EvilBrage

So, uhh, server's dead you guys.

Put something in the revolutionary's t8r uplink that can trigger the "virus" event that opens up the prison doors and shuts off the lights. I've always wanted to see event triggers in addition to items in the uplink (prison breakout, ion anomaly, drone hacking, things that the Syndicate could be expected to orchestrate.) If by the almighty power of statistics they don't manage to catch all of you in a sweep-and-brig, then someone can pop the button and suddenly the six bored prisoners become rioters who will probably take down the two or three man teams sent to stuff people into the permabrig.

Oh, how you skew the event to make it look so innocuous. It wasn't a roboticist - they took "the other guy's word" because it was a Research Director, played by me. Despite any life-saving potential earlier, your pAI was being a huge nuisance by scuttling around and yelling nonsensical things at people, and the moment I bopped it on the head and picked it up (which was a relatively nonviolent way of dealing with the issue, mind you), you shot me with a virus. There was no interaction beyond a shout for him to drop it and the subsequent shot from the syringe gun you used to infect him, barely two seconds apart. Judging from the fact that you're the kind of person who keeps viruses in syringe guns during a nuke round, I have an alternate theory: you wanted to try it out and were looking for an excuse to do so, and so you took the most childish excuse you could find at the end of the round. Briefcases do not fit inside backpacks, and even if they did, I searched every container on your person for an antibody with no success. Downplaying the issue that got you jobbanned in the first place compounded with lying about it to make it seem harmless doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture. Worse yet is that you posted with the intent to defend the very action that put you in this position in the first place. My perception of a job ban has always been that it serves to teach a lesson in how not to conduct yourself in that particular job; in my opinion, you haven't learned a thing.

People don't call votes because they're not interacting with an antag; they call votes because they're not doing anything they couldn't do in an extended round. Something simple like giving medbay a body to catalog and autopsy, the detective a pool of blood to investigate, or an engineer a suspiciously broken APC to fix can make all the difference. Some antags are afraid to do these things because their focus is on being a perfect antag, not on making a round fun. Accomplishing your objectives perfectly was inherently flawed, which is why we have objectiveless antags now; even that is a double-edged sword in that instead of performing a task with medical precision, now an antag doesn't have to do anything they don't want to, especially risky operations like stealing the nuke disc or assassinating the captain.

Well, yeah, but what I meant was that it wasn't coded in. Personally, if a round goes on for too long without something happening and then something finally does happen, it's really sort of a sudden and unwelcome shift in mood. You're enjoying a nice, relaxed chair RP and then suddenly a bomb goes off in medbay, and it's like you're putting everything that's happening on hold in order to deal with that (if you're a department required to do that sort of thing.) My point, though, is that it's not like a vote is a sure-fire way to kill a round. If a vote for a transfer passes, that means that half of the players at very least want a new round for whatever reason. At the risk of sounding pretentious, if you need more than two hours to set something up and execute it, then that's probably the wrong way to go about antagging. If you're so meticulously careful that no one else has anything to do for two hours, then I think people are well within their rights to call for another round. Think about why a round would take two hours to begin with - a changeling is trying to be perfect and undetected, a traitor is stealing things and covering his tracks very well, or a cult is busy researching words and generally avoiding everyone. That's all well and good, but if it takes two whole hours to do it, that's where the problem comes in, if you ask me. I see what we're trying to do, but bumping the minimum round time up an hour won't lead to higher quality rounds, because the issue with those rounds with potential lies with player behavior and not an inherent flaw with the way the server works. Some rounds are good, some rounds are not, and it's not so much a "problem to be addressed" as a fact of the game.

If more than half of the crew can't find interest in the round and wants to change it, I really see no reason to put a restriction on round time at all, let alone three hours. If a round is slow and people want to call a vote, it's because something is not being done right on the antagonist side of things - from all the times I've been every type of antagonist, I can safely say that if you don't have people engaged within two hours, you're doing something wrong enough to warrant the round coming to a close. A round timer is, in my opinion, a form of favoritism towards the small clique that's actually receiving RP while a majority of players could very well be bored and uninvolved (and again, an antag who does not make a reasonable effort to involve everyone isn't doing something right.) What I would support, however, is a thirty minute minimum between crew transfer votes. If one fails, then yes, there's a reasonable amount of expectation that another one shouldn't be called five minutes later, and while we do have administrators to cancel votes, that seems like something that should be streamlined instead of a hard minimum round time (sans an emergency shuttle being called.)

In my opinion, behavior like this really stems from the fact that IC behavior can be retconned at the will of the player. That is, they will never suffer the consequences of their actions because if any action does result in consequence, you can say "lol didn't happen" and the world keeps on turning. So when we have people constantly "getting away" with things, we eventually breed a culture in which doing these things that would normally get you fired becomes okay. Think about it - in real life, if you intentionally smash a window at your place of employment, chances are pretty good that you're getting fired. If you intentionally smash a window on Aurora, you'll get ten minutes in the brig for vandalism, at worst. However, there's really not a very good alternative to this beyond having administrators themselves decide whether or not a disciplinary action is canon (which, obviously, would take forever.) Seven - I can understand wanting to make someone's life extremely difficult, and I've found that the best way to go about this is paperwork. If you're the research director, force them to sign a form for every single article they create with the protolathe. Make them sign a waiver of some sort, or make your own free-form document as a method to get back at them. An example for you: a roboticist decided it would be a swell idea to pop an MMI into a mech because it was his friend, despite my director's orders to the contrary a shift before. I have a number of options here: 1) I can use the robotics console to EMP-blast the mech and tell security to arrest the roboticist. 2) I can force the roboticist to sign a form that states that he will serve time for all crimes committed by the mech, in addition to neglect of duty charges. Your most powerful weapon of vengeance as a head of staff isn't the cool Lawgiver you can make with the protolathe, or the telescopic baton; if you want to make someone's life miserable, your best weapon is your authority. Stooping to illicit modification of arrest records or locking people out of rooms is only going to make you look bad, both ICly and OOCly. On the other hand - anyone who comes to the complaint board about how much paperwork they had to do is out of their mind and probably going to be laughed at, and that makes you look good. Who cares if they're the captain? Now they have a potential "exceeding official powers" charge to stare down, and what happens after that, you ask? Fun.

I haven't really seen it as a measure to cut costs or the like, but rather as a way of containing the destructive power of a station. I've seen the example of the lone hero holding out against the legions of carp or what have you, but think of this from a company perspective: do they really want anyone who gets their hands on a laser rifle to be able to neutralize the rest of the station? Just the strategic placement of rechargers as well as the lackluster damage done by laser weapons leads me to believe that these are civilian model weapons that have been intentionally watered down by NanoTrasen. Research is capable of creating truly military-grade weaponry (the advanced energy guns that automagically recharge comes to mind) and the Pulse Rifles carried by the Death Squad are also an example of something that was truly meant to be military grade. The captain having a gun with a regenerating battery made sense, especially since it's inside a display case; it was probably a relic from his soldier days or something equally cliché, but more importantly, was actually meant to be used in extended combat on a battlefront as opposed to fired a few times to incapacitate someone. You know that guy in the white shirt and shiny badge behind the desk at your neighborhood corporate building? Putting in stronger energy weapons is the equivalent of giving him a fully automatic AR15 with two clips. Barney does not need an AR15, and if a mysterious band of terrorists show up, that's when you call the police (or the ERT, as our server's comparison.) The reason laser guns don't seem able to handle combat scenarios is because they weren't meant to, in my opinion - I'm not entirely convinced that NanoTrasen is ignorant that its research station is run by asylum inmates.

Throughout the cult rounds I've seen, short of cultists outright slaying individuals with their swords (which is ironically how most cults are outed), everyone generally shies away from accusations out of fear of being accused of metagaming. I'm not sure that's a good thing, and I'm not sure how to solve it, but I am of the opinion that cults have it a bit easier than other antags (who can be identified by the readily apparent danger they represent, whether by alien needles, terrorist uplinks/paraphernalia, viciously glowing eyes, blood red hardsuits, or being a friggin WIZARD). I'd like to see the chaplain and the librarian afforded a bit more knowledge about Nar'sie's cult. I like Baystation 12's guidelines (which are linked to in our own ruleset, mind you.) For the chaplain to go on a vigilante spree in response to being unable to convince others of the danger of the cult would not only be a great plot for a movie, but I think it would work for the server as well. Depending on how many people he could convince, I could see a nice three-sided conflict between the Cult, the Witch Hunt, and the Skeptics.

File all the complaints you want to, but that doesn't make your actions any less wrong; I don't think you're understanding that at all.

So if something seems fun, anyone can act out and start blowing people up, antag or not? Supporting someone and caring for them is one thing - manufacturing explosives and throwing them at a security team and the acting captain is quite another. If everyone could play an edgy psycho killer with a shady backstory, they would, but the server as a whole is neither fun nor remotely approaching realism with a staff like that.

You can resist the cult conversion, though, so it's closer to RP-Rev in that you can't just force people to join you. And without actual objectives, cult is actually a worthwhile round type if the cultists know how to work within the new boundaries (and lack thereof) correctly. As for the mimes and clown correlation to chucklefucking, people could do that just as easily with assistants. They weren't removed because it's any easier to screw with the station as a clown or mime - it was because of the stigma associated with them. Unlike your other examples of hydroponics or cargo, it takes actual effort to use them in a manner that can ruin someone's round, as opposed to a butthurt player who just died spamming blood writing to let everyone know that one person in particular is a cultist. Yes, we could ahelp instances in which this happens, but we could've ahelped instances in which clowns or mimes grief like any other individual, but they were removed instead.

We removed clowns and mimes.

The station isn't cut up into separate nations; you act like security and cargo could be "the enemy" if you do naught but decide it so. Judging from the extended round the other night, I can't say that I'm confident that you've actually taken the above to heart. A quick recap for those of you who weren't there: The geneticist decided to imbue herself with powers and run around as a hulk and smash walls down. Nothing new there. When she was arrested, however, many individuals jumped to her defense, Lucy Sparks among them. My own character (Casval Bederstadt) was convinced into allowing the geneticist (Katelynn Mcmullen) to stay in the permabrig without restraints either until her powers could be reversed, or the crew transfer shuttle arrived. Apparently, however, Lucy Sparks decided to break the exterior prison windows and aid the geneticist in escaping to the research outpost. Bear in mind that this all happened during an extended round - there were no antagonists. After several threats of mass murder over the radio by McMullen, Bederstadt gets the small security team suited up and begins a manhunt. When the research outpost was searched, Lucy Sparks exited a small room that was found to be housing Katelynn; she was arrested and they were bringing her back to the main station, but Lucy decided to sabotage the door and the shuttle. When questioned, she stated she would not be handing over Katelynn as "the next stage of human evolution," to which Casval responds by accusing the two of them of mutiny and threatening to execute Katelynn if she did not return on the shuttle. Lucy decided to call Casval's bluff, which prompted him to execute Katelynn out of rage and spite (and being the acting captain, he could legally authorize the execution.) They abandoned her body and went back for the shuttle that Lucy had since brought back. Without a word, she then chucks an explosive grenade at Casval's team. He picks it up and tries to throw it back, but since his player clicked on the shuttle like a moron without hitting the throw button, he ended up just standing there. One of the officers is killed shortly after the explosion, and Casval barely survives for the time being along with a third officer who was injured, but not critically so. Before Lucy could escape, she was quickly dispatched by the remaining two members of the team, but Casval died shortly after. My point is this: It would've been a great round if they were antagonists, but they weren't. From my point of view, Lucy Sparks essentially caused mayhem and murdered two individuals, provoked only by the incarceration of someone who would have been inspected at Central Command; that's not an action becoming of a player, let alone a whitelisted one. Bear in mind that she did not know that Katelynn was executed when she threw the explosive grenade at the three, and that even so, there's really no excuse for taking things to such an extreme level without intense personal provocation which was non-existent in this case.

I can't say I have any problems with Nightmare as an administrator, but I do have problems with Nasir as a character; I can recall a few instances that could be described, at very least, as "unbecoming." Mind, I have to reach about a month or two back, but I remember playing Internal Affairs and watching Nasir climb over the bar again and again to get drunk, and every time, he was arrested for doing so. Soon enough, the transfer shuttle was coming and my character informed Nasir that he would be filing an official report with Central Command about his behavior, to which he casually replies to the effect of, "what you say doesn't matter, they'll just hire me again for the next shift like they always do." Threats of physical violence were abound after the exchange as well. I can also recall numerous instances in which fear and common sense were ignored in favor of charging my antagonist characters with nothing but claws. It is ridiculous that an administrator was so willing to disturb the atmosphere by drawing upon the very OOC knowledge that CentCom will not fire anyone unless their players decide to shelve a character, and that in and of itself is telling of Nightmare's attitude while playing Nasir, I believe. He is incapable of playing Nasir in a disadvantageous position, whether it be fear, pain, lack of intelligence, or simple self-preservation. It's my belief that he associates himself with Nasir too deeply, and his pride results in this kind of behavior. I haven't noticed this happen with any other characters, but again, I haven't actually seen any of his other characters, which may indicate that Nasir is the only one he's played for a while. Switching characters around is important to keep them all fresh. No one should have to dread interacting with a particular character; games are supposed to be fun.

Yes, the administrators online at the time were asleep. I disagree on that second point, however - I believe it's a function that detracts from gameplay, even in the event that it's used as it was intended.

Another idea to throw in there to run parallel to the idea of morally objectionable genetics: protohuman thralls. In essence, a monkey turned into a human (a process which should be a bit more difficult than it currently is) would open up another window of neural programming commands after being injected with a 'thrall' implant. This would allow the geneticist to program the protohuman with different tasks; if you tell him to clean and give him a bar of soap, he'll go around the station mindlessly scrubbing the dirt he finds. Or maybe a particular area needs slightly more protection? Tell them to guard a particular area. Low on materials? Set him to mine things. Traitor? Use an emagged genetics console to send all of your protohumans on a murderous rampage.

During a cult round last night, I was more or less constantly followed by a ghost of someone in particular who decided to, whenever I was near anyone, spam blood writing on the ground that OMG HE IS ONE OF THEM DO NOT HELP HIM. This was far beyond annoying, and was actually a contributing factor to the rather rapid deterioration of the round in question. Creepy things happening during a cult round is fun, but the fun deteriorates very quickly with each use. It also more or less gives the round type away OOCly in a secret scenario. Could we limit or even remove the ghost writing after death?

Why not let other people hear your stomach rumblies too, if they're that bad?

Jaylor Rameau is a borderline kleptomaniac; he will frequently scalp his own shipments from cargo, and if Tau Ceti Daily announces a lottery winner, he will do his utmost to steal the lottery winnings. Samuel Avalon is a very two-faced individual. His facade of cheerfulness is only to get ahead, while he is actually best categorized as a solipsist and a nihilist.

Having a character that's slightly unhinged and perhaps makes a few errors is good. Having a character who's batshit crazy (see: goes around killing every single animal, drinks so heavily as to induce vomiting on purpose, etc.) is not. The line isn't as fine as people would like to believe - I'd just recommend applying a bit more common sense. Promoting someone to become a head of staff with a heavy criminal record might be a bit over the top, but if someone's just requesting extra access and the captain thinks it's not that important to check for records in that circumstance, that creates a bit more of a believable character. A guideline I'd use is this: how much does your boss get away with at your real job?

That should probably be stated in the whitelist application, then. The way it reads as-is is extremely open-ended, and given that I could scrap any idea I present here in favor of any other concept I could think of later on, I'm sorry to say I don't quite follow your logic. I'm sure that anyone could come up with a suitable character for a head-level position, and I'd argue that the whitelist's purpose is not to see how creative you can be with a head of staff's backstory, but rather to gauge OOC maturity and capability.

I thought about doing that, but that's so mainstream. And then I saw this question and decided that since 95% of applicants choose a character suited to being a head of staff, I would pick one that wasn't: Just as important (and perhaps even more important) than making a "convincing" head of staff character is knowing which characters are not suited to become a head of staff. I've seen a lot of snowflake syndrome (albeit perhaps not on this server) regarding ex-cons and known ex-Syndies who are somehow miraculously able to obtain a position as a head of staff, and it's just silly.