11-04-2013, 07:17 PM
I'm going to say straight up that I think miscreants are a really bad idea that only encourages really awful play. The only times I've seen miscreants doing anything worth noticing it's because I have to yell at someone over it. The concept of incentivizing jail time and non-murder punishments for criminal behavior by making some incidents of it non-traitory is fine, until it starts to pan out in play. To players, they look like under-equipped traitors if they're doing violent things (and are thus killed), awful players (in which case they're 'accidentally' hurled out the airlock or stuffed into the brig forever), or people itching for a ban (because their goals entail griefing despite IM saying he'd ban you for griefing as a miscreant). To admins, we're torn between punishing people for overstepping boundaries that are only half there, or keeping our hands off and watching security rip itself apart over a nonissue and get a bucket of adminhelps. Not to mention the conception "oh, he's probably a miscreant" making "oh he's probably a traitor" syndrome even worse - the ignoring or excusing of awful behavior, assuming the player is in the right, only to find out at the end of the round that they weren't. They often complain in OOC but don't always adminhelp, which leads to the player getting away with stupid bullshit again.
I like the idea of giving security more crimes to deal with, or trying to dial back the usual first response from "murder or gib", but I haven't seen anything good coming out of this.
I like the idea of giving security more crimes to deal with, or trying to dial back the usual first response from "murder or gib", but I haven't seen anything good coming out of this.