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I don't see why they couldn't keep that.

I just want to get a general community sense. How would people feel if we were to remove the "abductor" species, and replace them with grays that only spoke in wingdings? This would require the crew during abduction events, to determine if the gray in question was a crewmember, or one of the crew grays redneck cousins.

So yeah, its been said but.. This is just rabid vulpkanin. I mean we could like, give them powers and make it a game mode, sort of an alternative renamed vampire.....

@Breenland SM is set to go, just waiting on a mapper. Current plan is to beg @FreeStylaLT

Would be neat, but our atmospheric system is way older then TGs,. We only support the base 4 gasses.

I don't really know why a station owned by a single corporation would do this, its a bunch of extra work for the transfer of something that does not have value. So I spent some time trying to think of a multiplayer RPG that did not have an economy. I thought the Boulders Gate/Icewind Dale series from late 90s, but they had market places. TG is massively popular and we are talking about a port of their system. Considering every multiplayer RPG I can think of has a persistent economy, and TG has a persistent economy. I just don't see this as an issue.

So the problem, is that as we appear to be defining it, an economy exists to allocate scarce resources. A non-persistent economy, does not do that, effectively all it would do would be to limit how much of a resource someone could get in game. Yes, it would. But in doing so, its not so much a fairer distribution of resources, so much as it is a random distribution. I think any efforts to make an economy without persistence are a waste of time and effort. Without persistence, resources are not scarce except for perhaps immediately scarce for that round. Without any sort of actual (persistent) scarcity, we would have to significantly introduce scarcity by artificially reducing supply of key items for any of the changes to have a meaningful effect. (Station gets two medkits)

We are trying to make more mechanical incentives to roleplay. Or at the very least, not have mechanics that act as a disincentive to roleplay.

They are not reiterations but we don't really define what happens between shifts, or how everyone is back the next shift after the station was destroyed. Relationships persist between rounds socially, which heavily implies that the rounds are not just repeats of the same day. This is the major point, and we kind of just hand wave the inconsistencies. My general rule of thumb, is outside of everyone dying and if one person is an antag, it's remembered.

This would be pretty easy for us to deal with, we just need to have certain things cost something. The easiest way to not have to deal with debt, is to not sell things to people without money.

Legit plane. So for perspective, Donald Trumps personal jet (the 757 with the big TRUMP written on it) is a 1991 757-200 Two are up for sale right now in California with 80,000 hour (its been more then two decades) both have an asking price of 9.5 Million USD. Sure, you would need to fix up the interior, maybe new engines, but um..... A G650 is a serious plane.

So if you do want to do it, just ahelp first. Worst thing that can happen is you get a no. My general intervention plan for self-antaging that is not violent or seriously screwing over someones round is to look the other way assuming. 1) No salting over ahelp when caught by security 2) No salting over LOOC (This is worse then ahelps, I can brush off salt in ahelps with no issue, you don't get to mess with other players) 3) No screams of shitcurity or about security taking your voxygen, don't disarm spam and disposal their stun baton, I will not be impressed by your robustness. 4) Nobody ahelps it. If you don't think you can go with out 3/4 ahelp first. While making more opportunities for tiding way ups the chaos and should probably not be endorsed, but we are far looser on tiding then we could be.

Yeah for clarification, its very context dependent. On slow rounds, especially if you ahelp, you are going to get an amazing amount of latitude in thieving. The problem is, most people go full tide on red alert. When security is too busy dealing with the actual antags to respond to the break in and an officer getting his taser and baton stolen. Even if no major thefts occurred, I have been disappointed many times when ghosting. We fly around and watch, especially if things look like antag activity. This is not to catch people, its because its more interesting to watch. I have seen plenty of breakins, long security chases with much disarm spam and a ton of officers. Finally they get the tide, I go back to watching antags and then... without warning... *bwoink*

OK, so If I see any non-antags doing this, I am going to assume they are self antaging and if they cant offer an amazing RP explanation of why they were breaking two major laws under space law (in the same 3xx category as beating someone into crit) they will end up with a warning on first offence and depending on notes, I may ban them.

So, to be kind of the no fun allowed police. Breaking into high security areas as a non-antag is not the kind of thing I think we want to encourage at scale.

We've discussed this issue in another thread, but I feel that it's largely discouraging to coders to have to wait multiple months for your PR to be reviewed and ruled on, and you spend that time making sure that there are no outstanding merge conflicts or problems. This has been improving recently, at least! These are some of the hardest things to do, we had well... It took a great deal of effort to get the whole staff on the same page that not only were people complaining about the backlog, but that a backlog existed, and we needed to do something about it. After that we had to figure out what to do about it. We are doing better, we are making progress. It would be wrong to say the hard part is over and we have smooth sailing on the codebase front. We have a number of issues with our coder pipeline, and while we have cleared the backlog, the side effects of having one on our coder population are going to take time to counter. I could be wrong and we see a sustained bounce back, but I imagine we are going to see a spike of new PRs, a crash in new PRs, and then a slow gradual rebuilding. It will probably look something like the hype cycle curve. So while we are working through backlog, we have other code issues we need help on. 1) The long PR times and uncertain outcomes months in the future has contributed to many of our coders moving on. We have to rebuild trust that we will evaluate things fairly and in a reasonable time frame, and if we disagree, providing a meaningful and useful reason we disagree. We will need to rebuild engagement with our codebase, since we already lost it, we will almost certainly have a harder time then we did last time. Its easier to gain trust the first time, then it is to regain it after loosing it. 2) We continue to receive feedback that the staff and community do not agree with many of the gameplay decisions being made that effect where they think we should be moving. We have no real defining goal or direction, so it is very difficult to look at anything qualitatively vs just the balance numbers. Since most of the interactions don't come down to numbers, the appearance is that gameplay decisions just kind of happen for personal preference reasons. Since not everyone shares the same preference, it seems to be well,, unpredictable and unfair. Normally I would say, "Well thats tough because this is the direction the server is going in." But without being able to articulate that direction, well. Then it would be disingenuous of me to claim that more of a plan exists then personal preference at the top. I am good enough at this public speaking stuff, to know I won't win any friends by saying a plan exists, and then being unable to answer what it is. Number 2 is actually a really big deal, because we can't really have any sort of rewards for coding or what to tell coders about their ideas as we have no idea what we really want. I wish it was all just good news, perhaps it will be, perhaps we get a github bounce that keeps growing. But, objectively, we have problems. We are however, trying to solve them. While we may not have a path forward yet, we are working on it. Now thats done, onto fun stuff! Huge yes to this, if it's handled properly and with sufficient agility. If you want unbalanced wackiness, go whole hog on it. One time I tried to make a species immune to all slowdowns on the grounds they couldn't use guns. Seemed like a cool idea at the time. I'd still like to try it. Maintainers have started doing test merges, we are making good progress #voxleap2018 The difficulty, is its very easy to see a feature get added for rocks, and have the paper players freak out. The easiest solution is then to remove it. This is actually the most expensive solution, as the person who made the feature will probably not sink that level of effort in again anytime soon, and we end up with all the features removed. In my mind, the better solution all things else being equal, would be to give a neat new thing to paper. The problem is because everyone on the server is a special snowflake, getting the players of an entire species to agree to what constitutes an acceptable nerf, is just as difficult as getting different species to agree. I think we have to go with a trait system, we have no other choice then to keep following the signs for "Spesss, bland edition" If we stay on that road, we may just end up get where we are going. I don't like the idea of all species being reskins, because its on the path to acceptance that this is not a roleplaying game, its a PVP game with a rules about what you can say in the chat window. While CS:GO has a thriving market for gun skins (or so I am told), my feelings on server direction is that I am not super interested in a free 2d version of an FPS.

For what its worth (Basically nothing) I personally subscribe to the model of "That seems neat and unique, lets merge it." Approach to balance. I completely understand where you are coming from. But it really does come down to Neca's rock paper scissor example. While our current system has the appearance of being arbitrary, it does a decent job of upsetting almost everyone, which is a pretty fair indicator of a fair system. Yes it is chalk full of balance decisions that many in the community find questionable. But it is extremely hard to look at a species other then the karma ones and say they have any advantages/disadvantages. IPC stand out, because IPC have different mechanics. I see three ways around the Rock Paper Scissor issue. 1) Make all the species reskinned humans (IPCs need to eat fuel to break it down into methane for a fuel cell or something and have black oil blood) 2) A trait system where we can assign things points, and just kinda let whatever happen. IPC can just have less points to spend on traits then humans, to offset stuff. They can pick between EMP weakness or the change to cells. (Or they could take a weakness trait and only speak in trinary or something) 3) We could change game mechanics or gameplay to put less of an incentive on everyone killing each other all the time. That is kinda what I have for ideas, otherwise well I get this, but at the same time it's very bad to buff a species that was already human+ to human++. I do understand that there were nerfs merged at the same time. This is good! But it wasn't the intention of that PR. That was only to buff with "We'll handle nerfs later." when you take into account the absolutely glacial pace of Para development, it was a pretty dire outlook. Everyone in this is right, Yeah, we have had plenty of human to human+ buffs with promised future nurfs that never materialized, I would not fault you for saying there were never any nurfs intended by the author/maintainers/heads at all, as often, no nurfs are ever offered. I will not fault anyone for pattern recognition, even if the conclusion drawn is faulty, the pattern still exists. But none of that really addresses the concern about how species should be handled. It just refers back to previous examples that may/may not have been the right/wrong decisions for the right/wrong reasons. I have three ideas, the first is the easiest to both get coded and pass the merge process, it is the one I like least, but it is the most likely way to resolve this after just not resolving it. It is not possible to just have things appear out of nothingness and into fully formed PRs, someone has to code them, and that is primarily what we lack. You cannot merge something that was never coded.

Oh no worries, I prefer Bay atmos myself, I just don't want to deal with the difficulties of porting it, as I think I would be unable to overcome them.

Author of fastmos, which is an addition to Linda. Our atmos is a few years behind the other code bases, in both features and performance. The throwing mechanic makes it appear faster, but the reality is, its super expensive to do tile by tile calculations, which means that to make it spread faster, we would have to increase the rate at which it calculates all active tiles. So essentially, short of porting Bay or TGs system, this is about as good as we will be able to get. Considering that byond is single threaded, this is extremely unlikely to change in the future. Its a known limitation of our atmospherics system. Anything short of a port of a more modern system will not change this dynamic. As far as the 24 minute thing goes, before fastmos, our atmospherics system was 4 times slower. So um, that would be 100 minutes.

Everytime we try to make changes, they end up not sticking. Its kinda exhausting. We have near zero ability to make even the smallest change, that requires a massive focus of effort and will. Then it is at continued risk for just getting removed, its just not worth it. The species used to be far more distinct then they are now, making everything re-skinned humans has been a process that has been occurring for 3-4 years now. I would say, over balance concerns. It may not be a planned change, but a number of things likely came together to have the change occur anyways.

So for clarity, I don't actually think all species should just be reskinned humans... That feels like something one does because the game is about clickly PVP, which personally does not appeal to me, regardless of how true it may or may not be. I posted what I did as more of a "Be careful what you wish for." As like water or electricity, code changes take the path of least resistance.

So for the most part, insects manage to be plenty fast with a hard outer the casing. Our fleshy parts just cover an internal framework or hard material with appropriate joints. Weight is best thought of as thrust to weight ratio Either way advanced carbon materials are way lighter and way stronger steel, we just don't have a good manufacturing process IRL. Radiation seriously damages any electronics. Biological things are actually far more resilient, in that it would take significantly longer for say a Tajaran to die then an IPC. You can hardden electronics by both upping the weight such as using a few feet of lead for gamma rays, or lighter foil for alpha and beta. But assuming you don't have room for tons of lead, your next best bet is to increase the size of your transistors. Go from say a core i7 to looked a good solid Pentium 2. But yeah I would expect IPCs to be really resiliant to shock damage (physical impact). But exceptionally vulnerable to strong magnetic fields such as emp, or any radiation. EMP would probably just break them, but radiation would be more dangerous, it would not effect larger components, such as capacitors or wiring like an EMP would. But it would destroy the nano scale transistors on any computer chips, not all at once, but slowlu, basically permenent gradual brain damage, as the posibrain begain to degrade, and the subsystems for things like motor control begain fail, a logic gate at a time. What's most interesting, is that because gates are made up of many transistors, the failures would not be an overload like EMP, radiation would instead cause logic gates to begin to fail, either closed, open, or unpredictably fail in either of those two states. This would also be unrepairable, effected components would have to be replaced. So existentially, is an IPC software or hardware? Is it the posibrain, or does it live in storage somehow separate? Written on a phone, waiting for a show to start, sorry.

So this is the problem with species. Its very hard to differentiate them meaningfully without people falling into two camps. My special snowflake needs to be the best, I play X <==> My special snowflake needs to be the best, I don't play X IPCs are no exception, the problem is, at the center of that scale we have the compromise position of "Everything is just reskinned humans." In my perfect world, the solution to this is to make bullets embed, and lasers have the chance to damage internal organs as well. Species with fur could have a chance of catching on fire when hit with a laser. The alternative, is we just make IPCs more human. We could take the starbound approach to species balancing and use the Glitch as the template. (IPCs need to eat food to survive as they were "programmed" to behave like humans. ICily, they don't need it, but will die without it due to thinking they need to eat.) I think the second approach would be a pity, IPCs are unique and have unique mechanics. Although of the two options, I see the second approach as more probable then the first. Unique mechanics involve a ton of code snowflakes, so not only do unique mechanics come up against balance issues, they also have code issues. Not only does everyone have to agree on the balance, but also the code. Its way easier just to make them a subtype of human with a different skin and the ability to use *buzz and *beep. All species being reskinned humans is not an extreme position, it is the center of the balance spectrum. So while it may be an unpopular position, it is the one that we are most likely to pick as a community.

I share Neca's concerns. I also don't know that converting the Chaplin from an RP role to a PvP one is a direction that would be good to move in. Further Vampires are not KOS. Making them kill on sight adds another antag class into the PvP realm, and another game mode into PvP. We already have NukeOps, Wizard, Shadowlings, and Changelings for that. If anything we should remove the inquisitor gear from the priest and have it be something from cargo or CentCom.

This is the list of things I like about wizard rounds. It is the perfect round type to force when you need to buy 5 minutes to see if a patch got into the server and then reset without ending the round.