Dinarzad

I would disagree that it's a baseless claim to make, when a claim of it making a mechanical impact was part of the original post. It's making an argument that the system has at some point caused either his or someone's Diona character to die instead of healing off of the brighter normal lights. This is further implied with the comment of it being "Nice from an RP perspective but for an overall game experience it is preferable to be disabled." as this is more or less acknowledging that the RP side of things is not the argument being made, but the mechanical impacts it has. Affected has commented on the performance side of things, which is that it doesn't really impact much if anything other then the initial swap of lightning modes, their other argument is not about how it is from an RP stand point, which leaves only the mechanical argument left to be of any concern, so, I disagree that it's a ludicrous take to have on the argument so far. A bit assumptive that he plays a Diona, sure, but still not -that- ludicrous of a take. And the mechanical argument itself can be unraveled by the counterpoint of just using the PDA you spawn with, using the PDA light is enough light a Diona suffers no problems. The effort of removing the system seems unwarranted, it still does add -some- RP value as you and the OP have stated, and the actual negative impacts are incredibly slim.

As a person who has been gone from existence for like a year and a half or some ungodly number an only just coming back, here's an opinion that carries no weight to it, cuz Iunno how this stuff works anymore, I'm old: I don't think any one job should be "irreplaceable" for a department. Where if that job where not present it would cripple the function of a department. And I feel like limiting the reliability of the Detective's gear/abilities to him and him alone, opens the door to that problem arising. If a round has no Detective, that should not impair security directly; the absence should be felt, but not cripple. And I think it does that right now. Right now a Detective is a guy dedicated to putting a case together so that Security knows who the right guy to arrest is, and when that guy inevitably starts to scream "Shitcurity" over the radios and gets the IAA and the Captain breathing down your neck, you can pull out all the little bits and bobs necessary to tell everyone else to cool it cuz this is a dirty crime boy. The Detective makes the life of an Officer easier but is not -required- by the Officer in the event no Detective is not in a given round, if necessary an officer can do it themselves, it's just riskier and more annoying cuz that's bogging down their loadout with other gear. Or at least he SHOULD be making it easier, if he's doing his job right. ((We're sort of entertaining the hypothesis of 'How things are intended to work, not accounting for derp officers or Detcurity.))

No, if it wasn't an accusation it simply put, is not an accusation. It was unintentionally misleading, perhaps, but it was never an accusation. It was interpreted as one but that doesn't change what it is. You can also misinterpret factual evidence and data, that doesn't change what a fact is or the data itself, it means the interpretation was flawed or the fact was presented erroneously (Which I have admitted to) it does not suddenly change what the fact was to fit that flawed interpretation. And none of this addresses my point, it serves to prove it even more. Everything said was reduced and boiled down to one single snippet, one "Sound bite" of my post that was easy to jump on. The exact same thing that Necaladun was just talking out against. One admitted error in my post and nothing else I said is addressed or referred to or evidently seems to even matter and you want to tell me that "You don't have to spend minutes carefully crafting a post"? Apparently I do need to, because in one fuck up in said post, and nothing else I have to say is going to be addressed and it's additionally gotten me called a liar, when a lie was never the intent. So yes. I apparently do need to be particularly precise and careful with my wording, since my wording is going to be picked apart and subject to semantics, instead of the point itself, even now that it's been clarified. This is again, exactly the point people have when they say they feel like they're walking on eggshells when dealing with administration. You have not acknowledged the point itself, you have instead fixated on a single error that was already addressed, dodged the issue that was being raised and doubled down on focus on me and how I failed to portray my argument properly (Which is already acknowledged and even apologized for at this point.) Instead of addressing the concern, you have chided me for making a mistake. So the mistake in presenting the argument negates the argument altogether, which is itself, a fallacy. Do you really not see why that kind of behavior makes people nervous to bring up any issues or anything that might be even vaguely controversial, let alone to make sure their notes are accurate? If this were a situation occuring in-game and going onto my notes, I would have no way of knowing the remark was misinterpreted, I would be unable to correct it and future admins would be working off erroneous information. This is what people mean, this is an example in motion of that entire argument.

Again. It was never intended to be a verbatim quote of an actual incident. It was an exaggeration used to illustrate a point of view people have on not being able to see their notes and to be mildly funny. I am sorry if my attempt at humor has backfired that horribly, it wasn't intended to BE an actual example. But that reaction in and of itself, from multiple admins is a reason why so many people feel they're walking on eggshells. I made one comment that I DIDN'T carefully spend minutes crafting and that got misconstrued and it was immediately jumped upon and, in this case, got me called a liar. Is it really that hard to believe after that kind of reaction people get concerned what gets put into their notes and would like a chance to correct it?

My apologies, that was not intended to be an example of a message I received, mostly meant as a display of what not being told notes can cause confusion wise, albeit with an admitted bit of exaggeration to be somewhat funny. As for the rest of the post, no admins are not here to parent or discipline anyone. But neither do you HAVE to. Just providing access to notes offers a chance for SELF-Correction. No parenting needed, it's a chance to see a big ol' list of fuck ups you're making, or even a list of positive things you do, that can be encouragement to keep doing those things. It's merely giving the player information on their behavior, and then them making an informed choice of actions from there. It provides self-correction opportunities which would lower the workload of admins, even if only by a fraction.

"You did something bad, stop doing that." "Oh, okay what did I do?" "You don't need to know what, just stop doing it." Not being able to see your own notes leads to confusion and bewilderment. It's curbing another avenue for problem players to recognize a downward spiral and any chance for them to right that behavior. It focuses solely on the punishment for doing something wrong rather then giving that player a chance to self correct. The inability to talk about bans on discord in addition to not being able to see what you've been doing wrong, it's stacking the deck as much as possible into preventing a problem player from correcting his behavior BEFORE it comes to a head and requires a ban, instead of taking the "Ounce of Prevention" we've opted for multiple pounds of "Cure", it's ultimate more work to deal with all those ban appeals from people who had an oopsie then to give those people a means of self-correction before administrative intervention is needed. It's giving people the tools to solve their own problem before Admins have to. In addition, if a player has access to their own notes, they run out of excuses for continued misbehavior real fast. A player can't claim they didn't know something was a problem, when they had full access to see those notes and see that it WAS a problem, they could have seen it at any time and didn't care and continued to break rules and tow lines anyway, which helps lead to more open and shut cases, it's a more telling sign of someone's attitude as a player and whether or not they're any good for the server.

@Christasmurf Pretty much yeah. White blouse, black skirt. I confess, my suggestion is a little more selfish because I have a character that is meant to be kinda "Goth" in terms of dress style, but when it comes to clothes there's really not much to use for that, at least not without going full on an using the Victorian stuff.

An actual black skirt. The one we have is a red skirt with a black jacket, and the closest one that isn't something like the blueshield's jumpskirt, is to use the purple plaid one with a black hoodie over it.

Arcana: Magic obsessed nerd Shalqouir: Exasperated Robot Goth

Not right now, but we have a PR up to add them in.

I'm not sure why so many people keeping taking this as "YOU WANT TO REMOVE THE EMPS!?!?!?!??!" That's not even vaguely what people have suggested or mentioned neither in this thread nor over the years and the very fact people keep saying that just misleads OTHER people so it becomes a deafening echo chamber of misinformation. It's like spooking ONE individual causes them to shout something that was in no way even involved in the initial suggestion which spooks the rest of the group and causes horrible stagnation. Nobody wants EMPs to no longer be a weakness. At all. What people do want is the vulnerability LESSENED down OR for other Vulnerabilities to be reduced. I will say this again to make sure it absolutely cannot be misconstrued yet again. I and others do not want EMP's removed as an IPC Vulnerability. I do either want EMP's reduced in how much of a vulnerability they are, or I want the other nerfs that have stacked up over the years to be pulled BACK. Because all those "BUT THEY SO OP" points people keep making ignore how much of a double-edged sword almost all of them are and how most of the advantages they used to have no longer exist. Virus immunity? No Jesus Viruses either, it balances itself. Frankly beneficial viruses are infinitely more common then bad, so it's more of a nerf then a perk. Genetics immunity? No X-ray vision powers or hulk or whatever other powers. It balances itself. No Pain? A perk. No Breathe? A perk Immune to Chems? You're also immune to every single healing or beneficial chemical in the game, it balances itself. You do not get the good and you do not get the bad. Radiation immunity? A perk You take 50% more Brute and Burn damage, the most common sources in the game? A major con. You heal yourself with Cables/Welders? A perk. Welder immunity? A perk Your limbs pop off with the slightest provocation? A major con. You have "Blood" in the form of Oil, this blood does not regenerate naturally. A con. You cannot heal yourself if damage is over an easy to achieve threshold due to your damage multiplier? A con You can still "Break" limbs and require surgery to fix? A con. You can be instantly killed from a large range away through walls? The biggest con that you can put ON a race. You can survive without a head? Well your head pops off laughably easy and leaves you blind and deaf, so again, it rather balances itself. The theme here is only OBJECTIVE good things IPCs have are pain immunity, No Breathing, Welder Immunity, No radiation and they can heal themselves through light damage, with easy to obtain tools. But given your damage multiplier is so high you almost always need to get fixed up by a roboticist. Two to Tree hits with a toolbox is enough to put an IPC into a lethal situation. And over time they've had "Blood" added into them and being able to "Break" bones in the form of a damage threshold they need internal repairs for and are no longer able to heal via surface applications of welders or cables. I have Breath immunity, No organs (Other then a 'brain'), Regrowable limbs, Welder immunity AND 'blood' that I both regenerate and can refill from any basic sink as a slime person. And I STILL don't take 50% more damage from the majority of sources, don't have an instant kill mechanic and can still benefit from genetics and viruses and healing chemicals, while also being immune to Vampires. Sure seems funny lookin' to me on the outside. Their "Easy to break, easy to fix" design philosophy was up-ended in increments over a long period of time as now they bleed like humans and break bones like humans, except UNLIKE humans they also can instantly die through walls and take nearly double damage from the sources that 95% of crew will experience in an average shift. Is it, therefore, so absolutely outlandish to ask that something be done since they were previously acknowledged as being relatively balanced and were then nerfed? Is it absolutely unfathomable to think that telling people "Well yeah it's broken design and it's not fun but I mean you CHOSE not to have fun...." is a REALLY poor argument for game development and balancing? If you have to make something unenjoyable to play for the sake of balancing it, then the balance is shit and needs to be revised. If you can't manage to kill an IPC, then I am sorry, but you're not trying. 2 TC for an EMP Flashlight. It's dead, Punch in the chest a few times, it's dead. Tool box it in the chest twice, it's dead. I can and have killed IPCs before while actively trying NOT to kill them, it's really not that hard. It is poor balance and I have grown increasingly annoyed with people making up specious reasons to excuse it. It is BAD design. I cannot make staff change it and I cannot make staff change their mind on the direction they've gone with it, but I absolutely refuse to just pretend like it is good just because of that. The very fact that this debate has come up several times over several years is living proof of it. It comes up again and again and again and it does so for a reason.

Worth remembering that on /tg/ bone breaks aren't really a thing so being whapped once or twice is not an immediate death sentence. That said, even over on /tg/ you'd really just be using the Crusher to get the killing blow, not fighting something the entire time with it. Use the gun to do the bulk of the fight and when you think it's just about dead start using the crusher. This is easier with a med-hud as it should so the boss' HP that way. Megafauna are meant to be the ultimate encounters, high risk high reward. If you die your corpse is fuckin gone-zo, but the rewards for a kill can be great. This ultimately means melee is never going to be perfectly viable, just because the damage required to make those monsters that much of a threat is going to make melee struggle to compete, and lowering that damage would make megafauna simply too easy for the rewards they dish out. It's an unfortunate side effect but one I don't think that could be fixed without breaking other parts of it in worse ways.

You have clearly never looked at the Tool Storage room mid-round. That places becomes a barren wasteland. Wrenches an the like are still there, and they are also worthless for what we're talking about, welder and cables are the only thing that matter. Cable is easy. Welder is almost always gone, even then the hacked super welders you get from enabling contraband on the youtool vendor. Just because you say things doesn't make them true. I can also say "Fixing organics is easy, stop saying it isn't, stop being biased" but it really doesn't do anything for an argument except be needlessly confrontational. You act like people who play IPCs some how don't know the systems or mechanics required to heal organics as if they didn't play a human to get the required 15 karma to unlock IPC to begin with, or that they haven't moved on to other races since then. So instead, let's do a comparison. your AVERAGE Medical injury is solved by one, perhaps 2 Synthflesh patches, maybe some Charcoal or a broken bone which needs surgery. Your AVERAGE IPC injury requires a trip to robotics, because even though the damage isn't that bad, it's over the threshold to be unable to be repaired with surface welding/cables, so basically, suergery on all the effected areas, and refilling any lost oil because unlike organics, the oil will never regenerated. Here's the problem. all that septic surgery and dead organs you just mentioned, how painful it is to revive? Welcome to every single IPC who has ever been EMPed, ever. Given you SAY you are repairing IPCs I should think you would know that an IPC who is hit by an EMP is fried across their entire body, every single 'organ' every single limb. But with IPCs we don't have the magical macguffins of chemistry to lean on, no Synthflesh, no Mitocholide, nothin. So that means surgical repairing every single limb, brute and burn, manually repairing every single organ with nanopaste (Assuming Science is polite enough to give you any, they mostly tell you to fuck off.) or printing out every single organ to replace. It is a very long, very painful process, except instead of happening because you weren't found for 30 minutes, it happened instantly when you died because lol good joke. Sounds pretty similar to finding a long desiccated corpse that gets SR'd to me. [CITATION VERY MUCH NEEDED] This is 100% untrue in every single respect. IPCs that take damage over a certain threshold can no longer fix their own bodies with welders or cables and it absolutely requires a roboticist to open the limb up and do an equivalent to broken bone surgery. So no. You cannot fix that on the spot and you still need mandatory surgery just like organics. The whole point here was "Easy to damage, easy to fix" right? Well then why in Nar-sie's tits is this a thing? Sure sounds to me like IPC repair and Organic repair are sounding very, very similar except one of thme is paper and the other is not. What the actual fuck is this logic? "If you don't like it just stop playing it." Like.... like what? Uhh. No. How about if something is very obviously so obnoxiously and hilariously not fun to play as that you have to tell people not to play it, maybe that's a sign your design is actually fucking bad. Like shit dude, why do anything at that point if you don't like it just go somewhere else screw iteration and improvement. Why should we even make any more PRs, clearly the people just need to learn "Love it or leave it" right? Shit dude, you right. Lemme just go make code changes to give Security Death Squad gear, because I mean lore wise, Cyberiad is an EXTREMELY Valuable asset, conducting highly advanced research on one of the most versatile and profitable materials in the known universe, the thing that MADE NT a mega-corp, clearly they'd want their station adequately protected and this is an RP game so we don't need to worry about silly things like game balance! You try making that excuse to any fucking game designer or even just coders here about any other system and just watch it be laughed out of the room. If you have to admit that it's broken and unbalanced and try to make excuses for that, maybe that's a sign it's ACTUALLY broken and unbalanced and that's not a fucking good thing.

Yeaaaaah, nah. I would be profoundly against that. What you are suggesting is that characters shouldn't exist at all. Because that's what this suggestion would achieve. Your look is randomized, your name is randomized, you get to decide nothing about yourself. And frankly that's just a terrible idea in general when it comes to trying to achieve roleplay, if you don't care about your own character that you are playing, you're not going to care enough to roleplay it. Arcana, my slime, is named Arcana because she's obsessed with magic. Like, REALLY obsessed with magic, will hoard items she things are magical or enchanted an would do a LOT of things in order to learn the secrets of the Wizard Federation. She also may or may not have a pet fish named Cantrip. That above information exists BECAUSE I was able to name and create MY character, not be given some random hunk of failure from SS13's randomization. This is what you'd be expressly removing from the game by mandating Randomization and denying people the ability to make characters. The cons far and away blow the pros out of the water.

I don't think becoming combat-capable is necessary (Or even desirable) but the modules they're supplied with at current are dubiously useful at best. I mean, their 'host bioscan' module tells you even less then an un-upgraded health analyzer or even just a medical chip inserted into a PDA. That's... sort of depressing. It just sort of says "Hey. There's damage here" and their body temperature and that's genuinely about it. No read out of what limb is damage like analyzers, nothing. pAI becoming capable of attacking or defending someone was never my intent to imply. What I would like pAI to supply is information. Currently the information they can provide to people is questionably useful, Records access is rarely needed except for Security, and they don't look at it half the time either. The one use there would be helping over-burdened Wardens with managing Security Records, but they cannot write Records, only read them. (To prevent ghostly griefing, which is understandable, but drastically impairs usefulness.) The atmos analyzer is never needed, the people who need to worry about atmospherics have far better tools to handle it then you do, and the analyzer tool you have is incapable of scanning anomalies, so just grabbing a basic one available literally everywhere on station, is still a better option then you. I would prefer pAI become more utility or information tools, something akin to an SS13 equivalent to a Smartphone. And I would honestly sacrifice the "Living Death alarm" aspect if that helped achieve it, I don't feel that's exactly interesting gameplay for anyone, the host, the pAI or the antag being foiled. I would much rather pAI can hear the radio, but be unable to speak on it, if it meant giving them some TLC in the terms of more impactful modules.