[Davis]

I'm touching a little bit here on points that were already made by Mmartin in his post, but it's definitely fair to say that 0.3DL wasn't a factor of the LS:RP playerbase dropping. I spent a little while trying to figure out what happened, whether it was the approach that I was taking with Game Development, the frequency of the updates, the features that we added weren't as desired as originally thought, etc, and it was definitely a collection of problems:

1) We weren't updating frequently enough
2) The domain swap from ls-rp.com to ls-rp.io and broken links
3) The outages that we had on the forum frequently for a little while
4) The playerbase of the mod dropping in general

We definitely haven't seen any direct connections to the requirement to download content on our server, and our playerbase seeing a decrease, so I don't think it would be fair for us to scapegoat that as a reason (bear in mind, it took us a little while to properly leverage custom models/objects).

If anything, we saw a surge in interest with the release of custom objects, especially when we started leveraging it properly. It's allowed us to make significant changes to the map, without affecting the look and feel of the vanilla version of the game. Here's an example (https://imgur.com/a/WRPYHwu) of an area of the map that we replaced to fit a police headquarters and a strip mall, which wouldn't have been possible without 0.3DL. The opportunities are endless, and our players appreciate that.

It's also definitely not the waiting to download content that players who frequent LS:RP care about, there's already an application process that takes a few hours at best (to get reviewed), they don't care about an extra couple of minutes of content downloads for a more immersive playing experience.

All in all, we spent a lot of time studying the playerbase decrease, but the point that I'm trying to make is that I can say with confidence that downloading content was not a factor in it, that's something that I'm sure of.

The best way forward here is to put the control in the hands of the server, let them decide whether or not they want to toggle the download capabilities but make sure that they're available. There's one thing I am sure of, creating a further divide in SA:MP versions, and even more uncertainty around 0.3DL, isn't going to do any good for any of the parties involved.