Erik Tiber

Oh, shoot, yeah, I'll page you a link to a google docs page or something

It does All settlement and international claim to Antarctica is forbidden, it is to administrated by the United nations (Sol Alliance) for the common good of mankind. I was imagining that you could see some settlement there anyway once it warms up, maybe some mining operations. IT might be interesting, a nice place for anarchists or something. Hmm. In which case it's probably its own independent territory or something.

The idea was sorta that there were independent states in Antarctica, formed by settlers, and that these states then went and joined one of the supranational organizations. Unless that violates a treaty too, which it might, I'm not too familiar with that. Maybe we could mention some manner of EU breakup in the backstory, with the Scandinavian Union forming, followed by a resurgence of the EU? Yeah, the idea was that those were independent states, and that they were then sponsored by Japan. Thus the North Pacific Partnership. They're a supranational union, like the others. I personally think this sounds pretty cool. Yes, along with Ingushetia, Ossetia, and Dagestan. And another place whose name I can not recall at the moment. To clarify: The reason for the mediterranean coastline remaining the same is because of the presence of a dam at the Straight of Gibraltar, constructed sometime in the 2200's. It's one of the megastructures. There could also be a trans-atlantic tunnel or two, along with the various arcologies.

Yes, but I'm not so sure about making more than the basic package of genemods be extremely expensive. We could include a list of common genemods. Mundane stuff. Give people options and all that. Like circadian regulator. You only require four hours of sleep a night. Or maybe two hours of sleep a night, with the option of changing your sleep cycle so you sleep for four hours and then are awake for 44 hours at a time. Another possibility is the ability to adjust your neuroplasticity. This allows you to consciously choose you increase your neuroplasticity. This allows you to learn more quickly, of course. However, it comes with it the possibility of notable personality changes following this period of increased neuroplasticity. Of course, this is just increasing your neuroplasticity to the same degree as when you're, say, a child or something. Nothing too unreasonable. And it could be said to just allow, like, "above average" for the skill level or whatever. The point is that people get to deal with the identity issues that come with the resulting changes to personality that come as a natural result of using this mod. Increased prosthesis compatibility. Allows you to have a more heavily augmented character and reduces the risks of rejection to basically nil. Note that these could just be mods which are applied pre-birth. Post-birth retroviral stuff could be expensive or whatever, sure. I'm also not so sure over having so many child soldier gengineering projects. We could introduce the concept of corporate surrogacy though. I do not think that you would see gengineerng be used so extensively for like, supersoldier programs and all that. We have Chinese scientists trying out genetic modifciation on nonviable embryos right now. You could put that the first 'designer babies' could appear in, say, the 2040's. then maybe talk about how it could slowly spread from there. Eventually reaching a majority of the first world population sometime in the early 2100's. You could discuss corporate surrogacy, where corporations basically hire poor third world women to act as surrogates for their genetic modification trials. And the effects of the spread in biotech. You could include something or other about how cattle are largely replaced by unfeeling non-sentient sacks of meat gengineered from pigs and cows for maximum meat-production, with the caveat that certain people still eat 'organic' meat from actual cows. I'm not sure about the cloning thing. Putting someone into a clone of their own body should not have any risk of rejection at all. For someone else's body, they'd have significant risk of rejection. And cross-species transplants are just completely ridiculous, you'd need an MMI for that on both ends to make that remotely work. Oh god so many people want it. And cyberpunk. And. Yes.

...To go to school for today, so I won't be on until maybe even wednesday! Also you're all hitler.

I want to hug you.

The people have a responsibility to try actually addressing their points. If they refuse, if the other person actually has valid points, then it is their responsibility and they are thus guilty of unacceptable behavior. If everyone ignores their point, those people are not showing proper maturity. I am perfectly able to respond to someone debating in an assholish manner. I routinely do so. I do it on a daily manner. I expect others to show the same basic skills, and if they do not then I see no reason why they even deserve respect in the first place. The proper route is to admonish their tone and also respond to their points. Otherwise, simply concede the argument. You do not ignore their points. You have the self control necessary to not do so, and the validity of their point is entirely separate from their tone. This is conditional on the fact that they are not simply engaging in direct personal attacks while not making a point. Criticizing someone's behavior is not a personal attack. This is also conditional on the fact that they must be engaging in honest debate, countering the points presented to them, not engaging in dishonest tactics (such as goalpost shifting, etc.). They can't just hammer the same points over and over again and deflect all counterpoints. Now it's certainly not nice. And it's not good. I have personally admonished many people for acting like, frankly, rabid shitting monkeys, even when they were on my side in a debate, because they were like raging balls of hatred for no reason. And I criticized them for that. Their tone, specifically, even though I was on their side of the debate. However, had someone responded by flat-out ignoring their points, by responding to their post and saying that they would ignore them because of their tone, that person would be showing a disrespect to the very premise of reasoned debate. They can simply not state that they will ignore the points. They can say they're going to leave the debate. They can respond to the points and also criticize the tone. But if they refuse to respond to the points and use the tone as an excuse to ignore points, shutting down discussion, then they do not deserve the respect which they demand. Do note the conditions. They are rather specific, and someone just raging off and acting like an ass would probably not fit those criteria. The behavior- acting dishonestly, dismissing a point based on tone- should be discouraged nonetheless. Tone should not be used to actually counter a point. If someone actually has a legitimate counterpoint, then they should use that rather than trying to worm their way out of a response. Often people are trying to convince third parties in debates, not the person they're actually debating with. At least, that's what I'm used to. That's pretty much standard. If someone is actually convinced by the other party, even after a heated debate, then that's pretty admirable.

I'd like to clarify what I mean by dishonest debating, since there may be some confusion here. I think a better phrase may be, I don't know, bad faith debating. Poor debating. Something like that. Not literally just calling you a liar. I don't mean that you're lying about the motivations of other people, I don't remember the specifics, but unless I actually reread the entire thread I'm going to assume you weren't. I don't think you're an a-hole or anything. It mainly had to do with addressing points, not addressing points, stuff like that. Poor debating tactics might be the better word. And it's not like I think you're intentionally doing it either. It is poor practice to dismiss what someone says because of the way they say it, but your objective (as a part of a community where everyone should do their best to get along) is to get others to agree with you, not simply to be right. And sadly, some people will ignore you because of tone, no matter what - which is why I believe it is important that we encourage people to moderate themselves in the way they choose to deliver their messages, because if not, it *will* create unavoidable conflict. As purely personal advice, yes, tone is nice. That's getting into the effectiveness of their argument though, not whether they're actually debating honestly and is not relevant to whether or not the behavior is worthy of getting called out on. That's purely about how this behavior makes themselves worse off and has nothing to do with how it impacts others and how others may or may not be justified in responding. People should not dismiss something on tone, and if they do so they should, IMO, be called out for it by the administration. Maybe get a warning for it. I consider it worse than being abrasive but raising a good point. People are able to look past the tone, they are capable of doing so. Of course it's best if people aren't assholes when delivering a message, but regardless, the person dismissing the argument based on tone alone should not be let off the hook at all, as what they did is dishonest. If they did not want to continue the debate they could stop posting in the thread. If they continue posting after dismissing an argument based on tone, they should be disciplined. And if they just keep fleeing whenever someone disagrees with them and constantly brings up the same points and constantly tries to claim victory, they're a problem. I'm referring to kinda extreme instances here. Also note I have a certain problem poster on one of my previous forums online when I make that last statement, not anyone here. Sure.

Thirded! Although my behavior often doesn't reflect it , I still think Skull and Jackboot are pretty cool guys, and all the coders and spriters. Thanks, seriously. I really do like the server.

This sounds super gr8 to me. Suggestion: Their health plan is a large part of why people bother to work for such shitlers. Maybe include something or other about using this employee health plan as an opportunity to 'field test' certain medical treatments or something, along with something about kafka-esque contracts. I have a suggestion for cloning and how it is treated; use life insurance as a model, then probably increase the annual cost by one or two orders of magnitude. This could include the cost of periodic (like annual maybe) backups. You could call it "death insurance" or something. You could also totally include, as an alternative, emergency long-term cryonic storage as the cheaper alternative to cloning, or borgification. Maybe include post-death payment plans or something for certain plans. Not sure. But the cost structure seems ideal for this sort of thing.

I disagree with you to a point. Tone policing can be a problem, but as not everyone has the ability to call to reason 100% of the time and judge people solely on the content of their messages (while ignoring their tone), I can say that people will have a much easier time getting their point across if they're being polite. And you can say that "yeah, people need to be like me and stop being mad", but it won't stop them from being mad. That's a bit of why I feel like I'm at an impasse as to how to solve the issue of people being upset, actually. In the past, people have dismissed arguments based solely on tone. And in Skype conversations, I have had incidents where people have called a discussion a 'hate fest' because people were bringing up actual actions which people actually did. You can not dismiss a post's points based on the tone. The validity of the points is independent of the tone. If someone debates honestly, then their points should be engaged. If someone does not, then there is no point in engaging them. If they are abrasive but debate honestly, that is less worthy of discipline and condemnation than someone who argues dishonestly using polite language. The point is that criticism at all is considered hostility. It has in the past, been considered such. I'm personally all for starting another Sue thread, since the problem is very much still there. As for your post, arguments were already made in that thread. You did not debate with honesty and I do not see the point of trying to engage you here in this thread. If you would like to discuss this further, we can take this to PM's as to avoid derailing the thread. I would prefer this over dropping the subject, because I would very much like to continue this conversation.

You can totally have action with a heavy RP server. Take, for example, that one event where cats put everyone into a prison for some reason. This will be the example of what not to do. That could have had action and been heavy RP if it were set up well. But instead you had a stupidly large number of guards, way way way too many, thus preventing the prisoners from actually doing anything. The prisoners did not have excercise times. They did not have lunch times. They were largely restricted to their corner, and they were completely helpless before the horde of cat commando's outside. And then when the whole thing had not even gotten off the ground, for some reason the whole thing is interrupted with a Deus Ex Machina and a bunch of people are bombed to bits and just the ERT and the cat commando's get to fight out a gun battle, while the prisoners do nothing. If that were a heavy RP event: You would have had less guards. Far far less. Enough that, were the prisoners to actually band together to try to do something, they might be able to, I dunno, accomplish something of note. Rather than all get shot. Instead a bunch of people wanted to play a commando with guns for some reason, even though that completely defeats the point and just makes everything boring. You would not have ended the whole thing with a deus ex machina. There was potential, all the potential was avoided, the round was ended extremely early. Nothing was allowed to happen. The prisoners would have likely been moved between more areas. Maybe a designated recreation time. A designated working time. A lunch time. Something for them to do. Places for them to go. And by keeping them moving, you'll need to be more creative when coordinating, and you'll also have more opportunities to actually stay outside of the sight of the guards. That's heavy RP. You can make a story. It's not all about pew pew guns. You make a story with pew pew guns in it. That's just not the entire point of the whole thing, though.

The problem is that the community on Aurora has a tendency to sweep problems under the rug. The problem is not the complainers. There's a number of long-standing problems which have not been addressed. Removing the ability of the community to comment on complaints threads will do nothing to solve the problems. Threads will still be made in general. And if those get locked, then I will probably leave the community myself, frankly. I'm personally used to a forum where the staff enforces good faith debating, which focuses on the substance of a debate. The tone of a message is not an excuse to dismiss it. And if someone debates in bad faith, even if they're polite while doing so, they still get warned anyway or sometimes punished for dishonest debate tactics. I'm also used to a forum where everyone can see what everyone else is saying, and although there's an IRC, it's so large that things aren't too secret. If someone else talks shit, you can quote their post. And if someone else is an asshole, you can quote that. But here it's different. People make heavy use of skype, obviously me included, and not everyone keeps perfect logs. So if someone is being an asshole in game, you don't always have instant evidence. So if the person is favored by the staff for some reason, you're shit out of luck. Here, for some reason there's the idea that you have to pretend to like everyone, that there's no conflict and that you can just ignore that. That's stupid. Yes, being polite is nice. This is a normal thing. I go on a forum where people are allowed to call other people ignorant asshats, in the correct context, and yet you can still have a perfectly civil conversation there. I have compared people to climate change deniers in one thread, and in another thread on a different subject when I thought they were making valid arguments, I would back them up and show no hostility about it. And if it's in a non-political thread about, say, fanfiction, I'm not gonna suddenly warble at them unless it's relevant to the topic at hand. But here, there is a very restrictive definition of 'relevant'. There's a certain idea that simply making a statement about someone's behavior, even pointing out factual events which have occurred, is considered a 'hatefest' against that person. I'll just be honest and say that I'm referring to a discussion about Sue, and that my comments regarding dishonest debating referred to Frances' conduct within that thread, but that whole debacle is really emblematic of the larger problem. The fact that repeated threads got made about it, followed by nothing being done, is just part of the whole thing. People are perfectly capable of actually judging someone based on their behavior without, you know, having to call them a bad person all the time. I react based on behavior all the time. I'm not gonna bring up someone's bad behavior if they actually have owned up to it, or if it's not relevant to the topic. There's also various other problems, such as unequal enforcement of the rules, and possibly some bureaucracy or whatever, but those problems can't even be assessed until people get over the fact that yeah, problems exist, we should be able to talk about them, criticizing someone's behavior is not the same as a 'personal attack', and we shouldn't pretend that we all like each other. Not to say that we should be assholes or rabid shitting monkies, of course, but seriously, this is literally one of the most dysfunctional communities I have participated in online. Note the word "participated", not known of. I've not participated in whatever other batshittery people get up to on other server forums, and apparently half the SS13 communities are like goddamn Deliverance compared to where I'm from, but really, being one of the shinier turds is not something to be proud of. Not to downplay what Skull has done, since Skull is a cool guy, but yeah.

I'm going to guess that there's basic public health insurance that everyone gets but only covers absolutely basic stuff, importantly not including cloning and probably some of the more advanced prostheses. You can also get employer-provided health insurance or buy it yourself, if you want more coverage. I'm basically assuming that you can get the equivalent of modern-day medicare, but for the more advanced/expensive medicine you'll probably need to buy a plan or get one from your employer. Oh, and basic genefixing (just like removal of most genetic disorders plus some basic general improvements in physicality/intelligence) could be said to be subsidized in a manner similar to vaccinations, but such policies aren't always implemented fully out in the boonies. I'm going to assume it has full interracial marriage, rights for various self-aware beings and legal precedent for dealing with currently-undiscovered species. I personally would like it if their society had a different view towards the barriers between humans and animals. IE, given that you now have synthmeat and that cattle have probably been gengineered into just being limbless blobs of meat, kept alive by a brainstem and rudimentary organs (basically a meat-plant), you'll likely see stuff about, say, additional protections for certain types of animals. You now have synthetics with culture and aliens with culture. Maybe they gave certain rights to some of the more intelligent Earth-bound species like dolphins or chimps (just say the monkeys from monkey cubes are gengineered to be brain dead in order to comply with Sol law). NT could also probably use some legal loophole or other to get around dealing with that sort of law; alternatively, just say that those animal rights are just system-level laws in most of the primary systems, but do not apply to Biesel; this would basically help convey that Biesel is a bit of an unregulated 'wild west' place with fast money that plays fast and loose with the rules. As for surveillance, you should totally go all-out Orwellian surveillance. Huge supercomputers devoted to monitoring and processing astronomic amounts of information. Everything being electronic pretty much, and thus tracked. The government having access to pretty much everyone's internet use. They can track everyone everywhere. Their only limitation is in processing the immense amount of data. I'd advise modeling the Sol Alliance's security laws off of those of the United States, including the part where you can go and kill your citizens without due process in certain circumstances, or military detainment without trial. Then model the surveillance apparatus off of the UK (with CCTV's everywhere) plus the US intelligence community (ESPECIALLY including the NSA at its absolute worst). Explain that this comes in the aftermath of some terrorist attacks, where someone released gengineered smallpox and killed a few thousand before it was fully contained, or various other terrorist attacks enabled by the increasing proliferation of biotech, and something or other to actually justify having such a huge level of surveillance. The Orwellian status of the inner system could be a big part of why people emigrate to places like Tau Ceti. And perhaps there's simply an expectation that privacy is no longer the norm at all.

Omigod pictures and oh god pixels yes! I like this map a lot.

On the Sufficient Velocity forums, this is called "Spaghetti posting". It's pretty infamous, and a bad habit there. The mods there have started cracking down on it. I personally see their point. It's far, far better if you try to construct a single coherent response. I'm also not really sure on the 'anger' bit, in my experience being on forums where spaghetti posting normally occurs it's just... something that happens when a debate gets going. No anger involved really.

I normally really dislike dying because it always seems to take so long to get cloned. But eh. I'd personally like it if people would spend more time alive-but-incapacitated before reaching the 'death' threshhold, but I have not yet bothered to properly make a suggestion thread like I really really should. I Will admit, I'm soooo guilty of this.

That would mean restricting absolutely everyone who would like to give their characters more options. Like getting the surgery. Given that we have stuff like nanotech, stem cells, regenerative membrane, prostheses, all that stuff. I'd say it's quite reasonable to say that cosmetic surgery could theoretically be afforded by most people. Just expensive for poorer people. Possibly out of the reach of the poorest. The more extensive the disfigurement, the more you'd need to pay to get it fixed. That's entirely dependent upon whether it is actually affordable to get that fixed. Another reaction might be "Oh, you didn't want to get that fixed." Which again, leads to questions. Or "Oh, you got some scarring there". Scarification is a thing that people do right now. I dunno, maybe it's a fad. So you do not need to have removal be prohibitively expensive to justify him having the scars. He just didn't care or didn't mind. Going and getting surgery would be pretty inconvenient. Plenty of people put off doing things because it's inconvenient or a hassle already. This example is actually proving my point; that you can justify characters having scars without the need for arbitrarily increasing the cost of cosmetic surgery. From your description, he may even wear the scars as a badge of honor or something. Or they might have sentimental value to him, who knows. Either way, it says far more about someone's character if that character chooses to voluntarily forgo treatment, than if that character was unable to afford treatment. I'm not so sure. Incomes are way higher than today anyway, and medical care should be cheaper. Your own example demonstrates that it's perfectly possible to justify having scars without making cosmetic surgery be prohibitively expensive, thus restricting the options which players have. In fact, you are even able to have Nasir afford a spaceship. That's like having a private jet. From what you're saying Nasir is just flat-out loaded. He could buy a 7 foot tall golden statue of a phallus and stick it outside his office if he wanted to (though admittedly the price of gold would be much lower than today due to space mining ). He's not an example of someone who'd be affected by differences in price here, and is a very explicit example of how being able to afford the surgery does not mean he will necessarily get it. I don't think we should needlessly restrict players when characters with scars can already perfectly justify having the scars. And simply making it inconveniently expensive to receive such a surgery seems good enough for pretty much every single person with scars, while still giving people the option of playing characters that let them explore concepts like body autonomy and body modification, because seriously, it's boring to role-play someone from a society that can be summed up as "2015 plus spaceships".

Actually, far as I am aware having scars removed is not mentioned as expensive or cheap. Generally, however, cosmetic surgery is an expensive, painful, ordeal. Eh, I'd think that it's probably gotten quite a bit cheaper over time. That's completely my perspective with respect to flash cloning. I'm not so sure that they wouldn't be able to just print a body free of scar tissue. If they really wanted to, they probably could do just that. I like to imagine that the new body is basically combining the last body-scan and the newest brain-scan, and filling in the blanks on the brain with previous brain-scans. There's nothing wrong with a character having scars. Like you said, they tell stories. Characters might choose to retain their scars as a reminder of said stories. The fact that they chose to maintain said scars would tell a lot about their character. I personally would find it interesting to interact with characters who voluntarily keep scars and are proud of doing so. I think that would be more interesting than, say, someone who has scars and wants to get rid of them, but can't. I'm just gonna go on a lark and guess that the scars are probably easiest to avoid when you have immediate proper medical care, and that you'd see a very, very small amount of scar tissue from surgery normally (because it's probably minimally invasive). If I were to blatantly pull an estimate out of my ass (because really that's what I'm doing), I'd probably just say that it's probably affordable enough that just about everyone could deal with something like serious disfigurement or if the scar is seriously debilitating or painful, but if a scar is just a minor annoyance, not all that noticeable, or easily covered by clothing then most people probably wouldn't bother. That is, unless they like their scars and such.

Agreeing with this. Security rushed her, hasn't made any attempt to fear or panic RP by my understanding, and they got shot. Even with Dire having an antidote they killed her. I enjoyed roleplaying with Dire priorly, a perma ban seems like overly harsh I would like to note that she was harmbatonned to death by a security officer, after she was handcuffed and down, rather than actually being interrogated so NT can vivisect interrogate her for information.

I started watching Ghost in the Shell today. And suddenly I'm starting to feel really hype over the prospect of this being a thing. I know that feel. I know that feel so bad, bro. Bah, those people are excessively silly and their arguments are excessively silly. There's no question that they can make prostheses which appear outwardly human (and if someone argues otherwise I will lol so hard). And it bugs me that I am thus unable to play my character in a consistent manner, because she has, in the past, very much wanted to conceal the prostheses, and is still self-conscious of them to a degree, so to have her decide to not use these organic-looking prostheses is out of character for her. The impression I get is that so many people would very much like something like, say, prostheses, or augs, or other transhumanist elements. Or that, at the very least, the vast majority of people will not be bothered by the addition of these, or that the annoyance of this minority would be small enough as to be outweighed by the massive improvement this could mean for so many people's roleplay, by allowing them to play in an actual future society, with actual futuristic attitudes and technologies, rather than just 2015 in space. From my experience on the lore team (before Jackboot became the head, so note that this isn't commenting on how the current one conducts itself), it seemed like there was more of a lowest common denominator view towards this matter. Oh, and people covered in scars, which they could easily and cheaply fix but voluntarily choose not to. You know, I should totally have one of my characters ask someone about why they chose to get those cool-looking scars.

This is none of your business. It has been discussed and handled with administration. You do not have the entire picture on the situation regarding this, nor are you in any position to judge me for my actions. Doubly so when one remembers that the CE and RD (and by extension, their departments) are the people who are directly responsible for the AI and, in fact, are obligated to act when the AI is not acting properly. I'm not familiar enough with the incident to argue this point effectively. And I will repeat. The CE and RD, and their departments, are responsible for the AI. They are the people who are there to handle the damage, and take it down if it proves to be subverted or becomes a tangible threat. This isn't a case of rushing the antagonist, but rather filling one's role on the station. No different when security is required to go toe-to-toe with operatives, or try and find traitors who act against regulations. Then explain why the changes to stun gloves were found only 5 minutes after an extended round started, by a chief engineer no less. Why should they be making stun gloves when no threat is present? Evidently they are exceeding their responsibilities, or pursuing them in an overzealous manner. I'm very hesitant with militias, at least now, because right now chief engineers are apparently in the habit of making stun gloves 5 minutes into the round, and I wouldn't doubt that other engineers do the same. You stated earlier that if you see an engineer doing this, you should report this to their boss. But as has been shown earlier, even chief engineers have gone and armed up in situations where they have absolutely no reason to do so. It is inarguable that engineering, both the CE and others, have armed up in situations where there was no threat at all, nor any forseeable threat. The only argument is over how often they do this. Engineering is the only one that consistently makes these militia groups. I'm totally fine with a militia if the people aren't powergaming or playing to win, but given that the most prominent militia department has a history of powergaming, I'm not so sure that the players are even ready to make militias. The major problem is with security having no sense of self-preservation and being terrible at fear RP. Given that this is the apparent standard of light RP action, I would not want other departments descending to the same standard.

Cattle prods are weapons. You hold them. They can be disarmed. Unlike stungloves. Frankly, security shouldn't have the monopoly on instastun weapons of any kind. Either everyone can acquire something, or nobody can. I'm going to outright say this. Militias are healthy for the game. Civilians should be allowed to arm up and protect themselves. They shouldn't be expected to sit back and let HEROES OF THE STATION. SECURITY AND ERT ONLY handle every little thing. Yes, they have roles. They should fill those roles. No, they shouldn't hunt antagonists actively. They should, however, be permitted to defend themselves. If the situation is bad enough, they should be allowed to fight back. I will repeat this again and again. Security should not have a monopoly on resisting or countering antagonists. That is counter to everything SS13 stands for. While Aurora may consider itself different, in the end of the day we are still part of that community. Outright rejecting that one basic tenant of the game we play is, frankly, wrong. A big problem is that sec is quite horrible at fear RP and has little to no sense of self-preservation. It would be nice if everyone actually had a sense of self-preservation and didn't go and suicidally rush antags. That should apply to civilians and security. The solution isn't that civilians should just go and arm themselves to the teeth and rush an antag. I will note that you yourself have twice rushed the AI with an RCD as an engineer, only days apart. It's that we should ensure that people actually have a sense of self-preservation. For some perspective, I am fine with purely defensive measures. Two nights ago, during a nuke op round, the ops had encountered engineers, apparently engineers had been shot at. Everyone was quite terrified. My character at the time, Mongwa Kirongozi, was a former hacker/criminal (primarily white collar stuff). She hacked into the bar backroom for the shotgun, then realized it couldn't be concealed. So she hacked into the cargo autolathe, got a circular saw, hacked back into the bar, sawed off the shotgun, then hacked the cargo autolathe again to make some ammunition for it, as well as a flamethrower. Then she made a few flamethrowers for engineering for self-defense purposes, while they set up a shield generator. At no point did people actually go out and try to fight these antags. I didn't even know if the flamethrowers would work. And my actions may well have been excessive. However, there is a difference between going and taking a shotgun when you know there are armed terrorists with assault rifles running around, and rushing the AI with an RCD, twice. My character, at one point, was sent to the telecomms sattelite to get it back up and running, and nearly shot the captain when she walked into the control room, because Mongwa was terrified of the heavily armed terrorists. But I didn't try making a bomb, because bomb making is hard and my character probably doesn't know it ICly, and I didn't try making stungloves, because ICly it's far more useful to be able to actually have some safety when dealing with wires, and because she's not stupid and doesn't want to call attention to herself by blatantly fashioning weapons out of the blue. And I certainly didn't charge into a place where there were known antags. If I were to encounter an antag, my character's primary goal would be to get the hell out of there and survive. That was my sole objective the entire time; absolutely everything else is secondary. Going and RCD-rushing an AI is not at all in line with self-preservation as a primary objective.

Really though, it's that so many people have no sense of self preservation for their characters (but this is often a problem with security), or the antags simply don't give the majority of people any reason to feel actual terror or fear, or have any interaction with them. I think part of that would be linked to the fact that a bunch of people want to move away from heavy RP and towards action, so it's not like antags have much opportunity to do something without being robusted by security or random suicidal civilians. Eh, Ana does have a lot of problems with being very play to win, it's nothing new or controversial. I'm more than willing to take a discussion on that into another thread to avoid a derail though (and would not mind at all if Sue gave her opinion or whatever).

Well, certain characters are rather friendly or receptive to new people. I like to think that Lockie Green (my primary character) is one of them, but obviously I'm a bit biased there. Maybe just try approaching people? I'm not quite sure.