Updating rules and perception around shooting in public areas / daylight / or near cameras

[bonk]

After the abrupt conclusion of the thread that can be found HERE I will be making this suggestion thread as the reception on it was mostly very positive. I recommend you read the entirety of the thread and the first few pages as they held some very good points and counter-points to the discussion, which was then argued back. 

 

To squeeze what I had said in a couple words for those who do not have heaps of time to read my essays, this is what I inherently said:

 

Admins using the excuse "Why did you shoot in broad daylight with cameras present?" should be disallowed during in game and forum reports because this is something that is nonsensical. It's not something that exists in real life. As described in the thread, criminals are not smart. They can be clumsy, and with Los Santos = Los Angeles, LA is one of the most watched cities on Earth, so you will 9/10 have a camera watching your deed. Have a section in the admin handbook/let it be known for the trial admins that are learning the ropes that this is not an appropriate question to beg when dealing with a report. Why did I shoot? Because my character chose to at this time and day. It's an IC issue. Let the role play stem. If a detective from either PD/SD want to take handle on a shooting case, let them. Don't punish a player because PD/SD cannot do their job, even if there's a lack of evidence, cases can go cold. And most certainly don't make administrators micromanage more things than they need to, as that is what it feels like it is from a players perspective.

 

To close it off. There are also OOC factors such as "I can only log in during the day as I work during the night, am I barred from doing any illegal role play with my character?" and so on.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Blowin' Hollows
Title change

[Tennplugg]

I have to agree with this. 

Shooting in broad daylight isn't an excuse. 

[Farrell]

On another note, can we properly discuss topics and try get to a conclusion without it being abruptly locked? Still waiting on this to have a response after it was locked.

 
 

[amphetamine]

The location / time of day shouldn't matter as much as the reasons / escalation prior to the incident beforehand.  Just my 2 cents though.

[Moonsong]

I'm going to lock this for the same reasons I locked the thread in general discussions. Removing admin discretion would seriously undermine our ability to look at rule violations on a case by case basis. As has been stated many times not every situation is the same, what might be allowed in one situation may not be in another. Whilst I can appreciate that it may seem like we're applying rules inconsistently that's just not the case. For when you genuinely feel mistakes are made by adminsitrators, that's what staff reports are for. 

[FearnR]

I will be opening this thread back up after talking with the thread creator, for all comments going forward I want to lay the following ground rules and considerations to ensure this still productive and respectful. 

 

This suggestion and comments should be designed around solutions to the limiting opportunities for illegal roleplayers and the lack of allowance for "My character isn't that bright" excuses. We understand that illegal roleplayers are limited and have to operate as intelligent IC as being a "Dumb character that doesn't realize the repercussions" is often seen as a rule breach. 

 

Considerations

 

Please be mindful of the followings which I hope will help explain why this area of roleplay is so limiting and strict currently:

 

(1) We don't want to be a "cops and robbers server" meaning that allowing players to shoot / rob / assault other characters where ever, when ever, or for whatever reason and being able to always chalk it up to "My character isn't bright so that's why he didn't think about the repercussions" often results in the deterioration of the roleplay quality on our server. When people can claim "It's IC" on everything suddenly roleplay becomes more and more poor from what we have noticed in the past. 

 

(2) We are so strict about CCTV because it's such a difficult area to roleplay. If your character wants to rob / kill someone right in front of a camera it's easy to say "It's IC, just let the detectives take the easy win by having me on camera, it was the fault of my character for doing it on camera". However, working around CCTV roleplay is never easy. For those of you who don't know, here is the process. Step 1: Recognize there is a CCTV present that could have captured something. Step 2: LEO roleplay around pulling the CCTV and reviewing the footage. Step 3: OOCly trying to figure out who the suspect is, or having to get an admin involved to figure out who the suspect was OOC. Step 4: OOCly reaching out to the suspect to ask what the camera would have picked up (Time and time again we find players lying about what would be seen to reduce the chances of being caught). Step 5: Roleplay what the suspect informed the LEO RPer of and go from there based on words alone and not actually being able to review any images. Sometimes when they're lucky someone has shadowplay, but then again have to attempt to triangulate how that would look from the camera. 

 

So as you all participate in this suggestion I do hope to find a way to adjust our rules or the way this area of RP is enforced by server staff to be more accommodating to all types of roleplay. I ask however that if you are to participate you read my considerations and recognize how it works on the other side as well, and that the complexity of the situation is usually what results in it being disallowed completely. 

[bonk]

Thread's back in action.

 

:)

[avenero hittah]

13 hours ago, Blowin' Hollows said:

To close it off. There are also OOC factors such as "I can only log in during the day as I work during the night, am I barred from doing any illegal role play with my character?" and so on.

i live in perth, western australia. gmt +8. i exclusively play an illegal rper, so yeah. sometimes im gonna do crime during the day and occasionally it might result in shooting. the points in this thread got my support

Edited March 9, 2021 by avenero hittah

[KV]

I think more important than time of day and cameras present is the justification for these attacks and killings, and the RP that led up to them.  It's because of this that our characters make the decisions that they do.  And consequently, sometimes RP guides our hands and forces our characters into positions where they will make these rash decisions.  Unfortunately, this is subjective and subjected to entirely too many variables to outline it as black and white.    Admin discretion can help here, but we come into the problem where some admins will view what the player deemed as a justified kill as over the top or unnecessary.   I think admin discretion can do more good than harm in general, but I also feel that in some of these situations, the entire scope of the RP needs to be considered.  Also having a good understanding how some groups operate can help a lot. 

Having been an admin for over a year, these questions were posed by me for the sole purpose of finding the reasoning why a character would risk a life sentence.  And I can honestly say that a lot of excuses given were weak.  Really weak.  We can of course bring in that murders over petty things happen IRL all the time and I agree, that's true.  But we do not have the population to support a 1:1 representation of portrayal, unfortunately.  And so we have to look back more towards Rule 4: Death Matching - (Killing for poor reason.)   But even here, this can be subjective, sadly!  So in these cases, we have to consider the overall health of the server.  And this can be done as simply as going from killing someone, to beating the ever living shit out of them, or ..well imagination can go from there!  The point is, if the justification to kill someone isn't that strong, resort to less than lethal and still incredibly effective.

In a perfect world we'd be able to RP portrayal with complete accuracy, where people actually fear areas and groups and know better than to mouth off to the wrong people, and shootouts don't consist of people strafing back and forth to down the other group first, and people aren't executed for petty and laughable reasons.   But it's not perfect.  It's a game we play in and some elements will bleed into the RP and draw away from realism, be it mechanics, or the shortcomings of other RPers.  Updating the rules here for this is hard since there isn't a rule beyond Admin Discretion, and DMing involved.  I look forward to seeing some opinions on how this can be improved!



 

[Ink]

I keep seeing this argument being structured around time of day because there is then an opportunity to use what effectively amounts to a moral high ground of players timezones. Hello, I'm one of the players who RPs a virtually 100% legal, civilian character with thousands of hours of playtime. I RP from the US's west coast where logging in at a reasonable time for me means my character always lives at night. I have as much to lose here since my legal character who benefits most from "broad daylight" exists in perpetual darkness. The issue isn't about what time of the day it is.

 

Let me copy my post from the other thread, which notably never got a response from you @Blowin' Hollows.

 

Quote

I find the point is less whether or not it's possible for crime to happen in "broad daylight" or "with cameras present" -- obviously we know that the real world is stranger than fiction. The big difference, however, is the level of consequences. In real life when some piece of shit in human shape comes up and kills two police officers in a car, that will be with him for the rest of his life, and if/when he's caught he will find the end of his life at the hands of police, behinds bars, or in a chair. 

 

What we can't replicate on this server is the prevalence of those sources (that video OP posted would have had to come from one of the players involved because no building around would be "just recording", and there's a whole question of metagame there). What we can't replicate is the amount of witnesses that would be around who could lend crucial evidence to investigators. What we can't replicate is the amount of evidence that your average crime scene has on it.  We can't replicate the rarity--in GTA:W we have murders happening multiple times every single hour whereas in real life a murder in a city is a big deal (even if still a bit common). We can't replicate the investigative power of the PD and FBI because in real life one murder can easily have a whole detective detail focused on it, on GTA:W we have a much smaller and much busier PD where they're overloaded with just the amount of NEW CRIME happening, much less all the bullshit shit-tier nonsensical "stupid criminal" RP happening throughout the week.

 

And most importantly, what we don't replicate is the consequences. If your character who is a "stupid criminal" who killed someone in the "heat of the moment" gets caught, you're probably looking at a few OOC days in jail, which even ICly are just roleplayed as a matter of months at worst. Then your character's back out on the streets just a few months older, with a contact book full of new prison buddies, and goes right back to doing the same exact things like nothing happened.

 

It's sort of the same argument we get when people go "why can't we RP terrorists or school shooters, it happens all the time!" "Why is it unrealistic for my character to kill a person over something stupid, here are news videos and footage of real life murders done over very stupid things!" It's a matter of OOC courtesy and what's fun to roleplay for people. It's not fun for someone to come up and kill your character for no reason because we're a heavy RP server and there's not much to RP around it. Even in real life we don't even know how to respond to these acts of senseless tragedy because there's no reason besides "that person was sick." On GTA:W, it feels like more than 50% of characters are "sick" so why not just go full realism and let everyone just go around murdering everyone. I mean, the lack of any real consequences can be taken ICly, too, so why not? Why don't all the criminals on the server just create a mega-gang together and rove the city murdering every police officer they see, robbing every civilians, and turning this city into Mad Max?

 

Sure, you can say that's a slippery slope fallacy, but at the end of the day that's what people are pushing towards when they want to ignore these seemingly silly OOC guidelines we put on criminal activity. We put these OOC guidelines around it because we're trying to OOCly fake this world having consequences and complexity even while it's either A) physically impossible or B) just not fun.

 

If we made it so that a convicted murder charge got your character permanent life in prison, I'd be much more willing to let people "make heat of the moment" decisions and to commit seemingly senseless murders in "broad daylight" because then there'd be some actual consequences. If we made it so people getting killed by police officers because they pulled a gun on them or tried a suicidal shootout with the police was an automatic CK, I'd be much more supportive of all these "stupid criminals" doing as stupid criminals do.

 

Stupid criminals in real life (that's most of the kind of criminals people RP on this server) end up in prison for 10 years. 20 years. Life. Death row. On GTA:W they get small slaps on the wrist and it's clearly making it so most of them RP very little fear of consequences to any of their actions. Why not pick a crazy fight? If you get smoked it's just a PK. Why not try to rob civilians who have PF guns? You can always scream "RP gun fear" because you drew first, and complain about "stalling" when your broad daylight public robbery doesn't go your way. Why not kill the cop who pulls up because of your crime, there'll be no IC evidence left behind and it'll give you a head start on running, and it's not like you'll get in that much more trouble for it--just another couple OOC days in jail (and a few IC months, lol) if you get caught.

 

Above, FearnR addressed that "stupid criminal" isn't a good excuse for a character. It's just like how "mentally unstable" isn't a good excuse, how "I'm a convicted violent felon" isn't a good excuse, and how "my character is a radical brainwashed religious extremist trying to bring freedom the world through ultraviolence" isn't a good excuse. We're a heavy roleplay community and there needs to be a baseline level of intentionality to our character's actions especially when you're hoping that other people, especially people who aren't willingly involved in your RP, have to RP the consequences of your character's actions. It's as much a matter of generating decent roleplay as it is of being OOCly courteous to your fellow players.

 

So the issue isn't "broad daylight" or "broad night time" or whatever. If we ignored time of day for the benefit of all the criminals who feel like their freedom to commit brazen public murders, what we're also conveniently ignoring is that after midnight the player count rapidly starts to drop, meaning less and less police (an unrealistically "less" amount as if Los Santos was a real city the police force wouldn't go from like 40 cops to like 10 cops at the turn of midnight) to cover the same exact amount of territory, meaning even less possibility of your character being caught just from a matter of actual RP opportunity.

 

Violent, hostile criminal actions involving other player characters should be intentional, they should be relatively rare (especially when unprovoked, such as a robbery), and they should have a meaning and the vast potential for consequences. On GTA RP servers, it's already the "meta" to draw your gun first, it's already the "meta" to shoot first. If you kill the player you're in conflict with, you automatically win and they automatically lose. You're able to record it, put a sick rap track on it, and drop it on your faction thread as an example of how cool and dangerous your character is, and how shit all the other characters you've dropped are. If you RP pulling your gun first, you can scream "RP gun fear" on anyone else who draws their gun afterwards and chances are pretty good an admin will see it your way. Hell, if you have a gun trained on someone and they try to suicide-shootout you, you can rather easily force a CK on them for lack of RPed gun fear. Mind you, very few PD use this same card on all the criminal characters who whipped out their guns when they have multiple police aiming at them so they can PK out of consequences.

 

This is a heavy roleplay server, not a "heavy criminal simulation" server or whatever other designation. This is an RP environment for characters of all types, not just criminals, and not just cops. When criminal characters are allowed to RP the lack of consequences as close to IC as possible, we create a worse RP setting for EVERYONE on this server. All people. We lower the RP quality across the board. We make the experience worse for everyone. Holding all people to a higher standard is what our RP server should be standing for. A shootout should mean something, the consequences of it should mean something. The action of murdering another human should have weight even if the character pulling the trigger believes they're doing the right thing. 

 

And most importantly, we should roleplay a higher standard of what "NPC'd evidence" can possibly be collected at any moment. Because the reality is if you run up and shoot someone dead in front of Legion Square at 7 AM when there are 130 players online, OOCly no one was around in that second to see you do it, but realistically:

• There are hundreds of people living in the high-rise towers surrounding the area. Not just NPCs, but actual players, who are probably ICly asleep at home at the moment, or even online and just RPing in their interiors (but unable to actually look outside).
• There are dozens of cameras which would have some level of view of that action, but unless one of you records it with shadowplay and chucks it over to the police department, none of those cameras will actually have any *real* footage to use in investigation.
• There would be any number of people who would have seen this happen. People in the park, people commuting to work at  7 AM in the morning, people working the counter at the bank, all the actual IC businesses around.

 

Have some respect for the roleplay we all do here. Hold us to a higher standard. 

 

 

EDIT: as for @mother_superior-- dude, someone was live streaming your character. We didn't even need to NPC CCTV cameras or anything--your character's face was caught on high resolution camera executing a civilian for calling you gay. Are you ready to RP the consequences of your character getting life in prison for executing a man in cold blood who obviously is posing zero threat your character? Where's the RP quality there? You can say "this escalation was totally reasonable" but would you then say "man it's no fun that my character ends up in prison for life because of this, that's not fair, I'm just trying to RP a criminal, it's really hard to RP a criminal on GTA:W already, we have nothing to RP, it's because of my timezone that I executed that guy like a sick dog on his knees on one of the busiest arterial avenues in the entire city."

Edited March 9, 2021 by Ink