Montyfatcat

Typically I've seen the ones with whitelisted leader roles totally empty, likely because a third party without a leader can be awkward.

You could, but getting people to accept that is incredibly difficult, especially if they never see you away from the gloves. It also opens you up to slipping up if you're unaware they've been removed, and also opens up to potential arguments about whether they even exist in lore. It's neater and better for continuity if the gloves were a mechanical thing.

As long as people aren't putting EE ship crew to the wall I'm all for this.

Pair this with a reduction in ghost roles, honestly. Some rounds you join and you could set aside half the server population for roles that are locked to a whitelist. For example one round I saw a tajaran mining ship, an Orion Express Vessel and a Kataphract ship all in the same ghost role menu, all of them were with one person for each. This kind of kills the positive effects of these roles if what population that is sectioned off is split apart even further doing wreck diving.

The cautery wasn't even in there initially, even that's a new addition. It kind of feels like the tray was there exclusively for borgings, which conflicts with everything else.

Me and Sycmos rarely agree but I'm with them entirely here, especially as someone who once spent an entire month mute in public because my best friend wasn't at my school anymore. The community response to this has been, frankly, fucking horrid. Seeing how people regard a disability as a characteristic of a "cringe character" and are willing to make the setting oddly stunted in one area of progress just for the sake of stopping a minor annoyance, or a perceived potential issue that is entirely unlinked to the disability, has me wondering what happened to the community that was previously concerned about fair treatment of disabled characters and drawing a hard OOC line against picking on characters for those disabilities. So called "waifus" will exist regardless, how is making sign more viable in day-to-day gameplay going to change that? Surely they would use whatever is available to them at the time?

I like this, it's futuristic while also being decently grounded so long as it has logical restrictions. I'd even go so far as to say we could turn it into a fluff augment too, since aurora has a good amount of those and very established lore for augmentation going (by ss13 standards) crazy.

I disagree with universal maintenance access. Only engiborgs and rescue borgs should have that since they're the only ones that use it. Why would a service or science borg need it?

I've got mixed feelings on this. On the one hand I enjoy having something to do, but on the other hand borgs have this weird habit of never asking shit over radio, they always demand to talk in person in my experience. I don't like the idea of getting "machinist to workshop" for a borg to ask if they can have upgrades, it already happens currently with borgs asking for VTEC even when there's no mining (seriously please read the manifest before dragging the machinist away from what they're doing). I'm not opposed to this idea, but I'd prefer if they were either something that could be activated via a console in the machinist workshop (please make it less narrow first though holy fuck it's cramped) than something built and hand installed, since doing upgrades like that can get a little irritating at times when upgrades aren't maxed or when materials are super short because the new machinist built a mech without asking anyone. Alternatively, you open up the borg and use the multitool on it to unlock those tools after a bit of research has been done, I prefer this because it means that giving borgs more tools can be a part of the emag process rather than a freebie when they get emagged.

Move the ringer terminal on the new machinist workshop to actually sit on the wall# Give the machinist a proper fuel tank Give the machinist tinting windows

The first thing I feel whenever a cyborg cleans up an area of anything for me to do before I've even had a chance to arrive is "Not again, why didn't they radio ahead?" before realising that cyborgs, unlike every other character type, are basically given permission to "just do it" and not have to disclose what they're up to by virtue of their role being designed to be wallpaper roleplay wise. Or I think "For fuck's sake, when did we get an engiborg/mediborg and why didn't anyone let me know?" and realise yet again, the role isn't obliged to let me know. Policy wouldn't fix this, as policy needs active and constant enforcement and needs to be apparent from the start. This isn't like with literally any other job where someone joins and you see a radio message telling you exactly what they are, and I'm aware that people do wordlessly join, but I can at least try to contact them off the bat since I know they exist in my department and I need to communicate with them. You're entirely missing my point here. The """"""""""""race"""""""""""" that they are playing is specifically designed to be not a character, borgs are made with the intent to not be invested in. It don't want something "more unique" or whatever, I want to be able to know that if I scold a character, I'm not just scolding the player, I'm actually scolding the character, something which borgs are a concept are designed to not actually care about. Cyborgs aren't a species in the same way other species exist, they don't need a whitelist and they don't need any proof that you're capable. I've had to coach borg players more than once on how their own role works conceptually, something which doesn't come up with any other species whitelist because you're expected to know this sort of thing before you start playing them, it's why humans are the "default". If borgs go on a whitelist, I'll be happy since then I don't have to worry about conflicting standards, since we'll have actually enforceable and written down conventions. Because this is a very very poor answer. Some people really enjoy the archetype of a non-negotiating psychopath antag that will randomly fire into the crowd, 9/10 times the staff will be on them like dogs on steak because that can spoil other people's fun significantly. Some people enjoy the archetype of the wall of metal G2 sec officer that will relentlessly walk into a hail of fire because they know they can survive, these types of characters will either be told to chill by staff or be so heavily mocked by the community that I genuinely haven't seen a prominent G2 security officer in about 3 or 4 months. Some archetypes and roleplay types are genuinely just unfun for people on the other end, and as I said before, roleplay is a co-operative effort between multiple people to have fun. Just as I as a Dungeon Master ban active flying races at low level at my table for taking away the fun (as an oversimplification) and spotlight of other players, I consider borg to unfortunately be in the same boat, having too much personal power/jack-of-all-tradesmanship and not enough group benefit or personal downsides to actually justify it staying. I also don't want to hear about guidelines alone, because frankly plain guidelines in my experience lead to one of two things. Either something so vague and unenforced that they might as well not exist, or something strict enough that it devolves into people trying to rules lawyer their way around the documentation that exists because funnily enough they still want to keep playing the role as they did before. It's happened so many times across so many communities across so many games that I honestly cannot recommend guidelines alone in good faith without also recommending a mechanical way to enforce these guidelines that aren't community warnings.

It's only as forced as telling people "just tell the borg to go away". At least this is mechanical encouragement, instead of telling people to get over their inhibitions about spoiling another player's fun. Nothing's stopping someone making an engineer or pharmacist or whatever that just does the job and only talks when they have to, but at least then there isn't lore or mechanics encouraging them to be asocial, they're just playing an asocial character which can lead to more fun than just "stop talking to the robot weirdo"

In my experience any situation where IPCs are damaged enough to delay a mech is a situation where someone would have to be waiting for their mech in the first place anyway. Even an IPC that gets eel'd usually only has one or two fucked limbs, and mechs take so long that the time it takes to repair an IPC first is honestly nothing in comparison. The job is already incredibly non-busy, I think I do more than setup maybe once every 3rd round I play machinist, could just be my timezone though. You have to really get on with the other machinist to be willing to share the workshop with them for 2 hours with nobody else swinging by, and honestly idk what it is about the job but it attracts a lot of very abrasive and hard to get along with characters for some reason. Honestly this has never been an issue for me, machinists being in ops already makes for some very easy hounding since you're on their radio channel already. In the old days miners would bring resources by default so even then you didn't really have an issue back when the title was roboticist. This would end horribly imo, machinist already has a massive issue with stepping on people's toes in science, having a job then step on the machinist's toes at the same time would just lead to so much overlap that you might as well move the job back to science (something I'm not opposed to but have been told isn't happening). Alt titles only work when you're doing the same job anyway. Otherwise you get the issues Gem mentioned of having people refuse to do shit because of their alt title, which is just a giant pain in the ass. Since machinist is such a niche role already, having the role be split up and reliant on one another in such a clumsy way wouldn't really help.

Borgs, by their nature, are gameplay refined down to a handful of tools and rules that make them capable of running the entire station without even needing crew except for to change their modules, and even then many borg players are quite happy to print their own reset board and beg the machinist to come down and install it (sometimes in the middle of the machinist interacting with the AI). Borgs by design do not need anybody else, and have quite literally 1 (one) mechanic capping them from soloing every important job on the station during deadpop. Any job that can do this is automatically problematic, we already have a debate about super-doctor physicians and super-doctor surgeons, and there's an active poll to merge the roles that has gone with far less controversy than borg removal. The server is a co-operative experience that requires that players work together to have a fun time, and if there's a job that can do an entire department's functions while again only being capped by their lack of hands to insert their own reset board, that sort of eliminates the point, doesn't it? No job should be able to handle an entire department. Engineers shouldn't be able to handle atmos and they regularly get told they can't except for the most basic shit like thrusters. Regular officers shouldn't be able to perform an autopsy and the admins will come down with fury if they so much as try to take over the investigator's niche. Paramedics can't do surgery, and if they tried then again the admins would make sure they'd never hear the end of it. Each and every role on the server is kept to a niche so that the entire server is a co-operative experience. I'm not even sure sub-modules would help this, since yet again there comes the point of "Why not just make a first responder/pharmacist/engineer/janitor?" which still hasn't really been answered in this thread. The only convincing defence for keeping spawn borgs that I've seen is that people might need an emergency worker to start the SM or mix chems, but honestly there are multiple throwaway characters that exist just to do these jobs and fuck off into ghost again (plus, cyborgs have to wait 20 minutes in ghost like everyone else so what's the point?). Then there comes the factor that most people here aren't even advocating for total removal, especially since recent events have kinda made that whole idea pointless to begin with. Instead, most people simply want spawn borgs removed, since it discourages "maining" such a vague role and encourages people to make a variety of characters for the different roles they want to play. That's what we're all here for right? To see a variety of characters and interact with them in fun and interesting ways, which flies entirely against the nature of a role that is best played by zooming into a room, fixing the issue immediately and then promptly fucking off again once the work is done (I also feel like maintenance drones encourage this but at least they can't just entirely man a department by themselves). If a role can just avoid being a character fullstop by its nature, and gamifies the already mechanics heavy nature of ss13, then I truly have to ask what purpose it actually serves on a roleplay server. Even the lore seems to struggle to keep a relevant place for borgs, and the closest we got was a god damn punishment that most people hate to even see in round. Maybe it's time for borg to finally let go and be allowed to leave the normal gameplay loop.

Machinist as a role is one of those ones that has little to do as is. Very often machinists have a single preferred way they organise their workshop compared to other machinists, and very often this can bring conflict. There already isn't enough for them to do, why risk having two on shift for little to no benefit? The only time roboticists really needed to be in pairs in the old days was back when IPCs made up half of security, as at least then they'd possibly have more than one patient to deal with. Nowadays with balance changes and a general attitude shift in security, a double machinist isn't really needed. The workshop itself is also not very well structured for two people, being very tight and having only one real area to do any work, it's difficult to even work on different projects at the same time.