The State of IPC (and lore on the server)

[Kaed]

Hello I'm Kaed, and I'm here to complain about IPCs again.  Today we're going to talk about a special kind of power creep that as far as I can tell only exists on this server, but I also don't play on other servers, so what do I know.  Let's call it 'social creep'.

When I first rejoined the server again over a year back after a several year hiatus from playing SS13, IPCs were one of the most mechanically strong races in the game. I think they still are. You can't stun them by normal means except flashes (which can be hard to aim in combat), they're immune to pain, and while some of them might be slow, those ones are very tough too.  Usually people here interject that Ion rifles and emps are their weakness but those generally aren't available under standard circumstances, and only get brought out specifically to counter robots, and there is only one Ion rifle in normal play.

However, they also were the most socially maligned race on the server.  Skrell and unathi both generally hate robots, and there was in-lore incentive for others to treat them like objects. Laws didn't really protect them very much, and they were sharply limited from important roles.  This is what I would consider a 'social' debuff, something that made playing an IPC harder in a way that wasn't strictly mechanical.

Then our lore team started running antagonistic week-long events, which was good.  It was good because it made something interesting happen, and offered tangible benefits for the playerbase, something that would upset the status quo.  In particular, there was an event that as far as I remember (I might be off on this, it was a long time ago) allowed IPCs a choice between being allowed to have head positions and being considered people and thus it being murder to kill them.  They chose to become heads, and that created an interesting new dynamic on the station as a result of the event to shake up the social meta.

Except that it wasn't just something that upset the status quo, it BECAME the new status quo.  It was never treated as a temporary social buff to IPC players, a political favor that could be tossed aside when it was no longer convenient, it was just how things are going to be now, and as time went on and people who play IPC heads got settled into their new characters, it became harder and harder to justify taking it away from them.  And at some point, the concept of 'free IPCs' was also introduced, which just sort of tacked on the second alternative of the event rewards without anyone having to do anything that I'm aware of? 

Now, IPC's are basically humans as far as any social status goes. There's a special 'automacide' charge that is just murder for free IPCs, and while you can 'opt in' to being a non-free IPC if you want, there is zero oversight on it, there isn't even a mechanic that labels an IPC as free.  It's just a thing that is tacked onto their records if they can remember to do that, and there is no way for a casual bystander to know if the robot they are looking at is free or not.  The only thing that possibly makes things hard for them is the whole untagged shell pretending to be a human scenario, but that's so hard to pull about feasibly and so fiercely protected against metagame that it is sadly rare that it ever generates negative roleplay.

This social creep is getting out of hand.  As an unathi main, half of my racial tension is shitting on robots, and the direction of the server is slowly taking that away as it socially coddles them more and more.  Robots walk up to unathi to have casual conversations now, unafraid of being roughed up or cursed at, and the unathi who does is subject to an IR or security response.

If you can't bring yourself to take away some of these already present social buffs to IPCs, then I'm asking - BEGGING - the lore team to please do SOMETHING that shits on the IPCs a little.  Something that encourages the playerbase to treat them as something different or lesser from humans with stronger metal parts. I remember there once being an event where unathi were forced to register loyalty oaths to Nanotrasen due to a war, and it made people briefly mistrustful of their unathi coworkers.  It was a great temporary change in the status quo that drove roleplay in a new direction, but didn't stick around forever.  That was how the IPC heads thing should have been, and there should have been some later on difficulty that caused it to be difficult for IPCs who there for the event to stay heads, and even harder for ones who weren't active at the time of the event to just appear and become heads.

Edited July 17, 2019 by Kaed

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I agree with all points posted.

It would be interesting to see something happen to generate reactionaries against synths.

Edited July 16, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[Xelnagahunter]

I don't really play IPCs anymore, but I agree as a synth whitelist holder. There is little to no downside to playing an IPC at the current point, they are strong mechanically and treated with much the same respect as their organic counterparts (save for a few outlier characters). Granted, the entire playerbase seems to be largely avoiding racism as a whole, but this could be fixed with a few well aimed lore bits.

Note: These are based solely on the observations as I have seen them while I play or observe. I may be missing some of the racism and whatnot due to playtimes, but I don't think I really have.

[Bygonehero]

In order to get racism to manifest in average players, there needs to be mechanics that encourage adversity. This is done to great effect with Vaurca, with phoron leaks, kois food having developed their own mythos around Vaurca even before a player knows anything else about them.

[Soultheif96]

I also have to agree as a synth/command whitelist holder, I generally get treated like an equal or greater as Sterben or Flamel, which makes it difficult for others to discriminate or actively go against me while I am in charge of a department. I notice mild distaste by Skrell/Unathi/Dominians but never a point they outright ignore me or protest when I give a clear, direct order to them to do something. Best they do is just complain that I should not hold the position due to my synthetic nature.

So, I agree that there needs to be adversity and a push to such with lore backing it up.

[Sytic]

As a prominent IPC player, I've long maintained a stance on the fact that their mechanics are stupid and quite obviously stronger than most species, but I've never considered this.

I like it. Your points are solid and I agree with them. One thing I find difficulty with, though. "Social creep"? Can you go into further detail on what you mean by this?

Otherwise, +1. We should have more RP-fueled back and forth between recently developed "free thought" toasters and actual flesh and blood.

[MattAtlas]

I was originally against IPCs getting the chance to be HoP/HoS - I still am, I don't believe a robot should be commanding sec or having as much power as a HoP. Why? Because this reinforces machines not being considered a full "species". I don't like the basically almost human free reign that IPCs have nowadays, job-wise. Is it bad? Not really. Would I rather have the opposite? Yes.

[Kaed]

2 hours ago, Sytic said:

As a prominent IPC player, I've long maintained a stance on the fact that their mechanics are stupid and quite obviously stronger than most species, but I've never considered this.

I like it. Your points are solid and I agree with them. One thing I find difficulty with, though. "Social creep"? Can you go into further detail on what you mean by this?

Otherwise, +1. We should have more RP-fueled back and forth between recently developed "free thought" toasters and actual flesh and blood.

The concept of power creep is a series of buffs over time to a game or setting mechanic that eventually makes the result completely unrecognizable from the original source.  Take most shonen animes for instance.  The abilities of characters at the beginning of the series are generally small and paltry compared to how they are 100+ episodes in.  Where once they struggled to perform basic ninja jutsu, they are now blasting away forest and whatever.

In this case, the power creep takes the form of social status changes, one after the other, all positive with nothing to counterbalance them.  Ergo, social power creep

Edited July 17, 2019 by Kaed

[kyres1]

As said before, mass character reverts are out of the question due to the nature of exactly how many IPC heads there are. The mistake has long been made, but solving it is not as simple as reverting it.

I'm looking into ways to organically chop down on IPC rights without doing the following :

1. reverting/ending countless character backstories

2. throwing the entirety of synthlore back into a civil rights story loop

3. pissing everyone off.

An arc has been in development for about the last two and a half months that should be announced to the community near the end of this month, or the start of this coming one. This will be tied directly to synth rights in Tau Ceti without delving into what's been seen a million times before. You can expect solid answers on what the arc will result in around that time - though, it depends on how the arc goes and what the team in general wants. On the table are things like preventing IPCs from making IRs, separating them mechanically like Bygone proposed from their organic counterparts, etc.

Forcibly introducing discrimination through mechanics is possible but I have no idea how to make this happen. Vaurca are dangerous and annoying to be around due to leaking phoron and generally being stinky giant bugs. Making robots dangerous and annoying to be around is difficult without coming to ask the question, "why was this built, why is it here, and why is it doing what it's doing?" Unless we pull some ideas out of our butt in that regard, the current ideas we're working with generally revolve around out-of-mechanics stuff.

TL;DR something will happen to IPC rights no matter what. IPC heads can not be reverted easily, which is complicating things severely. More news will come in like 2 weeks

[Mofo1995]

When the synth rights arc was going on, I was fighting hard on the anti-synth side, but alas, we lost. Despite the consequences not going how I wanted, it was ultimately due to player actions, their participation, and their involvement in one of the greatest arcs with player-driven participation in the server's history. I'm really unwilling to roll that back and say "SIKE!" When people say "why do synths have more privileges than before?" everyone can always point to that big event which was driven by the community and their actions on server. It should remain. But I am wide open to alternatives such as Kyres is coming up with.

Around the time of the Frost event and during the second antag contest, the whole theme of "Synth Rights" grew extremely tired. It seemed like it encompassed all lore and it felt like it was all anyone talked about. As a lore writer it got exhausting, and I wanted to yeet it away and shift to a new hot button issue that everyone could talk about. The shifting didn't really work because of a poor follow through, since I was just the Tajara dev at the time and didn't want to lay my hands all over things outside of my lane, but I was happy to see people actually talking about other things and to be done with the hamfisted civil rights parallels. 

Anyways, I do agree that the pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction, with everyone treating IPCs as equals. I would encourage things like "be the change you want to see" but for some reason it just doesn't work as well with IPCs as it does with Tajara and Unathi and Vaurcae and even Skrell. I feel pretty leisurely about making racial judgments and insults against the organic races, but when it comes to IPCs even I hesitate and think, "Can I get away with calling it a tin can? Or being rude to it? Or generally making it feel unwelcome?" Because the meta is that they are equal at this point. We'll figure out a way to compensate the discrepancy here. 

[Bath Salts Addict]

I mean, is it really as much of an issue as people are convinced it is?

Just have your characters call them rusty tin cans and such. Just don't be surprised if the IPC in question gives you backsass. And imagine how it's going to go when an IPC or a pro-synth rights witness complains to IA about someone hurting their robo-feelings. The reporter would get laughed at.

What I'm taking away from this thread overall is "I want my character to be hateful and bigoted against robots but I don't want to face IC consequences and lose brownie points with other organic characters for playing a hateful bigot"

Edited July 20, 2019 by Bath Salts Addict

[Skull132]

On 17/07/2019 at 02:24, Marlon Phoenix said:

I agree with all points posted.

It would be interesting to see something happen to generate reactionaries against synths.

I am so going to frame this on my wall of irony.

Personal micro-aggressions aside, tho.

Yes this is an issue. Both the player base and the lore team have proven to be supremely incapable of handling long-term restrictions on choice. "Social creep" is a neat term for this, one which I will add to my collection, alongside "Bloat". It is ultimately a fact that the player base will enjoy a positive outlook on matters, simply because it is far easier to play a game where you are fed positive emotions over negative ones.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the development and lore teams to make sure this sort of power creep doesn't happen. We have failed, though over the past 6 months, as I've started to take a more closer look at the lore team, I have started to become wary of this issue more and more. In the future, for long developments, such as new species or large setting specific matters, I plan to have a harsher hand on matters like this.

However, as has been stated, reverts are an ass and not easily doable unless we rejigg a bit more than we currently can with the asteroid station. Perhaps we will be given an opportunity to in the future.

Further, none of this is a policy that's enforceable so this is gonna get binned.