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How the server fails to encourage roleplay over money


TinPan

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4 hours ago, Engelbert said:

As for the pistol...suprisingly a glock does not cost more than couple of grands in a shop in-game.


A gun with a license is around 10,000$ at the Ammunation.

 

4 hours ago, Engelbert said:

Not to be that guy, but heavy roleplay mean a thing to you?


Heavy roleplay means a lot of things to a lot of people. As someone who played Law Enforcement I can tell you that the amount of drugs, weapons and crime this server has would have resulted in the real Los Angeles having martial law and being a dystopian nightmare. Like LA has 2 dead cops a year, I probably saw around 50 a year.

Civilians focus more on their ideal lifestyle, illegals do a lot more crime than real life and cops get in way more shootings and chases. This is all a consequence of this being a game and people wanting to do fun stuff. If you try to reduce that you'll just lose players to other servers. At the end of the day this is a hobby people play for fun and I'll be damned if I log into GTAW to pretend I have a second job. I'll do things that are fun for me and make me think my time was well spent.

 

Trucking or Fishing isn't that and I don't see why there needs to be an OOC grind. Everyone should get a large sum of money on start and you can choose what you want to do with that. We all know money isn't fully IC anyway ( you can be a gang banger or cop or Security guard with 1,000,000$ in your bank due to playtime/wages but you'll never be allowed to use that money IC anyway )

 

forbid staff members from playing player characters

 

That's how you end up with no staff. Those people are volunteers who willingly burn their time to help a server they like and want to see improve, and you'd basically cut their investment by stopping them from playing.

 

Staff should do random events as NPCs

 

Now this... holy hell, I've been here a long time and I wonder why they don't do more of this. DMing is key to any RP server, it's what makes the world alive and is especially important to civilians who, unlike cops and illegal roleplayers, don't really get to do a lot of exciting things.

 

Things like creating an accident, a gas leak, a fire, a car sale with really good prices, any random event that people can interact with and is staff supervised would be great.

Edited by arandomgamer
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17 hours ago, cracked said:

The property market is a perfect example of players focused on money instead of roleplay. They rush to the properties that come back from inactivity like it's a competition, some sort of arcade game. Whoever gets it wins and everyone else is salty. Yesterday I was headed to an apartment I wanted to buy. 2 sports cars were outside, it was a forum drive apartment. I needed it for my RP, alas. The rich property hoarders got it instead. I wonder and what point it gets too ridicilous to be allowed.

People still flip properties even though it's prohibited. That's why there is a shortage of properties for sale. It would be nice to see those people punished for it.

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1 hour ago, Glitch said:

All good ideas imo which will never happen, shame.

They’re reasonable ideas, but just like you said; the likelihood of them happening is pretty much extremely minimal at this point.

 

Seems to be there’s almost a contentment among higher ups at the moment for the current situation I talked about in my original post to let it have its course ran versus taking a large leap to change up fundamentals in the name of long-term benefits.

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18 hours ago, NickyW said:

> people don’t want to work 9-5 all day and then come home to a character that works 9-5

 

17 hours ago, cracked said:

The property market is a perfect example of players focused on money instead of roleplay. They rush to the properties that come back from inactivity like it's a competition, some sort of arcade game. Whoever gets it wins and everyone else is salty. Yesterday I was headed to an apartment I wanted to buy. 2 sports cars were outside, it was a forum drive apartment. I needed it for my RP, alas. The rich property hoarders got it instead. I wonder and what point it gets too ridicilous to be allowed.

 

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16 minutes ago, arandomgamer said:

If you want people to stop hogging properties you should put a tax on owning, deduced even while offline. Run out of money, lose the property. PEople shouldn't be owning multiple houses on a server on which we ran out of houses.

FAX

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Actually there are a handful of people who want to roleplay poor/average people and in fact they do it just fine, basically ignoring how much scripted money they have.  What we have (and what GTA-based heavy RP servers have always had) is just a wide range of understanding of what heavy RP is.  Some people are here to develop a character and tell a story.  Some people are here to "find success", whether that be by making money or rising to the top of a faction.  It is just what it is, not everyone will have the same understanding of heavy RP.

Edited by Paenymion
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5 hours ago, Smilesville said:

GTAW is a MMO in its current state.

 

Player numbers and grinding net you far more rewards than a story ever will. These rewards also allow you an outsized impact on the stories of others - the stories we pretend to cherish. Fact of the matter is that there's no incentive to roleplay beyond the bare minimum.

This is the question we should all be asking.

 

I can put forth a few concepts that've worked exceptionally well on other servers. Most of them doubtlessly unpopular - but solutions nonetheless.

  1. Introduce an RP rating system. For example, every player is assigned a variable 0 to 4.
    0) You're new, and/or have difficulty staying in character. Any admin can give you this.
    1) You stay in character. Any admin can give you this.
    2) You've built a solid, believable character. Any admin can give you this.
    3) Not only is your character believable, but you regularly enhance the play of those around you. Three admins must agree to give/remove this.
    4) The style of play the server idolizes. A majority of admins must agree to give/remove this.

    Throw players more cash the higher their rating goes, if that's what you think will motivate them. Lock particular activities to a particular rating - for example, you're not permitted to perform robberies or own a business unless you have a 2 or higher. You can even change the levels required based on whether you want activities to be more or less common, since the RP rating distribution will end up looking like a bell curve.
     
  2. Forbid staff members from actively playing characters. We're beyond the need for this, frankly - even if we pretend we can quash all bias (we can't,) the mere appearance of bias combined with a general lack of transparency tends to do you more harm than good. Much harder to make a case for bias when you don't have a dog in the fight.

    Recognize that I don't make this suggestion without having done this myself for an extended period, for another server - it sucks at first, but you rapidly get used to it, especially since this is supposed to be considered in conjunction with my next suggestion.

    This (and my next suggestion) would also begin to address the issue of reports/requests going unanswered for hours with multiple staff members online. I understand you're volunteers, but I would propose that occupying a volunteer slot without actually doing the job is worse than never having taken the position at all. You're doubtlessly aware of how much I despise the state of burglary RP, but waiting several hours for a request is just not reasonable. My understanding is that most of you are involved in your own roleplay scenarios, and it's perfectly understandable not to put things on hold at the drop of a hat.

    Personal investment is kept to a minimum, and that frees you up for my next suggestion.
     
  3. Free staff members to host small events and instances while assuming the role of NPCs. There are some things beyond the ken of the player base - I never expect to see a bank robbery, for instance. However, if we'd like to drum up roleplay for the LSPD, who better to take on the role of the robbers than a staff-controlled NPC who can go to prison for life and/or disappear from the city at the drop of a hat? This doesn't have to be a large scale event - could be as condensed or as broad as the creative freedom you're willing to lend to staff members.

    At present, we seem to be caught in an overly restrictive loop in which we don't ask what a reasonable person would do when considering whether to permit something or not, but rather what the usual person would do. It's entire reasonable to fight back at gunpoint, for instance - but we don't permit it under the assumption that if it were permitted, everyone would do it.

    Incorrect as I think that assumption is, allowing staff members to take on uncommon roles the server doesn't trust the average player with allows others to react to a much more dynamic landscape of roleplay.
     

I've seen these in action, and they achieve results. I don't expect them to come anywhere near implementation, but hey - proposing a solution when you outline a flaw should become a more regular thing.

 

Admins are not qualified to assign people roleplay ability ratings lmao

 

There may be several good or even great roleplayers on the admin team, but just being an admin doesn't make you a great roleplayer nor does it give you the ability to scout other great roleplayers.

 

A better suggestion would be to create a Roleplay Quality Assurance team that has a similar responsibility to what point one suggests.

 

EDIT:

 

Also, while I agree that the server has a tendency to cater to the needs of the staff team before the needs of the community (this is why housing requests open so rarely, breakin requests/appeals/reports can take hours/weeks, etc) , I heavily disagree with the idea that staff members shouldn't be allowed to have active characters. At the end of the day, it's a roleplay server. They came here to roleplay, and they're volunteering to help out. If they were getting paid? Different story, but they aren't.

Edited by NickyW
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3 hours ago, Paenymion said:

Actually there are a handful of people who want to roleplay poor/average people and in fact they do it just fine, basically ignoring how much scripted money they have.  What we have (and what GTA-based heavy RP servers have always had) is just a wide range of understanding of what heavy RP is. 

 

This counts for staff too, mind you- opinions simply differ. I for my part claim the simulation is more important than anything, for instance- as a better simulated background allows both for better storytelling as well as for a more rewarding feeling of "success" than scripted or railroaded setups can.

 

20 minutes ago, NickyW said:

Admins are not qualified to assign people roleplay ability ratings lmao

Besides such arbitrary systems being established can only lead to more complaints, butthurt and bias, it's also absolutely ridiculous to expect the handful of staff we had to keep active track of each of our characters and their developement to apply a rating of whatever sorts.

 

Now even if we allege every staff member upholds incredibly high standard and they'd be perfectly fit to judge everyone's playstyle (and had guidelines to do so, but let's not go there), the simple workload makes the whole thought ridiculous.

How do admins observe this? Constantly spectating people?`Spending their time reading screenshot threads up, where people only selectively portrait their characters? Ridiculous either way.

20 minutes ago, NickyW said:

I heavily disagree with the idea that staff members shouldn't be allowed to have active characters.

They need to shut dumb threads or idiotic/troll posts* down faster imo.

 

I mean look at this lol, the title talks about an alleged failure to encourage people to rp.

And people come up with ideas like forbidding those most invested in the server to rp.

 

Dead.

 

*ammended, the title of this thread is actually something we could discuss. Unmoderated it's pointless as it ends in spam, 5-10 pages in a day on every "new" old topic etc.

Edited by knppel
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3 hours ago, NickyW said:

Admins are not qualified to assign people roleplay ability ratings lmao

Rating the quality of someone's roleplay is what admins do every time they respond to a report on the forum. They're already given wide latitude to determine what sorts of RP are acceptable or not - I've merely added a positive component to the equation (the potential for reward) rather than a consistently negative one (you're punished for something that isn't a rule, but they consider 'bad RP' anyways.)

 

I don't expect staff positions to require the same skillsets under my suggestions as they do now, anyways.

 

3 hours ago, NickyW said:

A better suggestion would be to create a Roleplay Quality Assurance team that has a similar responsibility to what point one suggests.

GTAW already has a Roleplay Quality Management team. The fact many didn't seem to know that speaks to how effective a concept that has been - never mind there doesn't seem to be any information on what their function is beyond "report things to them that don't break rules."

 

3 hours ago, NickyW said:

I heavily disagree with the idea that staff members shouldn't be allowed to have active characters. At the end of the day, it's a roleplay server. They came here to roleplay, and they're volunteering to help out.

Like I said, volunteering to do the job and subsequently not doing the job is worse than doing nothing at all. They're still roleplaying, just not on any active characters - only through NPCs. If they want to return to active characters, they're more than welcome to abdicate their staff positions. If that means we have regular cycles between administrators - on for a few months, off for a few months - that's fine.

 

3 hours ago, knppel said:

Besides such arbitrary systems being established can only lead to more complaints, butthurt and bias, it's also absolutely ridiculous to expect the handful of staff we had to keep active track of each of our characters and their developement to apply a rating of whatever sorts.

 

Now even if we allege every staff member upholds incredibly high standard and they'd be perfectly fit to judge everyone's playstyle (and had guidelines to do so, but let's not go there), the simple workload makes the whole thought ridiculous.

How do admins observe this? Constantly spectating people?`Spending their time reading screenshot threads up, where people only selectively portrait their characters? Ridiculous either way.

We're more or less at peak butthurt where we stand, here - there's really no way to go but up with regards to that.

 

The guidelines I set forth through the 2nd rank are easily observable through five minutes of observation. Merely having a screenshot thread could serve as impetus to attain one of these ranks - but I expect that staff will readily take advantage of the ability to play NPC in their own events. They will still be interacting with the other players regularly, but on an entirely different level. If several people engage in their event and they're at rank 0 or 1, it's easy for that staff member to make the call as to whether they should jump to ranks 1 or 2.

 

Throw up an admin section of RP notes on each player character if that helps you keep track of things. No system is perfect, but my suggestion is better by leaps and bounds than what we currently have - and like I said, I've personally worked on a server with this system and it works.

 

And it has the potential to streamline so many things. Rather than formulating a business idea and applying only to discover staff members don't think it's realistic for you to own a business, wouldn't it be nice to know right off the bat that a rank 2 means you can't create one, whereas rank 3 means you can? Notoriously terrible players won't be able to fly under the radar with craftily worded applications.

 

We all seem to acknowledge there's a problem, but when it comes to solutions, the attitude like this comes out:

3 hours ago, knppel said:

They need to shut dumb threads or idiotic/troll posts* down faster imo.

I mean look at this lol, the title talks about an alleged failure to encourage people to rp.

And people come up with ideas like forbidding those most invested in the server to rp.

Dead.

The server quality isn't going to improve one damn bit if you're not willing to fine tune the structures surrounding it and try new things (or, you know, read the suggestion in its entirety.)

 

Is the purpose of this thread to whine and complain, or find solutions?

Edited by Smilesville
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