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Disconnection and Forensics Improvements
Bad Internet? Your characters are narcoleptics!

This is a bit of a two-part suggestions which vaguely related to one another and I felt better in including them as a package than splitting them into two.

First is improvements on quitting and dc'ing, which is a bit of a two-parter, itself.

Firstly, the inclusion of 'quit' rooms. Rooms that, if you quit in, you despawn. Apartments, cubes, coffins. The reason I think this would be beneficial is two-fold. Abuse of people's characters while they're not about is a tad lame, it's not often but we've had cases of people "no life" following people, waiting for them to quit, then snapping their neck. The second issue is the 'coma' issue. ICly, most people do not act as if their character sleeps twenty hours a day, they're out and about, but if you, lets say, have a character as a roommate, this becomes a bit harder to reason as they can see you there. Thirdly, is that I don't believe that, if people are having IRL issues or need a break from the game, they should be punished for it. As it works, at the moment, you'll get given the boot and often start sleeping outside your apartment, if rent goes unpaid. With a QUIT room system, that character could just enter the game right outside the apartment, if they happen to quit in an apartment, and go with the rent unpaid.

Furthermore, alongside this, I think should be the removal of people just falling unconscious if they lose connection. It's bothersome, it's silly, it incentivises abuse even if we all play by a code of honor to not, it shouldn't be a thing to begin with. Now, of course, you might *want* your character to fall asleep and I think that's totally fair. But, as it stands, I believe that if you DC, your character should just stand there, idle, as normal. Add a sleep command that works as current quit does and puts your character 'to sleep', this can be used for a variety of reasons. Have it so that if a character stays asleep in a quit room for over a day, it'll auto 'quit despawn' them to mimick them going about their life.

PART DEUX: Forensics

Forensics is in an odd place and isn't all that useful. It's another case of development being obsessed with combat and leaving so many skills feeling half-baked, or utterly empty.

What I propose is the ability to use tech to give a bit of useful, OOC info. Info that, of course, translates to IC. Things such as setting up 'spy cams' outside of someone's apartment allowing a person with forensics to later 'retrieve the tape' having the game grant them different degrees of info, such as when they logged in during different days, hours played, the like. Set up of these devices would use one of the various tech skills, of course. Aside from someone's apartment, planting a tracker on someone or their vehicle could present similar advantages. This grants other skills an interesting niche in data gathering and makes hitting a mark a lot less than 'time to just sit outside someone's apartment'.

There should, obviously, be advantages to getting inside someone's home/you should be able to tell when a roomie is about (you live together, after all). In a quit room, there should be a command to see who's logged off there and when they logged off. Useful for someone to know if their roommate is gone for a lengthy period of time by noticing they haven't been around in days or weeks, and useful for sleuths too.

Just to be clear, most methods of harming a player who is disconnected are impossible. You can't necksnap someone who's logged out. If you drop a disconnected player in the sewers or into a room filled with radiation you're in for a bad time and probably catching a ban.
The majority of the forensic tools you mention exist but in different forms. Tracking beacons, motion detectors, and surveillance microphones can be used monitor people but the skill set needed is a lot less common so the route of least resistance is often taken.
@ReeferMadness

Those do not work as I'm recommending they do. Please re-read the post. The whole point is to give Forensics the ability to 'review recordings' to acquire vital data that otherwise requires someone to be chronically online. Cameras exist, yes, as do motion detectors. For them to be useful, you need to be actively surveilling them. That isn't interesting and doesn't prioritise skill usage. That's the reason they're not massively used, not the setup skill required

As someone who has seen huge surveillance network abused pretty extensively - I don't think being able to capture unlimited log data while offline is viable in any regard. Now, if these systems wrote to e-memory modules with an option to cease writing when full or overwrite themselves - that would be a solid sanity check...but also none of this has anything to do with forensics.

Digital forensics largely encompasses the recovery of deleted data or analysis thereof. This would be the purview of technicians.

Firstly: tech skills are already used for the setting up of the surveillance devices. Part of good game design is realizing that sometimes sacrifices have to be made in the realm of "realism". You want to spread out very strong capabilities throughout several skills, especially in a game with a big social focus, requiring you to seek out others to assist you. You either have to spread between both forensics and tech skills to set up and analyze data, which in turn means you're not focusing on other vital skills. You can further see this concept in my 'custom armours' thread, the idea that custom armour could present a new, interesting niche for non-combat skills, needing them to identify if a piece of equipment is armoured. Meaning that full combat characters require more-and-more the assistence of others.

Secondly: forensics is currently already used for 'tracking'. It's less forensics and more of a general 'investigation' skill. Digital forensics isn't what we're talking about, that's the purview of the grid, which isn't a discussion in this topic. This is watching hours upon hours of recordings, extrapolating, and correlating, which is not at all what a digital forensics tech does.