OolongCow

There's actually a server in SS14 whose entire concept is "a central station on which people congregate, choose from a list of preset, diverse ships that fill traditional departmental roles, and fly around helping each other/researching/mining/exploring to earn persistent money" that could be looked at as a source of what may or may not work well. Honestly? It wouldn't even be hard to link skills to specific firearms. You could democratize weaponry a bit by going "this is the idiot-proof laser rifle. If you have the lowest level of investment in guns you can use it fully and safely, and there's plenty of them for emergencies, but it's just kind of middlingly powerful in a 1 on 1 fight," while locking stuff like automatics being used to their fullest extent behind higher skill levels. Players FEELING powerful, or at least not HELPLESS, is more important than the actual power of their weapons. Someone handed a gun that's really loud and fires 5 damage bullets to fight a warform is always going to be happier than someone with their empty hands, even if they never use it, without significantly altering the course of rounds. Though I have to say, and I am very firm on this, that moving the armory to operations would necessitate the complete removal of on-ship antagonists. It becomes way, way too easy to completely declaw the people meant to protect the crew in a way you can't even suspend your disbelief over, like you can antags being warned against rushing the current armory. Either you'd have to put up so many rules and mechanics GUARANTEEING security can get their guns that it just becomes cumbersome, or you have to just accept that people will meta the guns every single round. A better idea would be putting the armory on the exterior perimeter of security, internal to the ship (to the left of the current security lobby maybe?), with a door operations can use to access the room and with a mechanic to at least warn security that someone's entering (steal the ammo storage bolt toggle code so it transmits to command AND security channels?). It's still security's room, but Ops can go in there if they need to, without needing to give them general security access.

Hard agree. TONS of things happen all the time thanks to the lore team. But it just... Doesn't really seem to matter in rounds. Not unless a coder or mapper comes along and devotes a lot of time into implementing that thing into the actual code of the server. It has more of an impact on the forums and the Discord where people talk about it than it does on the actual server. People will yap for days on end about Sol and where it's headed, but you log into Byond, open the server, and it doesn't really change anything. Sol is still the designated badman for antag gimmicks, and everyone continues to forget that Elyra exists. There's a reason the most popular origins are the ones with tons of loadout items, presence on the ship, and presence in ghost roles. People want to play and play around things that have more presence than text in a forum thread.

I feel like the people against it's concerns are valid, but that the art provides a greater positive than it does a negative. It's not a spectacular goresplosion, there is not stomach-turning and defined viscera, it's an honestly very tasteful but still shocking show of death. Saturn Devouring His Son is a much gorier piece of art that is highly-regarded and commonly shown without a content warning. Ivan the Terrible And His Son Ivan is about equivalently as bloody as the lobby art, yet is shown uncensored in its entirety and has even become a widely circulated meme with its edits. Coalf's art is art. It is tasteful and respectful of the subject matter. It should not be censored even if it might be interpreted as upsetting.

It's not controversial at all. For one simple fact: literally every single person who has heard "odyssey maps as functional overmap ships" has said "that sounds awesome". Allowing odyssey rounds to happen with the map being a ship that can actually interact with the Horizon would let ship combat actually happen. It would let Odyssey rounds happen aboard the Horizon, or at least closer to it. If we could somehow jury rig an umbilical that allows people to just WALK onto the other ship using cleverly-placed z-level teleporting tiles, then tons of issues for those maps just evaporate as well since you're no longer chained to the shuttles ferrying people.

I personally do not object in any way to Service, or Operations, or Science members volunteering to go along if they can present me with even a flimsy rationale for it. You have all the power in the world to invent a reason to go along. You can offer to run supplies back and forth, or keep a supply of materials and equipment flowing for engineering and medical. You can drag critical kitchen equipment into the Intrepid and use it as a field kitchen for the away team. You can roleplay as going along to give expert opinions on whatever the problem is. It is really, really easy to make up a reason to go on these missions. And people just refuse to. They want to go along, with zero justification from a roleplay perspective, with none of their job's equipment, to spectate instead of participate. If the chef and bartender come to me, as the captain, and say "Ma'am, we want to help. Can we put the soda dispensers and stove and our supplies on the Intrepid?" I will smile IRL and encourage them to do it every single round. I want them to be involved. But the obligation is on them to invent even a flimsy justification to maintain the suspension of disbelief. I can suggest that, obviously, but they need to take some responsibility too. People are just terrified of being proactive to get involved and it bums me out.

Honestly? All you'd have to do is steal the code from crumpling paper. If someone picks up the positronic and activates it on harm intent, they start a channel bar action to crush it underfoot and destroy it.

The overwhelming majority of charges filed are due to antags, which aren't canon and can't be IR'd. So that only leaves canonical charges against someone who committed a crime, which rarely happens because people don't generally play criminals on the flagship of a megacorporation. And when that does happen, as someone who plays HoS, either it gets handled by the normal procedure of charging someone, or it's IR'd because it's too close to the end of the round / an investigation couldn't be performed / it's a serious enough crime to require an IR regardless. I've genuinely never seen an officer get upset about a canon charge filed and IR to argue about it, even when the quality of security was significantly lower than it is now. Can you give an example of what you're claiming happening? I genuinely can't think of a single one.

Yes. Because those are OOC rules made to stop CCIA from tearing their hair out over constant, stupid, and frivolous IRs. People being terrified of "punishments" that literally don't mean anything is not CCIA's fault. It's the fault of people who perpetuate the idea of "OH MY GOD YOU MADE SOMEONE MAD YOU'RE GONNA GET FIRED!!!" Like the people I was replying to. You can literally just ask Bear how many people CCIA has actually fired for reasons that aren't actual crimes after multiple offenses. It's not a lot. Except I'm not disagreeing with you on that. CCIA only actually does anything meaningful when it's an actual issue for the SCC. They LITERALLY don't care about workplace arguments unless they have a reason to think it'll affect productivity. "We'll look into it never" is pretty much exactly what "a warning was given" means in the DO notice section of the WI. It's literally just there for posterity.

You know what I mean by "bad". I am not being unclear when I say that. People who break laws are, IC, doing wrong. And they would be fired in the setting we have. If this was a pirate ship it wouldn't matter because of course it's understandable they'd do those things. But they're on a flying office building. I said that under the presumption the people I was speaking to (mostly N8) wanted CCIA gone, as that was an entirely reasonable takeaway from how he was speaking. Except that in this context, it's not dictating the rules, it's dictating what people are allowed to roleplay, which is bad. Under the current system, admins only care about rule breaks, which two Unathi getting into a knife fight for understandable reasons is not. Without CCIA, it would be turned into a potential breach of the rules, which is basically up to the admins to decide on the spot, with no time to think it over or speak to people outside of ahelps. CCIA prevents admins from having to treat everything like it might be a rule break. It stops them from having to constantly tell everyone "okay stop playing the game and respond to my questions". That is a net positive that outweighs its current negatives, in my opinion. I already stated that I think CCIA can definitely be improved (which was the ORIGINAL point of this thread, before people started replying with how much they think it's a bad thing while not submitting any actually helpful suggestions). The problem, Fluffy, is that IRs take place outside of the round. They take longer, but they don't stop the round or anyone in it from playing the game while it's happening. Ahelps HAVE to happen and be resolved in the SAME round the currently IR'able event occurred. If someone does something that would get them IR'd at 2:00, admins have to be online, take the ahelp, then delay the round end until the issue is closed, because the in-game moderation tools just do not support long-term solutions besides a ban. If they let it slide so they can "get to it later", they just have to perform an OOC IR equivalent anyway. If a Guwan stabs someone at 2:00 and their player logs out when the round ends, the process of dealing with the issue becomes unbelievably messy and stops saving any effort at that point. I personally don't mind that behavior at all. I mind when it happens and the character destroys the setting by just getting away with it forever. If you play a criminal character, you're behaving no differently from playing an untagged shell or IPC-loving Dominian. If you do bad things, you are agreeing that it could go south and that character could be lost. And that's okay. They explicitly do this. Every punishment for similar IRs is literally just a slap on the wrist that affects you in no way whatsoever except character records. They would, because people being shitty and drunk loses them money. By your own logic, why would they ever give anyone even the slightest hint of clemency? More than being uncaring, why wouldn't they be firing people on the spot for the tiniest of infractions? Because that sucks for the players and nobody wants to deal with that. They care, because it makes the most number of players happy for things to be that way. Your comparison is backwards. They aren't apathetic, those companies actively protect those people, because getting rid of them would collapse their structure. Just like firing a captain for calling a Tajara "cat" would be stupid, so CCIA doesn't even bother doing anything but putting a token footnote on his file.

Nobody says that shouldn't be allowed, and it explicitly IS even under the current system. You have to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake to get fired under the current system. People who do bad things over and over again should naturally face punishment if they refuse to be sneaky or underhanded about it. People who cause issues, will rack up IC charges. That is just a fact, and isn't something someone who wants to play those characters should try and "dodge", especially by implying that nobody should have any authority to do anything about it. If I had to play command in a world where people are just immune to consequences of their actions, I wouldn't play command. It would turn into an incredibly ugly mess of OOC resentment and back-and-forth where being around those characters actively discourages me and multiple people I know from playing. It's hard enough dealing with unactionable apathy from your department's members, I can't imagine how hellish it would be to have to command a department when they can tell you to go fuck yourself and there's nothing anyone can do about it because the person refuses to roleplay wanting to keep their job. There's a difference between a detective with a five o' clock shadow that keeps a handle of liquor on his desk and is charismatic and coolheaded, and the reality HoS players face of "sprints to the bar, drinks until slurring, then vomits on the floor". Nobody plays the former, but I can't count the number of the latter I've seen on both hands. Every single one of these exists and is currently actively played by server members. The only people fired since Konyang started that weren't one-off characters played during events that honestly could've been slapped for OOC rule violations are Bava and Firetalon. Bava operated a hard drug smuggling operation in her workplace and is STILL able to come back in a few months after being released from prison if their player is interested. Firetalon was a literal pirate who got into multiple violent fights aboard the ship that resulted in serious injury. I don't understand how you can genuinely look at their cases and go "CCIA is too harsh..." You don't see those "hard" characters again, because they're usually played by newer players, or discarded as boring by existing ones. They aren't fired and it's incredibly misleading to state you see them "getting binned by CCIA". People harassed the CEO of NanoTrasen's relative when she visited and they were barely slapped on the wrist. You are absolutely exaggerating an issue that does not exist. It's not CCIA's job to "make it fun"? Without CCIA, an admin would've just pointed at Bava and said "you never did that, your RP is deleted" and that would be that. CCIA actively prevented admins from just telling people "no, you CANNOT do that". THAT is what CCIA's job is. Making it so the fun police don't show up and go "you RP'd wrong, don't do that again". Only insofar as actual server rule breaks are concerned. Admins have no obligation currently to bwoink people and go "why did you stab that guy?" unless they think it's someone griefing the server, because if you stab someone, CCIA will handle it. They don't have to micromanage everyone's RP and are allowed to actually play the game most of the time, only worrying about server rules. Which leads to fewer ahelps, bwoinks, and so on. If there was no CCIA, suddenly it is their job to stop what they're doing and ask "why did you stab that guy?". Then instead of a slow review process like CCIA uses, the admin is forced to either ban you or ban/delete your character before the round ends. If you think CCIA makes bad calls, just wait until admins have to delay round end for forty minutes to ask the Guwan chef why they stabbed the Biesellite security officer, check logs, and then make a judgement on what to do under a time constraint. Because that is what will happen in a HRP environment. That already happens in LRP with much lower standards.

The pre-teleport holding area for actors absolutely needs a clothes and headset vendor. You need them EVERY round, just as much as the species changer, so they may as well be added next to it. And please, PLEASE add the ability for storytellers to send and see faxes. I'm allowed to create a 100 tile wide bomb, but I can't privately correspond with command in an IC way?

They have a chilling effect on IC bad behavior. If you remove CCIA, you would be FORCED to enact a process by which command players can fire people who are way out of line IC. If I play HoS, and an investigator who gets drunk because "that's my character" starts slurring over the channel EVERY round, what is the process to punish them without CCIA? Ahelping them so admins can argue with them about what a believable character is? The guy will just go "you're impeding on my roleplay, self-destructive and abusive people exist, deal with it" and then cry endlessly if the staff actually punish them for it. It forces admins to OOC state what is and isn't acceptable behavior, which already varies wildly between staff members. "Well [Staff member] didn't get upset about it" will become an excuse for setting yourself on fire or punching your coworker in the face. It would also MASSIVELY increase the workload of the staff team, by requiring them to actively police people's behaviors in-round since there would no longer be any way to actually address what someone did besides ahelping when it happens and screeching the round to a halt as everyone stands still and responds to ahelps. What if Bava's smuggling had been handled by an admin? It almost WAS, and originally the handling admin was just going to tell them "no, retcon it, it never happened and don't do it again". That was EXPLICITLY what would have occurred before the parties involved insisted it should be handled by CCIA. Now it's an interesting bit of server and character history. I think CCIA can definitely be made better (the total lack of transparency, seeing outcomes being limited to command WL holders, etc.) but I still think that the cost of doing away with it would be greater than improving it. I'd also like to point out that the future people who dislike CCIA are suggesting is not the future that will actually exist. We are not going to remove CCIA and suddenly you'll be allowed to do whatever you want. Aurora will turn into "haha I am having good roleplay with this person and we got into a fistfight" only for *BWOINK* "Why did you punch that guy?" Followed by five minutes of not playing the game to explain, with potentially twenty more minutes of arguing with admins afterwards over whether you were justified or not. With CCIA, you can just punch the guy and explain later, if it even gets to that point. You won't even be fired, and the charges only "stick" to that one character, instead of you potentially getting temporarily banned if you run out the admins' patience. Removing CCIA also makes admins responsible for handling RP standards in-round, with no way to go round to round with it. You'll be seeing a LOT more "An admin has delayed the round end" messages at 2:20.

I think there's a common misconception by people newer to the server that CCIA is meant to be the end-all be-all for conflict resolution and punishing someone, when that's not really the case. It's explicitly preferred for command to handle it in-round. CCIA exists to handle things command isn't able to, either due to the constraints of round length, or because of the severity of what happened. A perceived overreliance on CCIA is in part because command players feel like it's their only means to control people, mostly due to not having any punishment to leverage except fines (pointless if the other person doesn't feel like RPing that they care, since money is genuinely worthless and round-to-round) and suspension for a single shift (and usually not even a full one). I think that if command was given more levers, even if it's just leaving notes on their employment record similarly to how brig charges stick, there would be a lot fewer frivolous IRs.