Scheveningen

Extra notes: I decided to put this at the top to clarify a few things. Up until fairly recently (2 weeks ago, ish), I had a decent administrative history of conduct for at least two years without a whitelist strip or administrative action in the form of a ban. My whitelist was automatically stripped as a result of a 3 day ban that was doled out, rightfully, because I lost my cool and made some rather ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about another player. I do, however, believe that awhile my demonstrated toxicity and refusal to just cool my head for more than two seconds rightfully earned the tempban, I don't think it had anything to do with how I play command, since the tempban was not disciplining for behavior while playing command. In hindsight, I would've probably not received that ban if I had simply stopped holding my ground for the things I had said, which inevitably led to the escalation of the 3 day ban because the banning admin was clearly seeing that I wasn't seeing where I was going wrong with my behavior. This is not a justification of that behavior, or anything like that, I definitely regret that conduct because even the fact that almost everyone has heated gamer moments doesn't mean that behavior is acceptable nor forgivable. BYOND key: Scheveningen Character names: How long have you been playing on Aurora?: Over five years. Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?: I am attempting to improve my OOC attitude while also holding the belief that I should still be whitelisted for command. I understand where I went wrong, but I also still want to actually play the characters I had specifically designed to be heads of staff. And unfortunately those characters on my roster are the ones the most established and the ones I enjoy playing the most as a head of staff, since I enjoy that interconnectivity that playing those characters inevitably brought on. And likewise I wasn't really tempbanned for a failure to act well within a majority of the IC or OOC expectations of a head of staff, but for being a dick. I'm not thinking this will come so easily, however. Why did you come to Aurora?: I didn't feel as strongly playing on the other servers over an eternity ago. Aurora has changed in very substantial ways since I had initially joined up, so my reasons have also likewise developed over time, as well. I particularly care for a fun, character-driven experience, but recent events have definitely soured my opinion as to the role of antagonists and the actual value they contribute to the game, lately. Have you read the Aurora wiki on the head roles and qualifications you plan on playing?: I'm quite familiar with what the jobs, the in-game chain of command and the pecking order for various situations. I'm aware of what each head role is supposed to have authority over. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they?: If we mean recently, yes. The admin issuing the 3-day (Alberyk, specifically) could probably speak more as to the situation's severity better than I can. On a scale of actual 1-10, I'd consider the situation in question a 5. In my very distant past when I was far more childish, toxic and petulant, it took a very concerted effort on my own end to recognize where I went wrong before moving to improve on several fronts. I have no illusions that I will ever reach an angelic status of reputation or conduct, however, I think not being a terrible person is a lot easier than being a good person. And that's where my goalpost is set, for the most part. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. Give a definition of what you think roleplay is, and should be about: The simplest way to describe it, in my view, is that it is an endeavor to make up a person who believably exists in the setting, and pretty much acting within specific constraints and personality types to make them their own person. The most important aspect of having characters with values is that they should probably clash in varying degrees with other characters that have opposite values. Because that happens a lot in real life, for one, and secondly that sort of conflict actually makes the game fairly fun. If everyone in-character gets along it's not always going to be fun. The core aspect of making a character and roleplaying as them is really just to have an interesting fictional personality. "Just be interesting" really should be the core aspect of roleplaying, especially as an antagonist, too. Equally important as a head of staff, as well. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?: Antagonists can very often destabilize rounds, and the heads of staff exist to hopefully bring structure to specific essential departments that otherwise have no real unified direction on how to solve a specific situation. Because every character is different, they all have different ideas on how to resolve a situation. The head of staff exists to break the stalemates and put forward their decision in order to contribute to immediately resolving the situation as well as damage controlling the chaos that usually results from antagonist action or random events. Understanding of responsibility is the reason why the whitelist exists, however. I can imagine the chaos of letting a day 0 player play HOS on a heavy roleplay server. It's not a good image, mind you. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?: I think it's genuinely overestimated how much impact heads of staff have/should have in-game - and likewise I think the expectations of head of staff players can be unrealistically high, but on the other hand it's a bad thing to not try to set the bar for what a head of staff character should behave like. And I personally have tried to set that bar in my own fashion to demonstrate to other people that playing a character out that is interesting, etc., is totally attainable, and it can be done in a variety of ways, but quality of execution is important to that success, I find. I think it's very explicit that there is a bare minimum expectation of IC conduct that is expected, but on the OOC side there's a list of things not to do rather than to do. Don't act like a terrible person OOCly, try to play an interesting character ICly. The purpose of this server, really, is just to play a character in an interesting manner. Ascertaining specific goals beyond that point will often border on the ideological, and more often than not will lead to disappointment and burnout. Could you give us the gist of what is currently happening in Tau Ceti and how it affected your characters and their careers?: With the SCC pretty much revealing itself as a legitimate power network, Rockefeller is rolling in his grave in laughter because the attempts by various governmental authorities to control the monopolies have clearly failed in this alternative future. The reveal of the current corporate alliance is pretty much the unveiling of Capitalism Two, which has its own implications that have made themselves immediately obvious in multitudes. The SCC represents similar tones from the Eridani Corporate Federation but perhaps in a much more powerful degree than was initially thought. Where in real life, corporate entities have implied, yet equally immense power through lobbyism and bribery, the power of the SCC is rather blatant, and the SCC doesn't care if you think so or not. A strong majority of my characters, in any case, have been forced to cope with the situation in their own ways. Some of them keep their heads down to avoid being thrown out of an airlock, the others are outright revolutionary types and a few others exploit the current situation for their own purposes. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted?: Captain, HoS, CMO, CE, RD. Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking: Vira Bolivar, Captain. Etilka Strelitz is my fairly recent HOS character, I plan at some foreseeable (but pretty far off) point to get Lara Lyuricheva-Serikov into a CMO position. Strotdrec Bjani-flatari is my CE that I play on dead hour, and Jun is my RD who I play whenever I feel like roleplaying an absolutely terrible person. Well, who's pretending, I guess. How would you rate your own roleplaying?: I don't personally like answering this question, as I'd rather have other people answer on their own account whether they think I am a good/interesting roleplayer or not. I certainly try to be both? Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action?: I understand this and will take additional, personal measures to avoid further administrative action. More specifically, I will endeavor to not continue being a bad person to others, regardless of my own confidence in being technically capable as a head of staff or a decent roleplayer, being a jerk is one of those end-all be-all things that can lead to a permanent ban, and I will avoid that path. Have you familiarize yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles?: I am quite familiar with the wiki pages in question.

gort, several counts of murder I approve of this PR

also the guns being white is more likely to be advanced polymer rather than being tupperware plastic. i think its pretty believable in the context of IC.

its a good thing your opinion is an outlier in terms of overwhelming feedback supporting this

Slugs are outright foiled by ballistic armor, whereas buckshot is normally foiled by the corporate heavy armor. Thus, with the current antag heavy armor kit (which is essentially very cheap for TC-based antagonists right now, and practically free for mercenaries), it is possible to take zero damage from buckshot and very little, residual damage from slugs.

Battle of the minds.

The current sprites look completely fine. It's weird to call for a reversion to an aesthetic that was in the 2010s.

You would lose.

So, infiltration. This is one of the only game modes that still has malf in it. It is bad. It involves two of the most irritating antagonists to deal with as a crew aligned character, each that which cannot really be easily dealt with for a variety of different reasons. Because of how repetitive it has gotten, to not just me but a large amount of voices have also stated that this game mode sucks a ton. Don't believe me? They will arrive here just to tell you how bad this game mode sucks. I've no real interest in writing out a point by point essay on why this game mode sucks, because anyone who's experienced it once can probably point out a lot of the flaws of this mixed game mode. Also, malf is literally not possible to roll on secret EXCEPT for the fact that infiltration and corruption still exists. Malf was removed as its own game mode for a variety of different reasons, again, not interested in posting an essay about it. If you were here for when it got removed, you know the reasons why, better yet if you experience rounds with malf in it you can guess why few people except AI players like malf that much. Therefore, I state to get rid of malf from all of the mixed game modes. They are, strictly speaking, awful for the game. Ninja itself is more easily salvageable for reasons not worth an essay to get into. Malf is not. Hear hear?

I support this until it is properly reworked.

I think all of them seem completely fine, kyres.

re: the guns, it's mostly just lame that antags have to - for the most part - resort to short/medium range weapons at the moment, it is a large part of them getting decimated by security at present since sec just hugs cover and plinks you with the laser rifle, which is all they really need to do since they are the ones playing defensive and have a stronger safety net. The surgery bot was mentioned not as an attempt to make the idea mine, but in hopes that it bears enough repeating that someone might think it is indeed a good enough idea and will actually put it into the game. The holo-decoy was a result of playing through Reach again, as were the grenade ideas. As for the grenades, 'aerodynamic' was just a silly in-character word to describe that stick grenades shouldn't be able to be tossed a super long distance away. They both use a different damage type respective to their role, for the most part, as two different stick grenades go. I had thought about the fakeout grenades being similar to the holo-decoy in certain ways, but it seemed better that they would be a non-lethal viscerator grenade variant instead, designed to buy time.

Just a general suggestion dump of mine for stuff that should be added to the uplink. This mostly just constitutes stuff that doesn't fill a necessary niche at the moment for traitors. Niche missing: long-range marksman options, both low power and high power. Solution 1: Add the antique sniper rifle in place of the bolt action (because the latter is questionably useful in actual combat due to its low firerate, capacity and middling damage performance). Add its specific magazines to uplink as well as add to be able to be vended via autolathe when hacked. Solution 2: Add the AMR back, but tweaked to be magazine-fed 14.5mm HVAP rounds, 4 shot capacity. Huge item, no longer can be holstered on weapon armor, to counteract its power it has to be inconvenient for inventory space. Add its specific magazines to uplink as well as add to be able to be vended via autolathe when hacked. Niche missing: Portable surgery options for antagonists. Solution: Purchaseable surgical drone (subtype of maint drones) that either can be occupied by a player through ghost spawner for faster surgery, or left as a utility device that fixes internal problems at a slower, but somewhat automated rate. Niche missing: Hologram deception device as an actually useful countermeasure in evasion or combat. Would help to inject Elyran tech even more into gameplay. Solution: Holographic Decoy package, surrounds the user with identical hologram copies indistinguishable from the original source (they will visually hold whatever the user was holding at the time), spawning the decoys at adjacent tiles of N,E,S,W of the user. They do not follow the user's movements, but instead move randomly only as the user does to cause problems with target identification. If attacked, they immediately fade away, but also cause a small smoke effect upon dissipating. They will also dissipate if out of immediate range, roughly sight radius of the user. Niche missing: More useful grenades. Solution 1: Adhesive Elyran plasma grenades. They can stick and detonate on you and cause explosive burns as well as briefly setting you on fire, though not enough to be particularly lethal, being stuck will likely require an immediate retreat and a medical bay visit. Unlike other grenades, they are not very aerodynamic and are limited to close range tosses, immediately stopping after they are thrown 4 tiles. If you are not stuck, you will take the same burn damage but will not be set on fire. Solution 2: Zo'rane spike grenades. They also stick to you, and upon detonation inject a fair deal of shrapnel throughout your body, but only a fraction as much as fragmentation grenades. Again, they are not aerodynamic, and are primarily useful at brutally incapacitating its intended target, though not as much as true frag grenades. Solution 3: 'Fakeout' grenades. They behave essentially similarly to viscerator grenades, except in the uplink they are far cheaper and come en-masse in a box. These are holographic projectors that spawn hardlight-origin viscerators that act and behave much like real viscerators, attacking and chasing anything in sight that is not a recognized person. They do not deal any real damage, but can be effective diversion tools. Just spitballing for now, might add more ideas later.

I've enjoyed this, though I have a question. Is there greater weight in favor of something like if mercenary gets voted by 7 people vs. when borer gets 1 vote, or is the vote actually equal? I've seen dominant mercenary votes for dynamic yet did not see mercenaries spawn through when the round started, is there an explanation for that - or is it just really bad luck?

I don't see why not, it's an item to assist the traitor's subterfuge, and if a player is to inhabit it, security is going to try to frag it. Therefore it should be able to frag back to make security think twice.

I would say remove antagHUD outright, it serves no function but to make metagaming before latejoining easier. I'd rather people take the risk of being wrong instead and having to pay for it, if necessary.

This is a very neat idea. It would be a good thing if they had self defense weapons and were flashproof, though.

Security gear has received innumerable amounts of nerfs to their effectiveness despite that antagonist gear has always been strictly superior in every way. What antagonists have never had, however, is actual self-sufficiency and the ability to properly 1v2 situations and consistently survive. It takes an inordinate amount of powergaming and positional skill to be able to avoid being damaged as an antagonist, but this takes its toll in the price of being unable to engage with the majority of the crew as a result. Antagonists have an extremely difficult time shrugging off wounds right now. Just had a round before this post where security was struggling to get decisive hits in on a squad of sol marine mercs, but eventually the conflict subsided. Both security and marines that were engaged had died or slumped to the floor due to their severe injuries. Security admittedly pushed their luck too much, but the marines had no chance at all to get surgery operation while also staying alive from the constant hit and run attacks of security. Mercenaries absolutely still need chem dispensers and a premium hypospray, probably heisters too at this rate. Their ship is often way too far from typical shoot-out positions to get people back for medical attention. Medical sits central to the station and all security players are smart enough to recognize that the outer areas of medical are good positions to defend and set up chokes for. As for traitors, they need redeemable tools of all sorts, especially medical supplies, to keep them alive in the round.