Scheveningen

The title should stick. We shouldn't confuse people by thinking we're less on the RP spectrum (or somehow convince people we're no longer Heavy Roleplay or something, and thus have degraded standards somehow???), we do take it seriously, but people constantly misconstrue what Heavy RP is, and it is nothing more than a spectrum descriptor. It's like defining sour to sweet, or left to right. You can be this left, or this right, or extremely sour, or just a bit sweet. I would figure we're on the "yeah we take RP as a major defining concern here", and I guess that makes it Heavy RP. Anything else to define it by is just rhetoric.

We do not make it a point to control how an antagonist roleplays unless they do it in such a manner that clearly violates both the written nature and the spirit of the rules. Metagaming, breaking immersion, otherwise acting like an griefer and not actually roleplaying. Those individuals will be spoken to as they are reported. Likewise, the lore team doesn't make it a point to insert lore guidelines for antagonists to follow, because there is no expectation for lore to be enforced (if the lore team wants it to be they should say so) OOCly, and frankly I don't wanna be one of almost 20ish folks who have to speak to people because "They got a lore detail slightly wrong, please re-educate them", because even I will admit I have no interest in learning the most arbitrary lore details and making it a point to force everyone else to apply that written stuff to memory or else they're breaking some arbitrary future guideline that will be set-up. That's not fun for anyone, and it's the equivalent of sending a police detective over to deal with the aftermath of a social spat between two lovers instead of being sent to deal with a murder scene. It's a waste of time and of our effort to be doing if we pitched forth any effort in that direction rather than more important things like ensuring people who are attempting to grief are caught in their tracks a fair deal before they can do any critical damage, ensuring antagonists aren't just using their special status to grief people and not roleplay, ensuring every other non-antag character is also held to the same standard but being required to have in-round motivation to do things rather than round-start motiviation as a result of antag status. And many other issues we need to watch out for, just to end the exposition there. That's your fault. Choosing not to speak out is the equivalent of not having an opinion at all, in the grand scheme of "who even cares", because if no one heard someone else's opinion it may as well not even be relevant in the current moment until it is brought up. There are ways to compress information without turning it into an exposition. It doesn't matter if we even tried to. The Republic of Biesel, does not exist. What Tau Ceti is cut out to be, does not exist. The Aurora I never existed, neither does the Aurora II. All of these details are based on a small team of folks' imagination and ability to create a story and a setting. The goal of roleplayers is not to abide by such and blend into the background like boring peasant NPCs shoveling dirt for no reason for 24 hours a day, but rather for each character on their own to make their own smaller story based on existing character backgrounds, how it shapes them, and how it influences the way they make decisions. Not all characters need to be perfectly uniform and aware of every single lore factor, because real people can either be political busybodies or simply not even give a damn about what goes on, because worlds and systems aren't run by single people, but rather the will of many very influential sorts who all possess a singular agenda. The way people fit in or not doesn't really matter. People IRL struggle to adhere to socio-cultural norms all of the time. Yes, we will strap on our stomping boots and annihilate anyone who tries to roleplay a space elf or some other gimmick that doesn't fit in. No, we're going to be in our socks if someone complains about lesbians in space. It is a thing, sorry, we know it hurts people's sensibilities, but they are there. If they end up sucking rather than actually roleplaying actual believable lesbians, obviously they'll get bwoinked too. The expectation that everyone be forcibly burdened with lore knowledge that rarely actually factors into how things are done on a corporate space station is a bit of an excessive one. Not every US citizen cares about Donald Trump, although a fair few make it their goal to have D.T. in their head all day because of their hunger for meaningless internet points. Anyway, the way xenos have to roleplay, I'm not sure you know what's at stake for most players. Awhile back a Tajaran player that came back from hiatus had their player go, "What the fuck is the PRA?" Everyone laughed OOCly and ridiculed the character ICly for not knowing something almost every native-born Tajaran would know. Humans have no oversight because we don't expect new players to immediately read chunks of exposition in order to find out small lore tidbits that hold only a small amount of relevance into how a corporation does things. Humans are easily the most diverse race, because humanity is not limited by what ideas, culture and background they can have, whereas the other races have their own internal culture regulated on a variable extent for each race. Skrell are the least extreme, Tajarans are pretty extreme, Unathi are very extreme, the Vaurcae are close to a hivemind groupthink, the dionaea gestalts are literal hiveminds. A priority for a new player to ease into the server is to actually find out if the server they're playing on for the first time sucks or not. Likewise we try to make it so that it also doesn't suck for a regular to be playing on either. We naturally cannot appease all kinds of people and only pitch in as much effort is required of us. We can't make people enjoy the server, they have to find entertainment in their own ways without being destructively disruptive or whatever else. You make this sound worse than it actually is, lol. We're not going to force new players to do this. That is an awful first impression to be making, to tell someone they need to file out giant paragraphs of filler information in order to be able to roleplay on the server. I will never enforce such a standard. Records have always been optional but recommended. Day zero new players with no records who go to the HoP may have a hard time getting a non-intern job when they join as assistant. But that's fine, I doubt they expect that as well, and if they throw a tantrum over it, they're the brat, not anyone else. Maturity is being able to deal with the hand you're dealt and improvise your agenda based off of it, some people are willing to deal with that, other people aren't. We hope most new folks who join at least try to give their first time on the server more than two chances before deciding to make a full judgement. When it comes to new players, first impressions matter. We want people to keep playing. It's hard to not seem intrusive when you are telling someone that they should be writing records up after they've played on the server for at least over a period of two weeks. Likewise, this is the internet, it is extremely easy to offend and also extremely easy to take offense. Such an issue would require a degree of polling, which I'll think about sometime later. Okay, protip. Intruders are equated to being nuisances or extremely dangerous by default. The crew are fully within their rights to not trust anyone who isn't a crewmember. If you want people to not see you as a bad person, don't act like a bad person. Benign antagonists have the added challenge of not trying to start needless malicious conflict (if they want to live by the end of the round without being lasered to death beforehand, of course), and instead engaging other people in the round with interesting degrees of verbosity and generally being helpful. Not being helpful or just generally being unhelpful, unsurprisingly gets the antag shunned by the crew and potentially lasered to death by security depending on the extent of which the antag fucks up. Sub-par roleplay is a result of sub-par roleplayers, not because we don't have nine million antagonist factions coded into the game that people randomly spawn as and have to abide by their arbitrary IC rules. Good roleplayers make good roleplay even out of an overall suck-y round. Being a good roleplayer is not something that can be taught, it is achieved through learning from others, on your own, what things appeal to people and generally just being charismatic, likable and reasonably verbose in general. You can't teach someone to be a good roleplayer, not entirely, because person A cannot teach person B anything other than how to roleplay like person A. That's nothing more than just creating a roleplay clone, not an individual person who has their own distinguished style and unique spin on roleplaying. This is not something we can force to change in any meaningful capacity. The entire community would have to radically change to meet your expectations, Kaed, and I'm not seeing that happen.

Initially I called this out as a corporate genie lamp but I see the issue with the shading was fixed. Jokes. It otherwise looks like a great custom item and I think this would be great for roleplay purposes. Personal items should be permitted more often, I know people hate the exclusivity thing but I think it's justifiable. It's a cute teapot and teapots already exist in-game. I say go for it.

Yes.

you play HoS non-stop and seize the ability for me to play HoS at least every once in awhile. jerk. Also, UM is wrong, I have killed Lukas Chapman at least twice in the past week as an antagonist, the first time I was a cultist and the second time I was an invisible leaping Vox who shrekt the crap out of Lukas who apparently got themselves a hardsuit visor with NVGs and thermals. Thought you were clever, eh? Think again, for my powergaming knows no bounds!

Metagaming is using any form of OOC knowledge that only a player or other character would know about, and applying it to your character's knowledge in IC and taking actions as a result of it. Basically, this is a character exploiting knowledge they do not reasonably have in-character in order to gain an advantage in the round, kill/shut down an antagonist, or generally just being a very serious round-breaking nuisance, et cetera. You did admit where you did wrong, so you get a bit of merit there. What you are referring to is IC in OOC, in which you talk about IC events in an OOC format in an effort to spoil the round, although this can either be intentional or unintentional, sometimes people do it on purpose. IC in OOC is different. Anyway, Alberyk should be on later today to look at your appeal.

Yeah but "domesticated slime pug" is a cute idea. Being able to domesticate slimes while also neutering is a very home-owner kind of thing.

Maybe one day we'll get an overhaul, but, meh. As of now the RD can choose to delete blueprints directly from the R&D server hub if he/she/it so chooses. You can delete the lawgiver itself or all of the progress done in combat tech.

Yeah goodness forbid they follow Directive Four and other regulations. What a terrible box to be put in, to be told to follow corporate law and use common sense ICly.

You're probably not meant for this server especially since you've had more than a month to figure out how to read the rules and follow them. You have two permas on record, has it not occurred to you that because we're a heavy roleplay server that we do things differently from conventional SS13 servers? If you want to chase antagonists and kill them to "win" then maybe go pick another server on the hub. There are other places that can better suit a competitive mindset, this server is really not one of them.

you actually need materials to get those levels. if research does their job and finishes r&d off that's pretty much a good thing in one way, but it's kinda the responsibility of the RD to ensure stuff doesn't get out of the lab, and for security to keep watch if science is pumping effort into r&d. Anything's easy to obtain if you powergame to get it as soon as possible. Lawgivers shouldn't be a researcher's priority, I hope people know that. a half hour is a fair deal of time, just gonna say that now.

EMPs counter the lawgiver.

Recently handed the OP a 3 day ban a little while ago for threatening another player in LOOC with complaints/bans. And generally just being an ass beyond the line of what is even socially acceptable. Said individual responded in an arrogant fashion when questioned about it and felt it more appropriate to cast blame on other individuals without looking at their own behavior first and accepting responsibility for consequences occurring from actions they took. Proof, in an imgur gallery for reference: http://imgur.com/a/mmaye I feel this is conduct unbecoming of a player first and foremost. A player that acts in such an entitled, aggressive way probably is not deserving of having a whitelist, especially since there are aspects of the Unathi subculture that unfortunately appeal to loose-cannon kinds of players. I believe it'd be a mistake to allow such a player to have the whitelist if they neither understand the kind of ooc standard they should be setting when interacting with members of the playerbase at-large, and what kind of IC standard they should be setting when their track record both IC and OOC are in question.

ree. Head admin doesn't even close his own unban threads that he lifts!

Lifterooni'd. Acquaint yourself with our rules, some things might've changed a fair bit, it's always good to be updated on them.

Okay then.

Oops, misspelled your first ckey in the unban panel the first time, that is why I did not see it. Anyway, here's the last known note for the recent ckey you tried, CaptainDeadBeard 2015-02-09 00:00:00 || TishinaStalker || Logged in as Security, and started beating personnel with a welding torch while being in metacommunication with Bjorn69. Logged upon contact. Permabanned. And much of the same for SteamyHotERP, reason being verbatim: Plasmagrief. And the ban was mirrored about eight times. Six times with the legacy system with jumbled IPs and CIDs. And twice just normally. So that might show you kinda evaded in the past (assuming CaptainDeadBeard is you, you didn't appeal the ban for that account), granted it was like 2 years back when you did it. Only real disclosure needed from you is a simple promise to not do it again and just abide by the rules, and we'll lift both straight away, since we try to be gucci like that.

No notes associated with that ckey. Is there another account you were playing on?

It should be a slimy pug. A domesticated slime pug. If you pet it your hands get goo-stained hands.

Hey, Kaed? How is playing the game in an effective way as an antagonist "trolling"? That aside, liches aren't immune to pain and there are ways to cripple their ability to do pretty much anything. Applying stuns, a straitjacket and a muzzle and throwing them into an isolation cell will completely disable them for the rest of the round. After which, you can blow them up with a sufficient yield bomb and deny their ability to return to their phylactery. I get you have a very anti-antagonist viewpoint on how roleplay should be, but honestly people seem to prefer to just allow the antag to powergame them to death rather than fighting back in a smart capacity. It's fine, for now, perhaps the phylactery needs to be rooted in a single place that can be detected through the xenoarch scanner or through a pinpointer.

The constant atmosphere of being forced into an emergency situation barely an hour into the round and for as long as the round lasts either up until the 2 hr mark when all of the antagonists are dead or sooner because the antagonists decided to sabotage the station beyond repair. I would prefer a wider variety of gameplay that isn't a constant high-octane and low-drag. It is notably less fun to have to deal with completely uncounterable situations such as a malf AI sabotaging the engine barely an hour into the round, in addition to traitors and changelings at the same time causing trouble of their own, round after round after round. Dismissing my concerns about how this reflects roleplay in favor of the excuse that "it's a new system" (it most certainly is not by now) and the bandwagon argument "people vote it a lot so clearly people like it" (most certainly not true, you should hear what people have to say at the end of the round sometimes) is not exactly the response I'd like to hear in relation to these sorts of issues. Especially when the person in particular brushing feedback off has not actually played these game modes out to see the kinds of effects these game modes have on the "meta-game" of roleplay and how rounds typically progress now. If you've ever seen how aggressive security is forced to play (I do mean to imply that security often has to adopt either an extremely violent reactive response to assault by antag or face the threat of being killed by one of three possible antagonist types in a single possible round) during these types of round types so as to not get killed first, you will know what I mean.

Can attest for the above, having spoken to the individual for it. While they were apologetic about it, there's not much to say when this kind of behavior acting as an agent of security department seems to be making a point to act as recklessly as it is.

It wasn't really my impression that all of the game modes would be introduced into their own separate secret rotation rather than just including them into the standard secret rotation to allow for a tuned variety of game modes. As it stands, mixed secret is what you vote if you want the station to devolve into utter chaos. There's a pretty high chance for cult to be rolled among all of the mixed secret game modes, comparable to the other game modes included in mixed secret. I don't really want to vote for a game mode set that'll be cult 40% of the time (if we're talking on-paper math, the actual ratio might be close to it though) because it is perhaps one of the most common game modes at the moment with the mixed secret changes. I think it would be better off if we did away with mixed secret and just threw all game mode possibilities into one category. This makes the game mode much harder to anticipate and there isn't a stigma where people decide to just not play at all because they can guess that cult is going to be in the mixed rotation among other antagonist game modes. Play too much of a single game mode and you get absolutely sick of the antagonist type, as well. It would be nice if cult happened every once in awhile equal to all of the other game modes.

Game modes with "win" or "lose" conditions are not exactly what we've sought out for. This also just seems to be like the double agent game mode.

Numap, mostly, as well as a plethora of changes, bugfixes, et cetera. Did you know that "Nu" is the 13th letter in the Greek alphabet? It also has a value of 50 in Greek numerals. The former fact was more or less spookier than the latter.