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Ink

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Everything posted by Ink

  1. God damn, Tom Clancy's writing this RP. My homeboy be out here robbing homes like
  2. You mean let's rob a working man's home where the owner probably works at least one or two full time jobs, is rarely ever home, and all the person's valuables are going to be a lot easier to find and much more easily transferable commodities which I can easily pawn... Versus let's rob a small fortress with a gate, cameras, security systems, in a quieter neighborhood where outsiders (especially minorities) are looked at much more suspiciously, where homes are bigger and more difficult to navigate and escape quickly, where valuables are more spread out and of more vague value on the secondhand pawn market, and where there is frequently at least one person home (housewives, children, personal assistants, maids, nannies, landscapers, pool boys). 🤔🤔🤔
  3. Like usual, the response to a lot of valid concerns in this thread is "IC issue." What about the OOC issues? Characters cease to exist when their players are offline, and vanish from the world. Realistically, they'd likely be at home, and would be able to react to a robbery happening in their home by notifying authorities. (To credit admins, some of them try to simulate something like this by having NPC neighbors call the police if your breakin takes too long) Characters cannot see outside of their home interiors into the exterior world (besides the new peephole script). Seeing a hooded figure vaulting through backyards and creeping around your neighbor's property would be easily seen from a 2nd story window, but because everyone knows that windows are purely cosmetic, few people realistically RP "fear" of being seen from windows. Criminal RP is benefited by the short-term timescale of the RP moment, but preventative or investigative RP is hindered by the long-term timescale of the RP scenario. A robbery only takes a few minutes, and the counter to that in real life is that there are people who spend hours of their lives every single day making a living to combat this or investigate it. This doesn't really happen in GTA:W. In real life, getting paid to be a security officer where all you do is drive around quiet, rich neighborhoods and rarely ever deal with any problems is a pretty sweet and easy gig. In GTA:W, it's an incredibly boring and lonely job which will make you lose interest in your character. Very few people want to RP that, and those that are interested in security RP have significantly more exciting prospects. A lack of significant IC consequences is in place because we're bending the IC issue in favor of the OOC issue that people playing criminal characters want to be able to RP and have fun. As a result, IC punishment is inordinately light on top of the ease of getting away from crimes. This ultimately results in criminals being more careless with their crimes because even if they are to be caught the consequences are minimal and the upside is worth it. Of course, it's okay to bend IC issues because of OOC issues when the criminal RPers benefit from it, right? 🙂 In real life, there would be Homeowners Associations associated with most of these neighborhoods, and this would make it much easier to collaborate between homeowners. Even if we are to assume the best solution is that these neighborhoods need to ICly create a security watch, this is hindered by the nature of the game. PM handles all the properties OOCly, and characters just suddenly vaguely come into possession of them. In real life, our world is persistent. If a home gets broken into during the night time, everyone in the neighborhood wakes up in the morning to heavy police presence in the neighborhood, and they will be more acutely aware of what had transpired. This allows the individual and the community to respond more quickly to threats. In GTA:W, characters vanish when they're not offline, players have different timezones and schedules, and spending any time outside in such an isolated area is inordinately risky, so there is little opportunity for casual neighborly RP. I can have both my next door neighbors get robbed and never know. While in real life I know what cars belong in my neighborhood, can infer the schedules of my neighbors, and know when someone doesn't belong, on GTA:W I have no idea whose car is whose or which car belongs where, so I can't even RP being suspicious of a vehicle that doesn't belong short of it being parked in my own driveway. In real life, the cost of human labor is relatively low compared to the wealth of the richest 1%. Your average multimillionaire could afford to hire a full-time security guard with no real problem ($20-25 an hour is $160-200 a day, $41,600 - $52,000 for a full year per guard), meanwhile the wealthy individual is able to make significantly more than that through their labor and investments. As a result, an association of wealthy individuals could rather easily staff a 4-guard rotation so that at least one person is always on duty to watch a wealthy neighborhood. The cost per day would be be approximately $600--an amount the sort of people who live in Beverly Hills make in less than an hour. On GTA:W, the cost of human labor is relatively high, because as players our most valuable and limited experience is OOC time. Even at only $4,000 an hour, which is a rather meager IC salary, it would cost $32,000 per 8 hours of coverage, or $96,000 for a full 24 hours. That means every single day, it costs as much as a brand new apartment to keep round-the-clock coverage with ONE PERSON to protect your neighborhood. If we ignore that this would probably require about 10 guards each putting in 1-3 hours of work every single day, it also represents an absurd expense. It would cost $35,040,000 -- yes, 35 MILLION DOLLARS -- to have ONE GUARD AT A TIME watching the neighborhood year-round. Even the richest characters in GTA:W are going to struggle to consistently make enough money to support that kind of expenditure, even as an entire community. But it's just an IC issue, right? 🤔 It might seem to me like "IC issue" is just the #1 throw-away line (up there with any discussions about "realism") to ignore the concerns of other players.
  4. What does RPQM seek out to do? Ultimately, it's trying to enforce "realism." There it is again, our favorite word on this server. The problem with realism is that the goal posts for what realism are always moving, and completely up to interpretation. There are very few official guidelines or procedures for realistically roleplaying different types of characters on this server. One admin might, in real life, be a younger individual with very limited real life experience. Or perhaps their experience might be from a European country that's very different from the United States. As a result, they might find certain things more or less realistic than it actually is. Over my 4 years on GTA:W, I've seen one set of admins say XYZ is unrealistic, but another set of admins is actively roleplaying something exactly like that with their characters or their friends and they find XYZ perfectly realistic, or at least acceptable for our roleplay server. I've seen some admins say "how is it realistic you run two different businesses" when the real world absolutely drips with examples of people doing this. I've had an admin say "it's unrealistic that your character can be successful without a college education" which speaks to me of some serious OOC brainwashing that this poor staff member has endured in their young life. I've had an admin say "most tattoo artists are very poor in real life and rarely achieve financial success." I've had an admin try to claim that it's unrealistic for a 30 year old to be a millionaire even though in the United States approximately 4% of all 30 year olds are millionaires. That tells me that staff member is probably only about 20 years old and has a skewed perception of the world and/or doesn't know many 30 year olds who aren't man-children playing video games all day. Or my favorite is "how does your character find the time to do all these things?" It's a well-meaning question at its heart, and there is perhaps room for it, but if you are doing it, the question of "how does your character find the time" is soulless because it disregards the OOC effort that's going into it. If we OOCly, in the midst of our real lives and playing a video game, can find the time to do multiple things with one character, then our characters who have significantly more time in the day to do that very thing, and who aren't limited to having to type out and roleplay things that'd take 30 seconds over the course of 5-10 minutes, then they have enough time to do these things. Workaholics exist in real life. Ultimately so much of this really subjective administration depends on who your OOC friends are and who your OOC enemies are on the server. Are you friends with a few admins in key positions? You're pretty much invulnerable short of egregious rulebreaking. Do you have the misfortune of personally running afoul of some admin or a really well-connected player who has friends with admins? Suddenly, it's very likely you'll be getting some admin-related heat on you. That's the problem: RPQM is rarely wrong... depending on where you set the goal posts. You can always move the goal posts. There's always room for every player on this server to be more realistic, but it's entirely unclear to us how realistic things are really supposed to be on GTA:W. We're obviously not gunning for 100% realism because our city is ludicrously overrun by criminal syndicates and people serve years of prison in a few days before getting back on the streets with the same people they were recently menacing with illegal firearms. That's not 100% realistic, but we accept that as "it's a game and it's supposed to be fun to RP in." In the years of GTA:W, the staff teams have gone through a turnover of different admins and different managers, and all of them have different interpretations. What was realistic enough for 2022 wasn't realistic enough for 2021 and now it's perhaps unrealistic again in 2023. Admin A finds it unrealistic that an uneducated 30-year-old entrepreneur can be doing well, Admin B perhaps knows someone exactly like that in real life and wouldn't find it unrealistic, Admin C dislikes a player or their friends dislike a player so they hit them harder with malicious compliance even though they know in their heart of hearts it's not that bad. We're expected to RP around systems which don't exist, and can get it held against us no matter what we do. The economy on this server is a joke, and we're supposed to equally roleplay that the economy doesn't exist ICly and is purely OOC while also RPing 100% at all times that the economy exists and is fully IC. We have to navigate the ridiculousness of RPing that a shot of rail whiskey costs 1/100th of a car, a pistol costs 1/3rd of a car, one regular car costs 5x more than another regular car because God thinks it looks cooler, a security guard costs $5,000 an hour and a DJ costs $10,000 an hour while an interior designer can make $150,000 in a single night just because they did a coffee bender and mapped a house overnight and another character makes $50,000 for "taking pictures" because OOCly they're actually going into Menyoo and creating 3D art for you instead of just snapping a few shots. We're supposed to tangle with that shitty economy day to day and RP it sometimes, but then also sometimes we're supposed to ignore it entirely. My character has enough money to pay for her vehicles twenty times over, but I'm always just a few moments from having an admin ask me "well how does your character afford the extreme expense of all these vehicles" as if the struggles of a minimum wage fry cook's life are what every character must strive to portray. I roleplay my character paying taxes and take care with all my character's business accounting as best as I can with the limitations of our server, yet I still have had admins saucily ask me "well, how are you paying taxes?" as if that's the bit of hard-hitting realistic RP that's truly the make-or-break of my portrayal. It's a "gotcha!" card that can always be magically pulled up because we don't have any rules about RPing paying taxes on the server, or how that's supposed to look like. This is just another example of how the goalposts of realism can always change, and our admin teams such as RPQM or PM always are able to make up guidelines, expectations, or other rulings based entirely on how they feel at the moment, if they like the person they're dealing with, if they're in a good mood or not. To wrap up this long ass post, let me refocus it here. If realism is the goal, but there is so little guidelines on what is realism or what procedures we should follow to be realistic, then how important is realism really. The big difference between a roleplay community that's fun and creative versus a roleplay community that's stiff and elitist is an overbearing admin team that claims they know what's realistic at every turn. Regulation has its place, and should exist for extreme or DISRUPTIVE roleplay. Everyone on GTA:W is here to RP, but everyone's idea of what is enjoyable RP is going to be slightly different, and everyone's interpretation of Los Santos/San Andreas's "realism" (which is actually more akin to tone, mood, and theme) is going to be a little bit different. If "legal" RPers can deal with there being a new mafia popping up every year, a hundred street gangs swapping out constantly, rampant crime in the streets, constant death and property crime all being "realistic" in this game, perhaps "illegal" RPers should stop getting so triggered by "mallrat" characters which might represent fast-paced caricatures of workaholics and wannabe influencers. Every single person on this server is cringe. We're all nerds spending our limited time on this planet playing make believe in a digital doll house built on a 10-year-old game. Some of ya'll just think your nerdy cringe is better than other people's nerdy cringe, and that's the most cringe part of it all. Let people have their fun, and be a little bit more flexible with your fellow gamer. Just because their idea of what's realistic for GTA:W doesn't 100% fit your interpretation doesn't immediately mean they're wrong, or that their RP is bad, or that they're destroying the server. They're just having fun, and as long as their fun is fun for other people, and those people keep logging into GTA:W to RP more, the community has the potential to win and be richer for it.
  5. We all know on GTA:W we strive towards the maximum possible realism, and that realism is the most noble goal for all roleplayers to constantly strive to! It's why we are so serious on this server about people realistically roleplaying fear during robberies, because there is no better roleplay on this server than embracing hard-hitting, engaging consequences, and when characters are faced with consequences it stands to reason that characters will make more interesting decisions. So right now, the rules promote excellent realism for all characters lucky enough to get robbed, by mechanically forcing the players to conduct themselves like a lootable NPC treasure bag. If they unrealistically behave in any way that isn't conducive to the robber emptying their inventory of assets, they are eligible to be CKed for this non-RP fear. That's really lucky for the victims, but right now this great rule doesn't apply both ways, and as a result criminal roleplayers are missing out on this fantastic motivation to dig deep into the boundless realism available to them on GTA:W. To make roleplay better and more interesting on this server, the same CK consequences should be on the table for any character who dies in the process of handling an unprovoked violent crime. This would really greatly improve the realism that everyone is lucky to participate in, and as we know realism is the #1 most important thing on GTA:W for everyone to have a really good time. We see this because every time an argument happens about a roleplay situation, the most common refrain is people pushing for what's "realistic" and so we know that realism is really why we all do this, and the largest source of fun. After seeing how important realism-based CK consequences are to the criminal roleplay community, I propose expanding them to everyone and making them more common because that will greatly increase the fun on this server, and give us all a sense of pride and accomplishment when we roleplay realistically. What I'm proposing is situations such as these: If a robber is killed, whether by their victim, a bystander, or a police officer as a result of a crime they engaged in, they are eligible for CK. This means robbers have to more realistically fear consequences of engaging in risky behavior and pick their targets more carefully, and it will make things so much more exciting and character developing for them when there is always the risk of dying if they don't always make the perfect call. This will also make it so robbers have to realistically roleplay fear of their robbery victims eventually finding them and enacting justice. If a criminal talks tough on a street block and this results in them getting gunned down, they are eligible for CK, because the character didn't realistically fear the consequences of talking shit and thus getting hit. This will greatly increase the realism of conflicts on the street and cause people to more commonly gun each other down, which is very realistic roleplay. If any character crosses the street without looking both ways and gets run over by a Korean street racer pumping 120 MPH on a city street, they are eligible for a CK or permanent disability if they manage to survive because they didn't appropriately roleplay the fear of the Los Santos transit system. This consequence would not be extended to country roads because, as we know, country roads take you home, and are not realistically expected to be places where street racers hoon heavily modified cars. These are just some ideas of how we can bring the excellent high-quality realism that the current robbery rules help us strive towards to everyone else in this server who was previously unaffected by these awesome rules. I know this will be very popular with the criminal RP community because they really love realism and are passionate about CKs being handed out to all players any time they behave unrealistically. Now everyone can roleplay fear and suffer CK consequences if they are not fearful of everything!
  6. Robbery RP is one of the most interesting and engaging types of RP on this server, and to me it's stunning that so many people don't realize the rich depths of fantastic roleplay available to all people getting robbed. See, if more people roleplayed a realistic reaction to robbery, everyone would realize just how fun, exciting, and deeply rewarding being robbed is in terms of roleplay. Let me demonstrate how to properly roleplay fear in a way that 1) complies with the rules, and 2) makes your local robbing player with very low real life self-esteem feel better about their miserable existence on this rock called Earth. Robber: AYO CUH YOU GETTIN ROBBED HANS UP FOO You, roleplaying properly: **Starts to sob and violently shit themselves, screaming incoherently in abject terror as they start to empty their pockets into a neat pile. Adamantly offers to suck the robber's dick.** Robber: NO I'M GOOD THANKS FELLOW RPER THIS WAS REALLY FUN See how good that RP was? If everyone roleplayed robberies properly, they'd all be so much more fun for everyone, and really a great example of why all of us log into GTA:W. It's really strong and engaging character-driven roleplay and definitely has some greater purpose to it than just farming players like they're lootbag NPCs.
  7. For more detail check out
  8. Detailed Description: I'd be surprised if this wasn't suggested before, but I couldn't find a topic during my cursory search. This is a rather simple suggestion that combines elements of the current note content system/menu system/CIM image system and the SMS system. Currently, if players want to text screenshots, we're used to having to ask OOCly for someone's Discord to send them the image. This is obviously not ideal. It'd be great if we could send photo attachments to people in text messages. The way this would work is like any other image systems currently in-game: you must first host the picture on an image-hosting service like imgur. When attaching the image to a text message, you feed it the direct link to the picture. The receiving player would get a notification for an MMS, and would have a button to click to "Download" the picture. Obviously, no real download happens, when the player clicks the button to download, a pop-up will appear containing the streamed image as though they viewed a note, menu, or poster-style CIM. Relevant Commands/Items None. Just an extension of our current image streaming script to the phone. How will it benefit the server? Streamline IC image sharing. Texting pictures to people is a common part of our modern world, and right now when it comes to doing that IG it is immersion breaking to need to coordinate outside of game. This would also allow a record of images being shared in-game rather than people taking it out of game on Discord where it can't be recorded by the server. This would allow people to share pictures of items they're selling with interested parties, share intel with other players, or just expand our options for roleplaying our characters' digital friendships.
  9. Love this idea. Have seen this once or twice on SA-MP RP servers and it was a really cool system. And maybe because these servers were smaller or more focused on heavy RP, but I never felt the system was abused. A good rework of the key system can be a building block for a lot of REALLY cool gameplay mechanics down the line. This is a foundational step that would allow for expansion and rebuilding the server's very RP engine. Relatively simple!! Take some inspiration from some of the best RPGs of all time, or current hits like Project Zomboid. House/Business/Faction/Vehicle Keys are now items. Keys display as a string. "Key - 24920492" or whatever. This makes it harder to metagame (such as "Key - 1234 Example Rd") You carry Keys in your inventory. To avoid spam of your inventory, all players have a Keyring item which "contains" all the Keys. You can check your Keyring. Keys can be duplicated by going to a Locksmith. Keys must be physically given, as an item, to people ICly. Keys are used automatically when available. (Don't waste the player's time with memorizing keys or inputting strings) You can leave it at that, and we already have an amazing start to a really cool key system on the server, and so much more potential to connect on from there with extra dev time later down the line. But what about mapping permissions and especially /pinvs? Importantly, these two will have to be broken off of the key system entirely, they have nothing to do with keys. Keys are items and fully in-character with no OOC abstraction. Mapping permissions and /pinv permissions are more an OOC interface on IC concepts which we put restrictions around for gameplay reasons. That's how they both are right now, that's how they should remain. The property owner will have a menu where they can assign or revoke privileges to mapping and the pinv to any character on GTA:W, regardless of if they have a key or not. Obviously, we want property owners to retain careful control of who they allow to map in their property. This will improve the current situation because some properties have multiple renters, and it's possible the property owner might only trust certain people to map in their property. If you have a key but no access to the /pinv, you can still freely open doors in the property with the key, but you just can't freely access the /pinv. You can always use a breakin request with a key, and the admin will oversee how your character snatches things up. To make this all "server with a thousands of players" friendly, we can have some script restrictions/rules changes that just cut down on the amount of bullshit admins and players have to deal with. Restrict or forbid stealing whole Keyrings. Perhaps allowable with admin permission for good IC reasoning. Possible guidelines around allowing people to ICly rob/steal specific keys off players, but not just random ones. (example: You want to mug Sam Samson for the key to his house.)
  10. Ink

    Item Descriptions

    Great idea, would love to see something like this. I wrote a proposal for something similar, thought I'd share it here:
  11. That could actually be cool. Pilots might have access to a command to buy a "prepared flight" Perhaps it costs anywhere from $5,000 (for 1-person planes) to $75,000 (for really big planes) to do the flight. The pilot picks their "arrival time" in server time. They need to be offline during this time for their character to make the transition over. It's up to them to determine how they will RP the "departure time" of their flight, since hanging out in a night club in LS 5 minutes before they have to log off for their "arrival time" In Liberty City might be a little silly. The pilot can change the time for a moderate fee (like 25%, to represent airport costs). If they're flying alone, that's the only hassle. If they already have passengers, they need to make sure they alert them appropriately, or just like in reality, they'll have some very grumpy people at the airport who realize they're not getting to where they need to be. The pilot can invite people to sign up to this flight using a randomly generated code, up to a maximum of how many people the registered plane for the flight can hold. It's up to the pilot to properly RP the distribution of the code--whether that is a code they send to their friends who they're taking with them, or a code they're sending to customers who will be their passengers. When characters RSVP for the flight, they will also be expected to be offline during "arrival time" so their character can be transitioned. If their character is online at the "arrival time" they will get a notification that they "missed their flight." It makes sense to put the "start" point of the RP at the destination arrival. If for instance a group of friends want to go to another city together with their pilot friend, the RP would make the most sense to start in the new area, and then they can figure out how they want to RP getting to that point depending on people's schedules. This proposal balances realism, fun, usefulness, and flexibility for RPers in different real life timezones or RP schedules. Users can sign up for a flight and be "transported" without necessarily all having to be there at exactly the same time. In the future perhaps there can be some sort of "flight RP"--and people interested in that earlier on can certainly organize times to show up for their passengers that are before the "arrival time" to do airport/flight RP. But until that's a thing with demand, the streamlined system works best. I really love the idea of pilots being able to fly around their friends, or to branch out and start independent airlines. That would be really cool for aviation RP on the server.
  12. Here it is, the small but powerful script innovation which will improve RP surrounding inventory interactions for all players. Let's call it "/invnote" for now. It's an item-based description system kind of like a blend between /stashinfo and /cim information markers. This is a tool which helps build continuity in our world and communicate more IC information to relevant users. You would use /invnote on any one item at any one ID. Users of the GUI inventory would have a "Notes" feature on items. Theoretically, the possibilities can be endless. You can add a /invnote on any item. A drink made at a bar. (createdrink) A plate of food served in a restaurant. (createfood/recipe) A gun, a knife, or a bullet. A Water Bottle you got at a 24-7 script or soda machine. A beautiful diamond ring from a jeweler's (goods) A grain of Wheat. A literal item Note. A Hoki from the fishing script. Any item with an /invnote on it becomes unique, but otherwise functions exactly the same. For people using GUI inventory, there would be an extra symbol on the item display. For people using text inventory, there would be an extra symbol in the /inv listing. You can use the item, spend the item, destroy the item as usual. You can use /invnotes to add extra information to any item which another player can later read. This has uses for absolutely every single roleplayer on this server. You can add more information about how the item looks or what it is. You can add details about how it might taste, or what's inside of it. You might add descriptions about damages on it or what may have happened to this particular item. Some ideas for uses: bartender's "Refreshing Margarita {Drink}" item having an extra bit of description about the garnishes on top or the glassware it's served in. There might be a cool plastic sword skewering some lushly hand-cut fruit together, or maybe the lime looks a week old. a slice of birthday cake having detail on how the cake was decorated or what it might taste like. Maybe it looks really nice in the item's name, but the description clues you in that this slice of cake is poorly made. a mobster scratching initials into a bullet intended to be sent as a message to a rival. Jewelers etching messages into rings, describing in more detail the stones or settings. a drug dealer adding descriptions about the ecstasy pills, the acid tablets, the state of the weed that you're getting, flavor profiles, potential effects, so on. you serve your homie some of that delicious ass "fresh" salmon in your fridge, and the last update on the item's /invnote is from 2021 👀 If you're someone who has made items for a business, you've probably dealt with a bit of this anxiety: How do you name the item in a way that's clean and sounds right, but that also gives as much information as possible about it. You don't have a lot of space. This system is for you. If you're someone who likes to put thought into the items your character carries around, uses, or gives to other people, this is for you. If you enjoy emergent RP of items, what they are, where you found them, and how they got there, this is your cup of tea. Though there are ways to abuse this system, like any other system on the server designed for RP, we should not allow that fear to detract from this really excellent heavy RP feature. Technical Aspects Thanks all for reading. This idea just struck me and I thought it would make RP better.
  13. I really hate the brewing script as it stands right now. I think it's fair for me to say that, too, as the brewery I've run for 3 years is the longest surviving brewery on all of GTA:W's history, and we've done more business than nearly every single other brewery that's ever existed on the server put together. At my last count, we've produced over 35,000 units of liquor. That's roughly 250 hours of me and our employees grinding the mindless brewing script job instead of actually doing something like, I don't know, RPing. The brewing script as it stands is a silly script with little bearing on the reality of making liquor. In the case of our brewery, for instance, it is almost a fully OOC script because we roleplay making our beer through the entire process, and most of our liquor is supplied in the style of a real world liquor distribution company. For a long time I've felt that breweries should have an advantage to producing liquor. Right now, my average sales order takes me about two hours to fill just in terms of grinding an OOC script job. Sure, I can watch things in another tab while I do it, but it's a massive drain on my limited time to RP, and I really am only doing it at this point because I like supporting the businesses that have stuck with us through the years. At the end of the day, when you do the math, the current brewing system means that the amount of time it takes to sell any respectable amount of booze means your profit margins are razor thin and you'd make 2-3x more just working /startshift at a gas station or 24/7. This is why breweries historically on GTA:W are just 1-or-2-man shows, because staffing a brewery is virtually impossible. Just think, breweries get the bar script which means they have no government support for paying their employees for work by default. That means for every sale that we do, there's about 8k in labor hours that comes right out of the profit margins, and we're already responsible for paying $25-40 a unit of liquor in material cost and $25 a unit in /createdrink cost. My other gripe with the current brewing system is that it's open to everyone. While I appreciate that it's primarily supposed to allow people to RP moonshiners or hobby brewers, the problem right now is there is no application process or moderator oversight. After 3 years of running the liquor scene on this server, I can say with confidence that almost half of all the businesses on the server just brew their own beer/liquor, or buy their beer/liquor from a random "hobby brewer" in their faction/friends group. Of course, none of these clubs/bars/restaurants RP that they're selling home-made swill that can cause enormous amounts of harm to people's health. None of them RP that the whiskey tastes funky and like it's full of artificial coloring. None of them RP that their beer is really extra earthy and hoppy and has a sour taste to it because it's made by a dude using the equivalent of $100 in basic brewing supplies. Most of them still RP themselves as serving Grey Goose and other top shelf liquor. I've brought this up to the administration a lot but there's only so much ability a player has to investigate this, most clubs/bars/restaurants doing this are keeping very tight-lipped about it for obvious reasons. I really think that this server would be better off if people had to apply to have access to the current brewing script--you just need to demonstrate realistically to the admins that you are going to actually RP good liquor creation and that you understand the limitations of hobby brewing and that you must RP a distinct homemade product and that it can't magically transform into bottled and bonded mass-market stuff. If we were to have a special Brewery Script that allowed us to make liquor items, then the existing brewing script can be updated to create items with a [Homemade] tag or something of the sort, so that way clubs/bars can't dodge the RP that what they're selling is homemade.
  14. Excuse me we're gathered here to mourn the loss of a great fallen friend. You must be looking for the "gormlessly confused" gathering next door.
  15. I want to take a moment to mourn the loss of radio station 97. Later named "Vinewood Hits" it was the background for many a great roleplay. Whoever ran that playlist did a fantastic job of always keeping it fresh and had perfect taste in music. It dropped beats for about two years, and its end was still way too soon. This holiday season will not be the same without the Christmas tracks that invaded every year around December time. Thank you for your service Radio Station 97. 😭🤧 (If anyone knows who ran it, tag them so we can finally give them the kudos they earned.)
  16. Let's dig down to the two core issues on the table here. All this discussion about COVID itself is missing the point, there are two main problems: 1) People, predominantly criminal roleplayers, want an IC justification to walk around with a mask all the time IC so they can always be in /mask mode for their sweet licks. 2) People are concerned about the standard the community uses to determine which events are safe to joke about, talk about, RP about and which ones are prohibited. Some feel this standard may be inconsistent, eurocentric, or otherwise entirely unnecessary. For the 1st issue, you don't have my sympathy. All the good criminal roleplayers have managed just fine these last two years of coming up with realistic times their characters would disguise themselves. The community is full of great role models who play their character without a mask most of the time, and who mask up in a way that's exciting when it's important to. They also understand that their character wearing a disguise is an ICly unsettling thing and handle it appropriately. The people asking for COVID to be "allowed" just so they can RP a mask more passively are really just looking to abuse the mask script and it shows. On the 2nd issue, that's a more complex one. Personally, I think our world is so ridiculously unrealistic as a general rule of thumb that people braying for "maximum realism" is a bit of a joke, and outright insincere at worst. No one hops into a roleplay set in the Half Life 2 world and goes "man, there aren't enough real world events for us to RP" -- why is San Andreas supposed to be different? Just because it looks like the real world? We have the freedom to play any "reality" we want within the context of a "modern non-fantasy world" -- why tether ourselves to RP the same exact reality we're in currently? That's both limiting and, for many people, depressing.
  17. My real life friend just got banned on real life FB for 48 hours, unbanned, and re-banned for a week just because he posted on a friend's timeline "happy birthday, thanks for letting me kidnap you, it was fun" -- he spent over an hour trying to call FB moderation and they weren't able to help him. I think frustrating censorship is part of the social media experience tbh, and you can always take it IC and grump about it. But just like in the real world, you can be furious at FB, but Mark Zuckerberg doesn't give a flying fuck, they're never going to apologize to you, they probably won't even reverse their decision, and you'll take it because you're addicted and won't stop using their service.
  18. I wonder who made this call. In real life US cities like Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, and more, these sort of port areas are kept secure at least during day time hours. The port where I live is manned by a checkpoint until the port closes at 8 PM. You are not getting in, by car or by foot, without having a reason to be there. After hours the port is just closed and you still can't get in even without the checkpoint. I could see a /cim that explains that the checkpoints are manned by IC guards from 8 AM to 8 PM server time and only authorized people can get in, and maybe making it so that it's possible to get in without authorization during night time hours. But I always roleplay when I drive through those mapped gates on our server that my character is going through a checkpoint and having to identify to get in. For Los Angeles, it would be entirely realistic for that port area to be checkpointed 24/7. I can understand wanting to minimize the impact "NPCs" have on the world, though. If we're not going to RP the checkpoints doing anything, though, maybe it's about time to remove that mapping? It's just confusing otherwise.
  19. If your name isn't Romano then get the fuck outta hea
  20. Ink

    [4SALE] Brick

    1.08M Wait sorry I take that back I thought this was for an endangered animal my bad, bid revoked.
  21. My brewery has roleplayed since 2020 that a bottle of liquor is 10 drinks (because calling 1 drink 1 bottle is ridiculous and inconsistent with realism). That means a bottle of liquor weighs 2000 grams, which honestly is about accurate (a 750mL bottle weighs 1400 grams, so the less common 1L bottle would be nearly 2kg). The problem, however, is that when we're delivering booze to a business, it becomes a comedic, almost entirely OOC juggling around of items, and though over 2 years we've gotten really good at it and handle it flawlessly, it's still a bother. And there have been times in the past where we've made a big delivery to a business where a completely loaded truck and a completely loaded van were not enough and we had to make multiple trips, which always feels a bit silly when it's ICly just a few kegs and a few cases of liquor. I don't necessarily know how important it is for the weight system to be the way it is. What I do know is that right now the amount of OOC juggling of inventory, especially for LEO players who are almost always at full capacity, is a bit bothersome. The amount of times I've tried to serve a food item or a drink to a character only to have to tell them "hey ur inventory is full" and watch their character start shoveling down random bullshit like they're a Skyrim character regaining health is... a bit too many. EDIT: Perhaps a system that allows you to "pack" a larger weight into a box which reduces its weight? Obviously the mass of the item doesn't change, but how easy it is to carry it does. Even just reducing the weight by half would make a pretty big difference for liquor RPers, at least. It'd make virtually no difference for drug RP, it would make a small but not enormous difference in weapons storage. Small trunk sizes will still be small trunks, but it'd make packing up a car and unloading a car more sensible.
  22. Unfortunately, this is something which will never change. Using microphones for police work has been a facet of the GTA RP community since about 2008. Almost all the decision-makers in this community have spent their entire GTA RP careers where microphones were a requirement of LEO RP. For many of our players, mics have been a part of GTA LEO RP since before they were even old enough to play video games on their own. This, like many similar issues in GTA RP, is one of those things where the conservative faction makes the call, and the conservative faction can see no other alternative. In their mind, microphones are the only solution. Most of the people who even would have the power to change this standard have no reason to--the microphone standard works perfectly for their own needs, so why would they willingly strip some of the flexibility and special power that they have? Microphone use has always and will always be a detriment to a text RP server. Voice chat splits the limited bandwidth of the human mind, and in all my experience RPing, I've only met a few players who truly and honestly could roleplay flawlessly while bullshitting about whatever else in voice chat. Doesn't matter if they're LEO, criminal, or whatever, people sitting in voice chat while RPing will often have more quiet characters, they will often engage in more non-verbal ("metagamed") communication [example: "look at this corner in the wall, doesn't it look silly?" or "oh, check out this guy walking up to us with the stupid outfit... what is he wearing!?"], they will frequently be prone to goofing around more, and ultimately they will not deliver as strong of a character portrayal while their mind is split (and dulled) with conversation droning in the background. Even in this community, when LEO RPers post videos--whether for fun, for reports, or for any other reason--they often have some bland chit-chat in the background entirely unrelated to what's happening IC. These are distractions, and definitely reduce RP quality--for some people by only a small amount, for some people by a considerable margin. (Of course, I've had this conversation dozens of times before, and pro-mic people will swear up and down that their RP is flawless and 100% undistracted while they voice chat, which is almost certainly a lie, so it's kind of moot.) We can argue to and fro about whether or not LEO RPers "need" microphones to give them some edge against criminal RPers, and I've always been on the fence about it. As someone who has been on all the sides of the RP spectrum, I've been on communities in the past where I played a LEO and sat in voice calls with a bunch of prepubescent British boys RPing badass tough police officer heroes in West Coast 1990s USA. Mics definitely helped. But no matter what, it's an unfair advantage that is given only to one group of players with no similar opportunities for other types. Although I appreciate GTA:W's community for making strict Teamspeak guidelines and including ways for disabled people to kiiiiinda take part in police RP, it's still not ideal. It makes no sense that criminals are not allowed to also use voice chat in tense situations such as shootouts or driving but police are. There's no real good OOC reason for this--that police are better trained? I mean, maybe, but LEO RPers do actual training which gives them an actual benefit in combat which most criminals do not bother to do, so it's not really fair to call mic use a compensation for IC training. That police have better equipment and tracking devices--true, and a legitimate argument, but of course there are other ways this could be portrayed through the game mode's script which does not involve a third party voice chat protocol.
  23. As someone who has only ever played one character on this server and who has no vested interest, it'd be cool if donator perks were account-wide. On the back end, I'm not sure how much extra money the server rakes in with people buying donor perks for multiple characters, and I imagine there probably are some whales out there who shell out a tidy sum to the server every month just to glam out all their favorite character slots, but I also imagine that there's a group of players who would probably buy every donator perk if they were account wide. But even just the subject of simply furniture slots? That would be cool, because mapping is already such an OOC thing anyway, and it's not about data or server load since a high-slot person could map for low-slot people, and you can use alt-mapping permissions anyway.
  24. I've built airlocks around the back doors in my businesses so that if someone powergames going through a door which should be clearly logically be locked but is not only because of script limitations, they're just trapped in a room with doors they actually can't open. We've been pretty lucky at our businesses that this has never really been an outright problem--but we've definitely had curious people checking out our back doors sin the past. I'm sure that there have been other businesses who have had criminal actions taken on them which use the vulnerability of these automatically unlocking back doors. Maybe a command like /tplock or something like that which is entirely separate from locking the property as a whole. The default plock and hlock will remain property-wide, and the tps have the ability to have a separate lock accessible with another command. In the short term, a question to the admins: If a business roleplays that the back door is always automatically locking and requires a key, and this information is in the /stashinfo, will the admins enforce that to void RP where someone abused that vulnerability? For the person doing it, they have no way of knowing that there's some RP lock, and they can't necessarily be blamed for doing what the game lets them, but it's also a well-known loophole in the script and I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation that your average real life business probably keeps its back door locked when shut (how many places have you worked in where you need to prop the back door with a brick or something to prevent it from locking you out).
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