Trupiano
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Posts posted by Trupiano
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1 hour ago, Timzii said:
Point system has nothing to do with how many days you have to spend in jail. It's when you reach 30 criminal points when there's a required court case to evaluate what happens with your characters future. I still believe the criminal points set a balanace of how much criminal activities your character can be caught doing before you're infront of a judge who decides your faith.
The issue with the point system is it's entirely predictable and can frankly be gamed. You only have to worry about life in prison if you reach 30 points, something a lot of people are able to avoid while still committing ridiculous and egregious crimes. Things like motive, the details of the crime, past criminal history have nothing to do with sentencing. This "CK" style request only changes one thing, It allows judges flexibility. No longer will you have to wait till someone hits 30 points before you get them off the street, if someone commits a specifically horrible crime, boom life sentence just like IRL. PD able to put together a concrete long form investigation will actually result in a W instead of spending 3 months doing an investigation only for the people you convicted to spend 2 IRL days behind bars.
I don't mean to be blunt, but frankly it seems like you and a lot of other people who are against this are so because this is perceived to be easier on criminals. But the thing is, being hard on criminals isn't exactly working. The point system did not have it's intended effect, people could still crimegrind regardless it just came down to if they get caught or not. At least with this suggestion, each and every crime could have the potential of being a seriously long sentence.
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31 minutes ago, Shaderz said:
I'm gonna play a bit of devil's advocate here but it's totally possible to chinwag with friends about your roleplay experiences whilst still roleplaying with them in a manner that is completely fluid and unobstructed by OOC influences.
I know a particular group of people whom I have been pretty close with recently and we all like to sit in voice-chat every now and then and talk about all sorts of things related and unrelated to our in-game experiences but the moment we begin roleplaying, we all dry up and immerse ourselves in our roleplay without letting our OOC friendship meddle in at any point, so it's definitely possible.
You just need to be careful about who you get close to on an OOC level and if they suddenly start letting their OOC grievances get in the way of their roleplay, which isn't really hard to notice, you steer away from them and cut any kind of contact with them.
The issue is, people aren't just talking about cut and dry MGing over voice. It doesn't matter who your RPing with, all it takes is someone to exhibit some kind of vocal tick, some kind of expression that implies something is happening in character and from there it snowballs. Suddenly people who were tabbed out tab in, people who were in interiors step outside to see what's going on, someones driving around and suddenly they are driving towards where they think they might run across their friend. All of it seems very very minor but it snowballs and can drastically shift the outcome of a scenario. You and your friends could be a perfect example to follow, you could mute anytime your IG, you could all follow strict personal guidelines about MGing and the use of information IC. But you and your friends are not a representation of the server as a whole and the the truth is most of the people who are using VOIP are probably falling into this trap.
The best and most clear cut solution is no VOIP while IG across the board. Doesn't matter if your a criminal committing a shooting or a ERPer going to a club. The playing field should be equal for everyone.
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+1 for this suggestion, additionally however I think the request should be for any amount of time greater then the existing penal code allows. While obviously the immediate thought is life sentences but I could see this better used to imprison someone for say 1 IRL year. Given the life cycle of characters on this server, 1 IRL year is practically a life sentence but it gives players a chance to resume that character on the outside one day.
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I think discord is a great tool for knowledge sharing, critiquing and generally just distributing information. But it also provides certain tools and abilities that can be tempting to abuse and ultimately hurt RP. VOIP is the most tempting and arguably the most damaging. People will tell you "Oh, we don't MG we're just chitchatting about IRL" but regardless of intention, if your in VOIP you will MG. It's just entirely unavoidable, for example someone in the call might be tabbed out and upon hearing someone who is IG vocally react to something immediately tab in. What might not seem like a big deal just gave you a serious upper hand IC. Intentional or not it's MG and it hurts natural RP on the server.
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8 minutes ago, Sush said:
That wasn't the point of my post. And we both know the people doing this aren't criminal RPers either. They're just robo-thugs who only care about getting more guns.
Here's one from a couple weeks ago:
Look at how hard this player slams on the brakes and then tries to ram me off my bike just for the chance of robbing my character. They aren't roleplaying in GTA:World, they're playing Rust or Day-Z and are just trying to kill 'geared players' for their loot. That's it, it was never about roleplay. The prime example of this is once the /rob command was introduced robbers started riding around 4 deep so they could take turns using the /rob command so their daily /rob totals didn't get high enough to be noticed by staff. It also demonstrates a play-to-win mentality as riding around with 4 dudes essentially ensures you 'win' every roleplay you engage in.
I mean first of all, ramming people to rob them is against the rules. But then again, they didn't ram you and cutting off your path so you can't go passed isn't against the rules. How you can tell so much from the fact that they slammed on their breaks is beyond me. I can kind of see where your coming from having had poor RP experiences with robbery clown cars in the past. But to be honest? That's just how robberies are committed in 2021. The mugger coming out of the shadowy alleyway isn't quite a thing, more often then not it's a group of teenagers rolling around in a stolen car looking for someone not paying attention while they walk down the street. They can quickly jump out, grab their shit and go.
Secondly, and my biggest issue here is that you can differentiate on the forums and say "Oh I'm not talking about the good criminal RPers" but how would you know the difference? You were able to determine that those players were Day-Z P2W players who only cared about loot off a less then 30 second clip where you didn't even interact with them. They just slammed on their breaks so that must mean they are only here to rob people? This is not just you, this is a large section of the community. Who will say "Oh, I'm only talking about the shit criminals" when in reality they mean "I'm talking about anyone who commits robberies" because really, they're just as bad about playing to win as the actual shit tier RPers who come here just to play GTAO.
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1 hour ago, HaminLord said:
Thats fine, let people do what they want, like I said in the original post this isn't about making the server an LEO utopia or a criminal heaven, its about asking how to best portray this shit icly, because I see both people telling me to go wild as an LEO and respond to calls with a carbine rifle, and then I also get people complaining and telling me this shit would never happen and I'm ruining their entire immersion, this happens so frequently which is why I have made this post in the first place
So again, I don't actually care about the crime rate, it can be even higher if it wants to be, I just want to know if there's an actual set way to react to it in character
I mean it's down to each and every person to decide how their character reacts to the situation. In your specific example? Yeah it doesn't matter how bad the crime rate is. Police in the United States are not gonna respond to calls with AR-15's strapped up because "Well the crime rates high". They aren't going to act like stone cold PTSD warriors who've seen it all and therefor are unafraid. Is it in the realm of possibility? Sure. But it would be immediately seen as overly armed police antagonizing a civilian population into submission.
I will admit, PD as a whole is kind of handicapped into being a perfect department by staff and it eliminates the potential for responses that are realistic, fun and at least satisfying for those cops who aren't enjoying constantly taking the L. You need corruption perms to be a dirty cop but the term "dirty cop" on this server means literally anything less then perfect when in reality, all cops are somewhat dirty. Last time a cop got shot by a gang member in my city? The police department arrested every black male they could find to the point where they maxed out the county jail and started holding people in storage lockers overnight. Am I saying this behavior is acceptable IRL? Absolutely not. But it does happen even if our media doesn't cover it, it should be an option on the table for PD.
55 minutes ago, Sush said:Not to sum it up in a meme but this is how it goes for me. Every time we say it's unrealistic we get the "but it's grand theft auto so that's how it is" which is fine I guess but if any person was getting robbed multiple times a week they'd be sitting on their roof with a sniper rifle picking people off within the first 5 months easy.
People get annoyed because this just isn't true. Doesn't matter how much of a bad ass you think you are IRL, This isn't gran torino. This isn't a bullshit Chris Kyle Katrina story. Your not gonna take up arms against your local criminal street gang.
55 minutes ago, Sush said:And any retaliation against a criminal character as a civilian character is seen as 'unrealistic' or whatever but in reality anybody who was getting robbed multiple times a week for 20+ years would probably do whatever it takes to stop it.
No, only the unrealistic responses are considered unrealistic. Players want either staff to just broadly come down on crime or they want the ability to just shoot it out. Which when talking about how we've got a deathmatch problem on the server, the latter does nothing but make it infinitely worse. In reality however, there are very realistic and effective solutions you can undertake which nobody who's been bitching about this is willing to try. Putting on political pressure to get things done.
My American city is going through it's worst period of crime in the last 20 years. Robberies, shootings and carjackings are a constant occurrence all day and night. What is the community doing about it? They aren't rushing to secure CCW permits or calling for the military to intervene. They're protesting in the street every day, demanding answers from their elected politicians. Where the hell was the police when they got robbed? Where were the police when there was a shooting in their area? What are we paying millions of tax dollars to them for their budget if they aren't able to do their job?
We could give the LSPD armored personnel carriers for daily patrol and implement immediate stop and frisk on anyone they want and I wouldn't care as long as it was implemented through IC lobbying and legislation. But no, just like legalizing weed everyone wants to bitch on the forums until staff just does all the heavy lifting for them.
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3 hours ago, Eastside.Shady said:
I dont understand how a "heavy rp" community can boat about their standards and skills when they can't even keep up their suspension of disbelief. gta world is not real life, it can never be 1:1 and it should absolutely never be 1:1. gta world is a figment of real life, heavily exaggerated and cherry-picked to be more intense and interesting. people with real life obligations and limited time for roleplay might want to skip over the mundane parts of their character's lives and only rp the interesting bits. the rest is assumed and NPC-ed.
these conversations about "taking the crime rate IC" are dumb and will never go anywhere. people RP to have fun in a more realistic, grounded setting. is it that hard to ignore a few robberies and shootings and accept that everything on gta:w is condensed into a shorter, easier to digest form?
Exactly this.
You want to know why the crime rate is so high? Because everyone plays this server for enjoyment. This is a roleplay server built on top of Grand Theft Auto 5, the literal crime video game. Now you can want it to be something different, but your being disingenuous if your shocked and appalled at the amount of crime that is always naturally going to be there on the server.
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35 minutes ago, Shaderz said:
their names which most often lack originality and are as plain as a canvas before a painter's touch, and so on. It's become a stereotype on the server at this point.
There's a few comments on this thread along this vein that bug me and it makes me think how much of an impact might be had if nametags were completely removed from the server. People see a group of Russian nametags or Italian-American nametags and they immediately, be it often times correctly (Since this is Grand Theft Auto, a game based entirely around crime) assume they are criminals. But how is that the players fault? Your the one letting your RP be effected by an OOC nametag.
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While I personally appreciate the upped level of scrutiny by IFM, I can't help but notice that some community members have it easier then others. I've seen several faction leaders have their factions closed or L&A'd by request and almost immediately get their new projects greenlit and made official. While I understand that these players have demonstrated a wealth of faction leadership experience and that's probably what leads to this decision, I can't help but notice it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of all the people who are truly trying to create something unique or lead something for the first time.
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- higher taxes aren't going to do anything except foster a grind mentality in new players.
- Starter money creates an unrealistic influx of cash sure, but it's only 200k given out at 5k an hour of active playtime. So that's 40 hours of play time before you accumulate the entire amount and even then, it's quickly spent on the starter assets like cars (30-50k) and a property (75-100k). Removing it would just lead to a grind mentality in new players and likely discourage people from starting or trying new characters in the first place.
Having so many rich people isn't the actual issue. We're replicating an LA style city, there are going to be tons of rich people. The issue is outside of extreme examples staff does nothing to curb unrealistic wealth portrayal or rises to said level. Are there millionaires who made their money playing for example poker in real life? Absolutely. But they are also experts at the game they play and spend hundreds of hours a week perfecting said craft. On GTAW there's about 500 millionaires who made all their money off poker and all they did was spend a couple hours pouring money into it until they came out on top.
Pokers just the example I used but the problem remains the same. Unless you used an exploit/glitch or didn't even try to RP when making your money, staff doesn't see any issue even if the portrayal is wildly off.
As a side note, I'd really like to see staff police the over accumulation of wealth. There's been about 20 replies on this thread saying that while they have millions in their account they still RP being poor. Now I've seen graphs in the past showing the percentage of millionaires on this server so its possible staff knows who they are, why not speak to them and say "Hey, what are you doing with this money. If you don't have a reason you gotta /charity it". Because I'll be frank, while I'm sure people who are doing this aren't letting it effect their RP. Let's be honest, when it comes to dropping some money on a new property or assets for your faction or character. People are very quick to suddenly tag in the money they supposedly didn't have IC.
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Bring it back, add a few more around the south side and make it so you aren't forced to go to one of them if it's the only thing open.
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Just an honest question, how would people feel about setting a minimum age for committing violent or egregious crime? 16+ seems to be a a middle ground most people can agree on, but I'm against removing the opportunity to play these younger characters all together. As much as people want to laugh it off, 13 is the age where kids start going into the gang life. Should they be out committing mass murder and running criminal empires? Absolutely not. But we can find logical ways to curb that without removing the option all together.
From what I see, peoples frustrations are 50% about the crime and 50% about just being annoyed they exist. Don't get me wrong, I get it. 13 year olds are annoying little shitheads IRL I don't like dealing with them either. But they exist regardless, being annoyed that they bother you character (Again, not talking about the high crime) is just not a valid reason to change the rules.
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5 minutes ago, DasFroggy said:
You know this is something you can report, right? It's a massive rulebreak, and can have the person's CCW licenses stripped from their account.
That said, your story seems a bit far fetched to begin with. If there really was any CCW abuse significant enough, in the fashion you're describing, to shut down community hub roleplay, we'd surely have more evidence of it in the report section?
Lmao what? What the fuck is your problem?
Yeah you can report... to RPQM, a team who's inability to act has left a majority of the community feeling like doing so is pointless. Regardless, RPQM reports are private, so holding up the report section like it's a smoking gun isn't the W you think it is. But yet again, someone on the criminal side shares their experience and @DasFroggy has to come in and invalidate it.
Sorry, I forgot this is all just apart of the grand conspiracy to make civilians the permanent victim slaves of criminal RPers. It can't possibly be that there are bad apples on both sides causing these issues.
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17 minutes ago, Engelbert said:
I know, I used to be one of those preaching against roleplaying outside and there are still people, not willling to step out. But for myself I can say, that the trend of robbing everyone they see outside, has gone down a bit. Infact I noticed the opposite, now it's more about, I am caught, sometimes chased away and sometimes punished, by people I try to pickpocket or break into their car. Instead of, "Hey I am calling the police!", they always try to punish the thief themselves. Why is that? Cause I noticed, that nearly everyone is either armed, or is actually someone with criminal activities. Be it a club DJ or a bartender.
I mean it's the same shit that people like me were saying would happen during the summer when there were all these calls to allow more CCW's to combat the amount of robberies. Spurred by the frustration of being robbed a lot of people very OOCly made the mental decision that when it comes to being the victim of crime, RP comes second to securing the W. I'm not saying that civilian characters just have to constantly be the victim but what I've found now is the minute a situation becomes sketch, everyone and their mother becomes John Wick. The minute the threat is gone? They go right back to a petite lesbian super model like almost nothing happened.
And I mean, it kinda plays into the issue plaguing the main topic of this post. There's a lot of illegal factions who have attempted to create communities, but it's hard to do so if you can't even enforce your rule. More times then I can count I've seen civilians roll up, mock criminal characters to their face and start issue because they know if push comes to shove they can pull their CCW and claim self defense.
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20 minutes ago, Chuckles said:
1) Do you think administrators should have experience in the genre before handling a report?
2) Do you feel that IFM are overwhelmed and understaffed?
3) How can we fix this?
1. Yes, although I think more important then having admins be experts or well versed is pushing for staff to be more open and honest about the things they don't know and promote admins to seek out help from other admins and players in the community on those subjects.
2. Are they overwhelmed? I don't think so. We have an IFM team right now that I'd consider pretty fair objectively and are decent at what they do, they just take a minute to do so. I do think the team should definitely be expanded but it's important to me that the right people are on that team, not just admins who have some form of experience or knowledge in illegal RP. IFM is just a team with so much influence, speaking from experience one bad egg can cause players serious headaches.
3. I think the staff team needs to focus more on promoting people on the quality of work they are doing, not just how long they've been on the team. While obviously this is probably how they already work. Something must not be working because as a community member it sometimes feels like the opposite. Not trying to call anybody out, just expressing how it's seen from a community members prospective.
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10 minutes ago, Chuckles said:
I feel like the context of the post is being overlooked and it's shaping into a new topic entirely as a result. The objective of the thread was founded around players leaving characters during active conditions. I do not blame people for running into a brick wall with their characters nor do I blame people for wanting to try new concepts, characters. The purpose of this post was directed at those who abandon their characters mid-conflict, mid-business, mid-storyline or mid-investigation. Boredom and demotivation isn't the problem here, dereliction is because it harms more than one person's structure. I would even go further to say that leaving with no plan, background or arrangement is powergaming.
My problem is not with those who leave inactive characters. It is with those who leave active characters spontaneously and with no real inference.
It's a tricky topic because while I see where your coming from and I agree with you to an extent, the topic becomes murky in the details. The line for when it's acceptable to retire a character is different for each person and to an a certain point each character. On top of that, how is someone supposed to know they are mid-investigation, mid-murder plot, etc. In their eyes they could be quitting said character at the perfect time, but for those around them it could serious mess with on going plans.
While I agree, there are definitely situation where people definitely should know they're in the middle of something. The prime example that comes to mind is the countless number of cash loans I've given out only to find out days later said player quit the character. It sucks and I do partially wish those types would receive punishment, but I also realize that trying to enforce something like this would be frankly an almost impossible headache. The truth is, nobody ever truly knowns if they are quitting when their stories done. They could, in their view have finished up all their loose ends. Should they face punishment because of a storyline they were entirely unaware of?
Lastly, and I think most importantly. This is a video game, something we all play for enjoyment. I recently quit my character to the displeasure (And celebration) of a lot of people. People I considered friends became frustrated with me for the exact same points that your bringing up and I agree with them to an extent, if I was in their shoes I'd feel some what of the same way. But I had lost all enjoyment for RP, it wasn't fun for me to play the character anymore and frankly I had reach a point in my real life where I decided I was ready to step away from RP, something that can be incredibly dominating in ones life. Some people were happy for me, they understood that I was trying to better my own life and were 100% behind it even if it created headaches for them. But others like I said, were jaded by it even if it barely or didn't effect their character.
I only bring this up because I feel like this happens a lot and while I get it, most of the times the burnout isn't permanent. Someone shouldn't in the back of their mind be sticking to a character or something they don't enjoy because they're fearful of getting punished. Someone might read that and think "Oh if your done playing just take the punishment what does it matter" and while your right. I think we can all honestly admit that Roleplay can be an addicting thing, we all see people in this community who suffer from it. I'll admit even for a period I suffered with it and someone who is unknowingly addicted to this shit is going to use that fear of punishment as a motivation and excuse to continue on playing.
For those reasons as silly as they might seem, I'm against any form of punishment to address the issue as it would simply be a headache to enforce with way more negatives then positives. There are just too many variable that would have to be considered in a decision and the option to just get up and quit, as frustrating as it may be for others should always be on the table.
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1 hour ago, averycoolguy said:
Go on Ebay and buy some Reading Comprehension. But just in case your card returns an error, I'll explain again. Slowly, using crayons.Guarding bodies does not help fight crime at all. 1 in 1000 body scenes will give you anything relevant.
Most of the time you find casings that will lead to some stolen gun from a dude that hasn't logged in months. A useless waste of time.
You're absolutely delusional. Our city of 700 players has the death rate of fucking Omaha Beach in World War 2. That's 100% an IFM issue. They're completely failing at keeping crime to a realistic level.Go outside and touch some grass, your clearly becoming to obsessed with the game friend.
Nobody said police RP is going to be fun even 50% of the time. But it's this frankly toxic fucking attitude your showing that's probably making it worse for you. Nobody said guarding bodies is what will lead to lower rates of crime, but it's apart of your characters job and maybe if LEO's actually did their jobs 100% of the time instead of picking and choosing which calls they want to take we'd see a difference.
But no, instead you come to the forums and throw a tantrum like a 5 year old. Slinging blame around on people and teams when you don't even know what they are fucking responsible for buddy. The funniest part of this entire exchange is the fact that you seem to think IFM is this godly power with an all seeing eye that sees and is responsible for every single illegal RP act on the server. When in reality, they're area of responsibility is literally in their name. Illegal faction Management. They manage the criminal factions on the server, they oversee suppliers/criminal schemes and they communicate with faction leaders. You know what they don't oversee? Random groups of three IRL buddies who made their accounts last week, formed a gang and started doing shit without even knowing there's a process for forming groups let alone an entire management team exists to oversee them.
See this is what bothers me, I don't have a problem with people from all sides having a say in this discussion. But time after time I see LEO's and civilians acting like they've identified the root cause of all issues on the server when a lot of the times (Like you) they don't know what the fuck they are talking about. You want IFM to crackdown on the criminal RP they oversee? Fine, it'll get slightly better for a brief period. But if you actually knew what the fuck you were talking about you'd know, this is an RPQM issue. You'd be up in arms about the fact that RPQM isn't policing the RP quality of criminals on the server. That's at least a logical team to focus your frustrations at because that's the team who's responsibility this falls under.
But no, lets blame Illegal RPers and IFM! We don't know what they do but they have Illegal in their name so they must be at fault.
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Every problem is criminals fault.
Too many police on scene? Stop being bad criminals.
Not enough police on scene? Stop being bad criminals.
Too many clubs? Criminals.
Not enough unique businesses? Criminals.
PD players admitting that they just straight up ignore calls and RP because they want to RP a cop but don't actually want to take responsibility for fighting crime? Who could possibly be to blame? That's right! Those damn criminals!
Everyone is entitled to play the game in a way that is enjoyable to them, but this is a serious RP server. If you sign up to be a LEO, your expected to RP all aspects and all duties. Not just the ones you and your friends think are exciting. Am I saying that criminal RPers are a pure angelic entity that is doing no wrong? Absolutely not. There are some dogshit criminal RPers who do the bare minimum and definitely contribute to the issues the community faces.
But you can't sit here and complain that crime being outrageously high is the issue when you also admit that a lot of you just straight up ignore calls and let crime get worse because your tired of dealing with it and then we see 35 officers responding to the shootout calls that apparently always lead to nothing. IFM isn't going to come in and magically fix the situation because the issue is not an illegal faction management one.
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2 hours ago, Brian3898 said:
If any of you guys have ANY sort of input on how staff can improve response times while still maintaining quality vetting and decent investigation of claims then I'm sure staff management is all ears, but all I see here is staff bashing, literally volunteers who day in and day in put in countless hours to make all of your experiences better for little to no gain of their own.
I think you need to understand just how fucked some of us have gotten by the staff team and the way some of them operate. As I said to @Wuhtah I don't mean to bash and I only mean to give constructive criticism but thing have gotten so bad now that it's hard to politely explain our issues with the way things are handled by staff.
You say you want to maintain quality vetting and decent investigations but to me, that comment is kind of a slap in the face. I've had so many issues, big or small that have to get run up the chain to management only for them to take so long to even get looked into that, by the time they get around to it management says the case is too old so they close it. This obviously is not you or the majority of other admins fault, but I hope you understand just how frustrating it is especially when so many issues seem to have to be elevated to those higher ups. There are so many of these volunteer admins but I keep having to interact with the same 5 people if I want to get anything of importance handled.
Again I'm not trying to come at you or any other staff member reading this. I don't know you personally and don't know the systems your operating in. But I know something is wrong, something is broken. Be it the systems or the people it needs to be fixed. Honestly, I think management should look to other servers outside the GTA sphere for influence on how they can improve. I've given management names in the past but I feel like sometimes (Coming INTO the GTA RP world) The GTA RP community gets a little obsessed with the servers they came from, how they operated and seem to view those one or two servers as the perfect way to run a GTA community. But this is 2021 not 2014, there are more then two ways to operate a server and I think GTAW would benefit from examining others.
I'll close by saying while I know this discussion has been heated and many admins including yourself might feel attacked, but people are complaining on this thread for the exact same reason that you joined staff. They want to see this community grow and get better, As staff members I think you can all admit that you have blinders as to how the way you operate effects the player base. Like I said in the beginning of my reply, you might believe that investigations here are decent and of good quality. But as a player? That couldn't feel farther from the truth, honestly it feels like an insult.
But as players we need to understand that we don't know what goes on behind the scenes and what we might attribute to a certain admin might be a decision coming from higher above or they make with hands tied in red tape. That's why, although heated I think this thread has been really good. I for one didn't know logs on GTAW were discord based (At least in part) and that explains a lot about why reports can sometimes take a bit of time and in the future it's something I can consider before I start getting pissy about a report taking so long. But that's really nothing in comparison to how much good we can do if we have a cold honest discussion about how we the players feel, what staff is currently facing and what an actual solution is.
Or we can just continue the endless cycle of people bitching on the forums, staff taking personal offense and nothing getting done.
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49 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:
I don't believe that 7 days should be taken for that long to handle a player report, but sometimes that is what happens. This could be because we're waiting on players to respond, reading evidence, waiting on chatlogs to come through, or just get busy with IRL stuff. I agree with you - some of the reports that wait (especially for a month) is unacceptable. I may be speaking out of line here when I say that.
First off, I want to say I appreciate you diving into the heat of this discussion and not only maintaining your composure but displaying a level of openness not regularly seen by staff. Secondly and on to the quote, those are definitely areas that can be streamlined and I brought up a few of them in my original reply. half of the things you mentioned would really be solved with a few key changes.
I don't know what the server keeps for logs on the backend for you guys to access but either they should be found and posted almost at the same time that the reports being taken OR we need to enforce a more standardized use of parser by players. Just like POV video evidence is required a lot of the time, so should chatlogs and they should be posted by the reporting party from the start.
I've mentioned it a few times now, but the whip needs to be cracked a lot sooner on players who aren't responding or taking a long time to respond. Twenty four hours after notification without an initial response? Automatic temp ban. Ignoring staff questions for a day or two while your active IG? Automatic temp ban. This is a part of the issue that's partly staff's fault for being too soft and partly the communities fault for taking advantage of it while complaining.
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10 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:
However, this thread does seem to be attacking from both sides. Let's go ahead and twist this thread around, so we can hopefully gain some insight from you guys (the players) on how us (administrators) could handle reports better. What advice do you guys have for us?
In the case of forum reports, this is unacceptable:
11 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:I highly suggest that if all parties have answered and it's been a couple of days (5-7), to tag the handling administrator. If this does not help - go to the head of administrative team @Odin or the assistant head of of the administrative team @Wally. If neither of these people get back to you, go to the head of the staff team @Pillsbury.
In no community other then GTAW has 7 days been an acceptable amount of time to wait for a report to get looked at. On top of that, while I totally get your just giving an honest suggestion on how to get the ball rolling. Take a moment to read that back, this is a community of thousands of players and we're expected to contact one of the four server managers if we want to get our simple report looked at? Does that really sound like a system that works? To put in to prospect, in one of my last communities although I was active for close to 5 years, I only interacted with the server owner twice (Once was just steamrolling him in HOI4). On GTAW? A community I've only been apart of for 2 or 3 years I've had to contact Nervous or management about issues more times then I can count.
Ask yourself, what does that say to me as a player about the rest of the staff team?
I don't know exactly how reports are taken up by staff but here's what I've seen in other communities that has worked.
- Reports should be handled by groups of three admins to quickly distribute the workload.
- Reports should be assigned handling admins within 48 hours of a report being posted. By this I mean a group of three have been tasked to look into it.
- Within 24 hours of being assigned the team should have looked over the report and posted their initial questions.
- Admins should close out reports within 7 days of them being posted.
It seems somewhat tedious but I promise you, it keeps the gears moving which in turn means less of a work load for staff. I get the impression that too much leeway is given to everyone in this realm. Admins are allowed too much freedom in how much of the basic bitch work they take on which leads reports to go untaken or unhandled, players are allowed too much freedom when it comes to answering report notifications which leads to trails and reports going cold which ultimately just makes reports more unappealing to take, on and on the cycle continues.
I don't mean to be overly harsh or offensive, but it's time for some tough love. This staff team and this community has the potential to be great, but it's being handicapped in my eyes by it's own inability to do the job and a bureaucratic way of approaching issues that stops it from finding any fruitful solutions.
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17 minutes ago, mj2002 said:
You should care about the volunteer work being done by the staff. They, in part, make your experience here possible and prevent the server's environment from descending (further) into complete chaos. Essentially, that chaos, is what you can expect on every single other server currently in existence. Administrators put their free time into helping the community keep itself together, and I believe they deserve a little more respect. Remember, you are donating money, not paying for a service where support staff are at your beck and call.
Firstly, there barely are any other RP servers given GTAW was able to effectively corner the market while everyone clung to a decade old game. Lets not pretend that the staff here is providing some type of world class service because they have practically 0 competition. The reality is, the areas in which GTAW's staff fail aren't even exclusive to GTA RP servers. normal ass reports are something every single RP server across every game type has to handle and many of them do it better then GTAW with less staff members and more players.
Secondly, the only reason it's a donation is because calling it a donation is a legal loophole, everybody knows this. I brought it up not to say that staff needs to be at my beck and call (Because I know they aren't seeing any of that money) but because I wanted to highlight that This server generates revenue for it's owner, therefor there's an incentive to fix broken systems.
28 minutes ago, mj2002 said:Bullshit excuses for poor performance.
It should have not taken 61 days, 2 staff reports and threatening to management that I was going to quit the server for them to look at my CK appeal.
Factions shouldn't be losing properties during wars because one admin team forgot to tell the players that they need to fill out an obscure property form for another admin team.
The admin team shouldn't be insisting players submit RPQM reports if they are going to sit open for 6+ months.
Reports shouldn't be sitting open so fucking long that all involved parties have quit the server.
You say it's all to make things fair or for even checks and balances, I see an insurmountable amount of hoops players either have to spend months jumping through to even get an answer on their idea or spend their entire lives no lifing this community until they have enough friends in staff that they can just side step the process.
As I said in my original reply, the issues plaguing this server are systemic and they've been there since breaking 300 players on a Friday night was exciting. There's a reason that the issue has grown alongside our player numbers even though we've expanded the staff team the entire time. The system that they are working within doesn't fucking work.
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GTAW is the only server where I've seen the staff team grow and grow yet the amount of work that gets done seems to be less and less.
And I know somebody is reading this and immediately rage typing about how much hard work staff does that we don't see or that they are volunteers. Frankly I don't really care and neither should you. This server is unable to meet it's most basic management duties in a timely manner, that's unacceptable for a community with thousands of players that generates tens of thousands of dollars in donations a year. The worst part, on top of that there seems to be a never ending and always changing amount of bureaucratic hoops to jump through to get anything done. Something that only puts more strain on the staff team by creating more work to sift through. It's ridiculous how many times I've seen someone report a situation only for it to take so long for staff to address it that said situation spirals into two more reports and a CK appeal.
Whatever staff is doing, its not working and I hope a serious discussion is had within staff about find a solution. But it's become very clear to me as a player that the entire system of how staff operates needs to be reworked from the ground floor because this issue is systemic.
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Replace the criminal points system
in Archive
Posted
1. The point system is straight forward, an intention design to discourage people from crimegrinding. You commit crime X you get Y points. That works fine when the lifecycle of a character is only a couple months or if you play a criminal mastermind who's also a stealth expert (A playstyle a lot of legal RPers will say is the only acceptable type of criminal). But getting arrested is just simply a huge part of criminal RP and when you've been around for say a year your gonna end up racking up at least some points. I know of people who, had good criminal characters but after an unfortunate series of events they hit 30 points and boom, they're characters a lifer. Now I get it, commit the crime, do the time. But the life sentence via the points system isn't punishing people for the crime they committed, it's punishing them for committing crime in general.
2. This does put quite a bit more pressure on DB, JSA and the DA's office and understandable people might be frustrated by that. But I look at it from a different prospective, what have these teams been missing? Actual teeth. Within the points system it didn't matter how good of an investigation DB puts in, it doesn't matter how good of an argument the DA makes, the point system decides everyones fate. The best example of this was the Martorano RICO, we had DB on our asses for 3 months building a case and while some of their key evidence did get thrown out for OOC reasons we felt really bad internally because ultimately all that 3 months did was put ten of our sixty guys in jail for maybe 3 days? This suggestion however would flip the script, each case with the right amount investigation and a good argument from the DA could theoretically get your guy thrown in jail for life or an extended period of time like a year.
3. It would entirely come down to the facts of the case, the way the defendant holds themselves and basically all the other things that play into a sentencing IRL. For example, if someone is RPing a hard ass gangbanger who shows no remorse for committing murder it doesn't matter how many points they have, if they show a clear disregard for human life they'd get a life sentence. On the flipside if someone had a long criminal history and this is they're first time getting caught in several months, they could argue that they've turned a new leaf, it was an accident etc and possibly get a lighter sentence or parole. Within the current system? I could quit being a criminal at 29 points, accidentally kill someone, get charged and boom, my character is a lifer.