Lawful IDs rework proposal

[Kauket]

Those ARE part of the game! Traders, PvEers, PvPers, Cap players, Snubbers, Casuals, tryhards, RPers, PoBers, Patrollers. Nobody is better or worse, they are all equally amazing and are using their precious time playing a mod of an ancient abandoned game. They should all try to understand and compromise with the other sides, making their time here better. Let's get more of these people in I say! That really should be the main metric of devs - how many people actually play. How can they get more people to actually play. The synergy of story, systems, econ, admins etc. should be there to work towards that main goal. I will never apologise for learning from the GMS and DTRs of the server.

This post here is the right mentality. Whether you like the activities or not, they are still activities to do within the server.

Well aside from the sealclubbing is not a good activity because having all the best players group up on the same team and never playing against each other and stomp people without any ability to even accomplish anything isn't good. Fun for one, not for both. Newbies cannot learn from that. Could amend that by having a scoreboard when you enter one of the arenas in conn as a duel minigame and have monthly leadership boards


But beyond that, looking into how to make the casual activities (pve, rp, pvp, trading) is a must. Especially since people can do another activity when they get bored or it's down time.

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[Saronsen]

just ask Markam how many times he tried to reason with LibGov because they just wouldn't accept what story/systems proposed

hmmm? how many times indeed?

well in the last 3.5-4ish years I've been in libgov, markam has approached libgov, uh..
well he approached me once in DMs, and libgov zero times.
his one approach was trying to force liberty/rheinland hostility with zero input from liberty, rheinland (i havent heard otherwise), and the insurgency (according to then-resident hellfire players in libgov at the time). and it seems me having a "friendly" talking to with him worked, as absolutely no one wanted lib/rhein war at the time, 11 seconds after they just got done fighting kusari (trigger warning for the children in the forum, foul language) 1 2 3. he never spoke to the rest of libgov, so technically he has never tried to reason with libgov. ever. even people who've been in libgov nearly twice as long as me don't recall speaking to markam about anything libgov related. it never made it to the discord server if he did. perhaps he spoke to them on matters not related to libgov as a whole?
There was that one time in DWG that they asked liberty what to do with the carcassone, and everyone actually had a nearly unanimous agreement.

or perhaps you mean me disagreeing with systems on them deleting systems? sorry, im not libgov, just part of it, and i think you can see by the poll that many more people than libgov had an opinion on the matter.

so yes, ask markam just how many times he tried to reason with libgov. if he tells you its more than 0, he's lying.
i'd tell you to stop pulling shit out of your ass but you're so full of it you have an endless supply you need to get rid of

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[Petitioner]

Those ARE part of the game! Traders, PvEers, PvPers, Cap players, Snubbers, Casuals, tryhards, RPers, PoBers, Patrollers. Nobody is better or worse, they are all equally amazing and are using their precious time playing a mod of an ancient abandoned game. They should all try to understand and compromise with the other sides, making their time here better. Let's get more of these people in I say! That really should be the main metric of devs - how many people actually play. How can they get more people to actually play. The synergy of story, systems, econ, admins etc. should be there to work towards that main goal. I will never apologise for learning from the GMS and DTRs of the server.

I want to second this being the good mentality. Of course it's a good thing to experiment with shifting up the gameplay loop in various ways, and when something comes along that seems to boost pop count, then maybe that ought to be elaborated upon. I don't understand the dislike towards "people who cyber 500k offplane", not least of all because it's pretty much never 500k offplane. Like Lemon said, there's a lot of different things that both draw new players and keep old players. For me, I'm here to tell stories; or rather, let the stories emergently write themselves. That's the beauty of a vast, complicated, interconnected universe, the stories and interactions that can emerge from the complexity of the environment and its inhabitants. Sometimes that leads to pvp, sometimes that leads to me getting more credits, sometimes it leads to long conversations at a freeport.

I seem to recall that large groups of randoms with no genuine reason to interact with each other yelling at each other near freeports was a common interaction back when we were at max playercount for half of the day. Maybe it isn't your cup of tea, but there's nothing forcing you to do that. You can always organize PvP events like Antonio does; plenty of people love those, too, and the fact that these radically different styles of interaction are possible in the same world is, to me, one of the most magical things about Freelancer as a platform.

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Anyway, on topic with the OP.
I like Groshyr's suggestions. Police in cruisers doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but more importantly, taking away an ability for them that is entirely unused doesn't make them any more or less enticing than they are now because nobody plays police as-is. So, how do we encourage police activity? We need to look at what drives interaction in general. As I said earlier in my post, there are a couple different styles of interaction that are predominant right now; the main ones are patrolling, dogfighting, and long drawn-out roleplaying. What changes would make all of these things more attractive for police factions?


- Restricting the ability to enforce laws to police IDs certainly gives patrollers an incentive to do this (making money via fines or snubswarming chonky transports), but it doesn't take away the reason for military IDs to do this (LN can still engage Rogues, KNF can still engage GC, etc).

- This change makes /net actually relevant. Smugglers will have actual reason to avoid the lanes with active police players, which encourages the guesswork-based cat-and-mouse chases that makes splitting up, hiring freelancers to help, etc actually effective tactics. If it turns out the smuggler has a heavy escort, and a lone LPI Liberator stumbles upon the smugglers, suddenly there's tension, reason to call for backup. Do the other officers get there in time? This tension is emotionally satisfying and makes players want to have more such experiences.

- Military factions being able to enforce laws in the border worlds only helps make the border worlds feel more dangerous for everyone rather than only dangerous for lawfuls. This encourages militaries to focus on border defense, which is what their main task ought to be outside of wartime (alongside responding to terrorist threats, eg pirate caps etc). With militaries spending more time in the border worlds, they're more likely to encounter each other. That might lead to border spats, arguments over jurisdiction etc that turn into combat (which has been a recurrent plot theme in Discovery; to my understanding that was supposed to be the entire motivation between the old Liberty/Rheinland war after all), or it might lead to combined patrols, or just spontaneous longer roleplays. All of these are emergent interactions that come about from the gameplay environment and are entirely player-driven, which helps increase player investment and sense of control, which is good for activity.

- I don't have any thoughts about intel factions because I don't play house intelligence. I only want to speak about things I'm qualified to assess.


tl;dr sounds good, try it out for awhile and see if it works. also give LH /net, maybe they'll actually log for once if they have it lol

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[Czechmate]

The big issue and flaw is - besides Liberty that has a corrupt corporate police that shares law enforcement with house agencies and removing navy/lsf enforcement would break lore you are splitting a zero.
Gallia's police was deleted and is now part of navy IFF.

In Rheinland Bretonia and Kusari very little law enforcement is done in the first place, in some months this might drop to literal zero - this might *seem* like a good idea l, but e.g. forcing BAF fleet to let pass a convoy of 20 Cardamine smugglers going through their capital right past them without them being able to do anything would discourage what little, if any, usage of law enforcement is in those houses. They don't patrol now, you wouldn't see more bpa, you'd just see even an emptier house

[Shimamori]

I like Groshyr's suggestions. Police in cruisers doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but more importantly, taking away an ability for them that is entirely unused doesn't make them any more or less enticing than they are now because nobody plays police as-is. So, how do we encourage police activity? We need to look at what drives interaction in general. As I said earlier in my post, there are a couple different styles of interaction that are predominant right now; the main ones are patrolling, dogfighting, and long drawn-out roleplaying. What changes would make all of these things more attractive for police factions?

- Restricting the ability to enforce laws to police IDs certainly gives patrollers an incentive to do this (making money via fines or snubswarming chonky transports), but it doesn't take away the reason for military IDs to do this (LN can still engage Rogues, KNF can still engage GC, etc).

- This change makes /net actually relevant. Smugglers will have actual reason to avoid the lanes with active police players, which encourages the guesswork-based cat-and-mouse chases that makes splitting up, hiring freelancers to help, etc actually effective tactics. If it turns out the smuggler has a heavy escort, and a lone LPI Liberator stumbles upon the smugglers, suddenly there's tension, reason to call for backup. Do the other officers get there in time? This tension is emotionally satisfying and makes players want to have more such experiences.

- Military factions being able to enforce laws in the border worlds only helps make the border worlds feel more dangerous for everyone rather than only dangerous for lawfuls. This encourages militaries to focus on border defense, which is what their main task ought to be outside of wartime (alongside responding to terrorist threats, eg pirate caps etc). With militaries spending more time in the border worlds, they're more likely to encounter each other. That might lead to border spats, arguments over jurisdiction etc that turn into combat (which has been a recurrent plot theme in Discovery; to my understanding that was supposed to be the entire motivation between the old Liberty/Rheinland war after all), or it might lead to combined patrols, or just spontaneous longer roleplays. All of these are emergent interactions that come about from the gameplay environment and are entirely player-driven, which helps increase player investment and sense of control, which is good for activity.

- I don't have any thoughts about intel factions because I don't play house intelligence. I only want to speak about things I'm qualified to assess.

tl;dr sounds good, try it out for awhile and see if it works. also give LH /net, maybe they'll actually log for once if they have it lol

Take away cruisers from the police and there will be even fewer incentives for the police to log. The main issue is there are simply no real incentives to police gameplay. I am talking from a perspective of a player who does fly KSP Takeda. Although I do not RP as KSP, I act alongside the ID. Here are a few observations from being police outside of Liberty.

• most of the time you greet some pass-by traders with kind words like "welcome to Kusari". It's ok once or twice but gets dull in a while. I also do not really get much of RP out of that bcs there is simply no organic moot topics for the interaction
  
• then you have smugglers who already avoid /net TL. One can predict their movement but tbh flying 80k from, say, Junyo to Kyushu JH to miss the smuggler by a margin and then roam the system is hardly enticing. Not like interactions with smugglers are better, though.
  
• then you have PvP. This is better than the two but why doing it on KSP ID if you have KNF with everything better? As you put it, you do not need law enforcement on KNF to shoot red. Quite often the red is an OC cruiser/battlecruiser so why would you even sweat on an underwhelming in the current balance GB or in a lonely bomber (because there are not enough lawful playerbase) when you can slap a Takeda or Komainu and have a decent duel?
  

If we move on with this rework, nothing will change because the changes do not bring any real incentives. Incentives will come automatically with larger playerbase. For better or worse, outside of Liberty lawful playerbase does not exist in sufficient numbers for non-planned activity and no /net features or law enforcement lines will change it because those two mechanics amount to an infinitesimal share of lawful activity anyway. And KNF (or RM, or GN, or BAF) can do the main activity, which is PvP, better.

Tldr; to spur lawful activity we just need more playerbase and active leadership, like Lemon, to organise the playerbase. With many ex-lawful leaders burnt out or busy iRL, and non existent influx of new blood this is hard to achieve. Maybe, the upcoming patch will bring in some activity boost, or bury the last hopes. Lawful playerbase outside Liberty is basically in limbo waiting.

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[Czechmate]

Tldr; to spur lawful activity we just need more playerbase and active leadership, like Lemon, to organise the playerbase. With many ex-lawful leaders burnt out or busy iRL, and non existent influx of new blood this is hard to achieve. Maybe, the upcoming patch will bring in some activity boost, or bury the last hopes. Lawful playerbase outside Liberty is basically in limbo waiting.

It more or less never existed en masse - was always on and off...In Gallia Police got deleted altogether and then added as sub-ID under Navy. Did anyone even notice? No, maybe Denis did...nobody uses the /net sub-ID because nobody besides me actually enforces laws in Gallia even though I tried hard to get Gendarmerie going... When we get a sub-ID on [GN] Tag with /net /nodock on gunboats and smaller only like indies (tick dock staff, been months again!) it will only get slightly better, we might get 2-3 people doing the niche patrolling couple times per weak...Which will boost law enforcement by around 1000% but it still will be minuscule.


Law enforcement in general isn't very attractive because there just are not enough lawbreakers outside of liberty outside of people making stuff to shoot you or raid you...which won't be the cup of tea for law-enforcing players who are usually RP oriented - they never were since I play from 2020. BAF has never patrolled and enforced laws/looked for smugglers, did that help BPA? Not at all, last attempt at OF ended up afk filling PoBs - making these restrictions would be dividing a zero and making things worse.


You need to think "gameplay" what can police actually do - @Zentor tested the prisoner transfer thing, but the profit was way too low - all Police IDs totally should have a plugin bonus on an internal prisoner/criminal route within their house that actually makes ore level money and is telegraphed to unlawful with good fences. Again forget Liberty where Sunbucks etc. are a thing and LPI is a corporation - think about BPA/KSP/Rheinland as the only "standard" police houses and how to give them stuff to do, and what type of player you are aiming the activity at (roleplayers, not PvPers)

[Omi]

I don't understand the dislike towards "people who cyber 500k offplane", not least of all because it's pretty much never 500k offplane.For me, I'm here to tell stories; or rather, let the stories emergently write themselves. That's the beauty of a vast, complicated, interconnected universe, the stories and interactions that can emerge from the complexity of the environment and its inhabitants.

The funny part is that these two things are basically completely opposed to one another -- the people logging in to roleplay in their closed-off groups somewhere far off the beaten path aren't actually interested in these emergent stories you're talking about. If they were, they'd be out somewhere where more interaction might be able to bump into them without it looking like blatant playerlist meta. It's an unsubtle 'go away, leave us alone' indicator, and it's been like that for years. I think the dislike is perfectly understandable, because it represents the fact that a significant portion of the already dwindling playerbase doesn't actually contribute to any server-wide organic interaction; they just all log in a clump when some Discord chat pings and head into an isolated system to use the game as a particularly awkward chat program. It's the other side of the coin to the meme-name raid loggers who materialise any time there's a fight brewing to drill one side into the dirt -- I think both are harmful in their own ways, but even raid logging PvPers have a smidgen more justification in that they're actually interacting with people outside their specially selected bubble, even if that interaction takes the form of slamming them into the dirt.

It's hardly a problem unique to Discovery, either. You see these kinds of roleplay cliques all over the place in any setting that promotes it -- the difference is that they usually have to be even less subtle about freezing people out of interrupting their private groupings. Disco just happens to offer a ludicrously sized playing space to make all of that even easier, because you're literally never going to have anyone organically come across you if you don't want to be found.

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[Darius]

Yeah, that's more or less what I tried to get across, admittedly in a less than polite way, but I hope no feelings were hurt.

The reason I am constantly getting so worked up after the random logging-in "roleplayers" do these days is because all the "roleplay" that's done these days is done by the same platoon of 6-7 individuals that are extremely opposed to having outsiders interact with them unless they're friends or acquaintances from earlier years.

I am in no way incapable of understanding that some people might want to roleplay that way, because roleplay doesn't mean either just PvP or 10 hour long chats, but there has to be a limit to how long we can turn a blind eye to these blatant circlejerks that pollute the server's environment. My solution to this is very simple and efficient, actually enforcing the rule that says that characters must play according to their role will ensure that such random meetings as Rogues talking to Nomads doesn't happen any longer. Buuuuut, the staff team showed no interest in doing that when I tried to reason with them, and even said that I'd end up on that list as well, so I've largely given up hope that such a solution will ever come.

[Petitioner]

Take away cruisers from the police and there will be even fewer incentives for the police to log.

As I said, there's already no incentive for police to log, because nobody logs them. As such, nobody would actually miss police cruisers, because none exist as-is.

Tldr; to spur lawful activity we just need more playerbase and active leadership, like Lemon, to organise the playerbase. With many ex-lawful leaders burnt out or busy iRL, and non existent influx of new blood this is hard to achieve. Maybe, the upcoming patch will bring in some activity boost, or bury the last hopes. Lawful playerbase outside Liberty is basically in limbo waiting.

If you're feeling up for it, then, start a police faction and try to get enthusiasm for it going. Out of curiosity, do you think most of your membership would be flying cruisers?

The funny part is that these two things are basically completely opposed to one another -- the people logging in to roleplay in their closed-off groups somewhere far off the beaten path aren't actually interested in these emergent stories you're talking about. If they were, they'd be out somewhere where more interaction might be able to bump into them without it looking like blatant playerlist meta.

I wonder who these cliques that never interact with outsiders are?

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[Kalhmera]

As some of you may know I led LPI for two years while it was official and I had an amazing time with great people. So I feel I can make a small comment about this. Police as everyone already knows its not really different that any lawful faction. You fight the bad guy and that's it. What made police factions different back then was the people playing them and how they played them. You didn't have people playing solely Navy factions because they can do war and enforce laws. You had people specifically wanting to play police factions for that type of RP the donut and all that jazz. As time moves forward it seems most people don't really want to play police factions and that's ok. We can sit here and debate for ages but if there was any meaningful change I would bring to the indies it would be to allow them to have the /nodock command. It would give police an edge in law enforcement rather then waiting 4 months for official.

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Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to struggle against entropy. - V. Havel

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