Skull132

This isn't the only case where such a problem exists, however. Pretty much the only case (outside of round-start borer) where you can jettison yourself from the round without making it lame for people is when you somehow discover the round "while passing by". For example, when mercs start blowing shit up and you realize this over comms. In any other situation, like a rev/cult kidnapping or an antag forcing you to do something; if you nope away from it, then it's going to be lame for a whole bunch of more people than just you. Generally I'd expect people to be tolerant towards being the subject for such events. There's an ass tonne of players on the server, the chances of you being a borer host two rounds in a row are slim to none. So just bare and grin it, try to find some enjoyment and engagement in it. The same applies for when a vamp dominates you, when you're forced to do something at gunpoint, etcetera. This is a matter where I think the principle is as important as pragmatism.

If going along with a borer is breaking character, then honest to god, what point is there in a borer gamemode in general? Because we would have people just rat out borers because they don't like going along with it. A part of roleplay is to figure out why your character would want to do something. So if you get brain-slugged, find that one part of him which would go along with it for whatever reason and roll with that. Following through with this mode of thought will lead to all antags which involve mind-fuckery or otherwise exerting control over a character (like vamp, among others) to be slated for removal. Because it's going to force you to do things you don't want to do. Why is this a bad first experience...? Go check reddit for threads that go along the lines of, "My first round was like X, holy crap I'm looking forward for the next one!" Most of them include really drastic shit happening, because it's engaging and thus memorable. Having a good brain-slug in your cranium, whispering you to do shit should be no different. Also, this is one of the cases where an admin could probably interject and transfer the host. But it's a rare enough case to be left as a unicorn. Re: importance. Ye okay, I kinda have to hand you that one. Though a compromise on this count would be to make it prefer those with the antag option enabled. Because it's equally important that the round actually starts. Re: converting antag types. Yes and no. As I explained in my long-post, at least half of those choices are lies. If we want to insist on heavy roleplay, then there's no chance in hell that you wouldn't join the cult during conversion. The only question would be how mentally deranged your character would be by the time he gives in. Rev is probably the most escapable, tho this is highly circumstantial, and saying "No" to a bunch of dudes with guns is generally a bad idea, if they engineer the situation well enough. But this brings me back to two points. First is that conversion and going along with antags is necessary for a healthy environment. Giving people the ability to directly nope away from being converted is awful, since it starts generating an attitude of, "If I'm not in control of what's happening to my character, I don't want to play at all." Again, the entire point of this game is to roll with the punches it serves you. If it means being a cultist, then so be it. If it means getting brain-slugged, then so be it. Yes, it is granted that you won't enjoy every single round, but do you enjoy every match of your favourite shooter? Or every episode of your favourite TV show? I will grant that this is erring on the side of a false dichotomy, because the expenditure of time is different, but the core idea is similar: even with your favourite activities, you tend to participate in the moments that you don't necessarily enjoy.

Indulge me a long-post. First, lemme pose a question. What difference does it make whether you get brain-slugged at round start, 5 minutes into the round, or 50 minutes into the round? My immediate response would be, "Well I can potentially avoid it in the latter two cases," but is this really true? A good antagonist will concoct a situation where you pretty much have no escape from, and are forced to submit. So this response rings a bit hollow. The way I see it, unless it's voted extended, you should be joining with the expectation of having antags mess with you. This includes being turned into a cultist, a revolutionary, with traitors setting you up to do their bidding, or with getting a brain-slug in your head. There is no "timeout" before this can happen, there is no preference to stop this from happening. You are expected to roll with it, you are expected to roleplay around it. A few notes about the above. First, in a previous discussion, the fact that cultists no longer insta-convert was brought up, thus giving you a theoretical "out" if you don't want to be a cultist. However, consider that this actually kinda works the other way around: the expected conduct of a "normal" character having his soul torn to pieces would be to submit and give in. Thus, all it is is a hamfisted attempt at flavour. Whether you like it or not is one thing, but do not misconstrue it for what it is not. Second, about roleplay. The argumentum ad-extremum of "Well we can no longer call ourselves HRP if we expect people to go along with antagonists!" is fucking bullshit. It has been bullshit since myself and YeahChris first encountered it in 2014, it will continue to remain bullshit. "Roleplay" is about playing a role in whatever setting you're plopped into it. If our setting requires to be receptive towards antag shenanigans, then that's how it is. Much like roleplaying a character in DnD would expect you to be receptive towards mystical fucking dungeons littering the landscape, and the unbelievable fact that your character is about to be the centre of a relatively large happening. But hey, it's the setting of the game, ergo, you roll with it. Much the same, in our game, you are expected to be somewhat receptive towards all the nine levels of hell that our antagonists can represent, and going along with it for a bit. Finally, I agree with Burger in that this shit is down to player expectations. Though my view on it is very simple: you are playing on a server with antags enabled. Close to 50 % of our rounds played each year are antag rounds. You will have to face them. You will have to interact with them. You are expected to get along with them and at worst, to play along with them to a certain degree. Theoretically the "realistic" way to handle most antag action would be to report it to sec and hide. This leads me to pointing out the fact that the people who say that they cryo when they figure out the mode and think they dislike it are ultimately toxic with respect to the game and expectations established before the antagonists. And for the record, before anyone starts bringing up stupid points about prior enforcement. We have warned and banned people for the following before, and are likely to do it again: regularly cryoing at round start when you don't get antag; regularly cryoing at round start when you do get antag; constantly asking to be de-antagged; regularly cryoing after being converted. And I would enjoy seeing all of these policies continued. And please don't throw stupid shit like, "Oh so real life has to be put on hold while I play the game?" as someone did in Discord earlier. The key word here is "Regularly". Once or twice, no one will even notice or care. Specially if you're also courteous about this by informing relevant entities over LOOC/AOOC/adminhelp.

I'm going to be very short on this matter. I've told Matt to "unconfirm" it as a bug. The antagonist is the borer. The borer selection adheres to default rules established by our gameplay model, so everything Works As Intended:tm:. The fact that you can spawn with a brain slug in your head at round start is the consequence of you playing on a server that has antagonists enabled. Expect antagonists to fuck with you. A traitor can pull you up within the first 5 minutes of the round with a gun if he wants you, so why shouldn't a borer be allowed to inhabit your skull? It's one of the many punches you roll with for that round. And let me remind you, that rolling with the punches is the entire point of RP. There should be no ahelping of borers for removal. Should you also ahelp cultists that want to convert you? Fuck that. Only if the antagonists is a grade A 'tard should you ahelp them (like if the borer instanoms your brain 4noraisins). Otherwise, you should be rolling with the punches and playing along in a goodhearted manner.

To add. There is a reason why we insist on complaint threads and it's likely very close to the reason you made this thread. They are visible. Staff do not communicate with each other over isolated decisions, it'd be a great waste of energy to. So the argument of "I spoke to 3 different staff about it," is a bit iffy, specially if raised as an alternate to the established and required policy of going by the forums. See, because individual decisions are made in isolation, there is not necessarily a review of them. The last staff member you ask might have no clue what you spoke about with the other 2, and management might be completely unaware of something even being spoken. Complaints raise decisions clearly for review. There is no real way to get around them, and they will be heard.

On the flip side, burger. Your mode of reporting things, as presented here, makes a lot of this unactionable. You submitted a staff complaint against Alb and Prate over a complex and misconstrued discussion, and the end result is that staff still don't have the ckey of the original poster via LOOC. (At least I don't remember seeing it and I've been tracking that complaint.) This thread also had the issue of both being a policy discussion thread and a player complaint. Or player complaints, I guess, with multiple instances wrapped into one. For us to do anything specific, we'd need to do a metric ass of unmangling, most of which could have been avoided by individual complaint threads.

As a preface. I'm going to wildly disagree with you on one count, and will be agreeing with you on a few others. But hey, such is life, you can't make everyone agree with you. Re: First paragraph. Trying to negate a call-out by stating it's not a call-out doesn't really work. But more to the point. The general policy here is, starting from the era of the Apartment Server incident, to absolutely not give a fuck about what other RP (or ERP, in the specific case of the Apartment Server) people get up to elsewhere or in their private messages. This is under two conditions: laws are respected and all individuals are okay with the interactions. In your call-out, it seems like the episode ended when you noped the fuck away from the situation (which is fine), ergo there was no harassment. There were also no laws broken, unless you care to enlighten me. This policy exists because otherwise, we would have the untenable task of dealing with "this guy was degenerate elsewhere" reports. We do not care. We should not care. Our house is our server, as long as the person adheres to our rules while in our house, that is fine. Again, with exception given to instances where actual common western law is broken, or where there is a relatively serious case of harassment/non-consensual shit. Your opening statement does nothing but incite a witch hunt, as would the policy required to enforce the rules the way you want them enforced. Because there is no better witch hunt than a case of, "He plays on vore and he likes to ERP there!" To continue. A surprising amount of people, for example, ERP in their private RP or on other servers. Which is fine as long as: all characters depicted and individuals involved are over the age of consent and everyone has given their consent to be involved in it. It might not be your cup to tea, but this is common and it's best not to judge at times. (Or technically, judge to your heart's content. But don't try to go seeking your own justice against them, specially not here.) As for getting involved in such groupings, as long as you can leave when you wish, which you did per your description, it's fine. Not your cup of tea, but you were able to nope away without the other party acting out against you in a hostile manner. Now. With this said. As I said, our house, our rules. The rest of your post addresses our rules and player's conduct on our server. Which is actually a valid ground for us to rule on, as per what I established before. You're effectively reiterating your complaint against Alb and Prate here, but since Garn has other complaints to manage, he has yet to get around to putting his current opinion down on writing there. I can reiterate what we've mulled over though, and at least the opinion that I would lean on. For the lack of a better word, "Degenerate" conduct here has a line and tummy rubs fall beyond that line. Along with a whole slew of other shit. This is my opinion. Fine on vore, I really don't give a crap. Might be fine on tg to rub behind the ears of a ca/tg/rille, but don't do it here. Also any clearly sexual conduct or references fall beyond that line. Also Zundy's shirtposting IMO, but we'll leave that shit for another day. And yes, I do agree with you that the metric of, "Well I'm okay with it, so should you be," is retarded and really bad. (And I'm not saying it's used by staff.) This is roughly why rules exist. As for the actual enforcement of the rules. Technically the rule to be cited here would be the one about keeping content largely PG. This is why that rule exists and where it has been used previously. Otherwise you have it fall under rule 0: always listen to staff. How effective it is. I'll have to leave answering this question up to the staff. Generally speaking, there are two things to make note of. Regardless of how much noise you make, running off on a crusade just because of what one person said is not too smart (been there, done that, don't want to repeat). Time needs to be taken to assess the situation and to actually figure out the extent of the damages. The second thing is that, when a specific policy has been let too lax, we usually write a staff memo about it and sometimes an address to the general playerbase to hash out the issue. Typically this has worked, but it's a slow process and will not see people getting the bannu. And you might still be left with cases that you disagree with (like the first one). However, it should more clearly communicate the policy and the staff's interpretation behind it. Will any of that happen? Well, we'll see starting with your staff complaint. Tho this is primarily in the court of the Head Admins, and I will not step into their lane unless absolutely all hope has been lost. Post closing, I have two more notes to make. I couldn't well think of a way to intertwine them into the rest of the post. Note that we're a heavy roleplay server. And we have lore. Lore is going to dictate certain things and certain attitudes, such as in Unathi culture the women being commonly held in lower regard as men. Which is, quite frankly, gonna result in certain roleplay instances where female Unathi characters are gonna be put down over male ones. This should, however, not be clearly sexual in nature, per my note above, and shouldn't really be a case of sexual harassment (I think our previous record with regards to IC sexual harassment taken too far is to nuke the player, at least one case comes to mind, though I'd have to research more to find the details). Second note, just to cover my ass legally, really, is that we do have an age limit on the server. US law establishes a few things regarding data processing and online registration consent that we have to adhere to. With it comes an age limit of 13 years. Anyone reported to be younger than that we need to ban and remove the account details of. Roughly.

tbf I did not make note of Amory's submission of a boiled down structure for ingame use on page 2. It handles half my point about names being important, tho the other half remains (the half regarding the name of the current "pilot" role).

Hi I just want to cut in here and point this out as a GIANT RED FLAG. This sounds like powercreep in more ways than one. In gameplay. Response teams are a conglomerate of 2 - 5 guys meant to mobilize fast, arrive on the station fast, and unfuck whatever situation is already fucked. Introducing someone with authority other than the squad leader will lead to dick swinging matches that do nothing but waste time. Specially when you consider that the shuttle is literally a, "Push button and go" type of deal. The team needs to mobilize fast, and two leaders sparring it out is not the way to encourage that. Specially when the second one could well be shot and the game would continue just fine. Now for the status quo. The fact that we already have a role called "Pilot", IMO, is a really bad idea. The shuttle is a worthless mechanic, simply serving as an explanation of "How we got here," and dedicating a man to dealing with it is bad gameplay design. It would be fair if the shuttle mechanics were the same as Bay's, or more complex. But they're not, so there is no shuttle piloting to do, ergo, there should be no pilot role. IMO the role should either be renamed to "Exosuit Pilot" or completely removed. Why the renaming? Because names matter. Role names are the first and most clear way to communicate information about the role. "Exosuit Pilot" would clearly communicate that this man is to drive an exosuit. Thaat is it, no questions asked, no confusion to be had. A "Pilot", even if we write into a wiki or into the description that he's actually meant to do more, will always be viewed as, among other things, being attached to the idea of piloting a shuttle. So to remove confusion, again, either nix the role entirely (and leave exosuits to legionnaires), or rename it to explicitly be the "Exosuit Pilot". Do not waste a player or time on a mechanic that does not exist. Finally, since we're on the topic of names and what they communicate. Regardless of how believable you consider the present rank structure, you have to admit that it communicates the player's position in the rank structure very clearly. Volunteers are the scum of the earth, legionnaires the regulars, and prefects (the ones with the fancy name) are the leaders. Simple and clear. Going full chub Roman introduces an element of, "Well. Am I above him or below him in this structure?" And yes, we could go through the trouble of explaining this shit in a wiki post or in some description. But: ERT is not common, ergo majority of the playerbase is not gonna read about it "Just because"; and people are unlikely to read or adhere to descriptions as well, specially when they're incentivized to very quickly grab the ghost spawners, for fear of timeout or someone beating them to the punch. Summa summarum. This is a bad idea because it's power creep. This is a bad idea because it's needlessly confusing, while the present situation is very clear. Rename pilot or remove.

We are. Not even close to this being an issue.

I wouldn't be opposed to cadets being removed. They work as sec-officer lites and thus are basically extra bodies. Yes, there is some RP value in them, but in this case, their role in gameplay superceedes that.

That really just makes you a shit friend though. ?

I'd go with a "No" for swords and shields. Lemme explain why. As far my view on popular mech culture is concerned, there are roughly two main interpretations of mechs in media. The ones which I consider "believable", the best examples of which can be found in the Battletech universe (yes, I am aware that there's also a lot of crud in the BTech universe, but the core mech designs are good and relatively practical): And then the other is animoo style mechs: I would personally see our mechs erring on the former side, which would mean that swords and shields are too impractical for them. Simply because they lack the articulation required. Prefer guns and missiles instead.

It uses an external service. I need to retool it to be a dynamic lib. It's possible that the service didn't boot properly yesterday when the server VM was restarted for updoots. Will check at some point today or tomorrow.

(It was a large group of dudes in the chat but I didn't grab pictures then.) This was an interesting and fun experience. Happy new year's everyone, thank you all for contributing and let's carry well onto the next one!

Speed limits on traveling while crawling don't sound like a bad idea. Neither does limiting some actions, like wielding two-handed weapons.

Today in lmaos-ville. Vent being welded blocks this. My PR does nooothing.

So basically. Make lying down not an indicator of being stunned (as it is now), but simply a valid state of interaction.

I beat the lizard coder man to the punch. Backsurge made to respect welded vents: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7867 I DO SEE A PROBLEM WITH THIS, though. It might be too easy of a solution for this event. Depending on how proactive the engineers and scientists/robobros are with welding them. The solution to this would be to make the welding them lower the chance of the gas being dispersed, and include a small explosion if this does happen. So mass welding might not be the best idea at that rate. But we'll see how this pans out ingame first.

Aye, aware. We're also slowly working on that. Tho it'll take a whole lot more doing.

So to illustrate the idiocity here. Man gets perma-d for badRP and apparently lying to staff. Which is valid, lying to staff is one of those things you really don't want to get caught doing. Man returns some 4 - 6 months later to get unbanned. Instead of following the procedure that's outlined, he tries to catch an exception. But none are made for him, since, well, exceptions require exceptional circumstances and this is literally the most average permaban ever. We have thousands of cases like yours on file. Anyways, man gets denied. Moans about on Discord until the point he's told to can it or get banned. He then leaves. Another 4 or so months later, the man returns and starts moaning about his treatment again! While doing so, he says stupid shit about ban-dodging and then gets promptly banned from Discord. He then posts a a really stupid topic on the forums, effectively calling everyone involved garbage. 4 hours after this, he posts an appeal, not taking back anything nor apologizing for anything, and claims that he's bringing us a peace offering. It's almost like we should be humbled that you've elected to extend us this olive branch. I feel like the adequate counter-offer would be to permaban you from the forums as well. Since you've clearly demonstrated that you are unable to conduct yourself in a reasonable manner, I don't think anyone should be putting up with the hilarity that you bring with you.

I forgot that Discord doesn't show ban reasons. Anyways, you were banned because you actively moaned about going to dodge the ban. Which is not ever a good idea.

ok zoomer

Funnily enough, staff regularly fall into this category. Or you could make it a client preference that has a default value of "show role". That way, people who are bothered enough can change it, but the rest, who don't really care, don't have to touch anything and they'll be shown as fine. Or just look whether the security manifest is empty or not :^). Ultimately tho ye, similar meta can just be done by comparing the manifest vs who list. Or using BOREALIS.