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Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Printable Version

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Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Barrier - 11-26-2023

Hi guys. You are probably aware than there are currently no dedicated police official factions in any house. Moreover, even unofficially, only a fraction of active players in any house seem to be playing police characters. Frankly, I don't remember the last time I saw a BPA or a KSP ship during my forays into Bretonia and Kusari, and Rheinland only has a few dedicated players for its unofficial police faction (KPR).

If we assume that this is a problem, what should be the solution?
I wanted to open a discussion about what could be the minimal amount of modification which may lead to more players focusing on police roleplay.

My own solution is as follows: change house military id lines from "Can enforce laws within House Space" to "Can attack ships breaking laws within House Space."
The idea behind this is simple: the military is a blunt tool with little training about civilian disputes and smuggling regulations. Their solution starts and ends with the application of force. So if you want more options when dealing with criminals (e.g. fines), and the ability to make inrp arrests, you fly on police ids. If anything too big comes calling, you ping the military for help and disengage until you have more support.

What do y'all think?

Ideas people put forward (sorted by my own opinion about ease of implementation):

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Czechmate - 11-26-2023

Gallia deleted police, has dual ID on one IFF for indies and officials, sorted. Sub ID on OF is most active "police" in the game. With no cap access, with no Tau lines.


Space police is a weird Freelancer concept that doesn't really work in the first place, isn't really used in sci fi where the Navies do the space policing, besides LPI that is private security corrupt corp as contrast to state employed lsf/navy.

Just merge them like Gallia or let them be the niche they are meant to remain more or less.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Traxit - 11-26-2023

The intrinsic issue comes with military IDs having access to the biggest ships. Additionally, Sirius has been warring with itself and Gallia ever since the Colony Wars back in 801. It would most likely be beneficial to have a story stance dictate the notion that house militaries are going to be gathering dust for the near future. Of course with certain unawfuls having access to warships that won't entirely be true. Bottom-line, forget inter-house wars = military factions are now out of fashion.

What do Police have in return...? /tlagsnet. Lol.

OP's suggestion may do more harm than good. You are turning all of the militaries into pvp tools, you incentivise military IDs to log less because they know their character can only shoot. Not that was any different in the first place...

Police ID needs more gimmicks, one such gimmick already exists in the form of /nodock. But the main counterpoint is how easy it would be to abuse, and the main counterargument is relying on our staff being vigilant, which is full of skepticism in the first place.

So more ideas need to pour out. One idea off the top of my head is ID-restricting interceptor engines for freighters and light fighters.
One monumental wacky idea is giving them yet-another flhook command that lets them disable Gate/Lane in some form, whether its forcefully kicking ships out of lane or disabling the entire lane. Jumpgates are rather self-explanatory, just block docking for 30 seconds. But again, we rely on the good faith of players and the vigilance of staff to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Whatever ideas pour through, I think it's important we do not nerf others, in order to buff others, to re-iterate - Buff the weak IDs to the strong.
Even if it means adding cruisers and above to police ID which we could balance by restricting all of the flhook powers to gunboats and below.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Levenna - 11-26-2023

I don't agree with that change to military IDs, personally. I find it incredibly poor that my ID would hypothetically restrict me to attacking and destroying little Timmy using adapted nomad blasters on a Freelancer ID because it's in breach of Liberty Law, rather than enforcing said law, maybe with a fine, and guiding him properly. Second, irl navies and coast guards play a significant role in the seizure of illegal narcotics and dealing with modern piracy. Remember, too, that all Navy pilots are officers, and this isn't your average enlisted personnel just going through a couple months of training. There's no reason to dumb them down solely to application of force.

If anything, it would be a risk but I would add /nodock to indie police IDs. It's a powerful tool, yes, it's abusable, yes, but so long as the abuse is enforced and sanctioned when it's used oorp or to troll, I think it'd work out.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Czechmate - 11-26-2023

(11-26-2023, 05:43 PM)Traxit Wrote: The intrinsic issue comes with military IDs having access to the biggest ships. Additionally, Sirius has been warring with itself and Gallia ever since the Colony Wars back in 801. It would most likely be beneficial to have a story stance dictate the notion that house militaries are going to be gathering dust for the near future. Of course with certain unawfuls having access to warships that won't entirely be true. Bottom-line, forget inter-house wars = military factions are now out of fashion.

What do Police have in return...? /tlagsnet. Lol.

OP's suggestion may do more harm than good. You are turning all of the militaries into pvp tools, you incentivise military IDs to log less because they know their character can only shoot. Not that was any different in the first place...

Police ID needs more gimmicks, one such gimmick already exists in the form of /nodock. But the main counterpoint is how easy it would be to abuse, and the main counterargument is relying on our staff being vigilant, which is full of skepticism in the first place.

So more ideas need to pour out. One idea off the top of my head is ID-restricting interceptor engines for freighters and light fighters.
One monumental wacky idea is giving them yet-another flhook command that lets them disable Gate/Lane in some form, whether its forcefully kicking ships out of lane or disabling the entire lane. Jumpgates are rather self-explanatory, just block docking for 30 seconds. But again, we rely on the good faith of players and the vigilance of staff to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Whatever ideas pour through, I think it's important we do not nerf others, in order to buff others, to re-iterate - Buff the weak IDs to the strong.
Even if it means adding cruisers and above to police ID which we could balance by restricting all of the flhook powers to gunboats and below.
Few lawfuls and navies patrol is the thing in the first place, that Includes Liberty where if Vanguard doesn't do patrolling you start having multiboxers roaming the tradelanses with artifacts.

Not sure how many gimmicks you'd have to bring in to change that and make people want to patrol regularly?

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Max Morse - 11-26-2023

I've been thinking on this for a while now, and I think you've found the problem correctly, but you're looking at it from the opposite perspective of how it should be handled.

House militaries are a primarily defensive force, with offensive capability when in active war against another house or a large enough threat that isn't necessarily a house. Militaries should be focused on the security of two things. First of all is that they should be focused on border control and the prevention of smuggling through active interception, militaries should be proactively trying to keep smugglers out by setting up checkpoints in heavy traffic areas. Secondly, security around Jump Gates and along trade lanes should primarily be handled by the militaries. They're meant to keep powerful hostile forces away from civilian installations, and as such they should be actively attempting to do that. This is why they have access to their respective houses heaviest warships.

House police on the other hand should be played around other objectives, some of which have overlap with the militaries, and others being entirely their own focus. Police should be focused on patrolling around the large population centers, so near settled planets and major trade installations. They should also be actively focused on using their access to tlagsnet to scan for smugglers actively using trade lanes and gates from a distance, which the militaries can't do. Because of this they should be more focused on the interception of smugglers, going after the ones that would logically have snuck past the military border control. Finally they should be focused on hunting down known criminals, using their ability to know where the criminals are at against them.

From my perspective the best way to achieve this is to give the police groups tools that make them both capable of independent action, but also capable of supporting their military forces. Police groups need more tools than they currently have to stop smugglers, for a start I'd suggest opening the nodock command up to indie police, since there's no OFs to use it right now, having it restricted to them is fairly pointless. I'd also suggest a command that would disable a ship's cruise engines for a longer duration (somewhere in the several minute area) if it's possible, though from what I recall in discussing these things it would be tricky to implement at best. If it were possible for there to be a command that can remotely disable trade lanes that would also be interesting. Possibly a "Police Scanner" that works as an improved cargo scanner that can only be used with Police IDs. To balance these advantages out, and to make the police more distinct from their military counterparts, I'd suggest removing their ability to fly cruisers from their ID lines, restricting them to only being able to fly gunboats would make their interaction more interesting, while also making more sense from a lore/roleplay perspective.

Police don't need too much to make them an alternative to military IDs, and they would benefit heavily from some general overall changes to the way ZoI with capital ships works. Police should be seeing a fair bit of benefit from the new factory modules that will make smuggling more viable. The other way to give them an indirect buff would be to put more limits on where unlawful capitals can operate. Not having to worry about a Corsair/RH/Outcast battleship chasing you down on your police gunboat is going to make them a lot more enjoyable to play.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Barrier - 11-26-2023

I have heard of /nodock myself, and I agree that it would be a useful tool that incorporates the idea that police are tied into the civilian infrastructure. In my opinion someone abusing this feature can be easily sanctioned under 1.2 (trolling) or maybe 2.3 (metagaming/powergaming). So maybe a lot of people will get hit with this after a potential rollout, but then things will settle where it gets used properly.

I guess the question is what this actually accomplishes. I guess instead of the criminal docking at a nearby lawful base, they will have to keep running until they get to some Junker base or an unlawful station. But unless you have the firepower, doesn't that just mean a longer chase with the criminal still docking to get away from you in the end?

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Lythrilux - 11-26-2023

Makes sense but wouldn't work in practice.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Levenna - 11-26-2023

(11-26-2023, 06:00 PM)Barrier Wrote: I guess the question is what this actually accomplishes. I guess instead of the criminal docking at a nearby lawful base, they will have to keep running until they get to some Junker base or an unlawful station. But unless you have the firepower, doesn't that just mean a longer chase with the criminal still docking to get away from you in the end?

You would be amazed how many smugglers get out of any kind of consequence by just F3'ing on the nearest base. That alone being prevented is pretty powerful and a very strong incentive to play police IDs with nodock. Two fighters can kill a transport pretty reliably. One talented bomber, maybe, one gunboat is frankly overkill. Point is that transports aren't *that* durable. It would force them to actually RP instead of silently run to the nearest base, or actually have a threat of dying.

RE: Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity? - Barrier - 11-26-2023

(11-26-2023, 06:09 PM)Levenna Wrote:
(11-26-2023, 06:00 PM)Barrier Wrote: I guess the question is what this actually accomplishes. I guess instead of the criminal docking at a nearby lawful base, they will have to keep running until they get to some Junker base or an unlawful station. But unless you have the firepower, doesn't that just mean a longer chase with the criminal still docking to get away from you in the end?

You would be amazed how many smugglers get out of any kind of consequence by just F3'ing on the nearest base. That alone being prevented is pretty powerful and a very strong incentive to play police IDs with nodock. Two fighters can kill a transport pretty reliably. One talented bomber, maybe, one gunboat is frankly overkill. Point is that transports aren't *that* durable.

Oh I agree, I remember during the taste of the future event, me and another bomber unloaded on a synth transport that just managed to dock on Stuttgart. But say if we were police with nodock and that was a smuggler, there's no way he'd get away from us even though Darmstadt is relatively close.

I guess I was more thinking of what happens on a solo patrol, but then again people can just pair up if they want.