The "Finish Your Damn Updates" Suggestion

[Pazz]

One thing that plagues Eclipse's development more than the lack thereof or the significant inconsistency therein and the lack of communication of intentions or work-in-progress projects and shared direction, at any given time, is the continued and repeated lack of update completion. When, after months and months, sometimes years of 'work-in-progress updates', an update finally releases, it is often provided with a day-one type of patch and one or two weeks of hotfixes and minor adjustments, but then the project is left behind in favor of another project.

Let me first say, I completely understand that a team of two (three if Thang had more direction and freedom) needs to maneuvre between different projects and can't get stuck on one thing for too long, but the size of the development team is the fault of no one but the development team itself; yes, malicious actors abused their roles before, but no attempt was made to introduce an infrastructure that allowed a healthier system for collaboration, before and after these incidents, and frankly, too many unfinished updates and empty promises, intentions, and/or ideas listed publicly in development blogs looks really, really bad.

Some of these may be small, some of these may be big, but all of these are left to gather dust, so they've got that in common.

 

ECLIPSE ROLEPLAY - Clothing Update (July 28th 2024)

• This was meant to be the Player Customization Update to beat all player customization updates, but it became the clothing update, only. Months before, during the development process of this larger-scale update, teasers were sent out about other aspects of character customization. This update came with listed intentions and promises made to faction leaders; this is two months short of being two years ago.
• Also, it's 2026, and we still can't remove tattoos. I really cannot imagine it's that hard to pop in a "REMOVE" button on the selected tattoo, or even every body part/category tab.
• FINISH FACTION LOADOUTS: When prompted about needing to make hundreds (yes, hundreds) of faction uniforms to properly utilize all uniform options, with individual rank insignias and textures for eg. badges, it was said that the "Faction Loadout" system would make this a lot easier, and that it would take place about two weeks or so after the update; this was roughly 92 weeks ago.
• FINISH BARBER SHOP & HAIRSTYLE CUSTOMIZATION: On the public development log, it was said that there was a barber shop update planned "once they were satisfied with the clothing update".
  
  
  1) The hair tie script is an idea that has been suggested countless times across many threads, it was finally acknowledged, but never touched on further.
  2) The barbershop update was mentioned once, then never again; no mention, 'tease', or any hint of a new barbershop UI, additional hair textures, makeup, facial hair, or the long-awaited hair head tattoos, so that people's hair can stop looking like it's falling off.
   
• FINISH CHARACTER CREATION REVAMP: Near the end of 2023, a revamped character creator UI was teased; what happened to this? Where is it? Why has it not been implemented? We're now 2.5 years later, and it's pretty long overdue to update the ancient character creation and plastic surgery UI that exists on the live server right now.
   
• Lastly, be less afraid to make adjustments to the clothing pack on the server. Factions that do well deserve to be acknowledged and have their clothing items put into the server, either in the store or importable for them. As it stands, the average life cycle of a faction on this server is about 0.2x the length of time that it takes for their clothes to be added. By the time they are added, the faction is either banned, disbanded, or has rebranded five times. Incentives only work when you actually dedicate yourself to rewarding them. 

 

ECLIPSE ROLEPLAY - Development Update (October 28th, 2023)

• FINISH FEATURE: The faction presets/loadouts were mentioned long before the clothing update, but understandably had to wait until the clothing update so as not to pile too many changes and variables into something unfinished. That was in October 2023. The clothing update was in July 2024. We're now in mid-April 2026.

ECLIPSE ROLEPLAY - Gun Update (July 19th, 2023)

• FINISH FUTURE PLANS: To my knowledge, though I'd love to be corrected, criminals can still not color their illegally obtained weapons outside of the purchasable weapon skins in the credit store, which don't apply to the most recent Mk II weapons anyway. This was listed as an intention in 2023. We're four months away from this being a three-year-old listed intention. 

Edited April 12 by Pazz

[Pazz]

This post got so convoluted that I cannot properly edit and format it anymore, but I think you get the gist of it.

FEBRUARY 2026 MINING UPDATE - "Soon after this release, weapons and firearms crafting will be released"; this is now two months ago, there has been no further update on any of this.

FEBRUARY 2026 PRISON UPDATE - "More prison updates and new activities are currently under development"; this is now two months ago, there has been no further update on any of this, including the much-awaited prison breakout script.

DECEMBER 2025 RACING UPDATE - Now five months, barring a few days, since release, has support for circuit and drag races been added? The semi-automated process for submitting community-made race tracks for public use? Money earned by participating in races?

JULY 2024 MONTHLY NEWSLETTER - Indicated in the 2024 newsletter was the in-development status of a rework of freelance jobs that would allow players to partake in the job together, including, at the time of posting, the courier job and garbage collection. We have heard nothing of this ever again; I guess it's not so much "unfinished" but rather a false promise, but still.

JUNE 2024 TV & CINEMA UPDATE - Promised as the third part of the update was the functionality of including preinstalled TV props within house interiors as watchable TVs; this never happened, and has not been addressed since, and is likely a disappointment to many, considering the theater room in the wildly expensive Diamond Casino penthouse interior.

I don't intend to rag on development, but also, abandoning in-development features with attached public acknowledgements and promises isn't a great look, and doesn't help with the stabilization of an already demoralized community. More than that, it is natural to scrap feature updates pre-release, but it really isn't that hard to actually communicate these things with the same community that you've shown your progress to before.

Also, never forget the 2020 shown-but-never-implemented-or-addressed-again banking update. May you rest in peace.

 

Edited April 12 by Pazz

[Jimmy Lynnch]

Pazz with banger after banger, shame this will get laughed at and pushed aside until people stop buying VIP

[Freclan]

still waiting for private garages bro, it's been 5 years

[Pazz]

8 minutes ago, Freclan said:

still waiting for private garages bro, it's been 5 years

Livestreamed development, livestreamed completion, livestream ended, never released!

[moment]

Well done Pazz, I hope this gets the awarness as it should, can only pray at this point.

[Frewer]

Not gonna lie, I've bought VIP since it came out and Royal because I've wanted to donate and help the server I spend so much time on, but that constant support seems like it's being taken for granted. I had to dig really deep to buy Diamond for this month. We have a solid player base of loyal people who want what's best for the server, but as the post suggests, we are roughly 3 years behind on everything. It's super frustrating! 

[Harley]

I've been here through literally every one of these failed promises and even I am still shocked at how much you've managed to highlight here.

I have stopped financially supporting ECRP for this exact same reason. The donations I was spending seemed to go nowhere. I think it's quite an insult to the community making a new £50/month VIP tier without actually giving anything more to the community, expecting the loyal ones who have stayed here for almost a decade to cough up.

I understand the previous drams with prior developers. It was a punch in the gut and I'm sure causes a huge lack of trust from the founders, but PLEASE consider hiring or taking on developers who are begging to do the job. There are plenty of players who pledge thousands of dollars a year to ECRP, I am certain even one more developer would benefit the server immensely.

Burnout is real, and I theorise this is why so many features have been abandoned or forgotten about, so bring someone else in. Bring someone else into Development who still has the motivation to build!

 

Also:

PLAYTESTING

Recently I've experienced and witnessed another community open up Playtesting Applications to their playerbase. Players could apply to be a playtester, were invited to a Discord and invited to a development server to playtest and report any bugs or issues with updates weeks before they were to release. This works SO WELL. Too many times have we seen updates come out, then immediately 100 bugs are found, or changes that need to be made. Let the playerbase who live and breathe your game apply to playtest your updates. No payment needed, and it should be a limited pool of players (The other community had around 50 dedicated players selected out of those who applied) and let them try to break your update! The members of staff in ECRP can only do so much, and who better to test and try to break an update to your game than the players who play it daily?

e.g - New Vehicle Update - Released to playtesters 2 weeks before scheduled release. Both crim and cop players are in playtesting group and set up pursuits to test them. Quickly the performance of the vehicles would be found to their potential, and bugs would be found so much quicker.

We're a very old community, and we have a lot of old ways of working that modern communities have learned from and do better than us. We need to be less afraid of change. It's been almost a decade, things modernise, things change, but one thing that has never changed is how loyal people are to ECRP. Learn from other communities. Actually review WHY are people leaving? Why do people go elsewhere? Don't settle on "It's just haters". Be better. There's always a deeper meaning. People don't abandon a community like this without real reason, reflecting inwards isn't a bad thing to do

[Ash]

Did they even ever finish the items listed in the roadmap almost half a year ago?

[DaddyShrood]

9 minutes ago, Ash said:

Did they even ever finish the items listed in the roadmap almost half a year ago?

of course not 

[Pazz]

29 minutes ago, Ash said:

Did they even ever finish the items listed in the roadmap almost half a year ago?

They'll be in the 2029 rendition of this post!

[AtlasOLimbo]

I respect you greatly Pazz for speaking out like this but it's extremely apparent that the founders do not care enough to make these updates happen.

All we get nowadays are updates made with generative AI or commissioned out to third parties, and even THOSE are rare. People still give money, so why would they? Like I've mentioned previously things only seem to move slightly when the community is so outraged you can't avoid the negative discourse on discord, forums, etc.

[AnakinB]

This shalln't be happening i fear

[Kazjii]

5 hours ago, AtlasOLimbo said:

I respect you greatly Pazz for speaking out like this but it's extremely apparent that the founders do not care enough to make these updates happen.

All we get nowadays are updates made with generative AI or commissioned out to third parties, and even THOSE are rare. People still give money, so why would they? Like I've mentioned previously things only seem to move slightly when the community is so outraged you can't avoid the negative discourse on discord, forums, etc.

I agree, even though I know you have made a good-faith decision to distance yourself from people involved in sharing criticism, I think this is an important consideration when talking about the topic at hand. +1 Pazz, good post

[DoubleA]

I stopped paying for VIP for close to a year now(minus when we had the war), could be less, but for someone who used to be diamond VIP for a few years straight, I found it as a huge slap in the face to see all of the lovely things that are brought to attention of devs/staff just to see NOTHING get done. Sure you re-scripted levels into a few jobs that BOOMED for 2 weeks but now have less than 2-3 people that do them consistently on a daily basis. 

Instead of focusing on how people can pay more money for a better experience, why not find a way EVERYONE to have a better experience. Because right now, if youre a crim and you dont have VIP, you spend most of your time in DOC AFKing. If you spend $50/month you can basically buy your time which is ridiculous. For a server that used to be about RP and community, the last few years its turned into nothing but asset farming and pay2win shit in the credit store.

And yeah, dont get me started on $250 for the best cars in the game.. THAT was what really accelerated the death of the casual player and made this a money hungry server.

 

Set up another community meeting to go over what we should focus on first! I'm sure it'll be well received and actually get something to change! Bring on new devs, constantly bring out new clothing - Bala streams his clothing that he makes, just constantly rotate things in and out every month so there is new things, finish up some of these loose end deals instead of juggling 50 things at once. Then when everything is all good for the major ticket items, you can start looking forward on hey this this and this are the next things were working on, do them one at a time and knock them down.

 

Common Pazz W  +1

[Massa T]

I hope they take it serious, I was pretty disappointed with the development and the roadmap - got banned for speaking my mind on it, kudos to you for having it actually get attention. 

[Homast]

I wholeheartedly agree with Pazz.

The cycle is Hype the community up for an update. Hype dies. String em along with teasers to maintain player retention, drop the update (Usually Late) and then abandon the feature, causing burnout and lack of faith in the dev team.

Either fix the shit you release (kindly) or stop milking us to pay for your Avocado toast. 

Real life situations hit, but when this is a consistent excuse for features being late, you get a boy who cried wolf situation.

Your pay pigs WILL eventually get tired as well, Or they'll just ask you to give them a bulldozer in exchange for 100 Euros.... That's probably more realistic. 

 

[Ritchie Stones]

they need more devs aboard, and... why not ? gta 6 is about to come out, 
i heard that they dont want other devs because of them possibly stealing the whole idea and replicate it, and steal playyers to theit own created city.
not sure if this is true, 

im my view, what do they have to lose ? they have a consistent player base, nobody can ever replace even of they copied this city else where, especialy with ta 6 a few months away. but that all i know, 

im also a bit frustrated with the promises never been folowed up,
as a owner of a bussiness myself i can tell you one thing that kills everything, is "inconsitency"

this post is intented in good faith and wisdom 

[Eliza]

+1 
Typical W post from Pazz

[Saint_]

W suggestion, will it ever happen? No. Unless the devs actually begin to expand the team or make some sort of attempt to make functional updates, it will continue to just be delays of the real updates, credit sales and p2w. It's super sad to see, but frankly I fully believe were past the point of trying to grow and improve the server, and simply just dragging it for as long as possible.

[AtlasOLimbo]

2 hours ago, Saint_ said:

W suggestion, will it ever happen? No. Unless the devs actually begin to expand the team or make some sort of attempt to make functional updates, it will continue to just be delays of the real updates, credit sales and p2w. It's super sad to see, but frankly I fully believe were past the point of trying to grow and improve the server, and simply just dragging it for as long as possible.

This tbh. Any good will was shored up when the roadmap completely fell flat of every single goal it had.

[Ritchie Stones]

4 hours ago, AtlasOLimbo said:

This tbh. Any good will was shored up when the roadmap completely fell flat of every single goal it had.

well... we either get more devs involved or WE ALL LOSE,  what is the alternative ?  

[DaddyShrood]

4 minutes ago, Ritchie Stones said:

well... we either get more devs involved or WE ALL LOSE,  what is the alternative ?  

Accept that that's not going to happen and we can just carry on watching the titanic sink?

[AtlasOLimbo]

2 hours ago, Ritchie Stones said:

well... we either get more devs involved or WE ALL LOSE,  what is the alternative ?  

Yeah, people have been trying to get them to do this for years. Isn't gonna happen.