CLF synthetic programming. The question of conversion. The Quickening?

General Discussion
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A bit of context

I’ve been drawn to a question on CLF synthetics. With CLF in general being now more relevant, we’ve ran into an interesting situation at round 26831.

A player spawned in as a CLF synthetic. Was wrecked, brought on Almayer and cuffed (still not-active). Reports of him stating stating before: “Death to the tyrants!” (or your preferend variant).

Skip a dozen of minutes, MP & command restarts him, despite CL’s screams not to (there was some, uhhhh, things happening on the ship. Larva loose, greenos, predator launching an assault on research, SO suicide) stating very clearly that it’s a bad idea.

Synth gets restarted, acts all polite and states to be W-Y alligned, assigned to Royce. CL calls it bullshit and demands for the synth to be kept detained. CO, shows up and agree to that, in return asking CL to fax W-Y (spolier: they did not repsond).

Long story short, while everyone was away, Finn gets uncuffed by a MP and goes and a (honestly impressive) killing spree like a true gamer.

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(Moments before disaster)

Gets put down. CL barely persuades the revived command and MP’s to not restart the CLF synth again. The round ends.

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You can follow a substantially more in-depth converstaion on this right here. You’ll get lots of more context first-hand.

What I know is that everyone involved enjoyed the round and RP very much, and no one has any problems with each other. However, a collective confusion still arose at the discord discussion.

Now for the main part

The question of CLF synthetic conversion

Finn, the synthetic in question, considered actually considering to RP as a “fixed” synthetic, as he was restarted by a W-Y synth key (regular one, the CL refused to provide his), but somewhere between the lines that decision was reverted and the machine rose up again.

Now, since something like this never happened before, almost every partisipant on of the situation ahad a unique take on it and tried to IC it:

  • CL was convinced that the machine is bluffing to get trust, and only certified personell on a certified Wey-Yu facility can fully reprogramme a synthetic back for good. Not some reset key nut-job thing.
  • Finn (the CLF synth) decided to initially genuinely roleplay as a reprogrammed W-Y synthetic, but got rebuffed by agressive CL rethoric and turned to doom mode. What also interesting what he did try to signal that something was wrong, like he was still damaged. Twitching, playing an invisible piano, going through a Quickening of sorts.
  • MPs & CO didn’t know what to do as it isn’t a common occurance.
  • The other synthetic, Athena, did catch Finn’s signs and were writing on how he still needs to be detained (in a marginably more calmer way than CL), but was too late for the breakout.

Overall, everyone liked the RP, but what was interesting is that no one knew how synthetic conversion works. At least, not clearly enough.

  • Does it depend from the reset key what is used? Finn had a corrupted one, a DYW ugly version from CLF on him, apperently. It’s describtion directly stated that it causes corruption. Does that mean that Synths alliance lies with what kind of synth reset key it’s revived with?

  • Or it’s a process what is comepletely offscreen, and can only be done with specialized equipment and people at a facility, meaning that IC synths faction cannot change on the fly via the “techincal” revamping??

  • Or it’s a drop of coin on how a synth player himself decides to play it out, making it unpredictable?

The possible solutions

Well, it could be clarified how, again, how synthetic faction conversion really works, or, rather, how it shoud be RPed. Should it be one of the abovementioned options? Or should the choice of it be left ambiguous enough for the players to decide for themselfs on the fly?

I’ll even be fine with the synth players to be left with a choice of their alliance like Finn did. It’s fun. The clarification of this fact itself would be a huge step up, meaning players know to expect the unexpected.

I wish for players to leave their opinion, as me and the other players were quite interested in how it would work back at the discord chat. This is why I aslo call the kind Sires of the @council_synth for help, hoping for their guidence. And other players from the situation with more clarification, context and opinion as well, as there is more to cover.

P.S Thanks for reading my essay. I’m going to fucking sleep.

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per current escalation rules, you are allowed to lie about and even disguise your allegiance. but the second you do so, you are no longer allowed to be hostile without proper escalation

I imagine it would also especially apply to CLF Synths, likely being stolen/hacked WY Models more open to combat than the USCMC ones

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Grr combat synths…is what I would normally say, but it is a special RP scenario that has potential for some fun for those in on the event. I will just throw in some 2 cents to build off of for others.

It sounds like Finn did a good job RPing and showing signs of his intentions. Although I don’t know if he went too far on his murder spree, the RPing to that point sounds like what a player should do.

  1. Destruction limitation. If you were for instance an unsuspecting CLF synth on the ship, you could throw away surg tools, explode research’s machines, explode OT’s tanks, remove cells from engines, hide OBs, etc. Likewise they could kill bodies 1 by 1 and throw them into the backrooms. There should be some kind of stated limitations in case synths go too far. Ideally though they do something funny and well stated: for instance taking surg tools, informing docs they are “in the wrong place and are being cleaned up to the right place”, and storing them in a locker in the gym. Only somewhat disruptive and gives MPs, MT etc something to react to.

  2. Synth conversions and limitations. Actually fixing a CLF synth wouldnt be easy for Almayer crew. Without knowing how the CLF managed to change them, best a MT could do would be replacing every logic component with something equivalent like a WJ’s components. The ‘AI’ specialist job and CE might have more insight. Obviously admin spawned WY can handle it. A reset key doesnt actually reset every memory, hacked and altered chip, etc in a synth and so that should be up to the synth player. Just to put some points on the interaction though:

A) Do not invalidate other’s RP: if a MT brought a WJ to the synth and said they ‘swapped some boards’, they really did swap some boards. Of course it is up to the synth if that really fixed them though.
B) Do not go hostile without a trace: For instance, don’t act like you are a reset WY synth, then sneak to engines and remove their power cells.
C) Do not instantly go berserk: If something is tried, RP it slowly succeeding or failing then revert. For instance, if you were dead on the colony, brought back up, WY key used on you and woke you up, don’t immediately murder everyone in the room.

For a final note, there should not be a ‘set way’ to handle the situation. If there was a ‘CLF fixer key’ it removes the other creative options to RP. The whole point is to have fun with it, where you are more rewarded for creative ideas to the problem.

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machine buzzing off and being weird and aldryk freeing it will never not be funny to me

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Interesting. Still, a clarification on there being no hard-and-fast rules (if it’ll go down that road) on conversion still would be nice, cause as I stated earlier, it will give at least some understanding of how to RP it to the players. Knowing that “It’s roleplayed IC by every person individually” is better than not knowing how it is supposed to be at all.

I’m still interested about what council members think about this.

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You make a good point: there could be some basic guidance for those lost in RP. Decision paralysis is a thing where if you have too many options you choose none of them.

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