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This post is in regards to the banning of the use of ten-codes on /tg/station servers. The most recent version of the ten-codes can be found here: https://pastebin.com/AcRHghFPSo I’ve been playing /tg/station on and off since the beginning, ten years ago. I most recently came back a few months ago with some inspiration to create a sec character, Diamond Dolce, after spending a long time watching RP streamers play GTA RP. On the server most of them play on, NoPixel, they all use voice-chat and cop players have a system of ten-codes they use on in-game radio to speed up communications. I thought the entire gimmick was really cool and added a lot of immersion to the RP, so I talked with some of the other sec mains to find out what they thought, got positive feedback, and then took NoPixel’s system of police codes, cut out ~70% of them, and tweaked the remainder to be more relevant to SS13. That was version 1. It was confusing, bloated, and hard to learn, but a lot of us had fun using it with each other. I would paste the list to a piece of paper every round that I played sec, and then use the copier in security to make several copies to hand out. If there was a player I hadn’t seen before on the sec team, I would specifically speak to them and hand them a copy of the codes, explaining what they were and being very clear that it was a voluntary gimmick that they didn’t have to participate in if they didn’t want to.
More recently, after working with some players that were critical of the system to address concerns, I released version 2, which slimmed it down further to just 20 codes and reorganized the codes to be more intuitive and easier to pick up. Instead of the codes being listed randomly, you could, in just a few seconds, learn that if you heard a radio code that was in the 10-10s, that meant an officer was in an emergency situation, if you heard one in the 10-20s, that meant they were talking about moving/meeting/arriving to different locations, and if you heard one in the 10-30s that meant they’d identified a hostile target.
Before version 2 could be truly rolled out, the headmins posted a ruling in Discord stating that the use of ten-codes was banned. The point of this thread is to inquire about the exact reasonings for this ruling, engage the community and the headmins in a discussion about it, to justify the existence and usage of this system as an emergent RP system, and the chilling effect this ruling might have on similar efforts to bring life and complexity to Manuel.
The stated, official reasoning for the ruling is here:
My response would be:The use of short-hand codes for communication in any department, specifically 10-10 codes, are not allowed. Our servers are English only which makes this style of codified speak subversive and makes the applicable channels too unfriendly to new or fair-weather players.
It’s not easy to learn a new language. It can take years of effort. Conversely, with the new system of ten-codes, it should take a matter of seconds to understand the broad strokes and easily interpret most of the codes with situational context and surrounding language. With the old system, this was still possible, but with less ease: during the initial Discord conversation discussing the ruling, sec and command regulars Samuel Price and Rhials Duffy both attested to the fact that, though they didn’t use the ten-codes, they were almost always able to figure out what was meant by people who were using them; Melbert, who plays Smells-the-Roses, recently posted a YouTube video of a round where they play a traitor with a syndicate comms chip, listening into sec comms on a round where the ten-codes were used heavily. They told me after the fact that “in general, yes, they weren’t that difficult to decipher.”
Other admins listed various other criticisms as part of the ruling during the initial discussion on discord. I will also address these. These are mishmashed quotes strung together from multiple messages by multiple admins:
Okay, there seems to be some major misunderstanding going on here. This system was made after discussions that my character had with other officers IC. It was introduced IC. When updates to it were made, I would play HoS, call a meeting, and announce it IC. Feedback on the codes was sought IC and the first ever update I made to them was after I received IC feedback. 95% of players first introduction to this system was by someone talking to them about it and offering them a copy of it IC.It's not RP when it's happening OOCly and shared only in this discord. It is a system of communication existing entirely outside of the game. These codes aren't publicly available, so the only way to know it is to have one of the players in on it let you know about it.
As to the codes not being publicly available: I made them as public as possible. If anyone outside of sec ever asked for a copy, it was given to them. Links to a pastebin copy were pinned in the #security-class channel on the Manuel discord, with the latest version having had 70 total views and the version before that having 92. After supportive staff members recommended I do so, I contacted the headmins on multiple occasions about posting the codes as a resource available on the wiki. I never received a response. Once the system was more refined, I planned to make a forum post about it. Every effort was made to make them publicly available.
Personally, I would love for there to be more of a visible barrier of entry to playing sec. Sec is one of the most important roles in the game, as they act as the primary foil for antagonists and, beyond combat situations, are largely an RP-focused role. A good sec player will do everything in their power to extend RP with prisoners and minimize any saltiness on their part -- being caught is supposed to be another part of the game, and it should still be fun for people who are willing to play along. If the people you arrest aren't having fun, there's either something wrong with their approach to the game or there's something wrong with how you're engaging with them. There's a lot of nuance, even if it doesn't look like it from the outside. And the fact that it does look easy and approachable from the outside means that a lot of newer players sign up to security and think they can learn it on their own, without asking more veteran players for help or taking any cues from them, and will even get offended and defensive if you suggest they do. Rounds when the majority of sec consist of players like this are usually when the cries of shitcurity are the loudest. We shouldn't be afraid to make security more complex than it currently is on an RP server. This is the very reason that a lot of RP servers have Security Cadet job slots.We don't want cliques to form or for new players to have a new hurdle to overcome just to participate in one of the most important parts of the game, communication.
I don't think there was any worry for cliques forming. I was the person who started the system, and the person I most commonly partnered with on the force was someone who didn't use the ten-codes. There was some hate centered on me specifically from certain security players, but not on people in general just for using the ten-codes, and not in the opposite direction towards people who didn't use them.
Lastly, I wanted to say that this ruling might have an unintended chilling effect on future efforts towards emergent RP gimmicks by players. I was initially messaged by an admin about a week after I'd started using the first draft of the ten-codes, saying that adminbus had discussed the topic and decided it was really cool, and I should go with it full steam ahead. I had no further contact about it until I saw an announcement that they were banned for good -- not even a PM or a heads up or anything. This is a pretty bad precedent, in my opinion. In the future, if a bunch of players came together to do something like establish a common lore setting to write our character backstories by, and attempt to have some storywriters make ongoing out-of-station storylines by news releases to go with it and give people things to make small talk about, publishing issues IC as library books and passing them around to create discussion, there's now a fear of admins coming by and telling us that the whole thing is banned because it's "cliquish" and "unfriendly to new players," at any time, even if we had prior admin approval for it. There's also a secondary issue in that this discussion and decision about an emergent RP feature was made completely without including the people participating in and developing that feature, which I don't think should happen. Discussions and rulings like this shouldn't be made completely behind the scenes, or at least should include the people who would be effected by it the most.
When you start an RP server, you're not just starting a multiplayer game, you're starting a community that's going to pick up quirks and culture. It's expected that there will be a barrier for entry to participate in that.
