Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity?

[darkwind]

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?

As a former police member, sounds fun.
Although i would think that may be limiting them is not very fair. May be they just wish this choice of roleplay. Shrugs. Let them have it.
They will be tempted to play police because of tlagsnet and nodock anyway. If they wish to play military for enforcing laws despite such levels of limitations, can we just admire them for more harder choices

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?

Somewhat risky of course giving that much power to indies.
but you are right regarding having ability to enforce rules, so lets presume we are responsible adults here.
kind of making me tempting to play police once again too

in the worst case there is always an option to rollback it back to having nodock to officials only.

Anyway, i vote to try giving it to indies too.

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?

As a former police player i can assure /nodock and tlagsnet is more than enough to play cat and mouse with criminals.
Sure they have safe homes like Junker bases, but they take long time to reach, and u can outsmart criminals if u analyze and make predictions well enough.
So it is very equal field.

> But unless you have the firepower

You need just having Bomber level of firepower for most of regular transporting criminals. Not really hard to meet quota.
Or sometimes needing actually Cruiser, if going against very heavy armored Junker vessels.

---

Interstellar	Autogit	Ctrl-V	Encryptor	Discovery At Linux
Dark Tools	DarkBot	DarkLint	DarkStat	DarkMap