stev

Okay so I'm not gonna go point by point here because this is a long goddamn post with not much to say. What I will say is, you chose to enter that discussion. When I was talking about it, I merely briefly outlined bits of the situation after someone asked me for more details on it. And even then, I didn't name names or assign blame to anyone in particular - you came into a discussion that wasn't about you specifically, and took it over to accuse me of lying about the situation to make you look bad, also throwing in some insults aimed at me while you were at it. I'd be kind of okay with how the round went if you were actually willing to accept some slight bit of responsibility, especially given you're on command trial, these things happen. What really made this complaint necessary, however, were these accusations of me lying about shit to make you look bad, instead of even considering the possibility that there were some slight misrememberings or miscommunications. And since we're on the armour vest topic again for some ungodly reason, I was holding a dufflebag in hand and wore the rifle on my back. Please just accept your memory might not be 100% perfect and let it go. Goddamn.

Okay so I don't know why you're doubling down and insisting we both had the armour on, only one of us had the armour on (the IPC). In fact @Faye <3 can probably attest to the fact that I (the Zhan) wasn't, given I was wearing the same ultra rare hat as her character instead of a helmet and armour, something I commented on when we met. I'm seriously not trying to gaslight you or anything here, and I don't know how else to tell you this, but you're misremembering what I was wearing and the fact that this has escalated to a player complaint about misremembering my clothes is exactly the problem I'm trying to highlight here.

BYOND Key: Memescope McGee Game ID: cda-adiZ; Discord discussion link: https://discord.com/channels/157516682288562176/725470666039754783/868165459919405077 Player Byond Key/Character name: Schevenigen/Etilka Strelitz Staff involved: @WickedCybs (ingame), @MattAtlas (on Discord) Reason for complaint: Poor escalation as HoS on a round, but primarily Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? Yes, I ahelped after I died; @WickedCybs responded and investigated it, but I had to go before the ticket got resolved. With the Discord issue, @MattAtlas told me to post on Schev's whitelist application or make a player complaint. Approximate Date/Time: For the round, see game ID. For the Discord thing, Schev's first message was posted at 17:17 BST/UTC+1, 23/07/2021, in the #serious-discussion channel. Description of the incident in-game (Game ID: cda-adiZ): Description of the Discord interaction (starting roughly https://discord.com/channels/157516682288562176/725470666039754783/868165459919405077): I was initially going to make this a post on Schev's command whitelist re-application (https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/16097-scheveningen-command-whitelist-reapp/), but after looking over the whole thing thought it'd be more appropriate to post this as a proper complaint.

The app and backstory seem good! One problem though, Unathi are barred from Idris.

At its core, my issue with Visegrad is that the cultural aspect is weak; despite the large word count of the overall text, the cultural interest and hard-to-define spice simply isn't there. While there could be some potential with the urban-rural divide with some development, as-is it's hard to envision what a character from Visegrad would look like, apart from being a bit gloomy and talking about rain and trees on a space station - there's very little to draw from for characterisation for a Visegradian, it lacks identity and distinction from any other random planet. This is, by the way, where the meming about Visegrad being the funny Poland planet comes in: There's not much to engage the reader culturally, so people naturally latch onto the Central European culture it's ostensibly rooted in as the most memorable aspect. This would be absolutely fine as a weakness of the text if the author was willing to accept this is the case and work on it. No writer is perfect, nobody can hold the expectation that a work is gonna be flawless. What makes this damning is that the author, Danse, is completely unwilling to accept criticism on this, making that initial weakness a fatal flaw that's unlikely to ever be fixed or addressed while the text is under his control. Multiple people, myself included, have made this issue known in private and in public, and the response every time is to ignore, dismiss or discredit these criticisms as bad faith and invalid. All that being said, some of the feedback on this forum thread has been kind of unhelpful, I agree. However, when everyone who's interested in legitimate constructive criticism gets brushed off on Discord, you either don't get much feedback at all or draw on the less-than-constructive stuff. I've said my piece. I hope you take this feedback onboard, as simply dismissing all criticism won't help you improve and grow as a writer.

In the interest of transparency, I've interacted with Omi plenty before and count them as a friend. I think this is a very solid application! Your plans for languages, both in the original post and in further replies, seem very solid and well-thought-out while keeping potential code limitations in mind. I can personally attest to other people's concerns about behaviour and temper, I've witnessed this a couple times and been the target of it once that I can remember. However, Omi seems to be well aware of this issue and seems to be taking steps to try and change that problem; this demonstrates a willingness to address issues in your own behaviour and approach that outweighs the negatives of the initial behaviour, in my book. I tried to think of some questions, but all the ones I'd really go for have already been asked. So +1 from me, to be reductive.

I'll try and be transparent with this at the beginning, I have some level of personal beef with Danse. However, as this is largely spanning from things that are very relevant to a lore-writing staff position, I'll talk about it where it's applicable. I don't believe Danse to be a good fit for a lore deputy for a few reasons. Firstly, he is highly selective when receiving feedback he's asked for. I and many others have given feedback on his Visegrad lore canonisation application when asked, only to be told that negative feedback and criticisms aren't valid or worth addressing (usually just responded to with 'Okay' and moved on from). While I can understand this if the feedback is shitty and unconstructive, all negative feedback about his writing is treated this way, leading to him claiming that "no-one has given negative feedback on Visegrad" despite multiple people have given constructive criticism after being asked - much of this feedback even comes back to the same points of criticism, yet is still not addressed in any way. I think it's a fairly unambiguous red flag when all criticism that could be interpreted as negative is ignored and called 'LRP criticism', whatever that even means. Secondly, I'm going to echo others and say that his general conduct and behaviour is, for the most part, quite negative. Half of what I see from him in lore discords and other public channels is just non-stop ragging on areas of lore he deems subpar (see constant 'remove Dominia', 'remove Diona', 'remove all aliens', etc.). While he claims that this is just jokes, it is absolutely constant and often the only thing you really see from him. There's also a trend of just replying to screenshots or logs of just anything the slightest bit funny done in-game with some variation on "I would have ahelped" or "you should be banned", which is just kinda shitty and toxic, especially when responding to absolutely harmless things. I find this especially dodgy with the context of my point on response to criticism, as he constantly "jokes" about removing everything but Sol while disregarding anything the slightest bit negative about his own projects. Thirdly, I feel Danse's writing and general thoughts on lore involve a really excessive focus on making things 110% realistic and hyper-detailed, but without much focus given to the actual characterisation potential of lore. To bring back the Visegrad example, Visegrad suffers from an overabundance of little details and minutiae (down to detailed and presumably scientifically accurate atmospheric composition statistics), yet without much in the way of engaging character hooks, running themes, or player interest. As the deputy application and some replies seem to present this approach as a positive, I think this will prove to be an issue should Danse be appointed. Finally, as others have more eloquently talked about, is the clear Solarian bias and nonstop OOC stanning whenever it comes up. Yes, I know Danse has claimed this is a joke, but he's never stopped doing it, either. This kinda broadly covers a lot of stuff, it's not as big a concern as the other two points, but it's still a significant portion of what they post and I'd be concerned that this bias might lead to proposed lore rewrites just making Sol bigger and cooler and stronger and everyone else weaker. I'll reiterate this, I have personal bias; however, I don't believe that makes my feedback wrong. EDIT: I have now been blocked by Danse as a result of this post, and am now apparently harassing them by continuing to give feedback. Make of that what you will.

I think if unstable mutagen is specifically such an issue as a weapon, we could easily address this by altering how it works. If its primary issue is just being an instant effect on-contact, we could simply make it work on inhalation or injection; making it take some time to take effect with some means of stopping the process partway through could also help.

Now I don't wanna be the guy to say this list is just a bunch of Torch features but like... It's almost all a list of Torch features, my guy. Gonna echo others in saying it's a bit early to be requesting a lot of this stuff. Also personally I'm opposed to merging Librarian and Chaplain/Counselor; while they're both rarely-played tertiary Service roles with little to no mechanics associated with them, they both have very very different vibes in play, and I speak as someone who mained a Counselor here for a good few months. Plus like, it'd be weird for the Chaplain to manage the Library and the Librarian to manage the Chapel, assuming they'll be present in some capacity. Uhhh misc takes on things: I don't agree with bridge bunnies being whitelisted, they're low impact and authority enough that it doesn't really matter as much as the real Command roles, plus they sound like a nice sort of learner role for people looking to get into Command. An emergency armory miiiight work? It'd need to contain very low power weaponry (think bolt-action pistols) and I think opening back up the trashfire that was General Quarters and full crew militias every round is a very big risk. Would have to be done very carefully with strict guidelines and admin regulation on what is acceptable with it and when. The Assistant -> Crewman change and the misc role renames... Idk why you want this? This is just replicating Bay except in a civilian setting where it makes less sense. Other stuff sounds fine, if ambitious and code-heavy, though largely seems to just be asking for Bay ports.

Might want to change 'NanoTrasen' to 'Stellar Corporate Conglomerate/SCC' just to preclude dumb stuff with contractors.

This was a bug with the plate carriers, got fixed last night. Plate carriers don't have the badge built in anymore.

Sorry for not replying for so long! Kept not getting round to it, my bad. It's great to have this stuff properly laid out, thanks. If there's nothing more to sort out and no actual action is being taken against me, I guess you can close this complaint?

But as you've now said, the actual issue at hand wasn't corrected. If the clarification is neither about my case specifically nor relevant to the rules you believe I'm in violation of, why is it relevant at all? The entire point of this addition is the bit you refuse to comment on, that none of your witnesses contacted me or spoke to me about their concerns or complaints. You're accusing me of knowingly and maliciously setting out to ruin other players' experience, yet you refuse to acknowledge that I have legitimately heard nothing substantially OOCly critical from any of the witnesses you say you're acting on behalf of and in the interests of. This isn't some unimportant minor detail that doesn't need comment; this is the difference between me just playing a character that you think skirts slightly close to the reasonable character rule versus accusations of me being a purposeful and malicious actor within the community, which, if it were true, could easily be interpreted to warrant a ban. And if you'd read my previous post(s) in full, you'd see that the one person who talked to me and gave criticism wasn't "taking issue" with the character, they gave constructive criticism on my wider playstyle with a mention of this character as part of that criticism; this was again constructive criticism, not someone coming to me and saying I'm out of line for playing this character, and stated that they were not acting as one of your witnesses. And I've responded to this point so, SO many times! I've addressed it in a number of ways across both the original tickets and almost every post in this entire thread, and you've STILL yet to acknowledge or actually address my responses! This entire complaint is has been me responding to you in depth and you choosing to ignore that I've done so, then go right back into insisting I'm wrong, or making yet more accusations against me without addressing or justifying any of the earlier accusations. This started out with mousetraps, and I still haven't even got a proper answer about why you think putting mousetraps on vents violates the server rules after a full week of this complaint and its resulting discussion. There's no bloody point in me even writing this at this point, as I know it's not gonna be meaningfully addressed beyond a flat denial or an accusation that I'm posting this in bad faith, and I'm starting to doubt there's any real point in replying here at all. Whatever, I've written this honestly and truthfully from my perspective here, so I'll post it.

Right, sorry about the lack of engagement with this! Kiiinda moved house like a day or two after posting, lost track of things for a bit. Yeah, that's a fair concern. The good thing about this is that it should be fairly easy to put these kits together, as no new items or behaviours should be required - it's just bundling existing items together, for the most part, so it should be pretty simple to expand the selections. Also, I'd argue the current system feels just as repetitive if not more; many inexperienced traitors just pick safe, simple tools like the emag and the coolest sounding weapon with no regard for whether it makes any lore sense or advances much of a story. I'd also try and make the more generic kits affordable enough that antags should be able to afford other stuff as well to mix things up, as well as the fact that plenty different gimmicks should be viable with the same kits.

Right. I've tried to explain my motivations with the character so many times at this point and it's just not getting through. I've already written my view and justification of the way I've written and played the character, fluency and denseness included, so I'm not going to repeat myself over and over again with it. As I've said before, the character has a very poor level of fluency, with the bare minimum knowledge of where places are to clean, commands to clean, and other essentials for some less-than-minimum-wage Zhan janitor in a comically exploitative work contract. Now, onto specific points: If that's the case, why did you say you were corrected on "the fluency issue"? This is contradictory and misleading, unless there's another fluency issue I haven't been made aware of. This is false. I've only ever had one person contact me with concerns/complaints about this character; it was spurred by the posting of this complaint; the criticism they gave about my playstyle was valid and constructive, and I've since tried to act on it (with my other characters). They also said they were not upset about the character and denied that they were acting as a witness for the purposes of this complaint. As they were also the only person (as far as I know/remember) to contact me with complaints or feedback about the character, I don't believe your claim that "some" of your witnesses have contacted me about it. Also, this post keeps on the idea that I'm guilty and malicious until I can somehow prove a lack of bad intent on my own part. Please stop accusing me of getting all my kicks here out of making people have a bad time, there's no real evidence here for it and you're not engaging with my arguments that I'm not out to harass anyone beyond just saying "one would hope you're not a shithead, but you are." Everything you've written assumes I'm lying with malicious intent, which would be grounds for additional, more serious administrative action against me if this complaint is overturned (as per server rules, 5.d., "On Staff": If you are contacted by an admin, you are expected to reply, and communicate clearly and in good will. Failure to reply or disrespect towards admins may be grounds for a ban.) You've also only chosen to reply to two small, very specific parts of my own responses, with little address toward my main point beyond refuting all that I've said in my defence.

There's nothing more anti-climactic than a blob core/hivebot beacon/malf AI being taken out mostly risk-free with a long-range sniper emitter three screens away. However, emitters also provide a number of cool and good functions like breaking open walls/objects, charging the SM, anomaly interactions, etc. My proposal is simple: Make the emitter's range limited, perhaps to about a view distance, to make it less of a fire-and-forget risk-free solution to problems. This would preserve its other uses, while still keeping it useful to a degree when fighting off blobs and such things.

Bumping.

So I really didn’t want to have to reply to this but I don’t really see any other option, as your response contains the exact same issue I made this complaint about: Whenever I asked questions or clarifications about what you were saying in the original ticket(s), you’d refuse to elaborate or clarify and then come back with a broader, harsher accusation than what the issue originally allegedly was, and I’ve still yet to receive any real explanation as to why any of what you’re accusing me of was A) problematic or B) even being addressed by you. This whole thing started out as you bwoinking me telling me to stop putting down mousetraps in halls, escalated into a fullblown investigation of whether my character was rules-breaking in his poor Basic fluency, and now it’s escalating to an accusation of me actively, purposefully, and maliciously designing and playing a character purely to fuck with people and piss other players off. Not only this, but every instance of your accusations against me, inside and outside of the original tickets, has been nothing but vague, non-specific incidents which I can’t possibly explain or defend as A) I haven’t been told the specifics of the situation you’re talking about, B) you’ve refused to explain or elaborate on what I did that was wrong, C) you’ve refused to explain why the things I’m being told I did wrong are wrong, D) are so aggressively interrogative that I can’t form a coherent argument against it, and E) none of my points or defences are addressed beyond an outright refutation before moving onto the next accusation, meaning I don’t even know if me defending my actions worked or not before I’m being accused of something else. As I seem to need to write this out in full again, despite me trying to explain this in the original ticket, I am not trying to OOCly upset people by cleaning their departments. When writing/playing this character I've intended him to mainly take a background role in most rounds, providing some fun IC conflict while playing around with some fun characterisation and exploring neat bits of the lore (namely the Quizosa nuclear strike). This character is a funny Zhan man who just wants to clean the station because that's his job, and that's a valid way to read the character if you don't want to go any deeper than that. If people choose to engage with the character some more, make an effort to get through to him or pick up on the tidbits of characterisation given through emotes, flavour text and items, they'll find a much more tragic figure who's essentially a slave to the corporation, trying to make some money to leave the remainder of his family when he eventually succumbs to his terminal illness. The point I'm trying to make here is that it's somewhat intentional that he's a bit annoying, that he causes some minor conflict with his insistence on cleaning every last thing, as that can be a great hook for fun roleplay if people choose to run with it. Now, onto the actual specific content of your response itself; I’ll be breaking this down into parts to make it easier to follow and address. Detailed response is spoilered for your convenience: tl;dr: This response is not only largely irrelevant, accusatory and inflammatory, but actively attempts to both undermine my complaint and get further administrative action taken against me while providing little to no response to my points, the complaint itself or my sincere and repeated requests for explanation as to why any of this is even happening. Sorry about the length. This has been extremely stressful to deal with and write about, given the open hostility I'm being treated with.

Bumping as it's been over 24 hours since posting, as per staff complaint board rules.

BYOND Key: Memescope McGee (don’t judge me I made the account like a week before montage parodies went out of style, shut upppppp) Staff BYOND Key: WitchBells Game ID: car-c0VY Reason for complaint: In the given round I was playing my Zhan Janitor character, Jrihrarmrra Baqazu (or the Zhanitor, for anyone familiar), much as I do most rounds I play him: I put down mousetraps on vents in mildly inconvenient places, obliviously and insistently did my job and cleaned regardless of what was happening around me, in an industrious sort of way. I was then bwoinked by WitchBells and was immediately told to stop placing mousetraps in the halls, then later in the ticket informed me my character’s poor fluency in Basic is in violation of the corporate regulations’ standard hiring requirements. To me, all of these things sound fine from an OOC, administrative/rules-based perspective. It’s all IC conflict, I’m not harassing anyone or yelling slurs or violating major rules; it’s *intentional* that this character causes some IC conflict, it’s a lot of fun to play and I’ve had people enjoy the character being around to generate fun, low-stakes, non-antag conflict. My issue is that WitchBells’s rulings (that A: I need to stop putting down mousetraps as a janitor, and B: all characters must maintain *full* fluency in Basic regardless of position or history) seem to be arbitrary OOC administrative action over IC issues. And to give extra context on the fluency issue and the character as a whole, this character has records that state that they’re essentially unpaid labour whose only real reward to working at all is health insurance for vital life-extending medical treatments for his terminal radiation sickness; this was approved by a CCIA member when consulting them about this, providing further justification for the character’s hiring being relatively lax on standards and for their poor Basic fluency, plus the fact that they are just a janitor on a non-existent minimum wage. As it stands, I’m left very confused as to why I was bwoinked about this. To me, this just seems like IC conflict taken into OOC, where an IR or something like that would be much more appropriate. Evidence/logs/etc: Unfortunately I wasn’t able to grab the logs before the server restarted. Aforementioned character records: Enrolled in the NanoTrasen Low-Income Employee Healthcare Initiative; the employee's healthcare expenses are covered by NanoTrasen Incorporated using funds drawn from the employee's salary without overdraft fees (excluding unforeseen medical complications). Additional remarks:

This suggestion/proposal is simply to add lore faction-themed kits or bundles to the traitor/merc/whatever antag uplinks, just like is already done for the merc gear loadouts but more specifically geared towards non-team antags. As has been the case with merc, this should help to better root antag stuff in the lore and help antags establish some good lore hooks. These kits should likely include a somewhat comprehensive grab bag of appropriate equipment (similar to merc gear loadouts), perhaps replacing the armour component of merc loadouts with lore-appropriate tools and items at a slight discount to encourage antags from different factions to play in a way that fits those factions. As I'm just one barely code-literate braindead gamer, I don't have ideas for every single faction in the lore, so I'll happily accept suggestions for kits in this thread; I also don't have the coding chops to code in new item behaviours myself, so this will probably be limited to existing items unless a coder decides to help out. Currently, kits include: ALA agent kit: Some explosives, a silenced pistol and/or folding shotgun + ammo, M'sai field rations, loaded toolbelt & taj insulated gloves. Sol military surplus kit (WIP): Military belt with grenades, Solarian service pistol + ammo, syndie headset/encryption key, [some more undecided tools] Frontier patriot kit (WIP): Some kind of revolver + holster, Vulture spacesuit w/ tank and magboots, [some more undecided tools] Obviously these are just initial kits to put the idea across, I'll probably add good suggestions to this post as they come in and update the kits according to feedback. And yes, I'm willing to code it myself, with a bit of help.

I'd be fine with having this as a replacement for the disruptors' window-passing. Having the disruptors pass windows can be a surprisingly big strategic advantage vs largely ballistic-based antags (e.g. merc, ling, ninja, sometimes raiders... actually, most antags are largely non-laser, thinking about it), as then even if you disable/outlast Sec's rifles and carbines they can just switch to sidearms and keep the positioning advantage.

Big agree on that. The sprites themselves are alright, but the amount of detailed, muscular body contouring and stuff is kind of weird and off-putting, especially since this is a civilian, corporate position. While this is also a problem with our old/current legacy Captain sprites, they simply don't look anything like you'd expect for the position, both in terms of consistency with other uniforms and from the pure mil-lite aesthetic of the new uniforms. Don't get me wrong, I'd love some new HoP/Captain uniforms, but this ain't it.

I'll just add that the round that triggered this, the (first) dead man's switch explosion which knocked out a chunk of Security wasn't triggered by death or anything - that was a purposeful, manual suicide bombing that would've just been done with another type of explosive if the dead man's switch was made unavailable.

Like this change a lot! Brings EMT in line with the other movements away from IRL specific terminology. I was gonna put that it might be worth considering making it 'Medical First Responder' for clarity, but realised that was dumb since it's less concise and made redundant by the fact they're in Medical anyway. @Geeves I +1'd your project, send me the foot pics