Moving Forward. April Update

[DatBerry]

I think my main concern is shared by Cake, I don't want to go back to the days of people ignoring their jobs to ERP, this is why ERP was removed in the first place.

But I don't think an outright ban was the best approach, we had a lot of positives from it, remnants of that are still here as you could ERP-bait people into murder, now you could use ERP as a very believable and immersive way to cajole people into doing things for you as an antag, or even as a normal crew member.

Citadel has a strict rule for heads of staff to not ERP on non-confirmed extended rounds, we could so something similar and put a emphasis that your job comes first, and we can enforce that with job bans, just like how we curbed the wave of SSDing crew in limited slot jobs (especially security).

I don't like the idea of bringing vox as crew, if they're brought in they should be treated as bad as vaurcae, no heads of staff positions and requiring forms to get good jobs.

ICly it makes no sense, they smell like rotten sardines and look like wild monsters, even their sprites show them very alien and unfriendly, besides the OOC stereotype that will influence all roleplay that includes vox.

I don't have any strong feelings about the other points, I don't see the player base voting for things to be a very good approach, if we left things in the majority's hand we would be an MRP server, so I am heavily biased against stripped player votes given more power without considering their reasoning and arguments.

[Fairness and Honor]

I do not think that this is good for the server, allowing erp breaks realism and admins shouldn't distance themselves from the community by adding something inbetween unless it is for IC things.

nominating myself if this isn't a joke

[Scheveningen]

I agree with the addition of ERP, as many times I have engaged with new people on the station, and felt extremely frustrated that I cannot take them in a blazing heat of uncontained passion right on the tile we met.

 

Same

[Coalf]

I don't care much about anything else, honestly Community Manager disgusts me slighty but if I speak out against it people will think i'm opressing the masses.

Vox, whatever. blah blah

What I'm concerned is ERP because we're clearly going to have to implement some kind of age restriction and I cannot agree with that.

First of all multiple admins/moderators have been confirmed as underage and doing something like this means wwe won't be able to accept them evne if they're fully capable, that is retarded.

Two, we're the top HRP server, are we seriously going to ruin our current reptuation with this? Everyone is going to flock to baystation if we really leave this update to happen.

Three seriously? Fucking seriously? Initially I thought this was an actual joke but after actually discussing it in adminchat this apperantly isn't even a joke.

I'm no stranger to ERP, I admit, however I don't come to Aurora for that, I come to Aurora for some mindnumbing fun, not this bullshit.

No, do not let this go through.

[Scheveningen]

I have changed my nomination. I nominate myself and only myself. I rule alone.

[LanceLynxx]

Well

On a CM: It has its risks, and I don't really see a problem at how things are run now (public forum posts, suggestions), seems like concentrating a lot of power into a single position that can make or break a community.

ERP: I think people are blowing (see what I did there) it out of proportion.. It's not like things will become sodom and gomorrah if ERP is allowed, same way we aren't going out in shootouts or toolboxing brawls just because we got easy access to guns and tools. It's still HRP, it is expected to be believable and fitting to a character's actions. You don't stop midshift to suck off someone and risk your job over it, or start an orgy in the holodeck with Ian and Pun Pun. Sex (flirting and everything else) is a very strong drive in almost all living beings, I don't see why shunt it just because it can be awkward. I mean, start acting like someone from an offenders list and you'll probably be charged with neglect of duty or similar, rack those up and you're getting a nice visit from CCIA and whatnot.

I bet station journalists would have some fun catching people as well.... haha. Although then you'd have to see how privacy laws come in place.

So yeah, seems fine. Time and place for everything.

Vox: Ehhh, I don't really see how vox would fit in the station. Aren't they some outliers of space society that sort of dislike everyone and just live like outcasts and raiders?

Gamemode probabilities: Meh, don't really care much, I play whatever and just enjoy it. Just hate peaceantags.

But it looks like an improvement for the larger community, so I guess it is a good democratic approach to game mode shuffles. good idea.

I would nominate probably azande for CM, since staff are uneligible.

[Guest Complete Garbage]

I would like to nominate Hivefleetchicken as community manager. I think he did a great job as tajara lore manager, (no offense mofo but to be fair he was probably better,) and he's just a general lad all around. If he's too busy drowning in pussy or engaging in white nationalist gang violence, I'd like to nominate Hackie Mahn.

[Yuri Daruski]

Secondly, with our push towards a believable atmosphere, we’ve as you’ve noticed been making strides towards improving this atmosphere, permitting more immersive and believable interactions by the crew. We’re going to continue on by gradually permitting more adult themes into the roleplaying atmosphere of Aurora. As you’ve all known already, romance and affection have been permitted but on the downlow. In our legitimization thread which should hopefully be released in two weeks time, we’ll discuss how we’ll return Erotic RolePlay back into Aurora. This is a response to a lot of private feedback sent to us as staff. The guidelines will establish when it’s alright and when it is not. Note that this does not mean ERP is permitted yet.

 

 

People seem to be either making a meme of this or calling how it's the worst thing in the world, at least the most vocal of people. Personally, I'm fine with this, After 6 years of playing SS13 and I've been on many different servers, many with, and many without adult themes, whether that be direct ERP or not.

-At the moment I feel people's main frame of reference at this moment is not wanting the station to turn into Citadel, who's main focus appears to be on such themes, and is overall a rather low RP server. Some have said Role-play will suffer, where everybody will just be in maint giving each other the ol' toss in the bed and nothing will get done. I've been on medium role-play servers where it hasn't been an issue so I find it hard to believe on a heavy role-play station that "Station everything will grind to a halt". I highly doubt whatever introduction to 'adult themes' (as it is rather vague) will be nearly as forward or bad as people seem to be leading on to think. Or at least the introduction will be a gradual one, as he says it will be.

At the moment there's a bit of an atmosphere where even kissing is kind of "Ew coodies" mentality in some of the crew at times. There's at times were I've been iffy to even /reference/ an adult theme just because of this station's distance to the subjects. If we're going for believability, then it's not hard to see that everybody on station is a normal adult on the middle of space, and given that /you work/ provides the station with a functioning bar, dorms, pool, and other such nontraditional work environments and situations, I don't see a reason for the company not to have taken into consideration 'adult themes' other than the pin-ups and spam messages of WetSkrell.net

Additionally, one could say that many people seem to think the station is going to turn into an instant sin city type situation, and sure, for the first short while you'd likely see a surge (such as we recently saw with the gun selection) but even that said it wouldn't be nearly to the scale that you see of the guns, simply because, and I can't believe I'm saying this, it's easier to get a gun than get into a 'adult situation' (assuming it is direct ERP). I'd be hard pressed to think there wouldn't be any sort of regulation, for lack of better terms.

I don't believe people need to be nearly as scared of this as they seem to be now, and many of our questions and concerns will likely be addressed in that "Legitimization thread" that is referenced in the OP

[Haveatya]

If I'm not mistaken, Vox can pry open any door. Hard pass thank you. Their alternative gas for respiration is also a pain.

On ERP, sure. But make it well known if you're working and are caught you can expect a demotion or to have that character fired.

[Chada1]

ERP should be disallowed, I say this seriously. Community manager i'm okay with, Vox i'm okay with but they need to have high whitelist standards and maybe even be limited in number and also heavily discriminated against (Akin to Vaurca)

Community manager would be very helpful in bridging the gap between Staff and players. I've felt this gap myself as Wiki manager, catching people talking about problems with the wiki but not posting on the wiki thread is frustrating, and I can't always be there to catch it. I doubt a community manager could either, but it would be nice to have someone who would relay concerns of the community to the appropriate people, still.

But seriously ERP needs to be disallowed, for one, it makes the entire Staff have to read through literal porn each time they go into logs when it comes to a complaint, in the other they have to literally post said porn on said complaint to highlight the evidence. You don't see how much of an issue that'll be? Let's look at the original reason it was disallowed. Underaged players. Without a means of age restricting them, the server could get into legal trouble due to exposing them to that kind of content.

However, with age restriction, this could be fine. This reason (Underage players) could feasibly be circumvented through a mechanic suggested on another server, Lewdsay. That would also fix the issue of Staff being forced to read it. So that brings me to my closing statement. The only realistic way to enable ERP is to port Extended Roleplay.

Is that really something we want to do??...

[Guest Complete Garbage]

Is that really something we want to do??...

 

Yes.

[Scheveningen]

At risk of being bamboozled because of "just a prank bro", why not, I'll be very very serious.

I don't care if ERP is implemented or not, I'd prefer 'not' because there would be a lot of changes needed to be done to bar minors from the server. This isn't a matter of debate, if you want to implement sexual themes, the kids gotta go and the server has to be an adult one now. A not great sacrifice for a great cause.

I don't care about Vox if they get implemented or not. Prefer not, as they'll get turbonerfed just to even be crew playable and that sucks.

Ambivalent about the community manager thing. But vote me regardless and I will change my mind on it.

Game mode voting is perfect the way it is.

[Pratepresidenten]

If ERP is allowed, may we allow OOC ERP?

You may have not heard of this style, (you aurora people know a lot of styles though) and frankly OOC ERP really gets me going if you know what I mean. I like it between staff members and me, but that's a personal thing (I like dominance). I really hope that with this new law coming, OOC ERP would also be allowed for Aurora station. Usually how it goes is a staff member spawns two empty dummies that me and anyone else are transported into, and we begin ERPing as normal ( ;} ). Not as characters, but as fellow members or staff members. ERP is meant for our pee pees to get hard, and this is just one way for it. Thank you! I really hope OOC ERP will be allowed.

 

Hard pass on this. Either you do it in character with reasonable escalation, lover or whatever, or you dont get to do it at all.

FIrst I thought you meant ERPing in ooc over text. lolno.

In any case, concerns about age restriction and such has been brought up. Probably wouldnt be too hard to implement a system, to allow underaged to be shielded from things and the rest to.. Do their thing. Our coders are pretty great.

In any case. There was also brought up the issue of ERPing over doing your job, well. We'll enforce that as we do anything. As it says in the rules, you need to be able to do your job to a satisfactory standard.

And we would enforce ERP related bullshittery harder, like.. Violent rape and necrophilia.

That being said, I think it'll be a nice change of pace for those boring rounds where nothing happens, like.. Medical as always, sooo... It'd be a great pasttime with a partner or random encounter you build a relationship with.

Nothing like an office quickie, right? >:3

[Ornias]

why are people unironically rallying around ERP

there are stations for blowing one another at 3 in the morning like you're two hippies watching animal planet

we're a fuckin roleplay station and you guys want to legalize smacking your wet willy on your pink haired nurses ear and nutting over hte public radio and saying ';hee hee mischannel' as you giggle with y our flacid cock. mayb e we'll legislate erp when we can go one roundwithout someone dabbing

also one of my many fears is that someone is going to try ERPing with a diona , and then we're going to need to incorporate mechanics for getting throns suck in your g-spot and i wouldn't wish having to code that on my worst enemy

[Scheveningen]

inb4 "if erp is allowed, will antags be allowed to rape people?"

glad to know the subject of ERP and all of its implications is all just a big april fools joke to staff lmao

[pickled_tomato]

if it isn't a giant joke i would legitimately like to be considered for the community manager position

i don't mean to go on a lot of paragraphs for a joke yet, but, if it's real all i would like to say for now is that i enjoyed my time helping aurora greatly and i'm still regretful that i wasn't at the time able to maintain the activity or devotion that i needed to in order to maintain a moderation position. i care about you guys. ya'll are pretty alright, and helping gives my life a bit of purpose.

[LordBalkara]

I do hope the whole ERP thing is a meme/April fool's joke.

ERP in text form is generally pretty bad. It relies on the writing abilities of the average person, and even then they have only as long as it takes for the other person to get bored, which in a 2d spessmen game where you can go and do all sorts of kooky shit isn't too long.

So you'll get all sorts of shittily written and pretty cringy me says. Seriously, if you think I'm exaggerating, go onto an ERP server, and and look at the ghost chat logs. It's not arousing, it's just kind of makes you groan and cringe in disgust/shame, until you look in your closet and find that gun you bought forever ago for "home defense", knowing full well what you planned on really doing with it. Your shaking hands cock it, a pointless gesture given its semi-automatic nature. You put it in your mouth, tasting the cold metal and faint taste of gunpowder from when you took it out to the range for a test. Hand shaking, lungs and heart working in overtime to keep you away from the death you seek, you look to your computer screen and see one big "OwO" in the chatbox. As your desperate hyperventilating turns into depressed and horrified sobs, your finger moves to the trigger and begins to squeeze. In addition, why are people fucking in the workplace? It's something that could get you in huge trouble, assuming you don't outright lose your job.

Overall, I just feel like that would be a really bad idea. We would be trashing our reputation, allowing people to do more low quality RP, and kind of making the already unrealistic setting even more unrealistic.

[Azande]

I completely support the nominations of @Azande and @Scheveningen

 

Thank you sir. I do want to say I am serious about this.

[Mofo1995]

I wanna preface my post by saying I like ERP. I wanna follow that by saying I don't think we should allow ERP on station. I'm fine with the inclusion of more adult themes and even the laxening of OOC (but not IC) rules against affection in public. But I think it will polarize the community and alienate a large number of our players. I can already see complaints of witnessing Tajara ERP rolling into my PMs. I think that by allowing more mature themes to that level on server, it will backfire and result in a more immature playerbase focused on simulations of romance rather than engaging character interactions. Pretty much everytime I play on ERP servers, I'm quickly discouraged by the clique-ness as everyone shuts themselves off from new interactions to instead isolate themselves with their partners. The result for me is that, ad an irregular and new player, I'm excluded from all character interaction beyond "fuck off" We could try the moderate approach and apply limits to how much people can go fuck off, but I really think it would provr ineffective and too grey. Now, some time ago, there eas talk of apartment server. Supposing it could be reasonably developed, I think that would be the perfect outlrt for ot. But im not the kind to make demands of the dev team since they do so much for us.

I love the idea of a community manager in the vague sense, in the sense that I think Tribunes of the Plebs are a cool idea. An elected mouthpiece for the community is a cool idea, but we have a really diverse community. And their duties could use a good definition to really pin down what they would do exactly and by what mrchanisms they would effrct the srver. The nonstaff idea is genius, since as a member of staff for 2 years now, I often grt the feeling that theres a disconnect. A gap everyone wants to see closed, but which is still there all the same. As far as popularity contests go, I think this is the one position that reallt fits just right as a popularity co,test and should be.

[Faris]

inb4 "if erp is allowed, will antags be allowed to rape people?"

 

 

There's a line we'll be setting. This example will result in bans being handed out, once the guidelines are implemented.

[Sytic]

If this isn't a massive april fools joke, like I suspect it is, and the staff are genuinely considering ERP, I'd like to mention something. private feedback. That's important. In the original post, the only feedback on ERP is given privately. Because nobody wants to fuck publically, on the job, and change the overall tone of the server. Keep the sexytimes between characters (if at all) through your own private channels. Not public. Also, I thought Vox were specifically balanced as an antag species, because they're really fucking strong and that's what makes them interesting? You'd be effectively gimping them by having to nerf them into the ground.

The other stuff I either don't care about, or support.

And as a little note, because I don't want to TRIGGER anyone:

 

 

Fucking keep your ERP to yourself. It changes the tone of the server, only discourages people from playing for the reasons they wanted to play for. Please. Please let this be an april fools joke. Putting in place ERP is signing your own server's death warrant so you can get sexual fetishistic kicks, for however long your server lasts until it dies in a dramatic shitfest.

 

 

EDIT: To add a few more words on this. This is a topic that hits close to home. I really, really don't fucking like ERP due to the people it brings, and what it brings out in people. I'm not entirely worried about what happens to the quality in roleplay, I've seen a lot of people I know who ERP and who I know ERP (some even on the staff team) that are great roleplayers, and cool dudes. But for what it brings out in people, OOCly, it's not a good reward. The people it'd bring who want that sort of experience. The people who are already here, once they start to ERP, and people knowing about it publically, doing it publically, brings out a side in people that I'd rather never ever have to see (again).

[Faris]

The people providing private feedback have been encouraged and have been posting here.

Furthermore, erotic roleplay doesn't have to be fully introduced to the server. There's always the fade premise in which the initial build up is done by the players until they hit a point where they "fade to black".

As for the Vox. Mechanical and lore changes and advances will need to be made. I'll need to discuss the specific with other members of staff on what options we really have pertaining to this.

[Scheveningen]

inb4 "if erp is allowed, will antags be allowed to rape people?"

 

 

There's a line we'll be setting. This example will result in bans being handed out, once the guidelines are implemented.

 

.

Oh, really?

I'm really glad staff are spending their time answering questions like these on Easter Sunday. This is exactly what Jesus would want them to be doing.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Guest

[Faris]

inb4 "if erp is allowed, will antags be allowed to rape people?"

 

 

There's a line we'll be setting. This example will result in bans being handed out, once the guidelines are implemented.

 

 

Realistically, not happening. Discord is not a substitute to the forums for serious discussions. It's quite obvious with his remarks afterwards that he wasn't being completely serious.

[Scheveningen]

There's a line we'll be setting. This example will result in bans being handed out, once the guidelines are implemented.

 

 

Realistically, not happening. Discord is not a substitute to the forums for serious discussions. It's quite obvious with his remarks afterwards that he wasn't being completely serious.

 

I'm not sure how this is to mean much when the earlier discussion was deliberately on the subject of "not going too far". If you aren't willing to go the distance (especially to maintain a joke), you'd seem better off not doing at all?

A head admin making jokes about rape in roleplay is still fucking disgusting.