Cleveland

Reprise.

It's far from being a merely semantic difference, because it very much affects the server in almost every aspect. Working factions were sacrificed on the altar of realism in favor of "realistic" concepts that failed even worse than their predecessors to achieve their goals, going as far as stopping to provide not just "quality" roleplay, but any kind of tangible roleplay altogether. If by "reality" you mean something that fits the server, then yes. If the server is set in the United States, it can't have a concept based on the Iraqi Republican Guard enforce the laws of the land nor you can have a faction of Somali pirates raid the Marina canals, because those concepts are outside of the setting, can hardly be justified in-character and therefore while they could be portrayed authentically, they're not immersive for the server. On the other hand, if portrayed correctly, Norteños and Yakuza can still provide an immersive environment despite not being present in Southern California in real-life, just as LCN organizations haven't been for the last twenty years or so. But instead of recognizing the success of factions such as Martorano and using it as an example to justify the liberalization of more concepts, FM seems to be on the path of clamping down even on LCN organizations because they "don't fit". GTA:W management should, at the very least, favor some sort of compromise between "realism" and "authenticity" in an attempt to create an immersive universe, or just allow players to take more risks and get out of the business of regulating a market that has always been very capable of regulating itself entirely. Immersive factions that can wisely mix realism with authenticity thrive, out-of-place factions that lean too much on one side or the other fall. Has there been exceptions? Yes, but it doesn't mean that there's a need for hundreds of restrictions that only force players to recreate the same concepts over and over again without ever having a spark of originality. As explained in this topic already, allowing a set of Norteños in Grapeseed or the presence of the Yakuza in Los Santos, among other concepts such as the SAHP or what-have-you, is not going to lead the server to disaster. Instead all management is doing now is riding a wave that has ended its propulsive power long ago. People are getting more and more tired of roleplaying the same concepts that have been brought forward for about a decade, especially when concepts that would fit the environment just as well with minimal adjustments are rejected with no other reason than "it's unrealistic". Southern California fatigue is real, but it's easier to just face the reality of things and pretend that this is a "heavy-roleplay" server. Maybe some of these new (or old) concepts will be bad, maybe they'll be exceptional: the only way to know is to let people try them. Norteños are forbidden because "realistically" there would be no such sets in L.S. county. Yakuza is forbidden because "realistically" there would be no such organization in L.S. county. Cartels are banned because "realistically" there wouldn't be their presence in L.S. county. Militias are heavily restricted because "realistically" Los Santos isn't a hotbed for militias. And the prohibition index doesn't even include those legal concepts that, while nominally allowed, are practically impossible to run without the staff stepping in and shutting them down because they threaten legacy factions or something along those lines, such as private ambulance services, ancillary police services, fire safety consultants, etc. If there's space for other stuff other than what's considered "realistic", it's very well hidden. That's a matter of enforcing the already existing rules in regards to poor portrayal, namely rule 0, and teaching those who are willing to learn. Regrettably even in this case the pendulum seems to swing between completely arbitrary and undeserved punishments for minor infractions that could be solved with a handshake and people who are let off the hook for fifty times in a row while proving they have learned nothing from their past mistakes. Factions still play a fundamental role in teaching new players, or even old players who still have something to learn, which is why the focus on factions, their lore and continuity is important and should be pursued. You can't teach every player singularly, but you can appoint faction leaders that care about immersive portrayals and have them help the players by showing them what works and what doesn't. In this case, again, SAPA is a good example of a new-players-magnet that legal factions should aspire to. Yes, L.A. would be the same with or without a Yakuza, and so would L.S. But a lot of the server culture is shaped by factions, faction lore and continuity, since factions serve as player hubs, and when the balance is broken its aftereffects are felt throughout the server. For years now, people have been bombarded with the idea that "realism" equals "quality roleplay", encouraging people to portray certain concepts only, behaving a certain way only and believe in certain standards only while crushing every trace of creativity and self-reliance. What good has it done to server, aside from pitting people and factions against each other in an effort to prove who's the most realistic and therefore the best roleplayer? Isn't the focus on "realism" the reason why most discussions are filled with news reports about how the crime is skyrocketing in L.A. and therefore it's realistic to have a hundred murders a day in L.S. as well, or quotes from this or that selectively chosen newspaper article that supports one side or the other of the argument? Because at the end of the day a lot of the issues highlighted by the original post (which has since long been derailed into a semi-coherent mess of a dozen discussions), including the bitter divisions the community goes through, are actually caused by this, by the idea that having a "good source" that proves how "realistic" you are in your roleplay allows you to force your ideals down everyone else's throat with no regards for their enjoyment and entertainment. And when you consider that topics like this one pop up almost every week, it doesn't seem to be doing the server much good.

@Fancy Toothpaste and @knppel have already explained the contrast in theoretical terms and both gave accurate descriptions for both sides of the coin. Assuming you refer to what the difference would be in a practical sense when it comes to the game and the server in general, it's somewhat more complicated, because neither are truly applicable without the game universe devolving in the mess that's GTA:W in this day and age. "Realism" implies that the server should seek to become as close as possible to reality, or rather the perception of reality that's gained from whatever sources are available, hence why the proponents that bring this to the extreme are often referred to a "scale model enthusiasts" by their detractors. Factions should be modeled after real-life organizations as accurately as possible, characters are expected to act in certain ways only with minimum to no deviation from the sources allowed, lore should closely follow the real history of the place where the roleplay is set, and so on. In short, L.S. = L.A. "Authenticity" is pretty much the opposite. There are few if any limits to what can be done in-game, server rules permitting of course, and since there's no sources to follow, most adherents to it are considered "unrealistic" by their critics. Factions are not expected to be as accurate and can even be entirely fictional, characters can be portrayed like players want, the lore pays more attention to in-game happenings than it does to history books. "Authenticity" is the kind of school of thought in which San Andreas can be an island governed as an U.S. territory off the coast of California and make sense. Both arguments have their pros and their cons, and both have merits in their own right. "Realism" leads to the creation of organizations, lore and characters that are more easily recognizable because they're patterned after real-life elements and therefore look more familiar, making it easier to get involved, but severely limits the choices in terms of what can be portrayed (this is particularly detrimental on GTA:W because the concepts that fit the SoCal background have been squeezed dry by now) along with not allowing enough flexibility when it comes to things that just can't work in-game (i.e. a 40-people Senate). "Authenticity", on the other hand, ensures that players can make full use of their creativity and create something original and unique, but it always runs the risk of going overboard with the liberties taken for the sake of roleplay, to the point that not all gaps can be filled effectively (i.e. some aspects of the game must be roleplayed despite them not existing IG, such as SADOC in GTA:W's case), for better immersion) and that most players would feel alienated from the final result (i.e. State Government having control over local agencies). The synthesis between these two extremes is "immersion". Creating an immersive environment implies taking the best features of both sides while dropping as many flaws as possible. Therefore you can have a law enforcement faction that is based off a real-life equivalent, but lets its members portray their characters with complete freedom, investigate a completely fictional motorcycle club faction that is native to the area and whose members have created their own lore. Or, vice versa, you can have a fictional police agency that's obviously still based on U.S. law enforcement standards interact with a street gang that takes an existing Sureño set as inspiration. Of course, these are mere examples that can be applied to every aspect of the server: police, gangs, OCGs, government, etc. And it's not like the server doesn't already have excellent examples of immersive factions that can blend "realism" and "authenticity". On the illegal side there's Martorano which mixes an "unrealistic" organization (an LCN outfit on the West Coast) with convincing lore and believable characters who have genuine reactions to the world around them. And on the legal side there's the San Andreas Port Authority which, while inspired by the Port of Los Angeles, isn't over-obsessed with recreating it down to the minute details or asking its members to say they're "employees of the Port of L.A.", preferring to create something original with its own customs and culture and whose leadership is one of the few that portrays actual executives by being present in-game and leading from the front instead of hiding behind alts. In short, a compromise between "realism" and "authenticity" can and should be found. GTA:W's management just lacks the will to enact it.

Factions have always been a self-regulating market and they would've kept being one if the scale model enthusiasts whose sole goal is turning the server into a diorama of Southern California hadn't been allowed to take FM hostage and start restricting concept after concept until the factions forum became a still life of its 2018 LS:RP equivalent, but with even less variety. The constant need to restrict more and more for the sake of realism™® is a trend that hearkens back to when the terminal stage of LS:RP began and it traces its roots to a certain wing of the law enforcement community whose members, being too unimaginative or lazy to create anything even remotely original, found a gateway to success by copy-pasting real-life manuals and Twitter posts of the portrayed agencies under the guise of providing quality roleplay©. The idea that realism™® equals quality roleplay© eventually solidified the concept that realism™® is good, therefore originality and novel concepts are bad and should be discouraged as much as possible in favor of mere replicas of existing organizations. Most people swallowed this theory hook, line and sinker along with the whole fishing rod, and that's how concepts that until not long before were accepted and even encouraged began to be restricted or shut down altogether because unrealistic™®. Those early mistakes by large part of the community are now paid in full as the whole idea reached ridiculous proportions on GTA:W. Since all positions of power in FM were held by train set fans, they managed to shift the mindset of the community more and more towards realism™® by banning this or that concept and requiring permission for everything else. Those who came after them never once stopped to think whether it was good for the server to limit the number of MCs, they simply kept the old rules in place because realism™® equals quality roleplay© and GTA:W is all about providing quality roleplay© to its players, assuming they can correctly file the 23 forms necessary to do almost anything that isn't hopping from club to club in a tuned up ricer with a paintjob classified as a crime against humanity. Moved by complacency, they kept this way of thinking that the playerbase is composed of people with room temperature IQ expressed in Celsius degrees who would irreparably break the server continuity if FM wasn't constantly monitoring them and limiting the damage they can do through their creativity. MCs and LCN factions were two of the last holdouts, along with some gangs, that still allowed players to have some degree of creativity when setting up their organizations and it's very unsurprising for those who have watched the whole downfall of creativity in favor of realism™® to see them limited in numbers. The next logical step would be to only allow a handful of pre-approved MCs and ban LCN factions altogether because, you know, on a "heavy roleplay" server realism™® is more important than people roleplaying. But though FM might be too busy trying to make the server into a Los Angeles snow globe to realize, the large majority of the playerbase is not so out-of-touch with reality enough they can't distinguish between what fits the server's American West Coast setting and what doesn't. There's a reason why British-inspired hooligan teams or Jamaican Rastafarian gangs have never truly taken off even when allowed while LCN crews and Sureño gangs are counted in the hundreds, and it's because your average player can recognize what fits the game universe and what doesn't, with the difference that they're not as hellbent on pursuing realism™® at all costs and therefore don't see a threat in an LCN faction, even if there are no LCN organizations in California right now, as long as the roleplay they provide is enjoyable and it fits into continuity. Allowing concepts that are currently banned such as cartels or Norteños won't create the cataclysm that some of you might think will happen. In the end it'd be survival of the fittest as it's always been. An Irish mob that acts like L.S. it's the Boston of the '70s wouldn't last, even without FM intervention, because very few enjoy portraying a walking anachronism, while one that keeps a low profile and operates more in line with what are the canons in this day and age would likely succeed. A Norteño set that drives all the way from Grapeseed to South L.S. to do a random hit on a random Sureño would be shut down, not because it's unrealistic™®, but because the rules already forbid DM, while one that keeps to the northern part of the map would probably thrive and may even bring activity to a part of the map that is historically neglected. FM should just stop trying to build their own SoCal model kit by forcing everyone else to play along with their delusions. Keep some minor restrictions on concepts, the few that make sense, but stop regulating the players' creativity with the excuse that you're improving the server, because it's having the opposite effect. Let people play the game for what it is. Or don't, and see where that road leads you.

To save you the time of reading the post, this is the summary: the state, or, rather, the county, being dead is not a disease in itself; it's a symptom of a larger illness. You've got it completely backwards. It's SAGOV that handles laws, public safety and penal code reforms, along with the IC supervision of SAPA and SAAA. They're doing none of that in a way that brings a net benefit to the server, mostly limiting their roleplay to meetings in GTA:O interiors and/or scenarios ripped straight from bad TV shows about politics. Not that the City of Los Santos does anything much better, with their Department of Public Works being relegated to acting as PD/SD's wreckers while the higher ups go clubbing. The Port Authority is roughly based on the Port of LA and the Board of Harbor Commissioners, which have nothing to do with the LAPD since they're civilian agencies under the government of the City of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Port Police are not a branch of the LAPD either, they're their own thing, separated from the LAPD and completely independent in their operations. The State with a capital S, meaning the San Andreas Government, is a poorly thought out organization that has failed consistently in each one of its iteration, because of its dispersive nature, its inability to properly influence the IC landscape, both the political one and the popular culture one, as well as the general unpreparedness of the players taking part in it and an ungodly amount of OOC interference by the staff. If you don't know who the Governor is, and you probably don't, it's because it's some staff member who couldn't care less about roleplaying a politician, but it's there because it's part of their "paygrade", thus has no incentive on making the State work. The server would've benefited greatly from staying as far as possible from a State government and instead focus on local government (board of county supervisors / city council), as it originally did, but in yet another of GTA:W's many missed opportunities, the powers that be instead chose to adopt a system that is almost universally loathed and widely known for failing to provide any sort of roleplay to the players-at-large, in addition to being unable to achieve absolutely nothing aside from the perpetuation of its own existence. A well-established city government could've provided a great deal of RP to the county (or state, as you call it) as well by roleplaying contracts with townships or roleplaying them as unincorporated areas under the jurisdiction of the city itself. By doing that, the Department of Sanitation could've been sent to collect the garbage in Paleto, the Department of Public Works could've fixed potholes in Grapeseed and so on. This of course implies that the faction would've been run by people who understand what the value of being "on the ground", or IG, with their own faction members instead of being more interested in pretending to play politics in GTA:O interiors or visiting nightclubs. The saying is that a single sanitation foreman provides as much IG roleplay as the entire Senate roster combined. If you want to envision a city government that is successful, imagine the Port of Los Santos, only bigger, full of new players that can barely comprehend the commands but have a willingness to improve and without security checkpoints to harass truckers every twenty feet. For more insight about the problem with government/political roleplay, see here. And it will keep being dead in the water, regardless of the establishment of a SADOC/SADCR/BOP. Corrections is such a niche concept that only two kinds of players can really last in there: people who genuinely enjoy spending their playing time in the same small area day in day out and are responsible for creating their own roleplay, or those who join with the aim of basically playing extras in the screenshots of their Discord friends' prison gang faction. Everyone else resigns so quickly they usually fail to even repay the amount of time that was invested in their training. It is, very probably, a staff's vanity project (like SAPR or SAAA) that it's being undertaken after SD's attempt at making a "jail-only" faction failed spectacularly due to lack of interest and manpower. Once the novelty wears off Bolingbroke will most likely fare as good as Twin Towers ever did (since the jail's inactivity is a long-standing issue, in case anyone promptly forgot the "please make a prison character" topic pinned at the top of this section for a long time or the jail-only character slot that was introduced in an attempt to increase the jail population). Of all the things that could've been tried to spice the server up, SADOC really is the only one LFM shouldn't have put effort into, because it doesn't depend over something they can control, directly or indirectly. Whoever decides to take the reins of SADOC on here better do their research about what kind of slop they serve for dinner in Soledad, least they're branded enemies of the State and required by staff-enforced consent decree to rebuild their faction from the ground up. For more insight about the problem with corrections roleplay, see here. At this stage, with so many law enforcement agencies already present, half of which don't have any in-game impact whatsoever, the SAHP could only work if they're roleplayed as a local office's personnel only and not as the SAHP in its entirety (sort of what the Park Rangers do, but done right). A single station in Paleto, with the highest rank being the office's commander (usually a Captain) and every other rank above being simply roleplayed with no in-game presence. It would serve well for those who want to roleplay a law enforcement officer but without the need to clock 40+ hours a week finding real pictures of officers/deputies to post on the factions' topic, involve themselves in investigations or play tacticool: just patrolmen patrolling the highways and the unincorporated communities. At an earlier time, the SAHP (or an equivalent) would have been an infinitely better choice for the server than LSSD, SAPR or SFM. PD/SD fatigue is real and it's really ironic that, since the server seeks to emulate California so much, they failed to even think of portraying one of its most recognizable historical institutions. Someone did think about it (as you can see here), and did a far better job than those who simply recycled the same old concepts, but the staff swiftly turned it down because the server wasn't ready. If it wasn't ready when the server only had a main LEO faction and a "jail-only" LEO faction, there certainly isn't more room for it now that there's four full-time LEO factions (and a fifth one being set up) roaming the entire map. If you want more insight on the sorry state of LEO roleplay and SAHP/SASP, see here. There were attempts to establish an unofficial Air Force concept based off USAF Security Forces (a.k.a Security Police pre-'97). It was a niche concept that was carried out by @Tiresias (the artist formerly known as arrdef) along with a group of 5-6 people and that mostly revolved around just patrolling Fort Zancudo and the surrounding areas, in a low-intensity RP environment, with no law enforcement powers whatsoever involved. It was met positively by most of those who interacted with them (save for, of course, the MDC people, those for whom if something is not on the MDC, it doesn't exist), but it was promptly shut down by LFM once it was discovered. The staff immediately stated that since the reception was positive arrdef could send them a PM and they would deliberate to establish it officially. The legend has it that, to this day, the PM still is to be read, but that's probably on arrdef for being unable to read the mind of the involved staff members and understand what they exactly wanted from him. Many such cases. Something similar was later tried again with LSX, this time by reaching out to the Department of Licenses for Roleplay Concepts, and the results were, if possible, even worse than previous attempt. In this case the focus was similarly on security guards, but civilian ones (so officially without law enforcement powers) and it once again revolved around roleplay such as sitting a gate shack for two hours discussing politics and personal life, interacting with new arrivals and borrowing paper cups from LSFD's station six. It was shut down and we got banned for it. If you want more insight on why civilian and civilian-adjacent roleplay doesn't work, see here. And this brings this topic to its final conclusion: all of the instances above may seem very unrelated between them, but they're actually intertwined. At the cost of sounding like a broken record, the reason why concepts that have been done to death and beyond for the better part of the last decade thrive while innovative ideas that could bring a breath of fresh air are immediately shut down without giving them the opportunity to do a trial run is that this server, and most of its staff, doesn't care much about roleplay as much as it cares about appealing to special interest groups and the lowest common denominator. Why should risks be taken by setting up something that was never tried before when you can simply recycle a concept that's been exploited to death and beyond on some 10 communities already? Why should regular players be trusted to be able to roleplay on themselves without staff supervision when you can lock every remotely interesting and novel concept behind mountains of paperwork so as not to threaten the status quo? And, on the other hand, why should players take the chance to do these concepts anyways, when there's a team that's dedicated, 24/7, to hunt down all those that commit wrongthink by doing "low quality roleplay", a hunt that will likely end with the culprit being punished, instead of being taught? Hence why people take the path of least resistance and just do the same things, over and over again, nightclubs and pointless money-making instead of lively political roleplay and blue-collar jobs for civilians, pursuits and shootouts instead of community policing and "passive law enforcement rp" for cops, drive-bys and gang hits instead of neighborhood interactions and a sense of community for gangsters. The server is allegedly already doing great in the current situation. There's no need to go off the beaten path. Except you have topics like this one appearing every week. One day it's to complain about the Senate and its apparent inactivity, another time is to complain about the status of civilian roleplay, yet another time is to complain about the fact that the state-county-anything that isn't the city, is dead. And all these problems don't have their roots in the fact that Senators are inactive, or that civilian roleplay is hindered by criminal roleplay, or that the area around Los Santos is devoid of people. The root is always the same: this server and its staff has done and continues to do its best to stifle the creativity of its players, because they see it as a risk. Allowing a Norteño group to be based in Grapeseed without them ever crossing into LS is a risk. Approving a group of players who want to RP an independent ambulance service is a risk. Enabling the Senate to actually make laws and setting the political atmosphere of the server is a risk. Making an USAF faction based out of Zancudo that patrols an area of the map used once a month by SWAT is a risk. Letting people roleplay as SAHP patrolmen in the county is a risk. Empowering regular players to create a novel concept without staff members backing them is a risk. Don't come up with concepts, just chase e-money so you can buy a billion dollar car that you can show off at tonight's club opening, which will be just like the last one and the next one, while you wait to join a law enforcement faction based on an idea that was already old when this server opened. And that's why the state feels dead. Because it is.

Then what was written before about management applies to the current head of PM. It doesn't change the fact that restricting things like lawn mowers, golf carts and similar assets is not going to provide anyone with a net gain, but it will waste everyone's time equally. People were complaining about waiting times for vehicles an year ago already, just like they were complaining about the amount of concepts being restricted and the corruption in the staff: it's an awful lot of time to make many small steps, and another reason why it feels like these discussions feel useless. Taking decisions affecting the server is one of their main roles, yet you're saying the staff doesn't make moves because they're afraid to offend one side or the other and don't know what to do about it. You're once again proving that the staff as a whole is pretty much adrift to its own devices and has no consistent, overall vision for what they're trying to achieve. This discussion gets more and more uncanny with every reply, it's a fever dream set on the forum of a roleplay server. There'll always be people who don't agree with the decisions you take, but what transpires from this topic and those similar to it is the exact opposite: everything is at a standstill, no reason is being provided for that and while management sits in its ivory tower far removed from the rest of the community waiting for someone like you to provide them with a summary of the current server climate, the server itself devolves into a circus of over-regulation, complacency and all the other issues that've been discussed to death in this and other topics already without creating any meaningful change whatsoever. You can't expect the players to solve problems the staff themselves have created.

It wasn't an attempt at shutting the conversation down, it was a genuine question because this need to over-regulate everything in the remote opportunity that someone uses one asset to harm the server is so nonsensical that's interesting to know what led you all to take this stance. If the staff teams truly believes one player using a lawn mower to troll is such a menace to the stability to the server that everyone else must file a research paper to get one, then it might be high time they reassess their priorities. Removing all these pointless barriers like applications for vehicles that can't cause any harm even if they were used for such purposes is not just going to save the players' time, but that of the staff as well. Like it's been said in other topics already, the less pointless bureaucracy regulating golf carts you have to deal with, the more time you'll have to help players IG and deal with issues that can lead to actual roleplay. Why those who are in charge of taking such decisions can't see this is bewildering, though your answer on who really decides what's allowed and what's not does give enough material to form a theory. You're the head of PM, which should be in charge of deciding which properties players are allowed to have, which ones fall under certain restriction and which ones should be removed altogether, yet this kind of decisions are deferred to someone higher than you for no discernible reason other than overloading a management team already incapable of dealing with their current responsibilities and concentrating all the authority in the hands of 3-4 players who have proven time and again to be extremely lethargic in carrying out their duties. And then the discussion goes back to what @Tiresias said in his post: that this place doesn't seem to have any management at all. How many statistics, suggestions and solutions do they need to figure out that lawn mowers aren't a weapon of mass destruction like they seem to think, or that allowing Norteño sets will not ruin the immersion but provide a breath of fresh air in a scene that's been stale for almost a decade, or that crooked admins need to be removed and the community informed about it instead of sweeping it under the rug hoping no one notices? Respect goes both ways. There really isn't much more to say on this point. Ignoring a PM for weeks on end, disbanding a faction because the admin has a feud with its members or abusing a staff position to favor OOC friends is not very respectful towards the players who invest time, effort and, in some cases, money and contribute to make the server what it is. You might not, and you seem to actually care about this community, which is why you should either reconsider your decision of not seeking to advance further in the staff or call it quits since the people above you clearly don't deserve your loyalty. Regardless, many of your fellow staff members, both past and present, have had OOC goals and continue to have them. All the complaints you see on this topic, coming from the community itself, are the result of staff rulings that were an attempt at creating conditions catering to a selected few under the guise of doing it "for the community". Entire factions have been destroyed, good players driven away and whole areas of roleplay have been put under lock and key "for the community", so a sane amount of skepticism towards those that use that claim is, if not well-deserved, at least somewhat justified. It's not derailment, as the many issues of the server are so intertwined it'd be a good idea to make one of those logic maps to sort them out. Additionally, saying there's too much bureaucracy or that admins should be accountable doesn't seem like a such controversial statement to make, nor it should be taken as bashing, and if it's considered any of those two things then the problem is on the side that sees it as such. The community is sick and tired of hearing the issues will be fixed in the next few weeks. Time is the most precious commodity of all, the share that can be used to play is limited and most people rightfully don't want to wait entire seasons for IFM to decide the time is right for LCN concepts or for their CK appeal to be reviewed. They're not here to sit through the forum-based equivalent of obtaining a building permit, they're here to get IG and play their characters. It's been the same issues and the same replies for months and even though, like you said, some (minor) things might have changed, the majority of the problems are still there: an appalling lack of communication, people who made a career out of creating a toxic environment being appointed to positions of responsibility in factions and in the staff instead of being told to stop with their behavior, an administration that doesn't seem to care whether this server lives or dies and refuses to face the situation they themselves created, widespread corruption or blatant double standards in the staff teams regulating roleplay, truckloads of rules that achieve nothing except for the frustration of regular players. We've been going in circles ourselves. Like @Jax said, in the end this whole discussion doesn't look like more than a semantic exercise in pointlessness.

The fact that people have to write two sentences and meet up with an admin instead of just getting IG and buying a golf cart or a lawn mower from a car dealership is evidence of how completely skewed the staff logic is. If it usually is accepted, then why do people need to waste time that would be better spent actually using those assets rather than filing a request for things they can't possibly harm the server with, even if they wanted to? What's the danger of allowing someone to just walk into a store and buy themselves a golf cart? And what's the way to go? You send them PMs, they ignore you at worst and give you two-words answers at best, without giving you any direction as what to do next despite that being their main role. You try to have a polite confrontation on Discord, they resort to blocking you and banning you from the server without even providing you with an actual answer. Please do enlighten @Tiresias and myself as to what the best way to get in touch with management is, because all the avenues we've pursued while we were still playing, those that were outlined in the respective topics, concluded with a server ban over something so trivial it didn't even warrant administrative action at all. No one expects management to run the show themselves, but since you are all so fond of throwing around words such as "quality", "standards" and so on, they should at least be able to enforce their supposed standards on those respective sub-teams. If the leader of IFM is a crooked rogue admin who has a habit of helping their friends' factions gain the upper hand through OOC methods, the manager responsible for FM as a whole should act on it and remove them. If the manager responsible for FM doesn't, then the founder should. But here the word accountability has no meaning. The server culture flows downstream from those who run it, and they managed to ingrain some concepts that would've been laughed at just 5 years ago because completely outside of the realm of common sense (i.e. the ruling allowing criminals to rob people in broad daylight in the middle of L.S.' main square because of "realism", "standards" and some other buzzwords) deep into the community: you know a server culture has been irredeemably corrupted when players are asking everyday for new rules, more regulations, additional gatekeeping while the situation has barely changed if you compare it to 2, 3 or 4 years ago. In fact, in some areas it has seen a significant worsening, despite thirty layers of bureaucracy being added to every aspect and less and less freedom being awarded to the players since then. The more staff supervision there is, the higher is the chance for an admin to go rogue and start favoring their OOC friends instead of ensuring a level playing field for everyone alike. This is Management 101. Yes, it's how supposed to be, but it's not like that when a bunch of cliques controls access to certain areas of roleplay, sabotaging whoever doesn't align with their views and driving away or forcing the conversion of those who don't conform to their "quality" level through a combination of social pressure, administrative action and selectively enforced double standards. What's worse is that it's easy for them to get far into staff teams because they have no true conviction besides attaining more power and shaping the server according to their own egotistical desires. Meanwhile the only person who could stop this running joke, the founder, clearly doesn't even know what he wants the server to be, aside from a vague indication of "heavy text-based roleplay" (which could mean everything). It might sound like pure conspiracy theory material if it wasn't for the fact that it happened right in front of your eyes and you all simply chose to ignore it. Do you really believe the expansion of LSSD from a "jail only faction" to a massive LEO agency with stations across the whole map is the result of the "quality police roleplay" the faction provides rather than the fact that basically their entire leadership was part of FM right when that expansion happened? Do you really believe that SAPR would've been a thing if it had been proposed by a regular player rather than by a lead admin? Do you really believe that SAAA would've been allowed to exist if it wasn't for the fact that the lead developer holds a stake in it? And I'm limiting myself to legal factions because, like my partner in crime, they've been my bread and butter for years at this point, though @goonbagAPPEAL insight in the illegal faction scene proves they're not faring much better. If you're doing it out of genuine care for the server and not because you have other OOC goals hiding behind a façade of politeness and understanding, as many other staff members "working for the betterment of the server" have done in the past, then your dedication to the server is commendable, but completely undeserved by those who you're currently trying to cover for. What @Tiresias meant to say, and he was without doubt echoing a pretty popular sentiment in this section, is that the problems that are being brought up here need an answer for someone who is, to quote some of your colleagues, "above your paygrade". But, like he said, they refuse to accept that management comes with as many responsibilities as privileges. Now if you'll excuse us, @Tiresias and I need to go research the NYC steam system.

They never were necessary, they aren't now and they never will be. There's rules all over the place, most of which are suggested by the players themselves, and yet the same topics keep showing up in this section over and over and over again. It doesn't need much more evidence to prove that a good 75% of the regulations currently in place are completely pointless and only serve to frustrate players who genuinely want to RP and overstretch staff resources who'd be better focused on catching and punishing actual rulebreakers instead of people who failed to articulate why the want to open an LCN crew in Los Santos. The server did by purposefully making players aim towards the lowest common denominator. Anything that is even remotely creative requires miles of red tape and staff supervision and/or support (neither of which are easy to achieve for a multitude of factors). On top of that, if you were to take the chance, you always run the risk of the powers that be barging in and force disbanding you because your concept doesn't fit with the server (despite the server continuity being extremely unclear on what fits) , or get dragged to the RP court because someone reported you for "poor portrayal". So people take the path of least resistance and do whatever is least likely to get them in trouble: in the case of cops is run-and-gun "RP", in the case of criminal roleplayers is low-level crimes with no impulse control and for everyone else is the hoarding of money and assets. Not allowing people to be creative shifted the priorities. In yet another example of self-created issues, if you drive away all those that roleplay for the sake of roleplaying because their views don't align perfectly with your own, then all that'll be left are those who roleplay for other ends. We all sleep in the bed we make.

SANEPA's Environmental Justice Task Force had some pretty good utility uniforms: But nothing beats the LSXPD Security Officer uniforms:

And it does. That first line could be the server's official motto. A third, if not half, of the issues GTA:W has, not just the staff-related ones, are self-inflicted due to mismanagement and complacency on behalf of those that run their respective shows. Don't fix what's not broken will kill this place on the long run, but at least it'll have mapped charging stations to make up for it. It's hard to have any interest in being part of a group of people who see you as a threat to the server for wanting to help new players by standing in a safezone or who automatically assume bad faith on your end when confronted with a situation that was entirely created by their own incompetence. Besides, it's not like you have to be an admin to criticize their work or to offer them advice and guidance. The argument that "it's voluntary work" is a double edged sword. Granted, the fact they're volunteers should make regular players think twice before being knuckleheads towards the staff for what they do, but on the other hand no one is forcing the admins to be admins. It's a well-known fact that being an administrator is a thankless job and if you join the staff expecting every one of your actions to be met with a ticker-tape parade by the playerbase, you're better off spending your free time doing your own thing, because once you have that green name, it's not expressions of gratitude that'll be thrown at you daily. Rules come from the staff team, regardless if it's a level one admin or management, and many rules related to specific areas of the servers (i.e. properties, factions, etc.) come from staff teams that are mostly composed of admins. And even if the admins don't write them, as you assume, they still enforce them, and if they enforce rules they themselves don't believe in without any attempt to change them, then they just show a hypocrisy that is hard to justify. You can only pass the buck so many times before it has to stop. Who is responsible for that, then? Lead admins? Management? The founder? What's stopping a regular admin from calling out a rule that's superfluous, obsolete or pointless and bring it to the attention of those above him in the chain of command? If they don't or can't, then it's back to the original cause of many of this server's problems: complacency and mismanagement. And yet most of what the server has done in the last few years has been adding rules upon rules and erasing any concept that showed promise for a different kind of RP. And it wasn't the community that did it. They might have called for it, but they didn't do it. That's always been a staple of every server, as it has the fact that 40% of the players reports could be solved by more communication. What hasn't been part of every server is the amount of bureaucracy and red tape that make any DMV look like a stroll in the park compared to GTA:W. If admins were only in charge of reports, chances are there'd be far less cases of burnout among them. Instead they have to manage reports, properties, vehicles, faction concepts, make monthly charts about guns and drug usage and so on and so forth, all activities that bring almost nothing in terms of roleplay in-game and drain the fun out of the game. On the note of communication, it's not like the staff is above having issues in clearly communication what they exactly want or in finding a compromise. They're perhaps the first offenders in being more interested in robotically enforcing rules as opposed to actively encourage roleplay, bureaucracy be damned. Since I've already highlighted enough problematic staff members, feel free to reach out to me if you want me to elaborate on this. That's because the staff created a server culture that sees the establishment of rules as a magic cure to all issues, so players have bought into the idea that adding more and more rules will deter troublemakers from making trouble. But even though a speed limit sign can tell you you're not supposed to go over 50 mph, it's not going to stop you from hitting 200 mph. Make the staff as reactive force instead of a proactive one. You can't possibly cover every single rule breaking situation that happens and if you try, you end up exactly in the situation you guys are now, burned out and stretched thin. Why on God's green Earth do players have to ask for an admin's permission to skip a car crash by mutual consent? In regards to the community wanting the rules being enforced more harshly, the problem is not the harshness, but rather the absolutely flippant way in which they're enforced by different admins. For a server that preaches a lot about standards, the staff seems to have none in regards to the enforcement rules, with repeated rulebreakers being given warnings after warnings while first-time offenders go straight to the ban can. Maybe adding rules about it will fix the problem.

Yes, we've had the time of our life over here.

Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions. As much as the staff are regular players like everyone else wanting, to roleplay, with lives of their own, etc., they brought this upon themselves. They painted themselves into this corner by adding pointless rules upon pointless rules for years on end in an attempt to enforce "standards", "quality" or whatever the favorite buzzword was at the moment, only to realize they didn't have enough manpower or time to possibly enforce them all until when it was too late. Every time a prospective admin joined the staff and called for more regulation instead of less, they contributed to increase the workload for themselves and all their fellow staff members. Maybe if admins were spending less time on the forums reviewing a 500 words application to decide whether someone has the correct background for a single-story house in Mirror Park or were less busy denying players from owning a golf cart because they didn't articulate correctly the need for it on the UCP, they'd be able to facilitate things IG and find time to roleplay themselves. You are all just prisoners, here, of your own device.

Threatening the server by standing in a safezone.

Alright, Chief Benavides, since I've realized only later that you were one of the few people to reach out to help in the days of old, regardless of whether it was out of genuine altruism, pity or more nefarious motives, I'll return the courtesy and provide you with an actual reply as well. The fact that I genuinely do not care about your opinion, Bospy's or anyone else's still stands, since I'm not really here nor I plan to be anytime soon. But all I wanted to do was sit in the most remote corner of the server and pretend to patrol a couple hours a day while staying as far as possible from all the OOC politicking, and thanks to those of your ilk that's now considered a threat of the server. You'll excuse me if I don't feel the need to waste my time with pleasantries or pretend that I appreciate what your leadership has done to the server. Perhaps if you focused less on the manner and more on the substance, you and others may see what the point is, fix the problems and make the whole place better for whoever still feels like playing. Not really in the mood to play semantics but an original piece is, by definition, something that was created without copying or imitating. By simply taking real-life procedures, appearance, jargon, customs of an existing organization and adjusting them to the setting of GTA:W, you're doing an adaptation at best, but certainly not something original. The over-reliance on established real life counterparts is a lazy exercise for unimaginative minds and incentives players to not take risks and be creative, encouraging them to do what (allegedly) is realistic and content themselves with what it's been done to death already. Your choice between two opposite extremes, the uber-realistic LSSD with its 1:1 scale model of LASD and the cartoonish SASD with its patrol cars straight out of a Looney Tunes skit perfectly sums up what I meant when I said that you don't seem interested in bridging gaps at all. You all seem to think in binaries. This "if you're not with us, then you're against us" mentality, along with the constant casual maligning of people who dare to criticize your faction or any aspect of your roleplay they don't agree with, is one of the aspects that make the LSSD seem cultish and make it an absolute blemish on the community (which stoops pretty low by itself already). Leaving aside the fact that SAHP would be preferable to the LSSD, if anything for the novelty factor, do you truly believe that a, say, San Andreas State Police with officers in khaki uniforms and smokey hats that drive white patrol cars, with procedures inspired by real-life ones and its own original customs would be so out of place with the server to the point of being unrealistic and breaking your immersion? Before answering, take a look at this: another elitist and I made up a law enforcement agency revolving around water completely from scratch, inspiring ourselves to real-life California agencies but purposefully peppering our roleplay with outright fictional terms and procedures for the sole purpose of proving that you can have fun, involve the community and be realistic without necessarily copy-pasting entire manuals and basing yourself on a single organization. You know who was our #1 fan? If someone wants to RP a CO or if he wants to portray a law enforcement official working outside of the city, his only chance is the LSSD. If he doesn't agree with the faction's mindset, you're already cutting that person out a chunk of RP on which the LSSD holds a monopoly. As for the second part of your post, ask yourself where did the obsession with realism came from? How did it take hold the server as a whole? Jonesy, Bospy and lambchops (and probably someone else too, but I can't be bothered to go look them all up) all have held positions in FM/LFM at the same time they were part of the leadership or had leadership-adjacent roles in the LSSD and with their positions they could influence many decisions concerning the entire server. It's no secret that these people hold a very specific view about the server's setting and how San Andreas should mirror California to the maximum extent possible, as proven by the direction the LSSD had under their guide, so yes, the LSSD was indirectly forcing its own standards down everyone else's throat. It's your paragraph that doesn't make much sense, since it seems to be a mish-mash of accusations that have been flung at me far too many times in the past for me not to recognize them, especially in the part where you once again go binary thinking between "realism" and "fun", as if the two things couldn't be reconciled without forcing everyone to march in lockstep. The LSSD does an excellent job at portraying its counterpart properly and it's a monument to what a dedicated group of people can do if they set out to achieve something. Don't mistake my contempt for the leadership's methods with a contempt for their dedication or ability: they all possess good administrative and organizational skills but they suffer from chronic backstabbing disorder, standards enforcement syndrome and a compulsive need to talk down anyone who doesn't align with their ideas on what roleplay should be (and, again, the whole scenario that spawned this topic is great evidence for that). It'd be much better if their skills weren't all employed for the wrong cause, which is the enforcement of their particular brand of "realism" across the board with no room for things that haven't been reported by an LASD bulletin. Because not everything can be "realistic" since reality itself is not realistic and it's a common mistake in entertainment to assume something to be "unrealistic" simply because it doesn't align with what we're used to in our daily life or what we're expecting to see. The LSSD and a lot of its members seem to be particularly prone to fall victim to this since they put far too much trust in "sources" instead of their own creativity, with the result being they end up doing the very things the LSSD was allegedly born to combat: engaging in the pretentious attitude of LSRP's LSPD and policing the server by telling people what they're doing is "wrong", "unrealistic", "low quality" and so on and so forth. And why is it that it was the LSSD specifically had to be expanded? Why could not a new faction, like the SAHP, or a new form of State-level law enforcement agency, or multiple smaller agencies dislocated across the map take over the additional police duties? If anything to shake things up, to make it so you all don't keep playing in the same eternal 2017 LSRP with updated graphics and a shovel script to make up for the lack of original concepts. It's all so tiresome. It'd be very cheap shot to make a joke about you've been roleplaying California so long you've probably started to acquire its less savory perks such as its literacy rate, but I'm going to give you a honest answer instead. It's not that you can't, it's that you're having a hard time doing it because the truth that emerges from those post is a rather uncomfortable one and you'd rather not admit it. I don't doubt for a single moment that the large majority of LSSD players fundamentally are good-hearted people who get high off their own hype of belonging to something elite and galvanized by a propaganda machine, but if you don't change your ways, it will be your faction's, and your leadership's, downfall. Foran is much more relevant to your current situation than you might think. For all his faults, the law enforcement scene would've been very different if it wasn't for him and, ironically, the LSSD is the one faction that owes him the most, as the man took the first steps towards realism by shaping the LSPD after the LAPD when the trend was to pursue British policing standards. Without him you all would probably be portraying an Americanized version of the West Midlands Police. And nothing better than the story of Foran and his fall from grace could exemplify what I talked about in both my original post and in this reply. Foran was considered a great roleplayer until the standards began to change and the community who had his back until the week before started calling for his removal. But standards aren't set in stone and the community's mood changes often and without warning. Though it certainly would be a very sobering wake-up call, I do not wish to see Wildcat follow down the same route, whether you believe it or not. Let us have peace.

You cannot build bridges with people who run a demolition company. The LSSD and its leadership are by far the greatest tragedy to have struck this community. The insistence on enforcing pointless rules under the guise of providing balance, the constant reminding to their members of their alleged superiority compared to the rest of the server, the absolutely ludicrous double standards when it comes to realism and other aspects of the game, their dishonesty in regards to the jail/prison system used as a gateway to establish a second law enforcement faction and the targeting of players who don't share their mindset are just a small number of the laundry list of offences committed by (most of) the current leadership. They have no interest in bridging gaps and having peace because they thrive off (D)iscord and chaos, since a divided community is easier to manipulate. They have no interest in being understanding or finding a compromise, because that would undermine the foundations of what they've built, a cult which leaves little room for dissent. They have no interest in moving forward because they're stuck in an eternal 2017, and not in a nostalgic way. It's the year of the Sheriff's Department and it always will be, forever. GTA:W could've been a great opportunity to branch out, to explore a new concept, a Highway Patrol or even a well-done, investigation-focused BOI, but thanks to the duplicity and the uninspired spirits of this group of people who believe themselves to be sole holders of the truth in matters of roleplay quality, the community has once more slumped back into the same dichotomy of LSPD/LSSD and the implementation of the same tried California tropes (but only when it suits them), a show that's been doing re-runs for almost a decade uninterrupted. Creating a successful marketing campaign around the «providing quality police roleplay» mantra is the one, single thing these people have come up with. Everything else is an outright rip-off that rejects all accusations of lacking originality with the trite excuse that "it's realistic" and therefore above all kinds of criticisms. And since they couldn't come up with something innovative, they forced the entire server to play by the delusion they call reality, but that really is a collection of L.A. Times headlines and 60 minutes reports about the Lynwood Vikings. Now of course this may seem undesirable, unwarranted, undeserved and if these people were more open to views different from theirs there might be a way to find an agreement, a settlement of sorts. As someone who saw Wildcat turn from a benevolent faction leader into the authoritarian tyrant of a religious sect that worships the LASD MPP, there is nothing that I wish more than rolling the system back to a different time and place, where people played the game instead of taking part in some futile realism contests. Unfortunately, he and his cohorts are too drunk on power, too far gone believing their own hype to realize their methods only sow more division within the community, and you don't really have to look further than the whole debacle that originated this thread for evidence of what the purity spiraling on behalf of these people led to: there is no honor among thieves, and the guy who thinks he's a better roleplayer than you is right behind the corner. I was at the side of this new Caesar named Wildcat as his Legate when he complained about Foran and his gang of M4-toting Chiefs, who ruled the rooster and bullied SADOC, strong of the support of his faction and of an LFM who cared about everything except roleplay. Now that Wildcat and his praetorians are the ones calling LFM to shut LSDA investigators down for interfering with his faction, it should perhaps be a good idea to remember what happened to Foran once his popular support ran out and LFM turned on him. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall.

But there's a place, somewhere in your memory, even now, more than half a decade later, where it's an eternal 2016, where you're still on that incredibly hideous sand dune in the middle of nowhere with your friends Xarex and arrdef just talking about IC events, a place where there are no admins telling you need to answer a hundred questions before you can own a house, a place where the fun has never ended and never will. How's that county jail holding up for you, @Wildcat?

Where's the prison guards? Am I really locked into this cubicle? Here I am In this travesty Weren't we all promised a better jail culture? I'm punished for my thievery Even though I am truly getting no, roleplay at all, Deputies have fled, they're out on gang patrol This is all a sham The faction never really cared or gave a damn Where's the prison guards? After all, this is my big night in the pound My introduction to la EME crowd I assumed that I would not stay here for long So I was wrong At least I understand All the innuendo and the irony And I appreciate The role that Winnfield played The posts that Pittman made And after the jail decline, And after there's no COs, There's locked doors To empty yards Where's the prison guards? For a prison faction to succeed what you need is a cadre of people who are willing to stay within a small area for the majority of their playing time and who are responsible for creating roleplay, not reacting to it. A correctional faction is the only type of law enforcement faction in which you are forced to be active in your roleplay (opening facilities, coming up with activities for inmates, etc.) as opposed to reactive (responding to shootouts, pulling cars over, etc.) if you want not to thrive, but to reach the baseline activity required for the faction to sustain itself. Unfortunately the players who are willing to engage in this kind of roleplay are very few and far between. On average, only one in fifteen people who join a correctional faction lasts longer than a month and not having an easy way out of correctional roleplay, such as the opportunity to go out on patrol or what-have-you, helps to weed out those who aren't really interested in that sort of RP. But even among those who manage to pass the probationary phase, there's only a handful who have the drive or skill to reach a supervisory position or above. A high rate of turnover among faction members results in much experience being wasted instead of being passed down to the next class of roleplayers, which inevitably makes finding figures capable of leading the faction in its entirety all the more difficult in the long run. This difficulty in retaining people also reflects on the eventual evolution of the faction. It goes without saying that the smaller the faction, the harder it is to cater to the many, ever-growing needs of the server population and their very rapidly changing opinions. For a faction that has a manpower pool of 100+ players, making sweeping changes in a short time is relatively easy, even if a large part of its players only log in-game and aren't responsible for making such changes. However, for a faction that barely reaches the 50 players in its entirety with more than 2/3 being baseline officers, any alteration is significantly more complicated, especially when its held at the same standards as all the others. LSRP's SADOC used to work because there was an extremely small but equally dedicated core of players who kept it together through hell and high water. But mind you that at no point throughout its history, except perhaps in its very early days, SADOC thrived or succeeded in its mission; for a large part of its existence, SADOC survived and sometimes did so narrowly. Besides, the SADOC mentioned by @Illusory simply cannot exist anymore in this year and age. A lot of LSRP's SADOC people just wanted to play for the sake of portraying a character in a somewhat sensible prison environment, catering to hardcore lifers and "tourists" alike, by taking information from different American correctional agencies and compiling it together so that it made sense within the server's lore. In this time made of endless red tape, lootboxes, fingernails scripts, IG-texts-to-Discord and other man made horrors beyond our comprehension, where you're mandated by contract to research every nook and cranny of the California penal system for 60+ hours a week with the aim of creating a metaverse in which play out all the power fantasies you can't IRL, that's simply not possible. There is, of course, a lesson in this. The ones who have ran and still run the jail and who once blamed every flaw of SADOC upon the very crowd that held it together may finally realize that it was not the people in charge, nor a mentality opposed to change that were the problem, but the system itself, which doesn't have a magic switch you can turn on and off to create the perfect prison environment. Especially with the absolutely preposterous standards things are held to on this server, it would take a lot more drive, dedication and skill than you can find in any RP community to run a correctional faction. Tl;dr: you reap what you sow.

The people who believe the amount of rules and regulations surrounding roleplay is "perfectly fine" are either purposefully ignoring reality for the sake of gratifying a staff administration that couldn't care less about them or have never played before landing in this bureaucratic nightmare that you keep pretending is a roleplay server. It's fairly ironic how the same individuals who in previous communities endlessly complained about the amounts of "useless bureaucracy" aimed at recording IC events in factions they weren't even part of now hold life-and-death power over your ideas, force you to file a business plan like they're the County Treasurer if you want to use a script and can shut you down if your idea of RP doesn't align with their concept of "quality", a word that's so abused it's completely devoid of meaning at this point. And don't make the mistake of believing that if you commit a mistake they're going to go easy on you, either. Like all truly soulless bureaucracies, its enforcers refuse to hear the reason why you didn't file Permit A38 correctly, they only care that you didn't and how much your punishment is going to be. Good roleplayers would follow the rules, therefore if you don't you clearly are a malicious entity that's here to wreak havoc on the server and destroy this high-standards roleplay paradise they worked so very hard to create, and which actually exists in their imagination only. Of course, you can't expect much more from those who are yet to understand the difference between "realism" and "immersion".

The only thing you're going to earn by portraying a normal civilian doing normal civilian day to day things is a ban.