Marlon P.

Why would it be worse to let people prove they can still play command? Whitelists get removed for misbehavior. What misbehavior is occuring here? There are incremental policies that will continue to chip away at the command playerbase. Applying for command is a cumbersome process. This policy is infantalizing; players who want to pop in after a year will find themselves feeling unwelcomed if they lose their whitelists because they went on a haitus. Otherwise explain why 365 days of inactivity makes someone fundementally incapable of playing a command role, and why they wouldnt just immediately hop servers to play command on another. (I dont have a command whitelist)

While I'd like that, and its a good idea, i want to make sure the existing rules dont become noob traps.

That would be changing the new rules, i think. Even if you click accept you could still get bwoinked.

I agree with DanseMacabre.

To decrease the need to bwoink people for not following the new archetypes being enforced on factions, and to decrease the potential of turning off a new player by bwoinking them over these and allowing them to fall into what are called noob traps, I am suggesting that the following be a mechanical restriction in character generation: If this is too difficult mechanically please consider adding visual aides on a sidebar, a topbar, or a bottombar to show 3 examples of what a character from those factions look like. This will minimize the workload on administration, clearly communicate expectations, and avoid potential PR disasters. Imagine the drama if an poorly worded bwoink says someones character is too white! Lol

I agree with the above post. +1

The same can be said of any nation during its independence, and americans in 1786 were all starkly positioned to question this new identity they just up and had to be. And you can get a lot of mileage out of that time. ICly it gives reason to question the republic and its identity, and reinvent itself while not being entrenched means you have valid reasons to not identity as a Biesellian by culture. It is a useful catchall that allows all characters and perspectives to be caught in. Oocly its useful narratively because it gives no identity a monopoly, easily handwaving the crazy diversity of cultural expression and not causing chaffing with the bi-monthly fads that sweep the playerbase in regards to character identity.

Haydizz has a different approach to the solutions and problems in lore than I do as our posts show in this thread, but his philosophy is consistent, convincing, and he has a good game plan with it. +1

I can't remember if i did already but I give this a +1. Alb hit all my concerns with good replies and he has a solid game plan.

I try to hop on once or twice a week to observe. I can research aurora in hour-long bursts through a day but 4 hours to playing chef is hard. I don't need to play every day to understand the game from a developmental standpoint. Through developers and administration i have casual access to data and research tools to help make decisions as a manager/event runner/loremaster. I've played every job and species over nearly 10 years and everything is about the same. There's not too much more to learn from me playing a job again unless it's been overhauled. Anything that was overhauled, I played to study it. Playtime is an indicator of activity from a developer unless the developer is already active through their development. My main goal is editorial work and managerial work. My activity in this regard is and will be consistent. The only concern is the projected impending collapse of my nations government within 2 - 4 years being detrimental to my general online activity. This will change with NBT. For my research i will have to play every job again to understand them in the new environment for a lore and gameplay perspective. For my existing playing though, the role I have fun playing is journalist, so if you see me it'll be as a journalist. I always play with looc disabled and don't keep ooc on for more than a few minutes at a time because it helps me stay in character. I did ask people to +1 my app if i knew they played on aurora and know me enough for me to ask. I dont pay attention to who plays how often. Didn't believe it was disingenuous, sorry.

I made a suggestion about this and I'd only be repeating what I said in the suggestion. It got totally ignored, so maybe it's a bad idea? Having degrees of failure for a lack in a skill for something would be nice, rather than a hard wall. DnD-like failure states can be frustrating.

What religion do they - Oh no! Lol What religion would they follow? How do they feel about the othet faiths? How do they incorporate the faith into their life?

Oh i didnt see that part of the op. OP, knock that off. Im not a sex creep for playing a vampire antagonist.

Vampire is my favorite mode and the only antagonist i have enabled these days. This OP is not convincing as to why my preference is wrong. You don't control your agency once you spawn. Edit: garn said everything i do. Vamps who make it horny should be ahelped and bonked.

I agree with this post.

An "apocalypse" is an ooc tool for writers. It's very useful which is why its a widespread trope for RPGs. The disasters of humanity, tajara, and unathi directly relate to the greed of the megacorporations. The 2nd great recession and the interstellar war is the framing device when bundled together to show the failure of state power over capitalism, and their replacement by capitalism. Unathi and tajara got hit with the same engineered disasters. The synth disaster for skrell is the narrative framework for synthetic paranoia. For the vaurca its a straightforward use of the trope. They had the apocalypse and are now deciding what their future should be.

If that's the developmental path we want to take, that is fine. A development philosophy behind it should be manifested so that it is consistent for all these factions and planets so we do not see it become overwhelming or have inconsistent levels of quality/detail. I would like to see these 'minor' planets into consolidated into 'Notable Colonies' style pages, either in their entirety or just for catagorizing. And the level of detail on them should be about consistent. I will bring up my abilities as an editor here, as in the physical process of editing pages. If a planet isn't too important to play in the narrative or the game, it should just include enough information to put across its theme, aesthetic, special rp considerations, and basic overview of how it's doing. Even if that means just using the K.I.S.S. editorial style when going over a page, which lets you say more things in the end. https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Crosk I'll use this planet as an example of the KISS system that i'd use if we reorganized these minor planets, just touching the environment section. Three paragraphs reduced to two through quick editing, which mostly removed information that repeated throughout the text and used a change in wording to put across information more concisely. If I did the same thing to the entire page, no information to players would be lost and the page would be a tighter presentation. If the entire page was edited this way the reduction in wordcount would be a lot more noticeable without any information loss.

I used to be pretty conservative, but even when loremaster I was changing my mind on it over time. I've basically flipped positions now. I like the diversity that we have, and only would want to see it moderated so it does not go too crazy in either direction. Language is one of the Big Three for representing a character, those being sprite, ic language, and gameplay. Language does a lot to make 'in' and 'out' groups and we have to decide how many of those groups we want established and running around. I like the Esperanto. If we do the second then we may see people migrate to another shared language as the 'meta' language. But this is also something we can do at the same time; keep TCB and experiment with more cross-understanding. As long as the reason for the languages' existence is consistent. The accents are a great middle-ground here. While it's difficult to place an accent in-game because I'm not always familiar with all the faction flags and emblems used to show them, it's great in concept. The four big languages we have now have a lot of branching accents, so I believe this goal of diversity has been accomplished. I would not advocate breaking up sol common; splitting the solarian identity further would harm their portrayal as a hegemonic force. Enforcement of the national language is important in portraying these kinds of empires, and irl too. Other languages can exist, or even grow to replace the enforced language, but for design reasons I'd want to see common staying with its diversity in accents more than a diversity in actual languages.

Thank you for the reply! It does make sense, I only disagree with that being how we should want things. I don't think humans being spread thin is good, because humanity doesn't have many places to have this kind of diversity. Humanity is very atomized, and by nature of having a million things to do it's difficult to really have anywhere with the depth of a place like Adhomai. Everything is so scaled-up to the national level, and it's only in a few factions that you can sink your teeth into the 'street level'. When this kind of depth is added somewhere, it's difficult to keep writing for all of that while also trying to work on other factions too. There's been a trend since 2015 with the playerbase where one particular faction, planet, or location will seize the imaginations of players. With humanity only we have like from what I can remember: Martian dusters; french wine makers; ATLAS nationalists; elyran people; eridani people, et cetera. And each time there's this spike in players for the faction and people start getting excited and want to see DLC for it added to the wiki by lore developers. Then when that's done, a few months later, a new fad sweeps the server and it happens again. After noticing this I even started utilizing the phenomenon to revitalize factions or intentionally socially engineer factions falling in/out of favor. I remember when ATLAS was dominating the cultural meta, and I split their entire playerbase down the middle and half of them migrated to be martian-themed instead. That was a lot of fun! Reading these new human planets a lot of them carry that trope of being a Planet of Hats, written after a long brainstorm by people in discord about having a 'Planet of [Hat]'. While writing this post, in the lore discord, there were energetic and repeated calls for several new planets with "space [country]" as the whole descriptor of it. We shouldn't really buy-in, as developers, to the ephemeral fads that come-and-go like the tides, or we end up with the situation humanity is in. It's remarkable that the head developer placed a ban on new planets and factions within humanity, which is something we've never seen before. That said, if the humandevs like their number of factions and locations, and don't mind being spread so thin with a big workload, then I'd try to work to achieve my objectives and also accommodate them. But SOMETHING has to happen; either something about the factions themselves or convincing arrow to let cael hire more into the human team or something. Another option is to remove locations that we determine to not be in much use from the wiki and keep everything else in a 'Notable Colonies' section.

Ok im convinced. I like this.

Oh then i got the wrong idea from your OP. I agree with and echo with your posts now.

"Antag contest" was what we called it when we were making up the process of canon events as we went along. I think what youre talking about is called an "arc" these days. I like any work expanding on the grim compact. It's a shame theyre not too popular it seems? They seemed to slot well into a niche people seemed to want at the time. What kind of impact do you want the compact to have on station during and after the arc? I like your ideas and that you wanna work on unathi. +1 in advance

I don't believe oldlore is better or was any kind of a golden age. I love what we have now! I criticize what seems like callous belittlement of peoples work. If/when in 2 years, a whole new batch of lore writers called the current batch's work terrible trash i would say the same thing: no one should have their work belittled. They're not here to defend themselves so it's just really mean. Regarding my hiring practices, i was young and idealistic about people. I believed that anyone that showed they were passionate and had a plan of action deserved a chance. There were stretches of time where i was the sole writer for one or even two of our playable races at one time, so any passion was attractive. Garn said it well - "well if you think youre so much better: prove it! Ill support you" I no longer hold this romantic idea. It may have worked sometimes, but it also blew up spectacularly. Once people started fantasizing about my death and DMing me gore and porn I had decided to abandon my optimism. By then it was too late and i was trapped in the abuse spiral. I would follow the hiring guidelines outlined by the guidelines i and mofo wrote up and which still apply i think. People need to be respectful no matter how talented or passionate they are. How do you feel about the automatic canonity guidelines? I set them down to directly address the scope of humans place in the lore being impossibly large. I believe that there should be a core set of factions, with their core planets, and core et al that we really lean in on. Other factions should be prompts for improvisation for players to use themselves. I'd want to return to that model. I'd like to work with the humandevs and see what their plans and general goals are, and see what they DON'T like doing, so we can work out how to plug those holes. I want to answer: "In one, two, three years, will all these human factions and cultures and histories still be in sync with one another and the wider lore? Whats the rate of updates right now? Can this be sustained? Do humandevs like their workload? Are they getting burnt out?" Like, im trying to imagine there being as many tajaran planets and alb and coalf having to keep it all settled. Even if it was supported by lore that they were so big... man it'd be crazy. A concrete solution (this is MY app) i would want to see is sloting all these other planets into a "notable human colonies" category and making sure their writing is able to be true at any given moment, barring articles that specifically address them. Oh id also add "humans" to the little list of playable races i kept having to click "sol alliance" to see the human navbox but that's a minor thing i can ask for as a player. Edit: Also i didn't write for dominia except for minor adjustments, if i remember correctly.

Thank you for the reply! Do you feel that each location can be given the same detail as tajara, and maintained to be so? What critetia SHOULD be used? My intention is to ask how the deputy loremaster considers these and how to resolve the issue, if they do find it an issue. My concern is human development has immense responsibilities more than any other team. They seem to be spread thin. what should the deputy do to help? Its my stance that humandevs have a hard time matching the depth of aliens for all locations because of their quantity. How I'd handle that isnt the full purpose of my replies to the app so i havent rambled off about solutions too much except as examples of what could be done. If the level of activity can be sustained, and I'm wildly wrong about the level of maintenence placed on human developers, that is great. I love when my fears are unfounded. Precedence just worries me because the size and scope of humanity has always been a challenge to the team in a way unique to them.

Even with conservative writing, look at how many human factions have international relations that mean they have to consistently respond to events in the wider galaxy. You are correct that we have the Big Six of Sol, Biesel, Eridani, the Coalition, Elyra, and Dominia. That's still more factions than we have writers, but that's not the end of the story. The wikipedia navboxes show the massive workload difference. Here is, to my knowledge and only using navbox pages, the counting of ONLY pages dedicated to a planet or system as available in the navbox for that species. Tajara have three planets and one system. Skrell have five distinct planets/locations with dedicated pages and a sixth that has minor details on ancillary locations. Unathi have three dedicated entries for systems and planets and one page with minor information on ancillaries. Dionae have four dedicated, and one ancillary. Vaurca have one page which all their colonized planets share, so it's all ancillary. IPC's have none, and neither do synthetics. The Sol Alliance has eleven planets with dedicated pages. Biesel has three. Dominia has two. Eridani has four. Elyra has two. The Coalition of Colonies has ten. That's thirty-two dedicated pages for locations under humanity. And each location that has a dedicated page has to include information on the history, culture, and society of that location. You say that you won't need to do rewrites if the work is quality, but I do not agree with this. Just recently we saw something written expanding New Gibson that saw criticism and planned rewrites to address them. That isn't bad - it's good, and expected, that submissions undergo maintenence and revision. It sounds though like you focus more on the big six. Would you rather see the other twenty-six places made minor locations and not focused on? Or should all of them be kept as updated as possible? How will you identify when one of these pages starts to get atrophied? Elyra used to be cutting edge, and then the problem of maintenence falling off had it become super old because so much was focused elsewhere. How will you coordinate all this? I still. +1 your app; this is just an area i find concerning and am wanting to see how applicants will handle it.