Poor roleplay / Ruleplay punishments

[Diligo]

Police officers - chase us with as many units as you like and with all the help you can get thanks to the taxpayers of this city. (the taxpayer money isnt infinite though)

Criminals - listen up! If you are chasing a warrener with 7 meta cars all in the same colours or the same outfits, you are putting yourself at risk of being noticed by the police!
If somebody is chasing you for a valid reason (prior roleplay situation), you should fear for your life and start breaking traffic rules to escape the perpretrators!

But what if... you are being chased because you remind someone of a rp situation that happened some time ago?
Just because the person gave you demands on a public city street but you were in a vehicle with the engine running, gives the person the rights to chase you, call for backup, pit your vehicle?
I guess so, because this happens often!

And the backup chasers - you never fear for your criminals freedom? you never fear for your financial loss? license loss? all that risk to speed and chase after a vehicle that is driven by a possible(not 100% confirmed) suspect that robbed your friend previously?

This is just one of 100 of examples of poor roleplay.

Admins, I love good roleplay, but I am tired of seeing this text in player report conclusions:
"..Even though we won't be issuing any punishments, keep in mind that both sides of this report showed poor roleplay in this situation.."

Come on! Isn't this what it is all about? Good roleplay experience, so people have memories of playing at Eclipse and remember having amazing, funny, exciting, sad roleplay situations?

Some people sit too much at the server and need to take a rest. DMing someone is probably a good reason to give someone some time to cool off.

But so does Poor roleplay!

All I am saying is that we are not issuing enough punishments!

So my suggestion is: Make Poor Roleplay punishable according to the player's combined character exp. points
Money taken away, License suspension, VIP suspension, Temporary cooldown period(day/week/month ban), Banned from making a faction, being in a faction.

If the person has played for a long time and has a lot of experience in-and-out of the game, then the person should be heavily punished,
while a new player should recieve a slap on the wrist and an explanation on how to roleplay better.

Lets not kid ourselves here - in the reports we have mostly everyone with so much EXP points that it gives a bad image onto other experienced roleplayers here.
 

Possible arguments that might come to mind and will be answered simply to save time for everyone-
1) ''there will be no people in the server'' - yes there will be no poor roleplayers in the server, very good yes
2) ''reports would take much longer to be concluded!'' - good things come with time, so does forcing people to roleplay not cut corners or play around the rules
3) "but what if it gets too subjective on the decisions and different opinions of how realistic the roleplay is or is not, and also favoritism and so on.."
- Check the forum topic "Decision Appeal" and a new set of staff will review the situation once more.
4)"people getting banned or punished for every poor roleplay will just stop coming to the server"
- 2 answers to this. 1) very sad that bad roleplay goes away. me cry 2)everyone always comes back. you will too. we love this server and everyone needs their own way of understanding why we are roleplaying. and for some - it needs to be a reality check.

CLARIFICATION - i am not talking about breaking several rules. I am talking about the QUALITY of an RP situation. If an admin/moderator wants to ''note'' poor roleplay and/or give formal warning but because the player/-s did not directly break any rules and for that reason not issue any punishments - ISSUE THEM!!
 

Edited October 24, 2024 by Nikolia

[Demonmit1]

/goodrp /badrp is an in game system that is heavily underutilized, and as far as im aware,  ignored by staff. there's some minor things that could be changed with it, like making it not have a limited range, but its a current system already in game that is underutilized and should be something staff should regularly check in on.

[Eliza]

On 10/24/2024 at 2:16 PM, Nikolia said:

Money taken away, License suspension, VIP suspension, Temporary cooldown period(day/week/month ban), Banned from making a faction, being in a faction.

ima keep it real if i ever lost in game money or VIP that I paid for with my real money because my RP wasn't deemed fit, I'm runnin out the door.

 

On a more constructive note, we have issued punishments in the past for more egregious levels of demonstrating poor RP. I can’t speak on behalf of every member of staff but I can say the majority operate in an education over punishment mindset, and would rather educate players to better RP than throw the book at them.

Edited October 26, 2024 by DontSniffSugar

[Freyster]

Erm, yea nah this is not a very thought through suggestion, respectfully.

The reason as to why is simple, everyone sees things differently and suspending peoples benefits or punishing them for someone disagreeing with what you‘re doing if you deem it to be good enough is silly.

Bless you for your time writing this.

Edited October 26, 2024 by Freyster

[Jordan]

I believe taking money, or suspending licenses for OOC actions is a terrible way to punish poor RP. While I agree there are plenty of examples of poor RP on the server, we ought to think what punishment fits the crime. If someone had poor RP and drove their 10F up Chilly, do I think they should lose their money? Or get their license suspended despite the fact they were never caught by law enforcement? No, because why would they? Those are IC consequences. This is why we have admin jail, and Bans.

To touch on:

"..Even though we won't be issuing any punishments, keep in mind that both sides of this report showed poor roleplay in this situation.."

I agree it shows a great deal of mercy, however we shouldn't always be pushed to punish players. First and foremost what we need to do is educate them and let them know what they did was wrong, because at the end of the day there is no way for us to know for certain if they understood what they did was wrong at the time. A lot of our rules have sections that state exact examples are hard to come across, because realistically if we were to list off the different ways someone could break "Non-RP" we'd be writing a novel in our rules section. We trust that each and every player will look at decision they make and use their best judgement to decide whether or not it breaks a rule. I guarantee you will almost never see a player commit 2 of the same rule breaks without receiving a punishment atleast one of those times.

While I appreciate your attempt at trying to rectify a known issue within the community, it should be viewed from a wider lens than simply issuing more punishments.

[Diligo]

Thank you all for focusing on what punishments would be good or bad, admins will take note of that.

Though if you havent encountered or yourself indulge in activities that would be considered Poor roleplay, but doesnt break any of the rules, I would understand why this would be a very very bad suggestion.

I will not name any names but seeing that admins also like to roleplay, I will assume that they love good roleplay.

Also a lot of admins/moderators are in factions that are frequently engaging in poor roleplay.
Which I understand that you cant control everyones actions at all times especially when people are from different timezones.
But there is a way to manage poor roleplay.

Firstly we have to understand how and why it happens

There are multiple factors and I will state what behaviour that precisely is:

1. Others are poorly roleplaying
   [Collective crowd behaviour]
2. Stalling happening because someone is not happy with the situation or its fairness
   [Need for justice]AND/OR[Win/win mentality]
3. OOC discussions while in an active roleplay situation
   [Need for justice]AND/OR[Win/win mentality]AND/OR[Not taking RP seriously]
4. Roleplay that is taking place is not in a suitable location (e.g. robbery happening in daylight on a city street might make someone skip some lines of /me's and also skip some essential roleplay)
   [Win/win mentality]
5. A person/group of people are breaking rules or broke them recently and the other party doesn't want to roleplay because that would put them in a disadvantage(e.g. ''if you dont play by the rules, i wont as well so i dont lose!'')
   [Collective crowd behaviour]

So to repeat my original post and clarify what I just posted -
Punish the actions that would be considered:
NonRP
Mixing
Metagaming
Stalling
(These rulebreaks usually later led or immediately lead to poor roleplay from either side of the report.)

In other words: Attack the root cause.

For example - a staff member is watching a report's footage, noticed some poor roleplay, little bit of mixing, maybe stalling?
Immediate punishment!

Also a suggestion but it is very extreme and knowing that people are already used to behave in certain way when bad roleplay/rulebreak is happening around them, they wont like it. But it is a bonus suggestion
And it is:
If someone makes a report about DeathMatching or Metagaming or Backup breach or Powergaming,
Staff members should look if the reporting party has broken any rules before/during/after the evidence provided.
If yes, then punish the reporting party and nullify any punishments given or to be given to the original reported rulebreaker.

This would force people to FULLY ROLEPLAY before, during and after a situation with a Rulebreaker.
This behaviour would make a habit into people's brains to always roleplay even if you see a cheater or a troll or whatever kind of rulebreaker. In my humble opinion this method would fix the roleplay in the end.

Good behaviour is a habit. If we have habit to stop roleplaying or bend the rules just because someone broke the rules or is breaking them in the moment -
We will always be in a perpetual state of poor roleplay.

Which is not what we are here for.

Last note:
 

On 10/26/2024 at 8:34 AM, Jordan said:

While I appreciate your attempt at trying to rectify a known issue within the community, it should be viewed from a wider lens than simply issuing more punishments.

Re-read what I said

On 10/24/2024 at 9:16 PM, Nikolia said:

If the person has played for a long time and has a lot of experience in-and-out of the game, then the person should be heavily punished,
while a new player should recieve a slap on the wrist and an explanation on how to roleplay better.

What are you going to teach a heavily experienced roleplayer about rulebreaks? With all due respect, this is funny.

Let me give you an example -
You own a plumbing company and also yourself are an expert plumber. You know how to fix stuff, but also you can teach others about your craft.
Sadly today you have 2 accidents that happened because of your hard-working plumbers.
The customer's are not happy and have made a report to your company's customer support.
The situations:
A) A young plumber, just starting off, comes to the house to fix a sink, makes a mistake, costs damages.
B) An experienced plumber, a lot of good work under their belt, comes to the house to fix a sink, makes a mistake, costs damages.

If you look from the perspective of justice system and good parenting - first mistake isn't that bad. 
But if you look from the perspective of business - any mistake is bad.

You can always say "look you have worked a long time and never made mistakes, it is okay, but this cost us financially"
so you appear more understanding - but completely disregarding an experienced plumber making a mistake is what (i am sorry) a fool would do.

Not going to name names but if a high profile senior administrator or a veteran of this server makes a rulebreak or roleplays poorly, I consider that a deliberate action. And accidental rulebreaks or poor roleplays should never come from experienced players.

So we can all be goody goody roleplayers, but if the server wants to become even bigger, we need to have higher standards, not additional new rules, but higher standards.
If the community was like 100 players in total, I would totally understand and actually wouldnt care that much myself.
But if we want to have fun while also growing, lets all roleplay better, learn how to lose and stop rulebreaking or roleplay poorly just because some PD, Crim or Civ is being a silly scallywag.

I wanna hear your thoughts, but
please refrain from using exceptions to the rule as arguments, i know that there are extremely rare cases of veteran roleplays discovering new ways to roleplay. but they are extremely rare compared to ammount of veterans

Thank you for taking your time reading this.

Edited October 27, 2024 by Nikolia

[Quietthecutie]

I can appreciate the sentiment of the suggestion. a LOT of people do display very poor RP standards at times, criminal and legal and it can be very annoying to have them ruin your evening through their actions.

However, staff will only issue punishments as a last resort unless compelled to through a forum report. they are highly motivated to try and take the educate, chastise, reform route instead of just firing out punishments. 

The reason for this is quite simple. they want to keep as many people on the server as possible to keep it active. every person they heavily punish/ban/suspend whatever is a potential loss of not only activity, but income for the server as said people will be less likely to purchase credits.

In the defence of this approach. a lot of peoples RP behaviours do improve gradually over time through this method. its also good because occasionally even the most well meaning player will slip up and make a mistake/overplay/just be in a bad mood. this doesn't necessarily mean they should be slapped with heavy punishments. we are all human at the end of the day.

Is it a perfect system? no, not even close. But at the end of the day we are all just players on a RP server. the Staff have a responsibility to keep the server active, welcoming and creative. and this means their best approach is the one they are currently taking which is very fluid and forgiving.

[Diligo]

(tl;dr at the bottom of post)

9 hours ago, Quietthecutie said:

Is it a perfect system? no, not even close. But at the end of the day we are all just players on a RP server. the Staff have a responsibility to keep the server active, welcoming and creative. and this means their best approach is the one they are currently taking which is very fluid and forgiving.

We all just players on a RP server. Here to have fun. Not to let our frustrations out because we had a bad day at school/work or wherever.

I come here to have a great time like someone would go to improv or dance classes.

I like examples so here is another one -
If a veteran dancer suddenly starts to become lazy and completely change their dancing style like on purpose to sabotage the whole dance groups image, then of course, gotta have a talk with the person, what is that all about, what is the issue, right?

Has anybody ever asked -
Why are you breaking the server rules?

No one ever wants to understand the person who is breaking the rules, because why need to when you can educate them(give them a lecture like you would give to a kid).
Because clearly they are so incompetent, that they need to be reminded not to deathmatch someone as if they didn't know it beforehand with their 100k xp.

Listen, if you ever see me blatantly DM someone, give me the correct punishment. Im a considerably new player here, but if a vet makes mistake like that or does some other type of poor roleplay.. got to have a conversation about why has that happened..

I am sure there have been private conversations, but from those conversations has something been brought to light and changed in the rulebook according to the needs?

It could not always be that the player broke the rules because well he didn't want to lose and is a scumbag pvp player that wants to win win win win....

I saw a crim player with about 2mil exp and maybe 6mil IC money net worth that lost his shit because of an ingame script losing him maybe 150k because there was PD in the vicinity who noticed the script bug unfolding..
to all the statistics nerds, the 2mil exp veteran lost 2.5% of his total wealth.
you think he was mad because of the money? i was surprised he even got mad!!
i was like chris pratt right down here!


 

I was so confused, so scared but at the same time TOTALLY UNDERSTOOD HIS ANGER!!!
The PD used the situation which had an OOC script issue to their advantage!!! it was not his mistake..

It is not about the money, it is about the message.

Win/win mentality, poor roleplay, taking advantage of a situation just because you can;
Baiting cops, baiting DM rights, "wait till they shoot first", tackling everyone at Bayview at any time because well "im bored"

Everybody is doing it, and me pointing it out I do stand out like a weirdo for not joining in the literal poor roleplay(i actually tackle a lot at bayview, but that is besides the point, okay?? i was bored!!)

Please! I am not trying to antagonize admins, players, vets and others, but just disregarding my post because of a fear of change or a possibility of player loss, would be little bit silly!! And we here sometimes are silly, but this is serious to me!

2-3 weeks ago I met a guy IC who has been banned multiple times -
When I had my RP situation with him, the person seemed okay, fine - even what I consider an average good roleplayer.
We talked, he had his whole character with its personality issues and it was fun even though I almost lost half my stuff, I enjoyed it.
A week later he was banned.

Why are these people breaking the rules? Why are they bending the rules to damage the quality of the roleplay?
I had my thoughts on this in the OP, but surely not everyone who is commiting poor roleplay ''just has a bad day''.

I come to have fun, if I get treated poorly, I take some rest. I do not go on a vengeance streak just to prove a point.
But sometimes it feels that it would be the right thing to do. To go and break rules just to deliver justice to a poor roleplayer.
Probably feels amazing.... maybe... i should.. nevermind, I know how I will get treated when I break the rules, will not attempt to.

TL;DR
Example leads to behaviour leads to habit and it becomes an endless cycle.

I put out my idea on how to end this perpetual poor roleplay cycle.

I have heard counter-arguments but also everyone being happy as it is.

But now to remind everyone a famous quoute by Louise Erdrich -



So now I would like to hear from people that support my idea or have even better ideas on how to grow the server.
Yes, that is a fact that having higher roleplay standards(and enforcing them) will grow the server EVEN MORE.

Please share your ideas, I am ready for them!

Edited October 28, 2024 by Nikolia

[Daxu]

On 10/24/2024 at 2:27 PM, Demonmit1 said:

/goodrp /badrp is an in game system that is heavily underutilized, and as far as im aware,  ignored by staff. there's some minor things that could be changed with it, like making it not have a limited range, but its a current system already in game that is underutilized and should be something staff should regularly check in on.

+1 I try to use it when I can, but by the time I have a chance to, the situation has often passed and I can't get it submitted

On 10/26/2024 at 1:06 AM, DontSniffSugar said:

ima keep it real if i ever lost in game money or VIP that I paid for with my real money because my RP wasn't deemed fit, I'm runnin out the door.

+1 don't disincentivize folks to continue helping out with server/community costs if they have the means.

On 10/26/2024 at 1:06 AM, DontSniffSugar said:

On a more constructive note, we have issued punishments in the past for more egregious levels of demonstrating poor RP. I can’t speak on behalf of every member of staff but I can say the majority operate in an education over punishment mindset, and would rather educate players to better RP than throw the book at them.

+1 this mindset is healthier than the "get players out of the community" approach.

What I might suggest is that in more situations (not all) where poor RP was on display and it led to significant IC consequences, maybe don't issue punishments but allow for it to be voided/restarted. In this way, all players benefit from an educational experience with staff and are not screwed over from something that wouldn't have happened if best practices were followed. Maybe this is already in place, not sure but I don't think I've ever seen this approach.

On 10/27/2024 at 7:02 AM, Nikolia said:

And accidental rulebreaks or poor roleplays should never come from experienced players.

-1 I have been a member of the community for 6+ years and still find myself asking people in /f chat "hey wait, is am I allowed to keep this person locked in the bed of a truck while waiting for police, or is it powergaming since they could realistically stand up?" (pulling from a real IC scenario I had the other day at Bayview ). I think we should all try to strive for perfection and higher standards, that way our outcome is "pretty good", but leaving no room for education across all experience levels with an ever-evolving community & rule-set is dangerous.

On 10/27/2024 at 8:57 PM, Nikolia said:

So now I would like to hear from people that support my idea or have even better ideas on how to grow the server.

I would encourage anyone to be the change that they want to see, and inspire others to follow you on that journey. Behavior is infectious and is easier to set in when you're new to something, so maybe try helping players get really fun, varied experiences where they can witness high-quality RP and learn from it (not just running labs and grinding freelance jobs). Engage with player-ran businesses and buy food/cater events instead of just spamming the general store/burgershot--plenty of high quality RP possible at a bakery or something.

I'd even support/partake in educational sessions based on the (many) forum posts/private collections of RP guides/archived reports.