Prison

Yes, I agree. Maybe not a ban because that's too stiff and harsh. But maybe an ajail sentence that goes up depending upon offense of idling out your sentence. Prison should be enforced just as much as regular roleplay is. Prison is still a In-Character environment, just as much as Ocean Flats or Juniper Hollows.

I'd leave it up to the playerbase. If there's a consistent amount of 100 to 200 players online, in every timezone, then definitely that's needed.

I think the current prison sentences in the penal code are fine. Having to spend weeks in prison with your character would be awful for a lot of players, especially for the newer ones. Often times role playing is a learning process for beginners and they often get into trouble through trial and error. If a newbie player gets into trouble and ends up arrested, one of his early interactions being to be locked in prison for weeks would be really off putting. I don’t think they’d return to the server. Plus on top of that, any system that promotes being offline or having to play on another character, is a flawed system. You need to cater to what the majority want and what works in practice. Your average player is going to want to play on their character and have fun, not sit offline or make more characters. And usually the people who suggest week-long sentences are the same people who have never role played in a prison environment for prolonged periods in the first place. And for the others that have, they know prison is a niche in the role play world and will never be everybody’s cup of tea, no matter how many educational walls of text they post of how fulfilling or important it is. I really think the current prison sentences are fine for a new server and asking for gigantic sentences at this point makes you look a bit pretentious.

@Bospy, I don’t know how the “full sentence offline, half sentence in-game” idea will work unless sentences are really long. If my sentence is 14 hours, and my character gets arrested, I can just go to sleep right now, go to work in the morning, and by the time I’m back it would’ve ran out and I wouldn’t even care I was in prison. Only way it works is if you make the sentences really long, which will bore players or force the offline/alt thing. Or if the offline period is extended to be really long, which will again promote being offline for a long time and not playing or will force players to bite the bullet and ride it out in-game which will make players just do really long sentences because they want to get back to what they were doing before like factions or playing with their buddies. And if you’re gonna have players do sentences in-game, just keep the manageable ones that are currently in place. The compromise in my opinion isn’t to have the “full sentence offline, half sentence in-game” idea, it’s to have normal sentences your average player can handle and then those of them that enjoy prison role play can just request extra time and stay there longer.

Judging by the replies so far, you people would be hella surprised to hear my opinion on this whole prison thing. I'll keep it to myself though! 

Truly a topic worthy of discussion nonetheless. It's quite the hit-or-miss though, since very few of us know how the BA-RP prison system is going to play out.

2 hours ago, Simeon said:

I think the current prison sentences in the penal code are fine. Having to spend weeks in prison with your character would be awful for a lot of players, especially for the newer ones. Often times role playing is a learning process for beginners and they often get into trouble through trial and error. If a newbie player gets into trouble and ends up arrested, one of his early interactions being to be locked in prison for weeks would be really off putting. I don’t think they’d return to the server. Plus on top of that, any system that promotes being offline or having to play on another character, is a flawed system. You need to cater to what the majority want and what works in practice. Your average player is going to want to play on their character and have fun, not sit offline or make more characters. And usually the people who suggest week-long sentences are the same people who have never role played in a prison environment for prolonged periods in the first place. And for the others that have, they know prison is a niche in the role play world and will never be everybody’s cup of tea, no matter how many educational walls of text they post of how fulfilling or important it is. I really think the current prison sentences are fine for a new server and asking for gigantic sentences at this point makes you look a bit pretentious.

 

@Bospy, I don’t know how the “full sentence offline, half sentence in-game” idea will work unless sentences are really long. If my sentence is 14 hours, and my character gets arrested, I can just go to sleep right now, go to work in the morning, and by the time I’m back it would’ve ran out and I wouldn’t even care I was in prison. Only way it works is if you make the sentences really long, which will bore players or force the offline/alt thing. Or if the offline period is extended to be really long, which will again promote being offline for a long time and not playing or will force players to bite the bullet and ride it out in-game which will make players just do really long sentences because they want to get back to what they were doing before like factions or playing with their buddies. And if you’re gonna have players do sentences in-game, just keep the manageable ones that are currently in place. The compromise in my opinion isn’t to have the “full sentence offline, half sentence in-game” idea, it’s to have normal sentences your average player can handle and then those of them that enjoy prison role play can just request extra time and stay there longer.

Why would it be awful, though? In real-life, sentences would be years long. You wouldn't see the criminal for a while. Sentences in weeks would be a lot more "realistic."

Depending on what the donation scheme will be, new players who get imprisoned very early on should be able to freely name change or make an alt anyway. While I do understand it might demotivate somebody who just joined to be imprisoned for weeks, it has to be fair for everybody. It isn't really an excuse. They committed a crime ICly and their character is imprisoned. Time shouldn't be adjusted to new players but all RPers. 

So I would just encourage new players not to commit crimes so soon. They know what they're doing, again in real-life they would be sentenced for years. It's not fair if they were back a few hours later. 

And also, I strongly disagree, it's way more fun to make more characters than sit through hours AFKing or stuck in prison because you have to spend your time online. At least you can do something else without being forced to be online if you want to play with that character again. Time would go down offline, players would have a lot of other solutions to spend their time in-game, on an alt etc, and there wouldn't be any AFKers.

Sentence time should range from one to ten hours in total while you can get ten hours only by committing terrorism.

I don't think DOC faction can be active from the beginning, player base won't be high enough for so many factions, it would be nice to see it when player bade reaches stable 150 players

I don't think new players are going to enjoy starting over, even if name changes are free, just because you think imprisoning their character for weeks and weeks  is somehow "more fair".

We want people to become invested in their character and the journey they take, yet shutting them out of it for three weeks will do the opposite of that.

It's also often the case that new players don't always know how easy it is to be caught committing a robbery, and punishing them by forcing them to start a new character or spend a month in a niche roleplay environment isn't right.

It'd be good if people spent more time explaining what might make prison roleplay work for them instead of how much they want to serve their time offline. 

4 hours ago, William_Schwertner said:

I don't think new players are going to enjoy starting over, even if name changes are free, just because you think imprisoning their character for weeks and weeks  is somehow "more fair".

 

We want people to become invested in their character and the journey they take, yet shutting them out of it for three weeks will do the opposite of that.

 

It's also often the case that new players don't always know how easy it is to be caught committing a robbery, and punishing them by forcing them to start a new character or spend a month in a niche roleplay environment isn't right.

 

It'd be good if people spent more time explaining what might make prison roleplay work for them instead of how much they want to serve their time offline. 

Why would new players need to "start over" every time they go to prison? Just wait it out as you would. You're not tied to RPing on one character, you can have alts, or namechange/CK if you don't want to do nothing for weeks. Also, players already feel punished with hourly based sentences. Many people feel as though it punishes the player more than the character.

Letting it decrease while offline as it should liberates players from being forced to be online. This is also a better compromise if a prison system is to be added since the player base wouldn't be as big. Also consider people RP in various time zones, and there are times where nobody is online. Only thing they would be able to do is AFK. For fairness of the player, time should go down while offline. Your character lives while you're offline. When somebody is imprisoned, they should be out the streets for a while, not be back merely a few hours later to do the same petty crimes!

Also, no way criminals would be released after spending a few hours in prison. First degree murders are life sentences or death penalty IRL, it should be that way in-game too. It's very unrealistic and impossible with US law for a character to be out in no less than a week for this type of murder, unless they escaped they would never be free again, I find this to encourage poor roleplay surrounding crime, as it creates this wrong idea that sentence times are a joke and no character can truly be imprisoned for good. People who get imprisoned can just find a time slot and idle until they're out. If you're roleplaying a criminal, you should be aware that your character might be punished for life, of for a very long time, so you can't just come back and do the same crimes the next day.

In California you can be imprisoned for up to 9 years for committing robbery. Your character would be in a niche environment for years as well in real-life. These are very serious crimes in real-life and shouldn't be reduced to just spending a few hours in prison, I don't find this to be a great roleplay system. (Especially in the IC Penal Code it is written in minutes. For a roleplay server this isn't serious!)

I'm gonna expound upon my old suggestion.

So, if we have day-long sentences, with a maximum of 3 or 4 days, we can have the hours decrease offline. If we also use the "halving" system, it encourages people to roleplay to shorten the general overall sentence. We could also incorporate work scripts to decrease the sentence as well - if you're doing a script job in the prison, such as delivering mail, working in the canteen, working in the workshop, and earning commissary, you earn points to an early release.

In addition to that, you make a parole system that paroles literally anyone so long as they haven't violated their parole in the past. If they've already served 50% of their time (or worked towards it), they can parole. The parole officers keep in touch for twice the time the prison sentence as initially meant to be. So if you were sentenced for 4 days, parole keeps in touch for 8. This way, there's an active parole component to the DOC and it encourages people to apply to the DOC. DOC is responsible entirely for apprehending parolees, up to and including breaching their house. Make them full-time peace officers with state authority but only for parolees on the outside and other criminals they witness. They won't patrol, but they will keep in touch with parolees when parolees are online. Make the parole system as inundated and full-up as possible so they have shit to do. This keeps people interested in DOC. Offer exterior work for DOC that is meaningful, community services, exterior operations, exterior investigations into gangs that supply prison gangs, etc.

So basically, we can have day-long sentences but the player can make an active effort to work down their sentence by hours or 30 minutes by doing script-based work in addition to parole. Let's say you work down half the sentence - the amount of work you do is incrementally decreased due to the fact you're nearing the end of your sentence, so instead of 30 it's 15 minutes or 5 minutes each cycle of work.

This shouldn't be difficult to script. And it'll provide a very interesting aspect for people joining DOC. Rather than DOC being the sub-par roleplayer faction, decent roleplayers will be attracted by the offers it presents. Directly mirror it to the real life CDCR. Let them have fugitive apprehension teams, work closely with other departments, and share information. People will definitely be attracted to that idea.

I think implementing a DOC faction should take second priority in terms of legal factions. As soon as the server launches and SFPD and SFFD are off the ground, start work on a SADCR faction.

No one is "forced to be online" per se; don't be absurd. 

People only need to be online to make progress with their characters, the same way they need to be online to earn money or to network with factions. Prison is an integral part of the criminal lifestyle and to circumvent it entirely is completely stupid. 

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"Also, no way criminals would be released after spending a few hours in prison. First degree murders are life sentences or death penalty IRL, it should be that way in-game too."

You're going to sap the joy out of the server before it's even launched. This is a roleplaying game where people can use their imagination to suspend their disbelief. Nobody treats the few hour sentences as 'in character'. You see characters die and reappear in neighbourhoods all the time, but we can deal with that the same way we can deal with imprisoned characters reappearing too. You're trying to imply an issue where there's never been one.

Some of the best factions on SAMP servers have grown out of prison. Prison can be a really great environment if it has the right support. A system where players don't have to log in to do time will seriously hamper prison factions.  

14 minutes ago, William_Schwertner said:

Some of the best factions on SAMP servers have grown out of prison. Prison can be a really great environment if it has the right support. A system where players don't have to log in to do time will seriously hamper prison factions.  

I'd argue the opposite - people who want to roleplay will go in-game and there's an incentive to go in-game with my system since you can shorten your sentence. The issue at other communities was that there were too many trolls in the prison and not enough staff management to prevent it. Prison roleplay would definitely benefit.

I had written a long response to your post but it somehow glitched and didn't save, oh well.

1 hour ago, William_Schwertner said:

No one is "forced to be online" per se; don't be absurd. 

 

People only need to be online to make progress with their characters, the same way they need to be online to earn money or to network with factions. Prison is an integral part of the criminal lifestyle and to circumvent it entirely is completely stupid. 

 

You're going to sap the joy out of the server before it's even launched. This is a roleplaying game where people can use their imagination to suspend their disbelief. Nobody treats the few hour sentences as 'in character'. You see characters die and reappear in neighbourhoods all the time, but we can deal with that the same way we can deal with imprisoned characters reappearing too. You're trying to imply an issue where there's never been one.

 

Some of the best factions on SAMP servers have grown out of prison. Prison can be a really great environment if it has the right support. A system where players don't have to log in to do time will seriously hamper prison factions.  

Yes, you're forced to be online for your character's sentence to go down, that's not an absurd thing to say.

You don't need to be in-game to progress your character. Time doesn't pause when you log off, your character doesn't magically freeze and hibernate when you /q.  It is implied they survive, go back to their home, eat and sleep when you're offline. Also, there are several things you can do to RP outside of the server. There is a World Wide Web section in the forums, allowing you to interact with other characters outside of the game and make new relations. There are the PD, FD and GOV websites, where your character can interact with faction members, ICly apply and legal faction members are generally expected to do forum paperwork, which is also entirely in-character. Of course, you need to be in-game to interact with the rest of the city but that's not the only way. Your character has a life when you're not there.

You'd be surprised but I have seen countless times people not RPing the prison sentences realistically. In the years I've RPed on SA-MP I've seen people roleplay having been to prison for quite literally the time in minutes, or people straight up voiding it even happened. I've encountered people who went to prison, and once released went back to RP with people as if nothing happened, when you log in once a day or every two days you wouldn't know if somebody has gone to prison while you were offline. People don't even age their characters when going to prison, there are people who've been to prison several times and still RP 25 years of age (since it is not enforced at all).

The Penal Code is literally written in minutes. It's not just "Robbery is punishable by 9 years of imprisonment (( 120 minutes ))" with OOC brackets to indicate the in-character time. The PC is entirely IC and yet it's written in minutes.

As for murder, it's only a 240 minutes jail time. In real-life first degree murder is a life imprisonment or capital punishment. There's no way anybody would be able to realistically get out of prison for murder after a few years, not at all. People caught for murder should be handed out life sentences, and if they wish to RP in prison forever, try to obtain parole somehow, CK and namechange, it should be up to them. 240 minutes is ridiculous and not realistic, if times are supposed to be OOC and it should be the real-life equivalent then people convicted of murder should be behind bars forever.

As for people dying and reappearing, that's a totally different issue. When a character is PKed, the person who is killed is supposed to forget everything that happened that caused their murder, and people who have witnessed the death are supposed to pretend this is another person who died and not them. Nobody is going to ICly interact with the person who just was PKed and talk about the murder. You can't join back the scene where you were just murdered, that's a rule in RP servers. I'm personally not a huge fan of PKs because it leads to people not valuing the lives of their characters, I think players who are killed by other characters should be automatically CKed (unless it was DM), but this is a totally different problem because prison is entirely in-character and you're supposed to roleplay having been to prison, otherwise there's no point having it at all.

The application of realism in your examples is totally inconsistent. If time can be served while you're offline because it's "realistic", then thirty year sentences can be introduced on the basis of realism too.

But it's hard to fathom where you stand on the idea because you're both complaining about prison roleplay and also talking about the need for people to spend months (or years???) in prison because of "realism."
 

The issues of character deaths and prison sentences are similar for reasons I've already made clear: they involve suspension of disbelief on the part of players, something everybody becomes quickly accustomed to doing. People might develop their 16-year-old to become a 25-year-old over the space of an OOC year, and everybody is fine with it. Time is hardly even talked about in character, in the same way people aren't talking about the eight car crashes a day they have, or the sudden shifts in weather, or characters vanishing into thin air...  Because, again, people can use their imagination and ignore (or at least get over) the strange discrepancies. 

You're so far off track with these completely arbitrary cries about what's realistic and what's not. If you don't like prison because you spend a lot of time AFK in a cell, just say that. Don't pretend it's to do with some wider argument about your roleplaying immersion. 

I support Bospy's idea of a compromise between offline and online countdowns. I also think dedicated prison roleplayers need as much support in terms of rules and supply chains as possible, since they're normally responsible for begetting good roleplay on the inside. Staff punishment of trolls in SACF would be a big help too. On other servers, serious prison roleplayers have been working in spite of the rules and it isn't healthy for roleplay.   

1 minute ago, William_Schwertner said:

The application of realism in your examples is totally inconsistent. If time can be served while you're offline because it's "realistic", then thirty year sentences can be introduced on the basis of realism too.

 

But it's hard to fathom where you stand on the idea because you're both complaining about prison roleplay and also talking about the need for people to spend months (or years???) in prison because of "realism."
 

The issues of character deaths and prison sentences are similar for reasons I've already made clear: they involve suspension of disbelief on the part of players, something everybody becomes quickly accustomed to doing. People might develop their 16-year-old to become a 25-year-old over the space of an OOC year, and everybody is fine with it. Time is hardly even talked about in character, in the same way people aren't talking about the eight car crashes a day they have, or the sudden shifts in weather, or characters vanishing into thin air...  Because, again, people can use their imagination and ignore (or at least get over) the strange discrepancies. 

 

You're so far off track with these completely arbitrary cries about what's realistic and what's not. If you don't like prison because you spend a lot of time AFK in a cell, just say that. Don't pretend it's to do with some wider argument about your roleplaying immersion. 

 

I support Bospy's idea of a compromise between offline and online countdowns. I also think dedicated prison roleplayers need as much support in terms of rules and supply chains as possible, since they're normally responsible for begetting good roleplay on the inside. Staff punishment of trolls in SACF would be a big help too. On other servers, serious prison roleplayers have been working in spite of the rules and it isn't healthy for roleplay.   

The point is that there has to be a line within realism and fun (because it's a game).

Yes people RP aging up quicker than IRL. However you can't just age up by 10 years in a single day, roleplaying 15 one day and 25 the other day. Admins who notice this will tell you not to do that. When it comes to prison times, let's say you go to prison for hit and run, realistically you can be in prison for 3 to 7 years. Let's say it was 3 weeks in prison with a better system. After three weeks you would age up by 5-10 years and it wouldn't be sudden. From an OOC point of view, it wouldn't be too realistic to assume three weeks is several IC years, three weeks is long enough time from an OOC point of view to accept this as being several years for the sake of not having seen a player for a while that it is believable. However with the current system if you get jailed for murder, in just 4 hours you can be back in the streets. Four hours. When such crimes would be life sentences at this point. It's absurd.

Characters vanishing into thin air or sudden weather changes they aren't decent examples, they're not supposed to be taken ICly, for instance people RP people who crash or /q simply leaving the scene and going back home. As for frequent car crashes, again this is plausible over the course in a day than a 20-year imprisonment can be rushed in a single day. There's an obvious line. You can't equal a few car crashes a day to prison times which IRL last several years.

We all have different opinions and this back and forth is not going to stop, so let's just end it.

4 hours ago, Neaksy said:

Yes people RP aging up quicker than IRL. However you can't just age up by 10 years in a single day, roleplaying 15 one day and 25 the other day. Admins who notice this will tell you not to do that. 

Generally speaking, character age has always been up to the player. No one's gonna force you to eventually roleplay growing older (or dying of natural cause lol), and no one's gonna keep track of how quick you age if you choose to do so - that's just bogus. Even an admin wouldn't care if you do that, roleplaying 15 one day and 25 the next. Sure, it's not proper roleplay per se, but as long as you're following server rules and not getting some kind of IC advantage out of this pseudo-OOC practice, then no one's gonna bother you. In fact, you can choose to just roleplay around a certain age forever, if that's what you like - seriously, no one's gonna complain about it.

Roleplaying that you have grown younger from what you've previously been is not allowed though, for obvious reasons, since you'd be heavily impacting the roleplay experience of others. Out of my five humble years in SA-MP roleplay though I've only heard of one such case - some guy was in a shoot-out, roleplaying an adult, and he happened to get away from the cops but was eventually caught, and when asked for his age he replied that he's less than 10. That's obviously rule-breaking, since he's trying to get a shorter sentence, all whilst declining that he doesn't match the wanted appearance because of a supposed age difference.

That's a whole other topic though so I won't go into any more details. Just thought I'd share. I kinda lost track of the thread, but I've seen many like this one in the past. Yeah, it's obviously a game and should be treated as one. Despite the allure of realism appearing nice and pretty on paper, at the end of the day we're all here to have a fun time and enjoy ourselves - yeah, violence can get out of hand at times, people murdering each other every week, but we can't just force people into prison for weeks or months. If you're into prison roleplay yourself though then that's cool, I've tried it out myself as well a couple of times - what we as experienced players have to keep in mind however is that the general population of SA-MP does not play GTA:SA with the intent of roleplaying in prison 24/7, and that's completely fine.

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The issue at other communities was that there were too many trolls in the prison and not enough staff management to prevent it.

Ah, I can assure you, there is absolute no way to prevent that, regardless of a staff team's capabilities and size. Improper behavior in prison such as constant AFKing or trolling can be stopped temporarily with ease, yes, even heavily discouraged, but admin intervention is and will never be capable of stopping that completely. Again, you have to realize that the people logging in-game are expecting to play Grand Theft Auto, not Prison Architect. Some of them enjoy prison roleplay, yeah, I'm one of those people, but the majority are here for the action and adrenaline - they get out of line when they don't get their fix. It's unfortunate, but that's how things are.

5 hours ago, Conspiracy said:

 

Generally speaking, character age has always been up to the player. No one's gonna force you to eventually roleplay growing older (or dying of natural cause lol), and no one's gonna keep track of how quick you age if you choose to do so - that's just bogus. Even an admin wouldn't care if you do that, roleplaying 15 one day and 25 the next. Sure, it's not proper roleplay per se, but as long as you're following server rules and not getting some kind of IC advantage out of this pseudo-OOC practice, then no one's gonna bother you. In fact, you can choose to just roleplay around a certain age forever, if that's what you like - seriously, no one's gonna complain about it.

 

Roleplaying that you have grown younger from what you've previously been is not allowed though, for obvious reasons, since you'd be heavily impacting the roleplay experience of others. Out of my five humble years in SA-MP roleplay though I've only heard of one such case - some guy was in a shoot-out, roleplaying an adult, and he happened to get away from the cops but was eventually caught, and when asked for his age he replied that he's less than 10. That's obviously rule-breaking, since he's trying to get a shorter sentence, all whilst declining that he doesn't match the wanted appearance because of a supposed age difference.

I've seen a few instances where a player would jump their character age from pre-teen to an adult or adult to an old man and being told to age back because they shouldn't age up so much so quickly without proper character development. I guess this varies from admin to admin but RPing with somebody who's one age one day and jumps to a much older age the day later isn't a desirable situation. It shouldn't be a rule but part of the roleplay etiquette.

Longer sentences that gets served even when you're offline would be the way to go. 

It's obvious that if you decide to roleplay a gang member/ a criminal or anything else that goes against the law, you are more than likely to visit prison here and there. Sentences lengths should be at top: 14400 minutes which is 24 hours in total. Obviously the players would not play for 24 hours straight, so I think it's fair. (Only for a felony, and depends on what kind of felony, of course)

On 12/6/2017 at 11:55 AM, Neaksy said:

 

 

Mate, not meaning to offend you but you come across as an elitist that wants to enforce elitism on others and that is a bad thing. It does seem to me that you take this game excessively serious, judging by your fairly long essays with formal language and a lot of detail that we honestly do not need, along with your opinion that people should put so much effort into a game. We are here to have fun really, not make this a second real life.

I highly disagree on making sentences way too long (days / weeks), but instead we should just encourage people to RP their sentences realistically in length, and prevent people from being silly about it (e.g. going to kill the cop that arrested you for armed robbery after you get out of jail). Essentially speaking, getting prisoned should mean by rules that the character ages up and that revenge on whoever was involved will not always still be so strong in the character's mind. I think the penal code should explain the sentences in months / years, and we should have an OOC notice of how long a month / year is in OOC time. Like.. 1 month could be 10 minutes, 1 year could be 120 minutes.

Absolutely agreeing with potential capital punishment or life sentence on murderers, enforced CKs by admins when needed, in severe cases.

 And yes, time should run out twice as fast when online, and normal when offline.

On 12/5/2017 at 10:13 AM, Nemo said:

Sentence time should range from one to ten hours in total while you can get ten hours only by committing terrorism.

 

I don't think DOC faction can be active from the beginning, player base won't be high enough for so many factions, it would be nice to see it when player bade reaches stable 150 players

Opening day is going to be 250-300+ easily. Were you around for the beta? It hit 150 in a matter of minutes.

And more people were outside complaning and begging for them to open more slots. and plus the forums are 100-200+ people online daily by the hour. A DOC faction can start right now and will fill up in days.