Frances

The chatlogs of Shlomo Goldstein were also posted in the funny stories thread, as well as in a chat involving over 60 people from the SS13 community (I may have had something to do with them ending up there). So it's not impossible for somebody to have made their way from there into last night's round. I'm not gonna deny that Solomon Goldstein is an obvious Shlomo Goldstein impersonator, but I have no idea who he was besides that (and apparently neither does Halo). Anyway, I offered literally everyone on the station the ability to join the syndicate. This might have been metabuddying if I, say, only accepted those two while refusing other people for an arbitrary reason. Which is, tbh... not what happened. If you really want to complain about metabuddying, I would suggest explaining exactly what events you believe had a tangible, negative effect on the round and how they can be ruled under the rule for metacommunication. Right now you just sound like you're upset and trying to find whatever excuse you can to get people in trouble because they were being silly and it doesn't conform to your RP standards.

I'm just suggesting that perhaps similar characters/players are naturally attracted to each other, much like medbay lesbians or super serious angry sec officers also tend to gravitate towards their own groups. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Halo was drawn to that player because they were saying ridiculous and silly things? I also don't understand how the accusation of metacommunication stands - whether this was a player that was actively out to seek Halo (I'm assuming by copying the "jewish chaplain" spiel that happened earlier that day), I've yet to understand how the two of them gained an unfair gameplay advantage through any sort of collaboration.

Can we actually leave the OP a chance to address/refute the criticism here, instead of going "oh, it's haters that don't like them so their opinions must be immediately discontinued"? I've got no personal issue with Sierra, lmao. I just saw that post, and felt it had the potential of being a problematic attitude as a mod, so I'd simply like to see what she has to say about it. Come to think of it, I've noticed a few hints of Sierra being confrontational, as if she was trying to pick a bone with certain users. I have another example here. As I said, it's fairly small things, but it's still demoralizing to encounter than from a mod. (And by the example I gave, I mean the sentence: "I'm a furry. There's other furries on this server too, but I'm not going to name them because you'll probably start throwing complaints at them too.")

Well, how does the station make money? I was under the impression Aurora wasn't there to produce plasma, but was rather able to harvest its own plasma to use for various research. The main revenue the station would share would be in the form of patents, research, etc. Sadly, there is no way to quantify this in-game. Basically, see the station as something NT pumps money into as an investment in exchange for great plasma research

Then I would recommend you judge people less and try to keep an open mind

Why do they need to have a mechanical buff, though? Their strength has always been their intelligence, not combat. I am actually thinking of some ways to give them in-universe buffs, basically "roleplayed" buffs. Some really crazy things that players could do with Skrell characters, that they have in fact sorta been able to do already but I just think no one has thought of it yet. But they are not combat buffs. Anyway, I'll say more on that when I have an actual reveal to post about the changes. And thanks for the link to the wiki, it is very appreciated. I have already been looking at it but I will look at it again.

This is incredibly meta. Anyway, the suggestions subforum has about 30 pages worth of threads. I think it has evolved far past a list of things coders need to go through and evaluate as "will implement/will not implement", but is rather a pool that they may feel free to draw ideas from at anytime. In this case, I don't see the need to disable it. I don't think we will ever be able to get through all the backlog anyway

I don't know why people call me FFrances (or Ffrances, or my favorite variation, Ffances) when my username is just Frances. I even changed my ckey so that it would stop yet it still happens

I have no idea if the Skrell are dying or not - I'm still looking at their wiki page and trying to decide what needs to be changed or not. But that does sound pretty depressing, so I'm not sure if I will keep it in unless there is a good reason I don't know why so many people call them squids, they don't look like squids to me

Tajaran and Unathi are reskinned humans and people seem to like them a lot I think the Skrell can be made more interesting without giving them mechanics. What mechanics would you like to see? If you want a mechanics-based species it might be easier to start from scratch. Dea's suggestion thread is a great project you should look into.

I did not think we judged people by their post count or the number of likes they received, though If so, can I turn in my posts somewhere? I would like to exchange them for more useful things and become a millionaire

I definitely think the round would have gone along easier if the wizard had been nicer and more serious with the HoS. This is not the player punishing the wizard for being rude to him, but rather the natural reaction which should be expected to someone being rude, pushy and obscure. Both combat and non-combat rounds with wizards can be fun. I think Halo did his fair share in trying to create a reasonable situation for the round, given the circumstances. The wizard would likely have had the chance to do more had the round not ended so early, and had the HoS' staff not slowed him down so much.

Thanks for the feedback! I think it's a good idea to make new threads about Skrell ideas, I just made a big thread in case some people didn't realize that. -I always thought the accent was pretty hard to type, and it is getting changed for something better. -The Skrell can honestly be pretty boring as a race, and they lack fun characterization. This is something I am trying to change. -I don't know about buffs because those would require coders, and people don't tend to really care about the buffs for their roleplay (how often do you see Tajarans mention that they can see things in the dark? You hear people complain about Tajaran/Unathi claws being sharp but that's about it). -I also don't know about giving them telepathy. It sounds like a pretty big advantage over department radios. (If you are an antag and you attack a person you can take off their radio. Harder to take off a Skrell brain - and it tends to make players angry.) I will look at it if coders are interested, but it is not in my plans for this week. -The Skrell are dying? Oh, no! Why did no one tell me about this?

I am surprised to hear that some people have a concept of "THE skrell". I did not know anybody still played the race I think people should be able to make their Skrells whatever color they want, as long as it looked good. They're squid/salamander things, and those species have a lot of different pastel colors in the wild, right? As for species, I think the concept of subspecies is pretty complicated. It's not something that a lot of sci-fi expands on unless it's necessary. You shouldn't need to take an anthropology class just to play as an alien. Let's start with just one type of Skrell and see what people want.

I have read all of your posts and appreciate the input so far (keep it up if you have more to say!) I'm not really replying to any of it yet as I'd rather organize my thoughts into a big master post that will be easier for everyone to read or understand. I'll see about doing that before the end of the week. But I will say that the accent will be removed and replaced by something easier to manage.

I actually disagree with this, yet I'm still opposed to the complaint or punishment being handed out. See, the whole thing about the wizard round is that it relies on players enforcing their suspension of disbelief and giving the wizard some leeway. Yes, there's violent wizards that teleport around while doing annoying stuff and fighting most of security, but these aren't extraordinary fun. The best wizard rounds I've seen come when the station goes "Okay, yes, you might be a dangerous intruder that teleported onto a secure research station without as much as an explanation, but since this is already incredibly fucking weird and we can't really stop you let's see where this is headed." This is described as "playing along with the wizard", and while it's hard to get everyone in a round to play along, it's a lot easier when the wizard is civil, nonviolent, and you have some smart members of command ready to organize and defuse things (they wouldn't /necessarily/ be fired by NT either, it's all about attitude in approaching a highly unusual problem). Now, were the actions that prevented the wizard from executing their plan and interacting with most of the crew Halo's fault? I think not, for the following reasons: -The wizard did unfortunately teleport into the most secure areas of the station by accident while casting an EMP -The wizard, although nonviolent, was honestly pretty difficult to cooperate with - from looking at those logs she mostly seemed to be yelling at the HoS while spouting some ridiculous and nonsensical story -The HoS' security crew actually made the interrogation incredibly difficult to swiftly process, as they kept trying to question and override the HoS' orders for pretty silly reasons (some of them were outright meta) I cryo'd very early in the round and kinda regret not staying in sec to tell people to stop being retards, but from what I was able to observe the wizard just got caught in unfortunate circumstances, and then her interrogation took most of the round because people were being incredibly idiotic about it (such as by starting a lengthy debate on having an unknown intruder cuffed/uncuffed when uncuffing them would've had no effect whatsoever, and it was probably better to humor the HoS). Now, I can't speak for Halo here, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have a chance to release you, as the whole "arresting the wizard" business took two hours because of people trying to obstruct and question it, and then the round transferred out :L

This should probably be moved to the suggestions subforum, but. Why were offtopic likes removed, actually?

Alright, I've had some sleep and I guess nobody really replied to this, so here's my take on what happened: It's 2AM. There's 20 people on the server. We barely manage to get a nuke round started, I get operative. I notice that my teammates are a Diona, and a black guy named Tyrese who seems to be kinda struggling with typing (no offense Tyrese's player, you were still cool, but most definitely a slav.) The Diona's player, Hackie, asks me in LOOC if I'm Halo (since my character was bald, I readied as a borg slot so my character didn't have any traits), and I decide to humor him by actually naming my character after Halo's nuke op. The two other ops actually seem to be getting a kick out of this, the Russian guy is calling me a legendary warrior or something and I tell him that I've never actually killed anyone and learned all of my combat skills through runescape. So, planning time. I quickly realize that the Diona isn't really intent on harming anything or anyone, which makes things kinda complicated for our remaining two ops. Black Russian wants to kill every single animal on station to "demoralize the crew" - a plan I'm not sure if the Diona is opposing because violence is involved, or because it actually sounds plain stupid. The two of us stealthily make our way to the bridge and I watch the other op shoot Chauncey through the window with a laser carbine before silently leaving. (This produces no effect whatsoever, as there wasn't even a captain or a head besides a late-join CMO for the entire round, and even so, I'm not sure if anyone would have actually cared about the captain's fox mysteriously dying, or if people would have just assumed it was natural causes somehow). It's at this point that I begin to think that we're not going to get very far, as Black Russian's plan is comically evil yet ineffective (he kept trying to convince me to shoot Chauncey by calling him "Old Yeller" and saying he had to be put out of his misery, I told him I forgot my weapons on the shuttle), and the Diona guy was happy to stay on the ship just driving us around after Black Russian told him not to come on our missions because he didn't want to harm anybody (I later tried to get him involved and he did come out with a ton of medkits). That's when I tried to suggest we hold a syndicate recruitment campaign. I knew we weren't going to come up with something terribly serious or dramatic as the only other plan my team came up with was to shoot the station's animals "to make the crew sad", and to prove my point our slav operative pretty much immediately begin to blare on comms that people should join us because we were "cool space pirates" (I say this literally, those were the terms used.) Now, I'm not saying that those two players were idiots and that my actions were excused because I followed suit. Far from that. I actually don't think there was really anything wrong with either of them (the Diona was content just to follow anyway tbh, and I had also planned on following until I realized slav op didn't have a plan that wasn't terrible.) What I'm arguing is more the fact that it was obvious the situation wasn't set up for anything serious from the start, and I don't feel like I really trampled on anyone's plans or expectations as a result. Rather than pretend to be the only serious op in a failing team (and probably get captured near-immediately and provide some very boring and lackluster roleplay), I tried to embrace some lighthearted fun, while giving players a wide change of pace and providing them with a chance to interact extensively with some less-than-serious, probably incredibly stupid and gullible ops, who were ready to let just about anybody onto their ship to do "cool syndicate stuff". Yes, the situation was absurd, I won't deny that. But we play in the absurd very often, as I've already stated. Thunderdome. Wizard rounds. Magical boxes that grant people's wishes and turn everybody into random mobs. Exploding ERP-detecting clowns. Evil space worms that battle against teams of 20 deathsquad or syndicate soldiers. Alien experiments raised on 400 years of bad memes that call people "bitch nigga". (Sue actually participated in the last one, so I'm not too sure why she's mad here.) The only real difference that happened in this round is that a few vocal people got upset because, as Jackboot put it, our operatives weren't total edgelords, I guess. And to that, all I really have to say is that I'm sorry, but I don't think we could have been.

Maybe we can get Jackboot's account banned before anyone notices, I've heard he supports subversive opinions.

Sorta breaking my vow to not post again until tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to provide an explanation for these kind of things as a whole (the explanation for that specific round can still wait until tomorrow). Silly, lighthearted things aren't bad, nor should they scare away anyone. It's quite simply impossible to maintain a 24/7 facade of office simulator and/or edgy syndicate drama, because people do get tired of these things, actually. I don't think the server should always be silly (and in fact it's often the staff's job to make sure that the silly doesn't overlap too much into the serious), but there are moments for silly and moments for serious. I see people getting upset at the presence of any silly at all. We do have, and enjoy (for most of us anyway) silly things. We had a thunderdome a few days ago, which definitely isn't in the spirit of "we're serious employees working for a space fortune 500 corporation". We also have wizard rounds, which are literally impossible to play completely seriously even if you try (they can be dramatic, but they'll never really be "serious" - even the best dramatic wizards I've seen have always been good because they had some slight comedic elements.) I feel terribly sorry by people getting offended by the sole presence of memes (tough luck living on the internet tbh), but as long as the memes aren't constant, I think it's a bit ridiculous to rule them as a problem. People actually make silly references and comments over general comms a lot, and this only becomes a problem when you have a recurrent character that's based around memes. Having a one-off character say "dank" a few times and make a mention of runescape isn't going to tear the fabric of roleplay apart, is it? So, anyway, I think this would be something valid to lament about if serious roleplay was literally missing from the server, but... it's not. A silly thing happened during a deadhour round, as many silly things have happened during deadhour rounds before. Other things I've seen people get upset at include players not playing seriously during nations, an event which is literally based around departments of the station splintering into pretend "countries". So what actually makes silly acceptable or not? Is it just an arbitrary distinction that you should enforce based on your personal, subjective preferences? If actual, serious roleplay was being trampled on for this I'd be more willing to empathize with your grievances, but you're actually requesting the unreasonable out of three disorganized nuke ops (one of which a nonviolent Diona) at two in the morning, local time. I'll post more about this tomorrow.

Things can get pretty heated when being a mod, and it's important to have the proper skills to defuse situations and know how to prevent people from getting upset, or at the very least, avoid having things devolve into a shouting match. In an otherwise fairly civil complaint, you made a relatively aggressive post, accusing a player of having a power complex, and calling them a "plain fucking shitter". Keep in mind most comments from people involved in this complaint, mods and users alike, were pointing towards the specific user you insulted (the recipient of the complaint) as having done nothing wrong at all. The user himself had also been polite in replying to the criticism, which was addressed with actual, valid refutations. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think your response was justified, and appropriate? Would you respond differently if you were a mod? Why/why not?

As this is a relatively long complaint, I'm gonna start by throwing out the things which I believe shouldn't have any reasonable basis, then I'm going to let this sit in and see what people think before writing my side. NOPE is actually the name of the character I readied as, a cyborg. Its full name is "Nanotrasen Operated Patrol Engineer, and it kinda looks like a huge mechanical spider. As for "Halo the Dank agent", I have no issue admitting that was a pretty silly reference to one of halorocks22's previous nuke op characters. Nuke ID cards have little to no bearing on the game, however, and I honestly don't know many people who don't enter joke titles on them. These logs are actually disjointed although they appear continuous in your post. I actually mentioned runescape first before making any allusion of being part of the syndicate. As far as the crew were concerned, this was just some random people talking on the radio. As characters pretty consistently reference incredibly dated games, movies and songs, I don't really see how mentioning runescape was a crime. (And there's actually a full story about why I asked the crew about runescape, although it was just an "in"-joke between me and another nuke op. If you have the full logs from observing since roundstart they should explain it. I have no idea who Solomon was. I actually made various attempts to try to convince the crew to join the Syndicate through humorous incentives, citing health benefits, dental plans, paid overtime, etc. I did happen to call out Solomon, though I admit it was by pure coincidence (though if I was metabuddying with that character's player, why exactly would I need to call them out on the radio anyway?) I would also have tried to convince any other people who manifested interest in joining the syndies. I actually didn't make it to the station until almost two hours into the round, after spending most of my playtime lost in space. I also addressed my condition repeatedly, to an extent I would say is greater than the one the group of security officers and doctors who decided to leave me in the brig dying engaged in. I actually called out for help several times, tried to get to medbay (before getting kicked out) and pretty consistently called out to my condition, reminding the crew that I was dying and in pain, while coughing and stuttering. (As for still trying to recruit people for my cause, it's absurd humor. I'll elaborate on that in my next post as the purpose of this post is to debunk false accusations). A mod pretty much lost his shit (I'm not sure over what, seeing as he didn't contact either me or halo about any of the issues of this complaint), but I don't think this should be used as an argument to further this complaint. It's better to look at what the actions were, not how the actions caused people to react (as I could lose my shit over literally any issue and that wouldn't necessarily give that issue more or less legitimacy). Maybe this is just my personal opinion, but I don't think incidents of chucklefucking have been increasing lately (Solomon Goldstein was found out to be an obvious troll and banned - we've always had those). Silly and lighthearted rounds have actually always been a part of Aurora - the only difference is that people recently started to get very upset at them for not being serious, while players chose to either ignore or enjoye them in the past, for the most part. Anyway. That should cover most of the details, I'll post a full explanation tomorrow, after we're done establishing what actually happened or not.

That's actually me haha. That's why you should always wait before the round ends before writing complaints boys. Anyway, regarding this specifically, there's various ways to play antags and I think "super serious terrorists who came to destroy you all" is only one of them. Especially when your comrades are a pacifist diona and a ruskii who wants to kill everyone on station. I thought that holding a humorous syndicate recruitment campaign would provide a nice change from whatever catastrophe was otherwise bound to happen (and, hey, you're still free to shoot at us if you want conflict, we are armed intruders nevertheless). Other than that, I don't see how asking people if they play Runescape is a meme. That's just an attempt at explaining all of this really quick, but if you still have a bone to pick over this feel free to make a separate complaint, as it doesn't really relate to poor halorocks22 over here.

Unrest is on the rise inside Tajaran rebel cells after a series of covert strikes orchestrated by the People's Strategic Information Service led to the acquisition of crucial intelligence pertaining to rebel actions. Sleeper agents, who infiltrated some of the most resilient Tajaran extremist-nationalist movements over the course of the past few months, are now showing their work as assets of the rebellion are being seized in droves. Among the goods seized are over four hundred thousand credits worth of gold, silver, and stolen artifacts. Records detailing rebel movements, internal command structures and planned operations have also been recovered, leading to the arrest of several dozen suspected collaborators and the foiling of at least three terror plots. This quick and decisive intervention by the People's Strategic Information Service marks a hard blow for the underground nationalist Tajaran movement, which is certain to hide deeper in an effort to maintain its cover, now that it is aware of the exact efficiency of Adhomai's counterintelligence service. LetzShake: +4 heat+4 power Jackboot put me in charge for this particular post. Seeing as you worked for the People's Strategic Information Service, I took some liberties in interpreting the results of your op. Let me know if this works!