Mantle

I mean as it stands we have factions roleplaying on top of google images. Not just 1 screenshot on their thread... but like, 6 to 7 screenshots, in ONE POST. This is the opposite of beneficial to the server and reduces the standards. This is whats happening now. We also have black factions who really have no idea how to behave as a realistic impoverished gang member by driving cars that exceed their portrayed characters wealth. These are all standard drooping things. My idea wasn't to outright let everyone make a thread and post whatever they like. My idea was to allow everyone to post and instead of 1 to 2 people from FM judging it, let the WHOLE server judge it. It's more efficient this way. I'd love to think that research is done to see how realistic a faction is but it isn't, or it isn't done thoroughly in our case. Sadly.

Disclaimer: all of the below is me literally just creating points that people will HOPEFULLY discuss and not take off topic and/or bash on anyone. I'd love if we could come to an understanding on either side on how this can be done better. I'm not asking anyone to be toxic on this thread so if you are toxic, you're doing it on your own accord and I don't want to be held responsible for it. I want to start off by saying I am NOT directing this at anyone or bashing (current or previous) faction management. I made this suggestion as it doesn't make sense to put the decision in the hands of a couple of individuals to decide whether a thread is worthy of being posted. I say this for a few reasons which I will list below: One or two people in charge of applications do not have the knowledge (this is NOT an insult, it's just being realistic. Even the most seasoned illegal roleplayer doesn't have the knowledge on every illegal organization) of what organizations realistically exist in Los Angeles. Again, this is not a jab at anybody but this is simply too much of an expectation for one or two people to have all the knowledge on. Unless you're a LAPD Major Crimes detective in real life or some criminology lecturer, the chances are.. you're under estimating what crime organizations exist in real life. I have first hand experience of this as we were denied for a reason which is simply false and uneducated. Furthermore, was doubled down upon by saying the people we were trying to portray are essentially bookmakers in bars taking bets nowadays... incorrect. My point being here is: not one, two, three or even four people possess the knowledge to understand what gangs/organizations actually exist in Los Angeles (which is what this server is trying to portray, from how it seems). Connecting off my last point, if the server is in fact trying to portray Los Angeles and ONLY Los Angeles based real life gangs/organizations are allowed, it's really plugging a hole where a plethora of roleplay should be leaking from that could be made on the server. I understand that allowing a British street gang in the middle of Los Angeles saying 'Wagwan fam' is dumb and obviously should be not allowed but disallowing other factions that exist in America and/or Los Angeles with the same concept just a different name... ie: a group portraying African-American DTO's that exist in Los Angeles but they decide to go with a different name (but follow the SAME concepts) will be denied because they don't realistically exist. It doesn't make any sense. This completely stomps out the ability to be different, unique all whilst remaining realistic... which should be the ultimate goal of roleplay, right? Or are we just trying to be exact carbon copies of everything in real life? If that was the case, LSPD should be renamed LAPD. We've now had two faction applications since joining in June. The first one was based off an African-American DTO (since none existed on the server). We were literally (and still to this day) waiting on a reply to our faction. The second was an Irish-American based mob which was denied for the reasons above 'Irish American mobs don't exist anymore' (yes they do). Both of these factions do not currently exist on the server, they're a hole waiting to be filled. A hole for law enforcement to roleplay with, civilians, business owners, lawyers, gangs.. you name it. The first one... never got a reply on. The second one took two weeks to be told it doesn't exist in real life (it does, which redirects me to the first bullet point above). With this point, I'm essentially trying to show that the delay it takes to even make a faction thread destroys roleplay, too. Our first faction, at the time, was the deepest on the server yet guys started to dwindle away since we were getting no response to our application and when people ask you daily, as the leader, "any response from FM" because they've 40+ screenshots ready to post and your answer is "Nothing yet", you've a flawed system. The second time, we did get a response, albeit, still slow and we had guys who were there on the first day move on and demotivation does kick in when you get no response and/or a response like the one we got. All of the above has not just happened to me but alsoto countless people from other roleplay communities that swapped to GTA World and they've had similar experiences that I have spoken with. Then there is guys who've had forum accounts active for 5 minutes and their faction thread is accepted. Other people who say they've been accepted almost instantly etc. We have PMs of people who have faction threads currently that confirmed all of this. It's really odd. In my opinion, faction threads should be public. Let everyone make a faction thread if they wish (no application required). Have enough faith in the community to decide if what is being portrayed is unrealistic. The community, as a whole, can give a lot more feedback than 2 people. It's not realistic for a small handful of guys to know everything about factions. If a faction is trash and unrealistic, it can be reported to FM and/or comments on their thread will show that. If a faction is good, the majority will support it. The delays of waiting on replies to applications can turn a motivated group into a demotivated group, fast. The denial reasons, when untrue, can also ruin someones motivation. There comes a point where you have to realize this whole thing is flawed. This server now has like 6 east European factions on the server, a lot of them posting a majority of zero roleplay screenshots and/or screenshots where the roleplay is literally done on top of a real life google image pictures. If the goal is to keep high quality factions in that area... those screenshots don't do it any justice. As much as I see the point of faction applications (to make the faction section of the forums look high quality), it doesn't work as we can see. The server is pretty much 90% East European, Latino and African American. FYI: there is 5x more Irish-Americans in California than East Europeans. Do I think East European factions should exist? Yes. I also think more Irish-American, Italian-American, British-American factions should exist.. but they don't. The ratios are off to portray a realistic setting. To assume they're (Irish-American organized crime) extinct whilst accepting 6 East European factions adds to my point of how this whole system is flawed and not allowing Irish-American factions or African-American DTOs creates a crevice where roleplay should exist, but doesn't because of how things are at the moment. In short, what I think would work a whole lot better is.... make faction threads available for anyone to post. Let the WHOLE community who read the thread decide if it's good or bad. Trust me... people will vouch their opinions if a faction is shitty and unrealistic. It's already noticeable on some of the current faction threads (the comments the community has left). At that point, let Faction Management review the complaints and see if they're valid and then make a decision to close the thread. At least this way you've given the faction an opportunity to make their thread, showcase their roleplay and what they plan to portray rather than shutting them down before they get a chance to do any of that. It works. A server with the community more involved in whats allowed/disallowed to be posted is always going to excel better than one with 2-3 people granting everything. Use the power of a huge community to your advantage. The demotivation factor when awaiting thread approval will be gone since members can roleplay instantly and post their screenshots instantly without waiting around for weeks to post any of the roleplay they've been getting in to... which like it or not, good roleplayers like to showcase the roleplay they do and the faction thread area gets a lot more eyes than the character stories section. Finally, wasting time will be gone. We had 7 people spend 20+ hours (minimum, with one guy spending over 90 hours) in 2 weeks on the Irish-American faction.. for it to be denied over a silly reason. Is there really a point to dedicate all that time to roleplaying your character to be told your character you're trying to portray doesn't exist in real life (when it does)? I don't think so. I've mentioned all these points to the person who denied us but the PM was seen and ignored (for almost a week) so I figured maybe some discussion can be received here instead as this is something that I see as an easily solvable but present issue on the server. Anyways, all of the above is me literally just creating points that people will HOPEFULLY discuss and not take off topic and/or bash on anyone. I'd love if we could come to an understanding on either side on how this can be done better. I'm not asking anyone to be toxic on this thread so if you are toxic, you're doing it on your own accord and I don't want to be held responsible for it. (Pasted this again at the bottom as a reminder not to be toxic).

See that is a valid reason for the rule in place. And I can see why it's in place from this point of view. But arguing the legality of it in real life vs in game and using that as your reason is invalid. But what you've said is a pretty valid reason & concern however I'm pretty sure it's more than gang members that cause a large influx of firearms to the server with little to no proper roleplay around them.

Period. If you suspect someone of being in a gang but they've a clean record and they own a PF license, catch them committing a crime and stop them from possessing firearms. That's it. Shouldn't be an OOC rule to stop that. It's just removing a layer of roleplay that should be there right now.

Quote the relevant parts. Not reading the whole thing. The following people are generally prohibited from acquiring or possessing a gun in California: felons (that is, anyone convicted of any felony offense in any jurisdiction),5 persons who are addicted to narcotics,6 persons with two (2) or more convictions under Penal Code 417, California's law against brandishing a weapon,7 persons convicted of certain misdemeanor offenses (such as a violation of Penal Code 273.5),8 persons who suffer from mental illness (people placed on two involuntary psychiatric holds in a year get a lifetime gun ban),9 and people under 18 (people under 21 may not purchase a gun).10 Penal Code 29810 requires that people convicted of the requisite crimes must relinquish their firearms to authorities. If you are prohibited from owning a gun, you are also prohibited from owning ammunition.11 Anyone else may possess a firearm or ammunition (other than armor piercing ammunition).12 However, in order to purchase a handgun, you must possess a valid handgun safety certificate.13 If you have the legal right possess a gun, there are several ways to exercise your Second Amendment right to bear arms. All of the above is all that really matters when it comes to ACQUIRING AND POSSESSING A FIREARM which is what the PF license is used for. Carrying a firearm on you concealed is a whole other bucket of worms and yes, it is A LOT more restrictive. But for the most part, the vast majority of people, including gang members with zero convictions, can and do possess guns in the USA, including California. And to answer some people saying 'legal weapons shouldn't flood the illegal market', it is realistic for legal weapons to flood the illegal market.

A CCW is not the same as a PF license.

You can own a license and be in a gang in the USA. All that should matter really for this type of shit is your criminal record. Is it clean? You can buy a gun, legally. Have you been convicted of a felony? You can't.

It's definitely weird that having no criminal record but roleplaying with a gang = you can't buy a firearm. I don't believe that is the situation in real life so I'm not sure why it's that way in game so I do agree with you there. On the other hand, it doesn't help when 95% of the server are using legally purchased firearms for their murders.

Power Moves

A development thread for Liam Byrne & Brian Kinahan, two life long best friends born into mob families.

ok

This is probably a cultural issue. In my country, cops will pull over anybody under the age of 25 that they want to and they'll search them if they want, nothing will be done about it. All because they're 'look suspicious' due to their age or how they're dressed. However, I went on vacation to the USA recently to see some American family and they all kind of said that the cops really don't harass them at all, in fact, they don't really stop people at all unless they've ran your plates and realize you haven't paid a ticket or something along those lines.

Yes I don't mean /me smokes cigarette. But I also don't mean twenty lines for you smoking a cigarette. It's utterly pointless.

This is a beginner roleplaying take to what actually matters. "/me smokes a cigarette" and "/me takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lighting one and inhaling the toxic fumes" are the exact same thing. One is just pointless and takes time away from development.

I'm seeing a lot of hate on gang roleplay on here and I can see why. When I first joined over from SAMP, I started a DTO faction with a street gang subset. During our time active, we had good roleplay and grew in numbers but.... the gangs in the surrounding area have no idea how to behave realistically, at all. A lot of the gangs in the area are overly aggressive and are clearly looking to just cause wars. This is fine when done occasionally but the truth is, every black gang I've seen is like this. Also, nobody can actually use proper black gang slang at all on this server and it's clear a lot of them have no background knowledge of how to lead a successful black street gang. Slang is obviously a MAJOR key to running a realistic faction. To add onto all of this, a serverwide thing I've seen is... you're treated as a bad roleplayer if you type short /me's such as "/me smacks Rodell into the mouth." instead of something like "/me raises his right hand and sends it directly into Rodell's jaw with the intent to do damage, putting his whole body weight behind it" this is a pretty outdated and honestly shitty way of thinking when it comes to roleplay. A much more modern, clean and slick style of roleplay is keeping your /me's short, simple and to the point. Some examples of stuff I see on here (marked with an X) and a much better way of roleplaying: Jane picks up her fork, cuts a piece of her steak, raises it to her mouth, and takes a bite. ✗ Jane eats her steak. ✓ Jane gets out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, lights her cigarette, raises it to her mouth, and takes a puff. ✗ Jane smokes a cigarette. ✓ Jane searches her pockets, takes out her wallet, pulls out some money, and hands it to the cashier. ✗ Jane pays the cashier. ✓ With this, we can conclude the level of your roleplay doesn't come from how long your /me is. Your roleplay standard is directly correlated to how your character is affected by situations that arise and how you develop realistically with those situations. So in short, you can be roleplaying in a gang and typing the longest /me's but if your behavior to situations around you and trying to show WHY you're roleplaying in a gang such as, displaying your characters struggle, is non-existent? Your quality of roleplay will always be trash. I'd love to see the people typing 40 page /me's cut down on that shit and actually try behave realistically, show real emotion, whats led to your characters decisions in life, how certain situations (deaths of homies, poverty, father locked up, mother ill, etc) affect them. That is how gang roleplay can be made better. With the current gangs, that probably won't happen since a lot of them can't use proper grammar or string together a proper sentence from what I experienced these last few days. I'm specifically speaking about the black gangs since that's what I mainly roleplay and that's what I've been around most on this server. TLDR: Black gangs don't behave realistically on here. /me usage is pretty outdated. I don't want to read a book of /me's on how you're smoking a cigarette, I want to see a short /me of you smoking your cigarette and then immediately back to CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. A fifty page line of cigarette smoking is not development or 'quality' roleplay.

If I had an Nvidia GPU, I'd be using Shadowplay for sure but I don't so instead I use OBS Studio with zero issues whatsoever.

Discussion wouldn't even be necessary for those as that's against the rules. Nothing to even discuss there. I'm sure admins are aware of who's robbing for the greater good of the server and who's robbing for their own selfish gain.

You're 100% right and I don't think anyone would disagree. A common issue I see is the following: a gang member or broke ass kid from the hood is roleplaying development that leads to a robbery for days (or more) beforehand. He finally bites the bullet and does his robbery on whoever his target may be. His robbery is quick (realistic) and he's out of there without sticking around. Now the victim of this robbery might be thinking "ffs this constant robbing shit is so dumb, all these gangs do is rob people 24/7" because that's all they see at the surface level. Victims of roleplayed situations are quick to jump to conclusions and assume that it was shit tier roleplay because they never see the build up. How does one go about seeing the build up? Faction threads and character stories. Unfortunately, faction threads gain A LOT more attention than character stories so you've a higher chance of your victim seeing the actual heavy RP that went behind what he first believed was some shitty roleplay. I see this on this thread a lot. A lot of people saying "half assed robberies" but you guys are failing to think that MAYBE behind those robberies is REALISTIC amazing development. I've had situations (on LSRP) before where a corrupt cop was framing my character with a BUNCH of charges which my character was aware of in-character. It was amazing roleplay that was building up for literally over a month. When confronted by another (uninformed) cop, my character acted irrationally and the guy who I was roleplaying with decided "Fuck this, I'm reporting you on the forums" to which he did. When the report was handled and I showed him all of the roleplay that led up to it, he willingly asked for the report to be closed as he was now aware of the development to what led to it. My point being here is: you guys may think that a lot of the situations you find yourself in is half-assed / unrealistic or whatever... but you really need to see the build up before you can be sure of that. If I'm roleplaying today and my characters best friend gets killed the night before. I'm going to roleplay the affects of that on him accordingly. If my character is outside his home, reflecting on everything and some random guy comes up talking shit... my character would DEFINITELY react differently to how someone who is living a normal life, stress free. You really cannot paint every character under the same brush and this is where I'm in agreement with @1357.

Can you be a little bit more detailed? It just closes out of nowhere? No error, no nothing? What screen do you see last before it shuts down?

not bad tbf.

AD is heavily underrated.

I get this from time to time. If retry doesn't fix it, open up task manager and close everything GTA V related, everything RageMP related and finally EVERYTHING steam related then try again.

Mhm. I understand this mindset but I've also read on this forum that Los Santos is a fictional city which shouldn't be mirrored as an exact replica of Los Angeles. With that in mind, the creativity of new gangs that still follow real life principles and behave realistically shouldn't be an issue, right? If a faction is creating amazing roleplay for the server, pushing new boundaries but their only downfall is that they aren't a "gang" that exists in Los Angeles (a place this server is not directly copying)... why should they be denied? As I've said: I'm new to this community. I've played here actively now for probably a little over a month (despite registering my account like 2 years ago). I've come from LSRP which also primarily based itself off of Los Angeles with its own adjustments and allowing for the creativity of the players to create their own realistic factions. Some of the best factions I've seen on there were the ones that didn't exist in real life but still behaved realistically just with their own twist. With all of this said, I think for 10 factions made (with no applications in place)... maybe 1 or 2 will be "unrealistic"... for instance, I did see someone on the server mentioned above trying to introduce a UK street gang in the middle of Los Santos.... which obviously is dumb and makes zero sense. That was shutdown immediately. Why couldn't that be the case here? After all, the faction thread should be 90% about displaying the roleplay standard expected from factions in the form of screenshots posted by it's members to the community. That should be the first priority. Right? I only really mention all of this because the first guy said "More gang roleplay" or something along those lines which is something I've heard guys say to me a lot also on Discord (lack of gangs/factions etc) and that is definitely a result of needing to apply to simply post a faction thread which in my own situation and another person I've been speaking to, has taken 4+ weeks (and still not finished). When you have your members PMing you daily "Any news on the faction application?" and "Any update?" (heres just a few examples I've found to show this isn't just me making it up: https://imgur.com/a/wyinkdK) and you don't have an answer for them, it definitely does demotivate them. Most are sitting on stacks of screenshots waiting to post for weeks but can't show them off and now with faction applications "closed"? I don't understand that at all, to be honest. It would be definitely easier to let people freely post their faction topics without an application and moderate everything that is posted. If it's not up to standard, lock and archive it. If it is, let them post their content and see how the community responds to it. If it's poor quality or unrealistic, I'm sure the community will overwhelmingly voice that on the topic which will in turn result in the faction being shutdown. But waiting a crazy amount of time to just post your faction topic, leaving members waiting? I don't think that's a working system. Edit: I just want to say that this is not meant to be a post downgrading the work Caporegime and Eyebrows do. They've both been respectful and polite to me and I have no complaints about what they do. I simply think for a current system like this to work... you'd need a lot more guys handling applications. I think those two are probably being overwhelmed with forum personal messages hence the delays in actually concluding an application. There is flaws to the system and I'm sure they can be fixed or something else can be tested. This is in no way a detrimental issue.