Frances

To be honest, IPCs are a lot harder to mess up than aliens. I don't really see what Sleepy could even do that'd be bad, here. Just stay away from sexbots and we should be fine?

Huh? I'm not really sure what you're talking about - my issue is when people get told they can't do X or X, or that they have to do a certain thing a certain way because of lore reasons. It hasn't been enforced so much (thanks to Jackboot being liberal), but I see a lot of suggestions pertaining to the lore that get torn apart by certain people due to minuscule details (most recently methods of cloning being realistic or unrealistic, for example. Like come on, people are arguing over instant 60-second cloning.) I believe you may be vastly misinterpreting what I'm trying to say - that and people complaining about something after refusing to give feedback are two different things. Also: I just want to get along with you people. I want everyone to be happy, and I'm personally willing to adapt and listen to people as much as possible. And I am getting seriously tired of people painting me as some kind of witch.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by that? I'm not a member of the lore team, but one thing I really like about Jackboot is that he's very relaxed as a loremaster, while still having the sense to create a lore that's solid and not full of eccentricities. A problem I've seen with many lore writers is that they get too absorbed in their own creation, and obsess over every detail being perfect rather than try to make the lore adapt to the players as much as possible. I've seen you engage in this a little as well, and I'm honestly a bit wary of anyone sparking long lore debates on the forums, for the sake of the immersion of scientists, specialists, or otherwise meganerds (pardon the term) - a few of which do play the game. But being told you can't do something for a non-obvious reason which only satisfies the standards of a very small group (the lore team itself) is kinda unfun. On the other hand, your previous contributions to the lore (fixing some early stupidity) were really great, and I know you to be a sensible person, so I may be simply misinformed. Just my two cents.

Skrell are simply not as attractive of a race as others. Tajarans are basically furries. Unathi are tough space lizard badasses who can be funny at times (and also furries). IPCs have quirky robot personalities. Skrells don't have much going for them. Most of them are awkward, hyperintelligent space nerds. And lots of people who like to roleplay super smart characters prefer them to be a bit more glamorous. There's a few serious, non-funny non-accent Skrell (well, I've mostly seen them in events, not as regular characters). But I'm cool with them. I'm cool with anyone who tries to play a Skrell, cause they're sorta neat. But no matter the role, in comparison to the other races available, Skrell will always remain a niche role, because fewer people are interested in being space squids than anything else.

That would indeed create a bit of a headache. If I understand Meowy well, he's saying every other person involved with the changeling would get metaknowledge of changelings during ling rounds. Still, could we simply trust everyone not to get dumb with this? There were syndicate characters with syndicate-related character arcs before, and everybody got along just fine.

I have seen him play (even yesterday). I think it's kinda shitty for everyone involved that you'd break a rule, get to keep on playing, and then end up being punished some 2-3 weeks afterwards. At the same time, I really think his behavior was unacceptable and deserves appropriate punishment.

You can't really say this. Nuclear has stayed in our code because enough people like it to keep it. It wouldn't get voted in so often if no one had any interest in it, and there is a marked difference between HRP Nuclear and LRP Nuclear. (Also, I'm pretty sure several gamemodes being treated the exact same way in the code is not a stigma) Anyway, if I had to guess why Extended rarely happens, it's because there's a fair amount of Secret rounds that are uneventful for most people. If anything, I'd say roughly 50% of my time playing on Secret, under any role (including a lot of security and medbay), I end up making it to the transfer shuttle with little to nothing interrupting my RP. Antags rarely go all-out, and it pretty much caused Secret to become the new Extended. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, especially with the code changes increasing the chances for Extended to appear in Secret.

Alright, here's my (new) take on the issue: -People are already free to roleplay a character's death more in depth if they so wish, especially canon deaths. -People generally won't be assed to give a damn about the death of a random person. Saying they would if they couldn't get cloned is a bit hypocritical, as I realized even I can't be bothered to care about random exploding assistants on most of my characters. -Why do we want to make cloning harder?

I'm not particularly interested in continuing to defend the suggestion (as I'm beginning to realize its flaws - no, not the ones Jamini pointed out while screaming), but that premise seems quite honestly ludicrous. You are requiring that: 1. Your character get killed mid-roleplay by antagonists/stupidity, neither of which happen terribly often 2. Your character get cloned, which is a process that can take anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour depending on how terrible medbay is (and if you're still alive when you get there) 3. Your character then be able to resume roleplay, assuming the initial situation they had left had been capable to maintain itself during the past hour or so, and people completely disregard the fact that said character has been cloned The only situation in which I could see that even working is in the event that an incredibly stupid accident kill you in extended (say a blob exploding a weldertank right next to you). Otherwise, people are likely going to be too occupied with the antagonists running amok and killing people to satisfy much of your chair-RP. Furthermore, even that premise wouldn't work, as CMD causes you to forget all events of the current shift IIRC, and you'd basically have to restart what you began from scratch.

The thing that sort of bothers me is that this isn't an issue that should take terribly long to process, and Plahunter broke probation and has been allowed to carry on for what has now been longer than the duration of the probation itself. I really am not trying to sound like a bitch. But it feels unfair for everyone.

Okay, if that's true I'm very sad. I've never acted knowing I would get cloned. Cloning isn't a guarantee, and in fact, I think people have generally done an excellent job at finding a good balance of taking risks and protecting their own lives in the past months. Is this really a problem that you see happening?

The actions of the engineer didn't make much sense to me that round. The round had been voted to be nuke. I do not think a single person was unaware these people were nuke operatives. However, when obvious antagonists (well, I think only nuke, specifically) attempts to act covertly by presenting themselves to be something else than angry syndicates, it is common courtesy for everyone to give them the benefit of the doubt to some extent. Going to their ship to discover their gear and bring it back on station would obviously put an end to that. Furthermore, there was no particularly valid IC reason for the person who went to the ship that round to do so.

I am getting increasingly swayed by the argument that "death in the SS13 universe isn't very serious by nature". There are a lot of things in the game that are not very serious. Screaming assistants running around at every turn and getting themselves killed in dumb ways is one of them. Maybe death isn't something we want to force people to be serious about. If they can't take it seriously right now, I feel like it might be for a reason other than cloning. In most cases, the game is too hectic to get people to process a death properly, unless the death was a canon event in extended or something such.

Download the Technic Launcher. Once the technic launcher has been downloaded, go to the "Modpacks" tab and look for this box. Paste the following url into it: http://api.technicpack.net/modpack/aurora-server-pack Then click "Install" at the bottom right of your launcher and you'll have the modpack ready to run from the launcher.

Based on the ability of the player not to involve others with their foolery against their will. I have once played a "human" character who was a ghost-in-the-shell-style android escaped from a high-tech laboratory. I antagged during antag rounds, and pretended to be perfectly normal otherwise (while still trying to hide my secret). I interacted with a few people who knew my secret during non-antag rounds, but they were willing participants who consented to keep previous events cannon and didn't mind the whole story. The other side of that was a couple of players who roleplayed being a werewolf and a vampire, and had a full werewolf-vs-vampire fight in a public hallway in front of a group of people. It was terribly silly and I think they were both talked to.

So Skull disappeared for finals. What happens now?

Does it matter as long as it's not used in a way that is disruptive? The rule on knowledge of antags/antag items exists solely to prevent meta (afaik). A player could be an underground syndicate CEO for all we care, as long as they didn't disclose any of their antag knowledge to others or put it to use during a regular round.

I stated a lot of reasons in my OP.

The last few conversations about cloning/genetics I partook in were far more civil and moderate than this one. This is a change I would like to see (if merely for the sake of figuring out how it makes the server different, and deciding whether we should stick with it or file it away as a dumb idea), but I must say I am sad to see the upset it seems to have caused. It's a somewhat minor addition on my end (and on the end of other players that are against cloning, I believe). I don't understand how this proposition can upset people so much, but if it makes people very angry (even if it's relatively few people) then I'm not sure it's really worth bothering.

People have been threatening to leave (or openly claimed they were leaving) the server over a flurry of various issues, to such a point that it has begun to be ridiculed by a portion of the playerbase. If people are opposed to this idea for a valid reason, then they should be able to argue their point with logic, not by throwing a tantrum.

As it has been repeated several times, this change does not force cloning outside of the lore, but simply makes it unpopular/no longer commonplace. My suggestion has not been brought up by lore concerns but by roleplay/OOC ones. It is very difficult to speculate accurately about what will be possible 400 years from now (have we been right about half of the stuff we thought we'd have in the year 2000, back in the 1900s?), so pretty much anything in 2457 could go or not. The way the game works and plays is more important than background lore, and neither saying that cloning would be commonplace or not would be terribly immersion-breaking. I would like to dismiss lore arguments as much as possible as it is the lore's job to bend to gameplay and roleplay first (lore != roleplay). Whenever someone brings a lore argument in a non-lore thread, it usually leads to several pages of subjective and disorganized arguing which has little to do with the original issue. I'm confused. You say it doesn't matter because most people don't get cloned, then you say that a few do. What exactly is your point here? Also, antags have little to do with it because they can always take the head of someone they killed. But it's sorta lame when the only way to effectively kill someone is to cut their head off like everyone is some sort of weird zombie. You can't rely on poisoning, staged accidents, or basically anything that doesn't require robusting in a private room. It is actually the reason why I know we should be talking to people who fail at antagging and explain to them how to antag better, rather than let them run rampant and leave their victims to be cloned. People play the psych so little I forgot it even existed lmao. Anyway, my point still stands that you rarely see geneticists. I'm not going to argue whether it's 1% or 5% of medbay (or any other number) because that's not the most relevant thing. Also I'll reply to Jamini's post later, as I'm busy and writing up a reply will take a while.

Lore argument. I've seen people get bombed a few time during nuke. In general, they didn't get cloned, because the station was in utter chaos. Half of the crew was dead and the remaining half was focused on saving themselves. The one time I've seen people get cloned during nuke (short of the ops themselves getting cloned which was hilarious), it was a HoS who died during a bombing, which is kinda, eh. It can go both ways. But I think succeeding at taking out a major target only to see them being revived and sent back into action sorta sucks, and only serves in giving you an incentive to bomb medbay/genetics. If this is true, then what purpose does cloning serve in the first place? The rules. The rules will stop them. Also... Lore argument.

Well, that sounds a bit too extreme for me. I remember when I joined Aurora, I spent a few rounds trying to figure out if deaths were canon or not - before realizing that having to make new characters that aren't throwaways every time you die would be a huge pain, and that people simply ignored most deaths in the favor of creating a longer narrative. I guess there's canon and round separation. Deaths should feel impactful in an individual round, but there's a difference between that and scaring away the players themselves because they wouldn't want to lose their characters. I simply don't think cloning is as much of a fix-all as people here paint it to be. I'd personally like to hear some stories of people that have been cloned following bullshit, rather than rants on how this change would be awful for everybody else. (I also asked in OOC. The general consensus was that people were open to removing cloning. We can only defend people who don't speak so much. At some point we'll just have to proceed regardless of what we assume people who don't speak up want; else we're just creating a world based on assumptions, for a group we don't even know anything about.)

I hope this answers most of your points. They were fun to read, and a lot of them were very good additions to the debate in general.

This is lovely. And made me laugh a lot, too.