Omicega

I've played in security with Gladiator for a long time now, mostly in and around Sevastian Yevgeniy. He's always come across as a really thorough and believable roleplayer who rarely (if ever) seems to get knocked out of character, but beyond that he also exhibits a real sense of fair play and OOC good faith when it comes to interacting with other players and especially antagonists. I just had my first round with his CE trial character too and I'm convinced, based off both that round and the months of gameplay I've seen from him before, that he's more than a match for the command whitelist. +1

Honestly, I thought you had this whitelist already. Even if I didn't already know your strength as a roleplayer in-game (having seen you since your cadet days...), it seems kind of weird that we'd trust someone with running lore arcs that effect the entire server and its direction and not with a command whitelist. I think you should be a shoe-in for this, but even leaving your loremaster status aside you are an easy +1 considering the quality of your characters and gameplay both.

Hello, I play the Tajara officer you call out by name here and I also submitted the ahelp to figure out if any of this was kosher or not, since I wasn't really sure myself if it was within reason for heads to start getting popped like bubble wrap. It felt more like a CM round than Aurora. Either way, I want to clear up a couple of things. I don't play antagonists more than once in a blue moon, and the last time I did (aside from being converted into one by revs/culties) was quite a while ago. I don't know what Tajara you're talking about, but it wasn't even me, and I don't appreciate your insinuation here that this is some kind of persistent vendetta or administrative shielding on my part. Thankfully, I don't even have to justify this since any investigation into that round will prove it was some other ckey playing whatever M'sai antagonist that was, but I want to reiterate that I am wholeheartedly unhappy about this veiled attempt at painting me as a consistent problem for you or something. This is just whataboutism even without context; with context, you're essentially complaining that the crew responded in kind after you started this behaviour. What do you expect? Yes, the crew is probably going to field execute the antagonists when they've deadchecked somewhere in the vicinity of 5+ people in cold blood already. Beyond that, I'm not really going to pick through the majority of your creative writing exercise here because I frankly don't want to, don't care to, and don't have to. I think the fact that you're treating a staff complaint like an opportunity to stroke off how 'badass' your merc team was speaks for itself, honestly. The hardsuits were armoured to the point where nothing on the ship could even properly penetrate them except the crew armoury rifles on AP mode and shotgun slugs, and when you have assault rifles on full auto as well I can understand wanting to left click everything in sight until you wipe the ship, but please don't tie a ribbon around a donkey and tell me it's a horse. I don't feel like my roleplay experience was particularly enriched by your actions and I am not really sure why going so far out of your way to explicitly permakill as many people as you did was as vital to your narrative as you say it is. I don't buy the excuse, and I'd respect you more if you just had the balls to admit that you popped heads off because you were in a position to. I could accept that as something that happens in the heat of the moment, but what I don't accept is that it was entirely story-driven and that you had no OOC stake in it, and I think it's insulting that you expect me to believe that it was all to craft a grand story -- doubly so when you can't even get through your own explanation of events without embellishing it like you're writing a novel. I would counter-complaint you for the veiled 'Azhara as their Antagonist character' (whatever that means?) accusation, since I think that's a clear attempt at smearing foul play on me, but instead I am just gonna ask @MattAtlas to address that as part of this overall investigation or whatever.

On the contrary, I didn't really enjoy your HOS play. I felt like you didn't coordinate the department well at all and left it to one side in favour of text roleplay with other Dominians or the rest of command or whoever else -- I wasn't in command chat so I can't really comment on what exactly you did, all I can say is that it felt like you essentially weren't there to do more than the bare minimum of coordination at an exceptionally slow pace. You don't list HOS as a role you'd like to play after the application is accepted, which is fair enough, but I would still say you were worse than having no HOS at all in the round I experienced with you.

I've played a fair few rounds with your warden now and I like seeing him around. I think Kelly would be an interesting addition to the HOS roster and I'd be interested in seeing how you handle being fully in charge.

The FSF isn't a homogenous, cohesive entity. It's literally in the name -- they're the Free Solarian Fleets. What the Caravaggio itself has done essentially has no bearing on what the rest of the FSF is doing. I want to make a bigger post about this event when it's not already quite late for me, and I'll try to get around to that tomorrow, but this idea that the Horizon is somehow dealing with the entire FSF is not correct. The event today dealt with the crew of a single cruiser of Solarian ex-military that have essentially gone privateer, not the faction as a whole.

I know why it is how it is; I just think having the bridge be less aesthetic would be more than outweighed by the simple convenience of having the directions match up. Even a left or right facing ship would've been easier to work around for my brain. Anyway, giving the decks official names could help but they're still going to get quickly referred to as D1-3, so I don't think it's a full solution. It would also help (?) imply that the residential decks are below the hangar where they actually are meant to be (I think) -- call decks 4-5 some interstitial maintenance stuff and then have the resi decks be below that, or something.

The residential elevators come up from below the hangar level, as I understand. I've always thought it made more sense to have Deck 1 be the top deck and then go downwards from there, so the Horizon deck numbering has always been confusing for me. I don't mind if we give them names (Bridge deck, Operations deck, Hangar deck or something) but for my preference I'd like the numbers switched too while there's still time. I'd complain about every single IC direction being opposite to its on-screen counterpart too (port is right on your screen, fore is down on your screen etc) but that ship has well and truly sailed and can't be fixed.

Fantastic. Thanks for the quick resolution!

I'm not here to comment on the part of your reply directed at Garnascus, but: You can search up 'chairRP' in any of the Aurora Discords you care to: maincord, Relay cord, whichever one you want. I'm still going to contend that I don't see it being used in a derogatory fashion. I keep asking you to stop ascribing whatever meaning you think is most defamatory to my choice of words and you keep ignoring me to repeat your baseless claims in a passive-aggressive and provocative tone -- it isn't contentious, you just chose it to be. It think it is in fact on-topic because you are coming after my overall conduct and alleged contribution to a 'toxic atmosphere' here, but if server staff decide it isn't relevant then I'm happy for them to say so and discount it as they please. If you want me to clarify my language in that quote of mine you've lifted, then you can replace 'of substance' with 'gameplay-related', and I'm sorry for not having proof-read the post better. I'm not here to defend my roleplay credentials to you, but I would hope that it is obvious to more or less anyone on Aurora at this point that I value chairRP just as much as I do left clicking someone until they go horizontal.

There was no metagaming involved, I can tell you that categorically. You can call it a meta-commentary or something if you like; it isn't uncommon that cadets find themselves ignored by security as a whole and head into cryo. I'm not sure what there is to have metagamed here, anyway -- the cadet cryoing is on the common frequency and available for anyone to hear, like you can see in the image. I don't truthfully know whether the cadet was ignored or not; I didn't see security comms since I wasn't in security, so it was a guess at best. I think what I said ICly reflects that lack of knowledge, and my character would have known about as much as I did OOCly -- which is essentially nothing.

You're still using language like this in the very same breath as accusing me of attributing different connotations to things I've said. If you have any actual evidence to back up the usage of the term as a derogatory one, by all means offer it. Otherwise, I'm going to ask you again to stop putting negative meaning into my mouth where I have repeatedly told you none exists. I have no desire to get into a back-and-forth public argument with you either, so if you don't have anything more to add then neither do I, and I'm happy to wait for staff to weigh in.

I'll keep this pretty brief. I've already been spoken to about my Relay conversation on the 23rd -- you can ask Faris for more details, if he's willing to give them, since to my knowledge he handled the whole thing. I asked him at the time if he was approaching me in an administrative capacity, just so I was certain, and he confirmed as much, so as far as I'm concerned that's already been addressed? Again, you can go to him for the details. I'm not sure why you're coming kicking my door down, either, after your comments earlier. Calling me mean-spirited and toxic when you are slurring me (and yes, that's what a slur is: an insinuation or allegation about me intended to insult and damage my reputation) with a comment like this: is entirely hypocritical. I would also point out to staff reading this that the thread appeared to basically be in the process of being brigaded, and I'm glad the thread got locked when it did considering where it was leading. I stand by what I said in the thread regarding the blob event and how it's generally handled. I've already explained what I meant by chairRP, too. If you want to construe it as derogatory and submit that as something for staff to adjudicate over -- fine, be my guest. I don't think I've used it in a derogatory context before and I'm not aware of any connotation attached to the term, so as far as I'm concerned it's just something you've cherry-picked to manufacture offense over. In short: yes, my conduct in the Relay was over the line, and I was spoken to about it already. I'm not the one coming out and essentially telling someone else to get off the server because they don't roleplay enough.

I actually don't appreciate that you're taking the term 'chairRP' as some sort of slur. You're presuming me to be acting in bad faith here -- I enjoy my own chairRP with other players on extended or otherwise low-intensity rounds all the time. You're the two choosing to construe it as a barbed comment; you're either doing something of substance on Aurora, or you're AFK, or you're chairRPing. If you want to take that as some kind of veiled attack on your playing preferences -- I don't care, that's your prerogative, but please keep it to your own thoughts or somewhere more private where you aren't using it to slander me. You can address the rest of my concerns without trying to paint me as some kind of high-roleplay hater, thank you, although I get the sense now that I'm being brigaded on account of some perceived chink in my armour.

I play lower pops quite a bit, although not as much as I'd like. I'm in the UTC+0 timezone and played a lot more earlier in the day when server pops at those hours supported it; lately it's been harder to find interaction at EU morning/early afternoon hours for a variety of reasons. I've handled a good few blobs solo or essentially solo at this point; it isn't hard and it doesn't require any kind of special knowledge. It isn't a struggle to go through as one engineer unless the blob spawned without your knowledge, like if you latejoin or something. You just find it (it takes ten minutes maximum to trawl Horizon's maintenance, considering there's hardly any of it) and kill it. It can't hide from you since it can't move to begin with, and there is really not that much of the ship it can spawn in anyway. If two characters nearly died to it then they just weren't capable to begin with -- I don't know how else to put the obvious blob-killing strategy beyond 'shoot the core with an emitter' and 'don't stand next to any of the green stuff'. It doesn't leave RNG trip hazards and explosions like hivebots do, nor does it set you on fire like hivebots do. It doesn't have any capability to retaliate at all beyond venting areas and attacking people who stand next to it. Okay? I'm still arguing it's a lot 'busier' to handle vines -- depending on their spawn point, admittedly -- than it is for a blob. You can kill any blob with one engineer and about fifteen minutes of effort max -- maybe twenty in the worst-case scenario that doesn't involve the blob having eaten stuff for half an hour before anyone looks for it. For vines you need at least a couple, and it can get really bad really quickly if they spawn somewhere open and can spread in every direction. No-one's saying you have to undo the damage. You can leave the hole in the ship patched with inflatables if you want, especially on lowpop -- nobody is really going to care if you just go back to your previous chairRP. It doesn't take much longer than 5 minutes to have the emitter vaporise the blob unless it's genuinely huge. I guess it's a bit RNG-dependent based on when the server ticks decide to regen the central core shield, but unless you're getting really unlucky they tend to up and die pretty quickly in my experience. You are right that security is useless against the thing, though -- in fact they're worse than useless, because all they do is trip engineers up, get in the way, and maybe vent more of the ship through inflatables while the engineers are trying to emitter it. Buffing security's weapons against the thing is probably a separate discussion, though, but I feel like any number buffs you could give them would be outweighed by the ammo capacity on their weapons. My main point here is that the gameplay Aurora offers is already minimal beyond secret modes -- and even then, you'd better be security, command, or maybe medical, otherwise you're looking at two hours of twiddling your thumbs while whatever is happening is handled by someone else. I don't think the latest band of lowpop players should neuter a ship event for everyone, and I think the threat it poses is already being overblown as long as you have one engineer on the manifest. Hopefully a PR that makes blobs impossible to see without at least one engineering crew on the manifest will sort it once and for all.

All the blob needs is to check for at least one engineer before it spawns. I don't really know where the misleading comparisons to military theory or whatever are coming from; you point an emitter at the main core, turn it on, and walk off. The blob can't regenerate its way out of that, full stop. I also don't really buy that searching Horizon's maintenance for the thing is an impossible task at lower pop: the same single engineer can do it with how cut-down maintenance is now compared to the Aurora. You poke your head into both of the wings, then take a run through deck one's central maintenance near the machinists' and the morgue. It's a lot easier with two or more, of course, but it's not some colossal threat that needs 5 engineers and fully staffed medical to handle. If anything, vines are more of a busywork problem than the blob, since you sometimes can't feasibly get rid of those if they spread too far at too low a pop.

BYOND Key: Omicega Game ID: cjm-acdH Player Byond Key/Character name: Forester40 Kyres1 GladiatorGames123 Staff involved: MattAtlas PersephoneQ Reason for complaint: The round was visitors and was pretty much a disaster from the get-go. I don't really have the time or energy to give an exhaustive breakdown of it, but two of the antags are less at fault here, although I still want to include them in the scope of the complaint. I think at around 00:30 to 00:45 round time the first real hostile interaction with antags at all was one opening up on full auto at some other officers -- I was further in at the armoury at the time, getting gear, but at this point they wound up getting dogpiled by security and basically obliterated in record time. It's kind of what you expect when a solo antag opens up against a full security team, regardless of what weapons they're using. The rest of the round was a long, slow, agonising affair where the two surviving antags tried to essentially play off what I'm assuming was meant to lighten to the tone of the round. Even at the best of times, it's pretty hard to react to antag actions in an HRP manner as it is on Aurora, but after one of the antag team has basically speedrun his way to full armoury distribution with full intent to permakill officers as quickly as he can, it's incredibly hard to sit around, play nice, and really maintain any sort of in-character level at all when the other two are doing a comedy double act in the bar. I'm making the complaint primarily because I think the ninja who kicked off this whole disaster shouldn't be playing antag anymore, but also because I think the other two failed to read the room after the initial disaster went off. I don't really have a say what kind of gimmick or roleplay the antags come up with when I'm playing security, but on a server that advertises itself as HRP I expect something that doesn't totally rip me out of the round. A short burst of RDM followed by a tongue-in-cheek comedy sketch followed by two hours of people calling the technomancer a 'furry' ICly is excruciating to the point where I think there should be some onus on the two remaining antags to try and stay coherent with whatever's already been established -- essentially to not derail the round into a series of jokes with really poor timing and string it out longer than it needs to go on. I don't know which antags were associated with which ckeys (although I can certainly guess!), but I want to make it clear that the vast majority of my criticism in this complaint is directed at the first ninja who decided to go loud, especially since I found out after the round that they were essentially egging on head PBs from the start. Both ninjas came onto the ship with rifle-tier ballistics (one generic AR, one LMG). I am assuming the speaker here is the guy who decided to try and clap Rize Noack out with fully automatic 7.62 roleplay and then fired six rounds into my skull, but I can't actually be sure. I am sure that logs of the round in question can confirm what happened. I don't really think there should be either an ongoing encouragement or acceptance of this, considering a lot of antags can just walk into the round with assault rifles or worse and -- realistically -- start escalating as quickly as they can justify. I can accept that maybe my complaint about the massive tone dissonance brought on by the Fortnite ninja and the two who decided to turn the round into a limp comedy at the bar is just a matter of taste, but I still would like it addressed anyway if possible. I'm fine with funny rounds which you don't take too seriously and I'm equally fine with your regular old 'four Sol gimmick mercs try to steal the SD' or whatever, but I'm not happy about one round trying to have both and I think the remaining antags could have (and should have) done something to not result in complete whiplash. Ideally they'd go away entirely or something -- the main issue is that once antag #1 has decided to try and decapitate as many security officers as he can, the tone of the round is kind of set and I'm mostly looking to go and actually roleplay with other persistent characters instead of trying to figure out how the fuck I'm meant to have my character tolerate an impromptu pantomime from people who continually ICly admit to being co-workers and happy associates of the guy who shot security about 15-20 times in the head. Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? Yes, I ahelped it -- not the initial ninja charge, but the bar fiasco that came afterwards. I was told to write a complaint at the end of it all regarding the round as a whole by MattAtlas, since he didn't have time to fully take it in the round, and every other member of moderation staff around was directly involved and couldn't have handled it anyway. Approximate Date/Time: The round immediately preceding the time of writing.

Engineering has precious little gameplay as it is once the roundstart setup is complete. The blob is one of the few things that gives you a reason to come out of the lobby and do something, and I don't think shifting further towards a perma-extended chatroom is something the server needs. The reason there are so many lowpop blobs lately is because the most active morning European player group tends to stack a lot of engineers, which increases the spawn weight. I can't comment on how exactly the maths works because I haven't delved that deeply into it, but it might even be that with so few people on in total and so many engineers relative to the pop, the blob might be one of the only major events eligible to spawn, especially if meteor and/or ship debris are disabled like I think they might be? Security aren't considered at all for the blob spawn weight, which I think is fair since they are basically useless against it anyway. It really only takes one person with an emitter to set it up in-line with the main core to kill a blob.

BYOND key: Omicega Discord name: Omi#7267 Borg / AI names: None. I don't play cyborgs and haven't really decided on a name for my AI yet. Have you read the Aurora wiki page about the AI? Yes. Why do you wish to be on the whitelist? The AI role is the kind of thing I've always toyed with the idea of trying in the back of my head, but it's only recently that I really find myself wanting to give it a real shot. I enjoy playing my IPCs and delving into some aspects of synth lore as it is, and seeing some recent AI play has given me a few ideas for character concepts of my own. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? I have one warning from six months ago for an alleged lack of respectfulness in deadchat. Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yes.

[Medical] Julia Laszofi says, "Pop quiz. Treatment of tetanus. Solveig, ten seconds." [Medical] Julia Laszofi says, "Wound debridgement, HiG, anti-spasmotics- you name it. Tetanus is terrible. I've only seen it twice." I wasn't actually in this round as medical, but I caught this while I was observing at roundstart before joining engineering later in the same round. The only reason I wanted to come in and mention this at all is because it kind of presses a sore point for me; namely the potential for IRL medical knowledge creeping into IC dialogue, and the disconnect that creates between players who are in the medical field themselves and players who aren't. I've had bad experiences on certain HRP servers where there was almost a culture of 'shaming' people for not knowing medical terms or IRL medical treatments or whatever, and while I don't know if this was meant to cross that line or not I want to make it clear that I'm not really comfortable with too much OOC terminology creeping into medical at all, especially from a CMO who can't really be shouted down. Other than that, though -- the rounds I have played with you as CMO, I thought you did just fine. One was a hellish lowpop raider round where I think you did the best anyone could expect from you considering the shocked doors; the other I was actually in medical underneath you and appreciated your clear communication.

I haven't worn my uniform unless prompted on any of my security characters since NBT launched, as the uniform sprite quality took a massive dive round about then. I only ever had it directly pointed out to me once ICly; the other two or three times I just changed ahead of schedule because it was obvious an inspection or something was coming up. I don't wear anything I'd call unreasonable in place of the uniform -- one character wears fatigues that are the same rough colour palette as Zavodskoi brown, and my Idris officer was using teal trousers and a shirt solely to get around no rolled-up sprites on the actual uniform -- but even so I don't really mind it staying as an IC violation if you're pulled up on it. I don't think people even noticed most of the time, since like I said I barely diverged from the existing palettes. I've had to change maybe three or four times out of God knows how many rounds as security, and frankly I don't trust the playerbase to keep their choice of clothing reasonable. You can call me a doomer, but it will lead to security showing up in short shorts and sandals once people feel the squeeze fading in earnest.

Hi. I'm the player of the officer you're complaining about, Azhara Shas'kui. I asked an admin if I was allowed to post here (since I am 'involved' by being named here?) and apparently I can. I don't know why you personally are as upset about any of this as you are, but since you're twisting words, actions, and alleged intent a lot here I feel a little bit compelled to say my piece, regardless of what the ruling on the complaint against Cybs himself actually is. I'm gonna refer to your diagram here since you went to all the trouble of drawing it: The mercs are doing this while three members of security are standing there talking to them. It's pretty simple -- all three of us were trying to roleplay with the mercenaries and their hostage, but only one of them is bothering to say anything back at all while the other one tries desperately to hack the door open and sprint into maintenance. I'm not trying to blame them for this -- I'd try to run as well, probably, if I were in their position, but I don't think I'm reasonably expected to stand there and talk to a brick wall while the antags use game mechanics to put themselves in as favourable position as they can. This isn't a roleplay/gameplay medium like tabletop, where talking takes no time at all and doesn't take away from being able to act simultaneously. I'm not going to stand there and write a novel while the antags essentially ignore me and run off into maintenance where they'll have a free hostage and a big advantage -- especially when neither of them have any flash protection. I actually pulled and armed the flashbang before they even finished hacking the door, but they were able to crowbar it open and sprint partially into the tunnels before it finished cooking. I didn't flash myself, either -- that was another officer who wound up getting flashed due to a lack of protection. This was at like 1:30 or 1:40 round time, give or take. I don't know how much time you want me to give an antag team so they can figure out what they want to do. They were essentially radio silent for the entire round until the HoS prompted them at length for a response, and their demand was essentially for us to allow them to hijack the ship. That's a textbook example of a demand you can't really negotiate with, and the HoS (understandably) didn't even try from then on. Funnily enough, the only reason I threw the flashbang at all was because they had a hostage. That's our one chance to get him back before they disappear into maintenance for the foreseeable future. It's not my fault they didn't have him held up with an actual weapon (one had a tesla glove, the other was too busy holding hacking tools), it's not my fault they didn't bring flash protection, and it's definitely not my fault that the mercs chose to escalate things the way they did. You're really quick and eager to frame this whole incident as if the mercenaries got wiped out at first contact by a bloodthirsty security officer uninterested in roleplay at all -- instead, this is about 1:30 or 1:40 into a two-hour round after the mercs have had ample time to do their thing. I don't appreciate your passive-aggression or your off-topic complaining about how flashbangs mechanically work; if you want to change them, it's pretty easy to go and try to PR a change that would make them less effective.

I don't feel like I've ever seen any of your characters actually roleplay beyond simply being... in the round? When you're not rolling antagonist, you mostly seem to just play a selection of different Tajara that all talk in extremely broken Basic, like they're cavemen. One of those is your bridge crew that you want to promote to XO, and I really wouldn't want to see an NKA Tajara with deliberately mangled grammar take up that position, personally.

I'm posting just to back up Arbs' statement regarding the round WAYRT is complaining about. I've known Arbs since 2014 in another community and consider him a close friend, so I'm not offering a +1 or -1 on that account, but I want to make a few things clear here as someone who participated in that same round. This is just you being ignorant of what happened in the round, and isn't the HOS's fault at all. Every single member of security except for myself (the ZI IPC that latejoined), the ISU that latejoined, and the HOS himself was a vampire or a thrall of a vampire. When the one vampire (Baker, IIRC) wound up dead, all the thralls began to roleplay as if they'd lost their memories during their time as thralls. They were all perfectly aware OOC of what was going on, given I saw them try to murder the HOS along with their vampire master earlier in the round. Regarding no radio presence, it is pretty hard for a HOS to communicate on the radio when he's in surgery for well over half an hour AND loses his radio because he played along with an obvious antagonist. If you'd have liked him to do anything different here, I'd love to hear it. You are basically just wrong here, so his assertions aren't really something you can say you "feel like" is false. Everything you've said is essentially invalid because of the circumstances of the round, and you didn't make any effort to actually get the proper context to what was happening. Using the IC actions of two secondary antagonists (thralls) as justification for Arbs' OOC ability to play command is something I find really questionable. Pavlovich was one of the vampire's thralls who assisted in attacking Bisenti earlier in the shift. I saw this and logs can and will confirm it if you doubt me on this account, or you can go find their player yourself and ask them. I'd say a HOS hitting an antagonist back for having attacked them earlier in the round is more than valid. I understand you're unhappy with how that round went for Operations and your militia, but I'm a little irritated to see you come in here and fire shots at someone's application without even doing the bare minimum of research beforehand. The end of round blurb showed the vampire and their thralls, too, so it's not as if that information was unavailable to you either.

IMO, the character is basically incompatible with a cooperative roleplay environment like Aurora. It might fit better into a tabletop setting or something, but monopolising 2:30 hours of time from 20+ people constantly and having such a dramatic shift from what a 'regular' command player gives the crew was often pretty overbearing. You're entitled to your opinion on how the character worked to influence rounds, but I don't think it's anything to heap praise on or be proud of. It just came across as selfish, really, whether it was wilful or not. I'm happy they were retired when people made their negative feedback known, at least. I wouldn't have any particular desire to see them come back, though, even as a liaison.