Revert the removal of the Aut'akh subspecies.

[Skyglazer]

What it says on the title. The removal of the Aut'akh Unathi subspecies has only served to do harm to lore and gameplay. Changes made to the code should coincide with changes in the lore, or at the very least adhere to what might exist in the lore. The removal of the Aut'akh Unathi subspecies has effectively removed all characters that had full-body prosthetics from play, which includes a long list of characters that existed before the change that cannot play without another way to play with a full-body prosthetic. To my knowledge, a solution to this issue is not being worked on and is not close to being implemented. With that being the case, I propose that the following changes be made:

• Bring back the Aut'akh Unathi subrace. Not only will it allow previously existing characters to continue existing, but it will also allow for any off-station roles (ERT, Antagonists, other special roles) to be Aut'akh characters. The current implementation of the prosthetics systems does not support ghost/antagonist roles adding prosthetics to their character through the use of the auto-surgeon or any other in-game character customization option. As there is no full-body-prosthetic solution close to completion, this is the fastest way to remedy the complete nullification of characters that the removal of it caused. Currently, any players who would want to play as Aut'akh off-station roles only have the option of playing a non-augmented Aut'akh, which are uncommon.
• Keep the current way the prosthetics and loadout items work. Aut'akh with only a few augmentations and implants should exist as per the lore, and non-FBP Aut'akh being able to use Aut'akh implants/prosthetics instead of the other brands is lore-friendly and simply nice to have.
• Keep the community updated on intended changes to code and lore. Especially when a multitude of characters are concerned, suddenly wiping several characters out of existence with a change that wasn't properly telegraphed is unacceptable and frankly unprofessional. This pull-request by Alberyk reads: 

  Quote

  This pr removes the aut'akh subspecies. Their limbs are now in the robot limb loadout option. Their augments are now in the loadout unathi section. Players can now control how augmented they want to be, instead of them all being fbp.

  In my interpretation and likely the interpretation of others, this language does not in any way state that the full body prosthetic will not be an option. "Players can control how augmented they want to be, instead of all being FBP," implies to me that there will be an option for SOME of them to be FBP. But no such option was included and this was not made clear in the PR or the announcement of the PR by Sleepy in the Unathi discord. The community should be made aware of the impending changes so they can prepare accordingly, be it through character retcons or switching existing characters off of the subspecies onto regular-Unathi so they do not need to be remade. If a character is saved to a species which is deleted, they are defaulted to human and lose a majority of their customization options including colors and languages. The lack of ability to prepare or adapt to these changes has left me completely unable to play my Aut'akh character, Siansi Arkha, and I would have loved to be informed of the steps that needed to be taken in order to avoid such a fate.

From what I can tell, there would be very little issue with re-adding the subspecies. The Aut'akh loadout items can be made unavailable for selection by Aut'akh in the loadout menu, or Aut'akh players can simply be informed not to select them, as they will not be necessary as the full-body prosthetic includes all of the features that the currently-selected items can provide (except for the graspers, which needed to be manually selected by Aut'akh anyway.) It will (likely) not break anything, cause any inconsistencies, and will work fine as a stand-in. The subspecies should be removed after and only after there is a way to continue playing as already-extant characters or a lore adjustment removing said characters from play is published. Doing this before just leaves players (such as myself) feeling angry, confused, and gypped. Some people have expressed their desire for Aut'akh to be removed from the game entirely, but removal should take the proper methods and should be a decision that many people take part in.

I think my request is a humble, reasonable-to-accomplish change that shouldn't upset anyone. I quite miss interactions between Aut'akh characters and my own, and indeed my Aut'akh character's interaction with others. Make changes to the code when they are ready, not half-done. Thank you for reading and potentially considering my request, please leave any questions/comments/concerns/other discussion below, I am welcome to hear it.

Edited June 6, 2020 by Skyglazer
Gypped is spelled with a y, not an i.

[Tomiix]

I feel like if the PR notes were clear, and the announcement more transparent about what we would be losing, I think the Aut'akh would of asked for it to be stopped and changed. The half-baked implementation without consideration for the characters it would destroy, is sort of disheartening. Yes, it was a desire I had to have non-fbp Unathi. It's something that is clearly lacking and should of been added. However not considering that removing the option of the FBP and what it would do to the existing community in a way killed a lot of Aut'akh characters and the motivation to play them.

Honestly a proper solution would of been to just... do something similar to how Off Worlder Humans work. Create the Reborn Aut'akh, and then create a Shard Aut'akh which is a unathi with access to Aut'akh implants and limbs. I don't see why this would of been any more of a challenge with other recent examples showing how this could be done.

I don't want to give anyone a hard time, it was most certainly a slip up instead of something in malice. But I would rather us not have access to Shard Aut'akh and having to wait however long it would take to separate the two then continue to have just Shards. I don't think its fair for people to not be able to play their Aut'akh they already made within the limitations.

 

+1 BTW

Edited June 6, 2020 by Tomiix

[Kintsugi]

As a preface: I have no special love for the Aut'akh. In fact, I don't particularly care for them - they feel out of place to me.

But the fact of the matter is that they were recently handled quite poorly - it is important to note that, indeed, the Aut'akh were not removed. They instead experienced a sweeping mechanical change that had repercussions for existing characters (With one of the potential repercussions being "this character is no longer playable.") This is, to be frank, unfair - a mechanical overhaul of how a species works that removes functionality needs to add an alternative in order to facilitate continued existence for characters that rely on that functionality. The recent PR did not provide an alternative, and I can't in good conscience say that the current situation is acceptable or fair to all the Aut'akh players who had their characters removed as a result of this. As a result, I must agree with the suggestion to revert the PR that removed the Aut'akh subspecies. If we want to move them over to FBPs, fine - but let's make that change when the work is already done. Assuring us that it will happen eventually is simply not good enough - and there is no harm in maintaining the previous status quo until the code is ready for the switch.

 

tl;dr +1

Edited June 6, 2020 by DanseMacabre

[Skull132]

56 minutes ago, DanseMacabre said:

If we want to move them over to FBPs, fine - but let's make that change when the work is already done.

What if we. Don't? Because I'm pretty sure we don't.

[IAmCrystalClear]

I have no love for Aut’akh. They feel out of place and don’t fit into unathi lore and core morales.

 

Despite this, the method of which they were handled recently was appalling and unacceptable. Regardless of the end goal, the fact we have completely removed some of the most enjoyable characters on the station with little (as far as I’m aware) prior warning and no alternative in place (even if one is planned) is downright pathetic.

Imagine if the sub races of Tajara were removed under the guise that their attributes would be added into the primary races, that were not implemented at all.
 

tl:dr; +1

[Kintsugi]

2 hours ago, Skull132 said:

What if we. Don't? Because I'm pretty sure we don't.

I don't understand what you're referring to.

[Carver]

With a base population of 10,000 in TC according to lore, they should be extremely rare and limited on station. This change has made an effective cut-down in the number of Aut'akh cultists on-board, and I would not want to see their return in full-bodied form unless limitations were made to the amount that may be present (so as to never outnumber normal Unathi characters).

[Skyglazer]

1 hour ago, Carver said:

With a base population of 10,000 in TC according to lore, they should be extremely rare and limited on station. This change has made an effective cut-down in the number of Aut'akh cultists on-board, and I would not want to see their return in full-bodied form unless limitations were made to the amount that may be present (so as to never outnumber normal Unathi characters).

Consider also in the same passage where it lists their limited population that it also says that they are all locked into work contracts with NanoTrasen because of the debt that they owe. A limitation frankly seems a bit petty to me because you don't see such a thing with any other race or subrace. If a certain number of people want to play specific characters, and they are all plausibly under NanoTrasen's employ, there's no reason that they shouldn't be able to work at the same time. And again, part of the problems is that terms like this should've been negotiated and discussed among the community before the change to remove them was made, so we could all have a fair say. If you aren't fond of seeing too many at once, so be it, but keep in mind there are many ways to justify it. Perhaps they negotiated with NanoTrasen to be staffed in groups so they would not feel lonely, as loneliness is a big problem for Aut'akh that aren't connected to OSS. Perhaps they are staffed around the same time because they all live on the same planet and the work-days are the same there. There are many ways to play-and-let-play, and there's going to be some major tweaks to their lore by Sleepy soon, so this line of discussion may end up proving obsolete in the future. Try to consider the ways of handling things that make the most people happy, as that's how we keep the most players on the server.

 

6 hours ago, Skull132 said:

What if we. Don't? Because I'm pretty sure we don't.

We do. See Alberyk (again, the initial author of the PR)'s statement here (there is a full conversation in the Unathi Chat Discord which goes into more detail, you can either take my word for it or look for yourself):

In this same discussion, Alberyk states that he is against reverting the removal of the subspecies because it would create "more work" for this future PR, with a lack of regard for the players these changes have inconvenienced. As IAmCrystalClear states, you'd never see this happen to a subrace of Tajara characters. Alberyk already has all the work done of removing the subspecies. I'll admit I'm not an experienced coder, but from what I've briefly looked through in the PR before drafting this post, there doesn't seem to be any real reason to me that undoing it and then doing it again at a later date should be particularly difficult, as the majority of the lines of code used are just removing referrals to the species in stuff like job code. If he really does not want to do it, I (and others) would be ready and willing to buckle down and try to get the subspecies back in without undoing some of the other stuff that he has added.

[DeadLantern]

4 hours ago, Carver said:

With a base population of 10,000 in TC according to lore, they should be extremely rare and limited on station. This change has made an effective cut-down in the number of Aut'akh cultists on-board, and I would not want to see their return in full-bodied form unless limitations were made to the amount that may be present (so as to never outnumber normal Unathi characters).

This point does not matter because characters were already made before the status quo. No matter your lore greivances, you can not just void characters from being a full Aut'akh. I honestly prefer having more unaugmented Aut'akh, but characters were already made. It is trashy just to force people to retcon their characters and their backstories or have them wait for the FBP PR to come. Why not just do both at the same time, and avoid this problem?

[Carver]

28 minutes ago, DeadLantern said:

This point does not matter because characters were already made before the status quo. No matter your lore greivances, you can not just void characters from being a full Aut'akh. I honestly prefer having more unaugmented Aut'akh, but characters were already made. It is trashy just to force people to retcon their characters and their backstories or have them wait for the FBP PR to come. Why not just do both at the same time, and avoid this problem?

It's a very minimal retcon as it were, and this is not the first nor likely the last time a significant change demanding retcons has been made like this. Shells (MMI/Circuit brains from the fractal lore era), ATLAS, Vox and Necropolis being four examples in a relative range from 'years ago' to 'weeks ago' as prime examples.

[DeadLantern]

It is not minimal. There is a very clear difference between fully augmented Aut'akh and unaugmented Aut'akh, both on Moghes and in New Gibson. Necropolis was literally just a name change, and it was done ICly. No one plays Vox. ATLAS still technically exists. And you can still play shells, even if their lore is different. You literally can not play a fully augmented Aut'akh. This is much more than just a small rework. It is barring players from their characters where previously they could play them. The difference, mechanically and lorewise, is huge between unaugmented and augmented Aut'akh.

[Skyglazer]

41 minutes ago, Carver said:

It's a very minimal retcon as it were, and this is not the first nor likely the last time a significant change demanding retcons has been made like this. Shells (MMI/Circuit brains from the fractal lore era), ATLAS, Vox and Necropolis being four examples in a relative range from 'years ago' to 'weeks ago' as prime examples.

This is not intended to be a retcon. This is a problem with a pending solution when there should be no problem to begin with, that is all. Lore retcons/etc. are completely separate from what is at play, no matter how much your opinions may differ from ours, they are not what we are talking about. The lore has not changed. Only the mechanics have. Fully augmented Aut'akh Unathi still exist in the lore, but you cannot play them in the game.

Edited June 6, 2020 by Skyglazer

[Cnaym]

From a mechanical standpoint they also lost their lore background due to the changes.

Survival on the polar capes: Subspecies did not take burn damage in a the kitchen freezer for example due to cold, was very weak to lasers as trade off.

Full prosthetic body: Slightly higher brute modifier, repeated flashing overloaded their eyes and dropped them on the floor.

Augments: In my opinion the biggest offender. Picking their two native implants and the (required) soul anchor costs you 9 loadout points. Add another three for a grasper and this becomes a joke.

Limbs: Can no longer remove and exchange limbs at will, one of the most unique features they had.

Sprint: Now the same as unathi, prior slightly slower with a little more stamina. Not a big one, but made sense for them being survivalists.

Flavor stuff is mostly their loss of unique colors and their weight now being a normal unathi. Not the most important, but people enjoy to call each other thick or RP with it.

Onto the good stuff then. You can be an ion proof aut'akh now, abusing the chemical systems until they get destroyed. Medical will no longer have to handle you like a difficult patient with mechanics that got rarely used. You can now space Aut'akh, which kills them quickly due to cold. You can finally be an undercover Aut'akh, recruiting folks that got crippled.

As probably one of the three to four people who played Aut'akh, this hit hard, but I do agree that they needed some changes and fixes. The way this was handled was not better or worse than the usual changes imho, it would just be nice if folks could work together to find some solutions now instead of pointing fingers.

Finally the balance side of things should be left to the coders and the lore side to the lore dev of the species. Maybe they plan to rewrite them a little to make this PR check out a little more  

[Carver]

11 hours ago, Cnaym said:

Augments: In my opinion the biggest offender. Picking their two native implants and the (required) soul anchor costs you 9 loadout points. Add another three for a grasper and this becomes a joke.

This I wasn't aware of. Assuming the three 'necessary augments' have no real mechanical benefit, I don't see why they'd cost 9 in total unless it's some clever way to limit them by discouraging fashionista players.

[Alberyk]

51 minutes ago, Carver said:

This I wasn't aware of. Assuming the three 'necessary augments' have no real mechanical benefit, I don't see why they'd cost 9 in total unless it's some clever way to limit them by discouraging fashionista players.

The only augment without an use, and the one needed to be an aut'kah in lore, only uses one point. All other have a mechanical use, they inject the user with beneficial chemicals when used.

[Scheveningen]

I personally have few arguments regarding the lore side apart from my misgivings about how Aut'akh are the most glaring subversion of everything Unathi lore stood for initially. It's... notably less relevant, in any case, compared to some actual concerns that need to be levied over lore content. Before I touch on that, I don't have an issue with Unathi having augmentations or partial prosthetic reconstruction, for various reasons I think that is better than bringing back the extreme of "Unathi FBPs" outright. To be perfectly honest, I'd prefer if the concept of "Aut'akh" were reserved to it being a concept of varying degrees of modification instead of a subspecies of its own.

On the mechanics side... where to begin? Aut'akh from the balance side of things was a goddamn nightmare. They essentially had the upsides of organics and IPCs bundled into one, with very few of the glaring downsides of either. Aut'akh could self-repair with nanopaste and that was really just absurd because Aut'akh antagonists would apply nanopaste to themselves and fix most external issues straight away. While they certainly had an ion vulnerability similar to IPCs, it didn't mean terribly much due to their ridiculous sustainability as antagonists. Compared to humans, they were much more oppressive to deal with as antagonists because they could cheat away damage while antagonists of more mortal qualities had to deal with bone breaks and more serious cases of bleeding. Not to mention all those free goodies they got as combitools and built-in augments. That was not a fun time. Due to the nature of Aut'akh being FBPs essentially, I recall a few occurrences where any chest/head damage dealt to an Aut'akh was uncharacteristically healed away anyway. Further, Aut'akh don't need to be limited to just nanopaste, but welding tool and wires to fix themselves on the fly was also mechanically possible. IPCs can't exactly do that. There were a lot of unaddressed issues with Aut'akh from the balance side of things before it was subsequently removed. The question of adding them back would also bring back the question of addressing everything I mentioned in terms of their design as well as anything I didn't mention, because I most likely did not cover everything there is that Aut'akh had raw strengths in.

Speaking of how awful they were in-game to deal with either as an antagonist myself or when they were the antagonist and I had to deal with them, well. I think Alb probably did the best possible thing in throwing Aut'akh temporarily into the trash bin.

Another thing with the question of bringing Aut'akh back. As far as I can reckon, I don't think there seems to be any real lore maintainer interest in continuing to develop Aut'akh, for reasons that might end up being somewhat self-evident. With sub-species shenanigans (especially to the scale of prosthetically hyper-modified Unathi people, as opposed to "I'm a cat except I'm white") comes the implication that they're a minor faction of Unathi that has to be relevant in the scheme of things and must have active development in terms of lore to justify their continued existence, because quite literally everything they stand for is in absolute opposition to Unathi general views on body modification and their rather cold outlook on synthetics. If they're to be brought back, I would want to see actual development from them on the lore side, and not just pushed away as some side thing, because that's how bloat happens.

To actually add to the conversation though: if Aut'akh are to come back, they shouldn't be a subspecies. Just, no. None of that snowflake stuff again, please. If this is to come back, it should be integrated into Unathi for the most part, and individual Aut'nathi can essentially decide for themselves how to stylize themselves on a scale of "My pinky is made of aluminum" to "YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO COMPLY" (which, while I don't think FBPs fit this server, I'll deal with it if it becomes an actual possibilty). And I honestly hope we do not get those weird Aut'akh internal organs which served very little function besides fluff. 

Edited June 7, 2020 by Scheveningen

[Cnaym]

11 hours ago, Carver said:

This I wasn't aware of. Assuming the three 'necessary augments' have no real mechanical benefit, I don't see why they'd cost 9 in total unless it's some clever way to limit them by discouraging fashionista players.

Well....

They enabled to trade a ton of nutrition for stabilizers or healing chems. From an RP perspective really neat. From a powergaming antag perspective super duper overpowered. It got a bit broken when I noticed that Nar-Sie monster spam could not even keep Aut'akh down because you were able to just eat the monsters.

That being said, it was part of what made them unique. Punishing the one antag that abuses Aut'akh seems better than yeeting the entire subspecies. I'd not have trouble with the point cost (or removel / nerf to the ground) of those two implants if they would instead keep their racial modifiers such as cold resistance. They live in polar bunkers, cold should not worry them ingame.

[Carver]

With those clarifications, I don't really think those two implants are required for the 'Aut'akh experience'. I'd be less worried about the 'one antag' and more about an entire sub-species (non-antags in particular) having a free version of an ability akin to something Ninjas and Borers have.

As for the cold resistance - that's also making the assumption that polar bunkers lack heating, no? It seems rather silly in and of itself that a cold-blooded species who very readily dies in temperatures a human would find mildly nippy can suddenly disregard that, and at the same time somehow avoid the fiery overheating issue present within IPCs of a similar size whose internal climate control wouldn't be competing with vital organs.

[DronzTheWolf]

7 hours ago, Carver said:

With those clarifications, I don't really think those two implants are required for the 'Aut'akh experience'. I'd be less worried about the 'one antag' and more about an entire sub-species (non-antags in particular) having a free version of an ability akin to something Ninjas and Borers have.

As for the cold resistance - that's also making the assumption that polar bunkers lack heating, no? It seems rather silly in and of itself that a cold-blooded species who very readily dies in temperatures a human would find mildly nippy can suddenly disregard that, and at the same time somehow avoid the fiery overheating issue present within IPCs of a similar size whose internal climate control wouldn't be competing with vital organs.

The Aut'akh literally buried themselves in snow to ambush the crusaders who went after them.

From page 4 of the Sinta Articles: 

Spoiler

“Ceaseless harassment from snipers plagued us for our march north.We all believed the Aut’akh showed a cowardly refusal to face the Maraziites in pitched battle and that this would continue. But we were marching through a valley, the Sinta on foot struggling to walk through the two feet deep snow. It was utterly quiet until we were suddenly ambushed. They burst up from the snow or came down from the mountains holding spears and rifles. Many of them were only partially augmented and the hide they still possessed was as white as the snow. Others were as bulky as a beast. I feared for my life and fled into one of the armored vehicles.”

 

[Carver]

16 hours ago, DronzTheWolf said:

The Aut'akh literally buried themselves in snow to ambush the crusaders who went after them.

From page 4 of the Sinta Articles: 

  Hide contents

“Ceaseless harassment from snipers plagued us for our march north.We all believed the Aut’akh showed a cowardly refusal to face the Maraziites in pitched battle and that this would continue. But we were marching through a valley, the Sinta on foot struggling to walk through the two feet deep snow. It was utterly quiet until we were suddenly ambushed. They burst up from the snow or came down from the mountains holding spears and rifles. Many of them were only partially augmented and the hide they still possessed was as white as the snow. Others were as bulky as a beast. I feared for my life and fled into one of the armored vehicles.”

 

You understand that burying yourself in snow is a valid and effective survival method to avoid freezing to death during winter storms? Wind chill is the especially lethal part of arctic storms, not the snow itself.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

The autakh were made to resist the cold. They handled exposure better than the regular unathi. They didnt spend the entire time buried in igloos, silly.

As a whole a roadmap of these changes for players to come to terms with. Every member of administration has voiced wanting autakh removed entirely, so I believe these changes are permanent and irreversable. Having it and the continued future dismantling of the faction come out of nowhere will do harm to the unathi subcommunity. Please create an open and honest roadmap for the future.

[Kintsugi]

On 07/06/2020 at 03:28, Scheveningen said:

-snip-

While I am sympathetic to the whole "they're overpowered" sentiment and I respect that you have problems with the Aut'akh because of that - Your post doesn't address the matter at hand. Aut'akh as they were before can be nerfed just fine - the topic of this thread is the fact that many Aut'akh characters were completely removed unceremoniously and unfairly. How and why do balance considerations justify the removal of characters?

[Codename: Bear]

Maybe this is the wrong place to ask, I've been rather removed from things for a while. Were Aut'akh the FBP Mecha Unathi?

[Scheveningen]

They don't, Danse. It's a separate, and arguably subjective issue. Ultimately this is a game, however, and the way Aut'akh were implemented, they were quite bad for the game state, and things are better off now in my opinion that they are removed. I do not think that they at the time really had a justification for continued existence considering their actual importance to the rest of Unathi lore. As a separate subspecies, their existence made little if no sense. It would've made much more sense if Aut'akh was simply a concept in which a minority of Unathi would self-modify with synthetic prosthetics and such. What we got was instead an extremely radical group of mecha lizards that blow raspberries from inside the Wasteland at the Hegemon. It doesn't surprise me that an overwhelming amount of staff wanted it removed considering how much of a mistake it was in the first place.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

38 minutes ago, Codename: Bear said:

Maybe this is the wrong place to ask, I've been rather removed from things for a while. Were Aut'akh the FBP Mecha Unathi?

Yes, theyre one if the two radical religious movements born directly from the apocalypse the unathi dealt with. Doomsday cults after the doomsday.