I could not disagree with this idea more. MPs already abuse their limited agency. You notice how when MPs aren’t present at roundstart, there’s almost never a need to deputize someone to deal with crimes? And yet, when you have MPs, there will often be several people arrested. Do marines have some kind of internal programming that makes them commit crimes when MPs come out of cryo? I doubt it. MPs (much like real cops lol) instigate crimes and then solve them. The issue is that the average round just does not include all that many crimes. Most MP rounds should be boring, but when people get bored they create their own fun, and that often comes at the cost of others. This is anti-fun and can also cause balance issues when half a dozen marines and/or a spec are sitting in the brig because an MP got bored. Giving MPs permission to grief with only arrest as a consequence would be fucking disastrous.
I also don’t think you need a WL for MP shit. Just start jobbanning MPs who are dicks. Regardless of the circumstances imo. You can put it in the roundstart warning. “Hey, if you’re a dick as an MP, even if you’re technically allowed to be, you’re going to be jobbanned.” Then, people ahelp, ya point to the sign, and the dick gets jobbanned. Problem solved. You don’t need marine law to figure out if someone is being a dick, just a little common sense.
Genuinely nothing in this reply has anything to do with this post. I’m going to go through it line by line because people dropping inflammatory remarks about how they aren’t happy somebody got arrested that one time is a common response to any policy discussion about MPs, which often ruins the conversation both for people who are for and against whatever the proposed idea is.
Ignoring the fact that people absolutely do call for MPs on lowpop when there are very few or none, and that a large chunk of arrests are the result of calls made by a person who has been wronged requesting MPs, the phrase “MPs already abuse their agency” is sort of backwards in concept. They don’t have the agency to make an arrest when no crime has been committed, just to decide whether a minor offense is worth arresting someone over. Generally, when I play MP, I let most minor crimes go, but that’s absolutely not something you are entitled to and to call not giving everyone that discretion it an abuse of power is ignorant at best and purposefully derailing the discussion at worst.
Aside from comparing someone not letting you get off scot free for pretend crimes in a video game to real police misconduct with real victims and how that’s lowkey weird, people should have the self control not to fight their coworkers for standing in delta prep (which is the typical example of arrest baiting. I know you have your own but we’ll get to that).
The crux of this paragraph and the specific use of six arrested Marines comes from this user’s experiences in Round 28238 (he also edited out a bunch of stuff about it that was in his original post). Marked in the discord as Ben Wyatt with the same profile picture, they later deleted all of their messages on the topic (though people’s replies to them persist). You can read up on it at your leisure, one of my LRC messages is here. The short version is, a handful of Marines committed a major crime which MPs are oocly required to arrest them for and that left Charlie squad undermanned.
Importantly, no MP was sanctioned under rule 11 (as far as I know) despite two staff members observing the round because the law wasn’t broken during it (except for one goober who took his armor off during a foot pursuit). This user’s experiences, while obviously not ideal, really give no reason to his disagreement other than “I had a bad round last night. Everything must be bad forever”.
If anything, the events of this round would’ve gone smoother for him if the MPs hadn’t been required by server rules to prosecute every offender.
Clearly inflammatory and meant to inspire an emotional reaction, but let’s dig into what he’s actually saying. In the context of the rest of his comment, this reads like “not only should MPs be required to follow the law, but they and they alone should have a clause allowing them to be job-banned for doing things that someone (a staff member in practice) subjectively decides is ‘being a dick’”. We’ve previously covered how griefing is still a rule a number of times. This is already a thing.
It’s important for people reading this post who may not play MP or interact with them often to know how many responses to this post are a more politely phrased version of this. Discussions on everything from Marine Law to MP balance are constantly derailed by “Someone broke the law and got arrested this one round, then Marines lost. Remove MPs right now even though management said that’s not happening and job ban everyone who doesn’t let specialists do whatever they want” style replies.
I’ve quite literally never once been arrested by an MP in my history playing this game. What I have seen, over and over again, is MPs intentionally causing trouble so that they can have a more active role in the round. This change would encourage that, which I’m against. I edited my post because there was stuff in there that was irrelevant to my point and I didn’t want to bring up specific issues. You directed me here in that last round chat, and you’re upset I’m disagreeing with your “solution”.
Anyway, as I said, you can be perfectly in line with the rules, and still be a dick. There are plenty of MPs who are fine with their round being boring and hang around and actually wait for crimes to be committed before doing something. There are also a handful of MPs who really enjoy the process of arresting someone and do anything in their power to manufacture situations where they can arrest someone. Giving them permission to ignore ML in order to do more of that would be awful.
I also really don’t appreciate the strawmanning. Your entire reply is “he said this but he actually means this and I don’t like that”. MPs already cause a lot of friction within the playerbase, MPs roleplaying dirty cops trying to frame each other, or ignoring crimes because they see their meta-buddies, or any other of a million things that would now be possible without OOC consequences would make this so much worse. I’ll give you that I could have worded my last paragraph better, but it pretty much comes down to “I think MPs oughta be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.” The swearing was unnecessary.
I’ve been watching this thread but I’m going to chime in.
There are 10000% times when people need to be deputized and people want MP’s. There are plenty of times when survivors come up and are menaces and guess what? No MPs. There are plenty of times when marines are shitters, but guess what? No MP’s. There is an honest to god need for MP’s.
Furthermore. Yes. There are MP’s who are absolute SHITTERS.
I think the biggest point I can point to on this was a round a few months ago where i had two NEW MPs wake up and start talking about torturing and kidnapping the CL
I was the CMP, I instantly told them off, and then ahelped it when they kept going.
But you know what? BOth of them were bwoinked, and the CL got a lawyer AND security team and we got some INSANELY awesome RP out of it where I was bargining in the conference room.
You say that when people are bored they create their own fun, and it comes at the cost of others.
There are numerous survivor mains and shipside mains who will do this. And they aren’t all MPs. And they will grief the shit out of shipside people.
Last night? Someone kidnapped someone into the maintence tunnels and tortured them, and there were no MPs, so the kidnappee had to break into the CiC (with a shotgun? IIRC) and hide in there with the Captain. (Poor Zion)
People intentionally cause trouble, people constantly hate on MP’s, people constantly ATTACK MP’s and use any excuse they can to get in trouble.
MP’s are human too (as much as everyone likes to pretend they aren’t)
And you know what? Plenty of MP’s get in trouble for being shitters. But also, if people weren’t dealt with by MPs…
More notes, more warnings, more assorted problems.
I agreed with the Thesis. I think MP’s should have more flexibiltiy.Because guess what? Shitter MP’s do get banned.
Shitter marines are allowed to keep being shitter marines, and people shipside who get bored and make their own fun need to be dealt with instead of involving staff, or taking away the ONE CiC member.
To clarify, I think we all can agree building a Maintenance tunnels bar harms no one. However, kidnapping a person and dragging them to the Bar would not be kosher.
Correct.
I am all for shipside fun. I love the Bars, the restaurants, the fun things that don’t negatively impact other people.
Let me clarify. It CAN come at the cost of others.
But there are also the people who break in, steal Jones, who hack doors, steal CMP headsets, fuck with the brig, terrorize the QM and other people.
And I think I can safely say most staff/CiC players don’t want to have to deal with those people.
I absolutely agree. Again, I’ve said nothing along the lines of “all MPs are evil” or “remove MPs permanently”. All I’m saying is that removing ML compliance from MPs would drastically increase the already present OOC conflicts that arise because of MPs. MPs roleplaying being corrupt, intentionally griefing, false arrests, etc. would be a nightmare.
Got 'em, boys; hit them with that FTFP and NOD double-whammy. Let’s force them to read SOP while in the brig while we’re at it.
That’s something else I really dislike; I’m OOC obligated to arrest my coworkers if I know they did something stupid like above. I per ML and asking staff in ahelp cannot Not do it if I have an awareness that it happened. Also part of why I don’t enjoy MP much anymore.
I don’t have anything further to add about what I would add/remove/disagree about adding/removing, just want to comment that we do have Spirit of the Law to use against rulesy types and yet it remains extremely difficult to actually have it have OOC consequences (or at least ones that don’t take 5 years?). It’s kind of a sorry state that the only way that a lot of rulesy people get caught up is when they butt heads with someone who is even MORE rulesy. (I guess to Duncan’s point about staff variability in how mandatory ML compliance complaints are handled)
Granted, seeing a red beret is like a sleeper activation for a number of marines (delta prep fr). Animosity is always sort of going to exist between marines and MPs even if we loosened up having to arrest people for stuff we think is fine or trivial because so many people soured rounds before.
Side thoughts
Contrary to Ben, I actually wouldn’t know what to do short of removing MPs to fix that lol
Also i want geeves’ gear resprite :c more soul, less tacticool