The current state of Eclipse-RP

[enantioM]

This thread has been started for others to express and share their feelings about the current state of the server. 
[DISCLAIMER]: THIS IS MY HONEST AND PERSONAL REVIEW.  YOU ARE ALL ENTITLED TO YOURS, SO FEEL FREE TO COMMUNICATE THEM BACK

It's sad to say this, but it feels pointless trying to suggest improvements here anymore, regardless of whether there is a good idea in discussion.  After looking through the suggestion threads almost every day, there are a lot of good ideas which are pushed aside and shunned by admins. I don't know why 99% of credible suggestions are never pushed forward or end up on the server. Is it because you guys see how much time that it would take to script and immediately push it aside, or just because nobody checks this to gain enough traction, or is it because you have put up with poorly built systems for so long you have just mentally accepted it to be ok? I can only assume these things as it's just so unclear to why very little has been done.

Have a look at either the changelogs or the #development tab and try and find at least one major update; within the past 8 months, there have literally been no significant changes to the server. If you exclude all the bug fixes and the tiny additions of small items being added to the import list, extra furniture, some more cars at the dealership, extra things on the credit-shop and extra commands for police/admins or additions to government buildings, you find nothing significant that helps improve what is wrong with the server. The forum is host to rational and reasonable suggestions/changes to help players, something that looks to be treated poorly by the staff team. 

Legal Jobs:
Jobs in the city are genuinely the most boring shit I have ever experienced and they feel like dull, monotonous chores that pay terribly. People don't pick which job they want to do out of enjoyment, but instead the money they receive from it. Right now, mining will make you the most if you know a trick or two with crates and an RV. The job itself is in a reasonably good state but the NCZ's are so poorly explained and enforced on this server. New players ignore those rules every single day, and will try to rob you as soon as you get in your vehicle outside the mine. The bus route is and has been the second best consistent and safe money making job since the addition of the Paleto route. As a result, it's accumulated with braindead children who trash your car ignoring every single road rule that has ever existed. Nobody actually enjoys doing this job but the money is so much better per hour than most jobs. The city bus route is a joke and pays twice as less, there is literally no point in doing it. Postal delivery is bad. It is so much of an RNG fest that it solely depends on whether or not you get a job in the hills (your shitty van can barely even get up them), the distance and the number of packages you get before you have to travel all the way across the map to just refill your van. The armored van money deliveries, despite also subjected to bad RNG, pays an ok amount but also falls so short because of its terrible torque getting up hills. Farming is an RNG fest but in a completely different way. Out of 10 full crop-rotations I completed, half of them were stolen by other farmers with zero RP. I always made sure to lock my van whenever I wasn't taking crops out the back but you can't keep the car locked and open the back doors at the same time, so people just abuse you being stuck in the harvesting animations, as there is no way to cancel them. This has been mentioned countless times and nothing has been done about it. Woodcutting is mediocre with pay, nothing special, nothing awfully exciting. Trucking is abysmal: despite countless people complaining about the loading times, the poor pay/time spent ratio and huge inconsistency in pay, it remains as one of the most deserted jobs. The garbage truck job can be ok pay, that's as long as there aren't more than 3 doing it at the same time otherwise you have travel to the other ends of the city because the respawn rates are so bad it isn't viable anymore. The toll booth is just appalling. Whilst having so much RNG involved with how much you get paid, half the people glitch-ram their way through the barrier or just wait until somebody else goes through to avoid paying and go behind them. Fishing is the most relaxing and requires the least amount of effort out of them all, which is why you find half of the city's population at the pier all talking to each other about how shit the other jobs are. The oil-rig drilling pays fairly well, but only if you've invested a lot into a truck, RV and some extra storage. 

Criminal jobs:
Illegal work has no depth or content: Robbing banks seem worth it at first, but the amount of people you require and time spent preparing for it all you could have made the same amount of money doing bus routes at Paleto. I, and several other friends, have carried out bank robberies many times. Some were done with no more than 5 people, and even then having escaped with ALL cash, in both lockers and table, the cut after laundering was literal piss. But lets say you wanted to just go and rob another bank, what's stopping you? Well you're in luck because you can only do 1 hostage situation a week otherwise you get apprehended by an admin. In this case, your only option is to get a massive group to all rush the room in hope of escaping before any cops come. If that goes well, you've probably only come out with anything between $10,000-20,000 depending on the amount of people. The reward vs risk is again just terrible. Want to rob a store? Simply a 50/50 roll of the dice whether or not you get police patrolling past them and metagame out of their ass. If you get lucky and succeed with either of these jobs, you walk away with a relatively small amount of money. If you don't, you get locked up with the most ridiculous prison sentence, accommodated with the most dry role-playing experience you could imagine from a Cop type RP-ing.  Want to get into the drug game? Don't, the money is shit unless you have 20+ tables running simultaneously. The profit for even the highest paying drugs is shocking, even after looking at all dealer NPC's. Pretty much any moderately entertaining illegal content is from gang engagement and shipments, but why should they be the only people who have access to the fun? The content has literally been designed around gangs. Overall, the amount of illegal jobs you can do is just stupidly sparse. Pretty much every other server I have played on has double the amount of criminal work, with twice the enjoyment. The risk vs reward on the server right now makes none of these illegal activities worth it. You will make more money participating in E-RP sucking some gremlin's toes in the nightclub than you will with anything in the city right now. 

Overall feel:
The standard of RP in general is on the extreme low and I personally expected better from a larger whitelisted server such as this. It's rare to come across a unique character with a fun voice, detailed personality, character weaknesses that are actually portrayed properly and somebody who creates unique roleplaying scenes. It seems now that everybody roleplays as them self, letting events in game affect them personally IRL and hence reacting in such a boring, predictable and immature way. Nobody wants to sacrifice any potential success or personal gain in this server in return for a comedic and enjoyable roleplaying experience. I was lucky enough to find a very rare small group of good role-players, whom of which I stuck with for quite some time.

Another huge problem on this server is racism. Call it what you want, "E-RP", ICC or whatever; there is simply no excuse to give room for people to call others the hard N-word because they got killed or beaten up. Most gang members think they are special and claim they are acting as their character, but really they are just racist, white prepubescent degenerates who want a free N-word pass. The amount of people breaking rules everyday its just absurd by looking at the report section here, and its clear that very immature people are being let in. The entry test to gain whitelist status is probably the easiest I have ever completed. It is simply copy and pasted information from forum threads. At the end of the day, you are all responsible for setting the standard here and whilst we appreciate banning those who break rules and some work by the staff here, the server is just so far from feeling like a completed experience and there is just an overall lack of effort when listening to the community.  

 

 

[jason]

Moved to the discussions subforum. 

[enantioM]

 

2 minutes ago, jason said:

Moved to the discussions subforum. 

Apparently posting this got me banned on discord. Not sure how much offense people take from constructive criticism but that's quite hilarious nevertheless. 

[Joey Figliani]

Preach!

[Lipq]

I completely agree with more or less every point made here, i have recently quit ECRP due to the fact that the experience became a monotonous cycle of go fish to make money, buy some guns, pay off impound fees, and then afk in jail for 5 hours all because you wanted to engage in some criminal RP which went south and you had 27 cruisers, 11 choppers, 20 supers, and a precision airstrike you me all at once, the attitude from the majority of criminal "Role players" didn't help either as it was a constant fuckfest of who can be the new epic #1 gang, always out to shoot and hardly ever out to RP which is an attitude i expect the newcomers to have but this attitude is extremely present withing the established "OG's" of the server which is incredibly disappointing, I've only met a handful of actual RP'ers on this server which really is sad considering the server currently has 400+ players at peak times. A thing i found the most confusing is the fact that any crim rp based complaint is always met with "just be smarter" or "Just rp better" which is just a bit dumb.

I had a character in SD which was a lot more fun but that was purely due to the massive imbalance between crim and LEO, I'd log on, do my patrol, arrest people with the most fair sentences possible and go on with my day until I got tired or annoyed that PD all of a sudden decided to give someone an 11 hour jail sentence and log off (SD rp standard felt much higher than PD and i didn't see the play to win mentality there which massive props there, a really well ran faction with real role-players).

I also do feel that the server developers do not take the community's opinions in to consideration, as a matter of fact i've wanted to make a big rant about what i dislike about the server in the hopes of maybe seeing some change but i just knew I'm going to catch a ban or something of that sort since constructive criticism is not liked here and is taken as an insult which is just, baffling? The community is actively paying money, supporting the server dev's yet the same people are being ignored and actively silenced?

Like maybe implementing a system similar to what OSRS does, where the community votes on propositions made by the devs would be a fantastic way to approach future development and would lead the server towards massive improvements.

Another thing i do not like one bit is OOC nerfs? The OOC nerfs, in my opinion are a massive reason this server has become a cops vs robbers server is the fact that the large focus seems to be on making sure that the crims aren't too op and any and all tools they have are either taken away OOC'ly or matched by adding things to the PD/SD arsenal which is just not where the priority should be.

Also, the rules? Legit just get rid of half the rules and let admins take initiative, the admin team is all pretty intelligent and have got a sound understanding of role play, they are meant to be the example of what roleplayers are supposed to be like yet they are constricted to this mundane cover every little thing rule set which causes ruleplaying and 200 daily reports, the staff team needs to sit down and discuss what the essential rules are and keep them only. I do however understand that there will be abusers, but, just ban them? I personally see no need for people who are here to abuse rules and look for loopholes, rather than spending their time and energy on rp. A fantastic example is - someone calls you a cunt - you punch them - you catch a dm? like please go outside, and start calling random people cunts, and see how far you can get before someone wallops you because I'm sure it won't be far, yet this is DM under the rules because there wasn't enough escalation, like what?

And lastly, the "This isn't realistic" shit needs to go man, of course shit isn't going to be realistic, this is a video game, and the fun thing about video games is that they aren't real life, nobody wants to go and play a game which is trying to be a hard copy of real life.

[jason]

46 minutes ago, enantioM said:

 

Apparently posting this got me banned on discord. Not sure how much offense people take from constructive criticism but that's quite hilarious nevertheless. 

Our most recent discord ban was issued 2 hours before this post was made. Please do not spread misinformation. 

[strangur]

Could not agree more, I have seen others great posts in all categories especially legal/freelance jobs get passed over, even basic ones like fishing. I myself made a very long, thought out post about how to improve the RP inside prison as it currently is near non existent with no bashing of anyone and addressing any potential problems that would arise from the new additions as well as referencing old posts on how to improve it from admins like Kat and it was deleted. no explanation, just was a considerable amount of work. The Police are very very very measurably over powered and have insane numbers, the gangs roll 20+ deep which is fine i guess but in other places that is restricted to a much lower number and the people in this place are less concerned with RP and having fun then they are with making money and killing others. Multiple other people with a following have made these issues known only to be banned for criticizing. 

Edited April 26, 2021 by strangur

[Joey Figliani]

58 minutes ago, enantioM said:

 

Apparently posting this got me banned on discord. Not sure how much offense people take from constructive criticism but that's quite hilarious nevertheless. 

Oh no no no. They are just RPing as grumpy admins. Don't worry

[Dara MacFadden]

Lots of things in your original statement are just false, such as the banks having low payout, if you have to rely on the script completely I don't know what to tell you

[enantioM]

1 minute ago, Dara MacFadden said:

Quote

Lots of things in your original statement are just false,

such as the banks having low payout, if you have to rely on the script completely I don't know what to tell you

Go and list every false thing in there my friend instead of making a bland sentence with no substance to it.
The bank payout is never the same. One day it was around $500k, the other it was around $300k [after laundering]. There's even luck with the amount of money you get, so that's more RNG against you. 

[Joey Figliani]

3 minutes ago, Dara MacFadden said:

Lots of things in your original statement are just false, such as the banks having low payout, if you have to rely on the script completely I don't know what to tell you

Bank payout is extremely low. You can only do 1 hostage situation a week OOC. sometimes I've gotten 300k. Split that between 5/6 people.  So what's the alternative to do more? Either pray you are lucky enough to get in and out without a hostage, or any cops showing up. (Good luck with that, response time for that alarm is usually less than 30 seconds). Or amass an army of 20 people to shoot your way out of the bank against an entire police force. And then if you survive, great job, now split that 300k between 20 people and congrats, you just bought everyone 2 bottles of water and a burger 

[jason]

Earnings from a bank robbery are based on how many PD/SD players are on duty. 

[strangur]

3 minutes ago, Dara MacFadden said:

Lots of things in your original statement are just false, such as the banks having low payout, if you have to rely on the script completely I don't know what to tell you

still gotta do 10 hours in prison with basically nothing to do. even the DOC workers months ago were begging for script jobs inside or even no script jobs but more areas/commisary to do something. Go to prison for 5-10 hrs, use your stamps to buy pickaxe, Mine, Get robbed or fight and lose the pickaxe even if you live, then you have no stamps and no pic so you have to rob someone else and thats all there is. fight too much you go on lockdown or solitary.

[enantioM]

1 minute ago, jason said:

Earnings from a bank robbery are based on how many PD/SD players are on duty. 

Right, so here's the problem with that. The amount of cops online doesn't correctly reflect those who are active and present at the scene of the heist. There could be 60 cops online one day and have 15 there at the heist. Whereas the next, there's 30 online and still the same amount of cops at the heist. The force could even be stronger with fewer cops online, with the same amount being there at the bank. That's so say a bank is even off cooldown, let alone get lucky with the amount of cops online. Again, its the roll of the dice, more RNG that doesn't favor the player. 

[Freclan]

not again

[Joey Figliani]

The rules on this server are completely out of wack. I got reprimanded by an admin for doing more than 1 hostage situation per week. I did one bank job earlier in the week, and then an admin appeared and reprimanded me in front of everyone on another completely unrelated scenario. I was using a FAKE hostage in order to get one of the negotiation officers from the other heist to come down and eat dinner and drink wine with us. Because before he previously stated to me, "Joey if you are going to fuck me on these deals, at least take me to dinner first". So thats what I did. I knew damn well I'd go to prison and lose money and shit. I did it because I wanted to create a funny and interesting rp interaction for the police. Admin comes in and pauses roleplay and reprimanded me in front of everyone for doing more than 1 hostage situation per week. Some rules don't need to be enforced for no reason just to make an example out of people. Meanwhile I go to prison and I see 2 guys, one role-playing as a racist, shouting the N word, and another role-playing as a straight up Nazi, but that's ok, that's good rp I guess 

[amazezzz]

We’ve been through this I think 10 times now, the server isn’t just scripts you can create your own type of rp by thinking and doing it, it’s not holding you back from doing so.

[enantioM]

2 minutes ago, amazezzz said:

We’ve been through this I think 10 times now, the server isn’t just scripts you can create your own type of rp by thinking and doing it, it’s not holding you back from doing so.

Can you give me an example to better understand your point there? 

 

[Joey Figliani]

2 minutes ago, amazezzz said:

We’ve been through this I think 10 times now, the server isn’t just scripts you can create your own type of rp by thinking and doing it, it’s not holding you back from doing so.

That is just not an excuse. Hostages are the only way to ensure you do not get immidiently shot in the face by the 50 super overpowered police officers. There isn't many ways you can use emotes without breaking PowerPlaying in order to ensure that you don't just get blasted and sent to prison. 

[strangur]

Regardless, There are larger issues to address. Many many times people have had valid criticism and in a constructive manner addressed it and were banned or silenced. furthermore if you play the server you can feel the issues. Theres a hundred posts adressing issues similar to the root of the problem with the current meta of RP in relation to PD/Criminals like this 

 and a thousand more. Still a lot of valid complaints being swept under the rug and a lot of criticism not being addressed or resolved. A ton of great forum posts with incredible ideas some small some large and very minimal progress, most of them are left on the chopping block. 

[enantioM]

2 minutes ago, strangur said:

Regardless, There are larger issues to address. Many many times people have had valid criticism and in a constructive manner addressed it and were banned or silenced. furthermore if you play the server you can feel the issues. Theres a hundred posts adressing issues similar to the root of the problem with the current meta of RP in relation to PD/Criminals like this 

 and a thousand more. Still a lot of valid complaints being swept under the rug and a lot of criticism not being addressed or resolved. A ton of great forum posts with incredible ideas some small some large and very minimal progress, most of them are left on the chopping block. 

This right here. 

[IAmTurtle]

2 hours ago, enantioM said:

not you get police patrolling past them and metagame out of their ass.

Can you give proof please?

[amazezzz]

Just now, Joey Figliani said:

That is just not an excuse. Hostages are the only way to ensure you do not get immidiently shot in the face by the 50 super overpowered police officers. There isn't many ways you can use emotes without breaking PowerPlaying in order to ensure that you don't just get blasted and sent to prison. 

The rule was made to stop 30 hostage situations a day from occurring, you have to look at it from a Police Officers perspective it gets pretty annoying to have to deal with 10 hostage situations a day where it takes so much time and effort and people to control it, sometimes there could be low amount of Police on duty where hostage situations are not able to be dealt with as it takes a lot of effort and etc, the rule was implanted so you could still have the hostage rp but also put some time in between it, if you’re not comfortable doing a bank robbery stores are always a option so are car chopping and many other options the server can offer.

[strangur]

6 minutes ago, amazezzz said:

We’ve been through this I think 10 times now, the server isn’t just scripts you can create your own type of rp by thinking and doing it, it’s not holding you back from doing so.

Again you either blast out, Take hostages or attempt a stealth, all of which either dont pay hardly at all, have insane penalties or even if you have hostages ive still had PD think they're superman and storm the bank with no RP regarding hostage life. Most other criminal activity pays like less than a free lance job unless you are in an offical faction of 35 people with import power, even then you wont be getting a ton of money from it unless you are at the top 

[jason]

Please keep this on topic by discussing server script improvements and roleplay standards. 
 

If this continues as a pd vs crim or bashing server staff post, it’ll be archived.