Frances

I'm sort of seeing it like the chaplain. It's a role that has a purpose, RP-wise, but involves no mechanics, and is so boring, unrewarding and generally thankless that few people are interested in doing it. Which would mean there'd be a very low demand for it, because the main appeal of the clown and mime roles (on LRP) and even the chaplain (on here) is chucklefucking. (I don't mind the chaplain being a chucklefuck though, most of the time he's the station buffoon and it's great.)

Tips for a few of the issues I saw people bring up here: -Roleplaying someone of the opposite gender is surprisingly easy. A few people complain that males roleplaying females tend to fall within the trap of playing "dudes with boobs", but tbh, it isn't something I really noticed here, mainly because, no matter who you are, you're first and foremost a professional working on a space station. And there isn't going to be much of a difference between a male and a female there - no need to get overly excited about going shopping with your besties after the shift, or pretending to have a period. People are just... people. When you roleplay a character of your own gender, you probably don't think about stereotypes. In fact, you probably don't think about how they're your own gender at all - your character simply exists, as a human (or alien) being with their own unique personality, likes, dislikes, qualities and flaws. The opposite gender starts out being the exact same. And if, branching from that, there's a persona you want to copy (the cool action dude, or the cutesy always happy chick), then go for it. But if what you're afraid is of doing a bad job, you'd be surprised - it's really hard to fuck up at pretending to be another gender. You're probably already doing a way worse job at pretending to be a space surgeon or scientist, yet nobody bats an eyelid there. -Also, I think someone said they were afraid of playing as a synthetic because they're not sure how to sound clinical/robotic enough, you could start out as a robot with a personality. These tend to be the cooler, coolest robots around, because tbh, actually leaving an impression as an emotionless borg is pretty hard - unless you're one of the best, few people will pay attention, or remember you. If you like the IC romance, it can be as fun as an actual one. If you hate it or aren't invested in it, though, commitment can become an issue pretty quick. Play it off as your character not being committed!

I can honestly say that one of the reasons why certain discussions drag on and on is because the core of the issues is not being framed properly. I've been a bit guilty of wanting to fight every fight there is to fight (rather than picking my battles and sticking to the most important topics), but one thing I've noticed (most recently in the threads regarding "IC dick characters" and Sue) is that I've tried to formulate the core issue, other people have tried too, but these discussions get ignored in favor of the much more entertaining (and inflammatory) one of slinging accusations at each other. Of course, these discussions won't head anywhere, because in the case of the Sue threads, the core issue was an undecided one - whether we should allow people to be dicks ICly or not. And you can spend forever arguing about a single person's actions - as long as there's no clearly set rules or policies, there is no "correct" side to that debate. I believe people need to understand that. They need to get a good understanding of their outrage, ask themselves /why/ they are outraged, and clearly formulate the reasons for that outrage, so that others have a chance to understanding the point of view they're presenting, and achieve a consensus together. It's a two-way street. Even if you don't like someone, don't see them as your enemy. See them as someone you have to work with, and if you do your best to work with them, no harm may fall upon you. Worst case, if the other user keeps being unreasonable, they'll get the boot. And if not, then we can all get along, and that'll be grand.

Well, suit yourself, but the best way to solve it is to bring these users to light, either to the eyes of the staff or to the community as a whole. Otherwise, it's very easy for somebody engaging in that kind of behavior to read this thread and go "oh, yeah, some other people do that, but I certainly don't."

The sad truth is few of the people engaging in passive aggression will actually read this thread, identify themselves, and curb their behavior. Especially when the issue is brought up as a vague blanket statement, without directing attention to specific cases. Your best bet, for anyone who sees someone else being a cunt on the forums, is to either call them out (politely), or report their post. These are the two best things you can do.

You don't need to telegraph all of your actions. But wordlessly planting the nuke in a vented location when the station is under complete disarray and there's another op distracting us by playing a completely different game, you don't think that's sort of, poor planning, OOC-wise? My gripe is specifically because the nuke was blown up. There would be no issue if you had wanted to do anything else, rob the station, kidnap half of the science team, destroy an entire wing, whatever else. Stealthing those things is fine, because even if you succeed flawlessly and without giving anyone a chance to fight back, there is still RP to be done. But stealth-planting the nuke and blowing it up is imo significantly crappier, because it just, ends the round early without giving anyone the chance to accomplish anything satisfying. I'm fairly certain your intent wasn't even to be stealthy, as you stated you expected people to come confront you. But the problem I find is that you did very little to ensure this confrontation would happen - there was another operative talking about a completely separate bomb threat and basically menacing us if we didn't comply with them, which didn't exactly made people want to rambo, and since no mention of the nuke whatsoever was given, we didn't really come to the conclusion that an op would bomb the station... to plant a bigger bomb. It was very unlikely that anyone would come to the brig, or discover the nuke in time.

What I don't understand in the excuse of "didn't have a choice" was that the general public wasn't informed that the nuke existed until about 2 minutes before it blew up. Could this not have been carried out in a more elegant way? I mean, if your plan is to never talk, and simply set up the nuke in the hope that the crew will come to robust you under the sole assumption that you're a nuke op, it seems like there'd be a lot of potential for things to go wrong.

I have a deviantart! http://thirteen-dogs.deviantart.com/ The stuff I post isn't necessarily stellar, but a lot of it is fun. I don't do many detailed paintings, mostly quick concepts like what I posted here.

Bit of a bump, but since the thread is still open, I'll say that Plahunter's suggestion isn't half-bad. There would be reasons why you aim for the center of mass irl (better guarantee to hit), but since everyone goes for headshots in SS13 when they're trying to kill people, I don't see why we couldn't specifically try for limb shots when shooting less-than-lethals. I believe the reason here was that Sue already had head targeted from a previous fight, and didn't have time to switch it due to a heat-of-the-moment thing, but generally it'd be preferable if you know you're going to use force in advance.

You can sorta prove yourself beforehand to a degree. Having characters that are irresponsible or childish isn't bad per se, but complementing them with more mature and responsible characters can provide you with solid credentials when applying for your heads whitelist.

Colors!

Bad doctors are terrible. A bad doctor can lock you down in surgery for 30 minutes, or completely forget about you, OD you on chems you don't even need or all sorts of terrible things. In order to bring this back on topic, I really struggle with RPing characters whose overall "moods" do not match my own. Has anyone else experienced this? Like I have a lot of really happy, or friendly, or casual characters, but sometimes I'm gonna feel especially gloomy and realize I don't have an overly depressing character to play.

This is actually the kind of situation I would be willing to go through medical for. That sounds way more fun than getting 50 burn damage, having to pretend you remotely care about your 50 burn damage as a doctor instantly fixes you up, and being sent on your way. Once, Lysanuh (one of Nightmare's characters) got killed by space carps. Doctors cloned him. Except, one particularity of Lysanuh is that he has a prosthetic arm. At some point during the cloning process, one of the doctors realizes that they should probably replace clone Lysanuh's healthy arm by his prosthetic, so that he does not realize he is a clone. Sadly, that doctor is not the doctor who is in the process of cloning Lysanuh. As a result, while Lysanuh wakes up from being cloned, he gets to see a random doctor dragging his own body to surgery to cut off his mechanical arm. He RP-faints. However, the story does not end there. Shortly after that, yet another doctor intelligently decides that although Lysanuh has already seen his own corpse, he would probably be glad to wake up with his prosthetic arm instead of a brand new healthy arm (who knows, he might just assume the whole thing was a dream at that point). Said doctor drags clone Lysanuh into surgery, and proceeds to cut Lysanuh's arm off. The doctor forgets to pust clone Lysanuh under anesthetic. Clone Lysanuh actually faints for real this time. Anyway. I find these debacles hilarious. The only way I would even resolve to getting myself cloned is if I was given a chance to see my own body, so I'd have the perfect excuse to go insane, throw a fit, and troll the fuck out of all the medbay doctors for the rest of the round. I love when people do that. (I really don't hate medbay I promise)

I don't like getting injured. Most of the time, if I get injured gravely, I'll try to succumb (or ask admins to kill me) just so I don't have to roleplay with the doctors over at medbay. (Sorry, guys! You're still cool!) I find the whole healing process really ridiculous (if a bit necessary, given the game). I don't mind roleplaying /being/ injured, but walking into medbay, being instantly healed back to "everything is fine", thanking the doctors and awkwardly walking out as if nothing had happened makes me feel ridiculous. I also don't like being cloned. Like, meh. Deaths should matter, and if I get killed during a round, whatever happened should carry enough impact that you shouldn't just see a character that died walking around again.

Keep drawing, Cassie, I like what you posted! I drew a set design today, and it was kinda SS13 related, so... Have the bedroom of some sort of syndie assassin in a city.

Elite struck me as terribly boring. I made the mistake (?) of buying it, only to find that the core gameplay is mostly composed of tedious, repetitive content, without any depth. Example: ferrying cargo. You can move cargo from a station to another. You load up a map of the galaxy with the 4+ billion star systems, try to find one that sells or buys cargo you want to trade, then fly your ship to a station. Although there's various kinds of cargo (some legal, some illegal), whether you're moving hydrogen or space tea, all cargo ends up being a number that has no impact on what you do besides trying to find the most profitable thing to sell (and maybe avoiding being scanned by the police). To move the cargo itself, you have to dock to a spaceport. You communicate with the spaceport to ask for docking permission, physically fly into it with your ship, go to an assigned docking bay, line up your ship to land, and then cool little robot arms are going to move you into the station where you get to some sort of service bay. You repeat the process in reverse to undock, engage your warp/hyperspeed drive through its own (fairly simple) process, move from system to system, and eventually dock to the next place you want to get to. This is all pretty neat on paper, and I honestly love the concept, because it's realistic. However, it becomes very annoying and tedious the instant you realize it doesn't mean fuck all. There's no epic, overarching story to your player's actions. The world of Elite: Dangerous doesn't feel deep, or elaborate. There's barely any multiplayer, and the multiplayer feels tacked on to something that was meant to be singleplayer by design from the start. The world is huge, but you can honestly go anywhere across it, and feel like like you're in the exact same place you were in five hours ago. There's three station models, about a dozen ship models, and an infinity of procedurally generated factions and planets you have absolutely no reason to care about. The combat is fun for a few hours - until you realize that unlocking new equipment and ships is a grind, and there's so little to unlock and optimize (though it takes forever to get to it). Games like Freelancer or Freespace sucked you in because of the epic stories they made you a part of. You could clearly identify the factions you were fighting for or against, their ships, their planets looked and felt different, worldwide events actually mattered (as there wasn't a permanent universe that required to remain relatively stable). Here, you just feel like a statistic, a tiny dot trying to amass an arbitrary amount of credit set by a game designer so you can unlock the next ship everybody has, so that you can make even more credits, for... nothing at all. Even Eve has godawful combat (as far as the arcade factor can be considered) and a terrible amount of statistical and time-dependent grinding, but the game gets carried by the fact that its gameworld is living and breathing, carried by its players and the alliances and wars that are constantly forged, broken, waged, etc. In Elite, there's no way whatsoever for players to organize, and after 10 hours I still couldn't really figure out under which circumstances I'd be allowed to communicate with another player-pilot or not. The game does get sold as a "space-trucking simulator", but honestly, it does none of that. It's tedious, because you get no sense of place, scale, or progression. All that you do is the same. The world never changes or feels different. You'll be doing the same missions over and over, perhaps with different numbers or with a different-looking cockpit. It basically feels like the worst aspects of a singleplayer game and a MMO got mixed into one. It's like the devs feel like they have to work with all the restrictions of a large, procedurally generated, always persistent world, but they don't give you the chance to play with it, or affect it at all.

I didn't even know we stopped accepting mute people. They're not bad characters, and there's no particular reason why they should be entirely barred from employment. Now, jobs for which rapid communication is absolutely crucial (doctor, security officer), I'd understand not having anyone mute, but there's a ton of other jobs where the impediment wouldn't matter very much.

There's a ton of trials going on right now. Since some previous trialmods have had an issue with getting noticed in the past (especially when it comes time to evaluate), one suggestion I might have for all applicants is to notice a mod/admin who shares the same playing hours as them, and closely partner up with that person to get them to evaluate them. Basically some sort of mentor system. It would ensure that you have a guarantee at least one person will be able to speak about you when trials are formally evaluated. Apologies if this is in the general section. I'm wasn't really sure where else to post it.

I had a short discussion with Skull as to why my application was not considered for trialmod. A few people raised several objections, the major lines of which were that people were concerned certain matters in my private life (which I understand I've disclosed very little about) would affect my capacity to moderate, and that my recent involvement in the drama surrounding player complaints vs. Sue (and my ensuing thread) put me in a bad light (certain people believe me to be favoring Sue, among other things). As the general policy is to not disclose information from the staff forums (to prevent users from nagging, questioning, and scrutinizing every single little thing a staffmember might do), I wasn't informed of who raised these objections, though it had the unfortunate effect of leaving me little chance to discuss them or defend myself. If I was given a chance to understand exactly where these reservations come from, I believe I would be able to provide a reasonable explanation for most, if not all of them. I'm not looking to fight anyone, I don't think I've been overly aggressive thus far, and I'd really like to discuss these issues with the people who have raised them, as I believe most of them to be a misunderstanding. I don't bite. I'm just looking to understand what happened. If you don't want to clutter up these threads, or simply wish to discuss these issues privately, feel free to send me a PM or contact me on the BYOND pager.

I was hoping for more people to butt in. I was also always under the impression that staff had the final say over complaints, not users, so I'm sort of waiting for an admin to post too. Anyway, I actually just remembered I did ask one question about something I'm still confused on. Also, This is my general stance on the situation as I can see it rn. Could someone confirm or dismiss it?

I'm gonna go ahead and side with the general opinion of other people here. No one should have to ask you to leave a vastly public space over a breakup, where the most that will happen is that you might have to run into the person's name a few times on the forums, and you are completely free to ignore them otherwise (unless they're on the staff, in which case it's pretty fucked to ask.) I understand not wanting to hurt whoever made that request, but that person is very immature in the first place to make such a demand.

blame people not setting up a custom OOC info text they're being bad eventhosts

I think one problem mentioned is that a lot of events are spontaneous. If somebody from the admin team were willing to partner with me (to give me flags and such), I'd love to host prescheduled events from time to time, a bit like we announced our future rounds in advance. Maybe we could have a read-only "master thread" for events, that gets updated whenever upcoming events are announced, sorta like the server status thread?

Ah, okay. Well, variety for the sake of variety would be nice. Personally, I could see a few options offered, from revolver, heavy pistol, and futuristic handgun.

Glad to see you back!