Urlance Woolsbane
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Posts posted by Urlance Woolsbane
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It was a post like many others on r/ss13. The same, tedious claim that the Paradise staff are playing Judas with the moneybag. Unsubstantiated rubbish, as usual. But it did bring something to my attention: Our Patreon is bringing in more than twice the monthly amount we need to run the server. Seeing as we have an overpopulation issue, why not consider getting a second one? Goon does it. TG does it. Why don't we?
Yes, it would require more staff members, but we've got fertile recruiting grounds. There are other issues that this could also solve: The RP divide, for instance. We could keep one server with the current rules, and another that's properly MRP. Or the development one. One server could be used to test various novel PRs, while those who prefer stability could stick to the other one. And so on and so forth.
Surely I can't be the only one in favor of this?
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6 minutes ago, EvadableMoxie said:
I don't necessarily agree or disagree (I don't feel qualified to give an opinion), but if this is the case perhaps adjusting EMPs themselves is the answer? Maybe the TC cost is too low, and maybe uranium + iron is too easy and there should be some additional equipment needed.
That's certainly one way of going about it. There are a number of reasonably satisfactory ways this could be fixed.
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2 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:
It isn't very fun or very fair for antags to be able to kill you in a way you realistically have zero chance to protect yourself from. However, IPCs getting killed by EMPs is hardly the only case for this. Unless you're an engineer who gets to run around in a hardsuit all day, chances are any antag with a syringe gun has the means to instantly kill you with no chance to fight back. Hell, if they have a revolver and shoot you in the back odds are you'll be dead before you can react. On top of that, we have so many ways to stun people, from batons to slipping, and once stunned you can easily be restrained and then killed.
So when people complain about EMPs not being fair to IPCs, they are right. It isn't fair. But SS13 isn't fair to anyone.
Organic crewmembers somehow manage not to die to memechems, revolvers, etc. with such alarming (and salt-inducing) regularity. Those things take a modicum of effort to employ, and aren't so horribly ubiquitous. An IPC faces the prospect of instant death from ion guns, revenants, chemical reactions, changelings, emp-flashlights, and more. All this in exchange for immunity to memechems, viruses (one of the game's tamer threats,) and hungry vampires. Oh, and newbs who think they can die by decapitation. YMMV, but freedom from memechems seems like the only one of those that's worthwhile. Oh, and there's also the lack of bones, but you've got a weaker body in return. You won't break your hand, but it will go flying off with ease.
Anyhow, I think a major issue with EMPs is their sheer ubiquitousness. Don't get me wrong, I adore capricious and bountiful death in SS13, and think that the game as it stands is far too safe. But even I think that regular, nigh-unavoidable, simplistic, instant death is a tad much, especially when there's little in the way of buffs to show for it. No other species has such a bete noir. Diona, for example, are vulnerable to darkness, which is hilariously easy to avoid, and Plant-B-Gone, which you have to go out of your way to use on one. Their real weakness is their slowness, but it leaves them with a fighting chance. Vox rely on voxygen, and that's an hilarious non-liability. Heck, even plasmamen seem considerably better off than IPCs, although admittedly few people play them.
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4 minutes ago, Anticept said:
Actually, this is a big problem in space. Anything that generates heat needs careful consideration for radiating that heat away. There's no air to take the heat away, so the only option is surface area so that it radiates on its own.
So it might not make sense at first glance, but unless IPCs have a circulatory system carrying heat away from their internals, it wouldn't bode well for them to spacewalk.
I don't think we're going for that level of realism, though. No one gives a second thought about cyborgs being space-proof, and they're much closer to what IPCs are than anything else.
EDIT: That said, this presents an opportunity to flesh out IPCs and borgs, by giving them some sort of heat-handling component.
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I rarely play IPC, so I'm neither an expert nor overly invested in their mechanics, but I think it's ludicrous that plant-men and skrekbirbs are space-proof while literal robots are not. I think that granting IPCs pressure immunity would go a long way towards balancing them.
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Oh, I agree that all-access shouldn't be dispensed like candy. There's more than a little truth to the old joke that the best way to win War Ops is to let the station destroy itself. But I also think that this has been the way of things for yonks. Some rando getting all-access is not an aberration, and if we want it to be, we need to actively fight the Anything Goes mentality that War Ops entails.
8 minutes ago, Anticept said:The question is, what would such a rule to convey this look like? It'd have to be simple and easily conveyed.
Probably something to the effect of "Desperate situations may call for desperate measures, but they do not call for the abdication of all responsibility. Consider the consequences of enabling others or putting them in harm's way. Lastly, this is an MRP server. Just because you know that the Emergency Shuttle's going to be called and the round ended does not mean that your character can decide to trash the station."
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Per Anticept's request, I'm moving this here.
QuoteI'm no authority, obviously, but methinks [giving out all access to a random chemist] is more of an issue with War Ops in general. It's treated as No Holds Barred Mode, which is understandable when the station is facing the prospect of total annihilation. Normal protocol naturally goes out the window. The one standard to which the crew is strictly held is that of working together. You're expected to do your part and, at the very least, stay out of the way.
Ought it to be this way? Perhaps not. But I think it's something the administration needs to be quite clear on. There's not even an unwritten rule, like with opening clown slots. Giving all access, weaponry, etc, even to the clown, is something that happens during War Ops on a regular basis. How is a player to know better?Discuss.
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11 minutes ago, Bxil said:
Instead of "The escape shuttle has been (re)called." - "NTV Charon has been (re)called.
"Thanati in the temple! Call the Charon!"
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12 minutes ago, Shadeykins said:
Bay lore != Paradise lore. If you read the rest of Baylore, Vox are basically fantastical magic bird men - there's a reason that section was removed.
Quite true, and I'm well aware of that. I just thought it merited a mention, seeing as it was the original justification.
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17 hours ago, Shadeykins said:
"Primalis talons are often cited as being unusually hard, and are often equated with having twice the strength of human bone. While not entirely true, the hardness of the skin on their upper arms and lower legs (along with their talons and the rest of their body) is often attributed to being one of the primary factors in both the survivability and pressure resistance in Primalis Vox."
https://nanotrasen.se/wiki/index.php/Vox#Vox_Physiology
Basically they're overly leathery raptor/bird things.
There's also this:
QuoteThey appear to have an almost robotic control over their scales and are able to lock them so tightly together that they form a protective 'space suit', allowing them to walk comfortably in zero pressure environments.
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32 minutes ago, Jared12100 said:
Just as the title says. Uncloneable species can't be changelings or used by changelings for DNA points/diguises. The logic is fairly simple: If you lack the DNA needed to be cloned, how exactly can you have the DNA needed to copied by changelings?
Simple. Cloning is human technology, based on human biology. Changelings are a very versatile species, capable of copying all manner of organic molecular structures. And changelings don't need biomass, for what that's worth.
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I'm probably just being dense, but what evidence is there to suggest that this is the result of the new system? Account age was a much less precise metric, seeing as it allowed you to log on once, then log off and come back a month later with every job unlocked.
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Fair enough. Godspeed, then.
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I don't think this is belongs on Paradise. We're terribly overcrowded on Boxstation. The last thing we need is one with less space.
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32 minutes ago, GuiltyBeans said:
And on another note, something I thought of here that I wanted to mention, even if it's not on topic completely. Random crew objectives, similar to what Goon has. It was mentioned somewhere.. Gods I know it was, maybe on Discord, but here as a forum response it'll be easier to put an input on it and not be so late to the game. I think adding objectives to the crew, like Goons objectives, would only hurt what RP we do have more. Giving person X an objective such as 'Accumulate X ammount of money this shift' would just put them going to the bar to gamble for half an hour. Or a silly objective like 'Steal the kitchen sink', when given to a serious character, would be immersion breaking. Why would someone serious have the objective like that?
(This isn't aimed towards Goons Antag objectives, just the normal ones that crew get when not antags.)
I brought up Goon's antag objectives earlier this topic, so you might have been thinking of that. I agree that job-based objectives aren't that hot. There's little incentive to complete them. They're too shoehorned in. Who cares if I made x amount of y type of robot, let alone kept my hat on? I think stationwide objectives work much better in that regard.
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Two things come to mind here:
First, the impression I get concerning murderboning rules is that antags are supposed to try to fulfill their objectives. It would after all, make little sense to release the engine ten minutes in, when you need to assassinate some janitor and steal the NAD. That said, perhaps we're being too strict. After all, antags are not nice people. They might be expected to perform acts of wanton cruelty when they don't think they will endanger their mission.Alternately, we might simply place restrictions on cheesier methods of killing, like the aforementioned engine-releasing. But I think that would be less beneficial to RP.
Secondly are Goon objectives. In among the usual steal x and assassinate y are a variety of broader, less conventional objectives. Things like "Destroy all the sleepers in Medbay," "Destroy all cyborgs," "Kill every engineer," or "Collect everyone's head." Granted, we are not Goon, but I don't see why we couldn't use these. They'd spice things up, if nothing else, while adding a middle ground between hijack and standard objectives.
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I much prefer stealth, as any sort of antag, but methinks proclaiming "Thou shalt not build an army of constructs" is akin to plugging a dam-leak with your finger. Since the inception of NuCult, we've had a myriad of balance issues, often construct related. Some were exploits, true, but I think this runs deeper than that. We ported NuCult from TG, a server with lower RP standards and shorter rounds. What works for them does not always work for us. I appreciate *why* we refactored the cult, what with the challenge of research coupled with the general difficulty of antagging on Paradise, but I'm not sure we didn't go too far in the other direction.
In short, I think we need to reconsider the mechanics of cult vis-a-vis the gameplay we want for this server.
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18 hours ago, necaladun said:
Officially there are no plans to replace the Cyberiad with another map.
Replace, perhaps not, but map rotation is already thing on several servers, most notably VG and TG. I assume that we'll eventually follow suite.
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Is verys good, yaya! Me is likings mores than dustlung original! Is trulies a musical shiny!
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11 minutes ago, shazbot194 said:
Honestly, I think we should stop looking to other severs for the direction of our own. Neither TG or heavy RP servers come close to what we offer. We do RP differently then all the heavy RP severs I have seen by utilizing more mechanical means for RP rather then 10 page essays. Nor are we even close to TG where SS13 is treated purely like a game. I think we should focus on what makes our server great, and that is features that let RP take place without brute forcing it like almost all "text to action" servers, where you type out every detail before you do a simple action like draw your taser. @ZN23X
I agree, and I think most folks here would. The primary obstacle to this is the lack of a good dev-base. We don't have a crack-team like TG, nor can we get anywhere near building one, because any original PRs are given severe and mysterious scrutiny, whereas TG-ports are welcomed with open arms. Heck, one of our maintainers outright wants us to rebase to TG. This is extremely demoralizing. One gets the impression that the powers that be have no confidence in their playerbase.
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Re Paradise having a higher standard of RP than TG et al: All this says is that they're worse than us. That's nothing to be proud of. Don't get me wrong, I do think Paradise is amenable to RP, but it needs to be pushed in the right direction. Paradise has a lot to recommend it, not least its community. It's nice playing 2D spessmens without a constant stream of "cuck," "autist," "faggot," and 2-edgy-5-u racial humor. But we are stagnant, and if we continue on our present course (or lack thereof) we will slowly dissolve, until we are nothing but TG-lite.
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40 minutes ago, Allfd said:
The auto de-lister is very likely here to stay, The last migration brought us about 5% more performance, however the amount of CPU we require for new features, bigger maps more players, ect is growing faster then the advancement of single core performance. This is unlikely to change and will likely get worse. We have perhaps one more jump in CPU performance ahead of us before everything becomes a factor of adding more cores, something byond will not benefit from.
We have a number of options,
- Control player population
- Cut features (goonlights I am looking at you)
If it was something we could solve by throwing money at it, we would.
What about splitting the server in two, ala Goon or TG? It wouldn't be easy, but it's not like we lack fertile recruiting/fundraising grounds. If they could do it, surely we can?
Heck, there's even a nifty server-jump feature we could port from TG.
This would also present a solution to the RP-issue: Make one server MRP, while the other stays at our current standards. -
I may be wrong, but I don't think Tex is overly fond of this sort of thing. I get the impression he likes being an ordinary player, not some SS13 celebrity.
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3 hours ago, SomeGuy9283 said:
Or am I a goof that's way overthinking this?
Not at all. We're already insanely overcrowded. The last thing we need is more players, callous as that indubitably sounds.
Vox doing Vox things, yaya
in Voxxy Forum
Posted
Skreking floorpills is be skreking poors voxxies right the skrek up!