[Aqua]

     The first scene was in Tannis. Shirly had been working with a local who was helping her with her common when Casidy spotted them. We’ll call the guy Terrance. So this is a perfect opportunity to get things rolling. Casidy went to Terance, making the argument that Shirly stole from the family, and was too damaged to be on her own. Shirly, who could barely speak common, but had expressed firmly that she couldn't go back and was in danger, panicked, and tried to stir Terance to action. So we have a patented Star Trek moral dilemma. Do you trust the lawful evil knight claiming her sister needs to go back and fight, or do you trust the panicked knight that hardly speaks common, but might be saying she’d be killed if she went back? Terrance decided it was not his problem anymore, clearly, despite both sides insisting Shirly needed help of some kind, that she could take care of herself, and began advertising his guild. When asked later he is quoted as telling another character “Oh yeah she’s fine now, don’t worry”. No one else felt like getting involved, so Casidy let her run off in the interest of not causing too much of a scene.

This is a big, self-perpetuating problem in this game. Most players will quickly make themselves a bystander in any situation that they can because there's usually no reward for involving themselves in a storyline or conflict that doesn't have them as an active participants. There are a large number of reasons for this that I can see or have felt before...

They might feel like they're intruding. Especially a thing if it's numerous members of a guild.

They might not want to get involved because there is clear and present danger to their character that is going to be decided by other people. Right now, the guards are the most lethargic seeming group of people who, as this post goes on, don't seem to do much, but they almost need to be that lethargic and slow because getting taken to Arjav enough times is one of the few things that can force your character to get murdered. Add on the fact that there's a potential for a soft ban in getting thrown in a cell that for some reason has an OOC restriction instead of just an IC one, the laws aren't clearly dictated anywhere that's accessible to the average player, and there's a lot of misinformation about what the guards will or won't consider crime, and some of the vocal minorities declare that the guards can and will and should arrest and detain people for IC misconceptions and misunderstandings when they have OOC power and authority to execute and soft ban means most people don't want to be put anywhere near that with a character that they want to last for their entire play time on the server. Involving themselves in a morally ambiguous group with this mostly fictitious but still potentially realizable sword hanging over them just isn't the optimal play there, and receding back into 'Oh they're fine' is the safest way they can extricate their character from that situation without harming the image or role they're trying to roleplay.

So I am going to chime in here, not to defend the guards but just to shed some light on some of the points posted here.

The laws aren't clearly shown

I don't understand what you mean by this, the laws have been posted on the forums and in the public discord, but I'll also link the thread for the Public Laws here. This list of laws has been posted for just about four years now and has been public because of IC reasons for a long time now. This 'if' and a big if you haven't known this, then we apologize but there isn't really anything more we can do to make it more public than it already is. MY suggestion is, if your character wants to know the laws you are more than welcome to walk up to any guard character, hell even the NPC's one that is on the map and just ask for the public laws, we'll happily facilitate that type of thing.

Soft Ban & Execution

Ok, yeah Arjav is always going to be some form of a soft ban and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say how we work in terms of putting someone in jail but I'll do what I can here. As it stands when we only deal with reports that we are given, be it later in the day [Due to lack of people to respond to it] or more or less 5 - 10 minutes after the ping, this obviously gives those in the scene ample time but this sometimes is thrown against us for not responding quick enough, not that it's a huge issue or the point of this post. As it stands we currently have two things we can do when it comes to arresting someone if applicable;

A) Community Service. This was put in place to lessen the 'soft ban' feeling to the players, it not only reduces a characters time in Arjav but gives them an alternative way to pay for their crimes, this usually applies to minor crimes like being a public pain in the ass which nowadays is mostly what our pings are for these days.

B) Imprisonment. This is always going to be a thing, so I'm not going to beat around the bush when it comes to this part. This tends to be used for anything passing the limit of so many minor crimes up to Severe charges, yes I'm fully aware that 'charges' themselves are not publicly displayed and that's for a very good reason.

We have no OOC control over executions, which I would like to emphasize. This has to go through a GM before we can even do any of that, despite the empire's lore of cutting their problems in half. Right now it takes a lot to get executed and is quite frankly very rare. Dev doesn't want us being execution happy and it's perfectly understandable.

Guards are the most lathergic group

I disagree heavily on this. Guard work is very tedious and is like babysitting a bunch of four-year-olds in a preschool, we are not going to openly get on to deal with the same shit that happens constantly, from experience is mentally draining and quite frankly happening at the most inconvenient times. To call us a lethargic group would be far from true, most of us enjoy our guards and hell some of us are actually trying to progress then outside of work. It's just not as simple as that, at least the way I see it.

Both Amber and Lokus have touched on the parts of the flame badgers thing so I have nothing more to say on it.