The short version. WC-RP ran for five years on SA-MP, peaked at 140 players online at the same time and died in 2013. People left, that’s all it was, the gamemode was never the problem and I’ve known that for over a decade, so this time the plan is in writing instead of in my head. The server is playable, it’s been up for 8 months, and there is nobody in it. The original WC-RP had way more features and I could keep adding forever, but that means never actually running the thing, so I built the important parts and put it up. The rest gets built with whoever shows up. This post is how the empty part gets fixed. It’s aimed at group leaders, since a server doesn’t fill up one player at a time, and a “hey come join my rp server” post won’t work anyway, people need to know what they’re joining, which factions are available, who their adversaries are, etc, etc… So that’s what this is.
Where this came from. In 2008, four of us left a SA-MP community called Secret Zombie Room Roleplay (SZR GTA Roleplay). No zombies, for the record. The most advanced NPC tech of that era was a car driving a pre-recorded route right into a wall, so the zombies were, at best, implied. We opened our own server on a home computer, which meant that whenever the founder’s PC ran Windows updates, WC-RP went offline. That was our uptime strategy.
A group named “Thugz” formed in late 2010 and without them there wouldn’t have been any traction at all. A few of them carried moderator badges through some rough patches, and the ones handing them out were me and the other admins, 17 or 18, deciding everything as a group. I bet some of you reading this were in a cradle back then haha. You’re old enough to play now; to some of us, this was yesterday. During the same year, the Gardels joined, got us off the bedroom machine and onto real hosting, and were granted founder status for it, which they spent the next years earning twice over.
By 2012 the gamemode was 50,000 lines of Pawn held together by a SQL plugin that would crash the entire server right when we had 100+ players on, like it had something against us. It’s funny now, it wasn’t back then. So we rewrote the whole thing. WC-RP 3.0 took the server past 100 daily players and to that 140 peak, with groups like Hills and Canarez in the mix. Then, the way it always goes, people left, and by 2013 it was over. The gamemode stayed in my head the whole time. It’s now forty-something services of C# on FiveM, same city, same feel.
The rewrite started in 2024. I burned out on it at some point, it sat there for months, then I picked it back up as a hobby and it slowly turned into a whole server again. It went live about 8 months ago, and since then it’s been up every day, mostly empty, while I kept fixing things and trying to get people to play in it. I know how these posts usually go, everyone has seen it: a new server launches, holds 15 players for two weeks, the owner stops logging in and that’s the end of it. I can’t prove I’m not that guy, nobody can. All I can point at is an empty server that’s still standing after 8 months, and an owner still writing posts about it instead of pulling the plug.
What kind of RP this is. Medium, which it always was anyway. I also remember that one time where I tried to force the entire community into Heavy RP, people were complaining about the RP so I started punishing people for not RP’ing. Later on I learned that doesn’t work, it never works. What does work is letting the main factions like LSPD handle the heavy part and serve as anchors for the rest, with the RP growing around them. LSPD and EMS run it strict. Out on the street you’re free to roam and be casual.
How the city opens. A server fills up group by group, that’s literally how the 2012 numbers happened, and the gamemode is designed around it, points, material runs, faction pay, all of it assumes factions exist. So the relaunch opens in phases, and each phase opens when there are enough people to make it work. You can’t put a roadmap on a calendar when you have an empty server.
Phase 1: LSPD and EMS. The cop and medic tech is done. CAD with plate lookups and criminal records, tickets that stick to the character, jail and release, hospital intake, medic duty, radio. The founding group writes the department’s SOPs and those become the standard, permanently.
Phase 2: illegal factions. Gangs and crews arrive into a city that already has police, so day one you have adversaries instead of an empty map. Points go live: timed war rounds over materials, drugs, the armoury. Turfs aren’t in yet, SA-MP had gang zones and FiveM doesn’t, so I’m writing my own streamer rather than faking it (Incognito’s streamer, anyone?).
Phase 3: the money layer. Businesses, houses, government, taxes that actually land in a government till, the lotto, the news. The city gets stakes.
What’s built already. You just need to download about 15 MB and you’re standing in Los Santos maybe 15 seconds after clicking connect. No ESX, no 8 GB of cars. New players land at the airport and get picked up by a taxi that drives them around the city narrating fifteen stops. F9 opens a checklist with GPS waypoints: clothes, job, first car. Jobs pay hourly, races have countdowns and scoreboards, there are time trials for the 4am crowd. Commands are the interface: /me, /do, /b, /low. Text based RP, always was.
How to grow from a new member to a community leader. I want everyone to have a clear roadmap, so here is the step-by-step process of how to get involved.
On the community side:
- You join as a newbie. /n is the newbie chat and it gets answered.
- Everything worth doing earns rep: achievements, helping new players, etc. The helper part: you assign a new player an onboarding task and the rep lands when they actually complete it, so you can’t farm it by handing out tasks, the help has to work. Rep can’t be bought and can’t be handed out with a title, it’s a record of things you actually did, nothing else.
- There’s no application for Helper, the server just tracks it for you: at 50 hours of playtime you become one automatically. There are literally achievements at 20 and 50 hours. Helpers answer /n, walk new players through the checklist and hand out onboarding tasks. A Helper only loses the role for abuse the entire community would recognize as ‘severe’, not for silly reasons or because someone disagreed with me.
- Ambassador is the step up from Helper, and you don’t get there by running events. You get there by doing the Helper work, answering /n, helping players, being around, until the entire community can see you’re one of the influential figures. That’s what the role means, I specifically created the role that way. Creating and organizing events is what the role unlocks afterwards, not the way you earn it. Same rule on removal as Helper.
- Admin is a different track and it’s not a promotion. Admins make sure players follow the rules and handle server issues like lost items, mainly administrative tasks. It is unglamorous administrative work. We do not sell these roles for real money; nobody should have to pay out of pocket just to do server janitor work.
On the faction side, LSPD as the example:
- The founding group joins as the first class and writes the SOPs. Those SOPs are the department’s law.
- Everyone in the founding group starts at the bottom of the department they built, that’s deliberate, because the moment titles are handed out for showing up they’re worth nothing.
- Promotions happen when the department needs them, when there’s an actual department to run, and by then the group already knows who it’s going to be, the one who trained the recruits and ran the patrols. I just make it official, I don’t pick it.
- What gets you there, concretely: hours (tracked), rep (earned), recruits trained, patrols run, and being around during the dead weeks. Anyone who needs a full city to enjoy logging in will leave in week one, and that’s fine, phase 2 exists for them. The ones still on at 9pm on a dead Tuesday are the foundation, simple as that.
What I’m looking for right now. Groups. Specifically a founding LSPD group and a founding EMS group, three or more people who want to build a department instead of inheriting a title. Illegal factions are next in line, and when you arrive the cops will already be on duty, that’s the whole point of the order. And if you’re the guy still doing the work in a server whose owner logged off two years ago, this post is aimed at you.
The honest part. The city is empty, and I’d rather tell you what that means than let you find out on day one. For a founding group the quiet weeks are the weeks where you actually build the thing: the SOPs, the pursuit policy, the radio protocol, all of it becomes what every later player inherits. Every server you’ve ever joined already had that stuff written by people who left before you showed up. Here you’re the ones writing it.
When civilians start showing up you’re the cops and medics they meet. Until the calendar fills, the events are on me, and early on that means simple stuff: a call over the radio, a car that needs chasing, a race night. Nothing fancy. The bigger events are literally what the Ambassador role unlocks, so the calendar stops being mine the moment the community has Ambassadors. If you need a busy city today this isn’t it yet, phase 2 will be waiting when you’re ready. But if you’ve ever put two years into a community that wiped your work on a whim, you know the difference between work that disappears one day and work that stays. Everything a founding group builds here stays.
Someone already messaged me before this post was even up. He’d just left his own server and his PD because, in his words, they don’t even know what RP is, and he’d love to be PD here too. I told him I didn’t have a definitive answer, because the honest one is I couldn’t piece it together either: what does being PD even mean right now, you’d be dealing with NPCs mostly. That’s the exact problem this post tries to address. One motivated guy is a start, but a department is a group, and until that group shows up there’s no PD to be part of.
How to get in.
Tell me who’s in your group and what you’ve run before, a faction, a department, an event series, anything. If it’s just you, that works too, the taxi and the checklist will keep you busy, but this post is really for the groups.
The taxi’s waiting at the airport.
