Skull132

If a species is meant to be androgynous upon inspection, then the code can be altered to reflect this. This is already the case with Diona, and if the Skrell lore dev wishes, can be expanded to Skrell. In species with commonly clear sexual dimorphism, such as humans, Unathi, etcetera, gendered pronouns per mechanics would remain, as I do not see a need to expand this to all species if we can already alter it per individual species per necessity.

Okay so, we did a final review of evidence, discussed some implications, and came to a verdict. First, the evidence. There were 5 points of evidence to consider. First were the PDA messages, which almost every single staff member that I asked an opinion from considered more incriminating than Bear makes out. Second piece was the bloody crime-scene itself, which Bear reportedly did not make an effort of to clean up. Third is the fact that I have 2 observers reporting that Bear stowed a bloody RIG/voidsuit in his character's locker, still bloodied and set to Tajaran mode. Fourth piece is the fact that Bear's character still had the bloody murder weapon on him upon arrival in CC, or at the very least, made minimal effort to dispose of it. And the final piece is the body itself, which wasn't crushed or otherwise disposed of. While true, it's really bad luck with how the tale of the body went, and an effort was clearly made on this front. To address some comments about the processing of said evidence, and the rules of The Game. It is true that very minimal amounts of evidence above was processed by IC means. However, the murder was conducted in the closing 15 - 20 minutes of the round. Which, in the context of canon murders, is probably the most unfair time to pull one off in, since it gimps the station's investigative forces immensely and puts the offender at an advantage. In an effort to keep The Game more fair, the administration reviews the evidence instead. Had a proper IC investigation been done in round, and had Bear's character managed to somehow talk off, hide, or otherwise distort the evidence while the investigation was in progress, our view on it may be different. But this did not happen. So, with all of this in mind, the staff believe that there is a lot of evidence pointing towards Yahir and not anyone else, really. The added extra of murder in SS13 is that you have a very closed list of suspects to run down, and likely, out of the present crew, Yahir would stick out like a sore thumb. So the verdict is likely going to be a guilty one, after some time spent on investigating and in court. There are likely some freedoms you can take with this matter, ranging from the character committing suicide to playing with how long the investigation and court hearings take, running the hell away, etcetera. But the final verdict would be that he's likely to be found guilty and is eliminated from play up until that point, and after that point. There was also a compromised developed over the weekend between Resi, Read, and Bear, which outlined the possibility of Yahir posting bail. However, literally every single leader of staff that I consulted on this matter was against this, from Mofo to Lancer to Head Admins. For two reasons, largely. First, it gets us in a bit of a quagmire, by allowing a murderer on station and among crew. Which is a spot that the administration is very keen to keep restrictions on, for obvious reasons: it's a very tough role to pull off and can end in horrible cringe. What's worse is that the murder in question wasn't exactly clean. Scuttlebutt is gonna run, and the amount of circumstantial evidence (note that circumstantial evidence is typically enough to convict, even for murders) is massive. Had it been a more thoroughly conducted affair, our opinion on this matter would have been different. This is to say: we do not believe the murder, as conducted, is clean enough to merit the character "surviving".

This hints at a more glaring underlying issue. Our role setup does not scale. At all. To be quite honest, I'd love to see the amount of roles scale up and down depending on current station size. This would solve the issue of over-stacking, and also help direct players towards picking roles that are generally needed.

Well, this is gonna be fun. Pretty sure we've spent a good few years humanizing ERT, starting from when we remade their rank structure. So I'm going to need a lot of citation to back up what you just said. In specific, where does it say that your character cannot know ERT characters? Further more, I don't understand the following, both on a grammatical and idea-based level: "you can't really incorporate these people into your character". Do you want to be able to play as a ERT character on station, much like you'd be able to play a TCFL or IAC one? If so, why do you hold this as the standard? If not, what does this even mean? Regarding the rest of your lore arguments. They are basically the "Baseline" of ERTs. And they're there as the run of the mill corporate goons meant to look out for the company's best interests. Which is something that's necessary, lore balance wise, at least until we crowbar NT out from being the main host of the station. --- Gameplay wise. While you're correct, their impressive loadout is simply due to them predating the current multiple response team system. The relatively easy solution to this would be to rebalance their equipment and call it a day.

Well, the man in question ended up doing this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/etxuq4/local_idiot_overreacts_to_slow_admin_response/ So uh. Time to lock, deny, and forum ban.

Oh. 513. Try using a different version or downgrading to 512. I'm uncertain if we work properly with the 513 clients, since there's a few changes between 512 and 513.

While we don't normally weight information from other servers, I just saw your ckey pop up on host chat and did a quick look-up. Reportedly, you've been involved in things like: doxxing, "sending malware links", and behaviour described as following: "xqcow1 has been joining servers, starting shit, and then claiming to SWAT server owners". This is coupled with the fact that apparently just yesterday you got nuked from another server for being a nitwit. Which is likely why you're now here. So uh. I'd vote "Noooo" on this one.

Okay. I have 2 issues to solve for you all. Why are we replacing Vox with borers? Neither is a crew playable race, neither falls under my clause of, "Fuck you, no more crew playable races". If you want to do away with the Vox then just have them fall into obscurity but remain in lore. Is this a good idea? Borers are unknown and mysterious and whatever else. Normalizing them by making them a friendly merchant species, IMO, would do a lot to undermine their antag aura. Extensively writing lore about them will also do a lot to remove that aura.

Need your ckey before proceeding. I am not getting any logins from your current IP.

Ban requests are an old vestige that should probably be removed. They were originally created back in 2013-2014, when we didn't have any persistent messaging system like the game -> discord bridge, and basically served as adminhelps for cases of clear grief when the admins weren't around. With the advent of Discord, this is no longer necessary, and most other ban requests are simply treated as player complaints. As for complaints vs appeals. There's two components to this, really. The first is that yes, technically speaking, people citing that the phrasing of "complaints" is by default negative are correct. And it does have an effect on mentality. However, this effect is usually skin deep and shouldn't really be an issue for a well balanced adult to overcome. The other thing is. "Appealing" bans is simply lingua franca for SS13. If you look at the forums, then we use the verbage of "Unban requests". There are only two real differences here: We have a different procedure for managing unban requests than we have any other appeal against admin action. This is primarily due to the fact that bans are the most severe form of punishment we have, ergo, deserve a fast-path. Unban requests are the only place where you can appeal a decision on grounds other than claiming the admin's judgement as erroneous. This is a very key difference, and absolutely should not apply be applied to notes and warnings. Due to these two points, it would be unwise and messy to have note and warning appeals in the unban requests section. They are not treated the same, ergo, they should not share a forum.

Just know that you run the risk of getting caught in a previous ban due to your predecessors, or in a blanket range ban. Specially with the VPN provider you appear to use. ? Anyways, closing and archiving.

> VPN connection Yee that would do it. You should be able to connect now.

Some count of days. I forget the specifics but it's probably between 3 and 7 days.

While I'm not up to scratch enough on de facto enforcement recently, it used to be very common for admins to handle ahelps about antags insta-ghosting when getting caught or mirked by security. Aaand the same for sec doing it. So ye, it should still be enforced like this.

Lemme do a double-take here. @Bear With the following in mind: Apparently there wasn't a decision made on this count, contrary to what you presented in the complaint? And you escalated it to a complaint in the middle of a discussion that both myself and @Mofo1995 mandated above. Which is fine, but at that point, I'd urge Mofo to undo the penalizing action, since there was no actual decision made on punishment before the matter was escalated. As for your options. IMO the ones presented by Mofo remain on the table.

From a purely, "I observed this happening" perspective. The mode of running a 1 - 2 month arc with announced happening times appears to be a pretty big success for player involvement. We tracked twice the number of players that we regularly get for the finale. Well done lads and ladderinos.

Well, agency goes both ways. The round in question was a canon event round, so the player [Bear] was completely aware of the fact that he would be throwing his character to the wolves by doing this murder. While there are no codified rules about "canon rounds", it has been made abundantly clear, through announcements, and de facto policy that events of the rounds classified as "Canon rounds" are by-default canon, and carry consequences. Ergo, the player exercised their agency by killing the Vaurca. It wasn't pre-coordinated with the event leaders, it was emergent gameplay during a round which is explicitly classified as canon. They got to pick their destiny, and their choice was to throw their character to the wolves. So to say that the player's agency was completely removed from this decision is absolutely false. There is also minimal analogy between the events here, which were a part of emergent gameplay, and the pre-planned murders and sentencing of characters, which is what took place during the Odin arc, sans one exception. Before moving on to my next point, allow me to state the authority that the respective teams have over characters and their play. The administrative team, and the CCIAA, which is a subdivision of the former, have direct authority to rule over the characters in play, ultimately. This is necessary for them to enforce the rules of the server. So effectively, the buck of, "Can I play my character?" stops with an administrator or a CCIA Agent's ruling, with the exception of complaints. The lore team's authority is non-existent in this field, with a caveat. The caveat is that any decision can be enforced with the consensus of all participating parties. Which how these situations have been handled thus far: the event leader and the subjects of the event have agreed upon whatever fate their characters end up with. If there is a disagreement, however, then the discussion should be escalated to the admins for review, judgement, and finalization. Which is sort of why we're here now! As @Mofo1995 said, the main issue to take here is to be with the process, not necessarily with the result. Though I'd also like to ask @Resilynn whether she deemed the matter closed, or actually had planned to follow up on this matter with the FIB/CCIAA before the complaint? Since this might also be a miscommunication one way or another. Ultimately, per the general consensus from the admin team, it is agreed that there should be consequences for the murder. The PDA messages make it quite clear that Bear's character is a prime suspect, and would remain so for quite a long time. It is possible that NT would minimize the hours he gets on Aurora during the investigation, even if simply to minimize any future altercations between him and the rest of the crew that are aware of Easter's and the Vaurca's death. To that end, most of Mofo's suggested possibilities for a specific resolution look sound, though we're open to alternatives as well, if they're deemed acceptable.

So I'm shooting the shit on Discord about ingame engines (the ones that power the station), and figured I'd toss some of the ideas here for notation's sake. First, engine needs to be more dynamic. Both inherently and control wise. Right now, from an automation engineer's point of view, the SM engine is very easy to control. There's no downside to overcooling it. So it's just a matter of generating a cooling force that's equal to or larger than the heat output of the rock. The system is completely static after that, minus the negligible decay in the output energy of the SM over time. This, however, is a slow enough process to be handled manually, if at all. All of this leads to an engine with surprisingly little depth to explore. It's literally a question how, "How will I generate a cooling force stronger than the heat I want out of the system?" How could we improve upon this? The main idea would be to give negative effects to overcooling the engine. The simplest form of this would be, if you overcool it, the reaction slows down and you generate less energy. This would require that you start balancing the heat input of the system with the heat output of the system, this making you think more about the actual process and how to get exactly the desired effects you're looking for. The issue that's following straight on the tailcoats of this is the lack of control. Basically, there's not enough fine grain control over both the output heat that's generated (emitter is a very large static offset function generator) and the cooling input of the system. Sooo that'd have to be addressed. But once it's done, it'd be possible to explore a lot deeper of a system than what we currently have, since you'd need to start figuring out cooling-to-heat ratios. To make the last point more fun, we could mess with the heat generation curve. At the moment it's likely somewhere between linear and an exponential continuous function. If we really wanted to have fun with it, we could make it a non-continuous function, or a highly complex function. This would permit us to create safe regions and not-so-safe regions. In the latter case, the heat generation would be very difficult to control and require a lot of work to stabilize. But in return, we could make it give off a lot more heat. This brings me to the final point. Automation. If we make the system inherently dynamic (the heat output can change over time without anything touching it), then we should also have a way to automate the control over the cooling output of the SM. Otherwise, you'd need to monitor the engine CONSTANTLY. And that'd be a bitch. In reality, this is where you'd apply a standard P(ID) controller. PID control itself is also a very deep topic, and a lot of fun could be had with this for those who are interested, I feel. This also wouldn't be the first time a mechanic solely relying on a deeper understanding of maths would enter the game. For simple setups, we could make an autotuning algorithm that can handle stable regions of the SM. That way, if you're new or whatever, you can follow basic instructions to set it up. But it'd result in less than optimal power output. For those who are interested, give them a full PID controller to tune and enough measuring equipment to figure out what's going on. There also exist two minor comments that I can't be arsed to figure out right now, as I'm tossing this idea into the void. First is that power generation is largely irrelevant right now. Not only is the powernet demand very static, it's very easy to overmatch it. And no one wants to deal with an undermatched powernet either, because that'd mean some departments not having access to the tools they need, or whatever. I guess a basic way to address this would be to have a power generation level which keeps everything running, then the next one which also charges the SMES ontop of this, and then the final one be an overmatched powernet. The next ideas would be to generate downsides from overmatching the powernet, either immediately or over time. (Also make these issues appear elsewhere on the station, so you're not always stuck staring at the engine as you try to fix them.) And the last one, likely most difficult, would be to make the demand more dynamic. Power usage of devices is completely unbalanced and nonsensical, is the other issue. The only way to really address this is similar to how we'd have to address the currency issue. Literally chase down EVERYTHING using power, put it into an excel sheet, categorize, and then normalize. BUT THAT'S A LOT OF WORK. The second matter is that I'd like there to be more lore-specific nods from engine fuck-ups. The fact that the only thing the SM engine does is explode is a complete waste of potential. It's a magical rock tied to bluespace or something. And the only two exciting things it does is... Generate heat and explode? Come on... This concludes my morning write-up. Please share with me your thoughts and opinions on the matter of making the in-game engine more FUN and DEEP.

Thots. Don't do the "!!!" thing, it's a bad way to grab attention. Red is already fine, bolded letters can be used on top of the colour red. Another point. One colour per line. Or to phrase it another way, there should not be a line which has two non-standard colours. Example being your handheld scanner mock-up. Duplication information is also a step towards bad design. If you have 3 pieces of information, in the handheld scanner mock-up again, being the number, the colour of the number, and then an assessment. Then one of them is unnecessary. Either remove the number or the verbal assessment. The player is able to understand the colour coding just fine. Mixing colours is also bad. Implying critical oxygen with the colour blue, instead of red, is suspicious. Though I kinda understand the reasoning for it: to avoid confusion with the rest. But it should hopefully be clear enough? Or maybe change the wording of the line instead. There's also the thought of having too much colour. IMO having the report of "No limb injuries" be standard black is fine. It's not meant to grab attention, so slamming green there is unnecessary.

For the record. I'll be handling this one unless Mofo shows an interest. Will review it Thursday or Friday, as I have time. Until then, discuss if there's anything left to discuss.

Can I just. > Man claims real judicial system works by public naming and shaming. > Alberyk, who's a recently graduated law student now, links real legal practice as evidence to the contrary. > "I'm sorry not relevant". Excuse me, wut. Also, @ordinal, what you cite is the media blowing things up. Which is a practice that has lately gotten a lot of scrutiny, with the practice of not naming violent offenders in the media becoming more and more noteworthy: https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/02/media/media-decisions-naming-showing-killers/index.html https://www.livescience.com/60595-stop-naming-mass-shooters-say-scientists.html (I found more links, but because I live in the EU, the US sites aren't too kind to me on being accessible.) Also note that the public record is kept public for the sake of transparency. There's a trade-off between the personal privacy of the individual, and keeping the legal processes of the judicial system transparent. It is a matter that has little to do with "Naming and shaming" and more to do with keeping the judicial branch accountable before the public. None of this is really applicable here, though. Because there is no social contract between us and our playerbase that comes even close to being equatable to the one that exists between a state, its judicial system, and its people. We're a private (semi-corporate) entity offering a service. We offer it on our terms and with respect to the local legal system. Finally, again on the OP. Requiring a compulsory "Anything else?" feels like you're missing the forest for the trees. If the exchange was courteous and the admin solved the problem he was initially contacted about, is it really a bad deal if he closes the ticket to soon? Is it really that much of a bother to simply open another and go, "Woupsie, there's also this"? Requiring a script (effectively) for handling ahelps feels like way too much effort for something which is ultimately a non-issue, IMO, and can be solved with further communication (adminhelping again).

@Garnascus First sentence. Must not. The rest is worded as you described, tho.

Sometimes certain accommodation must be made. I outlined the one required for borer to exist as an enjoyable game mode at all. If we permit characters to completely lose their shit and rat out a borer the first chance they get (round start or otherwise), then the gamemode is a relatively worthless addition. Imma invoke @Garnascus on this one. The policy as written might indeed be a bit too strict. Generally speaking, the borer has tools with which they can influence the host one way or another, and as said, borer v host conflict is expected to be a part of the round. However, a balance must be struck between that and not "ruining the round". And the proposal in this thread is basically the other end of the extreme.

But when playing a borer host, your character is still your character. Being put into an unfortunate (or perhaps not so) situation. The only request that we have is that you go along with it, for the sake of the round. Easiest method to do that, IMO, would be to simply establish that the infection happened way before, and so your character is kinda gotten to grips with having a slug in their brain. So you're still your character, just in a curious situation. You don't even have to be a mindless slave, just don't be completely lame and rat the bugger out the first chance you get. Host v borer conflict is an important part of gameplay, and this applies to round start hosts as well, the borer even has tools to deal with it. Just. Don't be a dick about it and :ree: the first chance you get. Also, I just spotted this. What is being a borer host than not being manipulated? The entire point of being a borer host is that your character is being manipulated by the slug in their cranium. You aren't a mindless slave, until you get your brain nommed anyways.

It already does, @DanseMacabre. For the n-th time, have a think about conversion game modes for a moment, and count the generic situations where you actually have a choice in. Not doing something while under threat of violence will generally get you bwoinked. You have some freedom in how you respond, but you will be bwoinked for trying to rambo (or for trying to escape, depending on circumstance). Again, when we view cultists or the rev's posing the question of "Hey, wanna rev it up?" the proper application of violence can engineer a situation where your character is forced to comply, and failure to do so will violate our roleplay guidelines (your character valuing their life). While the point of "Not forcing people to do what they don't want" seems noble. It has a shortcoming. See, beyond being subjected to antagonists, this game has many components that an individual might not want have happen to their character. Why would I want to participate in a scene where my character dies? Why would I want to participate in a scene where my character loses? Why would I want to participate in a scene where my character is forced to kill his best friend? All of these are possible scenarios for IC interaction, played through many times. Following the credo of "Let's let the players choose what they want have happen to their character" would remove the entire game from here. The entire idea behind multiplayer story driven games like SS13 is to build something together. Even on a smaller scale, like pen and paper games, your fellow mates can (and arguably, the better ones do) stab your character in the back or have other fun memes on their expense. And that makes the games good. Because it's a dynamic environment, the only bounds set are the ones of general decency and expected content. The rest is up to the players to create and react to. @AmoryBlaine Bad idea. What happens when the borer leaves his host. You're left with a body you can't clean-up easily and that is useless.