Mmartin

Congratulations!

Hello everyone, 2024 is over and it marks yet another year spent together on LS-RP. This was quite a big year for us, as we reopened our SA-MP server and the community underwent several major changes. We officially relaunched our SA-MP server on LS-RP's 17th birthday, May 17th. Let's take a look at some interesting stats from these 7 and half months. In 2024, there were 8,217 new accounts created! Surprisingly, 87% of players who played on SA-MP last year were new accounts that never played on LS-RP before. 55,952 in-game reports and 74,898 helpmes accepted by our wonderful staff team. 2,489 refund requests and over 900 forum reports processed. 43,377 in-game kills (!), with the most dangerous area being to nobody's surprise Idlewood, which saw 15,099 tragic deaths. 514,842 total hours spent ingame by players. Over 40,000 AFK/Idle kicks. It sure was a busy year with its ups and downs, and I want to thank everyone who chose to spend their time playing, or contributing to our community. I value every one of you. Looking forward into 2025, we've laid out several goals internally that will help us achieve two main goals that we're focusing in 2025: Expand our SA-MP community and re-launch our RageMP server. Both are actively worked on as we speak and I can't wait to share more information with you when the time is right. One of our first goals for January 2025 is to finish our big 14.0 update. If you'd like to see snippets from this update, you can check out Discord's #snippets; some of them you've probably already seen but we'll post more as the update nears finishing. To help us with that, I'm happy to welcome two new developers on board: Lead Developer Kane & Developer n0de101 Another goal we set out for ourselves, which we've largely completed is stricter activity enforcement in our staff team. I'm aware that activity and motivation works from top to bottom, so we've tightened our activity/LOA policies to ensure we've stable and active Leadership, Heads Of, Development and Admin team. I'm happy to say that more and more staff members are taking it upon themselves to improve the server and come up with solutions on how we can achieve our goals for 2025, and I'm glad that we've a solid plan going forward. Speaking of which — a message from Jack, our current Head of Staff: You talked, we listened Over the course of the last month or two, we've had many channels for members of the community to openly give feedback in a constructive way, we've been listening and already implemented some of the things spoken about. We're also in the planning and preparation stages for further changes listed within those topics. We had a standardised way of dealing with rulebreakers, typically we went down the education over punishment route, which resulted in a warning, kick, ajail then eventually a ban. Somewhere down the line the communication within the team broken down, resulting in education and warnings for very blatant rule breaking. Over time some players abused this stance and ended up being warned again after again with no real punishment. Due to this happening we have cleared it up within the team, that if players exhibit blatant rule breaking, we don't need to follow the line of education but to take direct action. Since the re-opening of SA-MP we introduced a Conflict of Interest rule, this prevented admins dealing with situations they are directly involved. In theory this change was great, as it meant little to no bias once a handling administrator could accept reports. In time the implementation of this rule ended in report times taking longer and sometimes no action being taken right away, if someone was to log or too much time had passed. Based on feedback from within staff and members of the community this rule was removed and we implore admins to use common sense and the knowledge they gain going through our Trainee Admin scheme. Transparency has been one of the most sought after comment since before I even joined the Staff team back in 2020. Over the past 5 years we've improved on this by ten fold, we continue to do this as the weeks go by. We're taking a new approach to transparency, including talking about staff policies which has never been done. If and when there is information to be shared to the community you can bet on knowing about it, sometimes its better to hold of on being transparent when some underlying details are missing or have not been fully completed. I hope the new approach we are taking is one for the betterment of our Staff and Community relationship. You may of seen we've inducted more modders and mappers within the team who are active and engaging with what the server needs, new maps and new mods. For some time now we've been stagnant in this area and it's affected many areas of the server. But we've now put the channels in place to allow factions, companies and such to have direct access to request maps to be made, implemented and the same with mods, it's never been easier than now. The above is a small insight to what is happening within staff. We've been through the many various posts and now have a solid list and foundation to work off and take inspiration to work towards a better community and experience for players as a whole. Illegal Faction Team Council Update from Klag & badhbh We'd like to start by introducing Serbian Transnational Criminal Organisation (STCO), who've been successful in reaching official faction status. 'Serbian Transnational Criminal Organisation is a Los Santos and San Fierro based criminal organization with its main roots coming from a now defunct criminal organization from Serbia. It's a continuation of many generations of Serbian American organized crime, with their involvements being weapon and drug trafficking, smuggling contraband and international fraud. STCO's reach is currently widespread over the city, with them being involved in both the political scene with the mayor's office as the financial sector with their many businesses primarily focused on providing alcohol and entertainment. Their influences in the streets reach multiple areas within Los Santos, primarily East Los Santos and Mulholland, with some parts in Vinewood and a few areas in San Fierro. Its founding members were part of previous generations of Serbian American organized crime having revived the old tradition reaching back over ten-plus years. From Pančevačka Grupa, to Srpska Mreža, to eventually continuing the legacy of the old Serbian Transnational Criminal Organization.' At the moment, the Illegal Faction Team are currently working on a restructure of one of our most popular schemes, the Strawman Scheme along with conducting a review of the drug-flow on the server. As of late, the Illegal Faction Team has undergone some significant changes not only in terms of leadership, but also the members of Illegal Faction Team itself. We're eager to support the server, and it's factions and would love to hear your feedback and concerns. As always, if you're interested in joining the Illegal Faction Team (Public), please reach out to a member of the Illegal Faction Team or private message, @Scumpy. Commerce and Estate Update by Izumi There is current changes taking place in Commerce and Estate and that is property changes such as Interior changes are not longer required to be posted on the forums and can now be /report'ed in-game where both the Commerce and Estate team and Senior Admin+ team can quickly get your property request done without the need to post on the forums. This should hopefully help people instead of having to wait for someone to check the forums for interior changes. Additionally, backdoor access can be reported in-game and finally, PTPs for both businesses and properties can be requested in-game instead of through the forums. You will still have to charity the amount for the warehouse, backdoor access and PTPs, however, this should hopefully help players without the need of posting on the forums. You can also still post on the forums if you cannot be in-game at the same time as commerce and estate staff. Lastly, with this update, we're rolling out the scheme which was posted in December for companies to be reimbursed a set amount of money for their employees to help cover the staffing cost for the roleplay they provide whilst under the company. You can find more information about it here; Note: Please keep in mind the Employee Reimbursement Scheme is in a trial run and the rates are subject to change based on the market behavior. Staff Updates by Jack Now, onto the Staff Update. Congratulations to our newly promoted staff members ... Senior Admin celestine Game Admin Kaibr — n0de101 Trainee Admin consistency — barney Senior Tester andr3y — Klag — Kunis — costinl — shmoney Welcome back to our recently returned staff members ... Senior Admin DDaniels Game Admin Duco And congratulations to the new mapping team leader! Mapping Team Leader Fiellavin All that being said, I'd like to once again wish you all the best going into 2025, may it be your best year yet!

Thank you to everyone who bothered to provide meaningful feedback. We'll address it throughout upcoming posts. Several staff members, besides the leadership, has taken actions to improve on some of it already. In the meantime, you don't need to start another thread for general feedback and we won't allow any more of them for the time being because it unfortunately always derails into staff and player bashing. If you have any more constructive feedback to provide, please PM me directly.

That's because you're a Loser, not a Winner, Kane.

All winners should have received an email by now; so check it & get back to me. If you won a gift card but didn't receive an email, please PM me here on forums.

Hello everyone, holidays are well underway & I hope you managed to spend time with the ones close to you, whether you celebrate or not. As announced in our December Update, we're running a giveaway this month as a token of appreciation and means to give back to our community. While I've plenty of interesting and exciting updates to share with you, I'll save those for the end of year update and focus solely on the giveaway today, so you can return to indulging in gluttony, or perhaps more innocuous festive activities. The prize pool for our giveaway was a grand total of 800 EUR in value! This includes 5 gift cards worth of 50 EUR each; 10 gift cards worth 25 EUR each; and 15 credit packages worth 2500 credits each. You can discover the full rules of the giveaway here. Without any further ado, I'd like to congratulate to the winners: Prize Winner (Account Name) 50 EUR Gift Card Dat_Block 50 EUR Gift Card Toby_Broakscrup 50 EUR Gift Card croxy 50 EUR Gift Card Yamagucci 50 EUR Gift Card Lamar_Coleman 25 EUR Gift Card Kazano 25 EUR Gift Card Mark_Lim 25 EUR Gift Card ElAlucin062 25 EUR Gift Card EskimoElephant 25 EUR Gift Card karol.pl 25 EUR Gift Card costinl 25 EUR Gift Card Togona 25 EUR Gift Card Cordell20s 25 EUR Gift Card MurphyTheGamer 25 EUR Gift Card beckardi 2500 Credits Drumj 2500 Credits SaintWoke 2500 Credits Kurdii 2500 Credits Husoparac11 2500 Credits terriblejamie 2500 Credits princip33 2500 Credits TALA 2500 Credits Betelgeuse 2500 Credits ShonSk1y 2500 Credits almightybounter 2500 Credits Ejiofor 2500 Credits EaglesWiz 2500 Credits Hoch 2500 Credits Mico_Castillano 2500 Credits Valchek Congratulations! If you won a gift card, I'll reach out via email within 48 hours with more information; if you won credits, they'll be applied to your account automatically within 48 hours & you'll receive a confirmation email. Once again happy holidays everyone, and talk soon with more updates! - Martin

Cleaned the thread up in reference to my previous post here; no, complaining that you're banned because you used cheats really isn't contributing.

I'm happy to actually see constructive and actionable feedback on this thread. This is also not a place to squash your personal beefs, so we'll moderate this thread more if it's not pertinent to a bigger picture discussion or if it's flat out inflammatory.

The only people who have put any measurable amount of effort towards Rage ever since SA-MP's launch was a small task force which consisted of staff members (mostly 3, really), who weren't interested in SA-MP at all and would've left otherwise. Literally all focus of the leadership team, staff team, and development team with the exception of danut was and to be quite frank, still is on SA-MP. What you're saying about focus is simply not factual and it's hard to take at face value as there's plenty of channels to verify this - see blog post, discord's #snippets, discord's #updates, discord's #git and so on. What does this mean exactly? You're responding to a message asking for less vague examples with more vague filibuster. Within very recent history, we started letting Testers into virtually any teams and leadership positions. You've tester/s in FTC. We promoted people from tester straight to Lead when we saw potential and people taking charge. We expedited people from lower staff ranks to Lead in record time when we saw potential. The component you're missing is that in an overwhelming majority of the cases, after a person assumes position where they can make a difference after loudly and proudly proclaiming they'll be able to, they become inactive almost immediately. After achieving what people are after and being faced with gratification and validation, any and all efforts tend to go out the window. This brings a genuine attempt of trying to delegate work into a full cycle of finding a replacement after a replacement. God bless the exceptions, because we've had, or have some really hard working folks with us - but those get overwhelmed by the lack of people to support them so they face the good old burnout instead. What are you left with? On another hand, the moment you refuse to give someone what they're after, be it rank, position assignment, official status, or whatever, you're going to be met with a hellfire of how you're incompetent and refusing to give people chances they deserve. Maybe not everyone is fit for everything they dream up. This has been a theme I witnessed over the years of the community turning from driven to entitled. I do not necessarily disagree with any of the other points you've made, but I'd like to turn these two around. I've seen this community go through a lot of different stages and faces over the last nearly 13 years I've been a part of it. The reason why I took charge when Mow left the community to die and disappeared forever into Norwegian fjords in 2018, why I spent thousands and thousands of hours working on it, basically put my personal life on hold for months at a time, was for the way the players made you feel when you put in effort. There's nothing I loved more than working on a feature for days or weeks at a time, only to witness players use it ingame and genuinely appreciate it. This filled me with purpose, and eventually made me choose a career in software development. At that time, LS-RP was also much easier to run. It practically ran itself and as long as you put basic effort into it and kept the wheels greased, it was smooth sailing with the occasional hiccup. The community always came together when needed and moved onwards and upwards. None of this is the case anymore. It is no longer enough to grease the wheels and keep inertia to make the server succeed, it requires much more hard work and determination to push forward, innovate, take charge and keep us level with competition. This proves to be a challenge when the community is filled with toxicity and vultures that will eat you alive at any sign of a misstep. Honestly I don't even blame leadership (I use this term to encompass both Leads and Heads of) for not sticking around and active for long enough with the shit they've to deal with on every day basis. What once used to be a supportive community has over the years evolved into a shell of its former self with unchecked toxicity in every thread and channel you open, with unforgiving members who expect flawless and cater to their exact vision without any consideration for the bigger picture. So once again - who's gonna push hard, innovate and dedicate countless hours of free time if there's seemingly no way to be good enough, and the goalpost is always moving? There's a reason why more and more people give up after being given access to do what they want to do - and it may be a hard pill to swallow but it's the community. It takes two to tango and there's two sides to every coin. I may be biased but I don't think it's leadership or development or whatever else scapegoat that will save this community. This community needs to save itself. By driving yourselves (ourselves?) further apart from each-other, it doesn't really matter what effort anyone puts in. Players don't join the server because Mmartin or any other single person. They don't join for the script, or who's leading what. They don't decide to join and stick around for any of that. They stick around for you. I appreciate that my frustration is showing through. I also appreciate you might see this as a "No, it's the kids who are wrong!" moment. Maybe it is, and while you may not agree with me, that's honest to God what my experience is.

Since Iudex chose not to contest the allegations in 2 days he's been banned. We figured it'd be fair to at least give them an opportunity to respond before actioning the removal, despite there being a clear consensus within the team that they were cheating.

first

Hello everyone, Welcome to the December Community Update. We're entering the last month of a year that has overall been a very good one for LS-RP. The return of SA-MP gave our community a much needed breath of fresh air, and it allowed us some time to step back and reflect on what we really want to do next. It's not quite the time to look back yet so I'll save all of that for the End Of Year update, but this year we decided to make it easier than ever to look back — we'll be doing a "Your year on LS-RP" (think Spotify Wrapped, etc) so that's something to look forward to. Keeping up with the End Of Year theme and the spirit of holidays, I want to encourage everyone to start decorating their houses with outside furniture for the season. If you're unable to do this for whatever reason worry not, we'll be allowing for holiday decoration submissions soon, available for personal properties, businesses, factions and companies. Keep your eyes peeled! LS-RP Christmas Giveaway '24 And finally, to celebrate this years' holidays and give back to the community, we're holding a prize giveaway for all of our players. The prize pool consists of Gift Cards in total value of 800 EUR! On December 25th, we'll be giving out: Prize #1: 5 Gift Cards of 50 EUR each Prize #2: 10 Gift Cards of 25 EUR each Prize #3: 15 LS-RP Premium Credit packages of 2500 Credits each Upon winning, you can choose any widely available Gift Card of your liking (Steam, Amazon, etc). As long as we can purchase it directly, you can have it! To read more about the giveaway, how to enter, and its rules, please visit: LS-RP Christmas Giveaway 2024 - Los Santos Roleplay. Faction Updates Faction Team Public We've recently revamped FTP to improve its functionality for the greater FT. The FTP is a great avenue to get in touch with the FT and voice your opinions, whether you're a seasoned veteran or a player just getting the ropes of things. It is a team designed for people to voice their concerns and partake in discussions without the stringent experience requirements of FT. If you're interested in joining the faction team and seriously impact the server's infrastructure, FTP is a great way to prove yourself. We're actively on the lookout of members that possess a sound acumen when it comes to the illegal mechanism, and FTP is somewhere you can demonstrate it in the best possible way. Please reach out to @Scumpy for all queries related to FTP. Barons Motorcycle Club I'd like to announce and congratulate Barons Motorcycle Club on reaching official status! Barons Motorcycle Club is an outlaw organized motorcycle club primarily based within Flint County, San Andreas. The establishment of the club was primarily based on a late succession from the defunct White Knights Motorcycle Club, which involved core past members of said club alongside newer faces to reunite under a new banner yet following their same outlaw ideology. Over an extensive period after first settling on the Flint-Whetstone highway, Barons had rapidly expanded its presence within the Flint County and Whetstone regions whilst primarily associating with other organizations and motorcycle clubs alike within the Los Santos city limits. - Spectre, Faction Team Council Faction Team Council I'd also like to congratulate @Klag for advancing into the Faction Team Council! He's now joining Spectre and badhbh in the council to help facilitate a fair and supportive ecosystem for the illegal factions on the server. I have personally taken an interest in illegal factions recently and will be working with the council closely to address some of the concerns that have been raised by the faction team, and illegal faction players recently. As always, communication is key, so if you've anything to bring up to the council or me directly, please create a ticket in the Factions Discord, and if necessary, escalate to me directly. As an example, we'll be trying to provide a more robust pipeline for factions to add custom maps into the server; even if they can't procure the maps themselves. We're adding 4 new mappers today to help us with that! Staff Updates & More Now, onto the Staff Update. Congratulations to our newly promoted staff members ... Senior Admin jungsaeo Trainee Admin n0de101 Senior Tester consistency And congratulations to the new mappers! Mapper peculata - Ricta - ganchew - Leg4nd114 As you may remember, a few updates ago we introduced a new role to the staff team; the Head of Player Experience. This role is supposed to bridge the gap between the player base and the staff teams, mainly the development team. This will help us understand the needs of the community better and translate that into a list of priorities for the teams to work on. Having an individual responsible for this is crucial so that nothing falls through the cracks. The position solidified and integrated more recently, and given its importance and wide reach across the staff team, we made this a lead position. There are two HOPE positions, one for SA-MP and one for our RageMP server (more on that later). So congratulations to our two new leads: Lead Admin ROZE Head of Player Experience (SA-MP) Lead Admin Helius Head of Player Experience (RageMP) I honestly can't find more fitting candidates for both of those roles, so I'm really excited about this setup. Also shoutout to risen, who was promoted to a Lead Admin just days after last month's announcement: Lead Admin risen Head of Testers Now you might be asking - RageMP? Is this still a thing? Yes. We've (when I say we, mostly a taskforce consisting of Helius, danut, and Conor) gone and looked back at our stint with RageMP last year and tried to learn from our mistakes why the server didn't work out as we might've hoped it would. We've learned a lot from the community and staff feedback, and are working on a plan to bring the server back to thrive. This takes some time as it involves quite a lot of further development, economy overhaul, factions overhaul, marketing and more. We aren't quite ready to share more details just yet, but we've several developers whose main interest is the RageMP platform and when I say they're cooking, they're cooking. Big ups for the group for not giving up on the project and bringing my morale back into it. Anyway more on that later, as I said, lots of work to do still and I don't want to get everyone excited too early. Considering danut's endless efforts with the project and continuous work on the gamemode ever since joining the team, I'm excited to announce he'll be taking a role of a Lead Developer on RageMP! I've no doubt that with his and Helius' effort as the HOPE for the project, we'll be able to see it really succeed. Lead Developer danut Lead Developer (RageMP) In the SA-MP department, we're working on the next juicy update to bring you. Make sure to cast your vote at the Feature Voting on the UCP as we use it to influence priorities. There's a lot of big things on the list, so they take time to implement, but every vote matters. Currently the two big things we're working on is the Thief/House Burglary revamp (see #snippets on Discord!) and Premium/Custom Skins feature to let players add their own skin to the game. Note from ROZE re. marketing: We have noticed that new players are being retained on the server pretty well now, we've had a lot of new people join and stick around, often logging hundreds of hours. As we're now in a comfortable position to retain new players we will be taking a more in-depth look at marketing. We recently spoke to several new players to gain feedback about how they found LS-RP, and we have also reached out to some content creators in order to get feedback on how we can better work with them to create a system where we can get a constant stream of publicity and 2-way support. On top of this, we are also looking at the possibilities of being put back onto the server browser. That's it from me for today! I hope you all are able to enjoy the holiday season (or suffer through it, at least, shoutout to fellow season depressos iykyk). We've a few things prepared to make the season on LS-RP festive, so join us and let's enjoy the game together. - Martin

Update: Lenny is back from his smoke break and can be seen on the tracks of San Andreas now.

(Note: Lenny will return to the server tomorrow due to works on the railways)