MattAtlas

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:

The Relay uses the PluralKit bot, which automatically creates posts with a name and profile picture set by you for characters. You don't need to swap your main account's profile picture at all, as it's handled via the bot in the relay IC channels.

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.

Look at Eridani. A planet or culture where augmentation is intrinsically tied into the lives of people, not in a weird "I think robots are gods, actually" way but more of a "I was brought up this way" or "The state requires me to do this" way. The latter is far more palatable than anything tied to religion. If you want to see how often people are called crazy for their religion, just look at Dominia - it's not even remotely as weird as the Trinary (the Tribunal is essentially an ultra zealot Abrahamic religion spinoff) and Dominians are still seen as extremely weird by 90% of server characters for it. This attitude towards them is not even tied to the aggressiveness of the religion: Trinarists get the same kind of weird looks. A well-written planet or culture where these are tied to the lives of people in a way that doesn't include the issues outlined above. There are infinite answers to this question and I'm not really going to go over many, instead I'll just point at Eridani as an example of what could be: augmentation there is a symbol of status and potentially of servitude to your corporation. You can extrapolate this to the state or whatever.

This was because aut'akh got mechanical augments before humans did, which made zero sense. Humans already had subtle transhumanist movements: Eridani, for one. I say subtle because augmentation was written to be encouraged in Eridani lore, but it's not really that persasive in their society. Transhumanism is better done without any religion tied into it -- essentially, it needs to be something that a character can pick up and still be normal in the lens of others (with rare exceptions, like Dominia). Just look at the Trinary Perfection as an example: it has maybe two players total at most at any given point in time because the whole premise is wacky as hell. This doesn't really deviate enough from the Trinary in my eyes, and it'll end up in the same way (basically unused and underrepresented) for reasons already stated above.

How often have you been playing lately, and on what timezone? I remember seeing you at least a few times back when you were on trial every day, but now I don't see you around anymore.

I highly suggest making a new character in general, considering your comments on your own character here and everything else I've said before.

Lowpop did not improve in player count when the station started with a full SMES. People don't join rounds because of the lack of population, and it's a self-feeding cycle that you can't actually break.

I can foresee this slippery sloping into people doing shit they shouldn't be able to, so I'm not a fan of it. In general, this thread just proves how unsustainable lowpop is and why it's not really ever considered for balance. The game hardly works on lowpop - adding solutions to fix a problem on lowpop pretty much always ends up causing more issues for high pop (see engineers complaining about having no roundstart setup) later on, without snowflake code. Considering we've already reverted the SMES change, I don't also want to revert the revert, otherwise we'll keep doing this forever and ever.

Denied, not enough feedback.

How exactly is a bartender/janitor/shaft miner character becoming a head of personnel? This should have been asked during your last app, but it slipped my mind completely. What do you mean here?