Doctor_Diddler

Considering my previous post is more relevant here (and I reiterate, I had no reason to believe any thread about crim RP would be coming since it's never been asked - part of the problem thjat), I'll do some reposting and add on: I honestly think it would be better if some gangs were just persistent and your character were forced to stay there. I know this is an RP-light server, but being able to move your assets (like guns you own, for example) to another faction is what enabled a few mega-gangs to dominate in warfare and make it so consistent criminals end up going from local latino street gang to italian gangster. There is no gang identity. The RP aspect is limited to wearing the same colors while you drive around in multi-million dollar cars. I think at this point an asset wipe is necessary and care should be put in place to dramatically slow power creep down. I know the credit sales were a big money maker but they also dramatically fucked the meta with the inclusion of cars like the niobe. The inclusion of NPC cars will put less emphasis on speed over driving. Use it. There's nothing to do except farm assets. Many of the crim systems do not promote conflict with other gangs at all. This is something even GTAO mastered - the biggest strength of a server is interaction between people. Comped drops are the closest we get to inter-faction conflict and other gangs are almost never involved. Drugs. Part of the reason why the taser-from-car epidemic started was steroid abuse. People will flagrantly avoid firearms in their face and just down every drug in their pocket so they can outrun everyone, which makes them an extreme liability to not knock out if they keep resisting arrest because you have no chance at catching them. LEO has no equivalent, so if you want to promote asymmetrical but balanced gameplay, there has to be some answer other than "lol good luck". This is most noticeable when it comes to shooting. 100 AP + drugs is just barely under 150AP (reserved for SWAT + special detective/STAFF outfits) and no drugs, along with zero recoil. With a weapon that deals more damage like the heavy rifle, crims have a flat out advantage in foot combat. especially against the schmucks not yet in a division. Fortunately, law enforcement had an answer to mass gang attacks; gunship nevermind, how about you just try hoping you never get into a gunfight. Hopes and dreams don't make balance and they certainly don't make it more fun for anyone but the people that log in once a day in the ass-end of the night to ambush cops. Ditching your expensive car to go swimming because you know you can easily dodge a chase is stupid for obvious reasons. Either increase the impound price (not recommended as everyone would suffer) or stop water pursuits (which have their place). Of course, I have a third option here. Remove reports replacing assets. This has created the absolute fucking worst type of people who will report every interaction and mistake to ensure they don't lose their guns. Tell them to kick rocks, instead. The admin oversight on this server won't be feasible if the server is more successful, so you may as well get used to it for anything but bugs and obvious cheaters. Create more structured paths into criminal RP. As I mentioned in my last post on the LEO topic, it's impossible to tell how you're supposed to start a fresh crim character without asking a bunch of people, which is stupid prima facia; "Hello, where can I go to commit crimes?" The only MMORPG dumb enough to try and introduce mechanics with zero oversight was Fallout 76, and they walked that back quickly when it became obvious having nothing but interaction with other people was not suitable to teaching. This could be a single text message upon making a character to visit 3 NPC's that give basic rundowns of LEO, CIV, and Crim activities. You want to keep it all IC. Great. Nobody is going to sit down and explain that you need to go to a car chop at Chiliad and then sell your parts to certain NPC's unless they like you, which they won't because you're new. Interact more with crims. If you're going to run a cartel and try to control other factions through imports, why not take advantage? The way it's currently set up, to my understanding, is that gangs and illegal factions are forced to do the same things like protect turf, rob banks, etc. to maintain power. That's stupid. The RP restrictions keep more creative and interesting endeavors from happening. Let me give you an example: After reading my favorite nonfiction mob tales, I decide to create a faction modeled after Murder, inc. We don't kill cops, we stay out of the limelight, and we don't protect turf. Our only turf is a grubby office building front. We take contracts from gangs and serve as mercenaries in wars but we don't get into fights ourselves. It is the opinion of this server that this faction is functionally worthless. So are racing gangs. Want a break from PVP? How about more PVP? Server events. Holy fuck this seems so obvious. You could take naked inspiration from GTAO. Right now events are super rare and only offered by high tier staff which means even good ideas get filtered through bureaucracy. I know I complained about PVP a second ago but just as an example of an event I proposed once: Humane has begun a limited-trial steroid in very small numbers that is rumored to increase run speed (more than normal ones or something - it doesn't really matter). I, shady criminal man, want that drug so we can try to duplicate it. Every crim in the city is alerted to the transport and everyone converges on it. If you have it, you can choose to keep it or sell it. Smaller gangs can get more frequent events while larger ones get less useful awards to keep it more balanced between the gangs. One gang getting a little too strong? Now there's a bounty out on them coming from our shadowy underlords. Damn the possibilities are endless. It can't be that hard to think of something if I can just spit them out so easily. Disincentivize large-scale shootouts. Idk if Fivem will fix this, but the server flat out can't handle giant, 12v12 confliots. It literally c0's everyone involved, so they shouldn't be encouraged. While I'm on the subject, just remove running into properties for gunfights. It only encourages script abuse because everyone puts their gun on their back upon spawning in, leading to one-sided shootouts with no counterplay. This is a screenshot of a raid I wasn't involved in and I drew shitty paint.net boxes onto it to show just how you could easily abuse the script to never lose a fight again. Add in a door to the left and it becomes an easy killbox. We run in and hide and my modern art wood furniture blocks both your bullets and your eyesight while I freely shoot your legs. The only reason this doesn't happen is because nobody has really tried it, but the problem with it is obvious. I'll probably have more later.

You want the real answer? The ultimate root of all the problems? It's a big, gaping wound that has been papered over with decaying gauze and bandage for years; there is absolutely no coherent direction for the server from the top down on how, philosophically, interactions are meant to go. Do you want this to be a crim-focused server where most of your interactions involve overcoming the police and getting away with constant crime? Great. You have babied-down GTAO with slightly less PVP. You may as well delete GOV, SD, and PD and just re-institute the stupid NPC cop system so people only rarely lose their things in the face of an unending but predictable force that will lose them immediately if they drive into a car mod shop. You can play Rockstar and spawn in FIB agents or whatever. Do you want this to be the cops and robbers server it's been occasionally trying to be? Well buckle up, I've got some ideas: Server should be focused on trying to make gang warfare the ultimate focus of crim gameplay outside of isolated crime. Sooo much dev time has been wasted on the faction war system that was shuttered when it was realized it was horrifically implemented (see: Pulling and then leaving ATM's, robbing your own bank so the other faction can't) and short-sighted. Wars become extremely lopsided affairs and turn into absolute jokes where one side is getting butchered by the other helplessly because the server has congregated around a small number of gangs that dominate everything. Nobody wants to start a small street gang on their own - why bother? You can't do jack shit. So any newcomer just ends up in the same factions inorganically, of which a select few have a massive advantage that makes inter-gang fighting trivial. This, is turn, means that gangs start fighting the police instead. Which brings me to my next point; there shouldn't be giant, city-spanning wars with law enforcement. So many rules are put into place from a faction-side because it's untenable without them. In a balanced system, cops should be something everyone wants to avoid altogether because they serve as the endpoint for supplies like drugs, guns, armor, etc. Police do not want your drug lab to make drugs, they want to shut it down. Fighting for a drug lab is a driver of crim rp and warfare. fighting with police is a one-time affair that ends in complete wipeout for one side or the other. You can't build a functioning system on one faction getting repeatedly wiped out entirely in the span of 30 minutes - who wants to keep RPing after they got slaughtered and now can't go anywhere in the city without getting hounded? Other gangs SHOULD be the primary conflict driver between gangs. Not police. If the server had more people, this would likely be less of a problem, but we can't fix the past. Enough one-sided threads like this one. I noticed despite being, in the consensus approximation, a cops-and-robbers server with a sprinkle of civ RP, there's never any asking LEO players what they would like to see. As I mentioned above, LEO's act as the server's impartial asset-deleters. You will have a guaranteed negative experience getting caught and having your assets seized - that is the nature of their role. In turn, this causes people to take their frustration out by repeatedly suggesting that whatever they THINK caused them to get caught is at fault, even if it wasn't to play at all. Gunships have been made a worthless triviality but there are still complaints about it on this thread. Does that tell you that it's still a problem, or that maybe the intiial estimation was wrong and that maybe the complaints were unjustified? Of course the inclination is to rule on the former, as it always seems to be. Police cars have gone from infinitely-spawning to fleet vehicles with their own consistent fuel and inventory tracking and yet no impact has been felt whatsoever. Attempts to make police cars even more worthless by giving each officer their own personal car have been repeatedly denied by LFM, even when people are spinning it faction-side as a good thing. So nobody is happy with the result, and everyone just has to live with it. Are we going to review the complaint and see if it was ultimately justified given that nothing has changed? No, never. There could be an equal thread asking LEO players within the next 5 minutes but I have no reason to expect that considering it has never happened before. Rather than try to see the issue in totality, we instead get suggestions for how to fuck the LEO experience because more complaints are lobbed towards them than vice versa. On top of that, suggestions for how to nerf LEO is a direct democracy while any pushback is an aristocracy - we ask everyone how they want to see LEO's changed and ask 5-10 people of faction leadership if they can offer enough pushback to prevent another scalp in the LEO arsenal from being taken. This is a kangaroo court, not an impartial investigation. Why are you asking a mob of people who are inherently inclined one way their opinion and then asking the smaller group of LEO players how they'd best like to be bent over a barrel? You're not going to get balance that way, you're just going to make everyone unhappy. You have here a bunch of guys encircling a police car of some lowly PD peon. Taken at its word, these fellows may very well have just wanted to fuck around, but from PD's perspective, what are you meant to do here? Is it not legitimate concern for your life when a group of gang members trap you in place with their cars that warrants a massive response? Are you supposed to just do nothing and hope they spare you? There are numerous examples of criminals hunting down police for fun (more on that later), so how can you take that chance? The only way an LEO player could know he was in no danger here was to have admin powers and know every character here as well as their mental state, the gang's general demeanor, and the entire stakes of the situation (i.e. are you chasing someone with guns in the car?). This is obviously impossible, so from the criminal perspective it will look like "win mentality" every time. I've been in chases that were 2 and a half hours long, featured upwards of 6 meta-car swaps, and as soon as the person stalled their car, they jumped out and ran and then complained that being tazed was "W cop mentality". I have literally no way of knowing whether the next chase will be 5 minutes or 50, and putting the emphasis on me to do so is completely unjustifiable. That's why you can expect people to react a certain way - they've been conditioned to do so and have no way of knowing whether or not the response is appropriate. I have a personal rule about not deploying spikes or authorizing them before 5 minutes into a chase, but you wouldn't know about that, because you didn't ask, and never have. I'm going off-topic in this thread to provide that information, because otherwise it would just be accepted that no such provisions exist for anyone (and some are codified into rule in these factions). So it will always seem like a win mentality. If there are winners and losers, there will be competitors. Even if, in every situation, all parties "win" (such as a consolation prize), people will inevitably compete to receive the best reward. This is human nature. You can't beat it out of people, or legislate it away. It will always be there, and it is what keeps people coming back to the server. I am so tired of the server-side criminalization of being frankly more clever than the people you're trying to go up against, and it goes both ways. I saw this report a few months ago and frankly, it made my blood boil a little. You have a guy try to end a pursuit by taking advantage of a bottleneck and getting an admin punishment for "forcing a pursuit to end like this, with no other way out other than to ram into and stall their own vehicle whilst putting your own life in danger, is not realistic or acceptable". Anyways, here's an unrealistic response. If people are going to do stupid things, there needs to be alignment in staff that they will win stupid prizes. Rather than try to punish LEO's for trying to use a helicopter to end massive gang fights (that crash everyone in the vicinity anyways, so why are we even encouraging them to continue???), why is the onus not on the people trying to engage with the state in a war between heavily-armored police and what should theoretically be street roughs? Why is it just accepted that having a helicopter over a bank heist is unfair when the occupants of said bank opted to sit and parley with the police because they want to try having a hostage, giving police time to spin up a helicopter? Hello, consequences of my actions, I don't believe we've met. Seems to me that the server's primary RP export is PVP but it's not curated so we're stuck in a middle ground of forcing everyone to hold back rather than engage in the kind of "roleplay" that the server is apparently trying to create. While I'm at it, gangs shouldn't be able to team up to fight the police realistically ever unless they were already allied beforehand. Bloods and crips would flee the sight of police cars, not try to team up with their blood-feud enemies in hopes of killing an entire department. It's stupid and feeds into the problem by forcing LEO's to need more heavy weaponry in case the situation comes up (which it was - almost daily at points with the ambushes) because our current ruleset allows criminals to blindly kill anyone on duty, even if they're NLR'd or uninvolved. Obviously, this goes for gangs and people that just so happen to be wearing some gang's colors, too. You know what happens when gangs get out of hand in real life? The national guard is called in and APC's, heavy armor, gunships, etc. show up and end the thread by any means necessary. That's not a thing on this server, so there's no incentive to not just gang up with 8 people and try to gank LEO's. There's a lot of fixes for this, but if you want to be simple you could just enable NLR'd players to come back as national guardsmen and wipe the floor with gang members until they give up. Naturally, that would bring out a lot of "win mentality" out of gang members (also known as "not wanting to lose for no reason"), so it won't happen. Perhaps it won't happen for good reason, but leaving the problem unsolved isn't helping, either. RP in this server is focused on interpersonal interactions with minimal script support and little admin supervision, but there's almost no reason to interact with other people. LEO's have it built in because they stop crimes and so have to respond to any calls, but crims primarily interact by fighting over the same resource or chance meetings on the street. Why is there no focus on trying to funnel people into interacting with anyone but police? Why are so many efforts devoted to keeping the small and obviously-dwindling community already present together? It's clear that powercreep has infested the server with supercars and gangs with arms enough for a small country but any talk of an asset wipe is entirely off the table. Why? What good is your decked-out S95 when you'll only ever see 7 people total in public because the server population is extremely low? This isn't COVID season. You have to work to attract people, now. If the new player experience sucks (and it does - with no guides and everything reliant on other people telling you how to do something entirely in-game, you'll have no idea where to go or how to make money), you won't attract or keep people. I've been on the server since 2023. Made a new crim character a few months ago. Had no fucking clue how to gain experience in "criminal". Still don't know where to find the guy to break into houses since I haven't seen him since that update launched and can't remember where he is. Had to ask around for the back-alley doctor that heals you and despite 3 people genuinely trying to help me, 2 of them gave me locations they sincerely thought were accurate but were wrong. Of course, I only knew he existed because I have an LEO character and thousands of hours. Is this an LEO-relevant complaint? Not really, but I've been writing this shit for the better part of an hour and I needed to get off my chest how directionless the vanilla, no-friends-on-the-server experience is. Most of the wiki isn't even written and what is is largely outdated.

You seem to have missed this part, so I quoted it for you: If, hypothetically, this was implemented and you had the option of either a full ic refund or keeping all the mods but knowing they would be illegal, what would your objection be?

Do you think the server would be better or worse if you could pull out a credit card and purchase a minigun on the spot?

I was thinking as well recently that this could also be molded into community events, such as a server staff-initiated group of supercars racing through the city, or being transported by a truck as if purchased by some bigshot and imported from overseas. Stealing it will cause a lot of ruckus but could reward some high tier parts if you can manage to get away and chop them. Throw in some news coverage, and suddenly everyone might be fighting over a single car a la GTAO's lobby events.

The higher you climb in a faction, especially a major one with a lot of perks (like PD), the more you need a filter of some kind to dig through all the irrelevant details. For example, we have something like 7 uniforms devoted to traffic enforcement. They're nice to have for RP reasons (like a rain coat) but when it's not raining, that becomes an issue. +1

You know this got me thinking - who's to say some of these car materials couldn't also be found rarely from chopping cars? Or perhaps guaranteed if you chop a more expensive car that has them installed, such as someone else's supercar?

So the big problem around town is that every gang, regardless of origin, is driving around $6M supercars and electric protoype cars like the La Co... well you know what it is. Not to mention, the entire meta revolves around cars that essentially accelerate the fastest, with every other type of car that can go fast but are slow to accelerate basically being relegated. My proposal is that cars will start with their baseline and then the mods that actually turn them into meta cars - like the HSW upgrade - are the result of underground modding scenes adding illegally obtained and illegal-to-own parts. You can still own your incredible hihg speed electric 240 super car, but unfortunately it now poses an additional risk; if you're caught, or you dump it, you're about to lose those parts. That's right! Lose them! When cars are impounded, LEO's will need to check for illegal car modifications, which they can miss. However, if they catch them, they can confiscate them, which lowers the vehicle's stats unless the car is re-modded. These car parts could be potentially obtained through things like the illegal trucking shipments or drops. Perhaps you could peruse parts on those laptops that are basically useless? A new dark mode app? Eh? Finally, Benny's mechanics can be criminals while on duty! The benefit is simple; it shifts the "meta" to focus more on picking and choosing your battles as well as adding potential for underground illegal mod shops (maybe an addition to chop shops?). More RP server wide with more cars getting the spotlight; for example, while a niobe might hit 240 easily, its mods might be far more expensive than, say, a vigero which is a significantly more common car in real life. With a tiered car part system to boot, suddenly every bank robbery becomes significantly more tactical and fun for all parties. Suddenly rolling out with your expensive monstrociti to a store robbery doesn't sound like a good proposition - maybe take a caracara or somesuch. Now, suddenly the width of usable vehicles becomes far more expansive, RP-friendly, and immersive. Police chases no longer end in 5 consecutive vehicle swaps after dumping your net worth at the pier to go for a swim. Gangs whose lore is being a local street gang will have more opportunity to drive more appropriate cars rather than whatever hits 240 the fastest. You want more RP on the server? Well brother, we're gonna have RP for days. You're going to have a thriving underground modding scene complete. You're going to have LEO's RPing taking cars apart. You're going to have interactions based on simply retrieving the car parts and fighting over which gang might get the upgraded pistons or whatever. The fun never ends, truly. Why would I support this when it means I wasted all my money on an HSW only to have it now be illegal? I think this could easily be solved with a buyback program. After all, it would be unfair to criminalize everyone who had one installed prior to it becoming illegal. Where there's a will, there's a way. Should this apply to every vehicle? I don't necessarily think so. I don't think anything would be significantly improved by, say, removing turbo mods from a packer or mule or something - their primary purposes is essentially just bulk storage and they aren't very fast to begin with. Perhaps something to be looked at if this suggestion is ever accepted, such as if pounders become the new battering rams.

+1 Just hope crims would use this more often. Don't feel like attracting too much PD attention? Just beat each other with bats! Has anyone ever seen brain damage? No? Well then stop worrying!

When suggesting things like "PD should get their cruisers fixed", you're only really considering it from the perspective on how to put the thumbscrews to PD. Why, exactly, shouldn't smaller gangs be forced underground? Law enforcement represents the state's just monopoly on violence to preserve order. If you want to flagrantly break that order, prepare to have the arm of the state descend upon you. If you're small time - act like it. You surrender peacefully and serve less time. You avoid police attention. You don't have the resources to wage war, so you keep a low profile. Maybe instead of trying to flee in a doomed evasion, you just bite it and save yourself the time. It is horrifically unrealistic to have cars doing 240 in the city, or have, say, OTF literally killing almost every cop in the entire city without the national guard descending in. LEO'S just adapt to the crim meta. If every chase was a warrener, you'd see more caracaras and staniers. PD has to be able to keep up with the likes of Niobes, kamachos, drags, etc. I love the caracara, but it's so slow that you're basically inviting anyone you pull over to laugh at you while they drive away. I love the light enhanced Stanier, but I'm not going to even entertain pulling over a drag with it. You want less meta choices? Easy fix - lower the speed cap. I will happily oblige.

Rrrr

Removal

So this is a suggestion that is twofold; 1. Add an item like a toolbox available for purchase and re-usable (because getting minor damage is a frequent occurence and charging for something this minor every single time is just cruel) that can be used to buff out cosmetic damage/fix windows. Look, let's be honest; nobody goes to the mechanic to pay $500 just to have their windows fixed. When you log out for the day, it'll just be fixed when you come back anyways. I've had times where I strive to drive carefully just to keep my ride pristine only to find that during my brief trip to a convenience store, my car vibrated so hard thanks to server lag that all the windows and both headlights are broken. The amount of cars I see driving around with a broken windshield is obscene and unrealistic. 2. Add a "clean car" functionality to the microfiber cloth. As far as I can tell the only use for it is to clean fingerprints? Giving it a one-use car clean adds another reason to buy one and lets you pick and choose when you want to spruce up your car's look. The dirt-caked wheel wells looks awesome on a semi barreling down the highway, but it just looks out of place on somebody's day-old Zentorno. I know people have asked about a car wash but if we're not getting this, this makes for a good alternative. Plus, if you wanted to be an enterprising but awful person, you could buy up all the microfiber cloths and offer to clean cars for a profit.

Is this where we're doing them all? Okay. Let me try my hand. 1. Pay people a small amount from the city (say, $50) to report bodies. 2. Advertise the coroner number noting that you're doing your part at a citizen AND you'll get paid. 3. AI generate some dead bodies in secluded places (i.e. say North point at Paleto, the dock where Devin Weston was pushed into an early grave, the humane labs parking lot, Davis quarry, etc.) 4. Have those AI generated bodies "anonymously reported" like the trucker order list. 5. Add coroner drop offs to major hospitals to increase interaction with LSEMS staff and add potential for more RP experiences. 6. Maybe emphasize the job every October for spooky month? You know, increased payout, some crazy stuff happening like really grisly scenes or something. Hell, you could include those normally as a rare spawn to create intrigue. You go out for a routune mission and find a body nailed to a wall or something.

I think we can circumvent the whole "nobody knows how to get a coroner -> coroner doesn't get work" thing if we paid people for finding bodies and then advertised that. Have it be a small amount to avoid abuse (like $50) but it incentivizes the behavior. ICly this obviously makes sense and oocly it makes people want to report them. I'm thinking addiitonally it can publically credit people so that if you've just shot someone you may want to think twice about reporting a body and profiting off of a drive-by. With that in mind, you could make generated bodies "reported anonymously". Oh, and additionally I think it'd be useful to have coroners travel to lesser-used roads like say North point at Paleto, the dock where Devin Weston was pushed into an early grave, the humane labs parking lot, Davis quarry, etc. to generate traffic to those areas. This also makes sense because if you're going to dump a body, you're obviously going to do it in secluded places.

I mostly roll by Doctor Diddler outside of a few platforms with draconian speech regulations. I've got essentially 10 years of RP experience on other... games? Mostly Runescape, so none of this stuff is majorly new to me. From my experience so far it looks like my biggest hurdle will be getting in-game experience and networking, because for some reason my microphone just will not work with RageMP. Hope to see you all around.