kyres1

Virgo Transportation departing! Early today, Virgo Transportation announced the end of their stay in Tau Ceti as their conglomerate has begun packing up and departing the system. The smaller businesses are expected to fully exit the Republic’s borders on a direct course for Sol within the next two days, while the larger collectives like the Sol Merchant Society and the Golden Deep have changed direction to the Frontier. Officials from Virgo shared word of resounding success in their stop, and they intend to mark Tau Ceti as an important location in their next annual migration. It was discovered amidst this time that the Golden Deep is a wholly synthetic faction directly from the Frontier itself, and further study into it has made public almost ten years of history between them and competing entities in the deep Frontier. Some three hundred representatives from Virgo have decided to stay and base operations in Tau Ceti, mostly Golden Deep merchants. “More visits from them and the Sol Merchant Society are expected before their next annual migration,” officials say, “and the positive impact events like this will be something to look forward to in the future.”

Ckey/BYOND Username: kyres1 Position Being Applied For (coder, mapper, spriter): Spriter. Past Experiences/Knowledge: Lots and lots of sprite work for Aurora, some map design and photo editing for D&D campaigns and wiki pages. Examples of Past Work: An entire TCFL gear set, the entire IPC voidsuit set and RIG set, the ninja hardsuit resprite, head of security voidsuit sprites. Several mechs, tanks, robots from developing synthetic lore and the occasional spooky eldritch monster. A lot of custom borg sprites, as well. Also an Elyran and Tup Commando RIG. Tajaran flags, IPC xenowear. Plenty of small clothing and miscellaneous items like jewels and crystals. All Vaurca voidsuits and tachyons as well as the combat exoskeleton. Constructable RIGs, Frontier Alliance RIGs, the combat RIG resprite. All Head of Security voidsuits. The techno-conglomerate RIG. All Offworlder gear as well as the Offworlder and Gravworlder replacement sprites (not shown below.) Hephaestus powersuit RIGs. Ceres' Lance bunker suit RIGs. Carp/shark replacement sprites. Tajaran lore RIGs and armor (not shown below). Vaurca RIGs (not shown below). Preferred Mode of Communication(Skype, Steam, etc.): noodle_buster#1934 Additional Comments: I am still learning as much of my spriting shows. While I'm confident in my ability to sprite most metallic things, more flow-y sprites like clothing or organic stuff is out of my reach for now.

details please

Merchant Collectives Settling! Some hours ago, it was announced by Virgo Transportation that several independent business partners within the collective were breaking off to set up permanent shop in the system. Of these were multiple NT-related associates and representatives of the Sol Merchant Society, who have vouched that basing operations in an area as central as Tau Ceti might prove beneficial. In taking this chance, they have made clear a need to have a more stable trading center than the Frontier for the coming years. The first few days of Virgo’s visit have gone excellently, with the streets of District 10 dotted with markets and trade posts causing traffic to be rerouted across Republic’s Landing for the duration of their stay. In other news, the Golden Deep has become known as a large-scale autonomous synthetic society, independent of any higher supervision in the Frontier. NanoTrasen officials have expressed a great desire to establish trade with these merchants, though their access to the Frontier seems to be limited by the vast Alliance territory between them. Despite their gaudy and glamorous appearance, the Golden Deep seem to just be another group apart of Virgo’s conglomerate for protection and marketing. Information on the Golden Deep has been willingly indulged to the Bugle as things have developed, as well as names and details of other solitary synthetic factions outside of charted space. Among these are the “Sunderers,” an apparently hostile raider group consisting of synthetics confined to cannibalizing others for survival. More details on both are being heavily investigated by on-site researchers so long as business is not disrupted.

Merchant Collectives Set Up Shop in Tau Ceti! On Sunday of this week, several cooperating merchant collectives under the name of Virgo Transportation having temporarily moved operations to Tau Ceti as part of their mission to open new markets. The system is the second-to-final stop just before the nomadic fleet departs back into Alliance space. This is the seventeenth stop the fleet has made within the last year. Estimates of their stay are around three weeks as they visit each part of the system. Presently, the businesses are poised to visit several populous and influential locations starting at Mendell City and bring exotic wares and excitement from far and wide. These collectives include several independent businesses and prominent groups such as the Sol Merchant Society, and a newcomer known as the Golden Deep — a mysterious Frontier collective that claims to have ties with NanoTrasen in the system. One of the long-standing members of the assembly commented on the group claiming, "They have a unique view on the gold they often trade for, compared to what you might expect- see, they don't want to save it, or trade it later. They melt it down and use the stuff as paint."

The gargantuan map certainly contributes to the complete lack of interaction between players one can receive for entire rounds, yes. The vast majority of the station does not receive any traffic for the larger part of a day, and during lowpop you'll rarely see anybody anywhere. Not much can be done about that without a whole new map.

Exotic Merchant Conglomerate Migrating! As of Sunday, the merchant conglomerate Virgo Transportation has announced that its traveling home fleet will begin to pass through Tau Ceti in one week. Estimates from Virgo say their stay will last approximately three weeks and they will try to visit areas across the system. They will be selling exotic wares and providing several unique attractions such as tours on board their experimental vessels, public orbital amusement establishments, and countless museum pieces from the edges of the Alliance and beyond. Particularly famed attractions include bumper-pods, zero-G roller coasters, and the specialty nomad shops of the Sol Merchant Society. Their visit will be chronicled by the Mendell City Bugle here from start to finish as the fleet makes preparations to move again. "We're no stranger to having merchants dock with our stations in the system, and we're wholly open to new business avenues like working alongside Virgo," a NanoTrasen public affairs official noted. "We look forward to their arrival with open docks."

Complaint number one of many veterans on the server is how security does not only have fun, they take fun from the majority of the station and secure the fun, preventing it from being shared with puny non-combatant staff. Only security must have the valids, right? Ironically, the same people call for antagonists starting conflict or antagonising the crew in some way, shape or form. It is a self-defeating mindset that only has one fix! Enter: a total (and probably relatively simple) antagonist rework! What I mean by this is removing the term “antagonist.” Not outlawing the word or trying to remove it from the community, but rewording things. Turning it into a new role along the lines of “event character” or “special role,” rather than something outright antagonistic. What will that do? Well, for one, you won’t be incentivized to involve only the protectors of the station and nobody else, or slaughter them ruthlessly before being able to. Beyond simple pedantics like that, there’s really big things that could be done. Currently antagging is really straightforward, laughably so. You gear up. You leave your hidey hole. You fight until you die, hopefully around 2:00, everyone goes home. This is every round, and the only antagonist role that does not fall under this is usually traitor. Well, how do we fix that repetition? Traitor is unique as it pits legitimate crew characters against one another and permits for crew-based interaction in a non-canon capacity. It is an essential gamemode that must stay for these reasons, and doesn’t require a major rework. Raising starting TC to 50 would fix any problems it could literally ever have. Rev is a solid gamemode on its own, though rough to make gimmicks with. It should remain the same, though it seriously needs some gimmick templates provided to players. Cult is a very unique gamemode mechanically. Nothing can really be added or taken away to this besides a player-selected deity and set agenda by a cult leader designated at roundstart. Same situation as rev. Vampire is a weird one. It is definitely worth keeping on its own, after thinking on it. Changeling, well, I can't comment on this. If it were up to me this incredibly broken and unplayable gamemode would have been removed a long time ago. Why it exists in its current state is a question for an entirely separate thread. Malf is completely fine. The source of its problems are its players and the massive freedom granted to them as you're essentially God. That isn't blaming anybody - it's more so saying it's incredibly hard to think of a good plan for malf, and it often suffers for it. Here’s the cool stuff. Mercenary and raider die entirely. These are merged into a single team-noncrew gamemode where players can pick and choose whatever equipment from either team they desire, whichever means of entry they desire AND MORE COOL AND NOT NECESSARILY ANTAGONISTIC STUFF to accommodate literally any gimmick one could imagine. Wizard and ninja die entirely. These are merged into a single solo-noncrew gamemode where players can pick and choose whatever equipment from either team they desire, whichever means of entry they desire AND MORE COOL AND NOT NECESSARILY ANTAGONISTIC STUFF to accommodate literally any gimmick one could imagine. For mixed gamemodes like crossfire/visitors, the antagonists would share the same spawnpoint and plan accordingly. For cases where they would want privacy in preparation from one another, they can take themselves through a teleporter that places them out of vision while the other prepares, before they themselves prepare. The issues with this are basically, “Won’t the affected gamemodes get boring?” Well, we can easily affect this by making community-made gimmicks available ingame from a contract DB of sorts. An OOC uplink, even. Staff could all work together to piece together maybe 15 starter gimmicks and players can make the rest. This will be no different, if not better than the current way things are, which is just “You’re a wizard,” or “You’re a pirate.” As for implementation, it's pretty straightforward outside of how the referenced OOC "game plan" list would work and how uplinks would be available to either wizards or raiders.

This is a pretty simple fix to make the merchant role considerably more fun. As it stands there is basically no way to obtain enough money to pay back the 4,000 credits merchants start with without rolling traitor. I don't see why it's so low when 90% of the items available are larger than your entire starting funds. Raising it to 10-20,000 would make for much more variety with what merchants can buy and contribute to the round.

Sounds good to me.

What the title says. Currently there is no way to nonlethally restrain or slow down any sort of synthetic short of lethals, meaning security must immediately escalate to lasers/ballistics to combat any synthetic threat. One could argue this is a weakness, but I doubt replacing ions/EMPs with a massive, maybe 10-20 second stun will make this matter much as it essentially makes killing them a choice so long as you've got the ion/EMPs. This is superior, in my mind, to the extremely high damage effective insta-kill that ion currently is and I feel dealing with synths could be much more interesting if you could truly "disable" them while permitting RP to continue without them being reduced to a brain. It's important that the stun is long but not annoyingly so. It should be long enough to cuff or remove power cells at the very least, and long enough to render them inoperable with a maglight on hand at most.

Not really a good idea as it stands. Making mechs immune to it sounds fine on paper because they're advanced combat vehicles and meant to be super duper overpowered. For playable races we are presently attempting, albeit very poorly, to maintain ""balance"" to some degree. Everything has some weakness, and things like Vaurca or IPCs who have massive amounts of buffs have glaring weaknesses such as instant kill magic blue guns or lasers/toxins. Do I think the ion's silly? Yes. But until we get more creative counters to IPCs beyond it just being lasers, ions and EMP, (or make all races equally OP) they need to stay. A good idea would be making ions a long stun like previously proposed so they're a way to slow down or otherwise incapacitate mechs/IPCs/synths long enough for other methods of murder to be employed, instead of an outright "lol ur ded" instant kill. Speaking of which, I'll make a separate suggestion thread for just that.

Were drone plasma cutters not nerfed like the rest? Because with a normal plasma cutter it's near impossible to cut any limbs off anymore.

Then we'll wait to see what he has to say. If you didn't intend anything to be negative, then my deduction is simply "we denied your app because it wasn't good enough." This is something we did not, and should have communicated, but do note that this was the biggest factor in denying it to begin with. "e: Calling this complaint a "[...]big brain autist tier staff complaint" on the general discord because I provided numbers to the points I made, instead of just shittalking someone, does not make this any better." This was not me or cake who said this, so please make sure to include that before someone misinterprets us as calling you autistic.

And I can repeat this. Cake had expressed concern to me in PMs about potentially misinterpreting you as being hostile towards him, and I'm beginning to think that's the case. So I'll ask you directly - did you intend to be rude, or was that just his imagination? As for not communicating over PMs, I can't imagine why, but I suppose that's your choice. The forums have a private messenger and you can ping us in the public discord to discuss as well for what it counts.

I don't know what to tell you. You made a poor application and off the premise of it we intended to decline it. It made zero sense and continues to, despite this eight page essay on the contrary. Cake himself said that he may just be misinterpreting you, and to feel free to contact him in DMs on the matter if he is. To clarify, he probably meant misinterpreting you as being rude and impatient, seeing as you're just about the only applicant to have ever posted something along the lines of "Still waiting, boys," after a wait. On top of that you were free to apply again at any time you wanted. "Like I said, your attitude matters. And it really could just be a misunderstanding, but until you have proven to me otherwise, this application is denied. " "You are free to reapply whenever you so desire, I will not bar you from such. If there is a next time, please reconsider your approach." "If you have questions or comments, you can contact me on discord at Cake#4864." Also, I shouldn't have to stress that server numbers aren't indicative of populous ingame. Would there be a shortage of half the jobs on the station, in that case? I can name plenty - Xenobotany rarely gets work, gardeners are few and far between, chaplains are fading away, engine technicians are extremely rare. There's a nondescript amount of beings in the Orion Spur if I recall correctly and the idea that NanoTrasen, a megacorporation with 440 million employees, would be in shortage of any specialization is silly. With all that said, what do you want from this complaint?

What the title says. I often exchange 4-6 TC or something valuable for a mounted cooler when I play IPC ninja or merc and take the hardsuit. They're very efficient and free up the suit storage slot for other things like giant guns and whatnot. I don't see any reason it shouldn't be in the uplink as something that costs somewhere below 8 telecrystals.

It's been a few days, but I'll provide some feedback from my own point of view in absence of others. I like the answers to some of these questions - they're pretty clear, contrary to how most people believe they must search for some abstract answer to each of the ones on their application. I'll move on to my two questions, in that case. What did NanoTrasen see in INGRAM that could not be seen in a positronic actually built for the work intended in xenoarchaeology? I ask this since you stated that INGRAM was originally built to do office work. How did this translate into EVA excavation of highly valuable artifacts? Did the replacement parts INGRAM received when moving through several company's hands mean anything in the end - did this harm their frame's work in any way? Were they regulation, or mismatched parts?

So did I. A drill and boots would change the game for miners, and for the best. A KA might be unnecessary.

That's the anomaly suit. I would honestly be fine with relabelling that to "expedition suit" and making it EVA capable, because as it stands it is unfortunately not. It also looks leagues better than the excavation suit. Also, here's the suit with a transparent visor.

In that case, I'll see about a redesign that looks more akin to what you've mentioned. One could argue that the medical voidsuit has no place looking armored as well, but I'd assume it's to fit with the running theme of departmental voidsuits. This more so calls for a standardized research voidsuit mechanically rather than a cosmetic redesign in my own mind's image. Still, we lack any species sprites for the excavation suits, and they are not modular like voidsuits.

Seems fantastic. I like it. Hopefully that availability will make setting up the engine less tedious.

This is a great start but at the same time there's a huge unused area of maintenance just north of hard storage that lacks anything besides pipes and wires. Why not use that instead? All it'd take is being expanded by one or two tiles and it could ultimately be the same thing, considering how wide it is.

Over the course of a pretty long time now we’ve grown accustomed to the same old same old of roundstart repetition. The entire game, for the first twenty to thirty minutes, is ultimately the same no matter what and antagonists disrupting this rarely brings anything good and is so discouraged it barely happens at all. For engineering, the engine and shields, which can take around twenty minutes at times. While the engine itself gets credit in the sense that its setup can be tweaked and adjusted to player preference, this is ultimately over complication for no reason other than trying new things to break repetition. Just stick phoron in it and it’ll power the station no matter what is thrown at it. As for shields I haven’t seen a single person against a premade shield room already being set up at round start for player convenience. For medical, most jobs barring chemist lack much setup. You grab your stuff and stare at sensors, which is a problem for another thread. For chemists, setup is pure agony. Refining this setup is fun at times but it takes as long as your CMO demands of it, which often times is over half an hour of just mixing and dispensing chemicals. Once you’ve gotten the setup refined, you ultimately become a robot that puts stuff in a fridge until you’re allowed to leave. Some people find even that fun though, so I don’t know. For R&D, oh boy. Every single thing except toxins needs setup, often times taking up to the first half of the shift to complete if you aren’t already experienced in it or aren’t rushing it to get it over with. To start, R&D levels are incredibly simple to maximize and can be done in ten minutes. Beyond that, they are an absolute requirement as you will soon be necessary for many basic commodities the station will ask of R&D as the shift progresses, from super/hyper cells to integrated circuit printers and so on. Xenoarchaeology can go an entire shift without running into an artifact, depending on how lucky they are, how far away it is and how much of a level is in their way. Gear from R&D changes this, of course. After finding it, one misclick or mistake can destroy the entire artifact and reset all of your work or completely wipe any chance of getting anything done that shift. Telescience can be calibrated relatively quickly from what I’ve seen, though I don’t know how to use it myself, I’ve seen Lance set it up in just five minutes as Sukhoi. Robotics is entirely dependent on R&D for resources and upgrades. Without upgrades, robotics just consumes way too many resources to be of any use and everything takes way too long. For supply, it’s pretty obvious. Sorting the warehouse is totally optional and, even if not, is typically done at the player’s pace and the items inside can provide interesting things for the round. When forced, it’s tedious as hell and usually is grounds to set your quartermaster on fire. Mining, on the other hand, is a rush. You are forced to get your first haul in as soon as possible with zero safety gear whatsoever for EVA, refine it and take it to research in the first 20 minutes every single shift without fail. One lag spike or visual stutter can mean the end of your round, so make sure to stay close to that airlock when you’re digging with that shovel. Once your first haul is in, you pray R&D has gotten sufficient levels for your tactical frame/experimental converter/uranium cell/AOE explosion chip or you’re going to be waiting ten to twenty minutes extra for it. After that, you go back out and utterly destroy the asteroid in ten minutes flat zooming around with your jetpack RIG and 20x20 AOE rock vaporizer, bring in a 20k point haul and go to the bar. After an hour you can finally roleplay. For every job under the civilian department, it’s usually pretty easy. In recent time, chef has become a much easier and fun role and hydroponics remains as the only civilian job with any “set up.” This setup is quick, easy, and entirely up to the player to dictate in regards to speed and variety. One would almost say it’s not tedious. For security, our most consistently populous department, there’s no setup. You put your gear on and walk out of your department. You are incentivized and almost required to involve yourself in every major event to occur on the station. One of these things is not like the others. The point here is pretty obvious. Roundstart set up contributes very little to the whole point of the server, which is roleplay. There are plenty of mechanic incentives to push roleplay in game. It’s an incredibly complex game, and there is so much more to do than what you do in the first ten to twenty minutes. Thus, remove it entirely. Here’s how I think that would work. Starting with engineering, have the engine’s resources for startup readily available rather than split between departmental access. This resource being phoron canisters, but someone probably would want more than just that for their unique engine setups. For shields, COMPLETELY have them setup roundstart. Wired, secured and behind engineering access windoors or airlocks in a specially made chamber or room. Engineers should not be expected to repeat this every single round. Moving onto medical, more specifically chemistry, having very basic chems or complex chems in small quantities done at round start and in the fridge would be excellent. Half a bottle of peridaxon in the fridge, and individual bottles of hyronalin, dylovene, bicaridine and dermaline, normal dexalin and that’s it. The specifics should definitely be argued as I’m not even certain of those numbers, but the presence of any of that would ensure medical is not handicapped despite being filled to the brim with doctors by just lacking a chemist. Furthermore, a chemist would still be necessary for the obviously complex treatments and very fun and engaging cloning mechanics ™. For R&D, basic levels (5 under everything and 4 bluespace, barring illegal/antagonist levels) at round start would address plenty of issues. Setup would be cut down to just a few minutes if even that and R&D would still be functional with a lab assistant or to a roboticist who doesn’t know how to acquire levels. Xenoarchaeology would be very hard to tweak. Giving them an accelerator of any kind, however, or even a drill would make their jobs thousands of times easier. Telescience does not need to be calibrated at round start and could easily be excused ICly as it’s “turned off” before the shift or something, but that would certainly help considering about 90% of people don’t know how that works whatsoever. For supply, leave cargo outside of mining as is. For mining, just give them magboots and decent accelerators immediately. Remember when accelerators had 3x3 blast radius? Just figure out the accelerator upgrades needed to mimic that behavior, and make a similar accelerator available to all four miners roundstart. It’s not that complicated, nor do we need to outright punish the players just for having picked miner. For civilian, nothing really needs to be changed. After what Burger did with hunger/thirst and chef mechanics I have heard very little in the way of complaining. For security, obviously nothing needs to be changed. In recent times we've suffered from massive population drop and many times you will find yourself completely alone in any role which requires any of the above to enjoy the game. This fluctuates massively and is obviously because of school and work, but nonetheless the drop is still there. I’m looking forward to seeing how something like this could be implemented or what people actually think of it in practice.

This is essentially a cosmetic suggestion, as science already has access to spacesuits (though, no voidsuits.) However, they are awful looking and very very old, and they follow no unifying scheme. Excavation suits are yellow and the toxins spacesuits are grey/blue while the AMI suit is tan with tiny purple highlights and a blue visor. In EVA there is no way to distinguish who is a distinguished scientist and who is just some guy in an unbranded spacesuit. This was a similar reason I sprited the head of security voidsuits, though this will be more accessible to nonwhitelisted players and hopefully mesh well in game. For comparison, the currently available suits to science are as follows - The expedition voidsuits would look like this - The rest of the species sprites will be done over time but they will all share the same color scheme and design. With these designs it's similar but not exactly the same as the AMI module, while still retaining the white/purple palette that basically everything from R&D shares. The idea is that toxins and xenoarchaeology would gain access to these suits, but under the broad term "expedition suits," so as to explain a lack of visual differentiation between the two jobs. It would also permit their reasonable usage in literal expeditions where researchers must go EVA but without the express purpose of looking at a crater or digging up fossils. Furthermore, this could entail a research-wide (save for maybe robotics and lab assistants, who typically lack any EVA access) EVA section that is directly accessible to the sub level lift leading into xenoarchaeology that can be used whenever there's an away mission event. In short, old one look bad, new one look more gooder. I'm willing to resprite them entirely as according to feedback.