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Every single house having an alarm


Stiggz

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The irony of the criminal community breaking into enough buildings to assess that "every house in the city has an alarm" is demanding a seemingly impossible amount of endurance to avoid laughing.

 

Yes, when you break into every house, eventually every house is going to have an alarm. Turns out people do not enjoy having their property broken into repeatedly. Who knew?

 

As for the crack dens and illicit goods storage having alarms, that is absolutely ridiculous. Criminals shouldn't be bringing the attention of law enforcement to such caches of evidence.

Edited by DasFroggy
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So work around it????

Break in, go quickly don't exert entire paragraphs of RP? :3

Maybe do some recon & get a snitch to tell you where the stashes are ahead of time, that way you can be in and out in 20 seconds?

Really shouldn't be that hard xD

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We talk about "play to win," but alarms really take the cake.

Before we even touch on them, we have to acknowledge that we have in the process ignored dozens of other systems that exist to defeat burglars without notifying the police: door jams, reinforced frames, barred windows, spikes, barbed wire, motion-activated lighting, trip sirens, to name just a few. All of these could deter crime just as effectively as an alarm, without the police becoming involved, and cost as much as a fully-equipped alarm system does now. These security features are prominent throughout the game, but have virtually zero impact on any break-ins or script mechanics.

Let's get back to "play to win," and the Prisoner's Dilemma:
 

Quote

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The possible outcomes are:

  • If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison
  • If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison
  • If A remains silent but B betrays A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free
  • If A and B both remain silent, both of them will serve only one year in prison (on the lesser charge).


You're probably wondering why I am citing a fundamental aspect of game theory, and that's because the alarm system as it exist serves only to punish those willing to risk something. No matter what, there is no good reason not to save up for and install an alarm. Criminal A will not sit down while Criminal B betrays them by robbing their stash house: best case scenario, they flee the scene and are or are not apprehended without the police stepping foot in to the property, and worst case scenario, they are apprehended on the property, leading to both Criminals A and B losing. As long as both parties lose, this is an acceptable outcome to the person being robbed, because it is a better outcome than only them losing their property or becoming tangled with an investigation.

Why on Earth did this system even make it off the drawing board?

My suggestions to fixing the issue:
 

  1. If alarms must remain in the game, they must direct calls not to the police, but to a human operator at a security firm like G6 that acts as investigation and intermediary for the police. There are hundreds of false alarms every day across the country because of faulty wiring, someone opening a window without thinking, or punching the wrong code in with your hands full of groceries. Police have other things to do besides swing by the Old Johnson Place to make sure that someone actually broke in versus a kid threw a rock through a window.
  2. Alarms must be delayed. There is virtually no window for any kind of roleplay of any kind. At this point, some players are waiting upwards of an hour-and-a-half simply to enter a room, say one line of dialogue, and then run away.
  3. Alarms must be much, much, much more expensive. They are a form of active insurance and people are expected to pay a premium to be constantly watched by a third party. They should not only cost a flat fee, but should be maintained with a weekly fee paid between whatever security firm provides it, and the excess going back to the "server."
  4. There must be alternative ways to protect a property and/or deter robbery besides alarms that can, with significant and wasteful effort, be defeated. Bars over windows and deadbolts on a door are obstacles, but they can be overcome. Let criminals decide whether or not it is worth the time, commotion and possibility of being identified or apprehended in the process, not an arbitrary timer and an admin on standby with a call to the police.
Edited by Skip
im gay
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24 minutes ago, cracked said:

So work around it????

Break in, go quickly don't exert entire paragraphs of RP? :3

Maybe do some recon & get a snitch to tell you where the stashes are ahead of time, that way you can be in and out in 20 seconds?

Really shouldn't be that hard xD

Illegal roleplayers shouldn't have to rush their roleplay or subject themselves to provide subpar roleplay because of the script setting off an alarm within two minutes of the house being broken into. There's numerous reasons as to why certain properties shouldn't have alarms fitted which alerts the police of a break in, e.g. a grow op in the middle of Grove Street.

 

At the minute it's impossible to do any kind of property break-in due to the two minute timer that's in place. I've seen illegal roleplayers wait forty minutes for a break-in request only to have the law enforcement agencies attend the property within minutes of them being inside, which leads them to getting arrested. This is why there isn't many robbery crews (to my knowledge) on this server compared to previous servers I've played on. There's no reward for anybody wanting to roleplay a burglar. You can't even roleplay disabling the alarm, the whole system needs to be reviewed. 

 

Edited by Hollywood Boulevard
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I personally have waited well over one hour for my request to be completely denied even though I have spent hours over several days, even weeks scoping places out with different ways to break into the property - with knowing what is inside (grow op). The whole system needs to be changed as it holds up roleplay and character development. 

 

The whole server needs a complete revamp in the direction of illegal roleplay and illegal factions. There is far too many blockades in place for most kind of illegal roleplay, not just house burglaries. Albeit house burglaries are by far the worst with either every house being alarmed to the hills despite it being completely unrealistic to have such alarms. 

 

Complete revamp needed urgently.

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I personally RP a burglar, I have done a good amount of breakins I would like to think, and they are very unbalanced. You wait an hour in hopes of you not being seen while waiting, and either get lucky in a 1/10 chance that there's no alarm or there's an alarm and you get swarmed like instantly. I have done many breakins and every time there has been an alarm there are police all around the property within seconds, even out in Blaine County, I have only gotten away from one breakin that had an alarm, its very unbalanced, and not to mention a lot of people don't have anything in their house, just remove alarms or delay it to like five minutes minimum. 

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8 minutes ago, AlphaBatal said:

isn't this an ic issue? why is it being taken on the forums?

Crack dealers and trap houses being rigged up with alarms is certainly an IC issue, but the reasoning behind it is very much an OOC problem. Alarms are /insanely/ effective at what they do. As I've said beforehand on the matter, a criminal who breaks into an apartment, stash, house, trailer, whatever - has at best a minute to pop off a few hastily written lines of attempting to search before the alarm sounds, at which point, you scatter. There's only so much planning that can account for an alarm. Especially when considering that a breakin relies upon the admin DM'ing the session, being able to respond to your questions and searching RP, and that there's always /technical/ issues too. I quite vividly remember a break in which I ended up trapped behind a door due to a bug and only got out because the admin helped me out - but I burned around half my time in there because of it.

 

Alarms are inherently not a bad idea. But they desparately need a revamp. I'm not saying laissez-faire, let me fuck up your house while searching it for 10 minutes. But maybe 3 minutes before an alarm sounds /just/ to allow people to actually nail what they're looking for, or at the very least, provide an opportunity for some half-decent RP.

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