MattAtlas

The purge wouldn't really be a recurring thing. Doing it once to get rid of players that have been inactive in the 'modern age' so to speak of Aurora is enough, honestly. The thing is, server expectations and character quality have changed so much from 2016 to 2020 that Aurora is basically an entirely different server. And people from 2016 do often return to play command roles without "re-integrating" first. This is essentially what we're doing by making older players have to go through a trial again. You aren't really being punished here; nothing is being held against you, you just need to play for some weeks regularly, reapply and get your whitelist again. You would have no trouble with this if you are a good player. I don't really entirely agree. Command whitelists are also a competency check. You stop being as competent at the game and at command if you're inactive for too long. You also stop being in line with what current standards for whitelistees are. We are much harsher on command whitelistees now than in 2017, for example. Competency absolutely does matter when you are playing captain or head of security; many inactive players return with a completely different mindset regarding antagonists and our expectations for security, which have also changed a lot since back then.

We can check the rounds played by each player to avoid situations like someone playing 1 round in April 2021 and avoiding the purge. I haven't finalized the criteria yet, however.

Former.

Hello everyone. I'm seeking your feedback on an idea that I had today and wanted to share with the rest of the Command Whitelist team. Essentially, with the NBT testing weekends on the horizon, my concern has shifted to the fact that many inactive players will probably return, and some may have command whitelists. Now, as we all know, standards weren't always the same, and people that take long breaks tend to forget about the server completely and not stay updated on rules, character standards, mechanics, and so on. In light of this, I'd like to strip the command whitelists of players that haven't played for a year or more, thus making sure that everyone is up to our current standards. What do you all think?

As the staff member in question is no longer available, I'll handle this. You'll be unbanned. Make sure to read the rules since this is an HRP server, so on and so forth.

Accepted.

I think my only feedback about you is that you need to pay more attention to things like apostrophes/punctuation. It might seem small, but it impacts the quality of your roleplay a lot. Otherwise, I think you've been an alright head of personnel.

Accepted.

On trial until 19JAN2022.

This rule was enforced from before that edit: it used to be enforced under the "too many administrative punishments" clause with the understanding that a ban essentially meant that, since you have to be punished a lot to be banned or fuck up really heavily. It was put into clear writing later, but this isn't an ex facto application.

You actually give pretty damn good reasonings here. I actually might change my way of thinking abt sol common. Good answers on the rest too. Nothing else comes to mind rn for questions but I might be back.

Sounds fine if I interpret this correctly, however I'd have to see a plan of action to be sure. Not something I need to see now anyway. Onto one of my favourite lore subjects, and one that constantly causes division in the team. What are your thoughts on languages in the setting? Do you think that Tau Ceti Basic is fine the way it is? How do you feel about getting rid of it and instead relying on various languages with cross understanding? Do you think the current human languages are fine, or should there be more? Would you break up Sol Common? If so, why? What are your thoughts on current language availability?

Good answers so far. I agree on your plans of action. Adding new planets after the lore is stable, with more consideration, is definitely a good idea. I do think things like Crosk, Zaurghis and maybe Burzsia shouldn't have been allowed in. What are your thoughts on languages in the setting? Do you think that Tau Ceti Basic is fine the way it is? How do you feel about getting rid of it and instead relying on various languages with cross understanding? Do you think the current human languages are fine, or should there be more? Would you break up Sol Common? If so, why? What are your thoughts on current language availability?

What are your thoughts on languages in the setting? Do you think that Tau Ceti Basic is fine the way it is? How do you feel about getting rid of it and instead relying on various languages with cross understanding? Do you think the current human languages are fine, or should there be more? Would you break up Sol Common? If so, why? What are your thoughts on current language availability?

Autocanon is fine but it needs far stricter rules. You shouldn't be able to headcanon planets in core territory. Only non-coalition frontier or other specific territories that can be added in the future (CRZ?), and even then they should have at most a few thousand people, and should basically be politically irrelevant. Well, see, that is the thing! They don't have planets but they have polities on Adhomai, which have a lot of inner factions and inner workings. It's basically the same concept as new planets, except it's all concentrated on one planet, if that makes sense. Good stuff here. I like the questions. Fair feelings. I understand. If that's true, that's fine. I only went through the Dominia page history and wrote down the names I saw.

Tajara and Unathi have the depth they have because their entire content is contained into one to three worlds. This has never been the case for human lore and it cannot be, because Humanity is a fragmented star empire that has billions of times the systems that Tajara do. The impression they're spread thin on a lot of areas comes from the fact that a lot of the areas we have now weren't properly developed before: Biesel, Dominia, Elyra and the then-Frontier Alliance come to mind. But this application is levying criticisms against the current state of things: Elyra's rework is done and on the horizion, Dominia is finished and is flourishing in the playerbase, the now-Coalition of Colonies has many planets (and thus, depth) and Biesel has been reworked to good, but not excellent success. A faction's depth is represented by its planets and the variety of content. The only one I would call anemic as of now is Elyra, which is not the product of the current lore team but of previous iterations. Human lore is not lacking depth. Alright, I concede that my phrasing was off. I apologize if you are reading this, Marlon. So I'll phrase it like this instead: "How have your administration capabilities regarding human lore changed since your last tenure?" I will precise that Dominia was not the work of one or two developers but three. In different eras. Of people that put their hands on Dominia, I can count Pegasus, SeniorScore, Zundy and Marlon himself. So this was not a one-off issue. While I can respect this, I don't really support it for staff hiring. I would like to know Marlon's thoughts on this.

How are you going to accomplish this in a sane way? There are way too many factions in the universe to try and write a page for each faction's feelings on another nation. Even worse if you get down to the species level.

I'm curious about what areas of human lore you think, other than the techno-conglomerate, need to be removed or rehauled. At what point does humanity stop having "too much stuff"? Since the technoconglomerate is such an irrelevant part of lore, it's hardly calculated in most players' heads when thinking about how many factions humanity has. If human lore won't be able to add new planets or locations, what do you foresee them doing? Do you have any work in mind for them? Or perhaps any new ideas for wider galaxy lore arcs?

This, combined with your reply on Hayden's app led me to doubt your claims about human lore. Why do you think the situation of Humanity is comparable to that of Tajara and Unathi? They all had incredibly different beginnings in the lore. Adhomai was written from the start to be politically fragmented. Same with the Hegemony. This created an environment where you could keep adding and adding because the worlds were very politically diverse already. Humanity is a victim of its own success, however, being among the first to colonize the stars because of their centralized government. So naturally they ended up fragmenting among the lines of star nations. So your ideal view of humanity would be for each star nation to have one planet, so we can bring them to the level of Tajara and Unathi lore? This doesn't make for an expansive setting and downplays the vastness of the galaxy. Tajara and Unathi have the small amount of planets they do because they are newcomers to the galactic stage. Considering warlord factions as proper star nations deserving of their own diplomacy is ridiculous and is only a pretext to raise the number of factions for your own argument. Quote from the first paragraph of the Human Wildlands page: "These successor states can control everywhere from one planet to multiple systems, though many have debatable levels of control over their claimed areas and are not recognized as legitimate governments by the greater Orion Spur." Again in Hayden's application you put forward the same concept: You seem to be under the impression that each planet and each little place in the spur for humanity needs constant maintenance and is a constant drain on the lore team. This is wrong: the places that get reworked and maintained are hardly ever new lore: the most evident example is Dominia, which had to go through several reworks, and mind you the pitiful state of Dominia happened under your administration. So why should anyone trust you with leading human lore forwards? But even Dominia is fine now, and doesn't really need maintenance work beyond small expansions here and there. When you talk about Human lore, you don't even consider the fact that their situation is different from the other species. Not once in your application or in your other replies have you alluded to the fact that Humanity has this many planets out of narrative necessity. Another comment I would criticize: The lore that's currently getting reworked is getting reworked for a reason: old writing standards for planets and factions were nonexistent and had very little character depth. You seem to be stuck under the impression that old writing is somehow of the same quality as new writing: this is a complete falsehood and can be seen just by looking at Earth's history page and going back to the 2018 version. Or look at the Humanity navbox's 2018 version. Factions won't get stuck in rehaul loops like you say they will if they're rehauled properly. Dominia was the exception to this, which I must reitarate, happened because the original iteration of Dominia was so awful that what Dominia is today is nowhere close to what it was before. I believe this targeting of human lore is going to do nothing but burn out human lore writers and make them want to quit. You did nothing in this thread but pretend to know the workload of human lore without even being involved in current humanity lore. Did you stop to ask the Human lore developer what their workload was like? You say you want to "reduce workload", but it sounds to me as if you just want to force human lore into a perpetual state of compacting their own planets and reducing locations into some idealistic vision of how Tajara and Unathi lore are arranged - which, as said before, does not work for humanity. I will tell you why people met you with contempt: You came back and immediately started preaching about how the old times were better. In this very application you keep preaching how lore consistency was better when you were loremaster. This is the wrong pretext to approach things. If you keep writing things like these in your applications and around the discord, how do you think people will take it? A lot of your application also whitewashes the mistakes you made in your prior tenure. I think you should be held accountable for these issues, seeing as those are a direct example of what exactly we'd be going back to. As an example, you said in this application that developers need etiquette classes. At the same time, I remember many of your picks for lore developers ended up fostering a terrible work environment. Just to name a few: VT, Sun Sam, Moondancer, BygoneHero, Paradox, Pan, Pegasus (who was also basically inactive for over half a year and was not removed), VTCobaltblood, Tammy (who had to be permabanned before being removed). So why should we trust you now when we have absolutely zero evidence of your style of management having changed? You say you changed, but that's your word against the past.

On trial until 14JAN2021. It is important to also know that losing your whitelist a second time means basically never getting it back.

Locking and archiving, since it has been over a hundred hours.

On trial until 12JAN2021.

Full ticket logs:

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Hello. The relay staff team is thinking of adding a new rule to close up a few issues and is curious about your thoughts or proposed changes: This is an edited version of what some of you may have seen in the bot channel. We are doing this to end the quasi-IC status of profile pictures in the relay, which are currently in a nebulous state. Additionally, this is to tie up a few consistency issues with enforcement of believability or modern-day content in the relay itself.