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How the server fails to encourage roleplay over money


TinPan

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24 minutes ago, Smilesville said:

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.

 

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."

 

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.

 

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:

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?


it’d help if your solutions were viable or realistic 

 

1. Admins determining whether rules were broken or not is **not** the same as deciding if people are good role players or not. Character development and portrayal is an entirely different skill set than ingame moderation and after 8 years of GTA Roleplay, I’ve seen that administrators are usually decent, even good, but not spectacular role players; I’m sure there’s exceptions. They may be paragons of the community, but that doesn’t make them paragons of actual roleplay. 
 

 

2. no one on an RP server is going to volunteer for a position that literally gets rid of their primary reason for playing on the server.

 

Someone else said this and I can’t agree more: we’re having problems with RP quality and your suggestion is to take the most invested members of the community, and force them to stop role playing?

 

that suggestion is unique, but it will *never* be accepted, so you’re wasting time and energy discussing it 

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Make it that when you are CKed or namechange u lose all your money and assets. Maybe people will care more about the RP than money making. Plus, that'd make properties prices to drastically fall, making them easier to get. Right now it's very hard to find properties in certain areas.

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The hunting update was a good example of what you explained. I was very excited about it but then I realized it's just another job to grind money... It doesn't encourage the RP.

 

How should have been done? Similar to the brewer job for example, where you would have to craft a butcher table at a property and then you can take the carcasses there to split them into pieces and either use the meat to cook food for yourself or sell the meat to restaurants and I mean, businesses owned by a player. The way it is now is, you shot an animal and grab the carcass to then drive to a blue blip and exchange it for money. It doesn't encourage the rp, at all... it draws the attention of money grinders, just like fishing.

 

And I agree with you in your point, this was just one of the examples I could come up with.

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13 minutes ago, NickyW said:


it’d help if your solutions were viable or realistic 

 

1. Admins determining whether rules were broken or not is **not** the same as deciding if people are good role players or not. Character development and portrayal is an entirely different skill set than ingame moderation and after 8 years of GTA Roleplay, I’ve seen that administrators are usually decent, even good, but not spectacular role players; I’m sure there’s exceptions. They may be paragons of the community, but that doesn’t make them paragons of actual roleplay. 
 

 

2. no one on an RP server is going to volunteer for a position that literally gets rid of their primary reason for playing on the server.

 

Someone else said this and I can’t agree more: we’re having problems with RP quality and your suggestion is to take the most invested members of the community, and force them to stop role playing?

 

that suggestion is unique, but it will *never* be accepted, so you’re wasting time and energy discussing it 

Not only is it viable - it's worked on other servers to create better atmospheres. Those atmospheres happen to be fantasy rather than modern realistic, but there's no substantial difference that would cause the system to stop functioning.

  1. It absolutely is. Admins determine if people are good roleplayers or not all the time - on a variety of applications littered throughout the forums to do the most basic of things like apply for a property. They don't have to be paragons in their own right, which is why higher ranks need more of them - but every person on the server should be able to tell the difference between OOC and IC, when someone stays in character, and when a character is a character and not a flavor of the week. This is all that's required for ranks 0-2.
     
  2. The nature of staff RP changes from characters to NPC's. Think of them more as you would a Game Master. You're talking like nobody would ever in their right mind sign up to be a DM or GM, but it happens all the time. Nobody is being stopped from roleplaying - only doing so with personal characters.

 

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3 minutes ago, Macarroncito said:

The hunting update was a good example of what you explained. I was very excited about it but then I realized it's just another job to grind money... It doesn't encourage the RP.

 

How should have been done? Similar to the brewer job for example, where you would have to craft a butcher table at a property and then you can take the carcasses there to split them into pieces and either use the meat to cook food for yourself or sell the meat to restaurants and I mean, businesses owned by a player. The way it is now is, you shot an animal and grab the carcass to then drive to a blue blip and exchange it for money. It doesn't encourage the rp, at all... it draws the attention of money grinders, just like fishing.

 

And I agree with you in your point, this was just one of the examples I could come up with.

Honestly, this exactly. 

I was hoping the hunting was going to be extremely in-depth. Like, you'd shoot an animal and you'd actually have an option when you approach the corpse to skin it or field dress it and harvest the meat. I was hoping there'd be a whole system of not only being able to sell caracasses, but also harvest meat, collect trophies, or allowing us pack meat into crates and resupply a restaurant business.

Of course, my expectations were far too high. As it is right now, the ONLY thing somewhat encouraging hunting RP is the bright red warnings telling you to RP or you will be punished. Hunting is obviously designed to just be another barebone RP grinding activity. There is nothing encouraging people to RP. RIght now, hunting is literally just a grinding activity with rules in place solely to prevent people from grinding too fast. I'm hoping that when the park rangers move in and they start actually interacting with hunters, RP quality standards would be improved.

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10 hours ago, Smilesville said:

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.
 

Please not this.

 

There have been a lot of admin created "RP" events in the past. I have complained about every single one. They do not create RP, because beyond that situation itself, there is no roleplay. For example, back in 2019 there was a "robbery" in the Paleto factory. Was there roleplay? Sure. What was the roleplay? Breaching the building and killing 4 admins who gave themselves assault rifles.

 

Giving admins carte blanche to spawn themselves equipment to create situations for the cops will, if they follow previous situations, just result in one massive shootout and not be particularly fun out of that.

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The thread's derailed a bit from the original topic, but I'm not opposed to following through the line of conversation. Smilesville has brought up a "RP rating" system where admins would collectively rate a player's RP to give them something like an RP credit score. Smilesville suggests this can be used as the basis for allowing people to own businesses and make more of those sweet, sweet e-moneys.

 

Personally I think that may be a bridge too far, and idealistically I disagree with this sort of "social credit score." What can't be denied, however, is that something like this is already happening on the server, but not in any organized way and with much less feedback. Admins already do create opinions on how "well" people roleplay and these opinions influence their opportunities. Currently, there's little feedback about this--you have no way of really knowing what the admins collectively feel about you without applying for property, applying for the staff team, or waiting until a sack of bricks fall on you. The lack of transparency and active feedback make this an unfriendly system to players, though it is only human and natural. I can't say for sure what the admin team as a whole feels about me--I know for a few months I had some really toxic players slandering me in private reports to the admins and this caused a lot of damage to the admin team's relationship with me because they were operating off of the information they had and never asking for my side. However, I also know a significant bit of time has passed and I've only had positive interactions with admins for many months, so who knows.

 

In a perfect world, we'd be able to have a more active stream of information between the staff and the player base. Unfortunately, there are 102,000 approved applications to the server and only like... what? 30? Admins? If even? There just isn't enough time in the day to do all the work they're already supposed to do, much less all the extra work of running a social credit score system, or giving players the one-on-one attention and care they may need. Plus, there's always the issue that for every 1 player who is a pleasure to work with from the admin team's side, there are going to be easily a dozen players who are rude, confrontational, or unreasonable. 

 

As for Smilesville's suggestion to make it so admins can't RP their personal characters while they're admins, that's a tough one. I've spent significantly more time in GTA roleplay as an admin than as a player, and when I was actually doing my job there just wasn't enough time to RP. And the problem is similar here--from what I've seen the most active admins tend to be the newer ones and they tend to haul ass and do insane amounts of work for the cause. Obviously we as players can't see behind the scenes--we don't know how much work is happening on Discord, on the forums, on the UCP, or any other number of places. But I'm certain there are some admins who are just not doing as much work--and part of that is probably because they're burnt out from being the admin who worked really hard last month and they just want a break to enjoy the game.

 

Smilesville says above something to the effect of "they may be volunteers, but if they're not doing their job they should stand down." I think a system like that could work, but not on GTA:W as it currently stands. The way they build the staff team at the moment is not built for a server this size, and IMO it needs some serious restructuring. One of the main problems, in my opinion, is that the Support Team is being highly underleveraged in its ability to save time for the Admin Team. We can't have the number of admins this server requires because it's really hard to find enough people you can trust with the level of information and power that even the lowest level admins are privy to--hell, some of the admins we have now were rule-breakers and trolls last year and were able to have that be overlooked. But the Support team allows a safer way to get volunteer help from people on the server, in theory without any obligation to convert them into admins.

 

And therein might be some of the antidote to this situation. Perhaps the Support team and the Admin team need to be a little bit more formally differentiated. What if the Support team was easier to get into, but it stood unique from the Admin team. Your status as an admin is distinct from your membership to the Support team. If you would prefer to take a month off admin duties to focus on your RP (but you don't want to retire fully), you revert back to being a member of the Support team for the time period and you may be reinstated in the future. The Support team would be tasked with a lot more of the administrative, time-consuming tasks which the Admins just do not have the time to do. The Support team would more closely collaborate with the Admin team, and so it would serve its purpose still of being a force multiplier for the admins, a vetting process for potential future admins, and a way to help players and increase the user friendliness of the GTA:W experience.

 

These were only some of the ideas I was excited to share with the staff team once upon a time when I applied, but at the time the powers that be were more interested in hearing out cowards slandering me in hidden PMs. 😬

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20 minutes ago, Ink said:

The thread's derailed a bit from the original topic, but I'm not opposed to following through the line of conversation. Smilesville has brought up a "RP rating" system where admins would collectively rate a player's RP to give them something like an RP credit score. Smilesville suggests this can be used as the basis for allowing people to own businesses and make more of those sweet, sweet e-moneys.

 

Personally I think that may be a bridge too far, and idealistically I disagree with this sort of "social credit score." What can't be denied, however, is that something like this is already happening on the server, but not in any organized way and with much less feedback. Admins already do create opinions on how "well" people roleplay and these opinions influence their opportunities. Currently, there's little feedback about this--you have no way of really knowing what the admins collectively feel about you without applying for property, applying for the staff team, or waiting until a sack of bricks fall on you. The lack of transparency and active feedback make this an unfriendly system to players, though it is only human and natural. I can't say for sure what the admin team as a whole feels about me--I know for a few months I had some really toxic players slandering me in private reports to the admins and this caused a lot of damage to the admin team's relationship with me because they were operating off of the information they had and never asking for my side. However, I also know a significant bit of time has passed and I've only had positive interactions with admins for many months, so who knows.

 

In a perfect world, we'd be able to have a more active stream of information between the staff and the player base. Unfortunately, there are 102,000 approved applications to the server and only like... what? 30? Admins? If even? There just isn't enough time in the day to do all the work they're already supposed to do, much less all the extra work of running a social credit score system, or giving players the one-on-one attention and care they may need. Plus, there's always the issue that for every 1 player who is a pleasure to work with from the admin team's side, there are going to be easily a dozen players who are rude, confrontational, or unreasonable. 

 

As for Smilesville's suggestion to make it so admins can't RP their personal characters while they're admins, that's a tough one. I've spent significantly more time in GTA roleplay as an admin than as a player, and when I was actually doing my job there just wasn't enough time to RP. And the problem is similar here--from what I've seen the most active admins tend to be the newer ones and they tend to haul ass and do insane amounts of work for the cause. Obviously we as players can't see behind the scenes--we don't know how much work is happening on Discord, on the forums, on the UCP, or any other number of places. But I'm certain there are some admins who are just not doing as much work--and part of that is probably because they're burnt out from being the admin who worked really hard last month and they just want a break to enjoy the game.

 

Smilesville says above something to the effect of "they may be volunteers, but if they're not doing their job they should stand down." I think a system like that could work, but not on GTA:W as it currently stands. The way they build the staff team at the moment is not built for a server this size, and IMO it needs some serious restructuring. One of the main problems, in my opinion, is that the Support Team is being highly underleveraged in its ability to save time for the Admin Team. We can't have the number of admins this server requires because it's really hard to find enough people you can trust with the level of information and power that even the lowest level admins are privy to--hell, some of the admins we have now were rule-breakers and trolls last year and were able to have that be overlooked. But the Support team allows a safer way to get volunteer help from people on the server, in theory without any obligation to convert them into admins.

 

And therein might be some of the antidote to this situation. Perhaps the Support team and the Admin team need to be a little bit more formally differentiated. What if the Support team was easier to get into, but it stood unique from the Admin team. Your status as an admin is distinct from your membership to the Support team. If you would prefer to take a month off admin duties to focus on your RP (but you don't want to retire fully), you revert back to being a member of the Support team for the time period and you may be reinstated in the future. The Support team would be tasked with a lot more of the administrative, time-consuming tasks which the Admins just do not have the time to do. The Support team would more closely collaborate with the Admin team, and so it would serve its purpose still of being a force multiplier for the admins, a vetting process for potential future admins, and a way to help players and increase the user friendliness of the GTA:W experience.

 

These were only some of the ideas I was excited to share with the staff team once upon a time when I applied, but at the time the powers that be were more interested in hearing out cowards slandering me in hidden PMs. 😬

Your first couple paragraphs are a great example of why an admin rating system might fail

 

its very possible that the prototype version we already have IS failing for the reasons you describe

 

not to suck my own dick here, but let’s be real. I know I’m a good role player, the people I role play with know I’m a good role player. I mean I’d hope so right? I’ve been doing it nearly ten years now.

 

but does the admin team know that? Who knows. The admin team, more often than not, only sees you when you fuck up, or apply for something. As long as you’re a good writer you can make up an intricate ass backstory that makes people fawn over you, just to get your app accepted, even if you do zero of that shit ICly

 

and the lack of transparency and communication just make it even more problematic 

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26 minutes ago, NickyW said:

but does the admin team know that? Who knows. The admin team, more often than not, only sees you when you fuck up, or apply for something. As long as you’re a good writer you can make up an intricate ass backstory that makes people fawn over you, just to get your app accepted, even if you do zero of that shit ICly

 

and the lack of transparency and communication just make it even more problematic 

A rating would make it very public where they stand on your style of RP. At present, the only people who get organic positive exposure are those who interact with the characters of staff members. Forcing them into intermittent NPC roles broadens the range of individuals they interact with, and seeing an amazing application from someone who can't eclipse Rank 1 despite having their rank changed numerous times raises red flags that keeps them from advancing despite their grandiose tale.

 

You know I have numerous problems with the lack of transparency of the staff team, but if we can't trust them to make very basic judgment calls on quality and we can't trust management to find people who can?

 

The server's beyond saving.

 

They already make these calls behind closed doors. I'm not "trusting" them with anything - I'm taking a pragmatic approach at the best way to shift the focus from mechanics to narration, because the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the server structure supports the grinding mindset.

 

  • Sure, you could have a wonderful application for a business - or you could just grind for one and buy it.
  • Problems getting people to deal with GOV bureaucracy? Increased mechanical paychecks were the solution.
  • Problems with a gang? Quantity trumps quality - doesn't matter how great a gang's story is if gang #2 knows when they're inactive and has twice the people online with the guns they grind robberies for.
  • Hell, we reward mere online time with cash. There was a time we pestered AFK people for farming checks, but that's long gone not because we accept it any more, but because of how difficult it was to moderate.

 

Modify the system all you like, but without gateways to entry for particular activities, you're just introducing a slight variation to the meta game of grinding.

 

55 minutes ago, Westen said:

There have been a lot of admin created "RP" events in the past. I have complained about every single one. They do not create RP, because beyond that situation itself, there is no roleplay. For example, back in 2019 there was a "robbery" in the Paleto factory. Was there roleplay? Sure. What was the roleplay? Breaching the building and killing 4 admins who gave themselves assault rifles.

 

Giving admins carte blanche to spawn themselves equipment to create situations for the cops will, if they follow previous situations, just result in one massive shootout and not be particularly fun out of that.

They frankly don't have a lot of experience in determining what makes a good event. This will change with time - and what I'd proposed was just an example. Beyond the situation itself, it's up to the players how it impacts (or doesn't impact) their characters. I'd imagine having to kill someone would shake an individual and start an interesting development arc for any realistic person, but my problems with the server's flippant attitude towards the intent to kill is a topic for another thread.

 

Admittedly, there's more room to run in the atmosphere the idea came from ('quests' don't mesh well with GTAW) but that's not an insurmountable learning curve.

Edited by Smilesville
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1 hour ago, Smilesville said:

Not only is it viable - it's worked on other servers to create better atmospheres. Those atmospheres happen to be fantasy rather than modern realistic, but there's no substantial difference that would cause the system to stop functioning.

As Ink said: The amount of active characters prevents that.

Repeating myself, even if we allege our admin team as example roleplayers who can fairly rate anyone's rp regardless of their personal favourite settings and styles, the sheer number of players they'd have to judge prevent this.

 

They're struggling to handle a bunch of house requests- and you seriously suggest they should put a system on top that requires them to actively supervise every active player's developement, character plausibility etc. etc. to define "how good" the respective player's roleplay is?

 

Even if this was a good idea (which it isn't) it could never be executed in a community of this size.

That works when I play at my home table with 4-7 players, or on a small server where I have 5 admins for 50 active people.

Here? Forget it, just forget it.

 

8 minutes ago, Smilesville said:

A rating would make it very public where they stand on your style of RP. At present, the only people who get organic positive exposure are those who interact with the characters of staff members. Forcing them into intermittent NPC roles broadens the range of individuals they interact with, and seeing an amazing application from someone who can't eclipse Rank 1 despite having their rank changed numerous times raises red flags that keeps them from advancing despite their grandiose tale.

Despite this grandiose ridiculous three line sentence with no point and comma I have to disagree.

 

You're alleging a hive mind here for the server staff, where they universally all think the same and will just slap a deserved rating on each of us.

This is not the case, same as us players the staff consists of individuals that have differeing point of views.

For the one person a character might be an obnoxious terrible Mary Sue, for the second a lovely illustration of a surprisingly realistic scenario.

 

Furthermore it alleges the community, all these few thousand active people, accepts these ratings unquestions.

For the aforementioned reason, this is not going to happen- even if the whole staff team would agree to slap a stamp on someone to award their roleplay, players can't be forced to universally accept that or see things the same way.

 

My rp can be both shit and excellent at the same time, as it depends on the playmate's reception, not my own.

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