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Thread: Remove Whitelists

  1. #1
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    Remove Whitelists

    I get that people will say I am only posting this on account of the pending player report I made against a predator yesterday, and I admit that it definitely influenced me to do it, but this is something that has bugged me for a long, long time, and I'm sure there are folks who can attest to me bitching about it long before yesterday.

    So, here's the gist of what I think should happen: Do away with whitelists, and either rework predators completely or remove them from the game.

    There are many, many reasons why I think this should be done.

    Having to make an application that sets your character in stone so you play the same person every time you play the role isn�t conducive to creativity, and this would create a far greater variety in terms of the characters and stories that people see, not just because the same players could play different characters, but because other players would be playing them too. Although it is allowed for COs to play different characters in the role, this isn't the case for predators or synths and also seems to be pretty rare. I haven't played a round that didn't have a Captain whose name I instantly recognized in a long time.

    Because of the whitelist and council policies, admins cannot interfere with whitelisted players, so if they do something that blatantly violates the whitelist guidelines and ruins another player's experience, even with screenshots and ample evidence, that person isn�t allowed to be ahealed and has to wait hours to play again. I also think it's incredibly frustrating that they then have the onus for proving that the player did something bad put entirely on them, despite the fact that admins have much easier access to logs. Yesterday's incident was only the first time that something like this has happened where I remembered to take screenshots, because I'm a stoned idiot half the time, but it was far from the only time I've been fucked with by whitelisted players. In the other cases, I didn't have the means to easily prove what they did, so I couldn't even write a player report.

    The way the applications work does not do a great job at weeding out problem players, because the skill of writing a story on one's own is completely different from the skill of collaborating with other people to create a story organically through roleplaying and character development/interaction. In some ways, they are pretty much polar opposites: when you write a story, there are pretty well-established literary techniques that almost everyone follows, even subconsciously, just because it's what they're used to. This includes having a main protagonist that the reader follows throughout the entire story, and in the vast majority of stories, the protagonist gets to live happily ever after. When you roleplay, especially in a competitive environment like CM, it's pretty much the reverse: you react to things that happen, often with very little control over them, and very frequently die before the story ends; in a roleplay with over a hundred people like CM, no one is a protagonist, we're all supporting characters. Encouraging players to view their character as the protagonist by having them write these types of stories centered solely around them engenders a toxic, elitist, "secret club" attitude, not necessarily among every whitelisted player, but certainly among quite a few of them.

    I have personally interacted with multiple whitelisted players in the past few months who were roleplaying at a lower standard than the PFCs in my squad, including COs. I am also certain that there are plenty of players who would make fantastic COs or Synths, but simply don't want to make an application, either because they don't want to deal with the effort involved or because they are principled against it for a variety of reasons.

    I think having a whitelist sucks, it's lame, and should be gone.

  2. #2
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    So random baldies should be able to roll captain?

  3. #3
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    Baldies can already roll XO or CMP to softgrief.

    What OP is saying is remove whitelists, not lower the standards. A baldie BEing people left and right I imagine would still be held accountable in this case of whitelist removal and so on.

    Besides, as far as RP standard goes each whitelist doesn't really get to show their gimmick prominently either or it's somewhat of a liable thing like typing out an entire paragraph of announcement with ridiculous accent thrown in instead of getting to the point for COs, or synths just well not having opportunity to show theirs because they're just more mechanically involved, and preds RP by sounding pretentious or standing around doing nothing with only dchat as their spectators while occasionally killing other players.


    So yeah, far as I can mostly see is that all the whitelist process do is weed out people that can't RP, true. But once ingame, when are you really going to RP? How is it going to show? Well due to the fundamental nature of CM being an TDM sure you MIGHT have SOME chance here and there but every time you're RPing, you're not exactly helping mechanically either, each time a synth goes RPing with the containment xeno instead of doing surgery is just that, and so on.
    Last edited by Ttly; 05-08-2019 at 11:51 PM.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by Imheretohelp View Post
    So random baldies should be able to roll captain?
    I don't really think that argument makes sense. There is already a role that is essentially the exact same thing as the Captain, and which can have the same influence over the round both mechanically and roleplay-wise and which is not whitelisted, yet we don't get tons of comdom XOs.

    It's the opposite, really; I prefer many of the XOs we get, like Goosen Dagen and Finnian Cottier, over COs like Donald Weinstein.

    And if that does happen, I don't think it'd be any worse for the marine's chances of victory than having Katashi Juro or Bill Carson as their captain.

    I've been playing SS13 for 7 years, in my experience, most of the "comdom" captains are people who are intentionally acting that way. Very rarely is someone who acts like a total moron to the point of self destructiveness an actual "random baldie." It was pretty popular to find "comdom" captains hysterically funny for a while, so people would do it on purpose. And if someone went overboard, or repeatedly offended, there were already ways to deal with that before whitelists were implemented. You could kick them, ban them, warn them, or just talk to them.

    I'm not saying that we should suddenly start accepting a poorer quality of roleplaying. What I'm saying is that we actually have a pretty solid quality of roleplaying despite being a TDM server, and having a whitelist is unnecessary and does more harm than good.
    Last edited by Plasmatik; 05-08-2019 at 11:58 PM.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Plasmatik View Post
    yet we don't get tons of comdom XOs.
    You need more play time on the server.

  6. #6
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    Sorry your round was ruined by a person who broke the guidelines and you didn't get aheal because you gotta report the whitelist player first, but that is exactly why whitelist are whitelists. Whitelisted roles are held to a high standard and are restricted by a shit ton of guidelines. You contradict yourself by saying "oh let's remove whitelist because admins can't punish these players right away." If we had predator open to everyone then the rule breaks would go over the window, because people would roll predator without even knowing the honor code, or a captain who doesn't know when to use BEs and a synth who breaks marine law or doesn't know how to do support roles at all. Truth be told you don't have to play exactly the same character every round, nobody is going to police a predator who says his gimmick is doing lodges and then next round he doesn't build any. Whitelisted roles get a lot of new mechanics but at the cost of a guideline and frankly, I am against your idea of removing whitelists, because if we did, then these whitelisted roles would have to be adjusted and would no longer be grant the same experience.
    Former staff, also former Synthetic senator.

    Now just a shitposter and lurker.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Plasmatik View Post
    And if someone went overboard, or repeatedly offended, there were already ways to deal with that before whitelists were implemented. You could kick them, ban them, warn them, or just talk to them.
    That's already the case with councils. We're here to held the whitelists to a higher standard and if we are informed that a player has broken the guideline, we talk to them and make sure they don't do it again.
    Former staff, also former Synthetic senator.

    Now just a shitposter and lurker.

  8. #8
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    I'd be fine with the CO whitelist going away, although not synth unless there is a change to multiple synths per round. For predators, making fewer restrictions but limit of 2/3 preds per round. I think there's too many vague rules with predators, which could be much more concrete. Ex. 'Don't have too much influence on the round.' to '2 T3 kills, 4 T2 kills per round.'

  9. #9
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    Well I think the whole "write a good story" meme is pretty dumb since 99% of the people playing won't be able to know or tell what your character's story is and I definitely agree being able to tell your character's story through actual roleplay is much more important. I'd much prefer the "write long snowflake backstory" to be replaced with "write about how you intend to act and play in-game", which is also why I like it when members of the whitelist council will ask the applicants specific questions regarding how they'd act in-game because that truly shows how fun they'd make the round instead of just saying "lol story was boring -1".

    I still think there should be a whitelist, but I've also always believed the whitelist should be for preventing new players/people with very low RP from taking important roles. Ultimately however I can live with just the required story part being removed.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by AcuteCircle View Post
    Sorry your round was ruined by a person who broke the guidelines and you didn't get aheal because you gotta report the whitelist player first, but that is exactly why whitelist are whitelists. Whitelisted roles are held to a high standard and are restricted by a shit ton of guidelines. You contradict yourself by saying "oh let's remove whitelist because admins can't punish these players right away." If we had predator open to everyone then the rule breaks would go over the window, because people would roll predator without even knowing the honor code, or a captain who doesn't know when to use BEs and a synth who breaks marine law or doesn't know how to do support roles at all. Truth be told you don't have to play exactly the same character every round, nobody is going to police a predator who says his gimmick is doing lodges and then next round he doesn't build any. Whitelisted roles get a lot of new mechanics but at the cost of a guideline and frankly, I am against your idea of removing whitelists, because if we did, then these whitelisted roles would have to be adjusted and would no longer be grant the same experience.
    There are other roles in the game that require the player to behave in specific ways in order to comply with the rules, but which are not whitelisted. MP, CMP, SO and XO immediately come to mind, but essentially every role in the game has certain guidelines it has to follow, not to mention Xenomorph Queens. If the vast majority of players can follow the rules when they play as those roles, what makes you think they can't if they picked one that's whitelisted?

    And as for predators, I think they should be reworked or removed, as I said before. I hate them in their current state, they are very rarely fun for people who are not playing them. Their behavior should be restricted by the mechanics of the game just like other roles are. Predators can pick up a taser and shoot someone with it, but a marine can't; yet, it is against the predator guidelines for them to do that. I think that's really silly. If the problem with updating them to use the skill system is that the code is spaghetti, then they should just be removed until someone remakes them. As I said in OP, I've felt this way for a long time and had many shitty experiences with predators in game. I just didn't feel salty enough about it to speak out about it on the forums until yesterday.
    Last edited by Plasmatik; 05-09-2019 at 12:14 AM.

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