Concerning Trends in FiveM

Hey everyone, I must first preface and start here and say I have been a member of the FiveM community for over 6 years now. Its been a major part of my life and my community means the world to me on this platform. However I think with the recent developments its time to call into question the business practices of this platform.

Before I get into any concerns I just want to say that this is FiveM’s platform and they are allowed to do whatever they want with it. These are just open concerns I figured it be time to show. Please do not be disrespectful and try to be giving constructive criticism. I also won’t be covering the ZAP hosting stuff because frankly to a lot of the community its kind of a meme and I don’t care about that partnership at all really.

So long ago when FiveM wasn’t FiveM and really, up until only rather recently, did FiveM start to profit off the platform. Now this is no concern of mine, this stuff has to be extremely expensive to afford. It was under the impression of myself and a lot of the community is that we as server owners were basically funding the project through Patreon.

Then the boosting came, and to be honest I was completely okay with the boosting at first. After all my community is a success story most likely because of it. However what used to be is not anymore and in order for you to be competitive on the front page we have to dish out thousands of dollars…

Then the sellers/resellers came and the open source leaking fight ensued…

All the scumbags(I mean “entrepreneurs”) came to FiveM when the learned of the money going around because of content creators. So now they need to get their money. So they come in and start selling scripts. But FiveM doesn’t allow sold scripts, so they had to go to 3rd party sites. Leakers fought back against the paid scripts by leaking them and breaking their iplocks. This was basically the fight over the past 2 years going back and forth.

Then FiveM partnered with Tebex and we got paid scripts on the forums. Paid scripts were abundant now but they were being leaked now. The leakers who were on FiveM’s side were now going against them. So leakers started to obfuscate their code or add these dumb locks again. FiveM then came out and said no you can’t do that we will have something soon.

Something soon is now here and now we have the same stuff to server owners that we hated (obfuscation) and now truly FiveM is in control. But the real question is did we ever want that…

nope

The stance on this forums and out of Bubble’s mouth himself is that this should be an open platform of ideas. People should release things publicly for free, but now money has polluted that and unfortunately this box is not one I don’t think you can easily close since the precedent is now set that paid scripts are completely okay. So this is a lost cause I can’t even argue anymore because it is basically a “too late” thing.

However, the real criticism came with this or so the straw that broke that camels back:

What is this crap? This looks nothing more than a pure money grab to continue to generate revenue. Frankly I think this has gone on enough and I think we need to stop here before this path of ruining the nature of the platform contunues.

Seriously where does this monetization stop? Remember when you guys said the serverside clothing streaming was only a pre-release for Patreon for a short while? Still now you can only get it with miniscule players or by paying. Which again, didn’t care about because we felt we were funding the project. Now it feels like I am paying for a service rather fund a project.

This may also explain the uptick in entitleness around people demanding things…

Anyway, hope this doesn’t offend anyone and I hope it sparks some actual discussion. I know these things have been murmured in the sidelines. But this can not continue to go down this path…

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Ever since 2016, ‘the nature of the platform’ has been one for people to abuse shit in every way they can. Nothing changed about that, other than giving up after trying to steer the community into more positive ‘natures’ and failing miserably many times, random ‘competing’ projects trying to start (with a focus on money and 0 focus on collaboration) by a bunch of Russians*, and other outright hostility that costs money to hire a team of people to mitigate since being told to ‘fuck off and die’ and ‘you don’t control our servers’ every moment we block someone for being hostile/money-grabbing/… or even add a feature so users know it’s servers being slow and not ‘FiveM’ itself gets old after the 5000th time.

This money can only be obtained by actually selling stuff as well, and that doesn’t change no matter if we provide any paid services or not, since there never was a sufficient supply of volunteers: people burnt out faster than we could make them moderator or anything back in those days.

Also, let me correct you:

Incorrect. You can still use RPF_FILE data file entries, build stuff from source, etc. and have this same functionality as always. The ‘clothes streaming’ stuff only applies to streaming. You can still pre-download with RPF_FILE as you could have since… 2015? 2016?

All the ‘paid’ functionality is free when you build from source, or change a single value around. The only thing that I guess is truly ‘paid’ is the server list, but that was a disgusting hellpit of squiggly RP servers and ‘Wyoming State Justice Border Community’ for years as well.

Also, literally there. There’s not much else that even can rationally be monetized, and depending on the results from other stuff, knobs may be turned on other paid functionality over time.


Finally,

This. Always. Happened. There were just some people who weren’t all crazy trying to make this into a money sink, but they gave up even before I stopped caring to make this a ‘better’ place. It’s nothing new at all. Even in 2016 this was just used as a platform for people to make fame and/or money, the moment this ‘DoJ’ or ‘SoE’ server showed up and became a hit with random ‘streamers’.

It’s the sole reason the Patreon features were even a thing: ‘if everyone else is randomly trying to make a buck and then being a massive nuisance when we block them for it, we have to do the same thing as well’. Nothing changed there. Even when ‘paid scripts’ weren’t ‘okay’, people sold scripts and got angry when we blocked sold scripts. The ‘upvotes’ were always dominated by rich Arabs with oil money, it’s just that this moved to other regions as well after a while. ‘Obfuscated’ resources were being sold as soon as people found out Roblox ‘obfuscators’ worked here. Free resources were being resold in 2016/2017 already. People were selling weird hosting even when we had outlawed any and all commercial services, even before the ‘ZAP’ thing - the only reason that even happened is that they asked, unlike all these other douchebags trying to sell hosting. There never were any sort of ‘glory days’ like you are claiming there were. This was always a painfully disgusting place with abuse everywhere.


*) Those projects do claim to be ‘free’, but they are closed-source, randomly reuse FiveM platform code against the license terms, abuse their closed-source nature by selling ‘private bug fixes’ for critical bugs to server owners and are even more basking in hostility and being-against-the-community.

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I don’t know, to me things were a lot better when I felt like it was a project everyone was participating and supporting in different ways. Where now it feel like CFX wouldn’t care but to make another quick buck. Which is frustrating because I know you don’t care about the money DB.

Just doesn’t feel like the same thing anymore

There was a lot picked out of here. What about this new monetization hour long crap? Just get rid of boosts already, they were broken long time ago and the only logical reason to keep them is money.

I think getting rid of boosts would be a good start to fixing the issue and showing the community this isn’t about money.

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While I don’t, people who we are currently employing kind of do care about, you know, having work at all.

‘broken’, how? The system works and is relatively sustainable, and it appears people who ‘cared’ never used the server list anyway given the amount of people going ‘but everyone just F8 connects’ to every change to improve the server list.

FWIW, for the long term we are still working on solving the server discovery question in new ways so that the dumb spam list doesn’t have to be used for anything relevant, but all the RP stuff doesn’t really have a better place to go either.

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Second reply from my laptop as mobile Firefox didn’t let me select text and ‘quote’ it suddenly:

That’s likely nostalgia-colored glasses. This never was the case, there was always a larger majority of abusive/entitled users.

What I’m more curious about, however, is this part:

Where does this sentiment come from? It’s popped up numerous times over the past 4-5 years, and has never been accurate at all, and similarly, why is ‘caring’ about the community/product in any way mutually exclusive with monetizing any functionality in the product?

Also, this is implying this trend was started by us. It wasn’t. We only went along with the community’s constant demands, but all it seems to have done is cause more and more resentment - ‘you’re not doing this good enough!’, ‘you’re dumb for not listening to even conflicting demands!’, ‘fix this shit I caused myself, but won’t provide any info for and is CLEARLY YOUR FAULT’, etc. - from either the same people or an opposed subset of the community.

We even tried fighting the constant tendency everyone had towards ‘monetizing everything’ and it led to the exact same resentment with the exact same narratives being posed. ‘why do you care if you don’t even fix [bug I didn’t report before]?’ and such.

This is nothing new. It wasn’t ‘better’ before. It always seems to have come from one side (us) with everyone else randomly hating everything tried here and generally not being helpful at all. Now we shipped yet another community request and yet again another subset is angry at this. When does this constant dissatisfaction towards us end? When will this project finally be fun to play or work on? So far all it is is an eternal sequence of pain and user concern. I wish it could all just end. Shut it all down, it’s no good anyway.

Sadly, can’t do that, too many people depend on downstream funneled funds from this project- always have, probably, even in 2016 someone would’ve just started a commercial-only closed-source fork of the project instead if we wouldn’t have continued on the project and ‘killed’ it outright, too many commercial interests even before we had any involvement in such.

Most of this isn’t even an issue with this project, but with general society nowadays. Are we now expected to somehow fix all of society?

Yet again I think the minority is shouting louder than the minority. If you didn’t know people that want to sell stuff aren’t the majority.

The MAJORITY of your players don’t even touch the other stuff. You’re hearing idiots screaming from the rooftops because they want the shortcut to FiveM success.

I’ve suggested that we establish proper communication in the community idk how many times.

It’s so obvious that there are concerns gone missing. We have the server owners group and that’s never used.

So where are we getting this feedback. Became maybe that’s a root cause I’d the source of information or the method gone about getting it

People who don’t speak up are not people we notice at all.

People getting abusive because they aren’t getting their way are. They’re really painful and annoying.

Also, there’s no way to tell if people are satisfied if they don’t even say anything. Most dissatisfaction is also voiced in places we don’t hear, so this isn’t quantifiable at all.

[citation needed]

And, again, I don’t care about ‘owning’ any set of ‘players’. Ideally, we’d not even have these players at all. What’s with this ‘my players’, ‘your players’, ‘their players’ phrasing, even? I’m hearing it a lot.

This project isn’t fun. It’s not even interesting either. It’s just an endless stream of pain where if we try to do anything to mitigate the pain, users will just cry harder and louder because they don’t like being mitigated away.

If there were any server that were fun to play on, maybe that’d be different, but no, it’s all just ‘RP this, RP that, [like some e-celebrity] such and so’, not even that is interesting.

A lot of people even rightly say ‘how can you say this isn’t broken? do you even play?’ and no, no I don’t because there’s nothing to play on here or even realize what is broken, and the few servers I do play at times aren’t ‘RP’ servers having ‘RP’ server issues.

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Cool. How would you ‘establish proper communication’ then? Just saying shit like that isn’t actionable at all.

I wonder why. Maybe because people didn’t respond to the few times we even tried to ask anything there? Maybe because without knowing anything to ask, there’s nothing to ask there? Everything done here is directly related to some feedback or annoyance someone else had as none of us even play or use this project for anything. Nobody else wanted to provide any info either except when there’s some incident that doesn’t suit them, and if they try to have any ‘communication effort’ they just vanish a week or two later.

This seems to have turned into yet another ‘it’s all your fault, Cfx!’ topic. I’m done with all that. Seriously. Is anything ever not our fault in everyone’s narratives?

Bubble its time to establish proper communication with server owners over a threshold.

We have the server owners group but that’s not used. We need some way to give you the real voice. After all these idiots running their money making schemes aren’t holding all the platforms players. The server owners hold the real voice since we are the ones every day seeing trends and stuff.

That resource is so valuable and yet it goes unused. I don’t care let’s do something so this stuff stops happening. Because I believe you have the right intentions but I feel like you aren’t going “what the heck” after because you think you’re making decisions for the majority of FiveM but it’s actually a minority…

Every server owner would love a voice to be heard. Setup a discord or something I don’t care. Something where the real voices are heard.

I’ve told people to do exactly that for over a year. Still, nobody took point on that, and I’m so unaware of most the community that I can’t do this myself at all.

Also, what’s ‘a threshold’? How would you do this with all the server folks who DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND ENGLISH, let alone speak it?

We don’t have a magical fix to all of society.

We have one. Nobody has been saying anything there for weeks now. I proposed to open it up to more people 2 months ago, similar to the DMD thing. Nobody did that either.

Whatever it is, people don’t seem to want to say anything until they reach some threshold of infinite dissatisfaction, and then it’s always a heated debate of many sorts.

See the ‘resource time warning’ thing for example. No monetization was involved there yet half the goddamn world seemed to be crying.

You know what’s a real minority? ‘Server owners over a threshold that speak English and care about the community’.

This won’t ‘stop happening’. There’s no way every group across a very diverse range can’t ever be ‘unhappy’. Even nothing changing anymore won’t cause that.

For what it’s worth, the resource time warning was a great change for server owners who actually care about their server and players. It was like being called out for bad code, it definitely incentivised me to do something about it.

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Boosting has always been an extremely “sensitive” topic for a lot of people, frankly the patreon boosts weren’t that good, the move to ZAP “centralised” and opened the boosting a lot, people could just make a ZAP Account and order boosts there using the plentiful and easy system zap offers, instead of the convoluted and frankly, not very helpful Patreon-Pledge system.

I personally believe that the “Burst Upvotes” are actually better than long term boosts, MTA actually employs a similar system, or at least did when i was still active on it, i personally believe that it allows servers to get up the server list cheaper than if you would order full long-term upvotes, sure there is ways to “abuse” it to always be on the top of the list, but its not financially viable at all for a vast majority of servers and/or players.

isn’t the discord fairly active? I haven’t been around since i shut my own server down, but i doubt communication is still an excuse to moan about changes you don’t like.

This is sadly an unavoidable reality of creating anything, some love it, some hate it, some want it slightly different, you can’t please everyone, this thread is proof of just that.

You are communicating with bubble right now, except you’re using that valuable resource to moan about changes you dont like and how terrible the communication is.

I may be biased here because FiveM also opened up many possibilities for me. But the fact that there are now more people actually in front of FiveM and communicating on the various channels are all great changes, Upvotes on ZAP, TEBEX and the recent Asset Escrow system have all been positive things.

my two cents.

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You’re asking US to do stuff but it has to be official. If you want a good system for communicating to server owners just ask.

Also what discord? I only know about said discord from someone else. See this is the problem, obviously whoever is heeding up community stuff is seriously failing.

Bubble you shouldn’t be in charge of community, we all know many reasons why and the main one being you don’t have time.

You have a community of community owners… You can ask for help, we all know how to run larger communities and get feedback loops otherwise our servers would be dead. Because unlike FiveM our members have choices of other places to go.

So how about we start by redoing server_owners. Then let’s have a topic setup on how we are going to communicate. Then let’s actually do it, not just say we are going to establish these convections.

No wonder you’re frustrated, you’re having to make major changes blind. Let’s get that pressure off of you.

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There is little to no communication. A discord with 300k people on it doesn’t mean anything. Discussions never stay on track and you aren’t verifying the people who you are listening to.

For instance and this is just how it is:
If you have a larger community you should be able to have a louder voice than a smaller one because you represent a larger portion of the playerbase. We are looking for proper methods and to leave that open in the public discord is asking for issues, I’m including the gated channels too.

That I do NOT agree with. You having a bigger server does not make you any more special then anyone else.

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Just saying that you should have a threshold of community size for a seat at the table is all.

Whether that is 500 or 1000 or 5000 people.

So with that logic we should just do everything Koil wants us to do.

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