OolongCow

Most of the "anger" at the other role comes from a feeling of "stealing" the only meaningful gameplay most engineering players get in the form of fixing things. No engineer actually cares if atmos does something engineering-related when they didn't want to do it in the first place (lightbulb replacements, fungus events, etc.). They care when the only meaningful gameplay they might get that round is "stolen" from them. So why do we keep trying to make it impossible for the "other role" to do these things, instead of give each role useful and fun things to do besides repairs? The turbine I suggested for atmos last year that was added and the INDRA are good steps, but engineering genuinely needs a REASON to do crazy setups and optimizations. The ONLY thing that regularly matters beyond the basic setup is thruster mixes, and that's both a lost art and something that still only occasionally comes up. There's no point to creating a super stable, or super hot and energetic supermatter setup. There's no reason to experiment with the INDRA to maximize output. There's no appreciable difference between four hydrogen cans and 30 shots and a min-maxed supermatter setup riding the red line so precariously that it takes constant babysitting to keep it going. It doesn't actually do anything besides let the really jankily-coded shields take one more small asteroid before you turn them off and on again to repair them (because for some reason they don't regenerate). The engineering department has three separate energy sources where half-assing a single one fully powers the ship and makes doing anything with the others pointless. There isn't even the satisfaction of being able to quickly charge the Leviathan anymore after its removal. I don't suggest requiring multiple engines be on for the ship to work. I suggest adding things that are just nice to have that engineers can be proud to have turned on.. Features and fun things for them and others, akin to R&D, that incentivizes pushing the limits of the engines and being good at your job. What that could be would have to be discussed, but I feel really strongly that the answer to the problems people have is not to keep removing gameplay from engineering jobs so the other can have it, but to just add more new things for each of them to do.

This is unfortunately a grey area where it doesn't exist for gameplay considerations, even though it occasionally causes issues like these. As Bear said, you should apply the assault charges in-round and follow up with a more thorough offering up as to what exactly happened in an IR if applicable. Keep in mind, the security team isn't actually granted authority by a civil government to levy legitimate criminal punishment. They aren't uniformed representatives of a government granted power by civil contract. Character security records have no weight outside of the corporate setting, as the SCC, while partnered with the Republic of Biesel and granted a LOT of far-reaching power, doesn't actually have the authority to send someone to an "SCC court" and put them in an "SCC prison". If the crime is serious enough, they're going to be handed over to the government for punishment. But only CCIA can decide to do that. Your job is to decide whether the extent of what someone did is something the ship can handle (in-round punishment), or something CCIA should handle (an IR). CCIA then decides if the company will handle it (probation, demotion, firing), or something the Republic of Biesel's justice system will handle (criminal charges). You personally deciding whether they assaulted someone or tried to murder them is less relevant than CCIA's findings, which depend on the records you took, the observations you made, and the evidence you gathered. Your opinion matters, but what charge you give that person is just an admission of your opinion, rather than a Judge Dredd-esque declaration of someone's guilt and summary punishment. Security and command only really reserve the authority to declare someone guilty of small crimes. You don't get to decide "this guy is a murderer" without a trial. You just get to say "we suspect he is the murderer and will be holding him until Biesel comes and gets him". That's why execution is off the table, and marooning and cyborgification are supposed to be close-to-the-chest and extremely heavy decisions only captains can make in the direst of circumstances. Because every bad man the ship catches is supposed to be handed over to Biesel for their day in court. Basically, in instances like these, you should worry most about gathering every single scrap of evidence you can for CCIA rather than "deciding the fate" of the perpetrator. Because you really aren't. You're the lawman who catches them and handles the immediate issues, not the justice system that punishes them for what they did.

I think the best way to do it would be requiring the Intrepid need a filled out flight plan, but on green, the Spark will just auto-announce it's departing over the operations and command channels with a list of all mobs with a CKey attached aboard.

My biggest concern is one I haven't seen brought up: If the usual gamemode becomes Odyssey, doesn't that make the setting of the server in the majority of rounds whatever mission we're on, rather than the Horizon? What are we losing if the majority of rounds are about going to a map divorced from what's arguably the main character of the server, the ship? And what's the motivation for mapping for the ship when realistically 75% of rounds won't take place on it? Why add a cafe or put miniature plant pots on tables if no one will ever see them? I'm not trying to naysay these changes, but I do think it's something that should be thought about and mitigated. Adding Odyssey maps that are functional shuttles that can dock with the Horizon, and the crew can board, would be a great alternative to "everyone has to always leave for something disconnected from the ship". Consider stuff like the Orion Express ship docking to refill our gas tanks, or the Tajaran circus ship being expanded on and letting actors put on a show. I've always thought it's incredibly strange how little the Horizon interacts with other friendly ships and their crews. We have overmap vessels for ghost spawns, but the rules around those are intentionally very wary of them stealing the show from antags. Putting more fleshed out ones front and center as Odyssey maps the Horizon MUST interact with would be a good change. A crewmember aboard the other ship might decide to steal from the Horizon, pick some pockets, and trick the crew out of their money. A cargo technician might get in a barfight with another patron on a Dominian vessel using space to circumvent gambling laws. I'd really like to see maps like that so that we don't lose the Horizon as an important part of rounds. I don't want to see it being populated relegated to Extended only.

I'm still working through a lot of this, but I'd like to quickly comment that an idea I don't think has been suggested is implementing a system whereby canon roundtypes can be either canon or noncanon, and if the exact same mission has been canon recently, automatically swaps to noncanon. This way we dodge the "this is the third Golden Deep merchamt we've saved this week" issue without requiring admin intervention/announcements.

My "40 player turnout" point was contingent on those 40 people showing up for an event planned over a single week that only needs one or two admins. Of course something as complicated as Silicon Nightmares only drawing 40 people would hurt and I genuinely empathize with and understand that fear. I was making the point that there's room for more frequent, less intense, less-planned-out events, and that we shouldn't judge them by the standards of major event arcs. It's okay if those events aren't pulling massive numbers, they weren't meant to.

It's really a fight of effort vs engagement. Balancing how much effort you put in vs player enjoyment and your own satisfaction (because you guys feeling proud DOES matter) that comes from it. I think there's plenty of room below gigakillmurder events with months of planning we aren't capitalizing on. At risk of sounding too much like a Gamer, we have a saturated AAA market and an underserved AA or A title market.

That won't happen. Read up in the thread. People crave violence and killing as the only form of canon since nobody will ever remember anything you did except die or kill. I've suggested on multiple occasions an event about the Horizon helping build a small colony on a planet, accomplishing objectives week to week as every event it gets larger and larger, more and more resembling a town, only to get shot down with "that's boring nobody would play that" as if sheer player count is the only qualifier for whether something was successful or not, and not whether the people participating enjoyed it. CM is the most populated server on the hub at any given time. Are we going to say that CM is more successful than us and we should start acting like CM to get our player count up? Is an event with multiple problems, failures in planning, and 150 players because it emphasizes combat over rp a success while a small, tight event with 40 people is a failure? Because that's the direction it feels like events are going. I want smaller events made in a shorter amount of time by fewer people with lower playercounts, and I'm not joking.

This probably requires input from coders on how difficult it would be to implement, but it would be nice to have, yes.

Not two Skrell. Two ROUNDS of Skrell XO. In all of that time someone only readied up with a Skrell XO twice, which is tantamount to admitting that there are 0 Skrell XO characters people actually kept playing.

Thank you for the convenient segway. There's an IR against COMMAND. Not the SCC that failed them at every conceivable level. That gave them nothing to work with and told them to "just go do it lol". No higher ups were fired for putting the Horizon's crew in that situation. The guy who gave us a non-functional cargo shuttle didn't lose his job. Nobody ever apologized for undersupplying and underinforming them despite the danger and gravity of the situation. The SCC, the company, the faceless entity, may as well just be immune to the consequences of its own actions. It will never be humbled, stumble, or fail at a level higher than the Horizon. When, not if, this change goes through, the Spur will just not react to thousands of xenos losing their jobs across the SCC's fleets. Nobody will comment on it. It may as well be declared dubiously-IC, because despite using IC justification of the SCC's racism, the universe and staff will treat it like an OOC decision with no IC consequences.

I should make something clear. I don't think these new restrictions are wrong or inherently bad. I don't think it's bad and admins are bad for considering it. It can be handled well. But I don't think it has been, nor will it. How this has been handled, very frankly, just feels disrespectful. Disrespectful of the time and effort people put into the affected characters. No effort was made to find compromise, or ask for input. It wasn't phrased as "this is something we're considering, give feedback so we can hear what everyone wants to do and try to smooth it along". It's just a dry declaration that really only has two possibilities: either you are just finding out that people are actually upset that their characters will face serious retcons through no fault of their own, or you did know, and simply chose not to address that in any way before declaring this course of action. Both possibilities are incredibly disappointing and make it feel as if staff don't consider player input or feelings important to how the server is run.

I don't disagree on that. I think that's an entirely reasonable assumption to make. But it's very obvious that any IC consequences for the SCC, from factions causing a fuss to outright returning the favor, will not be approved or allowed. The Hegemony is not going to look at their citizens being insulted and told they're lesser to humans and do the same to humans working for Hephaestus. The Trinary is not going to release a statement condemning this as a blatant act of discrimination. The SCC will escape any and all consequences for doing this, because in reality, it's an OOC-motivated decision and not one made with the lore in mind. And people who come here and enjoy playing their characters in a position that before this decision were entirely allowed, are going to get nothing out of it. Either they wordlessly retcon everything and move them to a position they don't even necessarily enjoy, or they get absolutely no roleplay hooks out of the deal and just have to eat a fat IC demotion L with nothing to bounce off of because the universe tells them the SCC can do no wrong and will never get their comeuppance. The same thing happened on Konyang. Will the SCC lose face and be embarrassed because they sent the Horizon's crew in with empty stun batons and non-functional flashlights to disable the warehouse transmitter? Nah. It's just swept under the rug despite being treated like an entirely IC issue despite being caused by poorly-tested event maps and unfortunate design decisions. This isn't an IR where these characters did something wrong, or they're given something meaty to work with for future roleplay. It's not done due to lore developments or with a possibility of reversal. Staff said "we are doing this" and plan to implement it in a completely unsatisfying way both OOC and IC. It's a dry, boring OOC rules change wearing the facepaint of being due to IC reasons while having no IC consequences or hooks. And that's just baffling.

I don't Disagree, Danse, but splitting the thread is liable to reduce engagement with that idea and make tracking who said what more difficult. I think the pros of staying in this thread outweigh the cons. As for the statement on retroactive species restrictions, I have to say it's just deeply confusing. This is an administrative-backed OOC change that will effectively delete the histories and arcs of multiple characters, without consulting anyone or even mentioning it beforehand. You knew this would happen. You knew it would upset people. But you didn't even bother to try and compromise or even inform the playerbase ahead of time? What are the affected characters supposed to do? Just retcon ever having occupied the position? Get what is ultimately a slap in the face demotion IC that the SCC will magically face no consequences for despite it being INCREDIBLY overt rather than subtle now that their hiring practices are racist? Are characters just supposed to ignore that only aliens got demoted and not say a word? Was any of this even considered?

It's also inconsistent with the way every other problem on the server is approached. CCIA has repeatedly made decisions that enable bad behavior on the part of players out of a desire to not limit them or roleplay over the actions of a few (the whole "drinking on duty" saga).