Current timeline

[Archer]

Hi. I'm not a native speaker, so this might be confusing. 

 

The more I've spent on the server, the more opportunities I've had to delve into the less known sources of lore in the SST universe, such as the comics, the CGI show (Roughnecks) and the tabletop RPG based upon the show, the rulebooks of which remain my go-to when it comes to all things lore related - and the more I began to dislike the turns the server canon takes, including the branch-off from the main series. I've been trying to imagine what would happen if our current timeline'd come to a conclusion, and we'd start anew, from the events predating the first movie, then gradually running our story intertwined with it, and take it further on. Personally I see little use in continuing this timeline, because I think that at this point we're repeating ourselves, and some elements of the story make little sense in the context of the big picture. Example - if the war's fought for 30 years, how come we don't have better guns, armor, tanks? How come the ecomony of the Federation didn't collapse, and how come it still lives and has public support if it has to fight a war with bugs, skinnies, and then seemingly millions strong separatists - for years to no end, and then adding the progenitors ontop of that? The list goes on. I believe that by starting a new timeline we'll be able to return back to the roots - the core of SST, bugs and skinnies versus humans. It'd eliminate the need in new weapons up until a certain point in the story, and (hopefully) will offer a little sense of progression (albeit it'd essentially be a rehash) and continuity, aswell as immersion (achieved by correlating the events with the movies) to the story. 

 

Naturally, there'll be problems: for one, it'd mean that all your characters will effectively be PK'd and you'll have to make a new one. To some, it hurts losing a character, but then again what's the difference between a PK in this situation, and rolling a 1 and dying a few days later? After all, all characters are going to die or otherwise be removed from the server's story at one point. I myself have a few characters I'd like to keep, so I'm no stranger to this problem. .net has always prided the continuity of its story, aswell, and I like and respect that - but most people here are likely to not care much about who Sky Marshal Hudson was and what'd he do on the server 10 years ago. 

 

Another problem I see is keeping things fresh. Right now, if the wipe'd come to pass, we'd have two movies and a few issues of comics inbetween to go off of. I imagine that'll last us half a year, maybe a year, but I'm not too sure myself what'll happen afterwards. I do hope that the admins'll work out a solution by then, without letting the story branch off again, because I have none at the moment. 

 

Finally, while I myself am not too bothered by this, I'm not sure how others would take having to roleplay knowing little about the bugs. Stuff like tankers, fireflies, anything outside of a normal warrior, hopper, plasma and a chariot bug would be unknown to SICON - at first. GnT (or FFRL, if you want), would be tasked with analyzing those types of bugs - something it currently has no ability to do, because the war's been going for 30 years and SICON already knows most of what it needs to combat the arachnids. The Marauders'd have to go temporarily - if we're sticking to the first movie, until first Marauders'd appear later on, or the faction'd have to use the Ape marauders (you could see them on my events, currently deemed too outdated to be used by the MI - courtesy of a compromise between myself, Mullberries and Jester) and Chickenhawk suits, which are a bit hard to use OOCly. Same for the APCs and tanks - but that, again, is based on what source we would be sticking to the closest. 

 

That's about all I can write off the top of my head. Discuss, put your thoughts down below, etc.

@Xalphox

TLDR - destroy the child, corrupt them all, end the current storyline, start a new one and try to stick to the movie(s) the best we can. 

[El Excellente]

no

[Spooks]

the solution to removing this staleness you're talking about is to consolidate the lore and run missions pertaining to it in the form of questlines. people like jester, grimm (edited because the welshie blackmailed me) orwell, and SW have done shit like this in the past and it breathed genuine life into the server. an example would be how orwell once off handedly mentioned to me a strain of bugs that evolved to deal with snow and that was genuinely interesting to me. instead of wiping things because it means you can use source material, you have to write your own and align it with the server.

 

on the other hand, even if you DO reset the lore and so on, stick with the source materials, etc, it'll have the same issue. just because people have to RP everything all over again (learning how the bugs work, etc,) doesn't mean they won't already be mentally used to it. it'll be boring. it's like when you see the old NCO types make new characters, they struggle to play rookies (some of them do, at the least.) in other words, this would only be a temporary measure.

[OpTiCFaZeSoCkzZz]

With us being in the middle of the Progenitor campaign it would be really underwhelming to cut it off. On top of that, the amount of players who have characters they want to keep, ranks they worked to get to and all of the likes. IC relations, characters people have been working hard on and building up for months, some even years. Of course if every single player was like "Yeah sure let's do that." Then who knows, it'd be in the XAs court. I'd personally not be too fond of the change. Just my piece on it. 

[OpTiCFaZeSoCkzZz]

3 minutes ago, Tony said:

orwell once off handedly mentioned to me a strain of bugs that evolved to deal with snow and that was genuinely interesting to me.

Not sure if he was referring specifically to the storyline I was doing on a planet, but I'm running something along those lines, there's some stuff on the Forums of the bugs being experimented on and all fo that. Probably gonna pick that storyline back up soon. 

 

[Spooks]

maybe, maybe not. regardless, questlines (imo) should be the main form of how the server feels lively, campaigns being the result of questlines and the likes. sw was once doing an operation called 'omnicron' and it was the last time i ever really enjoyed bugs in the server. he'd introduced decoy/worker bugs (memory is failing me here) and the drop was stressful. some of the stuff the MI mentioned in the debrief was even mentioned in the wiki page for the operation, which made the whole experience feel even more rewarding.

[Archer]

not necessarily has to be wiped right now, can be wrapped up first @OpTiCFaZeSoCkzZz

[OpTiCFaZeSoCkzZz]

Just now, Archer said:

not necessarily has to be wiped right now, can be wrapped up first @OpTiCFaZeSoCkzZz

True. Suppose it would be up to the playerbase as a whole in the end. 

[Spooks]

yeah but imagine doing that. 'okay kids we finished the big bad campaign and saved earth, now we're gonna WIPE the server.' a timeskip would be better.

[Archer]

and then what? it doesn't solve the problem, the bugs magically died? we keep fighting bugs with the same weapons? or we get new stuff but that will not be SST anymore. invent another enemy from the outside? 

it's the rock and a hard place. 

[Spooks]

you can do loads of shit. the bugs get smarter. there's a new separatist faction on the rise. the skinnies have finally emerged. (nobody to my knowledge has done anything big with skinnies, let alone done them properly.)

[Archer]

the bugs are smart, it's the admins that make them dumb. a new separatist faction, how many have we seen already? don't you think that by that point any and all dissidence will be stomped on by the civillians, come to look at it from the IC standpoint? who's going to have a valid programme to rally the people behind to rebel against those that had just saved them from a civil war and, potentially, progenitors? it'll look like making a faction for the sake of making it, and without a reason to rebel, those separatists will be just another NPC to kill. skinnies had a big thing when tophet was invaded. 

[Yuki || 日本語の悩み]

6 minutes ago, Archer said:

the bugs are smart, it's the admins that make them dumb. a new separatist faction, how many have we seen already? don't you think that by that point any and all dissidence will be stomped on by the civillians, come to look at it from the IC standpoint? who's going to have a valid programme to rally the people behind to rebel against those that had just saved them from a civil war and, potentially, progenitors? it'll look like making a faction for the sake of making it, and without a reason to rebel, those separatists will be just another NPC to kill. skinnies had a big thing when tophet was invaded. 

The biggest issue with Sep' factions is that they're just made for a quick event. The only two admins who made proper sep' factions was Grimm with D99, which was just a Sub-Faction of a Faction. And then Bospy's Red Faction. Sure, they may be a little weird to some, but they felt like they had a genuine motive behind their fighting. They both had some morals and beliefs, as well as a fighting style.

 

 The admins just need to be creative with their events and just stop running them with little to no thought put behind it. But I'm not saying they shouldn't just stop mindless events, as then we would be waiting like 7 hours for an event. But a bug drop here and there would be fine, maybe alongside some passive-ish events. 

 

Really, Sep' factions just need some more depth to them to make them enjoyable to people. Sure, the newer players pry don't care about the story, lore, etc and just want to shoot the shit, but only catering to that audience breaks up the older players who might like the story behind the sep faction, their motive, moral choices, etc. They need to be believable. 

 

Spoiler

And tbh, Skinnies currently have been made rather interesting by Orwell, and I'd like Orwell to do most Skinny events since he seems to know how they work.

 

[Spooks]

if it wasnt clear, nothing big has happened in this iteration regarding skinnies, unless i seriously missed something. separatists will always have a reason to exist.

and i never said bugs WERENT smart. i implied they can still get better. there's plenty of unexplored castes and shit.

[Archer]

infiltrators or tunnelers or mantis bugs, i view that as going too far from the normal sst

in this iteration, nothing major related to skinnies has happened, i got what you meant the first time

no, they won't - only for the sake of having human npcs to shoot 

[cat danny 25]

I personally find that the progenitors make the server feel like it's not sst anymore, but something else. Kind of like what Force Awakens and Last Jedi did to Star Wars. Same universe, but it's just not the same.

 

I'd advocate for a 'bring back Earth and move to a not so fucked up period'. Any character from Earth can never really go back there because the entire planet was glassed by progs, and won't be rebuilt in our characters lifetimes. There's really nothing to look forward to if the server were to end or a player retires a character.

[Spooks]

4 minutes ago, Archer said:

no, they won't - only for the sake of having human npcs to shoot 

sure they will. why are a bunch of farmers in the outer colonies going to give a shit about the fed. separatism doesn't always exist in the form of 'fuck the fed, we kill all federal dogs'

[Fitz]

Yes please. If it weren't for the RP on FaW being pretty terrible, I would much rather play there. That's why people play FaW, because it's actually SSTRP. If we can have that plus the better standard of RP, I don't see why anyone would stay on FaW besides possibly to keep some rank they got in two days that makes them feel special. 

 

I feel like I've a pretty interesting sep movement on Elixaeberna that I've put quite a bit of effort into, but because I'm not an admin it's always hard to get someone to actually sponsor my shit so the points between my pre-written events which are ready to go are really long, so nobody remembers them as easily. If you'd like to sponsor me, please, I'll take anyone at this point. I'll send you the few google docs I've written.

 

But yeah I pretty much agree, and people keep talking about how Grimm and a few other people made all these great campaigns, but they're gone now because it isn't SSTRP anymore, lol. Orwell and sw remain, but those are the only two I can think of, and sw doesn't often do events so it's pretty much just Orwell who I can rely on to make a decent campaign. 

[Rook]

27 minutes ago, cat danny 25 said:

I personally find that the progenitors make the server feel like it's not sst anymore, but something else. Kind of like what Force Awakens and Last Jedi did to Star Wars. Same universe, but it's just not the same.

 

I'd advocate for a 'bring back Earth and move to a not so fucked up period'. Any character from Earth can never really go back there because the entire planet was glassed by progs, and won't be rebuilt in our characters lifetimes. There's really nothing to look forward to if the server were to end or a player retires a character.

Planet wasn't glassed. Just occupied by the progs so they could stroggify the peeps for their own war. 

[Silly goose]

SST isn't a complicated thing. I think Tony's got it by the nuts. People don't really play because of arachnids or skinnies or progenitors. They play for the stories that come from the MI clashing against them. When admins run little event chains, or huge campaigns, they become a wellspring of those stories. 

 

Purging the server's timeline so far and reverting to before the films would be, if nothing else, a mistake in purely management terms. A lot of the draw of SST is nostalgia. People come here to revisit old characters all the time. Putting a full stop in that would kill a lot of interest in the server.

 

I think there is a problem (stagnancy has always been the main threat to a server like this one), but Tony's solution of admin-run plots and more connected events is a far better one than just wiping the slate clean.

 

My advice would be to put the more story-focused admins in a room and have them hash out a plot based around the MI being tasked to save a crucial system seeing unusual activity - something that could start at a simmer and build to full mobilisation. That sort of thing offers plenty of continuity for people to sink their teeth into. Have specific areas pop up routinely. Have recurring event characters - even enemies (without being huge TV broadcasting psychopaths for once please).  That sort of plot could last anything up to a month and end with a campaign which people genuinely felt passionate about.

 

 

Edit: A note on things feeling like SST: that's 100% atmosphere. Part of that is the responsibility of the players. Some of it is the responsibility of the event-runners. Wiping the slate clean doesn't get you a fresh atmosphere, it just means the old one has to build up again. If you want to change that, address it directly.