Munks

We also don't need a rushed, immediate sec nerf with no consideration made to how it affects the department. Put some thought into a suggestion before demanding it gets added thanks.

Why?

Cool

Just because you're not willing to actively enable and support the existing benefit of being human doesn't mean that benefit isn't there, or intended. Humans have advantages and they don't need to be made super difficult to kill. If the intent is to remove the IC oppression of xenospecies then let aliens be Captain already. Then maybe we can talk about making humans borderline invincible because they're just not snowflakey enough and clearly entitled to their own special mechanics

Then maybe the CCIA system should be reevaluated because not only did it destroy the tradeoff of being a guwan and not having to properly RP a unathi but also the intended advantage of being human. Maybe it's lowered our quality of roleplay

This is garbage and overpowered. The advantage of human characters is you get to wear certain advantageous equipment, be Captain (or canonically promoted to other command roles if you get that far), and be immune from institutional discrimination (which is only as meaningful as the playerbase is willing to actually roleplay the setting). Thats all you need as a species advantage

IAA is a role primarily vested in interacting and reacting to other players. The same goes for chaplain/counselor, psychiatrist, detective, reporter (to an extent), and librarian. These jobs have very little in the way of mechanically structured gameplay, they are not like engineers and miners where you can just decide they're too boring and code them more gameplay events to respond to. It's a problem with server culture that people ignore them in favor of aggressively pursuing IRs or jumping the chain of command to PDA the captain if something is wrong. You can't just handwave the argument of "people's experiences with bad IAA play stem from incompetence" either, when you follow it up with "people keep getting bored and decide to (illegally) meddle with others". That is 100 percent a problem with players, and server culture for not slapping these agents down, as mechanisms exist to do. If more players have to be lured in with shiny things then they don't belong in the role. Once again, someone needs to start whitelist stripping shitty command players, because the kind of person that goes IAA and starts acting like a secret agent/special security and pissing everyone off is the same kind of person that will overstep their bounds in other Head roles which IAA needs to exist to counter; once this is actually being enforced the issues with sometimes having an obnoxious IA will disappear.

What you described is outside the scope of internal affairs in the first place. Your root problem is incompetent, authority-hungry players, not the role itself. If deleted, these types would just move to Security and continue to harangue you with stupid shit. The answer is whitelist enforcement on these players, not outright removal.

It doesn't need one or the other. IAAs can function as an extension of Corporate Regulation as a source of passive conflict while still serving as a barrier to command incompetence. In fact if they're operating properly, as intended, they will inherently do both at the same time. It is an unfortunate reality that IAA is underplayed, as well as that, frankly, most of the regular ones we do have suck and don't understand their role. It's unfortunate, and it's unfortunate because they have an actual functional purpose to exist, and it's because of that purpose that they shouldn't be removed because I'd rather have a 24 percent chance to have an IAA on shift that should counteract whitelist failures than a 0 percent chance because the role was removed. IAA doesn't have to be glamorous, or entice people with cool perks and draw them in. You shouldn't play IA for any perks whatsoever. It's the same logic that being a moderator shouldn't come with any special perks or VIP glamor, you do it because you want to do it; otherwise it attracts glory hounds and insecure kids that are just in it for authority to throw around. If you're not interested in playing IAA you just shouldn't play it. Again, I'd rather have an IAA in it to actually do the job even if it's boring 24 percent of the time of the time than an IAA who got drawn in by extra authority, extra access, and a "self-defense" gun to go after bad guys with 100 percent of the time. This is no different than how it is now even if there is an IAA present. As a frequent IA player, I always believe that the situation should be handled on the smallest scale possible before IA is involved. The counselor can already play plenty of role in this. Nothing will change if the IA workload is officially offloaded to the counselor. People will skip peaceful mediation and seek someone with the authority to formally investigate complaints, as they do now. The captain and HoP should already be recommending people sort their issues out with counselling or their departmental head of staff handle departmental problems before taking it on themselves or jumping to activating IA. They dont, and this is because they suck at command. If the solution of merging IAA and HoP is taken, then effectively it accomplishes giving IA extra goodies (including guns and extra access) which, considering already HoPs have a hard time not acting like Security without being given the added benefit of officially being given an investigatory role, doesn't seem like the best idea. The problem is in the event that whoever happens to be HoP is incapable of fulfilling or unwilling to fulfill the duties of an IA, there should be room for a job which is entirely about handling these problems, and absolutely nothing more, so there is zero excuse to be incompetent at it. Not to mention there arises the issue of people tasked with IA work being antagonists, which counsellors and Heads of Personnel can.

Jackboot your stance seems like its that IAA is an "antagonistic" force to players, and I don't exactly see what the problem with that is. Corporate Regulation itself should be natural, passive antagonistic force against the crew. It exists to tell people what they can and can't do, even if it would what is best for the crew isn't in line with regulations. This creates a point of conflict for a character where they must decide if they are going to play by the rules, or be a loose cannon that gets shit done faster. Some form of structure that exists to be worked around, and as a result of which maybe security doesn't do as well a job as they could of shutting down and antagonist, or engineering or research doesn't work as quickly and efficiently as possible, or maybe medical doesn't treat someone as fast as they could. For an RP server, especially one that limits what actual antag players can and cannot do so heavily, you'd think a neutral, roleplay-based sort of conflict and antagonism such as this would be more appreciated. In an ideal perfect world, IAA wouldn't be needed, and heads of staff would be fully capable of holding their departments, and themselves, to standards. The world isn't perfect, however, and more often than not, our command players are the ones responsible for breaking protocol, because our corps of command players is so full of "heroes" and "protagonist" characters that refuse to let their characters do anything that might be considered immoral or wrong, and they've grown so comfortable in their popularity that no one does anything about it. As a result, the drastic measure of having an entire multi-slot role dedicated to sitting down and talking to these kinds of characters, and reporting issues that refuse to resolve themselves, is necessary. The Captain and HoP both have shit to do and can't be expected, nor would I since they too tend to have problems, to always step in whenever a head of staff is out of line. If you want to solve this and make IAA's unnecessary, maybe you should consider actually enforcing whitelist standards, so that that these characters that won't act as corporate leaders and only exist to be heroic superdoctors/super-engineers/etc are no longer relied on to do the job that they are demonstrably uninterested in doing. The players that roll Captains and Heads of Personnel are plagued by the same mindset and cannot be relied on to enforce regulations even if they did have the time to.

Add another General officer, the non-departmental officer currently is tasked with hallways, on both main and surface as well as most of maintenance. The option should be present either for two officers to buddy up, or to cover more ground since they have by far the most in their jurisdiction. While it's true that they can request assistance from the synthetics, borgs are beholden to their laws first and foremost and should not be factored in when balancing the population of Security (as it's entirely likely other modules will be chosen). The chain of command for departmental officers (as is shown when joining in, currently they answer to their department-specific head) should be revised to factor in the Head of Security as their primary leader. I get the reasoning for having the departmental officers beholden to the leader of that department, since having someone with thorough access to your department that you can't really control if they get out of line would be a hassle, but on the other hand someone with actual Security experience and education would be needed to supervise the officers; and departmental heads shouldn't have sole authority over their officers since I can already see it being an unfortunate issue with certain heads of staff not liking being held to regulation, and easily being able to get rid of the scrutinizing officer with some made up excuse as "insubordination" etc. They should answer to the Head of Security, with it noted that they pay special attention and respect to the wishes of the department they are securing.

It'd be neat if this was a machine that allowed wire tampering (and thus signaler attachment) allowing it to be cut and disabled or antagonists to fix a signaler to it to distract security on demand The captains office SHOULD be a difficult target to hit. Antag players should have to deal with it or target someplace of lesser importance

Willow Harper's Security Records alone show more security involvement than any character should realistically have, and her Employment Records show canon punishment on file with CCIA. Additionally, her Medical Records show a canon, continuously deteriorating mental state, one that Rosetango intentionally wrote for the character, to the point where Harper couldn't actually pass a mental examination (one of the bare minimal requisites of working for NT) and, again by Rosetango's own design, is bordering on officially being declared mentally unstable. Willow Harper is intentionally being played in this lowRP manner, with the classic defense of being psychotic, which is specifically restricted at the very top of the Creating a Character section of the rules. She's already been hit with a successful CCIA investigation which has done absolutely nothing to curb this antagonistic behavior, as with the history of Security involvement, which the records have only even captured a few more minor charges. There is a point where a character is obviously too unstable to have continued employment on station and Willow Harper, as an individual, surely passed that point long ago. Rosetango could probably play a better character if they actually wanted to, but at this point it should be with a different character, as Willow's continued presence on station in and of itself breaks roleplay and this is clearly the intended path of the character considering Rosetango wrote her mental instability into Willow's records and continues to act in such a manner despite already having received both in-game and CCIA punishment for doing so

I was there in the round for the Medbay incidents in question and while taken off guard by Jackboot's behavior, personally I didn't find it too extreme, but rather interesting. The one issue to me is the seemingly unnatural jump to the conclusion that Command channel was compromised when there wasn't anything in-character to support it other than being a bit too cautious. Raiders have the channels for a reason, it defeats the purpose of this if we're just going to start pre-emptively treating radio as if they're listening every time raiders/mercs appear. Even if we OOCly know that it's compromised, it's a matter of sportsmanship to treat them as normal until proven otherwise. Gonzales locking down the entire medbay over a chip bag on the lobby floor, and immediately tattling to Central Command over it instead of speaking to the Captain, is more extreme than anything Jackboot's done yet, though I won't get into how often he seems to pull stunts like this since it's not the point of the thread. Overall I've been liking Jackboot's return to command so far

No thanks, the problem is that there isn't enough pressure on the Command team to exhaust every possible option (including cracking open the vault and distributing hazard rigsuits) before calling for help rather than going to ERT. As usual the problem is with the quality of our command players and there is no reason to basically remove (yes, i said basically remove, we can barely even get CCIAA/admin responses to our faxes as is, without having to rely on them to give us ERT whenever its needed) the role. The suggestion to turn the ERT spawn button into a general distress beacon is more interesting an alternative and something I've thought of sometimes myself, and if something needs to be done it should be that. Activating the beacon would bring attention, for better or worse, to the station and make its status as a crippled NT facility in need of assistance to anyone who might be within range, be it an ERT patrol or something less desirable.