Fluffy

That is what I did in the last 2/3 weeks with Salvo Raccuso, both Ben and Trovensky started as intern/cadet so they were both created with a focus of absorbing and practice mechanics, Salvo on the other hand can be found every round somewhere else roleplaying, at the bar (either deck 1 or 2 one), in front of the bridge (which was named roleplay spot in different loocs), in the consular office etc.

BYOND key: Fluffyghost Character names: How long have you been playing on Aurora?: 3 months give or take, near every day in this timeframe Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? I got a complain on my character when I first joined the server (I never played HRP before so I thought to make a funny character, that was corrected soon after thanks to ReadThisNamePlz instead of in-round as at that time no staff was available to respond to the ahelp of the other two players I was playing with, which I currently enjoy to play with and have fun to this day when I play the (revised) Ben, and it seems they likewise enjoy having my character around, or so I think) and a warning that's being sorted out because I fell asleep while playing thus looking like AFK. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?: The main OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is to ensure everyone in the department, and that interact with members of said department, gets treated fairly and according to the rules, in a believable way and if possible that they can get a fair share of fun out of it, that includes curbing down do-all know-all personnel, attempts to metagame, to mantain situation and characters believability while ensuring the department try to remain functional and perform its services, that the tasks are fairly distributed to all the people in the department and are therefore engaged with the game while retaining a healthy amount of leeway on personal choices. You can also be tasked to teach and show to new players (or otherwise interns) how to do things inside said department, including etiquette and mechanically, or assign someone as a mentor to them to distribute the tasks, depending on how well stocked your department is. OOC ultimately, I believe your first task is to mantain an healthy balance of the fun of all players in your department and be the first line of defense against rules violation. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?: Whitelisted (heads whitelist) players are expected to act responsibly with the power they hold, striking a balance between allowing anarchy to spread in the department and a 1984 absolute survelliance and order dystopia, you'll be referred to and are expected to uphold and help uphold the rules and regulations (and definitely not break them, at least the OOC ones, and the IC ones only with a good, RP believable and explainable reason), you are also responsible in try to help player retention (including via the means indicated above) and have your good share of knowledge, work with the staff and be the first line of defense against bad behaviours. They also help to shape the events and atmosphere through their decisions, which must be believable. Finally, granting all of what already said, you are responsible to get the things in your department done, usually indirectly: a department that do not function affect the whole round for everyone, it's your job to avoid it happening via IC or (hopefully rarely via) OOC means as appropriate for the situation. I strive to uphold them through listening to all feedbacks and suggestions, working things out with other players or staff, double-doubting and trying to think well ahead of my decisions and actions. Could you give us the gist of what is currently happening in Tau ceti and how it affected your character and their career? Tau ceti is a boiling pot of anti-nt sentiment that continues to grow, one of my character is from the sol system and would like to see the system reunited with sol one day, but that applies for pretty much every system so except for the physical proximity it isn't all that much different to him than any other system or planet, though he would like to think that if tau ceti leaves the corporation it would open a door to negotiations to reunite with sol one day. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted? Head of Security, eventually overtime to expand in other departments or even captain one day, in the future. Have you familiarized yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles? I have read the wiki page for the HoS, the CMO and the Captain. Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking.: Fyodor Koesvyin - HoS (to be created) Sigismund Frenzick - CMO (former psychiatrist) Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Indeed if I fuck up or ruin other people's fun, nuke me out of the whitelist, the server population's overall fun is more important than any whitelist. Have you linked your byond account to the forums? Yes. Extra notes: Re- applying from After having talked with Matt, I was suggested to make a completely different character from Trovensky and play it for 2/3 weeks, therefore since then I only played Salvo Raccuso, as diametrically opposite from Trovensky as I could think of (within sanity), I also (sporadically) played Lenivier, an intern chemist, but it was only for some rounds so I don't expect anyone to remember having seen him around.

I know Wolf and enjoy seeing him around, definitely worth a trial so +1 from me

indeed, but if you have an interim, which only happens when the situation goes bad usually btw, you don't have the experienced head of the same department mentoring you, which is the value i was proposing, and you can't focus much on doing the work of a head either, as you also have to cover whatever duty you had in your previous slot (especially in sec if you are an officer, assuming all departments equally filled to capacity), so that's the best value i can see that implements in a modified way the proposal, as you save the slot for someone that will do the job you was supposed to do at roundstart, have a mentor on hand, can focus on the mentorship and all the positive stuffs you can think of, of course this slot would be antag prevented (on ship antags), not available if there's not a head, and only applicable to departments that have at any given moment a head, you won't be another commander alone bypassing the whitelist, and mechanically you are limited to the selected department head access that was my idea on how to modify the proposal, now slightly expanded with some thoughts on it more

ngl I would not mind a specific role, for each head/department + captain, to let people train (while backed by an already experienced head) in command duties or captainship basically, an intern/apprentice/cadet slot but for command roles, a slight and more broad variation of kel's proposal, would definitely help out in practicing for the players applying (or considering to apply for) the command whitelist to have direct mentorship and see if they like the role, and for those who already have it and other characters in other departments that they would like to verify if they have all the hang of the department before making a head of a specific department

It was also said such attempt would be rejected without much discussion, why they were merged anyways is beyond me, I don't play a borg much but as of now when I did (during the event) it felt disheartening to play, not able to really provide much help or assist the crew around while also being below them all, it seems to me like a lot of recent borg development (and merging) is aimed at making the borgs not want to be something someone would play, instead of cutting a reasonable window where they would be used like actual borgs, to help the crew accomplish things in moments of need, give a different level of RP (yes, you can role play a borg, it might not be interesting to some, but usually the alternative is that the tired player do not play at all, or at least does not play here) and in the end do not even seem address the reasons this whole thing started for, to me it seems like a loss for everyone involved in all the sides of the story. All in all, I feel like we should roll back to then move forward with actual, reasonable changes and a plan that both borg players, non borg players, lore writers and developers agree, in majority, with. .2c

I'd like to add my thoughts, some which resonate with others too, too: The slots seems to be too tight for an event, we had a lot of people who were playing as off duty during a shipwide threat and emergency, this wouldn't make much RP sense to me as, I'd have expected, all capable hands would have been put to duty on such a situation; you are an off duty doctor? you go to medbay and help around, you are an off duty engineer? here is some gear, help avoid the ship getting destroyed, and so on; the slots should be increased either mechanically or IC imho. There was not much sense of dread and risk, which is a recurring issue that the normal gamemodes rotation also suffers from: you know that, in the end, the ship will basically always win, even if we mess up big, it's basically never a story of how the ship managed to survive or win, but just how much leeway was left to the antags/opponents before we decided to annihilate them, in this event also reinforced by the staff (at least for what i understands) literally deleting the enemy ship weapon; a story can't be epic if everyone knows and expect the outcome already, and will always feel dull and rather unremarkable, it also makes it way harder to suspend the disbelief. There was essentially no preparation, you'd have expected that a ship going towards a combat area would have took the time to train an otherwise almost untrained crew for such a scenario using any moment possible and more, instead besides the one simulation event and some antags that engaged us in a ship to ship battle nothing of sort was done to my knowledge; to be clear: i don't mean two weeks straight of drills, but that it never really happened outside of the simulation event either, preferring to spend time at the bar or mining instead of preparing for the imminent threat, is something I'm having a hard time justifying, though I don't think it's necessarily a fault of the lore team or staff either. I think having a sister ship for those kind of events, that you lore-y can move to and man before the event starts, would save a lot of headaches and solve a lot of the complains, your character would not want to be involved in a combat scenario? it stays on the horizon and so on, chad characters ready to fight for the conglomerate/company/whatnot? board the sister ship for the event and off you go, ship gets almost destroyed? lore it gets repaired over weeks/months while you're back on the horizon (instead of magically next round have no damage); I think it would make it more fun, believable, justifiable and easy for all parties to use this strategy, the story doesn't necessarily need to always be around the horizon itself, there's an entire universe of things, having another sister ship more fitted for combat scenarios and the like seems a better option. Overall, ship to ship and boardings are fun, gives everyone things to do if done right, and I hope it's here to stay and be expanded upon with other options (not more destructive, but different).

I cannot agree more, there was an absolute chaos and it was never clear what neither Trovensky nor security as a whole was expected to do, as I already indicated if an appropriate elevation to interim HoS was issued he would have had a far firmer grasp on the situation; acting as a sorta information relayer and sending suggestions while also being the warden to process and mantain the prisoners and also an officer to go out and try to negotiate/arrest them too was just too many things to do all at once to perform each of them to a high degree of proficiency, the HoS barring exceptional circumstances is not supposed to go out and perform arrests itself, manage the brig and the likes, nor is the warden usually supposed to leave the brig, but I don't want to repeat what I already outlined in the other two comments, the extremely short version is that it was never clear I was supposed to command the security department and without an order my character had no character-RP reason to, so I didn't.

No, I was never elevated command, I remained a warden for the whole time, otherwise I would have retrieved a HoS headset to have access to the command channel and coordinate with the other departments to try to prepare a welder bomb containment as quickly as possible The OM updated the ID to warden, stating something on the line of "this will suffice" no less, and ordered to arm the team and arrest/contain the welder bomber, that's pretty much it This happened only in one instance that I know of, and it was because there was the welder bomber along with two bombs in our lobby, with me and another officer trying to reason with the bomber, eventually they proceeded to break the RP and pass through the bombed area to roll back out, but it neverthless was a minority of the time and any status update that i asked on the channel indicated everyone who replied to be outside doing something, in fact part of the time they were inside was because they were trying to recharge the laser weapons (and we had little to no power) That's a fair point and something I'd have liked to do, but I reiterate that Trovensky was not promoted to any position to take control of the department and as I indicated above (on top of him being a sucker for procedures and correct execution of orders) he did not outstepped his orders or unlawfully assumed a position of commanding other personnel that he was not ordered or assigned, and therefore not entitled, to hold

I'm gonna address this suggestion from different points: Yes, Trovensky (the character) was reluctant to take the big seat, as it would be expected from someone who is straight out from the military academy, spent years taking and executing orders from a drill sergeant and barely a foot into an active, real field would, one of our rules is to mantain character at all times, which is what I did, I explicitly hinted that if it was an order I would have executed it, but it wasn't, so I didn't as my character would not have believably done so, besides sending some suggestions. I did not take any leadership besides some hinting, he was assigned to warden, which explicitly states in our wiki and in the station procedures to have no position of command over the rest of the department, with the only order being to have the bomber taken care of and the breachers arrested, which was relayed along with a minimal necessary force applied suggestion to. On top of that, I had as an officer to go and try to capture the antags myself and try to negotiate with the bomber, which leaves little time to follow the whole situation around. On top of that, while doing so, I had two people (one of which was a cadet, the other an officer) essentially telling me to suck it while standing next to two bombs, one of the cadet came in and, while the negotiation was undergoing with the bomber, out of nowhere grabbed him and it went down from there with the welder firebombs explosions. Just to get the officers/cadets to finally come to armory and get equipments it took a good 10 minutes and multiple radio calls. We had zero losses, except the one antag that the same cadet (i think) as above mowed down with an SMG (thinking it was loaded with rubber bullets), a small fire from the firebomb explosion and that's pretty much it, we let the antags play some gimmicks, but it never went out of control, for some reason the alert was rised to red but that's all really. As I indicated in the application, one point of a head is to balance things out for everyone, antags included, sending out the whole department with a "shoot on sight, they're breathing our air" would not have been anywhere as fun, nor warranted given the IC circumstances (nor the corporate regulations), nor give many of the departments much to do for anywhere as long. Many people in OOC appreciated the round and had fun from it. We had for most of the round two officers and two cadets I believe, one of which got stabbed and had to be under surgery for a lenghty period of time, and an equal number of antags that were playing as mental patients that escaped to our ship, which were mostly non violent, which means that each officer had to apply the station procedure for arrest for each of them with a backup cadet or officer in case they turned violent, possibly (god forbid, apparently?) RPing with them besides "you, brig, now", plus the RP of trying to handle someone that is mentally unwell, and another two to three antags that were doing another gimmick, essentially putting us in a 3:1 situation for an extended period of time, not including guarding the brig (since we had power issues and the doors could open any moment from the lack of power) and processing the prisoners. I'm not sure where you got the impression of a poor sec presence but we were out to handle them since they appear for basically the entire round start to finish, with the only order being to detain the welder bomber and my character having no authority to really order anything as an interim warden, so I don't feel like this criticism is fair nor the situation reflective of my ability, with an appropriate character or Trovensky in an appropriate situation, to command, and I'd be pleased to justify my choices, hopefully to satisfaction, or demonstrate what I believe to be able to do.

+1 casimir and avek, which i interacted most, are well played, good RPer, definitely worth a trial

I for one like the idea of ship to ship battles, as it seems that (when the other ship is sufficiently armed) it involves next to every department, engineer fixes breaches, ops load the guns and order things and mine, security fend off the boarders or even go board, medical patches everyone up, bridge navigate and operate the firing of the weapons, it feels like everyone have things to do What I'd like to see is more things to be added for the less-engaged departments, as an example: science can make better longbow shots, that requires miners to mine resources for those The simulation event was the most fun I recall because we were being actively and heavily engaged by the enemy ship, maybe something similar on which to throw in a revolution started by some undercover agent of a faction could give even more engagement to everyone? Make science recover an artifact that then the antags attack us and try to get before we discover what it is, with a boarding and an enemy ship team? I don't know, but all in all I believe that the RP goes hand in hand with the mechanical action, we already spend most of the "normal" rounds and almost every round with at least an hour of preparation + sitting there doing nothing but chat, that having it in an event too feels like a slap in the face; mind you I don't mean every event the ship has to blow up (especially if they are weekly), but for what I have experienced and my own personal taste the ship to ship + boarding is the most engaging type of antag, followed by revolution, maybe we could extend the events so they cover more time to accomodate more IC events in it? Or run more events? I don't know, but I'm really looking forward for high-adrenaline events, and I'm thankful for the lore team and staff that makes them possible, as well as mappers and devs I think the population spiked since we added the ship weapons? I'm not sure, but it feels like so, so I guess a good amount of people likes this kind of gameplay too if that's the case?

BYOND key: Fluffyghost Character names: How long have you been playing on Aurora?: 2/3 months give or take, near every day in this timeframe Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? I got a complain on my character when I first joined the server (I never played HRP before so I thought to make a funny character, that was corrected soon after thanks to ReadThisNamePlz instead of in-round as at that time no staff was available to respond to the ahelp of the other two players I was playing with, which I currently enjoy to play with and have fun to this day when I play the (revised) Ben, and it seems they likewise enjoy having my character around, or so I think) and a warning that's being sorted out because I fell asleep while playing thus looking like AFK. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?: The main OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is to ensure everyone in the department, and that interact with members of said department, gets treated fairly and according to the rules, in a believable way and if possible that they can get a fair share of fun out of it, that includes curbing down do-all know-all personnel, attempts to metagame, to mantain situation and characters believability while ensuring the department try to remain functional and perform its services, that the tasks are fairly distributed to all the people in the department and are therefore engaged with the game while retaining a healthy amount of leeway on personal choices. You can also be tasked to teach and show to new players (or otherwise interns) how to do things inside said department, including etiquette and mechanically, or assign someone as a mentor to them to distribute the tasks, depending on how well stocked your department is. OOC ultimately, I believe your first task is to mantain an healthy balance of the fun of all players in your department and be the first line of defense against rules violation. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?: Whitelisted (heads whitelist) players are expected to act responsibly with the power they hold, striking a balance between allowing anarchy to spread in the department and a 1984 absolute survelliance and order dystopia, you'll be referred to and are expected to uphold and help uphold the rules and regulations (and definitely not break them, at least the OOC ones, and the IC ones only with a good, RP believable and explainable reason), you are also responsible in try to help player retention (including via the means indicated above) and have your good share of knowledge, work with the staff and be the first line of defense against bad behaviours. They also help to shape the events and atmosphere through their decisions, which must be believable. Finally, granting all of what already said, you are responsible to get the things in your department done, usually indirectly: a department that do not function affect the whole round for everyone, it's your job to avoid it happening via IC or (hopefully rarely via) OOC means as appropriate for the situation. I strive to uphold them through listening to all feedbacks and suggestions, working things out with other players or staff, double-doubting and trying to think well ahead of my decisions and actions. Could you give us the gist of what is currently happening in Tau ceti and how it affected your character and their career? Tau ceti is a boiling pot of anti-nt sentiment that continues to grow, one of my character is from the sol system and would like to see the system reunited with sol one day, but that applies for pretty much every system so except for the physical proximity it isn't all that much different to him than any other system or planet, though he would like to think that if tau ceti leaves the corporation it would open a door to negotiations to reunite with sol one day. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted? Head of Security, eventually overtime to expand in other departments or even captain one day, in the future. Have you familiarized yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles? I have read the wiki page for the HoS, the CMO and the Captain. Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking.: Fyodor Koesvyin - HoS (to be created, i thought to upgrade Trov but I made him more of a "on the field" kind of character for a "behind the desk" work, that'd denaturate his persona, so making a new one) Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Indeed if I fuck up or ruin other people's fun, nuke me out of the whitelist, the server population's overall fun is more important than any whitelist. Have you linked your byond account to the forums? Yes. Extra notes: If anyone would like to give me player feedbacks during the application or later, please do as it helps me and everyone by reflection, whether I get accepted or not.

This feels like a major restriction, if we are at lowpop for example the borg should be able to access the SM to start it, pharmacy to help make some med, help open the armory or even the crew armory for when the antag(s) go loud, not to mention this would make the borg itself an uninteresting target for the antag to acquire, thus further reducing the (already slim) interest in emagging it It's likely that when the all access is useful the most, you won't have any of them to begin with, and even if you do doing this access change would be very down the priority list to the point it will likely not be done most of the times even if useful The only "mechanical" change I see as both useful and wanted is to ask the borgs to verify that noone else is present to do something before they do it, I can see and much rather prefer a system that would say to the borg that access engineering that an engineer is present and not deceased and ask it to verify what to do with it, or even a verb that lists the departments and on the side a manned/unmanned indicator (maybe in a verb), and at best a way to change the access from an all access to a limitation (not vice versa) present in the console of each department, so that whoever is manning the department (or an RD/command for everyone) can negate the access to the borg to said department area if need be

This was the part I was asking about, if it would make more sense to call them action stations instead of battle stations for clarity Although unlike the name implies, "battle stations" doesn't mean to go grab a gun and prepare to shoot at whatever, it means to reach your designated position (station) that you're supposed and expected to be in a battle situation, for example on a military ship when the general quarter is called the doctors on board do not go man the anti-air cannons or whatnot, they wear the gear and stand by in the infirmary to receive patients, the engineers do not go load the guns, they suit up and prepare to put out fires and perform the damage control procedure if and when the ship gets hit or something happens, the pilots wear the equipments and prepare to take off and so on Battle station, in short, means "gear up, suit up, go where you're supposed to be and be ready at a penny drop notice to perform whatever duty you're supposed to, according to the battle stations procedure"

I mean something like, you have peridax currently, let's say it regenerates 100 per tick of organ health Now, with what I was suggesting integrating what you was saying, you'd have: - peridax, regenerates 1 per tick - peridax with a surgeon, the physician takes the drug out of the cabinet, loads it in said machine, the surgeon connects the patient to the machine and let it run, regenerates 25 per tick, no scarring - peridax plus, the pharmacist have to make it, regenerates 50 per tick - peridax plus with a surgeon, same as above, regenerates 100 per tick That would encourage: To involve both a surgeon and a physician to treat organ damages without scarring To try to have also a pharmacist if possible, to heal people faster and reduce the mortality rate To actually use the ICU and/or long term ward To give the lonely physician a way to treat someone with a fucked up organ, over a long period of time, even if he's alone in the round and no pharmacist or CMO ever showed up To hand the patient back to a physican after a surgery that gave scarring, place it in the long term ward with the drug that will sooner or later heal the scarring

If the popcap really is two people and what you want to do is just chatting, I feel like you're probably best off using a chat program or the OOC, if someone is playing a robot they likely aren't too much in the mood to chat to begin with

I support the organ scarring being more relevant and the nerfing of some drugs such that surgery would be the best option to fix organ damage, the rest IMHO isn't as good as it sounds on paper fun-wise, perhaps locking the nice chems behind a device placed in the ICU that only the surgeon can activate after hooking up the patient, and only then they will work? That would both give additional things to do to the surgeon, and make the ICU an actually used area

I have an idea @Faye <3 / @kermit: What if, instead of the "battle" stations, we make it (like the british do) "action" stations?

Added a few additions in the POC: The helm can now announce, with a click of a button, the evasive manouver, so people know what to expect and to brace if possible or interrupt something critical they are doing in a safe way (eg. surgeons) The sensors operator can announce from which direction the enemy fire is coming from using the button systems (same as the helm) to let passengers know where to run away from, and engineers/FRs where to run towards, and that there's no fire inbound so that operations can resume The lights now turn red (the same as the red alert) instead of keeping the default colour Please keep in mind this is a proof of concept, as usual video attached showing the new options along the old ones 2022-11-09 14-29-13.mkv

that went over my head lol, sorry I think the UI and the hotkey can be separated however, UI toggle hotkey keep pressed, also I support the idea that it should be configurable

I made a proof of concept in the video, please note it's the first time I ever touch DM language so I'm positive I could have broke something somewhere, and I'm also sure it can be improved, but here it is PS: headphones users beware, I have not balanced the audio 2022-11-07 22-06-37.mkv

Hotkey R to throw. no need for the screen button

Blue and red basically only tells you something about the ship status, they do not tell nor inform you that you are about to be thrown around by the ship doing evasive manouvers, or shook by the gun fire, they don't tell the (relevant) rest of the crew to prepare to assist in loading the ship guns, nor that the ship risk to be hit and vented in different locations, etc. etc., IMHO

I think it would be cool to have an alert level as or on top of the internal ones (green/blue/red/delta) that indicates the crew to prepare for the ship guns operations, with a SOP attached and some sound effects As an example of what I mean, I'll make up a competely arbitrary scenario to describe what would happen: An enemy vessel is spotted on the ship radar, it is deemed hostile and whatever command chain/procedure decides that ship combat is wanted/bound to happen The commander or who is acting as such orders the bridge to prepare for ship combat The bridge actuate the appropriate station alert system A message is sent as an emergency station alert, indicating as such An alarm sound effect is played A recorded voice effect is played: "General quarters general quarters, all hands man your battle stations, set condition zebra throughout the ship" Alarm sound effect is played again All bridge personnel not otherwise ordered: prepare on bridge and key areas to operate the equipments, helms prepare to manouver the ship, prepare to receive and load the weapons projectiles All engineering personnel not otherwise ordered: wear hardsuits with internals, acquire the materials and tools to repair hull breaches and the likes, prepare to assist in weapons repair Medical: FRs prepare hardsuits and to depart to recover injured personnel, doctors and surgeon prepare the inflatable walls to be deployed to contain the atmosphere in medbay, wear internals and/or softsuits Security not otherwise ordered: wear the hardsuits and the rest of the personnel the armors, open armory and prepare to either receive a possible incursion or send one out, prepare internals, patrol the decks Operations: suits and/or internals, haul the ammunitions to the relative weapons to be loaded according to what is needed/ordered Everyone else: prepare internals Off duty / civilians / visitors: prepare internals, group up in secure areas (Again it's just an example of what I mean, not a list of specific things that I propose should happen, except the numbered ones that sounds really cool) .2c