Announcement March 2021 Newsletter

[wool]

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March 2021 Newsletter​

Introduction

Hello everyone, it's safe to say it's been a good while since a community based announcement of any sort was made and due to a lot of the recent goings on internally and externally we figured now would be a good time to do just that. This thread serves as a means to explain how we intend to go forward with the community. It's no secret that RCRP has been suffering from a load of issues as of the last couple of years. Without spending all that much time dwelling on the past, I feel it's a good idea to get into where we, as management, intend to go over the up coming months. Something we've all been able to agree on is the lack of community interaction and the lack of overall transparency is something that simply will not work here, in order to vastly improve on this the management team has created a couple of new positions internally and decided to move forward with an announcement to address some of the clear community concerns as well as provide transparency.

Community Manager

For a long time now RCRP has lacked any direct community involvement from a member of the management team, while it's safe to say there's interaction here and there, it goes just as quickly as it comes. The player relations team was trialed last year but unfortunately fell flat as the server began to drop in players, leading to the team eventually being disbanded. Interaction with the community is vital, without it there's going to be a clear disconnect between the staff and the community, something that simply will not work. I will be taking up the position of community manager to begin to work on the issues I just mentioned and hopefully fix them. As the community manager I will be the middle man between the community & the staff team, making it my job to;

• Directly keep an open line with the community.
• Ensure the community feels their voice is being heard.
• Ensure the community/administrative suggestions are being handled in a timely manner.
• Ensure the community discussions are properly handled.
• Address any concerns the community might have.

I have high hopes for this position and depending on how well it works out and how huge the work load is, I may bring the PR team back sometime in the future.

Internal Team Reforms

The past month we've been figuring out the internal situation within the admin team, there has clearly been a few areas left neglected that are vital to the team so we're taking the initiative to revamp these aspects from our own ideas, internal suggestions and community suggestions. The three areas we've been looking into are the Admin Team, ST/business management & the Faction Management Team.

Admin Team
Management has been looking into internal reforms within the admin team, there's a lot we felt management could improve on. The key part being leadership. To better improve on this aspect we've added the "Head of Admins" position that currently comprised of two management members & two head admins. Dividing it up like this allows us to have three to four admins assigned to each management member/head admin assisting with this position. The HOAs will be responsible for the following;

• Handling administrative 1-2-1s on a bi-monthly basis.
• Handling admin complaints in a timely manner as and when they arise.
• Ensuring each member of the admin team's conduct is as it should be.
• Ensuring each member of the team has a task and is pulling their weight.
• Hosting admin team meetings as and when they're needed to improve uniformity within the team.

Asset Management
Asset management is something that has been neglected on RCRP for quite some time, so @toni has decided to take it on going forwards to revamp and ensure we have an actual solid team involved in the asset side of the server. There's no denying solid and active businesses are vital to any SAMP server, so we hope to see some major improvments come to our business scene real soon. The asset management team will be responsible for;

• Auctioning businesses and houses through Silver Trading.
• Managing interior requests for houses.
• Ensuring owners are actively opening their businesses and wiping businesses from owners that don't.
• Loaning businesses to players to use for roleplay.
• Managing the various systems the Asset Management team will be introducing in the coming weeks.

Faction Management
Faction Management has been front and center in bringing some normality back to RCRP since last summer, their reforms and improvements can already be seen in a majority of the work they continue to do and pump out. Since my departure from FM @brian. & @SadMan have began working on internal reforms to improve the team in a variety of different areas. Those are;

• The removal of consultants they deem unfit for the team.
• Internal reviews for each consultant to weed out those that may not be suitable for their FC positions.
• Internal reviews for each member of the FA team.
• Internal manuals revamps. (both FM & FA.)

The Faction Management Team has also recently opened up a liaison board for factions, instead of simply relying on the system of FM boards > discord, we now directly have a place for all of our factions to liase with one and other, get feedback, update their memberlists and have overall better contact with the Faction Management Team. We understand that some factions do wish they had more direct support or contact with FM, so this board will without a doubt improve things for either side.

Community Satisfaction Forms

Recently myself, @toni and @brian. sat down to go through the Community Satisfaction Forms sent in last year. It's unfortunate to say that a good majority of the feedback given to us is simply unusable so we feel it didn't warrant an entire thread responding to it like last year. We instead have decided to include it as a reponse to this announcement, we hope many of the issues raised with the admin/management team within the satisfaction form are currently being worked on. Below is a response to the most brought up points on the forms.

Game Mode/Script Support
Questions regarding scripting were probably the most common points raised in this years forms. This isn't directly something I can comment on as it's TommyB's area, however, his statement below addresses multiple concerns regarding what's been happening with script support & the drug system.

The LEO scene
A huge amount of comments on the satisfaction forms were regarding the LEO scene as a whole. We understand the community has had a large distaste for the standards within the scene over the recent months. Without focusing too much on the past, we've had some great changes and breakthroughs within the LEO scene as of late, the current SASP leadership have been divising a plan to better improve their faction as a whole as well as with their standing in the community. I've had a couple of chats with the HC myself and I'm incredibly interested to see how they get on, I won't get too deep into it as I'm sure the HC team will want to take the spotlight in announcing their plans in the future. LSSD has recently made a strong entry into the LEO scene and have set an incredibly high bar as to the kind of roleplay FM expects from LEO factions going forward. All this being said, we are sure that our LEO entities will have a positive effect on the server going forward.

Server-wide Toxicity
Server-wide toxicity was another issue brought up along these forms and it's blatantly obvious we have an issue with toxicity within the community from the top down. These issues are deep rooted and it's quite the task to charge head on and deal with these issues. The admin team could be and needs to be a hell of a lot more proactive in dealing with these issues, moving forward with our internal team based reforms, we intend to do just that. When it comes down to it, it's OUR job to ensure certain behaviours and attitudes aren't present on the platform and it's OUR job to ensure certain people aren't making the experiences of players negative ones. I understand actions speak louder than words on issues like this so as we move forward to continue improving our platform we're going to be taking harsher measures against toxicity in order to make everyones experience here more enjoyable.

DM mentalities presented by certain factions & players
Without trying to sugar coat the issue, the presence of DM squads and players simply here to cop bait or get themselves involved in shootouts recently has skyrocketed. This is an issue we have discussed and handled internally as these forms were released. The admin team came to a solution on how we intend to handle DM mentalities in factions and individual players will be handled going forward.

• FA has directly agreed to crack down on factions displaying this sort of behaviour. If the faction leaders incite this kind of behaviour or allow it to go unchecked then FA will take direct action, punishments will be handed out, the faction will also be liable to lose perks or result in it's full closure.
• Additional rule changes/implementations have been added to stomp out players with these mentaities, we've added additional sections to Rule 38 to stop unrealistic robberies that tend to fuel these scenarios as well as added additional guidelines to how and when players should be given refunds for 'looted' firearms.
• Admin uniformity on the matter, as explained above the team has come to a decision on how we intend to handle these problems as a whole.

Management & it's interaction with the server/community
This is something I directly spoke with both TommyB & Earl about, I do understand and respect their stances on the situation. The two of them have been members of the community for an incredibly long amount of time, they've seen many players come and go, so in that respect the current community isn't one they know all that well, due to this they've preferred to take back seat roles on the matter and just work on projects behind the scenes. Obviously this is something that doesn't necessarily work and it's obvious the community would like some level of transparency. Interally we agree on this matter which is why myself and toni intend to be the members of management that will have a good level of interaction with the community. The newly added community manager role should hopefully help with the management/community relationship overall.

Statement from TommyB

When talking about the development of the server's gamemode, I'm sure what comes to everyone's mind is the drug system that seems to be perpetually "in development." I've been in kind of a weird place when it comes to working on the server's gamemode for the past number of months. It's been a constant struggle to get myself in the right head space where I can sit down, work on the drug system and produce something that I'm actually proud of. Early on in the new system's development, I decided to make use of a fairly new plugin which allows you to handle JSON properly in SA-MP gamemodes. Since the goal for this new drug system is to make is as dynamic as possible, using JSON to handle storing internal drug data was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, quickly into development I realized that this plugin wasn't quite mature enough to handle my specific use case. I raised concerns to the maintainers of the plugin, they implemented a fix or two but it still wasn't quite what I needed. The internal editing and loading functions for drugs already made up about 1,000 lines of code which was built with this plugin in mind. Removing it at this point wasn't an option, so I decided to put the system on hold for a little bit while I waited for more changes to be made to the JSON plugin. These changes never came. After waiting for a couple of months, I decided that I'd start maintaining the plugin myself and added all of necessary features that I needed.

With the changes I needed in place, I brought all of the existing code up to snuff and set out to continue working on the system, but I ran into other mental roadblocks in the process. Since then the system has once again been sitting in limbo with me not really knowing how I want to move forward with it. You could safely say it's in "development hell" at this point. I obviously have full intentions to finish up the system, but I've arrived at a bit of a fork in the road. I've known for a while now that if I release any substantial system that's not the widely anticipated drug system, I'd end up upsetting a lot of members of the community. This is obviously something I'd rather avoid. I've written a couple of other systems in parallel with the drug system, but I never bothered merging them into the main development branch and pushing them out as a feature update at risk of upsetting illegal roleplayers. The problem is, this can only be effective for so long. When you reach the point where you're sitting on a small handful of unreleased features which have been finished for a month or two, not releasing them is stupidly pointless. If it's between not working on the durg system and not releasing anything else or not working on the drug system and releasing stuff in its place until I can get it done, it makes more sense to go with the latter. I'm sorry that the system has taken this long and still isn't close to being done. I'm doing the best that I can as a solo operation.

With that out of the way, I'll clear up a couple of misconceptions that I've seen float around the community. This new drug system hasn't been in development for as long as people might think. Misinformation may have spread around where people thought this system has been in the works for two years or something like that, but that's not even remotely true. The first lines of code for this system were written in late August of 2020. This was also around the time we saw a mass exodus of players, so motivation was also pretty low when it came to actually sitting down and churning out a bunch of all-new code. Secondly, this new feature won't just be shadow dropped out of nowhere one day. Players will be given plenty of notice when it's finally ready to come out. Due to the nature of how the RCRP gamemode is structured and the usefulness of Git branches, it will be very easy to simply merge the new drug system into the master branch of the server's source code once it's ready to be released. For now, I'll continue working on the server's gamemode as normal, releasing updates with new features and fixes for everyone while also chipping away at the new drug system on the side. Once the drug system is in a complete state, it will be merged into the main branch, tested and then released. Until then, all I can ask for is your patience on the matter. I'm not giving up on this new system and it WILL see release eventually.

Thanks,
TommyB.

Statement from Earl

Hey! As most of you probably noticed, there hasn't been too much of Earl to be seen for a good while, and I agree, I don't involve myself with the community nearly as much as I would like to. However, recently I've been going through some tougher periods in my life and felt majorly unmotivated to do any administrative work, to play any games, or like, to do anything at all, which greatly affected my involvement with the community and there's no denying that. However, RC:RP has been my home for nearly as long as I remember, and I still really care about the community and still want to help it prosper. For the past months I've been mostly working on things internally behind closed doors together with wool and toni (who, by the way, are an amazing asset to the server, and I'm really glad we have them aboard!) because that's what I feel much more comfortable with right now. It will probably stay this way for the near future, but I still do hope to get more directly involved as time goes. For the time being toni and wool will take care of direct communication with the community as they'll get it done far better than I can, but if you need anything from myself directly - I still respond to all of my forum PMs and all Discord @'s every day, so if you need my help - feel free to contact me.

Thanks,
Earl.

Statement from toni

Hey everyone. I wanna start by saying I'm super excited for all the changes we're working on, some which have been long overdue. One of them being the big revamp of the business scene that I'm working on as the Head of Asset Management alongside the AM team. A seperate announcement will be made with all the changes once we've actually sat down and discussed them. Depending on when this announcement comes out, that meeting might have happened already so stay tuned! In the future, we'll also be opening up the Asset Management team to the public, just how faction management has faction consultants. Unfortunately, the business scene has been pretty dead for years now with a lot of owners hoarding businesses and those that do use them actively barely get any support from us so we'll be introducing a lot of systems to support business owners in terms of monetary rewards and any issues they might have. Businesses are, in our opinion, just as important as factions and deserve all the support we can give them. To conclude this small statement, soon we will begin a massive project to wipe businesses from inactive owners. So please take this a small warning if you own an important business that was left unused for months.

Thank you,
toni.

Closing

It's safe to say we have our work cut out for us with many of the issues presented, but after internal discussions and the direction we're currently looking to take the team, I'm confident we can do something good with this.

If anyone has any interesting suggestions they feel could benefit the community, I'd highly recommend making use of the administrative/community suggestions board.
If you have something to say, or if you'd like your voice heard or just more input on a certain topic regarding RCRP, I'd recommend making use of the community discussions board.

I'm both excited and positive to see where these reforms go. It's safe to say an announcement like this has been well overdue, but it's better late than never. Transparency is incredibly important in many regards and it's something we feel the community deserves to have, without it we're going to continue on with the major disconnect we currently have. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on other areas they'd like to see improvement or improved transparency I'm always open to suggestions and discussions on these topics.

Thanks for reading,
wool.

 

[.stephen]

Ho! Mamma mia!

 

[fizzle]

yea pog

 

[wool]

I figure this post will also be a good place to address the recent downtime the server has had, over the past couple of days we've had various DDOS attacks knocking the server out, especially around peak time. The issues should be resolved now for anyone that's been trying to get in-game but has had connection issues.

 

[Witting]

great work toni

 

[klaus.]

Ho! First comment is a faggot!

 

[Sime]

epic

 

[Thekillergreece]

Nice nice.

 

[toni]

pogchamp good work wool and me
mostly wool

 

[mark]

Great work wool, really look forward to these administration and community reforms you plan on doing. Good on you for taking initiative as management.