Bospy

This mindset brings unintended consequences and I've seen the effect those consequences can have on legal faction and illegal faction relations. While we all thoroughly dislike people committing crimes and running around in muscle cars, it is much better to leave that to staff to deal with. If you relegate that to be dealt with by PD and tell them "IC is IC," you will have players in PD with very resentful attitudes towards criminal roleplay.

Western LS is also fairly active, at least Vespucci. My faction rolls incredibly deep at some times. We've got 10-15 gangmembers in the street.

An alternative to the current system is simply to bump the supposed crime committed up three times. That means if you have a single charge worth 2 hours, the police have 6 hours to investigate before they need to release you.

A 72 hour hold is basically a mini-ban. That's to the point where a player could become demotivated to play. This most definitely is not an IC issue. I am in firm agreement here. You can't expect people to confess to crimes they have committed if they are roleplaying a career criminal on any OOC level. It shouldn't be the goal of people roleplaying detectives to force confessions and dominate cases. This is a case where realism is crossing the boundaries of no longer fun. If they have all the evidence they need, they should be arrested for the time required by the crime. But even 24 hours is frankly a stretch. A detainment of 72 hours in real life without pure evidence to convict could be a civil rights case easily. Especially as CSI scripts do not exist, a detective who wants to fuck someone over can easily get away with it if, on a 2 hour hold, they choose to opt in for a 72 hour hold to "gather further evidence." This has the danger to be thoroughly abused. It is a disincentive to continue roleplay if the only way out of that 72 hours is to confess to a crime. That is, in essence, punishing the player for roleplaying a criminal. Criminals snitch plenty in real life, but there's a large portion of criminals who don't. By "telling on your friends," that player is eligible to be CK'd by their faction. They get out of a 72 hour hold, but now they need to donate money in order to get a namechange when their cohorts figure out they've snitched on an IC basis, which they almost certainly will. A player shouldn't need to use all of their characters slots in order to roleplay. As time goes on and guns proliferate, you will almost certainly find people shooting to get out of investigations and a bull-headed demeanor to any detective roleplay because of this variable, and as a result less cooperation when it comes to faction relations between illegal factions and the legal factions. You will have whacky ambushes out of Sinaloa and convoy attacks on prisoner transports. You will have people shooting any cop they see snapping pictures of them. 72 hours is excessive and will invite these behaviors.

Although this isn't one of the points initially in discussion, introducing a "high speed" unit to the Police Department sounds like a terrible idea. Helicopters, especially with the lack of tunnels and highways overlapping within the city, can easily reproduce the same effect that a high speed unit "could" bring. High speed units do not exist at any functional level in real life on the basis that at high speeds, pursuits are too dangerous. You can argue that for the sake of the game it's fun to chase someone going above 150 miles an hour, but inevitably that person is going to crash and fuck their car up anyways, and frankly it's arcadey to recreate Need for Speed. I'd argue the way to counter the proliferation of high speed cars is to introduce a tax similar to property ownership - you can possess X amount of cars until paying a tax scales up exponentially as things go on. Introducing other ways to invest money as well would be ideal. The goal of police shouldn't be to catch everyone doing whacky unrealistic shit. In my opinion, if someone is using NOS and driving a sports car at excess of 200 miles throughout Los Santos, that's unrealistic driver behavior and should be forwarded to staff. Should they be punished? Not for me to decide, but if you combine the driving with crimes such as robberies, that's just annoying on an OOC level. There exists some isolated cases of supercar chases, but almost none of them result in anything but a called off pursuit and a flaming vehicle wreck a couple miles down the highway. I'm not entirely sure what urges you not to approach the "hood," but in the LAPD in real life they don't have much choice as to where they select their assignments. You're assigned a beat, and if that beat is inside of the worst neighborhoods of Watts and elsewhere, you're expected to patrol there. In small towns, it might pass that you can reliably avoid poking around in the bad areas, but in the LAPD you're expected to get your hands dirty. Legal characters should approach gang infested areas, at least on-duty, as that is a realistic depiction of a police officer unless you're roleplaying a lazy guy. Proactive policing is rare in a city as big as LA unless you are in a specialized unit, but with the reality of population on GTAW, it's a must, and the most reliable area for that is gang-infested areas. Unless you're talking about off-duty, but that's just sensible. Ultimately, two things decide population: timezone and geography. GTAW, early on, decided to create properties as far as Paleto Bay. I personally find this to be a bad decision on the basis that it's equivalent to making a house rentable in Bayside on LSRP. The map is massive in comparison to SAMP, and to find people is a chore. Although the population may be catching up between communities, the density is going to remain significantly lower due to the simple fact we can't control map size. But you can control expansion - I think the best route moving forward is to congregate businesses, jobs, and scripting to the southern part of the map. This way, density is higher.

By mandating CKs for any death, you are inviting controversy. I am open to more CKs based on a specific set of circumstances, but to mandate it for any death seems negligent and would probably kill the server. I'm fairly certain even server management would not allow this to happen, but I do know that some members of the staff team do favor an extended CK system based on consequence (eg, if you're messing around in prison when it comes around, you can get stabbed to death and CK'd as a result unless you PC up.)

As mentioned, continuity is being worked on by staff. They're setting rules in stone as to where San Andreas is located and all the other nitty gritty details.

Best bet is to make a ban appeal and see if it's an actual ban or just a bug.

This should work. You need to make sure you select the "save to all outfits" option. I had a weird hairstyle before I finally figured that out.

This is more so a suggestion suited for the internal parts of PD rather than forcing it on them, but I believe their traffic unit already tickets a lot of bad parking jobs anyways.

Pretty sure the majority of drugs flow through drug suppliers, which go through a process with FM. There's no concept of an "official" faction, just suppliers - typically there's a single supplier per faction. Any faction you interact with, at least the ones which are scripted, generally will have some sort of supplier.

This is very refreshing to hear. Continuity is something that has lacked from other communities in the past.

This is entirely subjective and up to you and the other players involved. Anything that doesn't exist in the script is therefor NPC'd, so you're welcome to roleplay anything within the bounds of realism with player's consent.

Suggestion for you guys: I've always hated that things are roleplayed as everything on the map is solely what's "in state." I recommend that we say San Andreas as a state is much larger on an IC basis than just the island, in that manner people can establish that their characters are from analogues to real-life locations in California. For example, we make a fictional analogue for San Francisco in San Fierro, a fictional analogue for Orange County with Red County, etc. A state with two counties is somewhat unrealistic. Even the smallest US state, Rhode Island, has like 4-5. These places would "exist" off-map on some larger mainland.

MODERN (UPDATED) NOTE as per 2020: This guide is rather outdated as many circumstances have changed in real life in the CDCR prison system, and was a forewarning I do refer broadly to the general conditions of the gang-based political nature inside Californian prisons. These prisons are dominated by racial politics, so in this guide "whites," "blacks," and beyond are used to describe racial groupings. Keep in mind this is of course a very general guide, but this is quite literally how these gangs are structured in real life. I also moved the RP warning and rewrote some of it to better describe IFM's stance on these kinds of groups. Please note: I get fucking paranoid about registering to sketchy forums to find some of this info so you don't have to!! FOREWARNING: Before anything else, understand one thing - we are portraying white gangmembers, some of which are white supremacists. White gangs in California inherently have a racial aspect due to the nature of historical prison segregation. Before you approach this brand of roleplay, I HIGHLY recommend you leave any actual real life biases at the door, otherwise you will mix IC and OOC and not create a realistic character. Just as an actor portrays a character in a film, we are portraying a character in the context of a videogame. If this sort of thing is uncomfortable, you obviously can entirely avoid this brand of roleplay, but we are trying to mimic a criminal underworld which exists in the penal system of the United States and in the streets of California. "Peckerwood" gangs and skinhead gangs inherently have a very dangerous racial element to them due to the historical context of the locations they spawned in, and on a psychological basis, they use this racial element as a recruitment tool. This means that these characters can be racist and hold extremist fringe views. IF YOU HOLD THESE VIEWS IN REAL LIFE, DO NOT USE THIS AS A PLATFORM TO LIVE OUT YOUR POWER FANTASY. Not only is it inaccurate, you're probably mentally unhealthy, and mixing IC and OOC. There's little point to me listing the numerous reasons that Neo-Nazism or far-right ideologies are bad, if you're a believer in one of those ideologies then you shouldn't be present at this diverse community in the first place. At the end of the day, this is a videogame and a hobby - while the nuances of white gangs is exceedingly interesting due to their use of insane outdated racial ideology as a recruitment tool, it is NOT something that should be praised, and you can easily compare these messages to the same sort of recruitment strategies used by groups like ISIS. Far-right terrorism is described by the FBI as one of the most significant domestic terror threats in the United States for GOOD reason. Just like you would portray a ruthless orc in a game of DND, a peckerwood gang member is a VILLAIN. Anyone high-up in this line of roleplay are here to play a game. We don’t condone racism. Emphatically, Neo-Nazism is wrong, it is a detestable ideology and there is no place for it in the modern era, and white supremacism is not the focus of this roleplay. AND FINALLY, DON'T BE THAT IDIOT REPLYING "KEEP IT WHITE" or "THAT'S WHITE" TO A FACTION THREAD!!! You're literally spouting racist nonsense on an OOC basis because of characters interacting. You're mixing IC and OOC. San Andreas, based off of California, is on an in-character basis home to one of the most diverse communities in the United States. While basing our community's efforts on portraying Los Santos as Los Angeles, there's many open opportunities for gang roleplay. However, one part about all California gangs one person should understand is that many of these gangs are part of a large hierarchy that has tentacles stretching down from the highest security prisons in the state. Organizations like the Aryan Brotherhood, Nuestra Familia, Mexican Mafia, and Black Guerrilla Family all have varying degrees of control over street gangs within the state of California. These structures are insidious and organized. Therefore, it is sensible to represent this on an IC basis in our server. This guide is dedicated specifically to white gangsters, so we'll only touch on that branch. WHITE GANGMEMBERS IN CALIFORNIA White gang-members throughout California can be classified into two branches - peckerwoods and skinheads. Often times there's no distinction, but many white gang-members are not white power skinheads, and many white power skinheads would consider being called a "peckerwood" an insult. Peckerwood is an archaic slur from the South for white-trash poor whites. It has survived to the modern day in referring to any unaffiliated prisoner within some penal systems in the USA, and outlaw biker organizations also use it. Here's a great writeup from Wikipedia about white gangs within California: As written, there is a clear hierarchical structure within the Californian system. There are independent, unaffiliated "peckerwood" gangs which do their own thing, and then there's specific groups attached to a statewide hierarchy. Aryan Brotherhood | Nazi Low Riders PENI | Affiliate Peckerwood Gangs (not all) Who's at the top of this hierarchy? The Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang dominant inside of California's Department of Corrections and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I'm not going to go into much detail about who or what they are, but it is roughly equivalent to the Mexican Mafia or Nuestra Familia in terms of structural power. Aryan Brotherhood members are inducted after a long-term prison sentence. Generally, their members are one of two things or a combination of the two things - hyperintelligence and ruthlessness. You can be very intelligent and make it to the top by ordering other people to do your dirty work and outsmarting competitors, or you can just kill your competitors. Or you can do both. That's how people make their bones and get into the Aryan Brotherhood. They run everything in prison, and therefore most white gangs or motorcycle clubs pay some form of taxes. Ironically, one can't really consider the Aryan Brotherhood to be a skinhead gang. One caveat - not all peckerwood gangs abide to the Aryan Brotherhood. Some peckerwoods hate skinheads as well. Some peckerwoods are more closely aligned with Northern Mexicans and ally with them. A well known Louis Theroux documentary has a white Norteno part of the Northern Structure. Even in the Nazi Low Riders, there was a potential for a war with the AB and a faction of the NLR still dislikes the Aryan Brotherhood. This guide won't cover these special cases. WHITE GANGMEMBERS - RACISM and MISCONCEPTIONS Peckerwoods do not strictly follow any ideology and can be as insular or composed as they choose to be. Peckerwood gangs exist with black membership, some peckerwoods align themselves with many races. The only place race matters within the context of peckerwood gangs are self-avowed skinhead groups and prison. White gangs are incredibly sophisticated but also have ample room for meth-smoking idiots who have had their brains destroyed by years of drug use. You could be a ruthless robber, a drug pusher, or a white-collar criminal with card skimmers. There's lots of open opportunities. And one key thing that separates white gangs from other gangs is their lack of territory. They are very mobile. We'll touch on skinhead gangs and their racism. Real life skinheads are a flurry of ideologies. The main focus of this guide, however, is criminal skinheads. Criminal skinheads are a distinct group separate from the more commonly associated political ideologues, the legitimate neo-National Socialists/fascists. Political skinheads are not gang-members and are motivated by racial hatred. They are the domestic terrorist types, the guys who post on Stormfront, members of the KKK or NSM. They aren't into crime or drug dealing. If you're looking to roleplay a political skinhead, white gangs are a horrible and inaccurate place to do it, and by extension it's against server rules. If your intent is to roleplay a meth-head criminal gang-member, white gangs are a cool place to develop a character. Criminal skinheads have an attachment of hate, but most criminal skinhead gangs use race as a tool for recruitment or motivation. The context of white gangs within places like CA should be looked at within history - after the desegregation of prisons in CA, gangs of men coalesced into large racial groups, which in turn developed into prison gangs, which in turn brought street gangs up after many members left to the outside. Skinhead gangs established themselves in mainly heterogenous "transitional" areas. You can't find skinheads in Compton or Inglewood. You can find them in areas with a mixed demographic. The reason for this is simple - skinhead gangs, and many peckerwood gangs, recruit "latchkey" kids who are neglected by their parents or groom them for membership in the gang through parties and personal relationships. Gang recruiters are predatory and seek mainly the most vulnerable. Criminal skinheads are not inherently racist by themselves - although they use racist symbols, many members of skinhead gangs are don't necessarily care much about ideology. Keep in mind, it's California - incredibly racially diverse, regardless of the fact that there's a large white demographic in some places. The truly ideological skinheads that are part of skinhead gangs have been documented to connect with groups like the KKK, but this is a tiny minority and really only exists within a vacuum. Racism does exist within skinhead gangs for certain, but that racism is not fostered among the "latchkey" recruits until prison. Most skinheads don't care about racism outside of prison - the main drive for them is money. Gangster skinheads have been documented to have Latina girlfriends, black "business" associates, and beyond. Money is the ultimate motivator. If you're not making much money as a low-level peckerwood dealer in a small gang of young dudes, you might be enticed while in county jail to do work for a skinhead gang. If you do work, you advance up the ladder and receive more money. As you go deeper, you develop a potential addiction to drugs. As you develop addictions to drugs, you do more crime to fuel your addiction. The crimes you're used to doing don't fetch enough money, so you do more work - the work becomes violent, things like robberies and home invasions. Soon enough you're in prison. There, the ideology is fostered - you are cordoned off into your own race by the rules of higher-ups, and you're with people from your county and locality. You make connections. When you're back out, you're doing drugs again - but the connections come in handy. The connections ask you to kill people, injure them. At that point, you're invited in. And things continue to sink. You will most likely end up dead or in prison for life, or, rarely, make enough money and have enough respect that you can escape the lifestyle through permissions of your higher-ups, albeit knowing they can call upon you at any time. Gangs are blood-in, blood-out, but people do retire. Gang life is not glamorous. PRISON A person who has been in county jail will go through their court case and ultimately be found innocent or guilty. Most of the time, you will be guilty - we don't have the luxury of portraying a county jail, so assume that your character has spent several months behind bars in county jail and received a basic primer about how San Andreas prisons work. Prison in California, and by extension San Andreas, is divided by race. As mentioned previously, desegregation led to self segregation. Within the prison system, the hierarchy is most clear. It's where the racial politics are at their height. It's where racist ideologies are fostered. But money is still the same goal. Selling drugs in prison brings a massive profit, but you can't sell drugs without consent. And as a white prisoner, you must obey the rules set by shotcallers - members of the Nazi Low Riders and PENI. Gang modules separate individuals based on membership, and membership is ultimately race-based, but most prisons are so overcrowded that many races are together in one pod. When you first arrive to prison, you are separated based on risk and segregated based on sentence - levels advancing on a numerical basis separate inmates throughout the system. Level 1 and 2 yards are dorms due to overcrowding, and this is where low-level offenders or gang-member affiliates end up here. Level 3 yards are where intermediate offenders are placed with a cellmate in a cell. This is where inducted gang-members might end up on basic offenses or felonies. Level 4 is the strict "mainline" for murderers and heavy hitters. Prison politics are most clear here. Outside of this, "non-programming" yards exist for people who want to avoid gangs, of which you may consider Protective Custody such a case - that's where former COs, police officers, snitches, and sex offenders go. Gang dropouts also go there. PC also has gangs of its own. Then there's the SHU and ADSEG - the former is for permanent segregations, and that is no longer based on gang membership. Adseg is based on disciplinary actions. If you commit a violation of prison rules, you're sent to adseg after a rudimentary trial with the COs. Shotcallers receive people coming from reception who have been placed within one of those levels based on their risk. They receive them by demanding their "paperwork" - a 128G is a form given to all inmates after they've been cleared from reception. The form, through the numerical classification system, indicates if the inmate is a sex offender or informant. All new arrivals must demonstrate they're neither of these by showing their form to the relevant keyholder for their county. At this point, they're given a rundown of the rules - everything is divided on race. The basics are this: Whites and Southern Mexicans are allies, their enemies are North Mexicans and Blacks. Neutrality is generally held with people in "other" races. You cannot affiliate, associate, or hang out with people who are from the "enemy" section, or even the neutral section. You must program with the whites. You cannot disobey orders given by your county car. Everything is political and must go through a shotcaller or keyholder. You need a greenlight prior to attacking someone, going after a debt, or sorting out racial issues. More often than not, politics is peaceful before becoming a war. Wars are fought with shanks and fists. But negotiations between racial representatives is almost always attempted first. Juveniles are inherently separated within their own facilities. PENI has been documented to run mainline prison yards in level 2, 3, and 4 facilities. Up until recently, this was always the case due to the fact that if you were validated as an NLR or AB member, you were in segregation. Due to a court case which judged segregation based on gang affiliation to be unconstitutional in California, Nazi Low Riders are now running a select few level 4 yards, although the majority are being put on isolated “special” yards. Even some AB members have returned to the mainline as a result, but the majority are still segregated due to crimes committed in prison. ROLEPLAYING A WHITE GANGMEMBER ACCURATELY Everything that you should know contextually has been laid out to some degree already. If it applies to California, it also applies, to some degree, to this brand of roleplay. Obviously we can't portray everything accurately. But we should aim to portray most of it. If you're aiming to join a white gang, your best bet is to roleplay a local teenager or other white peckerwood. Locality is a key part of prison politics - almost all internal prison politics are based on an individual's home county. When you enter prison, you are subjugated to a "county car" which is a large body of people from your neighborhood and area. If you want to join Vespucci Skinheads, for instance, you shouldn't roleplay a guy from Paleto Bay. You'd be a Paleto Bay peckerwood, and you would associate with people from around there. Be warned - if you approach a gang and roleplay someone from another location other than their own personal location with a clear intent to join, you will probably be taken advantage of. In prison, you should try to roleplay being from somewhere with an active gang population so you're able to clique up in the county car, otherwise you'll be the sole Blaine County guy there. Your character shouldn't be from somewhere outside of San Andreas unless they moved as a child. You also wouldn't be sent to a San Andreas prison unless you were charged in the State of San Andreas. Some federal prisons turn felons over to state systems to serve the rest of their sentence if they have state charges, but you should avoid roleplaying this due to the complicated nature of federal prison, and your character would likely be in segregation. Female membership in gangs is nonexistent, as they cannot be inducted, but they can be given power based on their significant other's status within the gang. Female gangmembers often are the conduits for drug smuggling, money transfers, and other assorted crimes. Powerful female associates do exist, but their power comes solely from someone they're with. Drug use is ubiquitous in white gangs. If you're not using a drug, you're supplying it or rehabbing off of it - drugs are used prior to hits, attacks, robberies, and all assortments of things. Some stories have shown that many gangmembers are completely trashed on drugs outside of prison and very intelligent and squared away inside of prison. Meth is the drug of choice for whites. I highly recommend you roleplay a young latchkey kid if your intent is to join on the outside, no younger than 15. Don't roleplay being older than the age of 40 unless your character has miles of development. If you're a random 40 year old trying to join a white gang, you should've already been in one or your character is a huge fuck-up and nobody will associate with you. As I said, people in this life have three routes officially, with a "special" one for dropouts. You can die, end up in prison for life, or VERY rarely retire. If you're just getting into prison, there's more room to roleplay an unaffiliated peckerwood already involved in criminal affairs. If you want to jump in quick, this is a good route. Some people don't get involved in hardcore crime until prison. CREDITS The inspiration for this guide is from a multitude of guides from other communities, most notably written by Pie and Warren Borbeck. Not everything that could be included is definitely included in this guide, but I will add on numerous other things as time goes on. Mainly, I was tired of people copying things from other communities, and wanted to see something written in-house used as a guideline. This is a good baseline for roleplay. If you're looking for information, I highly suggest looking for interviews of prisoners on YouTube. The CDCR has produced a number of videos. If you’re not familiar with the California prison system, ensure you read more about it. Let me know if there's any errors or typos, I wrote this pretty quickly.

Try changing the priority of your game when it's running in the "Details" tab. Right click and select it.

This may also be a RAM issue.

I think it could be feasible if you settle on the idea that there's less female characters and the conditions for them would be different. At first, probably not, but I'd like to see it happen at some point so that there's a separation and bigger realism in prison. One thing that always bugged me on other servers was the lack of separation, it was just unrealistic and goofy.

The hope is, as echoed in this thread by other users, a system that encourages people to spend time in-game but also another that allows them to spend twice as much time out of the game for a sentence. This way it gives an incentive people to go in-game and RP. If they opt to spend time in-game, they should be quite aware of the potential consequences that being in prison comes with - gangs, killings, assaults, etc. If they're AFKing in-game with this system, there should be harsh punishments. I've gone over my ideas for an incredibly active parole and exterior component of the DOC before, in that way the faction can reliably attract good roleplayers. If the prison does come, I'd love to see two separate wings for female and male - one thing that has always broken immersion is having mixed-gender pods, that's just a headache. If the logistics can't be managed, it's a shame, but I think it'd promote very good roleplay.

My honest opinion is you find a niche and stick to it. Russian/Slavs are already around to an extent on the server. You could do a Chechen/Caucasus thing. My recommendation if you want to do organized crime is to peer at https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/organized-crime The only Slavs in the USA that get into organized crime are Eurasians and the Balkans. Anything else is a big stretch. A Carribean Mafia in Los Santos is sort of out of place. It'd be cool if the server were based on Miami or New York, but on the West Coast it's sort of rare to find any Caribbean criminals. If you want to do a more Latino-centric thing, I recommend you do the Pacific Cartel. Obviously none of this matters above, you're allowed to do whatever, but they're my suggestions.

put it down for the set

I think it'd be cool if there were tiers of treatment as well. A civilian can buy a basic first aid kit that treats cuts, scrapes, and bruises, maybe even a blackmarket could pop up for medical equipment so people could "treat" certain injuries outside the purview of FD to avoid legal attention. Then for factions like PD, a more advanced BLS kit with additional stabilization options like gunshot wounds and broken necks. For FD, they carry the big-boy kits that stabilize everything from gunshots to the lungs to compound fractures/fractures that have broken through the skin and severe burns. I think FD should have a lot more script support than many communities let them. If you relegate them to a purely roleplay driven faction, many people will simply go AFK or leave midway through conveniently to avoid it. I don't object to roleplay driven factions dependent on their function, such as government, but the Fire Department needs script support - dynamic fires, brush fires, injury scripts, and beyond.

The FBI investigates federal crime and enforces federal law. It wouldn't fit within the framework of this community, it'd be a huge layer of unnecessary bureaucracy. In California in real life, there is a state-based CBI which performs criminal investigations, but I don't think we'd need it since the LSPD already fills that vacuum.