Are you a victim of predatory developers?

Server Owners
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Predatory Developers

  • What are they? Who are they?

Have you ever purchased a resource advertised in the forums from a developer through Tebex only to find it GENUINELY doesn’t work? Nil value errors, framework discrepancies; the showcase makes it look like it would be the perfect addition to your project, but when you install it, nothing works or there are a plethora of issues?

But nobody is perfect…

  • I agree, however:

Groups like Codesign, rCore, Wasabi, Rahe, Scriptforge, Nass, OverExtended, and more have set the standard for resources that are truly plug-and-play for most servers. And if something isn’t working, their support generally is really spot on when helping you resolve your issue (barring the occasional poor experience here and there).

Is this a post to cry and whine?

  • No it isn’t, as a matter of fact, I believe there needs to be a solution implemented:

Cfx is a massive community. It truly takes a village to make the whole community successful. From NoPixel, to Onx, to Immense, to the tiny servers with 5 pals playing, we make up this entire ecosystem. There are people that truly want to do good and there are others that want to take advantage. Cfx has awards and acheivments members can earn through activity on the forums, but there needs to be something additional.

Well aren’t you so smart?

  • Developers and server owners need to be verified.

I understand everyone needs to start somewhere. However, those of us that have been on the platform needs a means of showing:

  1. We are legit.
  2. We are experienced.
  3. We are willing to teach, guide, and help.
  4. Well established and well connected in the community.

Verified Project owners/groups, verified developers, and verified creators would be immensely helpful for the community. It would make it easier for projects to determine whom to do business with beyond watching a YouTube video for a showcase and reading potentially bot’d reviews/posts on a marketplace forum post.

That sounds like a terrible idea.

  • Sure, there could be some negatives, but let’s look at the ripples…

You monetize your project for a variety of reasons. Some, aren’t as honest as other’s, but for the most part, I’d like to think there is a decent percentage of us that work on our projects full-time and use the money to develop our project, pay our bills, purchase assets, purchase resources, purchase services, etc… Every dollar you spend is one someone in your community worked hard to earn to be able to give you. The developers that are acting in a predatory manner, selling resources and providing little to no support ARE LITERALLY ROBBING YOU. And they have no place on this platform. I’ve spent a TON of money over the last few months rebuilding a 2.0 of my team’s project just to throw away 65% of the resources we buy because:

  1. Little to no support from the developer on the forums or through their ***cord (censored for forum rules)
  2. Quality of the resource is so poor, there is no way it is production ready for any environment.
  3. Is advertised as “[ESX/QB/Ox/Qbx/VRP/ERP/100kordie/etcRP]” and doesn’t really work well beyond the MAIN framework/environment the dev was developing in.
  4. ETC

These costs add up and culminate into a massive waste of resources that are taking away from the project.

Why this is truly important

  • We are all competing with one another while simultaneously supporting one another.

My players are your players and yours are mine. We see so many players come and go from project to project, but they STAY on the FiveM platform. At the end of the day, our goal should be to better our projects constantly to maintain our current players and attract new ones. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” so, NoPixel or some other well-known project does something crazy and now everyone is trying to raise the bar in their own project. There are developers that share the sentiment with us of raising the bar and are always looking for something new and unique to offer our projects. After all, if they wow us and the players, more and more projects will pick up their assets. Then there are the predatory ones that sneak their way through…

Let’s push for something to protect what truly matters

  • At the end of the day, we all have our fingers crossed for GTA 6 to come our way, potentially, for RP.

Some of us have built massive communities of our own off of the work Cfx has done. If we want to ensure GTA RP and other GTA related projects have a future, we need to work to provide a sense of nourishment within the community. I’m not asking for contributions or anything like that, I’m looking for support to get Cfx’s attention to help us figure out some sort of “verified” or “Official” label/status to provide to committed, serious members/groups/projects of this community.

Please put your thoughts and feedback below and thank your for taking the time to read.

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There is sadly a lot of “useless” scripts that are available for purchase here.

Sure, I’ve got scripting experience and can fix most of my issues by myself, but when you buy a script, advertised as release - you should be able to use the script with followed instructions if it’s not “Plug-And-Play”.
If that dosent help, the developer teams from the selected script should be able to support you, and actually fix your issues if your server is a supported framework without much hassle.

Yes, there is some teams like rahe, renewed, AV and mentioned teams by OP that are super helpful and do actually do support for their customers, and their scripts work without much hassle.

Now, the issue is that many people that buy scripts dont have much scripting experience and many “teams” sell mostly broken resources.

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You raise some valid points, and I’d like to add how problematic it is that most of these shops maintain their own review scores and perform censorship in their favor. I’ve been working on a project for some time; it’s essentially a Trustpilot for Tebex shops. I’d be happy to involve more people in this project and explore the possibility of creating an objective solution.

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Yes, for those of us that know a thing or two, its an immense luxury to be able to self resolve… But the “little guy” can’t do that, and they are the largest victims in this scenario.

Someone mentioned in my DM’s how the Verified system could yield negative or poor results, and to a point, I agree with him.

However, I think Cfx could implement uptime and average pop data from your project somehow or some sort of metric to determine a level of influence to help verify project owners/groups.

Then, those Verified project owners/groups could upvote certain platform available developers. Those developers with a mostly positive upvote, boosted by Verified voters, would be reviewed by Cfx and marked “Officially Verified” and perhaps have their own section in the marketplace.

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I’ll support that 100%. Its unfortunate this community has a scummy reputation for practices and there needs to be something that helps bring out the legitimate from the rest so those with noble intentions can support each other.

I would love to have a hugely attractive project like NoPixel, but in the same breath, it is reassuring to see their success and its a reminder that anyone of us could be next, with the right amount of work, support, and planning.

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See also:

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Interesting read. Couldn’t agree more. Seems the ‘bad-actor developer’ epidemic is at an all time high. For example, you see so many unique characters on the Cfx Project Discord reaching out through Direct Messages offering their very patchy ‘services’ ~ or ‘pay for client help’. Quite sad honestly.

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  1. I’m honored this post to some degree has caught your attention.
  2. I understand some of the issues developers face in that regard.
    It’s imparative that before server owners blame the developers, they ensure things are installed properly and do multiple fresh installs. Things happen sometimes that are beyond both party’s control, that’s understandable, but this is exclusively aimed at “developers” who advertise certain features or operations when the script doesn’t provide that and any support is disregarded.

There are several tickets I have open with developers that have been compensated for assets that are entirely escrowed with little to no response in them for MONTHS on end.

I’m in your community and I see the actual stupidity of some server owners, so the operating assumptions of this post are two-fold:

  1. You’re a competent server owner.
  2. You’re an honest developer making an effort to support your customers.

I hope I didn’t misconstrue what you were trying to communicate and understood properly.

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I couldn’t agree more. I hear many horror stories revolving purchasing scripts that are broken and/or lacking the ability to edit anything to accommodate the customer even slightly.

A reputation system of sorts may be beneficial to the community.

Thank you for the recognition as well. :green_heart:

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Perhaps even the concept of: developers must offer open source content freely until they are recognized by the community, then at that point they could offer encrypted/source available content.

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Got scammed so often. And no encrypted script I ever bought was issue free, they were full of non fixable issues nobody gave a f about, sadly.

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This is the biggest issue with the escrowing; developers often don’t provide adequate enough support to justify having code escrowed.

Or, they aren’t accounting for the amount of code that really doesn’t need to be encrypted.

I get wanting to protect your work, but if you don’t actually assist your customers, you won’t have any left.

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As for buyers, the quickest way to tell, if the resource is worth it is usually comment section for each release here, on the forum. Usually scripts that have very detailed description or a video showcase are worth checking out. And ideally, you want to stick to authors already verified by the community and good release history.

You can’t expect much from someone who never released anything and suddenly they release paid resources and promising that everything’s fully functional. That’s just not how it works, unless they’re professionals in their respective field, coming from a different game environment. Which is extremely unlikely, as such individuals could by easily paid much better elsewhere.

TL;DR

Don’t jump on every second release stitched together by someone started yesterday and expect everything will go well. Read comment section. Ask around, if necessary.

There’s a lot of free and very capable resources out there already (not just on this forum). And preferably, learn how to do it yourself instead.

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The problem is, there are a plethora of resources that look really good and are well explained and showcased, but flat out don’t deliver.

I was so mad when I purchased the particular housing script that promised the stars and the moon in the showcase and it legitimately never initialized.

I had to go in and start fixing things they seemingly just didn’t do for ESX even though they advertised for ESX compatibility. There were whole functions left entirely blank and data not properly passed from callback to callback.

This happens far too often. Cfx.re needs a centralized QA of sorts, but with how limited staff is, it will be hard to do.

If R* ever reads this, I’m happy to hop in a call and pan out some concepts for the platform.

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well explained and showcased, but flat out don’t deliver.

This sucks. Hence why reviews in comment section is so important. Especially, if it’s not trusted developer with rich and non problematic history. Give it some time, don’t just on everything fresh from the oven. This goes for both SW and HW alike.

That’s just one of many reasons why this won’t happen. One can be glad this community works the way it does and wasn’t dissolved with the first lawsuit or internal struggle of any kind many, many years back. I remeber these moments too well.

If R* ever reads this…

Hardly. They’ve got way bigger fish to fry than sorting this mess. You don’t touch what works. For them at least.

I think you have very romanticized notion about corporate management.

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I don’t really have romanticized anything…

As a company they need to water the grass where its brown. If they don’t weeds crop up and start taking over… They’ve already purchased Cfx… There’s nothing stopping them from doing an audit of the forums and reading this.

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They’ve made billions from GTA:O, not FiveM. When it comes to aquisition of this operation, your guess as good as mine. Neither of us can’t tell for sure what was the motive behind it. It certainly wasn’t money though. They’ve got much bigger cash cow to take care of already.

And much easier to manage.

There’s nothing stopping them from doing an audit of the forums and reading this.

There’s also nothing incentifying them to do so either, from how I see it. If that would be the case, you’d definitely notice by now.

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You’re joking if you think they weren’t financially motivated to purchase Cfx.re

And you’re still joking if you think what’s happening in this space isn’t on their radar…

You should probably read the room a bit with everything that’s happening. To each their own though.

At the end of the day, this post is to emphasize working together as a community to support the dev’s that actually car about what they’re making and who is buying it and for us to boycott those only looking to make a quick buck of some bs.

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Corpos have sometimes weird looking strategies, at the first glance. Like Microsoft buying game developer studios just to disolve them immediatelly after aquisition.

I bet they do it for money, but in a more twisted way. You know, like monopolising the market by literally destroying any growing, potential competition.

Sometimes corpos simply buy assets to keep them under control.

You should probably read the room a bit with everything that’s happening.

People keep complaining about state of things for years now. It doesn’t seem to change anytime soon. Under every community pulse from last 2 years or so, the most prominent community contributors keep complaining about straight up ignorance and arrogance from “the new team”. I haven’t been active for last 3-4 years, but even when checking on time to time, it’s sad to see how the project is being handled. When aquisition was announced, I chose to be hopeful, but it turned out to be just wishful thinking by the look of it. If anything, it seems R* checked under the hood, took everything they’ve found useful for their own purposes and shut the lid again. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how it currently looks. Read more below.

I see no new (wo)men power invested in. I see no money being invested in, to reflect on the size of the team and delivered results. What I see more and more of are complaints about the current management.

These are just examples I stumbled across. I haven’t been following the whole drama closely.

Again, I might be wrong. I’m not active in this community anymore. I only read occasionally what happens to fall to my lap. But it leaves overall a negative impression.

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Yeah, I’m not going to allow this thread to turn into a re-hash of the other threads you posted.

If I’ve learned anything from running Oasis its that: everyone can speculate all they want about what’s going on behind the scenes. Its up to leadership to communicate and its up to the active community to trust and respect.

Idk what they’re going through right now. For all I know it could be a heard of hampsters running on wheels powering the network, idk.

All I know is I’m doing my part to provide communication and feedback where I can for whoever’s eyes may find this post. R*, Cfx, you, and any other person/entity.

Point is, too many “swindlers” as Linden noted and not enough measures to protect against them, yet. I would love to see/hear more people reply on this thread about experiences they’ve had and potential ideas to help make things better.

I believe deep down through all of the bs we endure, there is a core community here driving this thing forward in a positive manner and these individuals should be in contact with each other and working with eachother to support each other’s projects and FiveM the best they can.

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