I'm seeing a common factor between all these events... you. Are you sure you're following the rules of each server properly, and acting appropriately? I can't imagine many servers would be thriving if they just randomly targeted new players.
Honestly, the issues you listed are all issues that are caused by a combination of bad scripts and a bad infrastructure. There's only so much Multi Theft Auto can do if server owners don't bother to learn proper security practices and implement them.
Also, anti-cheat clearly has seen updates numerous of times since 2023 (obviously they're not open about all the changes). Development is happening on a nearly daily basis with plenty of new updates coming available. The community is far from being neglected, a lot of the community is on the Discord server nowadays though. Please get your facts straight before you make such accusations.
We are planning to open source Sphene around Q4 of 2025. I'd like to set some expectations:
Sphene is still heavily in development, by no means will Sphene be something you can just run and enjoy on a server.
While a lot of features have been added to Sphene, a lot of the storyline is not fully playable yet. There are still a lot of glitches, and missing functionality. You WILL run into major issues.
We are working through some of the last hurdles that kept us from open sourcing the project.
We will only provide support on getting Sphene to run to those with clear intent to help its development.
By open sourcing the project later this year, we hope to accelerate its development. We hope to work together as a community to better understand how the underlying game code operates and how to implement missing functionality into Sphene. We look forward to working together with all of you!
Quick update, project is very much alive and loads of progress has been made since this topic was made. I'll add a new comment soon outlining the work we've done over these 6 years. I usually just do updates on our Discord server but realized that there's possibly a group of people out there that might be trying to get their updates on the project here.
That's pretty interesting. Would love to see what else we can achieve with AI in MTA. Could see this being useful a way to provide support for server players.
Question has been answered on Discord as well. You can't request to join the team. When there's a need for more staff members, existing staff will decide which community members are best suited for the job. There's a lot of factors that go into those decisions.
Just focus on being a positive part of the community.
Turns out 1.6 is real after all! Good job everyone who was involved with this update in any way. There's loads of QoL changes and new features I'm excited to actively use in my projects. Excited to see what else the future will bring to this incredible community.