- Sep 16, 2023
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This is going to be a mega-suggestion that has a lot of interlinking elements that essentially solve problems with each other and which I can't properly unlink into separate suggestions because of how interlinked they are. I'm very open to Content denying individual parts of this, wanting to change certain parts of it, or anything like that - I'll try and make this open to that sort of thing as much as possible. Strap in.
Any elements that I would consider a priority are marked with *, and any that I'd consider required are marked with **.
What does this suggestion change/add/remove:
The first thing I'd like to suggest is the replacement of the Technician Tool with a new item: the Technician Tablet.**
Secondly, I'd like to suggest an engineering/maintenance rework - including a more detailed plan for Containment Maintenance
:
Thirdly, I would suggest a rework of the roles themselves. For this, I lay out a base rework that I think is key, and an additional role that I think would help, but which I don't believe is completely necessary if Content Team doesn't wish to go that far.
Building on the above, I would also suggest adding an additional role:
Has something similar been suggested before? If so, why is your suggestion different?:
Various aspects of this have been suggested before, with varying results, and some base ideas here are already on the dev tracker (e.g. containment maintenance). For all of this, I have brought these together into one more cohesive suggestion to better contextualise them, and I have tried to expand on different areas and reasoning for all of it.
Possible Positives of the suggestion (At least 2):
Firstly, I don't think the autobreach and hack breach system is working very well as-is. It doesn't mesh well with RP that SCPs just magically breach without explanation every couple of hours, and the way you manually breach things is too simple to allow itself to be balanced particularly well. SCPs should breach for a reason, and a lack of maintenance should cause breaches, while there should be the opportunity to prevent breaches by doing that, rather than having absolutely no control over it. Replacing the breach queue like this should make this more fair and more interactive for both the Foundation trying to stop them from breaching, and the SCPs/CI/etc. trying to cause breaches. Causing a breach just being "hack a box, there's an alert for you starting it, and then when you succeed there's no warning" isn't great for trying to prevent it, as HCZ is just too huge, especially with low E-11 pop, to reliably find breach attempts and combat them well before a breach happens. It being just "hack one box" also is a bit too simple to provide any real opportunity to balance it well, though.
I feel that the replaced "breach queue" system, and the more immersive and expansive ability to tamper with things, provides a lot of opportunities both for the ones trying to tamper with things, and for the ones trying to stop them. CI actually have to be tactical - do they rush a hack and bring all of Foundation down on their back immediately but go fast and possibly move quickly, or do they take their time and risk being caught but also potentially cause a more unexpected and devastating breach? Do they avoid directly going for breaches but instead just work to make breaches happen quicker or be more drastic by removing any warning from them? And for the defenders, that works too - either CI rushes and you get more warning, or they don't and you might potentially catch them during patrols. There's tactics here, there's decisions to be made - it's not just "run down into HCZ, hack the meta SCPs and go as fast as possible".
And for the SCPs, they can see how their containment chamber is failing - the SRA starts to spin slower, they gain more control over their reality bending, they notice that nobody's been by for a bit longer than they normally have, and their containment chamber might fail soon. And more broadly, E&TS are coming by often, usually, which gives them both more opportunity to talk and do RP with others between research sessions, and potentially an opportunity to escape or cause havoc if the engineer slips up and accidentally goes somewhere they shouldn't or doesn't finish a repair in time before containment fails. They know that a CI DC tampered with their monitor earlier and if they breach now, nobody will know until it's too late and they're nearly out of HCZ.
For E&TS, this is great - they've got stuff to actively be doing, rather than being a purely reactive role that fixes things after a breach or raid. They need to actively maintain containment chambers and the like, otherwise things can breach. These are already pretty key roles (good luck defeating a code 2 if there's nobody to fix the airlock), but they're very situational. You also can't just get rid of them, because otherwise doors and the like that SCPs have to break to get out have no explanation for how they just magically fix themselves (the only reason I've still included a system for this is because at low pop, you need to suspend some aspects of RP because there simply are not enough people around for things to make sense - if you think about things like no ISD being around or D-block being completely empty too hard, you break RP immersion immediately, and this is just another aspect of that that just needs to happen otherwise everything falls apart the moment a D-class door faults the airlock). There's just so much more to actively be doing outside of just specific times of the day.
Overall, a system like described would just make things massively better for everyone.
Firstly: the minge issue. On both servers, time and time again, for the entire time the server has existed, people abuse these roles to just fuck around and do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else's fun. Minges will always exist, but there are reasons they gravitate to these roles and manage to get away with so much on them. If you flag onto any other role, you've got people keeping an eye out for you. Your directors, your Executive Researchers, your Inspectors, your Consultants - whoever else, you've got oversight, you've got people that will notice if their subordinates are outright fucking around, and will notice if the same player keeps getting into issues over and over again. What does E&TS have? You flag onto the job and there's nobody around - you spawn in a tiny, empty room, you can go around a bunch of the site and do whatever, and there's nobody there to even notice. If you're planning to fuck around, this is heaven. The most resistance you can expect is from ISD, who are spread so wide that they aren't particularly going to notice if you've been fucking around all day on the job, because each time, it's a new person arresting you or telling you to not do that again - they don't even have someone to report you to, so nobody notices that you, specifically keep causing problems until you've been doing it for weeks and that is too late. You try this on a job like Medical Trainee and at least one of your department's CL4s is going to notice that you keep being arrested, or that they never see you anywhere you're supposed to be, despite being on the job for hours, and within a day, you've been job banned from medical. You keep it up, and they might get staff involved as they have the insight to realise you fit the pattern of NITRP. E&TS? There's Site Administration. That's it. The same group that is also responsible for pretty much everything, on a grand scale, and do not have the time or patience, and often not the interest, to be dealing with a bunch of random minges. They have too broad a focus to notice these things, too much else going on, and quite frankly, they didn't sign up to micromanage E&TS - so they don't. And noone else does, either. And so the problem continues. You plan to minge? Go on an E&TS job, you get a CL2, a plausible reason to be just about anywhere on site, and nothing to stop you from repeatedly being an issue.
And that's just the side of things for people who set out to cause problems. What about the ones that just genuinely want to play those roles, but don't know how? They stay that way - there's nobody there giving them guidance (most of the time you can't even get people to answer basic questions on comms), and there doesn't seem to be much to do. You try and try, and you find out that wow, it really is just fixing some doors every few hours, and that's it. You want to engage in RP, but what is there to do? There's no operations you can join in on to make a start, there's nobody you can ask for ideas, most people on other jobs and departments seem very disinterested in even talking to you, so what are you supposed to do? You've got two options: you give up (and many people do, very quickly), or you keep trying. But you've got no guidance, you've got no experience to have a good plan or ideas for roleplay, and well, fuck, there's nothing else happening - might as well give it a go and try and make your own way. So you try. And you try. And you keep trying. At no point does anyone help you out or correct your mistakes or properly explain things to you, you either continue doing whatever you feel like doing, without any real support, or you get stopped by ISD. They've seen it all before, you minges, and they don't want to hear anything, and certainly don't want to engage you in RP. You're just a minge, just doing whatever you want, so you're going into jail for 30 minutes. And now you've still not gotten any better guidance, and you're now annoyed by ISD - and you were already just making everything up as you were going along, so why not fuck with them? And with everyone else that refuses to engage in RP with you? And everyone else. Fuck it, do whatever you want, because there were never any rails for the train to follow, and there's nobody really stopping you.
And for the few that don't just go completely off the rails, what is there? You can engage with Site Administration sometimes, and maybe someone, after literal years of being here, recognises your name and goes "yeah, lets involve them in this bit of roleplay" now and then. But that's it - you can try and push your own roleplay, but you've got no real backing, and are still entirely just at the whims of just about every other player, so whether it goes anywhere is a dice roll. Every single time. You might try and suggest "I don't think this is working, maybe we could change things", and the response from so many people, even experienced CN players, is generally "but those are the minge roles, people either minge on them or flag on quickly to do a repair - they're not real RP roles, that's not a real department, they're not RP roles - but also, if you want RP, just do RP". And so nothing ever changes, because those are problem roles - if you add another role that's just another problem. And why should Content Team, or SL, or IC leadership, or anyone else, spend any time on them - they're a problem, they've always been a problem, they'll always be a problem, and we're not considering changing that. No fixes, only problems.
All of these issues are interlinked - people minge because there's no oversight, the roles have a terrible reputation because there's so many minges, there's no RP opportunities because there's nobody (and nothing) to provide them and so many people refuse to engage with them because of their terrible reputation, and nobody's interested in really fixing that - or at least, nobody is that actually has any real ability to do anything about it. Some members of Site Administration might come along now and then that really do try, and sometimes, for a glorious moment, things actually get a bit better, because there's opportunities and interaction and RP and oversight and then someone else gets in charge and they don't care or actively want to tear that down. There needs to be an actual, functional change to these roles, otherwise they're going to remain as they are and they're going to remain a source of problems for everybody, even if those problems are so normalised that people don't even think they need to be solved or can be solved anymore.
So that's where the Director role comes in. A two-slot position, like any other director role, with the intention of solving so many of these issues at the source. There's active minges - there's two people actively keeping an eye out, listening to people's complaints, paying attention to what their subordinates are doing, and then acting on it, whether that's just talking to them, job banning them, or even referring them to staff if they're just here to cause problems and aren't doing anything to change. There's nothing for E&TS players to do - there's two people coming up with new ideas, new operations, providing new opportunities for their department to engage in, working with other departments to provide better opportunities for everyone, and actively listening to their department and providing things that the players want to do. The department has a terrible reputation, and it's cutting down RP opportunities between the department and other players - there's two people actively working to fix the problems at the source, and to rebuild the department's reputation and build new relationships. There's nobody listening to people's problems, both within and with the department - there's two people actively wanting to improve things, looking for problems and solving them, listening to people's complaints and providing them with solutions.
And finally, the progression just makes no sense, you start at Engineer, and then you try IT Tech, but there's nothing to do on that job with a tool that does nothing and access to basically none of the site, and you get to Tech Expert, but then what? But now, IT Tech isn't just worse than Engineer in every way - you've got just a bit more to do, you've got access to quite a bit more of the site - at least the corridors - and you can get into more offices and the like to fix terminals, interact with people, do RP - even just the clearance boost gives you access to so much more of the site and just so many more people to actively roleplay with. And then, gradually, you can move to Senior Engineer - that sounds interesting - and you've got access to even more. You can get into SCP chambers and do roleplay around them, you can do roleplay with other CL3s that involves info on their level - you want to get involved with ISD and help them with some technical RP for a court case, you've got it, you can actually even know anything at all about court cases and the like, there's so much info and places and people you can involve in RP. And, as always, there's that final step to strive for, if you're feeling it.
The Technician Tablet is meant to fix all of this and more. More interesting fixes? They're interactive - you actually get to have an idea of how you're fixing the issue, and you get to press more than one button. Sometimes the problem is different, sometimes you get to see interesting logs, sometimes you're even being asked to check the logs and get involved in RP about it - oh, cool, this keypad was hacked five minutes ago, and it looks like it might have been this GSD Guard that did it, here's the info, Agent. More to do? You've got a bit of variation in what needs to be done, you've got logs to interact with, you've got RP you can do around it, you've got servers and a few other bits you can also interact with. For the IT Technician, it's not massive, but it's miles better than what it currently has, especially with the previously suggested clearance bump.
For other roles, it's even better. You want to check on a containment chamber? Right now, it's just poke your head in (if you can even open the door) and see if any doors are broken or the containment box says "Failure" on the side - and half the time, you can't even close the doors behind you because they're CL3 and nobody in your entire department is, so I guess a few of the 076 doors are just staying open for the rest of this server restart. With this and the containment maintenance? Check on the CMS status, see if there's any faults, reboot a Scranton Reality Anchor that shut down because of a fault, peruse some logs and now and then see something interesting - someone seems to have hacked this CMS about five minutes ago, there might be CI around or something. Even without the containment maintenance update, you get to see what caused a breach, when a breach last happened, whether there were any recent hacking attempts on this one SCP, or whether those alerts E-11 got were somewhere else.
This tablet would make E&TS work so much more interesting and so much more RP-friendly. How did you fix the terminal by standing next to it with a wrench? Fuck knows - make some bullshit up that might mesh with reality or might not. How did you fix it with the tablet? I've connected to it, and it looks like someone was tampering with it about 10 minutes ago and triggered a fault, so I've just rebooted it, you might want to look for who's been snooping in your office. I can check the keypad for you - oh, it looks like an E-11 CPL James entered here around that time. There'd be so much more to do and see and do RP around.
Possible Negatives of the suggestion:
Based on the Positives & Negatives, why should this suggestion be accepted:
There's a lot here, and I've spoken at length in previous sections about why I think it should be done. But at the end of the day, I think it should be done because I think it would open up a lot of fun opportunities across the servers, for everyone, regardless of whether these are roles they play, because roleplay is about interaction, and changing one thing like this improves things for everyone.
It might be that huge parts of this are rejected by CT or the community at large, but I'd suggest (ha) thinking about the individual points and how maybe you might like one part, hate another, and not care about another - give your opinions on the different parts, and maybe, regardless of whether this whole suggestion is accepted, something good could come from it.
Any elements that I would consider a priority are marked with *, and any that I'd consider required are marked with **.
What does this suggestion change/add/remove:
The first thing I'd like to suggest is the replacement of the Technician Tool with a new item: the Technician Tablet.**
The overall idea here is to much better flesh out how a lot of things work with this. Currently, some things get broken and they are all either "Hold left click with the Repair Tool" or "Hold left click with the Technician Tool". That's boring, doesn't provide any info about what you're actually doing, and generally is pretty much as basic of an implementation as possible; the Technician Tool doesn't even do anything beyond fixing SCiPNet terminals (which aren't even broken that often). This makes the Technician Tool, and by extension the entire IT Technician job basically completely useless - more on that later.
The idea for the Technician Tablet is essentially that it would be a version of the Personnel Tablet with technical capabilities. It would be able to connect to various devices (entities), similar to how the TE-5 does. You would be able to left-click with the Technician Tablet while not zoomed into it and connect to a variety of devices, including:
For example, connecting to a keypad would result in a menu like this:
The logs would be for the last ~10 minutes and be scrollable. The specific length of them, I'd leave up to CT and devs to decide limits for balancing and for technical limitations. Every device would have the same basic options to turn it on/off, run diagnostics (would produce a basic thing like "No issues detected." or "Mechanical fault reported by connected device." for e.g. a door fault) - clicking on them would enter a command into the terminal and run it (e.g. "shutdown", "reboot", "diagnose"). There would be the possibility of custom commands for different device types which you would have to manually enter into the terminal as a command ("help" command would list all available commands) - e.g. "dispense bodycam" on a dispenser.
Each Technician Tablet would have restrictions on what it can/can't do. For example, a CL3 user wouldn't be able to connect to a CL4 keycard scanner, an IT Technician wouldn't be able to connect to an electrical cabinet, and an Engineer wouldn't be able to disable anything, only diagnose and reboot. These restrictions would be options in VJobEditor for SL to decide in game with different roles, plus the tablet would know which keycard(s) you have for clearance level.
This tablet would be used by jobs like Engineer, IT Tech, Tech Expert, etc. - with each having restrictions that make sense to them, e.g. Engineer not able to do IT stuff and IT Tech not able to do engineering stuff. It would enable a much more interactive and RP-friendly way of doing repairs and other RP, and would just make the experience a lot more interesting than just "go to things, if it says it's broken, hold left-click", and would be part of giving the IT Technician job more to do. It would also enable a lot of RP with other departments - e.g. ISD might want to know who broke into SCP-500 and stole a pill, and a Tech Expert might be able to see who entered the room through the keypad logs (and for balance - if someone uses a TE-5 to break in, you'd still not know, because it would produce garbled data like the log example above).
Ideally, anything the Technician Tablet can connect to/do, a TE-5 should potentially be able to do the same, though potentially with less control. For some things, that would already match up, e.g. a Technician Tablet could connect to a dispenser and dispense a given item, where a TE-5 can dispense a random item and will cause it to break with repeated attempts, while some things could be new ideas, like the Technician Tablet can disable a keypad indefinitely, while a TE-5 might be able to disable it for 3 minutes. The IC explanation here being that the TE-5 uses the same port the tablet does to connect to things, and just has some vulnerabilities it can exploit to trigger different things via it.
A secondary feature of this would be an additonal menu aside from the "Diagnostics" one, labelled "Status". This would display any known faults with different systems, e.g. a turbine being down, or a containment mechanism fault having been reported but not resolved (will be described with the containment maintenance section).
The idea for the Technician Tablet is essentially that it would be a version of the Personnel Tablet with technical capabilities. It would be able to connect to various devices (entities), similar to how the TE-5 does. You would be able to left-click with the Technician Tablet while not zoomed into it and connect to a variety of devices, including:
- SCiPNet Terminals
- Servers
- Electrical Cabinets
- Keypads
- CCTV Cameras
- Dispensers
- CCTV Displays
For example, connecting to a keypad would result in a menu like this:
| Anomaly OS 1.3 | Technician Tablet | |
|---|---|---|
| <SCP logo> | Device Diagnostics | <Icon buttons for enable/disable, run diagnostics, restart> |
| Command | Logs | Terminal |
| Operations | 23:07:38 - Diagnostics device connected (ID: 0x18, User: Tech Expert Ellis Ogden) | No operation ongoing. |
| Radios | 22:59:47 - Unknown device disconnected (ID: 0x37) | |
| Legal Codex | 22:59:43 - Successful access attempt by £^!&&a£$@@@3 | |
| Diagnostics | 22:59:03 - Unknown device connected (ID: 0x37) | > Enter command... |
| 22:51:23 - Unsuccessful access attempt by E-11 CPL Jones | ||
The logs would be for the last ~10 minutes and be scrollable. The specific length of them, I'd leave up to CT and devs to decide limits for balancing and for technical limitations. Every device would have the same basic options to turn it on/off, run diagnostics (would produce a basic thing like "No issues detected." or "Mechanical fault reported by connected device." for e.g. a door fault) - clicking on them would enter a command into the terminal and run it (e.g. "shutdown", "reboot", "diagnose"). There would be the possibility of custom commands for different device types which you would have to manually enter into the terminal as a command ("help" command would list all available commands) - e.g. "dispense bodycam" on a dispenser.
Each Technician Tablet would have restrictions on what it can/can't do. For example, a CL3 user wouldn't be able to connect to a CL4 keycard scanner, an IT Technician wouldn't be able to connect to an electrical cabinet, and an Engineer wouldn't be able to disable anything, only diagnose and reboot. These restrictions would be options in VJobEditor for SL to decide in game with different roles, plus the tablet would know which keycard(s) you have for clearance level.
This tablet would be used by jobs like Engineer, IT Tech, Tech Expert, etc. - with each having restrictions that make sense to them, e.g. Engineer not able to do IT stuff and IT Tech not able to do engineering stuff. It would enable a much more interactive and RP-friendly way of doing repairs and other RP, and would just make the experience a lot more interesting than just "go to things, if it says it's broken, hold left-click", and would be part of giving the IT Technician job more to do. It would also enable a lot of RP with other departments - e.g. ISD might want to know who broke into SCP-500 and stole a pill, and a Tech Expert might be able to see who entered the room through the keypad logs (and for balance - if someone uses a TE-5 to break in, you'd still not know, because it would produce garbled data like the log example above).
Ideally, anything the Technician Tablet can connect to/do, a TE-5 should potentially be able to do the same, though potentially with less control. For some things, that would already match up, e.g. a Technician Tablet could connect to a dispenser and dispense a given item, where a TE-5 can dispense a random item and will cause it to break with repeated attempts, while some things could be new ideas, like the Technician Tablet can disable a keypad indefinitely, while a TE-5 might be able to disable it for 3 minutes. The IC explanation here being that the TE-5 uses the same port the tablet does to connect to things, and just has some vulnerabilities it can exploit to trigger different things via it.
A secondary feature of this would be an additonal menu aside from the "Diagnostics" one, labelled "Status". This would display any known faults with different systems, e.g. a turbine being down, or a containment mechanism fault having been reported but not resolved (will be described with the containment maintenance section).
Secondly, I'd like to suggest an engineering/maintenance rework - including a more detailed plan for Containment Maintenance
:This comes with some smaller bits and some bigger ones.
Firstly, I want to suggest that the electrical cabinets have a slight rework:
Second, I want to suggest a comms system:
Thirdly, I'd like to suggest a reworked containment system, building on the base of what Containment Maintenance is possibly supposed to be**:
Thirdly, I would like to suggest a minor rework to the Placer Tool, and its addition to some jobs (described later on):
Finally, I would suggest updating the Repair Tool to be a bit more immersive, like so:
Firstly, I want to suggest that the electrical cabinets have a slight rework:
I would like the text explaining what the cabinet is for to be made more realistic - at the moment, the text looks very out of place and more like a UI element rather than it being an IC piece of text written on the cabinet. Secondly, I'd want the new Technician Tablet to be able to connect to it, which would provide the ability to:
When it comes to tampering via 079 or a TE-5, soft faults like those would occur (same effect of the system being offline, but different ways to fix them), rather than the standard electrical fault. Brodamide and similar would cause either the electrical fault or the garbled data, and things like the surges caused by breaches could cause any of them that make sense.
If softer faults occur, the cabinets should not spark - it should only be possible to diagnose an issue using the tablet.
- See logs of when faults occurred, when they were fixed, when people accessed the cabinet
- Diagnose if there is a fault
- Enable/disable and reboot the system
When it comes to tampering via 079 or a TE-5, soft faults like those would occur (same effect of the system being offline, but different ways to fix them), rather than the standard electrical fault. Brodamide and similar would cause either the electrical fault or the garbled data, and things like the surges caused by breaches could cause any of them that make sense.
If softer faults occur, the cabinets should not spark - it should only be possible to diagnose an issue using the tablet.
Second, I want to suggest a comms system:
There's a few forms this could come in, but two possible ones I'd like to suggest (which could co-exist) are:
- An antenna on surface level (maybe in the fenced area above the garage) that can fail (due to tampering or other causes). If it does, Foundation O-COMMS access is disabled.
- An internal comms system, with electrical cabinets and/or relays around the site. If they fail, comms and radio access fails (if using the relay system, then just for those that are within that area - e.g. there might be a relay in HCZ, and if it fails, then comms is inaccessible to those within HCZ, while the rest of the site can access it fine).
Thirdly, I'd like to suggest a reworked containment system, building on the base of what Containment Maintenance is possibly supposed to be**:
Essentially, the way containment works at all would be massively changed in every way.
Firstly, I would directly replace the current breach queue with a new system:
Secondly, I would suggest the addition of maintainable containment chamber elements - this is the more complex bit:
Firstly, I would directly replace the current breach queue with a new system:
*
Breaches should not occur due to a direct breach queue system that automatically breaches SCPs that have been online the longest. Breaches should occur entirely due to a containment mechanism failure (which I will describe in depth later). The breach queue itself should instead be replaced by a system where SCP players would opt into an increased breach chance. Those that do would be entered into a sort of queue where, based on how long they have been on the SCP and how recently that SCP has been breached, there is a chance for a catastrophic containment failure.
Catastrophic failures would be failure events that have a short duration and which lead to the SCP being immediately able to escape. Failure events as a whole will be described in more depth in later sections, but the gist is that they would be events in which there would be very little or no time for E&TS or E-11 to rectify them before they conclude, with the conclusion being that something fails so badly the SCP can just get out. Things like a sudden severe electrical fault with the SCP's Hume Occlusion Field generators (essentially an IC version of a containment blocker), a malfunctioning Scranton Reality Anchor (for reality bending SCPs), or similar things.
Only SCP players that opt into this would receive these, with a higher chance for those that have been waiting for it longer, and a lower chance for those that have breached recently (as in, if you, the player have breached recently, it's lower, and if the SCP you are playing has breached recently it is also, separately, lower). This wouldn't be a strict, visible timer, but more just a building chance over time, with the server just internally having a partially-randomised timer that, when triggered, gives each SCP in this group a chance to have a catastrophic failure.
Those that opt out would be given some other boost, like increased XP, to encourage people to opt out if they're not actively looking to breach - e.g. those that flag on for sampling or RP.
Breaches should not occur due to a direct breach queue system that automatically breaches SCPs that have been online the longest. Breaches should occur entirely due to a containment mechanism failure (which I will describe in depth later). The breach queue itself should instead be replaced by a system where SCP players would opt into an increased breach chance. Those that do would be entered into a sort of queue where, based on how long they have been on the SCP and how recently that SCP has been breached, there is a chance for a catastrophic containment failure.
Catastrophic failures would be failure events that have a short duration and which lead to the SCP being immediately able to escape. Failure events as a whole will be described in more depth in later sections, but the gist is that they would be events in which there would be very little or no time for E&TS or E-11 to rectify them before they conclude, with the conclusion being that something fails so badly the SCP can just get out. Things like a sudden severe electrical fault with the SCP's Hume Occlusion Field generators (essentially an IC version of a containment blocker), a malfunctioning Scranton Reality Anchor (for reality bending SCPs), or similar things.
Only SCP players that opt into this would receive these, with a higher chance for those that have been waiting for it longer, and a lower chance for those that have breached recently (as in, if you, the player have breached recently, it's lower, and if the SCP you are playing has breached recently it is also, separately, lower). This wouldn't be a strict, visible timer, but more just a building chance over time, with the server just internally having a partially-randomised timer that, when triggered, gives each SCP in this group a chance to have a catastrophic failure.
Those that opt out would be given some other boost, like increased XP, to encourage people to opt out if they're not actively looking to breach - e.g. those that flag on for sampling or RP.
Secondly, I would suggest the addition of maintainable containment chamber elements - this is the more complex bit:
**
Essentially, containment chambers should rely on multiple systems that must be maintained by E&TS. Depending on which SCP this is, they would have different systems.
Firstly would be the Containment Monitoring System. This would be what the hackable containment box is. It "monitors" the other systems for that chamber and reports if they have failed or are being tampered with. Essentially, if this is online, then relevant jobs should receive alerts through the system currently used for breach alerts and hacking alerts. So if a system is detected as being in a degraded state (e.g. one of two Scranton Reality Anchors for a TG chamber is down, but the other is fine), then E&TS staff of the right clearance would receive an alert through this specifying something like "Containment Fault - Type-Green-B", and would then need to go down, connect to the monitoring box with their tablet and view the diagnostics report that would tell them what specifically is wrong (e.g. "Electrical Fault: Scranton Reality Anchor A"). They would then fix these issues using either the tablet or their repair kit as needed on the specific system that is faulty.
As long as the CMS is up, the relevant E&TS/E-11/GSD/etc. staff should receive alerts, with different alerts being sent to different people depending on what is wrong. Some things might not trigger alerts, for example an individual system gradually degrading over time - alerts would only be sent if the CMS is able to detect it, e.g. it can detect a door failing, but not a door having degraded by 50%, as it can only "detect" that the door has opened when it shouldn't. Standard breach alerts become more specific - but also might just not happen if the CMS is down.
It should be possible to tamper with these using a TE-5. Specifically, there should be two options: disable, and disguised disable. Disabling it normally would cause the CMS to fault and become disabled without an alert to anyone, but doing a "disguised" disable would mean that if it succeeds, the regular display would not turn off or otherwise look like it has an issue. It would only be possible to identify a CMS having been disabled like this either through figuring out what the logs mean, or by running the diagnostic option, both via the Technician Tablet. The disguised option should be slightly harder than the non-disguised option.
Hacking a CMS should not trigger a hacking alert unless the attempt fails - at which point it would trigger an alert to E-11/SCUs for the specific SCP being hacked. Hacking another component while the CMS is working should trigger an alert immediately for the specific location. Hacking another component while it is disabled should trigger no alert at all, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. If the CMS is down, nothing that happens, whether through tampering or through standard faults, should trigger an alert. CI breaching SCPs would thus come with the potential to silently breach an SCP without anyone knowing, at the expense of time (having to separately hack the CMS and something else like a Hume Occlusion Field Generator) and risk (more hacking means more chances to potentially fail a hack and just trigger an immediate specific alert to E-11). Alternatively, they could just directly tamper with containment mechanisms like the HOFG to breach things faster, but at the expense of triggering immediate, specific tampering alerts. Each way comes with risks and opportunities. They might even just send a DC to go around doing disguised CMS disables on a bunch of SCPs so that breaches naturally occur and aren't alerted - or do it on one specific SCP they plan to breach in a later MR. The possibilities are endless for both CI and Foundation.
The second common system would be Hume Occlusion Fields, and their associated generators. Hume Occlusion Field is a term already used for the ERT shield walls - the idea here is that an SCP chamber typically uses a HOF generator to prevent SCPs from even trying to physically break the door down or anything like that - because they can't physically reach them. The HOF on a chamber surrounds the entire chamber and prevents SCPs with their own hume field from leaving the HOF surrounding them. This is essentially an IC version of the containment blocker that prevents SCPs from just running out of an open door. Most SCPs would have this and a suitable door to prevent SCPs from escaping, e.g. 076 containment would essentially just be this and the blastdoor and thick walls keeping it in, with a CMS monitoring the doors and the HOFG status. There would be a physical generator (maybe a custom fancy model for this?) that would be accessible to players in the outer area of containment chambers (e.g. for 173, it might be in the area next to the stairs down towards the containment door).
HOFGs would be interactable using a TE-5 or a Technician Tablet. A TE-5 would have the option to either disable or cause a fault - with the latter being a harder hack, but meaning that it would require fixing by E&TS before it could be brought back online, rather than just needing to be turned back on. They would be able to be turned on if off by simply interacting with them normally - but turning them off would require a Technician Tablet with the right permissions - so E-11 or whoever can easily recontain things.
HOFGs should degrade quickly if more SCPs than it is set up for are inside its area. So if, for example, the 076 one is re-enabled while both 035 and 076 are in the chamber, it should start to fail quite quickly. Similarly, SCPs should be able to physically attack it using a system similar to the door break system, and cause it to fail if broken to free other SCPs.
A third common system would be Scranton Reality Anchors. These would be part of chambers used by reality benders (TGs, 8837, etc.), and would disable any bending abilities within them. These failing for TGs would be catastrophic, as using the Disrupt ability should cause significant damage to any HOFG affecting them and allow them to breach quite quickly.
Typically, SCP chambers would come with doors, a HOFG, and a CMS, plus one or more SRAs for any reality benders as needed. However, some chambers are/should be different, including:
Various aspects of this (e.g. doors and other moving parts) should gradually wear down over time and eventually break or be weaker than they should be, meaning they'd require regular maintenance by E&TS, and failing to do that would lead to breaches. There should also be a random chance for different events to happen with different components, like an electrical fault, mechanical fault, or just turning off due to a bug or whatever. Most of these should be reasonable to maintain as long as E&TS is actively doing their job, barring the catastrophic failure events that people in the new "breach queue" can receive, which should generally not be recoverable outside of circumstances like an engineer already being there when it happens.
The rate of degradation and the chance of random events happening should gradually reduce with the number of active players and the number of people on E&TS jobs, until a point where they just outright stop and faults can only be triggered by tampering. At this point, broken things like doors and containment mechanisms should automatically fix themselves after ~5 minutes, similar to what doors and CCTV cameras already do. If the server is in this state, SCP players should have some indication that they aren't able to breach through this, like a notification when they flag on or when the server hits this pop while they're already on those jobs.
Some of these systems, like the CMSes, SRAs and HOFGs should be something that SL can set up on the fly. They should be able to just place a HOFG and then define an area that it generates a HOF over, or place a CMS and target it at a set of doors, HOFGs, etc. with a custom name. For example, they might want to add a CMS to cross-testing that monitors the outer doors for faults and sends alerts for them, or set up a HOFG in D-block to keep SCPs out.
When it comes to recontaining SCPs, the system would essentially be that E&TS has to repair them before SCPs can be recontained in them properly, and then those actually recontaining an SCP would have to drag the SCP into the chamber and then interact with the HOFG or whatever to turn it back on and recontain the SCP. At times where no E&TS are online, these systems should auto-fix themselves after a given time (~5 minutes, maybe).
Essentially, containment chambers should rely on multiple systems that must be maintained by E&TS. Depending on which SCP this is, they would have different systems.
Firstly would be the Containment Monitoring System. This would be what the hackable containment box is. It "monitors" the other systems for that chamber and reports if they have failed or are being tampered with. Essentially, if this is online, then relevant jobs should receive alerts through the system currently used for breach alerts and hacking alerts. So if a system is detected as being in a degraded state (e.g. one of two Scranton Reality Anchors for a TG chamber is down, but the other is fine), then E&TS staff of the right clearance would receive an alert through this specifying something like "Containment Fault - Type-Green-B", and would then need to go down, connect to the monitoring box with their tablet and view the diagnostics report that would tell them what specifically is wrong (e.g. "Electrical Fault: Scranton Reality Anchor A"). They would then fix these issues using either the tablet or their repair kit as needed on the specific system that is faulty.
As long as the CMS is up, the relevant E&TS/E-11/GSD/etc. staff should receive alerts, with different alerts being sent to different people depending on what is wrong. Some things might not trigger alerts, for example an individual system gradually degrading over time - alerts would only be sent if the CMS is able to detect it, e.g. it can detect a door failing, but not a door having degraded by 50%, as it can only "detect" that the door has opened when it shouldn't. Standard breach alerts become more specific - but also might just not happen if the CMS is down.
It should be possible to tamper with these using a TE-5. Specifically, there should be two options: disable, and disguised disable. Disabling it normally would cause the CMS to fault and become disabled without an alert to anyone, but doing a "disguised" disable would mean that if it succeeds, the regular display would not turn off or otherwise look like it has an issue. It would only be possible to identify a CMS having been disabled like this either through figuring out what the logs mean, or by running the diagnostic option, both via the Technician Tablet. The disguised option should be slightly harder than the non-disguised option.
Hacking a CMS should not trigger a hacking alert unless the attempt fails - at which point it would trigger an alert to E-11/SCUs for the specific SCP being hacked. Hacking another component while the CMS is working should trigger an alert immediately for the specific location. Hacking another component while it is disabled should trigger no alert at all, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. If the CMS is down, nothing that happens, whether through tampering or through standard faults, should trigger an alert. CI breaching SCPs would thus come with the potential to silently breach an SCP without anyone knowing, at the expense of time (having to separately hack the CMS and something else like a Hume Occlusion Field Generator) and risk (more hacking means more chances to potentially fail a hack and just trigger an immediate specific alert to E-11). Alternatively, they could just directly tamper with containment mechanisms like the HOFG to breach things faster, but at the expense of triggering immediate, specific tampering alerts. Each way comes with risks and opportunities. They might even just send a DC to go around doing disguised CMS disables on a bunch of SCPs so that breaches naturally occur and aren't alerted - or do it on one specific SCP they plan to breach in a later MR. The possibilities are endless for both CI and Foundation.
The second common system would be Hume Occlusion Fields, and their associated generators. Hume Occlusion Field is a term already used for the ERT shield walls - the idea here is that an SCP chamber typically uses a HOF generator to prevent SCPs from even trying to physically break the door down or anything like that - because they can't physically reach them. The HOF on a chamber surrounds the entire chamber and prevents SCPs with their own hume field from leaving the HOF surrounding them. This is essentially an IC version of the containment blocker that prevents SCPs from just running out of an open door. Most SCPs would have this and a suitable door to prevent SCPs from escaping, e.g. 076 containment would essentially just be this and the blastdoor and thick walls keeping it in, with a CMS monitoring the doors and the HOFG status. There would be a physical generator (maybe a custom fancy model for this?) that would be accessible to players in the outer area of containment chambers (e.g. for 173, it might be in the area next to the stairs down towards the containment door).
HOFGs would be interactable using a TE-5 or a Technician Tablet. A TE-5 would have the option to either disable or cause a fault - with the latter being a harder hack, but meaning that it would require fixing by E&TS before it could be brought back online, rather than just needing to be turned back on. They would be able to be turned on if off by simply interacting with them normally - but turning them off would require a Technician Tablet with the right permissions - so E-11 or whoever can easily recontain things.
HOFGs should degrade quickly if more SCPs than it is set up for are inside its area. So if, for example, the 076 one is re-enabled while both 035 and 076 are in the chamber, it should start to fail quite quickly. Similarly, SCPs should be able to physically attack it using a system similar to the door break system, and cause it to fail if broken to free other SCPs.
A third common system would be Scranton Reality Anchors. These would be part of chambers used by reality benders (TGs, 8837, etc.), and would disable any bending abilities within them. These failing for TGs would be catastrophic, as using the Disrupt ability should cause significant damage to any HOFG affecting them and allow them to breach quite quickly.
Typically, SCP chambers would come with doors, a HOFG, and a CMS, plus one or more SRAs for any reality benders as needed. However, some chambers are/should be different, including:
This SCP should have a CMS monitoring the box containing them, the airlock system, and the doors. The airlock system should be able to fail and be repairable, and be interactable using the TE-5/Tablet.
This would generally only have doors, a CMS, and no connection to any other systems. For containment failures, I am thinking something like the chamber itself being a faraday cage, with 079 able to connect to Foundation systems remotely via the CMS or other nearby systems if it fails (e.g. the shielding fails, and then 079 is able to hack the CMS or anything else nearby to gain access to their breach).
096 shouldn't have HOFs - it can get through anything, so using one would essentially just cause severe, widespread electrical faults due to 096 easily shredding through them directly. It should just have a CMS monitoring the doors and the motion sensors/sound in the chamber to alert if 096 is escaping/missing or enraged within its chamber.
106 should have a setup similar to what it already has, but the different elements (doors, floating chamber, electromagnets, etc.) should all be able to fail and need regular maintenance. If the site power is out for an extended period of time (e.g. 10 minutes), this should also cause 106's electromagnets to fail and thus cause a breach.
682 should be mostly a typical setup, but it does have the submersion elevator setup, which should be taken into account and also be something that can fail/need repairs.
912 should either not be immediately detected, or just have some kind of tracker connected to the CMS, which could be hacked to free it and trigger a breach.
Various aspects of this (e.g. doors and other moving parts) should gradually wear down over time and eventually break or be weaker than they should be, meaning they'd require regular maintenance by E&TS, and failing to do that would lead to breaches. There should also be a random chance for different events to happen with different components, like an electrical fault, mechanical fault, or just turning off due to a bug or whatever. Most of these should be reasonable to maintain as long as E&TS is actively doing their job, barring the catastrophic failure events that people in the new "breach queue" can receive, which should generally not be recoverable outside of circumstances like an engineer already being there when it happens.
The rate of degradation and the chance of random events happening should gradually reduce with the number of active players and the number of people on E&TS jobs, until a point where they just outright stop and faults can only be triggered by tampering. At this point, broken things like doors and containment mechanisms should automatically fix themselves after ~5 minutes, similar to what doors and CCTV cameras already do. If the server is in this state, SCP players should have some indication that they aren't able to breach through this, like a notification when they flag on or when the server hits this pop while they're already on those jobs.
Some of these systems, like the CMSes, SRAs and HOFGs should be something that SL can set up on the fly. They should be able to just place a HOFG and then define an area that it generates a HOF over, or place a CMS and target it at a set of doors, HOFGs, etc. with a custom name. For example, they might want to add a CMS to cross-testing that monitors the outer doors for faults and sends alerts for them, or set up a HOFG in D-block to keep SCPs out.
When it comes to recontaining SCPs, the system would essentially be that E&TS has to repair them before SCPs can be recontained in them properly, and then those actually recontaining an SCP would have to drag the SCP into the chamber and then interact with the HOFG or whatever to turn it back on and recontain the SCP. At times where no E&TS are online, these systems should auto-fix themselves after a given time (~5 minutes, maybe).
Thirdly, I would like to suggest a minor rework to the Placer Tool, and its addition to some jobs (described later on):
I would suggest making this something that can be configured by SL/GMs as appropriate, similar to the reality bending tool. It would be able to be configured when providing it and for each job that spawns with it:
- Which props they can spawn
- How many of each prop
- Whether each prop is destructable (can be damaged to destroy it)
- How long it takes to place
- How long it takes to remove
Finally, I would suggest updating the Repair Tool to be a bit more immersive, like so:
I would firstly rename it to the Repair Kit. It shouldn't be thought of as a magical SWEP that just solves whatever you're doing, but as just a normal tool kit. It would essentially do the same broad job as the Repair Tool, but would have a new model when being carried (as just a tool kit carried in one hand), and switch to different models depending on what repair you're currently doing (e.g. a wrench, screwdriver, blowtorch, etc.). For most repairs, the actual repair action would likely remain mostly the same (although fixing the buggy inaccessible doors and the inconsistency between whether you can actually repair something or not between client and server would be great). For some, though, it would be great to see little minigames similar to the electrical cabinet and TE-5 ones, e.g. replacing broken gears, removing debris, etc. - just to make repairs a bit less boring and require some more work than just "click and stare".
Thirdly, I would suggest a rework of the roles themselves. For this, I lay out a base rework that I think is key, and an additional role that I think would help, but which I don't believe is completely necessary if Content Team doesn't wish to go that far.
This is the simplest and least broad update, which I think can work regardless of any other changes, and I think could be implemented quite quickly without any real friction.
This boils down to tweaking the existing jobs, and adding a single additional job, like so:
This boils down to tweaking the existing jobs, and adding a single additional job, like so:
- Engineer
- Would mainly remain the same
- Would be given the Technician Tablet, with permission to reboot things only if a fault is detected first, and permission to view logs and run a diagnostic check. No ability to disable things, but able to enable them. Only able to interact with engineering-related things, not IT-related things like terminals and servers.
- CL1
- Would be given a Prop Placer Tool with the ability to place a couple of "Out of Order" signs, a couple of basic barriers (something like models/props_fortifications/traffic_barrier001.mdl) and a version of the ladder models/ares/stepstool.mdl that has collision that actually allows you to climb it.
- Janitor
- Would remain entirely the same
- IT Technician
- Would be upgraded to CL2, with the appropriate level requirement increases
- Would be given the Technician Tablet in place of the Technician Tool, and only be able to interact with IT-related things like terminals and servers. Would only be able to enable, reboot if fault detected, and run diagnostics.
- Would be given a Prop Placer Tool with the ability to place a couple of "Out of Order" signs
- Technical Expert -> Senior Engineer
- Would be renamed to Senior Engineer
- Would be made CL3 instead of CL2
- Would be given a Technician Tablet.
- Ability to reboot regardless of fault detected (with long cooldown).
- Ability to enable but not disable most items, but possibly able to disable a few things (turrets, for example, for combatting 079).
- Ability to diagnose fault, but at this point should ideally be able to just read the logs and figure it out pretty easily.
- Ability to interact with all systems they have the clearance level for.
- Same Prop Placer as Engineer
- Keypad overrides for SCP-079 and SCP-682 to allow containment maintenance tasks, and to the electrical centres.
- [New] Director
- Department Director role
- CL4
- Able to job ban the previously mentioned roles
- Responsible for providing and facilitating RP opportunities for their department, resolving issues that either face or are caused by E&TS staff, and a myriad of other responsibilities.
Building on the above, I would also suggest adding an additional role:
This would be a CL4 role in between Senior Engineer and Director, in a similar position to what IA Ambassador used to be. A managerial role, with job ban ability, and responsibility for helping out the rest of their department and working with other departments, and who is trusted with CL4 and to generally represent the department in lower level areas. They would allow the facilitation of more RP, provide more people to help out the newer players and be there for the rest of their department, and generally cover a lot of the lower level stuff a director would be doing, to free them up to look at the broader picture and actually direct the department, rather than just managing every minor issue directly.
Has something similar been suggested before? If so, why is your suggestion different?:
Various aspects of this have been suggested before, with varying results, and some base ideas here are already on the dev tracker (e.g. containment maintenance). For all of this, I have brought these together into one more cohesive suggestion to better contextualise them, and I have tried to expand on different areas and reasoning for all of it.
Possible Positives of the suggestion (At least 2):
Containment Maintenance
For this, the basic idea of containment maintenance has already been suggested, accepted, planned and replanned in the past. Here, I'm trying to bring together actual details for how I believe it should look, rather than just a base, vague idea of a rework.Firstly, I don't think the autobreach and hack breach system is working very well as-is. It doesn't mesh well with RP that SCPs just magically breach without explanation every couple of hours, and the way you manually breach things is too simple to allow itself to be balanced particularly well. SCPs should breach for a reason, and a lack of maintenance should cause breaches, while there should be the opportunity to prevent breaches by doing that, rather than having absolutely no control over it. Replacing the breach queue like this should make this more fair and more interactive for both the Foundation trying to stop them from breaching, and the SCPs/CI/etc. trying to cause breaches. Causing a breach just being "hack a box, there's an alert for you starting it, and then when you succeed there's no warning" isn't great for trying to prevent it, as HCZ is just too huge, especially with low E-11 pop, to reliably find breach attempts and combat them well before a breach happens. It being just "hack one box" also is a bit too simple to provide any real opportunity to balance it well, though.
I feel that the replaced "breach queue" system, and the more immersive and expansive ability to tamper with things, provides a lot of opportunities both for the ones trying to tamper with things, and for the ones trying to stop them. CI actually have to be tactical - do they rush a hack and bring all of Foundation down on their back immediately but go fast and possibly move quickly, or do they take their time and risk being caught but also potentially cause a more unexpected and devastating breach? Do they avoid directly going for breaches but instead just work to make breaches happen quicker or be more drastic by removing any warning from them? And for the defenders, that works too - either CI rushes and you get more warning, or they don't and you might potentially catch them during patrols. There's tactics here, there's decisions to be made - it's not just "run down into HCZ, hack the meta SCPs and go as fast as possible".
And for the SCPs, they can see how their containment chamber is failing - the SRA starts to spin slower, they gain more control over their reality bending, they notice that nobody's been by for a bit longer than they normally have, and their containment chamber might fail soon. And more broadly, E&TS are coming by often, usually, which gives them both more opportunity to talk and do RP with others between research sessions, and potentially an opportunity to escape or cause havoc if the engineer slips up and accidentally goes somewhere they shouldn't or doesn't finish a repair in time before containment fails. They know that a CI DC tampered with their monitor earlier and if they breach now, nobody will know until it's too late and they're nearly out of HCZ.
For E&TS, this is great - they've got stuff to actively be doing, rather than being a purely reactive role that fixes things after a breach or raid. They need to actively maintain containment chambers and the like, otherwise things can breach. These are already pretty key roles (good luck defeating a code 2 if there's nobody to fix the airlock), but they're very situational. You also can't just get rid of them, because otherwise doors and the like that SCPs have to break to get out have no explanation for how they just magically fix themselves (the only reason I've still included a system for this is because at low pop, you need to suspend some aspects of RP because there simply are not enough people around for things to make sense - if you think about things like no ISD being around or D-block being completely empty too hard, you break RP immersion immediately, and this is just another aspect of that that just needs to happen otherwise everything falls apart the moment a D-class door faults the airlock). There's just so much more to actively be doing outside of just specific times of the day.
Overall, a system like described would just make things massively better for everyone.
E&TS Role Rework
I've always believed this is necessary, and the issues that it not being a thing have brought have continued to be exactly the same the entire time I've been on the server. The key issues being the abundance of people abusing these jobs to cause problems for everyone, the lack of RP opportunities available to E&TS roles, the lack of basic respect given to E&TS players because they're immediately assumed to be minges by so many other players due to the reputation of their role, and the lack of reasonable progression for these players.Firstly: the minge issue. On both servers, time and time again, for the entire time the server has existed, people abuse these roles to just fuck around and do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else's fun. Minges will always exist, but there are reasons they gravitate to these roles and manage to get away with so much on them. If you flag onto any other role, you've got people keeping an eye out for you. Your directors, your Executive Researchers, your Inspectors, your Consultants - whoever else, you've got oversight, you've got people that will notice if their subordinates are outright fucking around, and will notice if the same player keeps getting into issues over and over again. What does E&TS have? You flag onto the job and there's nobody around - you spawn in a tiny, empty room, you can go around a bunch of the site and do whatever, and there's nobody there to even notice. If you're planning to fuck around, this is heaven. The most resistance you can expect is from ISD, who are spread so wide that they aren't particularly going to notice if you've been fucking around all day on the job, because each time, it's a new person arresting you or telling you to not do that again - they don't even have someone to report you to, so nobody notices that you, specifically keep causing problems until you've been doing it for weeks and that is too late. You try this on a job like Medical Trainee and at least one of your department's CL4s is going to notice that you keep being arrested, or that they never see you anywhere you're supposed to be, despite being on the job for hours, and within a day, you've been job banned from medical. You keep it up, and they might get staff involved as they have the insight to realise you fit the pattern of NITRP. E&TS? There's Site Administration. That's it. The same group that is also responsible for pretty much everything, on a grand scale, and do not have the time or patience, and often not the interest, to be dealing with a bunch of random minges. They have too broad a focus to notice these things, too much else going on, and quite frankly, they didn't sign up to micromanage E&TS - so they don't. And noone else does, either. And so the problem continues. You plan to minge? Go on an E&TS job, you get a CL2, a plausible reason to be just about anywhere on site, and nothing to stop you from repeatedly being an issue.
And that's just the side of things for people who set out to cause problems. What about the ones that just genuinely want to play those roles, but don't know how? They stay that way - there's nobody there giving them guidance (most of the time you can't even get people to answer basic questions on comms), and there doesn't seem to be much to do. You try and try, and you find out that wow, it really is just fixing some doors every few hours, and that's it. You want to engage in RP, but what is there to do? There's no operations you can join in on to make a start, there's nobody you can ask for ideas, most people on other jobs and departments seem very disinterested in even talking to you, so what are you supposed to do? You've got two options: you give up (and many people do, very quickly), or you keep trying. But you've got no guidance, you've got no experience to have a good plan or ideas for roleplay, and well, fuck, there's nothing else happening - might as well give it a go and try and make your own way. So you try. And you try. And you keep trying. At no point does anyone help you out or correct your mistakes or properly explain things to you, you either continue doing whatever you feel like doing, without any real support, or you get stopped by ISD. They've seen it all before, you minges, and they don't want to hear anything, and certainly don't want to engage you in RP. You're just a minge, just doing whatever you want, so you're going into jail for 30 minutes. And now you've still not gotten any better guidance, and you're now annoyed by ISD - and you were already just making everything up as you were going along, so why not fuck with them? And with everyone else that refuses to engage in RP with you? And everyone else. Fuck it, do whatever you want, because there were never any rails for the train to follow, and there's nobody really stopping you.
And for the few that don't just go completely off the rails, what is there? You can engage with Site Administration sometimes, and maybe someone, after literal years of being here, recognises your name and goes "yeah, lets involve them in this bit of roleplay" now and then. But that's it - you can try and push your own roleplay, but you've got no real backing, and are still entirely just at the whims of just about every other player, so whether it goes anywhere is a dice roll. Every single time. You might try and suggest "I don't think this is working, maybe we could change things", and the response from so many people, even experienced CN players, is generally "but those are the minge roles, people either minge on them or flag on quickly to do a repair - they're not real RP roles, that's not a real department, they're not RP roles - but also, if you want RP, just do RP". And so nothing ever changes, because those are problem roles - if you add another role that's just another problem. And why should Content Team, or SL, or IC leadership, or anyone else, spend any time on them - they're a problem, they've always been a problem, they'll always be a problem, and we're not considering changing that. No fixes, only problems.
All of these issues are interlinked - people minge because there's no oversight, the roles have a terrible reputation because there's so many minges, there's no RP opportunities because there's nobody (and nothing) to provide them and so many people refuse to engage with them because of their terrible reputation, and nobody's interested in really fixing that - or at least, nobody is that actually has any real ability to do anything about it. Some members of Site Administration might come along now and then that really do try, and sometimes, for a glorious moment, things actually get a bit better, because there's opportunities and interaction and RP and oversight and then someone else gets in charge and they don't care or actively want to tear that down. There needs to be an actual, functional change to these roles, otherwise they're going to remain as they are and they're going to remain a source of problems for everybody, even if those problems are so normalised that people don't even think they need to be solved or can be solved anymore.
So that's where the Director role comes in. A two-slot position, like any other director role, with the intention of solving so many of these issues at the source. There's active minges - there's two people actively keeping an eye out, listening to people's complaints, paying attention to what their subordinates are doing, and then acting on it, whether that's just talking to them, job banning them, or even referring them to staff if they're just here to cause problems and aren't doing anything to change. There's nothing for E&TS players to do - there's two people coming up with new ideas, new operations, providing new opportunities for their department to engage in, working with other departments to provide better opportunities for everyone, and actively listening to their department and providing things that the players want to do. The department has a terrible reputation, and it's cutting down RP opportunities between the department and other players - there's two people actively working to fix the problems at the source, and to rebuild the department's reputation and build new relationships. There's nobody listening to people's problems, both within and with the department - there's two people actively wanting to improve things, looking for problems and solving them, listening to people's complaints and providing them with solutions.
And finally, the progression just makes no sense, you start at Engineer, and then you try IT Tech, but there's nothing to do on that job with a tool that does nothing and access to basically none of the site, and you get to Tech Expert, but then what? But now, IT Tech isn't just worse than Engineer in every way - you've got just a bit more to do, you've got access to quite a bit more of the site - at least the corridors - and you can get into more offices and the like to fix terminals, interact with people, do RP - even just the clearance boost gives you access to so much more of the site and just so many more people to actively roleplay with. And then, gradually, you can move to Senior Engineer - that sounds interesting - and you've got access to even more. You can get into SCP chambers and do roleplay around them, you can do roleplay with other CL3s that involves info on their level - you want to get involved with ISD and help them with some technical RP for a court case, you've got it, you can actually even know anything at all about court cases and the like, there's so much info and places and people you can involve in RP. And, as always, there's that final step to strive for, if you're feeling it.
Technician Tablet
Speaking of IT Technician having nothing to do - do you know what they can do? They've got the Technician Tool. What does that do? It lets you click on broken SCiPNet terminals, wait a few seconds, and it's fixed. How often do you, on any role, actually interact with terminals? I'd bet that for most people, that answer is literally never. And that's all the role does - fix terminals, if you can get to them, and with CL1, you'd need someone to invite you into their area to fix their terminal, and who does that? Not very many, I can assure you - if people find that their terminal is broken when they need to use it, they just go to a different room nearby and use that. Most of the time they won't even try to get a technician to fix it, and certainly not very hard. So technicians get to fix a terminal about once per hour. And that's it. It's not even interesting to do - literally just click and wait without looking away. The most interesting part of it is that extremely rarely, a terminal will get trapped with a cognitohazard, which is a bit more subtle than the bright blue screens of most of the (very few) broken terminals you find.The Technician Tablet is meant to fix all of this and more. More interesting fixes? They're interactive - you actually get to have an idea of how you're fixing the issue, and you get to press more than one button. Sometimes the problem is different, sometimes you get to see interesting logs, sometimes you're even being asked to check the logs and get involved in RP about it - oh, cool, this keypad was hacked five minutes ago, and it looks like it might have been this GSD Guard that did it, here's the info, Agent. More to do? You've got a bit of variation in what needs to be done, you've got logs to interact with, you've got RP you can do around it, you've got servers and a few other bits you can also interact with. For the IT Technician, it's not massive, but it's miles better than what it currently has, especially with the previously suggested clearance bump.
For other roles, it's even better. You want to check on a containment chamber? Right now, it's just poke your head in (if you can even open the door) and see if any doors are broken or the containment box says "Failure" on the side - and half the time, you can't even close the doors behind you because they're CL3 and nobody in your entire department is, so I guess a few of the 076 doors are just staying open for the rest of this server restart. With this and the containment maintenance? Check on the CMS status, see if there's any faults, reboot a Scranton Reality Anchor that shut down because of a fault, peruse some logs and now and then see something interesting - someone seems to have hacked this CMS about five minutes ago, there might be CI around or something. Even without the containment maintenance update, you get to see what caused a breach, when a breach last happened, whether there were any recent hacking attempts on this one SCP, or whether those alerts E-11 got were somewhere else.
This tablet would make E&TS work so much more interesting and so much more RP-friendly. How did you fix the terminal by standing next to it with a wrench? Fuck knows - make some bullshit up that might mesh with reality or might not. How did you fix it with the tablet? I've connected to it, and it looks like someone was tampering with it about 10 minutes ago and triggered a fault, so I've just rebooted it, you might want to look for who's been snooping in your office. I can check the keypad for you - oh, it looks like an E-11 CPL James entered here around that time. There'd be so much more to do and see and do RP around.
Prop Placer Rework
This is essentially a bit of future-proofing. It's my understanding that at the moment, adding a prop placer tool to a job requires a small amount of dev work for every single change. I think it would be very possible to make a lot of that configurable by SL and the like so that adding them to different jobs or tweaking how many props can be placed or whatever can just be done quickly in-game in VJE or whatever. Given I'm also asking that a few jobs get these, I think making SL's work easier in the future for this would mean they have more flexibility to try things out and fix any issues like a job not having enough props or too many props or wanting a new prop. I believe the reality bending SWEP has something like this, but I'm not at all familiar with how any of that works.Possible Negatives of the suggestion:
- For a lot of this, this is quite a bit of dev work. No reason to deny it, but it would probably end up on the backlog for a while if there's no devs currently interested in picking it up.
- There are some balancing considerations to think on here regarding timing of certain things and other specifics - I'll leave that in the capable hands of Content Team, but I've tried to design the overall features to allow good balancing, while leaving the specifics of timing and who gets what alert and when and the like to CT to tweak as necessary. It's a bit more work for CT, but I think everything here is worth it.
- "The job changes might not fix anything". You're absolutely right - I think I've laid out pretty well why I believe it will massively improve things, but there's always the chance that, given this hasn't been done at all before, that it might simply fail to bring about the change that I think it will. I do think, however, that it would be possible to at least trial some of these changes, given they can all be done by SL without dev work, and I don't believe a trial version of this would take an unreasonable amount time to set up - it could easily be done over a weekend, if that (correct me if I'm wrong). At worst, this would waste a couple of hours of an SL member's time and it'd be reverted, but at best it could solve so many problems. It wouldn't be overnight, and it wouldn't solve everything, but I truly believe it would help a lot with a lot of issues. Regardless of how it might go, I think we could learn a lot just from trialling it for about a month, and that could inform both CT's decisions going forward (both around E&TS and job changes and the like in general), and any future suggestions around this sort of thing that I or anyone else might make - there'd be no point suggesting an E&TS job rework again that's the same as a previous one that we've actually tried and know didn't work.
Based on the Positives & Negatives, why should this suggestion be accepted:
There's a lot here, and I've spoken at length in previous sections about why I think it should be done. But at the end of the day, I think it should be done because I think it would open up a lot of fun opportunities across the servers, for everyone, regardless of whether these are roles they play, because roleplay is about interaction, and changing one thing like this improves things for everyone.
It might be that huge parts of this are rejected by CT or the community at large, but I'd suggest (ha) thinking about the individual points and how maybe you might like one part, hate another, and not care about another - give your opinions on the different parts, and maybe, regardless of whether this whole suggestion is accepted, something good could come from it.
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