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Breakins and property alarms


big city blues

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Currently, an alarm is the one and only tool a home owner has against break-ins. The fact the character would be present in the house at the time of the break-in goes out the window the moment they are not logged in, nor are there any other deterrents or tools available to assist in such. Things such as suspicious activities, strange vehicle in the driveway, (flash-)lights on or (loud) sounds are also not visible on the outside and are at the discretion of the overseeing admin to act upon. It is thus a double-edged sword when it comes to circumventing or disabling alarm, especially when assuming the path of least resistance in form of least and lackluster roleplay given that it can make a break-in a 100 to 0 take-everything-including-furniture in one night. On the one hand, yes, more creative and "smart" ways should be encouraged, but then you have the almightly balance and infamous sentence "it would tip the scales" that was so often used on suggestions around the criminal and law enforcement roleplay environment.

 

Now it would be nice to have that one exterior object showcasing an alarm box or alarm sticker at the door, but you can only add things such as CCTV, decorations or a physical alarm box when blowing 40 bucks into the server on a monthly basis which is frankly A) "pay2win" if made mandatory and B) aint nobody got money for that, it's not worth that 1 object solely for aesthetics...let alone exterior furnishing only loading in after at least 1 person has been inside the building post restart (?).

Edited by orca112
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5 hours ago, big city blues said:

I didn't want to get into the whole mass amount of alarms for that reason. My only complaint is putting alarms in their houses that are filled with illegal weapons. I wouldn't exactly want to risk the cops showing up to my place and finding my firearm laying around when clearing out the property

By law the police can't do anything about ur illegal shit if it's hidden unless they have a warrant. If it's sitting in plain view when they respond they can seize it, otherwise they can't go rummaging through your shit.

Edited by L I C E
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There was a discussion thread about alarm systems a few months back, but so far I believe it didn't actually lead to any changes. There are a lot of good suggestions in here though, such as involving player security factions being warned before LEO factions, or simply being forced to enable and disable the alarm manually on each entry. Forget to set the alarm again? Too bad, no alarm activation then. Forget to disable the alarm when entering? False alarm will be sent to the security group that maintains the alarm system, which is 95% of the real life alarm triggers anyway. It is realistic and provides for roleplay.

 

Its a matter of these concepts being picked up and worked on.

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18 hours ago, DasFroggy said:

 

Organize with an administrator beforehand, let them know that you're going to perform a break-in and a holdup at so and so property, and then per the timetable, secure the homeowner and force them to enter the disarm code. 

 

Not that I can speak from experience with that... My market is stolen vehicles. House break-ins are not my forte.

This involves a lot of moving parts on an OOC basis though, you would need an admin that's able to be online at the time you plan to grab the homeowner, the homeowner to be online at the time, the crew you plan on doing it with to be all on at the same time as the admins and homeowners and well you get the idea.

 

As someone who has a character that is heavily involved in house breakins I would say the main issue right now is definitely the alarms and the fact it seems every single house is fitted with an alarm system even ones that have no business having one. This discourages any form of well thought out plans and means you can't even scope out and target non alarmed houses, in my experience its just a whole lot easier to force either the front or back door open and begin searching as quick as possible before police show up which involves getting a single line of RP out most of the time before having to leave. 

 

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On 10/28/2021 at 10:14 PM, big city blues said:

So I've recently committed several property breakins with a crew of people as part of a faction, and I'm curious to get other people's opinions/personal experiences in the matter. This thread is completely irrelevant to the fact most properties that shouldn't have alarms do actually have alarms. There was one building we were targeting and had keys to the building. After waiting about two and a half hours to finally have the request accepted, we were told that despite having keys to unlock the property, the alarm would go off no matter what. This didn't make much sense to me, but not wanting to argue with an admin, we did it anyway. We used the keys for a quick and clean entry, and the property alarm still went off. Later, when discussing with the admin about the what and the why with the alarm and some other things, I was told that apparently if a property has an alarm, it will go off 100% of the time no matter what roleplay is done. According to them, even if the property was left unlocked, "[the alarm] will need to" go off, and it's "what the admins discussed". This has almost completely killed my interest in trying to roleplay a proper break in crew, and makes absolutely zero sense. Have other people had similar experiences when the alarm went off when it shouldn't have during a breakin? Was the administrator I spoke to wrong about the matter? I have no reason to believe they are, but I would like to know what other people have experienced and think about the matter. I could understand an NPCed 911 call if people sit around in a property all day, but if there's a group of people who have the upper hand prior to committing a robbery, it makes zero sense to treat the RP the same as violently smashing into a persons house. 

 

I believe he was correct, most alarms aren't tied to locks (Well because criminals are smart) and instead probably use things like infrared, motion sensors and even pressure sensors. I'd imagine it'd give the owner a short grace time to enter the deactivation code, or initiate whatever the process is to deactivate the alarm. It really depend son the alarm system itself. What would be the point of having a property alarm if they were easy to circumvent? They'd be as useful as vehicle locks are. If you're taking risks like burglaries, then that should come with consequences just as you'd expect a robbery victim to face consequences if they're non-compliant. Works both ways.

Edited by Moonsong
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If/when alarms go to security companies instead of directly to LEO, it will be a huge change (for the better imo).  The security companies will not be able to respond quite as fast (they can't legally speed nor ignore traffic signals for example), nor bring as much manpower as PD/SD.  Then it doesn't really matter if alarms are triggered or not, you'll get some more time and the possibility to fight/escape a player-run security company, which should be much easier than escaping police/sheriffs.

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35 minutes ago, Paenymion said:

If/when alarms go to security companies instead of directly to LEO, it will be a huge change (for the better imo).  The security companies will not be able to respond quite as fast (they can't legally speed nor ignore traffic signals for example), nor bring as much manpower as PD/SD.  Then it doesn't really matter if alarms are triggered or not, you'll get some more time and the possibility to fight/escape a player-run security company, which should be much easier than escaping police/sheriffs.

 

I'm looking forward to this. It'll give some solid returns on that AKM collection I bought a week ago. Just break in knowing that the first responders will not only be delayed, but easily killed every time, then we've got about a five to ten minute window before another followup radio/phone check, and THEN however long it takes police to respond.

 

Won't have to worry about alarms ever again. Neat.

Edited by DasFroggy
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9 minutes ago, DasFroggy said:

 

I'm looking forward to this. It'll give some solid returns on that AKM collection I bought a week ago. Just break in knowing that the first responders will not only be delayed, but easily killed every time, then we've got about a five to ten minute window before another followup radio/phone check, and THEN however long it takes police to respond.

 

Won't have to worry about alarms ever again. Neat.

If somebody really wants to turn a house burglary into a war then sure.  But I think there would be RP quality questions if somebody brought an AK to a burglary and remember that at this stage, the admin supervising the robbery SHOULD still be observing and if you decide to start shooting at the security company they can NPC the call to the cops and enforce a CK if it was a really stupid escalation.  More likely it will just give burglars a bit more time and then maybe escalate into melee conflict or foot pursuit (or just detention until LEO's arrive).  But as I said I think the scope for silliness is quite low because these are scenes that are always monitored by an admin.

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