If you ever played MPs for any prolonged amount of time, or happened to observe someone requesting an appeal, or were brigged yourself, you might have noticed that appeals exist in this weird limbo…
The problem with the appeals.
Appeals take time to fill out: by the defendant, by the Military Police, by the handler. By the time the latter finally showes up in brig, 15 or 20 minutes have passed (if not more). Keep in mind that as stated by the ML, it is the best if Handler goes through and checks everything: Witness testimonies, suspect’s testimony, all the evidence, etc… It takes time, and I never saw anyone actually do that.
I have about 80 MP rounds in total, and I have never seen anyone get their appeal processed in time. People literally get their appeal approved/denied with 30 seconds left on the timer, or not processed at all.
So in the end we have a genuinely well thought out appeal system, which rarely works due to fast-paced nature of the game.
I think there’s isn’t much that can be done to fix the problem, but I think there’s a way to patch it a bit at least, and make appeal process more convenient for everyone in the process.
Make so hitting the cell timer (with an AJS file in it) with an appeal form turn this:
Into this:
What is pictured above is probably the most barebone interpretation of the idea. The Jurisdictional Automated System autofill the defendant’s name & charges. The latter helps when MPs send the appeal to provost and forget to state the charges (happens constantly), which is very important.
The arresting officer part is debatable, since the one putting in the charges is not always the arresting officer. This can be solved by simply adding another field above the “Arresting officer” part, named “Processing officer/Prisoner processed by:” and add a remark of leaving the “arresting officer” part empty if it’s the same as the processing one.
Additionally, Some other things can be filled in as well. For example, the evidence that was logged in, and the witnesses. Usually because the incident report file is inside a runnig timer, the handler can’t look at this info. Maybe even add the incident description as well.
All of this would make filling out an appeal massively easier for the MPs. They’ll need to fill out less, and sometimes, if the incident report is summarised adequately with supporting evidence, nothing at all.