Leaderboard

Hey everyone, The last dozen or so posts we've made have been more or less pragmatic, to inform everyone about updates & what to expect next. It's been a while since I made a post about the server and its direction in general. I want to open a honest dialogue about where the server currently stands, and how we can move onwards and upwards from here. There's no sugar coating it — we're in a tough position right now, from multiple angles. The player base has been stable for quite a while, but took a major hit in the recent week or two. We had a day and a half of downtime recently caused by network issues and a DDOS attack, and after bringing the server back up we're seeing peak numbers that are lower than we had during the premium only pre-release. Saying it's sub optimal is putting it mildly. I will do my best to avoid any excuses and focus on facts, problems and solutions. If you ask ten people, you'll get ten reasons why the player base has declined. I'll dive into details of some of the issues we currently face. We've solutions for some of those problems, but I'd like to extend the discussion of how to handle some of these issues to you, the community, as well. Failure to manage expectations I feel that one of the issues we had from the beginning was our failure to manage the expectations. Handful of us worked on the gamemode for roughly two years, in the spare time we had when we felt like it and weren't working or otherwise busy. The aim from the beginning was to create a barebones MVP, which we could then expand on. I feel that I failed to communicate that, and as a result of that, a lot of the community expected us to be an equal competitor from day one. This led to a massive spike in interest initially, with the player base dwindling over time once more people realized that the experience we offer isn't as complete as they might need. Other players seeing the decline in player base could be another contributing factor to further decline. I feel like there isn't a simple solution for mismanaged expectations after the fact. I will use this as a much needed learning experience. Development not keeping up Another major contributor to the decline in morale and by proxy in player base is the way development progressed after release. We simply aren't doing enough to measure up. Initially, our main focus was on ensuring stability of the server and fixing critical issues post-release. We got some much-requested features out, but we haven't had more than a handful of completely new features come out since release. That's a major problem. With only a few exceptions (big shout out to Imperium, who has been carrying the team for the past month or so), the majority of our Development Team either became increasingly busy with work after release, or simply burned out. This was my case as well, as I started a new job in May and had to do a lot of adjusting and some travel; the time I had left was mostly spent on maintenance, handling technical issues, legal/biz aspect and managing the server as a whole. The timing was unfortunate, because we all knew that the real work begins post-launch to make sure the needs of our community are met. While some aspects of this can't be affected by me, I still came short — I failed to keep the development team motivated and to make sure people don't burn out. This, in the end, lead to some promises left behind, which is something I really wanted to leave in the SA-MP era. Unfortunate. There's several solutions that can be applied here. We'll be once again taking in more developers in the coming days to help us with the amount of work that needs to be done. I'll also look for a way to offload my work with managing the system infrastructure, so even fewer things are reliant solely on me and can be handled by another developer as well. Leadership & Communication I feel that a significant chunk of us in the core team (leadership, team leads and devs) switched to a coasting mode too quickly. We got comfortable and complacent. I believe that motivation and strength comes from top to bottom, and we as the leadership must do better to innovate, push forward, show face and communicate everything with the community. This became harder in the recent weeks and there's no other way about it, we simply must do better. Of course the list above isn't exhaustive. We're aware of the frequent shootouts, abundance of weapons in the server, frequent shootouts, jobs becoming stale, etcetera. We put together a two-week plan of action of things we'd like to accomplish. I'll share it with you, but please take it with a grain of salt as it may change and some things may be added, or taken out. Immediate (today/tomorrow) - Communicate the current state of the server (this post) - Add more developers to the team - Reach out to player-owned companies and factions to make sure they've everything they need - Reach out to admins regarding long report times, and not answering difficult reports Week 1 - Fix vehicle loan payments, and transfervehicle after paying off loan - Ability to "trade in" a leased vehicle, with the ability to get a % of your principal back - Add more clothing mods - Make Horsepower affect vehicle performance - Level requirement for equipping a weapon (across all characters) to curb DM - Add interior presets & interior change - Add separate group for /setprop access, so property reports aren't reliant on Leads - Adjust mechanic / vehicle part prices (wheels, etc) Week 2 - Some gambling script (even if just slots, lotto or blackjack) - Graffiti - Add more vehicles, whether existing GTA ones to pdm, or modded - More trucking routes - Investment into marketing - Schedule another community meeting To reiterate, we probably won't be able to do all of these, but these are some of the things we've identified need immediate attention. Despite the admittedly grim situation with the player base right now, I believe we can turn things around. The entire situation is very humbling and has been a big reality check and a learning experience for me. We've a lot going for us — we've a great staff team, a lot of knowledgeable and dedicated folk on our side, other major servers providing us assistance whenever we need it. But most importantly, we've fostered an awesome community which is what I focus on when it's time to push forward no matter what. I'm sorry I let some of you down, it hurts especially because I know a lot of people really believe in the project and want it to do well. This is where I'll turn the post towards you. If you're good at something and want to use your skill to help us make the server better, please reach out. If you've opinions you want to share, please do so below. I welcome opinions of anyone with the best interest of the server at heart. Martin

Heyo kiddo, it's too early for me to be writing this (seriously who gets up before 9 am on a Sunday) but here I am! Jumping straight into the script update, here's the changelog: - Added the ability to re-bind the Y to unfreeze button in /settings - Added a way for legal factions to toggle roadblock messages in /settings or via /togroadblock - Added /rb as a macro for /roadblock - Added better checks for /enter and /exit in a vehicle, so you should keep the passengers you used the command with - Added /setstation keeping the same volume when changing stations in cars - Added a 50% increase in rewards to both trucking and garbage collection jobs (this will be offset by a 33% cut in Cypress Logistics) - Added vehicle registration history to the MDC - Added a way for admins to set a vehicle's wheel colour - Added faction-specific loadouts to /loadout - Added a way to /lock furniture doors without being a property manager if you are in the same faction that owns the property - Fixed /towcars for companies again again again - Fixed /respawnme teleporting your vehicle into your spawn point with you - Fixed seeing heal messages if another player was in the same area but different dimension - Fixed not being able to create faction ranks with brackets in the name - Changed prison commands to be in the same radio message format as other radio messages Weapon Economy The weapon economy has been hotly talked about recently, with legal factions arguing there are too many PF guns being used as crimes, civilian roleplayers arguing that PF guns are too expensive, illegal factions arguing that there is too much trigger happiness over the smallest beef - we have recently implemented a solution that we hope will help in solving these issues. The Faction Team Council has now implemented an OOC cap on buying weapons - it was decided before that there would be no cap to help factions get established, however now we feel we are in a place where factions in the scheme are established as black market gun dealers and we can safely begin limiting the amount of guns that flow from the darknet into factions' hands. This is handled the same way as we did on SA-MP, through OOC points. For those not in the know, certain guns (like an AK-47) cost 3 points, whereas a pistol costs 1 point (these numbers may not be accurate). A faction with 15 points has a choice, buy 5 AK-47s in a month, or 15 pistols. You get the idea - larger weapons will become rarer as a faction tries to balance what guns are brought in versus what guns end up in the hands of a dead mobster. Alongside this change, the gun store weapons will also be reduced in price back to the levels they were at, meaning legal guns will be around the $500 to $800 range for a pistol again. In addition to this price change, we are implementing OOC bans. You, as a gang member, are welcome to buy a gun at a gun store (as long as you don't have a criminal record). If you use that cheap legal gun against police and they end up killing you, the license will be revoked after your death and a PF license ban will be issued on your account, meaning you cannot legally buy guns on any character until it is appealed. The point of this system is: don't get caught killing police with legal guns. You can now see whether a gun is legally bought by right clicking it in your inventory. It will show a serial number. Server Connection Issues For the last week or so, we have been getting reports of connection issues from some people. It seemed at first that these people shared something in common, i.e. the first report to me was that a group of Bulgarian players were not able to connect with their normal ISP, but could via mobile data. The issue seemed to spread to people from other regions and there didn't seem to be anything in particular that connected everybody. We asked for logs and the flow of when you first connect to when you lose connection, and a lot of people helped us out with that. We logged the issue with our server host and they have been looking into it for the past week or so. For those of you that don't know, networking is a pain in the ass and I'm glad I never have to deal with it. Rambling aside, as of last night it seems that these connection issues have been largely resolved. When I went to sleep last night, people were able to connect that were not able to connect before, and so it is my belief that we have made progress on this issue. As always, please continue to report to us if you are experiencing connection issues, but most, if not all, that had connection issues before should be able to connect now. Here is a message that Mmartin dropped into #updates last night: This was a well-documented phenomenon known in the tech industry as a "networking meme". Future Direction To put it succintly, please keep sending us your feedback. I know sometimes it gets a little drowned out when we get hundreds of players giving their suggestions, airing their frustrations and asking for changes to be made on the server. Sometimes we may not even respond, but rest assured that we do see it and add it to the list. We had some Development Team applications come in last month and the past 3 weeks have just been too busy for some of us to actually get together and sort through them. We have a couple of people in mind and will be reaching out shortly, and with that, I hope we can start seeing some more development going on. In the changelog above you may have spotted a 50% increase for all rewards to waste management (garbage) and trucking missions. Cypress Logistics and Los Santos Sanitation will not see these increases - their rewards will remain roughly the same. Anybody who wants to stick around in these script jobs will not be at a loss, so don't worry about that. If you make $500 a day now, you will make $500 a day still. These reward buffs are aimed at player-owned companies, who will be able to take a cut of the payment and still offer a rate that's higher than the server-owned jobs. This is something we will continue to monitor and look at against other areas that have been historically under-used (like mowing, our #1 prime feature that we bet all our dreams against). Prison roleplay has taken off with the introduction of the SADCR faction, and if you didn't know, what character model you are using (male or female) determines where you end up! Males have a male-only cell block, and females have a female-only cell block. You can of course mingle in the yard, but we hope that separating each sex into discrete cell blocks will help keep the immersion up for some of our prison roleplayers. In addition to these two, we have a third cell block for isolation, for those that don't fit into either adult male or adult female cell block, or have been bad enough to end up in a concrete box. If you are interested in bringing more life to the prison, I encourage you to take a look at Prison Schemes. Kendrick as always will be taking your feedback about Legal Factions and anything related. Mitcholodolo and DDaniels are your guys for the Illegal Faction side. Please feel free to approach myself about anything that these guys can't help with.