Bauser

All those reasons against canonizing antagonism are reasons I'm personally in favor of removing canon entirely. Ideally, since everything necessarily resets, it would make sense that the game would be played like 'groundhog day' - everything starting anew each time, like rewinding the clock. And in the future, I'll try not to bring up any relevant, ongoing topics that are inconvenient for you.

Kinda weird that such a menial task is the responsibility of professional engineers instead of the low-level service-people in their department, right?

Might just be because I'm new, but I don't know anywhere on the station that a floor painter is guaranteed to spawn. I've found one in maintenance a couple times, but it strikes me as reasonable that the janitors should have access to one. It's true that they aren't painters first or foremost, but since their role is the visual upkeep of the station, it makes sense that they would have a tool capable of repainting whatever gets torn up and rebuilt. Plus, I... really like interior painting.

You fail to see how the discussion of realism vs. gameplay is relevant to the topic about realism vs. gameplay? The extent to which we sanctify the canon or 'meta' is fundamental to the question of whether we should or shouldn't allow job hopping.

I just haven't observed that level of consistency. So all the people who die due to accidents (or of their own fault) and aren't cloned should be discontinued, right? And I don't know how to reconcile the consistency we do have with the round-based format of SS13. What it results in is a system where, in a given round, some events are canonized and others aren't - even though they happened side by side. And you get situations where certain events which should ideally carry over (E.G. part of the station is destroyed or something new is built for a reason other than antagonism) simply can't because of how the game works. I guess there just aren't many categories of things to even consider making canon. There's character creation (so backstory and role), there's character death, and there's relationships between characters. Other than that... everything is either antagonist actions or something that necessarily resets every round.

This rule is in place to enforce a sort of canon between rounds. However (owing to the hectic nature of the game), events and other details typically aren't canonized between rounds. Is there a particular reason that realism between rounds is important for job/character selection, but not for other things? To me, the episodic nature of SS13 sort of suggests that anything - characters included - should be variable between games as long as it's realistic within the confines of a single round. I mean, for obvious reasons, we have antagonist actions completely nulled from the record - but how do we decide which events are strictly caused by an antagonist, which are merely consequential, and which are unrelated at all? I don't have any big problem with enforcing character permanence, I just think that - for the sake of consistency - we should take an "all-or-nothing" approach. That is, have a lot more things be canonized, or don't bother with permanence at all as long as the legitimacy of the single round is maintained. Personally, I do prefer the latter - allowing people to change their characters however they want between games - because it's more accessible to people and makes it easier to invest in new characters (we don't want to become Baystation). But I do see the storytelling benefit of the current system.

Okay, I'll humor that. What visual elements or or stylistic changes could be made in order to integrate the eyebot sprite in with the "visual theme?"

I make no judgment on the idea as a whole, but I refute the argument that a whitelist will necessarily result in higher-quality players. Even if it has that effect initially (since players would broadly need to demonstrate proper behavior in order to get accepted), the whitelist risks fostering a sort of elitism that I think could be damaging in the case of security roles. And, in that case, it might have the long-term effect of furthering the divide between security and the rest of the crew. As if, you know, "there's this one group of players who gets to interact with the antagonists each round, and everyone else can take it or leave it." Keep in mind that a whitelist, even if it's not an extremely strict one, can be a massive barrier to entry for new players. Most people already aren't going to want to play a hard-RP server (this is the group we're glad to filter out), but then, some won't want to sign up on the forums, some won't want to stick to a single character for long enough, some won't bother trying if they think they won't make it - and if the extra hassle ends up limiting the pool of security players, that would create a serious problem. You'd have shortages of security players during certain time periods (according to players' time zones, etc.), and of course it would raise the pressure on playing security - which could exacerbate problems we already see with powergaming and such. I guess it's just a question of the ratio of good security players to bad ones, as to whether our approach should be to only exclude bad ones (like it is now, as bad players are manually removed from the role) or to only include good ones (as with a whitelist).

Given the complexity of the food and drink systems, it would be refreshing to see some drink varieties that aren't alcoholic. Coffee is a good outlet for that, considering (like booze) there are a million kinds.

An interesting implication of this is that it would be possible to murder someone by welding them in a locker and knocking it over repeatedly until they're dead. I... don't know if that's good or not. Also, why would it prevent the locker from being pulled or pushed? It's not like it weighs more when it falls over on its side. Sure, it's heavy and unwieldy when it's laying down, but it's already heavy and unwieldy when it's standing up, and that doesn't stop anybody.

OP proposes that giving the responsibility of engine setup to them would increase how often people play as atmos techs. I propose that it would just decrease how often the engine gets set up. And that's definitely a bigger problem.

Couldn't this problem be addressed in character? If people are creating ridiculous messages that are supposedly from CentCom, then the crew could probably choose to respond with skepticism matching the absurdity. So you could have people choosing to believe that the message was faked, not complying at all, and maybe others reluctantly falling in line only because they fear corporate reprisal... And only diehard companymen really jumping on the bandwagon. But it is still kinda dumb that people would make outlandish messages like that, so there should definitely be some guidelines in place. As it stands, letting antagonists draft a free-form message from Central is like giving a D&D player Wish. It's too powerful. They start acting like a chimp with a machine gun.

That would be true in the case that anything actually needed to be coded in order to implement the suggestion. But in this case, both the assets AND the framework are already present, so enabling it is basically as simple as flipping a switch. He said as much earlier - that it was just disabled, not anything changed or removed. EDIT: Additionally, even if he just didn't want to do it personally, that wouldn't make it right to dismiss the suggestion. Dismissing the suggestion means that he specifically thinks it shouldn't be implemented by anyone... So it's clearly not just a situation of him not wanting to do it personally.

As soon as you tell me that the need for content is not defined by the community, I completely lose value in your opinion. It clearly demonstrates that your priorities are in the wrong place.

No, it satisfies the desire of players to use the design. It completely stands on it's own merit; the fact that it's a reference is only coincidental. The reason we want to use it isn't so we can go "Oh, haha, yeah, like Fallout!" It's just so we can say "oh, cool hovering robot!" EDIT: Not to mention the fact that how many cyborg sprites you "need" is completely determined by how many people want. Nothing sprite-wise is visually "needed" - it's just a question of what people enjoy having.

The game is full of references - science fiction as a genre takes inspiration from other works all the time. It doesn't have to be called an eyebot - the fact is that a hovering pod is a perfectly reasonable design direction for futuristic robots to take. We've got xenomorphs. The AI face is practically SHODAN. We have a brand of ice tea that's named for a Homestuck character. You should at least see if the players want something before deciding for them.

A couple years ago I sprited some eyebots and they got adopted by Baystation. But then Bay started doing its lame Navy RP shtick and now I'm hoping the eyebots can be adopted here. The kicker is that the sprites for it are already in Aurora's robots.dmi. Ready to go. I guess Aurora branched off from Bay after they were added. But there's not an option to select it in-game. They basically look like this but without the lettering "AL" on the back (it was initially made for a personal custom cyborg), AND it's important to note that they have a subtle floating animation that's always on - just a little bobbing up and down. I made this thread because Nursiekitty said they wanted them. So. Might as well see if there's public support.