After about a year playing on Eclipse and learning all aspects of Grand Theft Auto Roleplay, I've come to some conclusions about the state of roleplay on the server. As we as a community are all in the pursuit of better roleplay standards, I hope you'll hear what I have to say with an open mind.
There has been one overall conclusion I have made after putting an absurd amount of playtime into criminal, LEO, and civilian characters. The criminal script negatively impacts criminal roleplay on the server. Broadly, all aspects of what it takes to be a scriptly "good" or "powerful" gang do not necessarily require any roleplay, and in practice I have not personally seen a faction with high roleplay standards succeed more in game than factions with less-than-great roleplay standards.
Turfs
Generally speaking, criminal factions pursue power in game by increasing their control in the "turfs" system. At the end of the day, criminal factions as a whole gauge their success in game by how they perform in the upkeep of their turfs and the "pushing" of other faction's turfs. There are several ways that this can be done in the turf system.
Firstly, I would like to talk about money laundering.
Money laundering in the script at the moment is a travesty. The concept could be, and has been, used to create wonderful roleplay stories about how an illegal organization works with businesses, protection rackets, and other illegal avenues to take dirty money and circulate it back to their benefit. Unfortunately though, it is instead reduced to learning how to drain as much packed cash as possible on a day-to-day basis and then bringing the money to an NPC to give you influence. Bank robberies should be a roleplay opportunity for everyone in the server, where criminals get to express themselves and their faction in a meaningful and special way in-character and in game conflicting with not only LEOs but also civilians in the area. Instead, because bank robberies are so vital to maintaining turfs in the script, they are hit on cool down in the most min-max way possible, getting all bikes so the fewest amount of people are caught as possible. There is currently effectively no roleplay involved in bank robberies, and when there is criminal-LEO conflict at banks, it normally results in a forum report. Although there are many reasons why the roleplay around bank robberies is bad right now, a major reason is because criminals are forced to min-max bank robberies if they want to be a scriptly powerful faction through turfs.
The second most consequential part of turfs is drug manufacturing.
At the moment, there is effectively 0 roleplay involved in most drug interactions on the server. Criminals sit in apartments for hours on end every day in the pursuit of furthering the power of their faction through the script turf system. This has gotten so bad that not only are criminals forced to isolate themselves for hours on end in game, but they also avoid drug RP with other characters. Nine times out of ten if you play a character that tries to buy drugs off the streets, you will not be able to do so because the current criminal script does not encourage that kind of roleplay. The current criminal script encourages sitting in highly unrealistic high rise apartment labs synthesizing absurd amounts of drugs and then taking them to an NPC to gain turf power. This is quite possibly the largest travesty of the criminal script at the moment, almost entirely due to the current turf script. I understand that solutions to some of the drug problems may be being addressed in the upcoming drug update, but I have concerns that these will not be enough.
Lastly, turfs are also maintained by "chopping" cars.
This is one of the most disappointing parts of criminal roleplay. At the moment, to chop a car all you will have to do is manage to steal a car and bring it to an NPC for processing. Gangs do not have any script incentive to engage in actual roleplay in this, and many a time the "roleplay" that is seen around chop shops is criminal characters hiding around a shop waiting to ambush potential car thieves. I cannot begin to express how dynamic the chop shop roleplay could potentially be for criminal organizations. Simply imagine a criminal organization actually running a chop shop. At the moment, most LEOs simply know the locations of chop shops. This obviously is ridiculous as if LEOs knew the location of a chop shop it would be swiftly shut down. Instead, criminal organizations could potentially create chop shops where criminal characters roleplay dismantling a vehicle at a particular location and establishing an RP chop shop for their criminal organization. LEOs could potentially investigate and find these location and attempt to bust them. Overall, this is yet another part of the script which supports effectively no roleplay.
So what would a better system look like?
I don't necessarily know what the best solution would be, but I'd like to think I have a relatively good idea of how we can improve things. Overall, the turf system should be based on what factions have the best roleplay reasons to control a certain territory. Effectively, as factions already have regular (monthly) faction guides meetings, criminal factions would display to faction services what their roleplay has been in game. This is already being done through the faction thread system where factions display their roleplay. The only change that would effectively happen is during faction guide meetings, faction leaders would display some of the roleplay they engaged in for the past month to their faction guides, and faction services would decide how faction turfs are distributed. This would create an environment where sheer size and wealth of a faction would not matter as much as roleplay does for the power of a faction. At the moment, I struggle to find any real, realistic roleplay in criminal circles, and this would heavily support realistic criminal roleplay.
