MattAtlas

Not planned right now

It isn't possible to always involve everyone, nor do I expect the first missions to. The point is never to have a fully functioning perfect utopic system right out of the gate, because that's unreasonable and impossible. The idea is always to get something that works out, and then let people iterate over it. Don't expect things to be fully calibrated on the first round. No. I want as many people to play Storyteller as possible. That doesn't mean it'll be handed out to everyone, but I don't see it as being much harder than a command whitelist. Not sure. The only way we'll know if it's a problem or not is to try it out and see what happens. Generally when things become abandoned they won't be maintained. Current gamemodes aren't maintained either, since nobody is really interested in the massive amount of work needed to make a gamemode or even to maintain it. I don't see it as a bad thing, personally - we need a new gamemode loop, not a parallel thing. Antags will stay but like I said before, they won't be the main focus of the server after a while. The examples are just examples to make people understand the scale of what can be done, I'm not going to put much effort into them obviously. I need to come up with a concept first and the implementation comes second. The doc also says that canon missions will be restricted in nature and they won't be shooty typically. I can't give an exact idea of what they'll be until I code them, though. I think it's possible, but I won't say yes/no yet. Can't really give a real response to this hypothetical right now, it's a "wait and find out" thing here. No idea. It's a valid concern (and a helpful one to bring up) but I have no ideas on it off the top of my head.

Try now.

Repeating content is a concern with anything. No matter what kind of new gamemode or new away site or new anything I would make, there's always going to be repetition. It's up to characters, the storytellers, the missions and the actors to keep it fresh - there's now four layers (five if you count admins) to keep things new instead of just two (antags and characters), which is about the best we can do. If the community gets involved enough, they can make new missions, and keep things fresh for everyone. The gamemode will just be dropped with a few missions and people will be told to vote it. When I say it needs to become the default I mean that eventually we'll have to start thinking about a "Mission Briefing" optic when adding things rather than a "Secret" thing. If you're adding a gun to sec, at some point we have to start thinking about how if it fits with the new gamemode, rather than if it's too OP for lings. From me personally, no. Don't really have the time to do two things at once. I thought about it and I realised that adding Missions that take place exclusively on the Horizon would be pretty easy, so yeah it's possible, they'd just be different kinds of Missions. I do want to make landing parties and expedition prep way faster at the same time. The PR will be merged and people will be told to play the gamemode. No real way to test a gamemode other than dropping people in the frying pan. End of July at the latest, probably. It is the plan for this to be a gamemode alongside the others, people would still be able to vote Secret or whatever. Read above on what "the default" means here. Would be up to the storyteller. This is mostly addressed in the doc already (it says that Canon Missions should only be minor stuff most of the time), but yeah, things won't be autocanon. It's like if your character died to carps on an extended round. You'd just get to retcon it if you wanted. If there's an IR it would follow normal canonicity rules, aka you can retcon it if all involved agree. I agree generally. I'll keep this in mind, might be a good idea. I share these concerns but I'm not really 100% sure at the moment how to involve every single department, it's a good thing to keep in mind. The service FOB idea is about the only one I have other than Service making MREs and shit to send groundside or serving off-duties/anyone who stayed on the Horizon. Agreed with everything here.

That's why the Missions themselves don't need a GM to run - they're made to work as is, then someone can roll a GM and run their own thing if they want to. I'd also like to police expectation in a sense - this is a good excuse to cut down on the antag toxicity we have and to go towards a more sane "roll with the punches" culture. At the same time, I don't think Storytellers need to do anything too out there if they don't want to... they can do something fairly simple if they'd like to as well, like just adding some extra roles to a Mission. But that's all up in the air as "ifs". I think whether or not two hour rounds are long enough is something that'll only crop up once we start playtesting, so I have no definite answer. The volunteer stuff is soft-handled by there being a delay in the Horizon getting to the Mission (it'll probably take 15 mins to get to the planet). Storyteller isn't a staff role. My idea is to implement it as a "player state" where you have the verbs to do things that staff do, but no actual normal perms. Build mode is being updated right now actually, there's a PR up that ports a much better version of it. This is a valid concern, though I think a Non-Canon Mission should be no different from a normal antag round, and Canon Missions really shouldn't be anything LARP-y unless required by the current arc/sector.

Today I announce to you the fruit of half a year of constant thinking, scheming, going back to the drawing board, questioning, and whatever else. Our gameplay loop is not sustainable and not fixable. Aurora as it is right now cannot continue existing. We need a revolution. I present to you Odyssey - there won't be any TL;DRs as reading the entire document is expressly required to understand the implementation, its goals, what it entails and its effects on the server. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CU2KY5Pwzu5izL5eu9l6k5cH1Rit7t_8RalDpgDnJG8/edit?usp=sharing Please leave your feedback here ONLY AFTER YOU READ THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT.

Here is a question - if you know you affected something as part of a group, and an article acknowledges it (thus it's in the lore and you can bring it up with a reference) without naming a specific name, why does that to you count as being "watered down" and "shit on"? You did affect the lore, you did affect the outcome of the event, why is not being specifically named and elevated over others the problem? Again you're equating not being named in a group effort to being "swept under the rug". This is only true if you think you only had an impact on the event if you were directly and explicitly named in an article or on the wiki. Which is not true - your contributions remain, you can still talk about them (as you often do on the Discord...), how exactly is your involvement being swept under the rug? Lastly, I hope you never come to me telling me that I can't canon kill your character if you do something stupid. This is weird grandstanding that you can't possibly think would work or do anything constructive. It just poisons the discourse by targeting us as your enemies - and I have enough self respect to stand up for myself. You do not want to poison this well more than you already have by opening up the post with "Aurora doesn't value my time". This equation is what lies at the heart of this problem because it is wrong. Aurora is not a tabletop game. Your characters are not tabletop characters and this is written very explicitly (the rules don't allow you to be a protagonist, neither do the events, neither does any existing mechanism in lore - just look at how Eternia or Verdict handle canon arcs). This kind of analogy creates unreasonable expectations that should be quashed, because group efforts are at the base of normal people succeeding in things. Your characters are normal people at the end of the day - slightly better than normal because they landed a really good job, but not protagonist-like. Before anyone says "this is actually inconsistent with the big shootout events", I have a big issue with them (I intentionally never participated in any, other than the warehouse assault where I spent most of my time fixing people's problems!) and I directly proposed heavily, heavily cutting down the scale and their presence in lore arcs.

Accepted.

Accepted.

Accepted.

Accepted.

It should be lifted now.

Got it. Unbanned.

Alright. Sorry to have put you through the wringer, just normal checkups for possible ban evasion. Unbanned. Tell me if it doesn't work.

I don't mind this. I draw the line at Big Chungus getting a medal because he was the last to click the hivebot boss in an event.

The current culture is the product of the regulations we have now. I made half of the things you're mentioning and they're the reason things were fixed. No, relaxing them is not always a good idea.

I'm going to skip over the long list of posts made by a lot of people because it would be exhausting to reply to them and there's only a few key points anyway. At the same time, I'll leave things like players in articles and etc to the Lore Team and I'll talk more about my view on the mechanics part of this - because, yes, there is a point where mechanics should be involved. My opinion on the matter, if anyone cares, is that I don't really feel like I needed my involvement in events to be explicitly written for them to impact my character. I didn't look at recognition, I only made do with what happened to my character, and I didn't really feel like I ever needed to point at news articles to feel like I tangibly did something, like when I murdered a captain. I have two main problems with characters being allowed in lore articles and more 'explicit' permanence: I personally witnessed quite a few people using it to ego-boost and that left a very sour taste in my mouth. I don't want our setting to become a constant race to the top where loads of people have accolades for "killing the Tajara killer" "killing the Hivebot Beacon in Synthetic Nightmares" "handling the Elyran raid on the Horizon during Dreary Futures" "avoiding the Clandestine Explosion" and so on. We have a corporate setting that I think should be preserved, and I think that allowing too much recognition of often-abstracted things (case in point - the involvement of the Horizon's employees in the mass assault events) leads to us dangerously picking away at its credibility. At the same time, I recognise that things must change, especially when so much of the community feels fairly strongly, and so I have some ideas (some thought up by Arrow as well which I agree with) on how to address some of the points here. To begin with, I think that mechanics are the only way "true permanence" can be achieved. Yes, there are lore articles where your character can get mentioned, but those are fickle, often buried by other news articles in the same thread and new threads with more articles, and require a lot more fine combing to find. Characters can have two different ways of having their deeds recognised: being alive and dead. While being alive, they would logically keep some sort of item that demonstrates their involvement in some sort of events. I don't think medals are the way to go about this. They feel way too LARPy. I'm not sure what to do here so I'm looking for suggestions on the matter. While being dead, there needs to be something that marks their involvement in a past arc. Our idea here was some sort of memorial with a terminal (think the one in Mass Effect 3 for a visual reference). I think this could be implemented fairly easily and without much of a hassle, even if it'd have to be manual. Basically what I'm thinking is that clicking the terminal opens up an UI where you can see who died in which event. So you could select "The Konyang Crisis" and then you'd see all the people that died, and be able to expand their "plaque" to see the circumstances and a neat custom message if any.

How do you know all this with an account that was made on December 31, exactly? Were you using a VPN when you connected?

Sorry for the delay, I've been a bit busy. Do you use VPNs or multiple computers? It is a bit weird that you say that you were never banned on the "namaco" ckey when it was autobanned on 24 september.

implementing this now

On trial until 6APR2024.

Sure thing.

The problem I have with these threads is that they always start from the "This is a problem for robotics" presupposition. There's not been a thread in recent memory that starts by describing a problem "with science", they're more like "there's a problem with robotics", and the answer proposed is always either some sort of science gutting, since the role lacks players to oppose the changes (as has happened in the recent years - making science start with everything unlocked is a form of gutting, much like the main SMES starting upgraded + full has been gutting for engineering, and rightly reverted) or some sort of robotics buff that leaves them completely independent from science. I want to bring particular attention to the "independent" part because robotics is an extremely powerful department. It's the one that can potentially alter the course of the round by itself, such as by shitting out combat hardsuits (pretty justifiable in just about any merc round, really) or mechs that are a pain in the ass to deal with for any antag that doesn't have a PEAC or ion rifle or whatever. Now, the only reason we don't see things like these happen often is because science works as a sort of double gate; you need materials, but you also need research, thus limiting the amount of times that you can effectively make combat hardsuits/mechs. This is a sort of self-balancing act, because if machinists were to start with all their shit unlocked and only with a need for mining materials, I can guarantee without a shred of doubt that in one-two months, two things will happen: Machinist players will demand a way to get materials quicker. Combat hardsuits and mechs will be nerfed into the ground, either by making EMPs more accessible for antags or making them far easier to kill for normal antags. I'm not suggesting a dismissal of this thread, but this is more or less my general look at the machinist problem. I think it's balanced on a tightrope that's best not cut away at - anything that happens to it should be a larger, more thoroughly tested rework, because I don't much like the gameplay implications of making mechs and combat hardsuits that much more common for ship characters.

I'm not taking this complaint for the time being, but if someone gets bwoinked that doesn't mean the roleplay was bad. You can get noted for breaking the rules while still roleplaying well. The note to me just reads that you didn't really fearRP, which isn't an indication on "roleplay quality" or anything.

On trial until 31MAR2024.