Omicega

I have no charge issues whatsoever as a shell running air cooling + solar charge -- in fact, with my thermostat as high as possible for idling, I stay at max charge without even thinking about it. I don't know what combinations of power source and cooling other people are working with, but if you just crank the thermostat to maximum to decrease your power draw as much as possible, solar power seems more than sufficient even for an air-cooled shell to idle on literally indefinitely. With liquid cooling, I had much the same experience except my power slowly drained, but I would still have been fine to last a full round while walking about the ship plenty.

Can't wait to see Maja Gretzsky's player get a take on a command role. Huge +1.

As long as these 'components' aren't all necessarily related to violent confrontation or conflict, I can agree with this. The increased depth in many away sites I've noticed since I came back is a good start, but I still don't think moving back to a style of gameplay where all departments are soft-encouraged to prepare for it potentially being nukies is the way forwards. I think a step towards more involved and interesting away sites that can engage people in exploration is far more of a promising direction to move in than trying to repair the fundamentally broken problem with antagonists. I've played in a few of those rounds @Faye <3 is talking about and she's right -- heads of security were (and are?) routinely nudged against overpreparing or overescalating against antagonists, even ones as round-defining as mercenary. A single traitor who knows what they're doing can bring the Horizon to its knees unless the security game aggressively 'counter-metas' everything they do; a merc team who makes good use of the intercepted radio can do so much more besides that. High character turnover isn't necessarily related to this issue, either -- if you ask me, it's more a symptom of it being very difficult to 'break in' to more established circles sometime, and then character concepts wind up being cycled out and scrapped as they're not really having the desired return on investment.

Regarding the thread about non-sec players not having enough stuff to do, I'd really rather the focus there stayed on giving those departments more things related to their actual jobs to do (the engineering busywork stuff being a great example; just let me open random panels on the floor and play a totally cosmetic 'channeling' animation to represent fiddling with wires or something) than shifting focus to any crew armoury stuff. I loathe few things on the Horizon more than the crew armoury, actually, since it's right up there with the ship guns as a big bright indicator of the hardline shift away from casual corporate roleplay that Aurora ended up taking. When rounds do go to enough of a red alert to cause a crew armoury rush, it usually just feels like all hope of roleplay left in the round has gone out the window because everyone is frothing at the mouth to play a really shitty TDM game instead. I can count the number of people who feel like they stay fully in-character after the crew armoury opens on the fingers of one hand. This might also be a hot take, but I don't think security is as popular as it is just because it leads into fighting the antagonist. Security just has a pretty comfy feel relative to other departments -- to echo a sentiment I raised in that other thread, it's one of the few places on Aurora where I feel like I'm working with my co-workers rather than against them. Engineering and medical both have far, far too many cooks in them for all but the most extreme rounds, and most of the time you just end up tripping one another up trying to double-up on tasks that really don't require more than one person at a time; conversely, I'm pretty much always happy to take someone else along to any security call that comes in when I play officer, since the potential for bouncing more roleplay around is there even if it's not antag-related, and if it is antag-related then it's also nice to have backup and some insurance against being left dead in a maintenance tunnel. Even on extended, I think security offers a vibe that other departments tend to miss out on sometimes. There's a very natural soft impetus to wander the ship, poke around, check in with people and just generally do stuff that other departments seem to lack -- the same thing that keeps engineering and medical in their respective glass boxes staring at consoles. That natural popularity doesn't help matters when it's combined with the added draw of fighting antagonists and having added gameplay beyond that, although why exactly anyone in their right mind would want to fight antags on Aurora in its current state is something I really can't answer.

I've seen two security wipes by a solo antag (traitor both times) in the past week alone, and that's with a solid 90% of rounds still rolling as either voted extended or secret extended. Most antagonists aren't very good at the game because the more established players on Aurora tend to be here for the roleplay rather than antagging, so there's a definite and natural trend towards antags being more inexperienced in general, but you absolutely do notice it when someone who knows how to use and abuse the mechanics on offer is strapped into their antag role. None of it is an issue of mechanical power available to both sides; rather, it's just that antags who don't play to win invariably wind up being crushed to death by security either overtly or covertly (security players will not shoot first for fear of being ahelped, sure, but you will still get boxed in on all sides by a fully kitted department if you allow it, or an officer will prowl after you looking for any evidence of valid behaviour, or something along those lines). Conversely, it's basically impossible for security to follow its usual 'gradual escalation' routine against antags who use a guerilla sort of playstyle against them in turn -- any attempt to play along in good faith with gimmicks like these tends to result in failure since there's no way the antag is going to stick around to talk with the investigator or a sympathetically-played officer just so the rest of the department can strap on its jackboots and get ready to kill them once the mandatory talking phase is over. Basically, someone always seems to end up frustrated no matter how it's played -- whether it's the antag being blown to shit because they weren't robust enough to outmanoeuvre the unrelenting march of the entire security department towards them, or whether it's the security department being slowly ground to death by an antagonist who has all the tools to very easily stay five steps ahead with better equipment, (often) all access, and a whole host of exciting (!) tools like punji traps, landmines, and the old reliable of fleeing to the Intrepid so security are forced to teleport themselves right into your finely crafted, custom-made death trap. I don't want to boil everything down to literally just being a big case of 'skill issue', but the reality is that the majority of antag players can't use the tools at their disposal to even a tenth of their potential. The ones that do, though, can and do bend entire rounds over all on their own if you give them the slightest chance. Beyond that, my only other observation is that I'm on board with this sentiment when it comes to picking one side over the other, because both of those security wipe rounds I mentioned earlier were pretty miserable to sit around in:

The solution is for people to view the extremely light gameplay Aurora offers as just a background element to the character interactions and roleplay on offer, I think. Actually effecting that is a whole different ball game, though. Adding newer, shinier, and more exciting stuff to do is addressing the symptom and not the root problem. All you'll see in that instance is more competition within departments to monopolise the new content available for their own enjoyment.

This is kind of the ideal and something that tends to only happen when you actually have a CE on capable of coordinating the department. Some of them are better at this than others, but it's really noticeable how the 'too many cooks' in engineering situation starts to fix itself with only a bit of hierarchy and delegation entering the equation. Personally I think part of the issue stems from the server having too many slots for some departments as well as there not being enough gameplay to go around, but I'm not sure targeting those would really fix the core parts of the issue. Drawing the CM comparison again here (I've been playing it a lot, sue me), what really strikes me is that doing literally any task in CM (medic, doctor, field engineer, whatever, you name it) feels like a cooperative activity where I'm working as part of one big team to accomplish a goal. Whether it's putting up some barricade to cover an inconsequential flank or scavenging for material or defibrillating someone or just firing a few stray shots to ward off a xeno coming in, everything you do feels more or less like you're working towards the same goal. By contrast, Aurora gameplay feels almost entirely competitive in its current state -- you honestly very rarely work with other players unless you're security trying to bring down an antag, or medical working on a very tough patient. Most of the time it's just a scramble for whoever's fastest on claiming something to get to do whatever it is, and I think people have genuinely just fallen into that autopiloting rut for a long time now. The problem I am getting at is that it's genuinely exhausting to try and keep on top of the race to accomplish anything relevant. I'll be the first to admit I don't know why people still jump at the chance to go and fix rampant brand intelligence the second the announcement goes out; if anything, that only confuses me more why there can't be a quick 'anyone gonna get that?' on engineering radio rather than someone frothing at the mouth to cut and mend a wire as fast as possible. I think the majority of players approach the game in a selfish and gameplay-first mindset that is pretty much the antithesis of what you should be on Aurora for -- the game barely even supports it considering there is very little to actually do in these rounds, so having everyone fall into the mentality of 'fuck you, I'm going to get mine' by jumping on every minor detail as quickly as possible only ends up making it feel worse. Furthermore, by having every single problem jumped on as soon as it presents itself (or before it even presents itself when you pre-optimise something to make sure it can't go wrong), people actually strangle their future gameplay in the cradle. In the same way that security are encouraged to leave antagonists alive so they can come back later in the round for a second go at things via an escape with spare TC or something, I think engineers could gain something from not trying to failsafe every single thing. Literally on my third round back or something I had an apprentice stroll up to me and suggest some way to failsafe the gyrotron on the INDRA even further (beyond the already accepted hotwiring stuff which has become the standard), and to be honest all I can really think at this point is why people are so adamant that nothing should ever go wrong. If there's already not enough gameplay to keep people from scrambling all over each other to try and get whatever scraps they can (and fuck you if you're a second too slow, it's mine now), why are people always so desperate to keep it that way? I know things work differently in medical. I'm leery of wading too much into that quagmire because, like any SS13 server, talking about medical optimisation and how gameplay relates to roleplay there tends to veer into a weird sort of quasi-OOC argument where people start trying to justify anything and everything in the name of medical being the altruistic extends-your-round and keeps-people-playing-the-game department. Personally I think a lot of that tends to come across in bad faith and people inflict a martyr complex on themselves then start whining about it -- the exact attitude that burnt me out of playing first responder so much, actually. Again, I still think whatever department you play in, Aurora has a strange culture of either soft or hard shaming you for not being 'good enough' at your job (and the people who grind the hell out of the game always have higher and higher expectations creeping up on you as to what 'good enough' entails). This can be not setting RCON to the 'correct' (read: subjectively correct) values, or failing to fill the air tanks at round start like @Desven said, or essentially any minor thing that diverges from being as good as the players are allowed to make it within the boundaries of the rules.

This might read as more of a rant or ramble than an organised series of thoughts, but I started playing earlier this week after a fairly long break and even after just a handful of rounds, I'm already kind of struck by the sheer level of hyperfixated preparedness and dedication to optimisation that permeates Aurora culture & gameplay nowadays. It might be hitting me particularly acutely as an engineering main these days, but you genuinely cannot have anything go wrong on the ship at all for more than maybe five minutes without at least one (usually two or more) people taking off like a missile to fix it as quickly as humanly possible. I don't really think this is a new problem by any means -- I could name more than a few players who have always approached their Aurora jobs like they're genuinely getting paid to fix the ninth issue of rampant brand intelligence this shift -- but it's striking how bad it feels to play alongside, at least for me. Do people really enjoy pre-emptively optimising all the possibility for things to go wrong out of the round as quickly and efficiently as they can, and then furthermore swarming all over any tiny issues that do crop up anyway? You could break a window in the chapel on highpop these days and if someone called it out you'd have three engineers minimum showing up to squabble over who gets to click the window frame with some reinforced glass. I can't really think of anything more exhausting than trying to play believable characters in these kinds of environments, especially when the behaviour seems to have become so normalised. I'm really looking to treat this game as a laid-back vehicle to enjoy the story, atmosphere, and potential character relationships I can develop from those; not to be placed into a constant battle for any gameplay-related content whatsoever that you either fully get on board with or get left behind from entirely. I haven't played security or medical in a while but I don't doubt that the same gameplay issues probably still crop up there -- the only caveats I can think of for those departments, though, are that security and medical-related situations can sometimes get serious enough to merit the preparatory legwork being put in. It feels a bit like some kind of switch trips the second people detect 'gameplay' cropping up in any sense, a bit like someone just flicked their roleplay switch off and replaced them with a weird, semi-IC caricature of what the character used to be. Watching the full engineering department stampede towards a breach that only needs one person to fix it until six people are crowding the hallway with inflatables and voidsuits, or all of security showing up to pretend like they don't know what a changeling is for the third time today, or physicians motoring out of the GTR at light speed because they think the responders might not be fast enough -- maybe it's just hitting me particularly acutely at this point but I really am sick of it. I spent a large portion of my break playing CM, and I can say with absolute confidence that even the most die-hard powergamers there -- a game that's a glorified team deathmatch with a fraction of the worldbuilding and roleplay atmosphere Aurora offers ( or should be offering) -- don't even come close to matching the level of devoted, slavish dedication to failsafing the ship that Aurora players can manage. The problem only exacerbates at higher pops too, I think, where the already limited amount of 'stuff to do' being divided among so many players leaves them with far more time to invest effort into showing off their optimised routines. A related issue is how high-intensity antag stuff seems to still hang over the server like a spectre -- we are at the point where one single antag main with enough means and motivation can casually kill half the manifest once red alert turns all your co-workers into brainless squad marines marching off to the crew armoury to play at trying to gank the antag (and dying en masse to punji traps or welder bombs or just an assault rifle, you name it), and I feel like maybe the possibility of these rounds cropping up is what's helped to feed and encourage this kind of behaviour? I think it definitely contributes. My point, really, is that I genuinely wonder if this is what people enjoy having the server atmosphere feel like. I don't really feel like I'm part of a department when I log into Aurora now -- in fact, the ideal manifest for me would be one where the server is full in every department except my own. I hate having co-workers because I know from experience that having other people in your department is almost never treated as an opportunity for working together these days, especially when having higher character turnover like myself contributes to you having a lack of 'recognition' from the established names in the field. Having a fuller department instead just means you're being sucked into an ever-worsening battle royale for stuff to do whether you like it or not. People will not wait even ten seconds before mashing out a .hResponding! into their radio when someone reports a vending machine throwing stuff around, or a power alarm here, or an atmosphere alarm there, or a greimorian somewhere else. Past a certain pop threshold and once secret is taking precedence over extended, it feels like people just log in to sit around in a glorified waiting room hoping someone more interesting than themselves will cause something to happen, and then the second that finally occurs the starting gun fires and everyone races off. I think people would actually have more fun if they sat back for a microsecond and actually roleplayed moving towards things, getting their gear together, and overall just treated it more like an extension of the opportunity to tell a story together rather than an opportunity to 'fix the problem' like it's literally just a video game. Maybe there's some kind of clout-chasing going on here too, I don't know, or maybe it is just a really pathetic form of validhunting where you aren't even hunting another player but the breach they left behind. You can always opt out of this behaviour and just play very laid-back on your own initiative, of course, but then you wind up being pigeonholed into playing a character archetype that would feasibly sit around peering at the camera console or monitoring computer or whatever else while other people actually get on with performing their iRP function. It's fundamentally very difficult to try and play characters that are meant to be industrious, dutiful, hardworking and caring etc. without also backing that up by participating fully in the rat race for whatever department you're part of. I've been back for like a handful of days at this point and I already find it to be exhausting -- I cannot express my distaste for the current 'meta' of preparing response kits/loadouts/whatever else every round for upwards of 20 minutes on end for the sole purpose of having the best chance at being the guy who gets to fix the problem when someone calls about a broken window across the ship an hour later, and I wish I was exaggerating. Am I just seeing the problem exacerbating in the light of high-intensity canon events becoming more of the norm? I know things were always somewhat like this, but I can't shake the feeling that the problem has only gotten worse since I've been away. How has one of the most gameplay-lite servers on the hub wound up feeling like more of a chore to fit into in terms of expectations and character setup than something like CM has? I really am curious to know what other people think here, whether it's specifically related to engineering (my current bugbear for veteran players and/or characters exterminating the remotest hint of anything going wrong with the ship at record speed) or to other departments.

You don't have to be in the current round to feel like you'd prefer to join a fresh round. Calling crew transfer without knowing what the current round is like is perfectly understandable if you'd rather just play one from 00:00. If I had my way there wouldn't even be a provision for round extensions without admin intervention and the rounds would rotate on a fixed ~2h30ish timer for ease of predicting their start times & slotting them into my day. Crew transfer shouldn't be made any harder to effect than it already is.

This is a pet peeve of mine as well. I feel like established players tend to try and get around this by simply introducing their new characters into their pre-existing friend group to begin with (I'm guilty too, tbh), or by signalling either explicitly or indirectly in Discord or something that you're the player behind your new spaceman. For genuine new players, I imagine the experience is even more torturous unless you get lucky enough to find someone away from their clique long enough to get any kind of mutual interest going. Aurora has a pretty harsh stance on lower playtimes on characters in general -- something I find intensely aggravating given how many I juggle at one time whenever I'm active -- and I think some voices in the community in particular would benefit from losing their fixation on the total playtime/veterancy of a character and/or player being the largest contributing factor in how 'authentic' or 'worthy' they are of anyone's time or respect. I feel like I'm an outlier sometimes in the sense that it's the newer names on the manifest that catch my interest and encourage me to seek out interaction with them, rather than trying to fawn over more established faces -- although again, like anyone else, I admit I still tend to just join up when I know my friends are around and hang around with them far more than I really should.

I think it's dreadfully disappointing that staff apparently feel like they're being browbeaten into coming along with such a problematic proposal. Aurora's character turnover and collective/collaborative approach to crediting the playerbase with coming through canon events is a strength, not a weakness. The absolute last thing I would want to see is any kind of system that, indirectly or not, feels like it's geared towards rewarding a combination of veterancy/old guard status, good RNG on event rolls (look at me, I'm the canonical guy who did X lore thing because I outrolled someone!), or even simply having the timezone/motivation/leisure time to attend the events at all in the first place. Just because the community wants it doesn't mean it's any good for the server; I really don't think we're going to benefit from allowing collective story progression on behalf of 'the crew of the Horizon' to be replaced with specific individuals in some kind of clout-farming exercise. I already find interacting with 'louder' established characters to be an exercise in frustration -- the strength of this server and the setting is in the more minor and grounded 'slice of life' roleplay, not in hearing about how John Fiveyearveteran killed 500 hivebots on Konyang and survived a Tajara tank battalion landing on the old Aurora. Matt summed up my concerns pretty well: I could hardly be more opposed to anything like this as I feel it encourages single-character maining (which is something I really just don't like and don't really understand the fixation with. Spread your wings a bit, try other origins/species/whatever, and get more out of the server), further demonises character alting/turnover in general as some kind of anti-roleplay stream of thought, and will overall just entrench the same old established character clique/elitism problem that all environments like Aurora have grappled with in the past. Part of the issue is that every major lore arc seems to be trying to one-up the one that came before it or something -- I didn't play for any of the Konyang arc because I'm kind of off my Aurora game right now for a variety of reasons, but apparently the whole thing built up to some kind of mega hivebot horde shootathon or something? It's like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Aurora so enticing going on somewhere within the lore team or even in the newer sections of the playerbase at large; to me, the server was always at its best the more it promoted the more 'mundane' and corporate angle of its setting and roleplay opportunities. Bigger, more bombastic events are a cheap way to sell out authenticity in exchange for playerbase hype and short to mid-term enthusiasm, but the fallout is that you then have 1000 veterans of The Hivebot War and The Assault On The SAV Whatever walking around completely undermining the believability of the otherwise low-intensity corporate setting. Doubling down on that by now allowing those specific people to flash their shiny official accolade around in addition to the above is not really something I relish seeing. The biggest takeaway from all of this for me is that @Sniblet kind of hit on the head is about micro-events. This system would actually be fine for me if Aurora was capable of limiting its event arcs in scope and scale, but I think any hope I had of the server heading in that direction started to die the moment we moved to the Horizon to begin with, and then had its coffin nailed shut when the ship had guns welded onto it overnight. I guess maybe that's what the majority want after all? All I know is I'd really like to see more low-key, slower-paced events that cater to something other than gearing up for an ultra death battle where people madly in love with their own OCs slaver and drool over the idea of getting CM-style medals of honour.

I can't agree with this more. Please revert this change -- I've been using spacebar as my resist key for years. At the very least, you could make it not totally override my keybind macros and just set both things to occur when I push it, instead of forcing a key binding on me I didn't even want in the first place.

One of the best, most consistent, and highest-quality roleplayers on the server period. There are few people who deserve the command whitelist more.

This is from a Discord that @La Villa Strangiato created and runs too, as I understand, so I guess that's even more funny. I can't really reiterate my +1 any more strongly, but I guess my concerns beyond that should be obvious.

I have had very limited interactions with you in-game and essentially none outside of it, but despite that I feel like I have to say your responses are so on-point with what I would have written if it was my app that it's almost uncanny. I like the idea of smaller arcs like your service-centric one, I love that you highlight the diversity of origins as a massive strength of human lore in particular, and even your favourite and least favourite areas of the whole area of human lore essentially line up as well. At some point I'll try and come up with some questions I'd like to ask, but I'm really just making a short post here now because it's quite late and I don't have the time to write a full one, but if I don't post at all I'll forget entirely. Suffice it to say that I really like your answers. If you're at liberty to share around and show that language lore addition/rework thing you've mentioned, I'd love to see that as well.