We were against them when I was around because people abused them, it violated the NPC rules, and it violated the no throw away characters in PvP rule. But the rules are always changing.
My main and (only) real issue with this server is what seems to be sometimes the lack of "transparancy" from the staff. I've been gone for quite some time so I really am not sure if this has changed since my absence, but I've been noticing lots of staff basically withholding information about other players, and giving vague reasons for banning people (Specifically the debacle with Kazzyk a while ago, though he apologized and rectified the issue, and buried the hatchet with that. No hard feelings, Kaz!) Also, pre Winter Update, mainly when we still had the TS, there were some staff members (i cant recall who) that mentioned having rule changes/future plans that they pretty much weren't allowed to speak about. Maybe it's just me, but all of these things affect the players and we kind of deserve to know why our experience on the server is changing. Why is X and Y necessary? What do you have planned for Z? Stuff like that. I mean, for petes sake people, its just a video game. Its not a matter of national security, and less ambiguity would probably help out the server abit. Bare in mind, I've been on haitus FOREVER, so i may just be blowing hot air here. Things might've changed. Maybe im overreacting. Who knows? Not me.
If we withhold plans for Antares future, it's usually because they're not fully formed ideas and are still being worked out. Once an idea is ready, that's when we pitch it to the community. Ideally Staff members shouldn't be talking about half-baked ideas, but we don't live in a perfect world.
Which is something we hear a lot, and is in large part the point of this entire thread. Ask a question, ANY question, and I will answer it honestly as best I can. I have always been transparent in my goals and motives with the server, unfortunately no one ever talks to me to find out what they are or why I/we do things. Also we typically withhold information about our plans because most of them are rough, unfinished and prone to change, or never amount to anything real. We don't want to mention a cool new project we are really excited about, only to realize later it won't work and have to scrap it in favour of something else. We prefer to keep things under wraps until it is set in stone.
He was initially suspended with appeal for excessive OOC in game, inflammatory posts and derailing a thread on the forums. He then made a less than serious and intentionally insulting appeal to have his account reenabled which we denied. Shortly after this he admitted to us that he did this intentionally, as he wanted to quit the server but also wanted to remove the temptation to return. He essentially acted out with the sole intent to be banned so as to remove his own ability to come back later. At the moment he is 'banned until appeal' with no time limit on said appeal.
if this has already been answered, just reply with a quote (or a number of them) with the answer. what exactly do you aim to accomplish with this thread?
Technically yes, but we are aiming to rework that soon. We just need to make sure the players have adequate ability to label their threads as private/public/IC/OOC. And we also need to make it clear that while players CAN read these threads, using them to metagame information is not kosher
New player acclimation is a small concern I have. As a relatively new player I have to admit it was a bit intimating. As the server has a bit of it's own lore that is not state until you delve deep into the forums. Currently there are only five colonies in the colony forums but only three give coordinates. That also adds a whole another level of intimation. Not knowing where to go and initializing RP for your character without proper knowledge. Is like going in for a job interview and not having a clue what that company does, or the job you are interviewing for. The Community guides forums is very helpful for sure if you know what your looking for. However I still felt lost on how to present my characters. Fernpetal was a preconceived idea as was Tanji. Not everyone may do what I did. I know there has been talk with improvement with the initial application process, but what about post application? How will new player acclimation be more of a smoother process?
I am not the staff, obviously. However, I feel as though the lore is like that so players are willing, mature and serious enough to care enough to find out. The colonies is not the staff's fault, that's the colony owner's fault. Again I am not staff so this is my opinion/thought.
At the moment the server has no official lore, aside from what the players themselves create for it. It is, in a sense, a blank slate for players to work in. The only real limitations being the frontier setting, as canonically Antares is considered to be out in the space boonies, far removed from 'core' space. The staff and I have been tinkering with potential ideas for official server lore, and we have some rough resources written up already, but our biggest challenge is creating something that everyone in the server will enjoy. It has been slow going so far, as we are all busy with other server issues and our personal lives, but we are slowly chipping away at it..I might open a suggestion thread soon, see what the community is interested in seeing as far as lore is concerned. The other issue we have with new players is the number of colonies, every player wants to be in charge of their own colony, and this invariably leads to a staggering number of half finished or otherwise abandoned colonies. If not that, we have groups of players make private colonies and roleplay only with each other, never branching out or inviting in new members, essentially cutting themselves off from the community. Neither of these are against the rules mind you, but it does make it incredible difficult to have what some would describe as a vibrant colony. The players are often too spread out, aimless, with 20 people spread out over 8 colonies, every one large and well made, but essentially a ghost town. Things would likely flow more smoothly if we had around 2-3 solid and well planned colonies that players could move between depending on what they were looking for.
We never made an official rule about it, but we have stated several times that throwaways are HIGHLY discouraged. A character that you write and play should NEVER be disposable, if a character is disposable to you then you should not be playing the character in the first place. Some instances are fine, as players have run events in the past where they introduced one off characters solely for said event. The terminology is important in that however, throwaway vs one off. A one off has a purpose, it is created for a reason, the reason is simply temporary. A throwaway is created solely to be thrown away. They are, from the very start, worthless. They serve no purpose other than to further the goals of the player who is lazily using them rather than settling his issues through proper roleplay.
Slightly off topic, but I feel I should note something, as people tend to lawyer the rules and throw loopholes at us. We wrote the rules with the sole purpose of making things better for the community. Some rules exist to maintain a balance of power between players in character, so no one player suddenly becomes all powerful and steamrolls over everyone else. Others exist to maintain a sense of civility and community, this was largely in response to the rampant 'toxicity' on the forums and in game from a few months back, as a result we seem to have flipped to the other side of the spectrum, and now there is rampant 'hugboxy' behaviour according to many players. We have a trend in the server for finding something to be angry about, labeling it and vilifying it to the point where the word loses all meaning. We also have rules in place that are common sense, like our powergaming and metagaming rules. Though the rule that has gotten us the most criticism has always been the stipulation that 'The staff have final say on all matters', though this has largely been out of fear of us abusing said rule, despite all evidence to the contrary. The rule is in place simply because we know we don't have policies written to deal with every possible issue we are going to encounter, some things we have to deal with case to case. Most of them are common sense, things that clearly should not be allowed, but that we simply hadn't thought we ever needed to address. Because they are common sense. We are not a government or any kind of bureaucratic system, we are a laid back community that likes to have fun and roleplay in our scifi sandbox. Our rules are flexible by nature, most things we have disallowed are disallowed for obvious reasons. We like to think the players are intelligent enough to know when something is probably not okay, we like to think that we DON'T have to tell you that running around in power armour with advanced shields and wielding a minigun is not okay(and also the character is cyborg kluex reborn as a miniknog/floran hybrid). We trust you to figure that out on your own. But we also have that one rule in place for when those truly unique and out of place scenarios happen.
I need some clarification on this for when I may or may not do instances in the future. So multi-clienting is frowned upon or does that count under one-offs? I don't even know if multi-clienting is even a thing anymore. The reason I ask though is because certain events may have people using "goons" or generic bandits. Some events have been done in the past doing so. I wouldn't want to do such things if they're discouraged.
Multiclienting is when one player controls 2+ characters at the same time. It is not allowed for general roleplay, but it is typically fine for events in which you may need to control multiple characters or set pieces. If you aren't sure feel free to ask, but we seldom say no to such things. But again, multiclienting for general roleplay is discouraged, we don't want players controlling entire families for example.
