Keane

There's certainly a middle ground between having something stuck behind admin permission and just allowing a free for all. The restriction does hold back a lot of potential RP from happening, but giving too much freedom will give us what we had before, only this time the meta cars are even faster and there's a lot more cheats being used on the server. Perhaps allowing unofficial factions that have existed for X amount of time to do these as a way of proving they can uphold standards could be a fair middle ground. The previous issue was quite literally anyone could do it. The admin team simply does not have the resources to make sure the amount of robberies this system would create will provide a net positive to the server. Where if factions could get involved, all their leaders would theoretically have to do is tell their members to not pull up 4 deep in an STX with automatics and to not use it as an excuse to get into a shooting with the responding police. Something as simple as not using a meta car and not arming themselves like they're in a faction war for a simple store robbery would already be a huge step in the right direction compared to what has happened in the past.

This used to be a thing back when the server was created. After the move to RageMP in 2018 and the increase in players that followed, the system was removed. Random players were essentially farming them in high end sports vehicles that could very easily outrun police. At a time before vehicle mods were a thing, Sultans and Schafters were always seen outside 24/7s robbing them. On the off chance these vehicles could not outrun the cops, it almost always ended in a shooting. Following many smaller groups being punished for poor RP and DM stemming from these robberies, they had to be removed. At the current stage of the server, where the playerbase is four times as big and the overall RP quality is lower, this is not a good idea.

The county previously existed as a way for players to get out of the craziness of the city. This was particularly attractive to people who wanted to get away from the constant shootings. The initial population of the county were legal players and ended up being there long term, while factions came and went frequently. Back in 2020/2021, there was one particular illegal faction that understood this dynamic. For any area to thrive, you need players of all RP types to be able to RP with each other. Anyone that spends more than five minutes on the forums can understand the legal vs illegal divide. This divide is amplified in the county in my opinion as you have legal players that want to head out there to avoid illegal RPers, yet they end up finding it. Then you have illegal faction members that think everyone in the county is a mallrat and they're not welcome. So when these types of players clash, even though they're the minority in their respective RP types in the area, we get what is described here. Illegal factions hold themselves to a much higher standard of portrayal when it comes to being accurate to how things are in California. They typically clash with the less experienced legal RPers who treat the county like it's rural Texas and show up dressed like cowboys. The sooner both sides learn to compliment each other and live with each other, the better. Back in the previously mentioned time, the locals who were not associated with any of the factions learned to work with them. The robbery epidemic at the time gave plenty of motivation for them to work together towards the common goal of hunting the robbery crews that liked to show up from the city. With the current rules in place, there isn't any strong motivation to get people together. It's gonna take a push from both sides to realize that locals are essential for a county to function. Not every business has to be extorted and not every crime needs to be reported.

SADCR and SanFire are state agencies with LEO powers but I've never seen any of their units running radar. You specifically have used the whole state-wide authority argument for years. But every cop that's a cop has state-wide authority as it matches how things work in California. From a gameplay perspective, it doesn't make sense for a cop to not be a cop just because of where they are on the map. Each faction was created with a purpose and a duty to fulfill that purpose. The overall point I wanted to make is that a new faction will make things worse as less than half of the existing LEO factions have stuck to their original purpose. SAHP will go in the exact same direction. I made my post because when SAHP is mentioned, the same people come by and try to make their arguments for it. It was also to point out the impact that bringing in new factions has. It's not a simple process. Why did the long-awaited IRS faction never came into existence? LFM and Management know that it's a lot of effort for little gain. There's problems all over the server and it's on the players themselves to fix it. The staff team do try, but it's an uphill battle. Many admins, including myself, gave up quite a lot to help improve quality but there becomes a point where you realize it's impossible. Being stricter with the GTA Online tier players is on the staff team. It's on the rest of the players to create an environment that teaches players how to do better.

Considering I was involved with the discussions between SAPR leadership and LSSD leadership before the faction was even publicly announced, I think I've got a good idea of what's happened since 2021. I also consider myself as someone that RPs in the county primarily, be it by creating the LSSD unit that focused on county patrols and being an active member of it and later RPing in the county on other characters. I've also been in LFM during the time that SAPR existed. An ad hominem argument does not dismiss any points that I brought up, or make people's actual experience of seeing SASP units running radar on the highway beside the Diamond Casino as recently as three months ago. Considering seeing rangers running radar on highways has been people's perception of the faction from its inception up to three months ago, it's going to take a lot of effort for that perception to change. There's a big difference between a unit crossing a highway like that and someone parked up on the highway itself. I think everyone is fine with units going from park to park. What's not fine is camping out on highways when there's so much more to be done in the parks. I saw ads for an event that happened yesterday that happened in the parks that many players enjoyed. If there was more of those, the community perception would absolutely change. Seeing as the community in general still sees rangers running radar on highways, those changes are not being enforced which brings me back to my points about standards and quality control. If the SASP was to use the same standards as the LSPD or LSSD, faction members wouldn't run radar at all because they'll fear being suspended or removed. But the standards are not the same. And that's not a problem in itself. If a faction leadership team wants to have lower standards, they can. Nothing wrong with that if they want to be reactive on issues rather than proactively placing restrictions. They just have to be aware of the consequences it has on how the community perceives the faction. Irradium was my own recommendation for faction leader when I was in LFM and I've brought concerns up with him in private before. He's capable but as I stated before in the thread, you need a full team of people working towards the goal of improving a faction for it to work. While I certainly don't play as actively as I used to, I do talk to players who primarily RP in the county and they've had similar experiences. My information is not only far from outdated, it's probably as best as it's going to get without being a member of SASP leadership myself. Anyway. There hasn't been any LSPD, LSSD, SanFire or SADCR members picking out what I said on the topic about their factions. I'd rather not clog it up with back and forth between me and what will be a growing number of SASP members replying based on the fact that this has been linked in the Discord for people to respond to me. There's many other issues when it comes to improving illegal RP. My post was simply explaining why another LEO faction will make things so much worse by using EVERY existing LEO faction as an example, not just one.

It's also about having people in leadership and supervisory positions having both the experience and knowledge to not only enforce standards, but teach members how to reach them.

I'd consider it easier to control RP quality in a larger faction because you can justify much larger entry requirements and testing throughout someone's time in the faction. When it comes to getting promoted, the best and most capable candidate out of a pool of many applicants get the role and you've had months to see how they work in the faction between promotions. Where in smaller factions, people not only get in easier due to more relaxed requirements but also get promoted in less time due to shorter time requirements and requirements in general. In larger factions, you can trust your supervisors and even your more senior non-supervisors to point people out as they become problems. In a smaller faction, everyone knows each other so that does not happen. If a friend of yours messes up, you might not even mention it to them. In a larger faction, if you mess up there's going to be a supervisor correcting it right away. The culture of a larger faction with a higher bar to entry and that's stricter from the second you join after recruitment is very different to the culture of a smaller faction where you know everyone and there's much easier entry requirements.

Additional law enforcement factions will never happen. Bringing in an additional faction creates a huge disruption to the server's ecosystem, both in the legal sphere and the illegal one. Splitting the duties from one faction off to create a new one is different to bringing in a faction that does the duties of another. SanFire started out as arson investigators within the LSFD, and they gradually got more and more independence as they grew and established themselves. As they do not patrol at all, giving them LEO powers to investigate a specific type of crime does not create such a big disruption. The same can be said for the jail duties of the LSSD being transferred over to SADCR. Not only was the faction handling it willingly letting SADCR take over the role, many of the people that focused on the jail in the LSSD were moving over. This allowed for a very smooth transition. It is a very different story for factions with a patrol element. These do create a much bigger disruption. When the LSSD was launched, the vast majority of members were not any other factions at the time. This created a lot of additional LEOs on the server and in turn, resulted in restrictions on LEO factions to keep things fair for illegal RP. There also had to be several agreements made between factions, and at one point LFM had the LSSD need permission to create anything beyond a traffic unit. LFM had to act as a mediator for something as simple as the LSSD wanting to investigate scenes they arrived on first, rather than being required to call an LSPD detective to investigate. The same happened with tactical units, with the LSSD being required to call LSPD SWAT for high-risk calls and warrants. LFM had to mediate here yet again to let the LSSD use their own tactical team. With SAPR being launched, the exact same things happened. The difference was that SAPR was a more relaxed faction with lower entry requirements and a lot less practical training. The vast majority of learning to RP as an LEO is done by getting involved in active situations and learning how to handle them. Someone already mentioned in this thread that SAPR (now SASP) faces a lot less situations than both the LSPD and LSSD do. This provides a lot less training opportunities. Someone who goes through the recruitment of the LSPD or LSSD, passes field training and then has a month or two in the faction is naturally going to be a lot more competent and experienced than someone in SASP (assuming those people have never been in an LEO faction before). This isn't a shot at the faction, but it's just the reality of what the factions are. One side can spend an evening going from situation to situation, while another can go hours without dealing with any crime. This made both LSSD and LFM hesitant to let SASP do more than just work in the parks because when they did leave the parks, the huge difference in experience caused many issues on scenes. If we did get SAHP, the issues with the SAPR launch will be amplified to something on the scale of the LSSD launch. LEO factions will always want to do more than patrol. You can ask anyone who has ever been in an LEO faction on GTA World. Very few people want to patrol in a basic unit and respond to calls as they come in. The most desirable units are typically tactical units( including K9) and detective units. Considering the CHP has tactical units, K9 and investigators, then our version of SAHP will be asking for the same. Members of SASP will be able to confirm that they asked for the same things, but only got K9. I have yet to see the logic of a faction that was designed to enforce the hunting act in state parks having drug detection dogs, but that's for LFM to answer. This all excludes the fact that an LEO faction needs people with years of experience to run properly. This is why the SAPR launch didn't go great and why the faction to this day is still suffering when it comes to increasing the standards of policing. You need at least ten people with lots of experience to launch something like SAHP and have it run correctly. If the LSSD didn't have that during launch, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful. Factions need experienced people to let them learn and improve, as well as implement policies that make the faction enjoyable to be around for other players rather than just existing to benefit the factions themselves. To touch on factions wanting more again, I think SanFire and its members deserve a pat on the back for being the only LEO faction created after the server was made to actually stick to its purpose for its entire time existing. I'm sure we'll be able to say the same for SADCR in a few months too. The LSSD was created to staff the jail and also have a patrol function, but the jail part failed. This is for a variety of reasons that need its own post to discuss and would take this off topic. SAPR (now SASP) was created to enforce the hunting act and patrol state parks but they're more often seen running radar on highways than in state parks. So when SAHP comes into existence and we see highway patrol units in South Central because their sound mods allowed them to hear a shooting on Forum Drive, we'll quickly see the community turning against it.

In cases like this, if one thing is allowed then the case can be made for more to be allowed. I'm sure you've heard of the phrase of someone being given an inch and then taking a mile. From an administrative point of view, it's better to just disallow it and not allow any wiggle room. Your particular situation is extremely specific and hasn't come up in the years that it has been since RPing family members has been prohibited.

I was the one that got that specific part of the rules added. Long story short, being related to another character is an easy excuse to use multiple characters to work towards a common goal. Characters should be unique and have their own interests and agendas shaped by IC events. In the past, people were using multiple characters to push their own OOC agenda to try to influence IC events. There was one situation where a character got CKed, and the same player returned on that character's IC brother to report her missing and start an investigation. If something major like that was to happen while you're RPing two related characters, it would be impossible to not reference what's going on. With all the conflict that happens, it's inevitable that you'll be put in a situation where one person discusses something your character's family member did. The metagaming rule requires you to not involve yourself in what your other characters do, and to be in line with the rule you would have to act like the family member does not exist. I can't imagine any situations where RPing your own character's family members would bring anything positive personally. There's way too many avenues to abuse this and no upsides at all.

This will be another reason my character's social bar is much higher than my real life one. OT: This is something that has been suggested many, many times over the years and the answer is always a unanimous no. It's just not interesting for the majority of players. Newer players will have a new system to get used to while learning everything else, and older players will see this as an inconvenience, especially when the novelty wears off.

Crimes in the open are often seen by many witnesses. Put ten witness statements together and you'll have a very accurate description on who did it. CCTV is everywhere in cities. If your car is seen in one camera, it can probably be tracked all the way back to where you parked the car before heading out to commit a crime. Not to mention lots of footage of the crime itself from many angles. The car could then be tracked all the way to wherever it was left after the fact. Sure this might take a lot of effort in real life, but considering most of the crime consists of shootings it would absolutely be realistic to happen here. But no outdoor cameras means this massive piece of evidence does not exist for the majority of crimes. Forensics is lacking compared to real life. You're leaving fingerprints and trace DNA everywhere you go. Your gun, the magazines and the bullets within it are going to have prints. Gunshot residue is hard to get off. There's a reason forensic investigators wear full body suits in real life because even a stray eye lash can contaminate a crime scene. If you get shot or stabbed, you need to get to a hospital. The hospital staff will then contact police. It is very easy to link a shooting victim to a shooting. By the time the person is stabilized in the ER, the cop might already have a warrant for their DNA. By the time the surgery is done, you might have two cops guarding you. And by the time you're ready to leave the hospital, there's likely going to be enough evidence to question you or even a warrant for your arrest. But because you can use one magic item to stop bleeding, this never happens on GTA:W. Everyone as a family. They're often some of the first people questioned when a crime happens. Their siblings, parents, cousins or friends will have a lot to say on who may have motive to commit a crime. This often results in more leads for an investigator to follow. Investigations get a lot easier when you have a suspect. Electronics are a criminal's worst friend. With a warrant, a cop can see exactly where you were at a certain time. Putting you in the area at the time of the crime is pretty strong evidence. A warrant can get your search history, even through VPNs. In fact, nowadays VPNs are not the magic shield people make them out to be. There's many other steps needed to be anonymous online. Any mid to large department will have dedicated detectives that only do surveillance. If you're suspected of a serious crime, you'll be followed 24/7. The LAPD's Special Investigations Section is pretty infamous for this. Even if they don't gather evidence for the original crime, they will probably catch you committing several other crimes while the original one is being investigated. Due to people's real life schedules, this kind of surveillance is not possible. It's much harder to hide evidence in real life than it is in-game. You can dump something and have it deleted from the server when the next restart (or server crash) happens. You can /vp a car to stop cops from finding it. Bodies and blood are extremely difficult to dispose of. There's a reason why crime scene cleaners make crazy amounts of money in real life. The corpse script is not effective and does not give enough information. Ties into some of my above points, such as forensics being lacking. Criminal databases are much more thorough in real life as it takes much longer to get into a criminal organization. You're likely to get caught doing a minor crime before you're ever trusted with a gun. This puts your face, DNA and fingerprints into the system. This doesn't happen on GTA:W, so facial recognition and forensics are not as effective. Combine this with the fact that many characters are throwaway characters, and you see my point. I stopped at 10 points on purpose, but if I had more time I could think of a lot more. If criminals were forced to abide by these ten points, then we would be seeing a much more effective police force that has a lot more arrests. Criminals will face IC consequences for IC actions, as opposed to many OOC rules. Realism is something that is brought up a lot, and the above points are realism. If people want to bring up examples of ARs being used in daylight robberies using cars in the middle of Beverly Hills, then they should also bring up how quickly the arrests happened after those robberies. You can't have all this freedom to commit crime without restrictions without the restrictions being lifted on law enforcement to investigate these crimes. Both criminals and cops are restricted to encourage balance and fairness across the board. Time has proven that with less restrictions, malicious players on both sides can ruin the playing experience for many players. Back on topic: Balance is exactly why many restrictions are in place. The best term which I used to throw around a lot (and EFT players will have heard this before) is as realistic as playable. Realism is a requirement for an RP server where you're required to be IC at all times, and it is up to the server itself to determine what level it wants to be at. We all come here to be on the more realistic side compared to what we see on popular voice RP servers like No PIxel. We cannot have 100% realism everywhere because it would be chaos. Some areas of RP might allow for 99% realism, while others have to sacrifice a ton of realism in order to maintain the fun for all players. The term as realistic as playable means that is has to be playable for everyone, not just one side. Should players have more influence on the government and be able to hold LEOs accountable? In some areas, yes. You can't paint it all with the same brush as, like I described here, balance is a must and has to be decided on a case by case basis. If you push the government to crack down on crime, they'll ask the LEO factions to do it. The above ten points is why they cannot because things have to be balanced. There is still a long way to go in order to balance things, but trust me when I say that the balance could be a lot worse.

I'm pretty qualified to answer here because I oversaw LSSD IA for quite some time, both as the Undersheriff and as a Division Chief. I have not been in any LEO factions for over a year though, so this post does not reflect current practice in any LEO factions. The purpose of IA isn't to punish cops. If it is set up correctly, it's a separate part of the faction that is there to strictly investigate complaints and form a conclusion. Once that conclusion is formed, the investigators move on. It's then up to the department's leaders and lawyers to figure out what to do when the investigation is concluded. The faction leaders and lawyers want to protect their faction as best as possible from lawsuits, so it's in their best interest to have an accurate investigation. The more information they have, the better. In my case, the policy was to attempt to settle out of court by giving a generous offer if it was found the deputy did wrong. There was only one case during my time overseeing IA of someone that refused the offer we sent back when the deputy was at fault and wanted to take it to court for publicity. This case was then lost in court so they missed out. It was in our interest as a leadership team from an IC perspective to keep the department out of court, and from an OOC perspective we wanted to help players avoid court if possible. In my own experience, the vast majority of IA cases came from people who, at the time, did not have a good understanding of why a deputy was doing what they were doing. This could be due to a lack of knowledge of US law or due to a lack of knowledge on department policy. Other times it came from people who didn't have enough context to see what's going on, for example deputies being aggressive when issuing orders to disperse when a shooting just happened. Because of this, many people make a report to IA, IA investigates, faction leaders conclude that the actions of the deputies at the time was reasonable given the circumstances and then the person making the report isn't happy. This makes them complain to other people that IA doesn't do it's job. There's a few options if an IA report doesn't go your way. The courts are probably the best bet. Sure, it can take months to conclude a case but it's the fairest way of solving an issue. I'd only recommend going to court if you have a strong case though and IA actually messed up, and not just because you disagree with the decision. You could also go to the faction leaders themselves for clarification. Or, in the case of you thinking there is OOC issues, LFM can investigate. Government RP is gaining some momentum following the mayoral election so there's plenty of avenues there. Politicians can put pressure on departments to be stricter. After all, they control the budget of these factions. Laws could be proposed that promote transparency more in line with how it currently is in California. Perhaps a government department could be created and funded to oversee LEO agencies, much like LA in real life. These are things that could have happened before, but there was a never a push from them. I might be biased because I've been heavily involved with IA on the cop side for so long, but my own theory is that IA in the current factions have typically done a good job at investigating and coming up with fair conclusions over the years. There will always be exceptions where people should have been punished and got away with it instead, but that can be said for every single system in the world.

Gun hungry players are the cause of most of the issues with illegal RP. It's not the factions who actually put effort in to find a supplier. It's the players that just want guns, guns and more guns so they have a reserve to dip into the next time they die in a shooting they provoked for their next DM video. We see robberies that are only out for guns, which is why legal RPers that likely have PF guns are targeted all the time. House robberies often look for guns, and there was a point a year or two ago when there was a spike in LEO characters being targeted for house robberies due to suspected metagaming. We're all too familiar with the looting epidemic, where a shootout involving two people will have everyone within a three block radius trying to sprint in to grab a gun. If the admin team took the time to explain the standards to these players, and then punish them for not adhering to said standards, we wouldn't have these threads. But the punishments never happen, and never have happened for some time now.

In my own experience, the quieter areas are patrolled a lot more frequently than most players think. You just see less cops there because there's almost never any crime going on that gets caught. Off peak times, you'll always see LSPD and LSSD units in Morningwood, Rockford Hills, Hawick and Alta. This is quick to change once peak time starts because there's back to back shootings. It makes no sense to ignore your faction members getting shot at, and both factions have IC culture that expects officers and deputies to respond to backup calls as a priority. I used to patrol the county a lot. There was very few occasions where I found crimes in progress. The usual interactions I got were someone reporting a crime in Paleto Bay while I was in Sandy Shores, which results in a three or four minute response time. Then that might be the only crime that happened during my time online. Meanwhile people were complaining on the forums about a massive crime wave in the county and that nobody could RP outside without being robbed. Even by putting effort into getting to know people that RPed in the county, it was difficult to figure out how to catch that crime before or during it happening. The results only came when there was three or four units spread out in specific areas and told to stick to those areas. We were able to find break ins while the getaway cars were parked outside and had backup on the way before the alarm went off. Four deep cars were spotted by county residents, reported to our units and then we had a two minute response time due to how everyone was set up. This was the result of months of building up relationships with people that RPed in the county, and then setting up a specific plan to deal with the crime wave people were feeling. In the beginning it was enjoyable but it quickly began feeling like a job because the few volunteers that were interested realized they were missing out on many other interactions while driving circles around Grapeseed because I told them to. Long story short, I tried this during my time in the LSSD and it's just not feasible. You need people to volunteer to give up interacting with people for most of their time in-game in the hopes that they're in the exact spot to see a crime happening at the exact time it happens. You could have two units looking for robbery crews in the hills, one in Rockford Hills, two more driving between Downtown Vinewood and Mirror Park and another covering ULSA for anything that might happen there. An armed robbery could still have the robbers scope the place out, conduct said robbery and then escape before one of the six units that specifically went out of their way to stay in quieter areas are anywhere near the area it occurred in. Even in South Central, you can have entire shootouts happen without an LEO being close enough to hear the shots despite there being such a huge patrol presence.