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Clickbait title woo. So let's talk about shaming culture. Shame is an important social tool to indicate a societal attitude towards behaviour. Go look up sociology shit on wiki. As crew, comments on your coworkers shape their actions. As admins, it can be our job to shame people for their behaviour. This can be done appropriately some times - but someone shouldn't feel too ashamed over a simple mistake, especially newbies. This needs to be done carefully and correctly to ensure that it stops the behaviour, and teaches people the correct action. You should avoid direct insults to the persons intelligence. This can cross IC/OOC boundaries, where your IC insults are being reflected at the person behind the screen. Several people have talked to me recently about how they've been shamed by admins OOCly and ICly in a variety of circumstances. Some of these times have been appropriate to shame someone for their behaviour. The degree to which this has been done and ways has not always been to my liking - I'd like to take this opportunity to remind admins that even a minor comment from someone with the power of a banhammer, comes across very strongly. Calling them an idiot in front of the entire station can be mortifying, and totally turn a new player off the game. This is something that should be remembered when you play the game too. Everyone has off days, and abusing the CE for messing up the singularity isn't going to stop anyone getting sucked into it or make the shuttle arrive faster. When you criticise someone's actions, try to do it in a way that teaches them what the correct thing to do is, and doesn't humiliate the person behind the screen too much. Over this weekend especially I'll be collecting various feedback etc on this, so feel free to message me. If you're reading old forum posts a year from now, also feel free to message me. It's literally my job to talk to players and the community about things like this.

Hey! Right now, the Psychologist has no purpose, mechanically speaking. If they were removed the game would not be different in the slightest. Compare this to other heavy RP roles like: Librarian: Some people really like reading the books, and I would personally miss the books. They have a unique mechanic, even if it's shallow. Removing them would remove a feature. Chaplain: Can bless people and are actually mechanically useful during some rounds (cultists and vampires). Removing them might actually affect balance in some modes. IAAs: Has a clear purpose on the station. Recently got their own comms channel which I love. When playing a command role, I always stay in touch with IAA to find any SOP breaches or direct them to stuff that needs investigating. If directed, they can be a great asset. If removed, SOP wouldn't be followed and adherence to Space Law might also suffer. Then we have the Psychologist. According to their SOP, there is no one who they can actually treat, without the permission of someone else. This makes sense, since their treatment doesn't actually do anything mechanically. Treating criminals is also, due to the nature of the gamemodes, useless. Traitors are working for the syndicate either willingly or forced and a good therapy session won't change that. The rest of the gamemodes force criminals that are impossible to help (vampires/changelings) for a psychologist. Even if they can be helped, they can't be released due to their status as EoC. The only criminals left are the small scale ones. The greytiders and shitters. I suppose the psychologists job could be to try to deal with those but as a psychologist you're coming at it from the wrong angle. They need information about rules of the server and how to act, not psychological help. Psychologist SOP for reference: In a short summary, they can't do anything assumed by their job without permission from someone else. Which would be fine, if they had some sort of dangerous or great power, but they don't. However, I don't think the psychiatrist should be able to force people into treatment against their will. I do think others should have that power though. So how do we solve this? Personally, I think features that lack purpose should be removed. By that logic, the Psychologist should be removed. On the other hand, I like the idea of the Psychologist so I wanted to bring some suggestions to make them able to do stuff. Here are some suggestions to give them a purpose: Positive Psychology. Some players will become angry playing this game. The Psychologist, could try to change their emotional state by offering encouragement and compliments. Their goal would be to turn those frowns upside down. This is hard in real life and doing it over a game might be harder. But using this type of psychology might actually make people feel a bit better. Treat it like a serious job. While a lot of beginners play IAA agents, people know when an IAA agent aren't living up to their standard. A psychologist should have a similar bar to reach for. They can't act however they want because then they would be worse than their patients. Psychiatric session/evaluation demanded: Any head can demand a psychiatric evaluation or session by any of their subordinates if they seem angry, sad or generally unhappy. If we base the Psychologists treatment on Positive Psychology, this sessions purpose would be to make them happy or calm down. IAA might also be able to demand that non-heads do a session. The Psychologist could also get access to the Procedures channel. The two outcomes I imagine for this would be the person demanded to do the session either flipping out completely and escalating their anger, which I would consider grounds for demotion OR accepting it, realizing they may not feel allright and do the session. If they feel better afterwards would depend on the psychiatrist. Research: The Psychologist can perform actual psychological research, just like in real life! CentComm, since they sometimes do odd stuff, might want to try some strange experiment. I assume this would be heavily based on the admins on at the shift start, but I'm also wondering how hard it would be to have a rotation of 10 different "experiments" similar to station goal that the Psychologist has to perform. Checking for completion would not be necessary, as long as they have a clear task. They could give their findings to the captain who could fax it to CentComm. Examples: Can (antagonist) be cured by 10 minute exposure to the clown? Will the happiness level of the station increase if the tiles are changed to wood? Will violence increase or decrease, based on the amount of flowers placed in the hallways? If a "calm area" is constructed near dorms, will people visit it to find inner peace? If the mime start acting out peaceful and happy scenarios, will the crew calmness increase? These are some thoughts I trew together in like half an hour so I'm sorry they're a bit confused. I'm sure there are plenty of better suggestions out there and I would love to see a job I love IRL get some more purpose in this game! So keep the suggestions coming!

Hey, We was chatting about this in the post round discord and a few people seemed to second the idea so thought I would post it here. Currently, IAA is one of the most misused and misunderstood job roles on the station as people often flock to it not necessarily knowing what their place is on the station generally causing people grief or wasting time (Not all of them do, I have seen some great IAA). Meanwhile, a role which can be quite critical and easy to grasp is locked behind Karma. Why Karma Lock IAA: I feel like adding a soft 5kp lock onto the IAA role will serve to attract only those who want to play the role properly and makes them more invested in learning it properly before forking out their karma. This could eventually open the doors for a wider look at IAA and how they function but I'm trying to keep this suggestion contained so maybe another time. Having had a few very good rounds as IAA, the role can be rewarding BUT only for those who want that type of play style and know what they are signing up for at round join/start. Unlocking BrigPhys: Honestly, I feel this role is so underrated and sometimes underused. A contributing factor to it's under-use is the fact that due to it's karma lock there isn't always one available. Whilst removing the karma lock wouldn't fix this all the time it would go some way and also provide another route for those new to security to get to grips, listen in to comms ETC. before jumping in at the deep end. Unlocking the role also serves to (edited below): TL:DR: You can go a round with no IAA and never know yet they can cause huge frustation when there is one who doesn't know the role and has no interest in learning it. Brig Phys is often needed and can cause little frustration especially when you have perma prisoners and can lead to some good rp/scenarios.

From an admin pov, my main concern with psych is the fact that a good chunk of the time, it is played by players who are absolutely bald, and decide to kidnap someone, straightjacket them, and force-feed them drugs. Because that's what they think is appropriate for a psych. I've had to ban more people from psych/medical for this than I care to remember. As such, any mechanic which psychs can abuse to detain people for long periods of time, or really at all, is probably not a good mechanic. If we're going to give psych a mechanic, something they can use to make the job more interesting/relevant, then I would suggest: something detection-based, like the ability to use an item to scan for abnormal brainwaves, which could reveal things like vampire thralling, mindslave implants, etc. This would require a unique neural scanner, them to hold still for 30-60 seconds, or something like that. Enough constraints that the psych can't mass-test everyone. something to do with curing psych abnormalities, like for example reversing abductor programming, or effectively giving someone a mindslave implant that makes them loyal to NT (OOCly, this is a reward for traitors, who get to be released 'on parole' rather than sitting out the rest of the round, as such this implant would be extremely limited supply, only one is available and only the psych can use it). have a system where people can opt to give their character mental disabilities, not just physical ones, during char creation (e.g. syndicate-induced PTSD) and have the psych able to dispense unique drugs to help with these... and have a unique HUD that lets them identify people whose medical records show they have these conditions (basically make it easier for them to find rp partners) Really, we should consider just removing the straightjacket from the psych, and giving it to sec's medical wing. Psych is meant to be treating patients on a voluntary basis. Patients sent to the psych against their will should come exclusively from security - not something the psych should be able to engineer themselves.