[PR] Contributor Rewards accessible to all

[Mordent]

Anything that tends towards more people picking non-skin-tone colors gets a thumbs down from me. Also, nuke the scream.

Copying the bulk of my post from the parallel admin discussion (and tweaking a bit for context), because of course this is happening now in: forums, forums (admin), Discord, Discord (admin), probably on the PR as well.

I disagree with people not having the same visual customization options as others, at least in part because it further makes impersonating them tricky, and a lot of the game is about social deduction and deception.

This extends to medal cosmetic awards in general, in my mind, but those aren't going away. Why not just bring it in line with those and let you do some cosmetic tweak of something? That way I can at least steal it off of them if I want to pretend to be them. I'd love if medals didn't mutate stuff you wore and was part of character setup, but whatever. Much bigger project, and this would just be "another one of those items" when that gets done. Some suggestions:

• Short-sleeve t-shirt and pants with some visual implication of writing/art on it, description along the lines of "I contributed my hardest and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
  
• Pen that has an extra-mechanical sound when you click it, a la mechanical keyboards.
  
• Let you change a cup into a "World's #<4 random digits> Greatest Contributor" mug.
  

To me the above feel sufficiently viable as something that crew could have (non-immersion breaking) while still being a fourth-wall nod.

I'm incredibly iffy on humans getting a full hue gamut for skin color. I understand some people want to use the combo of skin color and carefully selected hairstyles to play weird "races". I do not think this is consistent with our setting and think it should not be available as a baseline crew member. I'm sure this view is contentious, but it is what it is.

I understand you can be changed to any color in the genetics scanners right now; if we want to go the route of opening up the palette, combine it with also setting that as the same range on the genetics scanners. That way the "in setting" reason can easily be "yeah, I had genetics change me to neon purple as soon as I joined NT" or whatever you need to.

With all of the above done, contributor medal as a simple "your name is on a merged PR and/or its changelog authors" (allowing for spriters/mappers/etc. to get stuff in without being technical). Incredibly low barrier to entry.