wowzewow

I don't know how this hasn't been thought up yet. Basically, rework Ling and Vamp from LRP murderbone maintgankers to work more akin to social deduction games, ala Town Of Salem, Blood on the Clocktower kind of deal. A perfect fit for HRP.

Well, this is more on regular rounds. Should've specified. Anyway, there's really no point to join mid-round if, say, the expedition shuttle left, and there's just a skeleton crew on the Horizon. Yes - you still *can* play, but I don't think that would be very much fun, relatively speaking. Forgive me, I should've specified that I was referring more to high-intensity events. Laid on it a bit thick with the hyperbole. Although, still. It's a joke that event volunteers are just there to kill the crew. Konyang isn't really a good example, it's relatively safe, and mostly just peaceful exploring with the occassional encounter. Well, barring a few Johnny Somali characters, but that's beside the point. I'm talking more about the Adhomai event - where people decided to jump to the insta-death pit on a bet, and some dude literally went up to the massive beast that terrorized the crew in a wheelchair. And, you know. The lynching. And the massive firefight. I don't think a high intensity event should equal people dying en-masse, but more of more action, and more stakes. People coming back shaken, wounded. More of a dramatic "Battle of the bulge" rather than Trench warfare in Verdun. It's also pretty bad for canon event immersion. People are NOT going to risk their A-list characters with flavor text commisioned pictures because they're afraid to canonically die. Is it totally guaranteed? Debatable, but I think it's a reasonable precaution to take. I think people would be a lot more comfortable if death was the exception, not the rule.

This seems fine on paper, but in practice, Mid-round joining is very rare, ESPECIALLY in a HRP enviroment on Aurora. MRP-LRP servers can just throw you back into the action, because generally SHITS FUKD! But on Aurora, you need to IC'ly know what's going on. You can't really do that unless you're actively metagaming. The action disadvantage is that they are going to die without chance of recovery in the next fight. ...Yes, this is what I'm implying from my post. This is the action disadvantage I'm talking about. You're missing the point here. Death is supposed to be meaningful, and more death means the entirety of Sec dying isn't a tragedy, it's a statistic. It essentially makes us a meatgrinder, which is stupid. You literally see it nowadays as expected in canon events for large chunks of the crew to just fucking die. People are joking about how much of a deathtrap canon events are. Death is a powerful literary tool, but ONLY IN MODERATION. Now you see it as people jumping to their literal deaths for shits n' giggles during a CANON EVENT. Now, imagine this, for a moment. Sec finishes dealing with a team of mercs. What is more emotionally impactful? A. The entire Sec team dies. The mercs are dead too. The end! Time to call for round end! B. Security is battered and bruised. One or two couldn't make it back. Most, if not all of them, are crippled, or irrepariably maimed in some way. They are recovering in medical. They're thinking, and talking about their futures. Will they continue working here? One of them considers prosthetics. The Head of Security goes to comfort and have a chat with them. He awards one with a medal for bravery. This also, addresses the issue of non-player directed deaths. Sometimes, dying to RNG bullshit, like bad terrain, or some NPC mobs are simply not good storytelling. For example, if a miner gets fucked by bad luck, they aren't relegated to throwing their hands up and say, "Well, I guess I can't play the game anymore." Instead, at least they have a cool story to tell at the bar, "I got this scar when I was fending off a wild pack of Space Carp"

PREAMBLE So. I've been mulling over this for quite a while now. I'm a self-proclaimed medical main, but I've stopped enjoying playing it. Well. I still love the department though, RP'ing in it. I think it's really time we get to the heart of the problem. We can talk day and night about nerfing certain chemicals, damage values, and absolutely stupid BULLSHIT like chemical names and what not, but the crux of the issue hit me like a freight train after yet another discussion about medical metagaming the hell out of systems. I want to make my point clear, but also, please *do* read the entirety of this topic, because it's important. The Return of the Powergame, and Why After BrainMed, one of Matt's magum opuses, and a bunch of tweaking, it solved a lot of growing pains Aurora had with antag-crew interactions and firefights. Although after the novelty of BrainMed wore off, a lot of the old problems plaguing medical reared it's head again. Those who where there, I'd like to name a certain player that decided the best course of action to deal with patients is immediately sedating them with chloral hydrate in order to *operate* most effectively. Medical got back to business trying to *beat the system*. Zero mortality rate. Not there's anything wrong with that, but it revived the problem of basically nullifing any progress the antagonists made by boiling down the stakes to how long til' Security gets back on their feet again. I don't blame them though. It's not their fault, and they have a just reason to do so, which is : "People die too fast, and dying is bad. Dying means people don't get to play the game, and RP." Dying is Good, actually - but it's only one part of the solution Again, I still believe Matt is justified in his sharp course of action for BrainMed. Firefights were basically taking enough shots til' the other side ran out of patience or bullets. Death was literally the coup de grâce this stalemate needed. It brought drama, it brought stakes. It literally got fresh blood back into the scene. But, unsurprisingly, it got a lot of medical mains absolutely *livid* when it first came out. Because "dying is bad". But now, death rates are sharply going down. Medical's "winrate" is going back up again, and people are dying a lot less. Which then again returns us to the issues that plagued medical pre-BrainMed. The Two Ways People Interact With Medical - Please fix me up NOW so I can get back to roleplaying elsewhere. - Please fix me up slowly so I can get some roleplay here. These two are in complete opposing sides of the spectrum. Push for one side, and the other suffers. Stay in the middle, and no one's satisfied. Currently, medical is just railroaded to "fix everything and get the next patient in as soon as possible". And it's hard to break out of. Even if the patient wants to do the latter, there's not much they can do without actively resisting treatment and fighting the actual mechanics. Which then returns us to the rather unfortunate chloral hydrate moment. The Solution Alright, enough rambling. So, we've got two ways people want to interact with medical in entirely different ways and are in opposition to each other and mechanics. So, here's my proposal. There are two gameplay paths for medical in dealing with a patient. 1. 100% Health Zero Damage The current gameplay that medical has. Full scan, chemicals, and surgery. With one major change. A recovery period. After surgery, people can't, and shouldn't walk out of medical. Surgery "heals" much slower, but will return the body to basically 100%. (If they do choose to do so, make it so it they'll have a chance to re-break their bones, re-open sutres, and a lot of nasty things if they aren't fully recovered.) It makes sense, and it will benefit roleplay. On the old Aurora, there was an entire sublevel dedicated to recovering patients. Unfortunately people recovered so fast that it was rendered ultimately useless. Same with the nurse role basically, there aren't really *anyone* to look after. Imagine this - your good friend just got out of a firefight, and just finished surgery. They're recovering in a ward, and you have some time together for some soulful RP. Maybe you'll get a wheelchair and bring them to the kitchen for a meal. 2. Get Me Back In There, Now. Featuring the forgotten middle child of the Medical equipment, the Splint. Basically, advanced trauma kits, burn kits, splints and combat stims, and that's all. This is supposed to go by quickly, and will return you to about 80-90% back to health. You'll still need to come back to be fixed up to 100%, but you'll still be healthy enough to go back into combat. (with some very minor pain messages, of course) For example, any fractures will be basically functionally inert, but have the potential to get much worse if you get hurt again. Also, you're probably going to die rather than be incapacitated again (which is, uninutivitely, a plus : fragmeisters would much rather die a martyr's death than be stuck in the medical cuck-box - they chose their bed to make, so, why not let them lie in it?) Out of firefights, miners won't have half of their round ruined because they had an unfortunate fall - they can basically get a quick look-over in medical and get back to playing the game instead of being stuck somewhere they'd rather not be. This also has an added benefit to expeditions, so people can still participate and get back to playing instead of being buckled to a roller bed for the rest of the round. This is so both medical AND the patient has a choice in how they want to interact with the medical system. Incapacitation AND Death, rather than just the latter. With this new system in place, there also needs to be a change in the mortality rates - people need to be incapacitated, rather than dead, It's just that death was more convenient at the time because it was far too easy to get someone who got down back on their feet in a couple of minutes. This works two-fold : the wounded and incapacitated aren't there to throw off the balance of the combat going on, but also, more importantly, aren't just flat out dead so they're just out of the round entirely.

I know the Lore Application board exists, but I think somewhere people can put their ideas to flesh out would be a pretty good idea.

Honestly. This is unfeasible not because of the amount of channels, culture, or whatever. It's because of what the Lorecord server is *actually* used for. The Lorecord isn't an actual discord channel by any conventional interpretation. It's basically just a storeroom and dumping ground for lore discussion, assets and other things. (Which is kind of concerning, honestly.) To put it in other words, the Lore discord to Loredevs is basically what the Github is to Developers.

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Small Species: (Skrell, Tajara, Human, Vaurca, Dionae, Unathi, Synth, General) Human Short Description: Basically, this is changing New Hong Kong to be better at what culture it's trying to represent How will this be reflected on-station?: None Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: No Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team? Yes Long Description : This is kind of stupid and has been bugging me for a while. I'm Chinese IRL and this makes me want to bang my head against the wall. New Hai Phong is literally supposed to be the planet for Vietnam, Hong Kong, and South China. It's then repeated again in Konyang as New Hong Kong. Changing it to be New Guangdong. In real life, it's the province connected to Hong Kong and has very close economic ties to it. It's also one of the Special Economic Zones. However, the Kowloon Walled City aesthetic has to be cut drastically. The rest of the story beats can be kept the same. This makes it fit more with Konyang representing Northern China/East Asia. Alternatively you can also give it a huge New Hai Phonger diaspora, which would also make sense. I still think the name needs to be changed though.

A feature that could be ported from /tg/ iirc would be that ants spawn if you leave food on the floor after a while. Also cockroaches. They eat some of the food and leave toxins.

This post is in two parts, the map and the concept, so I'll review them seperately. The Map Honestly, I think it's due to remap the Horizon - it still hasn't shaken off the technical debt of NBT and how hastily cobbled together and rehashed it all was. It's a vast improvement over the "Station-on-Wheels" that is the current Horizon, which is as aesthetic as a brick. It actually looks like a ship! However, it does need to be pared down a few notches, size-wise. Which could be done by smaller decks, more floors. Still - it's too early to make decisive criticism, because with a map as large as this, it very much needs a review-by-committee and due process. The Concept Good concept, and pushes the envelope - although it needs to be reeled back a bit. I like the idea of an independent ship - players should have a greater stake in their workplace and their RP enviroment, after all. (We could have very meta discussions on map design like the Stupid Tree, but in canon) But, I do not think ditching megacorporate hegemony is the way to go. Personally, a large part of why we've moved towards this is because of how stifling the old "Everyone is Nanotrasen" setting was. Now, we're trading a blanket "Everyone's Nanotrasen" with "Everyone's Independent". There isn't very particularly interesting about "EVERYONE WE ARE NANOTRASEN TOGETHER KILL ANTAGS!!" compared to "Hey. We're both Zavodskoi here, turn the other eye, let's team up against that Idris guy instead" Another reiterated problem is authority and stakes. If everyone's independent, there isn't really much reason to listen to authority RP-wise other than a personal agreement between everyone, which is fragile at best. Honestly : It isn't that hard of a problem to solve - Megacorporations *should* have moderate authority - it's just that characters have a more outsized investment in the ship altogether - something akin to owning stocks in your own company IRL. You are still very much behooved to your corporate master. It's just that you're so far out in the Spur that you're (mostly) free of corporate authority and oversight that you're granted some more autonomy over other ships. Frankly, I'm just rather dissapointed at how much of a backseat the Megacorporations have taken all this time. There's a lot of interesting intra-ship conflict and flashpoints that doesn't even need antags to start, but are woefully underutillized, e.g. Corporation vs Corporation disagreements - profit over friends, etc. There's a reason why Revolution is such a compelling gamemode.

Honestly, thinking about this, a lot of the problem actually just simply stems from the all-encompassing always accurate extremely adaptable Body Scanner which kinds of sucks out any and all interesting depth to the job. I've always been a staunch advocate of "Ghetto medical/Manual medical", e.g. using Stethoscope to check heartrate, penlight to check eye-damage, grab-inspecting for fractures, etc. etc. which adds a lot of opportunity to roleplay. Unfortunately this goes against the main modus operandi of medical players of "SAVE EVERYONE", and it would be an extremely unpopular nerf. I've got some ideas for reforms for medical. It's just whether medical players are ready for it - and willing to accept it.

I think an easy solution would be to allow Physicians to do some very rudimentary chemistry. And physicians can already do basic surgery. I found it strange that CMOs can do advanced chemistry that while normal physicians can't do basic chemistry. Also, physicians can basically hold down the entire fort solo on lowpop. I think the problem stems from people believing that everyone in medical *has* to have an absolute prime directive - a side effect on how absolutely laser focused on mechanics the whole department is most of the time. Thing is, it doesn't have to be a bad thing, or a "problem" that needs to be solved, Physicians can do some RP by doing checkups, surgery, EMT-ing, trauma, sensor-watching... The only real time this issue compounds is on highpop, honestly, when every role is *absolutely* filled. But at that point I'd just say to "find your own fun" like any other less-mechanically intensive job on Aurora that has to do EVERY ROUND, mind you. (Psychologists crying in the corner.) Physicians are a jack of all trades, master of none. Unfortunately people are way too focused on the "master of none" part. At the end of the day, that's their role. A relatively safe pick in majority of situations if you just want to *play medical* without thinking too much.

Generally I think the larger issue stems from Machinist being stuck in Operations. This identity crisis issue has been here since day one of it's migration between departments.

They are coded in and were a formerly job-spawn item.

Unfortunately "Corporate Dystopia" isn't even particularly uniquely Auroran - this applies mostly to every other SS13 server as well, from the fact that majority of server lore branched out from the original Nanotrasen Megacorporate Goon lore. (Hell, I even think Eris done it better, because it's a literal anarcho-capitalist society where everyone has guns and what-not) Ironically, our corporate lore is the most neglected out of all of the other lore comparatively, and is further diluted by all the other planet and species lore. Not like that's a bad thing, but that's just how it is.

I'll just cut to the chase here. Way back when, Med/Sci and Com/Sec were one large department. Machinists, formerly Roboticists, landed solely in this very same department. Same with Virology and Genetics/Cloning. It's why they got removed. They didn't belong in Medical or in the game entirely because they were a neccessity Medical Job while playing as an optional Science Job. Machinist should be put back in Science. Like a lot of Science jobs, if there simply aren't any IPCs nor Borgs on board, then they are an optional Science Job. If there are, they are upgraded to being a necessity Medical Job. Even so, Nanopaste basically renders a lot of their stuff moot. They are only in Operations solely for the wishes of Corporate Lore - which personally, is the most undeveloped, and probably will be for the forseeable future in favor of Shiny New Planets. But basically, they should be returned to Science, and integrated like how Bay does it - the Machinist's surgery room is also connected to medical, so Medical can use it temporarily if all other ORs are full. Note that the Machinist isn't responsible for any medical stuff. They are just physically connected.

Well, a lot of the things I've really wanted to say have been already iterated on in the thread, like giving special treatment to those who are able to play for a specific 3 hours in a day (while other people have to wake up for work tommorow morning are given the shaft...) Hopefully, I think the Cold War and Konyang arcs are the exception, not the rule for events going forward. My general thoughts are that I simply think the server simply hasn't had enough time to settle properly. With the old Aurora Station, events were very much large and bombastic, but still generally contained within the confines of the station, which helped ground them a whole bunch. Post-NBT however, the scope has practically increased by orders of magnitude overnight. Which I feel has alienated a whole lot more people, and magnified my feelings about how impersonal old Lore was on the Aurora as well. Why should I care about happenings across the galaxy if it isn't going to affect my life on the station right here, right now? Why should I bother reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of a planet I'm never going to see, with people I'm never going to meet? Which goes into my next point. Direction and Ambition. Aurora has very much been a loosely held together conglomerate of passion projects, all with different loose threads of people tugging in different directions of their ambitions. With NBT everyone's been practically cut loose on what they want to do, and it's going to take a while to reign everyone in a certain direction. For me, I hope it is the "small-medium event, personal slice-of-life" kind, but I cannot definitively say for sure. In conclusion, I think we still need time to settle down post-NBT. Server culture, organization, development, lore just needs time to catch-up. It's a very much wild-west at the moment, and I feel it's going to be hard to exactly lock down canonicity when, say, the layout of the Horizon could change tomorrow, or sections of lore getting retconned and rewritten. Which I suppose is both a blessing and a curse that Aurora is one of the last HRP servers with continuous development. Hard to leave a mark on something's that always changing.

This would probably have a lot more meaning if it wasn't just possible to create a disposable character for every canonical event and running into danger to kill themselves.

this should be in the lore canonization applications section

Not my PR. Seeing the reactions this probably should be discussed. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/18404

Voting for Dismissal as well.

I can't believe I've been here long enough that people have already forgotten how bad rat roleplay is. Anyway. This has already been discussed ad nauseum. Immediate vote for dismissal.

Yes, of course. 1. Porting Man. The thing is. I really would agree with you. But it is simply a matter of difference on when. Again, the majority of sprites we have at the moment are 2007 /tg/ codersprites. I do not blame any amateur spriter using it as a reference, because they don't know any better. What do I say then? "Sorry, I have to reject your sprites because look terrible, and it is through no fault of your own that you chose to use codersprites as a reference." It'd be like if coders had nothing to go off other than 2010 Aurora codebase documentation, and then asking the team to singlehandedly and uniquely code shuttles and exoplanets. It's unfeasable, it's populist. Unless this can be rectified we will be at an impasse until the end of time. 2. Spriter Guide/Palette Stuff We wouldn't even need to have this conversation if I was allowed to simply get all our sprites up to speed instead of this endless back-and-forth. It's basically playing a constant Ship of Theseus of trying to police our new sprites and fix our old sprites. It is humanly impossible for me to juggle so many people with differing artstyles, wants, needs, visions all at once. Especially given our revolving door contributors over the years, a consistent artstyle will simply not emerge from randomness. At the end of the day, only after all is said and done, then we can constructively work on an artstyle. Until then we're basically just stuck reinventing our own wheels over and over.

Unfortunately, since Goonstation has a differing Github license than ours, we cannot port things from them. However, if you *do* find an alternative that similar on another server, it would be much more likely to be ported.

On Direction : I've made it very clear in the past, and most of my views have not changed on the matter. They are not staff restricted, and free to read on the across the forums on the Guides and Tutorials. If you ever do plan to sprite, are spriting, or have sprited, I urge you to read them. I'm frustrated that I have to keep repeating this againl : Port whatever that already exists in game and from other servers. Unique Aurora things should be appropriately given tailor made sprites, unlesss sufficiently generic to fall into the former category. This is mainly to just stop people from constantly reinventing our own wheels and waste their own time. Once porting is complete, we can use all the assets we've gained to springboard more effectively into building our own repository. Honestly, I can agree with your rhetoric about not porting. However, it is simply not feasible at the moment. Average day-to-day spriters on Aurora do not have such a wide repository and knowledge of other servers. Typically, our current sprites, which are extremely dated, are used as reference, and in turn, create sub-par sprites. This isn't ideal, I do not like people wasting their effort with poor tools. On Artstyle : I have exhausted all possible avenues of discussion about our artstyle with you. Absolutely basic concepts for a cohesive artstyle cannot be agreed upon. Palettes : You have disregarded discussion on. Perspective : Matt had to do a veto to go forward to use 3/4ths as a perspective. There are a myriad of other issues, but the main point I would like to put across is that your idea of an artstyle has no documentation whatsoever. There is nothing I can work with. On Porting : As to my knowledge, I do not know of any ban of porting whatsoever. All I know that exists is a restriction on porting from other servers with differing licenses. I remember my discussion with Arrow when I mistakenly ported a slot machine from Goon (which was later rectified), with a different license from ours. As far as I know, you, Kyres, have been the main, and only spreader of this rhetoric. In no point in this project you were forced to overextend yourself. In fact, I specifically requested you to stop and wait for other spriters to finish their work as well so we could cohesively move forward together as a team. Was it the best decision at the time? Debatable. But it was the best decision I could make at the moment with the knowledge I had at the moment. Then, for the walls, I had to grapple with you on deciding on the actual perspective of them because wall-mounted objects relied on their shape and form before I could start working on anything. You were advised to stop working on walls any further, and I explicitly warned you that any work then on would be subject to further changes. You then decided to wordlessly drop new computer console sprites, which was not requested, nor wanted, at all, as well as wall mounted objects. Which I very explicitly expressed that I would be working on. Which, I might add, time and time again, you have tried replacing. Across multiple PRs. I cannot fathom why you have kept doing this, other than leading me to speculation. They aren't even ports - they are fully original made sprites by myself. Same as the computer consoles. Which you also baffingly tried to replace as well, with pale imitations of TG style consoles. Which also lacked a majority of program sprites - which the existing ones already had. I'd understand if you tried to replace ported things, sure. But trying to replace my completely original sprites which are already well situated in the server is confounding. I accept that this project has not been as well organised as it should have been, seeing as it's the first major project I've undertaken in leading other people. I have good faith that this is just a comment on my mismanagement of my project and nothing else. No, it is not. It is to organise and genericise sprites for future use, as well as to expand our sprite repository for future exoplanet and event projects. For most events you have worked on, you have mostly wordlessly worked on your own seperate branch, before asking a Head Developer to merge it to master without a PR. Which is perfectly understandable, to keep events spoiler-free and under lock and key. Most events were self-contained anyway, and would have no lasting effect on the artstyle of the server. Similarly, in the Adhomai arc, a lot of assets were not seen anywhere else, and unique to Aurora's setting. Therefore, there was no need for any major changes. For the Konyang assets, I am not sure what alternative course of action I could have taken here. It was already bundled and merged into the codebase without much fanfare. Making a follow-up PR to rectify thing was the most sensible thing to do for me, after you went no-contact with the server and left without a trace. There a mismatch in perception of how much I had changed. Most of it was organization, and some were basically palette standardization and improvements so they can also be used outside of Konyang. Not to mention a sizable chunk is original work done by myself, and a lot of original content made by other developers have been completely untouched, save for being moved to different .dmi's and folders. This is a very large assumption to make about the wider community. However, I would like to formally apologize to Nienna, who was caught in the crossfire of this, and Atteria especially. Closing Thoughts : Frankly, I'm very emotionally exhausted from all of this. As if my original work does not matter, for all I've done for this server : contained sprites, fixing inhands, overlays, animations, myriads of loadout clothing, the fact that they can be recolorable, multi-colored, all of the different variants and alt-styles. For a complaint about me devaluing other's work, I've really had come to grips on how much I've been pidgeonholed into being "THE PORT GUY".