The current server browser does not encourage community scripters and developers to create unique experiences for players on the platform.
It instead promotes servers based on how much money they have spent and, for discoverability, solely relies on players already knowing what game modes to search for, which are two separate problems.
First problem: The server browser itself
The server browser is a giant global table with basic filtering capabilities (server name and tags) that defaults to sorting by who has spend the most on a virtual currency (boosts).
Most players aren’t going to bother using any of the other filtering and sorting options, which is why boosts work as well as they do.
Second problem: Discoverability
First of all, I’d like to state that the majority of players are only going to know about the top game mode(s) that they’ve come to know through Twitch, YouTube, and other social media platforms, so they’re only ever going to be searching for those top game modes without knowing that the platform actually houses a lot more than just those few.
Their knowledge of the platform’s server diversity solely depends on what they’ve already been exposed to through external sources.
A kind reminder that FiveM is a modding platform, not “GTA RP”. People can actually use FiveM to create new and exciting experiences, and this is how “RP” came about in the first place.
This results in server developers spending copious amounts of time developing genuinely cool and unique game modes only to have hundreds or thousands of hours of uncompensated work go down the drain because the platform completely fails at discoverability and their server never took off.
Yes, being good at marketing is a good skill to have, but it’s also important to remember that the base experience of your server is equally as important, and FiveM as the platform and provider of discoverability should be promoting this mindset, which it currently doesn’t.
What is discoverability?
It’s basically how discoverable a server (or group of servers) is to new and existing players.
An example of bad discoverability would be if your server never showed up on the server browser at all.
The solution, or part of it
I’d like to propose a solution to this that doesn’t necessarily mean cutting out boosts all together by just changing the structure of the server browser and focusing on improving discoverability.
If the global table was no longer global and the results (servers) were scoped to a category that a player would need to click on before being displayed a list of servers, then the player would also see the other game modes that exist on the platform.
A good example here (albeit not perfect!) is the way Garry’s Mod did it:
Note: There’s a lot of wasted screen space here, and more game modes could be shown in this example through some basic layout changes, like moving to a grid instead of a table.
How would this feel if used in FiveM?
The user flow would look like the following:
- Launch FiveM
- Click “Play”
- Select a server category (RP, PvP, Sandbox / Freeroam, etc)
- Select a server and connect to it
Instead of:
- Launch FiveM
- Click “Play”
- Select a server
By adding another step, albeit slightly increasing friction to join a server, it will significantly boost the discoverability of other game modes and types. This is an obvious benefit for the platform as players that are looking for more experiences will be able to easily discover and try them out rather than being pigeon-holed into joining servers that they already know about.
How will categories be sorted?
By popularity (based on average player count over the last 24 hours), or by raw, current player count.
How do servers get placed into a category?
Server owners would either have to select which category their server is in through the new portal (per-key) and/or have the category automatically assigned to them by the server browser based on keywords in tags, server names, or even the game type convar.
It’s worth noting that servers should only be able to be in one category at a time, and changing categories would require a server restart to prevent abuse.
What happens to servers with no category?
All servers that don’t have a category would be put in the “Other” category which would be forcefully pinned to the bottom of the list (forcing server owners to select a category if they want the better discoverability).
How do new categories get added?
As far as I understand it, this was one of the issues with Garry’s Mod, which gathered a list of distinctive game modes from the server list and then dynamically created the categories based on the currently used game modes by servers.
The only sensible way that I can see this working is if a Cfx.re employee dedicated a day of work to discovering new and popular game modes, whether that be by scouring the server browser, internal metrics, social media trends, etc.
Of course, asking the community would be a core part of this solution as it’ll especially help with building an initial list of categories which will end up covering the majority of servers right off the bat.
The remaining issue with that solution however is that new game modes will be put in the “Other” category until it becomes popular enough. This is why I’m also suggesting that the initial list includes general game modes (e.g. Battle Royale, Racing, Drifting, etc) that can apply to groups of servers that aren’t necessarily doing the same thing, much like the “RP” category.
Thank you for reading
This is of course a suggestion based on some thoughts that I’ve had over the last few months and there’s probably a few flaws with it that I haven’t thought of which one of you will end up pointing out below (which is a good thing!), but if you think this is a good idea just like I do then feel free to upvote it using reactions.
Discuss as freely and openly as you can, and keep the criticism constructive so we can work towards a better solution as a community 
