Michael_Dippolito

Topic for all usergroup members to read:

Frank’s hairline goes against the code of omertà.

Congrats to @Rye and @Kunis

Your hairline could.

Take it far!

Impeccable screens. Keep it up.

Congratulations to Robert Trentino, Richard DeNoia and John Angiolini. Welcome to the family.

Congratulations to Benjamin "Benny Ungar" Stompanto. Welcome to the family.

CIRCA 2018

Special shoutout to the LS:RP staff team who ensured the event wasn’t ruined by trolls and DMers, and also to Bellomo for their assistance in facilitating the arrangements for the event. Special thanks to the Bellantonios and the Serbian Transnational Criminal Organization for being in attendance.

I apologize wholeheartedly if that is the attitude that I give off but I’m genuinely speaking from a perspective of personal experiences and what I believe in my opinion would’ve been a better verdict. I have nothing but the best interest for the entirety of the server, and more importantly I applaud you and the other staff members who share the same best interests in the server and are actually striving to make a change. Truthfully, criticism can apply to all the entities that make LSRP what it is. Doesn’t matter if it is staff team, illegal/legal role players or civilians, no matter how hard we try to fight admitting it, have contributed to what LSRP has become today.

It isn’t nitpicking because for years this has been the kind of mentality that pitted players against staff members. Factions can’t be the only entity on the server preserving and enhancing realism on the server; you all as staff members have to do your part as well. The verdict of that report is basically catering to the percentage of players who serve no purpose whatsoever to the roleplay environment by orchestrating terrible robberies and fueling their itch to gun down people for little to no reason. From the outside looking in, it basically let everyone know that it is perfectly fine for someone to bait people off the mechanic hotline and rob them and if you do not comply then you’re the one at fault, no matter how stupid the roleplay was.

Why was the reporting party not frowned upon for utilizing the mechanic hotline to rob players? In what way was that realistic and a high standard of roleplay that LSRP has been striving to accomplish?

That player shouldn’t have been warned in the first place. Utilizing mechanic hotlines to rob mechanics is by far one of the dumbest, subpar example of role play and counters the goal of being a realistic environment. I had called a mechanic out to fix my car, once he arrived I pulled a gun on him.

I only used D'Aquila CF's casefile as an example of what kind of mentality came with giving that amount of power to a certain entity. That didn't mean that I was against having repercussions. In fact, those of us in Valenti CF were very open to having some interactions with detectives, so much to the point where we forwarded some information on our faction that were visible to the public via IC news articles so the detectives could have some lead on who is who. I'm not saying we need more rules, but in order for the playing field to be both enjoyable and fair on equal sides, this needs to be a thing:

D'Aquila CF was a faction from 2013-2015. My example stems from that time period where LEO factions were given the power to shut down factions, which was brought up again here.

Instead of granting legal factions the power to shut down factions as a whole, I would suggest leaning towards giving life sentences to certain characters involved in the most extreme crimes. Obviously, this would need to be backed with a sufficient amount of evidence, and I would even go as far as allowing an actual court trial to take place. Implementing this gives the opportunity for power shifts and tests the integrity of said faction to roleplay high profile arrests, and also gives them faction leaders a chance at controlling the faction from prison. In the past, giving LEOs the power to shut down factions promoted the toxic trait of shutting down factions just for shits and giggles. The factions that operated behind closed doors were often targetted more than factions that were performing hits in broad daylight and hosting drug and gun deals in public. The case files weren't even concrete enough to allow a faction to be taken down; an example being the D'Aquila Crime Family's profile. 80% of the case file was filled with nothing but surveillance photos of mobsters talking in public and barely any evidence confirming who held what rank other than twisted OOC narratives being intertwined IC. There weren't any wiretaps of anyone confirming who killed who, who ordered the hit on anyone. Not to mention the only substantial amount of evidence that they had was 2 years old and it was a recorded interview of two associates who were quitting the server and as a last "fuck you" to the faction they were in, they turned informant. You also had two cancers of the VICE Detective division; Ben Mason (who arrested someone from D'Aquila for calling him a "cocksucker" IC and charged them with sexual harassment) and Jamie LaVetta (who had a weird OOC obsession with shutting down factions who rarely made noise). There was also a wiretapped conversation between two soldiers who were in the middle of furnishing an interior that was bugged and one of them mentioned something along the lines of guns being bought, but it was obvious they weren't using the /b command to differentiate from the IC speech and yet the FM at the time still granted it as solid evidence of a gun deal, despite the dialogue being all lowercased and clearly just an OOC conversation between one another. There's a whole lot that could go wrong with granting LEOs that sort of power.