Sunset Roleplay Birthday Month - Information & changes
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Hi everyone,
In less than a month’s time, it will be 1 year since the server released its version 2. On the 5th August 2023 at 4PM CET, we released the server to the public. Some additional content discussing and celebrating this will be released in due course, but this announcement is purely for a few announcements (some unrelated to the birth date of the server).Here are a few of the things you need to know about before then…
Major update planned
We have been working on a major update that is centred around something in particular. This update will add several new features and improve existing gameplay on a specific area. We expect to release this update during the summer, and therefore during the birthday month. There is not much information to be publicised yet, but this update is very cinematic and so there will be plenty of content to be seen beforehand!
Content creator rewards
This server has done exceptionally well in making high-quality content and attracting people who make successful videos on the server. To help incentivise this further, we will be introducing rewards for content created on the server that follows criteria. To sign-up to this programme, you will need to open a support ticket on the Discord server.
Rewards for top creators will include exclusive items and assets not obtainable by anyone else.
Birthday month events
The events team will release an events schedule for the month of events soon.
Seized businesses
We’ve repossessed a great deal of properties either manually due to analysis of player inactivity periods, or automatically from the properties being automatically seized due to outstanding taxation. We’ve held these for a great deal of time, but we’ll be giving these out soon.
The plan is:
- High value properties will be sold by a team of real-estate agents through roleplay means. They will collect the highest value for these properties.
- Lesser valued properties but still important (ie. may be in LS but further away from main area) will go on-sale at certain times which will often be announced beforehand
Survey responses plan
We received a great deal of feedback from players and the majority of the surveys submitted were in great detail and very helpful. For contextual demographic purposes, 65.1% of participants were PC and 34.9% were mobile.
Firstly, we found that a very low number of participants actually found a need to work for money in the form of jobs and drugs and other means. Only 41.9% did so often or very often, and 34.9% being rarely or never and the remaining being on occasion. This highlights a disparity in the gameplay as earning for rewards in the form of assets and businesses as well as funding themselves and their factions is part of the gameplay cycle. We think this links to other points in the survey where a good deal of participants claimed that they were capable of funding themselves by nuking ATMs and robbing other players which ultimately removes the need to work. Therefore, ATM nuking rewards will be recalculated and balanced to include the number of PD online as a factor in the reward. This should keep it worthwhile to do, while also making it more of a side activity rather than a main income source.
Secondly, we found that there are some jobs used more than others despite them paying roughly the same for time and effort. The most common jobs were taxi and trucker which is not really a surprise. Other jobs such as dockworker, trashmaster, lifeguard, bus driver and train driver were some of the least used. It is possible that some of these jobs are quite monotonous and we do have ideas on how to improve this. However, jobs such as dockworker are not exactly going to be thrilling in any capacity - it is just simple.
Onto criminal activity - we found that 51.2% of people had tried the jewellery heist and only 25.6% of people had tried the museum heist. This is skewed obviously due to legal characters. Jewellery heist is much easier to do, and museum heist had some issues in the script that were not reported - this has been rectified in V2.3.74. Our initial thoughts were that setting up the heist was too difficult, but only 15.2% of people said that the heist was too difficult to setup. Despite this, 0% of people do heists often or very often - with a fairly rough quarterly split of around 20-30% in each category of never/occasional. The main issue seems to be the financial reward and the police interaction. The issue with lack of police response is addressed later in this topic. The financial rewards will also be looked into, but they were calculated the same as other incomes and as mentioned earlier, it is possible that the ease of income from ATMs were skewing the idea of what a good income should be.
Surprisingly, we found that a good majority of players enjoy the dominance-based turfs (flags) with 77.5% of players voting them above average in enjoyment.
With criminal missions we found that the main two missions (arms trafficking and smuggle) were the ones that were done the most often and it is no surprise, as these are the two oldest missions on the server. The newest missions are not done nearly as regularly, and the main reason cited in the responses was lack of good rewards and a lack of knowledge on how to do these missions. We have balanced the rewards in V2.3.74 and will look into making some video tutorials on how to do these missions.
Drug-wise, the server lacks considerably. According to 58.1% of respondents, weed is the most useful drug to produce with the next drugs (cocaine and meth) tied at only 7%. We think there is a severe lack of need to produce these drugs due to other income sources, which we have touched on earlier and fixed. Each of the drugs tells a similar story on never / not often producing, and so it is not exactly limited to one drug.
Overall, the majority of players are happy with the administration team’s performance. The admins were credited on having situations being dealt with well and their helpfulness, but the main issue mentioned was lack of activity and slow ticket handle times. A very interesting distribution was seen in the “It takes too long for my ticket to be handled in-game.” statement. Most players agreed with this on average (27.9% at “5/10”), but the rest of the votes were scattered evenly to the extremes (1 and 10) which implies players have varying experiences and most likely to do with timezone disparities. On the contrary, 72.1% of players find reports on Discord to be effective, and 72.1% also agree that their refund and property requests get handled on-time.
On our switch to medium roleplay, 76.7% of players found that the move to medium roleplay was a good idea for the server, but less people found that the improvement was not yet seen. The great majority players agreed that the server rules are fair and fit for purpose.
Overall, these statistics show a very interesting story into the server and we have had internal talks on how to address these issues and you can see some changes already having been made.
Server lore changes
As we had previously back in September-October, the server operated mainly under the guise of singleplayer factions. As we introduced the freight trafficking mission inspired heavily by the singleplayer mission, we believe that reverting back to this period will be best for engagement and interactions between factions. Each faction leader has selected their choice, and we are glad that the faction leaders were very on-board with this change and agree to be lore-accurate which should help with improving the standards of the server.
The changes to factions are as follows:
- La Familia Escarra -> The Survivalists
- National Balla Association -> Rollin’ Heights Ballas
- Scalleta Crime Family -> Leone Crime Family
- Bratva -> Los Santos Vagos
- Alperon Crime Family -> San Fierro Triads
- Vercetti Crime Family -> Forelli Crime Family
- North Side Youth -> Varrios Los Aztecas
The server will also begin its lore in 1994, a few years after the events of GTA SA concluded. A more in-depth description of this will come soon so that the lore can be updated progressively.
Changes to support SAPD
It is no secret that SAPD has not been active for a great duration of this server’s history. A lack of interest in law enforcement fuelled by shortcomings and poor interactions has led SAPD to become obsolete. However, SAPD is a faction that is the forefront of the server’s legal side and as much as criminal factions hate losing to them, an active police department is needed to keep both sides active.
Temporarily, SAPD’s academy has been suspended to make the entry process into the department easier. There will also be more live recruitment sessions to help drive up interest in the faction.
We’ve also made several rule changes to make sure interactions are more fun and fair:
- Compliance to traffic stops is now mandatory - if a police officer pulls over a vehicle involved in a traffic offence (anything is considered a traffic stop unless scriptwisely otherwise - ie. you’re suspected). You cannot assume that you’re being arrested for simply being pulled over - this also goes for any lack of money on hand etc, but more so for those with great wealth who refuse to pay tickets. There is usually no reason to flee from a traffic stop except to cause a shootout. Wanting to evade is a façade excuse as it 99% ends up in a shootout instigated by the suspects who wanted to evade to avoid it being branded as shooting over a traffic stop. You can only flee if the suspect’s identity is revealed. You cannot shoot over a traffic stop. This rule will be enforced within the next few days, with a grace period beforehand to help players become accustomed with the new rule.
- Police officers must go off-duty at duty points - this is more of a quality-control measure, but it helps avoid players who abuse the duty to use the vehicles to go from A->B and dump the vehicle
- Rules of Engagement (RoE) changes - you cannot camp at the scene of a crime instead of trying to escape. A minimum level of interaction between parties is required before a shootout. This goes for both sides - SAPD/SWAT/FBI/HRT cannot shoot without first attempting to communicate as this would violate the scale of force continuum which would be deathmatch as well, rather than IC corruption. Similarly, criminals must not initiate a shootout without being interacted with or interacting with them first. For example, if a police officer responds to a store robbery, they cannot be shot on sight unless they make some attempt to engage. This requires common sense to be enforced properly, but examples of engaging are aiming/shooting, attempting to arrest, etc. Simply arriving on the scene and waiting for backup is not engaging. This means you could threaten them and request them to leave with a warning, but it does not mean you can shoot before giving them any warnings prior to that.
We’re also planning to add more events for SAPD and illegal interaction. While we’re pushing for more roleplay and encourage factions to hold their own roleplay initiatives, we think some fun is also required for a healthy balance. Events such as armoury restocking and money transports will take place spontaneously, with criminals able to come across these and disrupt them. They most likely won’t be announced, but will be random and secret.
Reintroduction of FBI
We’ve decided to re-add FBI and HRT to add a bit more risk into criminal gameplay. We understand this contradicts the SAPD commitments slightly, but as they are on different terms working in different fields and not using the same members, it will not have an issue. FBI will not have sniper slots and is purely an investigatory bureau - HRT has the same number of sniper slots as SWAT (3 at the time of writing). Member slots are also heavily limited to avoid poaching from SAPD. This is an exclusive department with a focus on in-depth legal investigatory roleplay.
Undercover operations/stings, property/HQ raids etc are all authorised, and so players must be vigilant and more careful when they are operating a criminal lifestyle. Advertising the selling of illegal drugs is probably not the best idea.
Launcher Release
As promised many months ago, the launcher was in development. We are very close to being done, and expect to release it within the next few weeks or so - and we’ve decided on the name: Watchdog Client-side Anti-Cheat (WCA), which reflects our combined anti-cheat collective server-side and client-side. This will be regularly maintained for updates and patches, as it is not possible to make a perfect launcher first time, and any good anti-cheat requires continuous improvement. Anyone that says otherwise has no clue what they are talking about.
Information on what this software does is limited due to maintaining the integrity of its operation, but we will release a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use outlining our commitment on privacy and data collection, and what we expect from users for using our services.
Only players who participate in faction wars or are suspicious of cheats will be forced to use this launcher. Other usage is voluntary, but is encouraged.
A huge thank you to Sixy for her contributions in making the panel side of the launcher, to Foksha for his help in integrating the different parts of the backend, and to Valentin for his contributions and advice on all parts of the launcher.
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Happy to help the project
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