Scheveningen

I'm commander Shepherd and I endorse this Burger thread. I prefer canon events because I want my character's actions to actually matter and feel both fair and impactful within universe. If the round is an event but it's non-canon, I can be self-assured that anything I do will not matter because the objective of a canon event is different from that of a non-canon one-shot event. I like violent canon events more than I like violent non-canon events. The majority of the time, a non-canon event is run, it's escalated to such a ridiculous and immersion-breaking degree that you're better off voting for transfer or immediately finding a way to call the shuttle. It is not enjoyable to play a round where your actions are way too punishing because the event host running a non-canon round wants to see blood more than they want to see people enjoying themselves in a round centered around a different objective than just mindless violence. Every once in awhile a violent non-canon event can be entertaining but it's largely based around the person running it and what the objective involved is, in terms of whether it'll be quality or not. If it's someone who's notorious for pitting unkillable threats against the station then only the combat-oriented players are going to have a good time. I don't play Aurora for a heavy combat focus. I play it for a heavy roleplay focus. I'd rather event hosts make it more clear what they're going to be doing in an event in terms of theme. Forget the risk of metagaming, I'd rather know whether or not an event is going to be worth my time. I don't play Aurora to burn off steam, I play Aurora to have a good time. If I wanted to go burn off steam I'd play /tg/ for my spamclick fix instead.

I didn't know command whitelists were trialable.

-1, Standing in opposition to these proposed changes. The flash rework in its currently intended form has only been out for a week due to an issue with the UI interactions which got fixed just a couple days after the issue was identified. Furthermore, all the main OP proposes to change is tacking on unnecessary amounts of additional disabling effects that amusingly are too short in duration and too little in impact to be worth it. You're effectively attempting to add unnecessary amounts of mechanics to flashing. Presently, being unable to see for 7-10 seconds through direct flashing and 5-7 through the AOE activated flash is already more impactful than what 2 second slow-dizzy-blur combos will do. Flashes are not meant to be more physically irritating than pepperspray. They're a lower form of escalation of force for that reason, so that anyone who uses the flash isn't prosecuted for assault, unlike pepperspray where you can be prosecuted for assault/using it for torture. The power in the flash as it is, is due to its absolute simplicity. It does one thing but it does it quite well in ideal circumstances. If used incorrectly or in a situation where it'll have no impact anyway, it's useless, just like most tools. No tool in the security belt is supposed to be a swiss army knife alone, the security officer themselves has a wide assortment of tools to cover all the bases because it makes sense. Every tool individually tends to be singularly good at one thing, though, and the flash is excellent for setting up a grab or an immediate batonning/tasing. The change to their charge count is absolutely pointless. They passively regenerate an additional use every minute and they can easily short the bulb out if used too much. Furthermore, the OP has been uncommunicative, rude and dismissive of negative feedback, choosing only to reply to positive feedback.

What does the flash not do currently that wasn't initially intended in the recent update? It's a disabler tool, but not a guaranteed stun. It was intended in the PR I pushed to be a situational utility tool to be paired with other tools to combo with. Is there any confusion as to how I intended people to be using it? If not, what's wrong with that method?

There's also a separate verb to allow you to use exclusively kicks, punches, claws, etc. I forget what it's called as I've not found it that useful.

Willing to bet money on this, actually, we all know the exact kind of caliber of characters that would gravitate to here just because the option is available. Would rather we do our own thing instead to actually fit the server, since the setting of Polaris and the setting of Aurora are two different mysterious and mythical creatures. Being 4'11" in-game is supposed to be unlikely to start with since being too short would probably get you passed up for certain jobs. Either way, these physical appearances add little difference to the game and are not really worth the effort of designing interactions around too much in terms of mechanical value. They only matter as much as the player playing the short/tall/whatever character is willing to restrict the character by in-character. The way polaris seems to stretch/compress sprites just to simulate height looks very awkward and sloppy, imo. Kind of clashes a lot with uniformity in design, really don't like it. Not sure if I'm a fan of the traits either. They don't look interesting/in-depth enough to me to be worth porting in my eyes. Edit: These normally wouldn't be a 'no' vote from me if the suggestion was more than just "port this", which it mostly isn't unless it gets edited at some point. My VP on it is that we should go nuts with depth or not at all.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4919 And I fixed it. It's been fixed for a full week. What are you complaining about

Hard pass. Let's not become VOREstation with the character creation options. Keep it simple.

Double-edged sword, sadly. I'm not sure what I can do presently about that, since frankly a lot of antagonists at their baseline tend to be fairly limited at the start of a round in how they can disable and etc.

The new flash changes have only been out for a week. Absolutely untrue. Run a watch and it's up to 10 seconds of a blind through a direct flash and 7 seconds with an AOE flash. You greatly underestimate the value of it. Making a battery-fed flash with no passive recharge capability is bound to make it completely useless. Don't change how flashes recharge/store charges or they're going to be way less powerful than they were or are currently. It already does this. You can already juryrig a flash to supercharge and set someone on fire. lol jk this was on the original aurora codebase, not the current one. There's really not a lot of need for making flashes modular. If you want to make flashes even more gimmicky, though, this is surely the way to go about doing it. Not a good idea. You'd still be able to see your own character when blinded. 2 seconds is no time at all, it's a negligible disabling effect. The white overlay is there to simulate the immersive effect of being blinded by a white flash. I would've potentially made it so that the overlay overwrote anything on your screen, but then people would've complained about not being able to click someone while blinded. I would've also taken the method of Baystation's way of doing it if it was at all easy to port into our code. 2 seconds for those debuff effects is little time at all. Gimmicky and absolutely not impactful at all on virtue of how measly the duration is for those effects. It was the previous duration of how long the AOE flash blinded you before I made these changes. tl;dr Don't touch flash charges or add a battery to them. Flashes need the passive regen to be consistently useful. If you want to add disabling effects to being flashed, make them longer than 5 seconds. Numbers already dictate the impact of how flashes sit in the current state of the game. Unless you want to bring in Bay's changes to blinding and flashes, don't touch how the overlay is currently. Better yet, since this was my project in the first place and I already expressed intent to do a propose some changes next month, please don't go over my head and propose changes without first trying to discuss particulars with me, since I am responsible for the previous changes. How would you feel if I posted KA tweaks + the PR for it without even talking to you about it?

Sadly this isn't really linked anywhere aside from vaguely described in an IC guidebook. Inside the code, though, it is a totally different story. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/tree/33a87ea4fab5c42ea72c765000026b63a7ebfe90/code/datums/brain_damage All mental traumas are categorized variously into the ways that they're cured. The current cures are through hypnosis, through solitude, through electroshock that one crystal pod thingy, and through surgery. Hypnosis is a cure to fix behavioral patterns. Examples such as phobias. You stick these nerds with the hypnotic pocket watch or in the isolation room. Solitude is a cure to fix hallucination issues. Examples such as imaginary friends or etc. You stick these nerds in the isolation room in the psychiatry wing. Electroshock zaps the physical gay out of you the crystal pod treatment fixes physical coordination issues such as stuttering, speech impediments, and many other issues. Surgery fixes lots. I forget what the specific treatment is, it's probably just opening up their head and smearing the green trauma kit all over it and then that's a wrap. I haven't cured the surgery-specific ones before simply because of how RNG-intensive the traumas are.

[mention]BurgerBB[/mention] There's a fair bit to unpack with your statement, but this is largely why I have the feedback thread. Why do you think the change wasn't needed? Also, I don't think seeing security struggling to detain people with only a flash is a sign this change was a failure. Because it seems like, really, that they have a bad habit they need to work out of their system, and everything is working as intended. I mean, now it is, anyway. There were plenty of compensation changes made to the flash. The combo potential of being flash - > baton -> flash -> batonned and being unable to really respond to it is fairly significant. All I did was really just add additional steps for a potential takedown condition. The additional requirements of effort being involved means that the victim of a blind attempt can still evade and fight back for a period of time. Though if someone is using the flash in its present form correctly, they may not actually stand for long at all. [mention]Sytic[/mention] All spray weapons work similarly, but it otherwise seems fine with me, honestly, especially regarding the concern about security being 'forced' to utilize jointbreaks now. Which, honestly, if you've managed to dislocate both of someone's legs, didn't you already have enough time to slap cuffs on them and arrest them? I'm comfortable with security being forced to invest more effort if they have to arrest someone. Flashes were too good at what they did and were otherwise overloaded with mechanical advantages that it didn't need. [mention]kyres1[/mention] That's one of the results of the overall suggestion I hoped people would definitely put some significant stock in. Being stunned for five seconds (one second short of the handcuff delay timer) was something that people vastly underestimated. It's much more difficult to handle prisoners now, especially since pepperspray is a limited, but refillable, resource. I think it's a fine change because the flash is no longer effective as a crutch for individuals to use and abuse. Given the wide availability it held in gameplay, it was definitely too impactful without any significant risk or injury involved. It's now enforced through mechanics into a specific niche of usability. Being blinded isn't nothing to scoff at, because you're physically unable to visually respond to what's going on your screen for five to seven seconds. It's sad that certain people have written it off and thus haven't even tried to exploit it presently in combination with other tools at their disposal. But that's fine, really, the behavior of "spam click flash until they go horizontal" was exactly something I wanted to punish. Hilarious thought, though, that people are going to throw their flash away and suddenly they get turned horizontal by a malfunctioning borg that was very happy not to get flash cheesed. [mention]Trazz666[/mention] They can't really have their cursor on you by the time you've blinded them for seven seconds. Because they have a white overlay on their screen, obstructing their view. Even if they were making general guesses about your possible location on screen, wouldn't it be smart to try and circle them and weave in additional attacks while they're blind and vulnerable? Just offering what someone could do better to defend against the hypothetical situation of, "my cursor is over your avatar, you're gonna get CLICKED, son-- oh wait I'm blind". If you're an antagonist and worried about means that you can't defend yourself against, you should consider acquiring armor in the form of voidsuits and exploiting its advantages. Furthermore, buy a revolver or something if you're worried about losing a confrontation against security's other tools. You theoretically can't lose with a traitor revolver, unless you catastrophically miss every shot. If you're not a traitor, and some other form of antagonist, I suggest either exploiting what abilities you have presently or acquiring power in the same ways you do currently. The changes really didn't do too much against security during the later stages of the game when they're pursuing antagonists with lethal weapons. They weren't usually intent to take you down with a flash anyway. All blinds have been globally buffed, on the subject of the .45 flash pistols. The vampire's blind is significantly extended for example, as are flash rounds, the explosive flash, flashbangs (although not their stun duration), and so on. I'll consider adding pepperspray canisters to head of staff lockers. [mention]Sharp[/mention] It's worth noting that I already know how to make passive grabs root people into place, but, this would create a potential issue with grabs becoming way too strong again.

It's being taken into consideration. The large part of why the previous iteration of the flash was so oppressive was the duality of disabling it brought to the table. On one hand not only did it blind you, making you temporarily unable to react to something, but you also physically couldn't react due to your amount of control being locked down in a single input. And then again and again and again as those inputs were repeated due to how easy it was to retain that lockdown. When used well, a blind as it is can be very oppressive to deal with, considering its duration right now (which, I'm told, is significant, but might not even be long enough! imagine buffing it up to like 15 seconds, wouldn't that just be delightfully horrid). There are indeed some drawbacks already implemented so perhaps it is worth adding a slow effect on top of the initial blind effect.

It's been a bit under a week, but this thread will likely stay up regardless and take feedback as we go. Hello, self-proclaimed dirtbag contributor here! For context, the following two PRs are what I'm talking about. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4662 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4919 So, more or less, I'll flat out admit I'm speaking with a bias when I say I'm otherwise satisfied with the general premise of the changes I made. Obviously some people are still getting used to the idea that flashes won't work vs. Humans/Skrell/Taj/Unathi, and they respond in a bit of a shocked way when their flash breaks through over-use and it's not instantly dropping someone without sunglasses or full face protection like a sack of potatoes. I do believe the changes I made were justified, given it was one of the last legacy features of instantaneous, nil-force-used methods used to instantly stun someone or even keep them in a stunlock. I've seen a few situations where antagonists actually got the upper hand because of the stun being removed (and also because the people trying to use it as a stun didn't know it was removed, but, eh, c'est la vie), and managed to escape a situation that would've ended their round otherwise. Obviously, some people who play security are not very pleased with the changes. Even some heads of staff who were liberal users of the flash to kick trespassing nerds out of their department were not happy about it. Some people have also stated they no longer use the flash because I nerfed it into a trash state of unreliability. I would generally like to hear more of these thoughts though, and how the changes have influenced their own gameplay. Furthermore, do you think the game flow is better off without the stun mechanic attached to it? Do you think the blinds should be more significant than they are currently? Let me know by leaving a reply.

Could it be like the unathi cuffbreak thing where it requires remaining stamina and it takes 5 seconds to undertake? That way it's not instantaneous and you don't get eviscerated immediately.

I understand your situation entirely. Once everything's out of the way on Abo's part this can be resolved.

Potential for unreasonable abuse isn't really an argument imo, as anything can be abused in stupid ways and punished for it due to how stupid the method of abuse is for it. Likewise, the example you provided is an unreasonable abuse of tickets and would be very much punishable. If the staffmember assigned to the ticket isn't online when you try to adminhelp, you get an error message and cannot make a new message until another admin is called to fix the issue via discord or OOC. Both of which are awkward hoops to jump through. The situation I proposed is a better option for convenience's sake so that this doesn't happen where a player can be stuck in a trap where they cannot adminhelp over an issue that they typed up because of a pitfall in the ticket system.

Okay, how about a better compromise? Make it so that you can open more than one ticket in a round and not be constricted to PMing only to a singular ticket. If a player abuses this, it's obviously a qualifier for a ban from the server.

The X for an expanded ticket only collapses it from view, it doesn't close the ticket and allow the player to open a new one.

Sometimes the absolute madmins forget to close people's tickets. Or sometimes players may not have anything else to say about an issue they report. Either way it'd be nice to be able to close your own ticket in cases in which you're the one opening them. Of course, players shouldn't be able to close tickets that staff open initially. This also can be an issue if a staff member logs off before closing someone's ticket, because the person who has a ticket open with that staff member who dibs'd it last is not able to send another adminhelp until the ticket is closed by another staffmember.

BYOND Key: Scheveningen Game ID: bU2-aL7K Staff BYOND Key(s): ReadThisNamePlz, Garnascus Reason for complaint: A chaplain by the name of Adam Taylor landed in the brig initially for assault. He smashed a bottle on someone's head and immediately got brigged for it. They then pulled a fire alarm in the brig which I went to check out, and examined the culprit. . Once I identified the individual in particular as Adam Taylor, Chaplain, I sent an adminhelp message and had it handled by Readthisnameplz, moderator. . . . . . At this point I dropped it, because I already intended to make a complaint over this to allow for more transparent discussion to be undertaken without concerns of being given information I shouldn't have for an ongoing round. I will say, however, that the worship of memetics is definitely a nonsensical excuse just to have "The Worship of Memeism" on your Bible. You cannot just default to "It's just my character" in situations like these. It breaks immersion and it is not fun for anyone who is trying to take their own roleplay and other character's roleplay seriously in-game, it is the environment that has been fostered here for about four or so years. Most characters I see are moderately sane and reasonable, befitting of the setting with their own interesting expressed motivations, some of them are even inherently antagonistic in nature and they are guaranteed to always cause conflict when they're on the server, but it's always worth looking forward to. It's just goofy through-and-through, I don't find it that reasonable, tbh. What I've personally witnessed from Adam Taylor was an extremely griefy, goofy, non-serious and immersion-breaking concept. He sits inside the goalpost that people talk about when they complain about nonsensical or unreasonable characters, and I find it weird that staff didn't pursue this any further, because the character did a lot in the round that made absolutely no sense for any non-antagonistic character to be doing at all on the station. After this, the chaplain was released from the brig and immediately beelined to break into hydroponics. For what reason I have no idea, as a security officer I was already responding with an ion rifle to deal with an emagged cyborg and back up my fellow officers. I witnessed him break in and as much as I wanted to do something ICly, my character was already caught up with larger priorities. I then killed the ninja later on into the round, and the server almost unanimously voted to vote for transfer once I murked the ninja with a detective revolver. Once the shuttle docked at the Odin, the chaplain had this to say: . . I reported this and the head administrator took my second adminhelp complaining about this guy and only had "This is fine" to say. Nothing else, no other reasoning aside for it. I'm mostly suspicious about this and I'm curious as to why the round wasn't delayed to clarify this, since the rules say that you must remain in-character at all times and that you must have a sane, reasonable and sensible character concept. I asked in a third adminhelp if I could have the player's ckey to make this complaint more streamlined so that I'd have a better idea as to who I'd be complaining about in terms of their behavior, but the head administrator insisted they wouldn't give it to me until after the complaint was made, even though this isn't public policy expected of staff members, and I was previously expected to give out ckeys for people being complained about in the past. I'm not sure what changed. Afterward, I spoke to the player of Lin Dyslioth about what they experienced from the chaplain as they were detained. They told me that the chaplain apparently only replied in all caps and wrote something about masturbation on a piece of paper in the brig. They didn't get a screenshot of this but I'm taking their word for it because whoever played Adam Taylor was effectively creating situations of grief rather than actually roleplaying as a sane, balanced and reasonable character. Approximate Date/Time: 24-Jun-18, around 12-2AM for GMT-4. side note: this was originally drafted as a player complaint but it was moved to staff complaints instead since this is me contesting the decision and strongly disagreeing with how they dealt with this. Although frankly I have more issue with the character going unpunished than going after the staff for not doing enough.

What bygone said. Research has to be the supplier for this gear because it creates interaction for multiple parties and science to be able to interact with one another enough to give out the equipment needed. Departments shouldn't get OP gear round-start, and none of them should be self-sustaining either. It's a station with multiple teams working in tandem. It's not research's fault. Do you know how difficult it is to play research when it hinges 80% on the performance of mining? If there are no miners they can't get anything done either.

From what I can recall, it was a manual ban applied by Garnascus. He didn't use the bot since I think the first and second ones expired leading up to the fourth one at the very least. This was the same occasion that pacman was also indefinitely banned from the discord. Both were banned for relatively the same reason, which was engaging in a gagefight in the general discord because of some argument or another centered around me. I blocked Xander at the time just to quit the discussion, I think pacman might've said something in my defense which eventually led to Garnascus losing their patience with the both of them and just manually banning the two of them without the use of the bot.

The first one. It's been awhile so I don't see why not. I don't recall the exact situation but there's plenty of blame to go around.

How is this supposed to fix a systemic antagonist issue if the requirements are so easily superceded? It's only dead in the water because you say it is, but I will say this: The suggestion trips over itself because it posits to be the fix to an issue that's admittedly a substantial one: antagonist quality. However, the ability to judge whether an antagonist is a quality one or not is still judged from multiple individual subjective standpoints. When analyzed by an admin (a few of which already gave you feedback here as to why this isn't feasible), the only basis they have are two things: their experience and relevance with a specific nuance of roleplaying, and what the rules say about that nuance. Because even an admin can find themselves tripping over the interpretation of the rules and what the "right" way of enforcing them is for any given case, it's hard to consistently help this issue as none of the admins on the team actually look for people to ban unless those players are outright griefing. but c'mon man, in the end, this isn't something worth being tripped up about. There seems to be no end of subjects that give you immense depression, it's a bit theatrical.