Recent community concerns

FiveM Discussion
23

If you were there during the transition on RSM, you saw that it isn’t as easy as some you let you think it is. They had a really hard time switching over. All the outfits were wiped out. Most vanilla cars that were using custom wheels were all messed up. The server crashed a few times, mostly due to outfit files being messed up. etc.

It was not smooth.

As for RSM itself? They’re lost about 30% of their players since the switch over. RSM#1 used to have well over 700 players during peak hours. Even hitting 800 a few times. Now they’re lucky to even break 400. Most of the time RSM#1 is in the 200s. As I’m writing this RSM#2 only has 40. Last year at this time, they were well over 150 at this time of day on 2.

Idk if it’s the loss of the branded cars, or the mess with the outfits, or both… but the numbers don’t lie! It’s had a big negative impact.

24

Because of people ddosing them due to being upset over losing branded assets…

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25

I think the subject matter is not the rules relating to copyrighted assets but is instead the inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of it that is the cause of concern (atleast with that subject)

Not really a thread for “waaah I can’t write code to deal with getting rid of these vehicles gracefully”

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26

I’m very disappointed in the current state of the project too, the acquisition was supposed to be something positive for the community but instead we get this mess because the team behind cfx didn’t want to settle their drama before joining rockstar games. This was a milestone for the modding community surrounding gta and rdr and could have been a great example for other game developers to hop on the wagon and become more involved with the modding community also.

I can’t help but point out the fact that some of the issues mentioned have been issues that existed prior to the acquisition though but will admit it was never this bad and was personally hoping the acquisition would fix those issues. The rules have been cherry picked in the past when it came to enforcement and it has always been confusing identifying who was on the team. There are moderators that have been inactive (correct me if I’m wrong because I only ever see activity from Indra) who have still not been replaced. I’ve even had a cfx mod in my DMs before demanding I stayed silent on some matters I was going to speak about in my own community. For those still thinking rockstar is the problem this just shows these are pre-existing issues that went unresolved.

I also noticed the unfair treatment that n-pixel have been receiving in comparison to other communities.

  • They were able to align their launch date with the GTA RP week because they received insider information which one of their own team members confirmed.
  • They get their pull requests merged much faster than other community contributors which isn’t a big deal though as at least the project is getting updated.
  • Any server that opens with the same name or even contains the name gets shut down or hidden from the server list.
  • Any releases containing the word also gets taken down.
  • They went unbanned on the platform for years while they profited from the project using unofficial stores that were against the TOS to sell an application of all things.

And then you have the owner of QBCore who is also given special treatment for some weird reason? I’m not going to get into that though but you get the point. There are clearly some people in the community who get special treatment.

I think people need to start focusing less on nta did this and nta did that and focus more on “Okay, how do we move forward from here?” because no one side is at fault here. A few suggestions I have is to:

  • Remove inactive moderators and any element accounts that are no longer working on the project. Give correct labels to staff so the community can identify them and make a new guide before recruiting more people. I understand this may take some time as obviously there is a level of trust here but maybe you could just actually hire moderators instead and give them hours?
  • Stop giving special perks to certain servers just because they have a bigger audience or make this something that other servers can do. Like when you reach a certain amount of concurrent players make it so you can claim a short server name?
  • Servers have had enough time to move away from trademarks, if they are still using them they should be banned instantly and not be given any further time to rectify it. Enforcement needs to happen across the board equally, otherwise why should anyone listen to you? If you can’t or don’t plan to fully enforce it then you should remove the rule and leave server owners responsible for their own actions.
  • Be more transparent with the community on what you’re doing, I don’t understand why everything needs to be so private now?
  • I’m getting tired writing this now so I’ll prob edit this later but anyways statebag policies :eyes:
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27

image
image916×435 106 KB

I don’t see how this violates anyone’s IP, can someone explain to me how this was violating anything in the ToS/PLA?

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How is a random image used for a discord server violating the services provided by Cfx?

29

Oh ok, my bad - I thought the fire effects coming from the Mercedes-Benz were lifted from Forza. Thanks for pointing this out. :+1:

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Likely a misunderstanding due to the image containing sonic giving the impression that sonic is in the server.

31

Yes this. They have had more then enough time. That’s why my original point of blacklisting certain keywords would work. Who cares if it breaks servers. They’ve had more then enough time. Either enforce it or don’t. Picking and choosing who to go after is crap.

6 Likes
32

Me searching the ToS on why I can’t upload images to Discord

albertmoment

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33

It seems there is a 5 year old meme covering the PLA, you may need to remove it to be able to read it properly.

34

Yeah it does. I had to remove 1 car once and qb-core’s qb-garage crashed right there disabling any type of garage retrieval. That player, which had the deleted car, in his garage was completely screwed.

The only fix was to delete that vehicle from the SQL table.

So lets go back to what I said before: if you blanket the entire FiveM network with a “Block all branded cars” type of scheme, then unless admins go through their SQL tables, their servers are screwed.

Yes, I’m well aware FiveM can check all our resources even if it’s obfuscated by names changes etc.

The time required to track down 2000+ vehicles, remove them … in a way that you don’t piss off all the players for all their grinding, is going to be near catastrophic. By the time it’s all rectified, several days will have gone by and more than likely lost players won’t come back.

Please go back and remember what I first posted: “A system-wide blanket blocking of TOS offending resources, will destroy the vast majority of the servers. The only solution is a gradual transition.” Which many servers are already doing. But it takes time.

If this “ban all by FiveM” approach was really viable? It would’ve been done already!

36

Again, YOU’VE LITERALLY HAD MONTHS TO GET COMPLIANT. There is no excuse anymore. You should’ve solved it ages ago. This is on you.

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37

There is actually a very simple answer to why said server gets some “special” treatment. The server name is trademarked.

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Hard to have even a shred of sympathy for servers who have been directly benefiting from trademarked/infringing assets for years and propelling their servers into not only being successful but also profitable businesses in many cases.

You are breaking the law. You are using 2000+ assets you do not own which are stolen from other games representing brands that do not provide you with licensing to use those assets. If you can’t take a few days to review your resources for branded vehicles, take a list and review the table and codebase to replace offending vehicles to come into compliance maybe you should not be running a server in the first place.

I hope things change and the PLA infringements begin to mean being taken offline until compliance is met.

1 Like
39

Months since Cfx explicitly changed the terms to state no branded assets, even.

The TOS always stated you must be authorised to transfer/distribute assets to clients, and this was further clarified by Cfx and especially nta in November 2022. That is over 14 months for people to pull their heads out of the dirt and start removing infringing content from their servers.

The User Generated Content is copyrighted by their respective owner, and the provider of Game Servers asserts that they are authorized to transfer said content to the Users, and, allows CitizenFX to distribute, adapt and/or modify the User Generated Content through automated systems, or other means

and nta’s clarification:

if you’re not authorized to transfer content (e.g. a model/texture - worse if taken from another game! - or a digital representation of a trademarked item) to the users, you’re… not authorized to do so.

See the following posts.

1 Like
40

No, this was during the switch. Nex corrected the issues one by one and brought the server back online. It wasn’t DDOS.

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It wasn’t easy because:

  1. We were the first “mainstream” server of our type to comply with the PLA, so people understood less that this was a platform thing and not just an RSM thing. This led to us being a massive punching bag, soaking in all the hate, abuse, frustration and so on that came from regular freeroam players. The hope here was that all freeroam servers would be enforced at the same time, spreading all of this abuse outwards, and making it more apparent to players that this is something that all servers will need to go through.
  2. The deadline that we were given in September was the end of December, but that deadline didn’t match up with the deadlines that any of both the servers I was asked to report as well as the only other popular freeroam server that we’re in direct competition with. Hence why I’m kicking up such a fuss about how there’s unfair treatment going on (which there is) because that was a significant problem that Cfx.re didn’t seem to care about.

The abuse received from the community

Our server didn’t crash because of outfits, and most DDoS attacks were mitigated, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still impactful. The frequency of the attacks increased more than ten fold after we became compliant and we even received death threats and were harassed because of it. We even had players joining our server just to tell everyone in chat that x server was better and that ours was “dead” because x server still had their infringing content. You can probably guess which server was so commonly spoken about - no hate or disrespect towards them, they are genuinely cool people, I just wish that things went a more balanced way and that’s all on Cfx.re.

Our discussions with Cfx.re regarding PLA compliance

During our talks with Cfx.re, which we reached out to first, not the other way around (as a certain element once tried to spin it as), it remained professional up until the point where we started noticing these deadline differences. After all the reassurances that we were given that people would be treated fairly, we caught on that this wasn’t the case, and after that it felt to me like they were trying to sweep my entire situation under the carpet just like what they’re trying to do with these threads here on the forum. Their reasoning for treating us differently was because our server name had Rockstar in it. When I reached out in September I brought this up and asked for permission to continue using it, they said no in October and I immediately started changing our branding for it - that’s a big deal for us, because we’ve always been known for our name. I had no issue with changing our branding nonetheless and got the majority of it done by mid November, yet they didn’t bother turning around and adjusting the deadline to meet with the one given to other servers. I was entirely respectful and compliant with every demand they made, and made the effort to reach out to them about certain topics to get them resolved, yet they didn’t have the ounce of respect to tell us that we were being prioritised (as they say) because of the branding issue before we started noticing the unfairness involved in it.

The PLA and its future for my community

Complying with the PLA is the way forward, and we were genuinely looking forward to leaving our bad history of infringement behind and starting anew content-wise so that we can focus more on vehicle balancing and other things related to content that was just in a complete mess due to years of built-up trash. It’s just unfortunate that the care that was sworn to be taken months ago has not been taken at all, and there’s nothing from Cfx.re apologising for it, other than “I understand your frustration but this is happening” (paraphrasing).

Rockstar had nothing to do with the treatment

I will say here that the Rockstar employee that I spoke to during our talks was respectful and professional, but the element that I was mainly interacting with has had an awful attitude and didn’t show a single bit of respect in the time where it was needed. I know some of you will be reading this thinking “well at least he got some form of communication with Cfx.re”, and true, I agree that things could be worse, but things could also be better (and for everyone, not just us) if more care got put into this entire thing as it should have from the beginning. I pushed for and was reassured that everyone will be treated as fair as possible but that never happened, and looking at other servers on the platform it also seems they were given some form of odd treatment too, long before our time came.

Special treatment with a certain popular RP server

The special treatment with YesPixel has been apparent for the last year or two, and yes, they have a trademark, congrats - but that’s no excuse to not try and do the right thing by providing tools and options for the community to deal with the issues that YesPixel have been dealing with, including stolen assets, “YesPixel-inspired” releases (what’s even the point of blocking this if it’s not stolen?), misleading servers, and more.

Our assets actively being stolen while Cfx.re ignore the concern

I’d also like to add that we’ve been dealing with our own assets being actively stolen and being used on other servers too, and that I’ve actually reached out to Cfx.re repeatedly since September (again) to get some action taken against these cases as well as to fix a bug that will allow us to block this type of unauthorized use. I got a response in September when I first brought it to attention, saying “I’ll bring this up in the next meeting next week and get back to you about it” (paraphrasing) - but every time I’ve brought it up and bumped it after that point has resulted in no response whatsoever. If only we were a branch of YesPixel would these reports be taken seriously, I wonder :upside_down_face:

The end, for now

We’ve been a part of this project for almost 5 years now, helping to pave the way for high population servers as we were the only server out of a small group of others that were actually bothering to test changes for the platform. We were the first community server on the entire platform to achieve 700 concurrent players on one server back in early 2021, and we, as well as many other communities through the years, worked with Cfx.re relentlessly to improve the platform into what it is today.

And now here we are, shutting down our server until Cfx.re responds with an actual explanation for all of the concerns that we’ve presented to them - not just some generic PR template - an actual, good, deep-explaining statement just like the good old days. Until then, the entire future of my personal income (as far as this platform is concerned) is in their hands - let’s see how they value that.

23 Likes
42

Funny how a single brainlet managed to derail this important thread

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43

Is there any reason why people on the FiveM team are not considered Rockstar employees? Why the differentiation between “The Rockstar employee I talked to” and “cfx.re team”?