MONTHLY NEWSLETTER - DECEMBER 2023
Welcome to the first newsletter of ECLIPSE Roleplay! Our goal with this newsletter is to give players a better look into our current focuses, recent changes, and a sneak peek into upcoming developments.
DEVELOPMENT
We remain committed to enhancing the overall experience by continually introducing new features, refining existing ones, and making necessary balance adjustments, always prioritizing the well-being of the community. While this year has predominantly centered around developments in criminal roleplay, it's important to note that efforts have also been directed toward implementing new features, including the revamped Character Customization menu and the introduction of fresh clothing options. We are excited to see what the new year brings in terms of development.
Below is a recap of our most recent changes, as well as a recap of notable changes/additions that were done this year.
General Updates
The user panel has received a full and extensive revamp adding previously missing features in addition to optimizing existing features. You can check it out for yourself by visiting eclipse-rp.net and logging into your account.
Criminal Updates
More public drug labs have been added, tripling the previous amount.
Added rotating public drug labs & chop shops.
“Rotating” means that out of the large pool of drug labs, only a handful of them will be active at any given time on a rotation cycle that occurs after a certain amount of time
SWAT has the ability to dismantle a lab if they find one following a criminal investigation. If a lab is dismantled, it will reappear on the next rotation cycle.
Prison times have been lowered to a maximum of 3 to 5 hours instead of the previous 5 to 8 hours.
If you are prisoned, no matter what your charges are, the maximum amount of time you can serve is 3 hours if you are able to pay your fines. If you are unable to pay the fines associated with your charges, you will serve a maximum of 5 hours. These times are down from 5 hours and 8 hours respectively.
Offline prison time has been reduced from 1 hour served per 24 offline to 1 hour served per 12 offline.
When prisoned, if you log out, your time will continue to be served, just at a significantly reduced ratio. Previously, you would only serve 1 hour of in-game time for every 24 hours logged out. Following this change, you will now serve 1 hour of in-game time for every 12 hours logged out, effectively doubling the speed at which your time is served offline.
The stamp to dollar ratio and stamp to second served ratio have both been adjusted.
When entering prison, you are granted stamps and the ability to earn stamps through a few jobs scattered throughout the prison. These stamps can be exchanged for time served or you can save them and have it exchanged for cash when your sentence is over.
Legal Updates
The Government faction has been given access to live-view CCTV cameras.
The Government faction can now see Law Enforcement and Medical faction vehicles on the radar, and they can also see Government vehicles.
Government Factions have received an F4 customization update that allows them to mod their own vehicles and choose their own weapons with many customization options.
Seasonal
Snow has been added for the month of December.
Various small bodies of water around LS have frozen over with the cold weather.
NOTABLE PAST CHANGES
As some players reading this newsletter may have not been on the server in a while, we’d like to provide information on a few updates we consider to be important information for a returning player.
Chopshop Rework
If you haven’t played the server in a good while, you may remember one of two previous chopshop methods. Looking back, it’s quite clear those were very lackluster in their execution. To remedy this, we pushed a full overhaul of the chopshop system in April of 2022. To give a brief summary of a very large update, you have to disassemble the car piece by piece using various tools you can purchase through illegal NPCs, import through a smuggler, or “acquire” from other players. You can see more details on the Development Blog outlining this update.
Gun Update Part One
Guns, gun stores, and gun customization, in general, were very barebones from the launch of the server up until we started adding attachments and playing with damage balancing. Nowadays, we have a focus on a larger, overarching gun update. Part one of this update shipped in August of this year. Within this update, we added a lot of new guns from recent and old GTA updates, a full overhaul of the gun store UI and backend, damage, as well as a complete overhaul of ammunition types, attachments, skins, and various other means of weapon customization. You can see more details on the Development Blog outlining this update.
Private Drug Labs
Depending on when you last played, you may remember private drug labs being a lucrative and relatively easy method to make large amounts of money. Throughout several updates in the past few years, we’ve tweaked private drug labs to shift player focus towards public labs to drive player-to-player interaction. In general, we want players to interact with each other rather than sit alone inside of interiors.
Action Logs
Historically, scripted actions in ECLIPSE have been either instant or timed with a small timer bar. Nowadays, that is still partially true, but we’ve added a quick-time event for a lot of actions such as lockpicking vehicles, hotwiring, and dismantling certain objects. This introduces a focus on having players be attentive to their surroundings rather than beginning a long action and tabbing out
House Robberies
Before this update, you’d have to catch a player at their house and attempt to take advantage of that situation to rob their house. There was absolutely no other way to go about gaining access without a keyholder being present. Now, we have scripted house robberies handed out to players who purchase contracts from illegal NPCs. To avoid player targeting or people being punished for simply going to sleep, these house robberies occur in a separate instance of the house than that of the owner. When inside the house, players must keep their noise level down to not wake the homeowner who is asleep. They must sneak around, perform skill checks when breaking into safes, and get out all without waking the homeowner who will sound the alarm and contact the police. The potential payout is significant, but you must hone your skills and focus to earn it.
UPCOMING UPDATES
Here is a list of updates that are coming soon to Eclipse Roleplay.
Drug Effects
In their current state, drugs leave a lot to be desired. In order to remedy this and hopefully increase player interaction, we’re going to be pushing an update that will give each drug their own special effect. These effects can range from faster running speed, reduced damage taken, or more leniency with action timers.
Smuggler Job
If you’re a long-time Eclipse player, you may remember a script from 2017 called the drug smuggler job. In an attempt to begin blossoming a better environment for solo criminals, we’re going to be revamping and pushing an update with this job.
Criminal Script Events
Players may recall some small, one-off Event Team and Faction Management events such as the weapon plane crash or the money truck raid. Soon, we hope to push an update that will add similar events on a script level to make sure that there’s always something different to focus on.
Character Customization & Clothing
Many of our players have been interested in the sneak peeks provided by our new Character Customization system. We have been working tirelessly to get this system implemented and the clothes that our modding team has been working on, at the same time.
COMMUNITY EVENTS
Events are what thrive our community, whether it's a community-run event hosted by our Event Team or an event hosted by one of our many creative community members.
This month, our Event Team is hosting a Christmas Market on the 17th of December at 8 PM UTC. Want to host your booth at this event? Sign up at tinyurl.com/mistlemas!
Player-run events help the in-game culture develop, maintain a healthy sense of community, and drive new players to interact with people. We’d like to show our appreciation for their efforts by highlighting some of the player-run events happening this month.
#WeazelWinter Photo Contest
The Lust Drop Strip Club
DOC’s Winter Wonderland
Bayview’s Winter Ice Karting
IC INSIDER
Los Santos Motorcycle Club
As one of the first official civilian factions, Los Santos Motorcycle Club, colloquially known as LSMC, has been on the server for a long time. So long, that they’ll be celebrating their 4th anniversary on Monday, December 11th! Be sure to ping them in Discord and wish them another 4 years of success.
Los Santos Customs
Following the departure of the Los Santos Customs CEO in June, a suitable candidate has been found and appointed. Please join us in welcoming Mr. Liam Binnie as the new CEO of Los Santos Customs! You can read more about this on the Eclipse Government Website.
Los Santos Police Department
Many players have a strong dedication to their characters and show it through hours worked, actions performed, and general effort put towards furthering the roleplay capabilities of their factions. LSPD recently held their 2023 Awards Ceremony to congratulate these characters and, in turn, the players behind them. You can read more about this on the Eclipse Government Website.
GENERAL COMMUNITY UPDATES
Core Rule Changes
After a community meeting hosted by one of the server’s founders, we received a lot of feedback from all parts of our community. Most notably, we received several points of feedback about our deathmatching rules and the perceived restrictions imposed by them. From the feedback, we’ve understood that this can lead to stale, inorganic, and “checklist” feeling interactions where attacking a rival gang member feels more like a scripted event rather than an immersive, fun situation for those involved. Previously, the rule required proper IC motive in addition to interaction. Now, it requires IC motive and/or interaction. Your motive may involve gang conflicts, recent prior conflict with that player, or them actively posing a hostile threat to your allies. The interaction may be as simple as a robbery gone wrong, a report of a serious crime to the police, or a small situation that escalated into something greater. We will continue to monitor player interactions following this change to ensure its intentions have been understood.
Additionally, we’ve added a “purpose” section alongside the deathmatching rule in hopes of conveying our intentions with this rule instead of leaving it open to interpretation. You can view these changes in our Eclipse Server Rules Changelog and ask in our Discord server for further clarification.
Winter Fun!
An unprecedented cold front has swept the state and caused snowfall in Los Santos! In addition to this snowfall, smaller bodies of water seem to have frozen over. Due to these immense weather changes to the map, we’ve enacted our Snow Rules once again!
With the snow rules, you can expect a good few changes in cosmetics and playstyle. As it’s freezing outside, we’re expecting players to be roleplaying their environment correctly by dressing appropriate for the weather. In addition to your character dressing appropriately for the weather, so should their vehicles! As the roads are icy, slushy, and generally provide less traction, your vehicles should be both appropriate to these hazardous conditions and have snow tires (off-road tires) on them to maintain some semblance of realism. That being said, snow tires aren’t glue traps! Players should still be maintaining realistic driving for the conditions around them.
With your car tires expected to interact with the snow, why can’t your character? Well, we’ve got some good news! Grab hold of some snow on the ground to make some snowballs and toss ‘em at your friends, enemies, and random police cadets on the street! To do this, simply type “/getsnowball” into the chat when standing outside in the snow. Just know that some people may not particularly enjoy having snowballs thrown at them, and as such, your actions may come with consequences!
We hope that everyone enjoys the festive environment and new RP opportunities they provide.
VIDEO CONTESTS
Every month, we host a video contest on our Discord server where players can submit their videos by that contest’s theme for a chance to win free credits! For November, we had the theme of “Social Events” to show off events like parties, player assemblies, and general interactions of players on the server.
This month, the theme is “ERCP Rewind.” As the year is closing out, our aim with this theme is to show off a recap of player experiences in Eclipse from 2023. You can find more information about this theme and its rules in our aforementioned Discord server by reading the latest post from aleks in the #video-contests channel.
Below, you can see videos from our winners from our previous video contest!
1st Place - bigdaddyreggal
[ECRP] SWAT raid went wild!
2nd Place - hydromac
Twilight - Big Murph & Kane [ECRP]
3rd Place - amica
[ECRP] Grand Opening day of Mosley's Lowrider Tuning GST
