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I wish more people would focus on Good Roleplay Storys than just your own characters "Winning" all the time

Yetty

Member
Location
United Kingdom
 First of all I want to say I love this server and everyone in it, I've been here around a month and having a great time, I have been a bit of a veteran in the roleplay space starting around 15 years ago in Half Life 2 Roleplay. There are some amazing roleplayers on this server, you know who you are so this post is not blankly applying to everyone, in-fact the chances are the people im talking about don't really even come on the forums,

Back in Half Life 2 roleplay days we had the concept of Playing to lose, which was the idea that your character should always take the most interesting story path even if this means they lose in game, you shouldn't play to constantly win in every situation as it becomes boring for all parties involved.

For me Roleplay is about creating interesting storylines and stories despite the outcome for your individual character, the more interesting the story the more you have suceeded in creating a good experience for yourself and others around you, even if this means your character must die or lose if that makes for a more interesting story I will always follow this path.

However, I have found that quite a few people see roleplay more as an RPG where you have to progress and get more and more money and status and will sacrifice good story lines in favour of reaching this goal, an example is sometimes its possible without even realising it to use out of character bias to keep your character safe, for example you know from reading forums or just being around about certain groups or gangs that your character doesn't know, so you steer clear of them or are overly street wise when they are trying to trick you leading to missing out on a roleplay oppurtunity which is interesting but obviously your character would lose if you partake,

I notice a lot of people just focus on basic crime, muggings, stabbings, selling drugs etc and will happily kill anyone involved if it allows them to progress and become richer, and then use the character backstory of "well my character is a deranged egotistical maniac" in my opinion this is just plain bad roleplay, like in a hollywood drama if a character was just this they would be a very two dimensional boring character, where-as you look at great series like Breaking Bad and you see how Walter White slowly develops into an evil person, but even in his final state he wouldn't randomlly kill someone to progress his wealth or character, everything he does is either in revenge, for his family or to protect someone, but later we learn he enjoys this, this creates an interesting character. Character development is important and like a good story, characters should have some type of motivation to what they do and how they react in certain situations, someone who goes around stabbing everyone which obviously a lot of the time helps progress your in game situation is not as interesting as a character who is genuinely afraid of interacting with gangs and groups.

Working with other players to create interesting narratives is interesting, too many times people go to murder or death as a way to progress their characters despite destroying another characters storyline, where-as people should embrace these story lines to see where they go and they will find they get into much more interesting situations.

That is all 🙂

 
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TLDR: Take breaks, burnout is real, it's ok to do other stuff, virtual and real life moves on with or without us. 

I'd like to throw my opinion out there, not that it's worth much. Each community has its own unique culture, and the games those communities play also influence that culture. This community is pretty old, it's been over 8 years since I joined it when a Canadian Altis Life community I played on collapsed due to mismanagement and a few of us jumped over to RPUK (ALUK for you old heads). 

Now, I've preached life cycles for communities for years and I think this community has seen its fair share and is currently in the midst of one. The same thing that plagued the Arma 3 RP'ers is Plaguing the FiveM RPer's (Some of which are the same people). Burnout. People are playing for the sake of playing, someone said it's like they're using it more like VRChat or a Discord Call, which I can see why. They've invested so much time into the city and so have their friends and due to a sort of gravitational effect they all just congregate on the server every night together. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, what is bad is that people aren't recognizing when they need to break off and go do other things.

Burnout is real, it affects everyone. To deny this is to deny human nature. The life cycle I spoke about earlier is a little apparent to me as we are in the middle of a development hump as Dev's get ready to push out more things in the future, but it's never fast enough or enough content to keep some people satisfied for long. Generally during the process you start seeing more and more posts on the forums about overpowered factions (Looking at you AR, Poseidon, UNMC, Kavala Baldies) and the tit for tat reports and complaints between the groups. None of this is new or original, most of us have been here before. Multiple times.

Now the "Playing to lose" concept. I don't dislike it, but it relies on everyone having the same mentality which is impossible because humans are finicky. Every situation has a winner and loser. Now you can be a Winning Loser and a Losing Winner, but at the end of the day there is always a Victor and a Loser. The ultimate goal of all parties is to ensure everyone in a situation ends up as a Winner, but that's all but impossible most of the time. It's hard to find a balance between realism, game, and the imagination. 

I hope this brings solace to some people knowing the people at the top of the Staff Hierarchy have witnessed these things occurring time and time again, I am reluctant to call them problems but without problems there's no reason to have discussions and change things. So, at the end of the day, everything even some of the more advanced drama surrounding stuff can be beneficial. There has always been and always will be a better path forward, and I encourage any new and old player alike who's struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel to just take a break. I took a 7-year break from seriously roleplaying, it's ok. Sometimes those breaks last forever, that's ok too. No one can ever take the memories away of all the friends and experiences you made along the way. 

 
TLDR: Take breaks, burnout is real, it's ok to do other stuff, virtual and real life moves on with or without us. 
Honestly I think you hit the nail on the head with this, For while now I've had the view of somethings definitely off but I could never put my finger on it but this is exactly it. I also feel if anything a lot of the issues starting to pop up people are complaining about aren't necessarily issues that have just appeared out of thin air recently (not saying all issues and complaints people have should be disregarded as just burnout as that isn't always the case) but more people have spent so much time around the server and doing one thing or the same things over and over with no break they're starting to notice stuff that agitates them much more which then just grows and becomes more and more of an issue as times goes on and they continue to just push through and in a way force themselves to keep logging on and playing instead of just taking a break for a while even just a week.

I encourage any new and old player alike who's struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel to just take a break.
I would always get in the mindset (and still do) when I go to take a break of "oh what if I miss stuff going on in the server though or something important happens and I'm not there and i miss out on something big" truth is majority of the time nothing will I came back after a lovely week and a bit break and all you're gonna miss is maybe a few phone calls and text from peeps wondering if your character is dead XD

 
People are playing for the sake of playing, someone said it's like they're using it more like VRChat or a Discord Call, which I can see why. They've invested so much time into the city and so have their friends and due to a sort of gravitational effect they all just congregate on the server every night together. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, what is bad is that people aren't recognizing when they need to break off and go do other things.
This is a very interesting point I hadn't considered.

Do you think perhaps people are aligning their characters with their real self in this way, and thusfor them acting more like they do in real life and sort of their characters are more of an extension of their real life personalities and thusfor it would make sense why this situation could occur?

 
Sadly I think this is in part the nature of the game (GTA) and the demographic this server is aimed towards. It's quite clear when you have young adults that, instead of having multiple characters in different roles (police, nhs, g6, crim, legal civ), just have 4 crim characters. On all those characters they grind to get a weapon and then they go play loot vending machine simulator on a 2nd or 3rd character so it has no consequence for their main character. The state of the amount of robberies and the piss poor rp accompanied with them is abysmal atm. There is a hard core in this server that always provide good rp but besides that it's lacking hard.

People do play to win, like you said because of the RPG grind mindset. If this was sandbox RP it would be better RP wise, but 80% will leave the server. It's a double edged sword sadly. I even catch myself having a win mentality sometimes. Humans are competitive by nature after all. I don't know how you'd fix this situation besides making harsher rules on robbery rp etc. The nature of a person can not be changed.

 
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Sadly I think this is in part the nature of the game (GTA) and the demographic this server is aimed towards. It's quite clear when you have young adults that, instead of having multiple characters in different roles (police, nhs, g6, crim, legal civ), just have 4 crim characters. On all those characters they grind to get a weapon and then they go play loot vending machine simulator on a 2nd or 3rd character so it has no consequence for their main character. The state of the amount of robberies and the piss poor rp accompanied with them is abysmal atm. There is a hard core in this server that always provide good rp but besides that it's packing hard.

People do play to win, like you said because of the RPG grind mindset. If this was sandbox RP it would be better RP wise, but 80% will leave the server. It's a double edged sword sadly. I even catch myself having a win mentality sometimes. Humans are competitive by nature after all. I don't know how you'd fix this situation besides making harsher rules on robbery rp etc. The nature of a person can not be changed.
Completely agree with the fact everyone’s competitive through human nature however I do think the way the servers setup adds even more to this competitiveness. With the price of goods being so much in addition to how boring it is to make money many people can’t help but try NVL to save items, or go on the rob as the quickest form of making money. Is it right No, will it change no aslong as money is so tedious to make and items hold so much value. It’s not so much the item people care for losing or gaining it’s the hours it takes. 

 
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Completely agree with the fact everyone’s competitive through human nature however I do think the way the servers setup adds even more to this competitiveness. With the price of goods being so much in addition to how boring it is to make money many people can’t help but try NVL to save items, or go on the rob as the quickest form of making money. Is it right No, will it change no aslong as money is so tedious to make and items hold so much value. It’s not so much the item people care for losing or gaining it’s the hours it takes. 
I reckon you're referring to gun prices mostly. The aim of this server is to not be a 100k or die server, so not everyone should have a gun available. Especially in 3 weeks when the old guns have decayed the price will be even more. This clearly shows the direction the management team wants the server to go. I wholeheartedly agree with it, but the main issue is that people think everyone deserves to own a gun. IMO that shouldn't be the case. If people are too lazy to hop in a taxi for a few hours, even if it's for their first gun, they shouldn't have one. Besides that having everyone going around guns blazing will increase the vending machine "rp" we see now, which is another reason there will be less guns I reckon.

 
I reckon you're referring to gun prices mostly. The aim of this server is to not be a 100k or die server, so not everyone should have a gun available. Especially in 3 weeks when the old guns have decayed the price will be even more. This clearly shows the direction the management team wants the server to go. I wholeheartedly agree with it, but the main issue is that people think everyone deserves to own a gun. IMO that shouldn't be the case. If people are too lazy to hop in a taxi for a few hours, even if it's for their first gun, they shouldn't have one. Besides that having everyone going around guns blazing will increase the vending machine "rp" we see now, which is another reason there will be less guns I reckon.
Get what your saying but imo if there was more access to guns the vending machine rp will decrease, everyone has access to guns anyway so it wouldn't make a difference. I get you should have to earn it but as you said it could maybe take 2 hours taxing where's the rp in that if am taxing am ngl I've got YouTube on with no intention of interacting with anyone it shouldn't be like that either make making money more interactive or make goods cheaper imo. 

 
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