Frances

By that logic you do recognize Tajarans and Unathis wouldn't be in head roles either, yes?

Milk can be gotten from Betsy and other cows, which is why I'm assuming it wasn't added to the dispensers before (for balance reasons). Most of the other beverages have a very limited usability (and exist in such variety that making them limited/harvestable resources would be a huge pain), which is why I'm guessing the dispensers exist. Giving unlimited milk would be pretty OP since all other significant cooking ingredients can only be obtained through lengthier processes. I've also never seen a milk fountain irl, so there's that (most machines mix carbonated water and syrup at the output).

I actually prefer the ability for admins to use different colors, as it makes it easier to recognize which is speaking. We obviously can't start doing this for everyone, but since the server doesn't have that many admins and we're still a small community by chatroom standards, I see little issue with it.

In my playing time I actually found Empress quite personifiable. A personality does not necessarily need to have typically "human" quirks, but simply something that helps a character stand out. It is in fact Empress' heavy emphasis on mechanical characteristics that make her/it(?) enjoyable.

AIs with personality. AIs that go out of their way to talk to people, and interact with the world. AIs that actually attempt to personify the station, care about the crew, keep solid tabs on everyone's well-being and the current state of events. I see a lot of AIs simply sit in their core and do nothing unless asked to while acting like an emotionless robot with a completely bland personality. While that doesn't make them /bad/, it doesn't make them noticeable or noteworthy characters. Any AI with personality quirks will be far better received than a generic one.

Which new colours? I haven't been on the server for a while but from what I recall the dev and mod colors were simply switched.

From general experience, you won't get any endorsements unless you actively ask for feedback. But if you've had a good round with someone, don't hesitate to link them your application and ask for their support. Most people will be more than happy to help.

Yeah, Gollee names tend to be... high fantasy, for some reason. Go figure. Mia Snyder is an albino with natural black hair. I don't remember who played her, or if she's even around, but they made a point to specify in her flavor text her hair was naturally black despite being albino. Why? Go figure.

I can answer that one, even if I'm no longer around. Alright. Gal had, like, green anime hair. "Rust"-colored eyes with speckles of gold, and at least three different adjectives to describe eye color. She was also covered in weird runic tattoos, was 7'4'', and had a heavy addiction to opioids (to cope with the stress of her dark past). Oh, and she was also 26 and the acting captain. I'm pretty sure she had an eyepatch, too. It was like a fucking human sparkledog. I don't really remember what her personality was like, but it was pretty similar to this. She also ERP'd a lot, back when we didn't immediately interrupt things with clowns (though she's part of what started that). Oh, yes. And the green hair was due to genetic modifications for some reason. Not dye.

Oh, yeah. One thing I noticed which might be a semi-problem is actively "hating" on new/bad players as an attempt to be cool. Like, I don't think jokes about balds, or generally laughing at players who are completely lost in deadchat (meaning bald, probably very scared, and completely ignorant that this is a RP server). However, one thing that's not cool is active displays of hostility towards new players, or assuming they're garbage in an attempt to fit in with the cool kids. The cool kids don't hate on newbies. The cool kids are the people who actively engage with newbies, offer themselves as RP partners, and teach them the game.

I prefer to adopt an attitude of "assume the best until proven otherwise". Basically, if a new guy gets hired in your workplace, you generally expect that management knows what they're doing by hiring them, and the employee you're given will be proficient at their job. As for people OOCly, be kind to newcomers. They're the lifeblood of the server, and can be really fun to talk to.

No. I can't agree. Being in charge, leading and directing can be fun. And since you're doing it in a game for the sake of roleplaying for the sake of your own enjoyment (and others'), I'm gonna flat out say that if you don't enjoy being a head of staff, you shouldn't force yourself to play as one. I don't think anyone has ever gotten confused OOCly over heads having weird quirks. They're bosses. They can be assholes, unhelpful, obtrusive, all sorts of things. As long as they contribute to roleplay and don't ruin a player's round (and somebody bitching because things didn't go 100% the way they expected does not count). I don't think we should bar any species from head roles atm. The fantasy racism just isn't strong enough, and if it's something we want to add to our roleplay, it is the lore team's job to engage the playerbase by creating events, like Sue did with Tajarans. Not simply to make rules like "IPCs can't be heads because humans dun trust em".

This does not detract from the point that lore should be (and has been) constructed to follow gameplay unless it becomes absolutely jarring. And we still had ridiculous Unathi heads running rampant last I checked. From a gameplay perspective, I don't understand why these people can play but machines can't.

Gameplay comes before lore. If lore takes away from the user experience, then I am a firm believer lore needs to be changed. In this case, the fact is allowing aliens you discovered two decades ago, who have a heavy propensity to violence (or uprisings for Tajarans) into important management positions of human industry and corporations is vastly optimistic. I'd compare it to letting a native american run your fur-trading company in early 1700s North America, when most natives are actually still living in their own world, have not really integrated with your culture, and most people think a vast majority of them are up to weird and/or shady shit and there's heavy tensions between them and you proud colonizing European race. This doesn't mean we can't let Tajarans/Unathi be heads. Maybe humanity is overly optimistic and welcoming of alien races, or maybe NanoTrasen is simply incredibly confident in their ability to maintain control over their alien subordinates. Point is, it doesn't matter what the in-universe reason is, what matters is lore willed it that way. Why was this a change? If I remember correctly, Sue let Tajarans become heads with the clear intent of creating interesting conflict and tension over IC debates of Tajarans' roles in society. We had events, revolutions on the Tajaran homeworld, on-station investigations, job suspensions, etc. I understand the desire to make races unique and prevent them from being simple visual reskins. And restricting them from head roles is a way to enforce fantasy racism when we tend to have an overly welcoming community, in which every character save for a rare few is super accepting of all aliens. So this should be the main argument for people who don't want IPC heads, because having Tajaran and Unathi heads is already stretching common sense. However. I hope you understand that Tajaran and Unathi players have already been given the opportunity to play their characters as head roles, under a stretching of the lore similar to the one requested here, because it was deemed by the lore team to be more fun and interesting. So at this point, you are arbitrarily restraining IPC players from benefiting from the same privilege, in an attempt to bring balance to race variety. And this feels unfair to me - the end result is that it basically fucks over players of one race so another can enjoy expanded RP options.

Oh dear. Bleeding eyes? Cool eyeshades? The future is here.

It's a shock erotica/copypasta. There are faster (and more entertaining) ways of getting banned.

I'm gonna try to explain a bit what I understand happened. These acts in themselves aren't a problem. And while some of the most dedicated "purists" of our community agree that they shouldn't happen, I actually find that these situations can be very enjoyable, if not downright hilarious. Silly stuff is good every once in a while, and it is one of the reasons why we're here to roleplay. (I remember we had a gang of 1950s style greasers on the station once. That was great.) The problem is that these acts become stale once they overstay their welcome. Gimmicky characters or situations are cool because you don't have to deal with them constantly. You see them once, have a laugh, maybe stick them in the brig if you're security, and move on. But the moment you have to arrest Rick and Bob for vandalizing the station every round, with absolutely no repercussions from HR, it starts to get more annoying than funny. I believe the main issue staff had in this instance was that this was consistent behavior, that happened round after round. So the problem is not the act. It is its frequency.

I don't get what's the point of this application. These are, welding goggles. How are they different from normal welding goggles? Having the character's name imprinted/written on it really does not change much of anything. Like, you could grab any pair of already existing welding goggles and act like they were your own. That's fairly easy to explain to players, even in an IC fashion.

I have never seen an enjoyable game of malf. And I blame the malf players for this, not the powers they are given. All I ever remember from malf is the AI rushing to hack every single APC wordlessly as the crew tries to fight into its core. Outside of Lady_of_Ravens doing something once, I don't think I've seen any roleplay happen out of the 20-30 malf rounds I witnessed in my few months here. You'd think that given how much power the AI has, how unique of a role it is, and given the fact that we are a heavy-roleplay server, people would get creative with their malf AI games. But nope. People are shitty at playing malf AI, and I think anyone rushing for code delta without creating any roleplay (or minimal roleplay) should receive the same treatment ganking antagonists get. Maybe I'm being too harsh. But I guess that's something to think about. Shrug.

I never realized Hawk was 17. We once had a 17-year old, illiterate warden. lmao Anyway, my advice would be to not do the implant. I understand that's taking a pretty big step in a direction you're not used to with your specific character, but figure out some other sort of leverage people could have over him. That was the purpose of the implant, and a healthy, 100% RP replacement would prevent people from screaming snowflake or accusing you of powergaming (plus you won't be able to get the implant anyway, gameplay-wise).

There's a difference between IC and OOC punishment. IC punishment is part of roleplay - OOC punishment is for players being bad. Because not all criminally-oriented characters are actually terrible, I'd find it hard to see jobbans enforced on any other level than how they're being enforced now. (Which is, afaik, you get jobbanned if you fail horribly at doing your job without bringing any RP, or are super annoying). I never minded criminal/neglectful/chucklefuck characters done well. Felix Solano was a great example of that - most of the stuff he did would've gotten him fired ICly, but because he was so god damn hilarious, none of the players really minded. Now, the easiest way to impose a limit on this is for players playing these sort of characters not to do it often. I peddled drugs and did ridiculous things while playing, but I didn't do it all the time - which ensured security/players didn't get fed up by having to arrest my character constantly every round. The question is, is this enforcable? And I'm going to answer yes. In my time as an admin, I saw very few good criminal/chucklefuck characters, but whenever I did, I let them do their own thing. If you're bringing a valuable, non-frustrating contribution to the station's RP, you won't get in trouble. People who acted like complete idiots every round, however, and annoyed the crew to no end, would find themselves talked to pretty quick, and jobbanned if they didn't adjust their play. If you see a person act like that, my recommendation would be to adminhelp or send a player complaint, and they'll be dealt with. That's not going to change no matter what we do, because regardless of rules, these people will have to be handled manually some way or another. The only difference is I fear we might end up restricting players who are actually reasonable with roleplaying non-antag crime.

Sue has it right. Loyalty implanting a criminal does require a modicum of paperwork and procedure, and is generally seen as unethical and an extreme recourse, which prevents it from happening to every single person that gets arrested. This also makes interrogation (whether through legal or "enhanced" procedures) a viable first recourse, thus leading to valuable prisoner-RP (well, if you're into that). If the person still opposes you after that, there's not much else that will happen through a short 2-3 hour round. I think a more interesting question is when loyalty implants can actually be used well on prisoners. Because while I understand the OOC mindset of wanting to keep people into the game as much as possible, there's nothing ICly that warrants using them to "release" people unless you absolutely need them for something. For example, a syndicate bomber you want to force to turn in his or her collaborators, or a rogue engineer who set the singularity to blow you need to get to fix it. And these are fairly niche situations that happen rarely, most people who commit permabrig crimes just end up in the permabrig for the round.

In my opinion, this is a topic that deserves to be discussed nevertheless. There is a difference between an applicant stating a weakness in their application and other players actually reporting their thoughts on specific instances of that weakness regarding the applicant. Two people could both say "I sometime lose my temper", but if one receive many reports of temper problems and the other one doesn't, it does bring extra information that wouldn't be had otherwise. Without actually stating whether the temper issue brought here is a directly bad point or not for this application, I would think opening dialogue about it would definitely help the applicant. Players applying to be mods will have their behavior closely scrutinized, and should have the ability (and mindset) to discuss it openly and in public as long as other involved parties are being reasonable. There are also different types (and degrees) of ranting, and I believe there's a difference between the typical kind of public venting I have encountered from staff, and the kind that was reported here. Just my two cents.

Well. We're still going to keep talking, won't we? <3

It's been a fun year. However, it's time for me to leave. Life's caught up with me, and I honestly can't dedicate all the effort and energy I owe you guys anymore. Being part of the Aurora community for nearly a year has been an amazing experience, and I'm glad I was able to share many moments with you all, from sleepless nights of binging through round after round to absolutely ridiculous events. We've gone through a lot of people in that year. Some have stayed, some have left. Some have even come back. And for those who have not, we always find equally awesome people ready to take their place at every turn. The server has changed, too. For the best? I don't know, but that's what I hope. It's the reason why I stepped out of my hole of fucking around on ridiculous characters and generally not taking anything seriously (as well as being hyper-sarcastic) to try to lend you guys my help. And as a community, I can say that we really are getting shit done. We've grown to astounding levels since last spring, and managed to maintain a level of quality both in RP and in staff which honestly impresses me. I'm just one gal. And while it was my pleasure to assist however I could with whatever jobs needed to get done, I have no doubts that the server will be able to go on fine without me, and that new prospective members will rise up to take mod and admin positions (as they always have). Besides, we've still got Skull's unfaltering resolve to hang onto, and I'm convinced the guy's still going to be around running the show far after all of us have left. As for me, all that I wish is for the server not to forget its roots. We're here to enjoy ourselves. We're here to roleplay, and share our experiences in a game about spessmen in space. Not to enforce a charter of mindless rules. Not to uphold an order of staff dictated by seniority and prestige rather than a person's ability to speak their mind. Not to argue about needlessly petty details, when there's a bigger picture that needs to be taken care of. We're just a bunch of dudes on the internet, trying to play a silly game. So if you ever feel the stress getting to you, take a deep breath, relax, and remember that no one's out to get you. We're supposed to be here to have fun. This is about making friends, and building something together. Keep it real, Aurora. -Frances