SilverSZ

BYOND Key: SilverSZ (Silvie#0624) Total Ban Length: Permanent Banning staff member's Key: Peppermint (Soph#7256) Reason of Ban: Been told to knock it off with the horny posting. Can appeal on the forums. Check DMs for the posts in question Reason for Appeal: Posting on the relay after drinking at new years isn't a good idea in any circumstances, much less so with controlling my statements not being a strong point of mine sober. Took some time to reflect and chill outside of the relay for a bit and I'll be more mindful of my conduct in the future and avoid the place when my decision making is impaired. At this point however I'm missing talking to people in it as it is just very different to the conversations in our other servers, so I decided it would be a good time to pursue the appeal.

Hi, Thank you for Applying. I've got a few questions I would like to ask however so far I think the Application looks solid. 1. Can you elaborate on the thought processes of IPC in general and how they apply to Ewe as a character specifically, primarily interested in how it handles it's idea of self-preservation along with emotions (If they experience emotions at all) 2. Since Ewe is from Biesel what their thoughts in the state of synthetic rights within the nation? Do they view them as lacking, sufficient or do they simply not care about such things? 3. What does Ewe think of both it's finding of fame and then subsequence loss of it being transferred to the Horizon? 4. What does Ewe think of it's position in life? Is it content with being owned by Zavodskoi or does it have thoughts outside of being a simple worker? Thank you for your responses and best of luck.

Hi, thank you for applying. This application will be denied as it is lacking what we expect from an applicant, primarily in the length of your responses. I suggest you look back over some previously accepted applications and work on expanding your backstory and rest of the application in general. You can apply again in 3 days.

I'm sorry for the disappointment and do understand it, I would feel the same in the same situation but I do feel that not bringing back Mobius is for the best and I'm glad you understanding our reasoning, my biggest hope will be that you find a character you enjoy even more if you get the whitelist back. Outside of this, there's no other restrictions that you would have regarding IPC characters or what you can do or anything like that outside of any other member of the whitelist, part of why I think not returning Mobius is it means a truly clean slate and we can all move on with everything previous being water under the bridge and no need for anything more to be done besides let you enjoy playing the server with the whitelist. I'm glad you still want to pursue the whitelist and as I said before, if this were a new player I would give it 100% approval and with Mobius not returning I fully see everything that happened as water under the bridge and give this application my +1. Best of Luck once again.

Hi Firstly, thank you for applying. I've had a good amount of interaction with Francisco IC and seeing them both live up to the RP quality I would expect from an Aurora character and Synth Whitelistee makes me personally very happy. Francisco is a fun and interesting character and whilst I haven't seen the others to my memory I have no reason to doubt that either and gives me a lot of reassurance in regards to the application. Which itself, is perfectly good. If this were from a player with no previous history with the server it would be an easy accept for me. However, there is a serious matter to be bought up and discussed. Mobius was the character that previously caused your whitelist to be stripped, and regardless of the idea of them being reworked heavily the synthetic team feels uncomfortable with them being bought back and unfortunately we are going to have to say that bringing said character back is a hard no from us. Regardless of the outcome of the application, we don't feel comfortable with someone playing a character that previously lead to their whitelist being stripped in any form. I understand that the character must mean a lot to you, it's natural to be invested in characters you make and play for a long period. If you decide to withdraw your application based on this decision, there's no hard feelings. If you do continue with the application, you have my full support and I wish you the best.

Whilst alot has been said by other people I'd just like to chip in my own perspective on how I would reccomend someone deal with our lore base if they were just getting into the server and I've talked a few people into trying the server over the years who have enjoyed and this is the same way I encouraged them to engage with the lore starting off. I think a key thing for me is that I don't think you need to know all or even most lore for your first character (unless you really want to know everything and read everything of course) but if you don't you really don't. Infact, I'd argue finding out the lore in the game actually makes it way more fun starting out as a player. Being able to genuinely walk up to characters, human or alien and then ask where they are from or what they think or are like with genuine curiousity is an experience I wish I could have again, I think learning about every faction or race and stuff about them would be a detriment more than a good thing. My recommendation to new people starting was always to just, skim over the human planets and find one you like the vibe with, then read about that and the faction they belong too, and then the megacorporation you're going to have your character work for but then just... Make a character who wouldn't really know much else and enjoy the discovery of the lore in-game, find out how aliens react to humans by how they react to you or what others say about them, find out about factions by asking about them ingame and all that. I think other people do make good points on how we could make our lore more accessible in some ways, and I think producing an updated summary could help but honestly my recommendation would just be to narrow down what lore you have to learn by making a character who doesn't need to do much and discover the setting and lore in-game, maybe read a little bit now and again if something bought up interests you particularly. My last advice would be that Aurora exists to be a place for people to create creative, interesting and fun characters. The lore exists to facilitate this and put some guidelines in place to ensure that characters remain within the scope of what is allowed on the server. But really your goal looking at lore shouldn't be to be to perfectly adhere to every cultural aspect or exactly how the lore says you should but to take the lore and use it to make something you enjoy playing and others enjoy interacting with. So I wouldn't be too stressed or concerned about understanding every in and out of lore or every scenario and little piece. Find something you think is cool, make something cool from it and just hop into the game. By the time you want to make another character you'll probably understand the lore far better just from meeting people who used other parts of the lore for their characters.

One point until next rank.

Laugh React this Thread

Whilst I do love the idea personally and would enjoy seeing an EE ship of this nature added to the pool there's two things I want to mention. One more serious and another that's just a suggestion. Whilst I think the suggestions made will suffice for keeping the EE staff from antagging against the Horizon something that also needs to be considered is the Horizon antagging against the EE ship. Back with the older EE ship I remember a few notable incidents were instigated by the crew first due to our lore around the SCC/EE Rivalry, especially that with NT. With the addition of ship weapons this antagonism could still continue even without communication between both sides, I think allowing communication but not boarding could fix this issue as most of the time the Horizon probably wouldn't shoot them if the EE ship did as they said, but it is a cause for concern. Secondly, whilst Human, IPC and Skrell are the obvious choices for crew I would like to see C'thuric Vaurca considered as well. The current lore between the two factions makes the C'thur hive a shareholder and major partner with EE who employs them exclusively from amongst the Vaurca Hives. It's stated that obviously these Vaurca are not employed within Sol at the majority of EE facilities but instead used outside of Sol and in the Federation instead. I'm sure this would be something to talk to the Vaurca loredevs about but I think it would be neat if this special lore relationship was also represented on the ship.

L + Ratio

Byond Key: SilverSZ Discord Username: Silvie#0624 Character Names: Amsel Ilse Van Volvalaad Valerie Corneau Due to my tendency to delete characters often, these are the ones I recall. Amsel is the only character I play actively. How long have you been playing on Aurora?: Just under 2 years on and off of proper play Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? A singular warning from 1 year ago for afking as CSI. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?: Heads of Staff have two main purposes in my mind. The first is to be a leader and facilitator for your department. You should make sure your staff are doing well and ideally promote roleplay in the department so people don’t get bored. This also covers handling management and delegation, helping new players to the department and the other various IC tasks that are usually placed on a head of staff. The other main purpose is more to the round itself than to your department. A head of staff, especially certain ones like the Captain and HoS, should do their best to make the round fun for everyone, Antag or not, through their reactions to things going on and the pacing they choose to set. Command staff have a lot of power and should use it to drive the round in a fun direction. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?: Apart from the responsibilities covered above as part of their purpose, to make the round more enjoyable, do their IC job and promote roleplay. I think two key responsibilities for a head of staff is firstly to play an interesting, lore and rule appropriate characters. Similar to a species whitelist, having a command whitelist means you should live up to the standards set by the server and be somewhat of an example in character creation for other players. This also applies to your behaviour in character and towards other characters, you should be interesting to roleplay and interact with. The other major OOC responsibility is to have sufficient mechanical knowledge about the department you are involved with as a head of staff. You should know what you are doing both to perform your role effectively IC and be able to teach and help other players who might not know the department as well. You don’t need to know the entire ins and outs of everything to an expert level but you should be competent and decently knowledgeable at least Could you give us the gist of what is currently happening in Tau Ceti and how it affected your character and their career?: The situation in Tau Ceti could be better, could be worse. Whilst the Phoron Crisis continues to grip the economy and impact the Spur the SCC manages to mitigate the effects on the economy and continue to some of the best employers in the Spur. Tau Ceti has expanded in the wake of the Solarian Collapse through the CRZ and now attempts to manage its new territories whilst staying as the foremost galactic economic superpower. For Ai Xian despite the crisis and issues as a Fisanduhian, a life in Biesel and Career with the SCC proves to be far more than she could have attained back home, though the increased challenges posed by the crisis at work have put a strain on her home life. For Lucrezia she was under the ownership of Zeng-Hu in Assunzionie prior to the crisis. But due to her experience prior as an Executive Officer for expeditions in the Lights Edge her ownership was transferred to the SCC for the Horizon Mission, a direct consequence of the SCCs efforts to resolve the Phoron Crisis. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted?: Executive Officer and Head of Security for the Trial. Afterwards I also plan to play Captain and Consular. Have you familiarized yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles?: Yes Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking: Yawen Lin - Fisanduh Human Head of Security Lucrezia - Assunzione IPC Executive Officer Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action?: Yes Have you linked your Byond account to the forums?: Yes

Personally I think the ideas Danse presents are excellent. Our current languages have been something that bugged me for a long time as I do feel they are in a bad place lorewise and could be greatly expanded upon not just to be up to the standard I would like to see but also be more usable and interesting for characters to use in general. Whilst of course, the exact specifics of what languages are put in will be up to the Human Team, such as adding a Dominia specific language or the exact names of languages etc. I think that what Danse presents is a very good base to work from for a vast improvement on our current language lore. I don't really have anything to add personally, I think the languages proposed are good and cover most bases and the change to focusing on languages born from specific cultures rather than the hodgepodge lore we have now means we can add any that we feel become necessary easily in the future from a lore perspective if a certain area of the world becomes more prominent in lore which I am sure will happen in the future.

I was originally not planning to post in this thread, though I have been reading every post. Given I'm not very involved on planning and execution of the current event arc there were better people to speak on it from the team. But given how much I agree with Peppermints post I think it's important to echo it as someone actually on the team. I think a good chunk of issues in communication with the team can come from the medium in which we do it. Discord can be fully of people jumping in and out and not everyone will want the same level of seriousness in the discussion. The Forums are better but still are an open forum and I personally don't lean towards the very long posting style it encourages myself. If you have suggestions, complaints, ideas, questions. Whatever about lore in general like this event arc. Or Synthetic lore which is my area, or even just other areas of lore I pretty much like all of the lore here though obviously I think you should go see lore writers who actually work on that area if you have things about that area. Anyone regardless of any factors is welcome to DM me on Discord (Silvie#0624) and I will do my best to get back to you and have a good discussion about it. I should be open to DM if you're in any of the Aurora servers and if you can't you can send me a friend request. I might not be able to change certain things or affect other things but I can raise issues with the team and make sure your perspective is heard or address your concerns myself. I not only see it as an important part of being a lore team member but personally enjoy interacting with the community and talking about the Lore and hearing both praise and complaints for it. Even if I might disagree, more perspectives can help and that includes those outside of the team directly. At the end of the day, people would not be here or posting or talking about this if they were not passionate about the Lore of our server. I can assure you that the team and myself take feedback and mistakes done in Arcs and we don't dismiss it. This is the second major event arc of the Horizon and we are still learning, we learnt from Dreary Futures I and will from II in the same manner. I personally want to see as many people as possible enjoy the events and the lore we produce. So regardless of factors people have spoken about like being in a "The Minority" or such things I will treat your feedback the same as anyone else, even if I can't make things perfect there is always compromise to be found and tweaks to be made. I do just ask that, similar to what Peppermint says. We have these discussions in good faith and politely which of course goes both ways. If I ever treat you talking to me about lore in a rude or unfair way I would hope you make it obvious to me you feel that way so I can improve or obviously, you can bring concerns to Staff Complaints which both Luca and Cael take very seriously. But this is why I prefer DMs for this sort of discussion, it's far easier to be polite and civil without 10, 20 or more voices all talking over each other but just two people who are discussing something they have a passion for. Not to say that open discord channels and the forum don't have their purpose. But sometimes being able to know your concerns are directly heard and addressed is simply something those avenues can't provide and more methods of providing feedback is always good. To comment on the topic at hand of the thread, as well. I would not consider this Arc a sign of creeping militarization or milrp or such myself. I can say that I do not think many of things people seem to have fears about are something that should ever be on the Horizon. Whilst we will get into combat or even be told to go to it at times, we are not a military ship as much as we are not a non-combatant ship. The addition of weapons makes the Horizon capable of defending itself which was an issue before, but I see no reason there would be any further push towards a more military environment. It would be counter to the lore and setting we try to present, as we are not a military vessel, part of a military and we never will be.

Hi! Thank you for applying, I do like a lot of what you have written but I feel your backstory needs a little bit of expansion. What planet is Taurus from and his master from? How did he join the Golden Deep? What exactly will he be doing on the Horizon? I like what you're going for with the backstory and the events currently within it, but I feel it could use some fleshing out to ensure it's all good with our current lore. Best of Luck!

An issue with this idea is that by default lore staff don't have access to any method to confirm the amount of rounds someone has played. Unless we have another role such as Admin, CCIA etc we would have to reach out to someone else for each whitelist we did to confirm they aren't just lying. Which is something that I don't think many people would do but could happen and if we are placing a hard restriction that you must play x rounds to be whitelisted we would have to confirm it or its pointless. I also think it could be detrimental as whilst some people are denied for not having played enough and a belief they need to be more well-rounded etc. Some people are also accepted with a good application. I couldn't have played more than maybe 5-10 rounds when I got my synthetic whitelist which is really not much at all. I feel like putting a hard limit could deter people who might be interested in playing a certain species specifically, which does happen. Overall though I think that setting a hard limit of any nature is a bad idea, and applications should be judged on their own. Personally I've never advised against accepting an app due to a lack of playtime myself either, and wouldn't ever deter someone for applying for the synth whitelist due to a lack of playtime. I wouldn't want a hard limit for the synthetic whitelist and if other whitelists did I'd rather it just be a thing for them, not something placed on all species.

This is a good, well developed application so I'll be brief and ask my selfish question. You talk alot about inter-species cooperation and lore which is something I'm personally also passionate about for every species, not just synthetics. Have you had any ideas or concepts for Synthetic-Diona lore that you would want to work with the synth team to achieve. And if so what are they?

Hello, Good Application. Boggle is a good guy and very much passionate about Diona having played a few great ones that I know of atleast. I'm not massively knowledgeable on Diona lore so I'll keep my question on what I do know. Your desire to focus on inter-species lore and cooperation with Diona is exactly what I think the species has needed for a long time. It's the perfect way to make them more interesting and more involved in the setting. However at the moment, atleast to my knowledge having just woken up. There's really no significant IPC-Diona point of contact in the lore, outside of just "They both live in Biesel" and things like that. Are there any ideas you've had regarding Diona-IPC relations and co-existence specifically, and if so what are they?

Hello. This application has a few issues, I've discussed it with the lore team and will split up the points below. IPCs are inherently tied very strongly to megacorporation's in all areas they are produced, Barring Elyra as the exception to this rule. We have a page for Synthetic Origins on the wiki and we don't really want to see a new company making a cutting-edge, special frame to be a thing. As it goes against the heavy involvement of the pre-existing megacorporations we want in Synthetic Lore. Additionally the IPC wiki page states that "IPCs themselves lack any commercial military lines known to the general public." which this backstory seems to be in direct contradiction with. The way Takman is described makes it something that would not appear on the Horizon if it is meant to be a military frame and designed to mimic a human soldier. Military-Grade Synthetics are something that don't appear on the Horizon. Military-Grade frames such as Hunter-Killer units are not open to be played from the character creation menu for this reason and the frames presented as options none of them are military grade. Along with this any military grade parts for an IPC would be stripped once they leave service, which is why you can't play an Industrial or other unit as a military-grade synthetic. This simply isn't present on the Horizon. Finally, The character concept described really isn't what we look for in terms of a whitelist application character, we want to see a synthetic character with a story behind them rather than an out of the box, just made and shipped Synthetic which is what your current story seems to describe. A first-ever production model that is just shipped off with little to no backstory for themselves is not really acceptable in this regard as we want a whitelistee to show they can craft and interesting, compelling and lore accurate story about the synthetic themselves. So for the reasons above we won't be accepting this character as a Synthetic character. Though we welcome you to apply with a different character and we will look at it again once this is done. (You can just edit the current application for this of course, the rest is fine)

The issue with Intensity is we have to account of all possible outcomes in the event. If we had set it as a lower intensity. But then in the end a Torpedo actually gets launched or a firefight starts, that would likely go over worse as people might have considered the lower intensity as a mark of "Oh, I can play this character I wouldn't normally play out of fear of losing them". I do agree the actual event would fall under a low-middle intensity for me but I think labelling it as high was ideal for what might have happened. I don't think fighting was an option but we have to account for all actions the crew might take and there could have been people (from what I heard there were, just not people in command) who wanted to call the FSF on their bluff, personally, I just see marking it as high intensity as being cautious. As the FSF leader for the event I did note this as an issue. Unfortunately it was one of those events that was hard to involve people with. I hope the future events in the arc will be different personally, and intend to try and propose ways for this to happen. So hopefully people who felt uninvolved for this one will find the future ones better in this regard.

Trio covered most of the points I would have raised in this thread, so I'll just talk about something he didn't instead. I think it's important to understand the SCC's power doesn't come in the same way as a nation does. The SCC is reliant on the soft-power it projects from it's stranglehold over the Galactic Economy. Only the PMCG actually hosts something that could be considered a fighting force and it is not close to the military of our larger nations. Such as the Wildlands factions and Sol Proper. The Solarian Wildlands such as the FSF are bandits. They do not care about soft power or economics, and the SCC does not have the hard power to fight against a Full Solarian Battlegroup + Extras like the FSF, and the FSF does not have any reliance in a greater sense on the SCC as most of their forces are located in the Wildlands, beyond what would be considered the SCC's primary sphere of influence. Could the SCC build up a mega navy? Likely, they produce all the things required for such. But do they have one on hand to kill anyone they want? Not at all, it's not profitable to maintain such a thing and the SCC is not here to build a nation but make money. Heph failed to defeat a bunch of religious fanatics with no space ships on a rock, and had one of their most major corporate possessions raided in the meantime. In short, the SCC is soft power, not hard power. They couldn't wipe out the FSF and the FSF is not reliant on the SCC. It is unlikely anything greater between the two will come from the events, and the Carravagio will simply not be doing much business with the SCC in the future, not that they care with that payday they got.

I get confused by the current layout. But I think the Ping's suggestion is the ideal one. Lets just name them, the suggested names, Hangar, Main, Admin. Are short enough to be easy to say quickly. So I don't see that being an issue.

I think the criticism of the Map is pretty accurate. It's something the lore team has already noted for future events. As for people being left out, that is often the nature of events and including everyone, especially for more hostile events such as this can be very difficult. Though I do agree that letting people be on the Horizon would have aided this, again. I however have to say that I think the final point about event impact is incorrect. The FSF and their ship are currently serving as the Horizons security escort into a dangerous region of space, and the deaths of their two commanding officers will have a dramatic effect on this relationship going forward. I think it's premature to say the event had no effect on anything without having seen the rest of the arc and what occurs as a result of the event. There are more events to come and each outcome will have impacts down the road for the next event. Overall though, other than the point on impact I think this criticism is pretty solid. The lore team is still experimenting with how best to run events and do things in our new setting so I can say we do take note of these things and try and improve in the future. The away map idea actually came about because of the issues we have had in previous events getting the Intrepid to leave in a reasonable time, for example.

Good Answer, Venusians synthetics certainly need an expansion on their current lore. Good Luck with the Application.