Aquila

While that might sound good on paper, the cars on GTA:W have different stats, and I think some of them might be bugged too (Calico GTF's hood opens/closes randomly if you lock/unlock it). I think there should be a charge for test driving these cars, or let people test drive in a different dimension.

I just think it's funny when people put centimetres in their attributes. As far as I'm aware, height is never consistent in centimetres, because it changes slightly during day and night or something. Feet and inches is a bit broader, so it makes more sense to use them.

I've been in a couple roleplay scenarios where FD would've been crucial to have on-scene, and those situations didn't involve being wounded. One situation was where my character was stuck on a high place (think a hill/rooftop edge with no means of getting down), and FD could've either used ladders or a helicopter to rescue, but alas nobody was on duty at the time. With that being said, I feel like situations like mine are quite rare. I don't blame FD for this at all, I blame some of the players for only being interested in either venue roleplay, or crime roleplay. I do wish that FD had a huge influx of quality roleplayers joining; I've had some pretty good experiences with FD members, and a lot of them seem to know what they're doing, so props to them. The issue is that there aren't a lot of them at all — people would rather be a cop with a gun than a paramedic with potentially nothing but lines of RP by their side. Echoing this. What more could FD really do? When you think rationally, it's actually quite hard to blame FD — it isn't their fault that people aren't joining their faction. It is a staffing issue, but if their recruitment is open then what more could we expect from them? It's really down to the playerbase and whether any of the players want their characters in the faction.

I'm against the whole concept of NPC'ing things at all. Yeah, this is a game, but it's a heavy roleplay server too. If there's no medical units online, that's clearly a staffing issue. There are always plenty of cops online, whereas 4 years ago you'd go a couple hours without a single cop online at all. There's no logic nor benefit to powergaming an invisible EMT to take someone to the hospital. If nobody's around, then nobody's around. I'm not blaming FD at all for this issue, because the problem may very well be the lack of motivation from potential applicants. I'm not against this. I think if this were to be a thing, there would need to be some clear benefits and drawbacks between being a private EMT, and public service EMT (for LSFD). Furthermore, privatised EMTs may create some competition, which usually has a positive impact. I don't see any real issues coming out of this — so long as there are more EMTs around, then surely everyone should be happy?

I've submitted enough RPQ reports in my time to know they won't tackle the issue at large. I don't necessarily mind crime in the city, so long as it's portrayed well enough. The issue is that a lot of the crime that happens in the city is just a huge waste of time — for the most part, people just gather evidence, post a report, have the report conclude, void the situation, and post refund requests. That's so tedious and extremely annoying. I don't try to avoid crime out of fear of death or anything, I just avoid it purely because I'm sick of having to report people all the time and go through an unnecessary arbitration process with a lot of back-and-forths. If we're going to have crime on the server, it should be done properly, not by young people from Europe portraying Black Americans in an almost offensive and stereotypical manner, with poor English to boot (not taking into account slang).

Mechanic RP needs to stop being a requirement. I don't see the fun in roleplaying with an inanimate object that can't respond to you at all, it's just an inconvenience for everyone else who may want to actually do meaningful roleplay instead of standing around waiting for someone to type out arbitrary lines. Furthermore, a lot of the "mechanic RP" can be done by an average Joe, with the exception of paint work and wraps. Literally anyone can take off a bumper and fit a new one, and any schoolchild can grab a laptop (or phone these days) and remap an ECU. Applying a spoiler is not a challenge either. Makes no sense why simple things like changing a tire (something everyone should learn when they take their driving test) is locked behind a job wall. The whole mechanic RP thing is easy money and overrated. On a normal day, a mechanic can earn at least $30k from a few cars, and probably twice as much on a good day.

Again, it seems that people just want to fulfil this ridiculous OOC desires instead of actively writing a character biography. These people need to take a long hard look at the purpose of their character's existence.

i am a member of the sunshine gang

There are undoubtedly some good characters out there for sure. I've been to a street somewhere in Davis and roleplayed with one character about how the neighbourhood's changed over some years. The conversation was laidback. But that situation may be heavily influenced by my character's gender. Female characters seem to be greeted with far less hostility, while it's the complete opposite for males. Regardless, civilians in the area shouldn't be subjected to random acts of crime against them, especially if they live in the area. The well-portrayed characters are not a majority in South LS, from what I saw.

From my experience, these types of people (who portray real life gangs) are clearly struggling quite a bit. A lot of the members don't really know how to speak the lingo, and they're generally difficult to understand when they're speaking (I'm not talking about slang, I mean they literally struggle to speak English at all. This isn't the case with the majority, but it's just from what I've experienced myself. I feel it's much easier to simply roleplay living in an apartment block, with other people who you barely know, and you all experience a struggle and unite to form some kind of clique. That is how you create a genuine gang that you're familiar with. If people make their own gang, they don't have to research and then fail to portray a group properly. They can roleplay something they're experiencing there and then, instead of trying to replicate clips from videos, documentaries, and movies. Hopefully that makes sense. See, I can believe that because I've seen unnecessarily hostile behaviour at night venues. It's like these people pick the most negative stereotypes of a disenfranchised American group, and enforce them by messing around and trolling. They're looking for an OOC fight instead of developing genuine characters. I'd like to start a proper South LS group but it seems like way too much effort right now, and additionally I'll have to keep posting forum complaints just to clean up the region. Nobody wants to go through all that effort, I've already had to omit from posting some complaints.

Can we also make it so you can use /gps if you have a smartphone? Who on earth still uses GPS devices in a car anymore, other than old people? This isn't 2010, we need to move past these inconveniences when they make no sense.

It would be great if some of the businesses in the area were hiring, without having to depend on inactive business managers. If the barber shop and 24/7 could let you '/bjoin confirm' (roleplay that you work via an agency) without having to wait days for a manager/supervisor, then at least we can get some roleplay going. The inactive businesses need to be looked at properly.

Hunting right now is annoying. It's expensive, it's tedious, and there's no rewards for it, but people seem to excuse all of these issues by saying it's a "hobby", not a job. Realistically, I wouldn't go through all that effort to roleplay with inanimate objects that can't reply to me. Hunting needs an overhaul for sure, and I'm all for anything that benefits it. Also, add mountain lions. When the server was still new, we had admins roleplay mountain lions (shoutout to cowboy @Missi) and it was pretty fun to have a fear aspect when you're going mining. Fishing never had rods before because it was a starter job, but now that almost nobody fishes anymore, may as well upgrade it a bit since it's literally a 4 year old script with almost no changes made to it. There's a fishing store on the Del Perro Pier that's actually kinda cool, so I'd like to see a reason for these kinds of stores to exist and thrive, as well as serve a purpose for the server instead of just selling useless "goods" for no benefit like other stores.

once you're in a group chat, you can never leave, nor can you be removed from them. The website we use for Facebrowser is extremely dated, laggy, and overall pretty broken. If you delete a group chat from your messages, you'll still be given notifications when someone messages in it, because you literally cannot leave. When will we get our own social media site for the server?

Housing is a problem everywhere unfortunately. What bothers me the most is that a lot of neighbourhoods have absolutely no houses available to purchase whatsoever, but these neighbourhoods are barren or simply never occupied by its residents. The only neighbourhood I can see that is active with its residents is Little Seoul. I see no point in people having a house in a neighbourhood if they're never there at all. It's greedy and inconsiderate. A while ago, you could roleplay living in one of the rooms in the apartment buildings found in Chamberlain Hills, but obviously now you can't because they're all occupied. It's ridiculous that there are so many houses around, but somehow with a peak of ~700 players, all the houses across the map are taken and a lot of the map is relatively dead? It's not right. Housing problem could be resolved if people stopped buying houses purely to have as an address for faction applications, or for flipping. As said above, we got too many neighbourhoods that are empty, and all houses are occupied by characters that are rarely ever seen in the area. Civilian roleplayers, at least when South LS was somewhat active in 2018, usually just hung around as bystanders while conflict would happen. Some people played dice on the street corners or just do the (boring) "slice of life" roleplay that people love so much. What good is there to being a civilian in Vinewood, Rockford Hills or Vespucci? I've spoken to a few people who are simply bored of the server because unfortunately there isn't much to do unless you're in a faction or a gang, with the former requiring a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy — this is odd, because we live in a time where people are actively filling out real life job applications due to the pandemic. I've only met a couple on rare occasions. The rest seem to not know English well enough to portray even a standard American character — this is not a dig at people where English is not their primary language, but if they're struggling to communicate in standard English, then AAVE is going to be quite a challenge for them. Well, when GTA:W and FiveRP were competing, there were quite a few gangs on both servers in South LS. They didn't belong to a real life gang, they were usually just neighbourhood or block-based gangs without names. You need to be creative, and in South LS it really isn't that hard to start a gang without a plan. I don't see what's so interesting about copying something from real life and bringing it into the server; stale and overdone scenarios never end well and people try too hard to replicate something instead of organically creating roleplay, forming relations, and establishing their own groups. I think @Koko is still trying to get a hold of the barber shop between Chamberlain Hills and Rancho. Barber shop RP is actually a lot more interesting than I though, as I've done it myself one time. I'd argue that it's actually a LOT more beneficial for the server than the mechanic RP people value so much — these scenarios are literally one person roleplaying with an inanimate object that can't reply or do anything, whereas barber shop RP is interactive between at least two people. We need more of these for sure. Davis/Strawberry Mall seemed to be a failure, but I can't see any reason why other shops can't open. There needs to be more central hubs in the area for roleplay. I know a barber shop would be a de facto neutral point for gangs. Thing is, occasional chain robbers is something you'd see in 2017 GTA:W. We're in 2021, and the server hasn't tackled these issues yet. I want South LS to be more than just a meme with racist undertones, and for it to be an immersive environment for roleplay that isn't solely gang-based. People seem to think that South LS is supposed to be an area for Europeans roleplaying 12 year olds dropping N-bombs twice per sentence, but it's much more than that. Somewhere down the line, the area's quality of roleplay deteriorated, and I've been away for too long to find out when it happened.