Shenaanigans

You're correct that gunning straight for tcomms to put the station in the dark and unable to communicate nearly as well is a very powerful tool for an antagonist whose goal it is to cripple the station, but is it engaging? Don't forget that the point of antagonist actions in round is to create a narrative for the round and make things fun. It's not to win. This is the same reason why we have rules against powergaming and why most players roll their eyes at off-station antags who break into the captain's office for the spare at 00:10 round time; acting in a way that is strictly strategic from an IC perspective does not at all mean that what you're doing is fun for other people. I personally hate when antagonists take down comms, because if you're not engineering going on a quest into maintenance to fix it then the only way you're engaging with that is to sit around barely able to RP because you have no idea what's going on on the rest of the station. I'd be behind the idea of making tcomms less esoterically headache inducing to fix, sure, but I'm definitely behind putting that kind of sabotage in line with the SM/atmospherics. +1

Revenant definitely has a LOT of potential and I find the idea of it to be a refreshing departure from how every other roundtype we have works, so really it has my praise and admiration for what it accomplishes so far. I just think that it also needs time to take in the feedback it's gathered from tests and some more fleshing out-- things like more thorough guidelines on how revenants are expected to act, tweaks to their strength/abilities, adjustment to the spawn timer, etc. It's an entirely new gamemode, of course it's going to have growing pains. I would agree that it should be removed from the secret rotation because of how different it is from everything else in our server's repertoire, but that's sort of complicated by the new "intensity" voting system we have being tested. Not sure how that would work.

I have to agree with tomkiel here. I don't see how people voting for something and then ghosting when it doesn't win impacts the round, as this is a hobby and choosing not to partake in round types you don't like should be a right for players to keep. The only time voting and then not playing is actually harmful is when it sways the vote. Generalizing this to all voters basically punishes people who did nothing wrong in an attempt to... not make the people who deserve it feel bad? I don't understand it, honestly.

Yeah if this is going to be the only way that post-voting lock ins happen, I have to retract my support completely. I see no purpose in forcing people to play a gamemode that they didn't vote for. There are some modes that I know I would not want to play were they to win, and my tastes vary wildly from those of other players. I wouldn't want to force them to play when they're uninterested in the antag type, just as I wouldn't want to be dragged into, say, a tower defense or borer round when I voted for extended in the hopes of having a laid back round. This is not the way to go in my eyes.

I was the mercenary Radstorm and can definitely agree that that round was pretty much a trashfire from about an hour onward. It happens in mercenary rounds, and the addition of a merc ERT who was actually playing the "alliance to the highest bidder" angle out in RP just ended up forming the perfect storm. It's hard for me to really respond to the material of this complaint without specific incidents being brought up-- given how many different firefights went on throughout those two hours all blurring together --but generally I believe that we reacted suitably to security and did not, to my knowledge, engage when we had not been shot at first. For posterity's sake, our OOCly decided upon gimmick was going to be implanting people with explosives and then just turning them loose onto the station to do our bidding under threat of being blown up. This was on track for all of 20 minutes before Blondie was captured and we had to shift focus to getting them back and then treating them in the now empty medical. After that, trying to get the gimmick back on track seemed futile when security wasn't taking the fact that we had the implanted Detective with us seriously so we pivoted to the more bland "let us into the vault, I guess". That's when the ERT beacon went off and things slid off into further chaos from there.

The alert system will definitely help, but I'd still rather the force method to be honest. My reasoning for this being that it'll be a lot easier to miss a certain ckey coming up as flagged more than once when you could deter people from doing it at all with the idea of being locked into playing and then having to go to the effort of cryoing after. It just seems more efficient. I also don't particularly see the reason for wanting to push back against this (as a general response to people doing so in this thread) because it's very easy to avoid being caught up in it. Don't vote if you aren't 100% sure that you will play and have time to remain in at least some of the round. Easy. Voting is the mechanism by which players decide what the next round will look like, and if you aren't going to participate then you should not get to decide. It'd be like casting a vote for what to have for dinner when you're not eating.

I feel like the way to handle this already exists under the Vandalism charge. If someone's breaking parts of the station in any way, you can just brig/fine them for that.

I do agree that the alt title of "Barista" is pretty superfluous and, given the past precedent of stripping out alt titles in other departments, I wouldn't mind it being removed so we don't run into the weird gray area of trying to draw distinctions between the responsibilities of Bartender versus Barista. As far as removing the second slot goes? Hard disagree. That slot was added to allow more people to be able to play a very popular, RP oriented role as well as provide RP for the people behind the bar when no one is in ordering drinks. There's not a lot of mechanical pressure on bartenders to perform quickly, so a bit of shuffling around each other really isn't enough justification in my mind to go back down to one slot. Maybe you can make a case for re-mapping the bar to take up more of that huge space that's only occupied by tables right now if it feels that cramped.

Faye is consistently a very fun and positive presence around the server as well as someone who is both eager to learn and pass on her knowledge to others, which are traits that I think are downright essential for a Command whitelisted player. I have no doubt that she'll catch on to Command play very quickly and further benefit the medical department by helping along newbies who are trying to wrap their heads around brainmed. +1

This would be a pretty damn helpful addition. Having to rapid fire click for multiple minutes at a time is just not enjoyable and, so long as it takes up both your hand slots while doing so, having it be automatic to at least free you up to type would just be an overall benefit.

It's true that workarounds for this exist, but the point of this isn't to introduce a bulletproof way of forcing more people to play rounds. It's to cut back on "meme voting" for roundtypes that no one plans to actually play and leaving the people who do want to stuck with a less than desirable roundtype. Sure someone can joke vote for wizard/malf/etc with this measure in place, be locked in, change their character's preference to visitor or a highly contested role and hope they get spit back into the lobby, but that's a lot of extra effort to go to just so that you can have your "haha funee joke vote". It's not a perfect fix, I'll admit, but it will at least encourage people to take voting seriously.

As a moderator, I'll say that I would absolutely tell a person to knock it off if they were using control over a nymph to wantonly destroy things, bite people, or just have a huge nuisance of themselves. I don't think you can really compare them directly to rats (which I supported the removal of) because rats provided literally zero RP to the round while nymphs are actual, sentient creatures who can speak, gather knowledge from crew, and become gestalts. I don't see a reason why the spawn method for them shouldn't be made more accessible. It exists in a frustrating, half-broken state right now, so it should either be fixed to be sensible like posibrains or removed entirely if people think it's detrimental to RP.

I would assume that a new rule to that effect would be added. Like how we have rules against DCing for long periods of time.

I've seen discussions about this for a while now and I do think that it's necessary, given the amount of rounds we have actually seen swayed by "joke votes" or just votes by people who otherwise are not intending to play the round. It harms player population and causes a lot of frustration from people who were voting seriously. It's true that people can easily just cryo right after the round starts, but now mods and admins will be clearly able to see when someone is trying to dodge the lock-in and dole out punishments if players make a habit out of it. I rarely ready up for rounds and I'm perfectly fine with giving up my right to vote for round types in exchange. If you want to decide what the round type is going to be, you should be obliged to play at least the beginning of it.

I think this would be a great addition because yeah, as things currently stand, writing custom descriptions for things attached to other articles serves no purpose unless you specifically detach it and hand it over to someone for them to examine. That might be a necessity for things like showing someone the contents of a locket, but if you're wearing a pin or patch that's meant to have easily visible features then it's not really accomplishing its reason for being. As for what's reasonable to be seen at a distance, I feel that you have to leave at least some of that discretion up to a player (or use descriptors like "if you get up close X can be seen") alongside an expansion on the rule against putting character name in item names/descriptions.

Mel pretty much gave me my crash course in moderating when I first got my trial and is always nothing but wonderful to talk to both in-character and out. I'd be super happy to have her back in moderator squad. +1

Having worked alongside Hay for the last few months, I can vouch for the fact that they are extremely dedicated to tending Unathi lore and trying to sift through years of un-updated pages and complicated, esoteric history that's been left to grow weeds. It's no easy task, but we've made headway together. In general, they've already accomplished an impressive amount in their time as a deputy-- most notably spearheading the Aut'akh rework which changed a very clunky, out of place faction that drew a lot of mixed opinions into something that the majority of the community now enjoys and wants to explore --while still having a list of insightful points on how to further flesh out and neaten up Unathi lore. I have no doubt that they'll do a stellar job as maintainer, both because of their talent for lore writing and ability to coordinate with others so that everyone is happy with the end product. +1 epic gamer

I do love me some Queendom Unathi. This is a very interesting character concept and I'm fascinated to see how he interacts with other Unathi operating in the traditional mindset IE gender roles, particularly other males. I just have a few basic questions to get some more detail on your character's stance on the main lore tenants. 1) What religion does Ame'Kaz belong to? Is he particularly devout? 2) Given that his home was leveled by the Contact War, I'm assuming he doesn't feel very friendly toward the Izweski Hegemony. What is his stance on the whole Hegemony vs Traditionalist mindset? 3) What is his opinion of Unathi males living in the more traditional roleset? Is he jealous of their non-subservience, or proud of the way he lives his life?

True asked me for some pointers on this character's backstory before posting this and I had very little to say, because they already had a very solid character concept going and a good understanding of the interplay between the S'rand'marr faith and Tajaran politics. I think they'll do quite well portraying a Tajara and already show their RP skills in their current characters. The answers to stev's questions are also very insightful, further convincing me that they know their stuff. +1!

To echo Dead, really the only things I can think to ask are some of the basic questions I toss toward all whitelistees who didn't already touch upon them in their application. Just to get a sense of where the character stands on some of the very important cultural issues inherent to Unathi lore. I really love the concept of this character, though! Aging female Unathi who has already been through her childbearing years and is looking for adventure in what time she has left is something I haven't run across before. You mentioned that Skarahakh and her husband remained loyal to the Izweski; has this loyalty shifted at all over the years? Does she have any reservations about how they handled the Contact War and the damage it did to Moghes? What is her religious affiliation/beliefs? How does she feel toward all the different races she now has to coexist with? Is the shift to a multi-species workplace going well, or do you think she's going to have some difficulty?

I'm also in agreement with Flamingo/Abo. It's easier to just standardize the learner role age and expectations across the departments and let people add flavor via records and character interaction as they prefer.

The ban was permanent, since that's the policy we have for dealing with grief-y behavior. I'm glad to hear you've looked over the rules and realize your mistake, though, so I have no problem with unbanning you as long as you hold to your promise to not repeat this sort of thing in the future. Lifted!

Hello. The "we" in Paradox's response refers to me as the second party, since it was a joint decision to apply this permaban and I wrote the justification for the ban itself that shows up in the server-side record. Paradox and I equally contributed to both that and the above response so we are in agreement on all points. The reason why I applied the Discord ban is simply because a person who is permanently server banned should not have access to the other official platforms the community uses. It is not the place to discuss your ban or argue against it and I am sure you can reach various users through Discord PMs if you wanted to speak with them.

AUGH-- but also in seriousness, thank you for the compliments! I have a, uh, slight tendency to ramble in my character backstories so I'm glad it came off as well fleshed out. 1) I'd like to think that she ran across them once or twice during her time with the landcrawler and feels a kinship with them, being Queenless and braving the Wastes as she had been for those months. She prides herself on being adaptable and serving the Hive, even while being at a distance, so their ability to eke out an existence despite the harsh circumstances is something she respects. 2) With mixed emotions. The Hegemony allowing the K'lax to settle Tret and find employment on Moghes was very helpful to her kin coming off of the 2000 year journey through space and so she is grateful for that, but they are vassalized and so it's very obvious that there's a pecking order going on with the Hegemony lording over the Hive, which breeds a little bit of resentment, as well. She sees serving them as a necessary evil, but not a permanent one. She has a general fondness for Unathi, too, because of her time with the Dorviza. 3) My initial ideas mostly revolved around her presence being an odd thing to have in a medical bay. Her towering size, her more synthesized sounding voice, the sort of intense quality to her focus-- things that definitely don't scream "gentle, healing aura". I also planned to have her fine dexterity be limited enough that she cannot do surgeries, even with supervision, and finds it a bit hard to work with pills.

BYOND Key: Shenaanigans. Character Names: https://i.imgur.com/AkoQRkh.png Species you are applying to play: Vaurca. What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Light green. A liiittle bit more pastel than the color for Leto'yahkt'zor's unbound. Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes! 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 specific race: I'm most interested in Vaurca because I feel that they accomplish that middle ground of being a truly alien species-- with biology, culture, and lifestyles that are radically different from humans --without doing so severely enough to be impossible to play as an actual person. Vaurca are weird and freaky in a super unique way and that brings a challenge in portraying one that I'm interested in trying to do faithfully. I love the expansive lore on their biology, hive structures, and varied lesser Queens who all seem to have their own agendas and methods of rule, setting them apart from being just one cohesive hivemind, so I'd just really like to make a character within it. Bug people good. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: As I just mentioned, Vaurca are extremely alien in comparison to your average, baseline human and this applies to pretty much every aspect of their existence. They're a much more collaboratively focused species with an ability to literally imagine progeny into being to fit specific roles, which can then be further specialized through the use of implants and gene therapies to make the bound who are basically tools made flesh. Their idea of what makes a fulfilling life is almost always going to be "anything that benefits the Hive", making for a significantly different outlook on the world, and despite this comparatively simpler attitude their species' history is the most long lived and mysterious in the lore. Cast far off from their Homeworld in previously unknown space, forced to scrape together a fraction of their former glory among the other races that generally look down upon and exploit them. Their lives, struggles, and ways of thinking are guaranteed to be entirely different than what you would expect from a human, or any other race at all. Character Name: Za'Akaix'Trix K'lax Please provide a short backstory for this character: Born outside of the lineage of any of the K'laxan Lesser Queens in the year 2457, Za'Akaix'Trix K'lax was conceptualized within her egg into becoming a Warrior for her Hive. Being Queenless and not of the more versatile Worker caste, she and many others like her were sent off of Tret after she completed her year long process of physical maturation and training within the sliver of VR space the Queenless were afforded to serve as combat ready labor within the Wasteland of Moghes. She was assigned to one of the titanic landcrawlers that navigated the radiation scorched desert, a guard for the guards accompanying traveling nobles, and spent many months closed within the vehicle as its treads carried the small group within across the Wastes. She was mostly ignored as a looming, alien fixture during her time there-- tolerated as a useful force to have against any raiders, but not exactly embraced --and any credits she collected as her share for the jobs were, naturally, routed directly back to the Hiveship. The monotony of constant travel across the Wasteland was broken when, on one escort mission, things went south. The group of raiders that set upon them was larger and better equipped that any before and they battered the landcrawler, dealing heavy damage to its hull and gravelly wounding a few of the Uanthi who were brave enough to stick a head or arm out to return fire. They managed to hold out long enough for the raiders to give up and retreat, deeming the vehicle too difficult a nut to crack, but by then the damage was already done and they would have to go to a larger settlement for aid. Nearest and most promising was the home of the Dorviza, who took in, healed, and nursed the group back to full health. Once this was done, it was decided by the landcrawler's Unathi leadership that they wished to stay with the Wastelander Clan, rather than returning to the dangerous life of armed escorts, which left Trix in somewhat of a pickle. Gone was her task of helping the group with their jobs, leaving her stranded deep in the Wastes and cut off from the rest of the Hive. So, with little other option, the Za decided she would remain and carve out a place with the Clan until she could find an opportunity for transport to proper civilization and get back in contact with the rest of the K'lax to be reassigned. The position of guard against incursions from raiders was always available, especially among a Clan of primarily healers and botanists, but actual skirmishes were rare as only the most fiendish were apt to attack medics. In the interim, she had little to do-- besides try to learn and adapt. The Dorviza had been understandably wary of her presence at first, as a horribly tall insect bred for battle, but gradually they warmed to her more than the landcrawler crew ever had and sought to drag her into other tasks. Tilling land, spreading seeds, harvesting crops; then later patching wounds and applying the medicinal herbs that the Clan grew. It was... quite the disconnect from her predestined purpose, but life in the Wastes was about earning your keep and pitching in in any way that you were able to so, as an unbound, she adapted. Strictly speaking, there may have been opportunities scattered over Trix's time with the Dorviza that she could have bartered for a place on a visiting vehicle and left, but she found that she didn't want to. Or could come up with justification to stay and continue to diversify her skills instead. Eventually, though, there came a day when a family of Unathi she had grown close to decided they would be departing for the Untouched Lands with the end goal of leaving Moghes entirely, seeking better opportunities off-world. She was compelled to come along and protect them on the trip, ensuring that the group arrived unharmed and could board a shuttle as they had wished to, which finally brought her back to a place where she could get into contact with the rest of the Hive. After traveling back to Tret, Trix discovered that the need for Za in actual, combat related positions had gone down significantly in the years since she had been away and meant that she would likely be reassigned to some menial labor type position with her current skillset. Rejecting this option, she instead decided to re-enter VR for a course of new training: expanding her knowledge of medicine. She built up knowledge on the foundation of what she'd learned among the Dorviza-- making a point of gaining the knowledge she would need to treat xeno species, not just other Vaurca --and after a few more months was prepared to serve her Hive as a medical practitioner despite the disconnect such a thing had with her Warrior roots. Trix fell in with a group of others from her Hive that were to be shipped out to Tau Ceti for work there, to gather credits and bolster the wealth of the K'lax, and found employment with NanoTrasen in a Residency level position. As you might expect, this brought her to where she now works aboard the NSS Aurora. What do you like about this character?: The central idea behind Trix was, put most plainly, to have a physically intimidating character in a very passive, un-combat focused role for the dissonance that would create. Honestly I just thought it would be fun to play and garner reactions with. I've grown more fond of Trix's character concept through writing her backstory, though, and couldn't resist tying it in with the Mi'kuetz lore as I'm a huge fan of all of the Wasteland wiki page. This way I can flex my Unathi deputy brain while also using it to build up what I (at least hope) is a well thought out character. How would you rate your role-playing ability?: Uhhh I think for my last WL application I put an 8/10? And that's about fair. I think I have a knack for coming up with interesting character concepts and getting into their headspace so I can truly separate their personalities from my own and, as the months go by, my comfort level with SS13 as a RP platform only grows. Notes: If it wasn't already clear she'll be working as a Medical Resident. I'm not yet sure if I'll even pursue an Avowal to make her a Physician, since the idea of a perma-Resident who takes more of an assistance role within the department is pretty appealing. Hyezz.