MattAtlas

I don't know why any of what we're doing would alienate any characters, nor why what I'm proposing would be a reboot rather than an evolution of what we have. Everything that will lead to the new setting is canon and other than a timeskip (likely around 20 years) there will not be any extra requirements. The lore changes will make it fairly easy to port any old characters over if the player in question wishes to, the only ones that may take some additional rejigging are the particularly rich and posh characters -- but again, there will be avenues for that. Like I said on the Discord, if I thought that our problems could be solved without a new setting, I wouldn't have invested several years of my own and my developers' time. The truth of the matter is that what we have doesn't work and without iterating on it a lot our problems detailed in the thread and that have led to our pop dwindling are unfixable. As for the risks, there is a risk with everything, that's just part of taking big decisions. But if I were not confident in the product, I would not have presented it.

We don't have the development time to shift to an entirely new coding language, nevermind the infrastructure. This is a big project as it is.

Project Anabasis Development Diary #0 The Future of Aurora Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since the community survey that we made to collect player interest on various changes that we could make to the game. It has been even more time since the plans for the future of the server were formed, and we have now begun active development on both the lore and gameplay development sides. As we develop for the NBT, we will try our best to put out regular development diaries that outline what we’re doing, both as a way to keep players updated and engaged in the development process (for both lore and game), and also to collect feedback on the features and changes we make. Before we get into the details of the future of the server, however, I want to talk about present Aurora. More specifically, where we have failed, where the problems with our server lie, and how they can be fixed. This is because much of what we’re doing with NBT2 needs prior context to properly understand why we’re doing things a certain way. With that out of the way, let’s start with a problem that’s very familiar to us all. Lack of Gameplay Ever since our shift from the mixed MRP/HRP type of roleplay to strictly HRP with the removal of mixed secret somewhere around 2018, Aurora steadily had its gameplay eroded through many years. With the focus now on roleplay and character interactions, players lost sight of the game aspect of Aurora; the actual server became more akin to a sandbox with less of a game involved, where convenience outweighs the need for a game. A good example of this is the progressive erosion of inter-departmental gameplay and connections, how the hydroponicist until not too long ago was a job totally subsumed by the chef, because by that point it became a common perception that you should be able to do your job to its fullest extent no matter what. This is problematic because inter-department gameplay not only serves to drive interaction between character that otherwise wouldn’t interact with eachother, it’s also the fundamental basis of a cooperative game. Too much convenience leads to people having no reason to actually engage with the game, and thus they will take the path of least resistance – a path that involves them staying in their bubble. Other departments such as Science saw their gameplay loop become outdated with changes to the server rules or environment, so they fell into irrelevance and disrepair. With the removal of mixed secret and the shift towards permanent character development as the primary focus of Aurora, Science lost most of its raison-d’etre. It was fairly successful as the antagonist shenanigans department; players from 2017 like myself will remember Science mass printing lawgivers, energy glaives, energy shields, advanced energy guns… all of which were removed because of powergaming concerns, or simply because they no longer fit the more serious roleplay aspect of Aurora, leading to a deserted and ultimately pointless department. These problems were also compounded by unnecessarily draconian rules regarding the usage of much of Science equipment. All of this has led to a state where the game exists in a very tenuous way. As there is functionally no game to play, the only reason to join is to roleplay with your friends – but this is a case of whether the egg can be born before the chicken. How can we expect population to grow, or for people to join the game when there is no reason to unless there are already players online? In essence, Aurora works when the gamemode is Mercenary and when there is a minimum of population. If the population ever goes below that minimum amount, the game breaks completely, and people will no longer join. This is the biggest root cause of the spells of no population that we go through sometimes. If the planets align in a way where the population suddenly dies (exams is a typical one), then we will stop reaching that “critical mass” amount of players, and thus the server’s population will crash. The conclusion here is that Aurora must go back to being a game. This does not mean that roleplay should be deprioritized, neglected, or what have you, far from it – what I mean is that people should be joining the server to play a game, which will in turn provide them with roleplay. There should be a reason to join the round beyond your friends being online. Similarly, there should be a selling point to people. There should be enough action, enough palpable gameplay to get them to try the server and stick around – and this must be unique gameplay that they can’t get anywhere else. Insufficient Canonicity One of our biggest pride points about Aurora is our canonicity system, where everything is canon… or is supposed to, at least, unless it is an antagonist, an away site, an interaction with an offship, retconned… In essence, it’s fake canonicity. We want to pride ourselves on canonicity when nothing interesting (with an asterisk on interesting depending on personal interests, I mean it in the sense of Aurora’s gameplay) can actually be canon in the first place. This is a problem because one of our main pride point is essentially kneecapped by the rules, but there is a reason why this is the way it is. That reason is that canonicity must sustain the setting. A setting that’s meant to be corporate, smooth, and mostly similar to a 9-to-5 setting cannot have these things be canon. A corporate flagship setting has to apply a certain amount of restrictions to the characters played on it because otherwise it would be a plot hole. We already run into this fairly often with pirate characters. Realistically they would not be hired at all, but we all suspend our disbelief because they’re fun to have around. The point to understand here, however, is that a corporate flagship meant to be in a 9-to-5ish setting cannot have its crew dealing with dangerous pirates, massive greimorian infestations, crew deaths day in and day out. At that point you would not be a phoron research vessel anymore, it would be arguably breaking the lore, it would just not make sense to be doing those things when most of your crew is supposed to be scientists or otherwise civilians. A Stale Setting The setting itself contributes to this as well – the truth is that the corporate setting has become uninteresting. It is old, done to death, and no longer capable of attracting the standard SS13 playerbase that has now matured or moved onto newer pastures. We need to innovate, both because we are getting outcompeted by fresher settings, and also because our current setting is a ball and chain around our leg. It doesn’t let us do very interesting things, it constraints our development as everything needs to fit a static, mostly unchanging universe. It is hard to have interesting events happen not only because of the expectations placed upon us by the setting (the Horizon is expected to remain mostly safe as a non-combat science ship) but also because the universe as it is is lackluster in powderkegs and tension (the last major change was KOTW years ago, which arguably ended up stabilizing the universe even more). In short, the setting is too restrictive on what we can do. Aurora has a problem that its rounds are simply not interesting enough, and we can’t iterate on that without evolving or changing the setting so that we have more development freedom on what we can take the ship and its characters through. We also want players to have more room to play antagonistic or otherwise chaotic characters without running into as many IC or OOC problems, and for their actions to be canon more often than not, and we also want the universe to be fresher and give more opportunities for interesting things to happen, for different characters to be made and for players to regain that spark of inspiration that they once had. The Pillars of the New Setting With that said, what we aim to deliver is a less restrictive setting where characters are allowed to engage in more interesting activities, along with the relaxation of some rules to better allow for conflict to happen and flow in a round. As such, I have outlined some pillars of the new setting that will be respected for every step of the development process, and well into the future of the new setting. Unification of the setting. There must be a central thread that ties everyone together to some degree. Disconnection from the setting is not ideal as it leads to characters that are too “individual” and uninvested in the narrative. Removal of the reliance on lore events, and full integration of the players into the IC future of the game. The game must stand on its own two feet, without relying on lore events to give a breath of fresh air. They should still happen, but they should not be the main expectation of gameplay. Players should be free to shape the in-world narrative to a certain degree. More of this will be shared in a future development diary. As much conflict as possible must be canon. Whatever happens, it must be believable for the ship to have gone through it, and it should remain canon in accordance to the players’ wishes. Everyone must be involved in the gameplay loop. No one element – department, job, away ship – of the game should be completely uninvolved from the main gameplay loop. There must be a main gamemode that drives the characters’ motivations and actions. By giving the ship a real, concrete purpose, we can finally simulate the feeling that everyone is working through the same objective, adn create that feeling of camaraderie that was always lacking from the Horizon. As much gameplay as possible must be persistent. The next level in our evolution as a roleplay server is to strive for perfect persistence, wherein as many of the players’ actions are persistent as possible. Once again, this is how we will cement our status as a “true” roleplay server. The setting must be interesting, and provide sparks for long-term and short-term development, while also allowing for easy creation of gameplay elements. We want a universe that can be easily integrated into the game as much as possible for many reasons: better new player onboarding, more representation of lore in-game, and easy creation of gameplay elements. With that all out of the way, it’s time to finally present the second Next Big Thing – Project Anabasis! Project Anabasis To allow for all of these objectives to come into fruition, the setting will be changing accordingly. It should be very clear at this point that what we have now cannot work for what we want to accomplish with Aurora. You will be playing as freelancers in a freelancer ship, nominally owned by an independent freelancing group but at the same time entirely free to pursue your own goals. In the future setting of Aurora, freelancer and mercenary groups will have carved out a major place in the galactic order, and thus you will be able to shape your destiny as you see fit, to antagonize or help whichever corporation or government you desire – as long as you keep the money flowing! In this shattered, recovering universe, you can only rely on yourselves, and nobody else. This new setting will emphasize freedom for characters in both their actions and creation. The main avenue of gameplay will be away site exploration, which will feed all of the departments on the ship in a circular way – no department will be interdependent, everyone will have their way to contribute to the ship’s designs and the way in which they can do so will be varied. You may either contribute directly, or by making the work of another department easier. We want to stimulate as much active interaction with other departments as possible. One of the basis of this new setting is the loss of technology. While I won’t reveal too many details about this just yet, we are aiming for a large setback in terms of the general technology in the galaxy. Phoron technology will be rare, and most importantly, extremely powerful. Away sites will be filled with relics of a bygone age – a gilded age of prosperity, but also greed – for your characters to explore and find out more about a past that is now lost to time… or that they may have lived through. Departments will be redesigned with four technology tiers in mind, starting from rough, slower, less effective tools to highly experimental relic tools. This will allow us to segment and diversify gameplay, allowing for more dynamic interactions, the gating of resources or procedures, and so on. In general, we want the ship characters to have a reason to use worse or rougher tools. One good example of this is ghetto surgery – perhaps one of the things that feel the best and most exciting to do in game, yet there is never any reason to do it. We don’t want this to be the case, and as such we had to normalize the level of technology in the galaxy to a lower level. Speaking of technology, Science will be reworked from the ground-up into a Fabrication department whose purpose is to collect data, relics, and lost technology from away sites, and reprocess this data into usable semi-persistent technology for other department. This means that if an advanced design is discovered, it will persist for a certain amount of rounds rather than immediately fading away. These technologies will be powerful and use limited resources, so use them wisely! Away sites, and exploration in general, including combat, the medical system, and the ship combat system, will be redesigned from the ground up and become central elements of gameplay design. It will not be possible to progress past a certain tier of technology for your department without participating in away sites and extracting certain items or data from them, and neither will it be possible to complete the round’s objective without visiting them. Away sites will be turned from random shotgunned ruins into dynamic, major gameplay elements akin to dungeons with varying dynamic difficulty courtesy of a Director subsystem. We expect to build away sites with a gameplay duration of an hour to an hour and a half on average. Transportation to away sites will, of course, be facilitated to allow this. This also means that we will aim for a lot less away sites, but that are a lot bigger and have a lot more quality to them in scope. As many things as possible will be persistent. The ship we operate on will have its main persistent resource be money, which will be affected by the characters’ actions and by their success or failure in the main gamemode. Money is what the setting runs on! It is finite, persistent, and has sprawling effects on everything. It used for many things, such as resources, specialist tooling, and is passively consumed for ship maintenance. Money will affect as many things as possible on the ship – from general living conditions such as whether the floors and walls are dirty, to the starting equipment of a department, to the available food and drinks in the mess hall, to the starting situations of the characters. This all ties into the main gamemode and purpose of the ship: the Contracts gamemode, the pillar upon which everything is built. The ship (its Captain, failing that its Acting Captain, failing that still the crew by democratic vote) will be able to select a contract to fulfill that rewards a certain amount of money depending on the request and its difficulty rank. Different departments will be able to select sub-contracts to contribute to the multiplier of credits rewarded. Contracts is meant to be an evolution of Odyssey. Storytellers will be supported, but not necessary at all for the purposes of the gamemode. Away ships will be central elements of the gameplay loop. We will be cutting down on the amount of away ships that can spawn while making them higher quality, permanently canon, and involved in the gameplay loop. Away ships will be able to either interfere or help in the ship’s contract, with no more ambiguity to their purpose in the round. Will they decide to aid you in your objectives, or will they decide to claim the reward for themselves and stop you? That’s all I have to say for now! You are free to ask questions, of course, and remember that as each of these points are developed in depth, development diaries will be made to keep you guys updated. Lastly, if this proposal interests you at all, please consider contributing or applying to be a developer. To make this come true, we need as much manpower as possible, and every little bit helps. You can inquire about any information on this by messaging me on Discord. As for the setting… (credit to Sammy/Nauticall for the teaser image) Stay tuned for the next Development Diary!

You are missing the questions in the basic format here:

On trial until 30DEC2025. Wait, what do you mean it's December 2025?

Application accepted!

Application accepted!

To begin with, I don't really care about the ERP connotations. Non-ERP servers have had genemods (Baystation with Boosters) or variants of catgirls (TG with Felinids, Paradise, whatever else) for the longest time. This isn't really an ERP server versus non-ERP server dilemma. Neither is this about an IC context, you can make anything fit in a galaxy in the scale of trillions of people, someone's definitely put a tail on a robot before. It's about the soul of a server - so to speak, what the server wants to be. Firstly, unrequited wish fulfillment is not what an HRP server should be. This is for the same reason that we have lore. The players on your server can't always be doing what they want, because that leads to chaos where everyone lives in their little universe and gets used to the right to have anything they want, whenever they want. This creates an infinite slippery slope where anything gets accepted simply out of momentum. It's for this reasons that restrictions in lore and gameplay are just as important, if not more important than the actual breadth of what you can do. An ironclad example of this is the origin restrictions; before those were a thing, nobody ever played Eridanian characters as african people. As much as we can tell ourselves that our players are above and beyond everyone else's and that they are super mature, the reality of the situation is that roleplayers will always take the path of least resistance. This is why you need restrictions. They're guard rails that steer people into a certain direction. The breadth of lore you can play means nothing without these restrictions. This is why allowing something like robot tails allows a basically unending slippery slope, because you are validating wish fulfillment. With what argument would you then deny elf ears for humans? Now that you've added elf ears, what about dog ears? What about cat ears? What about moth eyes? And, before you know it, the server's lore - serious in tone, meant to evoke political and sometimes philosophical discussion - becomes a joke. A Gadpathurian character will be waxing poetic about how Sol bombed their home and deprived them of a normal life with cat ears and a tail on their sprite. It's for the same reason as if you gave Anakin and Obi Wan cat girls and cat ears during their final showdown the entire scene would just be silly. It's just not the place for these things. In short, no, this isn't what Aurora should become. This suggestion falls under biomods in Permanent Vetoes and as such it is denied.

After speaking with the applicant, this application was denied.

It's done

I will get around to adding this probably this week

On trial until 01NOV2025.

I think the only toggle I could endorse adding is a toggle that says "you are allowed to kill me without escalation for the round", basically a redshirt toggle. I think anything else has too much subconscious impact on antagonists and will lead them to feel even more boxed in than they already are. You can put all the disclaimers you like but when an antagonist is dealing with potentially being adminhelped for breaking consent, they will treat the whole thing like it is made of crystal.

It is not as easy as "increase the slots to let everyone have more fun", because at the end of the game SS13 is still a game where there's only a limited amount of gameplay to go by. While on Battlefield games, for example, you can theoretically always expand the maximum size of the server to something ridiculous like 1024 vs 1024 and still have enough gameplay for everyone to go by (there's one enemy per person) provided that you can make a map big enough, it does not work way on SS13. Primarily because of a few reasons. The balance reasons being that if you add one officer slot, this is going to completely destroy the balance of antagonist gamemodes. Four security officers, despite being objectively underequipped compared to mercs, still end up winning most of the time. Add a fifth officer slot and it is essentially overkill. This is also why we don't allow investigators or wardens to join fights unless things are going to shit, it's just unfair. To keep things fair you would have to increase merc slots by one, but now you also have to buff traitors, buff changelings, buff whoever else because the entirety of the game is balanced around four officers with a certain amount of guns. It is essentially a neverending slippery slope that will never stop, because if you legitimize "add more slots to get more gameplay", you end up in an ouroborous race where you have to keep adding to keep the gameplay fair. The fun-sharing reasons are that while some people are content with rolling their job and not doing anything, there comes a time where you have to do things because the round demands it. If there are ten engineers and only so many things to do, eventually you will be intruding on someone else's fun because everyone will be fighting to who is first to the scraps of gameplay. Aurora is already a server that is very poor on standalone gameplay, adding more slots only serves to segregate the existing gameplay away. This is partly why I divided Medical Doctor and Surgeon (used to be an MD alt title and thus you usually had 3-4 surgeons per round) into Physician and Surgeon with the original brainmed update in 2020. What happened is that since you could have an unlimited amount of surgeons, two of them would instantly claim the ORs, and any other ones would be banished to never doing their job and basically only taking care of GTR duties. And no, a "good faith" system is not enough of a guarantee here to be a reasonable solution. For gameplay development, I do not know about you guys, but developers have limited time to implement things. I physically do not have the time to implement gameplay for 7 engineers or however many slots people want to give to a certain role. If I have to rework a department's gameplay then I have to carefully calibrate the gameplay to the amount of slots, this is why medical is the way it is regarding some things being easier or harder to treat, it's because the expectation is that there are 2 physicians in the GTR. If I add more gameplay to medical, more things to keep track of, then I would consider raising the slots. But doing it before means that I have my work cut out for me already, which is not ideal. The more slots you add, the more work someone has to do to make sure that as many people in a department can have fun, and I do not wish that position on anyone. For events, any major event that is guaranteed to have gameplay/roleplay for everyone already uses the extended manifest with security/service/engineering personnel and whatever else. If an event does not use it then it is because the event runner did not think they could put that many people on the map or give that many people gameplay. I will not speak for kermit here but from my observations on the last event both of these were the case, there was simply not enough to go by for most people. Admin-wise we are already discussing rules that are more clear on involving off-duty crew in off-map roleplay on events and on Odysseys, it is just a matter of deciding what wording works best. That said, this suggestion is going to be dismissed because, as described earlier, I don't want and will not encourage a slots arms race. Any change will be made to specific slots and it will be discussed specifically for that slot.

Accepted long ago. Welcome to the team!