Bauser

You're not supposed to know if you'll get cloned. You're supposed to evaluate whether or not the possibility of being cloned is worth the wait, or if you're satisfied with the life you lived and ready to move on. If you die as Head of Security and can't be cloned, it gives someone else an opportunity to step up. If you wait two minutes to find out that your cloning is expeditious (and it is, since you're HoS), then the reward you get for your patience feels more earned. Additionally, it would encourage medical personnel to act with more haste, since people are less likely to stick around as long for cloning. It makes cloning fundamentally more special - so existing traumas and roadblocks to it could be dialed back for convenience. ADDITIONALLY additionally, remember that you can still see a little bit around your body when you're inside your corpse, so you DO know if something is happening with you (E.G. you are being taken to be cloned). It's not an exercise in blind faith.

I would if I could. Death is made extremely cheap just by the round-based format of the game. Respawning is what you do every round, and I have not seen any evidence that making it possible within a round as well inspires people to behave in any sort of way reminiscent of an actual crewmember aboard a very small and dangerous tin can floating in a very hostile and deadly black void. Forces antagonists to be creative, doesn't it? Things get a lot more real when you actually have to come up with plans that would make others let their guards down. Is that really asking too much from people? And how is that not a desirable goal? The root of classic traitor-based SS13 is the intrigue and uncertainty that arises exactly from this reality of not knowing who's on your side, and who's going to turn against you - but still having to work alongside them. Just because people become more suspicious, it doesn't mean they're going to stop responding to opportunities for gameplay and RP. If someone tries to lure them, they're not going to avoid playing just because it's dangerous - the only difference it makes is that the real possibility of an unpleasant death makes it more intense and exciting. Anybody else have something they'd like to get off their chest? It's open season, apparently. I'm not going anywhere, so you might as well go ahead.

It's worth noting that making helmets species-specific would have some gameplay consequences too. It would slightly limit the incidence of being able to use a helmet from a subdued security officer, or a stolen helmet, since it would now also have to match your race. Not a huge change, but one worth thinking about. And would there be any overlap in functionality? For instance, since Tajaran and Skrellian helmets would basically just be standard ones with extra accomodations for those races, it might make sense that humans would be able to wear those variants even though the Tajara and Skrell can't wear the human version. It doesn't have to be as simple as locking each item 1:1 according to race. Still I don't see what benefit is conferred by making these species-specific helmets that isn't already solved by making a verb and letting players choose. It could even be added to other headwear, perhaps. Maybe it would take a little more work to implement...

You can't observe the round if you're inside your corpse and you can't be cloned if you're ghosting; there already exists this implicit suggestion that the two states are supposed to be distinct and serve different purposes. This change would serve to solidify that suggestion. So when I say it's a problem of game mechanics not making sense, I mean to say that the current system "fights itself" thematically - it limits what you can do while in your corpse AND what you can do as a ghost, but it fails to restrict access between them. So anyone who's really opposed to this suggestion should be (and, by the sound of it, is) very in favor of Fortport's suggestion in the other thread: https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=9269 (Allow ghost-hearing + ghost-sight as a corpse) The problem that primarily concerns me is the disjointedness of limiting your dead-senses as a corpse while NOT limiting your ability to swap between ghost and corpse. So both Fortport's suggestion and mine solve that problem, they just do it by moving in opposite directions: his, by aligning both features to make death a little more forgiving, and mine, by aligning both features to make death a little more harsh. Well, I'm asking them to do that, or to ghost. All of these reactions here seem to suggest that forfeiting the ability to be cloned makes ghosting completely unacceptable somehow, but that's not a realistic view, considering how often people already choose not to be cloned, and just keep watching the round. We don't need to give people anything in exchange, because nothing has been taken away. If you want to ghost, ghost. Do it. Nothing is stopping you except your desire to come back from the dead. And if you really want to come back from the dead, yes, you can tough it out. I just don't see how existing in that quiet limbo, even for a while, is supposed to sound like an unfair price to pay for the opportunity to literally be brought back to life. It's exactly like you say: tab out for a bit. Eat some snacks. Go to the bathroom. Watch a video on YouTube. I contend there's nothing wrong with death taking you out of the round. As it stands currently, since you can ghost out and hop back in your body to be cloned, it doesn't do that - you always have the opportunity to be involved in the round either physically (going back in your body to be cloned) or socially (ghosting). This change would supply a consequence that is currently very lacking. Because if you have to choose, you will have to sacrifice one or the other. And I think that's a grand idea. I am tragically aware of the fact that most people don't understand why something like this is necessary or beneficial. If everyone already knew, I wouldn't feel obliged to make a thread trying to persuade them. Then what is? Because so far you've given me the impression that you'd be categorically averse to any change that makes death more impactful and less damaging, so your suggestion that there might be a different 'right' way to do it falls a little flat. Again, this change would not inhibit your ability to ghost from your body.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who say these dumb kinds of sentences think talking to people in the medbay lobby isn't playing the game. You'd have to be really detached from your characters and uninterested in RP if your only thought when you die is "gotta get that respawn." Your approach is more in line with someone who treats the game like a shooter or deathmatch, and I don't think that's what we're going for, broadly speaking. admin note: no personal insults allowed

The change does not prevent you from being cloned, nor does it prevent you from ghosting. All it does is make you choose between them, because it doesn't make mechanical sense to have unrestricted access to both. It's not as severe a punishment as you imply. No, waiting in a deaf body isn't particularly fun, but nobody's making you wait in that body. If you want to give up the ghost, go ahead. It would just make your decision to leave the round as final as it deserves to be.

For certain hairstyles (like the ones that mostly hang down, below the helmet-line), yes. But not for others. Which highlights the value of being able to choose. Wait no, I misunderstood. The hair sprite isn't visible through the helmet; the helmet is just overlaid on it. So only the parts that aren't covered by the helmet are visible. And because of that, it looks good on some hairstyles and bad on others. So, as above... highlighting the value of being able to choose.

Two of those aren't just an accident. First is a poorly-roleplayed malicious act by an antagonist (the sort of thing that warrants an ahelp), the second is a player deciding to make a death bee and failing to secure it (... the sort of thingt hat warrants an ahelp), and the third one is exactly the kind of accident that can be avoided by taking precautions. So the only death that qualifies (I.E. the only death that belongs in our gameplay instead of being an example of rule-breaking) is the one that you performed all by yourself...

Well, what kind of accident isn't preventable in-game? Workplace accidents like opening the phoron canister without a tank attached, miners falling into holes, scientists getting eaten by slimes, chemists mixing the wrong stuff... All the "accidental" deaths I can think of require the player to enact their death - in essence, meaning it really is for a lack of caution. The only accident scenarios I see that don't require the player's input would be like... getting hit with a meteor or having carps spawn on top of you, both of which are events that are forewarned by announcements. These are deaths we see every other round or so, and the idea is that they are deaths we really, really can avoid if we just teach people to actually be afraid of them. So it's true that these deaths are frustrating, but they're clearly not frustrating enough for people to actually do what they'd realistically do to avoid them. So rather than making the deaths less frustrating, my goal with this change is to make those deaths less common.

Alternatively, we could make it a verb to put your hair inside your helmet (hiding it). That way, people get to choose whether they want it displayed or not - and that would be valuable since certain hairstyles look nonsensical with a helmet sprite just slapped on top of it.

@ AmoryBlaine Brain damage was added for the same reason, to make death more serious, right? If there existed a baseline punishment for dying to always be awful, the need for randomized annoyances like that would be gone. We could do away with brain damage. We could speed up the cloning process, since the bad part of dying becomes the wait until cloning, rather than the wait during. This change doesn't have to be made by itself; I imagine it would demand tweaking of other mechanics like that. @ Itanimulli

I imagine it would have to allow for duplicate antagonists, otherwise it would never be able to recreate the occurrence of a traditional traitor round (e.g. 3-5 traitors) Come to think of it, I am a little disappointed by how comparatively rare that would become (having multiple antagonists of a single type). Wizards and ninjas and vampires rarely can duplicate the intrigue of a plain traitor round.

It has been brought to my attention that dying is a cheap event in Space Station 13. We have an easy pipeline for turning corpses back into productive employees, even if there are some circumstantial roadblocks that make it inconvenient or (practically at random) impossible. I contend that this approach is perfectly suitable for a classic game of Space Station 13 but that it is not well-suited for Aurora, owing to our culture of heavy roleplay. The rationale The suggestion Make ghosting irreversible. If you leave your corpse to observe the round, you lose the opportunity to re-enter that corpse to be cloned. Effectively, the decision to become a ghost would be sacrificing your later involvement in the round in exchange for the privilege of observing. Some people have told me that this sucks, and that being dead inside a corpse that can't see or hear anything would not be fun. To this I say: that's the idea. The goal of enacting this change would be to make players more cautious about dying, mechanically enforcing a rule of roleplay that already exists in theory, but not always in practice. It would have the added benefit of completely preventing the abuse of meta knowledge gained from ghosting. In short: it's a game, so when you die, it should feel like game-over.

So... theoretically, this would mean that 1 out of every 6 rounds would be extended, on average. How does that compare to the current rate of incidence for extended rounds? In other words, if this were implemented, should people expect extended to occur more often, or less?

@ Kaed It was a direct quotation. If you're unhappy with what it says, be mad at yourself for saying it wrong, not at me for reading it right. Your suggestion to become a DNC does not address the issue of death being cheap, because being DNC is entirely voluntary - therefore it does not enforce any penalty (since being subject to enforcement is necessarily involuntary, I.E. forced). If the only people who experience the drawback of death are the people who elect to experience that drawback, then that drawback is made insignificant. As to your suggestion to "attack it from the angle of cloning," I'm not completely sure what you mean. Make it even more difficult to clone someone? I mean, that's one school of thought, sure... I don't know why you aggressively believe it to be the only applicable school of thought. But you seem to express distaste with the hassles and roadblocks involved in cloning already - so maybe those measures are the punishments that need to be avoided (E.G. on the grounds that they are more random and thus punish different deaths unequally, etc.)? I don't say that authoritatively, but it should be some compelling evidence that maybe I'm not the villain you're treating me like.

We're just questioning how much of a punishment being dead actually is. Death is pretty easily reversible, so it's not necessarily true that the deceased "have no more impact on the round." The game should be fun, but frankly, I think dying should be markedly un-fun... then players might actually give it the gravity it deserves and act accordingly. You say the dead are officially objects that are out of the round, therefore they should be able to enjoy the privilege of ghosting. By that logic, making it impossible to re-enter your corpse would be the PERFECT mechanic, since it makes it so that ghosting is ONLY available to the people who actually choose to be out of the round for good, as you say.

I assume the general reasoning is that it's because there's nothing stopping you from ghosting any seeing everything anyway. My concern about a cool-down to reenter after ghosting would be that, without the benefit of ghost-sight/ghost-hearing, there's no way to guess whether ghosting at a particular time would screw you over. Since the only reason to re-enter your body is to be available for cloning, it seems like a cool-down would just make ghosting a sort of awful lottery where you find out whether or not your body is being retrieved quickly or not - and it's really a coin flip, depending on lots of factors like crew availability, circumstances of your death, etc.... If your body is being grabbed fast, then you're punished for ghosting quickly. If it's left there for a while, then ghosting later would punish you. Imagine if you stay in your corpse for 15 minutes hoping to get cloned, then finally give in and ghost, and then they try to clone you at the T+18 minute mark. Even though you were dedicated and waited in your corpse, you're being punished for not ghosting sooner (because if you'd gone sooner, you could re-enter and be cloned). tl;dr a cool-down is thematically appropriate but with the knowledge available to a dead person, it functionally just ends up as an annoying guessing game A counter-suggestion to THAT would be to place a timer not on ghosting, but rather on being cloned. And I don't mean putting a cool-down timer on the machine, I mean setting a MINIMUM TIME which someone has to be dead for before they are able to be cloned. That enforces a penalty for death without interfering with the ghosting situation. And it could be hand-waved with any amount of jargon in-game ("The body exhibits residual electrical activity and is unable to be cloned until the nervous system is static. Wait a little longer.") As to what would be an appropriate time, I don't know.

There aren't any tables that are intended to block people from entering departments, because players can already climb on top of tables. On the current map, department desks like those at security, R&D, engineering, etc. block entry by having access-locked windoors around them.

I literally said in my post that metagaming as a result of ghost knowledge doesn't happen a lot, but go off I guess God forgive me for suggesting that there be some actual consequence to dying

This is a good quality-of-life suggestion. @Jackboot: But as a ghost, you can already use the follow verb to stay attached to your corpse, it's just extra annoying steps. This would save players the trouble. Dying is already a free ticket for meta-knowledge because ghosting from a corpse has no consequences (you can re-enter your body whenever you'd like, so the opportunity for meta is completely unrestricted already. And fortunately, I don't think people typically abuse this power), so this change would basically allow the dead to enjoy the privileges of ghosting without the pointless little bit of work involved. A COUNTER-suggestion that really addresses the meta-advantage of ghosting would be to make it so that you can't re-enter your body if you ghost. This would mean that players who want a chance to stay in the round have to sacrifice the ability to see and hear the entire game, something we've been taking for granted. This would be my personal preference, but either it or Fortport's original suggestion would be better than the current system, on the grounds that they're more focused/purposeful. The current system allows dead players complete freedom, and Fortport's suggestion would streamline it, while my suggestion would force dead players to choose between staying in the round or observing it.

Replace the common radio channel with the ability to call one specific person at a time (Juani suggests doing this on headsets, I'd like to see it on PDAs, either way could be functionally identical to the other), and let intercoms be used for general paging that shout out to all other intercoms (or to a specific one, if you choose, like calling currently works on holopads). This way, the ability to shout out to the whole station (which is valuable whenever anybody needs to make a general announcement) is not erased, just made a little inconvenient (gated behind sticking to a specific location, next to the intercom) so people don't use it like a party line. Adding a call-operator role would be a step in the wrong direction, I think, both from gameplay and RP perspectives. It wouldn't really interact with other jobs in a meaningful way, since people would only talk to them as a middle-man for getting through to someone else. Plus, in the scenario that no one is playing it (which would be often, since people don't typically want to play a job without much player interaction (see: virologist)), it gives the AI more work to do. Replacing names with sound descriptions over radio seems like a pretty massive undertaking (moreso than any other part of this suggestion) both to implement and to refine in-game... because I foresee a terrible future where 50% of the radio discourse is every single newly-spawned player asking every. single. person. on the station. who they as soon as they say something. And unless the voice descriptors get very, very specific, there would also be plenty of asking who's who even AFTER those first identifiers (since there will be plenty of people with the same gender, same species, same home planet...). And if you make it any more specific, suddenly those descriptors get so long that it could totally clutter up the text window. EDIT: for alerting people that you're getting attacked in maintenance, we DO already have suit sensors. Maybe we could complement the current suit sensors with a new suit distress function of some sort, like a Life Alert bracelet, you could activate it just like your suit sensors to alert the personnel that you are consciously in danger. That way, it's still easy to tell people that you're in danger, just not as easy to be specific like telling them WHO is attacking you or WHERE, unless they're sharp on the follow-up (like calling your headset!)

Not to mention, cochlear implants already exist that restore hearing to people who are totally deaf

Instead of erasing the crew manifest from the PDA, what about making it so that antagonists can modify the manifest? There's no reason in a HRP environment that your character wouldn't be able to know who their co-workers are, and it's also quality-of-life feature for players to see who else is in-game, so the manifest is necessary in some capacity. But if you give antagonists an easy way to insert themselves wherever they want, it loses its use as a power-gaming tool.

Well would you look at that, the gang's all here. Nice to see some familiar faces in the audience today. Let's start with the fun one. Morality is not personal. Most people twist it for their own ends, but that's not always the case. The discussion of morality relates to community moderation because there is an unspoken understanding that rules are put into place in order to produce greater good. They punish wrongdoing; what do you think the purpose of that is? They might not want to admit it, in case it makes me look sympathetic (and you simply couldn't allow that), but morals are the foundation on which a community is built and, more literally, the foundation on which its rules are written. Not okay to you. You act as though I was uniquely harassing people, when the reality is that every vulgarity I used was a direct response to someone else making an affront against me. That's the problem with your whole approach here, really: you've misunderstood the direction or flow of events. It's easy for people to see that there is an offense made when I insulted people, but they were completely blind to the offenses that were made before, when they were stepping on me. But just because one offense is obvious and the other is not, doesn't mean one is greater than the other. Anyone who thinks hostility is never warranted is pathetic and , and by your own actions, I know for a fact that you agree. Your very first interaction with me on the Discord was an act of hostility, telling me how dumb I am, but now you're going to turn around and act like a good little boy because it makes it look like you actually respect the letter of the law instead of just having a massive complex that mysteriously causes you to post everywhere I post and specifically for the purpose of putting me down. Newsflash, Schev: You're not a moderator. You're not an administrator. You're just some punk who got pissy because I disagreed with your game suggestion and then made it your personal crusade to follow me around and insult anything I do. That's how we ended up here, with me trying to have a conversation with the administration, and you just bluntly inserting yourself as usual to make sure I am painted in as poor a light as possible. The irony appears lost on you, regarding "taking hours to write up vicious slander and acting like a stalker." One of us has acted like a stalker, and it isn't me. Another thing you continually fail to recognize is my statement that I plan to be perfectly kind and agreeable on the Discord. I expect to be taken seriously because I still maintain the illusion that people here care about what's right and what's wrong; I've brought no malice whatsoever except the malice which was in direct defense of that exact thing. You know as well as I do that that quote was taken out of context. I was baited into it, and my only regret so far is having taking the bait. So unless you want to provide an actual log of that entire conversation (which you won't, because it exonerates me), I'll just move on. If they don't want to deal with serious, intense discussions, then they shouldn't make serious, intense claims. If someone says something that is patently offensive and they can't support it, I'm not the bad guy just because I make them confront the fact that they're full of shit. Nobody is forcing anyone on the Discord to make broad, destructive generalizations, but that's what they did, and so they needed to be taken down a peg. Most people aren't paying attention closely enough to see when a person's words have damaging implications that are outside the scope of reason, but I am, and I have done nothing but hold people accountable for the things they say. Which is ironic, because holding me accountable for the things I've said is ostensibly why I'm on trial. The only difference is that I can answer for everything I've said, and those people (anyone I've rudely insulted) can't. Furthermore, your repeated use of the word harassment undermines the reality that I was only arguing with a couple people who, at every juncture, also chose to engage with me because they had something to prove. This is not a one-way street, I did not hop online looking for a fight, and the suggestion that I did is, frankly, retarded. Because, as I've said before, 90% of my interactions there (just like on the forum) were perfectly peaceable and constructive. Does this conclude the portion of your rant where you pretend to know anything about my life? Or pretend that my approach from moral superiority is based on anything other than the directly observable fact that I was fighting for things that everybody else was ignoring? This slander of yours, while cruel, is fortunately transparent. You have stated that, if it were up to you, I would have been completely erased from this community and game, because you find my actions so utterly abhorrent and irredeemable. Now, do you want to tell me that you aren't thinking in terms of good and evil and right and wrong? Because that's just laughable. I hold myself accountable for everything I've said. I wrote that in the original post, but I know you don't care, because you're not here to talk with me, you're here to talk at me. And that's where we differ. You have this conception of me in your head that is immune to scrutiny. But I have bad news: if it can't be scrutinized, then it can't be right. Like I've said, it's just a problem with directions. When both parties argue from a position of moral superiority, both will necessarily use the same logic, but only one of them is right. And you're wrong, for the simple reason that I've stated a dozen times before and you have ignored a dozen times before because it's at odds with your invincible ego: saying things that are rude is no wrongdoing if it's to defend from things that are actually damaging. You haven't learned a thing. As an aside, it's disappointing that you equate "being a man" with "bending over and taking whatever people try to force on you." There's nothing manly about choosing to be civil when your entire way of life is under attack. No, I'd say you haven't learned a thing. Just because you don't have any personal convictions doesn't mean I have to be just as empty and worthless. I am easy to enrage because I care about the implications of things that people say and I pay attention to what they say. It turns out that people are often accustomed to saying things they don't honestly believe or can't factually support. That might be good enough for you, but it's not good enough for me. I keep people honest. My offense was saying some mean words to people. Most people aren't still upset about it a month after a stranger calls them something mean. An adult wouldn't be, at least, since we have other things to worry about. If you are, that demonstrates my point that your grudge against me is much more pronounced and vitriolic than anything I've brought to the table. Does anybody believe a word of this? Or believe that it is remotely applicable? How very selfless of you to come in here and share how your personal struggle is so perfectly relevant to me and what I do. You're projecting, hard, and trying to infantilize me by acting like my anger is just a stage that you, in your bountiful mercy, were strong enough to grow out of. If you wanted to do me a favor, you'd stop stalking me. You're comically missing the point. The fact that those two situations are incomparable is exactly what I wanted to show, because it demonstrates why approaching them with the same rules and mindset is dumb and ineffective. But thank you for conceding that my case is not "open-and-shut." Precisely an amount of tolerance that you do not have. That's why you're not relevant in the equation. My takeaway from this is your admission that you have continued to target and victimize me just because you don't like me. Your shortsightedness is obvious by the fact that I have been getting along perfectly with everybody else (save for one) completely without incident throughout my stay here. This isn't a point, this is just you saying you don't like me again. You claim that I clash with personalities unlike mine, but as stated above, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise, supporting my initial claim that this trouble has been blown out of proportion. Not to mention, you know the fact that you think me wanting to feed the poor makes me a moral radical. I'm glad the bar isn't so low for everyone else here. Go fuck yourself. At this time, I'd like to reiterate my desire for someone to actually retrieve detailed logs of the conversations I had on the Discord. The one-sided, closed-minded approach that is being taken in this complaint is obvious by the fact that all the quotes and screencaps being wielded against me are being done in a vacuum, without context. This is because, if you actually look at the statements and attitudes I was responding to, it becomes obvious that my reactions were justified. So far, my aggressors have neglected to do this because they are here to put me away, rather than to discuss with me. And, well, that's pretty sad. Let's keep the ball rolling. I appreciate your meaning here, but what is the proper way to execute a defense from an attack against your entire way of life? I'm looking out for people. Matt says the reason he was obligated to step in was that somebody privately messaged him with a complaint (and boy do I have a guess about who did that), but every offense that I'm accused of enacting was enacted against me, too - only I didn't complain about it. That's because I'm not apologizing. I didn't do anything wrong, as far as I've seen so far. I came back because I'd hoped, after a month, it would be obvious with the benefit of hindsight that the circumstances surrounding my ban didn't justify that ban. When it became apparent that others hadn't reached the same conclusion, I started a discussion. When I say guise, I don't necessarily mean an intentional one. It is equally possible that I recognized a problem that you did not. The condition that warrants hostility is that the actions taken against me represent a one-sided attitude which is not at ALL representative of my regard for the community or the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants. Simply put, I think you got the wrong impression, and acting on that wrong impression made it worse. Fewer issues that you can see, you mean. This is what I mean by sweeping under the rug: the dumb shit that was said in there was massively destructive if anyone actually bothers to unpack it. Only, nobody else bothered to, so it looks as though I created issues when I only alerted people to their presence. I would like to discuss those things, but so far nobody has produced chat logs - only screencaps of me being rude when (as I've been saying for days) that is only half of the story. And not the more important half. Rule #1 explicitly states that it's based on admins having a reason when telling you something, which is what's drawn into question here. It is my contention that the staff responding to my case (on Discord) were given an uneven interpretation of events that vilified me simply because others complained to admins about my rudeness while I didn complain to admins about every flavor of atrocity they produced. Rule #2, I have been explicitly contesting (ad nauseam) on the grounds that it prohibits some necessary speech. Yeah, you told them to stop, too. And yet it's only me, here, probably in no small part because of the efforts of one user who conspired against me at every turn. You are my problem right now. You have every opportunity to prove what I'm saying is true, that I get along well with most everybody, and since I have no plan of bringing vitriol back to the Discord, it shouldn't even be a particularly difficult choice to make. The nature of this conversation (completely focused on things I supposedly did wrong) has made it seem as though my contribution was much more negative than it was in reality. As I mentioned earlier, the nature of that case changed when I learned of the grudge being held against me. One day not necessarily being enough to finish the resulting discussion, it was obvious that you were never interested in entertaining my case at all. It's just a show. I don't... think you know what the word "prostration" means. And if I'm misunderstanding you, then: I never said you were lying about anything, and I never implied you were lying about anything. It doesn't matter if it's a closed-door decision if, at the end of the day, that decision is made by the only two people who have a personal stake in it. It's disappointing, if somewhat refreshing, to hear you admit it. I mean, I don't entirely believe that you don't care (since, by your own admission, you volunteer out of good intentions and value the hobby of maintaining the community), but your conclusion here is extremely empowering as to the legitimacy of the argument I've made, which is: I got banned because other people didn't care about what was right as much as they cared about what was easy. I don't have any bad blood towards you, Sharp. I just know you made the wrong call. As I stated in response to Sharp, the conditions absolutely warranted hostility, and for a reason that is plainly invisible to you: the actions and attitudes held against me are one-sided and completely opposite the vast, vast majority of my experience with the community and their experience with me. Of course you're not going to say it was worth getting hostile over; you're the ones ignoring my plea. Show me where I asked you why you banned me. I never asked, because it's been obvious the entire time. You banned me because I kept doing something that you didn't like. And as I have tried over and over and over again to make the focus of this discussion: that's not a good enough reason. I appreciate that, even though you're still cherry-picking and refusing to admit any evidence of the wrongs that were enacted against me, you at least chose some quotes that prove a couple of my claims so far: 1) I was speaking because of a moral imperative 2) I chose to move to private messages because I valued the Discord community (but hey, guess who blocked me in private messages, after saying that's exactly what I should do! That's right, it's ya boi Schev, making sure I have no outlet for disagreeing with him except for those outlets that are keen to annoy admins in the process!! What a pal.) But. Most important take-away from this is that I didn't ask why you banned me from the Discord, because I wasn't confused as to why you banned me from the Discord. I said that back in my appeal. What I'm telling you is the same thing I told Sharp: You were fed a certain narrative that highlights me as a villain and ignores everything else, and you've been eating it up ever since. Now if you would like to actually get some substantive logs, I could get to unpacking them for you. You didn't have to do anything. You chose to tell Sharp to ban me because you became fixated on my vulgarity as the source of the Discord's unrest when it was not the source. Does no one else find it aggravating that everyone involved here is capable of producing chat logs in my defense except for me, and yet I'm the only one willing? Literally anyone else could hop on over to the Discord and scroll up to see what I was arguing for, but they continue to obsess only on the end-result of rude things I said, rather than any cruelty which warranted them. It's missing the mark by a mile.

Discord discriminator: Bauser#2332 BYOND key: Bauser Staff BYOND Key: Aboshehab, and I don't know Datamatt's (not that BYOND keys are terribly relevant to this complaint) Reason for complaint: Just a fundamental disagreement of priorities that led to my being banned from the Aurora Discord and then (temporarily) the Aurora forum. It is my (abbreviated) interpretation of events that I was banned from the Discord for using inflammatory language in response to other users' material that I believed to be damaging to the community character. As most of you reading this know, I am guilty of employing this language. However, I contend that the severity of that misconduct is insignificant next to the severity of the offenses I hoped to abate by enacting it and that, in total, I have always maintained the best interest of Aurora Station. Therefore, I believe the outward contempt I have expressed at times was justified, and the administration has disagreed. My goals in making this complaint are only to convince the administration of my good will and (ideally) reverse the decision that was recently made in my appeal. In detail, By creating the conditions that warrant hostility and then demonizing that hostility, you have proven nothing but the fact that this entire episode is an overblown farce by a few people who would happily sweep any substantive problem under the rug as long as they can maintain a guise of cordiality. But no, as soon as someone says some mean words, you'll pull up your big-boy panties and hand out bans so you can remind everyone not to start any fuss and all go back to pretending everything's peachy. It's just avoidance, and while that would be offensive enough to me on its own, I've enjoyed the unique privilege of taking the fall for it, too. I understand your reasoning here - you don't want your community to be contentious, because you want it to be attractive to lots of people. So you enact an orderly injustice that is palatable to everybody by not having any actual ideology or sentiment. I get it. I'm just telling you that it's wrong, on the grounds that plenty of things are worth getting worked up over. This way, everyone can make an informed decision about what is more important to them. I don't remember the details of everything I argued about on the Discord, but I can say with complete certainty that I only did it because I believed it would help correct some critical failure for the end goal of a better server. It goes like this: Calling people bad names is mean, but telling people they shouldn't feed the homeless is evil. I did the former to combat the latter. Literally. That was an argument I had, because it was an argument that needed to be had, and if I didn't do it, no one was going to. Then, I wait a month for things to cool down, and ask to be readmitted. My thought process is that we could all start over, since all that trouble was ancient history (or so I thought). Then I see you're gonna refuse to engage with the subject matter of my appeal, you're gonna close it in a day, you're going to tell me I can't talk about it for another month, then yeah, I'm gonna tell you to go fuck yourselves. No, it's not nice. It's not supposed to be nice. What it's supposed to be is an appropriate reaction to realizing I was talking to a brick wall and muted (like usual) before I'm done making my case (like usual). Your actions demonstrated that, in your minds, there was no correct response except complete prostration. That approach works when you're telling griefers why they can't murder whoever they want in-game, but it's not appropriate when the rules themselves are what's in question. It's what got me banned from the Discord, and it's what got me banned from the forum: just a popularity contest. And I hardly doubt it's coincidence that the three people who handled my appeal were exactly the three people who wanted me banned (Schev), decided I should be banned (Matt), and actually banned me (Sharp). I'm not an unreasonable person. Not by a long shot. Basically everybody I've been playing the game with for the last four months could substantiate that. Basically every other interaction I've had on the forum could substantiate that. But everyone involved in this charade has let me down at every step in the process. The reason I got banned from the Discord is that I care enough to confront people who drag us down, and yet, I am told that I insulted people "for no reason." If you just want to keep me out because I'm not pleasant to be around, great, OK, I know I don't get invited to parties - but I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone think you're doing it because it's the right thing to do. Evidence/logs/etc: In the absence of the Discord, I am unable to furnish logs which I could use to help explain my reasoning. At anyone's behest, if I am provided with a record of my messages and their context, I will gladly answer for each and every thing I said. Additional remarks: I am quite sure I would like to be unbanned more than any of you would like me to stay banned, for whatever that's worth. I always valued the opportunity to interact with people amicably on the Discord, and I made that reality known even at the time these troubles were ongoing. Any difficulty which escalated as a result of my presence, I engaged with not because it brought me any joy, but because I felt it was necessary. It may sound paradoxical, but I said the same thing then: If I am ever vulgar and aggressive, it is only because I sincerely believe that we can make progress by this arguing. If I didn't care about any of you or think that you were worth talking to, I would ignore you.