[2018] A Year in Recap and Season Greetings news

Hi there.

The Winter Holidays are here, so as usual we have got a new recap and status update post for you. Here is the summary of what has happened this year.

• We made efforts towards the new release through the first half of the year, so there was not much to talk about. There was an incompatibility issue with the 360 Total Security software which we advised you about and later in the year, there was a similar issue with McAfee.
• Late July, we have asked you about your thoughts about refreshing the community.mtasa.com portal. We have received some interesting feedback from you and we are still thinking about ways of implementing it, while considering our current resources.
  
  
• Also in July, we have migrated our bug tracking services to GitHub Issues, making it easier to track specific issues and link them to GitHub commits and pull requests. This has also allowed us to clean up our bug tracker - the old system had nearly 8000 tracked issues, some of which were 13 years old or so.
  
  
• On 7th of September, we have released Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas 1.5.6. This release added support for custom IFP animations among other things, like fixing the input and FPS lag reported by some of our users.
  
  
• Then a few days later, we have advised you to upgrade your MTA:SA servers to the latest version due to a server crash exploit that was discovered. There were some additional issues with this hotfix that were spotted later, but they have been all fixed within few days. If you have not yet upgraded your servers though, we still urge you to do so.

nX_ Vol.18 - CodeNX™ - 첫 장 - video by ElCrowMvs / map by nX

[GTA:DM] Wonder - Interstellar - by Wonder MTA

[MTA] Vice City - Map Preview #1 (JStreamer v3) - by Liberty City Roleplay

Multi Theft Auto - Tactics - by LoG4nTG

Multi Theft Auto - MTA CIT / GTA SA - San Andreas Police Department's 7th Anniversary (Dance Show) - video by PeteyFTW / server: CIT

Multi Theft Auto San Andreas Fail + Funny moments #1 - by Mr. Green Gaming

Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas - MTA DD - Map: Orgazm Cross - video by Game Master / map by Orgazm

MTA:SA Fast And Furious Paradise Trailer ! - by SDRIFTER Abdlmounaim

• Recent peak number of concurrent unique players: 30625 players on 2018.12.16 (at 16.30 GMT)
• Highest recorded number of concurrent unique players: 34653 players on 2018.02.03 (at 17.30 GMT)
• Recent number of daily unique players: 150390 players on 2018.12.01 (Saturday)
• Highest recorded number of daily unique players: 185818 players on 2018.02.03 (Saturday)
• Recent number of monthly unique players: 605834 players in November, 2018
• Highest recorded number of monthly unique players: 805903 players in January, 2018

Player counts were just slightly lower than last year, but we have also had some nice peak values at the beginning of the year. Good to see that there is still an interest in old but great games.

MTA:SA Version or series - Percentage of players using that version or series as of 24th of December, 2018

• 1.6.0 (alpha) - 0.05%
• 1.5.6 - 97.20%
• 1.5.5 - 2.00%
• 1.5.4 (and older) - 0.40%
• 1.4.x - 0.20%
• 1.3.x - 0.15%

Similar to last year, two of our most recent releases are used by over 99% of our player base. It means that there is little fragmentation between our releases and that players in general upgrade to the newest release once it is available. Also, there seems to be some interest in the newest alpha version as well - that is nice too.

Community-wise, our Discord has expanded this year - currently we have got 10 language-specific sections available for you there, as well as the active as usual English ones. We have also opened a new forum section recently to keep appeals for global game bans in one place. Over the next few weeks we intend to refresh our forum rules to better suit the current forum needs.

As for mod's development, we will continue working on the next release. We are thinking of integrating a new version of the client installer to reduce amount of issues encountered when installing MTA:SA (as well as to make it easier to investigate the remaining ones). We will also consider adding new features provided by our community members, such as editing collisions and adjusting surface properties by CrosRoad95.

That's it for now.