Aurora and the Canonicity Boogeyman

[Carver]

40 minutes ago, Dreamix said:

I wish we had events that are more mundane and calm, and affect some local space, and not the whole spur, or even a nation, faction, planet.
I wish we had smaller events, that require less work and preparation, but also were more frequent and common.
I wish we had more canon presence on Horizon, in and out of arcs, more visitors and other mini-events.

I can’t really agree with this enough, one of the more enjoyable experiences for me in a round lately was a canon visit by a sector administrator. It was so minor you’d not be faulted for assuming it was an antagonist’s gimmick, but it wasn’t - and that sort of little thing does a lot to make the world feel more real. Furthermore, some of the events I remember most fondly were the little ones like the C’thur Bulwark visit. It was quiet, it was interesting and above all you could interact with these major lore defining characters on a level not restricted to Command characters or violent action.

 

Now on an aside, as one of the ‘negative nancies’ who not uncommonly hopes for blood, I’d like to answer why I like these negative results. Firstly, it adds impact to an event in a way nothing else can truly match - people will remember the faction(s) that killed their loved ones, that maimed them and that brought them to the edge of their life. Cold Dawn is remembered for this, those present often feel very strongly about the DPRA in turn. The recent Exclusionist event is hardly spoken of because it didn’t really have any of this, and in turn I’ve seen very little commentary on the exclusionist movement or the greater Trinary Perfection that birthed it. Now, does that mean I don’t want to see positive results? No, that isn’t the case at all, but I want a large helping of ‘negativity’ to balance out the positivity so that when an event is marked as high impact: it means precisely that. It will leave an impact on those who attended, those who witnessed it and even those who were merely active around Aurora in the period yet couldn’t attend at that time.

Those large, death-laden and character defining high impact events aren’t all there should be though. It can’t all be death and glory, and ultimately I earnestly believe that high impact should be the rarest of event types to ensure they truly live up to their classification.

Edited April 4 by Carver
I overused an adjective and it bothered me.

[Fluffy]

40 minutes ago, Triogenix said:

[snip]

This argument seems to me wrong for multiple and completely different reasons, I will just highlight two:

 

The most simple first: It assumes that the LTA cannot ever encounter the same issue: This isn't possible to guarantee, the LTA is composed of people just like the lore writers, any other staff position, and the playerbase itself

 

Then, it assumes that the product of someone who did something wrong would necessarily also be bad, which isn't the case, if we banned someone for having done something wrong, that is the punishment for having done something wrong, it doesn't mean that everything he ever did must also be bad and thus expurged, any reference wiped from the picture - No, someone did something wrong, that is limited to what he did wrong, it's not all-encompassing, it doesn't follow that everything related to him must now also be bad or wrong, this line of reasoning has an odd taste of the famous meme of Stalin making people disappear from pictures, something that would be very funny ICly, and very concerning OOCly, to do

 

This also breaks the ICly-OOCly barrier, when we ban players, we do not man-in-black flash-erase their characters from the mind of other characters, because administrative actions such as those are OOC measures. Apart from the obvious consequence that banned people cannot play anymore, we do not go back in time and erase everything their characters did, and wipe them from everyone's memory, so I do not see why a character would need to be wiped just because someone was banned later down the line, if what they did at a specific time was good, it will remain ICly good, that doesn't change retroactively based on what happens to the player

 

There is also the arguments of probability and risk/benefit analysis, but Sue already made a nice version of that so I won't repeat it unless it requires further elaborations down the line

 

I can go on, but I think the mantra of "Not having a good reason to believe something is a sufficient reason not to believe it" should be sufficient here, so unless prompted, it wouldn't make sense to go on about it

 

13 minutes ago, Dreamix said:

And actually, yes, I do think it is intimidating to see characters who have saved the whole spur 5 times in their life, killed 100 pirates or solarian marines or whoever else, etc and etc. Why would I create a new and fresh character, and spend weeks or months establishing them, if they're never going to be as important as these veteran 10 year old characters, and anything I do in or out of events would only pale in comparison?

This has some issues too imo, first of all being: You can already find characters that killed 100 pirates or solarian marines (or people in general), that is part of the canonicity already, but it doesn't seem to be an issue that prevented new players from hopping in so far, so I guess we can put it to rest and say it isn't really an issue

 

The second, is two fold: To do noteworthy things, you have to face noteworthy risks - You might save the spur, but it's immensely more likely that you'll die instead. Someone saving the spur 5 times would be a statistical anomaly, that you will find maybe one character of, in the whole Aurora history, so it isn't really an issue

The second fold, is that you can also contribute to write the history of the Auroraverse and where it goes, with your characters. Just because someone else did it already, doesn't detract from your own accomplishments

 

 

For what it's worth, I think Sue et al. are right, and that it's good to let the characters have recognitions and the players have an hand in deciding where the story goes, through IC accomplishments and OOC canonization apps / pools / writing / etc.

[Shimmer]

34 minutes ago, Dreamix said:

If events were to be more mundane, that would help to change the perception about events being deadly, and deaths being the only lasting impact on anything.
If events were to be smaller and more frequent, that means more people have a greater chance to do something meaningful.
If we were to have more canon presence on horizon, it would let people outside of command and security jobs to interact with the arc.

It would give characters something to talk about, share, bond over. Antagonists don't involve any degree of canonicity, and they are like most of the engagement players get.

It's hard to develop a character when you basically retcon them all the time.

[greenjoe]

7 minutes ago, Shimmer said:

It would give characters something to talk about, share, bond over. Antagonists don't involve any degree of canonicity, and they are like most of the engagement players get.

It's hard to develop a character when you basically retcon them all the time.

I agree
This is good, and Dreamy's idea is good, I also agree with the points Sue brought up in the start of this thread.

[Fyni]

I had a HUGE post written up, but I condensed it down to:

***

I played Bay for over ten years, before coming here. The first thing my Bay friends who made the swap before me mentioned was canon events and canon character stuff. It was a huge draw, more so then the lore itself. I think the idea that canon things can make new players feel intimidated isn't unwarranted, but for some it's aspirational. Shame I learned that I can never make an impact, positive or negative. My character can never matter. Even if they die or get CCIA blackbagged, they just disappear into a void, as if there was no difference between the two.

I think a lot of valid points were made in my memorial thread. But I think it is reasonable to discuss this topic seperately, truly. I feel this cause is big enough that a community vote of somekind should be taken honestly.

***

This may be semi unrelated but I have mentioned multiple times in discord that the way the lore is presented on the wiki is often a mess, and there are literally hundreds of news articles. Has the number reached five hundred? Would that be surprising? Having a few names hidden in them basically means nothing to new players who will either never see the names or not even recognize them, but provides something to established characters. I think this is the very bare minimum of acknodlegment and it's sad not even that is allowed.

***

I also think more low stakes canon events would be great. Events which are just a normal round but with a pre-vetted antag gimmick run by trusted players who won't go on a murder spree, random anomalies for science, "oh we think we found Phoron go to X place", or "nearby freighter has had an explosion we need you to save people" or something to give none Security members moments to shine.

[MattAtlas]

I'm going to skip over the long list of posts made by a lot of people because it would be exhausting to reply to them and there's only a few key points anyway. At the same time, I'll leave things like players in articles and etc to the Lore Team and I'll talk more about my view on the mechanics part of this - because, yes, there is a point where mechanics should be involved.

My opinion on the matter, if anyone cares, is that I don't really feel like I needed my involvement in events to be explicitly written for them to impact my character. I didn't look at recognition, I only made do with what happened to my character, and I didn't really feel like I ever needed to point at news articles to feel like I tangibly did something, like when I murdered a captain.

I have two main problems with characters being allowed in lore articles and more 'explicit' permanence:

1. I personally witnessed quite a few people using it to ego-boost and that left a very sour taste in my mouth.
2. I don't want our setting to become a constant race to the top where loads of people have accolades for "killing the Tajara killer" "killing the Hivebot Beacon in Synthetic Nightmares" "handling the Elyran raid on the Horizon during Dreary Futures" "avoiding the Clandestine Explosion" and so on. We have a corporate setting that I think should be preserved, and I think that allowing too much recognition of often-abstracted things (case in point - the involvement of the Horizon's employees in the mass assault events) leads to us dangerously picking away at its credibility.

At the same time, I recognise that things must change, especially when so much of the community feels fairly strongly, and so I have some ideas (some thought up by Arrow as well which I agree with) on how to address some of the points here.

To begin with, I think that mechanics are the only way "true permanence" can be achieved. Yes, there are lore articles where your character can get mentioned, but those are fickle, often buried by other news articles in the same thread and new threads with more articles, and require a lot more fine combing to find. Characters can have two different ways of having their deeds recognised: being alive and dead.

1. While being alive, they would logically keep some sort of item that demonstrates their involvement in some sort of events.
   1. I don't think medals are the way to go about this. They feel way too LARPy. I'm not sure what to do here so I'm looking for suggestions on the matter.
2. While being dead, there needs to be something that marks their involvement in a past arc.
   1. Our idea here was some sort of memorial with a terminal (think the one in Mass Effect 3 for a visual reference). I think this could be implemented fairly easily and without much of a hassle, even if it'd have to be manual. Basically what I'm thinking is that clicking the terminal opens up an UI where you can see who died in which event. So you could select "The Konyang Crisis" and then you'd see all the people that died, and be able to expand their "plaque" to see the circumstances and a neat custom message if any.

[Fyni]

12 minutes ago, MattAtlas said:

While being dead, there needs to be something that marks their involvement in a past arc.

Our idea here was some sort of memorial with a terminal (think the one in Mass Effect 3 for a visual reference). I think this could be implemented fairly easily and without much of a hassle, even if it'd have to be manual. Basically what I'm thinking is that clicking the terminal opens up an UI where you can see who died in which event. So you could select "The Konyang Crisis" and then you'd see all the people that died, and be able to expand their "plaque" to see the circumstances and a neat custom message if any.

I recommended this a while back, and I think the discussion in it is what spawned this thread (somewhat)

 

12 minutes ago, MattAtlas said:

While being alive, they would logically keep some sort of item that demonstrates their involvement in some sort of events.

I don't think medals are the way to go about this. They feel way too LARPy. I'm not sure what to do here so I'm looking for suggestions on the matter.

Surely the most corporate way is a pizza party where everyone gets the smallest amount of pizza possible.

Seriously though, I would recommend "merits" which are similiar to incidents, which go on a characters records permenantly. Ideally this would also be alongside "public records" been available (a fourth type of record which just has basic info like name, gender, age) that anyone can see. "Part of the Assault on the Nuclear Station." would be an example merit. This would keep the thing out of the regular round (no chest full of medals) but would give something acknoledged in game. Merit giving ceremonies as short canon events would also be good for this, alongside "you got issued a bonus/increased salary" as a small modifier to wealth (wealth been something which doesn't really matter in game).

Edited April 4 by Fyni

[Triogenix]

After discussion with the rest of headstaff, we ended up thinking about the following ideas for the future;

1) An In-game memorial, on a computer(or something similar) that will showcase the names of all characters who died during IC arcs, and separate them by arc.(Matt mentioned this in his reply.)

2) Allow for characters to earn accolades, and be mentioned in articles, or other official lore, should it be wanted by the relevant team and the admin assigned to an event, and further approved by the loremasters and head administrators, similarly to the death-retcon rules. The rules will be edited to reflect this once we have a better idea of how we want to handle it going forward.

3) Due to the above - actions during events that are notable will be placed under heavier scrutiny by moderators and administrators.

4) Should the relevant team wish to pursue it, they may hold and publish interviews with members of the crew/characters present regarding events and arcs, which must be approved by the LTA before publishing.

5) The LTA, Head Staff, and relevant teams should ensure that the opportunity for and obtaining of the recognition by all of the above applies to a wide variety of players and characters, not just regulars. Furthermore, the aforementioned members of staff should strive to have it so that different characters/players get any of these types of recognition, either within the same arc, or across arcs.

6) As for events - we have been, and will continue to be attempting to have an increased amount of consistent, low stakes, style of events, in addition to high intensity ones, though this will take significant time, and will not be an immediate, noticed change, due to the way the lore team proposes and decides on events.

Beyond that, there are some parts where specifics will be hammered out; like do we have a system similar to what @Fyni suggested? Or something else. This isn’t final either, there may be some changes before being implemented as actual policy just due to how these things work, but this shows the general direction we’re thinking.

Edited April 4 by Triogenix
Making it more clear this isn't final

[greenjoe]

3 minutes ago, Triogenix said:

do we have a system similar to what @Fyni suggested?

What system are you referring to?

[N8-Toe]

I'm going to voice a concern on this. So I've been playing SS13 for nearing a decade, and Aurora on and off for 7ish? not sure anymore years

 

Part of the concern I'd have, is a few long running characters almost becoming "celebrities" in lore. So and So was a hero on Adhomai, Konyang, Biesel, names in the paper! face on TV! a hero across the spur.. and then imagining someone else looking at their character who was just "some guy". I think we should look for ways to give recognition or reward characters and players for their actions in events. But I don;t think I ever want to see a player characters name on the wiki. I would find it demoralizing to feel like I am a background character to the story and game and there is a group of "main characters". and If I was a new player I'd find it also off putting to see "well I'm just Atmostech/sec officer/doctor whatshisface. but my co worker is the hero of Kongyang, it said so on the wiki".

which this may make me slightly hypocritical. I've always maintained when making a character and backstory their "finest hour" should happen in game. Their moment of triumph or agony should happen in game. But with years on years on years of cannon arcs we run into, well... New characters from old players, and new characters from new players now having to stand up to someone who's canonically fought across the spur, or who's done great world altering heroic deeds. And well, we will have new characters. People decide to try new ones, new people come, people get alien whitelists, or just people want to play a different job. We will always have a new cast of characters, and that is not a bad thing, nor should the fact the names on the manifest is new discourage anyone from joining

But coming back to "how do we recognize players/characters". I think we should keep "if you die in an event, your toast" rule. As I think it does regulate behavior some, and really gives weight to the risks taken in events. I do 100% believe without that rule people would be more "out there" in risk. But I think those that die in cannon events should have their char name mentioned or memorialized. I dont think there is risk of any sort of "meta celebrity" status if they are dead, and gives a payoff and recognition to the character and player. But I don't think people should be put by name on the wiki or lore articles for success.  Lets use Kongyang for example, who gets  mentioned by name? the guy who destroyed the the transmitter? well if I was the one helping them but got left out, I may be sad or upset. Or I was leading the charge and wounded in the last moment. As well we ask players to be event volunteers. I was one for pretty much the entire Konyang arc, would missing out on that recognition discourage volunteers for that? I'd be abit miffed if I was an actor for the event and everyone but me got a mechanical/in record accolade for it and suddenly my own character is missing a mark on their record everyone else has. I'd be fine with "crewman so and so from the Horizon said this to our reporter". But I'm straight up walking away if I have to read in the wiki how someones character has  12 confirmed kills on three different planets and then I'm on shift with them.

 

I agree with Dream on more mundane events and cannoncity. But I do love the large arcs, I think they're part of what makes Aurora great. But some care is needed. Stepping back, sure it doesn't make sense a single ship and gaggle of 200 odd so and so's are at the middle of everything. but its a game and we need to work around it. I dont think embracing it and having service marks in records,  racks of medals on chests, or players on the wiki will help.

Edited April 4 by N8-Toe

[Triogenix]

30 minutes ago, N8-Toe said:

I think we should look for ways to give recognition or reward characters and players for their actions in events. But I don;t think I ever want to see a player characters name on the wiki. I would find it demoralizing to feel like I am a background character to the story and game and there is a group of "main characters". and If I was a new player I'd find it also off putting to see "well I'm just Atmostech/sec officer/doctor whatshisface. but my co worker is the hero of Kongyang, it said so on the wiki".

This is a fair concern and one that I tried to address here.

2 hours ago, Triogenix said:

wide variety of players and characters, not just regulars. Furthermore, the aforementioned members of staff should strive to have it so that different characters/players get any of these types of recognition, either within the same arc, or across arcs.

Again, nothing is final yet, but as part of this, my thoughts were to limit the number of times any character, or multiple characters all played by the same player, can be mentioned in "official" lore to like, once or twice, at most, to ensure that we recognize a wide variety of characters, and it's not just one person, or a group of people, to stop characters from  ending up looking like;

 

as for the wiki specifically - just due to how we do event arc pages(copy-pasting articles) if a name is in an article it'll go on the wiki. but I agree that we shouldn't have something on the Konyang page like "The rampancy was stopped by the Horizon crew, led by Captain Helena Artigas" or anything similar.

Edited April 4 by Triogenix

[NothingNew]

I don't really have much to add which hasn't been said by other people here, but I would like to give my perspective on a few things regarding canonicity and a few topics people have brought up. I've been playing Aurora sort of consistently since around December now and have been playing space station specifically for a couple years or so give or take (all different levels of role-play, come to think of it) so my perspective may come from someone who is a lot newer to the server compared to others. Likewise, my time tends to be fairly limited, and I don't always have the time to play on Aurora every day, and when I do it's usually in the mornings from around 5 AM (GMT) right before the population of the server dies off. Sometimes on the weekends I might get the opportunity to play Aurora in the evenings when it's high-pop (sometimes you'll get a good population in the evening at 6 PM on Sunday which is fairly nice) but that isn't always the case as I may very well end up preoccupied with something else, and while during the last event I was quite lucky in that each event-round took place roughly every two weeks, giving me a good chance to arrange my schedule to take part in the events there, I might not get the chance to take part in every single event in the future.

In and of itself that's fine, but I don't think there should be some pressure for players to attend every event round, nor do I want non-cannon interactions to be removed from the server (traitors primarily, some expeditions, when a character accidentally ingests Phoron or goes AFK next to a bloody carp, et cetera) as this would remove points of interest on the server for anyone who plays during off-peak times or has timezone or scheduling conflicts, rendering the server's participants only truly to those in the good ol' US of A. (Bald eagle squawk)

For starters, I don't think medals or accolades are the best way to go about it, as such would only really make sense for certain characters (and really goes against the corporate, workplace-oriented setting) like the head of security, or the captain. "Oh, see him? That's Billy Bird, the security guard. He has five medals and destroyed a set of pirates with his bare hands and fought in Spur-War 3. We don't know why he still works here or why a Phoron mining vessel was the most relevant in bringing the end of what was practically an entire war. Anyway, I've got to go back to hauling crates." It's a bit silly, isn't it?

Falters in character retention occurs for a lot of different reasons as well, mostly just because people either get bored of a character, that specific job role, move on from the Aurora server itself, or the role slots are filled up each time they want to play that specific character. Personally, I don't mind less-played characters joining event rounds to jump off a building, swim in the sewers or beat up the norinori mascot. It's funny. That's my opinion on that, really. It's just really funny - Those things happen at real-world mass-gatherings too, people can be really foolish.

Something that has been brought up that I would like to add on is that each event (or most from what I can tell) seems to involve some form of militia or battle and that's fine every once in awhile, but I would really like to see more corporate-themed events that are more relevant to the Horizon and the SCC as a set of companies, like events themed around corporate espionage (We have Einstein Engines still - What are they up to? They're still competitors, right?), or the release of new experimental technology/products that might use Phoron in some way. Maybe a ship full of very different people all from a variety of backgrounds would make a perfect testing ground for new technology or products. The SCC is a large company, and the Horizon is very expensive with a huge variety of different people, a lot of other organisations or companies would like to get their meat of the pie in reaching those onboard there for a variety of different reasons - Not just to harm them, but for public relation/marketing or research purposes, too.

It's low-stakes, but some of my favourite antag rounds were of just some random famous extranet star or corporate executive showing up to do something unprecedented. I'd like to see that more often, it's not at all unusual for famous people (or people well-known to their niche (like corporate executives)) to visit prisons or oil rigs, and it would be great to see some low-stake events like that which don't require as much effort into mapping. There is an entire realm of possibility here that (do forgive me) I feel is under-utilised, as we instead focus on militias or combat-oriented events.

I think this would help with character retention in some way too, since it's a lot broader and doesn't inherently involve characters who are combat-oriented. People may still die or get into heaps of trouble for intervening in something that's very important to the company, and the decisions characters make either individually or as a whole during non-combat oriented events can effect news articles too. Maybe we could have cannon-news reporters at the scene of these events to interview random people? Or if it is a public-relations thing, specific responses/reactions could be tested or probed.

As a far newer player myself, something that does bother me and affects character/player retention is that sometimes when you're involved in something a more-established character may join mid-round and the people you were previously working with will ignore you or your actions in favour of listening or interacting with the more-established character, to the point where you can't really interact with the round any more. It doesn't always happen, but it does happen often enough for me to pick up on it occurring.

I hope this post makes sense, my thoughts tend to be fairly jumbled. I enjoyed the last event, and I'm very interested to see what other events might entail. I just hope there's room for non-cannon, player-set events too, for the fun of it. Aurora tends to have a very specific, anti-antagonist culture that I hope can be improved or moved on from. This is a long post, apologies.

Edited April 4 by NothingNew

[Sniblet]

I’m like a year old. I have some scattered short thoughts from this thread and a lot aren’t super directly relevant. I’ll just dump them in no order.

I keep hearing rumors about The Dark Times of Aurora. It seems like every old-guard player has been through actual roleplaying hell because this server used to be an insufferable trash heap and if we make any change to anything at all, yea, The Howling Gate shall burst open once more, and in our final hours we shall despairingly cry out our regret for ever changing policy to allow machinists with one arm. I don’t know, this server seems alright from where I stand. Maybe we can relax a little? I kind of get this impression that rules and policy are based on the assumption that you can’t trust anybody with anything more than they need ever and the stakes of doing so are apocalyptic.

I think it’s cool that Ana is an ancient character. I truly would have no idea about this fact if I hadn’t read about it OOC, which is weird. I don’t think her age is intimidating. Jacquelyn Roberts told me a story about the Aurora IC once, and that was neat. It’s all really distant though. I don’t care about what happened on Aurora, really. It doesn’t affect me, unless it was part of KOTW, in which case it may tangentially affect me. Is this what canonicity feels like?

Nothing happens on Horizon outside of yearly events and monthly department renovations. Science’s discoveries and ops’s purchases are all, always, gone the next round. We don’t canonically meet other ships (except the small fleet of merchants following us everywhere and arbitrarily only meeting us on 30% of shifts) or discover new planets. We don’t find aliens that aren’t already well documented, and if we did, the writers would document them for us offscreen. We respond to things that happened without our input, watch as everything works out inevitably according to the writers’ design, then go back into warp until another meltdown occurs, so utterly memoryholed that nobody has even noticed that we have a weird device on our port wing yet. I guess it’s fun, but you can do more with a video game, not to mention a roleplaying game as stupidly malleable as SS13.

Isn’t Horizon the SCC’s flagship? Am I the only one noticing that the SCC doesn’t seem to think about their flagship at all except to send their commanding officers do-not-reply bot emails telling them to go be their only responder to the annual galactic crisis again? If the megacorporations have time to pretend to care about anything, surely it’s Horizon? No? Are we the flagship?

I like these micro-event suggestions. I haven’t particularly liked the arc events. Playing my PV shopkeeper was fun but playing a machinist trudging after the tactical strategic kill strike operative team squad and telling them repeatedly to please stop hitting the hundreds of lag-inducing identical black baselines after they were already dead was eh. I’d enjoy a Horizon where things do happen and our existence is acknowledged because the lore team are at least partly committed to maintaining that illusion.

If you could do a microarc just for science about them chasing some discovery that would have barely wiki-worthy lore significance then people might play science.

Edited April 4 by Sniblet

[Peppermint]

9 hours ago, Triogenix said:

After discussion with the rest of headstaff, we ended up thinking about the following ideas for the future;

1) An In-game memorial, on a computer(or something similar) that will showcase the names of all characters who died during IC arcs, and separate them by arc.(Matt mentioned this in his reply.)

2) Allow for characters to earn accolades, and be mentioned in articles, or other official lore, should it be wanted by the relevant team and the admin assigned to an event, and further approved by the loremasters and head administrators, similarly to the death-retcon rules. The rules will be edited to reflect this once we have a better idea of how we want to handle it going forward.

3) Due to the above - actions during events that are notable will be placed under heavier scrutiny by moderators and administrators.

4) Should the relevant team wish to pursue it, they may hold and publish interviews with members of the crew/characters present regarding events and arcs, which must be approved by the LTA before publishing.

5) The LTA, Head Staff, and relevant teams should ensure that the opportunity for and obtaining of the recognition by all of the above applies to a wide variety of players and characters, not just regulars. Furthermore, the aforementioned members of staff should strive to have it so that different characters/players get any of these types of recognition, either within the same arc, or across arcs.

6) As for events - we have been, and will continue to be attempting to have an increased amount of consistent, low stakes, style of events, in addition to high intensity ones, though this will take significant time, and will not be an immediate, noticed change, due to the way the lore team proposes and decides on events.

Beyond that, there are some parts where specifics will be hammered out; like do we have a system similar to what @Fyni suggested? Or something else. This isn’t final either, there may be some changes before being implemented as actual policy just due to how these things work, but this shows the general direction we’re thinking.

These all seem like really good things. I very much appreciate people being willing to give it a go, despite there being a lot of understandable misgivings. Excited!!

[Dreamix]

10 hours ago, Triogenix said:

1) An In-game memorial, on a computer(or something similar) that will showcase the names of all characters who died during IC arcs, and separate them by arc.(Matt mentioned this in his reply.)

A thought. How about something like this (or even combined functionality), that would show everyone who participated in the events, what roles they took, if they died or not. Even could be as simple as just saving the end round crew manifest from the event to display there.

Cause like even with the memorial/medals/etc, it would be a neat way to see or say "I was there", without either having to die to be put in the memorial, or having to do something super exceptional that gets you a medal or article mention.

I think that would be very cool to look up the manifest from some event and be like, "oh X and Y were there, it was fun, we did Z together", or "oh I forgot John was there too, and we did the thing", or "I was there, back then, and this was my department, these were the good times...".

Currently, this kind of information just is not kept or archived at all, and if you don't remember if you (or someone else) were there, there is no way to find that out. With the memorial/medals/etc, it's better, but it only works for dead or exceptional characters, and the average Joe still has no "proof" of being there at all.

Edited April 4 by Dreamix

[OolongCow]

13 hours ago, DanseMacabre said:

I'm sorry, but this is a hopelessly pessimistic and self-defeating attitude to have over such a niche and essentially non-existent issue. The idea that we need to prevent the players from ever receiving any form of recognition at all because, potentially, a bad character could be recognized, is both at once completely overkill and completely inconsistent with how we treat things made by sketchy people (ie: half of our lore). I won't go into why I feel that's the case, because I feel Limette makes the argument very soundly above, but I wanted to point this out. It's not at all a reasonable ruling on the issue - at the end of the day, it's an excessively restrictive response to an extremely niche scenario.

It's also inconsistent with the way every other problem on the server is approached. CCIA has repeatedly made decisions that enable bad behavior on the part of players out of a desire to not limit them or roleplay over the actions of a few (the whole "drinking on duty" saga).

[Kintsugi]

14 hours ago, MattAtlas said:

 

1. While being alive, they would logically keep some sort of item that demonstrates their involvement in some sort of events.
   1. I don't think medals are the way to go about this. They feel way too LARPy. I'm not sure what to do here so I'm looking for suggestions on the matter.

What about (and this is very much a working name) "expedition tokens"? These would, ICly, be items issued on behalf of the SCC to SCC employees who participated in an expedition or SCC "operation" (again, for lack of a better term), as a token of appreciation on the SCC's part and to recognize an employee's participation in such. They'd be small coins or badge-like items that have no actual value but would have a unique item sprite and could fit in wallets and would have a description that briefly summarizes the relevant arc. You could also lean into the unfeeling megacorporation angle here too - maybe each token has an insultingly trivial bonus to it, like a 3% discount at SCC retail locations or something, and that's all the SCC gives you for risking your life (or something, just an example).

Inspiration here are things like boy scout patches or, if you're comfortable with an example with a basis in a military tradition, things like challenge coins (frequently used outside of the military!)
 

Spoiler

 

[NothingNew]

7 minutes ago, DanseMacabre said:

"expedition tokens"
 

Sort of like in-game achievements? I sort of like this idea, it seems harmless enough. Little plastic tokens with cheap, corporate sticker labels. Where an office employee can be an office employee. Attend enough events and you can play Pogs with them. I feel like a digital listing would seem most professional, but the SCC giving you some cheap merchandise a T-shirt or a bracelet for volunteering would fit the setting, too.

 

[MattAtlas]

6 hours ago, Sniblet said:

I keep hearing rumors about The Dark Times of Aurora. It seems like every old-guard player has been through actual roleplaying hell because this server used to be an insufferable trash heap and if we make any change to anything at all, yea, The Howling Gate shall burst open once more, and in our final hours we shall despairingly cry out our regret for ever changing policy to allow machinists with one arm. I don’t know, this server seems alright from where I stand. Maybe we can relax a little? I kind of get this impression that rules and policy are based on the assumption that you can’t trust anybody with anything more than they need ever and the stakes of doing so are apocalyptic.

 

The current culture is the product of the regulations we have now. I made half of the things you're mentioning and they're the reason things were fixed.

No, relaxing them is not always a good idea.

[MattAtlas]

59 minutes ago, DanseMacabre said:

What about (and this is very much a working name) "expedition tokens"? These would, ICly, be items issued on behalf of the SCC to SCC employees who participated in an expedition or SCC "operation" (again, for lack of a better term), as a token of appreciation on the SCC's part and to recognize an employee's participation in such. They'd be small coins or badge-like items that have no actual value but would have a unique item sprite and could fit in wallets and would have a description that briefly summarizes the relevant arc. You could also lean into the unfeeling megacorporation angle here too - maybe each token has an insultingly trivial bonus to it, like a 3% discount at SCC retail locations or something, and that's all the SCC gives you for risking your life (or something, just an example).

Inspiration here are things like boy scout patches or, if you're comfortable with an example with a basis in a military tradition, things like challenge coins (frequently used outside of the military!)
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

I don't mind this. I draw the line at Big Chungus getting a medal because he was the last to click the hivebot boss in an event.

[NG+7 Gael]

I don't have a whole lot to add that hasn't already been said I think, but I definitely do have things to say on the topic of an in-game memorial and that sorta stuff. I absolutely believe that Aurora should do more to mention characters' involvement in events and canon stuff. It's a good thing with very few downsides, as many other people have stated. I entirely agree with the whole thing about players who have contributed to the server in some way via lore or code or who are otherwise mentioned in articles or w/e, later being discovered as "problematic" in some capacity being pretty overly-defensive, inconsistent with current Aurora policy, etc etc.

On the topic of memorials and medals and such though- I played Aurelien Levasseur, who died in the warehouse assault event on Konyang. Frankly, I think it sucks; he was in the middle of an arc, involved with many other characters, still had tons of roleplay potential, and was my longest-running character on Aurora. Obviously I queued up with him for a high-intensity event, which means that I knew that there was some chance of something happening to him, and that's fine- if I make a mistake with him or play him in a way that means he gets severely injured or killed, that's okay! However, to be entirely honest, I was not at all happy with his death. I think the circumstances of it should've led to a retcon, but it didn't. Even then, if he died without retcon, it at least should've served some purpose, right? Well, no actually, not at all. If it did, I would be far less annoyed about it. I think it's entirely accurate to say that his death was completely meaningless and pointless- it served zero purpose in the event or elsewhere. I played the round safely as command support for the entire duration until the end, when suddenly he was damn near immediately decapped while alone with zero chance for survival- there was literally nothing I could do about it. He didn't die because I misplayed, he died because I was following orders from command and an admin-controlled IPC + horde of infected spawned in the same direction he was heading. I had absolutely no agency here, not a single action I could have taken would've saved him. This leads me into the memorial / medals / awards discussion. At the very least, after my singular established character died an entirely meaningless death and was denied a retcon, I'd think he could be mentioned canonically in some way.

If we're going to be taking the approach of "dying in events is irreversible, regardless of the circumstances" we should at least make sure that the deaths aren't completely meaningless, because let's be real- the roleplay that comes from this sort of thing (someone dying without their death serving a purpose) is minimal. Most people completely forget about it after a few weeks at most. 

Edited April 4 by NG+7 Gael

[Fyni]

1 hour ago, NG+7 Gael said:

I entirely agree with the whole thing about players who have contributed to the server in some way via lore or code or who are otherwise mentioned in articles or w/e, later being discovered as "problematic" in some capacity being pretty overly-defensive, inconsistent with current Aurora policy, etc etc.

I wanted to address this and didn't know how to but I'm gonna try again: any public community of a certain size on the internet seems to end up with problematic people in it. I don't think that risk is one worth barring a lot of people out of contributing, as long as we all do our best to look out for the signs and are very clear that, OOC, we all agree, and I think the strong wording is appropriate, "fuck Nazis, fuck facists, fuck racists". These bad actors can creep in anywhere, sometimes hiding themselves. I don't think the solution is to bar everyone out, but to just be open and honest about how we deal with it. And also say fuck Nazis, go away, make it clear that's not what the community as a whole represents.

1 hour ago, NG+7 Gael said:

If we're going to be taking the approach of "dying in events is irreversible, regardless of the circumstances" we should at least make sure that the deaths aren't completely meaningless, because let's be real- the roleplay that comes from this sort of thing (someone dying without their death serving a purpose) is minimal. Most people completely forget about it after a few weeks at most. 

This is the number one counter arguement to that brought up in the memorial thread a few times: "what if people make new characters just to die to get their name in the lore?!"... so what? The important thing is, names people will remember will get in there too. Maybe one day a character who knew Aurelien will gather there and remember him for a moment, and remember the event.

[Desven]

If we’re pursuing the memorial terminal idea, I think having like an “art gallery” in there would be cool. Basically drawing with crayons mechanic so you can leave some notes to your deceased friends or make a doodle commemorating them. 

Edited April 5 by Desven

[greenjoe]

3 hours ago, Desven said:

If we’re pursuing the memorial terminal idea, I think having like an “art gallery” in there would be cool. Basically drawing with crayons mechanic so you can leave some notes to your deceased friends or make a doodle commemorating them. 

TG has a art system that saves paintings that are hung up and randomly loads a set in the mapped in picture frames each round

Something like that would be neat

[Omicega]

On 04/04/2024 at 02:33, MattAtlas said:

At the same time, I recognise that things must change, especially when so much of the community feels fairly strongly

I think it's dreadfully disappointing that staff apparently feel like they're being browbeaten into coming along with such a problematic proposal. Aurora's character turnover and collective/collaborative approach to crediting the playerbase with coming through canon events is a strength, not a weakness. The absolute last thing I would want to see is any kind of system that, indirectly or not, feels like it's geared towards rewarding a combination of veterancy/old guard status, good RNG on event rolls (look at me, I'm the canonical guy who did X lore thing because I outrolled someone!), or even simply having the timezone/motivation/leisure time to attend the events at all in the first place. Just because the community wants it doesn't mean it's any good for the server; I really don't think we're going to benefit from allowing collective story progression on behalf of 'the crew of the Horizon' to be replaced with specific individuals in some kind of clout-farming exercise. I already find interacting with 'louder' established characters to be an exercise in frustration -- the strength of this server and the setting is in the more minor and grounded 'slice of life' roleplay, not in hearing about how John Fiveyearveteran killed 500 hivebots on Konyang and survived a Tajara tank battalion landing on the old Aurora.

Matt summed up my concerns pretty well:

On 04/04/2024 at 02:33, MattAtlas said:

• I personally witnessed quite a few people using it to ego-boost and that left a very sour taste in my mouth.
• I don't want our setting to become a constant race to the top where loads of people have accolades for "killing the Tajara killer" "killing the Hivebot Beacon in Synthetic Nightmares" "handling the Elyran raid on the Horizon during Dreary Futures" "avoiding the Clandestine Explosion" and so on. We have a corporate setting that I think should be preserved, and I think that allowing too much recognition of often-abstracted things (case in point - the involvement of the Horizon's employees in the mass assault events) leads to us dangerously picking away at its credibility.

I could hardly be more opposed to anything like this as I feel it encourages single-character maining (which is something I really just don't like and don't really understand the fixation with. Spread your wings a bit, try other origins/species/whatever, and get more out of the server), further demonises character alting/turnover in general as some kind of anti-roleplay stream of thought, and will overall just entrench the same old established character clique/elitism problem that all environments like Aurora have grappled with in the past.

Part of the issue is that every major lore arc seems to be trying to one-up the one that came before it or something -- I didn't play for any of the Konyang arc because I'm kind of off my Aurora game right now for a variety of reasons, but apparently the whole thing built up to some kind of mega hivebot horde shootathon or something? It's like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Aurora so enticing going on somewhere within the lore team or even in the newer sections of the playerbase at large; to me, the server was always at its best the more it promoted the more 'mundane' and corporate angle of its setting and roleplay opportunities. Bigger, more bombastic events are a cheap way to sell out authenticity in exchange for playerbase hype and short to mid-term enthusiasm, but the fallout is that you then have 1000 veterans of The Hivebot War and The Assault On The SAV Whatever walking around completely undermining the believability of the otherwise low-intensity corporate setting. Doubling down on that by now allowing those specific people to flash their shiny official accolade around in addition to the above is not really something I relish seeing.

The biggest takeaway from all of this for me is that @Sniblet kind of hit on the head is about micro-events. This system would actually be fine for me if Aurora was capable of limiting its event arcs in scope and scale, but I think any hope I had of the server heading in that direction started to die the moment we moved to the Horizon to begin with, and then had its coffin nailed shut when the ship had guns welded onto it overnight. I guess maybe that's what the majority want after all? All I know is I'd really like to see more low-key, slower-paced events that cater to something other than gearing up for an ultra death battle where people madly in love with their own OCs slaver and drool over the idea of getting CM-style medals of honour.