My honest SAVRP Review
I have discovered this FiveM Server through pure luck and I'm at a crossway that I did so. Let's start with all the good things first.
The server has the best whitelisting process that I ever went through. It assures that you know the rules of the server, keeps out people that only want to make the day of others who actually want to have fun a bad experience and in the end it takes you a while which keeps people who only want another random servers for boredom out.
The SAVRP Server has a very noble mission attached to it, which is the Make A Wish donations it collects. Something I never saw before anywhere else related to FiveM.
The staff in the city is very responsive. When you have a problem, for example you fell through the floor, had a disconnect and now your job is messed up or anything else script related they are usually there in one minute. That is a really awesome thing to have.
Peak time population is a little over 150 people, you will most certainly always meet someone to interact with, if the feeling is mutual.
The assets and scripts on this server are amazing, over 800 when it comes to downloading them before you join.
In terms of things to do, you have options that keep you occupied for a very long time. Whitelisted jobs, non whitelisted jobs, activities and, of course, crime. All these things get big overhauls to make them even more interesting, even when they break things from time to time.
The economy is very fair. Have you ever been to these servers were a hot dog was 10.000$ or a simple rusty car was 100.000$? Well not on SAVRP, the economy is as good as it gets. In my eyes very realistic.
The rules of cars, while other servers which I will not mention, allow cars to go 400 km/h plus which makes for devastating collisions, which either total or kill you instantly or just ruin new players starter jobs, here you have to take your race cars to the actual track which is a totally different system.
Now the bad things in my opinion.
Realtor sector, first of all these amazing people are all volunteers and work hard besides also wanting to RP so it takes them time to get to assign you a house but the sheer demand on housing needs a change. Make it a whitelisted job like on so many other servers and have actual trained realtors in city that can show you houses and work through the list because waiting 2-3 days for a response on an off city ticket, the property being gone, finding a new one, opening a new ticket to rinse and repeat and in case you are stuck on a specific one just to wait months for it to open up again is just not it.
The law enforcement agencies have a nack of not knowing what they are actually doing. Lets pick an example. A traffic stop for red lights ran, no one injured, no cars crashed, no objects destroyed. The fine for that was 5.000$ and 10 Months of jail. Now, according to this being a highly realistic rp server that was a straight off to jail situation, no lawyer assigned, no hearing. For a traffic violation with no one that even got a scratch, fully compliant with the law in a cordial conversation and without priors? According to the Penal Code of the DOJ of SAVRP this would be a Class 3 Felony. SAVRP has a "special" worked out Transit Code with for me weird T.C Violations. On other Servers that I served as a Highway Patrol Officer with functioning Radar Equipment, Tickets etc. that would have been a combination of multiple Traffic Code violations such as Failure to yield for a red light, Chaotic Movement between lanes maybe and AT THE MOST if there was a functioning radar involved a variation of a minor to mediocre speeding violation. These are all just fines and not jail time or a felony. Now if we base this as real as possible since the universe of GTA is in the United States and take this example to court, a prosecutor might argue 30 days in jail if there was certain states given, such as intoxication, injuries, street racing or evading the police. But its not very likely depeding on the state. All im saying is, rework this legal system. Also they use game mechanics to punish you instead of real situations. If you do something that an NPC assigns you to do and there is no way out of it and they come over, busted? Well yes sometimes. You are expected to roleplay your way out of it. If that works thats perfect and should be like that which is totally fine but if they insist "I am seeing a GAME MECHANIC/something that shouldnt be part of RP and I punish you for this!" that is like saying a hacker put you in a tank, you are now in illegal posession of military equipment, lets book this guy. Seriously?
Again, the DOJ itself. It exists! Mostly on Discord. You can take the BAR exam, have yourself listed in the phone book sector but if you have a need for a case you will have most of it solved inside of there. Only major cases are done in the actual court house of the capitol building which is a shame, it makes being a lawyer...pointless. Picking another city I was part of, the DOJ was so understaffed that many criminals haven't even got the chance to have a lawyer in city present because they actually had to be flown around from the Capitol to the DOC or wherever else they were needed, may it be Private Attorneys or State Attorneys.
Unutilized Spots. Military RP doesn't exist on this server, I imagine this has a very good reason, its kind of a bummer because Fort Zancudo is a gigantic area plus the aircraft carrier could be a nice place to implement a special tactic unit for the Terrorism Act in the rules only if ever needed and not permanently on duty but they use the LSPD/BSCOs special units for that instead.
Gatekeeping for unrealistic things. We all know that on servers with high realism RP the whole point is to find out how things work and not to get told how they are. For example you dont go to the discord OOC and ask "Where is the Black Market?" Also you do not run up to a criminal and ask the same without being in their gang. But there are situations on SAVRP where the elite gatekeepers drive me actually up the walls. The case of Tebex is one of them. In case someone doesn't know what Tebex is, you pay real world money to buy something inside of the game. Now someone was asking if certain vehicles have a certain feature that he needed from so said Tebex vehicles. They cost a lot of real money, its not just 5 Dollars and there are not just 2 or 3. They just told him "FOIC" which means Find out in character. Now if it would be a dealership thing and you can just buy these for what you earn in the game and not actually your own money from work, that goes to your life thats a different story, somewhere a line needs to be drawn and thats at Tebex for me personally as much as donations towards people who make content is always appreciated. Also Scripts that are part of the integration of the server are highly customizable. You as a citizen cannot see inside of them what has been done, even after reading the documentation for the script. Lets pick the food truck for example. It is in the dealership but there are so many scripted variations of it that do different things that you can't be certain what the developers took out of the script or not. You can get a kitchen inside of it from the mech shop but does it work? Maybe, maybe not. Other servers spawn you a BBQ grill, a TV, a review system and a pricing sheet. So it is with many more things and the answer is always FOIC. Imagine you play someone that is 70+ and doesn't have a phone and gets told to use Social Media all the time, you are messed up.
Script Feedback. Sometimes or lately a bit more often Triage Tickets for the Script sector flow in that make certain things unmanageable, they are not big but they are annoying. I don't actively work anymore in programming, I once did but whenever I got a Helpdesk Ticket for example and it was sitting there, if even it did for 1 week, I gave the person an answer that it was at least aknowledged. Here thats not the case. They renamed it and thats it, even after I let them know that after all this time my problem is still occuring and I can't do anything in this regard and more people have the same issue. Now even if they have tickets in the hundreds, it would be a nice gesture to say one phrase, coming from customer support myself.
Professional Staff Shortage: EMS/SAFR has sometimes a serious staff shortage depending what time zone you are in. You are literally left for dead. Now that is obviously not their fault! Categorize this as neutral, just be aware that this Whitelisted job could really need more applicants. Especially because everyone wants to be a mechanic in the felt 100 mech shops instead of being a first responder.
New arrivals: Many new people that arrive have the grab and ditch mentality. If you ever help someone never ever expect anything they wont be around long enough mostly. Its just like real life in here, I helped around 12 or 14 people to get them hooked up with cars and jobs but thats all that it was, never expect anyone to call back or to hang out, its like Spark, a one off. That one is more of a funny point and not a negative one.
Some ending words: Over all this server is one of the best I was ever on, the climate is nice, I haven't met people that were negative towards anyone. A lot of the inhabitants of the city are very old in regards of server age, so there is some cliques going on and it can be hard to find connections to stick around and you can find yourself alone at times and grind away with whatever you are doing. I also noticed that whenever the server is doing a certain event, may it be a giveaway for a car or whatever people come and as soon as that giveaway is over the majority is storming off, so it is not as genuine as it might appear at the first glance. My advice is to experience yourself since I would give this FiveM server a very good rating still.