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Repeal the Captain or No Captain Rule


Owen

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Apparently I should make a suggestion instead of continuing posting on the Head of Staff forum. If you aren't whitelisted, basically what the Captain or No Captain rule is, is that if you are Captain, it is assumed that you have access to more knowledge and it is a direct promotion from any Head of Staff role so it isn't logical to be a Captain and Head of Staff on different shifts.


I think this is a very pointless rule. If we are going to apply this for Head of Staff being promoted to Captain. Why don't we do this for all departments then? If you are a CMO I guess you can't be anything else in Medical. See, it is dumb.


I have multiple characters who specialize in a certain Head of Staff role but are also a Captain because they are skilled in that as well. Valorallen Vitellia for example. He started off in Medical and then worked his way up to CMO and got an education on the administrative sides of things so now mains Head of Personnel and Captain. Is there such an issue for that?


And with Skrellian characters, they've had a much longer time to gain experience. There is definitely a good chance once you start getting up there in Skrell age you're going to see characters that have multiple skills. So, I have characters that are CMOs or RDs and then are also Captains because they've been with NanoTrasen for ages and are trusted. It just limits characters I think and I don't like the idea of people saying, "Oh it is unrealistic for characters to go back to lower jobs once they've recieved a promotion" I understand we are going for realism and yeah, if this was super realistic no one would be anything except one job. But that wouldn't be that much fun which is why we allow minor changes.


Also want to address the point of Captains having access to lots of information no one else has. There are Loyalty Implants for a reason. A Captain won't just randomly reveal company secrets if he is in another position. If they are, we can deal with that on a case by case thing because I can pretty much say with full certainty that most of our playerbase would not do that.


I would just like other people to post their thoughts on this change because I find it being incredibly illogical to just push this on the players.

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As someone who is still not clear on why this was implemented, I have to agree.


Artificially restricting characters to the one single-slot role when they're capable of working anywhere along the spectrum of their original department (while simultaneously prohibiting them from visiting) is an effective multi-job ban for nothing other than a snip of realism. Is it a little cringeworthy that we have department and rank-hopping characters? Maybe, but we also have a limited number of slots and changing crew needs for a decent round. What are we gaining by enforcing this in such a way? Why reduce choice this much?


There was a secondary reason given regarding restricted knowledge of the nuke, but I feel like that's even less of a good reason to enforce this rule. The nuke doesn't factor into most rounds, and the janitor who isn't bound by the restriction of the whitelist is just going to blab about it sometimes because they don't know any better anyway. We'd gently remind that janitor that to do so is against our rules (even though it isn't printed in them yet, and the average new player is going to have a hard time knowing about it). I like to think that we could have just done the same with our Captain characters who are occasionally working in other roles, or visiting.

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As far as I know, this rule was enforced because people were talking about the nuke in non-captain positions with their captain characters. And not just a few cases, either, but a whole lot. The nuke is supposed to be restricted knowledge to the captain, and the captain ONLY, outside of central command. And we can't say "memory wipe" and be done with it. If people hadn't spoken up about the nuke like that this would not have been needed. Sorry to say, but the community brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware.

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Talked about this some in the discord and I also disagree with the implementation. People were abusing their status as a "sometimes captain guyspls" in order to try and force their ruling on other heads and get around the decision of the nuke being made a secret. Personally I'd rather have the staff strip whitelists of people who abuse their occasional captain status than use a blanket solution like this. In any case the majority of people I saw doing it were those I wouldn't even bat an eye at if they did end up losing their whitelist otherwise.


I dislike broad punishments like this that strip away so much from the people who don't deserve it and multiple people have had characters effectively tanked from this ruling. Remove the retards and let the people who can handle their stuff keep on doing fun things.

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Talked about this some in the discord and I also disagree with the implementation. People were abusing their status as a "sometimes captain guyspls" in order to try and force their ruling on other heads and get around the decision of the nuke being made a secret. Personally I'd rather have the staff strip whitelists of people who abuse their occasional captain status than use a blanket solution like this. In any case the majority of people I saw doing it were those I wouldn't even bat an eye at if they did end up losing their whitelist otherwise.


I dislike broad punishments like this that strip away so much from the people who don't deserve it and multiple people have had characters effectively tanked from this ruling. Remove the retards and let the people who can handle their stuff keep on doing fun things.

 

It's not just about the nuke. People who had captain characters playing as non-captains used that as a reason to have immediate authority when there wasn't a captain around, even though they weren't assigned as the captain for that shift.

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Talked about this some in the discord and I also disagree with the implementation. People were abusing their status as a "sometimes captain guyspls" in order to try and force their ruling on other heads and get around the decision of the nuke being made a secret. Personally I'd rather have the staff strip whitelists of people who abuse their occasional captain status than use a blanket solution like this. In any case the majority of people I saw doing it were those I wouldn't even bat an eye at if they did end up losing their whitelist otherwise.


I dislike broad punishments like this that strip away so much from the people who don't deserve it and multiple people have had characters effectively tanked from this ruling. Remove the retards and let the people who can handle their stuff keep on doing fun things.

 

It's not just about the nuke. People who had captain characters playing as non-captains used that as a reason to have immediate authority when there wasn't a captain around, even though they weren't assigned as the captain for that shift.

 

I included that you turbo nerd.


"People were abusing their status as a "sometimes captain guyspls" in order to try and force their ruling on other heads"

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Agreed, this seems to be a shitty way of dealing with the nuke knowledge issue, as for the trying to enforce the ruling on others, that seems to be an IC, CCIA issue, where a character can then be effectively dealt with and possibly perma-punished from the role as that character.


I don't even have a head whitelist and even I think this policy is silly and unnecessary.

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Guest Complete Garbage

I've gotta agree, this is a pretty dumb and restrictive solution to a problem that could easily be resolved through more appropriate channels on a case-by-case basis.


If we're sticking with the (rediculously stupid) policy of super duper sekrit nook, then we could just have CCIA say, "zero-tolerance policy, if you talk about the nuke outside of captaincy, you're fucking done for."

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I've gotta agree, this is a pretty dumb and restrictive solution to a problem that could easily be resolved through more appropriate channels on a case-by-case basis.


If we're sticking with the (rediculously stupid) policy of super duper sekrit nook, then we could just have CCIA say, "zero-tolerance policy, if you talk about the nuke outside of captaincy, you're fucking done for."

 

Just about every instance of that, or the issue of a captain overstepping his bound while not currently serving as captain, almost always occur during or due to antag action which makes it so CCIA can't do anything about it outside of that one round.

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Guest Complete Garbage
I've gotta agree, this is a pretty dumb and restrictive solution to a problem that could easily be resolved through more appropriate channels on a case-by-case basis.


If we're sticking with the (rediculously stupid) policy of super duper sekrit nook, then we could just have CCIA say, "zero-tolerance policy, if you talk about the nuke outside of captaincy, you're fucking done for."

 

Just about every instance of that, or the issue of a captain overstepping his bound while not currently serving as captain, almost always occur during or due to antag action which makes it so CCIA can't do anything about it outside of that one round.

 

The administration could step in when CCIA rulings are rendered unactionable due to preservation of canonicity, but I still stand by my opinion that an all-out OOC-based blanket ruling against all whitelisted players is far from necessary.


When and where CCIA can operate, it should provide IC punitive measures to command staff who discuss corporate secrets or overstep their bounds. Otherwise, admins should be able to say, "hey, don't do this," and if it continues to happen, a whitelist strip is well in order.

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This policy is not meant primarily to solve issues of nuke knowledge and visitor captains. Those are tertiary at best. The primary reason is due to realism. A captain is the most important person aboard the station, this role is objectively a promotion in every way for your character. Coming aboard as another head cheapen all of command roles. The command roles are supposed to be incredibly specialized. You would work your entire life to even have a chance at a respective departments head role. Only the best of the best would have a shot at captain. Captain picard does not suddenly decide he wants to be a head of security for the day.


TLDR i think making the captain role more exclusive is healthier for the overall direction of the game. I understand most will not be happy with this change in the short term however.

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If realism is the goal, why not restrict people to their one job universally? No-one is 'realistically' hired to do surgery some days and xenobiology other days, or to be the Director of an elite research team on Mondays and Wednesdays, but only a plasma researcher on it during Tuesdays and Thursdays. Or to be a security officer sometimes, and a cadet or detective when there are already four officers on staff. And really, from the standpoint of having an administrator of a facility, it's not very realistic to swap the Captain or Command Staff out for new faces at all, either. Policies would just be confused messes with the leaders rotating in and out of any real base. Jester Stamos should probably just run the place in a 'realistic' setting, and woe to the dozen other Captains standing in line for his job, because he's there for the duration like any appointed leader.


The reason I think we don't go for that kind of realism anywhere on the manifest is because it would get in the way of people enjoying either their characters, or the round, without adding anything to the play. With this rule in effect, promoting a character you like to Captain pretty much removes them from public view, as long as someone else can beat them to the Captain slot consistently. I'd rather cringe a little at noticing a shift in the Command member's responsibilities - like we notice shifts everywhere else on the crew - than to just make certain faces extra rare. To me, issues with abusing authority and knowledge can/should be handled via staff oversight and common sense (a requirement for the whitelist?), and by checking applicant awareness of expectations on whitelist applications. The benefit of this change is very hard to see.


It's a corporation that abuses its employees and their careers without a second thought. It exists in a game with space bears, vampires and people who are encouraged to violently revolt when their pay is docked by half for one workday. Heavy roleplay can be achieved without heavy realism, and I'd rather see both encouraged in ways that don't take away choice.

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Guest Marlon Phoenix

I have to agree with the OP's suggestion; most of the reasoning for this change was because captain's know about the nuke and letting them be other command means more command knows about it.


It makes the most sense to me that the presence of a nuclear device is simply an open secret, similar to Israel's nuclear weapon's program. No one admits it publicly, but everyone knows it's there. Considering the things the public knows go on in deep space research stations I'd imagine most people would be more horrified if we didn't have a self-destruct option.


The "omg!!! a nuke!! wtf!!!" motions we see literally every other round has also gotten really old and boring.


If anything, it should be believed by the masses that the nuke can only be activated via some convoluted process, and the nuclear disk is the item that's kept classified. "Authentication disk" is much more open to interpretation than "nuclear fission device"

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Repeal.


It closes off avenues of play for heads of staff evolving into a command role, and forces a lot of characters to permanently stunt their development or hope to the the lucky one who gets the Captain slot. The nuke itself makes the most sense as an open secret where everyone rolls their eyes, or even arrests for "misuse of public comms", if anyone starts memeing about it.

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I agree with repealing. My thoughts on this issue:


1. Captain, much like imo EVERY promotion on the station, is a clearance level, not a specific job.

We have an environment where people job hop frequently, and often don't turn up at work for weeks at a time (often while their player plays a different character). That's just how people like to play the game, i don't see the sense in fighting it.


I believe being promoted to captain doesn't mean you command the station constantly, that creates cognitive dissonance - how can anyone else ever be captain?

No, it means that you're simply a high ranked NT employee, entrusted with captain level clearance.

You are still a human (or cat or lizard or whatever) with limited skills, you shouldn't be hopping between captain, chief engineer, head of security and research director, all on the same character. But it's entirely possible, reasonable, and imo even desireable, for a captain to have a specialty. Ive worked with captains who graduated up through the medical branch, and in times of crisis they weren't above coming down to personally assist a poor nurse with healing the wounded.


2. Loyalty implants.

This is an important issue for me. I like loyalty implants, they fit the scifi setting quite well.

They are a requirement for captain/HoS clearance. And if you do those jobs, they are something that you should have.


The IC justification we have right now, that your implants are deactivated or removed at the end of a shift, is imo retarded.

It exists only for the simple reason of justifying mechanics, and nobody has bothered fixing the mechanics instead. I could do that if general opinion supported it.


My personal opinion is that, if your character serves as captain/HOS ever, they must be loyalty implanted. And that, as much as the security clearance, is something that goes with you. Meaning that if you officially serve those positions once, you are implanted, for life. You should have that implant forevermore, wherever you go, unless you leave NT employment permanantly and get it removed.


To reflect that, i'd support making Loyalty Implants an option in character creation (for command-whitelisted players only). If you take it, your character cannot be most types of antagonists, and will always spawn with the implant regardless of which role they're playing. You can always switch to another character slot if you want to play antags. But that specific character, canonically, is implanted and can't be traitor. In addition, you will also be subject to the usual RP restrictions on implanted roles. IE, willingly doing things that harm NT or its image (like stealing, torturing/executing prisoners, assaulting people, getting drunk on duty, etc) is something your character should be physically unable to do, and become an OOC/administrative issue rather than an IC one.


If you don't take an implant, and/or remove it, you cannot join as Captain, Head of Security, or Internal Affairs Agent on that character. Attempting to join as these roles will give an error and kick you back to the lobby

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Guest Complete Garbage
I remember the dark old days of visitors walking onto the Bridge and expecting everyone to hand over command to them. It was stupid.

Those people were particularly retarded, and should have been dealt with on an administrative level. Equally retarded in my eyes, however, are hamfisted rulings that limit the whitelisted playerbase on this scale.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, it'd help if someone responded with saying "Ay, you aren't getting this" or "Alright" so far it has just been silence except for being told, "It will make the position healthier" without making any points. Stuff like this should be put to a vote before we do it tbh because the majority of people who posted their thoughts were against it.

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