Frances

I'll try to present the problem as best as I can while we wait for the mins to come into this thread. The AI was always meant to be a tool rather than an "ally of the good guys". However, verbatim interpretation of the laws leads to a few issues, namely that there's nothing that prevents an assistant from requesting access to the captain's quarters and walking in to grab the spare ID. It's honestly the only problem, though. The only real direct, immediately harmful thing an AI can do (while following its laws) is to grant extra access to people who don't have it. Anything else is complicated and convoluted enough that it's unlikely to happen under normal circumstances, and likely to lead from interesting RP if it did occur. An interpretation of the laws that tries to preserve the crew's respective access levels sorta takes care of that, but as a whole, you're basing your judgment calls on how weird a person is acting when doing that. (It's the same logic that dictates you probably shouldn't help the chef get unstable mutagen.) Which brings the AI a lot closer to an ever-watchful Big Brother, and a lot farther from a helpful-yet-exploitable tool.

As the holder of a whitelist ban following a similar incident, I can confirm that all forms of chucklefucking and joking around while on a whitelisted species/role are wholly unacceptable, and should be strictly reserved for bald, human assistants.

I don't think we really need to keep a tally of admin warns/bans. I'd rather have a holistic idea of what the admins are doing, and that's the kind of transparency I feel would be needed. Whenever users bring up an issue via a thread (maybe especially complaints?), it'd be good to have clear musings and explanations from staff, rather than just a super-neutral acknowledgement.

The ban was given out a year and a half ago. There was a history of Jackboot's CE doing way worse things (I don't remember the details but I'm fairly sure he kept breaking regulations in other minor ways that added up - don't worry, we didn't whitelist-strip people just for breaking into the kitchen even back then), and since there weren't really any DOs to enforce proper workplace behavior at that time, we gave out a whitelist strip. Yes, we could be pretty strict with what heads could do back then, and I'm much happier with the current system of DOs and IC complaints.

well the people who take lore too seriously tend to be more autistic than the general population The way I see it, the admins went down a path of [pretty stupid] decisions (publicly denouncing and banning a member for arbitrary reasons was one), then responded to the community's yelling with more yelling (the general response to all ensuing drama was another problem). Then, seeing these methods were ineffective, staff sounded a general retreat and they don't tend to get very involved with people anymore. My point is, if everyone is nice, and doesn't do anything too retarded, we should be able to get along. Yes, some people will be mad anyway, but these people are in small and manageable enough quantities that they deserve being addressed (or shrugged off), rather than be left as an excuse to infringe on the collective ability of the community to have decent staff-users communication. Doing this wasn't a problem in my time, and considering pretty much everybody that had issues with the administration was either driven off or banned, it shouldn't be now either.

It's a convenient excuse to say that you don't want to go more public because you're afraid of backlash, but I think you'll find most users to be surprisingly reasonable. Well, of course, there's also no need to make forum announcements whenever you ban people, or anything like that.

If that's the case then they've been doing a pretty poor job, considering the general complaints come from how devoid of consequences their interventions are.

Well, we don't need to do it just because everyone else does. What would be interesting is to actually look at the incentives admins have to be more private or public, and see what makes the best course of action for everyone depending on the circumstances. (Basically don't just look at what they do, look at why they do it - and find out if it's good.)

I was gonna make a thread about this too. Reading "it's been dealt with" on a player/admin complaint is... less than satisfying. And while you could argue satisfying the users isn't part of an admin's job, giving people the impression you're getting things done (along with actually doing them!) goes a long way towards keeping the community happy and involved. Is anyone's "privacy" really being preserved in a special way when you tell others situations have been "handled", rather than clearly explaining what happened? Because I see two situations: either whatever issue there had has been settled civilly, in which case everyone will be glad to hear about the resolution, or the problematic user/min has been a raging cock, in which case I don't think anyone should care too much if their pride is being hurt alongside it. PS: I've always really, really appreciated whenever an admin I've ahelped replies with a little "we talked to the user and it shouldn't happen again", or "we banned the user", along with a quick word of thanks. It's just a lot more encouraging to ahelp issues when there's actual follow-up and you feel like you've done something good, so it might be worthwhile to encourage staff to make that a habit.

The addition of stricter rules should be made to remedy a problem. Are bad AIs currently a problem, or do we want to add a whitelist simply because the factors limiting us from doing so are no longer a consideration? If the problem is really, really poor AIs, I'd suggest the rule be put under a timeban (like security) to give new players a chance to witness the role of an AI secondhand first.

Wait, I get that us common mortals aren't allowed to post in unban requests, but I'm really curious and can't resist the urge to ask... how did you manage to get permanently banned from posting just one NSFW link, especially if by accident?

That was a concern they've had, though I don't think anyone could actually "defeat" the DOs. If Mirk made an expy to circumvent character restrictions he'd probably run into OOC trouble. Anyway, while on the topic of DOs, one suggestion I have for them is greater OOC involvement. It's becoming clear that the people ranting about sec aren't having fun from an OOC standpoint (and some of their complaints do seem justified), so at some point a dialogue needs to be established with "problem" players to figure out exactly what's going on, and how we can encourage them to play sec characters that don't cause issues (are they caused on purpose? Is it just a desire to spark conflict? Could things be done in a way that's more fun for the other parties involved?)

Except there's already a 10 day requirement on sec jobs, so isn't that already accomplishing the function you're describing?

Jboy, just give us a play-by-play of how you'd like a good nuke round to go? Like, what would you like to see nuke ops do, from spawning to round end, in order for the round to be considered interesting? It's shouldn't take that long to write, I just want to see where you're coming from. And no, I don't think it's something that's really been explained by anyone yet.

The thing is we've got two choices. Either the AI gets the power to reveal all nuke ops, constantly give away their position and randomly shock them/lock them inside rooms, or the AI is valid. The AI being valid seems like a much lesser evil to me than having it be protected by plot armor as it mercilessly destroys all efforts of the ops. Also @jboy, can you tell us what you'd like nuke ops to do, though? I think quite a few people would like to hear your idea of how to change the problems you're presenting.

Well, if your stand is that no current nuke players are able to create any good roleplay, you should probably start by giving a clear example of what you'd like "good" ops to do.

The reason why nuke ops bomb the armory/cargo/AI is exactly so they can roleplay. Without it it's really easy for security and the crew to just shoot them down, which tends to result in even less interesting situations. What they do actually ensures roleplay can happen. What you just suggested doesn't. What do you think?

Huh. Most of the time when I did my best to listen to people's problems and solve disputes without making arrests people were genuinely thankful. The only complaints I encountered were from people literally screaming "shitcurity" and doing their best to be disruptive, which, tbh, is hard to take personally. But it might just be my own experience.

It's really interesting to see how the various races translate into player retention. I applied for a Skrell whitelist (and should still have it to this day), but I could never get into roleplaying Skrells because of how different they are, while it was always pretty easy to RP Taj characters. I also always see a lot more Tajarans and Skrells (both in terms of players and character variety) compared to Dionas and Skrells, so it's actually really surprising to see how many people have whitelists for these races (or how few people have whitelists for Tajs+Unathis, in comparison.)

This is something that rather perplexes me, so I figured I'd make a separate post to call it out. What exactly makes it so that being "good" sec = no fun? Being reasonable, kind, polite, and trying your best to avoid and defuse bad situations (and often being thanked for being the sole sane person in a conflict) definitely comes with its own reward, no?

Hard to say, as I don't come on the server much anymore and get to see little of security's day-to-day activities. So I'll speak generally. Imo, work needs to be put in on both the security and complainants' fronts. In security, the only way to solve "badsec" problems is to change the culture internal to the department. If you set clear guidelines on what is and isn't expected of officers, the whole department should eventually end up following through popular example. The way to do this isn't by whitelisting - the few people I've actually seen be problematic could easily pass a head whitelist for the most part. Rather, I encourage anyone interested by this issue to take up a job within security or command (HoS/Captain), and task themselves with setting the right example, while properly addressing the issues they find problematic members to cause. For the complainants themselves, I think it's important to realize that not everything security does is out of maliciousness or incompetence, and to carefully examine the events they encounter before filing them away as problematic issues. Once you fall into the mindset that security on Aurora is bad, it's easy to tell yourself that any situation you encounter is the result of bad security. This doesn't necessarily make it so, and it's a lot more effective (and a lot less frustrating!) to try to look at everything from the most neutral perspective possible rather than assume the possible worst out of everybody. Basically, don't look at everything in black and white, and the points you actually choose to bring up will resound even more

Not really. If security gets bitched at for arresting someone, can you imagine how much complaining antags encounter for killing them? Both roles require a thick skin, and the hate they get isn't necessarily proportional to the actual performance of their players.

One could easily argue that the bar set for command should be higher than the one set for security, though. By the logic you're describing, I'd be jobbanned from sec for making light of a game bug.

One thing I've learned here is that you can't stop people from being idiots if they want to be idiots. There's a million ways to create bad characters, and bad characters will be created no matter what, even if you reduce Aurora to a text-based, ASCII interface. You can restrict or get rid of things that are used for nothing but being bad (maybe those rainbow stockings), but there's no point in trying to limit legitimate game implements when shitters can just jump onto the next thing to, well, be a shit with.

Rename the janitors to "sanitation engineers".