Cnaym

I have taken to considering it a good antag round if the people I interacted with do not complain, as staff the dead chat comments will ruin otherwise enjoyable rounds, as can AooC sometimes. Usually better to disable them while going antag yourself. Stricter rule enforcement. I do not mean ban everyone who did an oopsie, but talking over issues is the only way to improve on them. If antags do blatently insane stuff ahelp it, let staff talk to them and clarify why they did it what they did. This sparks an entire range of emotions but most importantly you learn to talk with staff to explain your antag actions and in my optimistic childlike fantasy start to consider such things before getting prodded about it. The basics of why are we here, what is our goal, how are we going about it, how far would this character go for it and so on. From the rules themself you are not supposed to kill for the sake of it, gimmiks that go for two minutes and only serve to provoke security are not gimmiks at all. Stuff that does only drive a round straight against the wall like Nuke-Ops should be either done following the rules of the server or not at all. If security and antags are at least nudged to follow the server rules, the atmosphere should improve for everyone involved. The rest is a community mindset issue. If crew is grateful for antags then more people will try it who wish to do more than combat. It is easier to go along with antags if you can understand their position and ideas. At the top of the list are antags that not only make sense but propose issues for the crew to figure out personally. Dominians are a good example of this, most players are familiar with their lore and have established characters. Going in as high priest and demanding IPC sacrifices makes little to no sense for them. Flipside of the coin: Antag decides that the Edicts were changed and all dominians are to rejoice about the new (probably bad) circumstances -> Suddenly you got a lot of experienced folks going with it and causing all kind of situations. Back on point though: I do not think that code or rules can do all the work on that one. As long as okayish antags are treated shitty we will see little to no great antags. It is almost impossible to "train" antags during the rounds so the workshop idea or join as merc to help new folks is usually pretty worthless. Improvement therefore is most likely in my eyes if it comes from the antag player themselfes. Determined to improve, fine with failing a ton before that. Ignore the hate. Some people write down gimmiks that they come up with, take notes on how they work when they finaly role the slot for it and rate it afterwards. Could help if one wants to go the extra mile. Overall I got little to offer as a quick fix, I planned to write an antag guide but it's taking me a while since I keep running into walls on clearing up concepts. I think the biggest and fastest improvement would be of everyone involved to calm down and chill a bit. Don't open a conversation with a fireball or a las rifle and such. Goes for both sides of the conflict obviously.

"Oh? You're approaching me?"

Going to group those two just to ping you both. It comes with experience. The way I would recommend starting out is to enable traitor and do small stuff like one a day or every other day you play. That way you can come up with a goal beforehand and give it a try. Highpop usually has the bonus of not having to "carry" a round while lowpop often makes you solo antag which can be hard on the RP but quite easy on the mechanics -> Less eyes and guns around. Team modes like merc and raider depend too heavily on the team mates. Ninja or wiz with familiars is usually easier to start out with. It is hard to find the combination of mechanicly robust, OOCly healthy mindset and will to roleplay. The nature of not being canon and a healthy dose of "lets see how far I can get" is what motivated me when I started out, but I go months without enabling antag as well since it can be draining quickly. The last hint is to scale down expectations. No raider team has ever pulled le epic heist. Just rob peoples wallets. You will get more roleplay and laughs than with complicated gimmiks. For the favorite sneaky mode of vampire I recommend just sucking people in the middle of the hallway and roll with what happens. You can fail multiple times per round, my record were 4 x 200 credits as vamp for jumping people without having them forget about it in a single round ? If all else fails pick some thermal visors, a powerfist and steal lightbulbs. Chaos will ensue within minutes and most people enjoy "a drunk miner with the metal glove he found outside". As for the prep work that is directly linked to chance, experience and routine. Sometimes you get super unlucky and got to space walk half nacked and break into the captains office with a mag light, sometimes you find insulated gloves before finding your department. That is pretty much what keeps it entertaining for me long term, the random nature of the game and the fact that you get to play with different people every time. You can get good enough with mechanics to rob the vault within the first 10 minutes of the round without being noticed. In the end it only makes you notice how little you really need as antag to make a fun round. There is a reason why people like Ryan Barret are so popular targets, they make interaction entertaining regardless of the finer details. As you get used to mechanics like hacking an AI you start to combine and experiment with it to test out what works within the systems. You start to switch your fingerprints ID with someone and stop wearing gloves to get them arrested for example or just run into surgery and put the captains ID on the patient claiming absolute innocence in front of the security team and pointing towards the surgeon who was just doing his job. Sky is really the limit as antag, combat most of the times not being the key but a minor annoyance.

Play security! They are all scared chicken who almost exclusively know guns and CQC Some of the best roleplayers hide in the endless flood of officers -> You will rarely work together with the same team, almost never on high pop times Which is absolutely okay. I prefer people getting antag banned over perma. One is meant to help them improve their roleplay, the other is meant to remove them from the community for a while. Mindset and dedication is the only way to become better at it. If you struggle with a specific aspect of security figure out what makes them struggle and turn them tables ?

Fix it. ? Not a fan, looks washed out to me, lack of details. May be just my screen but I have already taken to calling the red one turd colored ICly. Maybe it's just me but the faction suits got some amazing designs while the others seem to be more of single colored blobs to me. Probably going to ignore it as most sprite changes since it finally comes down to personal flavor. If I had to buy them I'd take the TCFL one and use the CE suit as the EVA one instead. The EVA one looks like another softsuit to me and the hazard one is missing it's dangerous vibes completly. Art is hard, I do not usually comment on it.

The prices of multiple things like agent IDs have been dropped, they went from an option to consider to something almost everyone buys right now because of their cash to usefulness ratio. Other items are so expensive that it makes no sense at all to buy them, the anti matter rifle with a single shot for 25TC comes to mind, the 50TC minigun and so on. Antags are also able to buy relatively cheap combat suits from different factions on the go. The theory is probably to portray factions and lore but in reality you see only few used due to their stats to TC ratio. In regards to vampires and changelings, both antag types have been straight up broken for the majority of the last year. This once again makes people take the same paths at every attempt, potato ling being the worst offender here. Yes. Both. Preferably not a sec main with uplink shutting down other antags. Identifying yourself as main is the first step of improvement here. You cannot afford to be a one trick pony as antag. Someone playing only security (team based with support roles) does usually not think flexible enough to play a reliable ninja (you got to open your own doors there, nobody to call). Learning medical and engineering systems is super useful. The most common antag end right now is a failure to coordinate based on a lack of map knowledge, both departments enable you to explore and learn. Asking yourself if you can use and understand a hardsuit before taking it as merc or going full ninja is probably a good idea here (as example, very common issue). As an antag you lack the three things that lore events get for free: Predefined loadout, premade gimmik, free announcements. If you then see the eight people representing a lore event stomp into the station in hardsuits to murder a couple of people and leave again you could begin to wonder if antags are really expected to do anything more than that. I like a tank invasian as much as the next guy but a focus on storries and personal conflict would do most antag gimmiks a lot of good. We have those antags right now that are more or less known to only roleplay with a small part of the crew, for example only cargo or their service buddies. This is already an improvement over no interaction or gimmik and I would like to see it embraced and supported. Sure it's boring as fuck to play officer to guard a library for two hours but I prefer it to see the roleplaying antag swatted 20 mins into a round. Currently you cannot even dock with the station without an announcement or cloak system unless you wish to have the armory at yellow dock by the time your ship opens. If we wish to discuss something questions are the way to go ? Thank you for your questions!

This has probably gotten rid of any old antags desire to provdie fun for the crew, while making those with the right mindset shy away from the roles alltogether. I do not agree on the robustness idea at all. We currently do have people who can click others with las rifles, not a robust security team. Basic mechanics are no longer even considered or tried because the one route leads to success the fastest and reliably. The most robust officer we had was Klaus Kitzler, not because he got the valids or clicked the most antags, but because the player came in each and every round to give the antag the benefit of the doubt, stick to his own character and focus the crews safety while keeping humor and roleplay as their main targets. When I get to hunt down four semi wizards with machine pistols who I can basicly grab barehanded because they are not familiar with the mechanics in any shape or form I have no need to celebrate that largely in OOC or be toxic to the players. I absolutely get that securities fun in such a round comes from winning, but winning gets stale pretty fast without a challenge as well. The challenges of antaging used to be so much higher. They punished the player and a single forgotten tool could mean your round ended early. As a result crew was usually understanding, gave time to roleplay, provided aid in the most comical ways like leaving freebies out in the public and such. Antags were appreciated for taking on the challenge really. You could see a new antag improve with basicly every attempt they did. People would not have thought of going antag without being able to use gauze, EVA gear, guns and tools for doors. Stuff like heisting an AI was planned out and coordinated. Not headbutting a door until you get shot in the back by the arriving security forces and then blaming the airlocks or security. People then figured out that hacking the AI is one of the most useful and easy things you can do as antag, and suddenly your biggest issue was your silent helper nobody else was aware of. We had solo antags step out into the hallway lights to perform their show, not security hunting them in the tunnels on the first sign of troubles. This was when security still had access to the tunnels. Without a challenge we do not come to creative solutions. We get repeats of the same stuff happening every other round.

We do not promote sane characters or believable antags. Security has almost no way to handle antags without lethals and is in no form gaining anything from doing so. This result in stuff like a ling getting killed 6 times in a single round. Antags are provided powergaming gear instead of roleplay equipment. Gimmiks have been replaced by power fantasies. Creative antags are no longer trusted and will be shut down violently. Peace Antags are ignored by security until the lethals are authorized. Security and Antags have been engaging in an endless circle of kill or be killed. Roleplay is not the goal for most folks on either side. Mains on both sides are terrible at their roles and unwilling to learn new roles or improve. Balancing is an absolute joke at this point and it seems like everyone involved made it worse before giving up. There is no room for escalation if you bring a minigun or nuke onto the station. The more stuff antags got the worse their perfomances has become. Ninja and Revolution pretty much suicided by equipment at this point. Oldschool antags were in it for the challenge. Antaging is no longer challenging. Antags have been allowed to break rules frequently and just reroll antag the following round, playerbase does not ahelp if they do not see any use with it. Lore events focused on new weapons and kill counts. Antags usually work with less prep time. My experience of not only playing an excessive amount of rounds throughout all departments and antag roles but also during my time as admin. The Aurora seems to be suffering from a lack of creativity and understanding, both on a roleplay and mechanics level, that cannot be filled with weaponry and hardsuit sprites. Ignoring all that, the server atmosphere is not the sole responsibility of the modmin team, we all do our part of making it better or worse. The result of a community steering constantly away from roleplay may indicate a lack of interest or comprehension.

I am all for improving upon the prior laws if it is done by identifying a specific issue and improving upon the wording of it. This new lawset is pretty much either ignored or broken, both are not good enough for the evironment imho. We already had simple situations like two crewmember willing to murder each other, that allowed for absolutely zero involvement of stationbounds. Just the small addition of the "to the best of your abillities" allowed for decision making, option weighing and rolepley. The new laws are -> Fuck off into a corner until someone gives you a clear order which you most likely have to ignore I am fully aware that AIs and Borgs in the past used to spark the debate over an interpretation and that staff had to police such on a case by case basis, but the new lawset pretty much forces you to ignore it, there is no room for interpretation, if I wish to play maintenance drone I will join as one of them. Seeing how the new lawset is going to work would only happen if the playerbase follows it and ahelps breaks in it. Neither have been strong sites in the past and if someone is about to die ICly and I ignore a law to help them out they will probably not even consider ahelping it. -> I have seen multiple such situations within the first two rounds under the new laweset and pretty much everyone involved ignored them happily. If the goal was and still is: "To allow the AI some leeway when dealing with antagonists..." then we should allow AI and Borgs to interact with crew and antags, not deny both with a restrictive lawset. I still have hopes that the whitelist and the team are there to block and sort out terrible AI play and promote the healthy variants. That also means respecting the players freedom and trusting them with their decision making instead of removing any decisions from the role. The good AIs are usually known for doing a ton of stuff during the round, having personalities, knowing the station and so on. The bad part is hyper focused on valids, winning and formality. I would prefer if we promote and enable the first kind.

Pretty much all of the laws are rather badly formulated and I do not know how they are meant to be implemented in an average round. The result will be as follows. To be of any use as AI, even opening doors for a medic to rescue someone requires you to break and ignore your lawset -> If you cannot support the crew without doing so, why are the laws formulated like this. If I would not know it any better the entire law rework seems to be just another attempt at making it a passive role that will be unused and removed. I would also blame it on missing experience rather than bad faith though but that seems problematic as well. Instead we should consider that many people who are a lot smarter than any of us have spend multiple decades debating how to handle AI. The current laws seem to be an improvement over anything suggested in this thread.

That image pretty much detracted nothing from the points raised. I had the same thread written up to post it a day later without ever interacting with Incog before due to the points raised. Luckily people do not have to like each other to engage in friendly communication ?

Alb summed it up pretty nicely. I am all for making it either official or replacing it by an official one. It makes no sense to have a semi official server like this. While I understand that it did not start out as one, the fact that it is used as one makes it clear for me that there is a need for an official from of it to address the issues outlined in this thread. I also prefer to use the forums and such for appeals or complaints, a structure that is needed if discord is used for event related stuff that turns it to be canon and all. On the topic of moderation teams itself, I see no issue with having volunteers moderate such a discord with a focus on it. The old department channels were handled like this with official server admins at the top of the list.

I am once more asking for IC coverage of Phoenixport. It is nice to have information on the wiki but please accompany an ongoing lore change with IC news, the change is happening in two days and people currently stumble upon it on accident. This might be a good article for the new outlet

100% Agree with Schwann, I like to keep my opinion until I see the sprites ingame but they just do not fit or look realistic at all. They would do great as sprites for lasertag equipment but apart from that I have not found much positive to say about that. The mini disruptor looks more liky a hypospray to me than anything resembling a weapon as it is 90% grip and has no features resembling weaponry to me at all. The shotgun sprites would be saveable as high tech equipment when made a bit darker for ERT or Antag equipment I suppose but laser weaponry being white makes no sense from a visual nor technical viewpoint. A lot of details and usability were lost with this change as well, the charge meters being semi useless as of now for example.

Seeing a unathi wordlessly run around fireballing people and deploying smoke whenever an officer even coughs nearby is the lowest form of antaging we have. Seeing all of command cryo and security follow makes it even worse. Let the shitters win another one, cut more content for the invested part of the playerbase. It's going to happen and nobody is going to profit from it. Bandaid is not going to solve a fundamentally wrong thing like antags being constantly allowed to ignore rules. This topic was however not created to fix anything but instead to remove something.

BYOND key: Cnaym Discord name/id: Cnaym#9103 Borg / AI names: Kaiser / Elysia Have you read the Aurora wiki page about the AI?: Yes, sadly I have this memory issue where I remember wiki details forever Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?: Used to be one heck of a borg main, I play my AI frequently to fill in the Bar or Library, Elysia is known for having a hologram around somewhere that is offering services that are not staffed or general chatter and them cursed general advice announcements. I enjoy the AI role, I don't abuse the AI role, I want to keep doing both, simple as that. I like to do AI to either help new people or handle the station itself, speeding up and helping out with stuff like the engine settups and smelters and such. Overall I got positive feedback for Elysia and I would like to keep playing it. Antags probably know me for the looc: "REEEEEEEE CODE RED" meme when I spot them instead of doing so ICly. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? I got two notes relating to my borg play, one for ghosting in a recharger when I was too tired to climb into the cryo station next to it and one for one punching another borg into oblivion while being hunted by two malfs. Both are twoish years old. Nothing on my AI play afaik. Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yuh

That would be a single line fix then? Because it's pretty much useless to have an unstaffed checkpoint locked down.

After another round of standing at the wall of the Odin without any meaningful reasoning or response from the other side, I am suggesting to make it CCIA/ModMin decision again when it closes or opens so that a) We get Odin sec when it is locked down b) Do not get to stare at the wall after extendo Simple suggestion but it's a bit mind baffling to me why we got a new Odin with ghost spawners for the bar when the checkpoint can just nope out at any time

This is my favorite part about medical and the mere existence of our hillariously broken chemicals make such moments a rarity. At first glance the suggestion seems to destroy what our current concept of a medbay tries to do. It's a case of gameplay freedom versus roleplay restrictions. On the one hand I would love much stricter restrictions and a heavier focus on roleplay and skill instead of the current heavy focus on play to win. On the other hand this was a permanent issue since I joined the server and is the closes reflection of the antag mindset any crew department displays. I get daily reminders that security tries to win, medical HAS to win. This ranges from IC complaints to looc and dead chat salt. It's not the same as shutting the antags down, but the level of "just patch me asap and roleplay with someone else" is heartbreaking to say the least. There is this idea that a mechanical restriction is preferable to an administrative one. And from my time on the admin team I would have to agree. There is simply not much to be done about 90% of our medical players focusing on the winning aspect. I would have some ideas like nerfing chemicals or implementing a skill system to reduce it, but ultimately it's futile if the mindset remains the same. Now onto the suggested changes. They are a very simple solution to a very complex issue. But overall I consider them a solution by now. If everyone wants to Dr. House they can do so now, it'll be chaotic at the beginning but overall it should get rid of a lot of confusion and issues people run into with the medbay systems. On the other hand the roleplay focus remains open ended and everyone is free to roleplay their chars and specialization as the want to. I don't see why me being able to access everything would limit me in how I play my doctor or what to focus on. Just slam into their records that they are primarily a shrink or surgeon and that's it. If you prefer chems you do them, if you prefer surgery you do that, if you wanna be an intern or a nurse (slam that as alt title for intern) and be done with it really. The only thing that would need a little adjustments is the slots, but I do not think that less than 6 medical members would be a negative change overall.

Oh yeah. The old mode needs to remain a viable option. But an added shotgun alternative mode would make it really stand out from the default arsenal

I don't know as many nice words as Redoktober does, but the insane amount of waifus collecting around Bears tajara like some super magnet for kittens is astonishing. Also the sprite is nice, please add it.

I am aware of that. It requires the magic admin touc. Hence my choice of words. I would be happier with it added to the system, but getting it stable and working is more important ?

Intensity level and voted rounds I guess. This was what I suspected yeah, the reaction to having a possible extended is to focus all other votes on a single intensity, whereas heavy has some really odd choices. Malf for example could easily be (exclusive to) medium, which oddly enough according to this data would lower its chance to happen. Modes like mercs + borer or the infamous tower defense are almost impossible within the current implementation, which while not big, still feel like a loss to me. A suggestion would be to have persistant chance improvements, meaning that after a high intensity vote medium, low and extendo require a smaller majority than the prior rounds result. This would slightly tilt the scale towards more variety while allowing highpop to have back to back votes when a clear majority is present for an option.

I like the suggestion and this idea a lot. The drill already auto recharges rather quickly and is not a weapon since it cannot really hit anyone or do damage. Having the icelance be more of an ambush weapon compared to traditional guns would make it a lot more useful as well. All in all a good idea to spice the weapons up and get a bit of a fresh wind into the shooting economy of things.