MattAtlas

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!

Accepted long ago. Welcome to the team!

Accepted. Welcome to the team!

On trial until 19OCT2025.

Keep it normal here. Nobody is after your slots specifically, so let's avoid taking things personally.

this is intended, damage to the power core affects your charging multiplier

Also live for next round: Fixed an ancient problem where machine torsos counted as encased (having ribs), thus reducing the chance of hitting an organ to a whopping TWENTY PERCENT of the original chance. Fixed a bug with the roboticist chair sometimes not properly clearing up its cable.

Live for next round: Fixed a bug when taking internal organ damage. The 50/50 in damaging wires or electronics could land on a component that's already dead, thus practically voiding the damage dealt. Experimental: actual organ damage dealt now factors into integrity damage, meaning you will have to fix the organs themselves too.

Live for next round: Temperature gain is capped to species heat levels in some places (mainly cooling unit temperature gain) Fixed plating damage reduction not working properly Fixed hardsuit cooling units not working correctly (for some reason they had totally separate code from voidsuit cooling units)

A few things from my end: It is not a vaguepost. I was very clear with what is happening and I avoided dropping names in public on purpose because I do not want to embroil more people in public further. Nonetheless I thought it necessary to set the record straight on what is happening. You can notice that I gave Lily the very same way out you gave her in the first version of my first post, where I asked her if she really did mean to make a complaint against me, because from my point of view all I did was stop a peanut gallery. Where I got pissed off was the reaction after the complaint was closed. I want to make it clear that I did not make any demands to remove any player or anything, because in this complaint I expect to be judged like any player would be, and I would never suggest to the handling admins any sort of course of actions as that would be beyond a gross overstep. Me telling Lily to "not speak to me again" is a personal action because I came to the conclusion that I was lied to. When I made my post, I forwarded the evidence to Mel because that way she can verify that I am not making things up (because I would never, ever do such a thing). Instead of the complaint being closed, she can look into the evidence and what I brought forward as the most neutral party I can imagine, either her or Arrow. If there was a misunderstanding then that would be the best way to find it. As for you, personally did not think you were even involved much less had any part. I figured you may have talked to Lily over the complaint but that is it. As far as I am concerned I personally do not have any issue with you nor did I have any before. I did not mention a "shadowy LGBT cabal" anywhere. My issue is with the behaviour of specific people. I said group, because I have been playing SS13 since 2017 and I recognize that it is normal for people to become friends and stick around together. I do it too. To me it becomes a problem when you start abusing that position.

I have always believed that a server lives and dies by how it treats its new players. Especially if they are well intentioned and clearly trying their best, they should always be treated with the most leniency possible because that's how you foster a good, welcoming environment. What purpose is there in being excessively harsh with a new player? What use is it to be draconian with the slightest rule infraction? What reason do I have to doubt a new player's intentions and immediately assume the worst? All you get as a result is that the player in question will leave, tell their friends to not come, and Aurora will suffer from a critical lack of new players as it has for a long time now, and high roleplay servers are already a dying breed. With that out of the way, I'm going to tell you that you have been doing nothing but lying in this complaint. You are lying about not having any malicious intent, you are lying about being sorry for what you and your friends have done to me, and you are lying by claiming that you had no ill intentions towards this new player. This morning at 6 AM I woke up for my exam and the first thing I found in my DMs was a friend telling me that one of your group went to them to rant about this complaint. Generally I do not care about these things. You would be surprised at how many people come to me telling them that I did something draconian again. This does not matter to me usually, because I do not pretend that Aurora is an utopia where everyone gets along. Head staff will always make decisions that are hard, and I'm aware that I can be something of a hot-head sometimes and I take strong measures to protect this environment's friendliness to new players, whether that's moderating certain kinds of discussions (like what happened a few days ago) or others. I don't care if people disagree, I don't pretend to be end-all be-all administrator of SS13. Where I draw the line is your group accusing me of being a homophobe outright to my friends in order to isolate me and cut me off from the people I know. I am not going to tolerate this sort of disgusting behaviour anymore. This isn't the first time you or your people have hinted to it, and you are all complicit. Unluckily for your group, I have the names of everyone involved, and I'm going to forward them as well. You are all complicit because, willingly or not, you've managed to blow up a new player's mistake out of proportion by transforming it into an accusation of transphobia, and when things didn't go your way you then went to rile up support in other people's private messages. You tried to bully a new player out of the server as an organized group because you didn't like something that they were doing, when in reality it was nothing but a mistake that they were extremely apologetic for. For all the talk that you and your group put out about being "empathetic" or "welcoming" or "tolerant" none of you ever even considered the possibility that you were talking to a new player and that they were making a mistake in a good faith. Not a single time did you stop to think about what you were doing. Not a single thought in your head thought that perhaps a public complaint on a new player while publicly accusing them of transphobia was a bad idea. Did you even think that you could talk to the new player in LOOC to tell them that you were comfortable? The truth is that no, you didn't, because you are not showing a single hint of regret over FALSELY accusing a new player of being a transphobe. Is your discomfort worth more than others'? Do you have more of a right to feeling discomfort than others? Have you forgotten that this is a public space and not your private playground? Did you stop even once to think about the fact that you were going to irrepairably damage someone's reputation when they made a mistake that they apologized profusely for? The answer is no, because you did this maliciously. You know that you can get away with it, but I'm not going to let you do it anymore, and it's about time that everyone knows the kinds of games you've been playing. And I'm not going to pretend that you have no idea what you were doing. You sicced your friends on me (just one example, that is a player who has not played for years now - I wonder why they suddenly popped up!), several of which have been calling me a homophobe to my friends. Luckily I do not need to prove anything to anyone, and the people who know me know that I am not who you want to desperately believe that I am to justify your actions. The person who reported all of this to me has chosen to remain anonymous for their own safety -- yes, because your people are a group to hide from, considering your penchant for slandering people -- so I have forwarded the relevant proof to the headmins ahead of time. You tried apologising in my DMs with a fake apology when I know you have been complaining privately about my decision on the complaint (what decision? I wasn't involved in the final decision, all I did was protect a new player from people guessing that they were a racist or homophobe). You lied again when you said you were in no group (although I should say, in the context of this response I mean "group" less like an organized discord server and more of a vague group of people that talk to eachother). You and your friends asked me for help time and time again, putting up a friendly façade while at the same time telling others that I am a heinous person. Another note on what you brought up about staff telling you to make this a complaint, I criticized the handling staff in moderator chat and told them that they should not have told you to make a public complaint because it would have irrepairably damaged the player's reputation on the server even if the accusations were found to be false - something that I was right in suspecting, considering that you have all now taken to calling me and Campin horrid things over a complete non-issue. I was going to make an announcement to staff to tell them to not tell adminhelpers to make a complaint if the subject of the complaint would be potentially reputation-ruining, because of this exact problem. If anyone wonders why complaints aren't private in the first place, it is because of the limitations that come with the forum system we use. I have always, always, always been open to anyone DMing me for any decision. All one of you had to do was talk to me, or talk to anyone in private to figure out the reasons between the reasoning behind the decisions we make. Everything we did was to protect a new player's time on the server. But I will not accept this sort of behaviour. Not now, not ever. It is not possible that I have to handle these things because you all will start shadow witch hunts using your status as a shield. And I will not stay silent about what it is that you do anymore.

Did you actually intend to make this complaint against me? Because I didn't have any say in the final decision. If you did actually intend to add me to the complaint, then you are taking specific issue with what I wrote in the post I made before locking the thread. I've gotten information that you are not only actually making this complaint against me, you are ALSO acting maliciously against me along with your friends. People can disagree with our decisions, we can talk about it maturely, but I draw a line at you trying to slander me in private and I'm going to expose everything you all have been doing when I get home, because I will not tolerate this anymore.