Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity?

[LuckyOne]

As always, everyone commenting here is wrong (and that includes me ).

But to really fix police you need to turn the problem on its head. Why don't people play police IDs? Because there's nobody to police!

Seriously, I've been here for a while, and the situations where people were incentivised to log Police were set up to promote them to log - limited to high profile events with lots of smuggling activity.

First, you need to incentivise smuggling to happen during peak hours instead of when nobody is around. That means smuggling should be more akin to blockade running. Basically, give bonuses when there are lawfuls around in the system you sell your contraband.

Second, Police needs their own gameplay loop they could do while waiting for the smugglers to show up. Somebody suggested POB prison facilities, or just a straight up sellpoint bonus (acessible only for Police IDs) for captured pilots.

Third, I suggested several times to bring the NPC scanning patrols back, and make them "relay" info about your coordinates to all police / lawful IDs (unless you drop your cargo or bribe them - whichever is easier to code). This would make using JHs a bit harder, though still sneakier than TLs that always relay your info to everyone who's listening.

/nodock for indies could help quite a bit, but it's only a band-aid that might be more useful for trolling than true gameplay issues.