- Joined
- May 8, 2008
- Messages
- 14,979
Marco, thanks for your post. As someone who plays the GTA server nearly every day I surprisingly can speak to a lot of these items with certainty. I am going to preface my post with this - I am going to challenge you on many items here. I hope with my challenges you take an opportunity to think deeply rather than immediately feeling like I am dismissing your concern.
The fivem server looks and feels like its dieing, especially with the player count declining but it still doesnt seen like any actions are being taken to stop this.
While I recognize the server count isn't 64/64 every single day, I don't agree with you that the server is dying. Here is why:
When we reset the server and placed a whitelist on the server we took a significant risk and hit on our number 1 source of new members joining our servers and community. We placed a lock on the server and gated it behind a whitelist preventing the average default Danny from joining our server. This is where many players in this community started from. It's how I joined EdgeGamers. I joined the server, enjoyed the community, and stuck around for more. Now, we are exclusively functioning on word-of-mouth which will provide us with a significantly lower trickle of new players. This is good and bad. The good - we no longer have to worry about hackers entering our server, ruining our economy, and spawning boats, helicopters, planes, and aircraft carriers on our heads. The bad - we rely on our existing player base to populate the server. With fewer players and a gate preventing the average default Danny from joining, server numbers will be a slow climb. You can recognize this with our server stats being a wide range in activity. One day we could have a max player count of 20. The next day we could shoot up to a max player count of 40. It's dependent on the day, and the drive of our smaller playerbase without the help of default Danny to jump start the population.
What I am getting at here - this will be a slow build. Unlike other whitelisted roleplay servers that you may observe around the net that have the power of streamers, influencers, etc that may skyrocket the word-of-mouth aspect, we're very much on our own to get the word out. Until Jeremy Duck starts pulling 100+ viewers on his stream, this will be a slow build. We're basically starting over from where we have been the last three-four years. We're essentially building a new server with a new target audience from scratch.
As a player, you talk to others and everybody seens to have reasons as to why they dont play but these issues dont seen to get noticed. Posts get buried and LE its self seens to dismiss items. With an emphasis on seems.
As a fairly long player, ive had this same issue where it takes ages for simple suggestions or topics to be dealth with and if it does get dealt with, we as the playerbase have no input on it until the new idea is released.
Our server is built on and defined by player suggestions and recommendations. The entire path the Leadership team is on is based on the community related feedback. The staff that runs this server simply will not be able to implement every suggestion. They also have the responsibility of identifying which suggestions will impact the community most positively.
I'd like you to consider this. The base of players who post and engage in locations like the suggestions forum represent potentially 1/3 of the player base. With that, the Leadership team are responsible for weighing the suggestion of the 1/3 against the potential weight of the 2/3 that the rest of the player base represents. What I am saying here is that not every player who plays our server posts on these forums. Many may lurk. Many may have zero interest in posting on this board. So while you may have 8 people saying "THIS IS FANTASTIC" you may have 24 other players who feel otherwise and feel differently.
How I know that this server is built on and defined by player suggestions - I am at every single GTA meeting. Whether it be a member meeting or a Leadership meeting, I attempt to join every single one of them. The course the Leaders take is influenced significantly based on the direction the player base wants to go. The Leadership team hosts meetings every other week and now weekly to gather player feedback and input to drive the direction of this server. I put this in purple because it's one of the most prominent reasons I know that the Leaders responsible for this server make their decisions from the influence of their players. They take time out of their schedules every single week to listen to feedback from the players and modify their roadmap and plan based on what the players say.
Originally, it was the dev teams goal to push out updates for Hunting, Fishing, Diving and Farming. This has changed course based on player feedback and now the dev team is focusing on player requested items such as Criminal Enterprises (criminal missions), Bank Robberies, and CUSTOM CARS. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CUSTOM CARS! Oh, and we're working on a trading card game. [Sorry GTA Leaders if I wasn't supposed to say this. I'm the CEO and have no regrets. I don't play this card very often.]
Take the old bank payout as example, first it was to low and only after a couple of months it got changed to higher, turned out to be to high and i got changed only again after a couple of months to lower. Whilst nobody got an input on any of the changes. And having a big impact on the economy.
A mindblowing fact here - the Leadership team doesn't even dictate or decide the economy anymore. It's decided for entirely by the players, for the players. I put this in purple again because I will not sit here and allow a finger to be pointed at "THE LEADERSHIP" for not doing something for the players, when the entire economy of this server has been decided by, and is actively being decided by, some of the most active members we have. Shout out to Arjun, EchoFX, Illusion, Lucas7yoshi, among others who actively put in the work to make sure we have a well thought out dedicated economy that is for the players, by the players.
These people again, regularly attend the weekly player meetings to identify areas of opportunity and push out updates where they are needed. Leadership doesn't even own this piece. I am so happy that we have an amazing econ team to put in the work every day to deliver on such a critical area for our server.
I was really hyped for the long, LONG awaited "update/wipe" of the server because it is finally adding new thinga but for me it just felt like it came to late, and with the whitelist coming along the player count dissapeared.
And even now after this "huge" change, ther server, in my opinion, is dying harder than before.
It got released with a ton of bugs, left out things, and unadded things which should and couls have been discovered.
The server development team is on the shoulders of two individuals - Oblixion & Don. Most servers with demand that is expected of us have a full dev team. Our server has two people. Oblixion has two full time jobs, is a student and apparently goes to the gym to work on his biceps daily. Don is a parent of two kids with two ponies (dogs, I just wanted to make the pony comment) who also manages the entire infrastructure of this community from a Technical standpoint. Do I really need to explain why things take longer than expected? Do I really need to explain why things have bugs and things don't get released daily? They're busting their asses and do everything that they can to get updates out. What they really need is help. Know someone who is capable of coding in FiveM? Know someone who has familiarity with ESX plugins? Have them reach out to Oblixion or Don to help out.
Is the process perfect? No. Have we learned significant things along the way? Yes. What I can guarantee you is that we are no average fly by night operation. The setup we have in place, the leaders we have to support it, and more importantly the PEOPLE we have here will keep us sailing on. It will be a rocky ride as the boat catches some gnarly waves brah, but we are here for the long haul. As someone who has witnessed the FiveM server's growth over the last four years, this is no different than the other 3 (4?) times we've reset the server. It's a little more complicated now that we've whitelisted the server running exclusively off of word of mouth.
In the end what killed my expierence the most is after all my hours of playing, seeding, helping. No one bothers to ask what players like me, the dedicated playerbase, want or think about certain topics like the updates,changes, declining player count, whitelist etc.
We have a pretty good amount of expierence and knowledge on the server and its playerbase, in some cases even more than some of our leadership. But it seems like LE is to embarrased to ask for help or insight.
Have you attended the weekly meetings? Have you reached out for a meeting with the Leadership team? If the answers to these are "NO" I can understand why you may feel that the Leadership doesn't listen to the playerbase. In the last 4 months there have been 3 anonymous surveys, countless meetings, countless 1:1 conversations with players all to deliver on our commitment to be player first.
I will finish this wall by saying this:
EdgeGamers is built on feedback. This team who runs Grand Theft Auto and the FiveM server works extremely hard to listen, accept, adapt and keep moving forward. The work of being Leadership is thankless because everyone is quick to point the finger at you for what you're not doing when no one really has the clue to what you are doing. It's not because they're not transparent, it's the work that goes unsaid.
- Leadership meetings 2-3 times a week.
- Hours upon hours of Discord calls and conversations.
- Countless player reports, suggestions, concerns having to be addressed and handled typically out of the publics eye.
- Working your full time job or going to full time school while you're trying to sneak in a few extra eGO conversations without your boss or instructor knowing.
- Writing Google Docs & developing spreadsheets of organization and planning.
This kinda sums up my roughly 3 years of thoughts, written on phone so apologies for my grammar and writing. I could go into specifics on server scripts but this doesnt seem the right place.
Thank you for being here for 3 years. Hopefully you're here for 3 more.
