Ok Rebels cannot just fall back to their base and hide as the rules state:
(x.1) Attacking group bases can only be done under the following circumstances:
A member of the attacking group follows the base owner into the base as part of an active pursuit. (This only applies to player group owned bases, and does not apply to factions).
Or
With permission from a staff member and where said staff member can look over the situation while it unfolds. The staff member authorising the attack must be completely neutral in the situation.
These rules were discussed after player concerns of players logging in just to bolster a treasury Op. Police command were consulted on what should happen to players that do this and they said it should not happen and players should be punished accordingly.
We had a few options when dealing with this situation:
1) Deal with the report appropriately on the advice of police command and ban all 19 players involved (shitstorm due to innocents getting caught up in the ban list)
2) Put rules in place to stop any group only logging in for active combat situations using out of game methods to find out about them (metagaming)
Personally I wanted to go through the logs for the past couple of weeks and look at any police that only logged in immediately after a bank op started and rarely at other times and remove their whitelisting. (shitstorm)
Option two was discussed with roughly 20 staff members and 2 of the 3 CSI's. There were many members of other factions in that staff list.
All we wish for is for you guys to give this a chance. I do know you have legitimate concerns but guess what so do other players! Id rather we tried this than went and implemented some really bloody harsh rules or player tracking system to combat those out there that only play here for the gun fights.
The thing I don't understand, please don't take this in the wrong way as you do have a point that it was a hard decision to make with limited options, as well as the point that it should at least be tried out first, but...
People joining to take part in combat has always, always been a thing, but has only been addressed when a very specific example was put into public view on server 2 with the minimum amount of police available to respond VS around 25-30 rebels, furthermore, why would you attempt a HM treasury and expect it to be easy? It's literally a bank. From what I can tell, this has always been the way HM treasury robberies have been handled in the past, especially when they're done at midnight on low-pop servers to exploit the fact that the resistance would be minimal, however, I don't see a solution to that part? Personally, I don't see an issue with how they functioned in the past because it was always police on the attack, rebels by default having the defensive advantage and marksman positions, hence why gangs like Invictia won bank-ops no matter the number of cops, because they had the knowledge of how to compensate for their lower numbers, as well as the skill required.
TL;DR: numbers were never the issue, neither was the amount of cops joining to take part. I think the issue was that the example presented, making it seem as if rebels have it super hard on HMs, when infact they've got the advantage from the get-go with better weapons and positions, but aren't seem to be utilizing them correctly. It's worked in the past without issue because people expected to receive mass resistance when robbing a literal bank, but now the solution to losing seems to be taking it out of the equation by nulling the opposing force. This is why I believe so many people have taken the change badly, myself included.