Hi there lovely community, Viv here, also known as community beaterator on the Discord guild.
This post is not meant with any form of negativity towards anybody. It’s supposed to serve as an open letter to anybody reading through it (Preferably also someone of note that is actually able to address concerns) wanting some more information and I’m hopeful it will receive a proper reply given everything I’m about to go over below. I’m assuming that this post will be entirely removed or closed down if there is no formal reply to be provided, so I’ll save it as a draft either way for future reference.
I wanted to follow up a bit on my comment made in the latest 2024 January Community pulse:
There’s a couple of bullet points I’ve provided below that I’d like to address.
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This community pulse has been made seemingly a lot later, the 29th of January this time around, when this was seemingly never the case before (See June, July, August, September, October, November, December. 03/06/2023 June Pulse, 08/07/2023 July Pulse, 11/07/2023 August Pulse (Rockstar acquiring Cfx.re), 15/09/2023 September Pulse, 13/10/2023 October Pulse, 18/11/2023 November Pulse, 15/12/2023 December Pulse. Why is this the case in the first place?
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I personally understand burnout if this is the case. We’ve all experienced it given the situation. An acquisition is never really pretty in any case and it comes with it’s own setbacks.
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If this isn’t the case, what would it be? We would understand not having much done and leaving it up to @tabarra to showcase a really fresh, nice update for txAdmin that is full of information. (Thanks by the way, you’re an absolute star). Other than this there is seemingly nothing else of particular note.
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Given the fact that an exploit was patched out by @nta, we would have at least expected the community pulse to be out earlier, instead of having to practically beg for it within the public Discord guild. Every other community pulse has come a lot earlier, not at the end of the month, given all this, we’ve seen no further developments. The exploit was known about for months prior to the actual pull request being submitted. (Given the second bullet point I’ve mentioned, it’s completely understandable, we’d just like some further clarity on it)
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On the second point mentioned here, we would completely understand it. PR, however, is also supposed to address concerns like these. Anything in the form of “We’re aware development has been a bit slow given certain circumstances, we’re trying our best to address it internally and we’ll keep you updated as soon as possible.” would be at least more than enough to alleviate different concerns.
With all of this being said, we’d all appreciate it if it was somewhat addressed or we at least received some form of a reply, whatever it is. As mentioned in my comment in the January Community Pulse, please give us something. Anything at all. It’s desperation at this point.
It’s an outcry from community members that have stuck around with the project, have followed updates, are always around to talk to that have their own concerns. It doesn’t come from a place of “Oh Rockstar Games acquired Cfx.re, FiveM is ruined”, it comes from a place of care about the actual project. If we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t criticize it. We’d simply leave. And judging by the state of how things currently are and given that there is no communication, I’m expecting there to be a lot of others who follow suit in abandoning any hope for practically anything being done to address any of these concerns.
We keep being told to remain positive, sure, but none of the major concerns anybody has are being addressed in any notable way. What even are the notable concerns? Well, I’ll try to summarize them in here, as someone who’s active in the community and is able to see through all the chaos currently plaguing everybody.
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GitHub issues. There’s currently 232 open issues on GitHub and 69 (hehe funny number) pull requests. A lot of the listed issues practically don’t even have a singular reply to them, besides the comments on said issues made by @nta somewhere in August, from then on they just remain there, completely untouched. We understand development being slow, but please be transparent about what’s going on.
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Even with the above mentioned, why are specific pull requests, such as Assorted Steam presence fixes by blattersturm · Pull Request #2324 · citizenfx/fivem · GitHub marked this way, when this has never even been the case before. “In this case it’s to verify Linux build is fine”, okay, sure, but why is this taking more than 3 weeks now? Please be transparent.
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More on the 2nd bulletpoint here, you DO have actual good pull requests out there, and good issues that do require further investigation, however, none of them seem to be seemingly looked through in any capacity.
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On the topic of platform uptime, what about E-mails? Google and Yahoo recently updated their E-mail sender guidelines which you can find here. It’s something I personally reported a while ago, and a DNS change isn’t a hard thing to implement. New users cannot even register on the platform as the activation E-mail is sent out, but due to missing specific requirements for the domain, these E-mails are never received.
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This forum thread made by @Linden, addressing various concerns about the ToS: So releasing someone else's content is against the TOS, yes? as well as The "paid resource" meta regarding the Creator platform license agreement. There is quite a lot to read through. You may have your reservations about this particular person through other seemingly meme forum posts, however, these are all valid concerns from community members. Comments on all of these topics, including the latest community pulse, are a testament to this.
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Actually enforcing ToS, a point that’s very, very dear to me. There’s a whole heap of game servers out there violating ToS, taking payments through various other platforms such as CashApp or PayPal friends & family, selling ToS branded real life cars, nude peds, child peds (How can you look at this, not be uttrely disgusted and NOT take any action whatsoever?), branded clothing etc. A lot of those game servers are even listed on the main menu of FiveM. Their shitty coding and frameworks aside, they’re monetizing through the most illicit and illegal means available. More on this, I’ve had people personally tell me they’ve had support requests about such ToS violations lingering since a month or even two months with nobody to address them. I’d love to report the hell out of such as well, but hey, I can only have one support ticket at a time, unfortunately enough. And none of them are addressed either way, so there’s no point in reporting any of them anymore, for most community members.
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Lack of a support team. You’ve got amazing people helping out pretty much everybody we can find under #fivem-support in the discord guild. Good people from the community, such as @Matehun00, @Demonen, @JackP, myself and a lot of others that I currently don’t know the Cfx.re usernames of. It wouldn’t be hard to think of a support process, having us integrated properly into Forums and Discord, being able to manage threads, being able to form a bit of documentation on common issues instead of having to rely on third party websites (kindly made by @Demonen and it has been a huge help). Giving us a way to escalate certain issues if they’re out of our scope and we need somebody else to look into it. Why not, at the end of the day? My DMs are open, so why not reach out at any point if you do want to set up something meaningful you can put in a Community Pulse? It’s minimal effort at the end of the day.
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When are you bringing @nta back? I’ve heard and read through some rumors, nothing entirely concrete, however, most of the community had some hope that they’ll eventually be back and sort through a lot of these concerns and issues the community has. And that’s all we’re left with in the end, hope that things might be better. Quite honestly, I don’t see them getting any better without them. I feel like a large majority of the community you still do have around shares the exact same sentiment. I’m very hopeful it’ll be soon, but as things are right now, that small sense of hope is getting crushed every day of your silence. Whilst I do realize these are very strong words, they are justified and needed. When they were around, things used to be far more transparent, whilst there might have been other issues, like platform outages or anything extra, they were usually justified. Stuff was actively worked on, brought up and raised to the community and there was far more outreach.
There’s too many specific and too many details to be listed all in one long post. I’m at least hopeful this will be read through as an outcry from the community you do have. The very same community who cares deeply about the project, is hopeful that things will eventually get better in the best way that they possibly can. The very same community who has stuck around for years on end, just being there, actively discussing, working through issues together.
We’re already very heartbroken and trust has been broken since a long time now. Please stop breaking our hearts further and further by the day. Say something. Anything at all. Whatever it may be. Address some of this in some way. Reach out. Reply. Do anything. Literally anything besides this. The never ending silence and secrecy.
There is no nta cult. There is no private discord guild where negative messages are shared. This is all public information gathered through a lot of time in the official Cfx.re discord guild. Everything that’s listed above is something of note that everyone wants an answer to.
I urge anyone to share their thoughts freely and how they personally feel as a form of an open letter in the comments regarding all of this. Assuming this thread doesn’t get deleted or closed down, I feel like it’ll provide some form of semblance to hopefully proceed forward in an actual meaningful way.
