Scheveningen

Zundy, sign my petition to rename this thread "Alliance Systems", because Sol is a system of itself. That way it's less confusing because there's only one real Alliance in the lore.

Yeah, is Pigface canon? It better be the hit of the century.

You literally cut off the first half of my point because it was easier to address it if you edited my statement into something completely different from what I was saying. You also didn't address anything else I said. That's super childish. -1. Opposing this for my stated reasons on top of the OP ignoring a lot of initial criticism of their idea and why it has more negatives than upsides. I get you people get hard at the idea of slowly diluting available information from the game if not suggesting the newest idea on how to remove common comms from the game on a monthly basis, just because other people using information provided to them effectively ends up causing your antag round to go sideways (among the hundred other factors that actually do it much more impactfully), but you guys keep forgetting that rounds only last up to 3 hours max before people tire of it and want a reset of the round. Slowing down the round progression for both antagonists and non-antagonists is not how you create depth and fun. If this game wasn't based off of a round-by-round basis then there'd be justification for turning off some methods of communicating, but that's not how it works for this server.

I'm not really MO_oNy per se but I play HOS pretty frequently so I'll say my reply counts for something. Whether it's updated or not I'll enforce this all the same. The obvious concern is to whether or not a security officer is allowed to pick up a gun during a firefight from a mercenary or pirate and use it against them, which I personally think is fine. I also think it's fine to take a gun from a fallen hostile and keep it on your person for self-defense if you do not already have a weapon for yourself. It's a complete another thing for a security officer to pick up a revolver from a murder scene and with-hold turning it in, because that cause is far less excusable than keeping a hostile's weapon to help defend yourself + crew + station. The regulation more or less is clear on this distinction anyway. I believe he meant, "Officers are not literally above the regulations" in terms of "officers are not special". But a specific way in which they are special and thus are deserving of different treatment in regards to their own regulation breaching is due to the fact that they each command a fair deal of authority and represent the company's ability to enforce the same regulations they are supposed to uphold. If they deliberately break them to a serious degree, it is particularly telling of how unable they are to do their job. Blue code is absolutely a thing, UM, I totally agree that it is a problem during certain rounds, but this pretty much applies to virtually any department. Each department will stick up for their own unless sticking up for one another leads to a collective sinking ship type of situation. It's still an IC issue that has to be dealt with in the round, though. I covered this earlier, but effectively: There are often very good reasons for the HOS or the security officers to be repurposing those weapons. The armory now only starts with 4 potential lethal weapons and some lethal ammo for the .45 pistols that are otherwise not very good against heavy armor due to how little damage they deal. The .45 pistols, despite becoming significantly more lethal with the .45 jacketed rounds, still plink as much as C-20rs or as the detective's revolver does. They're not very strong compared to what guns might be dropped by a weakened pirate/mercenary/other antagonist. What can happen after the fact can lead to unfortunate results, but I don't think this regulation update suggestion is intended to cover the justified cases where you pick up a gun that you didn't have earlier to defend yourself + others. It's easy to strawman that the reason people play security is to valid antagonists but that's not my goal and I don't think it's the goal of many others either. It's a very narrow-minded way of thinking because it puts blame only on people who play security and removes any sort of accountability that antagonists themselves hold in being responsible for how others react to them. Antags can't win all the time. Only revs are the antagonists considered to be the heroic underdog. The antagonists are the villains, they're not the victims, they exist to create them. Because it would imply that CCIA don't think it reflects as much on an individual's record for abusing contraband supposed to be in lock up if they're a security officer, compared to how much of a serious charge it is to be caught with said contraband in the first place. And I'm certain you all don't think that way. Minimum a brig sentence leading up to a possible demotion, whichever the HOS/captain/ranking head of staff in that order thinks is best. Short of the captain ordering the HOS to demote the rulebreaker, obviously. There are zero guarantees in regards to whether or not security is willing to change. If this is implemented, corrupt sec characters will need to better adapt to the regulation update. Ergo, they must change or they get slapped with charges. Non-negotiable terms there. Without direct oversight from their head of security or captain, there's a lot security officers can get away with in terms of stepping over certain lines that they shouldn't. It's difficult to put an officer underneath a lens of scrutiny if there's nobody appropriate to be accountable for them. This is something that just has to be accepted as an IC issue, because everyone else operates on this similar principle. No evidence and no testimony means there's no case. tl;dr: Officers should be held to a higher standard, they're the enforcers of the law and if they violate it, they should be punished as befitting to the crime, but moreso closer to the maximum possible because there's a serious consequence to committing a crime as a crimestopper role. Abusing evidence is bad because it contaminates the forensic sanctity of the item they're abusing that may be really important to an ongoing investigation, and it's also very unprofessional of them to do. Picking up a gun as a security officer/HOS that wasn't administered in the armory to fight off boarders is not problematic and they aren't the SS for staying in-character and doing their best to protect the station and its personnel to the best of their ability. Not all security players play security just to valid. You'd be hardpressed to find someone who actually does, the NT-ISD discord/other players just jokes about it to poke fun at people who legitimately think security is out to get them because of OOC insecurities. There's no guarantee that anything will change in regards to the culture of security if anything is pushed through. People adapt based on how development goes or over time.

Okay. Again back to point one. How does making it incredibly difficult to find out if there's a doctor/roboticist/engineer/security officer to handle any array of issues lead to better gameplay? Can you rationalize for me as to how removing gameplay features with nothing substantial in return somehow adds depth to the game? Reworking mechanics is supposed to be better for gameflow, not for adding arbitrary difficulty and insidious tedium in comparison.

My playstyle is very dynamic and consistently moving. I do not enjoy being rooted in place for long periods of time when I play security unless I'm being actively engaged in a situation pertaining to my IC role or a social call pertaining to the relevance of my character's relationships with others. When I play HOS I don't like my officers sitting around idly either. They're not at their best possible potential for helpfulness by sitting around waiting for a console to flash especially if there's no guarantee someone will even bother to anonymously send security information that is difficult to immediately verify in the first place since anyone can send out information to security. Odds are security already either knows what's being anonymously sent or it's not useful to the current case, compared to how often anonymously sent info is actually going to be relevant. I doubt anyone actually plays security to sit around at a console. If they do it's because nothing's happened yet, and when something does happen, they're all over it for the rest of the round. Likewise, I don't think we need to force the absolute extreme in which people need to jump over incredible hurdles of walking around and asking up/down the chain just to figure out who they're supposed to be talking to for menial errands or expected requirements to their job. If my team and myself are actively tied up chasing pirates/traitors/lings/vampires around the station to nab for their associated crimes they've committed, odds are I'm going to prioritize the response to a console with dubious levels of verifiable information very low on my list of things I'll actively care about. It seems like everyone in addition to antagonists, is going to suffer from this. If you're non-command staff as a changeling and you don't have immediate ability to check your PDA to see what department you can infiltrate first and also consider the possibility of who will walk into your absorbing of someone, you're going to have a really short round real quick. Artificial difficulty done right is making things more difficult by adding different kinds of meaningful depth to the game that can make or break a person's individual experience. Depth is never added by removing something without immediate compensation.

I agree entirely. An officer abusing contraband should be held to a higher degree of scrutiny than a crewmember being caught with contraband. It should reflect accordingly in the aforementioned regulation.

Is the slime core processor device from /tg/ portable? The operating table for extracting cores is super tedious.

There's no guarantee security will check those.

As far as how the manifest goes, most of the crew roster are well acquainted with one another. Barring visitors, of course. While this is an understandable concern as to try and make certain non-crew antagonists viable in a stealth capacity, I don't believe this is really the right way to go about it. The problem with non-crew stealthing is how convoluted the process is in trying to blend in with a full crew roster with records, a snapshot photo and other fluff blurbs that everyone else that is crew happens to spawn with. Oh, and also appears on the manifest with name and rank. And the problem with that is creating a new set of records in the 'dirty' way is incredibly difficult to pull off to a degree of accuracy that matches the existing non-antag crew. It's also very time-consuming and it requires an insane amount of infiltrating areas you shouldn't have access to and stealing things you shouldn't have. It's a lot of breaking and entering just to blend in properly. I'd rather suggest tackling that issue of the records thing rather than outright removing 3/4s of the crew roster being able to identify anyone on the station. That's just flat out tacking on artificial difficulty without compensation.

Sabotaging a station system and then doing nothing else for the round as an antagonist is not only a waste of the antagonist slot that someone else could be using to actively interact with other players, but it can just as easily be argued as a case of grief. Back when ballistic drop pods were being actively used and I was a moderator, someone summoned one of them through a beacon hardly 3 minutes as the round started and they did nothing else for the round. When I asked them what their motivation was, they claimed it was because they wanted to give engineering something to do. At the time this wasn't acceptable because they dropped the equivalent of a bomb at departures and didn't really do anything else. The pod was so expensive on their TC budget that they literally could do nothing else. 3 minutes into the round with an instant escalation. Likewise, sabotaging a very critical means of communication without intending to escalate off of that is supposedly an antag no-no. You're never meant to deliberately plunge the round into an unplayable, unenjoyable and tedious limbo as an antagonist. Unless this has changed, I do believe this is part of current staff policy to consider 0 to 100 escalations for antagonists to be very poor play as an antagonist, which at the very least is deserving of a warning or at the very most an antagonist ban. But, unfortunately, asking staff to be on reactive overwatch for things that are not explicitly combat-logged spam/obvious grief is an untenable proposition. The staff have always tried to meddle as little as humanly possible to allow for the round to progress organically. There are situations where this is not true, but as far as I can recall the standard is usually set to wait for people to adminhelp before looking into issues. Another philosophy I learned as staff is that something that happens in-game is not an issue until it is adminhelped. This is meant to be interpreted as if administrators/moderators are reactive enforcers of the rules and for edge cases that have to be dealt with, rather than individuals that jump on issues and stop people to answer questions without having prior player provocation to be asking around as to why something progressed in-game. This also means that an issue a player neglects to mention over adminhelps is, as far as the administrators are concerned, not an issue at all because they don't know that you personally take issue with it. It's important for people to understand that adminhelping is also a means to convince a staff member that someone is breaking the rules if you feel like it's one of those edge cases that you feel strongly would be a bad influence on the overall roleplay quality if it were commonly accepted as an "okay thing to do" just because it's not strictly against the rules. Don't be obnoxious about this, obviously. I believe this is already policy, but not unlike destroying the engine, destroying communication can lead to some interesting escalation on the part of the round antagonist. It's obviously annoying for everyone else, though, because it is the means of communicating across the station. But because of this present risk that the antagonist could be acting well within their rights to be causing chaos, I don't think staff are very interested in interrogating every single player that dares try to sabotage telecommunications. After all, it's incredibly difficult to get into telecommunications without an emag to disable all of the turrets and needing the necessary access/tools to get inside. It's a very convoluted process to enter telecommunications. If someone is willing to invest that much effort, tools and time to shut down comms, maybe they do have a plan on what to be doing for the course of the round? Staff can't really make assumptions without a really good case for it.

Seriously, what? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? You practically stated Burger is the current community boogeyman. Your alarmist attitude and overall aggression towards Burger due to the historical contentiousness of his contributions to this community is getting absolutely ridiculous. I've zero idea why you feel compelled to make this personal. So, Burger wanting to diversify food to add to the character of the game and the nature of it being a roleplaying environment is somehow bad, because the game is as simplistic as it is? You need to stop posting on this forum board if the only thing that compels you to even contribute to discussion is to shit all over other people's ideas and their desire to contribute to the community's development.

You know what would be nice? If a mouse nibbling on a bit of food spread unique germs to it and make it very likely for the consumed food to spread a random disease to whoever ate it. It'd make virology more relevant at least. Likewise, I think the calculated food quality should also influence whether or not someone gets semi-potent buffs over a period of time or catches the space equivalent of salmonella because that steak wasn't cooked well enough.

You could make this assumption with or without this suggestion, I would think. It is not easy to get away with metagaming, contrary to popular belief. Medical going out of their way to tell security who has their sensors off is already inherent suspicion that the player themselves is attempting to metagame. It makes them easier to report in that case, and thus they'll get punished faster if they're that kind of player. I'm generally led to think that 80% of the regulars understand that and don't even bother trying to validate it, since they'd just as easily get caught. There are a lot of things that have risk for metagaming, even, but this community generally acts in good faith. I think we can trust one another to not abuse gameplay features for their own personal OOC goals in the round. This suggestion doesn't really change anything about what the expectations are for suit sensors on every code level. There's a lot of possibilities with what can happen with a simple preference addition to suit sensors, but I think metagamey behavior is really low on that list. If it does happen, I would think it's very easily punishable. Medical doctors cannot support any sort of IC logic that would justify accusing someone of being an antagonist just because they didn't turn their sensors on for code green or blue. It's only considered highly recommended on blue and then mandatory on red/delta.

I always felt it pretty annoying to have to double check every so often if my suit sensors are up throughout the course of the round due to medbay constantly parroting "suit sensors save lives" as if it were as familiar as breathing to them to say. I'm sure other people feel the same way, so here's my proposal: In character set-up, you should be able to adjust for each individual character whatever suit sensor setting they'd be set to by default rather than dictating it to RNG to decide whether or not the clothing you spawn in has the suit sensors enabled for it. This would also allow people to effectively decide which of their characters would generally keep their sensors tuned down, especially if the player intends on playing as an antagonist as said character and doesn't want to chance getting the short end of the stick because they forgot they had to adjust their sensors to begin with. I'm not actually sure if uniforms starting with sensors on/off is actually RNG, I did try to check the code for it but I didn't really find the answer I was looking for, so I'm chancing the assumption that it is.

Kaed? This is talking about the round event where someone randomly gets a massive amount of credits put into their account, not lottery tickets.

I like the premise of this overhaul, attempting to centralize both the kitchen and the bar together. It's just unfortunate that what had to be sacrificed is the initial table space towards the main hallway, and what used to be the original 'buffet counter' as I like to currently call it for lack of a better term. The self-sufficiency of the chef to be able to toss food either towards the hallway or the main dining area of the bar for pickup was definitely valuable. I'm hoping more people play bartender so that this isn't too much of an issue. My concerns can easily be handwaved by an engineer disassembling one of the tables between the kitchen and the bar. This does quite literally look like the bar & grill I used to manage, which is both cool and also mildly suspicious... :thinking: Put a cargo tagger and a hand labeller in the kitchen so they can wrap meals up and send them to certain departments to compensate.

I'm not saying it's your fault at all, I'm just saying what, in all likelihood, the common perception will be as I described. I would like to hear an argument on the merits of the actual merit of this visual concept being brought into practice, yes, I would. I'd be careful how you say that, as it's used in justification for plagiarism. See "Limbo of the Lost" as an extreme example of this query being put into practice.

Yes, but, think about it. When someone looks at this sprite, they don't think, "Oh, this looks a bit like the Sputnik satellite." They think, "Oh, this is an Enclave Duraframe Eyebot from Fallout." Eyebots, as opposed to many other pop culture references that exist in the game, are not just a nod to Fallout, such as the Fireball Whiskey is a subtle nod to Fallout/Wasteland through its flavortext. Eyebots themselves are identifiable and symbolic to Fallout.

You can effectively make a large amount of appeals but there's no guarantee they'll be accepted every time. Never feel like you shouldn't bother with an unban request unless it's a perma with a required reapply date. These seem to only be added in case you really 'impress' an administrator by being abrasive in asking to be unbanned. The big rule to note is that ban appeals are to accept responsibility, not deflect it. Staff complaints are for that in order to contest such things, unless the banning staff member is no longer staff.

It is now policy to make feedback threads for this sort of thing. You would know if you still played. :^) Could picks be buffed, as well in the sense of adding more options in terms of using mining equipment with each having distinct advantages over the other? Maybe add various material of picks that can be crafted with various quality. Steel being the standard, gold/silver being crap but cute novelty, and plasteel/titanium being very food, with diamond finishing with the best quality of pick. The sonic jackhammer, I think, should be cell powered by it, and it should plow through sand easily to make digging very efficient.

Note that my arguments for whatever I've mentioned are my own. It is fine if people take what I personally say with a grain of salt. I'm not gonna pretend the bandwagon has any more of a powerful stance just because it's the most outspoken/loudly broadcasted opinion. Just making that clear. They're constructs powered by souls, Pacman, that code snippet proves little beyond the obvious. A knight's plate armor can be dented by repeated force and you can also achieve the same effect by taking a baseball bat to someone's skull IRL with sufficient enough force applied multiple times, to create dents. Don't believe me? There are photos on the internet of such things. They turn the body captured by a soulstone to literal ash, in addition. It doesn't seem to just capture the soul, there's pretty clear indication what's going on there.

I'll see what I can think up.

They don't need to be better. Just cool, distinct in their way of being a corruption of existence while also making a bit of sense in how they do it, rather than nonsense as they were/are.

If you're insistent that I drop the argument that IPCs shouldn't be cult because of roleplay reasons in addition to mechanical ones, then fine, I will use the argument against them in regards to their inherent mechanics and why they make worse cultists than literally anyone else. They cannot use blood magic, mechanically, without slowly killing themselves and being a gigantic liability to the entire cult for not being able to self-heal. They are not merely suboptimal, they are outright unplayable due to their lack of a healing factor compared to the other races that do have self-healing and sustain just well enough in cult to be viable. I went over this in the last thread and none of the thread's detractors decided to address that point in the slightest, as if it went over their heads. IPCs, prior to the PR that was pushed way too soon to master, were mechanically useless in cult. Every point of damage they took from writing runes or using said runes added up. Cable coil is a limited resource and is quickly expended, at more extreme burn damage amounts, the IPC requires robotic surgery to fix. All of the biological races played cult out just fine. They healed off the burn in a minute or so. IPCs did not, and still do not. Now, if IPCs got snowflake code written for them that turned them into Robo-Cultists that had a unique resource to cast dark magic with which was also slightly distinct from what bioform cultists can do, that would be epic. Both in the mechanical "rule of cool" sense and in the "wow this shit is badass and it makes sense" category.