TinyBigJacko
Management
Management
Dev Team
Los Santos Police Command
Los Santos NHS
Los Santos Firefighter
Gruppe 6
Judge
- Location
- Vinewood Casino Management Office
Denzel, your rather snide remarks about being kept in the dark don't actually make me feel much like helping you out. As I said, there are only TWO people trying to keep this lot running, and although we DO listen to ALL of your suggestions, it is impossible to get everything in on the same day as you happen to think it up. Be realistic.
As for notifying the entire community about the DB loss, we took a call... get something back and running, or stop the entire server for however long it took for the community to fuss and fight over where we go from here, and whether we roll back about a month (great for you, maybe, but not so cool for people that joined ten days ago), and all sorts of other decisions to be made. In the end, it was a case of 'SHIT - get it going... get SOMETHING back, as soon as frickin' possible, and enable people to keep playing.' There was no question of keeping anything in the dark... I simply haven't had time to even write a forum post on the matter myself, we have been that busy.
If you really think we're that conspiratorial and anti-players, or intentionally keeping you in the dark to piss you off, then I feel sorry for you. Realistically, I don't have time to individually hand-pat every one of the 11 thousand players in our database, whilst attempting to reset the server back to a working condition. Do you? We had to make a (tough) call, and we thought that the economics-spin was probably a good way to minimise the general upset, by giving people a fresh new start and a different spin. Well, the fresh new start was out of our hands (it would've been zero-cash, if left to that damned DB management program, but at least we settled on 300k start per player).
Soveriegn - I appreciate everyone is pissed because they've lost cash, but nobody lost any vehicles as a result of this incident. Sure, the bank-balances of the rich have taken a big haircut (but that was probably going to happen in some form anyway, at some point, because some of the uber-rich were complaining that they've nothing better to do than grief people now, because they 'own' everything). Maybe the money-making opportunities still need tweaking in order to make them satisfying, but that will come. I can't bring your lost money back, sorry. Whether I say 'it was a database fault' or 'it was a treasury crash' makes very little difference. One is RL, one is RP. Take your pick. The money you banked in the past has been stolen, lost, missing, disappeared up a rabbit's arse - whatever makes it easier to deal with, mate. It's a new beginning.
Regards updates, not everything that we've done in the recent days has been listed there - and in the past, most of them had been posted by Asdrubael, not myself. There are some things that have been done recently and which are still on my list, that are civilian only, or rebel-related, and nothing to do with the cops. You won't have seen them simply because I've not had time to post about them yet. Others simply haven't been finished yet. This shit takes time. There are 'rebel-on-the-run' sub-games to be tested; we have a nightclub built but needing tweaking. I've changed the storage costs for civvy vehicles so they're less painful and easier to understand, I've dropped the 'auto-removal' of civvy driving licences when you run someone over; I've dropped the auto-removal of gun-licence when you kill someone (these now have to be RPed with a cop instead, as you'd expect in RL). Likewise, going to jail does not automatically lose your Rebel licence - that stays for good (depending on the outcome of the rebel-on-the-run sub-game testing).
I have a shedload of things to do, and even though I seem to spend ALL day, every day, doing these things, people are always unsatisfied, because THEIR thing isn't done now, now, now, and they think nobody listens to them. This simply isn't true. But we are not magicians. If we spent all our time consulting and factfinding and having lobby groups and love-ins, nothing would get done. Sure, in an ideal world, we'd have a fleet of developers with hours of spare time, ten admins, a few forum moderators and all sorts - but the reality is, finding, vetting, keeping and trusting people in those slots is not an overnight job. It takes time - and if we cut too many corners with granting power to individuals, well, you've probably seen what can happen if they turn out to be twats.
Hopefully can see that 'compensating everyone' is not a viable option, given the numbers of people who've lost money, and the time it would take to resolve this satisfactorily. It would be easier to solve the National Debt or make Ethopia a profitable and productive state where nobody goes hungry. I'm not expecting you to love that situation, but it is what it is. We will try and balance things to make it a happy (or at least interesting) place to make money and explore, but we cannot just start handing out wads of cash to the squeakiest wheels, because that wouldn't be fair. We're all in it together. And while we continue to tweak everything to everyone's satisfaction, bear in mind that most of my current developments for the civs are on hold, or at least, slowed down. Given time, I'll get to the bottom of the heap - but you'll need to be patient, all of you, please.
As for notifying the entire community about the DB loss, we took a call... get something back and running, or stop the entire server for however long it took for the community to fuss and fight over where we go from here, and whether we roll back about a month (great for you, maybe, but not so cool for people that joined ten days ago), and all sorts of other decisions to be made. In the end, it was a case of 'SHIT - get it going... get SOMETHING back, as soon as frickin' possible, and enable people to keep playing.' There was no question of keeping anything in the dark... I simply haven't had time to even write a forum post on the matter myself, we have been that busy.
If you really think we're that conspiratorial and anti-players, or intentionally keeping you in the dark to piss you off, then I feel sorry for you. Realistically, I don't have time to individually hand-pat every one of the 11 thousand players in our database, whilst attempting to reset the server back to a working condition. Do you? We had to make a (tough) call, and we thought that the economics-spin was probably a good way to minimise the general upset, by giving people a fresh new start and a different spin. Well, the fresh new start was out of our hands (it would've been zero-cash, if left to that damned DB management program, but at least we settled on 300k start per player).
Soveriegn - I appreciate everyone is pissed because they've lost cash, but nobody lost any vehicles as a result of this incident. Sure, the bank-balances of the rich have taken a big haircut (but that was probably going to happen in some form anyway, at some point, because some of the uber-rich were complaining that they've nothing better to do than grief people now, because they 'own' everything). Maybe the money-making opportunities still need tweaking in order to make them satisfying, but that will come. I can't bring your lost money back, sorry. Whether I say 'it was a database fault' or 'it was a treasury crash' makes very little difference. One is RL, one is RP. Take your pick. The money you banked in the past has been stolen, lost, missing, disappeared up a rabbit's arse - whatever makes it easier to deal with, mate. It's a new beginning.
Regards updates, not everything that we've done in the recent days has been listed there - and in the past, most of them had been posted by Asdrubael, not myself. There are some things that have been done recently and which are still on my list, that are civilian only, or rebel-related, and nothing to do with the cops. You won't have seen them simply because I've not had time to post about them yet. Others simply haven't been finished yet. This shit takes time. There are 'rebel-on-the-run' sub-games to be tested; we have a nightclub built but needing tweaking. I've changed the storage costs for civvy vehicles so they're less painful and easier to understand, I've dropped the 'auto-removal' of civvy driving licences when you run someone over; I've dropped the auto-removal of gun-licence when you kill someone (these now have to be RPed with a cop instead, as you'd expect in RL). Likewise, going to jail does not automatically lose your Rebel licence - that stays for good (depending on the outcome of the rebel-on-the-run sub-game testing).
I have a shedload of things to do, and even though I seem to spend ALL day, every day, doing these things, people are always unsatisfied, because THEIR thing isn't done now, now, now, and they think nobody listens to them. This simply isn't true. But we are not magicians. If we spent all our time consulting and factfinding and having lobby groups and love-ins, nothing would get done. Sure, in an ideal world, we'd have a fleet of developers with hours of spare time, ten admins, a few forum moderators and all sorts - but the reality is, finding, vetting, keeping and trusting people in those slots is not an overnight job. It takes time - and if we cut too many corners with granting power to individuals, well, you've probably seen what can happen if they turn out to be twats.
Hopefully can see that 'compensating everyone' is not a viable option, given the numbers of people who've lost money, and the time it would take to resolve this satisfactorily. It would be easier to solve the National Debt or make Ethopia a profitable and productive state where nobody goes hungry. I'm not expecting you to love that situation, but it is what it is. We will try and balance things to make it a happy (or at least interesting) place to make money and explore, but we cannot just start handing out wads of cash to the squeakiest wheels, because that wouldn't be fair. We're all in it together. And while we continue to tweak everything to everyone's satisfaction, bear in mind that most of my current developments for the civs are on hold, or at least, slowed down. Given time, I'll get to the bottom of the heap - but you'll need to be patient, all of you, please.
I will stick it out, though, because it simply HAS to be done. Wilco is working really hard right now to set up a new TeamSpeak server (because we have to move away from the German server that Asdrubael made for us)... and we've only recently moved from the German-hosted game-server back to one at Vilayer. We've been attacked multiple times by persons who had high-level access to these systems in the past, but so far, we've fended them off, or managed to recover things successfully without too much downtime. We've also suffered at the hands of a poorly-written community DB tool that was supposed to increase the scope for trusted people to do things like cop-whitelisting and granting donator access, and lighten the load on Wilco and me, only to discover that the damned program blew the database up and wiped all our cash and settings.