Since the old thread got locked for “locked to review” (implies that it was going to be reopened later, but 72 hours later it has not) I have decided to open this thread to continue the discussion. Apologies if things got a little uncivil last time, but everyone is pretty passionate about what’s being discussed.
First of all, locking the old thread shows that Cfx are trying to silence everything discussed in that thread, and without an official comment from them it seems they are denying the communities concerns with everything that is and has happened. This is a dangerous new trend that Cfx are doing, no proper form of community relations at all, all we get is the “community pulse” which doesn’t engage with the community at all.
Some new stuff has happened since the closing of the thread that I would like to discuss and that’s the handling of ToS enforcement rollout. We have seen the RSM Freeroam server close due to Cfx’s actions in regards to the way they are handling ToS violations. RSM Freeroam is one of the biggest servers on the platform and they have been around for AGES and been a part of Cfx’s growth. nex (the owner) has been an awesome member of the community for years and doesn’t deserve the unfair treatment.
In regards to this Cfx have taken a very unfair and weird method of rolling out proper enforcement, select servers are being given more time to action then others and this is resulting in servers dying and losing members because their competition is allowed to violate the ToS for longer then them. That is totally ridiculous and should never have happened.
Why isn’t simple things like blocking models with certain names (real car model names) being done to enforce the ToS? Seems like a pretty basic thing to get it started. Sure it won’t stop everyone, but most “server owners” don’t know the difference between a text file and a model.
Also in regards to larger servers how come the one famous RP server (can’t say it’s name otherwise my topic will require manual approval) is given special treatment? Why is their name blocked from being used as server names and server tags, but no other servers are given this same treatment? Are other servers not important to Cfx or do they only care about that one server?
I feel like the old thread was locked as soon as nta was starting to get praised for the work and time that was contributed. Feels very shady and proves the points made that nta is being “locked out” from doing anything related to Cfx.
There hasn’t been any progress from what I can tell when it comes to FiveM, you lock a thread where people are highlighting issues with how you’re operating and leave it like that for over 72h without any response as to why.
Did that post sting a little because what was brought up by multiple people turned out to be the truth and you no longer being able to skew shit?
As a community member that’s been around since the early days, I find this behavior to be super scummy. At least when nta was involved we were given transparency when it came to concerns from the community.
I didn’t participate in the previous post despite following it closely, but after it being put for “review” for more than 3 days I feel obliged to partake now.
First off, I don’t understand why does a ~20000 words thread take over 3 days (and counting) to “review”. What exactly does that imply and why can’t the ongoing conversation continue while the “review” is happening? Does it being closed for “review” mean that no one was paying any attention to the posts that had gathered in the 7 days it was open for?
That aside, to me it seems that the current leadership of Cfx has good ideas but no way to implement of enforce them. Removing real-life car brands from the Releases can be as simple as searching popular car manufacturers and flagging every post that comes up. We are being told “there aren’t enough people" to do it but at the same time people that offer to do support voluntarily are being ignored. Not enforcing the ToS properly and fully makes it seem unimportant, just like it was considered before - all the talk of “it’s always been disallowed, just never enforced”. I don’t understand why certain servers were even given multiple months to “Right-click → Delete” offending content even if it meant they would have less to offer for a few months - giving everyone equal ground wouldn’t result in what happened now where some competing servers were given different timelines, resulting in players leaving one server for another. We see the same preferential treatment in the case of censoring names from the server list - this case is more complicated as there has to be some sort of cut-off for allowing servers to participate but that cut-off surely can’t be only 1 big server. Enforcement also shouldn’t end the forum, offending resources should be taken off Tebex and those offered on external platforms should be actively blocked.
On the technical side, development has visibly slowed down, which I considered acceptable given that there are new processes to get used to. Some new stuff coming from the “core team” is interesting to people like me but most of it is hidden from the end user, to whom no progress is being made. Same goes for adhesive changes which are very valuable but mostly thankless work ( from me though). It seems that end user changes are delegated mostly to Disquse or community contributions which gives a false sense of “we don’t care about it”. (Side note, it is getting more and more complicated to judge who’s a team member and who’s hired to do the work which may also need improvement).
Speaking of community contributions, we’ve seen valuable contributions take weeks or months to merge, even though there is supposedly a person dedicated to reviews now. As well as that, I believe that too much importance is given to keeping canary stable, when it’s literally labeled “Unstable” in the UI. Am example that comes to mind is taking 2 weeks to review Linux builds for Assorted Steam presence fixes by blattersturm when the official documentation labels Linux builds as “courtesy ports” and as such prone to breaking. FiveM is probably an unique case in how many players use canary daily but most of that stems from people setting it once and forgetting about it - maybe some work is needed here to better indicated you are on an unstable version and being able to revert it in case the game keeps crashing?
I must say I have seen some positive changes since the Open Letter was opened, including taking care of some long standing issues and PRs and seemingly hiring more community contributors. I sincerely hope that this will not be a one-off and improvements will continue. As a personal and biased opinion, I’d like to see nta return to the project in some official form but that would require team members to communicate their issues with them (privately) and work together to resolving them. Keeping silent, avoiding and ignoring them doesn’t help resolve anything and I’m sure no one on the team would like being in a similar position. I’ve heard multiple times that people were surprised at the situation revealed in the open letter and that’s without the full picture being public knowledge yet. And in my opinion it’s not just nta, internal communication in general seems to be a problem given the talks of in-fighting between team members and some members starting to be publicly critical of the direction in the Open letter post. I believe with clearer internal and external communication most of my points can be resolved, the team can gain back the trust of the community and we can all work together to make a better product.
I think one of the major factors for all the problems the community is having is transparency.
In the old thread many people complained or argued about specific users and what they are doing (or supposed to do). However since the acquisition, we don’t actually know who is employed or not and especially who is responsible for what.
There is no sense in complaining about a specific user that’s “not doing their job” if it isn’t their job in the first place now. But we have no way of confirming this.
All the “new” Rockstar Staff should have proper tags here in the forum that actually show us their role. If many of the og contributors are now Rockstar staff but not as developers, then of course it would make sense as to why development slowed down. But again, we cannot know that.
I really don’t mind things slowing down, but what I do mind is that there is no actual information into what’s going on internally.
What about a roadmap? Even if it is just vague things like “feature x will be released around second quarter of 2024” and if you cannot keep such a date, announce it beforehand. Don’t just push it further and further. Like the supposed new “release website/section/whatever” that was announced and then no more news.
Please just give us more transparency! Most users will be fine with this as long as it is actually informative.
So a response came after 4 days of 0 communication.
Literally taken from “Generic PR Responses”.
Why lock it in the first place instead of just clearing up the “negative / guideline breaking posts” and keeping the thread open?
“We are working on addressing the concerns” - What is being done? The community has spoken out about wanting more transparency, yet we are given a basic ass response and a blanket response at that.
I think after all of that the community deserves more than “we are working on it lol xd”, specially after 4 days?!
Anyway, hopefully we do actually see more transparency and communication.
It’s not that easy. Sure on Freeroam servers with vMenu where your “garage” and outfits are stored on the client side, it’s pretty easy.
But Role Play servers have their data stored on the server side. The implications are far more. Offending vehicles have to be removed from scripts, like jobs, one by one. Then they have to be removed from player’s garages one by one. And possibly refunded to the players. Then they have to be removed from the dealerships and other things. Even the Casino offered cars as prizes.
If you fail to do it right at any point, you could crash one or more scripts, even critical ones, which bring down the whole server.
So you have to be very careful in how you proceed and likely go through 50+ scripts to make sure they won’t crash when the offending vehicles are removed. Then you have to remove these vehicles from the SQL tables and do it right so that the scripts, like garages, don’t crash as well.
And you haven’t even started working on the replacements. What vehicles do you use to replace all those that were removed? Some just aren’t there. Especially for jobs like Police or even construction jobs.
So if you follow the simple “block approach”, then you will like crash a bunch of servers doing that. You have to take a much wider view of the situation that just blanket it with “just block everything”.
FiveM is trying to help everyone be compliant without destroying the whole community. RP servers make up a big chunk, if not the biggest chunk, of FiveM servers. So a gradual transition, while be extremely cautious, is the best approach.
Not everyone is running a simple vMenu based freeroam server!
Nah this is an insanely bad take man, it’s literally 1 CTRL+F search in vscode/any other IDE or even a terminal command. Your reasoning makes 0 sense, and about the database stuff, its 1 or 2 queries to remove it. Please don’t go around spreading misinformation about this matter as it only benefits the ones who are the reason that this post was born. Thanks <3
If your scripts don’t check if a vehicle exists and is registered before using it, this was a good time to change that. Even so as @Beke_Rugos said, removing them is relatively easy and shouldn’t be a multi month long process. It’s only fair if all servers have to remove them at once.
But Role Play servers have their data stored on the server side. The implications are far more. Offending vehicles have to be removed from scripts, like jobs, one by one. Then they have to be removed from player’s garages one by one. And possibly refunded to the players. Then they have to be removed from the dealerships and other things. Even the Casino offered cars as prizes.
bro doesnt know that the fxserver can see the resource names, and names of files being streamed in, and just stop them from loading lol
Most scripts do not have proper error trapping for missing resources. As you pull a car model out for whatever reason, if it doesn’t exist as a server side resources, most of these scripts will crash. They just don’t know what to do when a resource goes missing.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. A vehicle model shows up in one table. Thne it’s linked to a plate no, this plate no. links it to player, garage, mods, jobs, use car sales etc. And sometimes it’s stores as HASH , not model name.
It’s not as easy as a single CTRL+F, that’s rubbish.
OFC they can stop them from loading. But that will also make a lot of scripts crash. In some cases one script calls upon another script to load a vehicle. The assumption is if the script loaded the vehicle properly from the DB, then it returns a false positive. The actual model was never spawned. So then the other script trying to put mods on the vehicle, like colors, parts etc. will crash when there’s no actual vehicle there.
So if this “lets just block” approach is taken as a simplistic blanket all of FiveM approach. The moment that’s activated it’ll crash halfthe FiveM servers out there.
I think FiveM is well aware of this which is why it hasn’t been done.
Its not. Let me break it down why you are wrong exactly:
These are stored in relational databases (notice the word relational, every data point has its own row and column, meanings it’s easy to delete. The raw json bullshit is not present in vehicle binding in most cases)
There are even online tools for obtaining this hash which you can look for in the database. You can even look for both! (remember, relational with separate rows/data point)
Lot of resources use lua config files, where the search functionality is fully feasable.
So please for all of us, quit trying to excuse what Cfx is doing by chatting bare shit on forum threads that stand up against this issue.
P.S: I can promise you I have seen more SQL tables than you buddy
Also, there’s also literally a native to check if the model is valid, that all scripts should be using, if you arent, thats on you.
And also, if the model doesnt exist, ot just wont spawn. it will not cause a crash.
eitherway, we should probably get this thread back on topic.
the timing of the other thread being “locked for review” for 4 days resulting in a truly inspiring excerpt of meaningless PR bullshit is honestly one of the most upsetting parts.
Yes, it diverged from the conversation - but it had been for a while, and seemingly only when people came in and actually gave transparency (presumably against the wishes of “cfx”) (and backed up nta) did that cross a threshold making it worth locking.
It very bluntly reads as “okay let’s silence this problem and hope people forget about it” - further backing this the response to that thread only came after this thread appeared.
It is not the right step, and the message means nothing with absolutely nothing to back up how things might improve or what is being done to address the concerns.
I want cfx and FiveM to be good and make fun stuff that people enjoy, but the past while is the wrong direction.
We did it when the PLA came out and it took about 15 minutes of coding to add a refund spot. We gave our community a week to refund their stuff. Then I just removed all the IRL branded shit.
If anything the clothing was more of a pain in the ass. @Beke_Rugos you are 100% correct and @Tifa1999 is really showing his lack of knowledge or comprehension.
Also yes its as easy as a Control + F, if you knew how to use VSCode properly you can search all that stuff in a couple seconds. Also, how do you not know where stuff is on your (assumed) own server?
Frivolous bs getting off-topic.
The rest on them locking it and hoping we forget, that’s been the “PR Tactic” of cfx for years now and we all know of many of these topics that shed light on the shadier side of cfx that get locked for “off topic” or “to review”. Then nothing happens, I expect nothing from them. As I said in the previous post, nta at least responded and showed he cared. When your own staff are calling out the bs its real hard to take locking that thread and saying “we will look into it” will result in anything other than pandering until we all forget about it…
I run a qb-core server and we had compliance within a few days. It really wasn’t as hard as your making it out. Tell people they have x time to sell at a spot we setup to buyback. We’ve switched to all lore cars and I’m actually happier!
I like your approach. Get the players to trade in their branded cars for cash. That actually makes it a lot easier. So cash it in or lose it. Write a script that will go and erase from all the sql tables. garages, trunk items, glovebox, stancer, handling, etc.
But you still have to go through all those scripts which use branded cars hard-coded in their own config.lua files. police job, ems job, fire job, mechanic job, car dealer etc. etc. Maybe some just left the defaults as ugly vanilla cars. But many servers i know, changed their cop and ems cars to branded ones. So config.lua editing will be needed.
vMenu folks have it easy. Just remove the car and vMenu grays it out. LOL
Yeah clothes. ugh… I’m not resequencing all that stuff. Just gonna remove the offending ones and replace those slots with new unbranded add-ons. Some players outfits will be messed up but we don’t have that many branded to start.
from me though). It seems that end user changes are delegated mostly to Disquse or community contributions which gives a false sense of “we don’t care about it”. (Side note, it is getting more and more complicated to judge who’s a team member and who’s hired to do the work which may also need improvement).