Cargo runs, Vehicle changes and Developer behaviour.

As a relative newcomer to the city(~3 weeks), I wanted to give my two cents on the situation.

I wanted to start off by saying that the city and its people are amazing. The stuff there is to do, the RP interactions, and the general willingness to help made me feel at home nearly instantly. I am having a lot of fun flying in.

During these weeks, I have witnessed several changes made by the developers. The most notable are the vehicle handling changes and the cargo guy being arrested twice.

In both cases, I think the developers have really failed, both in terms of testing and communication.

First, the vehicle handling changes. Without any notice or announcement, we were suddenly surprised by our cars driving very differently, not just handling-wise, but also in acceleration and top speed. Many people were very unhappy about their expensive cars(which took them many hours to get), feeling a lot worse. At first, no one had any idea what was happening. Was the car broken? Were the upgrades removed? Did the developer change it? It took a while to realize that there were changes because everyone was affected by it. So now we had to make our voices heard. People stormed to Discord to let the devs know this wasn't the way, but instead of getting clear communication about the plans, we were left wondering if our favorite cars would ever return to normal. One storm later, we got another change, which didn't necessarily improve it. Then, another storm followed, and after that, all the changes were reversed. Now, we have heard very little since there is pretty much no transparency about what will happen. There are now plenty of people wondering if they should buy cars at all with these changes looming over our heads, which could drop again at any moment.

Then, the cargo guy. Nearly every criminal activity you do in the city rewards you with dirty money, which you need to clean before you can use it. While there are other ways to clean money, one is very inaccessible to most, and the other makes you lose most of the value of the money. I did like the cargo guy initially being arrested by the police; I thought it was a very cool, significant RP moment, but then came this issue. Everyone was reasonably sure it would take a bit before the cargo guy would be released, so people questioned when we should start searching for him again. After a few days, we did some extensive searching around to see if we could find him, but the thought of searching for nothing was very demotivating; we needed some trigger to know he was back so we could look for him. People were asking in Discord if devs could say or do something, so we had some idea, but we were met with "find out in RP." You would think that if anyone knew, it was the cops. We asked the cops how long the cargo guy was stuck in jail, but they didn't know. How are we supposed to "find out in RP" when you can't find out in RP?

Ultimately, he came back, and as everyone could have expected, the cash-starved crims are all going to jump on the opportunity to finally get some money again.

But no, the cargo guy's vans were spawning under the map; everyone made sure to tell everyone not to waste $500 on him to make sure they didn't lose money, too, let alone save them from the disappointment of finding him after hours of search to find out it didn't work. So we waited for another few storms; during this time, the knowledge of the dude being there obviously spread to friends, and they would spread it to their friends. When he did get back and the cargo was working, it started a literal mania; I had never seen so many people so incredibly happy about something before. We found out that returning the vans was still bugged, though, which had the unintended side effect of those stacking up and being parked near the cargo place. I feel that the developer's actions led to this insane mania, and the fact that it was bugged three times only made the problem worse. Obviously, the PD was able to find it soon, and they shut it down, but everyone could have seen this was going to happen with these parameters in play.

I think the developers need to be more open about what is happening. We are being left in the dark for way too long about things that are important to us.

I think developers need to think more about how their changes affect the game. Why are changes that are obviously game-breaking being pushed out on a whim?

I think that developers need to do some more testing. How are you making a mistake three times when adding back the cargo guy?

I think the developers need to show some integrity, own up to their mistakes, and make those right again. The cargo guy being bugged ultimately led to the cops getting him; the developer should break him out of prison to make things right again.