hl2rp² feedback thread 2.0²

[Lewis!]

there was also a point where all we had were cultist cops and OTA, no in betweens

CPOG chuds forever seething over the OBC/Extinctionist alliance

 

[Eviction Notice]

there isn't a great deal that can be done interactions wise beyond the norm, especially because the cult's ideology tends to be fairly centralizing for the cultist's character.

I'd argue this very much isn't the case, especially for the Extinctionist and CLAMP fellows. A vast majority of them, especially Lewis, made an extra effort to ensure those outside the cult (even those that directly challenged their beliefs and ideals) were involved in plenty of their operations and shenanigans. This was especially prevalent during the Alps, I can't think of one unit that wasn't constantly discussing them!

Cult RP can be done well, especially when it involves others, ironically.

 

[Lewis!]

After a certain point (if your character isn't swayed and doesn't believe) there isn't a great deal that can be done interactions wise beyond the norm,

This is just blatantly wrong

First of all, we had people joining us right up until the very end when myself, @slick and @PeaceAndMagick89 stopped playing for various reasons.

Secondly up until Bucharest when the majority of the faction stopped playing, we were in quite heavy conflict with the rest of civil protection a lot of the time, and they were winning for the most part up until about the Alps map when we got organised again, mainly thanks to @slick

The Alps and Bucharest were definitely the golden age of the OBC because our primary antagonist was @RedMan who was an adversary in good faith for the sake of RP, I believe he actually held back out right destroying us even when he had the chance just to keep the RP going which I greatly respect. Then of course we had the neo-terrorwave in Bucharest when we were essentially the only cops playing and all of that was heavily intertwined with the rebels and the national guard. We had a spy in the guard, we had several safe houses and a shell company and everything we organised was set up in away that the rest of the faction or the rebels/guard could get involved in some manner.

The main issue we faced mainly was OOC spite from the same retards over and over basically, they didn't do a very good job stopping us mind you but the vitriol was very potent because we were doing something different.

The thing that really annoys me is cop players complaining about the lack of admin attention, it's been a constant issue for so long but what has the faction ever done to compensate for this? I mean you had admin attention, both mine and Slick when we were event staff, it's just that the playerbase refused to engage with anything we were doing even as our enemies. We were very successful with our RP endeavours because from the start the OBC had a set of goals that mattered to us and which evolved overtime. We had character arcs that were relevant among each other, an ideology to roleplay by and were willing to engage with anybody else in good faith.

Civil Protection has never done anything like we did, I imagine because of how restrictive and autistic the various neo-nazi headcops have been over the years, and yet when we get the most unique iteration in neb history the default is still to play le "jaded and cynical cop who's just got a job to do..." no passion, no real endgame, no internal goals beyond kill le rebels and whine. Yeah it's not fantastic when you see the rebel side of the server get a lot of shit done, but they are fundamentally more willing to engage with unique ideas and more free-form shit. The Civil Protection playerbase remains largely stagnent and generally operates in bad faith.

 

[Flop]

CPOG chuds forever seething over the OBC/Extinctionist alliance

I had a bunch of fun being part of the schizo cop gang and I fucking miss y'all

 

[Rabid]

Civil Protection has never done anything like we did, I imagine because of how restrictive and autistic the various neo-nazi headcops have been over the years

Real talk? Its because playing any kind of hyper-loyalist or cultist character (and a few people tried over the years including me) generally got you side-eyed by literally everyone inside the faction or out. It wasn't worth the hassle to try and play a loyalist who believed in what they were doing, because "doing that" inherently made most people hate you when you kicked in their door or disrupted whatever they were doing, no matter how nice you did it.

Literally the only way it worked was playing a loyalist cop who didn't do their job to sidestep the forum complaints (so like, not the concept at all really).

The OBC had the unique position of getting to play a cop with basically none of the faction responsibilities, and so none of the bad blood. It was fantastic for your roleplay of course but isn't indicitive of what things were like for most of LP/Neb's lifespan.

Yeah it's not fantastic when you see the rebel side of the server get a lot of shit done, but they are fundamentally more willing to engage with unique ideas and more free-form shit. The Civil Protection playerbase remains largely stagnent and generally operates in bad faith.

That's the point.

Cops barely get unique ideas and free-form shit to begin with from staff and never have. We've had event runners proudly saying it took one (not even event-related) incident for them to swear off giving cops any time at all or writing events for them.

No wonder rebels are more willing to engage when the default is to just go and give them fun things to do and leave cops kicking their feet.

 

[Lewis!]

That's the point.

Cops barely get unique ideas and free-form shit to begin with from staff and never have. We've had event runners proudly saying it took one (not even event-related) incident for them to swear off giving cops any time at all or writing events for them.

No wonder rebels are more willing to engage when the default is to just go and give them fun things to do and leave cops kicking their feet.

Yes but this is my point, they don't try to compensate by doing anything unique on their own.

 

[Flop]

Not saying this is what's happening currently on this thread (Right now it just seems like a discussion) but lets also try to get into solutions maybe here too, and get things rolling and talking about how to fix it too, instead of discussing the issue to death and going in circles

 

[Rabid]

Yes but this is my point, they don't try to compensate by doing anything unique on their own.

That's fair.

Its no secret that rebels have a lot more lateral freedom because they're just people trying to get by. The sky is the limit for them, conceptually, and a lot of their ideas are accomodated for (especially this iteration). You can play a refugee, a mechanic, a medic, whatever you want and not only will you be free to do that, you won't be pushed into any other role unless you want to be.

Meanwhile cops are sort of inherently tied to the faction, even conceptually. You can't play a passive cop, you can't play a "refugee" cop, you can't really explore anything without also being a "cop" cop.

I think that handicaps a lot of people to where the difference becomes personality and motivation, nothing 'obvious' or so overt. You see John Doe and you know he's a cool alien parasite puppeting a corpse, for example, which is super cool.

For the record, I'm not remotely shitting on the OBC or what you guys did, because its cool as fuck. I just think is a little easy to demonize cops for not making an effort themselves when there's a good chunk of the faction that literally never engages in this sort of discussion or voices themselves because they don't want the blowback for it.

 

['77 East]

I'll never forget when rebels spent months planning a UM heist for organs for Surra's(?) character for a surgery he needed and it went off well, they got away and it was super cool

Then other rebels complained about it on the forums saying it was unrealistic lmao

that was @john and it was just a single organ to replace one that had grown cancerous

tldr; Rebels have more shit to do and more cool avenues for RP

not necessarily true

I made plenty of rp doing ethical drama stuff like beating the crap out of someone to put it in bystander's heads that my cop was a hardass, then palming prisoners off or trying to coerce them into staying alive to dodge the pressure of having to kill them, ducking out of raids to avoid having to shoot some civvy and pretending something broke so I could drag a few people somewhere and talk in private.

a minor fault is that cops suffer from people not breaking out of the mold of being some perfect gestapo agent; you can do it and still follow all the rules. the major, unspoken fault is that some just prefer mindless s2k even over actual roleplay opportunities and these are the people who time and time again have been dragging things down because it's all they ever push for, intimidating others to follow their lead or be seen as 'not a cop'.

After a certain point (if your character isn't swayed and doesn't believe) there isn't a great deal that can be done interactions wise beyond the norm, especially because the cult's ideology tends to be fairly centralizing for the cultist's character.

not true

my character didn't believe and yet he was suckered into the whole thing by @Appetite Ruining Kebab putting him in a bait-and-switch situation, forced to pretend to be a hardass to avert suspicion from other cultists and sympathetic enough to non-cultists that he wasn't immediately fragged by some sour newcomer

regular cops had a few options:
1) were sympathetic, but usually couldn't commit and so it became a 'they are alright but we don't trust them fully' situation for both sides
2) didn't express an opinion or found the whole thing a joke, so both sides treated each other with measured restraint, some jabs
3) outright antagonistic, meaning they had drama and contention that wouldn't exist without the cultists

you could still have cultists who weren't fully gone too, not everyone was absolutely indoctrinated like @Lewis! and @slick

The OBC had the unique position of getting to play a cop with basically none of the faction responsibilities, and so none of the bad blood. It was fantastic for your roleplay of course but isn't indicitive of what things were like for most of LP/Neb's lifespan.

again, not correct

just because you were a cultist didn't mean you could easily buck orders, if anything it made shit worse on maps like ienu where a few RL's were itching to just charge and kill off members because of a bodygroup

some (like me) got around this by devoting most of our time to passive duties and letting others take the lead during sweeping ops, but acting like being a cultist magically got you out of faction duties is a fictitious belief

 

[Tinbe]

That's fair.

Its no secret that rebels have a lot more lateral freedom because they're just people trying to get by. The sky is the limit for them, conceptually, and a lot of their ideas are accomodated for (especially this iteration). You can play a refugee, a mechanic, a medic, whatever you want and not only will you be free to do that, you won't be pushed into any other role unless you want to be.

Meanwhile cops are sort of inherently tied to the faction, even conceptually. You can't play a passive cop, you can't play a "refugee" cop, you can't really explore anything without also being a "cop" cop.

I think that handicaps a lot of people to where the difference becomes personality and motivation, nothing 'obvious' or so overt. You see John Doe and you know he's a cool alien parasite puppeting a corpse, for example, which is super cool.

For the record, I'm not remotely shitting on the OBC or what you guys did, because its cool as fuck. I just think is a little easy to demonize cops for not making an effort themselves when there's a good chunk of the faction that literally never engages in this sort of discussion or voices themselves because they don't want the blowback for it.

You can be medic, mechanic etc. on cop side too, though? @Erkor played a mechanic cop in the past, and I can't imagine medics being any unlikelier in terms of accessibility. Hell, my last cop was going to use alien crack taken from shards of Xenian crystals she harvested from C14 Shell Beach. Sure, you have to account for faction politics when trying to add a unique quirk to your character, but aren't faction politics the reason people join a faction?

 

[Erkor]

hello

 

[Rabid]

again, not correct

just because you were a cultist didn't mean you could easily buck orders, if anything it made shit worse on maps like ienu where a few RL's were itching to just charge and kill off members because of a bodygroup

some (like me) got around this by devoting most of our time to passive duties and letting others take the lead during sweeping ops, but acting like being a cultist magically got you out of faction duties is a fictitious belief

Nah, what I mean is you literally didn't have faction roles. You weren't walking around a cityscape doing usual cop duties, wherein hyper-loyalism typically got you side-eyed at best or thrown on the forums at worst. The OBC as a whole was in a unique position to meld its ideology into the day-to-day because the day-to-day gave you much more time to passive without the risk of doing something that'd piss someone off.

That's why I said it wasn't fair to say that the OBC hadn't been done before because of the headcops of years gone, it wasn't done because loyalist cops as a whole were frowned upon by all sides.

You can be medic, mechanic etc. on cop side too, though? @Erkor played a mechanic cop in the past, and I can't imagine medics being any unlikelier in terms of accessibility. Hell, my last cop was going to use alien crack taken from shards of Xenian crystals she harvested from C14 Shell Beach. Sure, you have to account for faction politics when trying to add a unique quirk to your character, but aren't faction politics the reason people join a faction?

You can, but you can't opt out of being a cop, too. You're gonna get involved in a sweep or a patrol or something that'll piss someone off eventually, because that's an expectation on the cop side. You join knowing you're gonna do bad-guy shit.

Whereas if I wanna be a refugee I could literally just never pick up a gun and focus on doing something else entirely RP based.

That makes it harder for cops to stand out unless they go all-in, and they're more than likely to get lumped in with the bad eggs in the long term, too.

 

['77 East]

You're gonna get involved in a sweep or a patrol or something that'll piss someone off eventually, because that's an expectation on the cop side.

Step one: Shirk your sweep duties.
Step two: Get a reason to explain away why you are shirking your duties (that doesn't get you shot).

Repeat process.

If I could do it, anyone can.

 

[Tinbe]

You can, but you can't opt out of being a cop, too. You're gonna get involved in a sweep or a patrol or something that'll piss someone off eventually, because that's an expectation on the cop side. You join knowing you're gonna do bad-guy shit.

Whereas if I wanna be a refugee I could literally just never pick up a gun and focus on doing something else entirely RP based.

There's a lot for me to unpack here, and I'm not even sure how I'm meant to do that without sounding reductive, or like an asshole. They can't focus on roleplay, because they're expected to S2K, which will lead to controversy, which leads them to being demotivated from roleplaying?

This sounds like an extremely unhealthy faction dynamic.

 

[Rabid]

Step one: Shirk your sweep duties.
Step two: Get a reason to explain away why you are shirking your duties (that doesn't get you shot).

Repeat process.

If I could do it, anyone can.

I agree, and that sort of stuff is cool when it works.

But not every cop can do that - if they could, they wouldn't have a presence on the map. So eventually, as has probably happened to most cops at least once, you end up on a sweep where something goes wrong and you get lumped in as part of the group that did x or y.

By contrast, rebel characters literally never have to worry about that if they don't want to. Of course it happens, but there's no obligation for you to go out and shoot cops if your character is a mechanic and you can just... not.

There's a lot for me to unpack here, and I'm not even sure how I'm meant to do that without sounding reductive, or like an asshole. They can't focus on roleplay, because they're expected to S2K, which will lead to controversy, which leads them to being demotivated from roleplaying?

This sounds like an extremely unhealthy faction dynamic.

Its not that they can't roleplay, its more that they just don't have the same dynamics, chances or avenues as rebels do - which is why comparing them to rebels in that regard is inherently not fair.

There's plenty of cops who just sit in their own corner playing their character without a care in the world for S2K and end up dragged through the mud and boiled down to unimaginative bad-faith actors by proxy because their characters are either not as bombastic as literal cultists or not given chances to shine by staff - or they end up going on a patrol that goes wrong.

 

['77 East]

But not every cop can do that - if they could, they wouldn't have a presence on the map. So eventually, as has probably happened to most cops at least once, you end up on a sweep where something goes wrong and you get lumped in as part of the group that did x or y.

Thing is, it's not if every cop could do that - most want to, and that is the truth.
A lot seek conflict because they can't fathom finding alternatives, or solely want the server to be their deathmatch fix.

It is an option, and it's good that it is an option for those who want it; you can get out of lethal duties if you truly want to.
It's just that it requires some thinking and potentially, some sacrifice. Unless you're playing a pacifist, why wouldn't you bite the bullet and go:

"my self-insert nihilist would rather kill 30 random people than be inconvenienced by not going on this sweep, hell yeah let's kill some bitches!"

when the alternative is, at best, not getting to play S2K-a-thon and at worst, a demotion or even humiliating punishment because you couldn't cover/excuse your disappearance?

There's plenty of cops who just sit in their own corner playing their character without a care in the world for S2K and end up dragged through the mud and boiled down to unimaginative bad-faith actors by proxy because their characters are either not as bombastic as literal cultists or not given chances to shine by staff - or they end up going on a patrol that goes wrong.

You're still looking at it wrong.

Obviously, anyone who goes "sorry I won't sweep my cop is morally against murder" is going to get beaten up, yelled at repeatedly and then put on a firing line themselves for outing that they aren't a wehrmacht wannabie eager to gun down random people. In contrast, someone who makes themselves indispensable outside of the kill missions, thinks of actual tactics to get out of it (or alternatively, positions themselves at the rear and plans to retreat the moment the majority get wiped out) and doesn't (outwardly) provoke the system is going to have a much, much easier time with it.

 

[MaXenzie]

Obviously, anyone who goes "sorry I won't sweep my cop is morally against murder" is going to get beaten up, yelled at repeatedly and then put on a firing line themselves for outing that they aren't a wehrmacht wannabie eager to gun down random people.

i hate that this is a fairly succinct summary

of both sides, in different ways

i'm OOCly against S2K on principle, so i have all of my characters abstain either out of pacifism, cowardice, or pragmatism
people keep giving John Doe, the alien worm guy, a gun and telling him he should go out and kill cops when able

 

[Rabid]

Obviously, anyone who goes "sorry I won't sweep my cop is morally against murder" is going to get beaten up, yelled at repeatedly and then put on a firing line themselves for outing that they aren't a wehrmacht wannabie eager to gun down random people. In contrast, someone who makes themselves indispensable outside of the kill missions, thinks of actual tactics to get out of it (or alternatively, positions themselves at the rear and plans to retreat the moment the majority get wiped out) and doesn't (outwardly) provoke the system is going to have a much, much easier time with it.

I think I'm not being clear here; I'm not talking strictly about IC - I'm disagreeing with the premise Lewis made, that because rebels have more avenues of roleplay and get more staff involvement and have no outward obligation to go out and partake in murdering cops (unless the cops come to them obviously) that it doesn't mean the entire cop faction is filled with uninspired bad-faith actors.

To stand out and get called a "good roleplayer" you have to make your stuff a lot more obvious than rebels do, work with less freedom and hope your faction duties don't get you dragged on the forums - and even then, 99% of people won't know who the fuck your character is, but they'll damn well remember if you happen to be in an APC that mows down a group of roleplayers, however justified.

If cops were given the same blank slate and attention from staff as rebels are it'd make a world of difference.

I hope I'm making sense because I'm driving myself mad trying to explain my point lmao.

 

[MaXenzie]

I think I'm not being clear here; I'm not talking strictly about IC - I'm disagreeing with the premise Lewis made, that because rebels have more avenues of roleplay and get more staff involvement and have no outward obligation to go out and partake in murdering cops (unless the cops come to them obviously) that it doesn't mean the entire cop faction is filled with uninspired bad-faith actors.

To stand out and get called a "good roleplayer" you have to make your stuff a lot more obvious than rebels do, work with less freedom and hope your faction duties don't get you dragged on the forums - and even then, 99% of people won't know who the fuck your character is, but they'll damn well remember if you happen to be in an APC that mows down a group of roleplayers, however justified.

If cops were given the same blank slate and attention from staff as rebels are it'd make a world of difference.

I hope I'm making sense because I'm driving myself mad trying to explain my point lmao.

combine are faceless thugs first, characters second
it comes with being forced to wear identical clothes, and being encouraged to act in identical ways

 

[Ron]

combine are faceless thugs first, characters second
it comes with being forced to wear identical clothes, and being encouraged to act in identical ways

I'd like to point out that we recently introduced the division system which includes the XRAY division who act as the medical and "humanitarian" part of the faction. They aren't required to wear a mask and are in charge of handling refugees and such. I'll admit that it's weird for me to see a maskless cop as a citizen or as a cop having played the setting for so long, but it's gotten good reception and people seem to enjoy the avenue of roleplay it's opened up.