Scheveningen

Imagine melee combat having to require more initial thought before rushing someone down with a cult sword or stun baton. God bless this change

I didn't actually think this post was real when I was reading over it. I first snorted at "crystal agitator" and then choked at "hilariously surrounded by landmines." Then I looked at the git and wow, there really is a gulag below security now. why.

I find that the biggest issue with these events is that they do not make use of ghost spawns to slot players into these supposed intervals of chaos. PvE isn't that incredibly exciting, since they're coded to rush you down like the idiot simple mobs they are for the more severe events, and then every other event is either an environmental annoyance or just a straight up annoyance.

I was a little weirded out when Not'zar was later depicted showing up to a talk show in a clown suit and murdering the talk show host with a gun. So perhaps this is for the best after all

which is not a very high standard considering present company

why would you open an application for a position you already hold

Abo was the best at what he did as a head admin and then as a mod. +1, you don't get really good people like Abo very often as staff candidates.

Gonna bump this so hard. I'm personally in favor of #1.

I'm glad he's fucking dead. Kill all bots. In minecraft.

Thank goodness it's not a resignation post. You've done fantastic since you taken on reigns and I hope you stay on for the 2-2-2 milestone. I mean, you don't have to. As far as milestones go it'd be kind of cool, but not entirely required of you.

It was confusing to hear of alleged validhunting security play of the applicant from the staff here. I wasn't aware Ronald Monday was a vicious fun-hating antag killer under that otherwise interesting character exterior. I'm mostly being facetious of course, but as far as I can recall with recent play and etc, the player cannot really be characterized as that, unless there's something the entirety of staff has only experienced that nobody else has. My prior impression still hasn't changed, of course, it's clearly someone capable of trying and ultimately executing a plan to the best of their ability. They've done good enough so far.

Likely from the talks from back when Aboshehab was staff, but none of that stuff was fully realized as policy. The only thing that exists is "rules-as-written" unofficial policy in which staff may or may not enforce whatever constitutes as a believable character, i.e. a paraplegic security officer (most severe case) or a mute EMT (least severe but still pretty bad).

RE: Cloning, I'm glad it is gone. It had other questions of game balance and otherwise taking the consequence out of people being murdered. And lore I guess but that's not as consequential as the game being sensible and fun at the same time. Death is very serious now - but it is often annoying when it comes too easily not because of believability but how gamey bleedout meta can be. It is very possible to slow down the rate of bleeding out and etc as I mentioned in my initial post, and likewise to put the hammer down on exponential bleeding events. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/9592 I will say this PR in its test phase was pretty damn good at lowering projectile lethality, though I feel it doesn't do enough (what I mean is out of scope for the PR anyway) since armor is still one-dimensionally shitty - not that it is anyone's fault that it is shitty, armor is just designed shitty. It's just how it is. As soon as it gets merged the inner wroth inside me will be satisfied.

I will say, to your credit that it isn't your fault for answering what was expected to questions that are criminally one-sided and obvious, though. It's a silly thing of any community that people find themselves asking one-dimensional questions. I do wish I saw this sort of insight in your original post though, call that hesitance with the initial impression since I don't know you particularly well! Still, I'm less hesitant about the idea of you being staff since you put a lot more thought into your response with the various issues brought up. Not gonna reply to it specifically here since, honestly just the fact you put thought into addressing the specific concerns in-depth was enough, but the conversation regarding details can continue later. I don't want to bloat this thread on my own accord. You dissuaded half of my concerns which is nice. That aside, neutral is my weigh-in now. Changing my mind is legal, I assume.

1. Regarding history. While I consider writing history to be significant to establishing "why things are" for any given locational or factional status quo, a large part of "moving forward" should not be stuck in attempting to fill out holes in the past. A large majority of the community does not find these holes very significant in the grand scheme of things, and when they are gratuitous enough get patched up anyway by community outcry. It is a very small likelihood that filling out faction/location history will actually do anything in the short or long term (proven with Venus and Skrell). These are things that seem vastly unproductive to write, as these are things that would not be tangible in their effect on the game world as ongoing arcs and present-day worldbuilding both generally work. In addition, while I have no problem with someone filling out or rewriting my previous work with trying to lay groundwork in past generations about pre-Expansion age humanity - it's minimalistic as-is on purpose. It needs to stay that way because a lot of the things that did happen before and after the Great Spess War with the Coalition aren't very significant to the in-game "today". The politics are very different now that the Solarian Alliance is much bigger than it was - but it is also too big to even support itself now, so it has new problems to deal with. Rewriting old human history to be mildly different will not change or recontextualize how much on borrowed time the Solarian Alliance is. It seems you're not really focused on a minimalistic, productive approach with this subject, and it kind of lends to reason that any other approach with trying to rewrite history will only annoy players and waste time, your time especially since rewriting history without an aim for it to be in-context with how things are in the lore present will not be fruitful whatsoever. Just imagine if a Tajara lore deputy slot opened up and someone applied under the basis of wanting to fill out history 'gaps' that may or may not exist: it's not interesting of a goal. It really isn't. Everyone dwells on the issues and intrigue of "now" and "in the future." Dwelling on the past is universally considered a bad thing if there isn't a focus on how it adds context to now. 2. Regarding Dominia. I'm not really seeing why Dominia is being targeted right now? It has received many many notable improvements during the era of Borya (credit primarily to Schwann, of course! bless his workhorse heart), it's an otherwise interesting faction of complete assholes and that is a subject of politics. I've seen feedback supporting this and it is a bit wild to me; in this pursuit of liberalizing everything you will run out of ideological enemies to "liberalization." Dominia should stay as is, we need that "haughty asshole faction" because as I've seen so far, a lot of interesting roleplay and conflict has resulted in the synthesis of prior management decisions. If anything, Dominia was already made liberalized and far more accessible. Literally look at the amount of people who play Dominians now (Schwann and Borya must've done something right, yeah?!), why does this need to change again? Contrast with Diona, which no one plays because there is no reason to, they are not interesting. Dominia, conversely, is interesting in its current iteration. You seem to want to crush down what Dominia is right now for some otherwise vague reason. You claim it is not interesting, but there is a notable amount of Dominian characters that cycle in and out and end up being played on the server. Either this is because you have an agenda to change up Dominia and you are willing to ignore certain facts, or you are not as in-touch and educated about the issue of Dominia (and why people find it interesting enough to even play it) as you should be if you want to be critical about it. I haven't seen any discussion about this, and I view it as a major issue of policy to have to point out. 3. Regarding Elyra. You're not really wrong about all of this but with the above issues I'm not exactly confident you would be able to make it very interesting. Your focus on history rather than a focus on fleshing out culture and interesting character ideas is the deal-breaker here. 4. Regarding the Earth map. I have to be rude-sounding for a moment, but "God, who cares" is my response to this. Maps do not really matter, they are filler. Filler objectives are not goals. Filler is not incredibly interesting and does not push any team into the direction of practically accomplishing anything. It is world-building but only for the sake of it. Having a new map v3.7 of planet Earth when there are have been many unnecessary 'realiztic' revisions should absolutely not be the priority of any up-and-coming lore developer. It will have absolutely nothing to do with the upcoming King of the World arc, so why is this even mentioned as a goal, honestly? 5. Player feedback and goals in general. And transparency. Easily the most concerning thing to me is that you haven't really accounted for or mentioned player feedback in this application and how you plan on handling it. Since player feedback is a subject of major importance, it surprises me that "feedback" is only really mentioned once in your original post, which I consider an immediate application sin, followed by ding sound and immediate pretentious observation on my part and a deliberate misunderstanding of movie themes just to make a gotcha comment. Reference to how awful CinemaSins is aside, I'm not exactly certain of how you actually plan to approach the inevitable feedback that would arise from creating and putting to action your own changes, if it can be called that, as I mentioned prior criticisms above anyway. How about I mention goals? Goals, goals, goals. We all have them. Some short-term, some long-term. The position of human lore developer - rather than deputy - has to concern itself with a lot of long-term foresight. I would know, I've made a fair few mistakes in this regard for not prioritizing some issues properly and my work back then absolutely suffered for it, because I wasn't motivated to do anything due to my lack of priority set for the goals I had after the previous short and long-term ones were completed. I would not want to see the same mistakes repeated again of any human lore developer. I want to see them have consistent focus, drive and the ability to do things with an unrivalled wrath that bulldozes any bureaucratic obstacles in their path. You don't really seem to have much planned apart from several short-term objectives, this is good for giving people the impression you want to do some things, but for how long is this going to be, exactly? Having a lot of short-term goals and the will to execute them sounds like excellent attributes of a lore deputy, but not of the lore head of a specific lore department itself. Likewise, the subject of transparency. I constantly get the feeling there's something being missed, i.e. what you've written isn't all you want to do. Normally, this is a non-issue, but much of what you covered of wanting to change or do are either non-issues or not really significant to a grander agenda of making the human-centric worlds more interesting and adding culture and life to the fictional galaxy. Being up-front about what you want to do is, once again, rather important. Historically there have been fairly lengthy interim periods where lore developers in nondescript positions idle, don't do anything, literally nothing at all for months and occupy a staff position that could otherwise be handed off to someone else more ambitious to be able to actually do something with the volunteer job they applied for. The impression so far is that I don't know if you want to just complete what is listed above, or just wing it as time goes on (that's not a good thing to hear or say, by the way), or finally, you have things planned that are Super Top Secret™ which I don't think anyone will appreciate. 6. egg This is mostly my conclusion. I'm not opposed to you being a deputy in the near future, but I think you lack certain ambitions required of a team lead. Much of your proposed ideas don't really have tangible structure or purpose either, and everything else "Good" you had to say was essentially already expected of any applicant to say anyway; it's good (but also already expected) to say you will work in tandem with the other teams, because the practical answer if you want the job is 'yes', saying 'no' is the immediate wrong answer.

+1. There are various reasons why I prefer this applicant over the others, and it primarily has to do with policy rather than friendship. I'm vehemently supportive of good ideas and those who promise to support good ideas. Developers who promise to uphold status quo are, in my opinion, not incredibly interesting and are probably worse than lore developers who have radical but potentially bad ideas. Still, the major point here is that we have a fair few of progress-minded developers applying with decent ideas this time around, but I think Ven is the one with the most interesting ideas. I've been in a fair few of discussions of lore significance with Ven, as well as having read the above. I'm of the opinion that Ven seems to be the most underappreciated applicant so far and also the one with the most hidden potential.

To be fair this isn't hard to do, I always carry the head of staff laptop around to at-will lift maintenance restrictions and it hasn't become a problem. The limitations on security actively make it more difficult for them to neutralize antagonists as effectively. I'm still supportive of maintaining status quo on this issue. So long as other exceptions are not lifted, obviously. Gameplay is fine as-is regarding this specific aspect of gameplay.

I think little visual "pings" to illustrate noise movement would be great. I think it'd be preferable than mobs fading in or out of vision.

Literally no officer locks them away in the armory. Often they'll take the items for personal usage.