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I've heard rumours. Whispers of an underground rave for the ages, deep within the bowels of one of GTA Online's myriad entertainment venues, away from the prying eyes of the LSPD. The question is: where?

As a child of the '90s, I was a touch too young for the techno scene that swept the UK in the early stretch of the same decade, where community-led DIY club nights saw revellers packed into hatchback cars like sardines, windows down and ears pricked, following the rhythmic beats of a bass drum reverberating from a random field somewhere off the M6. realschule-moosburg.de

I was around instead for the post-millennium dance music movement, frequenting the likes of The Arches and the Sub Club in Glasgow on a weekly basis during my formative years, and spending every summer in Ibiza. GTA 5's After Hours update of 2018, then, was literally music to my ears with the likes of the Blessed Madonna, Tale of Us and Solomun—all of who feature in-game—among my favourite real-world DJs.

Now 40 years old, I've since hung up my dancing shoes—but as a one-time old-school raver, I've longed for, but have invariably struggled to find, a Grand Theft Auto roleplay scene slant on popular IRL events filled with like-minded soft shoe shufflers.

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Enter Roleplay UK's 'BOILER ROOM', a fan-led GTA-inspired take on the real-world event of the same name, which ran its first ever night earlier this year. "No ticket raffles, No fighting, No egos," says the event's organiser Liam Miller. "Just people here for the love of music."

Turn it up

As a fellow techno enthusiast, Miller says he'd always wanted to launch an illegal rave inside GTA 5, and reckoned doing so within the game's RP scene made sense. After spending a fair chunk of time combing the Los Santos and Blaine County playground for the perfect spot—within the bounds of a map players have spent 13 years covering from pillar to post—the space beneath the Vanilla Unicorn strip club was deemed the prime location. After that, it was all about planning.

"One thing that was particularly enjoyable about running the event, and something I think worked really well, was taking the time to build everything up," Miller explains. "First off, I created a Tweedle account [an in-character social media app used within GTA RP servers to share in-character information] called "Boiler Room".

"I then started posting cryptic-style short and punchy posts with no context and without telling anyone it was me. Then I started putting up posters to draw more attention to the event, all pointing towards some sort of underground dance event coming up that was strictly invite-only.

"Now, in a world that's been explored every inch by most players, people tend to be lured in by what they don't know. 'Who is it?', 'Where is it?', that sort of thing, you know?"

Party planning

Indeed, the elusiveness of the event in its organisational phase lent it an air of exclusivity and intrigue that helped Miller sow the seeds firmly in his community. He snuck out of the woodwork to liaise with the heads of the server's organised crime outfits, for example, offering personal invites and ensuring only the most powerful players would have access to the underground initiative.

Then came the logistics. The food, the drink, the cost of it all in terms of in-server funds, the DJs, the photographers, and even, ahem, the less-than-legal wares that have perhaps been known to help hedonistic revellers enjoy nights like these that little bit more, both in-game and in the real world.

Miller says: "So, the planning was all done by me. Until the night itself, it was my baby, I steered it the way I wanted and planned it all out—and it was bloody stressful! I used a couple of Discord channels in order to organise all the food and drinks and how much I'd spend in-game, who I would order from, when the collections were to happen and all of those sorts of things.

"The next thing that made it a success was the drug NØISE, a custom narcotic brought in especially for the night. I can't thank the developers enough for this, especially BOBINZ. The server's Tiki Bar provided food and drink too, and without them I'd have been stumped—so a massive shout out to them."

Miller extends his praise to the staff at Roleplay.co.uk and their help in realising his vision from inception to execution. He adds: "I had thought of where in the city I wanted to host the event, but I needed decks and equipment set up and the staff took this way further than I could have imagined.

"They built me an interactive elevator behind a disused building that took us all down into a disused bunker, where they built a full club setting that I could use. With the secrecy around the event, the custom drug (which I roleplayed was coming in from overseas) and the fact we were telling people it wasn't just a standard MLO [map-loaded object], excitement was now high. So, a massive thanks to all the staff at Roleplay.co.uk."

Photography, such as the eye-catching imagery shared in this article, was captured by various members of the server's community—not least Just Shoot Photography—and security was, for the most part, handled by the Arms of Outcasts motorcycle club.

It just so happens that Miller is a sergeant at this particular MC, and his buddies helped ensure tensions stayed low while the energy remained high for the duration. With plenty of police roleplayers keen to shut down events such as these at the drop of a bat elsewhere on the server, maintaining order, Miller says, was especially important.

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: I will never not be inspired by the boundless creativity that exists in the Grand Theft Auto roleplay scene.

From the first time I robbed a bank while pretending to be a journalist, to happening upon cool set-ups such as this one and reporting back from the outside looking in, I absolutely love how a game rooted in violence and crime continues to be stretched like pizza dough in some many different directions.

The arrival of GTA 6 will inevitably extend those horizons further than ever before, but in the shorter-term future, I can't wait to see what micro-scale events such as Miller's Boiler Room Los Santos do from here.

A quick glance at the event's still-active forum thread shows one player who was so inspired by the last outing, they've offered to livestream their own set at the next one. Whether or not that's possible remains to be seen—Miller is keen, but says there are some obstacles to be ironed out in order for it to happen—but what is nevertheless impressive is the broader cultural appeal the event has had within this community.

This, of course, captures the essence of techno culture on a much wider scale, and so to see that reflected in one of the most influential videogames of all time warms my old-school raving heart.

"I've gotta say, from a roleplay point of view, everyone really leaned into this," says Miller. "People didn't stop dancing the full time, and people were chatting about the made-up drug in the city for months afterwards—if I could get more in and things like that. It was really good and big love to the community."

With that same sense of nostalgia, then, my next question to Miller is one I've asked a thousand times in the wake of a killer rave: so, when's the next one?

"We're absolutely hoping to do another one!" he says. "This time with a bigger crowd, that would be sick—we counted 96 people at the first one, which is absolutely brilliant. But something more packed out than before with people just dancing and socialising, that'd be amazing.

"And as far as GTA 6 is concerned… Well, with roleplay and creative imagination, anything is possible."

I'm thinking about Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's keynotes, and something in them's been rattling around in the back of my skull—during them, Hikaru Tamaki (who was affectionately coined as Mr Prime live on stage)—revealed that the design team was considering making the new version of Dragoon, which'll be arriving in the expansion, have a 90% damage reduction buff while using its new Sky High action.

Since I've been playing it (circa Shadowbringers), FF14 has been praised for having an almost pitch-perfect balance between its jobs. We're talking separations of a few percentages between the DPS of different classes at the highest level. That's in part to having no talent tree system to speak of.

But it's also led to one of the biggest criticisms of the game: Homogenization. Every tank plays the same, every healer plays the same, every DPS hits its burst windows at two minutes. It's something that the developers are directly taking aim at. Whether they will is another question, as my colleague and fellow FF14-head Mollie Taylor rightfully pointed out earlier this week.

But it got me thinking: What did perfectly balancing those jobs in that way do? Who did it serve? And there are a few good arguments in favour of that. Even in a purely PvE context, MMOs aren't balanced like singleplayer games. They're social activities, and class balance matters not just for competition, but for cooperation.

If your class or job is underpowered, people aren't gonna want to take you on diddly squat in higher-end content; Learning how to master a class can feel like a waste of time if some guy on the flavour of the month out-damages you with two buttons; And MMOs are grindy, which means jumping to those new classes can take multiple hours.

Heck, even if you're just a filthy casual, it can feel pretty crappy to see your name in the muck at the bottom of damage meters. If there's something MMO players don't like, it's a sense of inefficiency.

So why is FF14 moving away from that and tipping the scales? Why do people still play classic WoW servers, where Feral druids, for instance, had to grind out inventories full of Manual Crowd Pummelers if they wanted to be fully-optimised because of a weird interaction with their weapon scaling? Why did Star Wars: Galaxies die by trying to bring its professions in line?

Because perfect balance is bad for MMOs. That's the hand-on-heart truth.

What makes you special

One of the main draws of the MMO is the idea of inhabiting a character within a wider world—and inside of that draw, being able to exist in a space in a community where your contribution is valuable. This, as we all know, is an unattainable fantasy and only possible in videogames.

Anyway, the memories that stick with me aren't the ones where I had an internal itch for justice scratched by the meticulous numbers balancing of a developer team—they're when I saw certain classes being unique. WoW understood this very well back in the day.

Hunters could kite raid bosses halfway across the continent, rogues could pick locks in dungeons to bypass lengthy attunement questlines, warlocks could summon players to raids, which meant something before the advent of LFR and dungeon finder.

These things are still present in modern WoW, sure, but they're less relevant. You don't need to bring a rogue to unlock a shortcut in a Mythic+ dungeon if you want a fast time. Hell, sometimes five bears can cut it.

City of Heroes is another example I like to trot out, because it's even more granular, down to not just your class choice, but your selection of "powerset"—having a kinetics character on your crew gave you a massively impactful roster of buffs unmatched by other powersets. Some archetypes and builds were such team players that they were basically useless on their own—while others could be custom-built to solo challenges meant for full teams.

Being able to provide a specific service, or bring a certain ability? That made you feel special. The iron grip of the holy trinity is probably inescapable, sure—but that doesn't mean it has to puncture every aspect of play.

The worry is, of course, what I mentioned above: That certain unique skills or talents or abilities might invalidate some classes for some raids or dungeons—and I am painting a very rose-tinted picture here. It's cool that, say, fire mages in WoW were useless in Molten Core, but better in Naxxramas—right until you have to respec or regear them.

But I honestly think that's a price worth paying, especially if you can build intentionally around it.

Built different

Evercold's also taking steps to accommodate this new philosophy, which is great, because FF14's already got the foundations of a game that can support more whackadoodle job design.

In the game, you can play every job on the same character, switching between them just by equipping a new weapon. You still need to level them up and gear them individually, but that doesn't take all too long in the grand scheme of things—it's something you're able to do passively just by ticking boxes on your roulettes.

With Evercold, Square Enix is taking that one step further by letting players "sync" their highest item level to other jobs. If you want to fine-tune your stats and get best-in-slot gear, you'll still have to grind for it—but if you suddenly need to swap jobs to bring a better-suited one to a boss, you'll be able to have a statistically viable version of that. Just a little weaker than a specialist.

In other words, if it ends up that certain jobs excel in certain fights, it's basically not the end of the world—players won't be given an unreasonable amount of work to have a swiss army knife of viable picks ready to go at any time.

In much the same way I feel about tab-targeting MMOs, where it feels as though MMO developers could improve the system that's already there rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I feel as though class balancing teams could take on all their knowledge of modern MMO design and apply them to this "purposefully imbalanced" template, too.

Much of the interesting friction and complexity of these older games was almost an accident, and they left unviable classes in the dirt for months, if not years. Modern-day balance and design schedules are both far more reactive and are done with deeper understanding of their own systems. Developers are more transparent, posting breakdowns of their choice-making. Even if those breakdowns are sometimes a little baffling, at least they're doing it.

I think there's a world in which a developer finds the right version of that oldschool, Star Wars Galaxies-esque formula—where every class, profession, or job has something it excels at, but needs help from others—that'll actually stick with modern audiences. And I think that MMO will be better for it.

Y'know. If a new MMO can actually be developed and made in the first place. Which isn't a sure thing.