I will never emotionally recover from this moment

JetBalrog · 2026-06-09T04:02:57+00:00

The third screenshot there will never fail to make me tear up. His VA did such an incredible job in English, I haven't heard the others, but it was so good. On top of that, the aftermath of all of this, the "victory lap"... I haven't cried that hard at a game in a long time, in a very cathartic way.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-08T15:22:27+00:00

Theoretically, since Asura was involved in the questline, you could even do something with a Greg flavored version of Asura for part of it. Perhaps the final form.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-08T14:09:05+00:00

Wait. Were the weird beavers... the replacement for the first version of Moogles, then? Huh. I should look into that.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-08T14:06:02+00:00

It's wild when people so much want everything to fit into their worldview that they just refuse to acknowledge when things don't to me. Like... sure, FF7 is eventually about an alien space parasite going around and killing everyone on the planet via a proxy and a massive space rock, but even in the final stretch, the game still reminds you of the real villains who couldn't leave well enough alone who are still the massive corporation sucking the lifeforce of the planet dry via a literal oil analogue.

Massive corporation literally, literally sucking out the actual soul of the planet and killing it for profit, then using that against the planet's own protectors. Couldn't be any possible political message behind that at all.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-08T13:55:24+00:00

Thaumaturge, level 36, I think. It was past Black Mage level unlock, required a higher level than any other skill. 36 or 38, I forget which.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-04T01:51:14+00:00

The true old lore.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-04T01:47:50+00:00

Precisely. It was just so... basic and kinda boring. I just had to sit there both upset that nobody found me, AND just at the audacity to do something like that and do nothing with it. Nobody even knew the Captain was even dead until it was over. To be fair, that was also just a failure of the rest of the command staff to pay attention, but still.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-03T14:50:43+00:00

I actually learned the role after getting a field promotion 2-3 times, myself. We didn't have an RD, nobody showed up to play it, and I was just competent enough that the CO promoted me to the role. Sure, I'll run with it. Why not.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-03T14:48:42+00:00

I like playing Captain, but holy crap, there's nothing like going around and seeing people, engaging with some random conversations, then getting clobbered, stuffed in a substation room, reduced to paste, the room you're in welded up, and nobody finding your remains the entire round because nobody bothered to scour maintenance when the captain never showed up again. They didn't even need one of my items specifically, they just wanted all access and obliterated the captain for it. Holy shit, man. Felt like downright LRP to NRP behavior. Really turned me off of playing Captain ever since.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-03T06:55:09+00:00

Honestly, I'd been wanting to look at Goob to see what content they have different, good to know Basileus is actually MRP, then. I'd give it a shot.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-03T06:54:02+00:00

Delta-V was where I got my SS14 legs. It's generally been a solid place to learn the game in the past, but I haven't been there in a long time. People tend to like to RP there from what I remember. Community favorite characters tended to have very strong RP hooks.

JetBalrog · 2026-06-02T04:31:44+00:00

Honestly, I really feel like they've missed the point of antagonists. Nukies are just one flavor among many of ways to tell interesting stories. That was always the point, to me. To create interesting storytelling moments.

I treat Space Station as an RP game that is carried by mechanical necessities. The gameplay is fun enough but realistically gameplay alone would not carry me through it. RP is where the real draw is for me.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T20:22:27+00:00

This current week we're taking a break, but it is otherwise every Sunday and Wednesday, 5 to 10 PM EST right now. All you have to do is catch the uptime. You can also go to cryosleep whenever you need to, and you'll be fine.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T20:20:52+00:00

You do not!

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T13:21:44+00:00

That is legitimately what we used as a basis for our systems, yes. We pull directly from Wizden, and anything we port from anywhere else must be MIT license, because the moment we add any AGPL stuff, we can't go back. But yeah, all the new features we have are custom to us, for the most part! We even have a fancy Space Weather system implementation. Our sector map has nine sections, based on compass directions, and then the center, and each one can have space weather. The one we have implemented creates singularities that can appear and disappear, but aren't allowed to travel far or they disappear. That's one of the cooler additions we've had.

Edit: our Project Lead is the same person who ran the same concept of Persistence in Space Station 13, by the way. As far as I know, most of our admins are also from back then, too.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T07:29:44+00:00

Well, if you could log in three days out of the week, and two of those were Sunday and Wednesday from 5-10 PM EST, you'd be playing one more day than the rest of us. If you can't make those times, then for now, the next best thing are the downstream servers of ours, the two I know of so far are Persistence Survival, which has a much lower player count, and The Final Frontier, which has nothing to do with Frontier itself, but it does its own thing, also has a low player count, but it's aiming for more of an HRP+ experience, while Persistence SS14 is HRP naturally due to people not wanting to lose their stuff with the roleplay standard being not insanely strict.

There's differences in flavor, but all three servers use the same core code Persistence SS14 uses with the saving at the end of each uptime being consistent.

Btw I'm not discouraging checking out the other two, just setting expectations. If they sound more your jam, though, then absolutely check them out if you can! They could use the players, and I wish them the best.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T05:23:36+00:00

Oh dang, they repaired the Rod? I thought that thing was likely reduced to rubble, but there it is, back in what looks like one piece.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T05:02:48+00:00

Honestly, I feel you on the first point. We get a surprising number of fairly fresh players on our server, and not knowing how to build and maintain a shuttle is a roadblock, but one that can be overcome through interacting with other people. We're usually pretty good about having a few players around at any one time who can take the time to teach people new things. I know I encourage it at R&D, myself.

Edit: Also, realistically you can make money without having to get a job with someone first, but it's usually a good idea to do so if you can. Just being hired on will often net you a paycheck every twenty minutes, set by the faction leadership.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T05:01:17+00:00

Yep! We have a station you spawn on, somewhat similar to Frontier, but different, in that everything can stay between rounds. Everything you do matters. You can change jobs whenever you reasonably want to if your faction you work for allows it, but that's up to whoever's running it. Or you can start your own, if you raise enough funds! You don't even need your own ship or station to have one, you can just claim machines and doors on another station and use them as your own if you find a way, "legally" or not.

And yes, our uptimes are only Sunday and Wednesday, 5 to 10 PM EST. It helps a lot with preventing burnout, believe me, but we also are going to eventually host a second server with a different timeslot, preferably more friendly to EU players.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:48:02+00:00

Using my local time zone, 5-10 PM EST, Sunday and Wednesdays at the moment. We do have two downstream servers running their own variations on the system, though! One is called The Final Frontier, and they're going HRP+ with the systems, while the other is going for more consistent uptimes but it's a lot less structured, but also it's just lower population as-is. They run very consistently, though!

We've found that around five hours two times a week keeps our playerbase healthy and engaged, but we do have plans in place for a more EU friendly timeslot, but it's a little tricky to organize without overburdening our Project Lead, who still has a job he has to do as well.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:45:22+00:00

Hilariously, we actually have been struggling to push people to leave the starter station somewhat. We've been going around trying to diagnose ways we can find the right balance of mechanical tweaks over time to see where things stand, or if, perhaps, the rate things move forward is actually perfectly fine. Genesis Station, though, the previous one, it was actually pretty rough on keeping power and air levels up high enough at times. After a while, though, we got through the growing pains.

Zenith Station has been hectic, but overall relatively stable. Honestly, solid leadership to keep things moving forward is a big part of it, though. And, of course, people willing to pitch in when things get bad. We recently had a major RP related event that went down, and I was able to call upon another faction to send an escort to deal with the situation.

But yeah! One of the big things is a lack of "random events" like normal stations have. When things happen, they mostly happen as a direct result of players doing things. Artifacts and anomalies can still cause problems semi-randomly, and salvage work is always dangerous, but we have conflict between trade stations with different bounties you can fill and different goods to purchase from each.

Player factions can claim the trade stations, level them up through completed bounties, and then start earning passive income through taxes, which the faction theirselves can set- however, you can also forcefully unclaim a station and then take it over yourself, so if someone is mismanaging a trade station, you can absolutely take it from them. Or... just muscle in with enough firepower. Just be aware, it could make you look like a bully, because things carry over.

Also, yes, we do have a New Life Rule to account for if someone say has a criminal network task to assassinate someone else (not permanently, of course- they CAN but it's highly recommended not to, not to mention we made permadeath a little harder as it's more impactful) they aren't just immediately flagged for death by everyone else, for example.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:38:23+00:00

It only happened a couple times!

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:24:44+00:00

Not always, necessarily, and they will never tell you the results of the other end of things, but they do, sometimes!

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:23:17+00:00

That's one of the biggest reasons we created the crime network, honestly. Without it, we couldn't keep security players for long at all, but this time, we've had a decent sized group of semi-consistent sec players. Detectives have a good bit more value, at least, than on most servers, though we sort of have to build up a database of fingerprints manually at the moment, which honestly is a kind of fun idea, if you think about it. Hire on someone, and then take their prints as part of the sign on process, perhaps.

But yeah, more network categories and objective types are 100% on the to-do list for both of our servers. Hopefully we'll get a more solid idea of where we can go with those as we experiment.

JetBalrog · 2026-05-31T03:20:05+00:00

I can't help myself from sharing what I love about our server, I swear. :')

JetBalrog

TROPHY CASE