Snakebittenn

The current (absolute) state of the CCIA process, interviews and all, has always heavily incensed me. The current model, I feel, is insufficient. It is slow, and tiresome. The ideal process should be the following. The IR maker makes their IR. They give every detail they can here (without writing a novella, of course.) They name their limited allowance of witnesses. This is where things change. The IR maker's job is, essentially, done. CCIA may contact them for some follow-up questions (either through Discord, the forums, or whatever other platform, but preferably Discord), but they do not take a followup interview unless necessary. CCIA will also contact the witnesses in the same manner. This is all IC, despite being on an OOC channel. The logs are captured and sent to Borealis, who will (somehow) format them for readability and post them in a channel in the CCIA staff discord section. If a person volunteers, they can take an on-station interview, but it would no longer be the main way of doing it. This would additionally have the benefit of player comfort during an interview. You have many things to worry about in the current way it's done. Ghosts watching you, pissing off the agent somehow, and worst of all the fact that you cannot step away. A Discord interview could go 'uninterrupted' because there is no worry about 'there is a ninja, please leave CCIA', or generally the fact that rounds have a limited amount of time to go on.

I don't think it's necessarily a fair suggestion. While lowpop extended might suck, lowpop wizard is like bear crawling naked through hot coals. Let people have doublestended if they like. If you want to disable double extended, disable double secret too.

Hello, fellow masters of the universe. We require displaying more of our glorious lore to the mayflies, and deputies are just what we need. On top of the usual developer application questions, I'd like a (between 500-1000 words is the sweet spot, but I'll still lovingly read it if it's really long, don't limit yourself) novel writing of your choice which demonstrates and understanding of the Skrell lore and what your plans are. Have something you want to add? Have something you want heavily cut? Go ahead and show it!

There are ways to make them less obnoxious. Putting traps in vents, giving the kitchen more traps, making Hiding take a little bit so you can't instant transmission up and down a table, and removing window bonking. I would rather try these methods first.

Your passion about the species is clear, despite you getting confused about it sometimes. Make sure to check the wiki any time you're confused, or just ping me. Approved.

You clearly show a lot of passion and research into the species, I'd be a fool of a Took not to acknowledge that. Welcome aboard.

I feel we should bar them from all antags except for rev/loy, yes.

Dionae are, currently, a negative for the game. We have to nerf them every week due to the ridiculous mechanics they've been given. Health and limb regeneration, not having bones, not having organs, plus being immune to brain damage, plus being immune to oxy/tox/clone, plus decapitation not killing them, plus ventcrawling, plus immunity to death due to splitting. Their lore is a little strange as well, but I'll say it can be developed and improved. However, as current, It's like having a shoggoth work at your local RadioShack. As well, their personalities are either: 1). Slow talking naïve idiot 2). Slow talking 600 year old 180 PhD genius RD 3). Slow talking aggressive Dominiaona (in sec) 4). Slow talking merc diona with an assault rifle 5). Slow talking friendly diona that actually has no personality at all I do not believe in their current iteration that Dionae have a positive impact on the game (mostly mechanically). At the very least, remove their ability to antag.

Couldn't you just put a Security barricade there yourself?

The player being generous is not a way to balance a mechanic/keep it in check.

You've touched on everything I could ask you to touch on, it's clear that you've done well in your research. Sorry for the time this took. Approved.

This, I like. Your character is pretty interesting, as we've had few Skrell like A'ablek. I look forward to seeing them onstation. Aprobado.

Lasers are a good enough counterplay. note that i am pointblanking the head with a laser rifle 6 s hots to kill a naked shell 10 to kill a shell with a regular sec helmet will take more than one laser rifle to kill an ablative'd shell. it took ~144 damage, takes 200 to kill. could probably finish off with a full smattering from your pistol or a good harmbaton session. 6 shots to kill a naked baseline 11 shots to kill a baseline with a regular sec helmet same for shells with ablatives 7 shots to kill a naked G2 ~12 to kill one with a regular sec helmet i will assume the same for the previous two with ablatives 6 shots to kill a naked zeng-hu about 10 to kill with a regular sec helmet but it bugged here assume the same for ablatives it took a piddly 3 shots of an ion rifle to kill a naked shell their foot exploded off on the second shot and likely they wouldn't have been able to do literally anything 3 shots for a G2 some things to consider: this was only one laser rifle. security has more than one laser weapon available to them, especially more than one laser rifle. i did not make any moves to disable them, such as shooting their legs (which does a number on their ability to stand and perform basic functions) the only people in this game that get ablative armor is security, and they only have two suits worth. it was only me firing at them. there are few ways to attain nanopaste.

This is a good application. I like the character concept, as we've discussed, I simply hope you find xenobiologist more fun than I did. Accepted.

This document is a whole lot of things that are either mostly wrong, completely out of context, or missing crucial elements. Vaurcan eyes pretty much explode if you flash them (which many, many roles carry or can find), they bleed out at twice the speed of everyone else, they do not selfheal, and Security is not bullet based. Security has like six lasers. Toxin damage is definitely more important in brainmed in which cascading organ failure can occur. Also, a good amount of their organs are weak to EMPs. Most of the 'reworks' have only given them roleplay advantages. The psi ping is the closest thing they have to a mechanical advantage that nobody else can replicate. Even then, thermals exist and are much better. Their grab resistance is completely nullified by the fact that they do not actually have any defensive perks. You can just brain them like everyone else. It'd be great if you'd take into account that they will still break their limbs when they fall (because they take extra brute, nullifying the fall bonus by a lot), that darkvision LITERALLY DOESN'T WORK, Also, the fastest Taj is literally weaker than offworlders, who you can easily kill by just punching them. It is literally never cold. Cold does not matter at all. I have not seen a freeze ray in use in the last two years. Only two frames can spacewalk without issue, and said frames are slow as fuck. You can spawn with a lunchbox to replicate not needing to eat or drink. They still need to charge. To quote Diggiez, loosely; Where are we. Who controls the markets? Who controls most of known space? What's the largest territory in the Orion Spur? Who runs it? Also, races should not automatically pay reverence to their human slavemasters. Most humans I can't even take seriously ingame or out of game. Lastly, Skrell do not have it better objectively. their society is basically ultrachina in which the police can literally invade your very dreams in the name of ensuring that you're up to spec ,and if you aren't, you literally get reprogrammed. it's entirely a wrong move for a skrell to be 1) not a double college graduate 2) introverted 3) anything the Federation dislikes 4) someone that does not regularly partake in multiplayer dreaming. also you are literally at like 45-50% life expectancy if you're not under Federation healthcare which only Federation citizens that are up to snuff get. they're short and kinda gross, they have to rely on solely their own power/diona/c'thur and not any form of smart AI, and they do not have massive influence over the galaxy considering most human factions get along just fine without thinking of them This is from two years ago. Shit changes. This is an actively developed game. It had nothing to do with Alb's implementation. Furthermore, /we/ had nothing to do with who does and who doesn't get this shit, besides recent talks about if Vaurca should get them. There is no 'lore-dev intervention', you were not even there. Also, Unathi can't even get implants unless they're Aut'akh.

I'm 85% sure we actually could.

I invite you to submit a PR to rework it.

I would be glad to remove the AI. It's something I succeeded in getting trialed on Bay before. The reasons are as follows. 1) The AI is essentially unlimited in its' power. The only limits an AI really has is: Running out of power, which essentially never happens because the SMES is good for pretty much forever if you know what you're doing. Cameras, which alert the AI and also anyone looking through cameras at the time if they're disabled (yes, it's pretty easy to know if one's been stealthily taken out.) The player being generous enough to not exert their full strength onto the crew/antag, which is an extraordinarily shitty way to balance. 2) The AI is bad for antaggery. Being bolted and shocked is not the only thing the AI can do against you, though it's certainly the most egregious power.. It can (and often has in certain cases) shout over every channel (and make command-level announcements) of your location and keep others away from you. It's the most powerful anti-antagonist tool, bar none, and its' laws essentially mandate it to do something about antags. Not only this, but it's incredibly hard to take the AI out (camera alarms, it's easy to know if one's been stealthily taken out) due to the fact that it's locked in a secure bunker that's harder to get into than the Captain's office. Keeping track of the AI and countering its' moves takes up like 75% of your brain, leaving very little head RAM for anything else. You either kill it, or you keep running away from it. 3) The AI offers very little. I will give you a free drawing of your character in MS Paint if you can name 10 things the AI commonly does for you that don't relate to door access and character interaction. 4) Nerfing it does not work. Most attempts to nerf the AI's powers, such as being able to immediately jump to you have been met with complaints that they 'gut the role'. I, for one, am not willing to deal with the vitriol, and I don't imagine there's legions of developers willing to rework it either. The AI role has not fundamentally changed for over a decade now. 5) Whitelisting it does not work. Imagine tomorrow we merged a PR that gives every engineer a rocket launcher (and twenty backup rockets, 'just in case.'). Imagine, if you will, the engineers proceed to use their new bazookas to immediately blow up every possible antag they find. The sane answer would be to take away the rocket launchers, not to whitelist the engineers so that 'only the good ones that sparingly fire rockets can play.' 6) Writing rules doesn't work. To lazily quote Skull, 'If we make rules for the AI. We must make rules for sec. If we make rules for sec, we must make rules for medical doctors and how they treat patients. It's a fucking rabbit hole, as Alb said and CM has demonstrated.' 7) (Subjectively!) The population of good AI players could not hope to outweigh the population of bad ones. Title. ? AI does not fit the game. Whoever decided to have an omniscient eye in the sky in a game about paranoia needs to be beaten. It also wildly tilts the game into the crew's favor, rather than having the balance at least pretend to be equal.

to copypaste from last night protohumans are dumb because 1) they are essentially just an ascended meme. they only originated from back in the day when you could somehow polymorph a chimp into a functioning human being (with 225 skin and neon green hair) with Genetics. 2) they have no lore basis asides from possibly proto vaurca. where are they coming from. who is making them. why is the Hegemony cool with proto unathi being sold like that. none of this is explained. 3) they are constantly used for the crew to be ridiculously edgy. I have seen a Captain invite the crew to watch one get crushed hydraulically as a 'safety demonstration on disposals'. the amount of times the crew has fed them to Changelings and just watched. people seem to forget they're basically just vegetative humans. 4) they actually reduce roleplay. most scenarios in which you'd use a protohuman could've been a lot cooler with an assistant signing a waiver or some shit. protos are super fucking gamey in the way of 'yeah my laser gun does exactly 30 burn' without any consequence or actual interaction regarding it. 5) i hate changelings/vampires using them to skip over their progression.

I will attempt to code the second one.

I think there's two conceptions going around that are honestly pretty valid. One, that Skrell are a Mary Sue race. Two, that they're very 'samey.' I've been thinking of ideas on how to fix the fact that they're, well, kinda very powerful, mostly expanding the genophage's effect on them and giving them ways to attempt to deal with it that are risky, controversial, or even desperate. Details to come when I fully have them figured out. There are some things I will take out or adjust, such as the 'their fleet is literally the best,' and try to have Tups (their trump card, I could say) used as little as physically possible. Otherwise, I will also adjust the Federation's stance on the rest of the galaxy, having them not be interventionalist unless they deem it absolutely necessary to meddle in foreign affairs (in an obvious way.) Second issue is one I'm not quite sure on methods to repair. I think most of this is due to the way Skrell really.. express themselves and display their emotions, but I'll try to have this be a little less universal in some fashion. Edit: I'm also hoping to address that Skrell RP regarding synthetics can sometimes be unfun for the players they're interacting with. Skrell will not become loveydovey with synths overnight, rest assured, but I hope to change the dialogue in some way. Outwards, hopefully. I want to have Skrell be more invested in the rest of the lore outside of 'everyone lives in the shadow of the anvil that is the Federation', and have them better integrated in the other parts of the lore (instead of completely being Elves and living in their magical forest away from the plot.) If the Federation is to act more, as detailed above, it won't be in the old lore where they only come to nuke people. I'm open to all kinds of dialogues and discussions about the lorebase so long as it's constructive and avoids being 'fuk skrell bad'. I have a pretty low tolerance for unproductive shitposting in a srs bsns discussion, but I'm certainly not the 'taking my ball and going home' type of person. So, basically, ye.

Edit: I am also singlehandedly responsible for rat lore.

Ckey/BYOND Username: ParadoxSpace Position Being Applied For: Lore Developer Past Experiences/Knowledge: Being former Skrell deputy, former Vaurca deputy, former IPC maintainer on Baystation12. Examples of Past Work: Most of the Bilröst, Jörmungandr and Jötunheimr (with heavy assistance from NursieKitty), my share of Venus lore (with heavy assistance from SamansaChan), the rework of the Ships and Stations page, Skrell dating, Skrell music, Skrell negative relationships(with heavy assistance from VTCobaltblood and Sleepy Wolf), a lot of Srom lore, how Skrell eat, Skrell ethnicities(with heavy assistance from Zyymurgy), making Skrell slimy, headtail control, and Beakmouth (again, special thanks to Zyy) Additional Comments: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GF2VsWtMVy4q60AEI4kfoXXSpdZkhcUEvwhep589QeA/edit?usp=sharing

Currently there's a very slight difference between personal and work modular computers. Pretty much all of them except the ones you might get from a laptop vendor are considered work computers. These cannot download programs, ever, even if Command is okay with that kind of thing (with the exception of the AI's computer, for some reason.) Personal computers /can/ download programs, with the caveat that most of them (except for games, the NTSL interpreter, the news browser, and I think a few others) do require job access to both download and run. There is extremely few ways to convert your work computer into a personal computer. I think the difference here is very arbitrary, and could (and probably will) hamper modular computer accessibility and ease of use later. Instead, it should be that all of them should be able to download things, with Command being able to track who's downloaded what, p2p transfers, and be able to disable both. They're all NanoTrasen programs anyway, it's not like we're downloading CS:Source at work or some shit.