Grover The Good

Agree to disagree on the necessity of the scripts to make roleplay immersive and entertaining, people just need to be shown how to roleplay without a script, not fed more and more so that their creativity is stifled even more. At the end of the day, you say it yourself that the competition wasn't particularly developed at its inception (class of 2017 here), and most LS-RP old timers jumped ships for their own selfish reasons, and not because the other side was particularly better in terms of both scripts and community. In fact, it's not all rainbows over there either. A staff team that takes administrative action over players for incorporating lore the admins themselves created or enacts a blanket ban over LCN organizations, a staple of roleplay communities, "because there's no LCN in California" is not exactly a shining example of good management focused on providing entertaining roleplay or an immersive world. You have a point in saying that after the third downfall it might be high time LS-RP staff and management in particular get their things together and put their money where their mouth is, lest big talk about transparency remains just that, talk. In many cases from the past, LS-RP succeeded because of dedicated, committed regular players and in spite of the staff, not thanks to them, and it seems as though history repeats itself. Back on the topic at hand and to answer @Nunwithagun, though, jobs that provide actual opportunities to roleplay.

Except roleplay never was and never will be about the scripts. What's absolutely necessary to roleplay? LCN survived and thrived for years, creating entertaining storylines about bringing people out in the woods and dumping them into a ditch, without a shovel script. The golden era of GND roleplay everyone fondly remembers never had scriptwise access to bank accounts and the mole system worked only if you were lucky. The Port Authority was built entirely around the very outdated trucking script and a faction system that dates back to the early days of the server. Many prison gangs made the prison feel alive without a script to make shanks or pruno, relying on DOC's faction leader to bring weapon packages and narcotics inside for them instead. SAN's script was always barebones but it still helped to spread in-character news about in-character events, giving impact to the actions of single players server-wide, and the State Senate didn't even need any scripts other than paychecks to leave a mark that made the world feel more immersive. At the cost of making a "back in my days" post, the problem is that roleplayers grew too reliant on the scripts for everything and believe that if something can't be done scriptwise, then it shouldn't be done, forgetting that roleplaying is make-believe from start to finish. You can roleplay burying someone without a shovel script. You can portray the FBI as existing without an actual faction being scripted. You can pay for a sandwich your character isn't going to eat scriptwise. Scripts are supposed to be a support feature for storytelling, not the basis. Your point about having a clear plan and actual management instead of winging it is agreeable, however. And this is why the focus on scripts is misleading: there's already a community out there that has far more scripts than anyone wants or needs, so unless LS-RP V comes out with features so extraordinary it dwarfs the competition in every possible aspect, which is certainly possible but highly unlikely due to the advantage the others have in terms of time and manpower, it's bound to be yet another disaster. LS-RP's past glories were only marginally affected by the scripts. Back at its peak, no one ever joined because the drug system has psychedelic effects, or because the vehicles' engines and batteries degrade over time, or because you can customize your callsign when going on duty as a cop. The main attraction always was the community's ability to create a living, immersive world in which players' actions led to consequences leaving a lasting legacy. So what is it? Is it the scripts and the features that attracts players, or the community/staff and the kind of roleplay they provide?

Roleplay, lore and a focus on giving an immersive experience as opposed to copy-pasting California in the game. With those, the only features a roleplayer needs are /me and /do.

And they don't happen fifteen months after giving constructive criticism, twice, either.

Don't worry, you can grant them all the powers you want as there's no way the factions currently known as LSPD and LSSD would ever be able to close down a faction because they couldn't organize an investigation and roleplay around it if their lives depended on it, for the simple reason that they're not the LSPD and the LSSD anymore. Sure they have the name and the graphics, but there's almost zero interest in character development, long-term storylines, carefully crafted scenarios or anything that resembles roleplay, as both factions have more or less been taken hostage by a pool of players for whom the law enforcement script is an easy way to get free weapons and armors to go around and "pack" people. And that's when they don't victimize their own factions by using their alts to mow down waves of the few good members who naively attempt to interact with them. In what surely is a coincidence, anyone who suspects these players, catches wind of their exploits or attempts to stop them is promptly met with a removal from the faction they're in or forced to resign after being put in a position where they're unable to actually change things. Meanwhile @Mmartin, @badhbh and @izumi, nominal members of LFM, are either sleeping, legally blind or willfully complicit in the downfall of two factions that, though not always great, have nonetheless provided countless interesting encounters and a much needed balance to the criminal scene. The law enforcement part of the server went from the handcrafted investigations of the Westbrook times to a bunch of glorified DM teams that occasionally use /me and /do, and they're going to sink further and drag the server down with them unless some people stop running cover for their friends and start taking the tough decisions they're supposed to take. The old faction takedown system had some glaring issues that had to be fixed, but it still worked better than the free-for-all the server has now. Back when Ethanol was head of LFM, some tweaks and updates to the system were proposed: instead of factions "shutting down" and being put on a cooldown period before reopening they would merely lose official status and script privileges ("descripted") and continue operate as normal, with major players being offered the chance to go through an IC trial on selected charges (to prevent clogging the courts with jaywalking cases), those who weren't involved in the investigation being allowed to keep running the faction and anyone who roleplayed skipping town forfeiting their rights to a trial and being sought as a fugitive (to prevent people from going inactive for a few weeks and resume their spot in the faction immediately after). This proposal got some support from the illegal factions at the time, AP-13 in particular, but then, ironically enough, AP-13 got descripted and its leaders lost access to the FM section where the discussion was being held, the FM at the time either resigned or was couped and everything went down the drain real fast as their successors didn't have much interest in changing things as they had in preserving the status quo. Official factions have always been the priority when it came to case files. Detectives have typically focused on factions that had a high-profile OOC, rather than IC, and treated the whole investigation as a giant, monolithic entity instead of pursuing single crimes (murders, smuggling, extortion, etc.) and use those to build a bigger and more robust case. This mentality being accepted, however, rarely fell to the single investigators and it was more of a systemic issue: on one hand, you had the faction leaderships who promoted a "results-at-all-costs" strategy, regardless of the methods or the actual roleplay involved (as seen in the detectives constantly taking surveillance pictures over actual confrontations); on the other, as you correctly point out in your post, it was a Faction Management that accepted pretty much anything at face value once the casefile became big enough (D'Aquila being an excellent example — it's a mystery how FM could accept that casefile). For the system to actually work well you need several components to work flawlessly together, including an illegal faction that's willing to play fair, law enforcement members who can prioritize IC threats over OOC glamour and an FM who's willing to put time and effort into reviewing the cases instead of just rubber stamping whatever LEOs bring to their table. But even in the case where the system doesn't work like clockwork, it'd still be an improvement over whatever's in place at the moment. Correct. And roleplay-wise, they still manage to be worse than they were in 2013.

In their critique of the server, these two posts might seem at odds, but they actually complement each other and highlight an issue that's been plaguing LS-RP long before its 2021 shutdown. It could be argued, in fact, that it was specifically this issue that caused the shutdown itself, as at the time RAGE was nothing out of the ordinary and other communities were (and still are) a mere copycat of LS-RP at its finest. The issue is that LS-RP stopped innovating years ago. Ever since its opening, LS-RP had always been at the forefront of innovation when it came to both scripts and roleplay ideas. Systems like DamianC's vehicle scripts or Mmartin's garages and commissary were unheard of, and something so far ahead other communities could never hope to catch up. Likewise, on the creative side, you had absolute novelties in terms of roleplay, things that no other server had ever tried or even considered, factions that players themselves had ideated organically (often after lengthy fights against conservative staff members who only wanted to conserve their power) and dramatically helped move the narrative away from just cops and robbers into more cinematic territory, such as SADOC or Meadows DTO. People wanted to be part of LS-RP because some things were simply impossible to roleplay anywhere else. LS-RP was the only server among English-speaking ones to have a vibrant prison scene, boasting three prison gangs at most times and a correctional faction, just because a bunch of players figured they could try to make it work. Long before the trucking scene was taken over by these ridiculous poorly portrayed business conglomerates, players self-organized into Reg's Trucker Association, which was the only representation of an union you could find anywhere. With nothing but resolve and the belief that going back-and-forth on the forums could be as fun as shootouts and pursuits, a small band of people managed to convince LFM to let them organize a State Legislature and brought a completely new kind of roleplay to light (at least until LFM decided to tear it down with dynamite). Starting from a barebones taxi script that charged laughable rates, people set up Unity Taxi, which was so successful and provided so much roleplay to the civilian scene it broke the longstanding assumption that no business faction that wasn't illegal would ever be given official. When some players decided to found an Armenian gang, they were laughed at, as gangs had to mandatorily be black or latinos, until those Armenians proved through their roleplay that idea wasn't far-fetched at all and eventually earned official status, after which nobody laughed anymore. And although some other communities might want you to think they're the first to have ever thought of turning the docks into a source of roleplay, LS-RP had a working Port of Los Santos in 2015 already, and its security was far less obnoxious than any of the subsequent iterations. There was a constant, deeply ingrained sense of moving forward, not necessarily towards better roleplay or more popular ideas, but forward nonetheless. People weren't scared of exploring new avenues to create roleplay, dismantling things that didn't work anymore (and in some cases even those that worked but could be organized differently), making mistakes and going back to the drawing board for another round of thinking if need be. There's nothing like that now. The server is at a standstill. Aside from a few long-running remarkable concepts like Valenti, there's very little that sets LS-RP apart from other communities. And there's zero interest in changing this, because there's an almost pathological fear that trying something new is going to doom the server combined with a deep denial of the actual state of things. It became preferable to lose players dissatisfied by how things are going by the dozen and running the server into the ground than take a leap of faith and touch a status quo that has been the same for almost a decade at this point. Look no further than this very topic, where the Head of Legal Factions tells people with a straight face that "all legal factions are running optimally" despite the LSSD, again as this thread proves, barely shows face in game, is torn apart by internal strife and crippled by a structure that should've been reformed months ago but wasn't because "you're meant to portray LASD", "this is just SoCal" and other assorted platitudes. LS-RP didn't scare so easy. That's what made it great. The only way to bring back the old playerbase, other than a time machine, is to bring back what brought the old playerbase here in the first place: creativity and boldness and perhaps add into the mix a staff that works with the players instead of for or against them to create something unique. If you keep doing what you've been doing so far, you'll mostly get the same results. And while you can ignore reality, the current numbers prove very well that you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

This topic very obviously is a hit piece created for the sole purpose of targeting a specific staff member (who had plenty of faults of his own in his fate) by people who believe themselves to be the smartest guys in the room, but at least proves that if a bait is taken earnestly, constructive discussion can sprout from the most unlikely of source. To move to the matter at hand, your concerns are valid, but from the other side of the barricade the perspective is flipped: law enforcement factions have been greatly restricted when it comes to the deployment of weaponry over the years. It used to be that all weapons were freely available to the most basic of officers, including entry-level positions, then usage of assault rifles was restricted to tactical teams, then MP5 usage was curtailed, then it became a requirement for LEOs to be "certified" (pass an exam on the forums after spending a significant amount of time in the faction) first to use M4s and then eventually shotguns as well, and the number of people who could be certified was limited as well. There's also a plethora of internal regulations that prevent LEO roleplayers from carrying out actions that used to be very common (shooting tires, deploy beanbags against motorcycle riders, etc.). On top of this, several OOC rules were established by LFM which, if broken, can result in severe punishment for the player, along with internal faction discipline. In short, the regular officer/deputy only has a handgun at their disposal unless they put time and effort in to earn a qualification, and they're still limited in what they can do with it, whereas any criminal roleplayer can tap into their private weapon stock they've been accumulating since 2014, grab three friends and use them on the flimsiest of excuses with little to no requirements. It doesn't mean some restrictions weren't needed, but the constant race for realism and "fairness" all the regulations resulted in a situation where most LEO roleplayers are typically underpowered and saddled with rules against parties who couldn't care less about either two of those aspects. It's doubly ironic when considering all the limitations were originally enacted as a way to "improve police roleplay" by teaching people how to roleplay around these weapons, yet firearm-related roleplay is basically unheard of in both factions, usually entirely revolving around taking or placing the M4 in the patrol car gun rack. That's the police roleplay equivalent of a cancer that, though repeatedly defeated, tends to reoccur from time to time, with no long-term cure in sight. All law enforcement factions regularly happen to have among their ranks a member or a group of members who believe Training Day or The Shield are the greatest thing since bread came sliced and roleplay as if they're CRASH in the 90s and recordings aren't a thing or the LASD is still under the Baca administration and they aren't being hit by a new whistleblower lawsuit every month. It was particularly noticeable in the "!!!" era of LSSD, where a group of faction members would routinely beat people, including other deputies, in many cases for no particular reason other than being edgy, but the LSPD also had plenty of occasions to shine in that regard as both factions rushed to adopt each other's trends, both good and bad. Once again, in a way that shows how truly ironic life can be, the portrayal of corruption was much more amateurish after all the "realistic" revamps than it was under Westbrook's leadership of GND, when it was more severe but in a sensible way that didn't stretch the suspension of disbelief. Even SADOC had its moment, however brief it was, when inmate and CO roleplayers used Discord to arrange times for stabbings to take place and riots to erupt in a true show of organic roleplay. The most comical of corruption scenarios usually take a combination of overzealous players who take their role way too seriously or want to enrich their portrayal by use the most trite dramatic device in the form of corruption (bonus points if their character's also an alcoholic or suffers from an addiction), a faction leadership that connives with them because of ignorance or interest and an LFM team that's too apathetic to actually carry out it duties. These planets rarely align. But when they do, good police roleplay gets eclipsed.

People are acting as if LFM being completely uncapable of running the legal faction scene and repeatedly betting on horses that have proven unsuitable for racing is an unprecedented event that only happened with the Iudex fiasco, but unless you're new or you've slept throughout LS-RP's history, you'd know that's always been the case. From the perspective of a regular player who's been around long enough to remember when the LSPD was based off the Met rather than the LAPD, LFM has never amounted to much else other than a bunch of holdouts who looked after their own and sought to maintain the status quo at all costs, with the occasional revolution only done for the sake of replacing the figures of the old regime with new ones, but without tearing down the regime mechanisms themselves. Collins used to bend over backwards to cover for Foran's autocratic management style of the LSPD and his attempts to torpedo any law enforcement faction that wasn't his own. Pitchounette, may God rest her soul, was resistant to any suggestion that could upset the balance of the server, not matter how small or inconsequential. ObZen's most notable achievement as head of LFM was destroying overnight a political roleplay scene that had taken years to be built only to appease a specific faction. Surreal and his circus completely killed any semblance of creativity in favor of mere imitation that produces nothing but dozens of characters that all look and act the same while dismantling critical systems such as the faction takedown scheme under the guise of "fairness". In the case of others who aren't specifically mentioned their tenure as Head of Legal Factions was so purposeless they're not even worth the time of being listed. The only LFM admin who seemed to have understood why LFM ever existed in the first place was Ethanol, under whom you could at least discuss topics that previously (and subsequently) were considered pipe dreams at best and nuisances at worst. Note that you could only discuss them, not actually see them implemented. But the point is that there never truly was a group of LFM admins who sought to create roleplay for others, and instead most of their time was spent on coming up with inventive solutions on how to limit it. LFM has always been the epitome of "let me know what you want, and I'll tell you why it can't be". LFM has always refused to innovate and shake things up since at least 2013, with each iteration relying on archaic rulings inherited from their predecessors like they're the Tablets of Stone while adding a slew of bad pronouncements of their own. Look no further than the ridiculous notion that the governor must be portrayed by the head of LFM, most of whom either didn't care or didn't know how to portray the role effectively, with the only notable exceptions being Pitch and Flemwad. Or ask yourself why it took SADOC ten years to get actual law enforcement powers for its special agents. Or wonder why during the sunset of LS-RP, both before the closing and after the reopening, it's always been the same people holding high-ranking positions within law enforcement factions. Or question why LFM spent time organizing pointless political agencies for a playerbase that doesn't even exist instead of engineering solutions towards improving the factions that are the main playerbase magnet. Where's the big news in LFM being chummy with and appointing a rulebreaker to leader of one of the server's most prominent factions?

It's worth asking why this happened. Unlike the managers of "other communities", Tyrell Parker, you at least have the distinction of understanding what roleplay is, and even being apt at it, but this didn't save you from making the same mistakes others have done, namely appointing people for whom roleplay was a means to an end, and not an end in itself. While it seems to be easy and popular to pin the blame on "other communities" who promoted this kind of mentality (and they do, without a doubt) while LS-RP was on a break, it was on LS-RP that this mindset was not only born, but encouraged by a section of the staff team who had zero interest in creating or even engaging in roleplay, but craved acceptance and power. They could not create something original if their life depended on it, and lacking creativity their only way to shine was to repackage copy-pasting real-life and sell it as some revolutionary act of innovativeness and imagination. These people eventually rose to prominence by enforcing arbitrary standards and railroading roleplay within some pre-determined boundaries instead of allowing it to develop organically. But since their scornful imitation of life obviously paled compared to actual roleplay, they had to make sure that their changes were well received, one way or another. So they started pitting factions and players against each other by assembling groups that on the surface looked like they were trying to solve an issue while, in practice, they were targeting a specific group of players, or by stirring up dissent in factions they considered problematic, or by enacting ridiculous rules that were meant to hinder one's portrayal while having no good reason to exist beyond some vague need for "realism". LS-RP slowly glided into a draconian environment in which dissent was either bought out through favors (staff positions, promotions within factions, perks, etc.) or silenced by driving away the critics. It got to a point where if someone had the right connections they could get anything they wanted regardless of their actual roleplay skills or impact on the server, and likewise if a player dared to object to the mainstream opinion held by the leadership, they'd find themselves removed from their positions on shaky grounds, if any were even necessary, or hounded by one of the many corporate named teams such as the Law Enforcement Role Play Brainstorming Group or whatever else their bright minds came up with in their only act of creativity. This situation of course drove away most of the more imaginative and committed players, ultimately leaving little more than just a bunch of power-hungry individuals, their sycophantic "friends" and people for whom roleplaying amounted to knowing how to use /me and /do. Of course they then first turned onto each other, and once the LS-RP ship began to tilt, most of the people that were an integral part of this system quickly jumped ship over to other communities, seeking new ways to satisfy their thirst for power, bringing with them the mentality they had been part of or fostered. But that's a story for another day, and for another set of (panda) ears to hear. The point being that it was the staff, first, that was filled with toxicity and vultures that would eat players alive at any sign of a misstep. It's great that you guys put so much effort into everything you do and work tirelessly for days on end to deliver something to the community, but so did Foran and Xarex when they led factions for years, and yet they were kicked out without as much as a "thank you for your service" because they didn't want to play ball with the staff. It's awful that you feel like the developers' efforts aren't appreciated enough by the players, but when people who sank hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game found themselves targeted by admins because they disagreed with the idea that LS-RP was meant to be a 1:1 scale model of California, they also felt the same way. It's a shame to see you think the community isn't supportive of the staff, but the average player likely thought the same of the leadership when they restricted features that should've been available to everyone to a selected few friends, or appointed their unqualified errand boys to a position of power. It must be said that almost none of this was your fault. But you were in a place where you could have stood up to it, like Damian did with Krisk, and you didn't. So it sounds somewhat hypocritical to now pull a Rodney King and ask why can't we all get along. It was the staff that chose to lock themselves in their ivory towers and close their eyes pretending that all was well, that any dissent was just the product of bitter provocateurs, only coming out to defend themselves when some sort of scandal erupted or to announce the next batch of chosen ones to be granted a red or green name. While the community definitely holds its fair share of responsibility in falling for the lie that better roleplay could only be achieved by being more aggressive and judgmental towards their fellow players, it was the staff that isolated themselves first. You, and the server in general, are just paying the price of choices that were made years ago.

Nothing ever happens. Like many other communities, LS-RP's been like that for a while now. To quote DamianC, the focus has shifted from roleplaying to obtaining absolute power and maintaining the status quo many moons ago. Look no further than this topic: the only staff replies are to either defend themselves or to intimate people to behave — not a single one offers a constructive suggestion on how to move forward or outlines a roadmap for the weeks to come. And, again, like many other communities, this kind of thinking rolls down hill: why should people stay, let alone move over here from other servers, when those in charge seemingly don't care about it themselves? This thread also makes it very clear that, again just like many other communities, LS-RP players these days are more concerned with the "quality" of roleplay others are providing than their own, with that mentality having been actively nurtured through the years by an outdated faction reward system, systematic staff corruption that promoted flattery and connivance over actually administrating and a server-wide culture that recognizes tearing your opponents down as opposed to rising up yourself. Some people in the comments above have blamed a competitor community for this try-hard mentality, but it was on LS-RP that it was born and cultivated. The very basis of roleplay, establish an in-character culture based on in-game events, became not just frowned upon, but outright forbidden at some point. Whenever someone strayed away from the path they set, a new set of overly-complicated rules or a new team would be set up to oversee every aspect of the server and make sure that no one would escape the grasp of the so-called "realism", a realism that wasn't like Valenti's, where carefully crafted characters interact with each other in a believable way to build complex, long-lasting stories in the setting and lore they themselves created, but a mere copy-pasting of real-life concepts barely adjusted to fit the game and mechanically fed to faction members through continuous hammering of slogans and reminders on their Discord servers. And so roleplay became less about creativity and more about absolute power, until the enforcement of absolute power was all that was left. This isn't something that happened in a week, or a month. It took a decade for this mentality to develop, take root and spread like it has right now: there's a whole generation of roleplayers who grew up on that standard and for whom overly-regulated roleplay that isn't aimed at building a cohesive narrative, supervised by people who advance through the staff not because their administration skills but only because they outlasted everyone else, is not only natural, it's all they've ever known. It's very short-sighted to believe that just changing a couple parameters will bring back LS-RP as it once was, especially when none of those that could have intervened did, letting the server transition from a blank canvas where every player could draw to their heart's content as long as they abided by the most basic of rules to a dystopia where using the wrong term on a law enforcement in-character radio could get you a dress-down on TeamSpeak by a supervisor. Suggestions were made, appeals written, indications given — multiple times. It was all preaching in the desert, and although that's perhaps the highest of callings, the results are laid out for everyone to see. The server clearly still has a lot of potential, even without reaching the once in a lifetime numbers it once did (at what cost?), but that potential cannot be unlocked unless the powers that be come to the realization that their server, their community needs them to take the lead and provide guidance. But they've proven time and again to have little, if any, interest in doing so. So what are you expecting? For @Michael to undo the damage that's been done in almost ten years overnight? @Mmartin's redemption arc?

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.

This isn't talked about nearly enough. It's high time to stop pretending that spouting such nonsense as "you're expected to realistically portray the LASD/LAPD" is conducive to good roleplay, or that simply integrating real-life codes and procedures is a gateway to unlocking the secrets of police portrayal, or that pasting actual slogans over in-game mappings is all you need to achieve your best performance as a pixel cop, because nothing could be further from the truth. If the only defining trait of your character is acing 100% of the LASD/LAPD lingo while jumping from shootout to pursuit to tactical deployment, then you're not much better than any other virtual gangbanger who uses gang roleplay and AAVE as a paper-thin disguise to engage in server-sanctioned DM without any consequence. Law enforcement roleplay somehow managed to pull a complete 360 and move from robocops whose only aim was to rack up as many arrests as possible while only engaging in action-packed scenarios, to a somewhat engaging and balanced level of police portrayal, right back to robocops whose only aim is to fill their sentences with as many LASD/LAPD terms as possible while only engaging in action-packed scenarios. It's just a long string of disjointed episodes without anything holding the whole thing together, and how could it be otherwise? Hardly anyone takes their time to do some station roleplay or get to know other characters beyond a cursory introduction, debriefs after situations are done just because it's "real life procedures" and not out of a genuine interest of interacting with fellow faction members, good luck finding anyone above a first-line supervisory rank to discuss important matters because it's not "realistic" for commanders to be in-game and expect to be called out over faction chat if you don't use the right code or just say it in plain English instead of getting your message across in numbers. While it's true that law enforcement factions receive a large amount of calls and can't possibly handle them all, it's also true that almost zero attention is given to anything else beyond the run and gun. Investigative roleplay is in shambles, held up by maybe five or six people in total. Patrol work is more shallow than it was in 2014 because even though the characters use more accurate terminology, they're nowhere near as interesting or have as much of a personality as they used to 10 years ago. Passive police roleplay is basically unheard of. And there's still people who somehow feel it's appropriate to use the "it's not about policing the server" motto. And it's absolutely not a problem limited to this server only, regardless of how popular others might be on other platforms. The law enforcement roleplay scene these days can be summed up as people playing LSPDFR in multiplayer.

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.