What are the purposes of VIP features in an RP Server?

[Pádraig]

Donator features are a point of contention on most roleplay servers. Some people feel like all donator features should be stripped out and free for everybody. While that is a nonsense idea, a server needs money to run, and there needs to be incentives behind donating. However, I and many players now feel like the incentives to donating put non-donators at a heavy disadvantage. We are at the point where there needs to be an open and good faith discourse on what the place of the VIP system is in GTA: World.

 

I myself believe that the VIP system has crossed the line from cool features that are not needed to essential items to succeed with your character and create proper roleplay. The first part of this stems from /bad.

 

Now /bad has been a point of contention in the community for quite some time, and Nervous has laid out reasons why bad is limited to a donator only feature.

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You can refer to my previous answers about it, you don't need a blip to have your business work (you did without it for years and years on SAMP), no one needs 100+ blips on the map for every businesses hence why it's locked, and it's one of our most important feature for donators. 3 reasons to not remove it, while I see none to give it to everyone.

These points in my opinion aren't very good. For one, Los Santos in GTA: San Andreas is waaay smaller than in GTAV, and had a lot more landmarks to make a business easily identifiable (the mall, Main-street, ASGH), and the districts were far more compact, making it easier to find a business if only the district name was given.

 

Secondly, you don't need to have a blip for your business to work because we've managed all this time on SAMP is a bad point, because everybody on SA-MP was on a level playing field, without /bad. This is the equivalent of only giving street gangs pistols and giving one street gang mini-guns and saying "You've managed to deal drugs and run your gang fine all this time with just pistols!"

 

And thirdly, the administration team will now manage /ad and /cad abuse, so is it much of a stretch to ask administration to curb /bad abuse?

 

However, this isn't my main point of contention, you could potentially skirt around /bad by hiring an advertiser and such, my bigger problem is with the new cooldowns on /ad. 

 

This in my opinion completely un-warranted restriction that seems little more than an attempt for more VIP subscriptions. The official reason is to curb spam however the 6 minute cool-down timer was more than enough to curb spam, and we all know that spam wasn't coming from non-donator players, its coming from club and other venue owners with VIP subscriptions. If people truly wanted to curate spam, this will do little to help.

 

As I've said, I do understand the server needs money, and I'm not against premium only features, however we've crossed the line from premium only features to non-premium restrictions. There are many more features that could be added to VIP players that would incentive more people to donate (e.g new VIP only sports/super-cars and such).

 

This thread isn't meant as a slight towards management, I hope that this thread will instead create a meaningful dialogue between the playerbase and the management of the server and hope it won't devolve into mean-spirited or bitter debates.

 

[Jennie]

This is a lost battle, so i'm not going to put another huge paragraph, they have already given their verdict, and the changes that have been made recently give rise to the fact that the deletion of icons has come to stay.

 

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[A_Acko]

so whos going to pay for the server bills then

[Nervous]

/bad only became a problem when garages got their icons removed. The only business owners making tons of money are the ones complaining? I'm not surprised. No /bad won't change, it was here since launch and no one ever complained before garage owners stepped in.

 

As for perks, they're cosmetics and not modifying any of the other players gameplay. You never had access to /bad or to an icon on SAMP, and yet everyone could roleplay perfectly and never complained about such a feature missing. When we had to think of how we do not go into a pay2win asset system like every other servers, we thought about some potentially non impacting feature that we could add and immediately restrict to donators, /bad was one of them.

 

You might want to prefere donators having unique vehicles or houses etc, I do not want this at all on GTAW, and It's not going to change soon. As for why we do not just remove all perks and only offer donations, well, while I have no doubt you're full of generosity, I cannot pay thousands alone every month, not by receiving 5€ / week through a non perk donation system.

Edited May 16, 2019 by Nervous