Osborn

Thank you for the appreciation, we are really trying our best

Staff in this community, including me, are all volunteers. Judging from monthly activity reviews from both support and admin staff, nearly everyone is doing a great job. There are probably many players out there who have the potential to become staff, including our Support Staff. However, we must always maintain a focus on quality. Otherwise, your next thread (not referring to you specifically) will be about poor quality. The process to join the administration team is quite rigorous, as it ensures that we recruit for quality rather than quantity. For the quantity aspect, we frequently recruit new Moderators from the Support Staff and occasionally reinstate former staff members. We will continue to ensure that our team is staffed in all time zones as needed. However, as others have pointed out, we have a reporting system on the forums for situations where it is impossible for a staff member to assist you in-game. There can be various reasons why you are not receiving help in-game: 1) There may be a high number of reports, 2) All staff members could be occupied with other reports, 3) There might be a limited number of staff members in-game who are engaged in an ongoing role-playing scenario, or 4) There could be a Conflict of Interest preventing the in-game staff members from addressing your report. Regardless of the reason(s), the forum report system serves as a solution to address issue 1 and beyond. I was also part of managing a community on SA-MP, among others, within the current staff team. It was not an experience that we want our staff members to go through. We had literal shifts and required staff to sign up for specific hours, being on constant admin duty while also being volunteers and not being paid. The result was a poor-quality staff team, as good staff members overworked themselves, eventually leaving. Consequently, we had to constantly recruit new admins to meet the quantity requirements. But even then, on SA-MP, we had a forum report system on both NG-RP and LS-RP, as not all situations could be resolved in-game. Nearly if not all other role-play communities, adopt a forum report system in addition to the in-game report system. I also feel it is unfair for you to call our system "disjointed" not having been a part of it. We have an extensive recruitment system, vetting, and training process that starts from the day that you join and becomes Support Staff. Just because you can't always get the help you deserve in-game, it does not mean that we're lacking staff, or that our staff team is somehow of poor quality. Perhaps if we had not offered other solutions to get your issue(s) addressed, then your assessment would've been fair, but in this case, it isn't. Hopefully, that answers your concerns!

Hello, the server and community are not going up for sale nor is it something you can purchase! Thanks for being enthusiastic about our community, however, we want it to become better just as much as anyone else! The topic of purchasing our community is obviously not a discussion to be held, hence why it's being locked. - Osborn.

Hello. Our Conflict of Interest rule was carefully created and modified over time to ensure that players can receive the best assistance that they deserve. It was not created so that staff members can avoid doing staff work for convenience. If you report a player in for example the LSPD, the COI rule intends to ensure that you get a more senior staff member (e.g. Administrator) to review your report or a staff member with no connection to the LSPD so that you get a thorough investigation from someone who can we make sure will approach the situation with full impartiality and no bias. While we believe all of our staff can be impartial and unbias, human psychology plays a large role. Yes, the COI rule can result in you having to post a forum report for your in-game issue, but this is not to inconvenience you, this is to make sure that you get the best experience possible having your situation looked at. Our Conflict of Interest rule isn't something that we're interested in removing or loosening up, it is there for the community.

Hey Matthew Hope you're doing alright!

Hello, I am going to go ahead and close this as it's not really a discussion to be had. As Kazji said, it's not our business what people do with their time or with their lives in general, if someone wants to play for an entire day, that's their right. Whether or not that's good for their health, that is something that they have to consider and work with themselves, our server is simply available to them, just as much as any other game is available at any time of the day. You could for example play GTA Online for 24 hours straight if you wanted to. As for the other points; anyone on our server can grind something out if they choose to; which has been highlighted quite well by Pazz! Nonetheless, I appreciate showing care for other players' well-being!

Hello, we have been trying to expedite a development review of VIP jail/prison time discount when players are already in jail or prison. It should hopefully be reviewed and fixed if there is an issue.

@MarcoD

SD member count is skewed as we've removed our hour requirement with respect for people's mental health, given the lack of activity up north most hours of the day. However, despite having the number of people on paper, we tend to have 5-8 on duty at most hours of the day, it gets especially bad towards the later hours. PD/SD is an RP service meant to be available 24/7 for ALL players, not just one group or one player at a time. For example, If two banks are robbed at the same time, PD/SD is supposed to be able to respond to both banks, and 911 calls in between etcetera - and at the moment, despite the great numbers you see on paper, this is not the case, we usually only have the numbers at one given time to deal with one group, and not even that at some hours of the day. A few days ago I responded to a 911 call of a shooting at Ace Liquor, I arrive and see a shooting, but end up just leaving as there was 0 backup available to me, I just couldn't do anything! Even if we take a quote like this, while it makes sense from a realistic perspective, it's far from the truth of what's happening the majority of the time. We almost never except for maybe Sundays have the number of people online to "overpower". Several nights in a row you'll see SD patrolling the city, because PD doesn't have more than 2-3 officers (while the server is at 120-130 players), sometimes you'll have SD asking PD to patrol the county because of the same scenario. SD/PD rarely gets to intercept and stop a bank robbery, there's often a single unit that has to watch as 10+ people run out and drive off - this is not saying that there has been a few times where PD and/or SD has been able to mobilize and intercept a robbery mid-through it due to having information of it happening. So us having the number of people that we do on paper =/= active people. We are just trying to ensure that we can provide our RP service adequately to a degree 24/7, again, for ALL players. We cannot properly have a cap and also expect to be able to do that, without enforcing a shift system and requiring people to actually log in, which at that point, we can throw mental health out the window. I also think it's important to once again reiterate that PD/SD is reactive and they don't plan their response unless it's a planned operation e.g. a warrant execution. Criminals can plan their situations most of the time, you can decide how many people you want to bring to a bank robbery, to a store robbery, or to run labs, whereas PD/SD simply has to react and adapt to the numbers that they have available, which at most times, don't exceed an absurd number. I hope I got my points across as to why it's not really possible to compare a criminal cap to a legal cap.

Charging players for the crimes that they have committed is not fundamentally wrong, because players make their choices and they are not forced. We are making steps to improve certain things: We are looking at defining Felony Public Endargement better so that it is more specific. It's very broad right now. Government/LFM (Lewis) is currently reviewing charges that could be separated into minor and severe. One example was Assault with a Deadly Weapon, currently, you can assault someone with a firearm and a baseball bat and get the same charge and time. Charges like this where it makes sense to have different degrees are being looked at it. As the leader of SD who is an advocate for the policy I was responsible for implementing, I do not feel that PD should be forced to adopt the same policy. It's IC politics, in the end, one department is more strict than another. It's like going into a different county or state in real life, attorney generals and cops may be more strict in one and not as strict in another. When I say that it's the player that makes choices, I am not wrong. Yes, I understand that there are certain charges that could be better defined and separated, but then it's also up to the players on what they want to do. You can rob a bank with an Assault Rifle, evade the police when they arrive, become the unfortunate soul out of 20 to be chased, lead the cops into an ambush, hopefully, escape or not, OR you can just evade without leading them into an ambush and hope for the best. You can evade the cops into the city at 200-240 km/h and hopefully not get into a situation where another motorist/pedestrian is put in acute danger. Or you can stay in the county. Yes, the county is harder to lose e.g. AIR but it's also extremely difficult to do something that puts the public in acute danger. I hope I am conveying my point correctly. The thing is, if PD gets berated for doing nothing wrong, SD is ultimately going to have to make amendments. We don't want PD to be berated because of our choices.

Bobby_Kirk - 10 Tickets

I welcome anyone to join SD (or PD) and you'll see that the 200 AP armor is rarely used (You can even take a ride-along on an alt! ). The only ones who can use it are tactical elements, GFU (at least in SD) uses 100 AP armor, and SED can use 200 AP armor but even then, that armor floats over their uniforms, it's ugly and not aesthetically pleasing. I must say in general, I am not a difficult person to work with. I've focused, when I lead PD, and now that I lead SD, to change policies in the fairness of criminal RP. But my decisions are based on logic, if something to me is too unrealistic, I cannot find myself implementing that in a policy. After playing 30+ hours/week for the past few months, I can safely say that there are a lot of situations that PD/SD loses on a daily, whether it's majority wipe, initial unit responding dying, or just criminals outsmarting us - but yes, there are a lot of situations that PD/SD will win as well, mostly when they either outnumber the criminals from the get-go, or the criminals stay in the area long enough for backup to arrive. PD/SD is reactive to the environment created by others. SD, for example, has recently been talking (In Character and Out of Character) to enforce the policy that disallows heavies from being carried on the back, which was an exemption implemented because of the IC environment back when SD was created, but we've found ourselves unable to re-enforce that policy simply because of how the IC environment is. I must say that personally, I do not agree with giving a patrol officer less armor than what's available to the average criminal, especially with the upcoming changes to weapons, bullets, and the implementation of armor plates to allow criminals to refill their armor. I think that you need to look at the grand picture rather than looking at it from the perspective of personal situations; most of the time (now this might be hard to realize if you've never been in SD/PD or had a ridealong), as a regular patrol officer, you're going to outnumbered in most situations, which in itself is already bad, and to make them easier targets than they already are, makes no sense to me. Players with issues of cops rushing into the center of situations, I remind you that Fear RP applies to cops just as much as it does to anyone else. In fact, we hold cops to higher standards (for some reason) when it comes to Fear RP, you won't (shouldn't) for example find a single unit enter a violent area such as Braddocks alone, as they have been told it's Fear RP. This is an example of something that is only enforced on cops. That's all I have to say! Happy Friday!

what

if it's close to bedtime, I tend to turn the lights off!

wtf