Stevie
Well-known member
- Location
- Ireland
Few short paragraphs on how I feel the server could improve. Dev's asked for a detailed description of everything so here it is.
-Rewarding players for good RP
People get rewarded for good RP. I agree that people should receive some sort of reward for bringing enjoyment to the players but it's very rare to happen. People who come in with great stories, interesting backgrounds and have unique characters, seem to be ignored. Very small portion of these players tend to receive anything at all if lucky. It would be incredible if the dev team also had a look at people who are good at what they do for eg. good racers, street vendors (people selling tacos and stuff) etc. Even if you're not the most amazing RPer out there but you're good at what you do, these people should receive some sort of little trinket.
Giving people small bits and pieces not only encourages them to do even better in the future but it really solidifies who they are on the server. This should be just as important as developing other parts of the server. This is what makes the good people stay around and if this is how they wanna progress, stuff like this shouldn't be ignored. After all, the community is what runs this server and if peoples efforts get ignored, they tend to get demotivated. They can only roleplay so much with imaginary items or stuff that they don't have before it gets boring.
Stuff can be given easily and same as that, it can easily be taken away so I don't see how this is something that needs to be thought 100 times through before it's given. Stuff like this won't change the balance of the server if anything, it would encourage a lot of the players to strive to do better and commit to their characters path.
-Money
When you come into the server, majority of the player base come in with the intention of making bank, becoming your average millionaire, buying cars, weapons and business you name it. I can't lie, I was the same when I came into the server but hey, here we are. As cringe as it sounds, with my friends at the start, we used to have competitions between ourselves on who can make the most money by trucking for the day, crazy right?. The dev team has spent a lot of time trying to adjust prices of existing jobs to fit the economy, increasing decreasing prices but you will never find a good balance especially on a server that doesn't go through resets etc.
You will never change the economy. Think of it this way, people that have been here a long time and those who were around at the time, got the businesses. Great, good for them. Adding more businesses won't make the place any better. If anything you're gonna encourage more people to only care about money by grinding all the time and avoiding RP because they are so tunnel-visioned on getting the thing they want. I feel the server itself pushes people to grind, they have guides on the wiki on how to do x job, how to get starter money, where to grow weed, how to mine all that shit (all money related).
Your average joe IRL can take pride in many other things they do and they enjoy on the daily, I play games not to make money, but because I enjoy it. The server when introducing new players into the world should have the same approach and it should give people the same idea when progressing through their characters story (I will throw in a few ideas down below in the thread later). Just to quickly mention too, people love things that are rare and not many people have, that's why often than not we see players fighting to own a rare that's 1/2 in the city etc. This can be expanded to other activities that also allow you to gain other rare items that nobody will have.
Realistically not everyone is gonna be a millionaire, common knowledge of course but people pursue it because the server itself doesn't have a lot of other avenues that people can explore. Before anyone tells me "oh just RP your way around the server and make your own fun", I agree with that statement to an extent. Believe it or not, some people are more imaginative than others. We have a bunch of great and different personalities on the server and that's what makes it unique. Some people require direction to be pointed in and some people just come up with something new everyday, it's normal, it's life.
We play games for the same common reason and that is to have fun. People have fun in different ways and some people here have to understand that.
Summing it up, everything you do on the server grants you money and maybe that's where things start going sideways a little bit.
-Weapons
Everybody wants weapons, they relocate in a new place in England, and instead of looking for a job or friends they look for weapons how to craft them and how to make bank. Crafting of guns should never be held behind your average civ and it should never be done at public bench. It doesn't make sense that an average civ can craft pistol parts because he has the materials to make a fully functioning firearm, he has no knowledge of how to put it together.
When people focus on grinding they forget about roleplay. If you interfere with their grind you're gonna get stabbed. Mines are a prime example, you mess with someone try to steal their ores, you're getting killed. It's not being opportunistic or looking for a fun time, all you get is poor RP. (other than that, what normal person walks into a mine to steal ore from miners? xd).
Fair enough, you grind for materials, you craft the parts you make the gun. You get a sense of progression but crafting a single gun takes hours. These hours can be put to other, more exciting parts of roleplay e.g. (meeting new people). Not only you're making yourself a story but you're also progressing someone else' story by meeting you.
Here is where the hate comes in and the best way to do this is to remove the mines completely. Being part of the apostles, I remember having a bunch of fun back in the day, when 10 of us would go down and just grind it out. It was a great bonding experience, we got to know each other while becoming best friends on the way, but that was only part of the journey. There is many other ways to do that, however we'd kill 2 birds with one stone (We'd grind for hours to make weapons + get to know each other).
If we didn't go mining and we didn't make those weapons we wouldn't progress as much as we did with them. Let's not hide it every gang did/does it to feel a sense of progression but looking back at it now, grinding stupid hours for guns just to have power and acknowledgement from other people is quiet counter-intuitive in RP. Adding up the hours that turned into days of grinding could be spent elsewhere getting to know other people, however that's just how it was on the server so we followed the meta (a lot of us were new to RP and I'm sure a lot of us would have done things differently now but after all, it's a learning experience, this further proves my point of what new players do when joining RP for the first time).
RP should never be about grinding something out, it should be real life but easy mode. How to fix this issue? It may not be perfect but for gangs to progress more in the RP aspect rather than grind for items, items should be given to them. To stop the constant grind for select gangs, allow them to get a shipment of weapons per week. It doesn't have to be much:
EG:
Shipment of 10 guns a week per gang that is involved in weapon distribution.
5 Pistols
3 SMG's
2 AR's
Select various guns from each category but in the format above (5 pistols = 3 Glocks + 2 standards) etc. Too many guns? lower it even more. Make it 8 or 6 with different ratios depending on the gangs size, wealth, image etc. With Lost dealing with big firearms, make them only get AR's or SMG's sometimes a surprise sniper in the package.
This way you can still monitor how many guns make it into the server, avoiding the problem of letting players craft too many guns per week and oversaturating the market. Gangs have already worked hard to receive their turf and be wearing colors so don't make us grind twice as hard for something that is taking a lot of the RP away.
-drugs and drug runs
Acquiring drugs is a bit of hit and miss. Gangs know how the coke runs work and all the other drugs are basically out of circulation ATM as coke is king. Nobody else wants to shift different drugs other than coke and your occasional weed sellers because they can grow it themselves.
There's a few points to touch on here. Gangs don't really have real means to start wars, most of the time it's petty shit like Apostle war with the Ballas. You can tell me whatever you want but that must be the stupidest war I've had on the server.
TLDR: Apostle had alliance with Ballas, Apostle member was on Ballas turf and didn't notice a Ballas car being stolen. Ballas demanded ridiculous compensation (in the millions), Apostles refused to pay, war.
Leading me to my point of allow gangs to beef over shit that actually makes sense for eg., if 2 gangs deal the same drug and they're trying to get rid of the stock. They cross the border and try expand beyond their territory they get into beef with the other gang trying to steal to their customers, warnings/words being said and eventually war. This in my mind makes sense on why a war should happen as the gangs are crossing each other, not because of petty shit. Stands the same for weapons and everything else that's dealt illegally on the server. (Obv there's more reasons for war, this is just an example)
So how to revive drugs?
Give gangs VARIETY is the keyword here, it's been said before and I'm sure it's already been discussed but gangs need to specialize in different things.
Meth, Coke, Crack, Heroine, Weed, LSD.
Assign the drugs to gangs that deal with this stuff. Like with weapons allow them to receive a shipment of ingredients every week so they can delegate the work to their cooks and get the drugs made. Each week when they receive the shipment, they have a chance of receiving some high quality ingredients. This and weapons, is just an idea so when the gangs do get their stuff, they don't have to sit there and grind it all day. They get the product so they can move on and get into an RP scenarios faster and more often.
How to make drugs? There is a variety of different labs around the map including, weed, coke, heroine etc. They all have available open interiors, perfect to get things on the go for gangs. It would be ideal for the buildings to be owned by a company or a group of people who want to rent them out and be cautious to who they rent out the space to. If the gang is busted legal trouble would be following the gang and the owners of the building. If the gang isn't careful and the police start catching on, the building can be raided and stuff taken away.
This building cannot be used for x amount of time before the heat has gone down(ranging between 1 - 2 weeks). Allow the gangs to have upgrades inside the warehouse, allowing for better equipment which allows them to utilize higher grade ingredients and get the best purity of the drug there is. They can always use the higher grade ingredients with lower tier benches but the result wouldn't be as good as the one with higher grade tools, so like we have now Low-Medium-High Grade drugs etc.
EG:
Low tier bench + Standard ingredients = Low Quality
Low tier bench + H.Q. ingredients = Medium Quality
High tier bench + Standard ingredients = Medium Quality
High tier bench + H.Q ingredients = High Quality
Give them a goal to progress towards with potential risk of losing it all.
If the building was ever raided, everything would be seized including benches storage etc and the gang would have to start their lab up again in a different location. Thus why there is many labs around the map which can be rented out. It makes sense for the gang not to halt the operation but to continue in a different place.
-ideas for activities that don't require payment, just pure enjoyment.
Just to explain these a bit, when people do something that they enjoy, and find it easy to get into they will tend to stick around and do it more. Leaderboards and past event results tend to motivate people a lot when they see their name on. Not all these jobs would require one but it would definitely be something that people would appreciate to see in the game.
(1) Racing
We already have a massive racing scene on the server, to make it even more exciting, I would really like to see the app. The features I'd like to see are:
-let organizers create their own tracks
-lap record for saved tracks and car used (like a leaderboard of top 10 fastest times) can be based off of classes that were recently implemented.
-checkpoints on the mini-map so we can start doing harder races
-current lap time
-position
Nitro would be a great addition to get that extra speed off the corners. Supply could be controlled by a group of underground racers or perhaps Aztecas? pog
(2) Karting
A group of people could organize a kart race. They would be brought to a different instance like Le Mans track is with a preloaded kart track and just smash away a few laps. Like in racing the karting would include:
-lap record (leaderboards)
-current lap time
-position
-checkpoints
Can just be an instance for now where people get the free roam and organize their own races eventually adding the leaderboards checkpoints etc.
(3) F1 Weekend
Throughout the entire week, people would be able to go to the Le Mans track spawning in an f1 car and be able to set fastest laps. Top 20 fastest drivers that week would race in the Sunday Grand Prix. Based on the set times that would be the starting grid for the Sunday race.
(4) Paintballing
Add a paintball course where players can fight it out for the rank 1 spot. We could have a variety of different events like 1v1s 2v2s 3v3s etc. The winners would be announced in the Los Santos News Paper (Coming next)
(5) Newspaper
Newspaper ran by Weazel News or other select parties who would like to participate go out and look for breaking stories throughout Los Santos. Place different news stands around the server where players can view daily news.
(6) Street Vendors
Los Santos Street market where players can go and sell goods either crafted by them or found around Los Santos. They can rent a tent, make a list of available goods and start selling.
(7) Story Pages
Find old pages and memorabilia from past events that happened in Los Santos. Let players write old stories from the beginning of the server and how the server has changed overtime. Best stories will be added to the game and can be found around the area where the event happened.
(8) Player Cards
Players change all the time, allow players to collect trading cards by different means of all the popular characters currently on the server. Once the character stops playing you can no longer find that card (Or make a new rotation of cards every once in a while). Allow players to exchange and buy cards from each other and save them in their LSDEX.
Hope I put some things mentioned into perspective and explained how I feel about a few things. Thanks for reading,
Stve.
-Rewarding players for good RP
People get rewarded for good RP. I agree that people should receive some sort of reward for bringing enjoyment to the players but it's very rare to happen. People who come in with great stories, interesting backgrounds and have unique characters, seem to be ignored. Very small portion of these players tend to receive anything at all if lucky. It would be incredible if the dev team also had a look at people who are good at what they do for eg. good racers, street vendors (people selling tacos and stuff) etc. Even if you're not the most amazing RPer out there but you're good at what you do, these people should receive some sort of little trinket.
Giving people small bits and pieces not only encourages them to do even better in the future but it really solidifies who they are on the server. This should be just as important as developing other parts of the server. This is what makes the good people stay around and if this is how they wanna progress, stuff like this shouldn't be ignored. After all, the community is what runs this server and if peoples efforts get ignored, they tend to get demotivated. They can only roleplay so much with imaginary items or stuff that they don't have before it gets boring.
Stuff can be given easily and same as that, it can easily be taken away so I don't see how this is something that needs to be thought 100 times through before it's given. Stuff like this won't change the balance of the server if anything, it would encourage a lot of the players to strive to do better and commit to their characters path.
-Money
When you come into the server, majority of the player base come in with the intention of making bank, becoming your average millionaire, buying cars, weapons and business you name it. I can't lie, I was the same when I came into the server but hey, here we are. As cringe as it sounds, with my friends at the start, we used to have competitions between ourselves on who can make the most money by trucking for the day, crazy right?. The dev team has spent a lot of time trying to adjust prices of existing jobs to fit the economy, increasing decreasing prices but you will never find a good balance especially on a server that doesn't go through resets etc.
You will never change the economy. Think of it this way, people that have been here a long time and those who were around at the time, got the businesses. Great, good for them. Adding more businesses won't make the place any better. If anything you're gonna encourage more people to only care about money by grinding all the time and avoiding RP because they are so tunnel-visioned on getting the thing they want. I feel the server itself pushes people to grind, they have guides on the wiki on how to do x job, how to get starter money, where to grow weed, how to mine all that shit (all money related).
Your average joe IRL can take pride in many other things they do and they enjoy on the daily, I play games not to make money, but because I enjoy it. The server when introducing new players into the world should have the same approach and it should give people the same idea when progressing through their characters story (I will throw in a few ideas down below in the thread later). Just to quickly mention too, people love things that are rare and not many people have, that's why often than not we see players fighting to own a rare that's 1/2 in the city etc. This can be expanded to other activities that also allow you to gain other rare items that nobody will have.
Realistically not everyone is gonna be a millionaire, common knowledge of course but people pursue it because the server itself doesn't have a lot of other avenues that people can explore. Before anyone tells me "oh just RP your way around the server and make your own fun", I agree with that statement to an extent. Believe it or not, some people are more imaginative than others. We have a bunch of great and different personalities on the server and that's what makes it unique. Some people require direction to be pointed in and some people just come up with something new everyday, it's normal, it's life.
We play games for the same common reason and that is to have fun. People have fun in different ways and some people here have to understand that.
Summing it up, everything you do on the server grants you money and maybe that's where things start going sideways a little bit.
-Weapons
Everybody wants weapons, they relocate in a new place in England, and instead of looking for a job or friends they look for weapons how to craft them and how to make bank. Crafting of guns should never be held behind your average civ and it should never be done at public bench. It doesn't make sense that an average civ can craft pistol parts because he has the materials to make a fully functioning firearm, he has no knowledge of how to put it together.
When people focus on grinding they forget about roleplay. If you interfere with their grind you're gonna get stabbed. Mines are a prime example, you mess with someone try to steal their ores, you're getting killed. It's not being opportunistic or looking for a fun time, all you get is poor RP. (other than that, what normal person walks into a mine to steal ore from miners? xd).
Fair enough, you grind for materials, you craft the parts you make the gun. You get a sense of progression but crafting a single gun takes hours. These hours can be put to other, more exciting parts of roleplay e.g. (meeting new people). Not only you're making yourself a story but you're also progressing someone else' story by meeting you.
Here is where the hate comes in and the best way to do this is to remove the mines completely. Being part of the apostles, I remember having a bunch of fun back in the day, when 10 of us would go down and just grind it out. It was a great bonding experience, we got to know each other while becoming best friends on the way, but that was only part of the journey. There is many other ways to do that, however we'd kill 2 birds with one stone (We'd grind for hours to make weapons + get to know each other).
If we didn't go mining and we didn't make those weapons we wouldn't progress as much as we did with them. Let's not hide it every gang did/does it to feel a sense of progression but looking back at it now, grinding stupid hours for guns just to have power and acknowledgement from other people is quiet counter-intuitive in RP. Adding up the hours that turned into days of grinding could be spent elsewhere getting to know other people, however that's just how it was on the server so we followed the meta (a lot of us were new to RP and I'm sure a lot of us would have done things differently now but after all, it's a learning experience, this further proves my point of what new players do when joining RP for the first time).
RP should never be about grinding something out, it should be real life but easy mode. How to fix this issue? It may not be perfect but for gangs to progress more in the RP aspect rather than grind for items, items should be given to them. To stop the constant grind for select gangs, allow them to get a shipment of weapons per week. It doesn't have to be much:
EG:
Shipment of 10 guns a week per gang that is involved in weapon distribution.
5 Pistols
3 SMG's
2 AR's
Select various guns from each category but in the format above (5 pistols = 3 Glocks + 2 standards) etc. Too many guns? lower it even more. Make it 8 or 6 with different ratios depending on the gangs size, wealth, image etc. With Lost dealing with big firearms, make them only get AR's or SMG's sometimes a surprise sniper in the package.
This way you can still monitor how many guns make it into the server, avoiding the problem of letting players craft too many guns per week and oversaturating the market. Gangs have already worked hard to receive their turf and be wearing colors so don't make us grind twice as hard for something that is taking a lot of the RP away.
-drugs and drug runs
Acquiring drugs is a bit of hit and miss. Gangs know how the coke runs work and all the other drugs are basically out of circulation ATM as coke is king. Nobody else wants to shift different drugs other than coke and your occasional weed sellers because they can grow it themselves.
There's a few points to touch on here. Gangs don't really have real means to start wars, most of the time it's petty shit like Apostle war with the Ballas. You can tell me whatever you want but that must be the stupidest war I've had on the server.
TLDR: Apostle had alliance with Ballas, Apostle member was on Ballas turf and didn't notice a Ballas car being stolen. Ballas demanded ridiculous compensation (in the millions), Apostles refused to pay, war.
Leading me to my point of allow gangs to beef over shit that actually makes sense for eg., if 2 gangs deal the same drug and they're trying to get rid of the stock. They cross the border and try expand beyond their territory they get into beef with the other gang trying to steal to their customers, warnings/words being said and eventually war. This in my mind makes sense on why a war should happen as the gangs are crossing each other, not because of petty shit. Stands the same for weapons and everything else that's dealt illegally on the server. (Obv there's more reasons for war, this is just an example)
So how to revive drugs?
Give gangs VARIETY is the keyword here, it's been said before and I'm sure it's already been discussed but gangs need to specialize in different things.
Meth, Coke, Crack, Heroine, Weed, LSD.
Assign the drugs to gangs that deal with this stuff. Like with weapons allow them to receive a shipment of ingredients every week so they can delegate the work to their cooks and get the drugs made. Each week when they receive the shipment, they have a chance of receiving some high quality ingredients. This and weapons, is just an idea so when the gangs do get their stuff, they don't have to sit there and grind it all day. They get the product so they can move on and get into an RP scenarios faster and more often.
How to make drugs? There is a variety of different labs around the map including, weed, coke, heroine etc. They all have available open interiors, perfect to get things on the go for gangs. It would be ideal for the buildings to be owned by a company or a group of people who want to rent them out and be cautious to who they rent out the space to. If the gang is busted legal trouble would be following the gang and the owners of the building. If the gang isn't careful and the police start catching on, the building can be raided and stuff taken away.
This building cannot be used for x amount of time before the heat has gone down(ranging between 1 - 2 weeks). Allow the gangs to have upgrades inside the warehouse, allowing for better equipment which allows them to utilize higher grade ingredients and get the best purity of the drug there is. They can always use the higher grade ingredients with lower tier benches but the result wouldn't be as good as the one with higher grade tools, so like we have now Low-Medium-High Grade drugs etc.
EG:
Low tier bench + Standard ingredients = Low Quality
Low tier bench + H.Q. ingredients = Medium Quality
High tier bench + Standard ingredients = Medium Quality
High tier bench + H.Q ingredients = High Quality
Give them a goal to progress towards with potential risk of losing it all.
If the building was ever raided, everything would be seized including benches storage etc and the gang would have to start their lab up again in a different location. Thus why there is many labs around the map which can be rented out. It makes sense for the gang not to halt the operation but to continue in a different place.
-ideas for activities that don't require payment, just pure enjoyment.
Just to explain these a bit, when people do something that they enjoy, and find it easy to get into they will tend to stick around and do it more. Leaderboards and past event results tend to motivate people a lot when they see their name on. Not all these jobs would require one but it would definitely be something that people would appreciate to see in the game.
(1) Racing
We already have a massive racing scene on the server, to make it even more exciting, I would really like to see the app. The features I'd like to see are:
-let organizers create their own tracks
-lap record for saved tracks and car used (like a leaderboard of top 10 fastest times) can be based off of classes that were recently implemented.
-checkpoints on the mini-map so we can start doing harder races
-current lap time
-position
Nitro would be a great addition to get that extra speed off the corners. Supply could be controlled by a group of underground racers or perhaps Aztecas? pog
(2) Karting
A group of people could organize a kart race. They would be brought to a different instance like Le Mans track is with a preloaded kart track and just smash away a few laps. Like in racing the karting would include:
-lap record (leaderboards)
-current lap time
-position
-checkpoints
Can just be an instance for now where people get the free roam and organize their own races eventually adding the leaderboards checkpoints etc.
(3) F1 Weekend
Throughout the entire week, people would be able to go to the Le Mans track spawning in an f1 car and be able to set fastest laps. Top 20 fastest drivers that week would race in the Sunday Grand Prix. Based on the set times that would be the starting grid for the Sunday race.
(4) Paintballing
Add a paintball course where players can fight it out for the rank 1 spot. We could have a variety of different events like 1v1s 2v2s 3v3s etc. The winners would be announced in the Los Santos News Paper (Coming next)
(5) Newspaper
Newspaper ran by Weazel News or other select parties who would like to participate go out and look for breaking stories throughout Los Santos. Place different news stands around the server where players can view daily news.
(6) Street Vendors
Los Santos Street market where players can go and sell goods either crafted by them or found around Los Santos. They can rent a tent, make a list of available goods and start selling.
(7) Story Pages
Find old pages and memorabilia from past events that happened in Los Santos. Let players write old stories from the beginning of the server and how the server has changed overtime. Best stories will be added to the game and can be found around the area where the event happened.
(8) Player Cards
Players change all the time, allow players to collect trading cards by different means of all the popular characters currently on the server. Once the character stops playing you can no longer find that card (Or make a new rotation of cards every once in a while). Allow players to exchange and buy cards from each other and save them in their LSDEX.
Hope I put some things mentioned into perspective and explained how I feel about a few things. Thanks for reading,
Stve.
