Leaderboard

Hello, Welcome to September's update. I want to go over staff changes and address a few recent topics, some of which we touched on in my last "We need to talk..." post. I've been keeping up with the comments on the thread and read all of them. I want to thank everyone who took their time to write down constructive criticism and everyone who shared words of support. I want to share my thoughts on some of the discussions that raised from the topic, and add a few of my own. Development Team Last week, we added three new developers to the team. I'd like to welcome GiamPy, java and matical. Neither of them waited a minute to jump right into the trenches and start contributing. Good luck and I'm looking forward to see what you guys bring to the server. Together with the rest of our development team, they put together their first update 1.3.7: I'm glad to say that by week 1, we managed to finish about half of our two week plan mentioned in my previous blog post, although we rearranged the priorities a little bit. The rest that wasn't implemented yet should come in next week's update. We've also spent some time eliminating any bottlenecks in the development process. A lot of the activities which relied solely on me are now a shared responsibility among the Development Team. ImperiumXVII is also taking on a more leading role within the team as the Head of Game Development. This all essentially means that a lot of the steps in the development lifecycle that were dependent on me exclusively are now delegated to the rest of the team, letting them do their thing even if I'm busy with other tasks. This all should allow us to do more work, more frequently. Our goal is to have an active release schedule, but it may take a few weeks to get there as we strengthen our processes. Circling back to pre-launch, we talked a lot about wanting to include community in development decisions as much as possible (suggestion voting, etc). We'll be trying out a more solidified community driven approach to development starting next week (after the 10th). More info on that later. In order to facilitate that, we created a new position within the Development Team - a Project Manager. The role of a PM will be to: - Organize community feedback and understand the needs and wants of the community - Be the bridge between the community and development team - Prioritize development work based on community feedback and server vision - Liaise with Team Leaders to understand their needs and priorities In essence, it's a nontechnical position within the Development team to make sure our priorities are in order and in line with the community's needs, while developers' focus can be primarily on developing. This position will be filled by Dos Santos, as he's demonstrated his capabilities within the Company Team, where he accomplished substantial improvements with a continuous feedback loop with company owners. Thank you to everyone from the staff team that applied for the position. We're still looking to onboard one or two more developers in the coming weeks, so if you didn't apply yet and are interested - now's the time. Stability We've had connection issues a few times since the launch of the server. Rarely, if ever, are they completely in our control. Lately we've been a frequent target of DDOS attacks which impacted our uptime and stability. This is a never ending cat and mouse game which will never be completely resolved, although I can assure you that during downtime, it's all hands on deck on finding a solution for the particular problem we're facing. I'm grateful for other server owners, and even rage dev themselves who have been instrumental in helping us reinforce our protection layers. In this case, I want to ask you for understanding when attacks do happen. We'll keep you updated on Discord in #updates if there's anything going on that would impact connections. Other Concerns When I say I read every single bit of feedback under blog posts and in general discussion I'm serious. I often choose not to engage too early or at all in order to not derail the conversation or turn it into a WPM typing contest. We've aggregated a lot of your feedback and tried to identify the underlying issues of problems players face, and proposed a solution to each of them. Some of the priorities in the near future will be (in no particular order): Adding more ways to make money, both as a legal and illegal character, and both P2P and NPC; Improve furniture UX; Make mapping easier & more appealing; Invest more time and money into marketing; Find a way to organize more events; Crack down on DM & poor reasons to kill in-game; Add more non-visual perks to drugs; Allow being in even more player-owned companies at once; This is an oversimplified, curated sample of some of the proposed solutions to some of the main concerns raised by both the staff, and the community. We'll address each point more in depth as it gets addressed and we have something to show for it. Together with the development changes, I'm very confident we're on the right track. Make sure to follow our Discord, namely #git and #snippets to stay close to the source with information re. new updates. Check #updates for announcements re. server status. Staff Changes Congratulations to our promoted and returning staff members... Senior Admin accursed — Amine Game Admin Kotwica — Bizarre Returning Junior Admin Zagros To put an end to the post, thank you once again for all your feedback and support on our last blog post. It means a lot to the team to see the community so passionate. You're why we do it, and who we do it for. Martin

The downtime that was caused by our host's planned maintenance could've been avoided - we weren't aware the maintenance was planned because I didn't receive an alert. It was very poor timing as I was without internet when it happened. Our takeaway from this is to figure out how to set up custom alerts that we can prevent this in the future. On the other hand, that was about the only downtime that we had since launch, which couldn't be attributed to attacks or provider network issues. We've been hit by DDOS since pretty much day 1 and there's several types of attacks, and for each we have to adapt individually. There's no blanket hail mary "protection" that protects you from everything, a lot of it is tweaking and changing up your setup to make yourself less vulnerable. We've been lucky enough to get help from other major servers in the space and even rage dev themselves, so we've been able to patch all holes so far. With time, I'm confident our protection setup will be decent, although this is a never ending cat & mouse game that's been around since there have been game servers, or any servers for that matter. I think on this front we've been doing rather good, always adapting to what's thrown at us and even switching providers when no immediate relief is available. This has cost us a significant amount of money and time, all just to keep the server online. That being said I understand why it's frustrating from a player POV, I hope you understand how we see and deal with the situation. I agree that promptness with #updates could be, in some cases, faster.

Grats boys!

They'll be back up soon, I'm moving them to a new host but got busy with the attacks this weekend.

Is Martin actually going to read the "We need to talk" comments or what? As of right now the server is shit, gets max 70ish players, no factions around it's all just people who play the game like it's habbo hotel. Read the comments and atleast try to make a change. Everyone's saying the same thing in the comments.

What he meant is that the obvious choice for a law enforcement faction would be a city police department, considering the majority of roleplay is focused in the city and the server’s name even includes the city name.

From the replies, it seems we got into this issue as several members brought up a concern that it’s difficult to do criminal roleplay when a patrol car is circling the block every 5 minutes. As for this, I wonder if it would be more “fair” to have a proportion that makes sense. For example, for every 10 players, 2 may be on-duty law enforcement. At 50 players, that would mean a ratio of 40 non-LEO to 10 LEO. At 100 players, that would be 80:20. It would probably make the most sense to do it as a script addition restricting the /duty command if the proportion is exceeded. Thats just my two cents. - - - As for the other problems, the decreasing player base from my view is due to an insufficient value proposition. Players are currently faced with a dilemma of whether to choose a higher population with more script features and more roleplay opportunities, or to choose the server they’ve played for years and hope its offering gets better in time. This is nothing more than an issue of incentive and economics — people will go where their time is best invested, and right now that isn’t here (which isn’t a bad thing, it’s an opportunity to face facts and improve). Personally, I think the other server is garbage because of how factions are run, the way laws are created, and the emphasis on RPG-style gameplay over truly-realistic roleplay. There are many examples throughout business in which the underdog has, through persistence and continuous improvement, overcome an industry leader— LSRP is no different, other than it was once the industry leader and now must claw its way back to the top. It’ll happen, we just need to throw our support behind those who are working to give us what we desire in a roleplay server.

u cant see our perspective because your one of them, regardless of how many players the server once had or has now, or when recruitment is open or not, it is a absolute fact that this server was way too populated with cops, i played non stop since release till a few weeks back and every other player was a cop, using the excuse of gang members arent active anymore is not true at all, it has always been like this, you lot would drive around Davis non stop thirsty for arrests, I said it back then that power hungry cops that dont give a fuck about other peoples perspective in RP and just wanna arrest arrest arrest to satisfy their own enjoyment will ruin the server, and we can talk about lack of features/updates and whatnot, but a factor in the player base dropping has 100% been because people just got fed up of cops on their dick 24/7

grats to all the new developers, hopefully one day I'll make it!