Why are MTA Servers such a letdown?

[notToddHoward]

Foreword

I fully respect the team behind MTA and SAMP, they all did and some of them still are doing great work, I think they gave/give us a big gift for the GTA SA community.

SAMP

Once upon a time was SAMP, it was first the big thing and MTA, a twinkle in a developers eye, it was great, many servers and many of them had unique things you stayed for, be it unique server unlockables (jetpacks and other original game content excluded), unique features such as and not limited to:

• player model customization, add props and decals from the game to your character, skins, custom skins(?).
• player vehicle customization, add props and decals from the game to your car, change colors, tuning, tuning that allowed the vehicle to be faster than usual.
• custom commands, well MTA has them too, but SAMP servers usually had more.

generally people who played it longer than I probably can surely expand on my list and mostly It was a great community, I often spend my time on a Freeroam Server it had features I listed above. Of course you'll always end up with foul fruits and in this case those individuals or foul fruits mostly used the weak Anti Cheat from SAMP, I believe SAMP doesn't even has one, maybe some server plugins but nothing really from the main developers itself, so more people began to literally drag in drop 2-4 zip files made before even SAMP was released and "hacked" on every server they could find and there was nothing the admins really could do about, except bans and kicks, so this trend continued, players got annoyed and some stopped playing, including me, but that's not the only reason but more on this further down.

MTA

After some time I heard about MTA and thought that it could be great and it was, there is now a pretty good Anti Cheat system and I had great time while playing, I explored different servers and spotted immediately improvements, mainly the DAYZ,RP and Zombie(?) gamemode section, also newer gamemodes got introduced and more there developed, "Project Need for Speed" and "ExO Gaming" today are a great example of servers MTA needs more of, they tend to stick to quality over content, but im not a shill, they still have Microtransaction that I come to further down and of course you have some Server which does its own scripting, that's good, I encourage that, but in the end you don't see the masterpieces like back in SAMP, I kinda stick to a server now because its the least sht.. sorry but after seeing the same "Lamborghini Aventador" model 5x in a row which I bet its model tris count is that of the map section currently loaded, no it sucks and why don't people stick to models that look like they would belong to the game world in general, but yes if you add it for the fun its okay but if the fun ends up in having a 3gb slow download, the fun for me sadly ends, the freeroam gamemode somehow was and still is a miss, you got some but they either have Microtransactions or a ranking system there you have to kill players, have fun getting 0wned a couple of times because someone needs to up his k/d or something, you can enable the passive mode but that maybe further decreases stuff you can do and I bet this can lead to a toxic community, and there is stuff like HEdit that allows to edit the handling of the vehicle you're sitting in doesn't really work on planes e.g. you can't make them faster, or if you change the wheels of a Roadtrain for example then change all 6 wheels not just 4, I want more Editors to play around with, that's for me freeroam

Era of Microtransactions and Copy Paste

After the big player base more or less ended for SAMP something began to grow, copy pasted servers, they just copied the big server, added more microtransactions and called it a day with of course VIP and other fancy stuff. MTA has the same problem now which like in SAMP increased overtime, this trend is nothing new sure, but still it appears to be almost on any Server and im not talking about donations, more about: give 9,99$ and you get jetpack/hydra/minigun/..., or give money or grind, something like this could potentially end up in not making fun, it rips the player literally the things they "could" do in the normal game and demand you pay for it. The money doesn't even go to Rockstar the guys who made this and I bet not a single penny goes to the MTA or SAMP development team except they maybe donate something.

End

So if you want feel free to discuss, I think MTA has to change again, I set big hopes for 1.6.0 to see what gets added and maybe more good Servers come.

[Nixon]

Hi, nice post.

It takes a lot of knowledge, creative energy, effort and money to make an original server with fun gameplay. How do you keep the motivation going if there's only 0-5 people playing on your server? The other problem is a lot of people see MTA servers as ways to earn a living. These people might have created more original content and continued working on their server if they could earn money, but most MTA players are too poor to buy a better PC, so they're definitely too poor to donate any meaningful amount of money.