Sirryan2002

Hello Everyone! I've kept this pretty under wraps outside of the staff team so this may come as a surprise to some people. This upcoming week I will be stepping down from the position of Head of Staff and handing over my responsibilities over to a new head of staff (yet to be announced). This is for a myriad of reasons beyond just generally being less active in the server, I've taken on a lot more responsibility in my life and am now taking a much more active role in my own professional development as I finish my university degree and gear up for a career in public education policy. I think this will be a very positive development for the server, I've done a lot and I am also a firm believer that frequent but consistent turnover in roles such as head of staff will ensure that someone active and motivated will always be there to lead the way. For that reason I've very excited for our new head of staff to takeover and carry on this role. I would like to note that this is far from the end of my career at Paradise. I will be moving laterally into a role that more directly deals with player/community contributions. I hope to more heavily support the Lore, Wiki, and Development team in whatever ways I am able. These are the things that ignited my passion in this community and I hope returning to them will stoke that flame again. That being said, I've been grateful for the 10 months I've spent as one of your heads of staff and I felt like I built a much deeper connection with this community because of it. Thanks for putting you trust in me this year!

thanks I went ahead and removed the attribution. As much as I appreciate what we ported from bay's wiki, most of that is no longer actually used on the wiki and has since been replaced by original work by Paradise contributors.

@Onyxarias has retired from being a Trial Admin

I like the idea of integrating MODsuits somehow into departments, they need to really exist in the context of some role I think. You should talk to Burza and Silverplate about how this could be worked into engineering with their plans for an engineering role + power engine overhaul. Otherwise you may want to explore how MODsuits could work with the roboticist role and just take on a large scoped project of improving that role in general.

July 16th, 2023 @Rurik has been hired as a trial admin @Onyxarias has been hired as a trial admin @Retrograde115 has been hired as a trial admin @Gatchapod has been hired as a trial admin @contemplez has been hired as a trial admin @Coolrune206 has been hired as a trial admin May god have mercy on their souls

I think it's a bit naïve to make a very public forum post at which anyone in the community (or 3rd party visitors) can see that criticizes the server and then request that the server administration not respond to it. You've always been able to reach out to the heads of staff in DMs and make inquiries as to application rejections or get info on previous notes/warnings. So to address your suggestions and explain some ways in which we run the server: First and foremost: we don't hire administrators to be people's friends or teach them how to play the game within our community guidelines; learning our guidelines and rules is a prerequisite to playing the game and the admin team's job is to enforce them when they're broken. When staff do this It's enforcement, not a criticism of the player; Unfortunately some players take it this way, which therein lies the difficulty of being a GA. Community outreach and good relationship building is an additional expectation of being a GA but not the main one. Constructive feedback and admin-to-player conversations have a myriad of benefits, namely it helps reduce rule-breaking and tension. This is of course, at the cost of significant time and energy. Some admins note hundreds of players a month and ban about 1/5 that amount of people. There is little room in that time frame to have solid conversations with each player, not to mention that some players don't just take notes/bans sitting down and will fight back (I'm done having 1 hour conversations with players over bans). Personally, for me, I worked an 11 hour shift yesterday and got home at 2AM, and now in the few 3-4 hours I have before I go back to work today I'm taking 30 minutes to sit down and reply to you. This is a story that is similar to other GAs who also work, have families, or other commitments which made time a valuable and scarce commodity for them. EDIT: Admin complaints and Ban Appeals already exist to facilitate these conversations :) Secondarily: it's an admin application, which is a job/role application. You're not entitled to an explanation, we don't owe you a full breakdown of why we denied your application and what aspects of that you could work on to be a perfect candidate in the future (technically part of this is already in the pre-reqs to making an app). Sometimes some players are just not great fits for the admin team for a myriad of reasons. I'd also like you to keep in mind that we have 25 applicants this cycle, 13 of which have been veto'd and denied already. You want a chance at being a Game Admin? Don't post shit like this. All it says to be is that you completely misunderstand the primary job of admins and how the community fits into it; If you really have adminned in the past then you should know that players won't just "accept" a single DM about notes or warnings, it will still make them feel alienated ESPECIALLY IF IT IS A WATCH NOTE AND NOT A FULL WARNING. Maybe you should take your own advice and taken this to a head of staff to have a conversation about it. Now you've made judgement of us without even starting up a conversation about potential issues. You've made several assumptions, one of which being the reasons we denied your application and second that you somehow know better than the people running an admin team who have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6+ years of experience. Game Admins are unpaid volunteers, one of the assurances they get is that they don't have to continue having conversations with poor actors in the community, they remove them and move on.

glad to see my materials template finally being put to good use

I like this idea

It would be cool to have some project zomboid esque features, with the sound effects and all. I don't particularly love how there's no consequence for being ridiculously violent as a non-antag character; it would be nice for your average greytider to be shocked/shaken-up after beating some rando into crit.

May 29th, 2023 @IcyV has retired from being a Game Admin @FoS has retired from being a Game Admin

May 5th 2023 @Charliminator has stepped down as a headcoder @SteelSlayer has been promoted to be a headcoder

I finally had a chance to look over this (a long time coming I know). Here are my initial thougths I like the idea of the map, having more unique maps to para, especially with someone who built it from the ground up within the community who is going to maintain it always a welcome thing. I would prefer we stick to only 4 actively maintained and used maps on the server, so that means in order for Shepard to be considered, a map like Meta would need to be pulled from rotation. I like the amount of open space, I hope our server can start moving towards having room for players to be more creative with constructions and having map support for potentially more customizable builds. It will need to go under similar performance scrutiny as cere Would like to hear other design team member's opinions of this, especially on what map this could potentially replace.

(we probably shouldn't be reviving 5 month dead threads) but I'll throw my 2 cents in here since this is being talked about again. Lets define the issues being discussed first: There is not enough RP between antagonists and security officers Roleplay at its most basic level is putting yourself into a certain role or position with motivations, believes, and core values which heavily influences the choices you make in-game. In this case, we're talking about how players act when they envision themselves as security officers and how they act when they envision themselves as traitors. I do not believe people have an issue roleplaying as these roles, you just don't like how these positions interact with each other when players are roleplaying in them. Furthermore, you think that because of the design of our game mechanics, the roleplaying leads most often to violence instead of interactions you consider more valuable like in-game chatting, bartering, and non-violent exchanges between officers and traitors. So I'll impart my first suggestion here, don't try to force player behavior, incentivize them to act in the way you want. Traitors are still nonetheless violent and intense when pursuing what you consider to be minor objectives, they know that if they get caught its likely game-over unless they prepared by not bringing and s-class or committing 400+ crimes. Security does not know the level of intensity of antags so changing their objectives while hijack/murder/etc objectives still exist will not lower their level of escalation, so antagonists will match this by always being violent even if they have minor objectives. You need to give players rewards for being non-violent. There is absolutely zero incentive not to be violent in antag/sec interactions (besides being punished for breaking server rules) which IMO is poor gameplay overtime. Officers first need some sort of progression structure that can be sped up by being corrupt, such as being able to get slightly better equipment with space cash (so briberies :)). 2nd, one thing that could be implemented that will also fix a lot of other issues is implementing buyable / choosable objectives instead of handing them out at round-start. Players should be able to choose objectives that match their playstyle. These can even be objectives--like you were saying--that are minor enough that it won't land them in perma, which means traitors get a much more softer start to their round which won't merc them for a minor mistake.

What exactly else is the AI supposed to do? Their entire job is designed around watching crew members, specifically crew members who are causing issues on station, antag or not. Borgs can very easily just go do a task like mopping floors or repairing the station but the AI is locked in its observer role the entire round. So the most common way to solve this is by involving themselves most actively in whatever exciting thing is going on in the round, which is usually antagonists. I don't disagree that AIs round-ending antags can be exhausting and make for poor gameplay, but additional rules are not going to fix this. The reason being that it would be a bad rule as it works directly against human nature in attempt to correct what is a game design issue at its foundation. AI, like most things in this game, needs to be overhauled. Furthermore, this is a nightmare to enforce, I am not log-diving to see if Security Officer X gave the AI specific permission to intervene; nor am I going to check if the HoS just gave a ultimatum for the entire round for the AI to intervene whenever they feel. This is one of those situations where the effort needed to properly investigate rule breaks of this sort far outweighs the actual value of enforcement. This is not going to change the current AI -> Antag gameplay culture in the long-term as it will need to be applied to each and every AI player since it's not going to be a rule one just easily understands at first. I actually think this will have the opposite effect of making AI players more toxic as they begin to target security players for not giving them the go ahead to intervene and "ruining" their AI round by neutering them of everything fun. If players are as you describe, this is exactly what is going to happen.

I have expressed my issues with Wizard in the past, especially during my office hours where I've talked about the design of the game mode extensively. The biggest key issues with Wizard are as follows: The game is currently designed for players to begin investing heavily in their roundstart job from the get go to start working towards mid-game to end-game tier progression, almost all wizards don't show up for the first 10 minutes and some even take 20-35 minutes before going to the station. This leads to frustration as it completely round-ends any progression people have with non-antag related mechanics basically. Any wizard that is not immediately killed will remove people from the round permanently either directly or indirectly through polymorph or transformation spells which means a meaningful portion of active players now have to observe for the rest of the round or play in a role that is something which they do not want to play whatsoever (think polymorphed into a slime or a difference species) (as to choice 1) Wizard is not balanced to be a major round and the only way to balance it would be to significantly nerf wizard and completely rework most spells Wizards can be incredibly anti-climatic especially if they're not great at wizarding, rounds should not end anti-climatically Wizard is still great content for the game, it should not just be removed So how to solve these issues when you cannot just remove the gamemode? Wizard will need to undergo significant changes pending dynamic gamemodes if we successfully integrate that system into our codebase. Here is what I propose as the "other" option: Wizard can no longer permanently remove any player from the round instantly, brains must be preserved upon death; Furthermore, the wizards spells should aim to injure and disable as opposed to kill (atleast with ease) Polymorph spells are purely temporary Entire round altering spells are completely removed (ghosts, guns, etc) The end goal of the wizard is not just to sow chaos but to complete a few select objectives and then finish their run by completing a "ritual" which will in someway permanently alter the rules of the round. I.e. if the wizard succeeds with the ritual, for the rest of the round portals will randomly appear occasionally which spawn random simple mobs (almost like netherworld portal but slightly less lethal). This not only prevents rounds by being completely derailed by a wizard but also punishes players for failing to contain the wizard in an interesting way that could actually be fun.