rrrrrr

Just to further this line of questioning, since it's a topic near and dear to me: why should certain issues, like drug abuse, be disconnected from reality? What purpose does that serve? Alcohol's in the game; should that be removed and replaced with a more powerful, fantastical analog? (Sorry if these questions sound too harsh!)

This is absolutely amazing! The ship itself looks great; love the massive propellant tanks, love that you need to do EVA to set up thrust, love that there are huge, noticeable radiators on the sides of the ship... and the docks being on the fore? Oh man. This here is one believable space ship. Love it.

At the risk of being somewhat off-topic, I feel like this idea should be explored in a different thread... mostly because I think it's a good idea. The Horizon being the flagship seems to preclude certain things, which is sad.

Wow, that's really cool... would those go well with the current walls?

Inspired by this thread. A few ideas for random events and making it less easy to fix things in ten seconds. Keep in mind that this is a knee-jerk thread with ideas that I came up with in two minutes. I'm going to the grocery store. random events, haha - Rats chew some wires in maintenance. Ten-to-fifteen minutes later, an announcement is sent out with GPS coordinates, ala "space fungus." Wiring in a "normal" area (i.e, covered by flooring) could just "short out," I guess. This would be neat, because you could feasibly "catch it" before the announcement goes out, if you're paying attention --- substation power would start dropping... gotta go and figure out why! - A section of pipes in an area burst (be they disposal, scrubber, or air.) Much like the above idea, an announcement revealing the exact location is delayed by a few minutes... possibly a long time. Carbon dioxide build-up, garbage piling up under the floor... wow! - "Hull damage." A section of the outer hull receives mild damage. Why? I don't know. Space debris. Who knows. Go outside and fix it. making things more difficult in general make walls more time-consuming to build. not in terms of actual time but in terms of steps. make it require bolting the sheet metal onto the girder and then welding it in place. same steps for reinforced plasteel walls. autolathe supremacy this is a "dante must die" mode-level idea i.e in terms of "what if things were just more of a pain to do" but: remove the ability to just fabricate rods floor tiles and crap by hand. yes it is convenient. how are you doing that though make getting these things require an autolathe and add an autolathe to engineering. (alternatively: no lathe in engineering. either build your own or work with operations/the machinist and use theirs.) instead of walking around with your twenty-five sheets of steel you have to actually understand what the problem is before you show up in order to fix it.

I think a major part of this is that on CM, every task is for "your team." Every task works towards a tangible goal. This is not how things are on Aurora, at least not most of the time. Each department has a different set of skills and these very rarely overlap into a "team effort" when it comes to dealing with problems --- the only real example I can think of that would require teamwork are a hivebot beacon. I can only think of one time where I went out of my way to check vending machines for rampant intelligence before anyone called it out. I did this because I was extremely bored and sort of tired. That's the mindset here, really. I don't see it as a "rat race" so much as "extreme boredom." People want things to do. When there is something to do, they will do it. The solution here, I guess, is to add more things to do, make mindless tasks more engaging/complex, but I'm not a coder and I'm not someone who comes up with good ideas.

Looking at this from the perspective of someone who plays engineering: I think I'm guilty of this, to be honest, mostly because when there's something to actually do --- boy, do I wanna go out there and do it. It triggers the rat portion of my brain that lights up when I "accomplish" something. I got a similar feeling when I had to fix the dishwasher at the restaurant I used to work at. The issue here is that one is a complex task that takes time (and one that I wasn't qualified to do, but had to, anyways!) and the other involves, at most, a few clicks. There is no middle-ground when it comes to fixing engineering problems in this game. You are either doing it as quickly as possible or you are not doing it. The best you can do is drag your feet and draw it out for as long as possible, which I try to do, if it isn't important. The issue is (like Sheeplets said) that people go stir crazy. I'm actually kind of struggling to understand what the real problem you're getting at is. The reason people fix minor problems so quickly is because they are minor problems and the map is not very large. In an ideal world, you would have to do quick-time events to fix a broken vending machine. (That isn't sarcasm.) This isn't an ideal world. You click on it with a debugger and wait... or, you click on it with a screwdriver, click on something with a wire cutter, click on it again, then click on it again with a screwdriver. For the hypothetical broken window at the chapel, you click on something and wait. If there are five other guys behind you doing rock-paper-scissors to click on it, this is because they are excited that there's something to do, even if it's totally mindless. also i like running everywhere because i like going fast

Posted already before the trial, but having now played more than a few rounds with QuestioningMark as Chief Engineer: he's good at it. He knows what he's doing. I don't think heaping superlatives would help much, 'cuz either you're good at "it" ("it" being managing and teaching) or you ain't. He's also a good roleplayer. He's also very active.

Had the opportunity to walk around in the revamped command bunker/AI core. Both look and feel nice and seem to have everything they need. The AI core's location is a lot better, now, since it actually feels secluded (versus just being accessible from a hallway right off the central ring.)

Probably a dumb idea, but for issue #1, a room with a television in it. So you can watch Columbo in space, or something. Either way, a random room where people can just sit down could be cool, I dunno.

Cam is a good character and, when it comes to knowledge of game mechanics, QuestioningMark is pretty darn good... he's good at explaining things on both an IC and OOC level to apprentices/new players, too. Not much to really say other than 'this guy is competent and a good roleplayer and I think it would be great if he got command whitelist.' CE characters are uncommon, too, although this trend has been changing, I've noticed. More would never hurt. +1

Love, love, love how the meeting room for R&D is no longer adjacent to the main hallway... that always felt a little weird to me. If nothing else is kept, I hope that is. I also like the return of a quasi-satellite design for the AI core. Not such a huge fan of how there's a window that gives you a direct line of sight from the outside all the way to the AI core. I get why (and there's also a gazillion turrets in the way), but I think it's a little odd.

please do this. i play with a trackpad and have to do 90s adventure game pixel hunting sometimes to get shit out of containers

I was a little confused when I saw that the machinist was a part of operations. (I mean, that, and that the role isn't called 'roboticist' anymore...) There's nothing, as far as I can tell, that really ties the role to operations in any specific way... and this mostly shows in the workshop's location. The only thing that comes to mind is their need for materials from the shaft miners and the fact that having ops radio access makes this easier to coordinate. It'd be like if the janitor's closet were right next to security, making the janitor part of that department. The workshop's pretty far from the warehouse, the hangar bay, etc. This would be a good change, especially now that the workshop's been moved. Hopefully with the AI core re-map, science can get more space, too.

Adding onto this specifically as someone who took a fairly long (5~ year) break from the server and have been "playing" for roughly as long as Sue: one major reason I kept playing was hearing about cool stuff that's happened in previous arcs. Not on Discord, but in the actual game, from other players. This was a major sign that Aurora was at least passingly similar to the MUD genre and that there were actual consequences to in-game actions. Around the time I quit playing, the most major event to have happened was sort of bare bones and had relatively little effect on the game's setting. I think it was the 2nd Antag Contest. To yet again compare Aurora to MUDs: the best part about any MUD, or at least any good MUD, is understanding that you're in a world that's been around for a while. One specific game I played had a collection of in-game libraries with books written by other player characters. Some of these went back, going by the in-game dates listed, to the late 1990s. It was extremely gratifying to read in-universe texts that dated back several decades both in the game itself and in the real world. After a while, trawling through several libraries across several in-game churches and monasteries, I began to pick up on certain names and start to get a "feel" for who these characters were, what their interests were, and even drama going on between them --- in a random desk in a monastery, me and a friend found a (long since dead) priest's personal letters. It was a ton of fun to read. Differences in gameplay mean that that kind of thing can't really be recreated in Aurora, obviously, but that kind of long-term canonicity is great. Any long-term canonicity is. Piecing together what went down on Adhomai both from the articles and what other player characters told mine was a lot of fun. Going from 'wait, thirty people died?' to understanding how they died and what they died for was, again, a lot of fun! Oh, by the way, no downsides. Even the 'some people will view themselves as protagonists' critique doesn't hold up all that well; so? If someone starts thinking of themselves as the protagonist of a collaborative roleplaying game, they're, uh, an asshole. People would view them as an asshole. Have some trust in people, anyways.