ChevyChevron

I can't really say I'm fond of how much it seems like the color schemes and aesthetics of companies are changing with the NBT.

For the "something has burrowed into the station" event, maybe something that builds a little nest in maintenance somewhere could work. A more defensive-oriented species that spreads some kind of biological growth over surrounding tiles, breaks open unbolted airlocks, and just tries to chase off anything that comes too close. A bit like how cult constructs can cultify walls/floors or how the hive spreads on Eris is what I'm thinking of.

You've all seen it. A station announcement rings out warning the crew about unknown life somewhere in the vicinity of the station. Not a few seconds later, someone from command or security chimes in on the common channel to remind people to pull fire alarms in case of carp. Or to let security know if you see fully grown greimorians somewhere. The announcement claims not to know what exactly is threatening the station, but everyone and their mother knows what it is anyway. I propose that these events should choose from a pool of potential simplemob types to spawn in and around the station, rather than just being something easily identified. This would make it so that people have to actually investigate the situation to know what the proper response is. Some of these might be non-hostile, a fact the sensors simply couldn't determine at range. Some of them might be dangerous enough to warrant busting out the armory guns. The point is to create more varied situations that people have to actually care about understanding and dealing with. The list should obviously be weighted to prevent more serious threats from becoming too commonplace, possibly including preventing some from spawning at all without at least some security presence to deal with them. (I'd say the same thing should be applied to blobs, preventing them from spawning at all if there isn't at least one engineer present, but that's outside the scope of this suggestion thread.) As for what critters could be added, I'm not sure yet. If you have any ideas for xenofauna, feel free to share them in this thread.

Speaking as someone who cuffs more than I get cuffed, I don't think this would be a positive change. As it stands, winding up in cuffs is already round-ending for most antagonists and from a game balance perspective it wouldn't be wise to make it even harder for antagonists to escape. That said, I agree that it's somewhat unrealistic, but I think that's a sacrifice we have to make for the sake of making the game mechanics fun.

Improper capitalization has been fixed, thanks for catching that. As for the question: Xot feels a good deal of guilt over the situation. Why did some of them live and some of them die? Xot feels responsible, as if it should have fought harder to save its fallen brethren. Thinking more introspectively, Xot would probably compare the feeling of loss to that felt by the humans who lost their comrades that day; it imagines it's a similar sort of loss, given that humans and other aliens have no VR afterlife they can see their loved ones in. Xot considers itself responsible despite the official stance not blaming anyone in particular, a belief that Xot suspects was part of why it was stationed away from active combat and was integrated into the SCC's security forces instead. It is a resilient sort, but the grief was certainly traumatic and Xot doesn't doubt it would have broken down entirely had another such loss occurred. Serving on the Aurora will let it continue to be of use to the hive and continue to fulfill its purpose as a warrior.

Thank you for the kind words. I don't intend to shy away from Xot's alien qualties, but rather explore how even in such an alien mindset there can be similarities and empathy shared between Vaurca and other species. 1: Xot believes in the Preeminence, the inclusion of aliens in its theology appealing to Xot's desire (and conditioning) to interact with other species. Xot is aware of the purpose for which it was born and enjoys fulfilling that purpose, something it considers evidence supporting the Preeminence's philosophy. More than that, though, Xot desires for there to be an end to strife between hives and species and the Preeminence's focus on shattering such barriers appeals to its diplomatic nature. 2: Xot is of the opinion that animosity and old grudges between the hives must be put aside in the face of modern problems. Even though the C'thur hive is the most economically stable of the hives in the Orion Spur, Xot is keenly aware how even small mistakes can snowball into catastrophe. It thinks that, as a whole, the hives stand to gain more by working together as equals than any of them would gain if by fighting for dominance. However, it has no illusions that such quarrels can ever be truly done away with so long as certain facts remain in place. For example, as the Lii'dra are unlikely to suddenly have a change of heart and establish peaceful diplomatic ties with other societies, the rest of Vaurca society is imperiled by the hive's continued existence. It also doubts that the Zo'ra are likely to put away their desire for sovereignty any time soon. Xot feels some particular affinity for Athvur's brood, given their relationship to humankind. 3: As Xot was chosen for EPMC work before it was born, the warrior has little experience with Federation society. In general, though, it approves of the Federation's desire to promote unity among its people but disagrees with some of the more extreme polices enacted to achieve this goal. However, Xot can also understand (even if it has difficulty relating to) the desire for independence characteristic of the Skrell living outside of the Federation. Ideally, it would like for some kind of compromise to be reached between both sides such that the more independent Skrell could still participate in and benefit the Federation without feeling oppressed or persecuted because of it. More practically, it wonders if the C'thur will be called on to provide soldiers in the event of a large-scale uprising, as such a campaign would no doubt be costly to all parties involved. Xot is interested in getting to know Skrell (as well as other species) in the more diverse workplace of an SCC station as its experience with the EPMC was largely only with humans outside of combat.

BYOND Key: Aethenos Character Names: John Chevalier, Mark Doe, Marcus Ahston, Damon Makris, Amanpreet Singh Species you are applying to play: Vaurca What color do you plan on making your first alien character: The sort of metallic blue-gray typical of the Vytel brood. Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes. Why do you wish to play this specific race: One of the first aliens I encountered when joining Aurora was a Vaurca warrior played by our dear Canon35. Kakvak was a frequent sight in the security department at the time and, seeing as I mostly play security, it meant I ran into it a lot. There were a lot of quirks about the Vaurca that I grew to appreciate, even as I became more familiar with other aliens across the station. It is also my understanding that there is a Vaurca event arc in the works, and I suspect the C'thur hive may be involved. I currently have no whitelists; thus it seemed a good place to start so that I could participate in the upcoming event arc and have a bug in that race, so to speak. The factional nature of the Vaurca appeals to me as well, as the different hives and the broods within them vie for their place in the spur. I tend to find myself more interested in the species with a lot of moving parts politically speaking, and the Vaurca definitely appeal to that. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: The impression I get is that Vaurcae are often almost closer to machines than to other forms of organic life. Their primary concerns are first preservation of the hive and second preservation of the self. Unlike IPCs and other synthetics, however, they are still organic creatures with wants and needs. Even bound may have their own little quirks of personality, despite the extremely limited capacity for those quirks to present themselves. Unbound, however, exist to fill in the gaps presented by the bound. While bound are able to be made to fill many positions, this naturally leads them to becoming cripplingly specialized and unable to perform outside of their limited purpose. Unbound can both fill the roles that require versatility as well as be a guiding hand to the bound around them. Character Name: Za'Akaix'Xot C'thur Please provide a short backstory for this character: Xot was created as part of a experimental hive cell of unbound Vytel warriors intended to serve as EPMCs alongside humans. The purpose of the experiment was to examine the effects of social bonding between Vaurca warriors and alien soldiers on the combat effectiveness of the warriors in question. To this end, Xot and the rest of its hive cell were given more intensive training in understanding alien culture and social cues than a warrior would ordinarily receive. Despite initial successes, however, the EPMC unit that Xot was a part of suffered catastrophic losses in a battle against pirates as a result of faulty intelligence. Most of Xot's hive cell died in the battle, the relatively expendable Vaurcae buying time for the EPMCs to evacuate, and a significant number of their neural sockets were unable to be recovered. Unfortunately, the pirates had scattered before the Vytel were able to muster the forces to reclaim the sockets of their dead and only a handful were ever found. The rest are presumed destroyed or stolen by the pirates. As a consequence, the experiment was shelved and the remaining warriors of the cell were transferred to standard EPMC work where they will likely remain for the rest of their natural lives. Xot's contract has wound up being passed to NanoTrasen, at least for the time being, and it will be serving aboard the Aurora as a security officer. Despite the experiment not being considered a failure officially, Xot feels something akin to guilt over how it turned out, especially with regards to the loss of life on the part of its fellow warriors and the EPMC soldiers they had grown close to. What do you like about this character?: Xot is intended to be something approaching charismatic for a Vaurca, able to mingle with other sentients and bond with them. One of the benefits found by the experiment it was created for is those who interact socially with Xot's cell tended to develop favorable opinions of Vaurca as a whole more readily. Xot exists in a sort of limbo between being ordered to make friends with other species and having a genuine desire to borne of its VR training. However, the survivor's guilt it feels regarding the hive cell members it lost complicates its purpose and gives it more depth than simply "what if bug man was able to make friends." I wanted to create a Vaurca security character that I knew wouldn't simply come out as a gung-ho soldier. Rather, Xot's enhanced ability to empathize with other sapients means that it has a greater desire to avoid bloodshed wherever possible. I usually prefer security characters with that twist to them of preferring a nonviolent solution but remaining capable of picking up a gun and using it in an emergency. Xot is my attempt at that archetype within the Vaurca narrative. Good, but not soft. Kind, but tormented. How would you rate your role-playing ability?: I'm of two minds on how to answer this question. Certain aspects of roleplaying, such as immersing myself in a character and maintaining the distinction between IC and OOC knowledge, I would say I am quite good at. Others, such as actually talking to other people, I find I do poorly at. I'm prone to dismissing my own capabilities and I wouldn't call myself a particularly impressive roleplayer, but I've had people tell me in the past that I am quite good at what I do. Ultimately, I hope to be both memorable and accurate with the lore I'm able to use, and I hope to improve over time.

At present, the purpose of Xenobiology is centered almost entirely around slimes. In my opinion, slime science is largely a relic of ye olden days of SS13 and has little purpose in an HRP environment. Be that as it may, I'm not going to argue for the removal of slimes as I would prefer to see them reworked into a more appropriate form. I don't have any ideas for that, so instead I'm going to share my ideas for antag organs. A feature of many rounds of changeling or vampire I've participated in has been, on the occasion where not only has the antagonist been captured by security and they're able to transport them without so much risk that it would be impractical, taking the sucker down to xenobiology to have the xenobiologist on staff look at them. Figure out what they are. Maybe threaten a vivisection or two. My idea is simple: Add gameplay for the xenobiologist in the form of vivisecting various forms of alien life, from carp to changelings, and give the research department rewards for carrying out this task. In the case of most simplemobs, getting a live animal on the surgery table would give the scientist the opportunity to extract intact organs from them. Merely butchering the carcass would likely ruin these delicate organs, and so there would need to be some way to render an animal unconscious that it might be transported safely to the table. Maybe a fire selector could be added to the xenofauna guns in the checkpoint, it would give security a reason to interact with science more often. These organs would be usable in one of three ways: You could stick them in the destructive analyzer and they would likely be quite valuable earlier in the round. You could package them up and sell them on the cargo shuttle. Or, finally, recipes could be added that use these organs. Maybe space carp livers are a delicacy in Dominia or something. The second part of this suggestion is to add new and exciting organs to various antagonists. Specifically; Changelings, Cultists, Loners, and Vampires. If we still had wizards, they'd be on this list as well. Changelings and Vampires would have various regular organs changed into variations specific to their antagonist type. These organs would have ties to the various abilities at their disposal and (initially) would be undetectable via scanner. A vampire's heart may have some unique and wacky abilities, but it will only show up as a heart when scanned unless the vampire has already gorged itself on a serious quantity of blood. Changelings in particular would be proficient at hiding their organs' true forms and organs extracted from a changeling who is not currently using their abilities would likely remain disguised for some time after removal. Similarly to the animal organs, these could be used for research or shipped via cargo shuttle. However, I'm also picturing scenarios where a xenobiologist implants these organs into either a monkey or (hopefully) a willing test subject to see what happens. This likely wouldn't result in giving random people access to antagonist abilities (more likely the organs would be rejected outright) but it could create some interesting scenarios. Maybe an organ that had been extracted from an antagonist, implanted into a test subject for some time, and then extracted again is worth even more research value or cash value. Maybe implanting these organs into people spreads the disease, so to speak, and creates more antagonists. That's probably a bad idea. Cultists, in this concept, would have a tumorous growth on their brains that directly connects them to the voice of Nar'Sie (Or whatever entity the cultist players have decided they worship. You get the point.) and is thus important for their cultist activities. A cult member whose tumor has been removed will not be able to speak the cult language or hear cult broadcasts. Removing the growth is not enough to cure an individual of Nar'Sie's taint, but it will cripple their ability to use cult powers for a time as the tumor regrows in their skull. As Cult is a gamemode centered around conversion, I think a decent idea would be to give some value to the crystal therapy pod by enabling it to de-convert a cultist who has had their tumor removed. This would give the station a means to permanently deal with cultists outside of murder and would give the cultists a reason to target the upper floor of medical beyond it being a convenient place to build a fort. Finally, loners (and by extension wizards, perhaps technomancers, and other psionically/magically inclined mobs) should have differences to their brain from the baseline of their species. As they gain power in the various forms of psionics, the brain would begin to grow and change in color. This would largely be a roleplay benefit (There are very few uses for a brain ingame for a number of reasons, as well as the fact that extracting it kills the poor sap whose skull gets cut open. For obvious reasons.) but it would permit xenobiologists/surgeons something to do in the case the antagonist was killed early in the round. Maybe a fax could be sent to Central about it, who could then display an interest in the carcass for scientific (And only scientific, we assure you) reasons.

As it stands, in certain scenarios being in cuffs can be round ending for antagonists. This is especially true if security personnel are nearby, as attempting to escape from cuffs gives a bright red message in chat and causes every nearby person to focus on moving the cuffed prisoner to prevent their escape. I propose making it so that escaping from cuffs only gives the red text to people who are near the prisoner, as well as putting red text in their description, IE: "John Tator is attempting to escape from his handcuffs!" This would give antagonists more room to escape when they're caught as well as give security the ability to notice when someone is escaping; after all, it makes little sense that you can only tell someone is trying to escape if you happen to be nearby when they start. Limiting the escape text to people within one or two tiles and allowing people who actively examine the prisoner to see they're trying to escape would be beneficial in my opinion. Ideally, this wouldn't apply to someone trying to break their handcuffs except for the examine text. Trying to break handcuffs is far from subtle and should remain louder in comparison to trying to quietly work your way out of them.

Alright, I think my questions have been answered to my satisfaction. For what it's worth, Danse has my +1 and I look forward to seeing how this goes.

Right, in the name of full disclosure, I'm only posting my thoughts here because I was asked to. I don't much like posting on the forums very much (I'm much more active and available on discord, even if I mostly lurk in the Aurora discords) due in large part to rarely feeling like I have anything worthwhile to say. So, because of that, I'm going to try and come up with some worthwhile things to say and to ask. My opinions on Danse are somewhat complicated: I haven't had the negative interactions with him I am aware many people have had. I've seen some of those interactions play out, so I know they exist, but I don't really think Danse and myself have had any particularly bad exchanges. I definitely don't agree with Danse on a lot of topics, some of them very dear to my heart, but the impression I get from Danse is that he's someone who cares about other people's opinions. He's been vocal in the past about despising echo chambers and I'm pretty sure if five other people agreed with him on a topic he'd seriously reconsider it on those grounds alone. I definitely think that he can be abrasive and confrontational at times, whether he means to or is even aware of how he's coming across. I think Danse values the existence of differing opinions; I once watched him help a friend of mine learn how to make a PR on GitHub only to downvote that same PR because he didn't agree with its purpose. He definitely cares a LOT about lore, and I usually expect rounds where he rolls antagonist to deeply involve some aspect of the lore in his RP. There are current lore-writers that I can't say I have the same experience with. I'm personally rather fond of some of his ideas he's linked in this thread, so I would definitely say he has some talent as a writer. I think Danse genuinely cares a lot about the way people think of him, perhaps too much at times. I don't think he's very good at dealing with people not liking him or his work, which could be a problem as a lore writer. Is this rambling paragraph going anywhere? Plausibly. Danse asked me to reply to this thread, so here I am. I have positive and negative impressions of the man. There are good and bad things I could say about him, depending on what you ask me about. Do I feel comfortable saying one way or the other whether I think he could make a good lore writer? Not yet. I don't feel like I know him particularly well, and I've only been in this community for a little over a year now. I'm sure a lot of people have more useful opinions to offer on the topic of Danse, but I think it's worth considering his application at the very least. I think it deserves some careful thought by someone much smarter than me about whether or not he's suited for the position. All that said, here are some questions for the man himself. Pardon me if they've already been asked and answered. You've expressed some concerns that people might think you want to be a human lore writer to push your V-Planet agenda. If you were to become a lore writer, would you make an effort to have Visegrad officially canonized? If not, why? One of your talents is creating compelling antagonist gimmicks, usually during mercenary rounds. Do you have any ideas in mind for event arcs (mini or otherwise) you could organize for the server to make use of that skill? You've said on multiple occasions that you're not particularly interested in megacorp lore. What do you think is the problem with megacorps in lore, and how can it be addressed? Do you think you could handle it well if you made a change to lore that became widely disliked by the playerbase? What would you do if that happened? How willing are you to work on PRs for parts of the lore that you don't particularly like, if it would further the lore team's efforts? I think with those questions answered, I'd be more comfortable giving the question of "Do I, Chevy the Chevron, think that Danse McAubrey should be given a position on the lore team as human lore deputy?" a definitive answer.

Haven't had a chance to play around with these yet for various reasons, but I can already tell you the changes are not going to be a positive one just when dealing with hostile mobs. Pre-nerf, every officer had a weapon that could deal with a carp in two shots. If you were careful and had half-decent aim, every single officer could take down eight carp. Easy as pie. For bonus points, the disruptor was moderately useful against spiders as well, giving officers who haven't yet gotten a weapon out of the armory the chance to do something about spiders threatening people. Now, there are exactly two xenofauna-grade pest guns in the checkpoint, meaning other officers will have to acquire weapons from the armory to be useful in a carp situation; and those pest guns have thus far not proven useful in the slightest against spiders, meaning you will HAVE to bust out the armory just to be able to employ the traditional anti-spider tactic of "hide behind windows and shoot so the funny spiders don't toxin you out of the round or lay eggs in your chest." Personally, I thought the pest guns would be a positive change at first since they were something we could hand off to cadets so they could feel useful during a carp situation. Potentially, non-sec could bust in there and get their hands on them with just a crowbar if they needed them badly enough to bust open windoors. Now the pest guns are just the solution to the invented problem of not being able to shoot through windows, and you still need the carbines if you need all four officers on carp duty. Overall, this is going to lead to a lot of situations where officers are running around with armory gear when, pre-nerf, they would have been carrying just their standard kit. Despite being a sec nerf, I can easily see this making life harder for antagonists due to the necessity of the warden handing out carbines when the disruptor would have been good enough before. I am 100% against these changes. If antagonists absolutely need their hands held in this way, consider letting disruptors shoot through windows and giving them a damage buff just against hostile mobs. Not having to go to the armory to deal with carp was a massive quality of life change for officers and this PR has wrecked that.

I don't play gardener but I know some people who do and (in addition to this thread) I've heard some complaints regarding the nature of growing Dionae. At present, I'd wager a lot of gardeners/xenobotanists think that nymphs aren't worth the effort needed to actually grow them. I think the changes proposed in this thread would go a long way toward improving the quality of life around the feature.

I remember in the leadup to these events being added, I think both Sue and Alberyk made mention of the kosmostrelki ERT on some of the discord servers and made special note that they aren't going to be on the station to firing squad anyone from the DPRA/NKA, depsite the political turmoil back home. I roll a kosmostrelki event spawn and there's a little info blurb that reminds us we're not here to be idiots and whatnot. So, we arrive on the station to learn what? There's a DPRA consular vampire, and the chief engineer desperately wants us to shoot him. That put us in an interesting position, lemme just say. I definitely like the system with the ghost spawners and the interesting ways they can interact with a round. The conspiracy event looked like it was shaping up to be a lot of fun if it got bigger than it did, but it also seems like most of the people who were involved weren't present for the round where it wrapped up (I had only just gotten brought up to speed ICly, for the record, so my absence was hardly world shattering) resulting in an SCC major victory. In general, I feel like the conspiracy could have been better in a few ways. Firstly, it seemed to center too strongly around a few characters who, by nature of the whole thing being a conspiracy, were somewhat reluctant to let anyone else in on the situation. Whether it was out of fear for others' safety or not fully trusting other people, that's kind of an unavoidable issue when a story starts centering around a small group of characters. Secondly, the whole shadiness of the SCC seemed to breed more confusion than would be necessary if the group was being organized by the big five. The SCC would usually show up and act like they were in charge without ever really communicating why security shouldn't treat them like any other boarders outside of the fact that they usually only showed up on canon rounds with powerful armor and weapons. I almost want to compare it to a mercenary round where the mercs use a station announcement to give themselves an RP shield to hide behind and prevent sec from escalating. Those are my thoughts. Overall, I do have a positive view of this event arc.

I guess I should preface this by saying that I do think Kyres is an extremely good sprite artist. That's not the point I want to contend here. I also agree with basically everything Valwyn said. The new version of the disruptors is very good, the stock on the rifle looks funky, and a gunmetal color would be a great idea if we're banning black guns from the armory. What I wish to say is that I think that going forward with Kyres' proposed resprites will be sacrificing atmosphere for uniqueness. I'm aware that there is a desire among the developers for the Aurora to have a unique visual style, but I don't think that the style of Kyres' sprites is the way to go. I think that these sprites are very good and would work very well as, specifically, firearms used and manufactured primarily by Zeng-Hu. Assuming lore remains the same and the guns in the armory are all NanoTrasen firearms, I don't think it's a good look. The style of these guns strikes me as far too pulpy, more in the vein of a Flash Gordon-esque space opera than the dramatic political thriller that Aurora lore seems to want to be. I think that if we want to encourage that atmosphere, we should maintain the current visual style of our guns and any further resprites should be made with it in mind. Now, I'll say it again in this thread. I'm a security main. I play security a lot. Given that I play security, I wind up with the disruptors and the armory guns in my hands at a somewhat higher-than-average rate compared to players who do not play security. Not every security player agrees with me, but I know several that do with regards to the art direction of Kyres' resprites. I wouldn't mind seeing these guns once in a while, but I wouldn't want to see one in my hands every round. I'd love to see our guns use sprites from Kyres if they sprites Kyres made were more "high-tech militaristic" and less Buck Rogers. On a more personal note, I stayed up late last night working on a resprite for the (very old) energy rifle that Odin security uses. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I put a lot of effort into it and I'm proud of what I managed to make. This sprite follows the art design of the existing laser rifle and, due to the upcoming resprites by Kyres, it's basically useless and I'm pretty sad and frustrated about that. I basically woke up this morning, saw Kyres' versions of the laser rifle and pump shotgun, and realized that all the work I did last night would go unused. I don't want to make a PR to change the sprite only for it to get replaced again in a couple of weeks. (Which, given how that exact thing happened to Kyres with the original disruptor sprites, I acknowledge the issue there.) Apologies to Kyres if any of my criticism comes off as mean-spirited or unnecessarily insulting. I'm having a bit of a knee-jerk reaction right now and I'm not sure how to phrase this better so I just want to get my opinions out there.

I think that specifically the different uniforms should be free. Presumably, they're provided by NanoTrasen (or whatever company you work for) and are something you're expected to wear. I don't think things like holsters/cameras/lunchboxes or what have you should necessarily be free, but I think that specific uniforms really ought to be. At the very least, maybe make the contractor uniforms (since contractors are required to be in their company uniform at all times) free so that you don't get a point tax for playing a non NanoTrasen character.

Have a picture of the current disruptors for comparison: Personally, I'm in favor of the change for basically the same reasons as Sinful. As a secmain, these are sprites I have to look at with significant frequency and I much prefer the style closer to the .45 as opposed to the current more pulp-esque sprites.