Rethinking Freeform Antagonism and "Heavy Roleplay"

There was a time a long while back that probably no one except Jackboot remembers, when I was invited to join the lore team. My first 'challenge' was at that time to tackle the lore for antagonists, so I started with wizard. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas to try and explain the at the time assorted in-game mechanics, like factions all the different outfits belonged to (this was before the branching spellbooks were patched in, so there wasn't a whole lot to work with other than clothing). I ran into a roadblock, however, in that the administrative staff at the time flat out told me that no antagonist is whitelisted, therefore they do not regulate their roleplay, and further that they absolutely refused to start doing so. There were some arguments between 'giving the roleplay structure' and 'stifling player creativity', and I ended up leaving the lore team in frustration, but discussing my old drama is not really why I'm writing this. (It's more of a context point to start from)

A couple weeks back, Skull posted a poll regarding people's opinions on how the server was managed. I ruminated over some of my desired answers there for a bit, and ended up never really posting my poll entry because I had more to say there than could feasibly be expressed in a small anonymous information gathering poll. So here I am now.

This thread starts at antagonists, but it really branches out from there, because the problem I want to bring up is endemic of how the server is run - enforcement of the actual setting, character design, and tying your characters into anything, is so slim as to be nearly nonexistent. Sure, it's easy enough to pretend to be a doctor on a space station, or a engineer who builds an engine, because for the most part you can just glide by defining your character by their profession, rather than any personality or connection they have to the larger galactic setting around them. How many of you people reading this thread right now know who Joseph Dorn is? Do you know what the capital of the Republic your character is working within is, or even what the name of that republic is? And for people playing unathi, do you know who Yizra Unzi is, and what their current relevance is within Moghes politics? How about Not'zar Izweski?

Probably most of you do not know the answers to all those questions, unless you ran to the wiki or have been reading Jackboots newsfeeds, which by the way he works damn hard on and you should give him props for. Or maybe most of you do know, because maybe the only people who use the forums are ones who care. Either way, they're not even obscure names or places I asked about there. It would be like being a US citizen today and not knowing who Donald Trump is, or that you live in North America. But that's part of the problem too. You don't have to. You don't have to know jack shit about the setting you're in beyond the most rudimentary concepts about culture and species, and even then it's only mildly enforced if you are trying to play a xeno race. Human characters have basically zero oversight in any way.

I'm fairly sure this is the way it is both because it makes the server more accessible to new people, and because it's a hassle to enforce things that strenuously. But your server advertises itself as 'Heavy Roleplay' right in BYOND's interface. Is that what 'heavy roleplay' means here in Space Station? The bare minimum you can put in place to make a cohesive setting round to round? No killing each other randomly, no griefing, make sure you only do stuff related to your job guys! Other than that, go nuts, lol!

Maybe you feel like if you start enforcing things like people having records filled out, you'll lose your player base. I disagree with this. I think stressing that people invest time and thought into their character beyond their physical appearance and name will give them more investiture in the character. People who give a flying fuck about who they are playing tend to roleplay better and more cohesively. They try, rather than get by.

Now, I'm not saying you should start demanding people fill out their records and make a backstory or get banned. But you should start gradually stressing to players new and old who have done nothing to flesh out their character to start doing so. Give people who have been playing for two weeks regularly and still haven't even filled out their appearance tags a nudge, urging them to read the lore and create a place in the setting beyond 'Medical Doctor 281A'. You can even have it be an automated message the server boops them with when they log in, to save admins the trouble of tracking it.

And this brings me to the subject of antagonist roleplay. Right now, as far as I am aware, the staff refuses to enforce any kind of standards for what a wizard or ninja is, why cultists exist, and so on. You can decide you are a highly advanced cyborg sent by Nanotrasen to destroy the station, or a wizard from the Biesel Mages Guild, if you wanted. Granted, few if any of the crew would believe either of those backstories are real. But it doesn't matter, because no one will fault you for creating your transposed OC unbound by any semblance of setting. You may as well be lying as telling the truth, because the backstory you create is so abstract and unimportant as to be irrelevant. You're an intruder to the canon on the station, and since the station pretends to be bound by lore, you're inevitably not welcome bringing your nonlore nonsense in. It probably makes it harder that each round with antagonists has retroactive continuity, and you're not supposed to remember there are such things as wizards or ninjas.

Again, I don't think you should tell antagonists how they are supposed to be playing. But the total void of anything resembling a lore to work from leads to people having to make up shit as they go, and often, this results in subpar roleplay. It's difficult for most people to make up more than a 'gimmick' on the spot, and a gimmick only barely keeps the flow of a roleplay going up until someone decides they don't care about your gimmick and would prefer to arrest you for being where you shouldn't be. Something needs to be written to give some of the more exotic antagonist a grounding to work from. An origin for wizards or ninjas, loose or complex as it may be. Maybe they can choose to ignore it if they have a better idea, but SOMETHING is better than the null information we have now beyond mechanics information.

So the TL;Dr is:

• Devs: Automatic Mechanic to remind people to fill out their char records and "style" once they have played x rounds
  
• Lore: Provide some background for antags, especially wizards and ninjas, to work with ?
  
• ?: Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff.
  
• Devs: Make newscasters display news stories
  

Edit: Updates with the additional points

So the TL;Dr is: (Correct me if I´m wrong)

• Devs: Automatic Mechanic to remind people to fill out their char records and "style" once they have played x rounds
  
• Lore: Provide some background for antags, especially wizards and ninjas, to work with ?
  

 

If I am completely wrong, provide a tldr that sums up your requests.

Uuuh, sure. I guess it could be summarized like that, but I'd also add

-Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff.

-Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'.

Moved and pruned. Carry on. (I may post on this like tomorrow or so.)

You actually brought up something I've had an issue with. Many people (myself included, sadly enough) do not know enough about the xeno species whether they play it or not. No skrell player knows anything about Querrbalak (or however it's spelled, honestly forgotten), few Unathi players can recount exactly how Guwandi and Guwan's differ and the reasons behind both. It's annoying as characters should know this, so I'd propose something that I've thought about in the past, which would at least ensure to some degree whitelisted players know their species better.

Currently to get a whitelist you need to show you can incorporate your xeno character into the backstory, and show that you've at least skimmed a page of the wiki. I would propose that in whitelist applications, each loredev puts in a specific set of questions for each race for the whitelistee to answer. Nothing too difficult, just stuff you should know after reading the wiki to a decent level, and maybe even throw some more recent stuff in if you're feeling edgy. These questions could range from "What are the four biological types of Vaucra", or "What year did Glorsh reach singularity?" and so on. Nothing too difficult, but knowledge nearly always essential to that species. I'm not sure if we could; or even should; apply this to head of staff whitelists, I might consider it, but I personally believe this is something we could at least try out, for now.

You actually brought up something I've had an issue with. Many people (myself included, sadly enough) do not know enough about the xeno species whether they play it or not. No skrell player knows anything about Querrbalak (or however it's spelled, honestly forgotten), few Unathi players can recount exactly how Guwandi and Guwan's differ and the reasons behind both. It's annoying as characters should know this, so I'd propose something that I've thought about in the past, which would at least ensure to some degree whitelisted players know their species better.

Currently to get a whitelist you need to show you can incorporate your xeno character into the backstory, and show that you've at least skimmed a page of the wiki. I would propose that in whitelist applications, each loredev puts in a specific set of questions for each race for the whitelistee to answer. Nothing too difficult, just stuff you should know after reading the wiki to a decent level, and maybe even throw some more recent stuff in if you're feeling edgy. These questions could range from "What are the four biological types of Vaucra", or "What year did Glorsh reach singularity?" and so on. Nothing too difficult, but knowledge nearly always essential to that species. I'm not sure if we could; or even should; apply this to head of staff whitelists, I might consider it, but I personally believe this is something we could at least try out, for now.

And that's just general lore stuff. Hardly anyone seems to know about contemporary events happening in the setting, i.e. the news posts.

As far as learning the lore for all of the species go, going away from whitelisted people at first, I can't really blame anybody. To learn all of the lore on humans and other species to a realistic level is basically like taking another government class in high school. Some people love it, some people hate it, but imo it's pretty reasonable for people to maybe not be overly caught up on certain events.

When it comes to people with whitelists though I think that should be for the lore folk to decide.

About records, I've noticed (to no surprise) that not many people have them. Hell I don't have them on some of the first characters that I made which I only played once, but those people without records can still have a personality. I think the biggest issue is that it's just an open slate. Boom- write the format, make up all of that fancy mumbo jumbo and then post it. Maybe a more user friendly records thingy would help with that, you'd still be able to write your own ofc, but have a button nearby the records that lets you open up a web interface and fills things out a bit more automatically. Type in your age, date of birth is already filled out on all 3, type your family and that's filled out on all 3, and have a standardized format instead of a blank slate.

The newscaster thing would be neat as heck though, it'd make the game feel more like you're on a space station inside of a bigger universe as opposed to you're on a space station with a bigger universe outside, if that makes sense.

That is my two cents, unwarranted but you'll like it, dammit!

There was a time a long while back that probably no one except Jackboot remembers, when I was invited to join the lore team. My first 'challenge' was at that time to tackle the lore for antagonists, so I started with wizard. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas to try and explain the at the time assorted in-game mechanics, like factions all the different outfits belonged to (this was before the branching spellbooks were patched in, so there wasn't a whole lot to work with other than clothing). I ran into a roadblock, however, in that the administrative staff at the time flat out told me that no antagonist is whitelisted, therefore they do not regulate their roleplay, and further that they absolutely refused to start doing so. There were some arguments between 'giving the roleplay structure' and 'stifling player creativity', and I ended up leaving the lore team in frustration, but discussing my old drama is not really why I'm writing this. (It's more of a context point to start from)

We do not make it a point to control how an antagonist roleplays unless they do it in such a manner that clearly violates both the written nature and the spirit of the rules. Metagaming, breaking immersion, otherwise acting like an griefer and not actually roleplaying. Those individuals will be spoken to as they are reported.

Likewise, the lore team doesn't make it a point to insert lore guidelines for antagonists to follow, because there is no expectation for lore to be enforced (if the lore team wants it to be they should say so) OOCly, and frankly I don't wanna be one of almost 20ish folks who have to speak to people because "They got a lore detail slightly wrong, please re-educate them", because even I will admit I have no interest in learning the most arbitrary lore details and making it a point to force everyone else to apply that written stuff to memory or else they're breaking some arbitrary future guideline that will be set-up.

That's not fun for anyone, and it's the equivalent of sending a police detective over to deal with the aftermath of a social spat between two lovers instead of being sent to deal with a murder scene. It's a waste of time and of our effort to be doing if we pitched forth any effort in that direction rather than more important things like ensuring people who are attempting to grief are caught in their tracks a fair deal before they can do any critical damage, ensuring antagonists aren't just using their special status to grief people and not roleplay, ensuring every other non-antag character is also held to the same standard but being required to have in-round motivation to do things rather than round-start motiviation as a result of antag status. And many other issues we need to watch out for, just to end the exposition there.

A couple weeks back, Skull posted a poll regarding people's opinions on how the server was managed. I ruminated over some of my desired answers there for a bit, and ended up never really posting my poll entry because I had more to say there than could feasibly be expressed in a small anonymous information gathering poll. So here I am now.

That's your fault. Choosing not to speak out is the equivalent of not having an opinion at all, in the grand scheme of "who even cares", because if no one heard someone else's opinion it may as well not even be relevant in the current moment until it is brought up. There are ways to compress information without turning it into an exposition.

This thread starts at antagonists, but it really branches out from there, because the problem I want to bring up is endemic of how the server is run - enforcement of the actual setting, character design, and tying your characters into anything, is so slim as to be nearly nonexistent. Sure, it's easy enough to pretend to be a doctor on a space station, or a engineer who builds an engine, because for the most part you can just glide by defining your character by their profession, rather than any personality or connection they have to the larger galactic setting around them.

It doesn't matter if we even tried to. The Republic of Biesel, does not exist. What Tau Ceti is cut out to be, does not exist. The Aurora I never existed, neither does the Aurora II. All of these details are based on a small team of folks' imagination and ability to create a story and a setting. The goal of roleplayers is not to abide by such and blend into the background like boring peasant NPCs shoveling dirt for no reason for 24 hours a day, but rather for each character on their own to make their own smaller story based on existing character backgrounds, how it shapes them, and how it influences the way they make decisions. Not all characters need to be perfectly uniform and aware of every single lore factor, because real people can either be political busybodies or simply not even give a damn about what goes on, because worlds and systems aren't run by single people, but rather the will of many very influential sorts who all possess a singular agenda.

The way people fit in or not doesn't really matter. People IRL struggle to adhere to socio-cultural norms all of the time. Yes, we will strap on our stomping boots and annihilate anyone who tries to roleplay a space elf or some other gimmick that doesn't fit in. No, we're going to be in our socks if someone complains about lesbians in space. It is a thing, sorry, we know it hurts people's sensibilities, but they are there. If they end up sucking rather than actually roleplaying actual believable lesbians, obviously they'll get bwoinked too.

Probably most of you do not know the answers to all those questions, unless you ran to the wiki or have been reading Jackboots newsfeeds, which by the way he works damn hard on and you should give him props for. Or maybe most of you do know, because maybe the only people who use the forums are ones who care. Either way, they're not even obscure names or places I asked about there. It would be like being a US citizen today and not knowing who Donald Trump is, or that you live in North America. But that's part of the problem too. You don't have to. You don't have to know jack shit about the setting you're in beyond the most rudimentary concepts about culture and species, and even then it's only mildly enforced if you are trying to play a xeno race. Human characters have basically zero oversight in any way.

The expectation that everyone be forcibly burdened with lore knowledge that rarely actually factors into how things are done on a corporate space station is a bit of an excessive one. Not every US citizen cares about Donald Trump, although a fair few make it their goal to have D.T. in their head all day because of their hunger for meaningless internet points. Anyway, the way xenos have to roleplay, I'm not sure you know what's at stake for most players. Awhile back a Tajaran player that came back from hiatus had their player go, "What the fuck is the PRA?"

Everyone laughed OOCly and ridiculed the character ICly for not knowing something almost every native-born Tajaran would know.

Humans have no oversight because we don't expect new players to immediately read chunks of exposition in order to find out small lore tidbits that hold only a small amount of relevance into how a corporation does things. Humans are easily the most diverse race, because humanity is not limited by what ideas, culture and background they can have, whereas the other races have their own internal culture regulated on a variable extent for each race. Skrell are the least extreme, Tajarans are pretty extreme, Unathi are very extreme, the Vaurcae are close to a hivemind groupthink, the dionaea gestalts are literal hiveminds.

A priority for a new player to ease into the server is to actually find out if the server they're playing on for the first time sucks or not. Likewise we try to make it so that it also doesn't suck for a regular to be playing on either. We naturally cannot appease all kinds of people and only pitch in as much effort is required of us. We can't make people enjoy the server, they have to find entertainment in their own ways without being destructively disruptive or whatever else.

I'm fairly sure this is the way it is both because it makes the server more accessible to new people, and because it's a hassle to enforce things that strenuously. But your server advertises itself as 'Heavy Roleplay' right in BYOND's interface. Is that what 'heavy roleplay' means here in Space Station? The bare minimum you can put in place to make a cohesive setting round to round? No killing each other randomly, no griefing, make sure you only do stuff related to your job guys! Other than that, go nuts, lol!

You make this sound worse than it actually is, lol.

Maybe you feel like if you start enforcing things like people having records filled out, you'll lose your player base. I disagree with this. I think stressing that people invest time and thought into their character beyond their physical appearance and name will give them more investiture in the character. People who give a flying fuck about who they are playing tend to roleplay better and more cohesively. They try, rather than get by.

We're not going to force new players to do this. That is an awful first impression to be making, to tell someone they need to file out giant paragraphs of filler information in order to be able to roleplay on the server. I will never enforce such a standard. Records have always been optional but recommended. Day zero new players with no records who go to the HoP may have a hard time getting a non-intern job when they join as assistant. But that's fine, I doubt they expect that as well, and if they throw a tantrum over it, they're the brat, not anyone else. Maturity is being able to deal with the hand you're dealt and improvise your agenda based off of it, some people are willing to deal with that, other people aren't. We hope most new folks who join at least try to give their first time on the server more than two chances before deciding to make a full judgement.

Now, I'm not saying you should start demanding people fill out their records and make a backstory or get banned. But you should start gradually stressing to players new and old who have done nothing to flesh out their character to start doing so. Give people who have been playing for two weeks regularly and still haven't even filled out their appearance tags a nudge, urging them to read the lore and create a place in the setting beyond 'Medical Doctor 281A'. You can even have it be an automated message the server boops them with when they log in, to save admins the trouble of tracking it.

When it comes to new players, first impressions matter. We want people to keep playing. It's hard to not seem intrusive when you are telling someone that they should be writing records up after they've played on the server for at least over a period of two weeks. Likewise, this is the internet, it is extremely easy to offend and also extremely easy to take offense. Such an issue would require a degree of polling, which I'll think about sometime later.

And this brings me to the subject of antagonist roleplay. Right now, as far as I am aware, the staff refuses to enforce any kind of standards for what a wizard or ninja is, why cultists exist, and so on. You can decide you are a highly advanced cyborg sent by Nanotrasen to destroy the station, or a wizard from the Biesel Mages Guild, if you wanted. Granted, few if any of the crew would believe either of those backstories are real. But it doesn't matter, because no one will fault you for creating your transposed OC unbound by any semblance of setting. You may as well be lying as telling the truth, because the backstory you create is so abstract and unimportant as to be irrelevant. You're an intruder to the canon on the station, and since the station pretends to be bound by lore, you're inevitably not welcome bringing your nonlore nonsense in. It probably makes it harder that each round with antagonists has retroactive continuity, and you're not supposed to remember there are such things as wizards or ninjas.

Okay, protip. Intruders are equated to being nuisances or extremely dangerous by default. The crew are fully within their rights to not trust anyone who isn't a crewmember.

If you want people to not see you as a bad person, don't act like a bad person. Benign antagonists have the added challenge of not trying to start needless malicious conflict (if they want to live by the end of the round without being lasered to death beforehand, of course), and instead engaging other people in the round with interesting degrees of verbosity and generally being helpful. Not being helpful or just generally being unhelpful, unsurprisingly gets the antag shunned by the crew and potentially lasered to death by security depending on the extent of which the antag fucks up.

Again, I don't think you should tell antagonists how they are supposed to be playing. But the total void of anything resembling a lore to work from leads to people having to make up shit as they go, and often, this results in subpar roleplay. It's difficult for most people to make up more than a 'gimmick' on the spot, and a gimmick only barely keeps the flow of a roleplay going up until someone decides they don't care about your gimmick and would prefer to arrest you for being where you shouldn't be. Something needs to be written to give some of the more exotic antagonist a grounding to work from. An origin for wizards or ninjas, loose or complex as it may be. Maybe they can choose to ignore it if they have a better idea, but SOMETHING is better than the null information we have now beyond mechanics information.

Sub-par roleplay is a result of sub-par roleplayers, not because we don't have nine million antagonist factions coded into the game that people randomly spawn as and have to abide by their arbitrary IC rules. Good roleplayers make good roleplay even out of an overall suck-y round. Being a good roleplayer is not something that can be taught, it is achieved through learning from others, on your own, what things appeal to people and generally just being charismatic, likable and reasonably verbose in general. You can't teach someone to be a good roleplayer, not entirely, because person A cannot teach person B anything other than how to roleplay like person A. That's nothing more than just creating a roleplay clone, not an individual person who has their own distinguished style and unique spin on roleplaying.

This is not something we can force to change in any meaningful capacity. The entire community would have to radically change to meet your expectations, Kaed, and I'm not seeing that happen.

I wish we would change the server message to just say "roleplay server". Too many people try to argue over what they personally think heavy roleplay is and why the server is living up to this. Forcing character records or particular ways to play is just bad juju i do not think is healthy for the server. Only when players get egregious with testing these boundaries do i take issue. You can certainly argue we are too lax on that. Maybe we are but im not one to reach for a shotgun instead of a scalpel.

The title should stick. We shouldn't confuse people by thinking we're less on the RP spectrum (or somehow convince people we're no longer Heavy Roleplay or something, and thus have degraded standards somehow???), we do take it seriously, but people constantly misconstrue what Heavy RP is, and it is nothing more than a spectrum descriptor. It's like defining sour to sweet, or left to right. You can be this left, or this right, or extremely sour, or just a bit sweet.

I would figure we're on the "yeah we take RP as a major defining concern here", and I guess that makes it Heavy RP. Anything else to define it by is just rhetoric.

[scrubbing this due to being unnecessarily rude]

"Abrasive" is not how I would put it, especially considering how I, and a few others, took the time to respond to you point-by-point and you seem content to dismiss them by claiming their sole arguments are "why does it matter" and "tl;dr".

Then you just say this entire endeavor of facilitating a conversation was pointless, without attempting to engage anyone else in this thread after a fair deal of people invest variable amounts of time to actually reply to you.

Alright, sure. Make your own impressions at this point, no one will change your outlook on things, right or wrong. Hope your next thread goes better next time.

I can see as usual that I am getting intense pushback about suggesting the server tighten anything resembling what I feel should be standards on a roleplaying server.

Do you understand that different communities have different ways of doing things? we have a particular idea in mind of what role play means. Myself, abosh and the rest of our staff team get to decide the terms. Our definition is not necessarily better or worse than another communities definition but i do think its reasonable to say we are doing a lot of things correctly based on our player count. I do not want to enforce character records or things of that nature because i think we have spent a long time creating a place thats easy to understand but also with a very deep rabbit hole you can venture down should you so desire. The lore is a prime example of this. Almost everyone knows the basics "ok Nanotrasen, spooky megacorp headed by miranda trasen....tau ceti...biesal, cats and lizards got it!" if you care enough to read articles and various wiki pages to create a more real character thats something YOU can decide and not something we want to force on you. "woah miranda is a changeling? president dorn likes to dab and the sol alliance tried to take over tau ceti!?"

I am of course open minded but if you are going to present us with a "better" way to do things you will have to overturn what i see as quite a lot of success. Unless you think aurora is a gigantic failure on life support. in which case the point it probably moot!

"Abrasive" is not how I would put it, especially considering how I, and a few others, took the time to respond to you point-by-point and you seem content to dismiss them by claiming their sole arguments are "why does it matter" and "tl;dr".

Then you just say this entire endeavor of facilitating a conversation was pointless, without attempting to engage anyone else in this thread after a fair deal of people invest variable amounts of time to actually reply to you.

Alright, sure. Make your own impressions at this point, no one will change your outlook on things, right or wrong. Hope your next thread goes better next time.

I read your post, Scheveningen, don't worry. If you really want me to summarize how I feel about it and facilitate a conversation, I will. Here are a few bullet points of my contention with your expressed viewpoints

-They are the exact same arguments I ran into last time, even when they aren't entirely relevant to my suggestion, such as:

--We don't moderate people's antag roleplay (One of the original purpose of this thread was not to suggest you tell antags how to roleplay, but to give them some lore to work with. Additionally, 'we just don't do that', is not really an argument for why you shouldn't do that in the future, but rather a resistance towards considering it.)

Along with several fresh, exciting ones, such as:

-The lore isn't real, all of it is made up, basically this is all a game, stop trying to make everyone take it seriously. (All I suggested is we give people nudges to care more, rather than leaving the entire thing up to their initiative, and to try and do somethings that make the setting feel more present. 'It's not real' is also never actually an argument you should be making to defend something about a fictional setting. Of course it's not real, but that's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about. We're also meaningless specks in the overall cosmos, but here we are, arguing on a forum. A concept or goal has as much meaning as you give it, and you can always give it more, even if it doesn't matter to other people.)

-Missing the point of my antagonist argument entirely to try and inform me how not to draw aggro from the crew. (The point of this paragraph was not to illustrate how hard it is not to get aggro by security, but to point out that since antagonist have no lore to work from, they make up their entire purpose on the spot. It is a meaningless story they are forced to make up that has no backing in anything. I wanted to give them a possibility to change that.)

-Blaming bad roleplayers entirely for bad roleplay, claiming that people can't be taught to improve. (This is actually kind of a poor opinion to have of people. They are thrown into a white room and expected to paint a mural, and you seem to think that it would be outrageous to even give them some stencils to start with until they can work without them. Art isn't a magical talent that you either have or don't have, and neither is writing or interpersonal understanding. It's also a little frustrating how often you resort to using dismissive hyperbolic statements like 'just because we don't have nine million factions coded into the game' as basis for your counterpoints.)

-New players wouldn't want it, we'd scare them away. (Even if this were actually more than a hasty generalization - since I don't think anyone has actually tried to do it?? -, that encouraging them to try harder, do we really need to be so all encompassing that anyone can feel like they fit in? You say people are easily offended on the internet, but so what? You'll lose some people, sure, but you'll draw others who want what we have now. There's over 200 people playing SS13 right now, and it's past midnight in most of the US. You're not hungry for a player pool.)

-We're not going to force people do do anything. (At no point in any part of my suggestion was I saying we should force people do do anything. The entire multiparaph suggestion can be summed as 'Hey, guys, let's try and make lore and characterization a thing that we encourage people to look into?', so maybe you will understand why I'm irritated that your responses seem to be entirely reflexive rote involving how the server just doesn't do that.)

I can see as usual that I am getting intense pushback about suggesting the server tighten anything resembling what I feel should be standards on a roleplaying server.

 

Do you understand that different communities have different ways of doing things? we have a particular idea in mind of what role play means. Myself, abosh and the rest of our staff team get to decide the terms. Our definition is not necessarily better or worse than another communities definition but i do think its reasonable to say we are doing a lot of things correctly based on our player count. I do not want to enforce character records or things of that nature because i think we have spent a long time creating a place thats easy to understand but also with a very deep rabbit hole you can venture down should you so desire. The lore is a prime example of this. Almost everyone knows the basics "ok Nanotrasen, spooky megacorp headed by miranda trasen....tau ceti...biesal, cats and lizards got it!" if you care enough to read articles and various wiki pages to create a more real character thats something YOU can decide and not something we want to force on you. "woah miranda is a changeling? president dorn likes to dab and the sol alliance tried to take over tau ceti!?"

I am of course open minded but if you are going to present us with a "better" way to do things you will have to overturn what i see as quite a lot of success. Unless you think aurora is a gigantic failure on life support. in which case the point it probably moot!

I understand that there's differing ways of doing things, but like, I'm not asking you to upend your entire structure?? To rehash what arrow said, my suggestion can be summed up as

-Devs: Automatic Mechanic to remind people to fill out their char records and "style" once they have played x rounds

-Lore: Provide some background for antags, especially wizards and ninjas, to work with? (But not as guide-rails, not a mandatory standard)

-Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff.

-Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'

I actually don't understand why this is such a stressful set of goals to apply that it would destroy the standards of your server as they are right now. I obviously want more than that, but I'm trying to work within what seem to be your goals, and you're screaming and acting like I'm twisting your arms! Hell, you could even throw the auto-reminder to update records out the window. What about the rest? What's actually the problem, other than we just don't do that. Could someone actually explain it to me, because I honestly don't understand. It sounds to me like just a suggestion to put more fluff and let people know it's there!

Yeah i dunno man, your post just came off like you're trying to decry aurora's degrading standards. Your suggestions in of themselves arent really unreasonable and if you where actually twisting my arm i would banish you to vorestation for a week.

Yeah i dunno man, your post just came off like you're trying to decry aurora's degrading standards. Your suggestions in of themselves arent really unreasonable and if you where actually twisting my arm i would banish you to vorestation for a week.

I didn't vote for this head admin but if I did I would've voted twice.

I've always done investment vs reward. At least in terms of lore, I've worked to have our server be as friendly to newcomers and old vets, lore-obsessives or people with a passive interest.

Without any investment you are a baseline human, usually from Earth.

The more you invest, the more rewards you get. All the whitelisted stuff you need to have investments to get with your applications. The news articles are optional, but obviously I really enjoy when people read them and follow the ever-changing lore dynamic we have going on.

I agree that there should be general guidelines for antagonists. They shouldn't be MANDATORY but clear guidelines on 'the vanilla' method of that game mode would be interesting. Admins DO police the antagonists already. I got bwoinked for being a ninja dueling people with basketball games.

If the server operated how this suggestion wanted it to, with the strict, hardwired requirements, I would have never played this server for that long. This sort of exclusivity breeds an 'in' crowd. A server survives by the grace of new players staying long enough to establish themselves, and locking the gate and requiring paperwork to get in would see that influx gutted.

A method of what you want is already being planned. In an indefinite amount of time many jobs will be locked behind age whitelists, so newcomers with NO records and NO lore knowledge will have to start in a non-sensitive job, hopefully giving them time to get situated and adjusted to our community.

I think Noah makes a very good point about employment records, and how they affect character backgrounds.

Simply needing the character to have a place of birth, education record, etc would VASTLY improve on some of the "backstory" elements, which as a recent HoP, I see are very sparse (most people either have no employment record or a very brief one). Since it's so open, some people go crazy and make this awesome resume, but it's very intimidating for someone who doesn't want to do that.

Simply having some guiding elements to it would encourage people to learn more about the background of their character, rather than just having them be an entity that magically appeared on the station to work.

Soft hands.

As Jackboot and Garn have stated, the nature of our community is to apply soft hands to the issues you described in most cases. Obviously excluding the rule violations which I expect all players to adminhelp promptly. Reminders and such probably won't happen, because tbqh they're annoying as fuck and won't help the situation at all. A large amount of "good roleplayers" start characters without records, pestering them about it is not going to win any hearts.

Development wise, here's the present plans that coincide with the topic:

• The economy meme will force people to choose their affiliation more wisely and so on. It'll introduce more consequence to where you're from and where you live and so on.
• I will probably at some point (undecided if this cycle or next dev cycle) make a character creation screen to present to new players as a method of softly introducing them to the lore.

As for why haven't we gotten around to those. Well. To put lightly: new map meme. And also other more important things.

Also, two points.

-Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff.

This is an issue for every HRP server. If you have a silver bullet for this, please do let us know. Otherwise, hnrg.

-Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'

This was actually a thing for about 6 months. There was no real feedback about it and the lore dweebs couldn't be arsed to keep it up to date.

Also, [mention]driecg36[/mention] if I may offer a fun solution to that. As HOP, if you're bored. Start calling people with record holes into your office, and quizzing them about their background and filling it in.

Also, driecg36 if I may offer a fun solution to that. As HOP, if you're bored. Start calling people with record holes into your office, and quizzing them about their background and filling it in.

Is it possible to change their records like that? If so, how, I don't remember seeing a button to edit it in the employment record screen thingy unless you're talking about just going over it with them and presenting them with records to put it on their own?

Also, @driecg36 if I may offer a fun solution to that. As HOP, if you're bored. Start calling people with record holes into your office, and quizzing them about their background and filling it in.

Ive considered doing that a lot of times, but I was unsure if the records actually stayed updated

Next time I have some time as HoP, I'll call in people to "update their records."

[mention]driecg36[/mention][mention]NoahKirchner[/mention]

It's not possible to permanently edit employment records. Medical records will be perma-editable Soon (in the same capacity as one can edit sec records: by adding a note which the player can remove).

Think of it more as, enticing the player to think about it. I guess you could offer up a pastebin of what you copied over vie LOOC, but eh. The main reason behind the act is to remind the player of the records, to maybe help them flesh them out a little by probing them ICly, and to create muh precious arpeees.

[mention]Skull132[/mention]

I pretty much always emphasize people to "Update their employment records at centcomm" every time I see a blank one.

I would love to have interviews with people where I would go over their employment history and update it for them though. Shame that doesn't carry over.

Also, two points.

-Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff.

 

This is an issue for every HRP server. If you have a silver bullet for this, please do let us know. Otherwise, hnrg.

 

-Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'

 

This was actually a thing for about 6 months. There was no real feedback about it and the lore dweebs couldn't be arsed to keep it up to date.

There's no silver bullet beyond something extreme like making them read it then quizzing them on it, which even I will acknowledge would be stupid and annoying.

However, there are several smaller things you could do to help.

-Make a scheduled (bi? semi?) weekly event organized by the lore team happen, involving some recent events. It would probably usually be human/tajara/unathi related, because those are the most played raced on the station, and it doesn't even necessarily need to be the focus of the whole round (which will probably be extended anyway). Loose examples:

-A modified skipjack with wounded tajaran soldiers limps over to the station requesting help. None of them speak solcom very well, if they do at all.

-A group of people arrive who are transparently being shills for Nanotrasen political interests to try and make the crew agree with them.

-An unathi group arrives on the station to formally exile a member of the crew, or whoever Jackboot decides that happens, because guwanning is usually off-screen or in character backstory.

-Not'zar arrives on the station to pardon a long-lost Izweski clan member hiding under a false name belonging to a clan that doesn't exist anymore.

-Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'

This was actually a thing for about 6 months. There was no real feedback about it and the lore dweebs couldn't be arsed to keep it up to date.

I dunno what to tell you there, man. Maybe try again some time and throw polls at people over it. If the lore team is disinterested in maintaining it, though, maybe there's no point.

Bringing the news feeds to the station

The technical implementation of that would not be too hard, but it would require the lore team to create each news story twice.

Once in the forum and once in the system that feeds the game.

But before that happens there needs to be the commitment from the lore team that its actually going to be used otherwise its lost love.

About records

[mention]SierraKomodo[/mention] has something planned for the WI that will simplify filling out the records.

Also, HoPs can take a important part in ensuring that records are present.

I usually deny any promotions if the person in question doesnt have any records.

Quite a lot of people want to play interim, if they dont have any records at all, there is no way I can verify they are quallified.

Automatic Reminder to fill out records.

Thats something that shouldnt be too hard and would just require a db query placed somewhere to fetch the rounds played as char and some changes to the UI so a message is displayed that you dont have any records.

Only question is how annoying it should be made.