dessysalta

dessysalta

Unabridged thoughts: As an antagonist player, I'd like to see abilities restructured such that they're not a grab-bag with arbitrary gates based on a single universal action; I think there should be breadth and depth of choice as it pertains to which powers you get for what reason. Basically, I don't want feeding to be the only way to unlock new abilities and I think existing abilities need to be reworked to be more situational rather than broad utility that's used by everyone and their mother. I'd also like to see vampire go from being vampire and more of an all-encompassing supernatural. Basically, I'd like for there to be choices aside from playing the most obvious vampire archetypes, or at least make those abilities and archetypes more mechanically interesting. I think these choices would allow for more personal freedom in gimmicks and incentivize roleplay over strict mechanics. Part of the appeal of gamemodes like Traitor and Mercenary are that they're incredibly free-form and let you do literally anything and trade for whatever the magical shopping cart doesn't have, and relatively recently have received psionic starters and such inside the uplink to allow for even more creativity to blossom (with discussions regarding changeling and vampire starters having been made as well, though I forget their consensus- either way, I support those too for the same reasons). The more options a "vampire" has, and the more people who can execute unique ideas there are, the better. Likewise, please compensate IPCs and Diona. I don't like readying up, as an antagonist or otherwise, to be completely stonewalled each round because of silicode preventing the clean inclusion of it. I would really like to see IPCs and Diona be given the ability to bite and drink blood, and then the players allowed to flavor it however the hell they want. These two in particular (unorthodox mechanical species + the literal blood-drinking species in canon) would be amazing to have on the roster, and if unique abilities for them were implemented, all the better. (Imagine a more potent Diona bite that forces your character into an emotional state? An IPC that runs off of blood and can meld it with its steel to create weird fucked up blood-metal-alloy weapons, or turn humans into biomechanical thralls from some kind of fucked up virus? Stuff like that.) As a non-antagonist, as it pertains to one of my previous suggestions I would really rather there be other abilities or items than combat and escape tools. As it stands, some of my worst memories of any antagonist come from them and changelings—I don't speak for everyone, but I can say that "I'm going to be bloodthirsty and then frenzy about an hour in" is something that's been seen a frustratingly disproportionate amount of times over the years. I believe this is due to the constraints of the extremely combat-oriented abilities with absolutely nothing else (not even an uplink or access to exploitables) to compense. I can't remember the last time, if any, that a vampire round held a genuine narrative and wasn't just "my character is a vampire now", "give me bloodpacks or die", or "I'm going to frenzy 40 minutes in". As both, I want to see more narrative options that might or might not be strictly aligned to the "vampire" theme. Let me or others do weird freak cult (the generic kind, not the Nar'sien one. Although...) nonsense, be some demon from hell, a half-dead geist, a fey-touched weirdo, or other mystical bullshit. Revenant (the gamemode) plays to the supernatural themes but never gets voted and is incredibly antiquated because of its lack of round-start antagonists (instead spawning them in via ghost role) and general lack of fun without adminbus. To those ends, the more weird magical nonsense you can do, the better. Besides, what other gamemode implements magic, the unnatural, or religious as core themes? It's only cult, and I want more variety than that. It would allow for more bizarre and "out there" gimmicks that break the mold and flip the setting on its head (like cult). Astute observers may notice all of the supernaturals I mentioned (demon, geist, "fey-touched" being a replacement for another that I'll explain in a sec) are references to White Wolf/Paradox Interactive, the same people who made Vampire: The Masquerade. All of the weird, cryptic, gothic stuff they have in their books is fucking delicious as fluff and lore. Obviously at a point what's being added far exceeds the original scope of "just make the Vampire mode more Vampire", but I can't but attest to the idea of getting more gritty mechanics or flavor items as it pertains to what would basically be Aurora's Demon: The Descent, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Changeling: The Lost, etc. It would just be cool as hell from a variety and narrative standpoint; at least for vampire specifically, I think the massive amount of stuff you can either import or take inspiration from as it pertains to White Wolf would offer an insane amount of variety while retaining the intrigue-heavy roots of vampires in fiction. Bonus points if you do anything with Exalted. I could talk at length about their abilities and how to implement them, but the long short of it is look into V:TM's "Disciplines" and then work your way around the rest of the books. Changeling: The Lost, for instance, has Contracts instead of Disciplines, which are still magical effects they can enact at will. Exalted has Charms. etc etc Anywho: TL;DR I'd like more abilities for variety and flavor, reworks of existing combat abilities OR additional abilities that are strictly non-combat, to see IPCs and Diona compensated or included in some way, and the supernatural part of vampire to be the most touched on rather than the idea of vampire existing as solely vampires. The reason the other gamemodes are popular is because they're very free-form and offer a lot more than meets the eye. Pretty please, give me more supernatural stuff to play with- I can easily and very happily imagine a world where people vote Mercenary for canon-derived gimmicks whereas they'd vote Vampire (or Supernatural etc.) for otherworldly, bizarre, or mind-fucky stuff.

and unrelated:

OR, be et tropyckal, it may have DYUERS COLOURS. +1. I LOOOVE Enchanted's characters and think they're one of the best writers out there.

I'm not against this, but NanoTrasen feels like the more immediately obvious pick to allow into engineering. There's a thread that predates this one by quite a lot- but either way it would have to be NT or the PMCG, not both (per the 3 depts rule).

I have a couple of playlists dedicated to a few characters, but I've generally only imagined a few songs when it comes to themes for them. Like... Nietzschka: Kira Vazquez: Ungnyeo: ...and whenever I play my Imperial priestess (Svetlana Tvrglavac) I listen to Keygen Church and especially Tenebre Rosse Sangue. Characters I like but have no idea what to use for their theme would be GEVURAH, Zsokuzi Gawgaryn, and Kasa'an Drek'za.

I think The Ill-Fated is one of the best writers on this server, dating back several years of play with extremely well-made characters. Seeing their old whitelist get stripped was a huge surprise, and if they're reapplying I have no doubts they'll be able to satisfy. +1. I want to see how they impress this time around.

Another couple of questions: How different will representatives/execs/consular officers be? And will retired or player-killed characters be able to make returns, provided they aren't actually dead? (I.e. characters that were fired or extradited)

Out of curiosity, are there currently any defined "no-go" groups or characters that simply cannot or will not survive the skip, short of old age? Additionally, will there be sweeping changes to species as a result of the major shift? It's my understanding a lot of characters are really set in stone in the current setting (i.e. a vaurca or corporate IPC is more than very unlikely to end up anywhere else)—what do you think will be done with those characters or their species, provided their owners would like to see them persist? Unrelated: How do you and the rest of staff plan to tackle self-antagonism or character goals? Freelancer settings that retain a great degree of individuality in their characters—for instance, Sojourn—can inspire choices that are primarily motivated OOCly, lack tangible effects, and/or ultimately make someone's round worse without good reasoning. While Aurora can and admittedly does suffer from this on occasion as with any server, these settings, combined with the emphasis placed on character freedom, can exacerbate it. With respect to Sojourn and its mistakes (such as serious issues with meta groups, self antagonism, and an utter lack of crew cohesion), how do you think you can prevent those issues from popping up, assuming they're bound to? Oh, and how do you foresee CCIA sticking around? Will it just be the IAD for the new ship, or something else?

Aside from SS14's administration being a bag of fun (sarcasm), Aurora wouldn't survive because their (SS14's) policies are so horrendously against any kind of conflict or meaningful interactions. That, and every single server plays like /TG/. It's too fast, the mechanics are all wrong for a heavy roleplay setting, and it's just way too much work. I, personally, would never play on any server that migrates from SS13 to SS14; the developers for SS14 (who have final say on pretty much anything that exists within it) have goals that run antithetical to SS13 and its playerbase, and I will never support them. The reason I came over to SS13 is because the devs and administration of SS14 treat it like the new Garry's Mod. Enforce the rules, never make room for gimmicks, ban or kick at the slightest inconvenience, even on MRP, "RDM RDM RDM!". On SS13 the first thing that happened after I accidentally killed a couple people is we had a short talk, I was told how I did so and not to do it again...and that's it. On SS14 I did so by mistake, they were cloned in 60s, and I got banned for 3 days, with absolutely no explanation of what I did wrong. Allegedly, WizDen (the "main" servers) administration has cited nonexistent threats from third parties to justify penal action on servers they dislike. It's a mess. Besides, everyone who shifts over would need to get their notes and warnings redone, import each character with their charges or records, whitelists, not to mention all of the other backend stuff I'm missing. But I'm not a dev, and I hate coding, so I dunno how hard that would be. TL;DR Not that it was going to be the case, but yeah, please don't move to SS14 if you have the chance.

TL;DR This was an amazing arc. So, I unfortunately wasn't there during the finale (sad) but I was for a couple of the events along the way; even outside of the events themselves it felt very oppressive, in a good way. The change in atmosphere from "we're terrifying corporates" to "we're fish in a barrel and there's a bear down the block" was so good, and from the radio signals to little hints from staff to even just the way the ship's crew played it, it felt real. I loved the hell out of it, personally. On a command level, it was a lot of fun. I know IC suggestions were more supposed to be a few sentences here and there (at least I assume so), but getting to write a whole bunch on the forums and see other people do so in turn was awesome. It was cool as fuck seeing people let out their more traditional writing styles for this event, in combination with stuff experienced in-game. (Shout out to Ksshzue "PUT ME IN A POD AND FIRE ME AT THEM!" Hiza LMAO) The events themselves were really good; I don't think the arc felt super high budget but I don't think it felt low budget as described, either. It was a departure from the massive custom maps we usually get for events, but honestly I don't think that was a negative at all. It was nice to see stuff goin' on and the staff made it so much more worthwhile with the inclusion of little features and hints (which yes, I'm touching upon again because it was so cool to see people chime in with "hey, this radio station is telling us to go here, let's check it out!"). It goes to show that we don't need a ton of custom things to make a really good arc that leaves so many characters changed before, during, and after it. Onto the nitpicks: I really don't have much to say other than to echo the slot problem. When I showed up for the first event, it definitely felt like there was too much competition for all the slots and as a result I got just a little bit sidelined (though command remedied the issue by putting me in an auxiliary role, which was a new and fun experience). Though, this is more of a long-standing issue and not so much one applicable to only this event. All in all, I loved it. From making my characters scared and giving them new motivations, to being enveloped in the little touches and atmosphere set both by staff and the players, it was just good. More like this, please. EDIT: Oh, and the amount of off-ships and antagonists that were inspired as a result was fucking awesome.