Jerome

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This is also an update posted by Dos Santos for anyone interested in knowing the current development progress.

I've combed through every post on this thread, and I have not seen any actual constructive criticism except for a select few posts. All I've read so far are attacks on different staff members, specifically bringing up history from several years ago on SA-MP and going back and forth for the sake of just wanting to argue. Threads like this never really work because one side of the isle provides criticism and raises concerns with ideas on how to fix these issues, while the other is usually only interested in shit-posting & spreading nonsense. The positive feedback and legitimate concerns raised in the thread are appreciated. As stated in an earlier post by Jack; If there any areas of concern such as faction management, quality assurance, illegal schemes and so forth, you may direct yourself to the link above and speak to the person in charge of that respective area. I will be locking this thread as it has been completely derailed and more than half of the posts serve no actual purpose in terms of looking for ways to fix areas of concern. Have a good night.

Suggestions are closed due to the development team needing to focus on the current list at the moment. I'm sure they'll re-open them in due time when they have had a chance to implement what's already been approved.

I'm not entirely against that but it needs to be a realistic number, not 10 people on duty at most because people want to commit broad daylight shootings with no repercussions. SD is more active than PD and has always been since launch - it's not a secret. It's even been said by people in your own leadership team, there's nothing wrong with that either. We just have more numbers, it is what it is. This isn't any attempt to discredit either faction, I even said that it's completely fine if people prefer PD over SD or SD over PD. It's their decision to roleplay what they want to roleplay.

The issue is, what does closing one faction down and sticking with just one do for the community? Making a decision like that doesn't really change much because the people from the previous faction can just flock over to the next one. You'll still have a bunch of cops. A change like that is just gonna piss off a lot of people because they have to move over and will likely have to deal with rank restructuring. As far as why there's more cops in Davis than gangs, that's because they all quit for reasons outside of LEO roleplayers' doing. They were unhappy with the way things were going with the server and left.

Also another question; IF the decision to close LSSD down was made, what stops former SD members from transferring to PD? You're still gonna have all these cops regardless if that's the case.

I think there are quite a lot of cops on this server, however not many have been recruited since the first month of the server. These are the same people that were here since day 1. They remained active and still do til this day, and it's not their fault that the gang roleplay and civilian scene took a massive decline. There is no way to fix the current ratio of cops to civilians at the moment outside of trying to retain what little criminal roleplayers and civilians we have left and rebuilding those scenes. Removing them isn't the logical way to go about it. What are you gonna do? Tell people who have done absolutely nothing wrong that people are pissed off because they now massively outnumber the civilians so they gotta go? Absolutely not. Did we take guns away from gangs who (and I highly doubt you can argue that this isn't true) blatantly abused them? No. We looked for ways to guide them into promoting more suitable roleplay and came up with ideas on how administration could start punishing repeat offenders. Why don't we close LSSD and have just PD? Well for one, there are a lot things internally between both factions that have gone down behind the scenes that people don't know about. Some people have moved to either PD or SD to get away from others while some just don't like the way the other faction is run, and that's okay. There is no way to merge the factions into one without a complete restructuring of the rank and file without pissing people off. How would you like it if you've put in 100+ hours of forum work and in-game work and grinded your way to a position that is no longer needed post faction merge? I know if it were me I'd just not play. These are things you have to take into account. You have to look at it from both sides, not just one. You're looking at it from an outsider's point of view. The most common way people look at PD vs SD is this; PD is the main faction, we roleplay in Los Santos (the city) SD are sheriff's, they belong in the county or patrolling a highway Right now, SD's numbers (even while we were still peaking 150-200 players) are always higher. Maybe some people just prefer SD over PD for the purpose of wanting to roleplay as a deputy sheriff / LASD counterpart while less want to roleplay as a PD officer / LAPD counterpart. My question to you now is this; Why close the LSSD? Why not close PD and have SD stay if they are and have always been more active since launch? I'm not asking the question as a means of wanting to know which is better. I'm just curious as to why you want PD to stay over SD.

As a member of the command team, I'm always supposed to have a defense or justification as to why a specific policy is in place or why we do things the way we do things. If you lead a faction I'd expect you to be able to do the same. No excuses were given because there was nothing to be excused for, no mistakes were made. An allegation was made, I proved the allegation to be untrue with screenshots showing otherwise. You should try to be more open yourself and understand that nobody is gonna submit to your passive aggressiveness nor is anyone obligated to support your opinion. If you don't like what I've said respectfully you don't have to read it nor respond to it.

We withdrew from Davis and this is what happened: https://streamable.com/eblpcc Full on gangland style shootings every 15 minutes. Illegal roleplayers did that to themselves. A majority of the server does not share the same opinion you share, only the people who are in denial about their subpar driving, constant shooting and refusal to take ownership for their mistakes share that opinion.

But were you driving with no license and an expired registration? Was it your first offense? You gotta take things like that into consideration. Were you respectful to the cop that pulled you over and gave notice to you that your stuff was expired? I myself have just made people walk/impounded the car for having no license + no registration. Everyone isn't me and nobody is required to show that type of discretion. The same way a lot of you think cops are the issue, a lot of people actually thought the gangs running around with massive cache's of weapons as if we're in the middle of Fallujah was the problem. I'm not saying LEOs are perfect but don't paint the false image that this server's decline in the PB was a result of LEO roleplayers because it wasn't nor did it even contribute to it's decline.

Nobody is "starving" for an arrest. That way of thinking is ridiculous and not supported by a single shred of evidence nor can you even name an instance when this occurred. You run an intersection IRL you get pulled over and get a ticket. Same happens in-game, except a lot of the time we don't even issue the tickets to first time offenders. If you're annoyed that you're being pulled over repeatedly you should probably stop driving like this is GTA Online then. Stop blaming cops for your poor driving, stop blaming cops for being more active than the rest of the playerbase and stop blaming the decline in the playerbase on cops. The issues we're having have nothing to do with LEO roleplayers.

That's definitely not why most people are not motivated to play. When the server first launched, it was peaking 300 players. Connection issues came and went, it started peaking just over 200. Then slowly reduced to about 150, 120, 100 and now we're struggling to maintain over 70 players. If you're gonna say that that decline is caused by cops then you're a lost cause. Throughout several months the server has been up, there was a point where cops were massively outnumbered by civilians and gang members. Our last recruitment drive is the only recruitment drive where we recently took in anywhere near 10 new recruits. The last few have been very selective, we were taking in 3-5 recruits a month. Driving around in a Buffalo STX running intersection and driving like this is GTA Online is the reason why most people are pulled over. Drive more realistic and you won't get pulled over.

Not really sure where you got your information from or who relayed it to you but your math is way off. The LSSD* (not the SASD - it does not exist), opens recruitment once per month, not once per week. No need to exaggerate, it won't help get your point across - in fact it'll just make people not take any of your concerns seriously. Second, there were nowhere near 22 SD cops online today - I was online and during my time online (I was online for about 5-6 hours), there were 12 cops online most of them were SD. Out of the 12, 4-5 were trainees from last month's recruitment drive. You can't blame their activity or higher ratio to non LEO on recruitment because that's definitely not the case. There's more cops than regular players because the gang members and civilian roleplayers are no longer too active. It's not like you can go and tell them not to log on because there's already too many cops online.

The price of weapons have been restored.

Prices of guns have since been restored to their previous values as per the last changelog.

There's nothing wrong with the quiz. Read the rules and then re-take the exam once you're confident you have an understanding of them.

I haven't seen you in-game the last 2 months to be fair. Regardless these are concerns you should bring up to the Executive Staff team who are always available and swiftly handle any genuine concerns.

They usually respond in-game all the time and if they aren't available then a report is made, initial statements are forwarded and the case is picked up the following day when IAB is available. I myself have paged IAB a few times and they have responded and in the instances where they could not respond, I filed the reports and IAB picked it up the following day. And they have all been investigated. I have also been the subject of investigations myself.

Then the supervisor on scene or the incident commander forwards a use of force and incident report to internal affairs and the case is picked up and handled by IAB.

Here are some of the few requests for IAB that have been made for questionable incidents;

You misunderstood what I said. We're not making people fill out a report for every shooting they're involved in. There is so much shooting that faction members would be on the forums filling out reports a majority of their time online. Some people have limited schedules and can only play maybe 2 or 3 hours per day. For instances where the shooting appears to be unjustified, there is a procedure for reporting this. IAB is always paged and arrives on scene to get a report from everyone on scene and the person is placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of their investigation. You being in courts have access to the few cases where this has happened so for you to say it's an excuse or second the fact that the LSSD does not provide some oversight for nonsense or unjustified shootings is nonsense. We've forwarded cases for questionable shootings and other instances where people have died in deputy involved car collisions.

There is zero OOC talks or causal conversation in IC TAC channels aside from the very rare instances where a pursuit becomes an admin sit, which always results in the TAC being cleared until the situation is resumed. This is enforced by all supervisors, command and faction leadership. This has always been standard practice even since SAMP. With the several shootings right after the other, it’s obvious we aren’t going to file incident reports for each one. While we are here to roleplay, we understand this is a video game and we have zero intention in making it a second job or paperwork simulator by creating use of force reports for all incidents.

The prices of PF guns will likely go down, probably just not anytime soon. A major issue right now with PF guns was the fact that 1; illegal roleplayers were applying for PFs instead of retrieving firearms through the illegal strawmen scheme because there's little to no to no effort in doing so and the prices were extremely cheap and 2; a majority of the DM reports are from people in possession of PF weapons. The current prices in no way shape or form were meant to reflect what the IRL model of the gun would cost - but as somewhat of a restriction or cooldown to prevent the massive abuse of the PF system in the first place. This wasn't really much of an issue on SA-MP because illegal roleplayers were barred OOCly from applying for PF licenses and anyone who lied on their applications and got busted were banned from applying in the future. The transfer of PF guns was also against server rules which isn't a thing anymore so people are just buying PF guns, selling them to their friends and reporting them stolen. This is a major issue that could not be ignored and has finally been addressed. I myself have pulled a car over for a simple traffic offense and 3-4 of the occupants of that vehicle got out shooting almost immediately upon making contact - come to find out that when I decide to PF check the names they all come back as newly issued PF licenses.