Exploits

I always wanted to start a really simple motorcycle club that is only about getting together on certain days to ride together. Not for racing, or to show off, or be a gang, or anything like that -- just some easy riding. Meet up somewhere, determine a path, enjoy the trip itself, then meet up again at the end at a business to hang out or something. You can use the radio script as built-in helmet comms so as to still be chatting and role-playing while riding, too. It's something I used to do with a friend on my current character in the past, and it feels very appropriate for her to do again in her current age and with her history, but my depression keeps me down, and I worry my activity just means it'd die very quickly, or that I'd be dumping the responsibility of it to somebody else.

But it didn't start by 'opening communications', it started with an understanding that everybody is here to role-play and that nobody is really 'against' anybody else. You've seen the LSPD & You thread. How much of that do you think actually got brought forward or implemented in any meaningful way? You can 'open communications' and still be entirely dismissive of what's being communicated, and that's what tends to happen when you presume it all comes from a place of spite or from 'the enemy', or what have you. The core mentality needs to change first and foremost before structural changes matter at all. We could all have had a personal private mailbox to the chief of police to 'communicate' but it's pointless if it's set to automatically redirect all their mail to the trashcan or only ever opened so they can scoff and laugh. Edit: What I'm saying is, if we open these channels to communicate solely on the notion that these are disparate groups that need to make concessions, then we've already lost the plot. What really needs to be reconciled isn't our lack of communication, but our failure to see our shared goal of making role-play interesting and engaging for all parties involved.

Again, they could already do this if they want to. LSSD didn't do well with illegal RPers because they 'communicated with them', they did well with illegal RPers because some of them are/were illegal RPers. There was an understanding from the top-down that people who role-play as law enforcement either don't know or don't care how their role-play is seen by or affects others, and the intention was to recruit people who did understand these impacts and didn't blindly attempt to score arrests with bare-minimum interaction. Nothing is keeping the current LSPD from also introducing these ideas and reaching out. They simply hadn't. And that's not a failing on LFM/IFM, that's a failing on the LSPD's leadership to look anywhere outside of themselves at the time. Just take a peek at Lagorio's embarrassing attempt to save face with his 'retirement' thread. There's a substantial amount of people in that thread who still hold positions of importance in the PD who are adamant that he either did nothing wrong at all, or was removed for "making the role-play better". They sealed themselves in their own echo chamber. LFM did not do that to them, I assure you. The failure was ultimately their own inability to not buy their own bullshit and actually admit to errors and the consequential perception people would have of them: no self-awareness, no intention to really improve internally (beyond their own dictations and decisions), and an insistence that the problem is 'other people'.

Yeah, by hand-picking individuals which, when individuals are put together, amalgamate into this amazing entity known as a group.

Everything to role-play with groups effectively already exists. Unless we're missing some massive organizational hole in our systems, or there is something entirely lacking in the script, then the issue isn't coordinating 'groups' around 'issues' but to stop forming groups solely around said invented issues. Legitimately at this time the biggest barrier to seeing more role-play in game is the insistence by certain parties that the role-play they claim to see and encounter is 'so bad' that they refuse to participate. These non-participants have no actual people to report, no real broken rules to point to -- they are just very loud while providing very little.

Ding ding. The majority of players are too busy having fun in-game role-playing to give a shit about how people with gold and blue names think their role-play is insufficient and 'hurting the server 😢'. Others play as long as they want to play (say, a month, or months), get their fill, and leave to other things. Much healthier than the insane attachments and calls for legacy or whatever the fuck we keep seeing touted out as a shorthand for pushing certain people out. It bears repeating, but if what you're seeing can't be posted here because it doesn't break any of the rules posted here, then you/your approach is the problem.

When I was younger, role-playing 25+ felt 'old' and 'wise'. That my character would be a police Sergeant with a marriage, a child, two cars, and a house seemed completely reasonable and attainable not just in-game, but in real-life, too. Now that I'm 30 and have lived the crushing weight of our hypercapitalist reality, that once reasonable idea now appears more like an exceptional aberration, and being 25 is neither 'old' nor does it make you particularly 'wise', I've discovered. You can't really fault people for not having a couple decades of life experience if they haven't even been on this Earth for a couple decades, and I'm not really in the habit of confirming people's life experiences just so I can make a judgment. I role-play my character in her mid-50's. Is it weird that she'll meet 20y/o's who own a business, are married, have a kid, and two cars? It sure wasn't weird to me when I was the one doing it. More importantly, that it was a bit fantastical and not strictly statistically accurate didn't really matter. I had fun, and I was within the allowable rules, and what my character had collected over his lifetime was done through role-play. When you meet said 20y/os with a laundry list of accomplishments, it would be much more reasonable and generous to assume that they've accumulated those accomplishments through role-play. After all, you can get an astonishing amount done in one year in-game compared to a year in real-life -- nobody actually makes it to a Lieutenant from Academy in that time, for example. And aging up is always a weird and tricky thing when you have many people in your role-play orbit.

Not much else to the subject, sadly. Let's not pretend that these robberies aren't ultimately extremely low effort behaviour for the most part. I also guarantee that if you ask most of these people to meet you at a rules bound crime-free zone, most would buck the deal for sudden and wholly invented reasons. I really don't recommend anybody folly themselves with the idea of 'handling this ICly'. Most of these players are just new or have no long-term server goals and are looking to have some easy fun. Nobody is going to put the time to investigate a robbery made by three sub-40hr player accounts in order to recoup lost goods through a month-long civil court procedure. Going to a 'public place' is pointless if they are factually empty of real players or nobody reacts or helps you in time. And I don't really reproach anybody for this on either side. There is absolutely nothing preventing you from protecting yourself by playing to the server rules of no-crime zones and asking that your exchanges happen at them. Some might say you're power/metagaming intentions by presuming a robbery by doing so, but the person committing it will almost never give you the same courtesy to admit that they are also ostensibly power/metagaming their robberies by doing the exact opposite.

I dunno why even move it, 'cause it's barely a discussion. The O.P. predicated all of this on an assumption that your character will be of a certain type, one who has no opinion or experience with guns: and if your character is that type, then yeah, some of this is applicable. Otherwise you're free to do whatever. I might pick up a P.F. or even C.C.W. on my character as things continue, but personally, I'm just over gunfights as a player. GTAV's shooting mechanics aren't that good, and it's even worse on RAGE. I have way more fun trying to talk situations down or ultimately being the victim than I do pulling out a gun and starting a gunfight, and this was true for me as a cop and remains true as a civilian. I won't rule out getting one for in-character reasons, but I'd still avoid using it.

Neat! Then I'm sure there's a list of names and totally legitimate grievances you could post to the report player thread and help us make the server better. 🙂

Where do you pull these numbers and assumptions from? Who are you talking about? This is what I mean. No offense to you directly, but there's nothing to engage in here. All we're going to conclude upon is your opinion of what fits a made-up category. Even if we all agreed, I'd still think this whole thing is pointless nonsense.

So somebody whose entire social circle, faction, home, and business is within Blaine County that does not 'RP the distance' is not a 'Blaine County role-player'? Thanks for clarifying, I guess. That we're 18 pages in and providing another definition just reinforces how dumb this bickering is, and I'm going to assume that even those of you in agreement that the county has 'issues' are probably all complaining about different people.

This is such a trite and empty statement, though. Like, you could slap this down on either side of the argument and be 'right'. Mostly I'm just tired of these bitch threads that try to single out either a very specific group of role-players or something amorphous to the point of meaninglessness. What is a Blaine County role-player? Am I one because I stop there whenever I ride out to check out the businesses? Is it the people who own those businesses? Only the homeowners? Do I have to fill out a punchcard to qualify, and if so, where do I get one? These topics never elevate beyond a fingerpoint and a "I don't like this.", and either people join in with the pointing or others disagree that it's an issue. And what, honestly, is the server management meant to do, anyway? What ostensible solution is there here? Do you think Nervous & Co. are going to go out and hire professional role-players to fill out these supposed problem areas? Seriously, if what you're seeing or experiencing can't be posted here because it doesn't violate any of the things you see here, then you're the problem or you're on the wrong server, because that person isn't doing anything wrong. You're free to continue disliking it, but that doesn't change that you're the one making a problem out of it.

You sure you can't just set weathersystem.good to (1) instead of (0)? /s Weather in real-life is 'unpredictable' to a degree, even with modern meteorology, but honestly, predictability is somewhat necessary in role-play. I'd 100% trade a system that somehow produces incredibly realistic weather transitions and/or emulates L.A. weather for one where I know with certainty that it will rain next week on Wednesday and can plan role-play accordingly. Even something as simple as three days of clear weather with one day of rain on a constant, predictable cycle seems preferable to me.

Hard agree. Missed a serious opportunity to just call it 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' and letting that joke write itself, though, so -2 points. 🙂

It's a strange place to find conflict, isn't it? A character has a problem or problems, your character wants to help — what's the problem? Well, it is a bit denigrating to be on the receiving end of this sort of charity. If you've dedicated countless hours to role-playing and representing a homeless character, having somebody swoop in with good intentions and several tens of thousands to spend only craters all the obstacles that effectively made up your role-play to begin with. Which kind of sucks, doesn't it? I really liked @Koko 's response here: A lot of people might presume that if you're homeless, whether role-playing one or encountering one, then your #1 goal must be getting a home. It does seem logical on the surface, but it's rarely that simple. Looking back at Koko's quote and having both been and been around addiction and homelessness, these are not an uncommon results. Outwardly though, if not role-played correctly, you'll just look like an obstinate asshole or idiot who appears to be sabotaging totally easy opportunities to help your character in order to maintain your homelessness. It takes a certain empathy and nuance to really portray internal conflict, especially something as destructive as addiction, in the right way. Even being an addict myself, it's incredibly difficult to express how much I wanted to be a better person but seemingly could not, and how much pain that caused for people who care(d) about me. Not even really sure what I'm trying to say. I guess I just think it's important if you're making a character as vulnerable as a homeless person to have worked out long in advance what the absolute root cause(es) of their homelessness will be. If somebody does happen to rock up and give you a free apartment and a job, you're going to have a very different reaction as a character if finances were the only thing keeping you homeless, compared to a character who has substance issues or severe anxiety. Violently self-destructing in an over-the-top manner to keep your character fitting into a typecast simply isn't that interesting nor nuanced, even if there truly are irredeemable people out there. But it's also absolutely true that there are people in the world who deeply want help to be better, receive that help, and then fuck it up again and again despite legitimating trying and wanting, having lived that life.

Really I just want forecasts to be variable but predictable. It's slightly annoying to roll out from home on my motorcycle and then turn around five minutes later because of a torrential downpour, since it sort of begs the question as to why my character wouldn't have been able to see/know that a storm was coming. It was at its most awkward when I role-played trying to set up a motorcycle ride with my character's friend and then reasonably cancelled out the plans five minutes later when a massive cracking thunderstorm rolled in for an hour. Right now it's up to players to interpret whether 'Cloudy' means 'finished raining' or 'about to rain', or ask somebody OoCly, because asking ICly "Has it rained?" is incredibly awkward when everything would be very visibly and obviously wet. I don't really care about emulating L.A. weather to a T or even in any respectable fashion: I would even love a month of snow in-game just to mix things up, see new styles on people and all the other ways that role-play changes in response, big and small. I'm only flustered by the lack of information our current system gives players to work with when it comes to role-playing around weather. The only thing we really need to know as players is when weather is or was not at norm. We always assume as a baseline that the weather is warm and sunny. All we're lacking, for those interested at least, is a way to know if it's rained or when it'll rain with reliability so that we can role-play in or around it. If we cut down on the number of times it rains, but greatly extend how long it rains, then /weather could say "Rain expected in the next Xhrs" and "Rain expected to continue for Xhrs", for example, with usable accuracy. Rain slowly becomes more of an event rather than a happenstance this way, and you can role-play around it.

This is one of those things like a hunger bar, where in theory it means more varied, frequent, and interesting role-play opportunities around food, but in reality is an impediment to role-play that's already very firmly established. Having a dispatcher doesn't provide anything new when it comes to law enforcement, criminal, nor civilian role-play besides existing for the sake of existing, and I don't find novelty to be a sustaining feature, especially when it's your only feature.

How do we change this, then? I understand that prison's lack of appeal can often appear or entirely be OoCly driven and selfish ("I don't want to be in prison" is a common one), but if what goes on is something like @nateX showed, then I mean ... I don't want to be in prison either, lol. Besides being 'criminals' in the vaguest sense, we can't really expect that what is essentially a series of randomly selected players who dropped into a closed environment produce only the best role-play when they have little in common or no shared goals; besides getting out, anyway. It takes connected, known, dedicated, and communicating groups weeks or months to establish factions in an environment of their choosing. Prison is plainly difficult, and it's even more difficult to motivate oneself to put in that time for role-play when it's occurring in the most bubble-like bubble in the server and your efforts rarely translate into anything tangible outside of the prison. I've seen this before, where there's no or poor role-play in prison, so nobody role-plays while in prison, but because nobody role-plays in prison, there's no role-play or only poor role-play in prison, so nobody role-plays while in prison, ad nauseam. What came first is a pointless debate. Turning to LS:RP, I know that switching to a mandatory 'hours' system for prison did in fact increase role-play, but that's overlooking the immense effort for role-play that Corrections and Peckerwood Nation had put into the place at around the same time. Simply making things 'mandatory' isn't what made prison on LS:RP as good as it got in 2011-14 or so. Both these groups did their role-play before the hour system, meaning regardless of how poor the state of things was, Corrections still tried to provide role-play, and Peckerwood members were voluntarily putting themselves into prison in order to create their RP without any guarantees that people coming into the prison system would even log-in during their sentences. At some point the cycle broke, and 'prison RP' stopped being an oxymoron. So either the server slaps something together to provide consistent prison events for role-play to center around, or we wait for a very generous person or group to put in the work themselves.

I still don't even understand what this is meant to improve or achieve. Supposedly we need this because factions today are bad, or don't survive long enough, or aren't motivated to be better or last longer, but ... not everything, or even anything, is meant to be a success story. Nothing mandates or demands that a faction survive X amount of months before qualifying as 'made it'. Did the Jamestown Mafia 'fail'? Would it have 'not failed' or been improved if we had slapped a label on it calling it 'official'? How and why? All of this is ignoring (as OP and others have) the circular issue that factions today, whatever your opinion of quality is, go through an approval process of some kind already. If factions suck then either that process or IFM itself is flawed, and layering on another process which is meant to handpick 'the best' still doesn't solve either issue of these factions sucking or IFM's flaws. Being an 'Official Faction ®' is predicated on so much at it is. Do you honestly think all official factions of the past were always intensely respected by all community members? Can we not honestly recall the endless and persistent circle-jerking in these past communities about which factions did or did not deserve the 'Official Faction ®' stamp? How some factions earning it would 'undermine our great institution of role-play', and other factions not earning it was some sort of slap in the face to its participants, or what the fuck ever? I sure do. The amount of discussion that was, quite frankly, utterly wasted on trying to reclaim, or redeem, or purify, or retain the sanctity of 'Official Factions ®' from 'those' people', or by bringing in 'that group', or promoting 'this kind of role-play' over 'that kind of role-play', instead of just keeping things fun and accessible was incredible, was nauseating, and I wonder how many words I also wasted on these discussions in the past. And what's hilarious to me is the 'fun and accessible' bit. People did complain about this, but there was far more conversation about who 'deserved' these titles than there was in addressing (on LS:RP specifically) the fact that this system would produce months-long gaps where there were no active illegal suppliers or even no official factions of a certain type to be an illegal supplier — literal months where guns and drugs could not be bought, resulting in quadrupled prices or complete product deserts because the last Mafia got shut down and no new one had been selected or met some nebulous criteria yet. We did this to ourselves. We legitimately killed whole sections of role-play for months because we wanted to 'incentivize' 'the best' and 'right' kind of role-play(ers), and not the 'wrong' or 'bad' kind. I really want to repeat that. I know we aren't looking to give exclusive commands and shit, but again: We would wholesale kill entire styles of role-play. For months. For everybody. Because we felt that creating and retaining an ideal idea of what an 'Official Faction ®' represented was more important. It's astonishing what time and hindsight can do, since I really was a proponent of this system and thought it did good. Now I'm aghast by it. And even without giving exclusive commands to these groups, you'll still see a lot of the social toxicity that this produced. Those endless arguments about who deserved the 'Official Faction ®' title instead of discussing ways to improve role-play accessibility for the most common player type: an unhealthy focus on "Who is best?" instead of "How can we help?" Let's just not have the former discussion at all. How? Like, seriously, how? How does this make interactions in-game better by any appreciable metric? So a faction that already exists and role-plays is made official. Cool. Literally nothing has changed unless you go on the forum and see their fancy 'Official Faction ®' stamp. If you were role-playing with them, it's because you liked them. If you didn't, that stamp isn't going to change your mind. It also doesn't suddenly make them better or worse role-players. It doesn't do anything. It's just going to create a title that people are going to bitch about, and yet its entire existence is OoC. It's a proud livery for the player who has it and a contentious debate for those that do not. Again, what would this have done for a faction like Jamestown Mafia? The last thing I want are factions and/or faction members to be motivated by an OoC goal instead of role-play for the sake of role-play.

Sort of diverging from the topic yourself now, aren't you? I'm certainly not in favour of the 'old system' on LS:RP. Tying access to commands and exclusive perks to the official label limited who you could role-play with by default. I could really go on about the problems this caused beyond being an impediment to natural/emergent role-play, but nobody here wants to see this on GTA:W, so that's good. We're all generally in agreement that offering actual, tangible incentives (beyond something like a faction chat, anyway) is a no. That certainly does raise the next question of "What's the point?" If the system doesn't offer anything other than a rubber stamp and an ego boost, why have it at all? I'm not sure about the word 'elitism' and how it's cropping up in this debate. Pardon if I put words in anybody's mouths, but allow me to make a distinction: elitist =/= good role-player. I don't think anybody is legitimately claiming and arguing against an idea that would promote "good role-play", or "elitists". I think instead 'elitist' is referring to individuals who, at minimum, believe they are a good role-player, but also, that their role-play should be standard form, or deserves commendation. There's a difference between being critical and being obstinate, and you'll find that most elitists (as I once was) are rigidly fixed in their opinion of what role-play should be. So what does all this talk of elitists and elitism have to do with this suggestion? Well, it's already been said that giving a faction an 'official' stamp tends to inflate people with egos like this. It doesn't necessarily follow that people in a faction, now official, immediately turn into ghoulish elitist role-play caricatures like the Valenti members of old (as I also once was! God we were insufferable). But it does follow that, regardless what those faction members do, their role-play has, very literally, been given a green light: that faction is now a model or example for similarly situated factions to follow for that same stamp. And what happens is usually something like an ebb and flow, where a unique faction shows up that stands out against 'the norm' is quickly 'officialized', and then other players emulate that faction until what was once unique is now 'the norm'. Then a unique faction shows up, and it stands out against that norm! Oh wait, no, we're back at it being repetitive and overdone again. Wait, what's this? Something new again?! I probably sound like this, (Or perhaps just, 'old man yells at cloud'.) ... but I want to affirm that I do not think this cycle is a bad thing, and it will also happen regardless of an official system. We factually do not need it! We already know that we don't want it to do anything for the faction, so our claim rests on the system improving role-play. It doesn't do that, though: it actually tends to narrow it towards an ever-changing point, and it does so through a system which is a decision by committee, whatever that committee may be. But again, whether we have this system, we will still see role-play cycle upward. What we have without it is simply more organic. The notion that we need the server to rubber stamp factions as "Certified Fresh RP" ... or what? Or players will be swayed by impure, unorthodox role-play? They'll learn to role-play ... bad, or something? Whatever attracts people will attract them. Officiating that only certain factions are worthy of attention and marrying what role-play is as either exclusive to or approximating that style of role-play has only stymied actual creativity by, whether explicitly stating it or not, serving players a blueprint of what we consider to be 'the best' conduct. We've got thousands of players. I'm very interested and excited to see what they would all come up with through their server experiences far more than I am interested in seeing who would win this supposed 'best mafia/gang/homeless camp' contest. This is a crown in search of a throne, and I ask you just stop carrying crowns around.

I both like and am disappointed by the facial details features. It's very difficult to strike the line between 'visible' but not 'excessive'. It took me a few tries to get my character's wrinkles and blemishes to look respectable and noticeable without having her looking like a haggard witch, and even then, people seem to assume by default that I'm role-playing being 30 years of age instead of 55+ until they /examine. The features just aren't obvious unless you're in first-person camera, sadly. Can we stop with the hysterically hyperbolic titles, also? More people than just the OP here really need to stop interpreting supposed trends or things they disagree with as a slippery slope to people role-playing vampyres or talking dogs or something. As well, let's be honest, you have to go extensively out of your way to make your character 'unattractive', but players using what are ostensibly fairly default models are not also, by default, role-playing a super model simply because they aren't explicitly stating otherwise. Try not to project so much and to maybe, when running off assumptions, assume more charitably.

I can't help y'all if you joined a text-based role-play game but don't wanna read.

Being generous with you, I just don't feel you've brought enough of an argument in to have started this discussion, even if I vaguely agree with what you're being critical of. Isn't it good that the example you outlined (reported cop & three separate admin decisions) was reversed? Sure, ideally it would have been 'gotten right' the first time, but rectification is a welcome second best, I'd say. If I was an admin presented with two versions of that report with one involving an officer claiming 'combat experience/training' and the other being a gang member younger than 25, I'd certainly say the former is much more believable and generally acceptable than the latter at first glance. When it comes to script-based (e.g. access to a handcuff command) or rule-based (permission for VOIP) advantages, I'm less absolutist and more concerned with outcomes. It should be 'realistic', yes, and it should generally reflect something existing, but it should also engender role-play, or at the very least, not harm it. A good example of all of these ideas in action is in the trace command: it's hilariously neutered and weak compared to how accurate, powerful, and almost inescapable cellphone/location tracing is nowadays, but it's implemented this way so that officers don't instantly catch people with a phone number, with the result being far more interesting cat and mouse conflict. Would it be realistic for a city with statistically this much crime to have facial recognition software and cameras on almost all public intersections? Would it also be realistic for that software to locate and send out alerts to officers when it recognizes the face of someone with an open warrant so that they can be confronted? If this sounds scary and Orwellian, I assure you, it is, and it also exists. But it simply wouldn't be very fun.

I can also state from experience that these rules emulate the rules I've seen on many other servers, and the result is many of the same problems. Hell, $5,000 goes a lot further on this server than it has on any server I've played on ... $5,000 was like, $50 in some places, and players would still conduct four-man robberies out of a Sultan and other nonsense, same as we tend to see here. I'm in agreement with how @Smilesville describes this situation: for whatever reason, even with these rules and limitations, there is simply, in the aggregate, more of an incentive to do robberies than not do robberies. A negative incentive is missing to keep them in check, and we can't always be deferring to player reports as the solution. It has to be something systemic.