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taking a break of drawing magical girls to draw uhhh uhhh... ? Here's some sketches of a darkwitch named Eileen Boyd and a demon named Erzaun; They're actually for a darkwitch concept design contest

The only thing I'd personally like to see is making robotics so it isn't so isolated. Make it more accessible like Medbay (make the recharge area a "lobby" that is accessible to the public?) It really sucks when you have a problem only robotics can fix and you go there only to find the shutters down and have to beg for assistance on comms, being ignored half the time and not knowing if there is anyone even working in robotics or if they are dead/fucking off. As my human I can at least walk through Deadbay and visibly see there is nobody there to help me. Which makes me feel less alone than standing outside robotics.

For maximum balance and gameplay, rebase to /tg/ with modularization and then just do this. I'm dead serious. Or rebase to citadel (deleting the ERP mechanics) because they have all the appearance options you could ever want, anyway. The balance conundrum will never be solved. Specifically with something as esoteric as IPCs. The variables from moment to moment are too many. While in one round an IPC fighting a blob may prove to be simply The Best, in another they will be Ion rifled by the first nuke op. The complexities of balancing them aside, there's also public opinion and maintainer opinion to try to deal with. Which will never reach consensus. Plus the code for them is just a mess.

IPC currently are one of, if not the, most unique of the karma races. They have the most day to day differences in their mechanics, using APCs/Cyborg rechargers for 'food', the utterly different way they have to heal themselves, feeling no pain, no breathing, such on an such forth. This is mostly what draws people to them, the very different playing experience and RP that they provide over being human or most the other organic races. To give other lesser played races a similar treatment is something I absolutely whole-heartedly agree, on, the more of those kinds of differences we can introduce to races the better I'd feel. I'd LOVE have weird shit with slime people that emphasizes they ARE made of sentient goo, or to emphasize the insect nature of the Kidan, use of pheromones or something. Not even necessarily BUFFS, just weird unique interactions. You'd be surprised how much more I wanted to play Kidan when they got the click-clack sound emotes. IPCs suffer horrible downsides from EMOPs and yet tons of people still play them because of those unique interactions and systems. Kidan, as an example, however, don't really have much of interest to make up for their big bug eyes. Yeah they have the armor, but that's very passive, there's little there that makes them FEEL different, you instead just feel like a human who can't wear goggles. That's the problem, as designing systems like that for so many species is going to be hard, but I think it's the best thing. People are a lot more willing to deal with even intense negatives, so long as the final result is different and provides a unique perspective. Personal opinion would be to, either among staff members or the community as a whole, open threads for the current race being looked at and put forth ideas that would make sense for the creature, ignore balance and work backwards from there. Like Grey having telekinesis. Makes sense. As ideas pile up, so there's a pool to work from, then administration can sort out via internal discussion of "I mean this makes sense and WOULD be cool, but that's broken af" Because ultimately, at the end of the day, this has been a very talked about subject for a long time, and the end call is made with the people coding those changes and the people approving them.

More people playing a race doesn't make the race stronger, so saying they can't be under-powered because they're popular is just objectively false. The fact is nothing really matters except for EMP weakness. EMP weakness is such a massive downside that it's not even hyperbole to say that every IPC alive on the station is only alive because everyone else is allowing them to be. The most robust SS13 player in the universe playing an IPC is trivial to kill.

Wholeheartedly agree with @tzo here. I think maybe the focus should be on some of the races which are completely underplayed. Kidan, Skrell, Drask and Diona spring to mind. Why are we constantly talking about how bad IPCs are when they're the second most popular race in the game?

I wanna put this out there right now, that if this is the direction Paradise goes, I will be the first one out the door. To clarify, I'm not saying this as some kind of threat to prevent admins from going that direction, I'm an on again, off again player, me leaving is gonna cause no problems. But I AM saying is so that staff members know that it very much is an extreme position to some. The entire appeal to paradise from my side as well as others, is that the various alien races, are actually alien in some regard. They don't play identically to a human, because that's dumb. There's no reason a robot should be identical to a human, nor why a living space bird cyborg should be identical to a bipedal cat, and so on. That is, to me, the main draw. It's what helps make things unique and while it does cause balance issues, also helps encourage immersion because you're not just acting like "Oh*beep boo;* no, the EMP is *beep boop* hurting me!" You are actually, as a player, kind of scared of EMPs because they'll ACTUALLY destroy your hopes and dreams as an IPC/Cyborg/etc. So I put this out there here and now, you'll lose players if you take that route. If you still feel that's the best path and this is what staff/community agree is best for the server, hey, I can respect that, you gotta do what you think is the right move, and I sure hell don't know what is anymore then anyone else does. But you should be prepared to alienate a few people in the act.

Saying that IPCs are underpowered is a bit... hard to believe when they're the most popular race after human (according to a suvrey I saw done awhile back). If they were really underpowered, I suspect they wouldn't be so popular. IPCs being weak to brute damage makes no sense to me. They're made of metal, and feel no pain. They should really be hardier than any organic. There is quite simply no flesh that I know of that's better at resisting blunt trauma than metal is. I can't think of any surface that would be better at reflecting away or radiating heat than shiny metal, either. That said, if IPCs were to lose their vulnerability to brute/burn damage, they would need something even stronger as a weakness to compensate. All species being reskinned humans is fine with me. I'd prefer each species to be more unique than that, but I'd rather have all species be reskinned humans than have species have wildly different power levels or strengths/weaknesses that make no sense.

I disagree vehemently. A surgery for an IPC that has been EMP'd is six surgeries for just basic repairs, another one for posibrain damage, another to replace the arm charger implant, and two more to replace the microbattery/optics. You need access to a mech fabricator, nanopaste, chemistry, etc. That's 10 surgeries, every single time an IPC gets EMP'd. This is akin to giving people free access to a mobile emagged recycler for the cost of 2TC. It uberfucks IPCs, is untraceable, works through walls, and takes about 3 stacks of cable coil along with a competent roboticist to repair (a job that was never balanced to have room/time for repairing IPCs at that). If there's a revenant in the round, most IPC players I know of just stop playing altogether - there's just absolutely no point in being revived. For contrast even a severely shot-up organic requires at most 4-5 surgeries and an IV. Usually one for IB, and the organ manip surgery also fixes broken bones (which reduces the number of surgeries) which is typically done on the head/chest. Also, cloning is an option - it's never an option for an IPC. Organics can also be kept alive and in the round via the use of chems - if an IPC needs surgery, they're probably dead and out of the round, incapable of interacting with anyone ICly.

I'd also like to throw in here... Chemistry. Access to stims, healing over time, etcetera. These are more or less completely denied to IPCs. While degreaser exists, IPCs can't make use of any of the incredibly useful traitor stimulants. Lack of access to meaningful chemical reagents and a proper balance to this is honestly a big deal, and is the primary reason why I personally stopped playing IPC almost altogether. I wouldn't mind seeing EMP's become less of a fuck you to IPC's in terms of repairing them after the fact. As it stands, you'll have an easier, faster (and probably more successful) time SR'ing and fixing someone who came out of an emagged recycler.

More like cute platform's guide to cutes. <3