Remove the disparity between Police, Passive and Criminal elements.
Governmential forces currently have (mostly) unchecked free reign over anything they do. Any punishments are (mostly) IC. However, there is little way to enforce this. A 5 minute /demote is nothing to a player. With the exception of the most egregious cases, any false arrest call is responded to with an !ic message. This leads to the situation where anything criminals do is hyper-analysed by staff, yet Police can do the same thing and get away with it.
In my opinion, this is one of the causes of such aggressive RP between Police and Criminals, as the only thing criminals can do, and not be in breach of rules, is sit in a house and print money, start shootouts with Police when they try to raid. If you try any other RP, mugging, robbing a store, 75% of the time you get cuff, warrant and boop'd. There's no RP in that.
Either we enforce equally, or we continue with this broken system.
Allow enforcement of the rules within context, and at the discretion of staff.
Whilst it would make our job harder, and means we couldn't just ban at first offence, instead having to converse with players and give warnings prior to punishments (though that's what we should be doing anyway), by changing the rules to a set of guidelines would allow us to allow such RPs.
This is such an important concept, that in /tg/station, it's rule #0.
SourceQuote:Enforcement of these rules is at the discretion of admins.
Admins are fully accountable for any consequences should they invoke this rule. Admins are also allowed to intervene in rounds when it is in the best interest of the playerbase.
In that game, if a situation is found to be in the best interest of the playerbase, they can allow it to continue. If a situation is found to be causing major issues, they can step in and stop it. In contrast, we are very limited in what we can do in that regard. We are forced to intervene in situations, even when they're not causing harm to players, are minor infractions or happen on an empty server. To quote a colleague, "The rules are the law and you either follow them or face the consequences. That goes for both players and staff who has to enforce them." We are granted no leeway in this. If it is in breach of any rule, we cannot allow an RP, even if said RP would be to the benefit of the community or playerbase.
More long term progression goals
Currently, the majority of the playerbase is only here for progression, rather than RP. However, that progression doesn't involve the development of their character, rather their account and inventory. As we've seen through the leaderboards (most hours, most money, highest inventory value, most REP), and how some people act about that rank, we can see that people care about that, rather than the development of their character. There are some exceptions, myself,
, and Trooper Steel, but in general, most people care about the account, more than the character.
By looking to the example of games with high player retention, MMOs, like Runescape and World of Warcraft, and Open-World Exploration games, like Skyrim and the Fallout series. All of these games, with high levels of player retention, all shame a common theme. They all have long-term perks for a player to work towards. For example, in MMOs, you have the Runescape skill capes, level 99 and 120 global broadcasts. In WoW, you have an entire set of end-game content upon reaching that top level. In both Skyrim and Fallout, the level progression awards actions ingame, unlocking more of the game world.
Reduce the avalibility of weapons
At the moment, weapons are based on money. The economy is slightly inflated, but there's been no change in the prices of weapons. If we reduced the avalibility of weaponry, by limiting it to time, rather than money, that could reduce the inflow of weaponry, increasing their value, and thus making them less likely to be used.