Grover The Good

This definition sums up modern day roleplay. A focus on hyperrealism and an overabundance of scripts gradually replaced storytelling, lore and worldbuilding. Committed roleplayers dedicated to creating fictional stories with just /me and /do were chased away in favor of people who spend their entire playing time chatting on TeamSpeak or Discord clamoring for more script support, staff oversight and advocating for their own skewed conception of "realism". Immersive storylines that lasted months and involved dozens of characters have been substituted with a bunch of disjointed, episodic vignettes completely disconnected from each other that are considered "high quality" only because they're based off an L.A. Times article or feature some obscure LAPD term among hundreds of lines of shallow dialogue. Roleplay has turned from a concerted effort to build something unique into a disingenuous exercise to see who can make the edgiest character. If you have a stroke of luck, you can still find a (likely extremely small) group of players who still have the old mindset and make something up with them: chances are it will not last because of staff interference, community hostility or some other OOC tampering. But especially if you don't, if you're a new player or a returning one who doesn't have the right connections, then you're condemned to wander among the hundreds of shallow avatars, club goers, cop LARPers and other assorted one-dimensional, cardboard cutout concepts that pass as characters these days. The only thing that can bring people back to LSRP and the kind of roleplay it once offered, at this point, is a time machine.

Theory Scripted jobs should serve a dual purpose: provide a reliable, constant source of income for players and offer a base around which roleplay, and eventually factions, can be created. A scripted job that fails in either aspect is a badly designed scripted job because it doesn't encourage players to roleplay to earn or because it provides money without encouraging roleplay. LSRP's current scripted jobs somehow all fail in doing both, since they cannot be done in co-op while also paying out so little that players are better off doing literally anything else, including AFK'ing, rather than participate in them. Some of the most innovative faction concepts in LSRP history were built around scripts. To name a few: Unity Taxi. The faction revolved entirely around the taxi driver scripted job and it was one, if not the first, wholly "civilian" faction to obtain official status, back when official status meant something and not that you were propped up by the staff because you're a cookie-cutter concept. Though details are hazy all these years later, the faction worked around a scheme where the leadership owned a significant number of taxis that they would loan out to anyone interested in roleplaying a taxi driver in return for a percentage of the fares earned, which eventually turned into having actual employees and company-owned taxis once they got the official faction script support. At some point it even had a dispatch to take and organize calls and it was completely player-grown and operated. Reg's Trucker Association. This one was a proto-union of truckers based out of Blueberry and that welcomed anyone with the trucker job. They would regularly organize convoys to the most distant pickup points, had a radio frequency on which truckers could communicate to fight the boredom of driving around the county on their own and had turned a disused part of the map into a trucking depot where truckers could go to have their trucks checked by mechanics, plan runs with other truckers or just hang out. Once again, completely player built out of a scripted job. The Port of Los Santos. At its very core, the Port of Los Santos was a bunch of people who hung out together at the docks and whose main goal was to help unload truckers who would bring supplies to the ships faster than they would have alone. Though not exactly revolving around the script job per se, the existence of a script job nonetheless made it was easier for players to find a common task to roleplay around and eventually build it up from there. The Port was wildly popular for a while, until legal factions management, the natural enemy of legal roleplay, decided it was a good idea to arrest everyone and the mayor for staging a completely in-character strike, like it was the 19th century, and the Port, while continuing to exist, never achieved the prominence it had again. Don't fix something that ain't broken at its finest. These are just the most memorable one, but it's likely that a walk through the archives would provide many more tales of scripted jobs leading to established factions. Practice With the past in mind, let's focus on the future (as grim as it may look) and turn the theory into practice. Some of the suggestions in the main post are a good starting point to build something around, but are still too focused on the scripted/earning part and not enough on the roleplay and others are simply not feasible and/or would have so much downtime or be so unpredictable in their provision of roleplay that are simply not worth pursuing. With that said, some of the concepts that should instead be explored or enhanced are: Garbage job. A classic that needs to be redone from the ground up ASAP, introducing co-op checkpoints whenever two players or more board the same trash truck and splitting the total reward by the number of players that carried out the mission, with a higher payout the higher number of players are involved. It encourages players to roleplay together, can be undertaken by a multitude of characters regardless of their position in the server (fully legal characters, criminal characters roleplaying a legal front, etc.) and can be used to build multiple faction concepts around it. Possible applications: gabagool LCN waste management front companies, City Department of Sanitation. Taxi Driver job. Are you talking to me? To favor self-employed taxi drivers, encourage the creation of companies and promoted the re-investment of funds, make it so the publicly available taxis can only be used for a limited amount of runs in the course of a hour or lower the reward significantly, whereas privately or company-owned taxis can do as many runs as they want or get the full reward. This would incentivize players to work towards getting their own taxi and/or work for companies or employers while also motivate enterprisingly-minded players or organized crime groups with plenty of money to launder to build companies. Possible applications: taxi companies, either legal or fronts. Trucker job. Another job that needs to be redone from scratch to encourage more interactivity between players, including making it so that two people or more can do the same route, either with different trucks or in the same one, which can be roleplayed as main and relief driver. Same as the taxi driver job, limited runs or lower reward if the truck is publicly owned, unlimited runs or full payout if the truck is owned by the player or by a player-run company. Possible applications: truck companies, either legal or fronts. Delivery Driver / Postman job. Much like the trucker, but on a smaller scale and doable with smaller vehicles, all the way down to a bike in the case of the postman. Like the taxi driver job, make it so publicly available trucks are limited in their hourly runs and motivate people to either buy their own truck (being their very own owner-operators) or seek employment with an already established company or faction. Possible applications: delivery companies, United States Postal Service (USPS) Construction Worker job. One of the few jobs that don't involve constantly moving around the map, its payout should depend on the amount of roleplay you provide (i.e. amount of /me lines or a similar criteria) instead of distance covered or similarly to the garbage job (the more players involved, the higher the payout). Both would encourage roleplay over grinding (and yes, having it based on /me's can be abused, but everything else can, too), but the latter would also incentivize players to partner up in order to earn more and thus prompt player to seek employment in an established company and/or found one and look for employees. Works well with a variety of concepts (fully legal, low-level street gangsters working as laborer, OCGs using construction companies as fronts, etc.) and can be used to introduce mapping changes organically by offering projects to player run companies instead of spawning fully-built abominations in the middle of the city with little to no roleplay behind it. Possible applications: construction companies, either legal or fronts. Cashier / Store Attendant / Business Employee job. Another job that requires you to stay fixed in one place, same as above. In addition to serving as a job that fits most backgrounds, it also serves to turn gas stations, 24/7 and similar establishments into roleplay hubs, since open businesses tend to attract the playerbase. This job should be able to be given by any company in the entertainment field (clubs, bars, etc.) to its employee and should work within the confines of the interior the establishment is set in to prevent abuse. It would be a one-size-fits-all job for all player-run companies that interact with the public. Possible applications: stores and businesses, either legal or fronts. All other jobs suggested in the main post don't really work or are redundant. News reports should be the prerogative of infotainment factions, if anything for a minimum level of quality control and reliability, and also because a news factions, if well roleplayed (most aren't), brings way more roleplay to the players and the server as a whole than a random job you can pick up through a rotating yellow "i". Hospital staff requires OOC knowledge to back the roleplay up and that can often be ascertained only by other players. Car salesmen can already be roleplayed by players since there's nothing preventing the establishment of used car dealerships (except the players' lack of imagination) and it's another position where the player dedication and knowledge makes the roleplay far more enjoyable. Same goes for gun dealers, though it calls into question why Ammunation shops cannot be owned by the players. Conclusion Overall, by looking at the current state of scripted jobs it looks like they were badly designed on purpose, perhaps with the hope of establishing a completely player-to-player economy that, very unsurprisingly, failed to materialize the moment the playerbase dropped under a certain level. Without going out of the way trying to reinvent the wheel for a third time, take some of the scripts that did a lot of good in the past, give it some polish and an update to bring them into the modern times and let people use them as tools to build roleplay, instead of trying to employ them to steer the playerbase in the direction you think they should be going. Whatever you do, however, do it fast, because time and patience are running out. This reply has been written in collaboration with @arrdef. TL;DR Scripts are tools. Treat them as such.

Management and Administration Admins are, have been and always will be chosen on the basis of some bureaucratic selection process and out-of-character networking which results in those with the most connections and/or ability to file an application in the best way possible, not those who are gifted at roleplaying, to be appointed to staff positions. This is due to a variety of factors, not least the fact that most of those whom you could consider good roleplayers are here exactly to do just that, roleplay, and not get embroiled into some senseless web of Discord politicking or endless talks about "quality", "standards", etc. that ultimately serve only to stroke someone's ego. What management can do, however, is fostering a mentality where those who are ultimately appointed carry out their duties with humility and with the intent of teaching rule breakers, rather than wantonly punishing them for the sake of it and assuming they know better than the rest of the community by virtue of their forum name being colored differently. Make it so that those in a position of responsibility keep an open mind when it comes to player requests and allow them to use their admin abilities to help the players create interesting scenarios instead of immediately shutting these ideas down because they don't fit some made-up criteria. Grinding and Scripted Jobs Despite this having been noted before, the scripted job system still is scripted backwards. Scripted jobs that should be a magnet for new players, make earning a salary easy and encourage random encounters (i.e. two truckers sharing a truck for faster unloading or a route to the same loading spot, two garbagemen randomly meeting at the landfill and going on shift together) are instead designed to be as complicated as possible with almost zero guidance, offer no way of long-term sustenance and purposefully keep players separate. Staying AFK two hours nets you the amount of 20 garbage trips around the city while offering an arguably better experience in terms of roleplay. Why would anyone waste their time engaging in something that isn't entertaining in the slightest and with no interaction with other players when they could simply leave their PC running and obtain the same reward? What Makesde LSRP Great What made SAMP's LSRP great was creativity and risk-taking. What makes RAGE:MP's LSRP a failure is the fact that it's the same soup as everywhere else, just reheated. At its peak, LSRP was LSRP because everyday was an improvement over the day before. There was a constant search for something new, there was innovation and players were not afraid of trying out new concepts or creating organizations completely from scratch. And it worked, until the powers that be decided that making a 1:1 model set of the biggest failure of a State in the Continental US was the new golden standard, at which point any and all attempts at exploring new avenues were promptly shut down and people settled into this California Dreamin' mindset where if you dare to do something that isn't "backed up by sources" you automatically qualify as a "bad roleplayer", as if roleplay meant copying things from government organizations websites or acting out your favorite gangland documentary in-game. There's already a community that does just that, with far more advanced scripts, so for LSRP to follow into the same path was a disaster waiting to happen. It's genuinely appalling that no one ever questioned whether this was a good idea, especially in light of the server's long and tenured history of taking risks that ultimately paid out, making it the premiere English-speaking server on which to play. Faced with having to choose between two similar servers, players obviously flocked towards the more advanced one. LSRP's chance to succeed was at doing the opposite and coming up with new ways to keep the setting interesting and fresh while also maintaining a certain degree of immersion (San Andreas still is a state on the US West Coast, gangs of Liverpool hooligans still are outliers that shouldn't be allowed). LSRP's management decided to not take the opportunity and now the server is paying the price for that. It's not too late to steer the ship in a different direction, but you all need to take a bit of pride in LSRP's history and remember what it was that made 600 players play every day. Player Trust and Communication Speaking of which, LSRP used to cater to such a large playerbase because the players mostly trusted the administration and felt they were approachable. Crooked admins, people who got their staff position through questionable means and outright malicious administration members were a staple, but the majority of the time there was strong forum communication and discussion between the regular players and the staff. This constant communication and discussion made it easier for players to accept a delayed script, an unpopular decision, a lagging in development. Admins, leads and managers would often show up in general discussions and throw their opinion into the midst and, in general, would keep the players in the loop as to what was going on behind the scenes. It created a good sense of community because even if the divide between staff members and regular players was always present, it gave players a voice and made them feel like they could trust those in charge to listen to their opinions. This attitude started fading in the days of post-2016 terminal stage LSRP with the restriction of important discussions to a bunch of selected individuals only, and eventually devolved into what it is now, with a post once every blue moon detailing things that may become a reality at some point, passing through the multiple instances of the server being delayed while the staff was incommunicado. You could argue that this lack of communication between the higher-ups and the playerbase is common on LSRP's main competitor, too, and you'd be right, but LSRP doesn't run itself like the opposition. The LSRP brand doesn't mean anything anymore to most people. Whatever fidelity was built between 2007 and 2021 is gone. Player trust at the moment is more or less at zero. Yes, there is a constant base of holdouts that show up everyday and play on the server and keep it alive, but it's not sustainable long-term and anyone telling you otherwise is outright delusional, and everyone else, people who left for whatever reason, are going to need a little more than an announcement saying "times are tough and we need to do better" to come back. For anyone thinking there was no mass exodus, the server opened with 300 players, which were down to 150 about a month later, which were down to 50 yesterday. The steps taken by @Dos Santos to keep the playerbase in the loop are good, but a "mistakes were made" post every once in a while is not going to change things, and neither are going to be snippets of server features posted on an obscure Discord channel of a server whose notifications most people likely turned off or who have never joined it in the first place. Set and illustrate a vision for the server, both in terms of roleplay and when it comes to features. Explain what you aim to achieve within the next six months and what possible hurdles are on the way so as to prepare the players in case you don't meet the deadlines. Liaise with factions and players and make sure they have what they need to roleplay what they want, don't wait to be approached, and don't let concepts be restrained by some artificial standards that only stifle creativity. Make these things visible to everyone on the forums for maximum impact. It's not rocket science, it's not even Management 101, it's just common sense. Pretending issues don't exist by isolating yourselves into some ivory towers like others do certainly is an alternative solution. Too bad it isn't the one that will make LSRP succeed.

Most people have never experienced that, so trying to appeal to nostalgia won't have much of an effect. In fact, it's one of the issues. The problems of the server started before it was even open. The powers that be seem to have thought that just bringing the brand back would've been enough to get former players to abandon other communities and go back home. Unfortunately this was the most wrong of assumptions. For one, after 2016 LSRP lost most of its original appeal, as it had turned into a jumbled mess of OOC connections, user infighting, complacency on behalf of the staff and staleness on behalf of the players and thus most émigrés had no reason to come back other than temporary curiosity. Additionally, the playerbase of other communities isn't composed exclusively of LSRP refugees, and those players who have never heard of it have little reason to check a server that offers a tenth of the features for no other significant gain. The economic system is good and the idea of having people buy things on credit is both very immersive and realistic in theory, but the scripts surrounding it have been designed backwards, in a way that actually discourages roleplaying around script-based jobs and fosters a mentality of grinding. The trash job works like a single-player mission that forces you to go from point A to point B and then repeat the same action 10 times instead of being a multiplayer system so that multiple players can roleplay a sanitation crew and, you know, roleplay while earning. The trucking is likewise not focused on actually roleplaying by having players share routes or some other similar framework, it instead encourages players to rush like a lemming to earn the most. There's no system that helps players to create roleplay hubs by simply existing while also earning a few bucks (i.e. the 24/7 job system that other communities have). In short the job scripts seem to have been teleported straight from 2010 and there's nothing, or very little, that's scripted to earn money while roleplaying with other people. But not all scripts are bad. Law enforcement scripts, for example, are quite advanced for a server that has launched not so long ago. Unfortunately not even half of the effort that was put into scripts for LEO factions was put into scripts that cater to illegal factions, with the end result being a noticeably unbalanced situation that definitely soured the illegal roleplayers. There's no reason to engage in the most common types of trafficking since narcotics have no effect and there's thus no market for them (since yeah, roleplay and all, but the people who use them just for roleplay can be counted on the fingers of one hand), and weapons appear to be a dime a dozen for criminals (and unbelievably expensive for legal roleplayers, which contributed to sour that share of the playerbase). Like it or not, the majority of RAGE MP players are used to having heaps of scripts to use as a crutch in their roleplay and thinking otherwise is just foolish from a business standpoint: you can do just fine without them, just don't expect to have enough of a playerbase to support the server. And even leaving the scripts aside and focusing on the storytelling, another major issue is that nothing was done to combat the staleness that affected SAMP's LSRP, it was doubled down on instead. This wasn't the fault of whoever is calling the shots only, though, as the West Coast has been used as backdrop for 15 years straight and there's very little that can be done differently, but even what could be done differently wasn't even taken into account. The lore and storytelling could've been the saving throws of LSRP, given that its main competitor seem to think that trying to create lore is a capital offense, but the LSRP mythos, despite having 15 years of SAMP history that could've been tapped into to create an immersive history, are reduced to three paragraphs that use the standard "we're just SoCal, but with some NorCal in an area of the map no one roleplays in". There's just nothing, in terms of factions or concepts, that can entice players because it isn't found anywhere else. The most obvious example is the legal faction panorama, that could've started with some fresh ideas that hadn't already been beaten to death in LSRP's previous instance and other communities but, no, you decided to go again with the tired LSPD/LSSD combo, which players can already experience in any server set in San Andreas, instead of ditching one of the two in favor of something new such as the SAHP or one of the half a dozen smaller police agencies that operate within LA city limits, and then you topped it all off by making both extremely bloated in an effort to be "realistic" instead of starting small and growing along with the playerbase. And then there's the complacency, which is perhaps the biggest issue of all. If you want the server to succeed you just cannot afford to be complacent or disappear for weeks on end only to pop up with a half-assed apology promising you'll do better in the future. The competition is many things, but complacent isn't one of them. You cannot possibly expect to pile up broken promise upon broken promise on top of a brand that is already greatly devalued since its heyday and get away with it. You need to set a vision of what you want to achieve roleplay-wise and stick to it, not jump from update to update and make it up as you go along. Either take it seriously and make justice to the banner you're under or call it a day and let people remember LSRP as the shining city on a hill that it once was. P.S. for the Panda's surveillance team: see, you're not that special, other management teams need guidance too.