MattAtlas

I don't think this point is very valid to be fair as people that wanted to do surgery used to intentionally pick the Surgeon alt title to do it, but with this change there would be an active expectation that you are a) not the sole surgeon b) expected to do GTR work as well and c) have no right to a monopoly of the ORs.

Due to the nature of this kind of complaint, I would like to remind everyone reading to not post unless directly involved.

Nationalization of megacorporate assets is not something that should be taken lightly in a megacorporate-dominated setting. The big thing to remember is that corporations essentially run the Spur-wide economy and the glass house of intergalactic economy is basically half-managed by them. A structure like that is inherently fragile and Sol nationalizing a fairly large amount of corporate assets in its space should ring some fairly big alarm bells for the galaxy, but also for its inhabitants. First and foremost, this action basically guarantees Biesel's hostility towards Sol, while it might be seen by some governments as amiable at most. Secondly, for Solarian citizens, the cessation of many corporate assembly chains essentially means that for a good amount of time, certain goods that require corporate expertise (think heavy machinery operation or assembly lines) are going to skyrocket in price for a while as retooling takes place and facilities are emptied out of their managers and re-staffed by SCA-appointed personnel. Sol's economy would take a sizeable hit, in my opinion, although I am no economist. It should reasonably rebound once the SCA really gets going, however. This action does allow Sol a good amount of control over its own economy as well, and makes it independent in SOME sectors -- this is more than Biesel has. The only company we currently have that arguably has a soul is Idris. Everything else falls short of having a defined personality simply because they don't have a powerful enough theme for players to latch onto. Idris succeeds because it has a strong, immediately-visible personality: sleazy bankers that just want money is something that's easy to co-opt and make a character out of. Everything else is niche or simply not well-advertised enough, or too hard to latch onto (Zeng-Hu's augment business is not only just not elaborated upon, it also hard-locks out a significant amount of characters, you have to make a really weird character to go along with ZH's theme, hence why most people just avoid this corp). In general, corporations need more of the flair that Idris has, but that's a major project on its own. Jargon needs its power scale checked, ideally through some sort of internal crisis à-la-KOTW. It is absolutely impossible for me to consider any sort of formal Jargon-Alliance relationship simply because that would mean the 2 most powerful entities in the Spur entering a formal alliance, which has INSANE repercussions for the Spur's political landscape. This kind of alliance would make our lore much worse as it'd essentially make both Sol and Jargon completely untouchable. Other than that, it should be a primarily trade or services-based relationship for the time being, with Jargon supporting Sol's current government and not messing about in the wildlands if not to benefit Sol to some degree. I'd like to see more Sol-Jargon cooperation hinted at in the tech/science fields, as well. The importance of bluespace gates (which are phoron-powered) is an often overlooked aspect, despite being a major one. Bluespace gates shutting down would essentially mean basically almost every single civilian/transport ship network shutting down as they can't use bluespace travel otherwise. This is a major issue that all governments would realistically be looking at -- imagine all cargo ships and airplanes ceasing to function overnight. That'd be a colossal deal, one which is not really ever hinted at or even pointed out in-lore. That's the biggest impact I can think of -- otherwise, I'd say shortage of pharmaceuticals and a looming power generation crisis are the bigger ones. A lot of inspiration can be taken from the 2000s energy crisis in this regard. Focusing on effects on characters, travel costs would spike up a lot; the same goes with import costs and all kinds of related things. What we can show off articles-wise would probably involve interviews of normal people in Biesel/Sol/the CoC from a diverse pool of planets. Essentially, these interviews would contain the average persons' grievances caused by the phoron shortage (as mentioned before, import costs, travel costs, fuel costs, ...) which can be made visible through the wiki (ideally in a Phoron Shortage page or something) and thus utilized by characters in-game for storytelling or background purposes. On an even higher level, thus speaking about governments, reason follows that governments would grow more desperate for phoron as time goes on (see my point about bluespace gates, the entire galaxy is quite literally on a timer to complete and utter economic explosion) and this should be reflected.

The issue I take with this segment is that you admit that this was a very visible gimmick in the first place. You were going to meet up with the technomancer in a public area by walking past public areas full of people, and then you decide that when you see someone, the appropriate course of action is to hold them up and tell them to not talk about you, despite the fact that you are intentionally walking through a public area to be seen. I can understand telling people to not call you out if you're doing a stealthy gimmick, but nothing about what you are saying is stealthy or even close to it. This is where the problem I have comes in: you are playing a gimmick meant to be public -- or at the very least, one where you know you're going to be seen instantly (around this time both your accomplices were known and were roleplaying in the bar). So why did you deviate from the gimmick to go and murder Rize for calling you out, when the plan you had very clearly involves the antagonists being a publicly known element? It is true that according to escalation rules you are justified in killing someone that called you out. But when that is what you want to happen, this comes off as little more than fishing for a confrontation or for a reason to shoot someone. More problematic than that is the fact that you did not consider the gimmick or your fellow antagonists at all in this course of action. By following Rize to the equipment room from around Medical purely to kill her because she called you out, you essentially completely messed up the gimmick, tone of the round and escalation for the other two antagonists. Being a team antagonist does not mean that you get to ignore your allies to chase kills -- you need to be considerate of the gimmick/story they're building. What you did here was quite clearly the opposite. A week-long antag ban will be given to Forester. No action will be taken regarding Kyres and Gladiator, as they were dealt a bad hand and there was no real good outcome for them.

I will be handling this with @Faris. Due to the size of the logs, the time this will take is probably in the realm of three days, but we should be able to sort this out in a decent time frame.

We've discussed the issue alongside some more members of the staff and we've found that the ruling made by Yonnimer is valid and will be upheld for the following reasons: Prosopagnosia is, realistically, something that would disbar you from being able to pursue any realistic security work. Identification augments may help for on-ship crew, but they are prone to malfunctions (think someone just using a faked ID or someone else's ID with their clothes) and realistically wouldn't do anything regarding boarders, which the SCC must account for. Colour blindness is nowhere near the same kind of thing. Note that the guidelines say that visibility of most of the light spectrum is required. Colour blindness is not just a binary "you see everything or it's black and white", there are many forms of it that cover many different parts of the spectrum and in most cases it's simply inability to distinguish between a few shades of colours. We have discussed the possibility of allowing augments to bypass this and our ruling on it is a hard no. This adds more loopholes than we are comfortable with and it is not territory that we want to enable for various reasons. This complaint will be locked in 24 hours.

As the person that created the accessibility requirements, I'll be handling this complaint along with @ShesTrying who will be double-checking my reasoning. Expect a reply before tomorrow. Additionally, if you are not involved, do not post.

Cooperating with the synthetic team is a nobrainer, really. Humans and synthetics are intertwined so deeply that they are inseparable. As far as I'm concerned the two teams should work together on most things, since for example a new human planet directly needs synthetic lore added to it as well. I think, relevant to this application, we could expand on synthetics on Venus especially -- in the entertainment industry and as actors notably, as synthetics have a considerable edge over humans (they can be manufactured to be perfect whereas humans have to undergo extensive plastic surgery or genetic engineering). I think we could, for example, build a certain rivalry between synthetic and organic actors in that regard. Some other interesting ideas are bound to pop up there. Two other things are Venusian Stars Institute owned synthetics (as rejecting actors for not meeting beauty standards is an ugly job, it can often be offloaded to particularly selfish synthetics) and VPPF synthetics, which in my mind would often be assigned to Jintarian patrols more. Intentionally so. Either way, I would like to make Venusian synthetics stand out from the rest and be a fairly interesting and well thought out origin for synthetic players. I think synthetics are in a good place for the rest of human lore, really. I have nothing I would particularly change regarding them, but I would be more than open on cooperating with the synth team for new additions.

I'm going to divide my answer into the theoretical and practical perspective. Theoretically speaking, how is the ongoing server narrative impacted? This is an interesting question to ask because if you want players to talk about a specific background event, or focus on it for more than a few days, you need staying power. A good example of staying power is King of the World. People were consistently and constantly focused on the IC events because they were reminded of them through both OOC means (articles!) and IC means (ghost roles, inability to leave the station). Our setting has since then evolved a lot and allows us a lot more freedom in how we bring staying power to the players -- we can use planets, ruins, ghost roles, and so on. Why is this relevant to the question? Sol has had a lot of staying power historically because our setting is Sol-centric (Biesel was for most of its history basically encircled by Sol and thus could not interact with any other factions IC), most characters are Solarian and thus people are going to be reminded of Sol more often, which inherently leads to people mentioning Solarian events more than anything else. However, now that our setting can actually move, we can get away from this situation. How do we make our setting not Sol centric? Moving to the Badlands is a great start. It puts us in an area where we can see things that aren't Solarian, mainly having to do with Elyra. In order to fix our Sol centricity, I'm going to take the Coalition as an example. We would come up with some sort of arc that the Horizon is involved in, one way or the other, and this arc should ideally be about an issue that the Horizon can resolve one way or the other. Offships would then be implemented that specifically relate to the arc in progress in some manner -- not in a way where they can directly alter the outcome of said arc, but more so to show off the ongoing issues presented by the arc. I don't believe being Sol-centric is a good thing and it's what King of the World is meant to remedy. I would say that the warlords being tied up are the last real Sol focus for the time being. I think space definitely needs to be given to IC development for the Coalition and other factions, in short.

I think I can ease your fears in some way by pointing at the fact that I've presented my viewpoints many, many times in the staff lore channels before and I don't think I've ever come off as abrasive. Nobody can really give a 100% guarantee of "I'll never be abrasive" as that's just unrealistic really since nobody has a perfect zen state, but I'd like to say that the vast, vast majority of the time I try to not be a prick. This is bound to happen, really, and it's a valid thing to believe or be concerned about. There's nothing I can really say about it other than hoping that my status doesn't factor too much into the application process. Of course it will always influence it a bit, but I don't think I'm ever going to win just by sheer status and I think I have the writing ability to back it up. I think the strongest part of my writing is that I can come up with good ideas pretty quickly and put them to paper at lightning speed. The Venus rework I put out was written in around an hour and a half -- granted, I already had a good idea of what I wanted to write as I spitballed with Schwann and some others a few months ago about reworking Venus -- but I can come up with things and put them in prose fairly quickly and in an engaging way, as I think my narration is pretty good and entertaining to read. The worst part for me is that I have to backspace a lot of sentences because they get too long and windy, and even then I still miss quite a few. You can see some of these in that Venus document and it's a habit I'm trying to get rid of, although it's a habit that every Romance first language and ESL/EFL speaker has. I don't think the boat should be rocked much in terms of the Scarab ship cultures. The current segmentation of the fleets is fine, I think, and variety is definitely always a massive plus. Being able to make a character that has various beliefs from their culture, a different name or way of speaking -- that's part of what makes human lore good, the diversity we have. I wouldn't want to deprive Scarab players of that, and thus I think each fleet should have its own culture and its own political stances. The latter here is kind of necessary as I want to turn Scarabs into a proper quasi-federation with a lot of internal politicking between the fleets. Finishing the old lore cleanup is the first and foremost priority -- so, in my opinion, Off-worlders and Scarabs are the first thing to tackle. After that, perhaps Venus if it is considered old lore by the LTA and Lain, and following all of this the warlords would take direct priority as the big human lore arc. I actually had an Ouerean character once, so I'm glad you asked this question! I found him pretty hard to play because Ouerea is very, very barebones. I think Ouerea should remain a mixed Unathi/Human planet and I actually have some ideas I'd like to propose with it, mainly adding a far more developed history section with a slight rework to how humans got there (my thoughts are that Ouerea was involved in some sort of Hephaestus development programme and contracted workers ended up becoming permanent after a while, thus leading to a few permanent settlements). The other main problem is that the cultures of Ouerea don't really blend, thus you have no real reason or flair that incite you to make an Ouerean character or stick to playing one. This is a bit of a paradox because at the same time Humans and Unathi haven't really been there long enough to justify the creation of a separate Ouerean culture for Humans. It's a situation that needs addressing (albeit low priority for the Human team, in my opinion -- perhaps to be addressed after the old lore cleanup and during the writing of the warlord arc) and any further comments on this would need the Unathi team's input, as it's their territory rather than the Human team's.

It depends on how it's done, and I put it that way because the human lore team as it is right now clearly intends to show the effects of an actual corporate dystopia and keeping Eridani disconnected from its Earth roots. If that's the way they wish Eridani to go, then having remnants of an old Earth culture is a bit dissonant -- they'd be the first things that a state like Eridani would stamp out. I can see them maybe surviving in dregs in one way or the other, but for suits it's a bit of a more complex argument, because they'd be the ones directly affected by Eridani's stamping out of old culture. I think it's possible, thinking about it, but I think it's important to keep in mind that it'd still be a 'synthetic' part of the culture: the state basically surgically removing the parts that might interfere with Eridanian culture and sponsoring the harmless parts, for example. A more definite and clearer answer would require research into West African culture that I haven't done (because it's a fuckload of research to do, and I don't want to start talking about people's culture without having done said research), but on a theoretical level these are my feelings on the matter. On the point of tourism, it's true that culture is a driving force behind it, but that's not really all there is to vacations, especially in the 2400s. I think Eridani could easily offer appealing things to tourists from abroad -- think expensive technology and all sorts of facilities/complexes for example -- to overcome this disadvantage.

It's possible but the issue is that they are all vying to take up the mantle of being the rightful Solarian government one way or the other, bar the ones that are just holding out for Sol intervention (MSRP, for example), and one of them is basically a genocidal hell state (SRF). I think it's more likely to see the big governments of the Spur back one of the warlords, but I wouldn't doubt the possibility of diplomacy. It depends highly on human lore's plans, really.

I have some ideas that mainly have to do with resolving Dominia's existing political isolation (I'd rather not go into details to not spoil anything, but I have spoken to Schwann before about this). More than that, I'd like to write some kind of arc about a centralization-or-decentralization struggle for the CoC as that is an interesting facet of Coalition politics that is mostly unexplored on the server. My hope is to have characters discuss the merits and flaws of centralization and maybe set the CoC on a certain course depending on how the arc goes. This could be an interesting one to tie into the scarcity -- e.g pro centralization sides claiming that the ongoing scarcity won't be addressed if the CoC stays as a fractured entity. You are right however that warlords are the non-negotiable priority. There can be some politics written there (I want to run an arc on the Xanusii News Service investigating conditions in the northern warlord state(s) actually) but it will eventually come down to a fight, obviously.

@Caelphon Here is my writing submission. You will find my notes at the top and the wiki prose at the bottom. https://docs.google.com/document/d/14mRMwPrE1kV7EL-Y99Ae7IsOT7BM9_fQb1jgWKWsAsQ/edit?usp=sharing This submission is entirely new and establishes Venus' history. This is a vital part of my Venus rework and I have written it in about 2 hours. I included my own flair (as can be gleamed by the narration) and a good amount of culture details. I'd like to add that it is not entirely complete and omits some societal ideas I have (expanding on the VSI, the formation of the VPPF, the Alliance's exemptions for Venus, more Jintarian details) as 1) they are a bit out of scope and 2) I would need to speak to the human lore team to add them. I believe this shows my creative capacity nonetheless.

If you mean factions in a macro-scale (so, Coalition, Dominia, Sol, ...) I think our amount is just right. I would not add any more than we have, as that gets very precarious. We don't really have much space in the Spur for it, and every faction we have is more active development required in terms of arcs/maintenance/etc. What we have now is enough for a lot of variety and just about manageable with a 3 person team.

Would a history section for New Venus work?

Interspecies coordination is pretty crucial to make sure that the lore 'comes together', so to speak. Ideally the Spur should be interconnected and intertwined, with various areas of space that blend humans and aliens together, although it has to be done intelligently -- it's a bit of a waste to have a setting full of species and then never explore the idea of them being around in the same planet. I feel like there's a lot that could be done to improve that and I'm open to it: an example could be Skrell on Venus and how Cytherea could be a getaway location for failed Skrell idols or scientists who just want a break from it all. What exactly are you looking for, and how long do you want it to be? I don't feel like I have much to go off of if you just say "a piece of content". I can try to write a pre-alpha Venus rewrite, but I'd need to know how long you want a showcase to be, because I don't intend to put all the apples in my basket in public right now. I don't really think so as the two spheres are fairly separate, except if a lore writer lashes out in the chat and I have to handle their conduct I guess? Alberyk was in this exact situation as a lore deputy before and there weren't really any issues. The only issue there is right now is that I can read the channels and give my input, but I can't really officially write, and administrators contributing to discussions has always been a bit of a grey area. That would be resolved if I were to be accepted.

Not against this, honestly. Put up a PR and I can testmerge it.

What does "K6" mean exactly? You write that it is a "reminder of where he started in the company", but I'm not sure how that ties into the acronym.

Ckey/BYOND Username: MattAtlas Position Being Applied For: Human Deputy Lore Developer Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page? Yes. How long have you been part of the community for? Since August 2017. Past Experiences/Knowledge: Examples of Past Work: See above. Why are you applying for this position and why do you believe you would make a good Human Lore Deputy? What is your favourite part of Human Lore and why? What is your least favourite? What are three projects (medium to large sized additions, reworks, or arcs) you would like to do or help organize if made Human Lore deputy? What do you believe are the current strengths and weaknesses of human lore? Why? What would you do to improve upon the weaknesses? Recently there has been discussion in the community and among the lore teams about Offworlder Humans. If made deputy, what is something you would want to do with Offworlder Humans as a whole and/or their various factions? There is a current open thread on community suggestions for a planet page for Eridani I. If you are accepted as a human lore deputy, you along with the rest of the Human Lore Team, would work on this planet. What are some things that you would like to implement on Eridani I's new planet page if given the opportunity? Have you ever be subject to any strikes or bans of any kind from Aurora's moderators or admins? If so, how long ago were these actions and what were they for? One strike in 2018 for posting a copypasta in the discord general chat. One warning on my server account for 'rude behaviour in a staff complaint' from 2020.

We did not.

Not sure what you are talking about here. Security had none of their weapons removed.

Accepted on trial.

This is accepted.

Accepted.