Frances

Solution to the spam: implement a second timer that only sends a message if another hasn't been sent in a while, -or- requires you to go down reasonably before sending another message (to say, 95 or 90) instead of sending one with every tick going over 100? For people being brought into paincrit, it's more of a game design issue than a coding one to be discussed firsthand?

Headmin here. I feel like the situation here is not a very serious one. The name you were asked to change was "Nintendo Powers". Given that having a character named "Nintendo" =/= Heavy RP, and that by all accounts you should have read our rules on naming conventions, I'm afraid you're pretty much responsible for working yourself into that situation. Bark is not an acceptable name either (I don't particularly care if "Meow" or "Chair" are obscure surnames in other languages or culture, they also wouldn't be allowed on here for the same reason "Bark" isn't.) Given how far-fetched this whole story sounds (come on, let's be honest here), I find that you could have done much more to explain your case than simply typing "Bark" twice in a row when asked a question, committing the very same fault you are blaming the responding moderator here to have done. While I do agree on one point, which is that the moderator who dealt with your case was pretty quick to ban (your very poor job of communicating your intent did not help you, though), while I would generally be inclined to lift this, I'm actually going to opt against it for the language you've used here. There are ways to submit appeals. They involve being polite; even if you're upset (even for legitimate reasons), you're expected to control your anger and not throw insults around needlessly. Calling the staff who banned you irresponsible, dumb, and stupid, along with copious amounts of cursing, does not convey at all that you are ready to discuss this issue maturely and in a reasonable manner. Thus, the ban stays in place. Additionally, this behavior will be going in your record too, and I'd recommend you make an effort to be much nicer when dealing with staff in the future, should you wish to avoid a repeat of this incident. EDIT: Due to replying to this with further insults sent via forum PMs, the user's ban has been extended to a permanent one, along with an adjoined forum ban.

Apologies for not looking at this yesterday because tired. First, let's contemplate a few facts, for everyone's sake. During the specific round in which you were banned, you took the syringe gun, as a chemist. Somebody noticed this, and informed the CMO, who went to contact you. At this point, you ran out of the department without a word - the CMO attempted to give chase, in order to recover the equipment. Given that nobody knew what was going on, or what your intentions were for running away (a verbal confrontation might have been best there), people basically attempted to catch you, before you could do something horrible like space yourself. The AI bolts the airlocks of escape, to prevent you from spacing yourself, and you, being caught, go AFK. At this point, we've had very little interaction on your behalf, besides taking the syringe gun for an unknown reason (which you have been unable to explain after an extended conversation through PMs), and making a mad dash for escape when confronted about it. Due to the overall confusion, charges get bumped from disobeying orders to assaulting a head - which at that point was your job to inform sec, and sec's job to check with the CMO what had happened properly. You being AFK during your arrest and ensuing proceedings did not help with that, but either way, at that point, IC issue. Second incident. You get released, after being demoted, and left with your chemist's jumpsuit. Rather than go to the locker rooms and change like a normal being would, you decide to drop your clothes then and there, and start wandering the station in your underwear. At some point (on your way to the locker room? God only knows), you come across the captain, who questions your nakedness (or underwearness). Rather than provide a suitable answer, you opt to run around the captain aimlessly in your underwear, forcing her to taze you after being asked to stand down and ignoring her orders (and yes, tazing someone running around in underwear like a headless chicken without responding in your workplace is something that's perfectly acceptable). Another miscommunication happens, and rather than being brigged for "threatening the captain/suspicious behavior", you end up in the brig for assault (of which there was none). While these two incidents were unfortunate, they represent a failure to communicate from all parties involved. However, I can clearly state that you were not free of blame here, given the extent of the events which led to both of your sentences, as well as the total lack of communication coming from your part on them (going as far as to afk while being given one). At that point, you had the power to attempt to fix things through proper communication, which did not justify admin intervention yet, yet you made no attempt whatsoever to communicate, besides yelling semi incoherently that you wanted a lawyer (of which we have none on the server), and beating yourself savagely with a lightbulb and your own fists while trying to claim your self-inflicted wounds were the fault of officers (which likely did not help your case.) Now that that's cleared up, onto the reason why you were banned. You have frankly been one of the most unpleasant and disrespectful individuals I've had to deal with in the four months I've modded/adminned here. Out of the hundreds of people I've had to deal with over this course of time, your name is one of the few that sticks out the most, and one I will likely yet remember for some time to come. Needless to say, this is not good. Not only were you incredibly argumentative during the whole time we contacted you, and refused to listen to us at all when we told you to drop issues that were not to be discussed anymore, as we had the final authority on them (after trying at lengths to explain to us why such and such things were decided that way, and you failing entirely at taking in our message), but you showed an amazing amount of disrespect towards the entire staff involved during the entire ordeal. You kept yelling constantly over PMs, refusing to drop your aggressive tone after being warned repeatedly (on at least four counts), went over to spam OOC with passive-aggressive messages regarding the round, decided to go afk in the middle of your original discussion with a moderator without even giving the basic courtesy of stating why beforehand, and essentially did everything possible to make sure we would never want to deal with you again. The staff working on this server are normal people, with lives, thoughts and emotions. They are here because they enjoy the game and the community we have. The help they provide comes on an entirely voluntary basis, and they do not get any form of compensation for it, other than the satisfaction of a job well done and the knowledge that they have gone and helped others. However, I think that one thing we can provide them in return, as a community making use of their services, is a respectful environment for them to work in. Given what they already do, and that they do their best to be polite and courteous to you, there is absolutely no reason why they have to sit and take your abuse. The way you have behaved yourself is, in my eyes, unacceptable. Not only have you not been able to follow simple directives given to you by staff for very reasonable reasons, but you have taken things to such a point that we were forced to give you a temporary ban from the game for your disrespectful attitude, and yet you come on the forums to post an appeal that is equally filled with hate, uncontrolled anger and vitriol, which demonstrates that you have effectively understood nothing of the reason why you are banned. Given that you have amassed an extraordinary amount of notes in your first day here (five, if I remember correctly), that the extent of your roleplay abilities consists of dropping DNA injectors on the escape shuttle as a geneticist while yelling "FREE POWERS!", and that you have graced our adminhelps with such gems as and I have decided after review to increase your temporary ban to a permanent one, which should confirm that you will indeed not be coming back to play on our server.

Appeal denied due to inactivity. It's been over two weeks with no reply. The offer still stands, but you'll have to make a new thread and open a communication line with us again, should you wish to be unbanned.

Request denied due to inactivity. Please submit a new appeal, should you wish.

As a note, these comments need to be based on feedback. If you make the effort of reading someone's application and vote on it, we expect you to give a clear reason why you are voting, whether it be in the positive or negative, even if it's simply to restate or agree with someone else's opinion. It's common courtesy for the person applying as it shows you've taken the time to actually read their application, and it also lets us be sure you're actually giving them a vote for a valid reason, and not just because they're your friend.

Yes. Copyright offenses are only pursued criminally if a monetary gain is made. As Scopes brings up, though, I'm not too sure about having the songs be in our open-source code. What about the midis that admins are already playing? Where are those stored?

I feel like the odds of someone sending us a cease & desist or DMCA notice are pretty low - especially since these are usually done by the publishers that hold rights to the music themselves. These people browse major file, video and sound-sharing websites, but would they really investigate one tiny server of the most obscure game there is, because they play songs sometimes on Friday nights?

One of the main conditions for reinstating your whitelist was that you were supposed to cease taking an overly antagonistic behavior with others when approaching conflicts, and would make an effort to argue in rational and polite ways. Given that you've failed to do that on your very application, after consulting with Less over this as well as recent events, I'm going to deny it. Please direct questions via PM, should you have any.

Feedback isn't instantaneous. Don't expect to post a thread and get a ton of replies overnight. If I were you, I would inform the people who you know on the server and enjoy roleplaying with, and ask them to vouch for you. You're also allowed to advertise your application in OOC (to a reasonable level), as it helps people garner a lot more views.

Fun Fact: Adrian Escurdado actually got his chemistry Ph.D in a promotional cereal box, and got a job aboard the Aurora due to CentCom's terrible record-keeping. He effectively knows nothing about science or chemistry, a testament to how little NanoTrasen cares about who they hire to send on a shift.

I got confused, and mistook your case for another that resulted in a jobban from sec, because I evidenly cannot read v.v I'm for unbanning nevertheless, since you actually went through the effort of making an appeal and were forthcoming in admitting your fault.

This seems like a reasonable enough request. I'm willing to grant you an unban, with Pumpking's approval, given you link me to the rule you broke here.

Going to be missing you and your RP. Hope to see you soon.

So why not make it a rule, if we're going to PM people about it anyway? The "no pop culture/reference" names falls under poor roleplay too, but has its own rule, since it's such a frequent occurence. I think bad AI/Borg names should get the same treatment. Also, players disregarding the name doesn't mean you don't see it every time the AI speaks.

I've never paid much attention to the lore until now, but this is quickly starting to become my favorite post on the forums. I think this raises some very interesting issues. Additionally, something that's always irked me about the "Earth being destroyed" scenario is that I find it highly unbelievable that we'd respond to having destroyed important parts of civilization and turning Earth into a wasteland with nearly immediate, thriving colonization programs establishing futuristic and highly developed settlements in a completely new system. It's like you're basically playing Fallout, but suddenly space programs suddenly rebuilt all of civilization very far away in space. If we look at a few colonization scenarios (both what happened irl with the colonization of the Americas, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri as a very good parallel example), colonization has always been an advanced, coordinated push brought on by overpopulation, a yearning for new resources, and will not thrive as a desperate attempt for survival. (I'm basically saying, if we have the resources and technology to actually establish colonies in other solar systems, there's no reason why people would completely abandon all of Earth. It's easier to survive in whatever areas remained untouched by devastation than it is to send a bunch of shuttles into space, especially if the world pop has decreased dramatically.)

Two detectives would end up stepping on each other's toes more often than not, I feel. A detective and forensics tech gives enough opportunity for teamwork and proper division of cases (when cases do happen), having three investigative characters is just overkill.

I've personally known Lessick for some time, and I don't know if this may reassure you, but I sincerely think she's one of the most impartial and self-conscious admins we have. Yes, some things might get on her nerves anyway, because she's just human (like all of us), but she actually took the time to examine and analyze the situation, and went to me as well as several people for counsel, to make sure she didn't react out of some grudge in the situation. So I'm fully willing to vouch for her, and am ready to give you full assurance that you're not being targeted for a reason or another, if it makes you feel better. We've always tried our best to treat everyone fairly and equally. The rest of this issue isn't really my job to discuss, as I wasn't present, but I wanted to come back to say this.

I'd like to post a rebuttal - I'm very aware that the issues that arose with Tophat had to do not only with his characters, but with the way he handled criticism. Not only did he refuse to listen to staff entirely for a time, being very argumentative throughout the whole ordeal, but he kept trying to placate them over unrelated issues, trying to constantly refocus attention away from himself, and nearly resorting to blackmail (bringing up incidents staff were involved in that had nothing to do with him, whenever we'd try to talk to him about problems with his character). Not only that, but in general a very negative attitude, and I quote, "If my whitelist is revolted, I will go antag every round or SSD", as well as constant incidents involving his captain (several times a day) make me a bit wary of granting him his whitelist back. Especially when he does not seem to have addressed any of that, and barely even admits his faults as a character ICly in this application. Perhaps another mod/admin who was more involved in these events would like to shed more light on the situation. Anyway, I can guarantee you that this application will not be accepted until Tophat addresses directly /all/ of the incidents that led to his whitelist strip, and explains clearly what he hopes to do, should he be reinstated, to ensure these do not happen again. (And it should be more than saying "heads should do their jobs, but are flawed, and I will try to find a balance between IC duties and flaws.")

I don't mean to discourage you from mapping at all, and am glad that you actually are willing to take feedback at face value. Mapping isn't an exact science, but aesthetics is a skill that can be developed, and working on a tileset is no different. First, to quickly clarify a few points you brought back, since I failed at explaining myself properly from wanting to cover so many things. -Airlocks and firedoors aren't a bad thing to mix up - in fact, most glass airlocks on Aurora have firedoors. Simply, you're supposed to place the firedoor under the airlock, not above it, which is what I was highlighting. Placing them over makes them highly visible, which is something we try to avoid. -It is true that I have no idea what state the map you were working from was in, which is why I tried not to make too many assumptions. However, I think that simply looking at the baystation layout for robotics (which is what this robotics lab seems to be from) could give you a few ideas of how to organize the floor, including various gimmicks to break up the pace in the turfs, such as warning stripes around the shutters or fabricators, a white tile area around the surgical station, and blue computer flooring around the recharging stations. Generally, very few rooms will be entirely of a single color, with this being limited to smaller ones. If you take some time to look around most stations' maps, you'll see various color-coded tiles, floor arrangements, patterns, warning stripes and other elements that serve to break the monotony of a monochrome floor. -Fair enough for the windows - though one place were a window pane would have probably looked better is by the bar, since two blocks leading into a windoor feel a bit strange. -Cryo sleepers aren't a technical issue - I was speaking visually. The fact that their blue and green piping ends abruptly with the way you've set them up bothers me, especially with the bottom row. This is a bit of a failure from the engine, since bed sprites need to match the characters' "laying down" sprites, but this is a case where you would set up your sleepers in such a way that they always have a wall above their rows for the pipes to disappear into. -Secure storage needs a walkable space, ideally indicated by some sort of floor markings (warning stripes or such), so that people can actually reach the back of it easily. Not only does it make it look more aesthetically pleasant (and not just like some game area), but having to drag ten items to get to the one you need is an experience no one should have to go through. -I think the embassies suffer a little from the lack of custom sprites - while most items in SS13 were built to fit the "space station" theme, there's very few items to create something that would look like, a diona embassy, for example. Now, a few tips, off the top of my head (sorry, still working with lists u_u): -Creative license is something you shouldn't be afraid to take, if you think you can put it to good use. Implementing new sprites is easy if you can provide them, and I can see no reason why someone would reject your work as long as it was good and easy to implement. I don't understand why Paradise had a "no new sprites-rule", but I can assure you that if someone comes up with something for Aurora we want, and designs their own sprites, and the sprites look good, we'll be glad to integrate them. -Work from reference. If you're not sure how to do something, and don't have a set idea, looking at various reference can help you come up with a design that's more than a shapeless blob, or an alley of uninspired furniture. This goes both for looking at other SS13 station layouts, and working from life. Most of the new areas I designed for our map project (which you can see the progress of here have been designed with real areas in mind. (And sometimes, a simple google image search is all it takes.) Sure, a locker room is a room with lockers and benches/stools, but the way these lockers and stools are arranged creates the difference between a room that's used to put lockers in, and an actual locker room. -Find people who are willing to give you feedback, and stick with them. Not all feedback is good - good criticism should always be backed up by logic. If you can't understand /why/ something is wrong, ask until it becomes clear; otherwise, that critique doesn't bring you anything in the way of improvement. -Don't take anything personally. Some people are assholes, some are not. Sometimes, feedback may seem harsh, but keep in mind people are providing it because they want to help you, not see you fail. If someone is being an outright douche for no visible reason, though, you don't have to listen to them. That's really all I can think of. I'm an artist, and these tips also apply in a more general sense, but I don't have any magical tips for mapping (other than trying to make your rooms look like something that would believably exist in real life, and constantly asking yourself whether your creations work well from a gameplay perspective). The most important thing to improve is probably going to be practice - and if these are your first attempts at mapping, you might find yourself improving very quickly as you keep messing with layouts and find an aesthetic you like. I'm nearly unwilling to suggest it, but if you really want to have a crack at something, we're looking to furnish the exterior of our station with a few abandoned outposts/bases. If you would like to come up with layouts for some of these (both ground-based and in space), feel free to have a go. You can get our current map from our github, which you should be able to work with as a base, since the new station's layout isn't important for that (and we haven't finalized our ground turfs yet, so feel free to use any you can find as a stand-in). If you wish to do that, though, keep in mind that's likely going to be a harder task than designing regular areas, as you have to create believable destruction (and some sprites to facilitate a good transition between the planet surface and abandoned outposts will have to be created at some point). Also, these areas should be rather small (we can't fit another derelict on our map, for example). And if you do get me something, I'll be glad to provide feedback, and do my best to help you fix any issues there might be with it.

Two things. Firstly, we have four active mappers already working on our map project, and are about to wrap up the basic layout. The next step is going to be laying down pipes, atmos, etc. and basically taking care of all the grinding stuff. There's a few mappers/devs I already trust for that, and given how delegating portions of our infrastructures to other mappers in the past has proven to create a major headache in the long run, I'd rather keep that end closed, and limited to as few people as possible (plus I do not think you came here to lay pipes). Secondly, I will be frank and say that there are a lot of issues with the builds you present here, on both an aesthetic and functional level. (Moreso the former.) Rather than going by paragraphs, I'll make a list of the problems I personally had with these screenshots, and end in a short conclusion. -There's a lot of firedoors placed over airlocks. -Robotics lost all the detail in its flooring, being replaced by a flat dark grey turf. -The robotics lab has a weird atrium thing which feels very unnecessary (it's way too packed anyway), and there's no good reason to move the public desk from its original location. -The public backroom to the bar, while interesting, is too small - rows of chairs touching each other make the area impossible to navigate when people are sitting at the tables. Also, the row of identical snack vendors is a bit off-putting. -There's a lot of nonstandard windows (basically, a block standard window placed over a grille), though this might be specific to your station. -The lounge of the bar is weird - four rainbow armchairs in a row, with some additional armchairs around a big couch that don't really seem to know what they're doing. -The bar counter follows a strange, serpentine shape. -The windoor leading to the bar's lounge will not actually touch these tables once spawned - it'd need to be framed by two window panes (running parallel). -I like the concept of a mess hall, but there's no incentive for people to use it as they barely eat. Combined with the bar, you have a very large area (I count 50+ seats in these two rooms) which would mostly remain empty, even with Paradise's higher pop count. -There's a large area in the upper left of the mess hall with nothing in it. -The bathroom should not have a double door leading to a single urinal and toilet stall. -Speaking of which, the bathroom is too big for what it contains (a 3x4 room for a single urinal and toilet) and is missing a sink. -The cryo pipes simply end into nothingness. -The civilian lounge is fine. -The very long row of personal lockers in the room outside of it, however, is not. These should be broken up somehow (in two rows?), or better organized, but not simply laid there. -I simply don't understand this. -Most of the embassies look fine, and follow a defined theme (which I like), though some are a bit empty. However, the diagonal walls are a big no-no in my book. They're not used anywhere else, and make for awkward-looking rooms in-game. -Engineering is okay, though the new secure storage is really disorganized (basically a big box), and will be hard to take things out of. (Also missing a few canisters, did they move?) To conclude, I think there's two really big elements to mapping. The first, aesthetics, is something that I think you really don't quite have down - as you admitted yourself. As far as function, I appreciate that thought has actually been put in giving your redesigns a purpose, though I don't feel like this purpose was carried out properly through these new maps. (e.g. if the mess hall is to be a place for eating in peace and nothing else, keep in mind that people will spend significantly less time in it, and thus it needs to be severely smaller than it currently is.)

Since we don't have a like button yet, ^this. I've seen some stolen-name AI done in a way that wasn't cringe- or eyeroll-worthy, but they're few and far between. But the more famous the name, the more likelihood of them being crap seems to be. So yeah, how famous is famous? Is this gonna be a ban on all robot-referential names, or just the popular badguys? If people can actually roleplay an AI well enough to make it remarkable, then it's not because of the name, IMO. Same argument could be taken to people roleplaying very well fictional (or real) characters - it happens, but it's still immersion-breaking. It's really a simple matter of changing the name. Anything widely recognizable would have to be changed? I'd argue that IHNMAIMS is sorta famous (especially among a culture group whose main interest is sci-fi), but I'm for having the rule be enforced only when the names are really jarring, with the less obvious/problematic cases being ignored.

Mythology and historical names should be allowed. That's the only type of reference I would approve of. In my opinion, the rule should forbid direct references to other robots/AIs. While AI-Hitler would end up with a jobban for obvious reasons, an AI copying the personality of Descartes or simply named after a mythological figure doesn't seem to pose a problem from a RP sense. It's the HAL9000/etc we're trying to get rid of.

Back to the custom item issue with this. There was one issue with your latest application. You wanted a custom item, however there was no backstory to it. Custom items exist to give players a tool to further their roleplay with. You never explained what made your medkit special - the reason why you needed this one to be different, and couldn't use a standard one. People tried to get you to talk more about your backstory, and reasons why you would need a custom medkit, as well as suggest you could simply use a standard one to help with your RP. Nothing rude, inflammatory or non-nice was said, until you got frustrated with answering these questions and decided to post a picture of a seinen character flipping the bird. This is my take on these events. You asked for a custom item without providing a reasoning as to why, got upset when people asked you to provide one, and gave up. If you feel like things went down any differently, feel free to counter my post with your own vision of things. But as things stand, I feel like the reaction of the community was far more mature than your own, and nothing anyone has said or done justified your response.

I'm going to say one thing. I'd like you to go back to the latest item app you've made (I locked it, but I'll keep it up for a while longer before deleting it so you can do that), and try to find the posts that upset you, and provoked a negative response on your behalf. Look at them, and analyze the bits from other users that denote clear aggression. Then, look at your own posts, and try to compare the two, pinpointing the bits which can clearly be conceived as aggression on both. After doing that, I'd like that you spend some time reflecting upon your behavior, on whether it constitutes a proper response to the way you were engaged in that thread, and if not, on ways you could respond instead. I say this, because I did not detect any hostility coming from other users. I believe the only modicum of it came from you - and I don't blame you the least, seeing as having your characters, designs and choices scrutinized and discussed can be a harsh experience when it first happens. However, I'd want you to keep in mind that we really do try to offer our help, as politely as possible.