What Do You Think of the New Vaurca?

[Nikov]

In that case I think this is a flawed vessel for a trans-humanist narrative. If you want a trans-humanist message, you need to start with a species that is fundamentally human, so that the same human drives and ambitions can tell a story about our own drives and ambitions. This species is fundamentally not human. I continue to fail to understand how Vaurca could develop into this pattern. It feels like at one point their species was just shoehorned into VR and trans-humanism.

A generation ship is an interesting idea, but why... why have six million adult Vaurca on it? Why not six billion frozen eggs and robotic hatcheries waiting to thaw them out on planetfall. You'd save tens of thousands of tons of mass.

I loved sim ant too, and I like a trans-humanist warning, but it all feels like chocolate pudding and Chinese food. Its on the same buffet but it just doesn't go together. I'd rather see the lore completely focus on a race of intelligent ant people and how they would behave, rather than intelligent ant people with VR dropped on them.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I'm so confused. The vast majority of what you said was addressed in the rewrite; I'll do some minor adjustments on their page to make them more obvious but otherwise, did you read the rewrite?

 

If you want a trans-humanist message, you need to start with a species that is fundamentally human, so that the same human drives and ambitions can tell a story about our own drives and ambitions

 

That is what's done, though. Every species we have takes a small piece of humanity and it's blown up to be their motif, and then it's run with until it becomes something unique. Every playable species we have is a caricature of some small part of humanity, as is super common in science fantasy because they're used as a commentary on that aspect of human culture, even if the original message becomes very obscure as the species takes on its own narrative.

I personally like Vaurca because of how non-human they are. They are the most alien and unique race that we have save for the dionaea.

 

It feels like at one point their species was just shoehorned into VR and trans-humanism.

 

Yes, you are right. That was a point. We don't know how they were dealing with it prior to the Great Migration (to be renamed Great Evacuation) when they got into their generation ships to be pretty much mandated into lifelong VR chambers but it was shoehorned in because of their circumstances. How else do you keep 6 million people alive at any one time and then all their descendants occupied over generations and generations in a single spaceship?

 

A generation ship is an interesting idea, but why... why have six million adult Vaurca on it? Why not six billion frozen eggs and robotic hatcheries waiting to thaw them out on planetfall. You'd save tens of thousands of tons of mass.

Again this was explained in the updated history, again it might be me not writing it across right?

• Their home moonplanet had only 200 years left before its thin ozone layer was stripped completely. (This was 2,000 years ago, recall)
• If you ask a Vaurca if they would like to continue being alive, chances are they would respond with "yes". That is why the ships were built to accommodate live Vaurca; they wanted to get off the planet. The ones that didn't just dug deeper and hoped they'd be safe, and we don't know how that worked out for them.
  
• The Vaurca pre-hiveships were SUPER AMAZING engineers and architects and despite a LOT of setbacks and failures inherent to early space programs they managed to create orbital industries to build these great lifeboats, because again, they wanted to keep on living thanks.
  
• Combined with the above, having live Vaurca in it theoretically lets you deal with more problems or contingencies. You can't drop 6 billion eggs on a planet and expect them to pop out fully capable of colonizing a planet. Plus if anything goes wrong and you end up with 6 billion eggsicles you have no way of replacing them. A functioning mini-hive gives you all the benefits of replacing any losses, and theoretically you already have quite a few people ready to hop out and plant a flag somewhere. And because the Bound in the Hiveships spent most of their time keeping the rickity thing together, this theory partially worked out for them.
  
• Combined with the above two: not everyone makes perfect decisions. And that's where the fun is - dealing with the consequences of a choice even if it had good intentions. They had differing theories but eventually one has to win out, even if it's not the one that you think fits the idea of a perfect plan.

I'd rather see the lore completely focus on a race of intelligent ant people and how they would behave, rather than intelligent ant people with VR dropped on them.

 

But.... It is..... Because they no longer live in their VR and have to rediscover their old ways of doing things or make new ones......... Which would be explored as their storyline progresses...... this was explained in the rewrite..........

 

Their concept could be applied to a much more intelligent, and equally oppressed race with more interesting RP associated to them more so then them being easily manipulated.

I do not understand. I'm so confused. They're not unintelligent and they aren't big dumb babies. They are very intelligent and very driven and very aggressive in their drives - that is why their ancestors had the audacity to build so many generation ships and allowed the sacrifice of their culture through VR in them. The Vaurca we are dealing with have no history of intergalactic diplomacy and they are taking babysteps into the bigger galaxy. It is literally the same progression as the unathi and tajaran. What you are asking is to copy/paste the unathi and tajaran. I wanted to give Vaurca players a bit more of an interesting canvas than that.

EDIT:

Outside all of this, justify to me why you are okay with stripping Vaurca players of their ability to continue playing their characters, and why they deserve to lose their ability to play them.

[Guest]

I personally like Vaurca because of how non-human they are. They are the most alien and unique race that we have save for the dionaea.

 

You like them from a theoretical standpoint, Jackboot. We can fantasize all day about what an ideal, practical universe we could create but in the end it doesn't really matter when we consider that a fair deal of Vaurca players do not really take into consideration that the lore exists and is worth expanding upon. The people who put depth and effort into their roleplay? Well, they're few and far inbetween, their efforts may be impressive but it sadly does not reflect the actual reality of things.

The end result is that people will play memebugs because it requires way less effort and they also don't fear retribution for memeing in IC, because they do it in the most abstract yet borderline ways.

The problem is the community, not the lore.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Delta it's been 2 days since the overhaul has gone live. I think we should give the players more than 2 days to adjust to things. We did not remove Unathi when they were being memelizards, nor did we remove Tajaran at the height of their sensual mrowling. We even kept Skrell despite the long duration where literally no one played them.

They are locked into remaining and we will see where we stand at the end of next month.

My liking of them isn't theoretical, it's me enjoying their motif and wanting to give it a fair chance for players to enjoy. I know they have potential to give our players more enjoyment. I'm not condemning their entire playerbase and denying it from the rest of the greater playerbase without a lot of consideration, because the cycle would just repeat ver batum with any other addition propped up to take their place.

[ChevalierMalFet]

So question: how do Vaurca qualify for jobs? Are Unbound still free to take all non-Head positions?

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

So question: how do Vaurca qualify for jobs? Are Unbound still free to take all non-Head positions?

 

No qualifications have been changed.

[Icuris]

I believe that the #1 issue holding some people back (me at least) is the large amount of negative experience interacting with Vaurca in game. Had the process been more heavily moderated and the volume of whitelisted players further controlled I believe that these negative experiences would have been far less memorable.

So essentially, I like the new lore. I like the concept, backround and I suppose the problem is what it usually is-The People. And it takes a lot of effort or bricks to fix that.

With a stronger moderation of the Vaurca race I think keeping them would benefit to the overall narrative of Jackboots sick, sick Space Fantasy.

[Snakebittenn]

I think people's dislike is a combination of IC hate poorly leaking into OOC hate, and general cries of 'a vaurca robusted me once they must all be terrible.'

[Guest]

I think people's dislike is a combination of IC hate poorly leaking into OOC hate, and general cries of 'a vaurca robusted me once they must all be terrible.'

 

yet another inspiring and enlightening strawman. Despite the words already spoken by people who believe Vaurca should be outwardly removed at this point since the concept simply isn't working, it seems the side that is for it is willing to ignore the points of those against it and are more than willing to misrepresent the stance of the community members wanting to scrap the unfinished, unmoderated meme race known as the Vaurca. Kossclasani, anybody?

You guys may be trying too hard to justify keeping a bad race that doesn't fit in the atmosphere of Aurora. Likewise in terms of the loredevs, they may be trying too desperately in an attempt to fix something that can't be fixed by lore devs.

[witchbells]

I don't think the vaurca's issue is a lore issue, aside from some select players roleplaying the race incorrectly, as stated previously in the thread. The old vaurca lore was wonderful. There was a lot of it, yes, but it was that extensive detail that made the race interesting, aside from the vast majority being heavily augmented and the various hive factions to choose from.

I believe vaurca's issue stems from a race that was, through all intents and purposes, genuinely intended to be different from our other races - something that, apparently, was hard to actually accomplish in game.

 

 

I made this with the help of a few people in discord who suggested mechanical improvements for the race.

eyes - Eyes are compound now. Meaning, flashes suck for a vaurca, but they don't suck nearly as much. A flash will work on a vaurca with significantly less risk now, but multiple flashes will slowly chip away at its vision. A supercharged flash could certainly render a vaurca blind.

antennae - The vaurca sprite already has antennae for the sake of having it. Lore-wise, it's already stated antennae are used for perception, communication, etc. I propose a headgear restriction in order to actually reflect how important antennae are in game, and perhaps an ability to mangle soft headgear to fit over/around the antennae.

mandibles - They're mandibles. Maybe nerf them, because the whole rip and tear thing is kind of ridiculous right now.

organic limbs - Vaurca's limbs are all mechanical, seemingly for no reason other than to somehow represent that they're an augmented race. I suggest making vaurca limbs fully organic, with a twist. Vaurca limbs/head/body will have a brute modifier to resist brute damage due to their insectoid caraspace, and lore should be changed to reflect that they do instead have caraspace.

neural port - Despite the many ideas thrown around to make this do something, the important part for now is that it exists. That said, an electromagnetic pulse will probably have devestating consequences with a species who has a little device embedded into their cortex.

breathing apparatus - Sedantis was a planet with minimal amounts of plasma in the air. The assumption is that vaurca are created with an artificial breathing apparatus in order to deal with their atmosphere. Mechanically, vaurca should have little to no trouble breathing in plasma. Again, an electromagnetic pulse will ruin everything and our poor vaurca will have no choice but to suffocate if the EMP to neural port didn't kill it first.

four legs - My final suggestion is to make vaurca a quadrupedal species, along with giving them a large ant abdomen. There are many reasons for this, but most important I think that it breaks up the monotony of all races on station having two arms, two legs, and maybe a tail. It's a drastic deviation from the norm, and it gives off the impression that vaurca are truly an alien species, and their unique characteristics will actually earn the distrust, suspicions, and sometimes interest of the other sentient species. Mechanically, it is shit. Vaurca would now have a uniform restriction, and are only able to wear uniforms meant for their species or uniforms that were heavily modified (most likely with the bottom part simply chopped off) and very few suits. Shoes are definitely a negative unless, again, you have shoes meant for vaurca. Now, while this is a heavy consequence for vaurca, it makes sense. Vaurca are an extremely new species, and lorewise, didn't normally wear clothing until they met humans.

Now, this is extremely long-winded, and it requires developer work, but I think this (along with a few whitelist reviews) is what we really need to make vaurca the race it was intended to be, and to make it enjoyable for players.

[Mofo1995]

 

This really reminds me of

.

[Snakebittenn]

daily reminder that it's not the race, it's the whitelisted players

[Guest]

daily reminder that it's not just the above that's the problem, it's a multitude of inherent issues applying at the same time that most likely cannot be fixed by lore development alone without changing the core concept of Vaurca and marking down what makes it Vaurca.

[Snakebittenn]

i too have the ability to be intentionally vague without listing what specific problems I have with something

[Guest]

Already did list the issues in the last threads on the subject. No point in repeating myself.

[ChevalierMalFet]

We're approaching this from a simulationist rather than narrativist perspective. Before we start talking about their background or their systems, we have to ask ourselves what we want the final product to look like. To whit:

How do we want Vaurca to be played in the normal context of the game? At what points do we want them to do something different from what a human would do, and what do they do? In a more general sense, what is their dramatic hook? What is their character?