Kaed

I don't understand understand why you're fighting so hard about this one specific point that a lot of people are disagreeing with you on. You clearly have a lot of good ideas about buffing the janitor. That's great, they could use a bit of love. Your work isn't invalidated in its entirety by one portion of it meeting resistance. Just give grounds on the thing about engineering janitors and focus on the other stuff that people like. I know it's a struggle when you feel strongly about something and people don't agree with it. Buy you are doing this for a community, not for your personal gratification (I would think, anyway?), So maybe you should consider being a little bit more open-minded about what the community is saying to you, rather than preparing to die defending your ideological hill.

.. Fowl they can literally walk through any door maint hatch they have been swiped to have access to, and you can't stun them unless you can reach them and alt click them, which you can't if they are hiding in a deep corner of maintenance. Have you even played a pAI recently? Or was that changed at some point since the last time I was a pAI a month ago? Your dismissal feels disconnected with the issue I stated, and it's a little frustrating.

First they ruin our kitchens with nanakode, now they try to take away our very janitors? This cannot be borne! Janitoria stands with the rest of the glorious civilian department! In all seriousness, though, [mention]LordFowl[/mention] you seem to have some misunderstandings about station hierarchy. Technically speaking, I wouldn't even really say there is a 'service' department at all. There is certainly a 'supply' department, which covers both raw materials (mining) and fabricated/exotic materiel (cargo). Hence why they all are on the 'supply' channel. And yes, there is a service channel, it's true. But by no means are the scattered remaining 'civilian' jobs really even a department. It's nice that bay implemented a radio channel for them all to chatter on, so everyone has a private line they can communicate on besides common, but here's the thing: It's so rarely used, and I have to this day never seen any coordination between anyone except the bartender and chef, and even then that's pretty rare. This is because they aren't a cohesive unit. They all have very distinct jobs that are only tenuously related under the 'serve the rest of the crew' banner. These are the jobs that have the service channel: -Chef -Bartender -Janitor -Chaplain Only half of those 'produce goods', as you put it, and the others provide some sort of service, either tangible (cleaning and replacing lights) or esoteric (religious). Beyond that, they're not really in any position to be considered a department with a common goal, and the service channel is pretty much there so their boss, the HoP, can contact them without the common channel. It doesn't make them a unit. That all being said, I like some of the ideas you have about the janitor, aside from the part about moving them to engineering. Even speaking from the vantage point you bring up that they are there for low level repairs, that doesn't really cover the rest of their job, which involves cleaning messes. Not 'shit's broken' messes, 'someone threw up on the floor' messes. And no matter how much you try to spin it, 'janitor' just doesn't roll of the tongue as an engineering department job title. The engineering department is full of trained individuals. They are professionals the station depends on for power and maintaining atmosphere, or people trying to be said professionals. The janitor is a man who walks around with a mop cart and spraybottle, and occasionally fixes noncomplex problems like broken lights. He belongs in the civilian 'department', with the other straggler civilian jobs. I like the idea of giving him a new room, and of letting him refill vending machines... but if we want vending machines to be refillable, we will have to cut down on the number of vending machines on the station. Right now, there are so many of them that if one is out of something you want, you can take a 30 second walk to the next vending machine, which probably has stuff left. Having like 4 non-departmental (food/drink) vending machines or less per floor, and all of them in public access areas, would greatly encourage the janitor to actually have something to do at times with refill mechanics. I'd rather like him to be able to get brown boxes with bags of chips or whatever in them, maybe even with a logo in shitty reddish brown ink on the carboard box, like you see everyone refilling vending machines with in real life.

A number of the colored gloves could really use a tune up between the color they are supposed to be and the color that actually displays in game. As a few particularly awful examples; The 'black gloves'. They are clearly more of a shade of dull gray. This is particularly vexing because they are normally worn by security officers, whose corporate uniforms sport a large amount of actual black on them, and tend towards wearing jackboots. Having pasty gray gloves throws off the whole thing and makes it look ugly, contrasts with the sharp blacks. The 'red gloves'. I don't know in what madness filled alternate reality these salmon colored monstrosities can be called 'red', but it's not this one. They honestly are some of the ugliest gloves in the game, salmon is not a color that mixes well with pretty much anything ever. And while we're here, a red variant of the oft unused 'evening gloves', to match the red cheongsam loadout item would look very posh.

I think that people should spawn in the corporate uniform, because it's the only ones that look sharp, and not like mismatched garbage in color thematic. The other uniforms can go in the bin, really. If we're going for standardized uniforms as a concept, the wide array of shirt colors in standard is offputting. And the naval uniforms just look gross and pasty. You might say, 'but the different shirt colors let you tell them apart easily!' Except that there are other, more clearly visible cues, such as the hat the warden wears, or the trenchcoat and hat the HoS wears. Even officers have a hat, though for whatever reason, it's considered an optional part of the uniform. Not to mention that it's very common for people to spawn with a custom overwear item that covers their shirt, rendering the whole purpose of the 'easily distinguished shirt color' thing kind of moot.

No. The captain did not violate protocol. He ordered the arrest of an individual. He said 'arrest this drunk doctor'. He never told the officer to not get a warrant. Even in this fantasy you have created where captains can violate regulations at any time and people are expected to comply and worry about it later ("Kill that bartender, I don't like the way he spoke to me" "Okay, captain." *summarily executes bartender, dutifully reports it to IAA*), rather than it only being valid for critical situations . He never did anything except advise security of a neglect of duty charge and to get on it. It was on the Officer Matthews to assume that meant 'right now, who cares about regulations, because the captain said to arrest someone.' The problem is on Matthews. He needs to deal with his own poor decision-making, rather that everyone trying to divert blame every other which way except on him.

I should point out, for the sake of clarity, that Matthews was never actually demoted. I just confiscated his voidsuit and lethal weaponry and told him to gtfo and go do regular officer rounds and to stay off the Moyers case. The salt here is probably about 90% because I wouldn't let him go chase down the antag anymore. I will also admit that my previous post is somewhat lacking in crucial context, and that's my fault. I took a long time writing it, and when I was ready to post it, I saw that shameonturtles had posted. It was late, and I was far too tired to do more than tack on a comment at the end directed at him. If I'd had time/inclination to read his entire post, I might have revised some of my post. I'm sorry. However, I still stand by that you illegally dismissed regulations in arresting that doctor because you felt the captain's orders superseded any attempt to follow protocol. You say he admitted in person to being drunk, but you had to trespass on medical without a warrant to reach him. Hell, if you really wanted to not a warrant, you could have stood outside of medical, and hailed him on comms, and he would admit to being drunk. Then you could have said, "come out here then, you are being charged with neglect of duty", because, woop, he just admitted to his infraction. Maybe he would have even submitted peaceably. Instead you waltzed in like you were dah boss because 'the captain said so'.

The head of security in question here, from the Matthews thing. Listen, bucko. You came into the round a considerable amount of time after much of the stuff happened, so I'm willing to acknowledge that most of what you got was hearsay. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Khazarazir somehow unfairly colored my perception of poor innocent Matthews by filing his report. For starters, I arrived after the actual drunk doctor arrest happened, and did not read that report I was faxed by Khazarazir until he literally pointed it out to me, while you were standing in the office. That report only affirmed what I had already come to feel about Officer Matthews. I was also willing to assume that you were just roleplaying a robot IAA with your irritating tendency to try and skate by on the most vague regulatory technicalities to excuse Matthews actions, but you clearly are here, OOC, defending those same views. So let's get started here on the pile of muck you've drudged up here. This (specifically the second sentence about exceptions) is the bit of corporate regulations you used to justify Matthews marching into the medbay, without a warrant, and arresting a drunk doctor'. You also cited the bit about the captain ordering him arrested. There are several important contexts to this situation you have failed to take into account. -The captain is not above regulations. The corporate regulations literally say that only a few sentences above the warrant bit. They can bypass them for the purposes of a state of emergency, yes, but they cannot order, especially in a code green situation where no crew members are in danger, anyone to violate corporate regulations. A doctor being drunk in the medbay is not a state of emergency. The captain being 'a loyalty implanted head' does not excuse your lack of procedure. -The exception for witnessing a crime is intended to allow officers to act in defense of the crew if someone is endangering them. The charge of 'hooliganism' is already very nebulous. Arresting someone for being drunk is literally something they cover in the hooliganism charge description, and it mostly comes down to 'don't bother really unless they are being disruptive or belligerent'. So claiming you 'saw a crime in progress' when you arrived on account of 'he was visibly drunk' is pretty laughable. Neglect of duty is similarly nebulous charge and should be treated with care, rather than just summarily applied without a warrant because the captain said to arrest someone. -The process of obtaining a warrant is not an ordeal. There was absolutely nothing stopping security from spending a few extra minutes performing the necessary regulatory procedures before heading to the medbay to arrest the doctor. Instead, Matthews just beelined straight for the medbay and arrested the doctor without bothering to even ask to enter. Without a warrant in this situation, he could even reasonably have been charged with trespassing. These all seem like entirely valid reasons for an IAA to get on your ass about. I don't know you, ShameOnTurtles, but you were a source of frustration for the both the captain and me during that round. Your hyper-aggressiveness, while it might have been 'technically allowed' on account of the miner had some kind of dangerous weapon (I never heard what it was? A mining laser? Don't know, largely irrelevant for the purposes of this) repeatedly caused the situation to be exacerbated. I told you after the first time I heard you had fired first on the clearly scared, armed civilian that you needed to exercise more restraint and not jump to lethal force. And then, only ten minutes or so later, I am witness to a radio conversation that roughly went like this (I do not have the exact logs) Moyers: I want to talk Officer: We're not going to shoot. *10 seconds later* Moyers: *screaming about being shot by Matthews* I deliberately gave you the gun that had a stun setting for a reason. rather than the more deadly lethal-only thing in the armory. I sort of assumed it would be self evident in how I did not give you the big guns. I admit that I could have elaborated more about my desire to capture him without lethal force, but I was pretty clear about my disapproval after you did it the first time. I only relieved you of your duty on the case after you ignored my orders and did it again. I also note, if it matters, that the captain was riding me to remove you from the Moyers case too, so I wasn't alone in thinking you were being unreasonably violent.

I don't think you're looking at the matter in the right light, honestly. While it is certainly possible for a small set of unathi to believe a thing contrary to the overarching racial ideologies, it does not make them two dimensional if there is no significant group that supports it. Let me give you an example that provides you more context, though. Humans, largely as a whole, consider cannibalism to be a taboo practice. No major power in the world would ever condone it, and while there are certainly countries and small groups that practice it, either religiously or out of desperation, the parts of the world that consider themselves 'civilized' look upon them with pity or disdain for being backwater savages or pathetic wretches. If you brought a human character onto the station that religiously believed cannibalism was an acceptable practice, and requested bodies from the morgue to prepare food with, do you think that anyone would agree to that? I really, really doubt it. But that doesn't make human characters one-dimensional. It's just that there are some things that are so universally accepted as taboo by a species that it would be silly for you to try and make a character centered around it. Unathi do not think like humans do. You should not try and project human ways of thinking onto unathi, if you wish them to remain essentially unathi. There is a world of other things you can play with as far as unathi character personalities without focusing on this one aspect that you think makes them flat characters. Try looking at a larger picture rather than railing against what is set in stone.

I would like to take a moment to stress that I really, really don't like this, but I am trying my best to be courteous here. Skating over the skeevy stuff you added in about unathi gender identity, I feel that this concept countermands a lot of what makes unathi unique as a culture. Their mistrust of synthetic races for not having souls and distaste for modifying their bodies to replace battle injuries is, in my opinion, some of the most core tenants of what separates unathi/synthetic relations apart from how basically how every other races treats robotics. What I feel like you are doing here is trying to make up a new religion to justify your ex-guwan roboticist getting deeper into their profession. It's already a little weird to have an unathi roboticist, but I feel like you want to create a scenario where it isn't strange anymore, and you can start dipping into transunathism. I also want to bring up that the Th'akh religion is already woefully underrepresented by Jackboot's lore decisions, and adding a third secular religion that is directly likely to induce strong conflict with the other two religions will muddle things up and make it even harder for Th'akh traditionalists to get any screen time. And that's not even adding in the secular 'doomsayer' faction that Jackboot has mentioned he plans to implement at some point. In summary, no. We don't need a religious faction to be added in that exists entirely to allow unathi players to discard half of their racial mentality and be buddies with robots and have prosthetic limbs. You can always go back to being a Guwan if you want Azala to do that.

I think the problem is the medium, really. This game takes place in what amounts to a professional workplace, with security guards present. People are there to do their jobs, not relax and get high. You do not go to work to sell drugs, you go to a shadier place where there is no authority figures present to make illicit deals. It's just not the right place to be considering drug dealing as a viable practice.

I don't agree with this. The entire pull of mice is that they have a short respawn timer and you can just scurry around observing. Treating them like they are more valuable and require a long respawn timer to make up for them being a minor antagonist that the crew should be rewarded for killing is not the right mindset. I also don't see a reason why they should be able to affect the round in some tangible way, by destroying objects (boxes). I think even when they eat food it doesn't really deplete the food, you just emote nibbling on it.

On the one hand, some of this sounds decent on the surface. On the other, 'lol drugs' as a gimmick is often done terribly, and generally is not worth the trouble even if you have half a brain and can figure how to do it in an interesting way. Most people will just snitch on you immediately to security once they hear about your drug dealing. Few people are interested in playing druggies, too.

There has been a plague of people who use solgov and ATLAS as motivation for their antag gimmicks. It happens so often and it's starting to run it into the ground. Examples of this include: -fire all teh xenos -time for a draft everyone is a soldier now -solgov is invaded/visiting again!!1! These mercs are definitely solgov and not faking it. Can we just like, start rejecting these gimmick ideas if they come up again. Just like put a blanket ban on them for a bit. Now, I recognize we had a big event about them. A lot of players remember it. It was a thing. Over six months ago. Don't we have two new human Loredevs now? Surely there's more potentially going on in human space than 'SolGov are assholes' Just some spitball ideas for new lore concepts you can bring into play: -there is an unknown parasitic alien species that recently been discovered to have been infesting one of the human systems. Everyone is freaking out, who can you trust, how deep does the infiltration go? We need to quarantine it and make sure that it doesn't escape into other human systems! (Note: not necessarily cortical borers) -One of the human systems has started practicing transhumanism. (Oh no look out Jackboot~) This is a distant, alarming thing that is happening in affects the political views on synthetics and thier relation to humans in general, not necessarily something involving people doing it on station. -A major human Colony or system has been practicing gene modification on themselves. They no longer consider themselves to be human, but rather something better. This has caused a lot of friction and they have seceded. What measure is a true human, and how do you know if your fellow coworker really is one? (Mmmm, stellaris~) Naturally, you don't have to follow any of these ideas, new Loredevs. But please do something new and fresh.

I've had this happen a couple times and agree. Also, what is with this talk about 'coders pouring time into this'. As far as I'm aware it's more of a mapping issue and could probably be changed in about 5 seconds. It is literally trivial and just a quality of life improvement. Saying we should leave things like this in the game to serve as 'gotchas' for inexperienced/inattentive players does not make the game more fun for anyone. It just makes you sound like kind of an elitist jerk ;/

I like the idea, but I acknowledge what Azande is saying is a valid point - the casuals/normies who don't like to think too hard about things in game would be put off. That's apparently a bad thing, from what I hear every time someone wants to complicate the format.

You are being ridiculous. Even if there is such a problem of non-communicative behavior 'killing the role', then that is a problem facing players, not something you solve by forcing people together by spawning them in inappropriate locations. I personally would rather not take the time introducing myself until I finish preparing myself. I have a briefcase to fill with folders and paperwork. This suggestion was not intended to keep Internal Affairs agents away from the 'dirty peasants in security', it was to actually have them spawn in their office and or workplace like everyone else in the server does.

I was asked to weigh in on this. So let's see what I can find to say about this. It's a well-written application. It certainly seems like he took the time to write out well thought replies to the inquiries. I think munks is capable of being a head. I don't see any particular reason why he shouldn't get whitelisted. But, stop playing disgusting cat beasts all the time. You have a perfectly working unathi whitelist, use it. Come back from the Dark Side.

I really don't understand why IAA spawn in the meeting room with the officers and other security staff. They aren't part of that team. Generally, they just walk right out of the meeting room and go to their office. So can we change this to be over in the actual IAA office?

I suggested this before with the whole 'cloning insurance' thing where you tick where your character has insurance or not in character creation, making the default 'no', and then you also only get certain cloning conditions based on your employee position.

No. No it isn't. Roleplaying is about taking on the role of someone who isn't you. That includes anything that could happen to that character to change them. Even in real life, people's personalities and goals can change. Emotional trauma, war, cult indoctrination. As a years long veteran of tabletop games, I can tell you that people's characters do not stay the same from how they start over the course of a campaign. And things move a lot faster here in 2 hour chaos simulator. It is only on this server where people believe they should be allowed to exist in a special little safety bubble and forced antag conversion is mean and ruins 'teh rps'. Or in this case, that implanting people with behavioral altering technology destroys their character. Listen. How a person acts based on an outside influence does not change who they are, at their core. If someone is holding a gun at you, and tells you to call Nanotrasen your daddy, it doesn't mean your character has been completely derailed into something else and is now a nanotrasen loyalist, it means you are being coerced into it. The principle is the same if it is mystical influence or technological implants. People are complex, multilayered creatures and it's difficult to realistically say 'X would never do that!" If people continue to go into rounds with the expectation that their character will never be pressed to act outside of a set of parameters they chose, and that it's 'bad for roleplay' when they do, then they are not mature roleplayers. This is a freeform roleplay medium where bad things are expected to happen. You go every non-extended round knowing this. I really don't see why we need to remove loyalty implants. They're just fine as is. They fit in with the metaplot of ambiguously nefarious corporation way better than 'sanity' implants, which seem to imply people in charge of a station somehow need mental bolstering.

I generally have to agree with Scheveningen on this. Wow that felt weird. Namely, the bit about buddy systems being much more effective than any seniority role would be, especially since people are prats and enjoy using authority as a baton or merit badge rather than for why it's there. However, I should point out that 'the buddy system' of officers has some fundamental flaws. The flaws are less in the concept of officer buddies and more in the medium and playerbase. Here are a few -The buddy system inherently assumes there is an even number of players or someone is left without a buddy -The buddy system effectively makes every two officers/cadets a unit for the purpose of 'presence'. This means that, functionally, you are halving the area your department can cover for influence in vision, discovery, and capture of threats. In a much bigger, multilevel station, this can be a problem in certain situations, -The buddy system requires people to adhere to it for it to matter. I have frequently assigned partners at round start, and found out, half an hour in, that they walked off in different directions about 30 seconds after leaving my line of sight. A number of players hate being assigned a partner, for various reasons. I've heard everything from 'my character is a lone wolf' to 'it's code green who cares', to purely OOC reasons like 'I would like to give antags more of a chance to do something by not double teaming them' and 'I hate HoS players who try to force me to work with people I don't want to (so I'm going to passive aggressively rebel even though IC I have no reason to)' It's honestly the last bit that causes me the most trouble in my experience as a HoS. However, I don't really have a solution for it. I can tell you that senior/patrol officers is not the solution. The security department exists because antagonists exist. It doesn't matter how many layers of 'high roleplay' a server tries to put over conduct and job responsibility - it's why they're there. They're the anti-antag department. A lot of people join with that mentality, and it often makes then really bad security officers. They have tunnel vision on finding and getting the bad guys, and forget to do the whole 'part of a station crew' thing. You can't fix that with new positions. You can't fix that with a buddy system. The best you can do is try to educate people on how not to be validhunter prats and hope they can disconnect themselves enough from 'just a game lol' mentality to not be horrible to play with, or that they end up getting a sec ban.

How would you propose to implement that? Force the game to replace everything after 10 characters with '-arrgh!' when someone is injured? How would you sanity check that? What stops them from trying again a second later with the 'repeat previous message' command? Having someone spam "HELP SEC MAINT-augh!" 4-5 times before you take off their headset would be really silly and dumb. I guess you could implement a 5 or so second 'can't use your radio' period might work when you take above a certain threshold of damage (15?) in a short period of time

Where do unathi stand on species popularity stats?

These all sound like much better ideas than 'some random names and job titles who might be subversive'. I support it.