Frances

The whole point of parapens is that they're stealthy. If you provide a person with a warning that they've been injected, you just turned the parapen into a syringe. I think making parapens ineffective against hardsuits adds an interesting (if small) dynamic. Since they're mostly meant to be used as stealth items I don't see this affecting anything terribly important (if you need to neutralize a person in a hardsuit right now you should probably have to rely on something else than your tiny parapen). Don't make them provide people with a warning, though. The ability to inject chemicals instantaneously alone is only really effective in melee combat, and people here seem to think parapens as a combat tool are bad (because they're unrealistic? Meh, so are most cool SS13 combat tricks.)

@Dea: I'm not gonna start a quoteamid, but I'm gonna try to reply to your points. While colonies make for interesting fluff they should not be at the center of the lore. The main reason for this is that there's a ton of them, and so we can't expect people to care about all of them. It's better to let the lore team concentrate their efforts on a few strong factions (Sol and Biesel?) that everybody knows about, and leave colonies as fluff for whoever is interested. The lore team is not apathetic, but I think there is a much better defined distinction between "core" and "fluff" lore than there was a year ago. The fact is most people don't play here for deep lore, and of those that do, most prefer to invest themselves heavily in one or two areas, and can't be expected to know literally everything about all of our lore. This leads to the team having a very laid-back attitude about fluff (essentially letting people design their own cool stuff, and roping their friends along if they want), while being much more critical and thoughtful of "core" lore (basically what everyone is gonna be dealing with, and ideally where we want to concentrate most of our efforts as it constitutes the most efficient use of everybody's time). Sadly, I feel like if colonies have been neglected, it's because no one bothered to care about them. I don't think it's the lore team's responsibility to create 30 cookie-cutter colonies that no one will care about - it's the players' responsibility to create their own colonies that they hopefully care about. This is an option that has been offered to them for quite some time. I don't know whether people haven't thought up colonies because they literally don't care or because they're simply unaware they can do that (in which case you should try to encourage people to do it), but in either case this leaves us in a situation where having Sol go at war with its colonies isn't extremely feasible in the near future, because it'd generate a conflict that nobody would really care about or understand anything of. I don't know what the complex power struggles between Sol and Biesel are, but surely we could come up with some kind of conflict involving them if we wanted. If you really want to have colonial conflicts I'm not saying it's off the table, but it would require people to begin to care about the colonies, and it would basically be much, much easier to start a war between belligerents that people already know about (it can involve alien factions, too, or be a civil war.) To sum up, the design precepts I'm trying to represent here basically go as follow: Interesting gameplay should dictate lore It's great when lore can dictate interesting gameplay But lore shouldn't dictate uninteresting gameplay

An issue I want to bring up is that very few players currently have an incentive to care about colonies. I know a select few who have characters who come from a colonist background, but for the most part, almost everyone is running with a Biesel/Sol background. Colonies don't have much hold in the "public" lore and getting people to root for them in their current state would be pretty difficult. There are two solutions to this. One would be to give colonies more importance, but it serves as a fluff background for characters as best, given that nobody currently residing in a colony would be reasonably expected to come work on the Aurora every day. The other option would be to start a war between parties we actually care about (TC and Sol?) Edit: It would also be a lot easier to justify military presence in Biesel (and specifically on the Aurora) if TC was involved, seeing as the station is much closer to Biesel than to Sol affairs.

Is there any possibility you guys might want to rule this one as a misunderstanding? Mod wanted to contact user over minor incident. User reacts with humorous reply (if the user was PMed over their use of the words "booty butt cheeks" I can sorta understand their reaction). Mod takes a really long time to reply again. User, not really sure what they should do (if anything, as the initial PM was a one-way statement, not an inquiry), announces their departure in deadchat. Mod misses said announcement, assumes user logged on them, and places a minor ban, on msay's consensus. The thing that irks me is that the communication exhibited by the mod here really looked like a one-way thing. Like, Thundy didn't ask Kazkin a question or tried to work on an ongoing issue, she just warned him about previous behavior. Even if Kazkin replied in a contesting tone, the lack of a reply for the next ten minutes should pretty much absolve him of any wrongdoings committed through the simple action of logging off - there was no reasonable indication at that point that Thundy still required his presence. As such it doesn't feel really fair to punish the user simply for being unable to guess an ambiguous exchange wasn't complete.

How does one grief with a ringtone? I feel due for some new tricks.

Skrell morphology isn't very different from humans', so we could assume they weigh roughly as much as a short human would.

I feel like this should follow common sense, but as far as goodsec/badsec goes: -Punches are not okay when you have another non-lethal means of disarming your opponent (flash, baton, taser, pepperspray, flashbang) -Punches are okay when all of your non-lethal weapons have been rendered ineffective or taken from you and the individual you wish to neutralize represents a direct threat to somebody (Obvious exceptions apply, say if your character had any reason to lose their cool (their partner just got killed, they get nervous facing a really big threat, rookie losing their calm), but expect IC repercussions if appropriate.) Like this is pretty much how sec combat should work (and I dare anyone to correct me on this). Due to SS13's mechanics (you can only really hope to incapacitate people through physical beatdowns by bringing them to death's doorway) it's not a generally accepted tactic to subdue troublemakers via fisticuffs. Unless you have no choice. However, since Hypatia's equipment was stolen in this case, and she had due cause to subdue the operatives (one had committed murder), I don't really see what the big deal here is.

I've seen Houssam act dickish towards characters he (I assume Houssam) didn't like (mostly because said people were being obtuse themselves). It's pretty hard to prove whether such a thing is ICly or OOCly driven, but as long as it's a realistic reaction for the character and doesn't go against the general spirit of roleplay, then I don't see why we should give a damn. Houssam has made some characters miserable, but I don't think he's made players miserable. Anyway you will probably want actual proof of unfair DO punishments before claiming that Jackboot is biased as a DO (hint: I've been told the DO chat in general loves to trashtalk about people...)

Then yeah, from a character perspective it might be understandable (loyalty implants are supposed to be extreme, idk, I could see some characters refusing to be implemented on principle), but it looks like a problem if literally all of security but Hypatia was cool to play along, and Hypatia chose to address this by threatening to shoot people with a gun. Perhaps more of an OOC problem, but still.

Is it fair to judge people for behavior during a rev round? What exactly did Hypatia do that round that went against the spirit of roleplay, and how was their behavior different from the ones of other people (sec or revs) who partook in the round?

I think that removing processing time from the sentence should be a guideline, but not a strict one. It can be pretty hard to keep track of exactly how much time people spend doing whatever without a timer, and part of the brig's punishment is having to go through processing. (Say you get booked for a 5 minute crime, since the booking will always take longer than 5 minutes you still don't get released as soon as you're processed. But the booking should also be at least mildly entertaining in comparison to the actual prison sentence). Time should be removed from a sentence (at the warden's/officer's judgement) when it would be considered unfair for security to dish out a full sentence. Say you're trying to book someone for vandalism but sec gets delayed and they have to wait around in the brig for 15 minutes, you can let them go. Or if someone spends a while in interrogation, you should remove time from their sentence appropriately. Does that seem fair?

From having worked with Jackboot on a few lore things, and having the chance to discuss his general outlook on the game (including as a DO), I can say that removing him from the DOs for issues that for the most part were never discussed with him constitutes a gross waste of his talents. Jackboot is very capable to adapt, discuss, and be reasonable in making efforts to meet other people's desires and expectations. Of the info presented here, most seems to be based on hearsay, non-issues (things that are convention for other DOs to do), or issues that Jackboot was never made aware of and thus couldn't be held responsible for in good conscience. Some of the evidence contradicts other evidence presented. For example, you're both reproaching Jackboot of having done little work (with DOs having given out roughly three actual punishments since their inception), but also slamming him for bringing up an idea that resulted in the punishment of a character (Travis), which I assume had to be approved by an admin like every other punishment. There's actually several instances in the logs you provided where people seem to find issue with Jackboot for no other reason than because he partook, or wanted to start a neutral, open-ended discussion about something related to the game. Furthermore, I don't understand the fear of possible conflicts of interests between someone who works into DOs and Lore. A player is much more likely to develop bias through regular play on the server (you know, the thing that people actually get salty about all the time) than they are through whatever lore activities they may engage in, so all of your DOs are already facing a much greater risk (and I'd assume it's being handled just fine.) Furthermore, if Jackboot actually developed a grudge, it would be incredibly easier for him to act as the uncontested authority directly in charge of the lore than as a lowly DO, where he has to answer both to his peers, and to admins. Furthermore, considering that you graciously accepted him into DOs after he was made Loremaster, it would be better to provide actual evidence of bias before bringing this up as an argument. Lastly, I don't understand why some of these accusations (some of which Jackboot claims are false or misdirected, some of which don't make any sense) weren't brought to him for confirmation before dismissing him. If there was something substantial (let's say there was a scandal because he managed to give an unfair punishment to somebody he admitted to dislike for personal reasons) then character testimony could be useful, but from what I can see he was fired on other people's impressions alone. Without making an effort to verify these impressions, or see how they could be addressed. This can be summed up by Skull's quote: In my tenure as Headmin, I had to kick roughly three people from our staff. Issues mostly came to me as they were presented by others. However, I always made sure to verify the issues with the people concerned themselves, and try to discuss possible solutions before resorting to expulsion. The only people I kicked out where people that either demonstrated repeatedly they were unable of change, or verbally expressed they had no interest in modifying their behavior. In comparison, this whole situation seems mishandled. The fact alone that a user's suggestion thread was grossly misinterpreted as an out-of-the-blue abuse of the loremaster's position, and that said misrepresentation was factored in as actual evidence to kick this user from the DO corps (when a quick look at the user's 150-word opening post would be enough to dismiss all misconstrued ideas) goes to show that little to no homework was done before firing this person.

I'm pretty sure the "adhere to the chain of command" rule is really there to tell people not to brush off heads without a good reason. There can be some exception to this, and having one of your characters disagree with a head on a moral basis falls in a gray area (mainly based on the nature of the disagreement and how reasonable both characters' morals are).

I think what Brage is saying is that this will encourage players to toe farther with the chucklefucking/silly RP line. Which, it might. But when it does, I can confirm the staff are actually there to push back. The very vocal ranting of a select few people is also doing an efficient job at ensuring not too many people try to break the norm too often.

I don't know if it's me, but Killerhurtz's opening statement seems fairly neutral. Like they wanted to bring up/verify the fact, but there wasn't anything accusatory about it. No clue why they called you out for your tone, though. There wasn't anything wrong with it either.

I do not play Tyrone Lenoir. Neither does Coolbc. The assumption that Tyrone (Lenoir) is a racist character is sorta puzzling given that he's the whitest black character I know and I've never seen him grow weed. Lastly, you probably want to drop the "meme squad" thing because it makes you look like a conspiracy theorist. I also don't see how having a character named "Tyrone" is racist considering there's roughly 100 000 people named Tyrone in America. The name is mostly carried by black males, yes. So it would be logical to see a black male character using it. I've seen two Tyrones on station (Halo's and this one) so it's not like the name (or archetype) has achieved any sort of memetic status, and I feel like people might honestly getting upset over a kneejerk reaction here. Also, roleplaying incompetence does not necessarily equate chucklefucking. Especially when the actions are intended to have canon to semi-canon repercussions for the character (semi-canon being retconning character death into an injury, for example.)

Ran into the same kind of trouble before, so I feel your pain. I don't think having a character who speaks in African American Vernacular English (AAVE - a very real and common dialect in America) is racist, but some people feel like it is. Maybe because it makes black people look "uneducated and uncultured", instead of, you know, actually being part of their culture. /s.

Because playing a round for comedy = literally grief. ayyyy strawman arguments

Some players' discontent seems to come from the idea that "non-serious roleplay robs the server of high-quality, serious roleplay we already have so little of". No. It doesn't. If most of the rounds are bland, average and unremarkable (or even bad by some's standards), then people taking an occasional round to goof off (especially when they're the round's antagonists) is unlikely to eat into much of high quality. There's a limited number of rounds, yes. But when 80% of the rounds are average, you don't turn to squashing the 10% of variety you don't like. You find opportunities to turn more of the remaining 80% into great.

Pretty much my opinion as well. Sadly I didn't get to observe the entirety of the round, but this really goes to show there's always going to be some form of outcry against anything that isn't "super-srs".

That's all good, except for one important distinction you forget to make. Jam is not preserves. Preserves is defined as a sweetened fruit or vegetable preparation in which the main plant body is prepared in chunks. In jams, however, the fruits and/or vegetables are pulped. Therefore, the picture you posted, along with its caption, are factually incorrect.

or just have him apply for skrell B)