How did you discover SS13?

[Splatpope]

wait no, disregard what I say, I was playing a shitty game but not on byond :

I discovered SS13 on the Face of Mankind forums.

[Buzzbomb]

A few years ago I happened upon an article (can't remember the site) praising NEStalga when it was exclusively on Byond and decided to check it out.

Discovered Byond, wondered why 300+ people were playing this SpaceStation13 game while the next most populated game was around 25 or so players, been playing goonstation almost exclusively since.

good lord how long has it been since donut-2?

[LinkDaWolf]

a guy who was my friend at the time invited me onto some server to grief w/ him. i spent most of my time trying to figure out how to pick shit up until he got banned and i left. eventually i came back to it without him and kinda just went on random servers, and eventually just ended up sticking with goonstation

[UrsulaMejor]

jefmajor did a stream

[phart]

another online social group, which may or may not have been known as the KWMIFC for some reason, kept on talking about this game and how complex it was. Naturally there was a small server they were running, and from there I eventually hopped into TG, which got really really boring after a while, looking for something new, I just said "fuck it" and tried out goon. The horror stories people on other stories told me about it sounded much more like amusing anecdotes to me, so how bad could it be?

Apparently, really bad. That's why I loved it though, haven't quit being cripplingly addicted to this place since!

[pizzatiger]

To be 100% honest i found it when steam greenlight first went up and centration made a post.

[Conor12]

A friend once told me many crazy and hilarious stories about a game he was playing. Of meteors and explosions and clowns on a space station, simply trying to survive.

I then played it myself, being useless amongst the chaotic rounds. Eventually I could tell my friends crazy stories and introduced them to the game too.

[Kaet]

I stumbled on a video that plumphelmetpunk made about just being the janitor on a space station while all the other people do their jobs.
This sounded amazing to me and I knew I had stumbled onto something special.
At the moment I had just moved into a new place and didn't have a chair for my computer yet, so I spent the next 3 days rewatching the 3 or 4 videos he had made about the game at that time and reading the wiki while sitting on the floor.
I really didn't want to get into this game unprepared. It was as amazing as I had hoped it would be and I am glad I took the few days to properly prepare myself.

I think this is was the first time I watched something of plumps too. Hes a pretty cool guy.

[A4Brogan]

Ah, The origins of my career as a farting spaceman. Stay awhile and listen.

It all started with Minecraft. I was searching for a decent server to call my regular, when I found one that I adored. I would later be known for a while as Nirrius.
Now this server introduced me to some friends from around the world, some that I still talk to daily to this day, after almost a decade! but these are not the ones important to the story; Only one is, and his handle was Mario90900.

We were always in this group, building cities and our own little projects. We would share freely of our resources, and many large projects were to be had. Then one day, Mario90900 introduced me to a game called Space Station 13, and here begins what I call "The Golden Age of /tg/station"
At first, I was not amused; Every action was clunky and unintuitive, and a constant fear of breaking the rules and never playing with my buddy again created a constant paranoia that still is with me to this day. But, like moss, the game grew on me; I began playing daily and reporting any bugs I found.

After a while, I was shocked that Mario90900 became an admin! I began learning more and more of the games little quirks, and we started prank wars. Mario tended to play a lizard Janitor named Jon Riker, which eventually led to the explosion of lizard-people in the other codebases (to my knowledge). As his character was always a somewhat shy, but dedicated fellow, I decided to make my clown the biggest butt-pipe imaginable and often swapped his cleaner foam grenades with blood smoke and the occasional space-lube foam grenades, when I could hack in and steal the galoshes.

After a while, some stupid, thin-skinned player practically forced Mario90900 to step down from the admin position, and shortly after, the game. The playerbase lamented the loss of our favorite scaled janitor, and a small group of players (including myself) would take up the job as lizard janitors, but never the name. It was after this that the community began to show signs of decay, and it was not too long after that one group let elitism and ego go to their head and doom /tg/station to what it is today.
After Mario left, So did one of the greatest coders of that branch, Errorage. He had resigned due to allegations of being a raging bone-flute, similar to my friend. Then came the worst person possible to ever begin to code in BYOND to step in: paprka.
At first, paprka was alright: he made some really good balances to certain aspects, making it easier for antags to actually have a chance to escape the grasp of security. But then, things start to go down the shitter.

It was during this time I was interested in coding, so I hung out there to learn some from poking around the svn. I was alerted to some very clique-y actions before, but the one that broke the camel's back was when one young aspiring coder, StarToad, was giving the best he could into his ideas, even spriting and coding them himself. What did the coderbus do? Flat out mocked his work and put his ideas down. Then, all of a sudden, he vanished. This will be important later, so remember this.

The coders were always a group of introverts, but always listened and played alongside us. When Errorage left, it was like they began to hold the players in contempt, and would begin changing shit that was "For balance", but more often than not, these balances were not only wrecking the feel of the game, but often were so insignificant that only veterans would know these tricks. Then paprka tried to remove Donk Pockets. His reasoning? "Special Snowflake Coding", as the coding was not part of some stupid, self-made standard. The community had been through several changes that they hated, but no one felt like they could stand up to the coders. I realized that, if I did not take action, nobody would.

I decided to post in their forums about the commit that would remove Donk Pockets, and made several points as to why removing them would be messing with the very style of the codebase. Apparently, this resonated with a terrifying number of players, admins, and mods; A shitstorm was headed straight for paprka. His response was a marking point; what was once a decent coder became known as the shit-heel of a once good batch of hobbyists.
paprka turned on everyone, and kicked into overdrive. Donk Pockets remained, but he began making his own stuff and slamming it in, with other coders seeming to be on his side. many more changes to the gameplay came, and when met with negative feedback, would insult, belittle and outright troll players.

At this time, something was pointed out to me about StarToad disappearance; The coders on the channel started a running joke that Startoad had, and I quote, "Several Gigabytes of kiddy-porn on his hard-drive". This "Joke" turned into a rumor on the server, and StarToad was so appalled and worn-down from torment, he gave up coding entirely, and never played any form of SS13 again.

When I became aware of this, I was totally conflicted. At the time, I was doing spriting for /tg/, and a few others. I still have the files of a banana lamp I created, and it has gone onto other servers, like Sigurd and /vg/. But after hearing a foul joke that turned into a life-destroying internet rumor about a person, I came to the conclusion that, morally and physically, I could not be a part of people that would do such a hateful deed to someone that young.

So I left. I stopped playing for a long time. Then I was told about /vg/. All the old guard had fled to their own server, taken the best parts of /tg/,Bay, and a few others, and started making their own code and maps! I jumped in, ready to sprite. This is where I discovered goonstation. The details are hazy, but I think I wound up being a sort of diplomatic relations when it became to spriting or something, but eventually, goon coding and the players kind of latched onto me and assimilated me. Now I play solely on Servers 1,4, and occasionally 3 when I want to try to build my own station. Now, I am always helping the solarium runners and currently amassing scrap metal to fix up a few things on my machine and pay my goon membership.

[Mageziya]

That makes me wonder, what's the biggest controversy that goon has ever had?

Also, how has goon managed to seemingly avoid so much controversy? Is it because it spawned from Something Awful, as opposed to something like 4chan? Is it because it stayed closed source? Is is because of something else?

[BlackPhoenix]

That makes me wonder, what's the biggest controversy that goon has ever had?

Also, how has goon managed to seemingly avoid so much controversy? Is it because it spawned from Something Awful, as opposed to something like 4chan? Is it because it stayed closed source? Is is because of something else?

Probably that one coder or whatever who made wizards super overpowered among other things, and his code had to be cleaned out bit by bit. From what I understand, he was just a jerk who made whatever he felt like playing super strong for his power trip or something.

[Ed Venture]

That makes me wonder, what's the biggest controversy that goon has ever had?

Also, how has goon managed to seemingly avoid so much controversy? Is it because it spawned from Something Awful, as opposed to something like 4chan? Is it because it stayed closed source? Is is because of something else?

That is a really good question. In the five years of me solely playing space station on goonstation I can't think of a time any admins did anything truly awful. Sure they may flatter, ban someone for a dumb reason, change something for the worse. But they let us freely discuss these things and if enough people voice their opinions with good points then change comes.

The only thing I can think of is only based on my experience and does not reflect on the beliefs of the playerbase as a whole. But it was when a certain player made it his mission to grief and kill people as a non-antag and would always get away with it because of Hilarity cause. Which was basically was if you are shit but make the admins laugh you can get away with anything! I don't believe hilarity cause is a thing anymore (Thank god cause it was fucking stupid) but the inaction around that player and how I for the most part would end up in the middle of his shit made me drop Space station for a few months because it stop being fun. Man have things changed since then and for the better obviously.

[Ed Venture]

For the record this happen in what I believed to be my second or third year here. I never had a metagrudge with the person cause as I stated when he really started to make me angry I just stopped playing. He was eventually banned during the early stages of cogmap1 and he even popped into IRC like a month ago and I bury the hatchet with the guy and we spent a good amount of time reminiscing about those days. I was even told by an admin that he was unbanned and allowed to play again causes they gave him another chance if he agreed to change his name and from what I'm told he has completely changed his ways.

[BaneOfGiygas]

I distinctly recall an admin (I believe it was Wonkmin) refer to some darker days where admins hurled insults at people for calling said admins out on being shit, but that's since been cleared out.

Also, while this might not be quite the term you're looking for when you say "controversy", poo and the artistic toolbox are two things that immediately spring to mind.

Really, I think that most of the reason why Goonstation is so successful is because it's so lax. The rules are simple to wrap one's head around and most of the basic mechanics are quite "pick up and go", strange HUD notwithstanding. There aren't any esoteric RP restrictions or other such formalities to worry about, you just hop in and partake in spaceman shenanigans. But at the same time, the admins are diligent in enforcing the rules and making sure that shitty things are taken care of as quickly as possible. The sense of community is also a major plus, as there are times where it feels less like it's just the admins making the game for the players to play and more like those two groups are collaborating. The recent cruiser tests are a great example of this.

[69andahalf]

That makes me wonder, what's the biggest controversy that goon has ever had?

Also, how has goon managed to seemingly avoid so much controversy? Is it because it spawned from Something Awful, as opposed to something like 4chan? Is it because it stayed closed source? Is is because of something else?

Probably not too controversial, but Gibbed used to have a fairly bad reputation for being fairly "offensive". Honestly, it was probably because the staff was younger than they are today, and grew out of it, but Gibbed used to be kinda sketchy sometimes. Usually it was just racial stereotypes, such as the black man eating KFC and dancing gif, or the "that's racist" gifs. I don't want to come off as overly stickler, but I don't think any of those would be seen on the station today. There was a fair bit of autism name calling as well, generally in adminhelp and on the forums which scared a lot of people off from playing on gibbed. The forums in particular used to be very toxic, especially the ban appeals. I always remember admins setting people's avatars to fairly offensive images that would probably scare anyone off from trying to be part of the community again. At one point I believe the wiki was even called "autistic powers". There was certainly a different admin team compared to who we have today, and Wonk has done a lot to improve the reputation of LLJK and keep the admin very professional.

I should also mention that Gibbed wasn't terrible all the time, some of the best events where held back in the glory days of #3 and #4, but the server has changed much for the better.

If i'm digging up too much of the past and an admin wants to edit, clarify or delete this post, they can feel free too. I also hope that this post doesn't degrade into "how was Gibbed in the past", but I guess i'm not really helping.