Leaderboard

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(From left to right; Omari Ward a/k/a Big Capo, Kejuan Tejada a/k/a Big Pop-Off, Rashaun Boyd a/k/a Big Wick, Kordell Gillard a/k/a Big 300, Raimy Grant a/k/a Baby Lucky, Franklin Pierce a/k/a Lil Tank)

I think some improvements in terms of payouts can also be done in order to motivate players to log in. People are most likely not going to spend the same amount of time In Game as they used to so I think some "helicopter money" can go a long way. It's never been done but I think it's worth considering and the benefits will outweigh the possible consequences to the server economy, which, obviously is not perfect. A few options would be: - Add a default paycheck increase for all non leading players that are members of Companies. Boost their paychecks depending on rank, can even start with a 3-5k boost / paycheck, that increases as they are promoted within the company. Allow for company points to be used to increase paychecks as well. Motivate players to RP and where it applies, learn to RP, rather than farm scripted jobs endlessly. - Add the company chat even though from what I read there were some concerns it would demotivate unofficial factions from seeking to become official. I think the main motivation behind the official status right now is access to the drug and weapon store, given the fact that the supply of weapons and drugs is currently limited. Most companies seek to employ non faction members as well, who will often be new players too. Company chat can then serve as a platform for them to ask questions regarding the company system, and the scripted jobs that companies are based on. They can get quick answers and take some pressure off testers and admins as well, since older members can guide them for simple questions, related or non related to the company system. - Extend happy hour to also apply to paychecks, savings, interest. It's a good improvement, I noticed an uptick in players when happy hour was introduced. Take it even further to motivate players to log in during dead hours (mornings) as well as peak hours. - Motivate new players by increasing payouts to them. Introduce the old mechanic paycheck back (2.900) for new players up to level 5 or even 10. This coupled with a company paycheck would be a very welcome boost for new players starting their journey on LSRP. - Double the savings interest rate up to a certain amount (500k for example). Being able to deposit and withdraw while having savings is a nice addition. I think this option is also worth considering. - I saw there was a mention of ads being run already. Add a promotion for new players; double starting money for players that come from ads. Or, a free vehicle for those new players to get them started.

(From left to right; Omari Ward a/k/a Big Capo, Kejuan Tejada a/k/a Big Pop-Off, Rashaun Boyd a/k/a Big Wick, Kordell Gillard a/k/a Big 300, Raimy Grant a/k/a Baby Lucky, Franklin Pierce a/k/a Lil Tank)

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This thread portrays the life after prison of PEN1 member Patrick Murdock. If you have any questions, feel free to send a PM.

Some people pretend they care, while they most definitely do not care. Only there to help themselves and feed their own ego. In my opinion, LSRP is doing pretty good. I've been playing since pre-launch and so far I haven't noticed anything drastic. The people in management are easier to reach, IFTC isn't like @JesterJr said a circlejerk and recently new members of FT were added who are more trustworthy and capable in comparison to the batch before it. Can the server improve? Of course. But I think us as players ought to improve as well. Because ever since I came back, a lot of people here have returned with their inflated ego's, doing their best to get their ego back up. A lot of people have gone soft, continiously complaining and looking at how they can bite you in the ass when you're not looking, just so they can benefit themselves at the cost of other players. I think we need to find a healthy balance and discuss this academically like the OP did to raise our concerns, along with good manners and eloquent speech, instead of whining and talking shit.

This was originally intended as a response to gyzo's "Can we bring back the old playerbase count?" topic but after I completed the post I felt it was worthy of its own topic. A VISION FOR THE FUTURE: Achieving peak LSRP activity numbers is probably an unrealistic goal given the landscape of the RP scene nowadays, but I do believe there are steps that can be taken to maintain and build upon the current player base. There have been plenty of solid ideas here and elsewhere on the forums that can help bring about positive change in different aspects of LSRP, but my post is going to be focused on the big picture and what all of us can do—players and admins alike—to help LSRP reach its true potential. To touch briefly on why I personally returned to LSRP: it was for Valenti much more so than it was for LSRP or SAMP. In the past, I have publicly voiced my displeasure with LSRP staff. I was very skeptical of the LSRP comeback and thought it was simply a last-ditch marketing gimmick for the GTAV server; I didn’t think it would be successful and had no interest in rejoining until countless Valenti members reached out urging me to reopen the faction. I went through with it and I’m glad I did because the server has exceeded our expectations so far and has allowed us to make a serious comeback as a faction. Upon our return with how accommodating the staff was setting us up with official status and swiftly handling requests, it was the first time since I joined Valenti in 2011 that I felt we were finally getting the respect we deserve as the longest-standing and most renowned faction on the server. Unfortunately, with lengthy delays and several questionable rulings against us recently, this feeling has dissipated to a degree, but I am still of the belief that the staff team is doing a better job than they have in most previous eras. Regardless of player count, LSRP still has major potential and I believe we can make this final era something special if we all work together. CULTURE SHIFT With that said, everyone needs to remember that the admins are volunteers and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The admin team makes LSRP possible and we need to be grateful for that. We need to squash this “us vs. them” mentality that drives a wedge between the players and admins, and we all need to start pulling the rope in the same direction. A clear vision for the future needs to be outlined and at the center of that needs to be a cultural shift that brings the community together as one team working towards the common goal of making the best role-play experience possible. LSRP having a smaller player base doesn’t mean the community doesn’t have room to grow and it isn’t something we should dwell on; instead, we need to look at this as a prime opportunity to build the foundation upon which the new era of LSRP can be built. The success of this server has always been a team effort and that will need to be even more pronounced this time around to ensure we have a community that is sustainable and has room to grow. FACTION SCENE The faction scene and the great factions in particular have always been the main driver of LSRP’s success. We are currently in a good spot with several long-standing official factions and some solid new factions on the come-up. This kind of continuity of characters and factions is key to creating an immersive, realistic, cohesive, and sustainable role-play environment. To maintain and improve upon the current state of the faction scene, everyone needs to play their part. To build strong, quality factions, people need to consider joining the existing factions instead of creating new ones. Only those who are experienced and qualified should be making new factions with the intent of filling a gap in the current faction scene, but we need to be cautious not to oversaturate certain genres. Faction leaders need to create factions with purpose and meaning, the average player needs to stay IC and focus on the realistic development of their character, and the admins need to incentivize, reward, and help facilitate quality role-play. The standard for achieving official status needs to remain high and admins shouldn’t feel pressured to lower the bar in order to appease to players out of desperation. High standards for official factions ensures a healthy faction scene and lowering the bar will create for weaker, unsustainable factions, as has been seen in the past. Unofficial factions now have plenty of schemes they can apply for and it’s certainly a good thing to reward good performance and give people the tools they need to role-play, but only the best faction(s) in each genre should represent LSRP as an official faction. On the other hand, toxic factions need to be disciplined, and if improvement isn’t seen in quick order, they need to be shut down. LSRP has been doing a good job with this as of late and I have seen the benefits first-hand in the LCN scene. The description of a long-time official crime family that was notorious for rule breaking and subpar role-play early on in the LSRP comeback set the tone. That faction in particular has since improved and are making positive contributions to the role-play. The recent shutdown of another toxic LCN faction was another step in the right direction. The LCN scene is experiencing one of its better eras right now and that is in large part thanks to LSRP bringing the hammer down on these problematic factions. In order to optimize the faction scene, I would like to suggest a revamp of the Faction Team structure as seen below: Head of Factions and/or Faction Team Council Official faction leaders (1 from each official faction) The most qualified admins and players with ample faction experience Testers/admins who serve the purpose of handling requests in a timely fashion The most notable change is the involvement of the official faction leaders. When LSRP was in its heyday and on an upward trajectory, there wasn’t a massive Faction Team; there was a Head of Factions who consulted the official faction leaders, which worked quite well at the time. The official faction leaders are a highly knowledgeable group and can bring great value to the Faction Team’s decision-making process. Additionally, this ensures all official factions are represented equally in the faction team and limits the potential for corruption. The Faction Team needs to consist of a healthy balance of players experienced in all the major genres. Many players (myself included) have grown increasingly frustrated with their suggestions falling on deaf ears over the years and, as such, don’t speak up like they used to and have no desire to seek out staff positions. LSRP acknowledging this and going out of their way to recruit the most suitable candidates for the Faction Team (and other staff divisions) would go a long way. ROLE-PLAY MINDSET Everyone needs to adopt the mindset of focusing on the realistic development of their characters. Stay in the moment and embrace every scene. The play-to-win mindset, trigger happiness and seeking quick thrills is not the best way to go about role-playing and it drags the server down. LSRP is marketed as a heavy role-play server and we need to back this up. Below I have linked two threads from the old forums related to this topic: (39) [Tutorial] A case for RPing realistically - Los Santos Roleplay (39) Realism + Character Development = Fun = Success - Los Santos Roleplay MARKETING Other posters have already outlined different approaches that can be taken to market the server and I am in agreement that this needs to be a major focus for staff. Aside from this, word of mouth will go a long way in bringing old players back to the server, but we all need to do our part to make the best role-play environment possible in order to lure people back. While I am of the opinion that the staff team has improved, there is still a stigma weighing them down and they need to continue making positive steps to repair their reputation for some players to ever consider a return. The admins also need to recognize the value many of the long-standing official factions bring from a marketing standpoint. Countless players have come through these factions and people who are otherwise disgruntled with LSRP staff can potentially be lured back by the prospect of rejoining their old faction and continuing their character’s story. Remove the red tape and let these historic factions thrive. PLAYER RETENTION Marketing is useless if we can’t retain the players we bring in. Having a strong faction scene will go a long way in attracting and retaining players. On top of this, the community needs to be welcoming and the game needs to be as user-friendly as possible. LSRP does a good job of allowing players to have creative freedom, but there are still plenty of instances of the admin team being overbearing on people’s creativity. Remove unnecessary restrictions and applications; allow players to craft their characters as they see fit within reason. Factions and players who have made mass contributions to the server over the years should especially be given the benefit of the doubt and more leeway. As others have stated, having the current script-based jobs as the main moneymakers for new players won’t cut it. The government needs to have funding available for companies so that money can be earned through actual role-play as opposed to mindlessly farming scripted jobs. I suggest the introduction of a new staff division or a “buddy system” of sorts committed to helping new players learn the ropes not only in regards to the game itself but also how to role-play realistically and develop a character. We need to focus on retaining players who are here to role-play and develop a realistic character. It’s usually quite easy to decipher between someone who is here to role-play and someone who is not. Discipline and ban rulebreakers/toxic players who only serve to disrupt the experience of real role-players; LSRP being lenient with these types of players out of desperation to keep the player count up is counterproductive. Additionally, LSRP needs to be cautious with how much time they put into the GTAV server. I’m not sure if this explains the recent increase in wait times, but the increased focus on GTAV certainly had a damning effect on the SAMP server last time around and history tends to repeat itself. GTAV is covered, but there is clearly still an appetite for SAMP and thankfully LSRP has filled that void for now. Most of us are here because we aren’t interested in GTAV. The SAMP server, in my opinion, should be the top priority; don’t take it for granted. TL;DR Role-play is a collaborative game and people need to stop being so selfish. Take responsibility yourself, regardless of your role on the server, and think about how you can positively contribute to the community. Focus on role-playing and developing your character realistically. We need to come together as one team to create the best role-play experience possible for the success of LSRP going forward.

Hey @manslaughter, Since my name was brought up. I'll address your concerns and state that all of the feedback that was given by unofficial faction leaders was forwarded to the correct people. Furthermore, there were threads made around the topic at hand. If you refer back to the message that was sent out, it was a general feedback request that was optional for unofficial factions to take part in to see if we as the IFT could find or spot any repetitive issues. Out of the repetitive issues, there were only a handful that were presented forward such as drug concerns and the spotlight for unofficial factions itself. With that being said, I think it is very unwise of you to think that there was no point of submitting the things that you did. Your feedback along with many others was taken into account before a handful of discussions started within the private section. I think majority of you fail to realize the things that are happening behind the scenes and how many discussions in fact take place. However, at the same time, there is so much that can be discussed until the development side proceeds forward with suggested things. It is clear that the sensitive topic of how IFT is handling things is up in the air. However, I do reassure you that everyone is taking the job seriously especially after the recent spotlight of discussions that took place publicly. One thing that we strive and push for is transparency. With transparency also comes the line between the truth and the lie. I would urge you guys to always hear both sides of the story before jumping to a conclusion. I am not saying that you cannot have a mind of your own, but there is a sense of urgency that we are not working machines as well and that we have a full-time job. With that being said, I would like to still push forward for transparency and most importantly being more communicative towards the general community that includes both official and unofficial factions. This will be discussed internally on how we can keep everything aligned but most importantly give out more details along with what is happening behind the scenes as long as it's not considered leaking. This can be in a form of FT updates, roadmap, or even community meetings. This is something that we're going to discuss and bring forward. Furthermore, we are going to be revamping the Faction Public Team soon enough that the FTC can comment on themselves ( @Flip, @Spectre, @badhbh) that will take a different direction and a structure. I hope response was respectable and all I ask for is time from our end to strength the process even more.

someone left their trash at the street and wont pick it up.....

There isn't any management to speak of. There hasn't been for years. Being in a management position implies having a vision that goes beyond what's in front of you at this very moment, it means being able to plan for the future, to set objectives and chart a somewhat cohesive strategy to achieve them. As this discussion, and countless others before, prove LS-RP, just like many other GTA RP communities, hasn't had something of the sort for about a decade at this point. Illegal factions wrestle in the metaphorical mud of the forums and tear each other to shreds in private Discord chats, complaining about how bad they have it, but at least there's long-standing concepts such as 38th Street or Valenti who honor the legacy of their predecessors and can carry an years-long narrative. Outside the fort there's no such luxuries, only a vast wasteland of concepts that sit uncared for, despite having been proven to be some of the most entertaining segments of LS-RP through the years, or groups that actively work to forget, rather than remember, without providing anything to replace that heritage. "Civilian" roleplay is an alien concept, gatekept by two or three Weyland-Yutani replicas with interests ranging from entertainment to trucking to private security, all done in the same shallow, boring, unimaginative and trite manner while having absolutely zero impact when it comes to creating roleplay. They just jump from one club opening to the next, from this delivery to the next, from mechanically checking a customer's /licenses to the next, and are all so similar and easily interchangeable that don't provide anything to the server, let alone a developing long-term story that can keep its members engaged and teach new players something about roleplaying captivating characters. The best the civilian scene can get is events like whatever the monstrosity called Wonderland was supposed to be, things that were already embarrassing when they were launched years ago. Government roleplay is all but dead. A faction that should serve, as historically has, as a port of call for newbies to learn the ropes about the server and roleplay in general has been all but forgotten, with legal faction management neglecting the implementation of ideas that can be easily portrayed in-game with minimal efforts such as a Public Works Department in favor of grand-standing, pointless contraptions like the Senate that require knowledgeable and capable players, which are in short supply these days. And even in the remote cases where such contraptions end up working they have been, time and again, either put under the control of a staff member who couldn't care less about roleplaying the Governor or immediately squashed for daring to try and roleplay instead of following the script set by the staff. Law enforcement roleplay is little more than a collection of tired concepts that have been around for literal decades and don't distinguish themselves in the slightest when compared to other communities. It's the same names, the same organizations, the same graphics, and in some cases, even the same people staffing them. Any attempt at diversifying or introducing concepts that, while not an exact 1:1 diorama of the real agencies, would bring more roleplay or more interactions (and thus potentially more players) are almost instantly shot down in the name of "realism" or some other buzzword, and characters are likewise encouraged to be one of the two or three different flavors of LAPD officer/ LASD deputy available to select from, with little room for deviation. Meanwhile the in-character history of the faction is relentlessly erased in favor of make-believe stories that not only never happened, but also seek to remove the efforts of those players who contributed to establish them and bring them where they are today (William Baxter was never LSPD Chief, but Michael Houston was). All of this is controlled by very nebulous groups of players with corporate names like Property Management Team, Economy Team, Faction Team, who, in addition to not being really accountable to anyone but the powers that be and operating under some unknown procedures, don't really set a course for the server to follow or come up with strategies to bring about a better experience as much as they respond to crises. And it's mostly because nobody gives a damn about anything but their own little slice of the server. Nobody seems to understand, or maybe care, that a formulaic law enforcement faction is inevitably going to ruin the experience for gangs and LCN groups alike and vice versa, or that the lack of a vibrant "civilian" scene makes the world feel more lifeless and akin to a Cops'n'Robbers server, or that even low-level government roleplay can provide a lot of scenarios for all the other factions to interact with. If you've seen The Wire, there's a line that should be implemented as the admin's oath of office: "We're building something here, we're building it from scratch. And all the pieces matter." What caused the fall of LS-RP, for three times in a row, wasn't the lack of scripts, or the outdated graphics, or the absence of this or that rule. It was, very simply, a lack of vision, a refusal to admit mistakes and improve, an indifference for things that don't directly affected the interests of those with decisional power, a stubborn denial of one's own faults followed by apologetic excuse and accusations of conspiracy against the server. It was complacency. And so LS-RP, the server once regarded not as one great place to roleplay at but the great place to roleplay at, fell, not because of its competitors, but because of its own rulers. We all sleep in the bed we make.

October 3, 2024

the server fell on october 20th 2024