It doesn’t rebut anything because you could have the most amazing, actual novel sized story, and I’d read 3 pages of it then deny you when I saw you saw a dudes limb off when fixing his leg.
You have completely missed the forest for the trees. The story is to gauge your competency in literacy, understanding of the lore, and desire to get the WL.
Stop hyper focusing on the easiest part of a WL application. It takes you an hour or two to write your entire app, it takes you 100 hours minimum of playing the roles before you can even apply.
Opening up WJ to a no-whitelist status would simply increase the work load of Staff who now have to police Working Joes and clamp down on bad behaviour, and there will be bad behaviour Working Joes. The current system is self-policing, I’ve never had to intervene against a Working Joe before.
I can promise you, you’ll play it once and never touch it again.
Also the reason its for synths is because you can reasonably trust a Synth player to play working joe and not do something pants on head dumb. Therefore it requires no real moderation at all because players can self govern in this whitelist pretty well.
To be honest, no, we can’t thrust players to non-LRP play anything. Look at dedicated “RP roles”: CCs are usually fine, but most CLs are straight up LRP and either sit in their office and insert “need whiteout DS real fast pls send it over” into some copypasted form which has like the double amount of characters when compared to the actual message every two minutes, softgrief research/command/MPs or deploy to FOB for “RP reasons” and end up chasing down benos with their dual-wield shotguns. Squad marines are often just here to frag benos and are willing to mutiny over a non-meta strategy. Benos, play a round as one, the hivemind could as well be XOOC.
jokes on you, i play MT with a zero criminal record and scream at WJs for “stealing my job” when i should be committing crimes. hold up, the joke is on me reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
idk. I just think it’d be easy to slap a 100-400 hour timelock on Working Joe and be done there. That way, the amount of people is significantly less that you have to moderate - and thus less jbans necessary. It’s a mandatory rp role but that doesn’t mean it needs to be WLed - just that it has to be strict.
Ofcourse for the logistics of having a bunch of people to worry about. You can kinda bandaid fix that by locking working joe slots too, for 1 to low working joe hour counts, 3 to working joes with higher working joe hour counts (dont have to worry as much about them), the rest (unlimited) to synth wl/staff. I don’t think it’s as difficult to respond to 1 or 2 ahelps about a lrp joe when theres only one slot for lrp joes to take - then they get “deWLed” (jbanned), and everyone forgets.
Just needs a set of working joe rp guidelines that pops up when you join as working joe. After all, the role doesn’t do much, so reading guidelines is nothing.
I think theres merit to having an easy partial-afk role like Janitor. playing MP or MT during 90% of rounds is also mostly afk - i don’t think its on the same scale as working joe in terms of mindless monotony ofcourse. I think it’s worth the tradeoff of people potentially doing stupid shit as working joe.
I do understand it’s mostly just intended as a staff role to afk while waiting for ahelps or whatever though, and that it’d lose its “self-moderation”. So not much can be expected.
Slap high timelock (100-400 hours is reasonable), allow voice lines only (text lines only in appolo, maybe regular text lines only for WL if you want), make a wiki page for WJ RP standards, link it in the joining message, jobban people on the first infringement. Problem solved. People usually don’t want to get punished, so they will try to follow rules. We have roles with a lot higher effect on the game such as MPs and XO, and they are in 99% of the cases trying to play their role.
So a lot of people here speak about griefing or “more administrator weight” but why don’t the COs get the XO the same as Synths are trusted with Joes? The second in the command of the whole ship has the ability to grief and we have seen plenty of XOs do so. A huge time lock and a first job ban warning would realistically sate both the people saying “it’s so boring man don’t apply for synth just for staff” and the guys who want to do nothing all round and be robotic MTs, lest we restrict other roles who have a really higher chance and ability to grief than Joes.
Seems like a decent compromise to end people asking for it.
As @Lagomorphica said in one of their comments. People play roles, get bored, then grief. I can see where people would want to grief because there is literally nothing happening. I’ve had absolute slogs of boring shifts as MP, ran out of things to do as MT, and had slow operations as CL.
If everyone saw how being a working Joe is just a diluted mute Maintenance Technician with voice lines and a melee buff THEY CAN’T USE 90% OF THE TIME. I think it’ll work out.