In Half-Life 2, it's explicitly outlined that the members of the Civil Protection force go home and lead normal lives after their shifts. Voice lines like "Your wife doesn't like me, does she?". We've stripped this away and made their lives in the force constant and unchanging with no real family contact.
Have them contact family then, maybe. It's fine to have some time of privacy or whatever, even be off-duty around as long as, well you know, they don't show they're CPs or whatever and if they do it's at their own risk (just like when rebels have 2 sides, the city clothing and the rebel clothing, and don't want to be caught switching so they can stay undercover).
But having CPs on-duty walking around unmasked in public looks completely off to what people who come to the server are expecting. If you're working Dispatch will force you to have your uniform, that's what I mean.
personally, i'd like to see adaptations of
@bjfgpkqkdmtnspwndsjt 's take on the civil protection: more comparable to modern police forces with much more leeway for brutality, corruption, and other such things.
imo, anything short of explicitly going rogue, i.e running off to the slums or actively assisting rebels, shouldn't be hidden behind an application.
Completely agree.
I don't think Half-Life 2 will go away because we take away the tools that let CP's be really unpleasant to deal with IC and OOC.
But CPs, regardless of what you're offering, will be unpleasant to deal with IC. They're supposed to be, they have more power than the rest of citizens and can do shady shit too.
My point is, do not remove that IC feeling. If CPs stop being antagonists completely there will be no sense of conflict between Humanity and the Union to its lowest level: The city life.
Allow them to have a life outside of their CP duties, wearing normal clothes and such, even if the have a tracker band when they do so or whatever so they don't go off-grid, I don't know that's up to people to decide, but when on-duty Dispatch should be professional and make sure they all are uniformed. If then, in the shadows, they want to unmask themselves in front of their foes, then that's their issue.
Essentially this:
The idea that the theme of HL2 needs to be stripped away in order to fix an easily solvable predicament within the parameters outlined by the existing universe is outlandishly unfounded. People aren't joining for a custom setting, the majority is connecting for HL2. And in order to make HL2 a functioning roleplay medium we must fill in the blank spaces and occasionally take liberties in order to benefit the server as a whole. We don't need to blotch out the name in order to make things fun and we don't need to lunge away from the game too far to add intrigue.
