Frances

The platform is "group of antagonists cooperating together to accomplish something bad". At this moment, nuke is the only gamemode which achieves that, besides cult, which I would argue is even more rigid, because you have the imposed horror/occult theme forced onto it. I would like to hear some suggestions as to how you'd like to rework that into something that accomplishes the above purpose better.

I fail to see how that's the case, seeing as it's a pain to even find backstory about anything related to NanoTrasen or human settlements, and while I know that there's a big document that's been written somewhere, none of that has been properly communicated to the players. Plus, sunk cost fallacy. In my opinion, this is actually at the core of a major, major problem. We can keep writing the flawed lore, but it won't get any better. Since the players don't know anything yet, this is actually the ideal time to fix the lore's major flaws, because very few people's backstories are closely tied to it. But yeah, if it's an issue, it should be fixed. And it's not a matter of "have we spent too much time on other stuff already to feel like fixing it?", it's "can we fix it?" And I believe that answer is yes. Our core is that NanoTrasen operates in the Tau Ceti system, away from Sol, and that they're out there exploiting plasma and generally being a megacorporation. There's also settlements around Tau Ceti, some of which are pretty big (like, Earth big). Sol, Tau Ceti, and other systems are connected via warp gates. We move between planets quickly with the help of bluespace. There's also the Skrell, Unathi, and Tajaran, all of which we've made contact with in the past few decades. Nothing in that indicates that Earth must be destroyed for this backstory to emerge. Humans could've turned towards space colonization out of the typical human desire to expand (to exploit resources, or whatever else). Much like we populated America from Europe, and turned it into something that's very Europe-like. It's even more believable due to all the resource shortages we're facing - Earth doesn't need to be destroyed to encourage massive waves of colonization.

Gonna shoot another big idea here, since I've started looking at our lore more carefully. I don't understand why Earth was destroyed. Really, I don't get it. Apart from it not being mentioned in Bay lore, and maybe for the sake of being edgy or unique. But even after sitting down and thinking about it for a while, I fail to see what exact positives this brings us. And on the flipside, it actually causes a few issues. Issue 1: It's counter-intuitive, and overcomplicates the lore The first thing a lot of people who don't read our lore do is create a character from a specific cultural background, say, "Igor the Russian bartender", or "Suresh the Indian xenobiologist". When asked to provide info about their background, they say something along the lines of "oh, I'm from Russian/India/whatever, 400 years in the future". At which point they're told that Earth has been destroyed, and they have to search our lore for their culture-specific faction, which they must learn eeeeeverything about, and which sometimes doesn't even exist. And the truth is, when there's a ton of different ethnicities that are all represented, that's a ton of (completely new, unique) backgrounds to learn about. Which makes playing anyone who isn't your generic space human from Biesel completely unknown territory, both for you and for anyone else involved. That's not fun. The thing with Earth is that it's relateable: it's fun to play as someone from a country 400 years in the future, think about all the hurdles and challenges a culture might've faced over time, how it might've progressed. But to have to relearn everything about a culture from scratch, including new planets, settlements, cities, governments, etc - that's just too much. Especially when you have to do it for /everyone/. And space clones of nations are not nearly as engaging as the nations on Earth themselves, especially when we have to write about so many of them, and thus end up with so little time to give any of them true flavor or personality. Which brings us to our second issue: Issue 2: We're going to end up with too many factions/space clones of existing countries This is already a problem. We have 35 planets, 13 new nations, and 13 corporations. We don't need that many! No one will ever have the patience to learn about all of these! And this is in big part an issue caused by the destruction of Earth - all of the previous ethnicities need to exist somewhere, and instead of simply moving them to Biesel or another big planet, and making Earth 2.0 (which would be pretty boring, arguably - we might as well keep Earth at this point), we decided to give all of them their own little faction and planets. Ideally, when creating a story, you want to put the focus on fewer, more detailed points. All we need is two or three big factions maximum. These are the big factions everybody needs to know about, and that can create our out-of-Sol storyline. Everyone else could stay back on Earth, with the recent history of Earth nations/cultures being an addition to what we know in the 21st century, rather than a completely new backstory we have to learn about every single one of them. And I'm not saying to off all of the tiny planets, and companies. It's cool that there's a research lab that mass-produces clones on planet Zykklon-B or whatever, and that there's a little company in Tau Ceti that manufactures general goods. But we shouldn't /need/ to know about that; there should be a clear distinction between what constitutes our main story, and what constitutes, basically, fluff. Basically, it's like all the aliens in the cantina in Star Wars. They look cool, they probably all have their detailed backstory someone took the time to write after the films, but you don't need to know what each and every single one does to understand the plot of the movie. And our system should be set the same way.

People play nuke in a specific way because that's the way they expect it to be played. Here's a secret: SS13 is a very open game. You can do whatever the fuck you want. I'll still remember one of the best nuke rounds we've ever had. There was a nuke op who was kinda new, and started throwing around silly ideas, such as having the team disguise themselves as Jehovah's Witnesses. After a bit of talking, I managed to convince Nightmare to spawn a few bibles and chaplain's outfits in the syndicate ship. And then, the greatest thing happened - the ops actually attempted to disguise as traveling missionaries. It failed horribly, everything granted - most of them ended up getting lost in space due to being unable to control their jetpacks, iirc. But some of them actually made it - and successfully infiltrated the station (after a fake CentCom report informing the station of traveling missionaries was sent by admins to help them along a little). And the lesson to learn here is that if you come up with an idea, no matter how wacky it is, no matter how insane it sounds, it can probably be realized. Now, the issue is, how do we actually make that happen? Because people are used to a typical playstyle - bomb telecoms, raid armory, destroy supply shuttle computer. But what people don't seem to realize is that they can do anything, literally /anything/ with staff involvement. You wanna disguise as clowns? Sure, send an ahelp, we'll be glad to spawn you clown masks. But people don't know that, and they don't seem to be aware that they can come up with their own objectives (despite nuke being objective-less). Cause they expect the same old "take hostages, shoot sec, get the disc, blow up the station, run away". It doesn't have to be like that - you're Syndicate operators, perhaps you're going after certain crewmembers, collecting bounties, stealing science equipment, heck, even kidnapping scientists to force them to work for the Syndicate instead of NanoTrasen! Anything evil goes. And the possibilities only really end with your imagination. I'm quite saddened to not see more people innovate when playing nuke - and I don't know how to fix it. (I see regulars, even staffmembers lead the nuke team all the time, and they still stick to the same boring approach, without a fault.) But I think as long as there's hope, nuke isn't a gamemode that should be removed. There is potential for RP in it, and all RP doesn't have to be everyday regular work activities - outside of events, nuke is the only roundtype that pretty much guarantees heavy action and crisis situations involving all of the crew at once. It has a great framework: a bunch of heavily equipped dudes come to wreak havoc on the station. It's just not executed properly, and needs more variety from the players involved.

Ckey/BYOND Username: FFrances Position Being Applied For (coder, mapper, spriter): Lore Dev Past Experiences/Knowledge: Game design, story design. Nothing I can show here, sadly. It's all over the place. Also two years of experience with digital art. Examples of Past Work: The lobby screen. You look at it every time you log on. My flowery writing can also be seen all over unban request threads where I smack balds in the face. Preferred Mode of Communication (Skype, Steam, etc.): Skype (all the major devs have it) Additional Comments: Hi. You've probably seen the long, ranty post I wrote yesterday about the way our lore is currently handled. The fact is, one of the things that annoy me the most currently is the way our lore is communicated to our users - I think our wiki is inefficient, and there's a sore lack of lore guides for people trying to get into our universe. I have a lot of ideas of how to improve that, and I figured rather than communicating them to someone else and hoping they actually execute them, I'd give a shot at offering to create/implement them myself. I am not here to radically change the way our lore works. I don't want to retcon civilizations, or canonize the clown planet, or anything like that. But I do do want to change completely how lore is /handled/, on the front end. What gets to the users, basically. Not content, but content delivery. I generally have a pretty good idea of how to do that, and I'd like to get in touch with the people who are in charge of the wiki, to see if we can work something out. If you're interested in the help, that is. Also, something I've wanted to do for a while is draw concepts for you guys. So if you feel like you need any, count that as an offer as well.

Filing this one for now, since no one has replied in quite a bit. The rule has been amended, which is what I believe was the only fault here.

Not exactly true. While we don't have tertiaries anymore, primaries represent our most trusted admins, while people who haven't been admins for as long or aren't as entrusted with important community decisions are secondaries. I also know there's still a few different access differences between primaries and secondaries, but I'm looking to get them removed (as soon as I talk to skull), because they're mostly things like verbs to restart the server, delay rounds, etc. And there's no particular reason why secondaries shouldn't have them.

This is another example of how poorly lore is doing on the communication front. For most of my time, Lowell was the one city everybody knew about - and it was on Biesel. At some point, I noticed the change on the wiki, and asked a lore member. I was told it was a typo, and that they had no idea why it was written that way. You guys renamed the most important city in the lore, because a lesser known city had the same name. And you informed so few people that even the lore team itself wasn't fully aware of it. You really should avoid changing major things unless you have a really good reason - constant retcons get really confusing (well, it might not happen at this point, given that everything in the lore is being moved around - but the Mars city should've probably been renamed). And when you make big changes like that, Announce them. Create a lore changelog, at least.

No more stupid appeals. Everybody either admits instantly their faults when talked to and becomes a productive community member, or realizes this isn't the place for them and moves on. All griefers are funny.

Want a tip? We're a pretty big place nowadays. If you shine through good behavior, you'll be remembered by many; if you misbehave and make a fool of yourself, you'll be quickly forgotten by the few. I used to do horribly trolly shit too. I don't think anybody even /remembers/ any of it. So if you want a new beginning, you have it. As far as I know, you've never gotten in trouble with staff, and haven't made anyone rage in OOC. That's pretty much good in my book - if you want to focus more on serious roleplay and building strong relationships here, you're good to go. You'll find we're pretty welcoming.

Right, I'm going to put an end to this now before you start insulting anyone else. You've been given ample explanation as to why you were banned. Your ban won't be lifted until you recognize how your behavior was problematic - I would suggest waiting several months before submitting another appeal. Any further threads on the subject, along with the abrasive behavior you've showed once again here, will result in a forum ban.

Thread locked due to inactivity. As Valkrae said, please repost with the proper format.

The specific words you constructed your ahelp out of were the issue here. This is going nowhere. You still seem to completely fail at understanding what the problem is. So, here. You acted like an asshole today. You acted like an asshole several times before. We don't like people who act like assholes. We asked you to stop acting like an asshole repeatedly, and you kept acting like an asshole. You were warned that there would be further consequences if you continued. Thusly, we removed you from the community, because you don't seem to be intent on stopping to act like an asshole, and there's not much else we can do besides ask you politely or remove you.

1. What you did was actually pretty serious. The fact that we had to tell you repeatedly not to be rude in ahelps makes it a problem. And what matters isn't what you personally consider rude or not; it's the perception everybody else has of your behavior. 2. There is actually a very simple reason why I kept messaging you, which is that you engaged in behavior that was unacceptable. When somebody breaks the rules, we don't simply leave them alone because they "don't want to deal with us" - we either discuss the issue until the person recognizes their wrongdoings and provides us assurance they won't cause further incidents, or apply a punishment, should they prove themselves unable to give us such an assurance. You were in no grounds to simply "quit" the conversation. That's like saying you committed a crime but didn't feel like getting arrested.

That's not how that works. By that logic, every incident should exist as its own entirely contained bubble - but nobody is interested in living in a world where you say something rude in ahelp or OOC every few days, and we give you a slap on the wrist every few days. At some point, you should understand that this kind of behavior isn't to be continued. And since these were all incidents from the past month (hardly any time at all), they can and will be taken into account when evaluating your overall attitude and ability to adapt and chance your behavior. As I said, this isn't an etiquette class. If you fail to recognize how your behavior is rude and unwanted, then this is not the community for you.

I believe there's two factors at play here. The first is that you're really, really rude. And by that, I mean that I had to give you a ban to calm down before, because after we muted you from ahelps over a similar issue, you started cursing us out in allcaps through prayers. We're voluteers. We're trying to offer a service to players, by keeping the server clean. However, one thing we don't need, is pissy people cursing at us (and other players) through ahelps. Courtesy is expected when sending a PM to the admins, and if you're speaking in an aggressive tone, you'll be told to calm down. If you prove yourself unable to calm down, you'll be muted, or banned. My refusal to address your issue is simple: we'll help you if you're polite with us. As I explained in my very first PM to you today, insulting other players and calling them "shitcurity" in ahelps is not a good way to get us to assist you. I was focused on tackling that issue first - had you apologized, and showing any sign of acknowledging that your behavior had been inappropriate, we would've moved on to the problem you were having in the game. However, since you were instead intent on continuing the display of poor behavior you have been repeatedly putting on throughout the past weeks, that sadly did not happen. As a proof of that, I've taken the time to highlight a few quotes from yours that constitute "rude, aggressive or dismissive behavior", just in this appeal and in the conversation we had earlier. That's a lot of stuff. That's also not the first time something like this has happened. And I won't explain to you case by case why every single of these quotes above is in that box; we're not here to offer a course on etiquette. The second thing is that you seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking I have a grudge against you. I don't hate you personally; however, I do have to enforce the rules, and one of them happens to be that people shouldn't act like dicks in ahelps (or OOC). If I end up having to talk to you about that a lot, it's because you're doing it a lot. But it is by no means a personal issue - you would very likely have gotten the exact same response from any other member of staff, and in fact, I decided to hand out a permaban because another mod reminded me that you had been talked to about your behavior several times before. You do have a right to request for another staffmember to talk to you, if you have reason to believe the person you're talking to is holding a grudge against you. However, don't delude yourself into thinking that simply because someone is telling you you've broken a rule, they must hate you. You've been warned and talked to by several different members of staff during the course of your stay here, and they've all agreed your behavior was problematic. As for my final opinion on this, you have been given chance after chance after chance ...to fix your behavior. And have ignored every single one of them. At this point, you don't have much ground to appeal this ban, imo.

I actually have to disagree that accuracy has to be the basis of the lore. There are a few "100% scientifically accurate" sci-fi stories out there. We have talking cats. We are not one of them. Lore is there to provide a background for people to roleplay on. Not to tell them how to roleplay. As such, lore should be interesting, and fun. The accuracy comes as a bonus, and as long as lore seems coherent to the layman, it should never compromise majorly for the sake of accuracy alone.

Disclaimer: This post is mostly satire. I'm gonna curse a lot, I'm going to make fun of a lot of things. This is mostly an attempt to keep things entertaining, while venting out my frustration; this post is gonna be fucking long, so all the satire is mostly an attempt at keeping the reader interested. So, don't take anything personally. I'm not singling anyone out. I'm still glad you guys are doing a job with the lore, trying to get things together. I'm not part of the lore team. I talk to a few members of the lore team, and thus have a vague idea of how it operates. However, I am a player. And as a player, I will make one confession: I have no idea what the fuck's going on anymore. I noticed few players actually discuss the lore in-game. We don't have many lore events. Outside-of-station backstories amount to almost zero. The reason for that? Lore is underdeveloped, uninteresting, and inaccessible. And the changes to it don't seem to be coming. Here's what I know, as an average player. Anything else, besides that information, I have no idea whatsoever about. And I don't think anyone else does either, because if they did, I'd probably have heard of it while playing at some point. Because if somebody walks up to me and tells me "Oh, I'm from planet Space Banana X-447", you can be sure I'm gonna be researching planet Space Banana X-447 on the wiki, so that I don't look like a complete idiot that doesn't know about an entire planet worth of people while holding a conversation. That'd be like, being some redneck that doesn't know Europe exists. Whatever. And the wiki. I actually made the effort of looking at it a bit earlier, in the hopes that I had perhaps missed some critical bits of information everybody else knew about but simply decided to keep from me through some secrecy pact. But not only is our background summary a bunch of esoteric and uninformative poetry, but every single page is crammed with unnecessary and uninteresting details, while providing little content that is actually relevant to anything a player will ever care about. Who gives a shit about the angle of rotational orbit of the Epsilon Eridani system? Certainly not me. It doesn't help me roleplay. And, don't take me wrong, I appreciate that someone actually took the time to write down all of that info. But it shouldn't have to be something I need to read through to get to the important bits, and even less the majority of the entire lore we have on a whole system. (By the way, I also learned that the Epsilon Eridani system existed. That would've been something nice to know a bit ago. Like, six months back or so. Unless it's a new solar system? In which case, maybe you should've told us that you added an entire new freakin' solar system to the lore? Who knows.) But yeah. Put that stuff elsewhere. Maybe in an appendix, at the end of planet's descriptions, or even on another page. But when I'm trying to get the basic info on what a planet is about and what it does, I don't want to sift through paragraphs of periapsis, apoapsis, and astronomical notations. The wiki is clunky, I don't know where to go on it. It should probably be written in a way that makes it easy to navigate for people that don't know about the lore, not people that do. Because the point here is to educate the server's population, not keep records nobody's gonna be able to look at because they can't figure out where anything is. I've also heard a few issues with the way lore is created - there seems to be a focus on what's accurate, rather than what's fun. And you should never let scientific accuracy dictate the plot when writing a story - there's something called suspension of disbelief, and it takes place the moment we have freakin' cat people and the god damn Killer Croc walking around as station employees. Basically, don't cut out every idea until you end up with something that's 100% accurate and predictable; you're most likely gonna end up with boring stuff if you do that. Instead, try to come up with cool shit; and if you see an idea that seems too retarded to exist (like computing power as a currency, or something), then you cut it out. I'm not gonna speak on issues any more than that. I'm rambling enough as it is. Rather, I'm going to provide a list of what I'd actually like the lore to be, rather than what it is. -Comprehensive Lore should be comprehensive. And that doesn't mean including the details of every plant and planet diameter there is. Basic info, like what type of planet it is, who lives there. What kind of people. What kind of industry. Are they at war? What's their history? The rest of the stuff isn't as important; you can create an encyclopedia later, if you want, but that shouldn't be your priority. It's something you do after the main story is done. And you don't force everyone to read through the encyclopedia to learn the important things about your game world, because most people won't have the patience to. Heck, I'd like to be able to refer to the wiki on-the-fly, while playing. But I can't, because it's too cluttered. -Accessible Accessibility. Again, the encyclopedia is presented before any useful information. The first thing you could do is create a layman's guide; something, a page or two at most, that gives you a general overview of everything that's going on in our universe (and not just generalities like "there are skrells and tajarans, also the syndicate", actual background stuff: what factions, planets, events, etc would everybody know about). Then, rework the wiki so it's less of a mess. Make sure articles are properly written, categorized, follow the same format. Add more pictures, because you have pages that are literally twenty paragraphs of text with no images, and that's just awful. If you make a list of planets, add a picture for each planet of the list, so we can find them quickly and have a way to differentiate them at a glance. Something like that. And please, separate encyclopedic content from what should be the main info. -Engaging Lastly, lore shouldn't be boring. A lot of the lore discussion I've seen puts too much focus on all of our lore being about the only possible and accurate outcome of civilization in roughly 450 years. And if you follow a single, linear path, and let it dictate all of your design decisions, you're gonna end up with a lore that's really fucking boring. We have anthropomorphic aliens that somehow look exactly like earth creatures, breathe the same atmosphere as us, and are at a roughly equal level of technological and social advancement as us. Newsflash: that's probably not scientifically accurate. And I'm not saying to take that out; that's good stuff. But you're setting the bar too high on the new things you're making: the question shouldn't be "will this offend some scientist in the middle of an underground lab somewhere in California?", it should be "is this f***ing retarded?" For me, SS13 has always been one of these space-opera type narratives. You know, stuff like Star Wars, or Mass Effect. A balance of humor, drama, romance, action, horror, basically all kinds of stuff that's trying to draw in as many people as possible. And I get that lore team members might be more of the intellectual type. People that ambition to write complex space epics that chronicle the advancements and folly of man. But I feel like you're forgetting about your target audience here. We don't have the framework for that kind of stuff. SS13 is the story of the average Joe, going about his space adventures. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad. Sometimes a lot of things. But these facets aren't being represented here. Our universe is complex, but not rich. It's detailed, but not engaging. Anyway. I don't know. I feel like if I had to bundle all of that under a single problem, I'd say that our current lore lacks heart. It lacks life, the creative spark of a bunch of people coming together with the desire to reach out and entertain an audience. Right now, it's just a jumbled mess of text and tables and figures, filling up pages and pages of paper. And I'm seeing that it could be so much more.

Appeal denied due to lack of user activity (not answering the question asked, not logging since the appeal was made). I have no qualms with unbanning you - should you ever show up again, just submit a new appeal.

Again, you're attempting to misrepresent the situation. You were not banned for "using a stun baton", but for using one on a civilian without warning, when the situation didn't call for it (as well as throwing it at them, which I believe is ridiculous). You were also not banned for carrying a weapon on code blue, but for failing to stow it safely when arresting a civilian. And I understand not verbally announcing your intent to arrest to somebody who you've just seen commit murder (though you technically would announce it once you subdued them, which is procedure), but not saying a single thing to somebody who made no attempt to resist, and was completely unaware of their charges, is a big no-no. This is just pointless back and forth - I'm presenting the facts to you, and you keep denying them. Since Skull is no longer active in this thread, I'll submit the verdict myself: this jobban was put in place due to several breaches of conduct during a single incident. You have failed to even recognize your fault in most of these incidents, up to and into your appeal. Your general conduct has brought you close to a permanent ban, and you are currently in no position to get any previous bans lifted. Thus, the jobban stays.

Alright. The ban's still being held for its remaining duration due to being a repeat offense, but I feel a lot better about this (and your chances in the future) after having read your post. Cursing isn't a problem. People curse all the time, for various reasons (sometimes to be hilarious), but as long as the curses aren't overly memetic or exaggeratedly crass, they're plainly acceptable. It's the context of the conversation that really matters - and as a general rule sex isn't a topic that will fly well in OOC, considering some people will always be immature about it.

I'd rather you actually answer my questions. Namely, You were banned because you were unable to heed previous warnings given to you. Now, the purpose of punishment is more than "you break this rule, you pay the price". It's both a dissuasive measure ("don't do this") and a reformative measure ("we don't want you to do this"). The last thing we want is for people to go "oh, I've been banned, whatever". Rather, I'd prefer you actually examine your behavior in detail, and understand not only why you were banned, but what you can do to avoid getting banned again. Because I can give you a guarantee, that I've given everyone: I won't play games of escalation. There's an issue, the issue has been brought to you. If you're unable to address it, we won't give you ban after ban that you can ignore; either you show us that you're able to modify your behavior, or we remove you from the community due to your inability to integrate. And I'm confident you don't want the latter happening. It's thus your job to fix your mess, and prove to us that you're actually fixing it - if you have no interest in doing that, you won't be headed anywhere. And this is why I want a longer reply than "I'll deal with the ban".

More items supporting current-day religious and cultural values in a serious context? Yes, please! Also, simple solution for the Kirpan: make it sealed within its sheath and impossible to draw - that's the status of Kirpans in lots of countries that allow them, whereas other knives might be banned.

Not really - I'm waiting for the bulk of the new code and for some new spriters to help with the new map, so that's not keeping me busy at the moment. However, it's quite difficult to create a smaller station than the already very space-efficient boxstation, because everything that's there serves a specific purpose. There's very little to strip away, and dead hour will still leave you with 1-2 people in each department.