[Trexmaster]

Come one come all, post all the things you wish the Guard did better, or didn't do at all.

Really though, I'm making this thread because I want to hear what people have to say about the player guards of SL2 in a constructive manner. Unlike how it's typically spewed out at random, since I feel people never tend to voice this opinion to those who'd be able to make good use of hearing it, preferring to rant to friends unrelated to the guard instead.

Regardless of your ranting preferences, now is your chance to criticize to your hearts contents. Try and keep it civil and name-calling to a minimum, this isn't meant to call people out. If you have an issue with a specific guard player, take it up with them first. Due to the nature of the role, it's both an IC and OOC responsibility to fairly handle offending players.

I'll start with a complaint I and several others have had in the past.

Code:

Jail times. Jailing players serves little to no purpose beyond a soft-ban from the game, and while deserved for particularly egregious or outright stupid cases, a means of punishing the player ICly more than OOCly should be formed. Reforms to the Fort to offer more things to do for prisoners have been brainstormed and considered, but it's been pushed to the side since there isn't much will or demand to see them through.

Some may suggest lowering the sentence time to compensate, but as Chaos already put forth before, it may be a better idea to hand out more lasting punishments befitting the crime, such as fines or in more serious cases, amputation. This runs into a plethora of new issues, hence why it hasn't been mobilized immediately. Such as people trivializing such penalties or outright not wanting their character to be permanently penalized in such a manner.

In the end there isn't a perfect solution to the Jail Time problem. The first step is recognizing it's an issue, and that stuffing people into the fort for weeks at a time isn't conductive to roleplay. It just makes most people unwilling to do criminal activity on characters they actually enjoy, and making alts to do crimes instead so they can log out of them for the entire jail period and just play another character they like.

[Sawrock]

Personally, the concept of NPC guards watching over areas makes crime roleplay difficult. Yes, it's stupid to commit a crime in public, but in the real world there aren't guards (or police) everywhere. And yes, while Cellsvich Square is a big area where there's likely to be one guard, there's almost going to be no roleplay (and thus, fun) in the other parts of Cellsvich, leading to either waiting hours for someone to stumble on you when you're waiting in a housing district, and even then the person can say ((Oh, I'm just OOCly moving to my house.)) And to note also, while committing crimes in public IS stupid, not every character is smart ICly- which can lead to fun roleplay.

I'd like to suggest that PC guards be present to "witness" crimes.

In addition, on the issue of having prison be boring, I have a suggestion. We could say the prison collars we put on prisoners have two types, "Lock" which would be the standard type, and "Community Service" which would be a type that could inject chemicals/zap/etc prisoners with the touch of a button to induce being knocked out. Those collars could OOCly serve two purposes- one, the prisoners could roleplay being in town with a guard watching over them (most likely, but not having to do, actual community service). The second is that they could ICly go about grinding with a guardsman in tow. I know my guard, Kcoryas, would be willing to bring a prisoner or two with him on a monster-hunting expedition or to Cellsvich for rehabilitation.

[Chaos]

Jail Time

The 'jail' was meant to get expansions to fill out the activities i planned for it, but it's something I never really got around to, and from the looks of everyone who simply logs out of jail, there's not much reason to really add them in at this time. So far, I've been silently trying to iron out something to replace this. We could just go over to 'shorter jail times' but that means more character-inflicted punishments, as the OP noted. It's not me trying to ruin your characters; but if a character is going around committing serious crimes and gets caught, they should be dealt with just as seriously, not just a few days in jail.

PC Guards must witness crimes

Except that this puts incredibly undue stress on Guard players to form an airtight patrol schedule, which comes into conflict with a few things I'll be noting later in this post. Also, there are far more people in this world than the PCs could even hope to represent; I would not put the burden of witness on a group of Guard Characters that couldn't hope to match the population of the entire guard force.

Also, before someone inevitably brings these up:

PC Guard Presence

I can agree that as of late, the amount of PC Guards on patrol are disappointingly low. I will be sifting through the guard and potentially opening another round of applications once I get the time for it, but please bear the following in mind:

1. People have lives. They are not surefire guaranteed to be around every day, nor are they contractually obligated to play SL2 for a good chunk of their waking hours.
2. The Guard Players are just as human as you are. From some of the guard-bashing I've seen, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if a few guards got discouraged and lost their motivation.

If either of these factors keep getting in the way of whomever I bring into the Guard, there's not much else I can do. I could go on about this, but honestly, if you couldn't imagine yourself regularly patrolling with your schedule, I don't think it's a stretch to step back and give the guards a bit of breathing room.

'Guards are omnipresent'

....I'm not sure who's claiming this, but that's completely incorrect. NPC Guards can be expected in the more popular of public areas, as well as popular junctions during prime hours. (that can include things like guild/company events/parties, if they so wish) Places like the wilderness, behind houses, alleyways, (most) sewers, etc. are not somewhere you can claim NPC guards to be, unless you have very good reason to say 'my character got this guard to follow him and check this out'.

If your idea of making things happen is just running up and causing mayhem in plain view of popular areas, then I'm sorry, but the guard is going to notice it one way or another. If you're looking to avoid the attention of law enforcement, then it's best to do your thing where they wouldn't normally look.

[Shujin]

A Issue I have is that serval guard players are the kind of players that have many different characters. While that is of course no issue on itself, it kinda becomes one once those players as friends decide "Hey let's make this group and to XY criminal stuff!" pulling a bunch of those guards into the boat leaving automatically a window for themselves in which they can act cause:
A.) They know what the guards do, since well technically they are the guards.
B.) Since they are the ones playing a good deal of the Guards aren't even avaiable, making it so that they are basically able to run wild like they want.
C.) And since those guards are also in that group, and no one really likes the guards party pooping, they get away with ALOT more than they should. Not to mention that I see more often than not Guard players soft handling acts from their friends.

In contradiction to that, players without that benefit have to always face absolute cluelessness of the all of a sudden Guard Ultra Instinct Awareness and Omnipresence.(cause more often than not people throw hints to guard friends OOCly, you can't tell me thats not happening.) The Guards handle those people alot harsher and give up much more punsihments (For example, Someone who litterally commited grave crimes like attacking the Hospital and causing a player indirectly to die by an attempt to capture them, is pretty much handwaved fine with some pseudo excuse they had(being controlled, wasn't invastigated either), while others with no crime record at all have been accused to being threating someone, getting jailed without IC proof.)
This makes it feel REALLY inconsistent and while you can say "Everyone can handle punishments differntly", should a force like the guards really do that to this degree? In a social game where you automatically benefit your friends, even if you try to be unbiased?
I get that most of those things aren't even on purpose and just a by product of the 3423 Characters per player issue, but I have seen people way to often handwave their friends of with a warning while other players in the same conditions or even lighter have almost always been treated with instant jailtime.

This gives those people an real unfair advantage. They can Shut down others really quickly and they themself do not get shut down at all. Making them the winners on both sides pretty much 90% of the time.(cause like everyone else they say: "jail sucks, don't wanna get jail thats bad for RP and boring so I can't cause havoc!" aka welcome to the world of normal palyers)


Guards and their permission to pretty much Godmod and being flawless. Example of that are:
-Player Guard forgets to work after script A, forgetting to take off weapons and body search the criminal.->It will always be pretended that they do no such mistake.
-Player Guard releases the criminal and forgets to take of the special cuffs, so criminal decides "Nice, I take that with me and try to research that thing!"-> Nah a Guard would never make the mistake, no matter how much you Icly distracted them!
-The power of Omni knowledge some of them pretent to have, by reading logs, where they say We have witness NPC this and that. While this part is okay, sometimes they also take in whispers (that yes might proof the criminal actually guilty) into that. So they know it OOCly and still kinda put it into IC and get some pseudo excuse as to why they did that. It's terrible. I know not all do that though, thankfully.

@Saw about prison: People aren't even willing to RP with the prisoners 99% of the time, they just be stoic and put them in jail sometimes maybe exchange three lines but leave then and never return. Meaning a huge part of why Prison is so boring is indeed the fact that there is no RP at all nor anyone willing to RP with them. I doubt this will change because they have to tag along with that prisoner to dungeons and shit.
But I agree that there should be some ways to put themself into the empires service to maybe reduce the jail time, and Chaos is actually doing that from time to time, which is cool.

There isn't really much to be done though, sadly. The people in question will always deny it and come up with excuses and swear to Mercala that they never even dared to write someone OOCly (people just randomly pop up in a group inside a place they never usually frequent in, of course, fully ready.) or give a reasonable explaination in that situation that understandable but in the long run they do not hold onto that stick and do 180° when other people are in the same situation who aren't played by their friends. And the guards that actually play them good and diligent, from which we of course have some aswell, can't really do much either on their own and are actually sorta rarely seen in game cause no one really enjoys playing a guard much either cause it's not exactly a thankful position either.
So I don't know? Guards feel generally just like a mary sue group that are absolutely flawless, despite them obviously not being such, else we didn't have the running gags about Guards constantly fucking up. And you can't do much against friends benefitting each other where they can under what ever excuse they have.
*shrugs*

EditDidn't read Chaos yet. Reading)

[Fern]

Besides some of the things that have already been mentioned, I feel the need to point out how people often desire guards to not be present. And it, funny enough, isn't always because they just want to avoid jail.

I imagine this comes from the cynicism induced by other players in past situations, for the most part. But sometimes people purposefully do their best to take something away from the guards in hopes of avoiding OOC salt/passive-aggression. I may not experience it as much as them since I don't deal with guards too often, but I more or less have seen what they mean. It can make the atmosphere quite bitter at that.

There are goofy people that will OOCly (and due to this, ICly in the worst cases) treat the guards with such disdain to the point the guards get cynical. Some of these cynical guards then, begin a train of passive aggression in LOOC whenever a crime happens, on their own in such a way that would turn off the others from roleplaying.

And please don't get me wrong... I'm not saying the guards are the only ones to blame. I'm saying that, thanks to the worst part of the community, we got a chain reaction that not only makes players want to avoid the guards like the plague from an OOC point of view, but also turns off the guards themselves from doing their job. Not saying it applies to -everyone- but it's common enough to be worthy of mention.

Though, I personally believe the jail time is the biggest issue of them all. Believe it or not, it's part of the reason why a specific crowd dislikes/avoids guards - they feel that the jail is basically a ban from playing your character. And if that's your only character, by chance? That ends up being an unintentional ban from the game. Though hopefully there will be something to do about this.

[Chaos]

Guard Players with Villain characters

This is a point for debate. On one hand, a good roleplayer knows better than to metagame with the kind of information that Guards have/receive, and if a Guard Player can't play villain, then they're getting handicapped over a role that isn't very appreciated. On the other hand, it could lead to villains acting where guards would be present, but are suspiciously absent.

'Guards are biased'

If you think you're encountering this, your best option is to contact me with as many details (and logs) as possible. When someone complains about something like this, I investigate the matter ASAP. Same goes for if you think that a Guard is responding to a situation they shouldn't be. (Though on the other hand, refusing to nudge someone about, say, a brawl in the middle of Cellsvich's Market District can be just as bad) If these incidents do happen, I'd rather know about them ASAP and immediately deal with it, rather than hear it a year later from someone who didn't take the time to report it but spills the beans in a rant.

'Guards handwave their mistakes'

There might be a very first time that I would smooth over, but if a Guard does something like forgetting to close and lock certain important doors, or doesn't remove certain objects from a prisoner, that's their fault and they can try to recover from it the IC way. Again, if a Guard is doing otherwise, contact me (with logs, ideally) and I'll sort things out.

[Shujin]

Oh yeah, also to clraify. I do not think the Guards are to blame. I am much aware, like Fern said, that its a sort of chain reaction that causes bad blood between people. So yeah I can see what Fern is pointing at aswell.

@Chaos
About Guard/Villians: Yeah when I thought about it I came to the same conclusion, that this is sorta difficult to handle. And I dare to say that some of the guards, with certain winning mindsets, sorta have troubles seperating A from B. Not out of Ill intent or something, but simply cause they don't think so far for the sake of their fun, which I can't really blame them for aswell.


Yeah I am certainly guilty of the not reporting such things when I see them, since I am generally more the "Swallowing" type till I am super annoyed and also get Cynical. Not a healthy trait and certainly something I should work at but...It's also based on feeling helpless in the situation, though I know that you can be Super fair, nice and actually put effort into it to help, (like you did for me when Soapy bug abuse stole my stuff which you did despite not having to, which got you a lot of respect from me.) its still most of the time word against word, or it just doesn't feel THAT bad at the moment but it kinda adds up.
Abunch of people actually come to me and rant a bit about this and that, and often I notice that they suspect the exact same people that I do to do those things I mentioned previously...Almost exclusively. And when I am in my usual mood I tell them aswell to bring it up but the people afraid of geting shunned by the community actually. Which I honestly understand, cause those are vastly considered the "Upper class of players" so to say...People can be right out Toxic when you step on their toes even if you are in the right. And I doubt you can do much against that either.

[Sawrock]

Except that this puts incredibly undue stress on Guard players to form an airtight patrol schedule, which comes into conflict with a few things I'll be noting later in this post.

It shouldn't. Guards shouldn't always be present. I view what you're saying here, and tell me if I'm wrong, but that's an "Us vs. Them" mentality which is terrible for roleplay. Crimes SHOULD happen. It creates conflict. Now, not all of that conflict will be fun. Some people will be dumb. But people can already be dumb within the laws... so I'd rather have active roleplay instead of casual chatting around the fountain every time I log in, with roleplay going nowhere.

Also, in response to this:

Places like the wilderness, behind houses, alleyways, (most) sewers, etc. are not somewhere you can claim NPC guards to be, unless you have very good reason to say 'my character got this guard to follow him and check this out'.

To which I previously posted...

nd yes, while Cellsvich Square is a big area where there's likely to be one guard, there's almost going to be no roleplay (and thus, fun) in the other parts of Cellsvich, leading to either waiting hours for someone to stumble on you when you're waiting in a housing district, and even then the person can say ((Oh, I'm just OOCly moving to my house.))

[GSM]

I just wanna throw in my thoughts about all of this:

Certain players and roleplay can be blown out of proportion/misinterpreted and punished with a character softban in the way of jail time. I've had this happen to myself twice, regarding the same character (of course it was Falcen), leading to him being arrested for a mix of crimes equaling 27 OOC days.

27. OOC. DAYS. Let that sink in.

And I'm not just saying that this is an issue with non-guard characters- guard characters are also guilty of this, taking a minor comment or joke and blowing it up to an Assault charge and arresting someone for it. Or, taking a slight detail with a crime and adding that on.

In my first case with Falcen, a natural 20 on an optional roll in my case ended up nearly killing someone I threw a fucking mayonnaise jar at, when it wasn't even meant to be a particularly powerful throw, leading to an OOC 24 hour sentence.

In my second, a controlled fire trap that wouldn't have touched anything else nor destroyed any other property other than the mechanism that begun it was misinterpreted by a guard as being an uncontrollable fire storm and led to an Arson charge, which is punishable by 24 OOC days of prison. It led to me having to curb Falcen's trickster-like and wild nature because I didn't want him to be either arrested for a literal month, or be executed and told to just deal with the fact that my main character and draw to the game was eliminated from existence.

Players have misinterpreted roleplay from other characters in many ways (I'm guilty of it too, to an extent) and it has led to jail time. And until that problem is addressed, I don't honestly think that this system will improve by very much.

[Ryuzaki]

pun hand...

Pun Hand...

PUN HAND!

>Gets jail time for wearing a hand
>Reapers come along wearing skulls, hands, bones, w/e
>Entirely handwaved
>Charge still stood, and still affects the jail time Barra gets for it.

Tfw Guard racist.

Seriousness though, the lack of activity in the guard has been a problem as of late. Just remember, I managed to start and finish a 4 man team fight in the middle of Cellsvich on Horatio, the guard STILL haven't managed to speak to Hachi despite him being in Cellsvich countless times, and let Jaque off with breaking a guy's nose mostly because he's a smooth talker. I've got very few gripes with the guard, but the inactivity is an issue, a huge one. There's players who are on practically every day who've vied for guard spots in the past and been denied, and players who are rarely on that are guards. Now, I'm not accusing anyone of that or anything there, so don't mistake me for that. But, I do think it'd be smart to open up guard applications sooner rather than later, Chaos.

As for prison, I kept Barra online for a full 6 hour (ooc) imprisonment(PUN HAND) and I sat and RPed with Faye (Spoops), it was really nice character dev for Barra at the time, and she was one of the first guards to find out who he was back home. I think maybe to encourage characters who become prisoners to maybe stay active in jail, the extra active guards would be nice, especially the ones who'd be willing to spend their time co-ordinating RP times with prisoners, especially the long-sentence ones.

The guard shouldn't be hated for doing their job, especially not OOCly. ICly, hate them as much as you want, I have chars that hate the guard (Barra, Hachi, Horatio, Guy, Jaque), I have chars that love the guard (Itadeki, Raina) and chars that are indifferent but understand their purpose. OOCly? Well, I applied for them ages ago, and do intend on applying again with Itadeki eventually, so that should tell you my opinion on them now. I have my gripes about how they are right now, and it is mostly because of the lack thereof, so yeah, time to get the new recruits in, Chaos. We really need active guards now.

EDIT: I do wanna say Mark (MakeshiftWalrus) is one of my fave guards, especially after putting up with my shit on Barra with the pun hand fiasco, it was hilarious RP, and to all the other guards who've been annoyed by his antics (Frank, Kira, Spo, Lone etc.)