I’m probably going to get some flack for this, but fuck it, I’m sick of the lies. Ever since technetium joined the team (it’s been a few years) he has slowly been taking control of everything. He was the one to communicate with Rockstar and start talks of the acquisition. He slowly manipulated and bullied nta into selling Cfx even though nta had hesitations about doing so. This was a hostile takeover from the beginning.
This is not a good person to have total control of the project.
Sure nta has his quirks, but this project was his baby, he created it, he made it what it is today. Without him NOTHING would exist. Cfx was his life. Yes he shut things down from time to time, but it was usually for a good reason (the stuff going on behind the scenes that I mentioned above, pushing him into dark places). nta is the victim here, I cannot reinforce that point enough. I am seeing a friend of mine descend into a dark place caused by technetium and others on the Cfx “team”. They should all be ashamed of themselves.
Previously I mentioned I got muted because of me speaking out in the early days of the acquisition over my concerns with things. I have later learned (from a few people in the Cfx team) that a false narrative was sold about me by nimoa (one of the people on the team) based on some comments my edgy younger self made in 2017. All though I don’t disagree that the things I said back then weren’t the best things to say, but I am a totally different person today. He then relayed to their Rockstar rep that I am not a person to trust and that “we tried to reach out to Smallo with no success”, however NO ONE attempted to reach out to me. These people cannot be trusted. They lie and lie to get what they want and sell whatever narrative benefits themselves.
I am utterly disappointed in this community and the Cfx team and I don’t know else to say…
Make sure you screenshot this, as they will likely delete it and silence me again.
While on the discussion of things that have changed since the R* acquisition / nta’s exclusion from the project, I think it’s also worth mentioning the loss of support for open source projects.
dexyfex, the creator of CodeWalker, was basically paid “a full time income” through Patreon. While relying on that long-term might not be the best choice, the fact it was dropped immediately after acquisition is a little concerning. I’m not sure if the situation changed, but nta was the one behind that financial support and even paid him out of pocket after that drama.
There were some other contributions up until 2023 which you can see at Cfx.re - Open Collective. I’m not expecting any type of support for open source projects nowadays.
Venting feels fitting here, and though I hesitate to create a new thread for this, it’s something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I find myself reminiscing about the good old days when FiveM was a vibrant hub for sharing and enjoyment, a far cry from the current landscape dominated by business motives.
It’s disheartening to witness the transformation of what was once a communal space into a marketplace. Every server now seems to operate as a business entity, with self-proclaimed “scripters” (often individuals with basic Lua knowledge) adopting the title of “businessman.” The server creation scene, especially by those who lack a profound understanding of server dynamics, seems driven solely by the pursuit of profit – a stark departure from the initial essence of FiveM.
I recall a time when FiveM embodied the spirit of sharing knowledge, starting as a personal hobby for me. Now, I feel like I’m standing alone in a crowd of commercial enterprises. The acquisition brought about significant changes, causing many familiar faces to vanish. The sense of community, once strong and united, has dissipated. Discord servers and forums, once thriving hubs, have devolved into chaos, with channels disappearing and genuine pleas for help going unanswered.
The very essence of open source collaboration that the project was founded upon seems to be waning. I’m beginning to feel suffocated within this community, where only a handful continue to uphold the principles of sharing and cooperation. It’s disconcerting to witness this shift.
In the midst of it all, I can’t help but wonder – where has the spirit of sharing gone? My resources, such as ScaleformUI and FXEvents, are readily available on my GitHub for anyone to explore, utilize, and learn from. I yearn for the return of a community driven by a passion for sharing and knowledge, rather than one solely motivated by monetary gain.
sorry for the long text, here is a sad remembering potato
I don’t know or particularly care about what d-bubs did internally (I actually found it fun to see if he was an element or not every weekend); not to say I’m excusing him or vouching for him.
What I do know is he was of immense help on some of my more thorny issues (which I have threads on my profile for), and not a SINGLE other element even read the topics that I can recall.
Thorium for a few months was fantastic on the FiveM Scripters discord, but has since moved from a full-time to a part time team, leaving the Monov2 in limbo, and ceasing messaging activity.
Moving on to more things of substance, the uptime issue and him being the only one with access to fix things isn’t necessarily his fault; it’s awful business practice - a practice they seem to still be doing with other aspects of the place. Hell, I’d be a full time volunteer for the github and forums if it got things moving.
To build onto that last point, the contract with Tebex killed this place. I’d LOVE to post my things to github and prove I am competent to contribute, but, what’s the point? People steal and resell my scripts on an approved market with no recourse, I can’t sell my own because you have to make C# open source or support 63 different frameworks, and the cfx github has PR’s that change two sentences of docs sitting around for years, let alone anything bigger than that. Give more people contributor, and require 3 trusted people to approve them and they get auto-merged.
So, yeah, I agree with manups here. The sense of community, of discovery, of sharing? It’s gone. Why share when you know it’s just going to get cut, murdered, and sold by some rando? Go back to the black-market scripting sites and get rid of Tebex. If the elements won’t contribute, make it worth the communities’ time to.
I frankly don’t believe there is any such replacement, but I don’t know if nta returning is viable. We can’t ignore some of the things they have said or done which are a liability now that Cfx is an official part of r*, and I don’t see how they would be better off returning to work with the people that have systematically destroyed everything they worked on.
Of course there’s the option of removing those people - which seemingly would have little impact on the platform - but I’m unsure how you hire somebody that has been slighted, betrayed, manipulated or whatever else without any hard feelings and distrust. Even removing those people doesn’t resolve past issues with actions and comments made by nta, nor their history with r*. Their presence would absolutely be a benefit to the platform, and having them around at some level would be fantastic (just see some of the pull request reviews) but I just don’t know how that would happen.
Worth noting Gottfried is back so we can already expect things to start moving.
It’s a discord server meant to share knowledge and chilling for scripters that I made initially for C# people… then enlarged it and made it for everyone after ScaleformUI and Lua people asking for help… so it’s basically a discord server where you learn something new everyday
Thank you all for voicing concerns, I think a vast majority of the community is on your side. The people who aren’t are usually the abusers. I’ve been around this community for over 6 years and have vocalized my displeasure before in my somewhat infamous rant on the paid content takeover when it started happening. I may butt heads with nta, but at least he cared enough to respond…always. (even if it was super sarcastic or made me feel like an idiot, I never felt like he didn’t care)
2 days and nothing said here by a team member is the most telling thing in this thread.
It feels like we were sold out by some bad actors and the only way I think this would ever be resolved is if people started to leave. They hit another concurrent player record so in their eyes I am sure they feel like they are doing good. But when the core group of the community who are holding up the backbone of a majority of servers get frustrated and leave, that should be the most telling. Most of the people in this thread voicing concerns are the ones who have contributed to pushing the project and community forward.
So I will end this just by saying thank you to all of you guys who I rely on to run my shitty server. Maybe someone will listen to you all eventually…
I’m not sure why everyone is talking about nta being “excluded” from the project. He’s an active contributor and was just commenting on PRs two days ago. If it’s about him being excluded from being in charge of anything and having “keys”, thank god. We don’t have to worry about everything getting nuked every other week. For all the shit given to technetium, I can’t say that I’ve seen a single other person other than nta constantly harassing the community over the years. Is he brilliant? Sure, but he’s not a god and everyone needs to stop treating him like one, forgetting all the harassment along the way. Technetium and other elements have tried to at least be professional with Cfx. FiveM folks are fortunate that Rockstar even hired nta / let him contribute, with all of the history of harassment and unprofessionalism there.
To be clear, I’m not defending Cfx or the elements with everything else. There needs to be a lot fixed, especially since the acquisition (six months is a lot of time to get adjusted). Those that know me know that I have always been quite critical of Cfx. Overall I agree with everything above with the exception of nta.
By that metric, aren’t you also not ‘excluded from the project’, since you’re also able to post on the forums and make PRs? The definition you’re using here is wildly inaccurate, and outright hostile/dangerous since people might take your claims as some sort of ‘truth’.
There’s a wide range of options between ‘being given even less privileges than a random member of the public’ and ‘having full control over everything to end up with escalations or other stress turning into despair-driven decisions’. The latter I agree wasn’t suitable whatsoever, and is why I ended up deciding to sell the project at the time. That does not mean that anything that happened after that (i.e. being betrayed by people who I thought were friends, ghosted, stuck into an unclear situation where I keep having things be delayed time after time after time, in a legal mess due a former colleague making claims regarding a lot of made up cherry-picked bullshit rather than trying to talk directly, and a whole lot more that would barely be able to be summarized in a post) makes any sense.
“constantly ‘harassing’ the community” that I literally built over time myself. It’s people like you ‘constantly harassing me’ that led to the escalations that you seem to feel so strongly about. Recall, the entire community wasn’t ever meant to be a ‘professional xd commercial for-profit project’ from the get-go: it was just me working on this as a hobby, eventually getting some friends in on it, but mainly just trying to have fun and make something cool. A lot of stress though since I had to deal with a lot of stuff by myself though, and not really by choice either.
This post of yours is the first post in this thread that actually ticks me off and has me literally shaking, mainly as you’re repeating exactly the same narrative that this group of former-friends has: the focus on just the negative things I did over time, but completely ignoring the cause of these actions, and claiming that any sort of treatment I received as a result is obviously justified, and they are in the right for being the ones to live some sort of perfect life off of the stuff I’d created while refusing to come to any more permanent/lasting solution or even talk things through: in fact, this whole escalation started with one supposed ‘friend’ being angry when requested to talk about a situation that they had slowly been throwing me into, and then a huge chain of events downstream from there.
If you’d ever actually tried to talk to me, rather than being presumptively judgmental, maybe we’d have gotten along better. Forgiveness is a thing, also as negativity often begets more negativity.
From a discussion in redm-general around probably one of the largest incidents you might’ve been referring to (i.e. the time RedM was disabled after some RedM change was causing some additional stress in an already-bad period where most of the team also was somewhat unavailable, or, at worst, causing additional escalations by being passive-aggressive - see the phrasing ‘chewed out internally’ used here):
A lot of those same factors applied over time, things actually improved for a few months after that, until some sudden setback around I believe May made the old tensions return, and then the stress from the Rockstar deal being worked on (a lot of paperwork!) definitely didn’t help either.
The fact that the other folks performed their harassment in private and/or in weirdly passive-aggressive ways, does not make it the case that I’m the only person who did anything ‘wrong’ at all. In fact, I seem to be the only person from that whole group that is even interested in solving the situation at all… or even talking things through directly.
That’s indeed all I’m asking for: clarity. Some sort of closure, or a way to just leave the past be in the past, and figure out how to continue in the future, with the same team that’s always been working on this, without this weird mutual fear and ghosting and unpredictability that seems to have been building up over the past 6-12 months. You all can reach out to me fine. I won’t hate any of you for it, I won’t even try to blame any of you for it. My goal always had been to have everyone just… get along fine, and get decent outcomes for everyone.
… and a bit of not wanting to see the project I’ve spent a decade of my life on be potentially ruined by a lot of bad decisions, I guess. There’s a lot of potential here, and I think it’d be a lot easier to unlock that potential without half of the team clashing (or duplicating work rather than asking me for advice because I’m in this half-pushed-out limbo state).
I guess this person hasn’t seen me treating people on discord like idiots and calling them names constantly, all while helping out with their support questions… Most often random people tho. But who am I to this project right ;d
I agree with not wanting to see a project you’ve dedicated the past decade on just go to piss, sadly it does look like not much is being worked on from the “team”.
As mentioned previously in this thread, there has been zero response from anyone in the FiveM staff team. Which is laughable at best. Why might that be? Because they don’t have a good response regarding this?
Gotta stop being bitches and stab people in the back for your own gains.
Directed to this so called “staff”, you’d be shit without nta and his passion for this project. You really think there’d be something as big as FiveM out there right now without the groundwork that was made all those years ago, I recall being there when we were testing shit in IV, the amount of hours spent testing shit, trying out ViIV before V launched on PC, all of that. Where were you back then? Nowhere, that’s where.
You’re a moderator and still have contributor tags… so no, the metric you claim isn’t the same. I don’t have either of those things. You are formally affiliated with Cfx - still. So it isn’t outright dangerous for people to know you are not excluded.
As for the harassment, the whole FiveM/RedM community is well aware of what I mean. It isn’t about the one incident you outlined. You did it yet again after that incident and you did it many other times prior to that. The only reason it isn’t still happening is because they took your keys away finally after the last incident.
I understand stress and mental health, but that does not mean your actions time and time again are excusable. You have no place being in a position of authority and I know many of us are glad you no longer are. You should get help and I know your actions were screaming for that, but it doesn’t make it right whatsoever.
I don’t know, I’d say it’s dangerous for people to assume the person being gatekept (read also: excluded) from most project things is still tied to the project, most of which have nothing to do with a leadership role or any possibility of “harassment” you’re mentioning.
You should probably give their post another read though because I feel like everything you just said was addressed just prior.
‘Contributor tags’ - I presume you’re referring to the state on GitHub? This shows up for anyone who ever had a commit in a repository.
‘Moderator’ - I forgot I even had this still! There’s a lot of people who have moderator permissions despite not being part of the project anymore, or even having visited the forums in a while . (it’s curious that these moderator accounts don’t get cleaned up, especially given the last time spurious moderator accounts were a thing led to a data breach)
Let’s name some:
@transparent-tracing: Quit the project in early 2022. Still has moderator access and visits the forums daily, despite not having posted or been active in the community for a while. Supposedly hangs around closely with the group that’s been escalating against me and has been a key player in said escalation however, so technically is less excluded than I am, which is also probably why their access hasn’t been removed.
@_duk: Hasn’t been directly involved in a while, last visited October 2023. Still gets asked a few things from time to time, though shouldn’t need moderator privileges directly.
These do not necessarily reflect the actual state of my involvement, which is more along the lines of ‘indefinitely suspended and even posting this or helping out on GitHub or even playing the FiveM client or interacting with anyone who plays or uses FiveM/RedM is potentially violating some terms’, and any requests for clarification were also curiously ignored.
I was supposed to be involved like most other direct employees/contractors (which would’ve basically been the same way as before, minus having access to production systems directly, which was a decision I’d made myself because the access would usually lead to a lot of the mutual fear stuff), however this state has somehow been in limbo for a very, very long time now, without any direct reason being indicated as to why it’s taking this long, including to the team.
(this is also something that isn’t explicitly stated in public, indeed, fueling a lot of speculation and circling back to the initial part of the topic here: the sudden lack of transparency. the ‘indefinitely’ state is a new one, I was originally told I’d be able to return a week or so ago - only to get an awfully surprising email a few days later…)
The remaining parts that feel like an attack on ‘I’m glad you’re no longer involved or able to do anything!’ are best addressed in the post below, as well as in my post above yours:
Why is only negative stuff ‘not excusable’, but somehow the positive things (me having worked on 90%+ of the project!) are supposed to be taken for granted?
As said, this attitude (did something bad and therefore should be disproportionately shunned forever!) is just awfully counterproductive, and in fact led to a lot of additional escalations in the past as the weird passive-aggressiveness just led to more little things happening.
Also,
… the intent, to my understanding, at least, had always been to have me be equivalent to the remainder of the former team: no more and no less, no ‘super leadership’ privileges that could lead to people being hesitant to provide feedback to me, no access to production systems (unless needed and in a supervised way), but also no extra weird responsibilities, gatekeeping or other expectations that other team members also didn’t get. Of course, starting from day one, this promise already turned out to be broken, and over the following months, more and more things started falling apart or being escalated against me.
Going only by public information won’t give you a complete story whatsoever. I’ve been keeping quiet for the past while as well, but given the state moved to ‘indefinitely’ after I was already made to wait disproportionately long after a sudden escalation by one of these former friends, and also given the narrative being spread here, I’m somewhat trying to be a little more transparent here. Similarly, if I’m supposed to not say anything here or do anything differently, I’d like that to be pointed out to me directly, not for that to be something I find out indirectly weeks to months later as it comes up in some story way after the fact… communication has been lacking and the past months have been full of a lot of bombshells regarding things like that.
I’m basing the Contributor status not just off GitHub, you are formally a Contributor with Cfx, no? There are many people who have contributed to the repo that do not have this status. You’re also a Rockstar employee, no?
Any access you do not have or things that you are being “excluded” from are surely because of the risk you pose. Rockstar clearly understands this apparently. Hell, you literally were one of the few people spreading awareness of the GTA5 leaks in a third-party discord - after the acquisition and you becoming a Rockstar employee. I’m not surprised whatsoever that Rockstar wouldn’t give you equal access to everything. Though they probably don’t even know that you were doing that, but from a corporate risk mitigation point of view, it just supports their apparent decisions even further. Just casually discussing the leak and bringing attention when no one else was discussing them prior:
This isn’t about the negativity of the topic, it’s about trust and authority. You cannot be trusted to be in a position of authority and apparently you cannot be trusted to have privileged access to certain things. Not having privileged access to everything doesn’t mean you are excluded from contributing to the project and you even have more privileges than most.
You can spin this however you like, but you are part of Rockstar and Cfx more than the vast majority of us. Anything you are not being included in is because of your own actions. Yes you built Fivem, but you also lost control over it because of your irresponsibility time and time again.
None of what I have said was intended to be a personal attack. I was merely stating facts and questioning why everyone is so concerned about nta. Though I do understand why it would upset you, as it is the truth and no one else seems willing to say it. If I had harassed the community like you did and nuked so much research from existence, I would fully expect to lose all of my privileges.
Cfx and FIveM are no longer beholden to you and that is for the better. It will be a more positive and healthy environment without you in a position of authority (though to your points, I still question why you’ve been allowed to continue as a moderator). Cfx and Rockstar still have their issues overall, but at least this last six months has been peaceful.
You don’t seem to understand that now nta is gone the project will sit at basically a standstill. Nothing significant will change or improve. The people “in charge” have next to no development skills. The only people there with a brain are Disquse and the anticheat guys. They do have the skills to mince words to make it seem like stuff is happening though. But the fact stands that nothing of significance has changed since the acquisition.
To further upon this, scrolling through allllll the github commits you can determine that effectively no interesting new features have come since the merge
The two exceptions to this are nta and Disquse.
nta’s coming from them when in the mysterious phantom state they’ve been setup in through public PR’s.
I literally cannot think of ANY meaningful new things that have come since the merge from any of the elements or -cfx’s
Whatever the reason may be, fuck all has come out since the merge and the only things that are notable are from two people, and then theres like 5 or 6 other elements in the history doing the equivalent of “fixed typo in comment in obscure file”.
A particularly good one to point out is when new authentications broke and the person who fixed it was nta not actually someone presently and actively working under Cfx
I’d really prefer if you’d drop the topic instead of trying to find more and more ways to ‘prove me wrong’, but since you’re out to get me for whatever reason:
What does ‘formally [being] a Contributor’ even mean, according to you?
False.
This is a role in a Discord server that also wasn’t removed (and had been abandoned for a while), and does not indicate any sort of formal status or affiliation. @_duk is still there as well and he’s not even a R* contractor/employee, either, as is another contractor that had since been terminated, alongside a fair few element accounts that belong to people that left way prior to the acquisition.
Again, trying to piece together some sort of ‘objective truth’ based on snippets of information (‘having a role not be removed means you’re formally involved!’) does not usually lead to the actual truth.
Conjecture, as with your above posts based on pure speculation as well as ignoring a lot of subtext. For one, why are you using the word "excluded" in quotes, specifically?
I don’t have access to production systems, which is the only ‘risk’ that I provably ‘pose’. This should not include things like a) pay being suspended, b) not having access to internal chats and collaboration systems and c) not even knowing if I’m even supposed to do any work at any point in time, being in some sort of limbo state.
It could very well be Rockstar is comprised of people with the same mentality you have, in which case I can say one thing: if I had been aware of this, I would not have sold the project. If I had been given the ability to undo this upon finding out, I very much would have done so. I had been given explicit promises both from the people supervising the deal at Rockstar, as well as the people on my side, that I’d be allowed to remain involved fine, and if anything would be done ‘against’ me, that the (apparently ‘pretend’) friends would ‘not stand for that’.
Again conjecture. These ‘leaks’ were out in the wild for over a year at the time, I’m not ‘a Rockstar employee’, and said ‘a third-party Discord’ is one of the few places one could have modding discussion in the first place - and in the days and weeks after, the same debug information was being discussed there as well by pretty much everyone.
(fun fact: the leaks are still the only canonical information that anyone from the Cfx team has: internal info-sharing has still not been approved as the leaks themselves made for a lot of concerns regarding security, though supposedly some progress is being made on this front over the past few weeks)
Similarly so, had I had access to internal chats instead of these being restricted due to said escalations, I would have discussed this information there.
If you’re so certain of this a) not being known and b) this being ‘another reason to kick me out’, assuming you’re not ‘out to get me’, why are you trying to make this even more apparent/broadly known? As above, this is dangerous behavior you’re expressing and feels almost targeted.
Again, conjecture. Why are you trying to infer that you know more than me about the situation I am in myself? You’re not the person in this situation, yet you’re somehow either a) accusing me of lying based on your own gut feeling or b) overly confident that you know more about myself or others’ decisions regarding myself than I do.
Because even despite at least part of it being ‘the truth’, does it make sense to ‘punish’ this disproportionately? Does it make sense for a random community member to rub it in, lathed in additional weird conjecture?
That part in and of itself can very well be seen as ‘a personal attack’, and very easily could be seen as defamatory (especially that parts are pertinently false, therefore perhaps even libelous). Nonetheless, it’s also counterproductive - ‘yeah you know that guy? they did something bad long ago!’ doesn’t really make for a good atmosphere - and the fact you posted ‘just to provide a counterweight to the people wanting me back’ does infer some sort of personal grudge towards me.
Again, I implore you to read the remainder of my posts above instead of trying to advocate for me being pushed out even harder. It’s not like the final statement in your post about ‘the last six months being peaceful’ has in any way been contingent on me being fully pushed out like this.
It also seems like you’re enjoying me ‘getting what I deserve’ or whatever underlying view you’re trying to express here.
As said in my earlier post:
None of this is in. any way proportionate. Similarly, what I wrote is merely a set of reactions and clarifications to things you’ve posted, and do not in any way represent the complete story.
Finally, one more thing:
This project existing, these friends having this perfect life of theirs, is also ‘because of my actions’. Not because of their actions. Similarly, I’ve made numerous efforts over time to reduce these negative ‘actions’ from even being possible - the team however felt their goals could be furthered by letting them happen, so they refused to accept any of my mitigation strategies.
However, again, I’d prefer you refrain from replying here further (and… let’s agree to disagree?), even if at least to keep the peace. People like you who keep dwelling on the past are exactly what has caused a lot of these escalations, and you seem unwilling to actually read what I wrote above, and it appears you’re still holding some sort of grudge or aiming for retribution for something I would’ve done at some point.
As above,
… sometimes it’s better to let things that happened in the past remain in the past, learn from them, and try to make things better.
