CCC: Cop mentalities(?)

[The Milkman]

ic is ic

 

[Maroon]

But over the past few weeks as I've dove properly into the forums and played the server, I've noticed a trend with Civil Protection - not only have they been PKing more of their own than they have rebels, at least in public, but a comment in one of the appeals gave me a few red flags about the approach to IC relations. I can't find the quote exactly, but the overall mentality was:

"You aren't in any sort of brotherhood and you cannot trust your superiors".

I'm glad you finally decided to play on the server. Though I must add that judging the entire faction from mainly the forums is still not quite representative of how things are going. Hell, I think even the cop discord might be a better place for that.

But onto your points:

I've noticed a trend with Civil Protection - not only have they been PKing more of their own than they have rebels.
This is partially true. Since the start of this year, a lot of functionaries have been pushing and testing limits to see how much they can get away with. The main reason for many cops' fall from grace is that they had embedded themselves into romantic relationships (internally) that bordered from
questionable to outright insane. There has been a hard crackdown on this, and I think the vast majority of functionaries recently executed honest-to-god had it coming since such relationships often went hand-in-hand with outright disobedience. It came as far that we outright had to ban civil partnerships for cops, but this will return at some point. Possibly with the reform mentioned later.

"You aren't in any sort of brotherhood and you cannot trust your superiors".
I still stand by this, to a degree. The issue with the unit in that particular appeal is that they used those emotions as a crutch to shove away responsibility for their actions. That functionary in particular was well-liked even at that point, but I think the writer expected to get away with their character's disobedience -- which is, again, the cardinal sin for cops -- by displaying those emotions. As cop leads, we leave day-to-day matters to our rank leaders, who mainly deal with judicial affairs, and together they decided to deservice that functionary (for good reason.)

But as a more philosophical concept, I 100% stand by the fact that a human being cannot collaborate with a fascist, genocidal regime without at the very least being a little cutthroat or sociopathic. This gets emboldened the further up the rank one goes, and nobility in the upper echelons is rare. I personally play my character more deprived and immoral the higher up the chain they are, peaking at Overseer James Wittrow (who many know not to be a very good person).
But regardless, we do not enforce behavior as such in even the rank leaders. They play their characters as they want to, and I don't think we've ever had to step in for anything other than faulty OOC behavior (minging, toxicity, etc.)

That to me feels like it is a bad thing to push IC - because it makes people more inclined to play non-characters who have no incentive to actually make themselves unique for fear of being killed over it, which then leads to my second point:
I'm not sure how you took that away from my reply to that post. This is not the case at all. We give functionaries near-total in-character freedom to do what they want with their character. It is now easier than ever to play the character they want: embracing the sociopathic beatcop, hanging bad as the conscience-plagued collaborator, or making the streets your own as the corrupt douchebag.

Since the early days of Castro (who had to jump through several PK's) there's seemingly been a big aversion to letting conflict boil? I feel like there's no real faction-wide sense of "we'll only step in when we absolutely have to", instead there seems to be a mentality that conflict should be stepped on at the first possible opportunity to keep the peace, given doing anything else might risk their cop being PK'd.
Casto is an odd case. As we see in many of the recently de-serviced functionaries, a great many of them (the vast majority) had out-of-character issues that ended up with them being removed from the whitelist and/or the server. Merlin is one of those people, although he's not a cop. I think you're specifically hinting towards political conflict here which is something the staff team as a whole have grown tired of. Futurism started off great, but ended as a thinly-veiled OOC powerplay. I'm personally grateful it ended when it did.

I also think I know where you're heading with that second sentence, and I will address that below:

Pepe's PK is the most recent example, wherein he could have just easily kept his RP to the forums before submitting the petition - but he wanted to take it in game to involve people. This sort of thing concerns me, because it gives people the message that if they do too much of anything they'll likely get PK'd - even if it is innocent in nature. This naturally just ends in people not doing much and makes the city vs rebel divide worsen as people seek shelter rather than engaging themselves.
Pepe honestly had what was coming to him. Involving people is great, and I applaud the idea. The reason he got de-serviced isn't because of his petition, but how the character handled the criticism from Civil Protection. Earlier you mentioned the freedom to play a character-- the ground unit who pursued Pepe during the whole petition thing did so from his own volition, without orders, probably purely because Pepe's character pissed him off. There are tons of similar stations set up in the city: recruitment for political groups, the newly formed Constabulary force, private-owned job desks, etc. In victory street especially, incredible leeway is given for citizens to do their own thing.

Maybe this seems like an exaggeration but I've been around Gmod long enough to see some warning signs, so I thought I'd post this here to let other people put down their own experiences.
While we appreciate the criticism, I don't think your fears are that justified. Most of these cases have played out on the forums, and I think they gave you a warped vision of what actually goes on day-to-day in Civil Protection and their interaction with other factions. Can I ask how long you played and during what time period?

Directly telling people that "If you RP emotion you are still probably going to end up PK'd" breeds cops who will go by the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it to promote roleplay, specifically to save themselves from any potential backlash internally. It also pushes them into not RPing emotion or generally being fleshed-out characters for the same reason.
That's not what I meant for people to take away from my post there, and it is not at all what we are pushing for. To clarify, we encourage units to show emotions-- to have character growth, development, and to make bonds along the way. My point there was that shielding your actions under the guise of emotions will not work. I would dare to even say that most de-serviced units in recent history failed to take their responsibility -- backtalked their superiors, blamed other -- and that is what led to their execution.

As a final note, we do have a very special reform coming up. I can't go into details, but it will make the ranks a great deal more fluid. It will encourage conflict within Civil Protection and raise the stakes of what kind of relationships you have with your fellow units. I also hope to pair an off-duty system with this though we'll probably hold off on that for a while until we settle into the new map.

 

[numbers23541]

james wittrow is by far the best cop character

never have i met one that made my blood boil and instill so much fucking raw emotion in me whenever he stepped on my toes

i like the lack of brotherhood in CP. it's cutthroat, much like what a poorly internally policed militia that kills people for a living would be like

the last time i had to deal with brotherhood type beat shit here it just instilled semi cringe and ooc circlejerking into characters

 

[WillowBot]

omfg

please play the damn game instead of going on huge rants about the "state of the server"

zomg

Hello, Swagile. I'm from the Department of Cringe Management and Dispersal. I've received several reports which seem to indicate that you have posted a rather large amount of cringe in this area.

Upon further inspection of the post in question, our team can safely say that you did, in fact, post a near lethal dose of cringe. The cleanup of a Cringe leakage of this magnitude will doubtless take several days of fully geared HAZMAT trained men, working double shifts.

Would you rather go to Cringe Prison, or pay the bill for the clean up?

 

[Fedora]

community manager btw

poltical rper btw

 

[Noh]

I'm glad you finally decided to play on the server. Though I must add that judging the entire faction from mainly the forums is still not quite representative of how things are going. Hell, I think even the cop discord might be a better place for that.

But onto your points:

I've noticed a trend with Civil Protection - not only have they been PKing more of their own than they have rebels.
This is partially true. Since the start of this year, a lot of functionaries have been pushing and testing limits to see how much they can get away with. The main reason for many cops' fall from grace is that they had embedded themselves into romantic relationships (internally) that bordered from
questionable to outright insane. There has been a hard crackdown on this, and I think the vast majority of functionaries recently executed honest-to-god had it coming since such relationships often went hand-in-hand with outright disobedience. It came as far that we outright had to ban civil partnerships for cops, but this will return at some point. Possibly with the reform mentioned later.

"You aren't in any sort of brotherhood and you cannot trust your superiors".
I still stand by this, to a degree. The issue with the unit in that particular appeal is that they used those emotions as a crutch to shove away responsibility for their actions. That functionary in particular was well-liked even at that point, but I think the writer expected to get away with their character's disobedience -- which is, again, the cardinal sin for cops -- by displaying those emotions. As cop leads, we leave day-to-day matters to our rank leaders, who mainly deal with judicial affairs, and together they decided to deservice that functionary (for good reason.)

But as a more philosophical concept, I 100% stand by the fact that a human being cannot collaborate with a fascist, genocidal regime without at the very least being a little cutthroat or sociopathic. This gets emboldened the further up the rank one goes, and nobility in the upper echelons is rare. I personally play my character more deprived and immoral the higher up the chain they are, peaking at Overseer James Wittrow (who many know not to be a very good person).
But regardless, we do not enforce behavior as such in even the rank leaders. They play their characters as they want to, and I don't think we've ever had to step in for anything other than faulty OOC behavior (minging, toxicity, etc.)

That to me feels like it is a bad thing to push IC - because it makes people more inclined to play non-characters who have no incentive to actually make themselves unique for fear of being killed over it, which then leads to my second point:
I'm not sure how you took that away from my reply to that post. This is not the case at all. We give functionaries near-total in-character freedom to do what they want with their character. It is now easier than ever to play the character they want: embracing the sociopathic beatcop, hanging bad as the conscience-plagued collaborator, or making the streets your own as the corrupt douchebag.

Since the early days of Castro (who had to jump through several PK's) there's seemingly been a big aversion to letting conflict boil? I feel like there's no real faction-wide sense of "we'll only step in when we absolutely have to", instead there seems to be a mentality that conflict should be stepped on at the first possible opportunity to keep the peace, given doing anything else might risk their cop being PK'd.
Casto is an odd case. As we see in many of the recently de-serviced functionaries, a great many of them (the vast majority) had out-of-character issues that ended up with them being removed from the whitelist and/or the server. Merlin is one of those people, although he's not a cop. I think you're specifically hinting towards political conflict here which is something the staff team as a whole have grown tired of. Futurism started off great, but ended as a thinly-veiled OOC powerplay. I'm personally grateful it ended when it did.

I also think I know where you're heading with that second sentence, and I will address that below:

Pepe's PK is the most recent example, wherein he could have just easily kept his RP to the forums before submitting the petition - but he wanted to take it in game to involve people. This sort of thing concerns me, because it gives people the message that if they do too much of anything they'll likely get PK'd - even if it is innocent in nature. This naturally just ends in people not doing much and makes the city vs rebel divide worsen as people seek shelter rather than engaging themselves.
Pepe honestly had what was coming to him. Involving people is great, and I applaud the idea. The reason he got de-serviced isn't because of his petition, but how the character handled the criticism from Civil Protection. Earlier you mentioned the freedom to play a character-- the ground unit who pursued Pepe during the whole petition thing did so from his own volition, without orders, probably purely because Pepe's character pissed him off. There are tons of similar stations set up in the city: recruitment for political groups, the newly formed Constabulary force, private-owned job desks, etc. In victory street especially, incredible leeway is given for citizens to do their own thing.

Maybe this seems like an exaggeration but I've been around Gmod long enough to see some warning signs, so I thought I'd post this here to let other people put down their own experiences.
While we appreciate the criticism, I don't think your fears are that justified. Most of these cases have played out on the forums, and I think they gave you a warped vision of what actually goes on day-to-day in Civil Protection and their interaction with other factions. Can I ask how long you played and during what time period?

Directly telling people that "If you RP emotion you are still probably going to end up PK'd" breeds cops who will go by the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it to promote roleplay, specifically to save themselves from any potential backlash internally. It also pushes them into not RPing emotion or generally being fleshed-out characters for the same reason.
That's not what I meant for people to take away from my post there, and it is not at all what we are pushing for. To clarify, we encourage units to show emotions-- to have character growth, development, and to make bonds along the way. My point there was that shielding your actions under the guise of emotions will not work. I would dare to even say that most de-serviced units in recent history failed to take their responsibility -- backtalked their superiors, blamed other -- and that is what led to their execution.

As a final note, we do have a very special reform coming up. I can't go into details, but it will make the ranks a great deal more fluid. It will encourage conflict within Civil Protection and raise the stakes of what kind of relationships you have with your fellow units. I also hope to pair an off-duty system with this though we'll probably hold off on that for a while until we settle into the new map.

too long, didnt read

 

[soneil3]

I'm glad you finally decided to play on the server. Though I must add that judging the entire faction from mainly the forums is still not quite representative of how things are going...

Fantastic writeup Maroon.

You hit pretty much every mark with professionalism. I wanted to try to counter argue at least one point but found them all valid.

 

[Rabid]

omfg

please play the damn game instead of going on huge rants about the "state of the server"

zomg

Swagile I know you know I'm not doing this to shit on "the state of the server" lol. I actually think most things are running great.

I'm glad you finally decided to play on the server. Though I must add that judging the entire faction from mainly the forums is still not quite representative of how things are going. Hell, I think even the cop discord might be a better place for that.

But onto your points:

I've noticed a trend with Civil Protection - not only have they been PKing more of their own than they have rebels.
This is partially true. Since the start of this year, a lot of functionaries have been pushing and testing limits to see how much they can get away with. The main reason for many cops' fall from grace is that they had embedded themselves into romantic relationships (internally) that bordered from
questionable to outright insane. There has been a hard crackdown on this, and I think the vast majority of functionaries recently executed honest-to-god had it coming since such relationships often went hand-in-hand with outright disobedience. It came as far that we outright had to ban civil partnerships for cops, but this will return at some point. Possibly with the reform mentioned later.

"You aren't in any sort of brotherhood and you cannot trust your superiors".
I still stand by this, to a degree. The issue with the unit in that particular appeal is that they used those emotions as a crutch to shove away responsibility for their actions. That functionary in particular was well-liked even at that point, but I think the writer expected to get away with their character's disobedience -- which is, again, the cardinal sin for cops -- by displaying those emotions. As cop leads, we leave day-to-day matters to our rank leaders, who mainly deal with judicial affairs, and together they decided to deservice that functionary (for good reason.)

But as a more philosophical concept, I 100% stand by the fact that a human being cannot collaborate with a fascist, genocidal regime without at the very least being a little cutthroat or sociopathic. This gets emboldened the further up the rank one goes, and nobility in the upper echelons is rare. I personally play my character more deprived and immoral the higher up the chain they are, peaking at Overseer James Wittrow (who many know not to be a very good person).
But regardless, we do not enforce behavior as such in even the rank leaders. They play their characters as they want to, and I don't think we've ever had to step in for anything other than faulty OOC behavior (minging, toxicity, etc.)

That to me feels like it is a bad thing to push IC - because it makes people more inclined to play non-characters who have no incentive to actually make themselves unique for fear of being killed over it, which then leads to my second point:
I'm not sure how you took that away from my reply to that post. This is not the case at all. We give functionaries near-total in-character freedom to do what they want with their character. It is now easier than ever to play the character they want: embracing the sociopathic beatcop, hanging bad as the conscience-plagued collaborator, or making the streets your own as the corrupt douchebag.

Since the early days of Castro (who had to jump through several PK's) there's seemingly been a big aversion to letting conflict boil? I feel like there's no real faction-wide sense of "we'll only step in when we absolutely have to", instead there seems to be a mentality that conflict should be stepped on at the first possible opportunity to keep the peace, given doing anything else might risk their cop being PK'd.
Casto is an odd case. As we see in many of the recently de-serviced functionaries, a great many of them (the vast majority) had out-of-character issues that ended up with them being removed from the whitelist and/or the server. Merlin is one of those people, although he's not a cop. I think you're specifically hinting towards political conflict here which is something the staff team as a whole have grown tired of. Futurism started off great, but ended as a thinly-veiled OOC powerplay. I'm personally grateful it ended when it did.

I also think I know where you're heading with that second sentence, and I will address that below:

Pepe's PK is the most recent example, wherein he could have just easily kept his RP to the forums before submitting the petition - but he wanted to take it in game to involve people. This sort of thing concerns me, because it gives people the message that if they do too much of anything they'll likely get PK'd - even if it is innocent in nature. This naturally just ends in people not doing much and makes the city vs rebel divide worsen as people seek shelter rather than engaging themselves.
Pepe honestly had what was coming to him. Involving people is great, and I applaud the idea. The reason he got de-serviced isn't because of his petition, but how the character handled the criticism from Civil Protection. Earlier you mentioned the freedom to play a character-- the ground unit who pursued Pepe during the whole petition thing did so from his own volition, without orders, probably purely because Pepe's character pissed him off. There are tons of similar stations set up in the city: recruitment for political groups, the newly formed Constabulary force, private-owned job desks, etc. In victory street especially, incredible leeway is given for citizens to do their own thing.

Maybe this seems like an exaggeration but I've been around Gmod long enough to see some warning signs, so I thought I'd post this here to let other people put down their own experiences.
While we appreciate the criticism, I don't think your fears are that justified. Most of these cases have played out on the forums, and I think they gave you a warped vision of what actually goes on day-to-day in Civil Protection and their interaction with other factions. Can I ask how long you played and during what time period?

Directly telling people that "If you RP emotion you are still probably going to end up PK'd" breeds cops who will go by the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it to promote roleplay, specifically to save themselves from any potential backlash internally. It also pushes them into not RPing emotion or generally being fleshed-out characters for the same reason.
That's not what I meant for people to take away from my post there, and it is not at all what we are pushing for. To clarify, we encourage units to show emotions-- to have character growth, development, and to make bonds along the way. My point there was that shielding your actions under the guise of emotions will not work. I would dare to even say that most de-serviced units in recent history failed to take their responsibility -- backtalked their superiors, blamed other -- and that is what led to their execution.

As a final note, we do have a very special reform coming up. I can't go into details, but it will make the ranks a great deal more fluid. It will encourage conflict within Civil Protection and raise the stakes of what kind of relationships you have with your fellow units. I also hope to pair an off-duty system with this though we'll probably hold off on that for a while until we settle into the new map.

I won't pick this apart, but I want to thank you for going so in depth and not assuming the worst.

As I said in my main post and the first part of this one, my critique wasn't done to shit on anything or to try and pick holes - more so that I'd heard a distressing number of people with more understanding than I do about the internals of the faction (or had more 'antagonistic' actions IC) complain to me since I started to play and got talking to them. I know what happens when this sort of resentment is left to fester - it becomes the normal view from the playerbase over time.

The problem is that I, of course, have no internal view of the faction. I can only judge based on word of mouth and what I see on the forums - which can lead to a view that doesn't always match the actual in-faction experience.

Civil Protection is a faction I really enjoy, one I plan on applying to, so again - thank you for taking my criticisms without assuming I'm simply throwing shit.