Scheveningen

Love the idea in general, looking forward to the execution.

Pls. I don't want to drill a single tile a million times to dig a hole in the floor.

I personally don't think you're giving the applicant a lot of credit by calling him a weenie and then not explaining past "I skimmed past his chat history and he said some things I didn't like that are also in this thread." It's quite the opposite, rather, it seems to be said in that way for the sake of saying it and having a reason to dismiss the application. SeniorScore is a long-time player on the server and his character Ryan McLean is one I recall with substantial clarity both on-server and for the NT relay, plus its text-chat RP apartment servers. SeniorScore is -- well it's easier to explain what he's not. He's not incompetent, he isn't a sycophant, and he's the exact opposite of a bad roleplayer. If I were to grade how a player sits in terms of their overall attitude, competency with mechanics and ability to roleplay, Seniorscore sits well between the middle and the top of the graph. I don't find his attitude at all as offensive as certain members of the community that still exist around here, far from it, in fact, given how I believe Senior sits many rungs up that graph compared to how I view those aforementioned individuals. SeniorScore is certainly opinionated and holds political views some might find to be one of the reasons they don't frequent the political discussion section of the main discord, but I do not personally find such political beliefs relevant to determining the actual character values an individual has. If said individuals are judging SeniorScore alone on the basis that his politics are no bueno, I'd be reticient to believe anyone who thinks that way is remotely close to being a good judge of character. I've held witness to certain 'spats' of his attitude before. It's not the worst or even close to being unacceptable when I've experienced it. I remember mentioning the word "sycophant" before, and SeniorScore does have a tendency to be less than tolerant to individuals who might fit that bill. We're all human beings in the regard of occasionally evaluating how we treat people incorrectly due to not having all of the facts, but it surely hasn't stopped the majority of us from hurling arguments, nasty implications and insults towards other players we disagree with before, some of us who have done that quite recently anyway and will likely do it again if they find the justification to do so. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, as it were. As doxx has said, there's many people who've been needlessly unfair already in how they assert their judgement of the OP, so I'll move off this point. In short, I endorse this application. It is not a tentative endorsement nor an overwhelming "yes yes yes", it's a moderate endorsement. There are mild concerns I have but I trust SeniorScore to not misuse his role. Being slightly mean-spirited on occasion doesn't forfeit your whitelist, otherwise literally no one who has posted in this thread would at all have a good metric to be able to endorse other people for command whitelists.

It actually doesn't. Security culture didn't change when I tried to one of the community pillars for what security was supposed to represent when I reformed as a security main, and it also didn't change with the myriad of development changes to security. A person content with powergaming and ruining the game for antags will not care if you try and nerf their bad habits without dealing with them in an administrative capacity, they will continue to powergame with whatever methods they have left. People like this do not care what you do to the balance of the game, in fact they welcome it because they make it so that antagonists have to keep using the same predictable methods, and it also makes the game worse for everyone else that tries to take the RP aspect of it seriously. I do not agree with this. Antagonists must be able to have the ability to hold their own and be a threat to the station (I wanted to give antags 50 TC at one point but there were balance concerns about it, case in point). It is an unsaid requirement for playing antagonist if you ever want to succeed in your IC goals. Balance-wise: A single antagonist should be able, assuming with an average amount of skill and decent equipment, to 1v2 without taking too much damage. Security does not need to be nerfed, but all antag classes should be buffed so that it is scary to take on an antagonist by yourself, and will often require teamwork from multiple individuals to take them out, so as to solidify that an antagonist is ideally very good at 1v1ing and should almost always come out on top in those conflict scenarios. Of course someone who gets punished for breaking the rules feels like they're being persecuted. Those feelings are misguided, ultimately, to the real context and truth case-by-case as to why those players continuously get punished by the administration. We have certain members of the community who pride themselves in pressing the observe button and reporting morally grey situations to the administrators while adopting a very black-and-white tone in how they view the situation, and I've had to defend my case to an administrator against a fair deal of lying and misleading statements said about me from an observer, rather than a person I might've wronged directly. I would very much prefer we not enable those prideful individuals who think they know how a situation went down better than the people involved in a round. It's a very fucked up situation to be in, that you're more likely to be adminhelped about by someone who likely only joined the round to watch your character do something without any context as to what's going on in the overarching round. Imagine that, being reported by somebody for a roleplay issue, and the guy/gal doing it is not even in the round? It's not that unlikely, it happens fairly often. "It's been dealt with" may be unsatisfying to hear, but I'd rather not entertain the implication of giving habitual ghost-whiners more power to behave as they do if the system is ever to change. You cannot know if a person died purely because the captain didn't let the entire crew on a need-to-know basis. It is extremely easy to look at a situation start to finish like that and make those assumptions, but it is not the right way to go about it because it ignores the 'time and place' factors of the individual who died and the other people involved in the situation. I'm indifferent about this one, because it's a far in the future suggestion given the lack of an ETA on NBT at the moment. I won't go so far as to say it's not relevant, but it's best to address NBT suggestions when we see evidence that it's close to being underway.

I'm fine with it being a service hub while still one of many important research divisions at work. It's a neat split between "the station is unimportant but it exists" and "the station is the flagship effort of nanotrasen despite dozens if not hundreds of similar stations existing across the galaxy asffafsfsaf -foams at the mouth-". The latter just felt like a forced trope where we were giving ourselves a false participation trophy of wax pretending to be gold. It just added to the cringey feeling one experiences when someone tries to behave like an anime protagonist.

This is usually the case because when command starts informing people about what's going on when it's ultimately not really necessary to let everyone in on the need-to-know, there's always a group of people that have to directly insert themselves into danger regardless of whether or not they're a character that can bring anything to the table in resolving the problem with the threat. It's not believable character behavior for command staff members to stop and tell a group of bored assistants what's going on, in my opinion. That time could be better used trying to communicate with command staff and organizing plans on what to do. There's always been a need-to-know basis when it comes to dealing with antagonists because it makes sense ICly. "No, I can't stop to tell you what's going on right now, if you're not already on the need-to-know, it means I don't need your help right now" is not a particularly insidious statement, yet command staff get constantly lambasted when they try to lower the amount of people that potentially endanger themselves because the offending individuals got told the exact context of what's going on and end up trying, whether told to or not, to help, despite being often unqualified ICly to deal with the situation. Each command staff player has their own way of running their department and whether they exercise the need-to-know basis method or not, it's their way of running the show. If you think you know better than the wide assortment of command players doing their job, why not apply for a command whitelist and do better? I find this lore canonization application to be an odd precedent because it looks to try and change/force certain behaviors.

-1 No. Station security guards are the equivalent of town guards or policemen for the respective setting. They must be identifiable as an authority figure (or rather as the official pawns of the actual authority.)

I would prefer if maps were also a voted option in addition to game mode votes

Generally speaking, DMs are the most effective and direct method for me to speak to whomever I need to in order to, well, get what I want done, really. Arrow's advice has been nothing other than helpful largely in changing features the way that is still fair and balanced for the game state. I am not someone who commonly shares discussions in DMs, but in short there were good points made from both sides. Ultimately the !FUN! argument has to concede to 'fair and balanced' one every once in awhile. I have suggested and will suggest that anyone who has a bone to pick with the status quo of how firing pins are balanced to make a suggestion thread and make their points from there. Alternatively, if you are a contributor and avid on making the changes to propose yourself, you can speak to any array of the devs for their input on what ideas you have.

I'm asking my interpretation be considered for new policy.

Forums are a little weird displaying images so just click the spoiler above to see the exact applicable context of what I'm referring to when I ask for clarification to these rules. First off: Antagonists are not exempt from the rules - This is a rule that is clearly written in such a way that can't be misunderstood. In essence it's saying being an antag is not license to grief, but I would think it would also say it means that antagonists should follow certain rules regarding how characters are supposed to behave, antagonist status not-withstanding. Granted, this counters another thing also mentioned, which is the caveat in Conflict is acceptable, even when you are an antag. The passage is: "Keep in mind, the more drastic the action, the more motivated your character has to be to commit to it, and the consequences it brings. Unless you're an antagonist, this motivation has to be developed through roleplay on the server: backstory cannot legitimize drastic things, such as trying to assault security staff because of a bad childhood, for example. It is also very much encouraged that you roleplay out the consequences to such conflict where possible." Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what this actually means, but basically there's an exception to escalating conflict if you're an antagonist. But I would assume this means that an antagonist, unlike other characters, has roundstart justification to outright go, "Hi, I'm an assassin and you are my objective. I am not killing you because it's opportunistic, but because I already motivated myself to plan this ahead of time, and I'm going to murder you to the best of my ability." I am absolutely okay with justification like that. Because pre-meditated murderers are safe in terms of the rules and also lead to very fun and engaging situations in trying to catch murderers like this later down the line. However, what I often see is that this caveat that "I am the antag" means it allows you to commit collateral or an opportunistic kill "just because". I do not think it means that it is license to gank just because an antagonist "has to do something" in the round. The hammer gets slammed down hard on someone who does this to an antagonist. Why don't they get the same level of scrutiny when they do it? I do not like murders of opportunism (i.e., a murder that was a random, heat of the moment thing and not pre-meditated. Note I am not against killing people in self-defense or because they deliberately tried to stand in an antagonist's way, that's different) because it's simply just one of those things that are guaranteed to get out of hand. For the sake of preserving roleplay integrity and in the interest of not deliberately putting people out of the round because the rules are unclear, I do want an actual consistent standard of enforcement regarding those two details. The only rule I think antagonists are exempt from is murdering in self-defense. I do think they should get a little lee-way regarding "escalating in a realistic manner", but not enough to permit them to basically murder someone because "opportunism."

Only thing worth quoting because this is the most obvious example of what we've repeatedly seen so far. You know how Skull was worried about the peanut gallery killing this thread? I'm not so worried about them at this point. Because little statements like these being flung from Fowl to add up to making it seem like Fowl is deliberately trying to make people feel unwelcome in this community. I seriously do not see how you think repeatedly yelling at and insulting your opposition is helping you defend your case against the accusations made against you which simplify down to you yelling at community members and belittling them. You are doing nothing more than proving their point. I'm starting to have deja vu at this point because there's another developer in Aurora's history that was dismissed over their unprofessional behavior in addition to the abuse of their powers as a staff member.

do you believe there should be no consequences as a result of you using your power as a staff member to abuse the calendar and thus be the "lit match" as to why the calendar feature was disabled? When I mean consequences, I mean reasonable ones. Anywhere between a reprimand to being stripped of forum powers for a month, which is the most appropriate response to curb abusing forum features as a staff member. Keep in mind that were it not for you abusing, it's likely the calendar would've stayed. You understand the implications of that issue, right? I'd also be really cautious about playing semantics to downplay the severity of using your forum role powers for a deed obviously not intended to be used in such a way, regardless of whether you're 'able to' or not. The expectation is to act in good faith. The issue being addressed is whether you acted in good faith, and it's hard to say you did because such an act is hard to justify happening at all, much less on it being 'with good intentions.' If no to "I don't think I should be disciplined for acting out of line with the calendar issue", where do you typically draw the line in which you expect other staff members to moderate you?

This is what I mean, in terms of what you said. I really don't understand what you meant by that. I don't think the role of staff members is to 'soften opinion' or whatever in terms of their role. I really don't understand what you're implying if you write something down of this caliber but don't literally mean it. It seems confusing in this context to say.

I re-read this post at least more than a few times now, not really knowing what to say because it was such a discomforting thing to read. What do you mean by "I think the server can take the hit"? Are you referring to people choosing to leave the server as 'an acceptable casualty' just to uphold this abstract concept of liberty, even allowing people to be smug POSes? Before you say, "you misunderstand", you might want to look at that statement as 'Oh, I should've been more clear, because it already has awkward implications just saying it.' I also want to say "Rusty Sh4ckleford died for this" to reference how we must often be cautious about how we police attitude and tone, but if I'll be honest, the way Fowl seems comfortable treating people is something that appears to aim below the belt and without really pulling any punches. Is keeping Aurorastation as a community safe and fun for everyone not as important as ensuring we allow Fowl to be a dick whenever he wants to be? That's the question I've seen Jackboot pose and that's one I'll pose as well. UM's post is also sound and still hits the mark here. We're not Amazon, true, but shouldn't we be upholding some principle of professionalism for staff members? I can certainly speak of my own failings on that matter as a staff member. If I took the fall inevitably for having a bad attitude as a staff member (granted, I resigned), shouldn't some similar principle be enforced here? It sets a nasty precedent of what any other staff member can get away with doing if left unaddressed otherwise. I'm aware Skull's a busy person, but I'm not sure how I feel about him sitting on this issue 3 days past due date of roughly when this was supposed to be officially addressed. Granted I don't see behind the scenes and rightfully so, seems a little odd for such a publicly-affecting issue like this hasn't been publicly addressed yet.

nani kore wa, an assassins creed reference? Something I always wanted to implement was a certain, inconspicuous accessory that gave you a verb to extend a blade from said accessory to use in melee combat, while also being perfect for concealing an assassination weapon that was easy to carry into a room with discretion. At first I remember wanting way back to simply copy-paste the code from the ninja suit for the energy blade into something of this low-tech caliber. 'Course, this idea suddenly got forgotten until now. Now, however, the better framework (in terms of design) already exists in the form of the changeling armblade. While getting knocked down with an armblade simply morphs the arm back to normal, it obviously can't be disarmed and turned on its attacker. I wanted to implement a low-tech example of this while not being as powerful as an armblade or the ninjas energy blade. Particularly, I would like basically anyone to be able to construct such a contraption, though only antagonist-type characters would be the only ones to have justification and knowledge to do so. Similar to how other improvised weapons are treated in-game, and the overall popularity of such things isn't expected to change. Albeit, this would be intended to be a particularly useful example. However, something like this has many implications that would affect gameplay in a variable amount of ways, so I'm curious as to what the community thinks before deciding on what to do. Thoughts?

Cute outfit, reasonable amounts of justification involved to have these items in the game. Code/spritework looks done too, so that's a plus. +1

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/5684 excuses about not making a feedback thread immediately intensifies

Which is the major reason why I don't find Faysal's behavior in these situations problematic. If he led the charge whether there was a HoS/security force or not, then this would be a problem worth looking at. Since the context is about whether Faysal is a validhunter, a lot of people have already said that he's never gone so far as to be guilty of such a thing. Alb follows the rules in this respect by escalating appropriately, and he's frankly one of the model, shining examples of players on this server that do it well and consistently.

Feel free to consult with other detractors of this change in what they think is reasonable or what you should've implemented instead. You can take their opinion with as much of a grain of wheat. There's enough time between the times it was implemented and now to presume that it likely wasn't worth the concern of anyone in the past, because they judged the mechanic through the lens of "it's just a video game" rather than "an actual simulation of sci fi/fantasy mechanics." It's a relatively safe assumption to make that not dealing with it was intentional. "Make better decisions." You don't have to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Okay, rather, 'don't serve the bun out from the oven until it's done.' As it stands, teleporting into a window enclosure (no grille) has equal amounts of lethality as teleporting into a 1x1 wall. That's not fun for anyone. To diverge from that, there's also more enabled use for malicious people to use telescience now rather than the telesci explorers themselves as it stands. If you send a GPS out into a wall to comb through the mines... well, you just lost a GPS. Telescience used to be a decent way of finding the random dungeons. Now they have to be found the harder way. Alright. Here's my issue with this: You believe in moderating people's actions, but you won't moderate your own 'tude and how you speak to others. I hope you recognize the conflict between the message and the messenger there, and that you realize the mistake there and better yourself as a person and a staff member. That's all else I'll say on that point. Beyond that, I am still adamant that either a revert or a rework of this PR needs to be done to be less punishing to the benign users while still being attractive to the explorer-type telescience users, while still adding a element that does punish overzealous attempts at exploring or even malicious intent in general. I don't mind Teleport into Wall > Lose arm so much as I mind losing an arm teleporting into a partial window. Gibbing is also something I believe should be restricted to high-yield explosives, Vox Armalis, Vaurca Warforms, Xeno Queens and etc.