Dinarzad
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Posts posted by Dinarzad
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15 hours ago, tzo said:
In theory, yes, IPCs are easy to repair.
In practice, I've found reviving a dead IPC is extremely time-consuming and difficult compared to reviving a human.
A good way I've found to summarize it up is usually:
It's easy to get materials to repair IPCs, but a pain in the ass to do the repairs.
It's hard to get the materials to heal a human, but easy to do with those.
Everything needed to fix an IPC is pretty much available in public access rooms, things you get from cargo or are in toolboxes all over the station. Easy to find, but doing the repairs, like tzo said, is really a slow process that most people don't seem to know how to do. IPCs NEED surgery past a certain threshold cuz of internal structural damage once over a damage cap. I know IPC repairs off the top of my head usually, but even I sometimes fuck 'em up or stumble over one I do rarely. An that was before the "IPCs bleed oil" thing Iunno how it is after that.
Conversely, the stuff to heal humans is hard to get hold of, mostly being limited to the Medical department itself or from Chemistry, and are not handed out willy-nilly. But the process of healing them is easy as pie. Slap on a synthflesh patch, dump into cryo, clone, defib, etc. are all easy. Even surgeries are mitigated by the fact you only really ever have to do surgery for things like broken bones or internal organ/bleeding, due to aforementioned Cryo an such, so you memorize those handfuls and you're really set unless something unusual pops in. Again, I know most of those surgeries by heart, being someone that played a lot of medical and a lot of IPC, I screw up meat surgery far less then metal surgery -
12 minutes ago, ZN23X said:
We werent saying being popular makes them stronger, we were saying maybe we should focus on making improvements to less popular races to make them more appealing instead of making a race that is already popular more appealing.
IPC currently are one of, if not the, most unique of the karma races. They have the most day to day differences in their mechanics, using APCs/Cyborg rechargers for 'food', the utterly different way they have to heal themselves, feeling no pain, no breathing, such on an such forth. This is mostly what draws people to them, the very different playing experience and RP that they provide over being human or most the other organic races.
To give other lesser played races a similar treatment is something I absolutely whole-heartedly agree, on, the more of those kinds of differences we can introduce to races the better I'd feel. I'd LOVE have weird shit with slime people that emphasizes they ARE made of sentient goo, or to emphasize the insect nature of the Kidan, use of pheromones or something. Not even necessarily BUFFS, just weird unique interactions. You'd be surprised how much more I wanted to play Kidan when they got the click-clack sound emotes.
IPCs suffer horrible downsides from EMOPs and yet tons of people still play them because of those unique interactions and systems. Kidan, as an example, however, don't really have much of interest to make up for their big bug eyes. Yeah they have the armor, but that's very passive, there's little there that makes them FEEL different, you instead just feel like a human who can't wear goggles. That's the problem, as designing systems like that for so many species is going to be hard, but I think it's the best thing. People are a lot more willing to deal with even intense negatives, so long as the final result is different and provides a unique perspective.
Personal opinion would be to, either among staff members or the community as a whole, open threads for the current race being looked at and put forth ideas that would make sense for the creature, ignore balance and work backwards from there.
Like Grey having telekinesis. Makes sense. As ideas pile up, so there's a pool to work from, then administration can sort out via internal discussion of "I mean this makes sense and WOULD be cool, but that's broken af"
Because ultimately, at the end of the day, this has been a very talked about subject for a long time, and the end call is made with the people coding those changes and the people approving them.-
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10 hours ago, Allfd said:
All species being reskinned humans is not an extreme position, it is the center of the balance spectrum. So while it may be an unpopular position, it is the one that we are most likely to pick as a community.
I wanna put this out there right now, that if this is the direction Paradise goes, I will be the first one out the door.
To clarify, I'm not saying this as some kind of threat to prevent admins from going that direction, I'm an on again, off again player, me leaving is gonna cause no problems.
But I AM saying is so that staff members know that it very much is an extreme position to some. The entire appeal to paradise from my side as well as others, is that the various alien races, are actually alien in some regard. They don't play identically to a human, because that's dumb. There's no reason a robot should be identical to a human, nor why a living space bird cyborg should be identical to a bipedal cat, and so on.
That is, to me, the main draw. It's what helps make things unique and while it does cause balance issues, also helps encourage immersion because you're not just acting like "Oh*beep boo;* no, the EMP is *beep boop* hurting me!" You are actually, as a player, kind of scared of EMPs because they'll ACTUALLY destroy your hopes and dreams as an IPC/Cyborg/etc.
So I put this out there here and now, you'll lose players if you take that route. If you still feel that's the best path and this is what staff/community agree is best for the server, hey, I can respect that, you gotta do what you think is the right move, and I sure hell don't know what is anymore then anyone else does. But you should be prepared to alienate a few people in the act.-
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Mmm. Instead of just gathering money, what if the objective were to empty the station's account? It's a harder feat to accomplish then just getting money, and fits the syndicate narrative of corporation espionage/sabotage by going for NT's pocketbook.
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On 7/23/2018 at 8:13 PM, necaladun said:
Karma locks for vital roles would mean that there is no one able to do said job. Even if a dozen or so people have unlocked say, Captain, there's still the chance none of them want to play it. The larger the cost, the more this would be a problem.
To add on to this further:
You also may not necessarily have gotten Karma for doing something that is important for a Captain.
And to clarify I mean, you could just as easily have gotten the necessary karma to buy the Captain, by just being good at surgery/medical, or RPing decently as a civilian. Those are good things to know, no doubt and a captain who knows how to RP is equally VERY nice.
But end of the day, that doesn't mean the person is necessarily gonna be any more efficient as a Captain then right now. They might know how to RP, but still know dick all about Space Law or SoP or what have you.
Conversely Magistrate costs karma and a fair chunk of Karma, because it's more a matter of trust, then anything else, given just what that job is allowed to do, but is also not necessary to the station's function.
Cappy is a necessity, he really needs to be there, so it just has a playtime limit to help weed out the newest players from stumbling into the most important job ever. -
On 7/14/2018 at 4:32 PM, Malphystoh said:
that's like the worst disguise ever. Job title Terminated? Incoming boots and stun batons. The vast majority of those IDs have negative things associated with them. Like they were a murder victim or were executed / sent to perma. You wanna rummage through filth to slap on a target sign to your head? Be my guest. XD
In addendum, if it goes through the grinder its gone. Your premise hinges on they can still be used. This assumes a cargo tech gives a damn when checking the refuse pile before just letting it go off to the disposal. Regardless. Even if I think its a terrible disguise if a traitor wants it. Great. Super. Let them rock it out. If that is the main pretext of your argument. (it can be used for bad things) then all the better. Give the antags a chance to roam around in trash IDs. It adds more depth to the entire situation. My initial premise is I don't leave them laying around. If its terminated into the trash it goes. Though I could see saving them if you were running out of spare IDs due to theft and murder.
Target sign isn't a problem, when it's a target sign for someone else, now is it? All you need is for someone to NOT know who you REALLY are, you don't give a good God damn if they think you're Jim-Bob the Maintenance Hobo who was fired for being a dick to half the crew.
Cargo turns on the trash grinder AT ALL, maybe once every three rounds? more then half the time I wander in there, it's not even fucked with, you'd be absolutely stupefied the amount of high-grade stuff I pull out of disposals.
If a Traitor wants it, great. That's not the subject of this discussion, the subject of the discussion is an ID Disposal tool, for the Head of Staff whose ENTIRE JOB revolves around properly handing out, upgrading, downgrading and disposing of Identification Cards. It's sort of the HoP's job to do this, and preferably without causing casual security breaches by dumping ID tags that can still be used to fuck with Security, into public trash bins.
You said there was no reason not to disposal them, and I simply provided a reason why putting them into a public area, even Terminated, is not something a HoP should be doing, to say nothing of the RP reasons like facilitating identity theft an shit that could be sued for.
Imagine if an IRL company or bank just threw away old ID tags into the dumpster outside that anyone had access to. Are they invalid? Sure. Do the Security guards know that casually at a glance? Probably not. Could they be used to cause problems? You bet. Paper shredders and shit exist for a reason in offices that handle people's identification.
(And before anyone mentions Sec HUDs, Terminated IDs do not have an icon of their own, they simply show up as an unrecognized ID, same as if someone had a custom title. Something not visible at a glance an would involve browsing through the manifest to bring it up first.)
So there you go. It's not only adding to RP because it makes sense in-universe, it's no worse then disposaling it as we just established and it's a quality of life bump for the HoP. Small perks in it;s favor, with nothing really against it. -
According to SoP it's technically murder to do so without a signed form.
However, if this was genuinely accidental, and the roboticist in question was willing to put the brain back into the body and see it off to cloning, I feel a sentence of perma or exile would be ludicrously over-kill. Demotion could be appropriate and probably the most likely outcome.
People make mistakes. Fucking someone over for an hour and a half for a mistake they were very much willing to fix, seems like it'd be ... a little much.
People seem to forget you can "De-borg" someone, and make them fleshy again. And if nobody is willing to cut someone slack for an honest mistake that they're willing to fix, then you really aren't giving them a reason to cooperate in any regard. -
1 hour ago, Malphystoh said:
I mean to say the disposals grinder can handle the iDs. No reason for an extra thing. Just throw them away. They are already terminated. The ID is worthless.
Not entirely, as they can still be used to hide one's identity.
While the ID itself has no access, the fact the ID has a name on it, means someone can use it to disguise themselves. And someone who wants a disguise is the kind of person who won't care if the ID is terminated, they either have the tools to break in to places or have something like an e-mag.
In general, putting IDs anywhere public is asking for trouble, terminated or not.-
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2 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:
What you're saying is it sucks to be emagged but then saying changes that reduce the frequency and duration of how often drones get emagged are bad. It makes no logical sense.
Being emagged by itself is not terrible. Being told "Welp gg no re you have 5 minutes to live then a 10 minute wait period, no matter what you do" is a problem.
While some may not seek out being converted, it's not like there are players who would despise the sudden freedom to be an antag. There is actually a middle ground that exists between "Run at people and ask to be made antag" and "I never want to be converted ever." Personally, I don't like being emagged, don't like being antag period, but that doesn't mean I suddenly like what was done, because I'm thinking beyond my own personal feelings on the matter.
The problem is, right now an emagged drone serves to be fun for no one. It;s not fun for the traitor, it;s not fun for the drone player, even someone who might be able to get into the "I am an evil sabotage bot" role and have fun with it, can't, because they have a whole 5 minutes to live.
It is a change that benefits no one, harms a majority of players in multiple playstyles and does nothing to impair the one type of rule-breaking player that it was intended to stop.-
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57 minutes ago, Vissy said:
That being said, if neither of these or other viable solutions are available for some reasons, I would prefer having e-magged drones removed entirely over leaving things as they are. It's just appears to be too much of a headache for the drone players who didn't want to be e-magged to begin with. What do you think?
Just to put this out there, since most people didn;t read that PR in question by all accounts...
My original argument (And still my current stance) is that if drones are going to be nerfed this hard and it;s the ONLY state that current staff will allow Emagged drones to be in, then yes
I'd rather have them removed utterly.
Better to remove them, then leave them as this broken, mess that is more of an active impediment and misery that they are in now.
This was, is and will continue to be, my stance.
Either tune it back, or just remove the option altogether, better that then to unintentionally fuck with people's heads.-
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Because there's a big difference between removing a suicide pill, an item only designed to kill you to avoid capture, a pill that is very clearly labeled (It even has a skull an crossbones on it now). It is working as it is intended, it is SUPPOSED to kill you so that you won't be captured, or you can feed it to someone else if you so choose.
And a device that has all the appearances of being a helpful tool for your agenda, that not only does nothing, but is an active detriment.
It's the difference of me selling you something, the first one is a product I tell you flat out "This bottle is full of poison, so be careful with it."
The next one is me telling you, it's a bottle of shampoo that will make your hair fabulous, and then it turns out to be Nair.
You don't see where that just might be a little bit of an issue?
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Do you mean like the way I said it was a painful experience to play as, said that it did nothing to stop the actual problem but punished the people playing regularly, that it turned it into a noob trap for new antags to screw themselves over with? That the restrictions put on were horrifying? You mean THAT discussion of what was changed and how it made the server a worse place?
Because
I am pretty sure I did all that. So. No, I'm pretty sure you're looking for a reason to shut down my argument without ever having to address it. Moving goalposts isn't necessary here.
Your comparison is flawed. You liken it to driving to a T intersection where you can only pick the pre-existing paths, but that's not what happens when a PR is made, is it? A PR is about CHANGING something, you are adding, removing or tweaking something.
To work off your analogy, it is more similar to BUILDING that road, or in this case going back to a road already built and discussing with people how it should be changed. So again this binary logic does not work and I am still not sure where and how you are getting there.
This was not a paid commission of code, this was not a set in stone truth of the universe, it was a PR providing a smorgasbord of options to do a thing, in this case to nerf Emagged maintenance drones. At no point, is someone obligated to push their PR EXACTLY as initially submitted, it can be changed. If you don't believe me, you can go read through older closed PRs and see how many of them were changed and tweaked from their initial submissions.
So no, at no point did ALL OF THOSE things need to happen at the same time.
And while you might not like this line of debate, you might deem it "of no substance" and irrelevant. It is actually, really really important we acknowledge this flaw, and acknowledge why it was bad, so that going forward we can, perhaps, not repeat the mistakes of the past. Something something not knowing history and being doomed to repeat it?
Because this PR has already come and gone, it's a done deal. The least we can do is learn why it was a shit storm, so that we avoid future shit storms of that nature, going forward.
And in the process we all learn the problems that shit storm has caused, but since you seem to think I didn't address this already, I'll indulge you with playing the broken record and repeating myself.
The changes harm the server, because it's no good to the player base. It punishes the drone player for doing nothing wrong.
It seeks to prevent people from intentionally being converted, and to make the drone far far less impactful when it IS emagged.
In the former, it doesn't do a single thing. Someone who will intentionally be converted, will still do that, for a chance at a 5 minute murder/antag spree, no fuss, no muss.
The latter was done so intensely that it has been left in a worthless/nigh worthless state. 5 minutes is not enough time to coordinate a plan from the traitor who emagged you, it is barely enough time to travel the station and begin your sabotage, it is all but impossible to do this quietly as you are painted with a giant "I AM EVIL" sign, and it is a clear giveaway that someone has an emag and is fucking with synths. So, stealthy sabotage bot is not quite in the cards, but their combat ability was also tanked as well on top. You cannot sneak. You cannot survive an attack. So what GOOD are you?
This all, in addition. puts people on high alert REAL fast, so it actively strips some of your element of surprise away. It is a Noob Trap. Looks good on paper, but in actuality is inefficent and terrible, serving only to make people more guarded then if you had just left the Drone alone and just emagged into some location to do the sabotage manually.
Drones may or may not have needed A nerf, but they did not need ALL the nerfs.
TL;DR: It doesn't punish the people it is specifically trying to punish, instead it punishes the average joe who played the way they are supposed to. There is, after all, no way to know someone is holding an emag until he is emagging you, and running away is not an option, given you are slower and vent crawling takes time.
In addition to punishing players with a shitty experience it punishes the traitor for doing it, by instead screwing him over, in the IDEAL case of the drone listening to his master, you get some minor sabotage at best, and your job made harder. In the case of someone just fucking off into the blue, you get nothing, and your job made harder.-
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3 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:
Suggestions are not options...
Let's say you have a feature, we'll call it Y. You have a PR to change that feature to Z. You also have a suggestion to change it to X.
What are you options?
Well, you're options are:
1. Do nothing and leave it Y
2. Apply the PR and change it to Z.
And that's it. Those are your two options. Changing it to X isn't an option here. You could decide you think X is better and maybe that decision leads you to not applying the PR to change it to Y, but that's still picking option 1.
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What?
What.... does this even mean?
You realize the PR was to apply a general nerf to emagged drones, right? Like thE PR was literally called a "Menu of Drone Nerfs", like a menu to pick from. As in... it wasn't to specifically do any one thing. It's not a binary state of "Everything" or "Nothing". It is... it is entirely possible to do ONE thing and not the other thens based on feedback given from other people looking at your PR. You can order just ONE item from a menu, you don;t need to order the entire thing.
It's not like adding a feature, where you either add it or do not add it.
This is a balance change. There's a LOT of numbers to tweak. You could add the 5 minute timer in isolation, or do one of the other nerfs first an then see how that effects balance before proceeding further with further changes if it proves necessary.
A Suggestion can be options. They are suggested alternatives to what is being proposed in the present state. This entire suggestions sub-forum is to suggest options and ideas for code-savvy people to jump if they so choose.
I... I don't understand where this binary thinking of "You either leave it alone or do five different changes in one PR" thinking is coming from, man, I need help here.-
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1 hour ago, EvadableMoxie said:
You took what I said out of context, I was responding specifically to the argument that drones should not have been nerfed because improving them would have been better. Obviously it makes sense to discuss future changes, it's just not an argument for what we should have done in the past, because it wasn't an option at that time.
It was always an option, there were a ton of suggestions when that PR was active and relevant. Most of those suggestions were not taken and the one that WAS taken, the 5 minute lifetime, ignored the critical second half of that suggestion, that the 5 minute duration would be enacted to the exclusion of the other nerfs.
Instead it was rolled into the other existing ones, and followed up with a PR that made E-magged drones very very obvious, by giving them red eyes. So, another nerf on top of already game-changing nerfs before they had even settled. (Red-eye PR may actually have preceded the nerf PR, I cannot recall which came first.)
Going back in time to change it is not an option. Acknowledging it was handled horribly during the affair so that it can be avoided going forward, is, however, very much an option.
The key problem here is how many nerfs were made, massive balance changes, done in so short an order with little to no time for consideration or seeing what was necessary. It would not have killed people to take it slow, nor would it kill them going forward. Baby steps are better then yanking out 4 things at one time, because then if things go south, you have no idea which one of those things was the problem and which one was the vital component that made it all work.
To draw a parallel, Fox recently added the Gloves of the North Star, letting them work with Hulk. He did this because he was already working on refactoring our Hulk code to be generally better all around, and when that refactor was done, the gloves would no longer work with Hulk. The consequence: This meant for a while Hulk + North Star was broken. You could kill people from 100 to dead in sub 3 seconds. It was timed.
This was objectively broken more then Emagged drones ever could be. But it was a process that had time taken on it, because the end result was healthier for the game.
What happened here was instead of each nerf being it's own PR, or each step taken bit by bit to get things done properly, overtime. Instead of asking people to live with it a little bit (They'd been just fine with it up to then, it wouldn't kill them to take it at a slower, deliberate pace), it was all lumped into one PR and jammed out of the gate as fast as possible, to the dismissal of everyone that was arguing it was going too far.
This is the core problem. Not that it was nerfed, that it was nerfed too much and done so faster then any other PR, most other PR's get chided and finger wagged at for trying to jam through multiple major changes with that kind of speed, this one should have been no different but for some reason was.-
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3 hours ago, Tayswift said:
Empirically, drones are an incredibly difficult role because they were designed to be hands off fun little things for ghosts to do but the reality was much different. In fact, tg just removed drones entirely cause they were too much of a mess for admins to handle. Drones even had a static overlay where they couldn't see who crew members were and tg STILL removed them. In the words of one of their admins, drones are "infinite all access ghosts that require admin micromanagement because they're only allowed to build and ignore people in a multiplayer game and they get in trouble when their buildings impact those other people in a multiplayer game"
That's just drones on their own without being emagable. It's already extremely difficult to avoid interfering with the round as a drone, and now you decry the removal of the temptation to throw off those chains and become an agent if chaos that requires the attention of half the station to catch and destroy?
My intention with the drone nerfs initially was to move them into a support role. I presented a bunch of nerfs that would work towards accomplishing that goal and also took some ideas from the PR discussion. Staff wanted to move the emagged drone into more of a targeted sabotage role, which I thought was pretty cool too. And I think you maybe right that five minutes may be too short to accomplish some forms of sabotage.
However I'm tired of arguments that drones are just like any other convertible role. They are not. And no amount of theorycrafting is going to change the fact that this is empirically false, which can be attested to both by our staff and the staff of other servers, none of whom have antag drones and one of whom have removed maint drones entirely.
You're also comparing TG style drones to our more Bay-style drones, those are RADICALLY different systems.
for one, Drone shells had to be built by crew, and secondly TG style drones DID NOT have a "Drone management console" like our more Bay-style does. They were, essentially, spiderbots with hands.
Anyone who has ever made a spider-bot can tell you all the ways that can fucking go wrong.
TG-style drones also had no inbuilt tools at all, they had storage, and everything else they had they had to go pick up around the station, which is also WAY easier to "Interfere" with, when you are looting engineering/science of it's resources.
This is a comparison of apples to oranges. Just because they share the name "Drone" and had the same goal, the functions they took to get there were wildly different.
And, as has been pointed out a lot over the years, we're not TG. We have a very different player base with a very different mentality, with a very different stance taken from administrators.
These things do not compare beyond a superficial manner of comparison.
So, yes. I decry the removal of game systems when the opportunity to improve them and work them into a more healthy state with minimal effort was right there, and I wasn't the only one decrying it.The temptation to do 'bad things' is all over SS13 as a base game, let alone in Paradise's serverbase. If we're going to start coding things out because "People might be tempted" then you better gear up for a whole lot of coding because boy-howdy there's a LOT of systems in this game that give you the chance to be an asshole that kinda just works on the honor system that people won't abuse it, or face the pain train of a banhammer. But you don't go around doing that because that is usually an objectively terrible idea that NEVER works out for the better.
You cannot empirically prove a single thing, because the very nature of what you are saying is subjective. In your own argument, and in that PR it says as much that what was "Interfering" to one admin, was kosher with another, that's very damned definition of 'Subjective' so don't try and make it out like your opinion is an objective fact, because it is just that. It is not some scientifically proven fact, don't pretend otherwise.
The 'Observation' you're trying to pass off as evidence isn't really applicable when the huge variation of settings exists.-
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2 minutes ago, EvadableMoxie said:
Making golems requires 30-60 minutes of work depending on the luck and skill of the xenobiologist and can really only be effectively done in one specific area of the station, by one specific role. This means it's easy to stop, monitor, or control.
To spawn a drone, a ghost presses a button.
To say producing a golem is the same amount of effort as spawning as a drone is just completely ridiculous.
I've gotten Golem slimes done in sub-30 minutes, you go from grey to metal, to gold to admantine, each slime takes 2 monkeys, 1 to have it hit adult and 1 to split. If luck is on your side, you have adamantine slimes before you even need a single monkey cube refill, just using starter equipment.
Both boils down to a waiting game and random chance, golems can take longer if luck isn;t on your side, Drones might never appear, both of them involve a bare minimum of effort put in by the antagonist.
To say they're leagues apart is just completely ridiculous.
It's pretty easy to make ANYTHING sound silly when you play the spin game. -
1 hour ago, EvadableMoxie said:
If a cultist makes and converts a golem, they worked for that opportunity. They had to do Xenobio, or break into it, and get the extract and use it. It's something they did, and it's something the crew could have stopped from happening.
Xeno-bio comes down to "How lucky are you?" when it comes to getting the color of slimes you want.
That's not "Work" that's RNGsus, that's rolling dice to see how fast you get adamantine slimes.
And since most xeno-biologists make Adamantine slimes fairly regularly, monitoring xenobiology does absolutely nothing to counter anything. That's like seeing and stopping an engineer form doing the solars because he COULD be trying to overload the power system.
All you do is pop the golem rune in maintenance or in the cult lair instead of in the camera filled lab and congrats, free cultists. And 1 adamantine slime can easily pop out 9 cores, when Science does upgrades to the machines as they almost always do, again with no work on the part of that cultist. That's about as much work as buying an Emag and rolling the dice that a drone joins into the game and that you happen to run into it early on enough to be a help. And emagging a drone makes it VERY obvious something is amiss, given it gives drones literally evil red eyes, so it also, more often then not, gives up a portion of your element of surprise.
If all you're looking for was "Counterplay" then these nerfs do absolutely nothing to achieve the goal you're laying out. It does nothing to prevent how "easy" it is to do, it just makes the act of doing it at all a noob trap to the antag, and a giant pain in the ass for the drone player. All you need for counterplay is to put emagged drones on the drone console, same as an emagged cyborg, so that if it becomes clear it is emagged, you remotely blow it. THAT is counterplay. It also subtly encourages certain playre behaviours without being an active misery, because it encourages "Sabotage bot" playstyles, which was, according to the PR, the goal if the entire thing. A stealthy saboteur is less likely to be caught and blown, a murder-bot is going to get got reeeeeeeeal fast.
What we got was a sledgehammer to the entire concept because "I personally don't like it so it should go away". And THAT is faulty design work when far better or less invasive alternatives were presented, and not even my own suggests, LOTS of people weighed in with solutiosn that were far more palatable then this.-
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10 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:
The role of Cyborgs, like crew, is to have an impact on the round. They can save lives, chase down antags, or be subverted when the AI's law change. Creating them is a decision the crew makes in order to get the benefits in exchange for the risks. It's part of the design of borgs that you can never really fully trust them. Further, Cyborgs name themselves and have oversight from the AI, making them not anonymous and making it far easier to tell if they are intentionally trying to be emagged.
Maintenance drones on the other hand aren't supposed to normally impact the round, because it's an infinitely respawning ghost role. It's more akin to respawning as a mouse, with just a bit more to do. The two aren't really comparable when it comes to design or function.
If you disagree with someone, attack their idea, not the person. If you can't even accept the fact that someone might disagree with you for logical reasons then really there's not much reason to discuss anything with you.
I did attack their idea, repeatedly, several times in the PR that brought the changes to begin with. There was never any real rebuttal to those arguments.
I also gave alternative suggestions, I didn't just say "Idea's shit lol" and carry on, I provided thought out suggestions.
Calling someone salty and saying they're letting it make them irrational is not a personal attack, it is absolutely calling into question the motives for WHY they're making their suggestions and motivations can be important to know. It's literally the entire reason that "i ded pls nerf" github tag even exists.
If you disagree withsomeone, attack their idea, don't try to dismiss it out of hand because it was delivered in a way you don't like.
The point of the maintenance drone is not to INTERFERE in the round, not have no impact, that notion is literally impossible.
You cannot be involved in the round or exist in it and have no impact in it. Drones have engineering tools, can repair breaches/various items, can clean and even set up atmos layouts. ALL of those things impact a round rather heavily. If someone like an antag blows a hole in the station and a drone fixes it, it has impacted the round rather heavily, potentially foiling an antag's plot.
If a drone repipes atmosia to be more effective, thus handling a plasma fire efficiently, it effected the round quite heavily.
If it sets up the turbine/solars and helps power the station, it is impacting the round.
By cleaning up a room of blood and gibs, it's potentially wiping away a crime scene before anyone saw it. That's another massive impact.
Doing ANYTHING shy of being your normal everyday civilian RPing in the bar, is going to have tangible impact on the round. You cannot avoid a drone having impact in the round, by the fact it EXISTS, it has impact and always will, you;re taking that interpretation far too literally, or far too strictly.
The goal is for them not to INTERFERE in the round, not to be seperate from it entirely.
Earlier your quantification for "Emagging drones to work" was knowing that a drone didn't do so intentionally, that they didn't purposefully get themselves made an antag, but a positronic brain can do that EXACT same thing. They are both ghosts joining into the round, both can just as easily tell who is and isn't an antag prior to joining if they had a mind to. They are both designed to have impact in the round, just to differing levels. A borg can have MORE of an impact in a more open manner since it can talk.
As for oversight, Drones have just as much oversight as Cyborgs, the problem isn't that they DON'T, the problem is the crew is too lazy to ever give a shit to do that. That shiny drone console in engineering tells you the location and name and status of every single active drone. It can be used to resync drone laws (Mostly a hold-over feature from when there was an occasional bug that caused drones to have borg laws instead of the KEEPER laws.) and to give a remote kill command to any NON-EMAGGED drones.
Each drone has a unique number identification, and unlike cyborgs, blowing every single drone, while a dick move, is a lot less of a big deal, considering those non-antag players can also respawn.
Currently, emagged drones do not appear on that console and are thusly, immune to it. Something emagged cyborgs can't say. That was why the number one suggested nerf was to have them show up ON that console and able to be remotely blown, just like a cyborg. Thus keeping drones from being tiny murderboner bots, because that's a great way to get yourself instagibbed.
The choices taken to get to this point were illogical and irrational. Most people AGREED nerfs needed to be had, what people argued was for a series of smaller nerfs until we got to a good place, as opposed to taking a sledgehammer to the entire thing, repeatedly, in several areas all at once.
Again, few people said they didn't need ANY nerfs. The problem was it was 3-4 all at the same time, instead of 1 or 2 to bring their power level down safely and slowly. It was all about a knee-jerk quick-fix instead of doing the job correctly and precisely.-
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17 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:
For emagged drones to work, we need to know, 100% that people are not specifically becoming drones and allowing themselves to be emagged. If people are doing that, the whole thing breaks down.
And the problem is, there is absolutely zero way to enforce drones not trying to be emagged. Unless the person who plays the drone is dumb enough to do something really egregious or flat out admit they are doing it, they will never be caught. All you need to do to get emagged is be in science maintenance while a traitor with an emag is around and let it happen. Can we prove that a drone was in sci maint specifically to be emagged? No, we cannot. And on top of that drones are anonymous so you can't even establish a clear pattern of behavior.
Forget all of the other arguments, this right here is why emagged drones should not be a thing. Because it relies on rules that are totally unenforceable, and unenforceable rules are not rules. Everything else, from fun for the drones and antag, to their combat power mostly being derived from a bad interface, to the power of an emag, to antag/sec balance is static and doesn't matter because this issue means emagged drones cannot work, no matter how they are implemented. It would be better if we didn't have them at all, but the current crippling nerf of making them basically useless is better than how it was before at least. They should have been removed entirely, but as they say, a good compromise makes everyone upset.
Positronic Brains, mid-round join cyborgs.
Still can't stop 'em from knowingly getting antag'd.
And yet, you still don't give cyborgs a 5 minute lifespan.
The current design is good for no one. It's terrible for antagonists, cuz it just broadcasts their existence.
It's terrible for the drone who gets 5 minutes to live and if it's player wasn't keen on antagging to begin with, now has to stop everything it was doing for 15 minutes, the length of a major crime brig sentence, for doing nothing.
It was a kneejerk reaction that went WAYYY too far.
The alternative people gave wasn't even minor. Just make emagged drones appear on the drone console to be remotely blown, just like cyborgs. Now Drones have to play with a measure of caution, just like borgs, else they just get remotely blown.
Why all this OTHER stuff happened is beyond me, the fix was simple, it was easy, it was the ultimate nerf that didn't ruin everyone's good time. But instead of going down the easiest, clear-cut path, we elected to take weird and horribly confusing paths to achieve the same goal an all we got was obnoxious design because of it.
A Good compromise is one that everyone can live with and tolerate, that works out for both parties.
This was never a compromise. This was one side's salt overdose hitting lethal quantities and letting it cloud their judgment with irrational thinking.-
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Just now, EvadableMoxie said:
Isn't that better than being an antag's personal all-access ID for an indeterminate amount of time? At least a timer puts a cap on the amount of time you have to be sidetracked before you can respawn and go back to what you were doing.
Sort of.
5 minutes limits your misery, but before you could be given orders to go an chaos havoc, to be a saboteur.
Now, five minutes is barely enough plan to lay out a plan, get there and enact it. -
3 minutes ago, EvadableMoxie said:
I don't think it went far enough. An infinitely re-spawning ghost role shouldn't have the option to be converted into an antag at all.
QuoteIt was to the point a LARGE portion of people in the debate when it was happened said to just make drones unable to be e-magged BECAUSE the nerfs were so extreme.
A PR was made to do exactly that, and it was shot down.
And to be honest, at this juncture I find it the most preferable option. It's better to justn ot be able to be emagged at all, then to be emagged while you're on some other project an be forced into an Antag's personal all-access ID card for 5 minutes instead of doin somethin like pipe atmosia or somethin'. -
29 minutes ago, Tayswift said:
Depends on your definition of fun. Emagged maint drone isn't "fun" in the sense of you get to robust people, but it's not that different from normal maint drone play in that you're just doing your job but in an evil way. The "emag = death" thing is helpful in that it incentivizes drones to run away from being emagged. Before the changes, drones would run toward antags to get emagged all the time.
That's no different then, as a civilian, running at a Shadowling or cult to get converted, but you don't suddenly make it so all converted greytide gib after 5 minutes or making Emagged cyborgs blow after 5 minutes. There are somethings that cannot and should not be handled via mechanics for these kinds of reasons. That is something for administration.
As I recall it, few people disagreed Drones were TOO strong, but the nerfs applied to them were far and away too much, and that was the toned down edition. It's of dubious use to most antags and it's a direct killjoy on the Drone to go "Welp you got 5 minutes lol gg no re". Because bear in mind the death also forces that 10 minute cooldown on being able to rejoin. So as somone is playing a drone, gets e-magged out of the blue and toddles on to a death they can do nothing to stop, their entire gameplay interrupted, they now have to wait just to get back to what they were doing, a total of at most, 15 minutes. The equivalent of a Major Crime brig sentence, just for being caught out.
It was to the point a LARGE portion of people in the debate when it was happened said to just make drones unable to be e-magged BECAUSE the nerfs were so extreme.
They needed to be toned down, but what they got was ridiculously overkill. You want to make an e-magged drone not a combat machine, I'm fine with that, make thme utterly unable to attack things while emagged so they can be nasty little sabotage bots, I am fine with that.
But their current state is easily the most painful experience I have had on paradise since it went through.
Making something painful to play as a 'Balance' to discourage an activity you will NEVER be able to stop, is not good. It punishes a player who did nothing wrong and does nothing to stop the other kind of player they'll still do it for a chance at 5 minutes of murderboning.
Drones are actual players too, they should PROBABLY be allowed to have fun now an again.-
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The Kinetic Accelerator is far and away the most useful and powerful mining tool you can get. Even in it's basic state you still end up mining faster with it then a pick axe.
And even if science utterly ignores you, 2 cooldown mods and 1 damage mod, leave you able to clear things out fast, shred through mobs and pop open abandoned crates in relatively short order.
If science DOES give you the mining AoE, then every shot is mining a 3x3 radius, more then a RIPLY drill does, ona shorter cooldown at range.
As for the Crusher, I've always assumed it to be a very intentional "Hard mode" for mining, that's why it's so unwieldy. It's also justn ot quite up to "Par" as it should be however, as it's something that heavily involves Lavaland stlye mining, where, on killing creatures with the Kinetic Crusher, you have a chance to drop special trophies from that that you slap onto the Crusher to improve it. (Killing Legion mobs for example, which are basically reskinned Hivelords, can grant you a 'Legion Skull' which reduces the cooldown of the crusher)) -
Just now, Trubus said:
Then break the "death alarm".
The problem is, the "Death alarm" is the radio. It's just the innate fact a pAI, as soon as it's master is in trouble can shriek wildly over the radio, and that a pAI itself can be so thoroughly hidden that an antag might never even know they have one until it starts screaming.
To me, personally, that's just some of the risk of using chemical silencing instead of EMP, but it is seemingly enough of a concern that it bothers people so, that's why I suggested making the radio a purchased module so that if a pAI DOES grab it, they're limiting themselves elsewhere in exchange, and maybe making the radio more impressive in the process (Departmental channels an the like.)
Reworking Chaplains
in Public Archives
Posted · Edited by Dinarzad
Make it a balance weight.
Neutral Chaplains are all about self-sufficiency right? survival? They're tanky, not so much Damagey.
Your Good chaplains are your typical priest archetypes, they're healers/support types. This comes at personal cost and/or the shitty ability to harm others, even for self-defense.
So by that nature if dark chaplains are mostly based on damage, perhaps that comes with a cost. After all, these are dark, twisted beings the chaplain serves, they don;t give out power without a price. To help discourage valid-salads maybe they take more damage depending on the types of null rod they take? you want that LOL MUH DEEPS style Frostmourne-esque sword? Cool but now you take the same kinda damage as an IPC does. Cthulhu giveth and Cthulhu taketh away, either you bring more souls to him or you end up dead and he claims yours, either way he wins in the end etc. etc.
If we're looking to discourage validhunting with Evil Chap, that'd be my suggestion for it. Good got shit all for damage and meh defense, but are super good with others around them, Neutral has lots of self-sufficiency, like normal chappy does, and evil can do some pain train, but it comes with some hefty consequences as per your Dark Contract.
Also: As long as that good chaplain has dem prayer beads, this sounds dope and I will pray that you don;t get gibbed when Medbay forgets how to yank out xeno larva.