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

ily lmfao I am fucking crying

Praise the fuckin' devil, God can suck my dick, I scorch the veins

First of all, big thank you for the Dev team that jumped right way into the work, we really appreciate you and support you! Secondly, Thank you Martin for responding and listening to our feedback, communication is key and it builds the trust back Lastly, congratulations to everyone! Especially @Dos Santos and @accursed, they're the most easily reachable admins who always communicate and help players right away with no wait. I hope more admins will be more "reachable" and communicative. Last note: @Mmartin can you unban me from discord, it's been 16days and still no response on my ban appeal. Thank you and good luck to everyone! #LSRP4LYFE

this screen is sick as fuck

Only good part is Zagros in the team.

congrats to all

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

@accurseddaddy!

I love what new devs did to the server. I hope next month update will be better and better.. Congratulations everyone!

Grats boys!

Congratulations all! Good read, exciting times ahead.

HO!

I’m still trying to picture “the look” 😂

Just to clarify, I'm not agreeing we should just disband the LSSD and make do with the LSPD, all I'm discussing is that the server shouldn't perhaps gone with 2 LEO's to start off with and if that were the case, the LSPD would be the most logical one to have. We've got to look at the circumstances that are happening on this server and it's clear that the roleplay in the county is almost nonexistent, apart from the people who occasionally go to the county side for some nature roleplay, a person who evades the cops by using the county or a trucker who is forced to go there because of the routes. Looking through the screenshot and videos section on this forum, this only confirms that the majority of roleplay is within city limits. If I'm not mistaken, the Sheriff's Department recently closed down their Paleto Bay station and moved its 2nd station within city limits for the same exact reason: not enough roleplay. I highly doubt criminal roleplayers will move their operations outside of the city, the city itself is big enough for them to do whatever they want without being disturbed by the police. And even if they'd move their operations to the county right now, there is no one patrolling it. I'm aware you're going to disagree with me and that's fine, this is something we'll probably never figure out or come to a compromise. Honestly, I don't know how this server is going to be active again with a decent player base. There is a big competitor out there where a lot of people are already ''settled'', no one wants to start building their entire imperium again, do UCP tests, write character backgrounds or fail the driver test 4 times and then start off with fewer than 5k. It's extremely hard to get your head above the water and gain attention. People who were playing the game in 2015 era have since grown into their adult lives and are occupied with far more important things and aren't interested in playing a roleplaying game anymore. That coupled with the fact that the launch has been delayed a few times, communication has been bad and transparency hardly seen, good luck gaining the trust from people that have given up.

Great read, congrats to those promoted and welcome back to Zagros!

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.