Lawful IDs rework proposal

[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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