The whole reason the lethal payouts were reduced in the past was to lessen the incentive for police officers to lethal civilians because they felt they were being overused. While I feel that the current lethal rules are good the way they are in terms of when officers can automatically lethal such as unreachable locations, shooting from benches, 1 minute to restart etc... I do feel that there are many situations where lethal force is used when it should not. Misuse of lethals should be a more severe punishment and or the ability to vote for lethals should be only Sgt+ or alternatively only corporals voting when no Sgt+ is on the server.
On the topic of civilians losing their loadouts when being lethaled, I find that entire argument complete nonsense. When you buy a loadout you are taking the risk that you will lose the loadout when you lose the fight. Once you get into a fight regardless of who you are fighting whether it be a civilan, bounty hunter, or police officer you losing the fight is the same outcome. You losing your loadout. The fact that you "got lethaled" by a cop has nothing to do with the fact that you are losing your loadout. Most of the time not only are you taking the risk of using the loadout you purchased but the civ is also purposely putting themselves in a situation where they are going to be engaged by police officers. For instance bank, fed, store robberies, attacking an hq, committing a prison break etc... Even if you get downed instead of lethaled, if the cops get you your still losing your loadout. If you end up getting lethaled solo with only a 5k bounty then you either put yourself into a position where the cop had no choice but to lethal you or the cop abused lethals. If the latter is the case then report the officer through the proper channels and it will be dealt with.
The real issue is that many civilians are constantly putting themselves in positions that force or heavily encourage the police officers to lethal them with the sole purpose of having their bounty cleared. There are many ways to do this including but not limited to, fighting on bank roof, ATM roof, or unreachable at bank, shooting from benches on helicopters, turning yourself in or engaging cops with 1 minute to restart, firing from unreachable locations, shooting from houses, and towers such as solar towers by airHQ chop-shop. The cop payout for lethals has already been reduced to the point that you might as well not get paid at all. Mechanics are in place that allow rebels to commit any amount of crimes they want and easily get full pardons. Yes I am aware there are ways to catch some of these criminals without the use of lethals such as using helicopters to reach players on roofs or unreachable locations but these options require an orca which is very expensive and they most often dont work either due to incompetent officers or too many heavily armed rebels. The point being that lethals should not be a way out of your crimes. Like I said earlier the entire "oh but im already losing my loadout so I deserve a pardon" makes no logical sense.
While I dont agree with the current revive system as it is and I certainly think it could be improved, it has been the same way for a long time and it isn't a huge problem. The most simple answer to this problem in my opinion is to simply remove both the payout and the pardon from lethaling a suspect. Changing some of the rules and punishments around the use of lethals could be beneficial but I have already mention how I feel about that earlier in this post. The solutions I do not agree with are making either reduced respawn or forced respawn as this is too harsh and too many people would lose their shit if this was the case.
This solution removes the incentive for cops to use lethals as the cops get no payout for lethaling and it is in their best interest to capture the civilian so they can process them and get some money from the ticket thus meaning lethals would be used only when they are truly necessary. This also prevents abuse from rebels using lethals as a simple way to get out of all their charges. Yes there is no perfect solution and no matter what there are going to be scenarios where people abuse mechanics but overall this solution has the least amount of issues. If it stays the way it is people are going to continue to get free pardons from lethaling. I know someone is going to talk about robocopping and while yes true robocops do exist I find that the majority of police officers are going to give you a fair chance to explain yourself and give you an appropriate ticket. The main issue is most often not the officer but that civilians either suck as RP or disagree with the ticket they receive. But despite what you think, people have different opinions on how large your ticket should be based on roleplay. Sometimes you are going to have to pay a ticket or maybe even receive jail time. That is part of being a rebel and committing crimes. Oh and dont even get me started on how much parole is abused daily. Ill save that for another time.
