Goonhub
02-21-2021, 06:43 PM
Indifferent from me, for now.
You've got good knowledge and generally a good OOC attitude in Discord; and I've seen you help a ton of people with questions and things, so I think your attentiveness there is good and would suit you in the ability to answer tons of questions. The only two areas I've been...a little stumped by are when it comes to Ranching Knowledge and AI Knowledge, and not that you don't have these, but the way you convey them is really critical and maybe could use just a bit more improvement. For all the critique you give yourself about engineering, I have really enjoyed running into you when you've been playing your engineering character, and some of the novel communication/relationships you've brought into rounds with them.
For ranching, I know when chickens first came out (and with each new breed), there's a lot of interest and excitment and a real desire to know all there is to know and find everything. I have been a part of trying to ranch for new chickens too, and not that this itself is like a Cardinal Sin or something. When this did originally all start up, I know someone gave a suggestion/something they wanted to test out on the chickens to try finding a new breed, and I know they were told at the time that you and another person who were into multi-round ranching and testing didn't wanna test it, and that gave the impression that they needed to leave; they mentioned that they felt pushed out of exploring ranching for future rounds after that. I wasn't super into ranching for a little while but when December-ish came around, I wanted to ranch cause I had some cool chickens I wanted to aim for, but I also felt very...not in-step with ranching Knowledge and Meta because of some of the talk I'd seen from Discord from the few hardcore rancher mains. I'm sure people can look at my comments from earlier in Jan/end of Dec there, when trying to find new chickens I got really defeated when I couldn't get things right fast enough and felt stupid as all hell because I wasn't caught up on ranching. I felt dumb in comparison because of the way ranching and exploring new things in ranching had kind of become an indomintrable fortress of knowledge that I wasn't a part of from the start, that I had nothing meaningful or new to contribute to.
I think in this kind of a chicken science scenario, encouraging ideas in-round and out-of-round, even if it's just a "hey, didn't think to try that before. Let me know how it goes"; partnering with other players who are new to the role to work on things they want to test; and maybe letting people try things even if we don't think they would work are is all good. It's like a true science: sometimes we have to test things we know wouldn't work just to confirm that they don't work. And despite all that, something is gained from that process: we know definitively the thing doesn't work! This is minor; this is easy to work towards. I know you can do it and don't have worries about this going forward.
The AI stuff for OOC talk is relative to me and my general approach to playing, but the way rogue/misunderstanding-new-player AIs and new-player AIs with limited technical skillsets in the role have been talked about in rp-server in general hasn't been terribly kind. There was one example where people were talking about teleporting rogue AIs into the crusher and then as a borg readily stepping up to be AI'd to take their place. I don't remember if you specifically participated in this conversation, but other ones similar in tonality regarding AIs people don't like play for or Secondary AIs made without permissions from the original AI have transpired in this way. I'd rather play out the round and let admins handle that stuff post-round, otherwise it all just comes off very..."I know the right way to do this, step aside,". Which maybe needs some finessing to not bump up against the idea of not backseating and genrally stepping on other people's toes and their experience in a tit-for-tat because they ruined someone else's experience. This is a greater issue for just server talk on the whole, but one that I think you-when-stepping-into-the-role-of-a-frequent-AI-player run up against; and not like this is some overarching concern you're going to throw anybody in any role into a crusher for not doing good enough, but just with AI specifically, if someone isn't playing to your specific set of standards, there seems to be a lot of hostility towards that. This type of conversation is genuinely one of the reasons I stopped rolling AI because I can, do, and always will make mistakes and don't want to be destroyed or not given an opportunity to get better because other people don't think I played to a high enough standard to deserve that. Again, this is a personal preference, so like, small in the grander scheme of things. Maybe negligable, even.
Related but different, the way technical AI skillsets and station wipes and stuff get hyped up by people (this is a general-ish conversational trend too) also definitely rings of an "AI main superiority" that I absolutely despise. The last thing I want people thinking is that AI players are somehow all turbonerds who are only oh-so-kindly letting them have a round when they could murder them at a moment's notice in 1000 ways. These kinds of comments also communicate the idea that playing AI has a Ridiculously High Skill Barrier and Isn't for Loser Noobs that Will Make Everyone's Round Unfun and Inefficient because they don't know how to send a PDA file to someone. I don't want people to have those fears, whether they're trying to play AI or trying to play a human under an AI. Scaling in destructiveness as a rogue isn't a pity move worth bragging about how you didn't slaughter everyone; it's an essential part of good sportsmanship and humility in storytelling on the RP servers. I haven't seen this in a while but I'm also not terribly active in the OOC channels these conversations were occurring in, so I would resolve it's possible maybe this have been moved past already.
This is where things get weird, maybe?
My experiences with you as a non-silicon have been largely pretty good and creative, exciting, and made me feel involved in the round greater. My experiences with you as a silicon have made me feel ignored, sidelined, or useless.
You play characters in-round that aren't silicons that are very good! I had one fun round ranching on Clarion where Speaks with Scars built out an extension and was the only one who responded to my radio/PDA request to put in a build permit. I had a ton of fun with that and that was a round where I think your RP work and collaboration with other players really shined; you got to 1. help someone 2. who was doing a thing that you cared a lot about (ranching) 3. in a way that promoted and benefitted their experience (which is very becoming of a mentor!) without trying to control that exploration and experience. This was good and I wish I got to interact with more people in this manner!
As silicon, you're very technically good. But I've had two rounds where you were an AI shell and I was a medical doctor; in one, I was trying to treat patients and do my job and you came up and started working on a person as I was carrying them to Medical through the public market. I said "I've got it" because I figured this IC communicates a Law 2 request and OOC communicates a desire to do my job. You continued to treat them. I left them on the floor in the hall for you to work on, collected some stuff from the Medbay on Cog1, then set up in the north medical booth and opened up Google Chrome or something because it was very clear there was not going to be much for me to do that round if you were a medical module AI shell. This has kind of been the general trend whenever I'm playing rounds as a medical role and you have a medical module.
There was another round you were AI, I was a miner on Cog2. I was with two relatively new miners, one who was literally-just-started-new, and one who was new but not-so-new-they-couldn't-mine-erebite. The newer of the two I taught the equipment and the computer workings and stuff, and they worked on the QT while the other person was mining on the magnet. I fully intended to leave station for the outpost so I figured I would just get the newer miner working the QT to help the person on the magnet. Miner on the QT finds the Hidden Workshop, asks about it, I say it's a thing that we could go to using a teleporter in science. I head out to the magnet, we pulled a starstone asteroid, mined that up, and said I'd show the other miners how to go get the profits from selling the starstone added to our accounts as a treat for the new player who had pulled it. I headed to QM, walked back with like 4 million credits annnnnnnd...the newest miner was gone. I spent like 20 minutes running all around the station trying to find them, asking whereabouts (multiple times), calling out on radio, and got nothing. Finally they yelled for help on the radio that they were at the hidden workshop and stuck and had been stuck for like a half hour. I grabbed a cargo teleporter because I figured I might find a crate there and get them out of there. Except I was stuck but I didn't think this was such a big deal because I could PDA or radio or maybe someone would get the PortASci to me and maybe the other player just hadn't known about those things (they had also been kind of quiet to ask for help, from what I saw)...I requested help numerous times, over the course of almost an hour. I was stuck in the hidden workshop from like minute 30 to minute 89 or 92 of the round. It was distinctly an hour though, I remember setting my character to rest and opening a new browser window to do something else. I requested help from you directly to operate the LRT. I was ignored for an hour specifically when you were playing AI in favor of some kudzu thing in the chapel. I get that I was not the narrative focal point of the round, and didn't get a chance to really be a part of it. I felt like absolute trash being ignored like that for so long.
I would like to see, now with perhaps more awareness of this, a few more months of the kind of gameplay from that first category of experiences (which is also more recent, so I believe you're on the right path!), and a little more distance between some of the older habits. I'd really happily turn my recommendation into a full +1 at that point because you can bring a lot of good to rounds and be very fun and encouraging, and that's what I want people's average experience with you across all roles and platforms to be.
You've got good knowledge and generally a good OOC attitude in Discord; and I've seen you help a ton of people with questions and things, so I think your attentiveness there is good and would suit you in the ability to answer tons of questions. The only two areas I've been...a little stumped by are when it comes to Ranching Knowledge and AI Knowledge, and not that you don't have these, but the way you convey them is really critical and maybe could use just a bit more improvement. For all the critique you give yourself about engineering, I have really enjoyed running into you when you've been playing your engineering character, and some of the novel communication/relationships you've brought into rounds with them.
For ranching, I know when chickens first came out (and with each new breed), there's a lot of interest and excitment and a real desire to know all there is to know and find everything. I have been a part of trying to ranch for new chickens too, and not that this itself is like a Cardinal Sin or something. When this did originally all start up, I know someone gave a suggestion/something they wanted to test out on the chickens to try finding a new breed, and I know they were told at the time that you and another person who were into multi-round ranching and testing didn't wanna test it, and that gave the impression that they needed to leave; they mentioned that they felt pushed out of exploring ranching for future rounds after that. I wasn't super into ranching for a little while but when December-ish came around, I wanted to ranch cause I had some cool chickens I wanted to aim for, but I also felt very...not in-step with ranching Knowledge and Meta because of some of the talk I'd seen from Discord from the few hardcore rancher mains. I'm sure people can look at my comments from earlier in Jan/end of Dec there, when trying to find new chickens I got really defeated when I couldn't get things right fast enough and felt stupid as all hell because I wasn't caught up on ranching. I felt dumb in comparison because of the way ranching and exploring new things in ranching had kind of become an indomintrable fortress of knowledge that I wasn't a part of from the start, that I had nothing meaningful or new to contribute to.
I think in this kind of a chicken science scenario, encouraging ideas in-round and out-of-round, even if it's just a "hey, didn't think to try that before. Let me know how it goes"; partnering with other players who are new to the role to work on things they want to test; and maybe letting people try things even if we don't think they would work are is all good. It's like a true science: sometimes we have to test things we know wouldn't work just to confirm that they don't work. And despite all that, something is gained from that process: we know definitively the thing doesn't work! This is minor; this is easy to work towards. I know you can do it and don't have worries about this going forward.
The AI stuff for OOC talk is relative to me and my general approach to playing, but the way rogue/misunderstanding-new-player AIs and new-player AIs with limited technical skillsets in the role have been talked about in rp-server in general hasn't been terribly kind. There was one example where people were talking about teleporting rogue AIs into the crusher and then as a borg readily stepping up to be AI'd to take their place. I don't remember if you specifically participated in this conversation, but other ones similar in tonality regarding AIs people don't like play for or Secondary AIs made without permissions from the original AI have transpired in this way. I'd rather play out the round and let admins handle that stuff post-round, otherwise it all just comes off very..."I know the right way to do this, step aside,". Which maybe needs some finessing to not bump up against the idea of not backseating and genrally stepping on other people's toes and their experience in a tit-for-tat because they ruined someone else's experience. This is a greater issue for just server talk on the whole, but one that I think you-when-stepping-into-the-role-of-a-frequent-AI-player run up against; and not like this is some overarching concern you're going to throw anybody in any role into a crusher for not doing good enough, but just with AI specifically, if someone isn't playing to your specific set of standards, there seems to be a lot of hostility towards that. This type of conversation is genuinely one of the reasons I stopped rolling AI because I can, do, and always will make mistakes and don't want to be destroyed or not given an opportunity to get better because other people don't think I played to a high enough standard to deserve that. Again, this is a personal preference, so like, small in the grander scheme of things. Maybe negligable, even.
Related but different, the way technical AI skillsets and station wipes and stuff get hyped up by people (this is a general-ish conversational trend too) also definitely rings of an "AI main superiority" that I absolutely despise. The last thing I want people thinking is that AI players are somehow all turbonerds who are only oh-so-kindly letting them have a round when they could murder them at a moment's notice in 1000 ways. These kinds of comments also communicate the idea that playing AI has a Ridiculously High Skill Barrier and Isn't for Loser Noobs that Will Make Everyone's Round Unfun and Inefficient because they don't know how to send a PDA file to someone. I don't want people to have those fears, whether they're trying to play AI or trying to play a human under an AI. Scaling in destructiveness as a rogue isn't a pity move worth bragging about how you didn't slaughter everyone; it's an essential part of good sportsmanship and humility in storytelling on the RP servers. I haven't seen this in a while but I'm also not terribly active in the OOC channels these conversations were occurring in, so I would resolve it's possible maybe this have been moved past already.
This is where things get weird, maybe?
My experiences with you as a non-silicon have been largely pretty good and creative, exciting, and made me feel involved in the round greater. My experiences with you as a silicon have made me feel ignored, sidelined, or useless.
You play characters in-round that aren't silicons that are very good! I had one fun round ranching on Clarion where Speaks with Scars built out an extension and was the only one who responded to my radio/PDA request to put in a build permit. I had a ton of fun with that and that was a round where I think your RP work and collaboration with other players really shined; you got to 1. help someone 2. who was doing a thing that you cared a lot about (ranching) 3. in a way that promoted and benefitted their experience (which is very becoming of a mentor!) without trying to control that exploration and experience. This was good and I wish I got to interact with more people in this manner!
As silicon, you're very technically good. But I've had two rounds where you were an AI shell and I was a medical doctor; in one, I was trying to treat patients and do my job and you came up and started working on a person as I was carrying them to Medical through the public market. I said "I've got it" because I figured this IC communicates a Law 2 request and OOC communicates a desire to do my job. You continued to treat them. I left them on the floor in the hall for you to work on, collected some stuff from the Medbay on Cog1, then set up in the north medical booth and opened up Google Chrome or something because it was very clear there was not going to be much for me to do that round if you were a medical module AI shell. This has kind of been the general trend whenever I'm playing rounds as a medical role and you have a medical module.
There was another round you were AI, I was a miner on Cog2. I was with two relatively new miners, one who was literally-just-started-new, and one who was new but not-so-new-they-couldn't-mine-erebite. The newer of the two I taught the equipment and the computer workings and stuff, and they worked on the QT while the other person was mining on the magnet. I fully intended to leave station for the outpost so I figured I would just get the newer miner working the QT to help the person on the magnet. Miner on the QT finds the Hidden Workshop, asks about it, I say it's a thing that we could go to using a teleporter in science. I head out to the magnet, we pulled a starstone asteroid, mined that up, and said I'd show the other miners how to go get the profits from selling the starstone added to our accounts as a treat for the new player who had pulled it. I headed to QM, walked back with like 4 million credits annnnnnnd...the newest miner was gone. I spent like 20 minutes running all around the station trying to find them, asking whereabouts (multiple times), calling out on radio, and got nothing. Finally they yelled for help on the radio that they were at the hidden workshop and stuck and had been stuck for like a half hour. I grabbed a cargo teleporter because I figured I might find a crate there and get them out of there. Except I was stuck but I didn't think this was such a big deal because I could PDA or radio or maybe someone would get the PortASci to me and maybe the other player just hadn't known about those things (they had also been kind of quiet to ask for help, from what I saw)...I requested help numerous times, over the course of almost an hour. I was stuck in the hidden workshop from like minute 30 to minute 89 or 92 of the round. It was distinctly an hour though, I remember setting my character to rest and opening a new browser window to do something else. I requested help from you directly to operate the LRT. I was ignored for an hour specifically when you were playing AI in favor of some kudzu thing in the chapel. I get that I was not the narrative focal point of the round, and didn't get a chance to really be a part of it. I felt like absolute trash being ignored like that for so long.
I would like to see, now with perhaps more awareness of this, a few more months of the kind of gameplay from that first category of experiences (which is also more recent, so I believe you're on the right path!), and a little more distance between some of the older habits. I'd really happily turn my recommendation into a full +1 at that point because you can bring a lot of good to rounds and be very fun and encouraging, and that's what I want people's average experience with you across all roles and platforms to be.