Been reading this for a while and wanted to finally chime in since others asked. You need to separate facts from assumptions and lies. It is clear as days that the main reason why you are seeing a decline in the community now is from the mistakes that the leadership put forward along with putting people in positions where they shouldn’t have been from the get-go. The decision making around a lot of things started before the first batch of official factions even got announced after the relaunch of SAMP. @Brigone being one of the firsts to vocalize the problems that the server was facing along with calling out bullshit that people were doing from the admin team and leadership perspective. The only reason that didn’t go anywhere was simply because of one reason. One person leaving doesn’t matter to us only because the server is doing totally fine and one leaving isn’t going to cause much of an issue. In other words, the admin team and specifically people in recognizable positions were too comfortable and let the server flow on. The next batch of folks started leaving when you saw that there was no progression in the script itself. The server becomes stall when there’s clearly no progressive updates, a roadmap that is ultimately outdated, along with the attention being at two different places. Why are you building on a foundation that is already in shambles.
I have been both in IFT, led an official illegal faction, led a legal faction, and eventually came into the staff team. Simply put, the culture is toxic in those ranks where you’re going to have three groups. The folks that are vocal, quiet, and shit talkers. I am not going to name anyone here nor do I care since I already have stopped playing in this community, but the vocal folks were already zoned out from folks that were in positions, and it was like we were going against a militia of a brick wall. @Kev and @Clack vocalized a lot of these things in the standard meetings we had along with suggestions that never went anywhere. Ultimately, the developer team got shifted like the times and nothing came out of it. All in all, the culture of this community was horrible in the admin ranks itself and the mentality majority held. I will not even get started in the legal side of the house and how people were harbored from punishments along with the recent things @Aloosh called out on the situation of alt accounts.
Marketing isn’t going to help this community gain numbers if internally those issues weren’t fixed. And I’m answering that question now as well they’re not going to be fixed only because of people and their egos. When you do call them out for their bullshit then they get censored or messages are removed. It’s the easiest thing they’ve done and will do. The main problem was the staff itself, and the positions folks held. The regaining of numbers is unrealistic when the serious folks themselves stopped playing. It’ll be very hard to bring them back due to them firsthand seeing the drama in the staff side. All in all, the community needs to realize that censorship and poor decision making from many folks is the reason we are here. We warned them about 8 months back that this is what will happen and these kinds of threads are what you will have to deal with if you don’t give transparency, updates, and honesty. They lacked in every area and here we are. I don’t mean to rub or derail this topic in any way, but it was worth putting this out there that these attempts in the backend happened, but these are the consequences of getting brushed off.