EvilBrage

I have ideas about this, some of which may not relate to each other at all. Okay? Go: #1: Create an account number at character creation automatically, allow players to define a PIN (or allow them to get a random PIN.) #2: During rounds with antagonists, your max credit gain is what you'd normally make in that shift. There is no max credit loss. Extended rounds are 100% canon in terms of credit gain and loss. Significant losses/gains in station accounts will generate logs (unless the black box is destroyed) that duty officers will investigate. #3: Allow a character to arrive on the station with more custom loadout items than normally possible - for a small fee, of course. #4: Alternatively, make characters purchase their loadout items. If you don't have it with you at the shift's conclusion, you have to buy it again to take it with you next shift. If you have someone else's custom loadout item on your person at the shift's conclusion, it is now yours. #5: Allow characters in non-command/security roles to purchase small amounts of contraband to bring onto the station with them (I'm thinking controlled substances, not weapons, here.) #6: Allow players to define custom purchases that only show up on a personal inventory screen. For example, I want Jaylor to buy a sketchkin pistol for home defense - so in an item field, I type "sketchkin pistol" and for a credit cost (I'd recommend a sticky post with guidelines pertaining to item costs) I enter whatever seems appropriate. The credits are deducted from my account, and the item pops up in my inventory tab. This won't have any effect in-game; it's just a vanity-based credit sink. #7: Allow players to define their character's address and lifestyle. Higher classes of living impose a higher cost per shift to keep your accommodations habitable, but they're also shown next to your character's address in their employment records. Another vanity item. #8: Security officers can suggest fines in lieu of brig time; Duty officers can impose them. Any individual with an account in arrears is unable to have a custom loadout and must suffer similarly arbitrary penalties until they pay off their debts.

And any head of security who doesn't prepare for these possibilities is gonna have a bad time.

I like this idea. I know you don't typically use flashbangs and prefer to go right for six revolver shots to the head, but sunglasses only block about 10% of the flashbang's effect. Security helmets, on the other hand, allow an officer to jump right back up after 2 ticks. Compare this to the 13 ticks (longer than a disarm-intent stun from a baton, mind you) that everyone else has to sit through and you'll see the disconnect. People with sunglasses are only marginally better off, stunned for 10 ticks and weakened for 3 instead. Even airtight hardsuits don't provide any level of protection from a flashbang - the only way to reduce your stun time to security officer levels are to have a security helmet, have earmuffs (conveniently also only possessed by security) or be a hulk. A flashbang shouldn't be delivering the same amount of stun as a baton, and I'm curious about the interpretation that it would explode with enough force to knock someone off their feet, or even cause them to drop to the ground when they're 7 tiles away. I'm still adamant about changing the effect to an extended blindness/deafness rather than a stun.

"YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SHUT THE FUCK UP!" "Fuck you, you black armor wearing douche." STOP BREAKING THE LAW, ASSHOLE.

Let's take it down a notch; at present, it can stun me for quite a bit from at least seven squares away. We have two options if we want to balance them out: 1. Reduce the range at which the stun takes place. 2. Remove the stun and replace it with deafness and an extended whiteout for your screen, lowering the effects on individuals with eye protection.

Jaylor is a 5 - and a well documented one at that. And I'm seriously curious about how some of you think your characters are 7-9's. Friggin' edgelords.

It helps in the same way that a wheelchair with flames on it does, or a custom data slate in place of the normal PDA does. It tells a little something more about a character - sure, you could just use your imagination and justify how someone doesn't need something, but it plays a part into a more immersive experience for the occasional unique item to stand out. Yes, I'm asking for a unique turtleneck, but it's not "particularly" unique compared to the large swath of custom items that were linked to deeply emotional XYZ - it's unique in a "less is more" sort of way, which is something I'd argue that would be beneficial to the server, lest we become flooded with heirlooms of long-lost relatives and applications become accepted on the basis of how heart-wrenching their backstory is (just glance through the accepted whitelists and tell me how many 'tragic hero' tropes you can find.) As for the security bit, I'm sure we can both agree that the level of RP between prisoners and security officers isn't exactly "stellar." Both groups are to blame for this, but I've seen more security officers try to engage prisoners as of late (not a majority, mind you, but they're out there.) It's not often you'll hear someone proclaim that they want to be a prisoner, and that's because of the perceived death of RP that being held in the brig entails. I'd assert that I can put a crack in that perception, and if a custom item can expedite that, then why not? tl;dr Less is more. (P.S: And a minor point on how little effort this would require on the part of developers: I've already coded the item with the necessary sprite references for you.)

I'm fairly certain it's a bug; all the code is still in there but it (obviously) just doesn't work.

I don't think I made my metaphor clear enough, let me try to explain in a different way; guardrails. Guardrails are not built because the government assumes you're an ignoramus who would drive off a cliff at the first provocation, but rather in case such an event were to take place. We disable votes during OOC in case someone tries to influence the vote. We have people of many different ages playing on this server, and while I agree that most of them are decent people who are able to take criticism from the community in a constructive manner, administrations should always be somewhat discretionary in their disciplinary actions in case this is not true of the individual in question. Removing guardrails because "most people won't drive off" is silly. To specify who "should" and "should not" be involved with online communities isn't something we decide. That is simply one opinion of many. What any staff needs to establish is a set of rules and procedures that apply to everyone equally while preserving the atmosphere and tone that the server wishes to convey; in my experience, a system of semi-secrecy is necessary (and optimal) for handling these sorts of things. To say otherwise is questioning the integrity, impartiality, and/or rationality of the staff themselves, which is perfectly okay, mind you - but the system itself is solid.

You could simply prevent them from switching their "be antag" from "no" to "yes" on the character startup screen until the proper amount of time has elapsed.

Let's talk about infections. Specifically, removing them. First of all, there's enough accidental ways to die in this game without having to rub ointment on every single wound I take - it's a bit unnecessary. Far more unnecessary is the way infections go wildly out of control if left unchecked for too long, with almost no sign that they're doing so until you need spaceacillin injections (and in my experience, it's been surprisingly difficult finding a doctor who actually knows how to respond to infections.) Second, from a realism standpoint, there's no way any sort of infection known to man would spread so fast.

You've missed the parallel that Cassie was essentially the staff of her server; presumably, she published the logs, had her laugh, and then banned the individuals involved (unless she didn't ban them - that wasn't terribly clear.) That is a punitive style of leadership, as opposed to our own server's corrective style of leadership, ergo the comparison. Apparently they're so gullible that we have OOC turned off for votes and they're so impatient that we have a mandatory 2 hour waiting period before a crew transfer can be called. It's not that they are these things, but we put policies into place to account for all possibilities. If someone's vote is swayed by OOC, we don't want that happening, so we disable OOC.

My only gripe is that when someone sends a fax about something super serious, we usually get a super snarky "improper format lol" back. Even if that's true - really? That's followed by "we're fining everyone with access to a fax machine" if it happens again, which makes absolutely zero sense, business-wise (not to mention cheapening an already oft-unused credit system, as people will simply ignore the fines next round, and probably even that same round.) Focus more on individuals. I'd much prefer to see "XYZ, please report to HR for a performance review" rather than "we're taking money from you now because you've mildly annoyed us."

I feel obligated to weigh in based on my administration experience with other servers (albeit never SS13.) As stated earlier, gaming communities tend to act very similarly in terms of punishment and the explanation thereof. In the interest of shedding some light on why that is, consider that you may eventually be one of the individuals punished for some sort of infraction, somehow. While we (as human beings) do tend to look at punishments of others as indicative of an innate character flaw, we attribute our own punishments as externally motivated (the exact name of this psychological phenomenon escapes me at the moment.) For the staff to be semi-surreptitious about this is ultimately an act of mercy, and giving a reprimanded player the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, if the administrators were to publicly announce "we have banned EvilBrage for three days for End-of-Round grief," your innate conclusion is not that I did something in a specific circumstance, it's that I like to grief and fuck with people. In shifting to a more open structure, you're also shifting the results of bans and other punitive actions from a constructive attempt to conform the individual into an acceptable persona to interact with others on the server (or in severe cases, removing them entirely if they're unable or unwilling to conform) into a destructive form of action, in which we are taking action to punish and humiliate the player rather than reform them - believe it or not, it kills communities. When I first became an administrator for another gaming server and elected to browse through the staff-only forums designated for discussing individual player behavior and punishment for specific events, I was frankly appalled at how many players I knew personally had done things that were very malicious and selfish - but without that knowledge, they seemed sociable and kind enough individuals to play with, which leads me to my point. Nobody is perfect; everyone will have an embarrassing moment, and when yours comes, how do you want the staff to react? Several of you were wondering why Cassie's fiasco with the Apartments server and the log-spreading was stamped out and that player was removed from the community, and the answer is exactly as I've outlined. I can say without a doubt that had the precedent set there been allowed to continue, a lot of good players who made simple mistakes would not be playing any more. Being "transparent" in that manner encourages humiliation in the court of public opinion and ostracized players will simply leave. If you think cliques are bad now, encouraging more transparency would exponentially inflate the problem. This may be surprising to hear from me since I'm also outspoken in my belief that Aurora's complaints aren't handled very effectively, but this isn't the solution to that (or any) problem.

The above statement is true. When he was outed as an antagonist kidnapping another miner, he essentially dipped out to radio silence and wordlessly tried to robust me while I was in a big stompy mech (mistake) when I did find him; he quit because he lost. Hell, I got more RP out of his attempted victim.

Can we kill the absolutely pointless cameras in maintenance? They seem like they're there expressly to allow an AI to expose my antag doomfort, especially considering the ease with which new cameras can be installed if the engineers so desire. Bridge/AI core/Captain's Office also need to be in an area that's less prone to being blown sky high from the exterior.

Help intent handcuffing yourself would be what makes you feign the cuffs. I still like this idea, a lot.

Yes, this. Can we have these on the holodeck? Reminds me a bit of the Star Trek holodeck a bit when I think about it that way.

Thing is, I reported someone who did the exact thing stated above and nothing came of it. Moreover, I reported it literally in the middle of their doing it, and was told that nothing could be done about it, ergo my earlier statement that the job bans are not applied as liberally as they should be.

I dunno, I think we could leave it this way and call it a feature. I mean, if the CSI is so careless to lose his stuff, he really deserves to lose the mechanical advantage tied to them.

Go to mining. And never come back. I may eventually space myself and fly back to Earth in an attempt to figure out what the fuck is going on. When I discover my house is no longer there (and that I'm a 6'4'' human with a strange accent,) I would return to the Aurora, steal a bunch of guns, and go live out my space pirate fantasies.

I exist to make people slightly uncomfortable. Only slightly.

You can already do this. It's cleverly hidden under "auxillary forensic tools."

Because when you report a bad security officer, nothing of substance happens - and you don't have to fill out a whitelist every time you want to play a security officer, but that's beside the point. I've always seen the rule interpreted backwards - that is, an event is non canon unless agreed upon by both parties. Please confer with your fellow moderators and administrators to come to a decision on that, because honestly if you refuse to rewrite the rules and then say something is "generally accepted" when issuing a warning, that's a recipe for a huge amount of confusion. In light of this quote, however, I will now prioritize bad security when I go on antag killing sprees. Let the rivers run red. This is another point I'm trying to make - for all their bluster and announcement capabilities, the duty officers are ineffective as a whole. After some brainstorming, I've come to the conclusion that the most effective solution to this problem is for our administrators to start taking complaints against security more seriously, especially those with repeated problems in which the individual is utterly unrepentant. I'd be completely fine with a more liberal approach to security job bans, both permanent and temporary, because there's honestly no shortage of security players. I can't think of any other measure that doesn't harm good security players as well, and I prefer not to do that.