Scheveningen

Frankly, the "walk up and click to stun and win the confrontation" meta for cultists are boring. The exact opposite of boring, in my opinion, is paper planes. as such, I suggest that stun talismans work in the following two cases: 1.) Stun talismans are now a "prime and rush to get close" weapon, similar to lighting a stick of dynamite and running to a poor sod you intend to take with you. Except rather than becoming a casualty, stun talismans immediately stun anyone within melee-range radius once the priming time completes much like a flashbang. It will still inflict 50% of the same stun times as current talismans do, but with more payoff and risk attached to it. (Stun multiple people at once? yes PLS) Stun talismans get obvious indicators and flash cult-red as well as create a blood-red light source when activated. 2.) Stun talismans when primed can be folded into paper planes and thrown. If they are thrown directly at a mob, it embeds into their body until it 'detonates' and stuns the victim for a heavier amount of time than what the current stun talisman can do presently. This can be counterplayed by ripping the paper plane out of the wound fast enough before it detonates. This will separate the good cultists from the bad ones in execution.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dh04s8X9DugxOZeWEo4G9tk3wONo5ZIn7Hkk6dtlRo0/edit# AWAY MISSIONS

Rail-roading does not work as well as you might think it does. This was an experience I had in a campaign. Suppose the characters enter a city, and find a riot or similar event. The most sensible choice would be to get the hell out of there immediately. If the players choose this strategy, and the DM needs their participation in the riot for the plot to develop, characters will find the city door closed, or a mob in front of it which prevents them to leave. There are more subtle and less subtle ways of railroading the roleplaying experience. It is rarely a worthy sacrifice to completely disable any sense of free-will in roleplaying. You're forcing characters into a pre-written plotline and you do not give them the avenue of choice at all, which is something here that adds a ton of fucking depth to in-character decisions to be able to choose whether to participate or walk away from a situation. Rail-roading is very bad because it gives the illusion that the outcome was random but in reality, it was orchestrated by the Master since the very beginning. Meaning the story and the point of roleplaying meant ultimately nothing because none of the players were able to make their own decisions and had to be forced to play along with the game that one person was planning to execute all along. Rail-roading is oftentimes only fun for the DM, not the players that expect their decisions to actually have weight and depth to it. I'll fight anyone IRL that disagrees otherwise. Free will is critically important for roleplaying, because otherwise characters are not even characters. They are just vessels to be toyed with by a power-hungry campaign Master, which is hardly any fun for most people. I did feel the experience was rail-roaded slightly when Central Command got involved. The initial plan with the HAPT was that they were going to nuke the station, did you know? Instead they got reworked to instate a slow-and-steady quarantine to hopefully involve more people into the paranoia rather than prematurely ending the round. I was annoyed as the captain as even I, the most important role on the station, was basically enforced to be locked up. It was annoying but I just deferred to speaking to my borer about fluff stuff to round it all out. I figured because it was happening that it was the intention of the event manager. Not really the best thing that could've happened but I have rather low expectations for non-canon events too, but I don't go so far as to avoid playing them.

Well, I guess if it wasn't completely hammered in before that you can't walk into xenobiology to stop an outbreak, you certainly can't do it now since you're gated behind other department hurdles to handle relatively simple issues.

To those who seek enjoyment in things, they will find it. For those who seek the opposite, they will find it. Fine, we'll try to have fun without you.

i mean fires are weak as is, but nerfing the usefulness of fire extinguishers won't make fire strong again

I quit staff some time ago but I feel a lil bit obligated to comment since this was my ban to issue. Not that my advice is incredibly solid in the current state but I'm just putting it out there that I'm going to comment and stand up for myself when I'm accused of lying without evidence or proof. In your last appeal, you effectively accused me of being a double agent of some sort 'serving' under the interests of someone else. Let it be known that as much as I tried to act as proactive as I did to enforce the rules in a riskier but more impactful way, I still answered to the senior admin staff above me and the head staff above them. What they said, goes. I constantly took counsel of my peers to handle just about any given situation because I always felt more comfortable in making decisions when I had team-backing to make them. I don't appreciate being accused of being a puppet for doing a job. Your removal from the community was unfortunate but ultimately necessary, I was not the only person that thought this. Based off of this paragraph alone, what's the cost-benefit of actually unbanning you? The staff team (myself included) gave you multiple chances and avenues to improve before. Only because you ignored them did we at the time start to punish you repeatedly, because it obvious you were incapable of listening to feedback. It's sad that punishing you didn't give you a reality check even then, but that's a common sense issue, and people generally need common sense and respect for the rules to last long in practically any community. We really didn't see any reason to keep you around, so you were removed from being able to play and participate in the community. What are you even talking about? You act like this arbiter of truth but you admitted you had no respect for the rules whatsoever. What makes you so valuable and important that you say you didn't deserve a permanent ban from the server? If the head staff felt I was in the wrong, they would have overruled my decision and you wouldn't be appealing a permanent ban from the server. They have insofar not done so, so it pretty much spells out a very different story as to what they thought about my justification. During my tenure as a moderator I almost always spoke to a head admin when I gave out a permanent ban to a server regular whether it was really necessary or not. It was a fair check to what power I held to be able to remove someone from the server. I didn't take permabanning players very lightly, I attempted to weigh cost-benefit into every single long-term ban decision I made. I can easily say that I didn't make this decision to permaban you alone. You were not a friendly individual. You were very accusatory and hostile towards other members of the playerbase and you participated in perpetuating a very toxic atmosphere. I don't care who started it, you kept it going and weren't willing to stop your toxic attitude and also to stop the drama-stirring. I didn't realize there was a metric for what constitutes as a superior or inferior moderator. Although I have heard rumors about the staff team being an effective Fourth Reich under Skull132 (wake up, sheeple), I wasn't sure this is what people meant by that, especially since I have no actual idea what you're talking about. You're making shit up to get attention. I never used the Incident Reports as a basis for your permanent ban. You have zero basis to imply that I did. It's CCIA's job to determine guilt out of IC reports, it was not my job to determine guilt out of them. Never once did I use incident reports as proof you weren't worth keeping around the community, it was your OOC attitude in handling issues and how they poured into IC. You had very little respect for roleplaying guidelines and you have already admitted you had no respect for the OOC rules either. You were a repeat offender, very toxic and unwilling to take personal responsibility for your own actions. Your own ego was, and still is, the defining problem. "I admit I have no respect for the rules, UNBAN ME BTW." I honestly don't remember any of these situations. Then again it was almost a year ago that you were permabanned. I will say it's super easy to make up stuff on the spot after a year, but it's also easy to forget things or people that I hadn't even thought about for a year. It sounds as if you're way too prideful to take personal responsibility for yourself and your actions. Case in point, really. This is the worst ban appeal I've ever seen drafted. There's only one other person that I believe should be indefinitely kept away from the community for good other than you. That's not an accomplishment. You are honestly wasting your time making another appeal here because you hadn't learned anything from the last one. Ban appeals are for taking personal responsibility and understanding you did wrong and that you won't make the same mistake again. This is flat out arrogance and lying in a ban appeal to score yourself sympathy. I don't know where you're from that casting blame on other people to get disciplinary actions lifted off yourself actually works for you. This is some home-grown entitlement. Permanently banning you from the server is certainly not among the things I regret coming out of the gate with my moderator tenure.

speak for yourself. the event was fantastic, we hadn't done borers for awhile and it was the best executed borer event i've ever experienced.

why was this even a thing in the first place? thats so intensely arbitrary and stupid.

This thread has very little to do with antagonists and the interaction stemming from it. Quoting ParadoxSpace to summarize the point of the topic that JB has written in full in the main OP: "As someone who's partaken in like atleast two events as an event character, there's an awful tendency for command and Security to try to sequester events away from the general public and generally keep knowledge/communication to the crew at large at an absolute minimum. During the tajaran refugee ebent we got shoved into a tiny area of the construction level and were never allowed anywhere without Security's noses in our assholes." Get it out of your head that this is about only antagonists. They are not the only thing to this server that makes it special. Remember what this server is advertised as on the hub. Heavy Roleplay. That means getting people involved to roleplay into the shoes of their character and getting some good experiences out of this server is very important. The problem is command and security forcing people out of the general interaction even if the other departments have really good reason to be involved in any given situation. The problem is certain members of the community that take actions, whether they know it or not, that isolate people from the fun. It's cliquey behavior and it's not fun. Just say yes. That's the only thing that needs to be done here. Involve people in your gimmicks and just say yes. Open up your comfort zones and allow people into your bubble.

'legally' port it over, emulate it with code mock-up, whatever. Anything that makes it so that ling is actually made good again would be the ideal option.

mofo is banned from posting here, i s2g

This is a thread to help revive the age-old concept of wanting to give up one of your older characters to permit someone else to play. A bit of organization sometimes goes a long way. General gist of it is thusly: Drop a post in for one of your characters that you don't wish to have wholesale ownership of anymore. If someone quotes your post, try to get into contact with them to work out details. Round out general characteristics in terms of personality to help flesh out for other people to figure out how to fit in such shoes to be roleplaying a new character for. After you get with another player to transfer ownership of a character, make sure to check in with administrators or CCIA to find out if said character has any pending IC strikes or something. Make sure you copy-paste records and the flavor text and such simply for complete transferal's sake. It'd be weird if an established character suddenly lost their flavor text and records all of a sudden, because that is a substantial amount of substance, believe it or not. The hope for this is to open up pre-existing groups of characters, whether they be just family members of existing characters or what-have-you. This is intended to be completely player-driven in terms of motivations. I'd start but I don't have characters I'd like to trade off, personally.

That didn't really change what I said. There is nothing above each of the other departmental lobbies to justify similar 'sunroofs.'

don't feel too bad, we all mess up super hard

tfw when people don't read the main post and they post essays of opinions without a document format, and not realizing what this thread is actually for Feels bad man.

There's nothing connecting anything any of the lobbies short of the medical lobby due to its connection to the psych ward. Up or down leads to solid asteroid rock only, outside of the medical level. . . Contrast with medical, which only has catwalks above it for purely aesthetic purposes and not actually to support the ceiling or anything since the catwalk area can't be accessed without a jetpack or breaking windows. . . The overlook from the psych ward is not there for any other purpose than for aesthetic. Is maintenance not good enough for hiding? Or build your own metal hut out in space or something. It's impractical to add similar sunroof-like structures above the lobbies. Only people with jetpacks are going to make use of it.

what the fuck. reported. This is literally too wholesome for the forums.

In regards to this, I think the context should be seen as to why they were banned. If it was head of staff related and a fuck-up of epic proportions, then their whitelist integrity should certainly be reviewed if it comes down to the point where it's like "this guy pretty much is supposed to represent command whitelistees and he blew it." If not, then it's unnecessary to tack on unrelated punishments. In regards to the whole reactive moderator policy, I get that nobody on the staff team wants to turn their volunteer thing into a full time job that they will slowly stop enjoying if they try to take moderation much more seriously, but I really have no better suggestions than just for staff to be a bit more proactive in checking for issues, particularly with command and security. Simply because of how easy it is to ruin the round as either of those roles, whereas others require substantially more obvious effort to do so and thus is easier to scrutinize, whereas command/security acting beyond their station is harder to scrutinize due to the nature of their jobs.

If I remember right, the teleport code needed re-factoring. Because it was super inefficient. It just needs to summon 10x as much as it does now if that is still a concern, so that it doesn't inadvertently hang up the server if reverted back to its normal state. Then you can toss the remainder into a satchel and then feed it into an ore box.

A major issue of the command whitelist format is that it falsely prioritizes the need for having a flowery backstory to substitute for actual substance. 2 paragraphs of Snowflake McGee tells me literally nothing of how responsible and how good of a player someone is on the OOC side. These are the major qualities needed of a command whitelisted player: Needs to have leadership/social skills, must get along well with others, respectful, non-hostile in most cases. An overall competence with game mechanics to make them an able and capable teacher. Being a responsible player with a good record. A mixed record as a player that follows the rules and when they don't is not necessarily a disqualifier, but a bad player that has no respect for rules or community traditions should be disqualified entirely. The understanding that whitelistees are expected to act above and beyond the typical expected standard of a normal player when they play as a command staff character. Overall respect for the community and for the rules + guidelines set in general and for heads of staff. OOC honesty. Liars and people that hide the truth about issues due to ego problems are not desirable candidates for a whitelist. The willingness to identify their own personal mistakes and resolve them in mature and reasonable fashions. A respect for their own place in a round and the reasonable limitations they're expected to apply their character to in order for a more interesting gameplay experience. A respect for 'lanes' and line-leading departments in general. Knowing how to accept if and when they are wrong and are willing to improve themselves whenever necessary. It is utterly necessary for the sake of the server culture that whitelistees actually take the privilege they were given, very seriously. No player should be entitled to a command whitelist. They must earn it! Greater power means greater responsibility, greater responsibility demands a greater understanding that one's conduct must be nothing less than decent. I do not think 'mediocre' whitelists should be accepted because of the merit alone that there are no purely negative aspects to an application. There must be an actual guideline on what gets your application accepted. You must have positive qualities to be deserving of command staff whitelisting. Furthermore, requiring several paragraphs prose about a character that likely is not even implemented in-game yet is dumb. Nobody cares about your character's background when you apply them as a head of staff because being a responsible writer of backstory is expected even without the whitelist. Being able to write a long backstory does not qualify the character as command staff material. Being able to identify why being whitelisted as command is important on the OOC side is much more relevant to the idea of ensuring a player is actually qualified for the whitelist. It's not just an IC thing. It is literally the main thing to the server as to why it's been able to bring forth quality roleplay scenarios time and time again, because the command staff are supposed to basically be the pillars of each round to which people are supposed to uphold a similar standard if they want the same thing. Command is not treated like this because it's presently a fucking joke to get a whitelist accepted. The reason being? The format is bad and the expectations for a head of staff are not clear. [b]BYOND key:[/b] [b]Character names:[/b] [hr] [b]How long have you been playing on Aurora?:[/b] [b]Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?:[/b] [b]Why did you come to Aurora?:[/b] [b]Have you read the Aurora wiki on the head roles and qualifications you plan on playing?:[/b] [hr] [b]Have you ever been banned from the server, or any staff-issued offenses that would be worthy of talking about in this application? Be honest:[/b] [b]What is roleplay? Why is it important to you?:[/b] [b]What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?:[/b] [b]What values do you think are necessary to properly play a head of staff?:[/b] [b]What does the 'Heavy' component to this roleplaying server - mean to you?:[/b] [b]What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?:[/b] [hr] Please pick one of your characters for this section, and provide well articulated responses to the following questions. [b]Character name:[/b] [b]Character age:[/b] [b]Character role being applied for:[/b] [b]Speak honestly and with good faith; is this character qualified through their attitude and past conduct (if applicable) to be a head of staff?:[/b] [hr] 'Yes' alone is not an answer. Provide detailed explanations to questions. We want to know your mindset. [b]How would you rate your own roleplaying?:[/b] [b]Do you consider yourself a responsible player?:[/b] [b]With your track record on this server, would you consider yourself deserving of a command whitelist?:[/b] [hr] [b]Extra notes:[/b] Furthermore, I believe the whitelisting team should have the right and own personal discretion to immediately deny a whitelist application and force the applicant to reapply exactly one month after if the offending player has a previous ban over two weeks on record in the past 3 months, or if they have any similar conduct issues that put them down the strait into Deep Shit Creek. We need filters for controversial and sub-par command applicants, because it is arguable that the lack of quality heads of staff are creating adverse effects on the roleplay quality of this server. Applying for head of staff should not feel like a home-work assignment for lore, but heads of staff are important for other reasons besides lore. They make or break a round if the person playing the head is either good or bad, respectively. I seriously think we should be more strict about it for future applications. Being command is no small thing, it is very easy to screw up if the person playing it has no idea what they're doing or has no intention of playing it seriously to the best of their effort and abilities. Command has the most impact on how the round turns out because they are leadership roles. They should be taken seriously OOCly and start to be moderated under a higher degree of proactive scrutiny. Asking the playerbase to ahelp issues does not work to a great effect. The playerbase does not know how the rules are supposed to be applied and if they can be applied for any given case. The rest of the staff do, however, and they're better qualified than virtually anyone else. I really think, in general, they should be looking out for people screwing up in roleplay contexts, but most of all important looking out for bad command. To a player, the value at which something is ahelpable is absolutely not quantifiable by them. So they don't know whether it is worth it or not. It shouldn't be the community's responsibility to help staff moderate command, it should be the responsibility of staff to actively try to oversee and moderate the behavior of the most important game roles in most rounds. Command needs to be more heavily moderated than virtually anyone else. Can we start cracking down? I view this as very important to the server's identity to have only decent or better players be command staff. I will now ping the relevant individuals for their thoughts. [mention]Sharp[/mention][mention]Garnascus[/mention][mention]Coalf[/mention][mention]Synnono[/mention] Sorry, I know you hate me, I do too. In case Syn asks "why am I pinged", it is because I consider their position as Head Fax Dictator as one with major clout and I'd like to see what they have to say as someone that has enforced certain actions on heads of staff before, and likely has an equally unique perspective as the others I pinged in this listing. Anyone else is free to discuss but I won't guarantee that I value your opinion unless you 100% agree with my proposition without question, only positive feedback is helpful to me, I do not tolerate dissent of opinion. /s

WIIIIIINK. This was an old feature. No idea where it went to, honestly.

What if they say no

The clear option is to nerf the entire station so that they're forced to interact with one singular department. Or just add superior stuff to cargo that allows the various departments (medical, for the sake of example) to skip steps and get power items. The more sane option rather than forcing them to interact, but rather to have really good incentive to do so. Besides, what interaction for cargo went past this generalization anyway; "I need a thing" "We need your money" "Okie" "It'll arrive in like forty minutes" "Thanks for nothing"

See my signature. That's why it exists. So it can be destroyed.