BRAINOS

sonic's post was very enlightening and confirmed my suspicions. taika did great, and everything they did, to my knowledge, had a clear motivation, whether that's just what taika would do or general antaggery, they did a good job at providing and escalating conflict in the round. val, however, i cannot see why they'd wake up and hop out of cryo with the first thing on their mind being "don't trust cargo," and interpreting "hey don't assault us" as such a serious danger that they need to notify command staff, which is the beef of this complaint without the salt. from our perspective, it seemed like cybs didn't like what cargo was doing while observing and deliberately injected val into the situation with the intent to interfere. at no point did val even attempt to get both sides of the story, because their mind was already made up based on what they'd observed.

N french toast at that.

i shouldn't have to reiterate these two facts: 1. cargo made no threats to any department, at any time, aside from telling taika, "hey, don't beat the shit out of our cargo tech again, or we'll be unhappy." 2. the only hands thrown were at preston, and got him into paincrit, by the antag, for antag reasons. i want to know where this bs is coming from that cargo was doling out threats like oprah to every department, or that cargo even attacked anyone. val saw one comment and decided to PDA all of engineering, medical and command that cargo is belligerently violent and threatening the safety of the crew? you claim to have tried to piece the story together, but completely neglected to hear anything out from cargo, who was attacked in the first place? if it wasn't metagaming or metagrudge, what even was your, or your character's motivation to make sure every single department had their guns drawn on two dipshit humans and a robot?

hey, i'm posting here 'cus i was involved. so, preston (who i was playing) was thrown out of medical by summer - on his way out of medical to grab food for the unathi, on the CMO and QM's orders. the EPMC drew their gun on him and told him to leave medical - while he was literally on his way out, and on orders from Summer's boss. of course, cargo comms are gonna light up because that's really annoying, but not a huge deal. this is what WickedCybs hears while observing, according to what they said in OOC. taika comes over to cargo, beats the shit out of preston (antag stuff, that's chill) and within a few seconds of taika leaving, pres is left gasping and stuttering. hanna greene, shaft miner, patches him up and makes sure he's okay, but it's really gonna piss off cargo when you beat the shit out of one of their techs who doesn't fight back. cargo comms go crazy again, and it's around this time that WickedCybs comes on, as Val. Later next round WickedCybs literally admits they weren't thinking about joining until over-hearing cargo comms. Nat and Courier come back into the department and find pres all fucked up, and go find taika, the gardener, to talk to them, and they have a conversation. this is the conversation that Val then overhears, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that nat, and by extension, of course, all of cargo, are just throwing around threats for no reason at all. the situation between medical and cargo had been de-escalated from boiling point to simply tense, but this is when Val jumps in, inserting themselves into a situation that didn't need it, with an OOC motive, and starts telling all the other departments that cargo's threatening medical and engineering. suddenly we have medical, engineering, command and the fucking EPMC all over us, and val is painting us as ''hostile idiots.'' later on, in ooc, WickedCybs keeps saying that ''cargo could have handled the situation better'' and was 100% confident they were in the right to call cargo liars. it's one thing to stir the shit-pot ICly, that's chill, but to be so invested in everything to start egging everyone on OOCly is overboard. a cargo tech was beaten, severely, and it's still on us to not bitch about it over private comms that you'd only hear OOCly? in summary, WickedCybs injected their character on the motivation of OOC information and then continued painting cargo, ICly and OOCly, as villains, without listening to any reason. the metagame-y start of all of this is what's got me irritated. it turned a frustrating round into something i'm literally ready to retire preston over. it's a good thing a huge portion of that wasn't canon. i've played preston for several years and to have someone inject themselves and join their clique's crusade with meta knowledge and motivation just to screw my character over is something i wouldn't have expected in this community.

i wanna be explicitly clear when i say that i've got no beef with wezzy. i think, in this case, they might've misconstrued what i said as "approval," but my approval literally does not matter. i'm not staff. they're totally free to put whatever they want as PR. i did say that his sprites are an improvement on what the original hyposprays were (those ugly fuckin welder things lmao), and maybe I could've been clearer that i did not like their sprites, but.... again, my approval is not a contingency for things to be added or changed. i have the social skills of a trained walnut, and talking to me can be like pulling teeth. my entire personality basically boils down to being non-confrontational and pretending i'm just cool about things instead of completely emotionally incapable of caring. i think both sprites are pretty ugly, in all honesty. mine are chunky, his are pillow-shaded, and both are very clearly done by amateurs. we can go with either one, i'm cool with it. if anything, looking back on it, i think it was somewhat a courtesy (however unnecessary) that wezzy showed me his sprites at all.

that's why we have a mandatory ID policy. if someone looks out of place, scope the ID real quick. resilynn's old place of work, which was an isolated research station, had more visitors than staff on a weekly basis and the issue of any potential sabotage or theft or vandalism was solved literally by an ID policy.

people who have worked at actual private research stations have confirmed that there is no uniform policy because the company operating them understands that they hired adults with degrees who are capable of dressing themselves. @Resilynn's post on this sums it up. probably because paradise is medium RP with less incentive to invest time in your character's appearance or personal styling. the lower RP a server is, the more likely you'll see people choose a crewcut and say "cool, that's Chuck Dennis right there, he's a chemist," and roll with the default jumpsuit you spawn in with. the only 3 departments that absolutely need to be identifiable within a split second with life or death consequences are sec, med, and MAYBE engineering... and for the most part, they handle their clothing fine. the ONLY additional "cracking down" that we could do is a PPE policy for science when it is relevant. the cases which we see someone blatantly fuck around with the wrong clothing for the job are few and far enough between to be glaringly obvious. this is not a widespread problem with an official policy needing to be implemented. the rest is forcing some arbitrary idea of "realism" onto people, some of which have done it for real and know better.

except you're not supposed to roleplay a robot, you're supposed to roleplay a human brain in a robot body. which, again, we already have precedent for in the form of au'takh. they are literally just unathi with near full-body prosthetics (kind of a general grievous situation but essentially the same thing). we could nerf the full-body prosthetic thing simply by letting them have pain, along with all of the other nerfs an IPC already has. i'm not sure how au'takh are done mechanically, but there's no reason humans can't get the same treatment. simply whitelist the full-body thing and bam, there you go. unless we're all cool with the only instance of advanced transhumanism in this game being rep'd by the most notoriously technophobic, superstitious species in our lore?

the fact we got augmented unathi before we got augmented humans is, to me, fucking bonkers in 100 ways. we could literally just have a race of shells that have a human brain inside, ala ghost in the shell, and call it a day, and i'd be happy. this is the simplest way to implement this without worrying about mechanics. i'm absolutely down for more, though.

if we shifted the setting from "elite research station" to a more mundane trade outpost with a research division, it'd make more sense for our game mechanics and characters. our characters are expected not to be snowflakes, but i feel like simply having the privilege to board the aurora is already snowflakey. +1 and then some. expand on this to go for a setting shift where the crew can finally just be mostly normal people with a few overachievers instead of every crew member needing six doctorates just to realistically be a janitor

an armband's function used to be done perfectly when our ID's were color coded. armbands generally give me major heeby jeebies, and i hate them. i propose we resprite the ID's (and i will be happy to do this) to at least have department colored borders. @DanseMacabre a good compromise for science would be: if working with chemicals: a. you MUST wear your department jumpsuit, or: b. you MUST wear a labcoat over your clothing. but for a guy tinkering with integrated electronics? no, absolutely no reason. but that is the ONLY additional uniform requirement i can see being sensible. the rest is overkill.

no no no and also please god no we have ID's you can see from 30 feet away if you examine by squinting already to my experience, the nicer your job is, the less likely you are to have a strict uniform policy. the only exceptions are security, medical and engineering, and this is only because there's specialized gear for those jobs. any other job will expect you to be an adult and dress yourself. i can't trust the developers to be style conscious when implementing jumpsuits that we absolutely HAVE to wear. i didn't expect this to be such a hard line for me but - this would literally make me walk from the server. we are adults who work on a nice station in a cushy job with good benefits. most of us are capable of dressing ourselves. we don't work at McDonald's, where we can't be trusted to pick out our own clothing. i get wanting to identify sec, med and engineering at a glance: but when the hell was the last time you NEEDED to identify a librarian within a split second with life or death consequences?

god, yes, please. i've long hated viruses for their tendencies to break immersion, and this is another one of those random events that can be annoying at best, and completely immersion-shattering at its worst. imagine coming into work and fucking cyanide gas comes out of the AC vent. the guy sitting next to it fucking dies on the spot. it'd make national news. the building would be shut down faster than you can say, ''holy fucking shit,'' and there would be mass hysteria. why the hell is it so commonplace, then, on one of the galaxy's most advanced and prestigious research stations ever built?

this is very well done; my only question is: what was the cloning department there for on the aurora, in the first place- and why is it gone now, ICly? NT decided to try out cloning and got a cease and desist from ZH? NT was helping advance a particularly tricky part of research in exchange for stocks in ZH? there was a gas leak and we all had a bizarre mass hallucination, there never was any cloning done on the aurora?

everything doxx has said has been truth, with very big agree energy. as a long-time QM player for several years on various servers including this one, i've experienced every single part of the spectrum from shitters to heaven-sent angels running the department and i can definitely say the issue is way more of a community and enforcement thing than a mechanical thing. about the quartermaster position: to say that QM adds nothing to a round is - well, it's fucky, and i struggle to agree with that. the rounds i've been QM and had the energy to deal with people's shitheadedness, it was an essential role to keep cargo running smoothly, with warehouse items being delivered, mining's resources being delivered, orders actually being taken- if you have a cargo crew who will listen, having a boss helps tremendously to keep everything in sync, and i am not here for the BS of just leaving it all to the head. i've had HoP's not even bother setting a single foot in cargo or service for entire rounds, i don't trust them to micromanage cargo the way it needs to be, and i definitely don't trust the cargo techs to manage everything themselves. i haven't played as much lately, and have actively avoided the QM role because of the shitheads in cargo tech positions who treat any authority figure like an untrustworthy jackass and skirt around their boss's line of sight to keep doing the same bullshit they've been doing. i know i'm not the only good QM who's been discouraged from playing because of this rampant shitlery- and when all the good ones quit, you're left with the bad ones that are being cited over and over here. my best rounds as QM have been spent peeling miner's guts off the asteroid or ordering equipment for the miners or teaching cargo techs how to do things the right way, but lately we haven't had a lot of people willing to engage in any of that, because they think the warehouse is a fucking candy shop and everything in there is theirs. because the good QM's don't want to put up with this, and don't have the energy to fight with three other people and get no support whatsoever from the established command positions (i've never had an HoP care about cargo techs being belligerent shitlords except once and that was over PDA), they're less likely to keep filling that slot, and we're left with the bad ones. the bad QM's certainly don't help run the department and are more often than not the militia leaders we're fearing here. my proposal is to give it a longer playtime restriction before you can play, and if at all possible, a department-specific playtime position, where you must log so many hours as CT and miner before you can be eligible for QM. everything else will fix the issue of QM's being assholes and teaching new players how to be assholes, too. if whitelisting QM is a thing that happens, i wouldn't oppose it, especially because it allows us to give the QM a bit more authority and gravitas over the cargo techs to keep them in line while also barring some of the known bad ones. about the cargo tech position: i've heard it described as common sense that cargo techs should not be able to approve orders for guns. i wholeheartedly agree. i'll go a step further and even say that yes, we should remove guns from the list of items we can order, period. don't even let them show up. as quartermaster, when you have three cargo techs screaming at you and harassing you for not ordering guns, it's exhausting, especially since they'll just order guns themselves. if anything happens, the first reflex is to order guns. in an actual crisis situation, it does feel stupid to say "don't order guns just let sec handle it :)" when sec hasn't responded to a single call from cargo for months and your crewmembers are going missing one by one, even when they're sitting in their department. we need to be way more serious about reporting bad cargo techs and enforcing better cargo behavior. right now it seems like such the norm, it's tough to report every single case because there can just be so many. it's really killed my enjoyment of playing in cargo, way more than quartermasters existing has. it's pretty routine at this point that rowdy cargo techs who want to powergame for the sake of powergaming will overrun the department and either harass the QM out of their position or the QM will enable it. there was a mentioning of possibly letting only heads, AI and QM approve gun orders, and i'll take it a step further and say only heads and AI can authorize a gun order. about KA's: maybe nerf the damage output, but for god's sake please don't just get rid of them. mining is a pretty thankless, repetitive and boring job. it's only worse when you have to rely on drills or pickaxes. about the whole situation: i definitely agree there's a huge problem with cargo and i am desperate for solutions here. there's a reason i'm hardly ever in my department anymore. there's a reason i hardly play cargo anymore. i know i'm not the only decent player who's basically been shoved out of their position by greytides wearing shorts. this is only letting more greytides in shorts take over and compound the issue.