Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity?

[Haste]

Is the goal of these changes:

• To get more players playing Discovery Freelancer, some of whom will play the new and improved Police IDs (which are already better Navy IDs for the purposes of flying anything but a Dreadnought), or,
  
• To try and encourage current (Navy? Other lawful?) players to stop playing those characters and instead to play Police IDs?
  

This is always what I feel we collectively miss while messing around with "police buffs". There's nothing wrong with the IDs. There never has been anything wrong with the IDs. The Police IDs are Navy IDs with TLAGSNET, making them objectively better. I don't know if trying to funnel some navy/military/whatever players into police factions will actually change anything about the game.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for adding little carrots to dangle in front of the playerbase to try and reward players for "playing their role", but I feel like if we're going to pay police a salary we should also pay navy ships a salary for the same activities. They're pretty interchangeable. We want navy patrols just as badly as we want police patrols. Why not spend the same dev time but give more IDs more to do? Because we want to artificially boost the police playerbase?

Also, if the main reason why players don't play police is that the power fantasy of the ID isn't to their liking, which is a pretty safe assumption (again, the IDs are universally superior to navy IDs of the same houses from what I've seen), won't trying to "force" them to play the ID just result in mediocrely roleplayed police characters?

I'd rather focus on giving all our players more stuff to do and more fun to have in the game rather than spending disproportionate dev time on fixing a problem that isn't really a problem. People who like to play police characters will play police characters regardless of the ID.

Maybe my perspective on this is biased as my very first official faction was LPI and I had an absolute blast playing it, but it just seems like we're missing the forest for the trees. Get more players playing, and being a policeman on patrol will be more fun. If we want more activities you can do that don't rely on players in your ZoI, which we definitely do, add them in such a way that the maximum number of IDs / players benefit. To be honest, salary or not, flying around a house aimlessly taking lanes just because it drip-feeds you some credits still doesn't sound super enticing to me.

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