. The estimate that we should be done by Q4 was not backed by any real numbers, but rather a "gut feeling". - We've added new things to the scope for release. Those things were usually features which we deemed essential but forgot about them early on; or were only made aware of them now. - We spent a lot of time focusing on detail and polish of existing features. - Personal and professional obligations of the team, although this one was kept to a surprising minimum during Q4. After hours of deliberation, we chose option 2. We've taken several steps to make sure this is the last date we give you. We wanted to work towards a concrete date instead of a vague time range ("summer", "q4"). - As mentioned previously, we made an itemized of all remaining features and activities until we're release-ready. - We've added a estimate in hours to every remaining item or activity. - We're accounting for a % of risk dedicated to fixing bugs and unforeseen difficulties. This risk is currently set to 10%. - We've created metrics to monitor whether we're ahead of, or behind schedule. This allows us to play with the scope and reevaluate our current assignments if we're falling behind schedule. Based on these steps and metrics, we came up with the official release date of LS-RP:V on February 24th, 2022. Community Involvement With the release being postponed by just a bit over month and a half, we're looking for ways to keep the community engaged with what we're doing. Here's some milestones you can look forward to in the near future: - Character Customization made available ahead of launch, first for Patrons and later for the general public. - Character Applications made available ahead of launch to the general public. - Staff Reinstatements opening ahead to get ready for launch. The concrete dates of each will be announced separately at one point or another; but we're aiming to release the character customization server this week. There's a few more things we've up our sleeves to keep the community engaged, but I don't want to announce them just yet as they're not as thought through as the rest. If you have any ideas yourself, my inbox is always open. Progress Update I'll try to include a progress update where it makes sense when I write these posts. This should give you the idea of where we are in terms of the schedule and how much work is remaining in different parts of the code. Here's the current status: I've been on a mission to be as transparent as reasonably possible during the development of LS-RP:V. I had a lot to learn from the SA-MP days and I sincerely hope that the information we give you is keeping you excited during the wait; whether it's snippets, blog posts or just random talks on Discord. It's hard at times as we don't want to give away too much for several reasons. Sharing this progress update is yet another step in trying to balance out communication, element of surprise and competitive advantage. Closing Statement I understand any and all feelings of frustration at the announcement today. It's not fun news, but at the same time it's good news. It allows us to work on delivering what we've initially set out to make. I'd like to express my gratitude to the entire staff team who has been actively engaging in improving the server's features and standing behind the project the whole time; to the patrons who keep our infrastructure bills on time and to the community for believing in the project. Thank you for being understanding. If you'd like to be closer to the action, consider joining our discord at https://discord.gg/ls-rp, where we post snippets of our work. Kind regards and happy holiday season, Mmartin on behalf of LS-RP Staff

We did have a general idea of who was in the gang and it wasn't really our goal to arrest as much people as some people would think we wanted to, having been apart of it myself we honestly moved away from it because of how unrealistic the RP surrounding it became. Especially coming from some of the 'teen' rpers who really would have some sense of fear considering they not even a gang member would try to stand clear. They tend to get involved and ultimately suffered those consequences. And personally I don't think the injunctions were enjoyable because again the lack of fear or the quality of RP surrounding the injunction was just awful. Killing cops pointlessly, if you knew you got an injunction on you'll probably try to keep things on the low which was the opposite of what was happening. But I stand with the cops and the illegal roleplayers and keeping my fingers crossed that both side of the spectrum could improve significantly in that aspect and the RP surrounding such. As a supervisor within GND, I can attest that in most cases we rarely arrested unless we knew you were confirmed or tatted, but most of the time if you were caught with a known gang member. You being frisked and ID'ed was all for documenting purposes. But like I said previously, our goal with most injuctions were to create positive interactions and hopefully a realistic environment under those circumstances. But most importantly when they were issue, specific guidelines were asked to be followed as our main purpose for them weren't solely to get arrest.

True. I think one thing LEO factions have to put more effort in is creating the injunction for people who are certainly members and people who are with them. Say it's a group of people, two of five are in the injunction list and three of them are not. They'd still be arrested for breaking the injunction terms, because people are not to hang around with the ones on the list. I think a list of that sort was in-deed created for 38ST injunction, but I could be wrong. I do see where you are coming from though. Injunctions shouldn't be on absolutely any black person or mexican in the territory, just known gang members and people who associate with them.

The main issue I saw with you guys and injunctions is you usually tried to enforce the injunction on the entire faction, instead of just on people they knew for sure are gang members. Usually when an injunction is filed, there's a specific list of individuals that it pertains to, and not just a whole neighborhood in general.

We've always tried to keep it as realistic as possible when it came to rping injunctions however the roleplay surrounding them lacked severely which at some points resulted in us not even wanting to push for them. But I'm sure that will change in the future for both sides of the fence.

You're talking about years ago, and not in recent times. As we said before, it's very easy to criticize something from the outside looking in. What people often didn't see is people spending hours online waiting for a call, to get dispatched out finally, only to arrive on scene and have the player accept death immediately. That is very demotivating. This is a more niche area of roleplay. We're not law enforcement officers, we're not out patrolling the streets, we don't have the ability to just interact with people on a traffic stop, or other altercation. We're there when there's a fire, which due to the server rules, was rare, or in the case of medical emergencies that could be handled within our scope. Many people were salty over losing a shootout, and would often rush through medical roleplay, or PM us to tell us to hurry, or they'd AFK / force a crash to avoid the medical roleplay, simply because they didn't want to do it. During my time in the faction I've had members request fires a multitude of times, and when we had Admins available, they were so excited to participate. In the days of old, when I first joined in 2019, and before that, there was a certain lack of interest in the firefighting side. That changed with Genny becoming the Chief, and with the current team we have now. They're very dedicated, and have all contributed to a more equal interest in each half of our faction. We're a Fire Department, but we can't force players to be arsonists, just as you can't force people in real life to be arsonists. Even for our real life-counterpart, 75% of the LAFD's calls are medical based. We're a service to the public in their time of need, we can't force people to injure themselves, we're there in case of emergency. It's to be expected that we'll have slower shifts, and sometimes people don't realize how slow it'll be, which is why we always encouraged passive roleplay between faction members. This wasn't always obtainable because of different time zones, but it's a game, and we made do with what we could. Players might not always have an entire day to play the game. So if an Admin started a fire without checking that FD had enough units on, to see them log off "immediately after the 911 call", then that's to be expected. Clear communication between faction and Administration would be needed for a pre-set fire. And as I said, waiting hours for calls only to be left with nothing can be demotivating. I'm speaking from experience when there were never any active Firefighters on when I'd first joined, in my time zone and play time at least. Genny and I have worked very hard in conjunction with our current team to get everyone in a much more active state. The server itself was lower on activity in the months leading up to its closing, so with a slower server, it wasn't always guaranteed to have bustling shifts every single day. You're also probably thinking of the old days of training. I've personally been responsible for recruitment and training for the last year. Nothing was ever copy/pasted, nor was it in the year before that when Genny was leading it. She and I always made it personal, and interacted with everyone involved. Trainings are detailed enough that players can comprehend what is to be expected of them on-duty should they graduate, whether or not they have any prior medical knowledge or experience. You were a recruit during my time, but had left the server shortly into your time in FD, so you didn't get to see much of the current faction from an insider's perspective. You left the faction on January 12th of 2020—nearly two years ago. You never joined the Training and Support Bureau either, so you didn't get to see the manuals for the division which I personally wrote. Genny and I disallowed copy and paste formats, as we wanted each class to be personal, and unique to the class at hand. While the material was the same at its base, you'd never experience the same class twice, just because of how different each recruit was. No two recruits asked the same question in the same way, and some would roleplay more in-depth, while others wouldn't, which just comes with the territory of a roleplay community. As for the length, we can only go by what was done on SAMP. The EMT classes took anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how fast recruits would type, or how much they wanted to participate and engage in banter with the instructor(s). There is a lot to go over, and the majority of it is typing, because you need to explain the core of medical scenes, and explain everything that comes with handling them. Our firefighting classes took anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, again depending on the recruits' participation, and how much they wanted to hear from or talk with instructors. One of our Captains who is in TSB was very dedicated, and enjoyed giving everyone more detailed lectures, and encouraged a back and forth Q&A session before or after each class. Academies are a crucial part of the faction's foundation, because these classes allow a safe and comfortable environment for recruits to learn the ropes, without the fear of being shot by some random gangster, or having their screen flooded with a bunch of random text that has nothing to do with their learning experience. This gives them a sense of what to expect from the faction before they're in the Field Training Program phase, so they'll be less overwhelmed when their first shift comes about. Genny and I are adamant on maintaining a personalized academy experience with the upcoming V server. Nothing will ever be a copy/paste! 🙂