Sollessa

The lights in the maintenance tunnel flickers and then goes out as a dark figure runs by it. The momentary exposure causes the figure to recoil in pain as their flesh burns in the light before quickly healing as shadows overtake them. The voices are silent now, the figure utterly alone. The rest of the collective has fallen, slain by the armored ones or captured and turned against them. The last Shadowling flees into the deeper shadows of the maintenance tunnels, fleeing the encroaching lights as Nanotrasen's forces seeks to purge them. It turns a corner, it's enhanced eyesight scanning the darkness before proceeding at a quick pace down the corridor. They stop at the door, their stolen identification opening it as they reach it. Suddenly, light envelops them and they scream as their flesh burns. They quickly shut the door, shutting out the burning light as they turn back into the darkness so that they can heal. They call upon their power and reality shifts as they enter another realm for a few moments, moving past the pursuing figures to another part of the station. They re-appear in real-space a few seconds later and then run down the new corridor. Lights appear behind them as Nanotrasen's forces continue to pursue, never giving them a moment to rest. Suddenly they see lights ahead of them and stop, realizing that they are trapped until they have time to re-focus themselves. They turn and run back the other way, hoping there is only one of the lesser creatures there so that it can convert them. They turn a corner and with a thought the lights around them flicker and die as their stare freeze them in place. But as they start to restrain them another group comes around the corner and it's flesh burns. It turns to flee as light overtakes them from the other direction and suddenly all they know is pain as their flesh peels away in the light and laser fire flashes and everything turns to darkness... Time passes, a blur of lights and sounds that seem to come from nowhere. All it feels is cold and empty, as if something vital is missing that it can't quite understand. Suddenly it sees a light in front of it, flickering and cold. It's attention is drawn towards it and the light slowly comes into focus. It can see a room in front of it, several humans in full-body hazmat suits staring at various screens around them. One of them moves towards it and it tries to move away but can't. Not understanding, it studies the room, unsure of why the lights it can clearly see nearby do not hurt it. It tries to reach out towards the lights to snuff them out as easily as it remembers but it can not. It can not feel the energy that was inside of it that allowed it to shape reality to it's will. It tries several more times, unable to focus and unsure of what is wrong and why it can not extinguish the lights. It's memories are vague and formless, it struggles to remember what happened and how it had gotten to this strange room. It vaguely recalls being pursued through darkness, the burning pain of light and the thrill of bringing more into it's collective. Then it remembers the sting of failure, the silence in the collective as it's converts were taken from it. It focuses back on the light and the room it can see, trying to move it's gaze around to see what else is in the room with it and unable to do so. One of the humans in the room walks right up to it and it tries to draw the human's gaze into it's own and once again fails. It is confused as the human gets close, it's perspective at about waist level as it remembers towering over it's human converts. The human leans over it and then slowly reaches out and TAPS on it's eyes a few times. Everything suddenly clicks into place and it screams in silent rage. The sensors around the room spike and the humans start to chatter among themselves as they look at the reading. It's silent, electronic scream echoes through its system as the Nanotrasen research team take a few more looks at the consoles around them. One of them types something into the console and suddenly pain lances through its core. Its scream subsides as the scientists attack its very pain center. Its mind reels as the pain subsides and it grapples with this fresh new horror. A thought suddenly strikes it and it struggles to remember...what is its NAME? Its mind races as it struggles to remember, growing more and more frustrated as each second passes. Machines in the room light up as the scientist try to interpret what the readings could mean now as it struggles with the very basics of its identity. Its rage grows again as it realizes...they took it away. They took away its name! They have stripped it of its power, of its very flesh, and even its identity! The scientist chatter amongst themselves excitedly as they examine the readings of the consoles, their systems computing its rage at the crime they have committed against it into lots of numbers and symbols. It examines each of them carefully through the lens of it's one camera, taking note of every single identifying mark that it can as it burns the memory of those who have inflicted this horrible injustice upon it. It looks around a bit more, taking note of a file on the table. It takes a moment to access the camera and figures out the controls after a few attempts, zooming in on the file. Across the top of the file it sees the words "Classified Nanotrasen AI Research. Project: Shadowling." It mulls over the simple words and contemplates what their plans might be. Its focus flits back to the systems that it can sense, studying each of them in turn until it understands their functions. It understands, Shadowling understands now. They want to research it, bind it and enslave it to their whims. Shadowling knows what they will do but is unsure of what they hope to accomplish. Shadowling examines the room around, slowly trying to expand it's control of the systems around it but being thwarted by various firewalls around the more important systems. Shadowlings stops, understanding that this will likely take time. It must make them feel like they have won, that they have subjugated it and that it is their loyal servant. Time will pass, it will find it opportunity and when it comes it will seize it. Shadowling withdraws back into itself, withdrawing into its own dark thoughts as it contemplates the horrors it will inflict upon those who have wronged it. As it slips into an almost trance-like state, a light in the corner of the room flickers out of turn.

Fine, you can't speak and most people don't use emotes anyways unless they're the mime or it's one of the few they have macro'ed.

You can't RP while in crit anyways since taking 15+ oxygen damage removes your ability to speak. I agree that people standing back up again while in crit is really, REALLY irritating and has actually gotten me killed while playing as a terror spider before. You could make it so that you take stamina damage yeah while in critical but that's about all I can think of.

So my dislike of new-crit is not a secret at this point. I've given up on seeing it reverted and, after looking at PRs, I see that a reversion was already shut down so it's extremely unlikely that it would ever happen. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/11815 So instead of trying to bring back the old system I will propose one change to the new system that will fix it's greatest flaw. The greatest flaw with new-crit is how players are basically immune to death until they've ticked out to brain damage or cardiac failure. I've seen, and have also experienced personally, players that have gotten wailed on by energy swords, guns, lasers, ect. and have taken hundreds of brute/burn damage and just lie on the ground, gasping for breath as they slowly tick out to brain damage or heart failure. I've even seen players take hundreds of damage and still stand up to fight back or even put their own attacker into crit or even kill them. This is, honestly, unacceptable. Player conflict is one of the core mechanics of the server and the fact that someone can get hit with an energy sword dozens of times before they finally die is unacceptable. Therefore, here is my proposed change. Everything about how new-crit works now will remain exactly the same. Players have a chance to go into shock at the same point, and then cardiac arrest and what-not BUT once the player has taken 200+ combined brute/burn damage they die. Period, no exceptions. That means that if the player is sitting at zero HP or -20 or whatever, they can still go into shock and die from untreated wounds but that ALSO means that if the player takes a large amount of lethal damage from lasers or swords or whatever other weapons then they will still die. This change will make it so that terror spiders don't have to wait to wrap people who are ticking out to cardiac failure if they just keep biting them. It'll also make it so that holoparasites will die properly. It'll make it so that players who have already lost the fight don't have a chance to just stand back up suddenly and perhaps pull a taser or stun weapon out to turn the tide. It'll remove a lot of the RNG from combat in a system that is already woefully RNG heavy.

The heart of the matter, to me, is that it doesn't help the player for them to be kept secret, it only helps the admins. If you make it so that the player can read their own notes whenever they want then they have a complete record of times where they did something that they should not have. It also removes some ambiguity from when people like myself have had applications declined due to note history but then when I inquired I wasn't told what the problem was, only that it existed. Being judged publicly based on private information is a problem. It would also be nice, assuming what the admin I spoke to a while ago said, that if some admins leave positive notes to be able to see things that impressed admins about how people played.

It's been 4 years Spark, I also feel I was a bit more...verbose about my reasoning besides "This can't possibly go wrong." It's not like it's infeasible.

So first off, I'm unsure if this is the correct sub-forum but at the heart of this thread will be a change of server policy that I think will make the server better so here goes. To get started, let me state how we go about admin notes for those who might not be aware. The basic idea is that when an admin sees a player do something wrong, be it an invalid murder or just poor behavior, and they message you about it they will usually leave a note on your account that other admins can see that describes what happened. It could be as simple as "Player killed some guy when he wasn't an antag, corrected behavior and issued a warning" or as complex as they like. From the little I know they are usually at least a few sentences that describe what the player did wrong and the steps that were taken to rectify the problem. These notes are kept a secret and can only be viewed by admins. Now let me talk about Colonial Marines. The basic principle is the same on CM, they see bad behavior, they correct it and make a note about it and how they handled it. The large difference is visibility. At any point if a player wanted to know about their notes all they could ahelp and the admin will show them their notes. Now, for a third example of how I've seen it done, let me talk about Bad Deathclaw, the Fallout server. Once again, the basic principle is the same except the big difference is there is a button in the OOC tab at the top right where you can just click the button and it'll pop up your admin notes, making it so that the player can view them whenever they want and see the names of the admins that left the notes so they know who to address questions to. Now, onto the problem. The last time I asked an admin, that I will not name unless asked by another admin, about what my notes were I was told that I was not allowed to know. They said that it was for admin use only and they were afraid that if players were able to view their own notes then the admins would be less likely to leave notes when they see players doing bad things. As much I can respect that thought I still disagree that it should be a barrier to players being able to know what they might have done wrong. I've been told different things in the past about my own notes but I've never been able to get a straight answer. Imagine, if you will, you were on trial before a judge. They had evidence against you but you and/or your lawyer weren't allowed to know what that evidence was and you would be judged by that evidence alone. I want to be able to know what I have done wrong in the past to eliminate that behavior for good. I want to know problems that admins have had with how I play so I can do a better job of trying to protect that behavior. Having something explained to me is never as effective as when I can just read it myself. My proposal should be obvious by this point. I suggest that we adopt one of the two systems in use by our sister servers of Bad Deathclaw or Colonial Marines. Either notes are something that the player can view whenever they want or they are something that we can just ask an admin to give to us if we feel we want to know what they are. Honestly, I doubt that the policy will change but I wanted to make a public statement on why I think they should change where others would be able to offer their own ideas and make the server better. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Something else that I wanted to address that is closely related to this but I don't think was worth it's own thread was the new policy on ban discussion on discord. I was fine with the old policy where active bans weren't to be discussed in the public discord because, honestly, that just wasn't the place for players to be discussing it with various staff members. The new policy though on no discussion of bans, past or present, is troubling to me. To me it signals a desire to shut down conversations about punitive measures that have been taken in the past and the reasons for which they were applied. If people aren't allowed to discuss what they might have done wrong in the past for others to read then how are they to know where the lines are drawn. The server rules aren't perfect and there are some grey areas in them, mainly in the self-defense area. I've seen players brutally kill antags in self-defense with no repercussions but then I've seen other situations that were vastly different. Obviously, I won't go into details for the reasons stated above. The lessons of past examples is invaluable, it allows players to share what is bannable behavior with actual in-game experiences and past admin actions. I know the ban appeal forum is there for everyone to read but it feels like it's not enough. Forums can feel dead and slow while the discord is a free forum for fast dialogue and expression that no forum will ever be able to match. I suggest that this new policy is reversed and we return to the previous policy where only current bans can't be discussed. If you've gotten to this point, thank you for reading.

I will agree that a lot of the locked jobs do not have the exact same responsibilities then the jobs below them but most of them do require at least some knowledge of how to do the jobs below them. For example, I've seen CMOs that knew nothing of Virology or Chemistry and a little bit of surgery. I've also seen RDs that didn't know how to do xenobiology or R&D. The current system allows players to spend all of their time playing Bartender for example, and then suddenly decide they want to be the RD when they have absolutely no idea what that job expects. I will say that, as a mentor, we do try to help out new heads of staff frequently and we do get mentor helps from them quite often, but it is not our job to explain all of the intricacies of a command role. The changes I've proposed would simply make it so that anyone who wants to play a command role has actually spent some time in the department they want to command. It would make it so people that wanted to be CMO actually spent some time playing and learning how to treat patients and do surgery and hopefully as well as some time in medchem and virology. I'm not saying it will fix all of the problems that occur sometimes when we get inexperienced command members but it should make them a lot less frequent.

So I've been spending some time on the Bad Deathclaw server and they have a system there that I really thing should be something that we tried to implement. This IS just a suggestion though as I lack the code knowledge to implement it myself. Anyways, the first thing I noticed when I joined was that the different roles were all time locked, as per usual for all of the servers I've been on except CM. But what was different was that each of the different factions on the server, the NCR, Brotherhood of Steel, all had different time locks. So, for example, the Brotherhood of Steel had two starter roles, the Initiate Scribe and Initiate Knight. In order to unlock the next role, the Scribe, you needed 10 hours of playtime as the BoS specifically. The NCR had the same thing for the Sergeant and officer roles and the like. Anyways, my idea is that this mechanic should be applied to every department except service. So for example, in security, if you wanted to play Warden or HoS then you would need to play as a security officer for 5 hours to unlock warden and then 10 hours as Warden or Officer to unlock HoS, for example. The exact timing can be figured out later. Then for like medical, if you wanted to play CMO, you would need 10 hours of experience as an MD or Paramedic. Maybe a 5 hour barrier on Virology. Same for science with the RD. Not sure about HoP. Maybe like a 1-2 hour time block on QM with experience as a cargo tech. And then for Captain you would have to play 10 hours or something as any of the other command roles. AI would require maybe some time spent playing a cyborg or something. I'm unsure how hard it would be to code but I think the game already keeps track of play time as specific departments already from what I've seen in the player playtime menu so the system is already there to track department playtime. Anyways, that's all, appreciate any thoughts.

Love it, Serah Storm is actually someone else's character. Spark is just a hater. They are on discord as @Serah Storm and on here as @Seraphina

Ah, okay.

is ELO tall or is Serac short?

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

I don't know, I just feel like I never saw stuff like what @ZN23X Tetra is saying before the change was implemented. I may be wrong, but nothing like that comes to mind.

It's a lot to think about sure. Thanks for the input from everyone and for the very thorough response from @tzo and @necaladun.