EvadableMoxie

Not giving out all access makes sense, and I sort of dislike the meta of doing that because it breaks down jobs having roles by giving everyone access to everything and things just sort of become every man for himself with people busting into departments and doing things on their own. But not giving out guns? That I wouldn't like. I don't think non-sec non-antags should be some kind of cattle there to be killed or defended. An engineer or doctor or scientist can do their job armed or unarmed, but if they're armed at least they have a chance to defend themselves from whatever threat is currently facing the station. Terror spiders specifically are a mode where arming yourself is a huge deal. It's not like Xenos where you're just going to be chained stunned anyway so it doesn't matter if you're the best SS13 player ever or AFK making a sandwich. Against spiders being armed is a pretty big deal because spiders don't have a ranged attack and it's suicidal to fight them in melee. I would never want to be without a weapon during a spider infestation. I'd feel like my job is to be an object to be killed by the antags so they can have fun and nothing more.

This would be a nice quality of life change, especially considering the cosmetic items don't actually do anything and are unlimited (Using the technique described above) anyway. I would hazard a guess if someone makes the PR it'll get in, but the problem is someone has to do it.

Even outside of the issue with slot machines there are problems. You can already send minerals back for points, and those minerals give you mining points which you can convert to cash. So you'd be able to double dip by sending the ore for points and then sending the money you for for mining the ore for points. Not to mention that it's not all that difficult to get tens of thousands of credits via mining. There are also departmental accounts with a lot of money, again tens of thousands, maybe even hundred of thousands of credits. It would be easy to have a ton of points very early on.

Yea, every playable race can be defibbed, including slimes. Even Plasmamen. To easily defib a plasmaman, do it under a shower so they don't burst into flame.

Some of these are not so useless, but... You can use a welder on rods or floor tiles to convert them back to into metal sheets. AI holopads are machines. This means you can use a screw driver, crowbar, wirecutters, and then a wrench to dismantle them for 5 metal sheets, 5 cable coil and a capacitor. Since they're literally everywhere you could get cable coil and metal on demand this way, albeit it slowly. Splashing simple mobs with Strange Reagent will revive them. You can revive Ian and other pets this way. You can also heal simple mobs using a trauma kit. You can feed spent shotgun shells into an autolathe to get the same amount of metal a new shell would cost. Showers can be wrenched to change the temperature. Cold showers are cold enough to activate cryoxadone. Baggies from the drug lab are coded as beakers, meaning you can use them as parts to build an protolathe or circuit imprinter. You can click individual lights as an AI to turn them on and off. Doing it rapidly can make it look like someone is being haunted.

If you take away all of an emagged drones remote access then they're really only useful for combat. So then it feels like it's stepping on the toes of the Holo-parasite. And I'm not sure it's good design to allow a traitor to buy a couple of drones, tell them "Go kill X." and then sit back and wait. I suppose they can do that now with emagged borgs, but at least that risks discovery if the borg rats you out when it's rebuilt. I think it would be more useful to give drones a role that is separate from combat. Let them be useful for getting you into places or scouting things out, but leave the combat support role to holo-paras. But then it's all theory, I'm not against testing anything and seeing how it plays out.

It's not really about punishment, people can do things to you to take you out of a round or change your gameplay, and that's part of SS13. An assistant with a crowbar might kill you as a drone or a diona nymph, but that's just how playing one of those is. So, if it sucks to be emagged, well, that's SS13. Shitty things can happen to you. I'd still prefer drones not be emaggable at all, but I don't think how it is now is much different than other things in SS13. I think making them purchasable traitor items could work, because we can apply a specific TC cost to make them balanced. It wouldn't be infinitely respawnable through no action of the person in the round, and it wouldn't be something that's converted so there'd be no issue with drones trying to be emagged. I think the only thing I'd want addressed at that point is the ability of drones to interface with electronics while inside pipes.

I would agree that it's less fun to be an emagged drone now than it was before. However, the goal is to increase how much fun everyone has. This is similar to the self-antagging and antag-hunting rules. They make the game less fun for some people, but they are necessary to keep the game fun for everyone. We're getting into subjective things here, but I've always felt emagged drones were incredibly unfun to deal with, and that's a sentiment I've seen agreed with by a lot of people. Obviously this is opinion, and if you disagree that's valid, but my impression of it is that we're all better off now not having to deal with them.

I'm sorry but your argument doesn't make any sense. Yea, everything you said about getting emagged and having it be a jarring change of playstyle is true, but it was true both before and after the nerf. If anything, it's a good argument for not having emagged drones in the first place. If the point is that it sucks to get emagged how can you say applying a timer that limits how long you are emagged be a bad change? How can giving traitors less incentive to emag drones and thus having less emagged drones be a bad change? 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.

I don't see how the nerfs hurt normal drone players in any way. I assume you're talking about people who don't want to be emagged. Well, why would someone who doesn't want to be emagged be upset about a time limit on how long they'll be emagged for before they explode and can just respawn? How will providing antags with less incentive to emag drones in the first place, and thus reducing the number of emagged drones hurt players who don't want to be emagged? It seems pretty clear to me that nerfing emagged drone gameplay is going to hurt people who want to play emagged drones. People who don't want to play emagged drones will either not particular care, or be relieved that the 5 minute time limit will let them get back to the type of gameplay they want. I don't see how emagging drones is a newbie trap at all, but okay, let's assume it is. So what? This is a server that wouldn't remove suicide pills from the nukie kit but we shouldn't nerf drones because antags might make a decision to emag them and that decision might hurt them? So, we'll let antags (and everyone else) hurt themselves in 100s of ways, but this specific thing, emagging drones, this crosses some kind of line? I don't follow. I agree with you that in the current state emagged drones are nearly useless. And I think that's a good thing, because they shouldn't exist at all. Saying they are useless now is only an argument against the nerfs if we both agree they shouldn't be useless, and we don't.

Let's say you're at a crossroads, specifically a T intersection. Your destination is straight ahead, but there's no road straight ahead. The only roads that exist will require you to turn left or right here, go a bit past, and then double back. If someone turns left in this situation, you can say "You know, it would be great if we built a road here that went straight so we could get to where we are going faster." And you'd be absolutely right. It certainly would be, and there's no harm in discussing it. What you cannot do is say "The driver was wrong to turn left, because it would have been faster to go straight if someone had built a road there." Yes, it's true that it would have been, but going straight was not an option at the time. Going back to the PR. This idea of improving drones and how they work with emags rather than nerfing them into the ground? It's a good idea. It's much like building that road. We'd all prefer it. But also like the road, at that given point in time, it was not an option. Until someone actually did that, it wasn't an option, so saying that it should have been done instead is an invalid argument. It couldn't have been done instead. It still can't, until someone makes a PR. But, I feel like I have to keep trying to steer you back to the actual conversation. You want to talk about the way the PR was handled and the motivations of the people making the PR. But I haven't actually seen you talk about what was actually changed and how that made the server a worse place. That's what we should be discussing and I feel like you just aren't willing to do that and this is becoming a waste of time as we argue about everything but anything with actual substance.

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.

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.

I agree completely that improving systems is generally better than removing them. But you are stating this as if there was a mutually exclusive decision to make between improving it and nerfing it, and nerfing was picked. That isn't the case. There was no improvement PR made and uploaded that could have used as an alternative. If anyone does ever offer such a PR in the future, having drones nerfed now won't prevent the change from being considered. There are a ton of ways drones could be changed so that emagging them would make sense. But until someone offers a PR up, that really isn't relevant.

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.

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. If a drone pops out of the vents next to an traitor, that's just a gift. The traitor didn't do anything to make it happen, it just did, and there is no counterplay the crew could have done to stop it from happening. I mean, technically they could blow all drones and destroy all fabricators every round with traitors in it, but that really isn't a realistic strategy like simply monitoring Xenobio on a cultist round is. That's the important distinction here. Cult golems are a strategy cultists employ, which requires action and can be countered. Emagged drones just sorta happen. Sure, the traitor has to emag them but getting the opportunity to do so is entirely beyond control of both of the traitor and crew. You can't even really say buying the emag was the strategy since traitors buy emags for so many different reasons completely unrelated to drones.

So... we should ignore motivations and focus on the merits? I've said that twice already, I'm glad we agree now. My half-assed excuses are in my previous posts, if you want to discuss them, feel free to scroll up and read them. Regarding your points, as I said the main issue is mostly about a ghost role that can infinitely respawn itself without any intervention from anyone alive in the round being convertible. Discussing power in SS13 is a really difficult call because it's a game where combat can be decided by a bar of soap. Anything being overpowered or underpowered will be highly subjective. What I hope we can both agree on is that they were effective in combat. And that's really all that matters to me. I don't think an infinitely respawnable ghost role that can spawn itself without any intervention from a player in the round should have the potential to be converted into an effective combat tool.

Golems require a player in game to do something to create them. Drones do not. I think you are correct about the intentions of the people who made the nerf. But it doesn't matter, because it's irrelevant. The entire PR could be, as you put it 'i ded plz nerf' and still be the right call. That's why we don't bring in motivations. Because they don't matter. If you are saying the PR is necessarily wrong due to the motivations of the person who made it, then you're making an Ad Hominem attack and not addressing the subject matter. If you aren't saying the PR is necessarily wrong due to the motivations of the person who made it, then the motivations don't matter anyway. There is no reason to bring them up or discuss them. Discuss the merits of the nerf.

People who are unable to recognize the proper time and place for things. Believe me, I have ran through the halls naked on meth firing laser tag guns, but I've never done it with nukies inbound or terror spiders on station. When things are dull and boring, people should be a little crazy to spice them up. But when things have already gone to shit, the last thing one should do is making the overall situation worse. There are times when even The Gray and The Red must unite against a bigger threat.

I'm talking about 'attack' here in the context of debate. Questioning the motives of one making an argument rather than the argument itself is the literal definition of an Ad Homiem attack, which literally translates to "To the person." The motives of someone making an argument are entirely irrelevant. Either their arguments have merit or they do not. If they do not, you should be able to logically explain why they do not. And if they do, then the argument should be respected for it's merit, regardless of the motivations of the one making it. This is the very basic bedrock of debate and discussion. Bringing up the intentions of the other party doesn't mean you're neccessarily wrong, but it is beside the point and a distraction from the actual debate. Anyway, sorry for the tangent. Let's actually discuss the issue. The crux of your rebuttal as I understand it is trying to compare borgs to drones by stating both could act to be intentionally subverted, and thus since emagging of borgs is okay, it follows that emagging of drones is also okay. If I have misunderstood your position, I apologize. It's true that conversion is a major aspect of Space Station 13. It goes even beyond Borgs. A player could want to be mindslaved into an antag, converted into a shadowling thrall, infected by xenos to become a larva... conversion is a major theme, and in all of these cases a player may attempt to intentionally by converted. I will need to demonstrate what makes drones unique in that they should not be convertible while other roles should be. I argue that it comes down to two major differences inherent to drones. 1. Drones are an unlimited resource that can spawn into the round at any time without any action by someone already in the round. If a Borg is destroyed, they must wait to re-enter the round until repaired. Emagged borgs that are detonated usually have their posibrain destroyed in the process and so are out of the round until someone builds a new borg. If the crew wants to stop building borgs, because they are constantly being subverted or the AI is malf or for whatever reason, they can do that. Borgs are more akin to golems than they are to drones in that they can only enter the round when a player already in the round allows them to. This makes drones unique in that they are the only convertible thing that can be endlessly spawned at will by players with no input from the player already in the round or from the triggering of a specific event. To give an example of this in fact, it used to be possible to convert simple mobs into cults. There is a well known story of the cultist mouse which occurred when a mouse happened to be on a convert rune and was converted into the cult. While it was a funny event, the result was that a PR was quickly put through to make converting of simple mobs impossible. Despite this, golems were not changed in the same way, and can still be converted into a cult. One could argue it was simply a matter of realism as a golem possesses the necessary intelligence to be converted while a mice does not. However, there is also a strong mechanical reason for the distinction here. Mice can be infinitely spawned without any input from players, whereas golems require a player to create them. I think it's basic design philosophy that there simply should not be a convertible role that can spawn infinitely without any impact from the players already in the round. 2. It is much harder to establish a pattern of behavior for attempting to be converted with drones than for other roles. Your assertion that drones have the same level of oversight as a Borg is patently false. You pointed out exactly it's false why when you explained how the drone console works and how it doesn't detect emagged drones or allow remote termination like the Robotics console does. This is beside the point, however. The argument was not related to player oversight in an ingame sense, but rather the the ability to detect players who are intentionally attempting to be emagged. Drones spawn whenever they want, usually in an isolated or low traffic area. They have generic names with only a number identifier and that number changes every time a drone dies and respawns. A borg, by comparison, has to be created by a player, usually robotics. The AI gets a notification whenever a new borg is created. Borgs have unique names, a selection of module and a selection of sprite. Borgs can interact with the crew, whereas drones are isolated. In short, borgs are distinctive and drones are generic. Additionally, borgs have specific jobs based on their model that determine where they should be and what they should be doing. Borgs have a boss, the AI, who should be monitoring them and even gets an info panel to help do so. Drones do not, the AI can't even talk to them beyond pinging certain area for repair with the fabricator console. If a borg is doing weird things and not their job the AI is far more likely to notice, as compared to a drone which it might not even be aware exists until it happens to see it on cams. Even in a situation where a drone's behavior has been recognized as suspicious, it's much harder to prove anything. If a crew member runs into maintenance as soon as people shout cult or shadowlings, it's pretty noticeable. Borgs, like crew, have specific jobs and specific places they should and shouldn't be. Drones not only don't have anywhere specific to be or not be, one could argue that since their laws say not to take a interest in the affairs of any being other than drones that they are required not to consider danger when deciding where to go or not go. Drones have a lot more deniability which makes it easier for them to get away with trying to be emagged, far moreso than borgs. These things make drones unique among convertible roles, and provides a very real distinction between drones and borgs.

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.

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.

And what about before sec knows it's a rev round? What if sec thinks it's a rev round and it isn't? You can't have different rules for different game modes when the game mode type is secret.

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.

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.