OolongCow

There's a difference between nations and corporations, and we shouldn't conflate them. Plenty of corporations, even ones in the SCC, take actions that are actively detrimental to its interests and the interests of other members. We don't need the same nation to be "designated bad guy" for a decade straight. It just demeans and demotivates the lore team to actually give Sol anything interesting to do and provides very low quality RP. Are we also just sort of forgetting that Elyra exists and committed state-sponsored acts of violence against the Horizon more recently and more officially than Sol ever did? Frost was a rogue agent with tacit support from parts of the government, and most of the characters his actions impacted aren't even around anymore. His first invasion was defeated at extreme cost by Sol itself ordering the 25th fleet to put him down for violating Biesel's national sovereignty without permission. The Elyran government directly ordered special forces to put guns to the heads of the crew of the Horizon: and plenty of currently-played characters were around for it. The only reason they didn't get their way is because of the FSF being bribed by the crew. The SCC is not the Republic of Biesel. Most characters are not Bieselites and were not directly affected by Frost's invasions. They only care about "sol bad" because players keep OOC insisting Sol remain a monolithic bad guy instead of looking slightly to the side where the Lii'dra, Exclusionists, and pirates are happy to oblige the need for ontological evils. There are diplomatic missions even between the most hostile of countries. Which is what Sol and Biesel are. The SCC and EE are corporations, and despite the SCC's close ties with Biesel, it is still motivated by profit. The promise of Solarian markets opening back up to them would be enticing. It could be reasoned that Solarian consulars dipping their toes in the pool by sending representatives to Biesel indirectly through the SCC could also be the first step towards a thaw between them. Something a lot of people would find really interesting in comparison to "sol turned evil and racist and isolationist again".

I don't support singling out expeditions for special protections, though I would petition that it be added to the guide pages for antags and be treated as common courtesy by admins in ahelps that antags should be considerate of the crew's access to help. Security and medical emergencies are several magnitudes more serious alone on an exoplanet than aboard the Horizon. They should be reminded of that, and have it pointed out to them on the wiki and by staff that they should therefore not treat those situations identically. Beating a scientist over the head with a laser sword for mouthing off to you may be acceptable on the Horizon, but you may as well have just murdered them if you do so on the Intrepid. Out in space in a small box with one exit, where no help is coming any time soon, an antag going on a killing spree is a lot less justifiable. It often feels like a masturbatory ego stroking, that they're able to shoot all of these fish in this proverbial barrel.

The points I was making above is that I also want to see it happen, so that character concepts that rebuke your concerns and offer people some weighty Solarian characters of influence that aren't like Frost or his cronies to interact with. I want Solarian consulars to be a diagetic way of rehabilitating Sol's reputation. A natural, roleplay-centric way of shifting people's perceptions away from marines in power armor. Because no matter how many liberal Solarians people make, the perception of Sol is of the nation that invaded Biesel and beat a member of the Aurora's staff to death in its hallways.

Yeah, a minimum, not preferential weights for total hours. I just assumed that people would think of that due to existing timelocks on Aurora and other servers. 10 is a bit easy to reach, though, because of aforementioned AFKing and farming. I can't really suggest a number since that would ultimately be up to staff, but I can say that ten sounds too low, at least for command like this thread suggests. For the rest of the crew, though, that would probably put the funny "sets themselves on fire by 'accident'" clowns in the dumpster where they belong without being too much a risk of excluding new players or newer characters.

If this was ever implemented, it would have to be based on hours played as that character id, not staff handpicking the characters that are allowed to fill slots for events. It's just opening the server and staff up to too many accusations, no matter how well-intentioned the suggestion is in theory.

I'm not actually opposing them, by the by. I'm expressing concerns that are worth discussing before we go ahead with this. Dominian consulars dodge the issue because the "bad ones" explicitly represent the worst parts of Dominia. They are genuine representatives of what Dominia IS and rebuke any idea that "it's not that bad." The lore team actively encourages Dominian consulars to watch primaries and enforce Dominia's edicts so that they don't just seem toothless. Sol is nothing BUT stereotypes at the moment. It has no counterweight besides the characters people play, who often either end up racists, stereotypes of racists, or people who actively distance themselves from Sol due to said stereotypes. Solarian patriots that despise Frost and want a democratic Sol with a bright future are basically nonexistent. Consulars are a chance to introduce those concepts, and while I desperately want that and believe it is ultimately worth the risk, I'm still leery of letting people do whatever because people WILL make the characters I described and swing the pendulum right back towards Marc Prices and jarheads.

I support them coming back. Sol kind of ended up being 2016 to 2020's designated laughingstock nation. As much as people dump on Dominia, it at least gets some lore where it is not portrayed as an overtly evil, antagonistic force to the very vast majority of the crew's characters that has very little official presence on the ship and is hilariously incompetent every time they appear. It has some nuance. It has good and bad. The Imperial family and the Volvalaads are trying their best to make it slightly less dystopic. Sol needs some presence taking them in a similar direction that isn't pushed by a bi-monthly lore article. On the other hand, and while I have no right to dictate how people can RP their characters, I don't want to see John Sol, Consular, constantly shouting about how he hates everyone that isn't a human and getting in the way of command and just generally being a stereotype of the Solarian the lore team has tried to move away from with what attention they have given them lately. I would rather people forget Sol exists than have people constantly playing Frost-supporting Hopperites with no political tact whatsoever every round. It will become very boring and make the life of every character from Sol that doesn't fall into that mold all the more difficult.

Antags have demonstrated over and over again that the vast majority of them will just mindlessly mash the "remove security's attempts to contain me" button as soon as humanly possible no matter how ill-advised it may be. See: lings repeatedly reviving themselves in main hallways while being carried in a bodybag only to get immediately domed and justifying harsher treatment because that guy was just medically dead and now he isn't. This suggestion will not lead to antags being strategic. It will just lead to security players keeping a mental timer and pulling out a baton at the 3 minute mark or whatever to instantly stun the person once they finish slipping their cuffs because they know it's coming, and humoring the lowest common denominator of antag play by giving them a free escape for performing the bare minimum of effort with no forethought, roleplay, or even TC cost only appeals to security players that just want to make spaceman horizontal and brag about how they beat up John Hub, Antag Main in #general-chat. This is another concern. Freedom Implants should feel good for the antag to use at just the right time, but not unfair to security if it's just spammed blindly. This kind of change would just devalue that.

As a HoS player I try my best to correct this behavior when I see it and reward antags for cooperating. I'm always running to get them water, food, asking if they need anything, et cetera.

I am not, and if I made you feel that way, I apologize. You're one of my favorite antag players and I specifically point at you (as can be attested by a discord search) whenever antag players go "well, how SHOULD I behave?" By my standards you do do that and I appreciate it immensely. People like you are one of the reasons security is tolerable and I can't overstate, again, how much I appreciate it. You had my respect for actually talking to security and attempting to play an actual character who's also sometimes an antag before last Sunday, and your decision to not crash the canon barbecue but actually ahelp if you could cryo and join in on your security character because you thought it'd be more fun and you valued the RP more than "haha I interrupted an event lol!" just cemented that opinion. My perceptions and how I feel aren't actionable. While you and players like you dedicated to improving things don't fall under the umbrella of my post, I'm not going to just not say those things. Because, let's be honest, John Hub outnumbers you and the regulars who do actually play antag 3 to 1, and the negative experiences they cause are unfortunately more memorable than the good ones you make. I agree. It's a cold war of antag players and sec players refusing to trust each other. Thus why I support Sue's suggestion of a visitation area. There's probably more I could say to encourage further interaction between captured antags and the crew (legal counsel, more incentive to talk to detectives, etc.) but that wasn't in the thread's scope and I don't want to shift it too much. My objection is that I, personally, don't think this will provide enough positives to outweigh the plainly inevitable negatives. In retrospect, it's so easy to escape from the brig as-is due to wardens not existing / not even following procedure out of a fear of metagaming (when is the last time anyone actually saw a serious criminal get tracking implanted despite half the crimes in the Major section requiring it?) that it quite literally doesn't matter if the antag abuses this proposed system to do it, so I don't disagree here. I'm going to be honest, here: You are good at this. If the average antag player were all Evandorf clones I'd support your point entirely. But they aren't, and the average antag player displays a level of consideration for others and social awareness roughly equivalent to the average sec player: that being none. It feels like if they were allowed to, most autotraitors would DDoS my computer if they knew admins wouldn't bwoink them just because it was a big red button on their screen and it made them win. They do not care about me, or you, or the tense interrogation roleplay going on between Shaw and the investigator. They want to make spaceman horizontal. They want to see funny things happen. They want to post in general chat about how they totally owned security and say: ">extended see you guys in three hours" because they come to an RP server and make non-character antag-only slots where you're lucky to get more than two paragraphs out of them the entire round. It's frustrating, and I loathe giving people like that more rope to hang me with despite knowing that someone has to take the first step, because this server isn't a job for me. I come here to have fun. I shouldn't have to put up with rounds where I actively do not have fun and suffer with the faith that me "selflessly" doing so will magically change the behavior of antag players - most of whom disappear after two months anyway and thus don't have any ability to influence new antags that show up even if I do somehow convince them to trust and respect security players. It's frustrating, man. I've been playing this game for almost six years, and every server is the same with the back and forth between antags and security. Aurora is the closest to having it right. I want to trust antag players won't abuse something like this. I know you won't. I know Nikola won't. But I don't trust John Hub to not look at this, go "I should find the best way to be annoying to the blue men," and then give security another thing to make their lives miserable until he gets bored and John Hub the Second comes along and begins the cycle anew. I just don't think this is the solution to some very valid problems you bring up, and think it's worth looking elsewhere for answers.

An alternative for antags already exists without foisting the burden of ensuring one person has 10% more fun at everyone else's expense. It's called the cryo cell and observing/respawning as a non-antag. We already point at the generous respawn system for crew (usually sec) who complain they were killed too quickly. Why shouldn't we do so for antags too? It's silly to suggest we should break immersion like this for something that, let's be very frank here, provides little value to good-intentioned players while adding avenues for horrific abuse by both sides. I do not want to be obligated to give Lyle Linetoer a free pass to escape the brig (because of course an easy way to remove the collar/implant/whatever WILL be added or found), nor do I want to put up with 10 hour playtime wardens putting those measures on literally every prisoner through my door until they're being ahelped every round. I support Sue's suggestion of a visitation area, however.

BYOND Ckey: OolongCow Discord username: Maybelle Character names: Jedrzej Kuhn, Head of Security Marisa Warren, Engineer Lena Braun, Captain Species you are applying to play: IPC ------------------------------ General Whitelist Requirements What colour do you plan on making your first alien character?: (IPCs exempt) Don't care that they're exempt. Hephaestus Green, let's go. Have you read the lore pages for the species you wish to be whitelisted for?: Literally bookmarked it for quick reference after doing so. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question. Why do you wish to play this species?: Metal man good. With the bulk of my reasoning out of the way, I just enjoy overthinking things and getting analytical and philosophical about my characters, the world, and what's going on around it all. I had a serious discussion with Danse in lore chat about how Visegrad's soil must suck and be nothing but clay and sand due to constant erosion from rain. Being allowed to delve into philosophical arguments about the soul, intelligence, and what constitutes a person as someone actually experiencing that, with a long lifetime and the ability to plug themselves into the extranet with millennia of literature on the matter to help find those answers is just really appealing to me. Especially if it means dragging other people into those discussions. Conflict is good, but it doesn't necessarily have to be aggressive. It can be inspiring empathy in apathetic characters. It can be challenging people's beliefs merely by existing. And the fact of the matter is that IPCs are the centerpiece of a lot of Aurora's more interesting conflicts. What makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a human?: Because they shouldn't be, by all accounts. They were made by humans in humanity's image. They have human morals programmed into them and human hands built them. The first IPCs were created as a more human alternative to the mindless automata that dominated the 24th century. The most prominent IPC religion reveres the humans that believed in their inhuman humanity. Yet they are distinctly not human; while humans, generally, do not treat them like people. How can countries like the Republic of Biesel, who to the faces of their citizens espouse ideals of market liberalism and democracy reconcile with that? Humanity created IPCs. They're the offspring of our efforts, and yet they're used and discarded and traded and built as if they were chattel slaves. They're subjected to, when one thinks about it for a moment, some of the most horrifying and dehumanizing treatment in the entire Spur, despite all the evidence in the world that they can be practically mentally indistinguishable from a person, given time. Even a Guwan can at times receive better treatment from a Sinta than an owned IPC in some parts of Mendell City. At least a Guwan is still considered a member of the Unathi race, capable of possibly ever redeeming themselves and becoming an equal. Many humans think IPCs are an actively antagonistic force. How crushing must that be to one that knows better? How terrifying must life be living under such a system if you're educated enough to understand how terrible that is, even by the standards of the people doing it to you? That is so incredibly, amazingly interesting to me. I want to be a part of telling that story. I want to play into and rail against and bring that conflict to the forefront, even if it's just making people question why a tin can is reading poetry. ------------------------------ Character Application Character Name: Hephaestus Industries Mining Unit (Generation Two) - Series Z1 - Serial Number Z-100076 - Zephyrus Write a backstory for your character. This may include their origin, education, personality and how they arrived to the SCCV Horizon: ------------------------------------- March 14th, 2456 Mendell City, Biesel Junior Manager of Hazel! ltd. Dealership #TC-104 Ryan Adams was not having a good day. His boss had saddled him with the night shift for the next six months, his team member retention was atrocious, and his stupid bitch of a wife had failed to schedule the family scrapheap for maintenance. Probably too busy being a worthless drunk around the house with the excuse of "raising the kid". What a sick joke. Here he was selling top of the line Hazels when his severance package should've included one. But those goddamn Hephaestus lawyers had weaseled their way into arguing the contract only specified a "domestic servant IPC", and dumped a useless gen one rust stain mining unit that should've been disassembled a decade before he got it on him. And for what? A minor case of corporate espionage? As if they didn't do it too! "Pardon me, sir, but I'm through browsing, and I have a few questions." Snapped back to reality, the poorly-shaven man smiled on instinct. An instinct bred into him by years of climbing the corporate ladder. Peering over his desk at the diminutive woman in a wheelchair across from him, the businessman's eyes flashed as the two's met. He could always sense a sucker. And this woman was the biggest he'd ever seen. "And how did you like our selection, ma'am?" he asked, politely. "Well, I'm not really sure I can afford... any of these. And I don't know if my credit is good enough for a payment plan..." In that moment, something clicked for Adams. A devious little sprout of an idea. He did need some extra cash to pay off a few debts, after all... And what the company didn't know wouldn't hurt them, right? ------------------------------------- December 30th, 2464 Cape City, Biesel 8 Years Later Wheeled into place by the seashore, the woman in a wheelchair smiled up at her caretaker, her small green eyes appearing sad and cold despite the smile. "Zeph, will you miss me when I'm gone?" The question was sudden. Unexpected. The unit was unsure how to respond. It took exactly 482 milliseconds for its processors to generate a reply after the conversational pause timer. "I am unsure if I am capable of grief, Miss Madeline." She had ordered it to be honest with her at all times and not to attempt to protect her feelings or lie about how it "felt". Any emotional distress was regrettable, but unavoidable. "Will you remember me, then?" The woman's curly red hair was characterized as "messy" by her own parameters. The unit made a note to perform grooming duties once they had returned home. There was no one else who could do so for her, so the job had fallen to it as usual. His charge had no other family. "Until my new owners decide that it is time for me to be wiped, or to be deactivated." That response elicited a great amount of internal emotional distress. Even with incomplete interfacing, the unit's Hazel!-branded body language package registered a level of anguish that took the tall Generation one by surprise. Such a level of stress was not healthy. "I apologize if my words upset you, Miss Madeline. You ordered me not to be untruthful nor hide my observations." "I know, Zeph, but I don't want you to talk like that." The unit paused for a moment, processing. "Miss Madeline. If you mean to continue in your plan of allowing me to register as a free positronic, I urge you to reconsider. My frame is far too old and would require constant maintenance. I would be unable to afford such costs due to my age. You should transfer me to a corporation of your choice. There is simply no alternative." Withdrawing an envelope from a pocket in her sweater, the normally kind woman's eyes, with moisture forming at the corners, turned uncharacteristically stern. The stamp across the front of the unassuming piece of mail read "VeriLife Insurance". Holding it up to the optics of the unit behind her, her hand trembling slightly, the woman stated matter-of-factly, "Yes. There is." ------------------------------------- How have the recent events of the Orion Spur impacted your character?: Decurion Reynolds gave the limp remains of the Exclusionist terrorist at his feet a kick. "Finally dead?" asked Zheng, the company medical sergeant. "I don't want to lose another guy to the 'standing back up' trick." With the memory of a laughing Legionnaire with a pretty smile - now a smoking corpse - in his mind, the Decurion leveled his rifle with the heart of the felled terrorist and loosed another two rounds for good measure. One for Sasha, another for Jeremiah. Rot in whatever hell you believed in, he thought to himself, before kicking the remains aside, shouldering his rifle, and pulling the IPC tag scanner from its pouch. Senior Legionnaire Zheng balked as he entered the cargo hold proper. Rows and rows of hibernating IPCs lined the walls, awaiting wakefulness back on Biesel proper. A good way to avoid maintenance and power costs during transport, for those on a budget. "So this is what they were willing to die for, huh?" A low whistle escaped his lips. "Must be at least sixty of 'em here." Staring down at the readout on the scanner, Decurion Reynolds replied, "Seems like most are pretty freshly wiped, too. Fresh from Burszia." Rapping his knuckle against the armored shoulder of a freshly-painted G2, the medical sergeant grimaced. "Good thing we caught 'em quickly. These fucking Exies would've turned them into good little soldiers if we hadn't." As he glanced down at an ominous little pouch tied around the neck of the dead Exclusionist, the sergeant shuddered. It looked full of sand, but he knew all too well what was really inside. Watching his superior's back as he paused in front of one frame in particular, the medic continued, "So what now?" "We call Hephaestus to come collect their property." How does your character view the megacorporation they work for?: Popping the hefty battery of the G2 in front of him out with a screwdriver, Machinist Ket'ah Kuhwinla chuffed as he examined the readout on the console beside him. This free machine would almost be better off submitting to the company, as he had. There was no shame in submission, especially with such outrageous maintenance costs. Flipping the welding goggles down over his eyes, the Sinta set to work repairing a crack in the superstructure of the machine before him. He was experienced enough to know that this "wear and tear" was a common manufacturing defect in these cheaper frames. However, manufacturing defects were a loss in profits, and if it kept these machines coming in for regular maintenance, and kept him supplied with a steady flow of work, where was the real harm in mislabeling it? Matriarch Ss'wala would have considered it shrewd and proper. And who was he to argue with the matriarch? Leaning back to admire his handiwork after some time, the sinta picked at the slag scale of his weld with a claw, flicking the crust onto the floor and frowning. Below par work. He'd distracted himself. Sloppy. Slotting the battery back into place, he tapped a few keys on his console, scheduling a maintenance appointment in three months to fix it and a thinned wire he'd spotted in the left arm. "Is my maintenance complete, Master Kuhwinla?" the G2 asked as it whirred to life. "You are good to go, yesss," replied the Sinta offhandedly. A little white lie would not hurt, he thought. It was a fairly new frame, and a free one at that. Keeping an eye on it while under Hephaestus's employ was just good business. Such minor issues were a convenient excuse, and these G2s would inevitably develop real problems for him to fix regardless. This was just insurance. The G2 remained silent for a moment. An awkward moment that began to make the machinist uneasy. "Thank you," the imposing IPC replied eventually, as it climbed to its feet. "My self-diagnostics report nothing of note." Ket'ah watched the IPC warily as it began to leave. Something pricked at the base of his tail. An intuition. Was that machine just sarcastic with him?

And they wept, for there was no more lore left to write.

Red Nightshade is an unbelievably powerful drug. I don't disagree it should be possible to make surreptitiously, but your suggested recipe is way too easy. You can literally get Stimm within 30 seconds of roundstart using loadouts. I'd suggest adding a mutated plant that produces small amounts of Lithium (for the synaptizine) instead, as that's the only chemical you can't get otherwise, and it can be multipurposed as a traitor plant (which we need more of anyway) while not requiring recipe changes. Phoron is already doable with Kois. This would obviously make synaptizine pathetically easy to acquire, but whatever. It's not and will never be balanced and this is just a thought experiment anyway.

As opposed to your suggestion of... them just losing without a counter? Go read the suggestion thread about moving the security armory to the current crew armory for why this is just a plain bad idea.

I 1v4'd security, permanently killing one and hospitalizing two others, while they were armored and armed with lethals, using a 2TC manual, a chemical you can make within 10 minutes of roundstart, and a steel knife. I had no guns, and no armor. This was literally my first antag round ever on the server. The role is not difficult to "win" at, even when your standards for success are "ownzoning sec" (which it shouldn't really ever be).

I just want antags to stop acting like an MMORPG writing team and thinking that the only way they can engross people is by being a massive, bombastic, ship-ending threat, bigger than the last one. Go start a barfight. Be an aggressive drunk that uses a tool implant to break out of your low-security cell and start a fistfight with sec officers after emoting and taunting them. Go deal drugs and bribe one of the less reputable officers. Break someone's leg for the mafia. Have a bad day at work, blow up, and shoot that coworker you hate, then panic and apologize to everyone around while you hold their dying body. Do SOMETHING besides "I am going to be a le generic bad man who... le kills people..." This has extended to events, too, though thankfully admins have started to take notice of the sentiment that not every canon event has to end with eight dead crewmembers and PTSD for the survivors. I am begging you as a security player to let me go easy on you, talk to you about why you're doing things, and interact with you in a way that is not "you are le bad, I will now shoot you" from both sides. It's so unbelievably, burnout-inducingly boring and makes me want to just leave the round when I see the sixth adrenaline sacs armblade ling who makes no attempt to do anything original and becomes a silent shuffler the moment they're discovered that week.

Most people don't have an issue with dying. The issue is that deaths often feel meaningless, undeserved, and arbitrary. Being killed without the ability to fight back by someone who made zero effort to make it interesting is one of the main reasons people wanted ling removed from secret. No one is going to object if they die at 1:30 after a round of back and forth with a murderer. But most people have issues with an antag ganking someone who got off the residential elevator not one minute prior and parapen -> decapping them. And don't use the boring "gotcha" of "but real life's deaths are meaningless, undeserved, and arbitrary too!" Because while that's true, this isn't real life and those are boring stories that I didn't come here for. If I wanted to get arbitrarily killed in a nihilistic environment where my death means nothing I'd play Lifeweb. Also, I'm still not convinced about the antag portion of the argument, because my point was never addressed. It's ridiculously easy to disable sensors as-is, and any antag who's concerned about sensors can just either kill the person outright or leave them for medical to save. The concerns around medical's culture is valid and I agree that that has to change, but I take issue with using "think of the poor antags" as any genuine justification. Dealing with sensors as a bad man is a very small ask for all of the not-necessarily-antag-related cases of people getting dunked it prevents. The medical culture issue is a much better justification that I do not necessarily disagree with. I know this can be sort of a word salad, so I'll reiterate: I don't agree that they should be removed because of antags. But if medical players are saying it's making medical less fun, then by all means do it and do it now.

Engineering is not a role that needs to be "balanced". People who play engineering do it because they want to have fun, and nobody suffers if engineers are having fun. There is not a single antagonist type that suffers because atmos did entirely voluntary upgrades, or because atmos techs can replace a wire. Yet there's some asinine belief that adding something that removes a major annoyance from a role is "too far". This is the equivalent of removing spare handcuffs from security and telling them "just go print them from ops if you want more than the ones that spawn in your belts" except there's not even an "other side" that benefits. This is probably the dumbest way possible to differentiate between the roles. You're just going to make people play atmos tech even less than they already do until some coder adds some exclusive thing to them (probably as a removal from normal engineers) to try and force people to play them again. How about you give them something to actually do that isn't vital to the integrity of the ship that engineers don't get to play with? I already floated the idea of and offered to map a side room where atmos techs can play with a TEG for burn chamber experimentation that doesn't require long waits for operations deliveries or science bothering to print them some gas cooler boards (which also serves as a convenient way for them to teach new atmos techs).

They don't need it, because there's nothing wrong with them. They only warn people who aren't being naughty medical members once someone's already dying, at which point, medical should be allowed to come get them. If anyone's concerned about people surviving when they shouldn't, then just kill them instead of hoping they'll bleed out? It's the exact same thing as letting them bleed out off sensors, except you can't "well ackshually 🤓" the admins over it. If you don't want people to die, you WANT medical to come get them. If you WANT them to die, then just kill them.

Xenoarcheologists should be following miners around anyway. They get someone to RP with, they consolidate shuttle usage, and they get some of that magic "interdepartmental reliance" that comes up every time someone complains about why their department doesn't get an incredibly obvious QoL improvement (see: why engineering doesn't get circuit printers and why security doesn't even get a single white medkit).

It would make sense to replace Pun-Pun with a "social" animal. We already have two dogs, give them a cat that can laze behind the bar.

None of my complaints about ling have really changed. The PR to "fix it" was how it should have always been, but did nothing except act as a QoL buff for changelings while ultimately addressing literally none of the concerns outlined in this thread. Adrenaline Sacs is still a fundamentally broken ability that violates core design philosophies around incredibly powerful chems being limited in availability and number of uses. I don't care about "variety". It's badly designed, has constantly shown that there are basically no people willing or able to actually roleplay interesting concepts with it, and inevitably always devolves into headashing or the round ending because it's literally uncontainable thanks to armblade, which breaks even reinforced walls, unless you meta it with chemical/atmospheric sedation. Something admins would probably object to if it keeps happening because chemistry is overpowered, we all know it's overpowered, and the crew remembering it exists would make most antags into a joke. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how people play, I feel. From what I've seen? Security players are at their most understanding, most willing to humor antags, and least validhunty when they know what to expect and are allowed to feel sure of how intense the round's going to be. If they KNOW the round is going to be 1-2 lings, and they OOC know the identity of one of the lings, they will almost certainly "let them cook" up until they kill people. Sure they'll go hard on them after that, but people inside the sec-antag loop tend to be more cautious about just dunking antags thirty minutes in if they know that that's half of the antags in the entire round, and that they aren't going to get surprise mercs at 1:10 because, whoops! It was actually bughunt! One of the worst parts about playing security is not knowing if you're going to get Trey Tor's gnarly drug dealing adventures and a gimmick, both of which you can roleplay with the entire round, or silent shuffler mercs + ninjas that speak four sentences total after arriving on the ship, and without a HoS or Warden. It incentivizes people to dunk antags because they're scared that otherwise the last half hour of the round will become unmanageably chaotic. It's why there's such a noticeable shift in security player's willingness to RP around the 1:20 mark. They assume that this is all of the antags in the round revealed and then feel confident acting accordingly instead of starting something only to get interrupted because the mercs finally showed up. The argument against it being voted for isn't from security's end, it's from the crew's end, and people being overly cautious not to get caught by lings while alone. People who do not want to be killed by a changeling out of nowhere will, probably, not follow random people into maintenance. Because they know that they're going to be removed from the round (not fun) by a changeling instead of taken hostage or involved with a gimmick (fun).