Kintsugi

folks, they're stealing our elections, we can't have a radical like RACIST TORVALD in charge of Biesel, they rigged it because they hate freedom - and the fake news media, they're not saying anything about it - because frankly, they're in on it, you know, the voter fraud in the CRZ - it's crazy, look at what's happening to Biesel, they're trying to make us like Sol folks, they're trampling all over our Biesel values, and, you know it, and I know it, and it's just, just so true.

I don't have much to add personally as I haven't really wanted much to do with SS13 at the moment, but I have to say that as an ardent proponent of the independent setting over the corporate setting, I think this concept obviously has a lot of merit.

I personally had the idea of adding an investigations version of the camera drone that journalists currently have that would be visible on the security network, but the conclusion that I came to was that giving security any form of camera like this would just be a tremendous nerf to antags - it just becomes all the more impossible to evade detection and dogpiling. I feel more or less the same about this proposal, unfortunately.

Shimmer makes a great point. Caseless ammo is absolutely going to undermine the visual spectacle of a firefight and I think we shouldn't have it. In fact, I see no point to the addition of caseless ammunition at all except how "cool" it sounds, but in practice it's genuinely much worse game design. Spent casings are an important part of the evidence/investigator gameplay loop. In general, I think this PR is a net negative. It doesn't really solve the problem of real-world calibers being all we have, merely shifting most of them around to much more LARP-y alternatives. I really don't see what this is going to accomplish meaningfully.

As the OP, I'd like to point out that the point of this thread was to make the XO into the ship's 2IC, not to make the XO into the ship's 2IC while maintaining the present species allowances - not trying to be a jerk, but at this point this thread's purpose has been achieved and discussion about species restrictions should probably be moved elsewhere.

What about (and this is very much a working name) "expedition tokens"? These would, ICly, be items issued on behalf of the SCC to SCC employees who participated in an expedition or SCC "operation" (again, for lack of a better term), as a token of appreciation on the SCC's part and to recognize an employee's participation in such. They'd be small coins or badge-like items that have no actual value but would have a unique item sprite and could fit in wallets and would have a description that briefly summarizes the relevant arc. You could also lean into the unfeeling megacorporation angle here too - maybe each token has an insultingly trivial bonus to it, like a 3% discount at SCC retail locations or something, and that's all the SCC gives you for risking your life (or something, just an example). Inspiration here are things like boy scout patches or, if you're comfortable with an example with a basis in a military tradition, things like challenge coins (frequently used outside of the military!)

I'm sorry, but this is a hopelessly pessimistic and self-defeating attitude to have over such a niche and essentially non-existent issue. The idea that we need to prevent the players from ever receiving any form of recognition at all because, potentially, a bad character could be recognized, is both at once completely overkill and completely inconsistent with how we treat things made by sketchy people (ie: half of our lore). I won't go into why I feel that's the case, because I feel Limette makes the argument very soundly above, but I wanted to point this out. It's not at all a reasonable ruling on the issue - at the end of the day, it's an excessively restrictive response to an extremely niche scenario.

I like this idea but I feel that the responses are proof enough that it's just one of those things that people are too skeptical of to completely accept, even if in practice I think the concerns being raised are extremely unlikely to ever come to pass. There are certain ideas on HRP servers that people seemingly can never stomach: canonicity where characters exist beyond just existing is one of them. The fact of the matter is that despite Aurora placing such a focus on canonicity, people are deeply concerned with the idea of characters ever being recognized in any way, and more than that people really do not like it if characters are given any form of treatment that isn't negative or the exact same form of attention being given to every other character. How often do you see people bragging about IC accomplishments of their characters in OOC, or even IC for that matter? How often do you actually see people bragging about how their characters died in events? Because to be frank, most people I see who lose characters in events are upset or completely happy to move on. Player and especially character turnover on Aurora is huge: characters simply do not last more than a few months typically, which means that there's very few people developing a strong enough attachment to their character in the first place to treat them as this OOC achievement to be paraded around. And here's the fact of the matter: if this seems exclusionary and intimidating to new players, the whole server will seem that way. If people are being turned off of Aurora because there's a rock somewhere with some names on it because of event arcs, they're going to be turned off by the fact there's hundreds of thousands of words on the wiki that they have to read to know about these arcs and the lore as a whole and that we have these event arcs constantly. Is the expectation that we're going to hide Aurora's past arcs and things from new players in order to not scare them off? Because if that's what we have to resort to, we have a serious problem, lol. I'd actually like to make the argument that showing a new player that their character *could* matter and that things that happen to their character *could* matter would be a huge draw for people. Anyway, it might seem like I'm trying to target a specific argument or someone's specific arguments, but at the end of the day I've been seeing this same sort of apprehension for as long as I've been playing HRP (It was so strong on Bay that they avoided canonicity completely in general for many many years). I think this is just how a lot of people naturally feel about this sort of thing, and too many people feel this way for it to ever be accepted on the server. For what it's worth, I think in practice nobody would actually care much. There might be a few rounds after event arcs where people go RP with the rock, but I think in the long term it'll just be a half-forgotten decoration, like Patience would be if it wasn't in your face 24/7. And that aside, I think concerns about a tonal shift are unfounded. There's a whole lot of things that are going to shift our tone before *that* does. Let me close with this: Not many people seem to remember this, but the Aurora had IC memorials to dead crew as a result of the serial killer arc. It included their names and how they were murdered by a serial killer. There were multiple memorials around the station. Do you know how often these memorials existing caused problems? Well, I can't be sure they didn't cause issues at any point as I only started playing here in 2019, but I can say that I never saw anything, and I haven't heard of anything happening either. And last Christmas we had an event where some characters were ICly given medals and high honors from the SCC, because of their actions during the Dreary Futures 2 finale event. This is supposedly the exact sort of situation everyone is worried about - characters getting recognized above other characters for their actions. And yet? I don't even think any of those characters still exist, a bit more than a year later, and when they did exist I sure never saw any problematic behavior like people worry about, IC or OOC.

Hi, I was just wondering about how active you are on Aurora? You don't appear to be active in the discords or here on the forums. I haven't been on the server often recently myself so this could absolutely be a me problem, but I don't recognize any of your characters either. When would you say that you started participating in the community again and how much have you played since then? It also seems like the last time you were active was four years ago, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Employee Name: Sohei Employee Rank: Investigator Date of Interaction: 2/3/2466 INTERACTION A: Airborne Purpose Synthetic, Unknown Designation INTERACTION B: Bipedal Purpose Synthetic, Unknown Designation