Giving @skintone a x hour grace period.
Somewhere between 1, 12, 24 hours.

Another option would be maybe letting everyone have a couple of mulligans on their @skintone selection, so they're not under the timer, but I agree that set it once keep it forever is not ideal for something that has no real preview anymore.

Imagine being able to get promoted faster if you mod yourself to be your corp's colors...

Back on topic: yes to a grace period for skin tones and letting you actually preview them on yourself before committing, and yes to adding a few more shades.

Emily: YES I've been dreaming about having this in SD for years.

There's a lot of the supported 256 gamut that could reasonably be said to be a possible natural skin tone (including blues!), so in a hypothetical situation where there was a way to @service-request/biomod a custom skintone, I'd just as soon let players flex their creativity and just reign in specific ones that are too Optical Annihilating.

Yes, Sindome is a PvP game but it is, in my mind, a RP game first and foremost. Sure, we have to sacrifice some freedom for the sake of PvP but there's only so much I think can be locked down before you end up playing one of those RP muds where mechanics are largely ignored because they get in the way of RPing.

Yes, a balance must be struck but I feel that things like locking skintones are already pushing the game further into a combat sim and further from a RP game. And while I am aware that unlocking skintones will leave some room for occasional low level 'abuse', I'd take that if it gave me greater control over my character and how they are expressed in the game.

If it's decided that we can't trust players to try and police themselves and the community to try and police each other and the occasional low level 'abuse' that may come from having unlocked skintones, I'd suggest the following in addition to crashdown's original suggestion.

Add '@skintone lighten' and '@skintone darken' to the game You can use one or the other every week or month and it results in your skintone shifting one level up or down. If desired, set boundaries on how far above or below your initial skintone you can shift.

Add devices into the game where you can pay to have your 'initial' skintone changed. Maybe the greater the shift the greater the cost.This is like a tanning bed but high-tech enough to go both ways, be permanent and make any skintone possible.

Allow someone with enough high enough disguise and relevant stats to change their skintone. I would be fine with any skintone being an option once enough skill is reached but one could also make greater shifts require greater skill/stat levels. Probably do this with the 'appear' command. This lasts until they 'stop appearing' and you could add in conditions where it goes away like showers or a period of time.

Again, I prefer to just do away with the lock entirely but if it has to stay, I'd love to see crashdown's idea and more implemented.

While I wouldn't say that I am completely against changing skintone being added to disguise, I would say that I don't want to see disguise buffed any more until things like forensics are buffed first. As a rule I think that before any new ability is given to disguise, counter measures should be created and implemented in forensics or similar FIRST.

For the most part, I very much agree crashdown!

The old @options system did allow characters to make their bit name in shortdesc any color they wanted, yes. I can't remember if that was the case for @nakeds when you looked at another person. It's been awhile and it doesn't exist in photos so I'd need others to chime in.

I don't think I'm offbase. I've seen people copy verbatim lines of descriptions of other characters to put in a disguise. Not copy with your own light flair, but direct verbatim copied descriptions. And that to me is against the spirit of competition. Everyone won't agree. But when I think of @skintone being added as a disguise check, all I can see is opening that up to so much more. I can also already think of how that will make a cheesy combat situation even more cheesy on top of everything else.

There's no limitations on @nakeds. There's no real limitations on @describe me. There's guidelines and rules, but there's no hard limitations. Appear makes that even more versatile. Yeah, people meta. It blows. Some people do it on purpose, some people do it on accident. But I'd rather we continue to try to change that culture and discourage smallworlding rather than open up something to be codedly gamed and abused.

It won't, imo, lead to anywhere good to just open up more into disguise..

This is just not true. There is NO perfect disguise possible, with any tools or skill. All of them have flaws, none of which are intended as far as I know but all of which are detectable to a knowing eye. This can very easily be shown by players attempting to pass themselves off in full disguises, like if you doubt me try it. You'll see all the problems that have plagued this coming to light very quickly I can assure you.

Being able to recognize a colour code for a skintone is not a balancing mechanism, nor is it realistic since changing skin colours is an actual thing people do to both disguise themselves and you know, also go about their daily lives. It's highly realistic.

Take for example two mechanisms: One where you can write anything you want in your character nakeds to enable disguising, another where a label is applied to a character when they're disguised or not.

It would simply not matter how the first mechanism might be used by anyone, there is no potential outcome where it would have greater precedence than the second which would reveal their disguised status regardless. Differences in skintone just end up not being meaningful when there is a separate reveal for disguises unaffected by them.

Players may not know these tells and be more fooled by skintone changes, true, but I think ultimately these sorts of systems have to be balanced around perfect play since any failing in a disguise of any kind often gives up the game.

In all fairness, I have also used the 'perfect disguise' in ways which crashdown cites as against the spirit of competition. This is truly a slippery slope, and it's really hard to dig into without getting into mechanics directly. I do think it's very important for PCs to represent their skill level accordingly and will echo that sentiment. However, when actively combatting others and meta - finding a happy medium for all parties is tricky.

I would've loved if metachrosis allowed you to alter @skintone on command and suggested as much in my MEH-Metachrosis post, but I'm still uncertain if the community can handle such responsibly. Not from a concern of abuse, but of dialogue around skin color, and behaving as adults.

Well we're essentially talking about two different things, I'm talking about creating new personas and you're talking about duplicating characters which I've argued should be against the rules completely to begin with. I agree players can abuse systems but I don't see @skintone as a major bulwark against that, abuse must be handled when it occurs but not everything can be accounted for ahead of time while still allowing creativity in gameplay.

I dunno, @skintone addition to disguise doesn't feel like a must or very pressing. I've had fun using contacts, wigs and carefully draped clothing.

I think copying descs should also be a no-no unless you get full on biomods - this would require admin review and be one heck of a commitment. Personas are very different from attempting to be a total clone of someone else. Good point there.