GhostInSpace

I know this is kind of old, but if you see this thread: You'll find that my unban appeal was approved. For some reason I am still listed as being banned for 1 minute when I try to join the server. I was hoping to have an opportunity to play again! Thank you.

Okay, will do, thank you.

Understood. May I be unbanned now?

I get what you're saying. My character isn't really looking for excuses to break into the brig (Edit: whoops I meant to say Captain's Quarters, but yes, the Brig as well) on a shiftly basis though. He frequently does it while acting as an antagonist (done it once as a Cultist and once as a Revolutionary, broke into the Brig once as an Operative) or if the circumstances are extreme, like a massive bomb detonating in the departures area and the command pods are the only escape pods left. That being said, the Captain's Quarters isn't all that secure. If you have access to a voidsuit and outer space, you can break in easily enough. The combination is: screwdriver, crowbar, screwdriver, rotate window 90 degrees, wirecutters, screwdriver, crowbar, screwdriver, rotate window 90 degrees, bing, bang, boom, you're in.

Strictly speaking, I don't think what I had my character do during that session was over the line at all. I am a fan and a practitioner of organic roleplaying— or call it reactive roleplaying if you prefer. What I mean by this is I develop my character's personality and backstory, and I act in character and react to the actions taken by other characters and thus allow other characters to react IC to mine. In the particular session that led to my perma, my character was receiving no assistance from Security despite pointing out a major security risk (in this case it was an Assistant equipping themselves with insulated gloves) and there was a character on the Aurora who was claiming to be a mercenary bounty hunter making repeated requests over general comms to assassinate my character, while simultaneously assassinating my character's character through repeated insults. My character's intention in breaking into the Captain's Quarters and looting everything of value (specifically two e-pistols, a hand teleporter, and the Captain's spare ID card) was to attempt to sell them to the Traitor Antagonist on station at the time for fat stacks of ingame dosh. The Traitor at the time was the aforementioned Assistant that had procured the insulated gloves. Either that, or he was simply going to keep them as souvenirs of a bad day at work. I personally believe that my character's decision to break into the Captain's Quarters from spacevoid in a hardsuit had developed organically IC, and I am sorry that I wasn't able to illustrate that to you through our discussion over adminhelps. Jake Stahl, my skin at the time, is a criminal. He is a crook. He has contacts to the Tau Ceti black market, and has a criminal past, so I thought some illicit action would be justified. All that being said, my personal perspective on self antagging is this: If you are committing actions that fall into the Redlisted area in the Corporate Law handbook, or your combined infractions are amounting to a permabrig sentence, then it is probably self antagging and you shouldn't do it without some sort of OOC approval (such as by speaking with an Admin over ahelps) or if you are in an Antagonist role, in which case you have more freedom in your actions.

BYOND Key: GhostInSpace, SpectralSquid Total Ban Length: Permaban Banning staff member's Key: Garnascus Reason of Ban: Broke into the Captain's Quarters to "have some fun", coupled with an extreme abuse of escalation of force and self-antagonistic behaviour over the last three months. Reason for Appeal: I like the server and would like to continue to play on the server. Aurora is the only server that offers a gamemode vote, so it's the only RP server that offers the ability to experience each gamemode from both the perspective of standard crew and antagonists. My character had his IC reasons for infiltrating the Captain's Quarters which unfortunately Garnascus did not find acceptable. I have a better idea what sort of behaviour constitutes self-antagonism now. I would very much like to continue to play on the server.

Bye now.

I have some concerns with this, and I'll outline them now: Sorry to interject here, but... First: I don't picture NanoTrasen as "corrupt and vicious." I would say that the Nanotrasen corporation is utterly and totally amoral, and driven largely by the goal of ensuring both the success of their various projects and a very high bottom-line profit at the end of every fiscal year. Of course, this profit-driven total amorality means that sometimes the decisions made by the company and N.T. Central Command may appear as heartless, vicious, and corrupt. However: NanoTrasen is also the biggest and most powerful megacorporation in known space. In all of known space. On the galactic stage, even among highly advanced species like the Skrell, the corporation is literally peerless and dominates a number of different markets from plasma research and refinement to interstellar warpgate travel. Being a Terran company, they probably have public and private, hidden ties to the Sol Alliance and are likely a major contributor to Sol's Military-Industrial Complex. Unless there is another heretofore unknown private corporate entity being run somewhere else in the universe, NanoTrasen is (within the setting of the game and the server's setting) the biggest and the best. Corporations that have succeeded in achieving huge amounts of wealth, influence, and power— And I am talking about actually massive corporations and real power, not Walmart building big box stores in small towns and forcing out mom and pop toolshops and grocery stores, but the kind of really powerful corporations that can exert influence on a global scale, are actually wildly successful and typically offer very appealing jobs due to the benefits that they offer their employees. Health care benefits are typically one of the things that they offer their employees. Corporations value loyalty and service. In real life, every corporation I've worked for (and actually in every job I've worked for) the general rule has been this: after you have contributed X amount of service hours, you are entitled to X benefits regardless of your position within the company. Corporations want to ensure that their employees are productive. A happy employee is a productive employee. For employees to be happy, corporations will typically offer anything that is realistically feasible to ensure a safe and fun working environment, and to eliminate stresses in an employee's personal life. There is little a corporation can offer an employee in regards to their personal life besides: a) Paying them money so that they can maintain a comfortable standard of living and b) Ensure that they are always in good health, and have access to good healthcare providers in the event that their health fails for any reason. You have the same healthcare plan as your coworkers, and your supervisors, and your supervisor's supervisors, and their coworkers, presumably all the way up to the company's CEO. It will probably cover things like dental, eye care, mechanical prosthesis repairs and maintenance and, in the event of a work-related accident, access to treatment for serious life threatening injuries— and, in 2457, where cloning is a relatively easy process to perform if you're a trained geneticist, a guarantee that you will be cloned by the corporation if you die on the job. This plan will probably not cover things like Rejuvanate treatments to ensure you are beautiful and young throughout your whole life, or cover the surgery to transplant your brain into a Tajaran IPC shell simply because you feel more like a Tajaran than a Terran, nor will your health care plan provide access to cloning facilities if you are say for example murdered in a dispute over space drugs in a bar on Mendell City, or shot in the head by an Unathi thug hulking out on Hyperzine while you're getting credits from an ATM. If your character has access to these sorts of things, you probably have a very well-paid, highly successful character who has access to private healthcare options not offered to all employees as part of their employment contract. A final note on the fictional NanoTrasen healthcare plan: the medical facilities on station are in fact NanoTrasen owned and operated. There is no reason that they would not offer on-site cloning services to all employees in the event of any workplace death. Now, you were saying something about death... Right! You're implying here that every chef, botanist, assistant, medical doctor, surgeon, scientist, lab assistant, nursing intern, librarian, etc, routinely faces and encounters death on a regular round to round basis. This is actually not the case, and from an IC perspective character death should always be a very serious concern for your character, because when your character is actually facing death the last thing on their mind should be "Oh well, they'll just clone me later so it's all good." If your character is in a life or death situation, they should probably be thinking "OMFG I DONT WANT TO DIE." and if your thoughts are otherwise you're probably not taking the situation or your character very seriously. Aurora is a Heavy RP server. The server actually has a very clear rule which I'll reference now: What this means to me is that if your character is habitually climbing or "falling" into disposal units, you are probably playing a character that is too incompetent to have succeeded in getting themselves a job with the biggest and most powerful and most successful corporation in the whole known galaxy, regardless of whether you're a greyshirt, a security cadet, a geneticist or the C.E. (all examples of people I've seen end up in the disposals IC). Note: I am going to point out that it is impossible to "accidentally" fall into a disposal unit. The game specifies when you interact with one that your character is attempting to climb into the disposal unit. The action that you, the player, have to perform is a click and drag from yourself to the disposal. It is always intentional and never an accident, and therefore if you end up in disposals while I'm working Cargo Bay, don't be surprised if my character "accidentally" (totally intentionally) mass drives your character's dumb ass into space. Now, that is called being vicious and corrupt. What I am trying to say in regards to this disposals business is this: Players who routinely are having their characters climb into a mechanical apparatus designed for transporting garbage and other material around the station, players (and characters) who are fully aware that climbing into a disposal unit will have their character violently ground up by the workings of said machine, are either playing psychotic or insane characters, which is against the rules, or they are playing incompetent characters not performing their job to a satisfactory standard, characters that probably would've been fired a long time ago or, more likely, wouldn't have even been hired. Either way, it's not Heavy RPing at all. There's a difference to being committed to the round and being committed to your character's involvement in the round. Different characters have different jobs, skillsets, and relationships. It is easy enough to say "just jump back into the round as a new character and join in again!" but often not as easy in execution. Plus, if you are respawning into a round with a new character that character should have no knowledge of what's going on on station before they arrived— even though you, as a player, clearly would —so you would have to tread particularly carefully to avoid metagaming and using knowledge of the situation outside what your character would have. Additionally, this may not even always be feasible if you are waiting thirty minutes for a respawn and the round is already two hours in and people are calling for a crew transfer vote. Well, as I understand it, the Chaplain role actually has a pretty crucial part to play in certain round types like Cult and Vampire, so having them be able to be permanently removed from the round could give OOC advantages to antags and open the door for all kinds of dumb shit. But that's an OOC perspective on game mechanics. Not really pertinent. As I said before, employees in the civilian sector are not exposed to death as frequently as other departments but in some circumstances and situations they do end up getting killed or dying, and it isn't always because they are throwing themselves in harm's way. Cutting out cloning for the civilian sector only serves to remove RP potential for both characters in the civilian sector and the medics that handle cloning, which is why I think it's a bad idea. As it stands though, any good Geneticist will know to prioritize cloning of certain individuals over other individuals based on rank and importance to the events at hand. Is the station undergoing an engineering emergency? A good geneticist should know to clone the dead Engineer before the dead Assistant or the dead Warden or the dead Chef. If any limitation is going to be placed on cloning in game due to certain characters / jobs being "more important" than others, it should be limited ONLY to the Chiefs of Staff: Captain, Head of Personnel, Research Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Security, and nobody else. Out of curiosity, is this suggestion a thinly veiled attempt to get the server to discuss permanent character death as a rule?

I have some concerns with this, and I'll outline them now: Sorry to interject here, but... First: I don't picture NanoTrasen as "corrupt and vicious." I would say that the Nanotrasen corporation is utterly and totally amoral, and driven largely by the goal of ensuring both the success of their various projects and a very high bottom-line profit at the end of every fiscal year. Of course, this profit-driven total amorality means that sometimes the decisions made by the company and N.T. Central Command may appear as heartless, vicious, and corrupt. However: NanoTrasen is also the biggest and most powerful megacorporation in known space. In all of known space. On the galactic stage, even among highly advanced species like the Skrell, the corporation is literally peerless and dominates a number of different markets from plasma research and refinement to interstellar warpgate travel. Being a Terran company, they probably have public and private, hidden ties to the Sol Alliance and are likely a major contributor to Sol's Military-Industrial Complex. Unless there is another heretofore unknown private corporate entity being run somewhere else in the universe, NanoTrasen is (within the setting of the game and the server's setting) the biggest and the best. Corporations that have succeeded in achieving huge amounts of wealth, influence, and power— And I am talking about actually massive corporations and real power, not Walmart building big box stores in small towns and forcing out mom and pop toolshops and grocery stores, but the kind of really powerful corporations that can exert influence on a global scale, are actually wildly successful and typically offer very appealing jobs due to the benefits that they offer their employees. Health care benefits are typically one of the things that they offer their employees. Corporations value loyalty and service. In real life, every corporation I've worked for (and actually in every job I've worked for) the general rule has been this: after you have contributed X amount of service hours, you are entitled to X benefits regardless of your position within the company. Corporations want to ensure that their employees are productive. A happy employee is a productive employee. For employees to be happy, corporations will typically offer anything that is realistically feasible to ensure a safe and fun working environment, and to eliminate stresses in an employee's personal life. There is little a corporation can offer an employee in regards to their personal life besides: a) Paying them money so that they can maintain a comfortable standard of living and b) Ensure that they are always in good health, and have access to good healthcare providers in the event that their health fails for any reason. You have the same healthcare plan as your coworkers, and your supervisors, and your supervisor's supervisors, and their coworkers, presumably all the way up to the company's CEO. It will probably cover things like dental, eye care, mechanical prosthesis repairs and maintenance and, in the event of a work-related accident, access to treatment for serious life threatening injuries— and, in 2457, where cloning is a relatively easy process to perform if you're a trained geneticist, a guarantee that you will be cloned by the corporation if you die on the job. This plan will probably not cover things like Rejuvanate treatments to ensure you are beautiful and young throughout your whole life, or cover the surgery to transplant your brain into a Tajaran IPC shell simply because you feel more like a Tajaran than a Terran, nor will your health care plan provide access to cloning facilities if you are say for example murdered in a dispute over space drugs in a bar on Mendell City, or shot in the head by an Unathi thug hulking out on Hyperzine while you're getting credits from an ATM. If your character has access to these sorts of things, you probably have a very well-paid, highly successful character who has access to private healthcare options not offered to all employees as part of their employment contract. A final note on the fictional NanoTrasen healthcare plan: the medical facilities on station are in fact NanoTrasen owned and operated. There is no reason that they would not offer on-site cloning services to all employees in the event of any workplace death. Now, you were saying something about death... Right! You're implying here that every chef, botanist, assistant, medical doctor, surgeon, scientist, lab assistant, nursing intern, librarian, etc, routinely faces and encounters death on a regular round to round basis. This is actually not the case, and from an IC perspective character death should always be a very serious concern for your character, because when your character is actually facing death the last thing on their mind should be "Oh well, they'll just clone me later so it's all good." If your character is in a life or death situation, they should probably be thinking "OMFG I DONT WANT TO DIE." and if your thoughts are otherwise you're probably not taking the situation or your character very seriously. Aurora is a Heavy RP server. The server actually has a very clear rule which I'll reference now: What this means to me is that if your character is habitually climbing or "falling" into disposal units, you are probably playing a character that is too incompetent to have succeeded in getting themselves a job with the biggest and most powerful and most successful corporation in the whole known galaxy, regardless of whether you're a greyshirt, a security cadet, a geneticist or the C.E. (all examples of people I've seen end up in the disposals IC). Note: I am going to point out that it is impossible to "accidentally" fall into a disposal unit. The game specifies when you interact with one that your character is attempting to climb into the disposal unit. The action that you, the player, have to perform is a click and drag from yourself to the disposal. It is always intentional and never an accident, and therefore if you end up in disposals while I'm working Cargo Bay, don't be surprised if my character "accidentally" (totally intentionally) mass drives your character's dumb ass into space. Now, that is called being vicious and corrupt. What I am trying to say in regards to this disposals business is this: Players who routinely are having their characters climb into a mechanical apparatus designed for transporting garbage and other material around the station, players (and characters) who are fully aware that climbing into a disposal unit will have their character violently ground up by the workings of said machine, are either playing psychotic or insane characters, which is against the rules, or they are playing incompetent characters not performing their job to a satisfactory standard, characters that probably would've been fired a long time ago or, more likely, wouldn't have even been hired. Either way, it's not Heavy RPing at all. There's a difference to being committed to the round and being committed to your character's involvement in the round. Different characters have different jobs, skillsets, and relationships. It is easy enough to say "just jump back into the round as a new character and join in again!" but often not as easy in execution. Plus, if you are respawning into a round with a new character that character should have no knowledge of what's going on on station before they arrived— even though you, as a player, clearly would —so you would have to tread particularly carefully to avoid metagaming and using knowledge of the situation outside what your character would have. Additionally, this may not even always be feasible if you are waiting thirty minutes for a respawn and the round is already two hours in and people are calling for a crew transfer vote. Well, as I understand it, the Chaplain role actually has a pretty crucial part to play in certain round types like Cult and Vampire, so having them be able to be permanently removed from the round could give OOC advantages to antags and open the door for all kinds of dumb shit. But that's an OOC perspective on game mechanics. Not really pertinent. As I said before, employees in the civilian sector are not exposed to death as frequently as other departments but in some circumstances and situations they do end up getting killed or dying, and it isn't always because they are throwing themselves in harm's way. Cutting out cloning for the civilian sector only serves to remove RP potential for both characters in the civilian sector and the medics that handle cloning, which is why I think it's a bad idea. As it stands though, any good Geneticist will know to prioritize cloning of certain individuals over other individuals based on rank and importance to the events at hand. Is the station undergoing an engineering emergency? A good geneticist should know to clone the dead Engineer before the dead Assistant or the dead Warden or the dead Chef. If any limitation is going to be placed on cloning in game due to certain characters / jobs being "more important" than others, it should be limited ONLY to the Chiefs of Staff: Captain, Head of Personnel, Research Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Security, and nobody else. Out of curiosity, is this suggestion a thinly veiled attempt to get the server to discuss permanent character death as a rule?

Ah well. I heard a lot of complaints about that event afterwards. I went into that round intending only to mine some minerals and build a space fort and I ended up taking a guy prisoner on the mining outpost, almost killing a dude with an e-carbine, and putting five or six shots into another guy's face and destroying his head with a fire axe in service to Nar'Sie while wearing the Captain's armor. So it's all good.

Ah well. I heard a lot of complaints about that event afterwards. I went into that round intending only to mine some minerals and build a space fort and I ended up taking a guy prisoner on the mining outpost, almost killing a dude with an e-carbine, and putting five or six shots into another guy's face and destroying his head with a fire axe in service to Nar'Sie while wearing the Captain's armor. So it's all good.

I didn't, actually. See my first post:

I didn't, actually. See my first post:

It was extended, as per event. Lots of things can happen in an event round. Extended doesn't always mean 'no antags'. You could be told it's a Colony event and then suddenly you're being attacked by ghostly shadows. Admins (and, in general, most storytellers) will typically withhold information about their plots in order to avoid spoiling them. You have to be prepared for anything. Suffice to say, when I had my Cultist transmit a psychic message that contained his known word of power, my character received some interesting information and I had intended to work with it IC. I will only have Stahl, or any of my characters, act like a Cultist if they have that little Cthulhu Cult symbol floating by their heads. Therefore if you witness Stahl acting like a bloodthirsty religious fanatic, it is because he is part of the Cult. Not because I simply wanted to have him act like a cultist for no reason.

It was extended, as per event. Lots of things can happen in an event round. Extended doesn't always mean 'no antags'. You could be told it's a Colony event and then suddenly you're being attacked by ghostly shadows. Admins (and, in general, most storytellers) will typically withhold information about their plots in order to avoid spoiling them. You have to be prepared for anything. Suffice to say, when I had my Cultist transmit a psychic message that contained his known word of power, my character received some interesting information and I had intended to work with it IC. I will only have Stahl, or any of my characters, act like a Cultist if they have that little Cthulhu Cult symbol floating by their heads. Therefore if you witness Stahl acting like a bloodthirsty religious fanatic, it is because he is part of the Cult. Not because I simply wanted to have him act like a cultist for no reason.