Arrest VOIP

 I have seen many people offer ways to incentivize arrests, many of them are good, I feel that quite a few of them disrupt the formula of the game in a way that would mean everyone who arrests will have almost the same type of strategic advantage, no matter player skill. A simple, easy, and tactically variable way to rework arrests, would be disallowing each team from hearing their arrested teammates, and providing negative xp multipliers on deaths, and not on arrests.

 To me, intruder has always been about two things: communication, and turning tables. These changes would easily make arrests fit with this style. Everyone knows the issue with current arrests. There is virtually no incentive for it, and very much an incentive to arrest and then immediately kill, as an arrested enemy could easily warn other enemies of their location, defeating the whole point of an arrest. Not to mention even if that wasn’t a problem, it grants no other advantage, it would simply be death by another name.

 Not hearing arrested teammates would easily eliminate the first problem, as they couldn’t call for help, and would open up a plethora of options for the person arresting and arrested, such as interrogation, trickery, misdirection, and distraction.

 The second half, although seemingly very small, would drastically change the game.

 When I say negative xp multiplier, I don’t mean a simple subtractive multiplier. In my ideal implementation, it would be divisive, meaning you couldn’t lose more points than you would enter with, no matter what, everyone walks out a rich man, but some leave richer than others. This would incentivize being arrested rather than being killed, which would open the door for strategies I couldn’t even imagine. There would be possibility for surrenders for those who know they can’t win, there would be faked surrenders, arrested suspects could plead for their life instead of just pressing the space bar five times and not losing anything. The options are limitless and overall more freeing.

 But the real magic comes with these together, in the world of intruder, arresting is simply an afterthought, most new players will almost never know this mechanic even exists unless they happened upon it by accident while trying to shoot a fallen person while unarmed. With both of these systems, arrests would become a goal superseding kills. And whereas dying just puts you out of the game, an arrested party would still be a benefit to their team, with things like misdirection, lying, and just wating time for the enemy team. This personally feels like the right direction for arrests to go.