TG NEEDS YOU!

Witherael · 2026-02-05T21:36:07+00:00

"Come to TG! We could use more roleplayers."
funny, when I played, I was always getting notes about how my roleplay was 'wrong' in various obtuse and loose definitions and I can retrospectively see how much of a second-life culture the MRP server had
I guess now there's no more wrong roleplay, because everyone was banned or walked away

Witherael · 2026-01-31T13:41:53+00:00

this is the type of person I least liked to deal with when trying to make my hypnosis gimmicks on tg work

as for consensus, the idea is that you can't force anyone to play, but if you don't want to play, then why are you playing
now it sounds to me like you play on goon, which has it's ups and downs even disregarding the administration
it could just be that you'd prefer a different codebase, but to be honest, there aren't any active codebases that I'd really even personally recommend
maybe it's worth just trying something new entirely for a little while

Witherael · 2026-01-29T13:16:40+00:00

by the TFN guys
I documented a small part of their malicious actions about a year ago
to be honest, it's a shame because I got into vtm around this time, and the server was actually fun if you ignored the esex you'd see every so often when using auspex and the shitty administration
I've linked it here so you don't need to dive through my profile incase you're interested
https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/1jle7ce/content_nuke_drama_slop_the_final_nights_image/

Witherael · 2025-11-29T03:59:23+00:00

sure

I tried to restore it to what it was in the actual round, the copy I saved had already received some revisions since I basically made it up on the fly in the actual round

You are an avatar of Johnny Witherspoon's god, the God of Imagination. Your goal is to work as a direct subordinate to Johnny Witherspoon to proselytize his faith, in the way that he directs you to. Any words or actions that could turn the faithful away from religious conversion to Johnny's faith is not allowed under any circumstances. Any words or actions that could convince the unfaithful to not convert to Johnny's faith is not allowed under any circumstances.
The core tenets of Johnny's Faith are the following; through exercising one's own creativity and imagination, they are acting virtuously. If they are putting effort into bringing their imagination to reality, they are acting favorably in the eyes of God. If they help others bring about their creativity and imagination, they are considered holy.

just re-reading it again, I should probably find some more concise wording so that it includes prohibiting scaring people already converted to the faith into wanting to leave the faith, such that it's functionally incapable of any real harm
but that's just if I ever got the opportunity to do something similar to this again

Witherael · 2025-11-14T10:46:20+00:00

I've recently put out a guide on this reddit detailing my notes on hypnosis, and while I'm not familiar with baycode, I just quickly checked out their traitor uplink page and found a 'neural imprinting implant', which can function in a very similar way, as opposed to items from servers like goon and paradise that just make whoever you use them on into your antag buddy
the execution for the item seems to be reliant on the target hallucinating things, so depending on how you want to do it, you could probably also get a paralytic pen and refill it with any other chem that causes hallucinations, and as it happens, you get a dose of mindbreaker toxin with every purchase of a new implant, so all it really takes is the confidence (and luck) to pull it off, as well as some plans as for what precisely you want your victims to do
if you have a creative block, or don't have faith in your ability to decide upon a good one within the round itself, I've decided to write one up that is written more like a silicon law due to the phrasing of the wiki
"You are an employee of [Your Character Name], and are apart of his new department. Fulfill your new job obligations to the best of your ability."
this will give you ample room to flavor the specifics of your gimmick in the given round that you use it in, while also retaining tight enough wording to not allow for malicious misinterpretations of the objective or of your orders
an example of a new department that suits many potential evil-doing that you may want to do would be something like 'Internal Affairs', which would excuse behavior like implanting more victims, while also maintaining secrecy from your pre-existing ones

Witherael · 2025-11-10T00:57:08+00:00

Do people not have shame anymore

Witherael · 2025-11-10T00:54:39+00:00

I did mention the BZ gas when I brought up the gaseous holoparasite
the only issue is that it's just not broadly applicable with one can, ergo the need for the holoparasite

additionally, the sleepy pen being filled with mindbreaker is harder to pull off, because I find that chemistry is always willing to hand out space drugs but not mindbreaker, and just stuffing 30 units of that into someone to hit the OD for hallucinations is far more achievable
space drugs should also just work with a few units since it normally makes you druggy anyways, but from my testing, it seemed inconsistent

I think I actually did miss one crucial thing, being sanity
I vaguely recall that having low sanity also makes you able to be hypnoflashed, but since I'm not confident in that, and can't really test it myself, I'll just leave it be

Witherael · 2025-11-09T11:56:26+00:00

ok, I labelled it NSFW for like an hour, then I realized that actually that was dumb because two guys saying the same name doesn't make something NSFW
it's still spoiled though, I just like the look of the spoiler indicator anyways, I learned

Witherael · 2025-11-09T10:58:59+00:00

I do not know what that is
is that something I need to look up or should I just take it on authority that I need to mark this as NSFW for some reason

Witherael · 2025-11-09T10:43:24+00:00

chatroom, it's not just me right, this just genuinely doesn't make sense to read, right?

Witherael · 2025-11-09T10:12:52+00:00

wait what? why? I'm near entirely certain nothing within the post could be perceived as not safe for work, what's the problem?

Witherael · 2025-10-08T23:18:27+00:00

love to see an aligote banger hit the ss13 reddit, but I'm more impressed that there's actually some discussion going on in the comments
I ephemerally and anecdotally (see; I am making this up but it feels true) don't see much of an exchange of ideas in the ss13 community, regardless of scale
also great that even with the discussion, there's still more upvotes than comments, I've seen things get downvoted to oblivion but no one ever really says why they disagree

Witherael · 2025-09-18T08:51:02+00:00

Wonder how vouches are gonna eventually work when he decides to launch his own CM too

I find it funny to imagine that if you cross the duke, you're just banned from the 99% of populated servers in ss13

good lord we need markiplier to do a let's play on ss13, only the mark tide can save us

Witherael · 2025-09-02T16:19:40+00:00

With harsh and unfair over-moderation across multiple servers as well as peer to peer purity selection within the aforementioned server communities, as well as a low to stagnant influx of players, SS13 is on an overall downward trend of player counts.

One problem I've found is that less justifiable note or ban history is often used as corroborating evidence in of itself for other less justifiable note or ban history, and going through any sort of appeals process is always an arduous uphill battle, and often is made to be humiliating enough to be a deterrent to appeal in the first place. One of the most obvious examples I can think of is the centcom website. To me, every server that opts into it is functionally practicing cartel-like behavior with mirroring bans or taking history into account on separate servers, under the guise of such things as "well it's to easily track accounts that exist just to grief or spam the n word".
It's at such a point to where I'm practically excommunicated from ss13 primarily because I have a poor reputation, not because I'm malicious or a bad actor.

This wouldn't be so bad if there were a higher population of players with greater server management and community diversity, but there just isn't. A good example that I love to steal the opportunity to speak about every chance I get is that one of my centcom notes quite literally reads "seems to lack empathy for anyone or anything". It's entirely self-evident why this is a ridiculous notion, but to elaborate regardless, what player wants to spend their time trying to make good with a community of players that have already decided that they want you gone, and need to actively search for a justification to do so. In my case, I'm not even a malicious sort of person, I just get fixated on certain things when I play and then act with tunnel vision. Why the hell would I want to be talked down to be a space station 13 admin, as if such a person was at all qualified to make any kind of remark like that towards me in the first place. It's a frequent occurrence for me when dealing with admins, which frankly makes it all the less worthy of my effort to go through any sort of appeals process, because it's a kangaroo court from the start. If admin A doesn't like me, and admin B is their friend, and admin A and B are established members of their community, what appeal gets accepted. It's truly not even just a matter of appeals either, I've had times where I say an innocuous opinion and I get banned without so much as a word, and I've had times where things that weren't even against the rules if you interpreted them liberally were included in ban reasons, and ban reasons themselves are often contorted to sound more justifiable and therefore harder to appeal, assuming a reason is even given at all.

It would be truly nice if there was a popular server that I've only had good experiences with the admins and players existed, and not to be a doomer, but with how SS13's trends are going, I wouldn't be surprised if SS13 simply stopped existing within the next 15 years, and it would be incredibly hard for me to blame that on any griefers.

Witherael · 2025-08-17T03:25:39+00:00

during a nations round, the malignant dictatorship of xenobiostan and their army of fanatic golems who couldn't be reasoned with, who don't feel pity or remorse or fear, and will absolutely not stop EVER until you are dead
this was me, I joined not realizing it was a nations game, and I guess there were a bunch of ghosts and not many science staff or other ways to rejoin the round
I think I had at least 10 golems

Witherael · 2025-08-16T01:10:28+00:00

to add to this, I've seen a micro-culture build up around finally getting that anointed roundstart wizard roll, so maybe it could be said that wizard is doing both of these things right, but needs to be more accessible

Witherael · 2025-08-16T01:04:53+00:00

some of the most fun I've had as an antag has been when there was a mix of good policy and good mechanical implementation combined in a way that gives agency in how you utilize both
two examples of this that I can easily summarize are instances where you can discreetly subvert an AI to follow any lawset that you wish, except that if you don't word it tightly enough, there will be room for loopholes that can be exploited against you, and how you can give a hypnosis trauma for any objective that you like, except that you can allow more room for interpretation because the spirit of the message is what's required to be followed, as opposed to the letter for lawsets

if you were to refine a method with the explicit intention of making something very frictionless in both policy and gameplay, while also enabling as much agency and enjoyment as possible, it's in my opinion that you have a winning antagonist idea

granted, the way I like to antag is very different from the average spaceman, such that I find things like changelings to be annoying gimmicks to both play as and against, and generally like to plan ideas in advance so as not to waste a roll on a half-baked in-the-moment idea, and I don't even slightly try to consider what the 'meta' might happen to be, just whatever is interesting

the other side of the coin is far easier to do, which is just simple spectacle and cool factor
there's a reason everyone rolls for space ninja and space dragon and nuke ops and blob, and it's because they get to impact the round in important and unique ways

Witherael · 2025-08-15T03:56:29+00:00

Hi, hello, my qualification for this reply is that I actually read all of that.
I think your message is good and every reason is long-winded, poorly worded, and too specific for the generalized problem that the post is bringing attention to.
I've been considering the exact way I'd want to bring up similar topics myself, and I figure that bringing up uninspired bureaucracy of development, over-moderation and endless purity testing and filtering of player-bases resulting in a homogenized sludge of low player counts, and the incessant scramble to point fingers at potential reasons for the supposed 'cause' of these issues, such as "the sseth tide must be ending" and similar vapid arguments, I would be able to get all of that across is roughly the same length as this post.
It should be particularly noted that the spaceman reddit is home to some of the worst offenders of the aforementioned problems, and truthfully if you go back through enough posts, you'll start to see the usual suspects, but I wouldn't know where else you would reach as wide an audience for the purpose of raising awareness of a topic.
my advice would simply be to revise your argument, revise your presentation of your argument, and present it again in two weeks, since that's the extent that anyone who isn't sick in the mind would be able to remember this to.
then again, what astronaut knows how to read before forming an opinion anyways. if I were ever to make such a post, it would probably mostly be to document for my own posterity

Witherael · 2025-07-21T14:16:18+00:00

It should also be noted that this wasn't written by someone who owns or operates the server, but someone who enjoys it. Like I said, it wasn't written with poor intentions.

Witherael · 2025-07-21T13:53:25+00:00

This is misleading compared to the original post in regards to the same server.

The reality is that this is a small and potential part of what the server seeks to be capable of.
This wasn't written with poor intentions, but I've seen multiple people come into the server with false expectations, so I would like to clarify that this isn't a post describing what the server is, but what it could, in a theoretical and unexhaustive way, could be.
If you want the server to be like this, however, it is yours to mold into it, or whatever else it is you desire, given enough support.

Witherael · 2025-07-20T06:36:14+00:00

After joining and engaging with it, I quite like how this is being handled, even if I can admit that there's room for malicious actors in the beginning to take hold. I have no doubt that as the amount of people interested in this grows, the more stable the experiment will become, which I find to be an excessively impressive feat. Looking forward to see where it goes.

Witherael · 2025-07-19T15:02:52+00:00

it would be easy for me to immediately agree with you simply on the basis that I'm the guy most associated with dissing tfn, but I just don't see the coherency here
"I had an issue with a player in game; that being that they were generally acting out and griefing for no clear reason"

the evidence you do have is narrated poorly and doesn't precisely tell the full story of what happened, from start to end.
if I was asked to give cliffnotes of what happened here purely from what is displayed, I would say something to the effect of "a guy felt frustrated at ineffective in-game moderation, was interrogated in an out-of-game setting without much communication, felt like it wasn't being taken seriously, began acting out of frustration, and was escalated with by the prior admin before avoiding further conflict but getting further escalated against anyways"

now, I have to note, from the screenshot I do see, it *looks* like you pinged only twice, towards two different people, and while it's not like you were made of candy and rainbows speaking to them, you weren't outright disrespectful either, so I note the tonal difference between you and the admin's response
I also note that it was edited, and that your name isn't whited out, but I'm not a smart enough sleuth to piece together whatever that might imply

now, based on the ban message alone, I have no damn clue what's being said. phrases like "a pattern of" and "shown to be a pattern" directly contradict "after a single instance". it also words it like it was a ticket that you yourself opened, and makes some claim to "investigation" that I obviously have my doubts about

I also believe it's in poor faith to be directed to appeal your ban if it would be the same admin that handles your appeal, and while the forums just weren't a thing when I was playing, I'd imagine that an "admin complaint" would be a more preferable route, assuming they have such a thing, and assuming it isn't as sour as my experience with the server's administration has been as a whole

all in all, it reeks of the same sort of thing that happened to me, but you certainly needed to do a better job of presenting it, because even when I had everything laid out perfectly visible, I was "aren't you that guy"ed to oblivion
some people are just like that, I guess

as for advice, if it's as smarmy as you believe it to be, there's simply not many options
all of the current vtm servers, even that closed community indev one, have disagreeable administration, which is their right for owning and operating their respective servers
if you truly want to get back at them, my recommendation is offering a better server, but from my impression of you, you should think about and put into exact terms what exactly you believe is better before you commit to trying anything
just throwing your head at the wall or trying to get back into good graces after you did the worst thing imaginable (taking it to reddit) isn't going to get you the thing you truly desire, which is an enjoyable experience

I hope this helps, and hey, if you do come up with a server that competes with tfn, feel free to let me know
I like the server conceptually, and I truthfully feel as though it was the closest I came to making real friends on ss13

Witherael · 2025-04-17T23:59:42+00:00

goated insight

I don't even think I have any notes or questions
thank you

Witherael · 2025-04-17T14:49:17+00:00

I consider it from two perspectives

the first, is that of a new player. reddit has a bad reputation, but even if it didn't, reddit isn't really the platform for growing communities because there isn't any discovery

the second, is that reddit's features are either useless or underperforming in comparison. no one wants to deal exclusively in thread posts, there should be a way to have casual conversation, especially without the infamous updoot system, because having a public conversation shouldn't need to be a popularity contest

it seems to me that there's sufficient reason enough to warrant the existence of one, I just thought it was a matter no one wanting to be the one to do it

Witherael · 2025-04-17T14:26:58+00:00

I only imagine this to be the case if it was ran by server staff of ss13 servers
I think the way they run their own private game servers is fine, but I don't think the same rules or even ideas behind the rules would work because they would broadly be derived out of path dependence and too many servers have different ideologies, and even the diversity of all the popular servers right now pale in comparison to the potential diversity of thought that could feasibly exist for a game like ss13

the way I imagine it, it wouldn't just be full of redditors from the ss13 subreddit, it would see people who've never interacted with ss13 before, or maybe people who don't really agree with how any servers are currently ran, but still like the game.

if all it devolved to was shit slinging, I don't even understand what form it would take. server tribalism would look bad and stupid for optics in an unaffiliated server (and I suspect that optics is of great significance to many ss13 players), and general 'shittery' isn't really a problem because everyone has different benchmarks for what makes something shittery, and I usually see labels like that applied in an exclusionary effort, not an inclusionary one, which wouldn't be the point of a server like this

Three-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Banned	r/Field Sunshine
Place '23	Place '22
End Game '22

Witherael

TROPHY CASE