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Statement on UG:MP


LocMax
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  • Community Manager

Hello dear players.

 

In the light of openness, we want to publish a statement on the state of our Underground Multiplayer server and the reasoning which has led us to the current situation where we're openly at disagreement with the UG:MP's management team. This is just a summary of the whole story. Behind these statements and the messages in the screenshots, there is a massive amount of "soft" communication before it came to the situations described here.

 

- We had to do the whole server in 15 days to make it playable and interesting

That's right, we were informed about 15 days before the UG:MP release, that it would release. So in 15 days, we had to completely rework our existing SA:MP script, adapt it to allow UG weapons, vehicles, skins, weathers and other ton of custom things, and we also had to scrape most of the information off of their website because dkluin wasn't willing to provide us some things such as a complete list of weapon names, vehicle model names, tuning component names and such from the source code. Which resulted in a lot of manual work, while there was already barely time.

 

It is practically a miracle that we managed to pull this off in such a short time and with such an immense amount of testing we had to perform. We also in that time converted a lot of features and changed them to supplement a heavier roleplay style server.

 

(dates are in American format, it's 06/12/2020)

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- They wanted us to close our SA:MP server and completely merge into UG:MP

Yeah, they actually wanted us to close the SA:MP server and merge the players into UG:MP. Effectively forcing players to go play UG:MP if they wanted to play on our server. We obviously rejected this as our goal as a gaming community is to expand on platforms, not just center ourselves on one platform. Hence we decided to expand onto UG:MP, and on FiveM and on SA:MP and such. As can be seen in the screenshots, they never communicated this, but were holding all kinds of one-sided expectations towards us.

 

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- They repeatedly demanded admin levels in the server

They firstly asked for admin levels in the server on the release so they could set their skins and such. We allowed that as it was the release and didn't see any issues with it. However, after the release, they resumed asking for admin levels and we were quite unhappy about that as we were trying to maintain the sovereignty of our server and not make it appear to them as if we are their subsidiary or something alike. Additionally the admin level was mainly used to test things (or even fuck around) at the cost of actual players. This was also harmful for our image as a server.

 

They were also on multiple occasions asking for roles on our discord server to highlight themselves, however we rejected this and I specifically said we'd give them a role when Kalcor comes and gets his role. Why should we give them a special role when we wouldn't give a role to the creator of SA:MP or FiveM either?

 

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- They were given our suggestions for installer, better client, etc.. and kept acting in denial about it

We told them very early on that an installer would ease things up and make it simple for an average computer user to install the mod. They would usually say "all it takes is to drop files into game directory". Yeah, firstly the files shouldn't even be downloaded from some third party sites like gta modding or moddb but should have been readily available for download from their main page with a big easy to find download button.

 

From the moment we started developing to make it to the UG:MP release in time, we had the best intentions on making it all a success. With that came sometimes harsh but necessary suggestions. These suggestions were waved away while other irrelevant things were being developed.

 

They ended up adding the installer quite some time later after hosting a poll.

 

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- They were constantly playing other servers and tagging @ everyone on their discord but never came on ours

You probably observed this if you were in their discord. They'd repeatedly play other servers and tag @everyone on discord to check it out with them. However they basically never did it for our server, which was also the first and only server that moved to their platform which had a big community behind it and whose developers and owners invested immense time and effort into getting it ready in time for release so that their platform release wouldn't be a flop without any server to play on. This shows they want all the gain, but not the costs.


- They were using hacks on the server in front of players and thereby ruining its public opinion

They frequently joined our server and flew around using a surfly mod. This made the server look unprofessional and unserious, especially as they were holding admin levels which they demanded and it was supposed to be a heavy roleplay server. Imagine joining a heavy roleplay server and seeing admins fly around like supermen. It was just making the public image and opinion of our server bad.


- The Truth was quite frequently unprofessional and using his position for malicious things

Firstly he was asking to reserve the big mansion on the middle island in Vice City for himself. When I rejected it, he was saying how he wouldn't fix the issues with the modeling of it otherwise, citing his position in UG. I also asked for him to remove all the gates from houses on that rich island of Vice City so players could purchase those houses and use the yards. He did not want to do it. Then, dkluin told him to do it anyway as we stated that the houses would be useless when they were closed off by mapped gates. During testing, he was frequently distracting our management team and development team from testing the necessary things, and asked from them to instead take pictures with him, roleplay with him, freeroam around, etc. This while a whole team of people from Valrise were trying to work hard to find bugs, both ours and those UG:MP related.

 

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- The truth's public shaming of the server in UG discord

Truth played our server for months on SA:MP. He was in police department and in SWAT division. His name was Stefano_Truthano. He repeatedly in that time complimented our server and was showing excitement for it to join UG:MP. Then suddenly, in recent weeks, he was in public chats on UG discord saying that the name of our community is a banned word there, and asking individuals who were asking him questions about our community to not remind him of it, implying it was a terrible server and a community. Additionally he was blaming all problems on us by downplaying our features, while he knew exactly what he was getting due to him having actively played on our SA:MP server.

 

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- dkluin's constant attacks on SAMP as a platform, calling it dead, bad, etc..

dkluin, as you can find in his message history, frequently attacked SA:MP as a platform, stating it's dying, and that UG:MP can kill it off, and attacking players who spoke of SA:MP on his discord and such. It's quite ironical when he gets all offended and aggressive when somebody critiques his own platform, isn't it? I mean, if you can call SA:MP a dying platform, why can't somebody call UG:MP a dead platform? What's the difference? At least you don't get banned on SA:MP discord for saying that.

 

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- Them ironically being offended when having their platform called out

As mentioned above, I in a few occasions called the platform out for not having players. They responded to my messages (which were public) by telling me to "watch my tone" and claiming I was being disrespectful and whatnot. Note the above point, where dkluin on multiple occasions states the same about SA:MP. I believe it's quite hypocritical for a person that is supposed to be a lead manager of a platform to behave in such an unstable way and not realize the objective fact that the platform he is a developer of attracts no players. And instead of addressing the issues and the causes behind it, he prefers to go around and ask people to shut up.

 

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- dkluin's abuse of power banning Jason Maxwell and warning him for not even hostile or badly written statements saying they should've released sooner

Yeah, there was a discussion recently on UG discord (which was deleted by dkluin) where Truth was calling our server out, among other servers and stating they are the reason for lack of players on the platform. I responded by asking him to not blame the servers for the lack of players on the platform, and I showed an image of all servers on their platform with no players, and told them that it's impossible for ~30 servers to be bad and the cause of their lack of players. To this, obviously, they responded in a rather hostile manner, as can be seen in images below, and ended up banning Jason Maxwell, who quite calmly and objectively presented a statement to them.

 

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- These discussions we held here where we objectively laid down points and they constantly took them as attacks and unconstructive criticism

On multiple occasions I have attempted, along with Weston, Mikro, and Jason Maxwell to reason with them and provide them with objective and constructive suggestions to potentially boost their player base on the platform. However, they appeared to always take these as offenses and disrespect, pointing back to our server as the cause for the lack of players and claiming the scripts were part of the issue, the management another part of the issue, and the lack of factions another part of the issue. He would rarely go on to say that the root cause is the lack of players on the platform itself.

 

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Conclusion

This whole history of what happened in the past months, ended yesterday when a discussion occurred between us and a UG manager RzDat. For communication between UG and Valrise, we have a liaison channel on our discord. In the past months dkluin and The Truth already left our discord because of our critique, leaving only RzDat remaining as a UG representative. Once again we got called out and put in a corner. As always we came with a structured response, once again hoping on our arguments to be accepted into a good discussion.

 

The last constructive discussion as show in the above screenshot, ended in RzDat removing the whitelist position of Valrise for no reason.

 

At the same time Mikro was banned from their discord, solely based on the one reply in the screenshot above.

 

I hope this demonstrates that it is impossible to work with them. We put a ton of effort into helping them release their long overdue project. While other servers and communities were holding back, we went the extra mile to be ready at the release date. Just to be greeted with ignorance, disrespect and unprofessional actions afterwards, as substantiated above.

 

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I want to thank all who tested, developed or worked on the server as I legit was fanboying and hoping this would work and we made the server out of thin air in negative time. Even tho it failed I am thankful for at least trying and spending some time in-game ❤️

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Indeed Pete. It was fun testing and hoping we'd have a Heavy Roleplay server. Sadly the platform owners are beyond unreasonable. Much thanks to Mikro and Mathew for developing this headache. And the countless hours spent trying to fix the so called "easy migration".

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Valrise's SAMP playerbase is bigger than the UGMP platform as a whole..

 

This topic was sent to a different server owner I do not see a point of them demanding such powers and roles.

 

Thanks for your time developing the UGMP server both of you.

Edited by Ivor
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5 minutes ago, Elias Carter said:

if nothing else, these guys produced one of the most entertaining drama sequences in the history of mudoo, this was a fun read lol

Novel worthy shit i tell you.

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I wanna remove the OGMP trailer from my channel, this kinda ruining my shits - I know how hard y'all worked on that to get it working sad from their side. I will be removing the trailer cause just why not.

 

  

5 minutes ago, Terry said:

Thank you for your hard work lads!

As Terry said, thanks for atleast trying to get something new in our community and I'm always down to help in any way of sort!

I prefered samp over ugmp anyways since I wasn't familiar with it anyway but man. I can't leave samp and y'all just needa focus on samp and fivem so many cool shit can be added just take your time and let's keep the community together.

Edited by Ed
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32 minutes ago, LocMax said:

It's quite ironical when he gets all offended and aggressive when somebody critiques his own platform

Kalkor 2.0, but wait Kalkor atleast made it so it still works today.

I'd say negative version of Kalkor

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1 hour ago, Elias Carter said:

if nothing else, these guys produced one of the most entertaining drama sequences in the history of mudoo, this was a fun read lol

 

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4 minutes ago, AMR said:

Kalkor 2.0, but wait Kalkor atleast made it so it still works today.

I'd say negative version of Kalkor

Don't even compare them to Kalcor, Kalcor indeed made a wrong decision but if without him, this platform itself would've never existed.

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Just now, iChiwi said:

Don't even compare them to Kalcor, Kalcor indeed made a wrong decision but if without him, this platform itself would've never existed.

only about that part where he used to get defensive when someone criticized his work, he banned everyone who said "where is DL" in samp forums lol.

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Wasn't enough time, bad planning from the UGMP team on the late notice, they put in a lot of time and to see it die will be hard for them to get over I'm sure. I know you put a lot of effort into the 15 days of developing as well so it's unfortunate from both sides to see it die after so much work was put in. It's UGMP's job to promote the platform, it's your guys job to promote the server if you want it to stand out further, both sides of advertisement was poor from what I saw. One of the most viewed videos on YouTube was my installation tutorial which highlights the problem of the ease of access to people and as locmax mentioned many times, too many buttons and people won't bother. It's unfortunate the server and platform died but there's no progress being made to revive it by arguing over the past. If you still plan to revive the server, create the features whilst there are no players on it, or later regret it when players start arriving and you need to rush the features out. Or kill the server and cut ties with UGMP because the drama has been going on for a while now and it's clear it won't be resolved in any beneficial way, the samp server is still growing, it clearly hasn't affected Valrise's image very much. 

During the first few weeks the website was also down pretty frequently meaning people can't even login which just killed any hype during the launch as well as that, having to manually install new updates every week or so is just asking for trouble with compatibility and stability. 

Bare in mind, we're all reading these points from this community's viewpoint, so remember there could be other things that weren't included but ye anyway peace.

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Hello, I'm gonna make my inquiry about the arguments pointed out in LocMax's post and reply to them. I'm not here to reply to any other post nor gonna waste more time on this pointless drama. After this, There will be no more talks between the UG team and Valrise.

- We had to do the whole server in 15 days to make it playable and interesting
LocMax and the rest of the team knew the risk and were not forced into that position. After we finished polishing the last known bugs for UG:MP's release, we were looking for servers who are willing to accept exclusive dev builds and get their servers ready for release. LocMax and his team accepted this task and knew the time limit without hesitation. Once we all agreed on it, the countdown to UG:MP's release has started.

 

dkluin wasn't willing to provide us some things such as a complete list of weapon names, vehicle model names, tuning component names and such from the source code. Which resulted in a lot of manual work, while there was already barely time.

We provided you with all the necessary information from our website's documentation, it had weapon names, vehicle model names, tuning component names and much more - giving out the source code is an extremely risky move to us especially when we are already putting a lot of trust on the Valrise team.

https://gtaundergroundmod.com/pages/ug-mp/documentation

 

- They wanted us to close our SA:MP server and completely merge into UG:MP

That was at a time where our expectations with UG:MP's release was extremely high, we did not force you in any way to migrate or completely abandon your SA:MP server. Saying so is just another attempt to smear us as toxic people.

 

- They repeatedly demanded admin levels in the server

An untold fact: About 70-90 players joined during the first few hours of UG:MP's release and with them - a lot of hackers. The amount of hackers who started flooding the server demanded an extra layer of protection so other players can safely explore and experience the server, in addition to many other players who are asking for help and/or don't know what to do and how to continue. In short: We were given admin privileges just so we can help the server fend off the first wave of players.

 

- They were given our suggestions for installer, better client, etc.. and kept acting in denial about it

The suggestions that came from Valrise sometimes came off in a very toxic and disrespectful manner, sometimes the criticism we got was just plain useless:

-No Landmass: This is just a fantasy, we don't have the resources nor the manpower to pull off such an ambitious project just so there will be "more content" for servers. GTA: Underground was initially about reuniting the 3D era but ended up adding lots of new BETA content and custom made content. Over the years grew the misconception that Landmass will also appear at one point but it was never promised in an official statement. UG already offers plenty of content from all of the 3D era GTA's, the Manhunt series, Bully and a lot more custom made weapons and vehicles with different stats. At the end of the day we are developers of a free mod who are doing from passion to the GTA series, we will not break our backs and lose our sanity for something we never promised.

-Mediocre skin list: As I stated before - Cherry picking. UG offers skins from all of the 3D era GTA's, Manhunts, Bully and loads of custom skins yet somehow this is not good?

 

In the end we did make an installer, but it seems like the Valrise team was not very fond of it...

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- They were constantly playing other servers and tagging @ everyone on their discord but never came on ours

Truth be told, me and dkluin were never fans of roleplay servers, however you did not mention the fact that TheTruth was the one who was hooked up on Valrise and was keen on spending his free time trying to promote OGRP:

 

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However, in typical fashion - Nobody came to the event and LocMax ended up laughing at an attempt to promote his own server.

Let's not forget that the server was extremely lacking in features and was heavily neglected in terms of updates, as the last update was only a few days after UG:MP was released.

 

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- They were using hacks on the server in front of players and thereby ruining its public opinion

Hours after UG:MP's release, players started to get annoyed by the fact that OGRP was lacking in features - There were no available cars at all, No custom weapons (or weapons at all) and the play area was restricted to Vice City only. It was agreed upon with the rest of the OGRP staff that we will start spawning in some vehicles for players to enjoy and show them UG:MP's features using non-roleplay methods. In the end, we managed to entertain a lot of players who hate roleplay and were very keen to try UG:MP's brand new stuff by preventing them from leaving. We only use surfly for development purposes, but after the first day of release, we did not use cheats at all to break RP.

 

- The Truth was quite frequently unprofessional and using his position for malicious things

- The truth's public shaming of the server in UG discord

A lot of the things you presented were taken extremely out of context, The Truth was dedicated to your server and worked hard to see OGRP succeed yet you threw him under the bus. The general attitude towards your server was so unprofessional and it seems like only TT truly cared about it.

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- Them ironically being offended when having their platform called out

We receive a ton of criticism, sometimes we accept it and sometimes we don't. Personally I have taken LocMax's long paragraphs into account but it's very hard to take him seriously especially when he treats his own UG:MP server like dogshit, barely communicates with us and only tells us step up our game. In addition to Maxwell's constant trolling and LocMax just encouraging him to continue hurling insults - We started taking Valrise's "criticism" less seriously.

 

- dkluin's abuse of power banning Jason Maxwell and warning him for not even hostile or badly written statements saying they should've released sooner

You didn't include some parts of the conversation... why?

 

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My Conclusion

I was the only UG Dev left in the Valrise server and the one who decided to pull the plug on Valrise' whitelist status. The reason? Unprofessionalism from LocMax and his team, complete disrespect to the partnership between UG and Valrise and most important of all: The complete neglect and poor behavior towards the OGRP server. LocMax occasionally joined in the crowd by mocking UG:MP and mocking his own server - basically spitting on his own work and expecting it to be our responsibility for his server to succeed:

Spoiler

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LocMax also put on a different face when talking to us on our server, which is one of the many reasons it was difficult taking him seriously.

 

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As I said before, UG:MP will continue development despite the Valrise' team best effort to bring us down. We are passionate and enthusiastic modders and we are working on this project  completely out of passion for the game and not for money. Therefore I ask that Valrise and UG:MP will go their own separate ways peacefully. We will continue developing our mod and Valrise will continue their work in SA:MP.

 

NOTE: The Valrise team may choose to stay on the internet tab if they wish to prevent discarding all of the work they put on the server, however being on the whitelist is out of the question.

 

Thank you for reading this. As I said above, I will not answer any replies.

Edited by RzDat
typos and an important note
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Guest Randall

I've been monitoring the whole project of Overground Roleplay for the past months and I honestly can't and will not accept that the hard work of so many people will now go to waste because of this.

 

This project would benefit both UG:MP and the Valrise Community since it was a very good opportunity to expand. 

The developers of both sides, UG:MP and our people here have placed a lot of effort.

Do you want to throw away your hard work? Or other's people work?

 

Its possible errors were made in the communications, but think how positive this server would benefit and make so many people happy.

It would also benefit UG:MP because Valrise has the experience to lead and grow a stable community, with the obvious example of the SA:MP server.

This would also promote the modification and attract more players.

 

Now, instead of writing long answers explaining what happened in the past, let's find a way to carry this project on.

 

And don't do this for yourself or to cover your position but for the people waiting this project for so many months. 

And for the people that may not know this project for now but one day will spend hundrends of hours playing.

Because this is what is going to happen if you solve this now.

 

Both of you know that.

There is still hope it depends on you.

@RzDat@LocMax

 

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After reading the mentioned above, Mikro and Locmax did real hard work scripting the server in freaking 15 days ( wtf ), As the UG management is retarded and about 'Truth' he is an idiot. Since Valrise is growing day by day and it's beating some great servers of all time. #ValriseforLife 

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