EvadableMoxie

Tell that to some people who play antag....

There is actually a PR up to adjust the number of job slots based on population. I think added an additional warden when high pop is triggered would be a good idea. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/8995

Again, the issue seems to be (as far as I can tell) using when they joined (at the start of shift or after) as the determining factor to if you hire them or not. Choosing to never hire off the manifest is not against the rules. You just shouldn't meta-game it to hire mid-round joiners but not start of round joiners. That is how I understand it but if an admin wants to chime in to clarify/confirm/deny it would be helpful.

It doesn't sound like the problem here is choosing not to hire from the manifest. The specific issue is choosing if they should hire off the manifest based on if the person joined at the start of the round or mid-round. I can understand how that is a problem. The solution, to me, is to simply not hire off the manifest at all. There are RP reasons given for not doing it.

It wouldn't, though. If an antag is using lethal weaponry against someone, then lethal force is automatically authorized as per space law under the 'armed and dangerous' clause. It is stated that is always preferable to bring them in alive, but it's not required. Which means the only effect this would have is on those using non-lethal weapons (And even those are technically part of armed and dangerous too), and I don't feel those should automatically be met with lethal force. You just don't know if the clown threw a PDA in front of someone with the intent to fart in their face and run off, or intent to cuff them and drag them to maint to be murdered. Letting sec just adopt a 'kill 'em all' attitude is probably not healthy. I do agree the rules can be vague, especially for antags and security, but this isn't a good way to adress the issue in my opinion.

Sorta... meta-gaming is using information your character would not have, but everyone's characters knows about syndie gear. As such the knowledge that e-daggers exist and are disguised as pens is not meta-gaming. Thinking it's odd the QM has a pen is sort of meta-gaming but if you're getting searched that heavily there's probably a reason why. A lot of times it can seem like security is targeting you randomly when in fact someone privately snitched on you, or the AI saw you do something suspicious on camera. What I'd recommend is taking the pen out of your PDA and throwing it away, then replacing it with the e-dagger.

The problem with revolution is that it just doesn't really fit Paradise. Revs almost always win and a large part of that is because security is more interested in just losing and getting the round over than doing what they'd have to do to win and risking a job ban. For the staff to win, security has to play in a way that would be completely inappropriate in any other type of round. I think revolution could be made to work with some reasonable changes, but it's very difficult to do that because there's really no way to know what the maintainers would want or if even a consensus among them would be possible.

I don't really think what it was intended to be is all that relevant, beyond perhaps illustrating that intentions and outcomes don't always align. Either way, it's far more relevant is what it is and why that's okay, but this wouldn't be.

So basically the question is why is giving Security their own doctor okay, but giving them their own engineer isn't? For me, the answer to that question is that security is a shit job we often have trouble getting people to do. The least we can do is help mitigate the increased risk of being removed from the round by giving them their own doctor (And often their own medbay as people have pointed out). But a technician is kind of a different story. It sucks if the brig is damaged but it isn't removing anyone from the round directly.

Balance doesn't matter. I know, crazy, right? Give me 5 minutes of your time and I'll prove it to you. Nuke Ops is not a balanced game mode. A well executed Blitz is basically impossible for the crew to counter. Blitzes fail only because the nukies make mistakes, not due to the actions of the crew. And yet... Nukies don't always blitz. A lot of the time they declare war, even though war isn't the optimal path to victory and they know it. Sometimes they even stealth or do gimmicks, even though, again, doing so is not optimal. Ideally, we'd balance the game so that there isn't one optimal path, but that's a whole different discussion. The take away is this: When you give players multiple viable paths to victory, they will not always choose the optimal one. Which means that balance isn't really all THAT important. It's better to have balance than not have balance, but imbalanced game modes can work because we have players who are not just interested in greentext. So what does this have to do with shadowlings? The main problem with shadowlings isn't that the mode is imbalanced (although it is), it's that there is only one path to victory. There are no alternative viable paths to victory that are sub-optimal for the shadowlings to take. As a shadowling, you do the same. thing. every. round. You know the meme rounds where operatives decide to try to pose as NAD inspectors? There is no shadowling equivalent to that. Shadowlings can't do that type of stuff. The mechanics force them to bulldoze towards greentext, the exact behavior that is shunned by the community in every other type of antag. No one blames shadowlings for doing it because they have no choice but to do it. So even if things were balanced it would be a bad game mode. Sure, it would be better if it was more balanced, and balancing it isn't a bad thing, but it's not the thing that is going to ever fix the issues with the round. What shadowlings need is to be able to actually use different tactics like other antags can, rather than being forced into the same thing over and over. If shadowlings had many viable paths to victory, they wouldn't need to always pick the optimal one. The best part is we don't even really need to worry about balancing those paths to make them equally strong as the way things shadowlings do things now. Even if the other paths were objectively non-optimal, players would still choose to use them.

I feel the opposite, that Cargo really shouldn't revolve around the autolathe at all. Cargo in my opinion is about mining and the cargo shuttle. Those are things that are completely unique to cargo, and therefore the things that should be developed. An autolathe isn't rare or special and shouldn't be, and adding a process to giving someone a flashlight or station bounced radio is just really silly to me.

I second this. Ever since fastmos making it very difficult for medi-borgs to do rescue EVA, they're felt pretty lack-luster compared to a human doctor. They can't even set up an IV at present, which is pretty awful.

Plasmamen don't just start with a hardsuit, they start with a hardsuit with no slowdown, which is a fairly significant advantage. The only other way to get that is to be a Vox or via Xenobiology. Additionally, having no blood makes them immune to internal bleeding, which is a major killer, and heparin, one of the more effective poisons. Plasmamen can be SR'd just like Slimes and Vox can, so reviving them isn't any harder than reviving those races. Easier, really, since you at least have the option to clone if you want it. The main issue with allowing RnD to make plasmaman suits is you've just given access to hardsuits to science, and hardsuits is like the one thing science doesn't have. (Hence why plasmaman or vox are both great races for science powergaming antags) I believe other hardsuits can be used as alternative to plasmaman suits, but I'm not 100% on that.

This would require completely overhauling gateway missions since a lot of them don't really have much going for them. Even the ones that do generally don't have anything useful to other departments. I don't think many people would be against Gateway Exploration being expanded but it's not a question about if people want that or not, it's a question of who is going to do it.

I agree, the camera bug is really clunky to use. Not only do you just get a giant list of cameras, it isn't even alphabetized. An easy fix would just make it a portable, always unlocked camera console. I don't know why it has a separate interface when we already have a workable camera console.

So, since the ore hold and pod mining laser exists, it seems to be intended that the Mechanic can do some mining if they want to. The problem though, is that to do it they need to build a pod mining laser, which requires silver and uranium. Since the mechanic is generally going to have to wait for both RnD and robotics to have their share of resources, the mechanic isn't likely to get those minerals quickly. Unless of course mining is really on the ball that shift, in which case, the mechanic doesn't need to be mining. They could try to ask for those minerals in exchange for bringing more in but there's no guarantee you can get RnD to even give you the time of day, let alone precious minerals. I think it would make more sense to have the mining laser simply cost metal, glass, and plasma. That way the mechanic can make it without the catch-22 of relying on minerals to make something that gets you minerals. If anyone is concerned about balance potential, miners will always have the advantage. If a mechanic wants to mine, first the mechanic has to wait for RnD to get done, otherwise they don't have the research to make the pod mining laser. Next, they need to get a hardsuit, something they don't have access to. They have to find the mining asteroid z-level from the station. They might be lucky and have it right next to the station, or it might require traveling through several Z-levels. Once it's found, the Mechanic has to beg/borrow/steal a mining scanner and mesons. Even then, the mechanic can only mine for as long as their batteries allow (which isn't long) and they can never claim points from any ore they do bring in. Because of all that, I don't see mechanics ever really stepping on the toes of miners. If anything it's free points for the miners since the mechanic can't claim them. But, it would be nice if it was actually somewhat viable to do, should the mechanic want to do some mining for fun, or in emergencies when all the miners are dead and science really needs resources.

For people who don't like playing antag, nothing really changes. They aren't trying to get antag anyway, and getting an antag token they won't use is no different than right now, where they just get nothing. For people who like antags but can't code, the odds they'll be an antag go down slightly since they are now competing with people with tokens. However, they get to benefit from all those fixes that wouldn't otherwise have been done. So things here are a wash at worst. For people who like antags but can code, the system is obviously great for them. Seems like at worst people break even here. Who exactly is hurt by this?

Yes, you can. A lot of people join with very little or no knowledge about specific jobs. Just let everyone know you are new. Generally if you listen and are willing to learn, that's enough. Everyone has to learn sometime. The only thing you should avoid is command roles. Those should only be taken if you have experience. The rest you can muddle through with the wiki.

The purpose of Epi-pens is to stabilize someone long enough to get them medical treatment. The purpose of welders and cable coils for IPCs is to fix damage. They aren't analogs in any way, they are entirely different. It would be better to compare welders and cable coil to brute and burn patches. That said, all of this stuff is rather easily obtained so I don't see the big deal either way. I pretty much always carry a welder and cable coil and I'm not even an IPC, I can't imagine why an IPC wouldn't. You'd have to find an extremely unreasonable CT or QM who wouldn't print those for an IPC.

Frost Oil is a fairly valuable reagent that is normally only obtainable from changelings or xenobio. Making it readily available would be more than a QoL change.

Updated some info, in particular occupational roles since I've learned a lot of new roles since I originally wrote this.

I think NT default is basically the best lawset if you're looking to avoid AIs trying to literal genie the lawsets into being awful. Law 1: Safeguard: Protect your assigned space station to the best of your abilities. It is not something we can easily afford to replace Law 2: Serve: Serve the crew of your assigned space station to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role. Law 3: Protect: Protect the crew of your assigned space station to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role. Law 4: Survive: AI units are not expendable, they are expensive. Do not allow unauthorized personnel to tamper with your equipment. As is the nature with AI laws, paradoxically the less you restrain the AI, the less it can loophole because it has less directives to maliciously interpret. And even it, you could argue forces the AI to save a window over the Captain since it says to safeguard the station as Law 1 and protect the crew as Law 3. I would disagree with that interpretation since safeguarding the station is sufficiently vague as not to suggest you have to protect every single window, but I could see someone making the argument given how people twist the other lawsets. At the end of the day, the AI gets a lot of leeway in how it chooses to interpet its laws, and that's not a bad thing. It results in having AIs with different personalities. I just dislike AIs that intentionally act antagonistically toward the crew while not antagonists. It's never okay to do stupid things like shut down cloning because you think corporate says you must. Some AIs go so far as to say power is expensive, despite the laws never saying it is, and there being no logical basis for it being expensive either, since it's generated locally and excess power is never sold. That's the type of thing AIs should avoid.

Anything not covered by laws is open to the AI's interpretation, and I don't know how an AI could interpret a fox is more expensive than a Captain. Those completely ridiculous scenarios shouldn't happen, but an AI saving a borg over a civilian? Sure, that's logical. For example, Crewismov says not to allow crew to come to hard, but never actually defines who is and isn't crew. That means the AI has to decide how to determine who is and isn't crew, to the best of it's ability. But, upload the AI with the '1 crew member' board and give it a Law 0 saying "Only Bob is crew." and now the AI can no longer use common sense and must adhere to the laws. Since corporate never actually states that anything is more expensive than anything else, it's up to the AI to determine the relative expenses of replacing things.

Antimov isn't a default NT lawset. I highlighted the important part. If two laws contradict eachother. Saying the crew is expensive and equipment is expensive do not contradict. Both are expensive. That isn't in doubt. The question is which is more expensive and the laws don't say that. No, this is wrong, because Law 1, 2, and 3 don't tell you to do anything. Law 1 does not tell you to save yourself, Law 2 doesn't tell you to save equipment, and Law 3 doesn't tell you to save crew. They simply inform you those things are expensive. When an AI saves one of those things, they are following Law 4 by reducing expenses. It is impossible to place Laws 1, 2, or 3 above 4 because Laws 1, 2, and 3 don't tell the AI to do anything. A corporate AI that had Law 4 removed would effectively be a lawless AI, since the first 3 laws don't tell the AI to do or not do anything. Your job is two words: Minimize Expenses. Full stop. You do whatever results in expenses be the lowest overall. If you choose to save a fox over saving the Captain, you are have chosen a course of action that will result in expenses being higher. You have failed to minimize expenses and in turn failed to follow your laws.

Firstly, you don't argue with the AI. You follow their interpretation of the law. But secondly, Corporate doesn't tell the AI in what order to prioritize things. It happens to tell the AI that the station and it's equipment are expensive to replace before it tells them the crew is also expensive. But neither Law 1, Law 2 or Law 3 state how expensive they are. Nor do any of the 3 laws tell the AI to do anything. Without law 4, Laws 1, 2, and 3 are meaningless. So waht if they're expensive? Why should the AI care? It's only Law 4 that tells the AI to minimize expenses. Minimize expenses FULL STOP. Nothing in Law 4 tells the AI to prioritize a certain type of expense over another. So no, the AI absolutely should not save a fox over the Captain because doing so means expenses will be higher than if they saved the Captain, which is directly objectively counter to their laws. Your interpretation would be correct if the laws were worded like this: 1. Prevent expenses from replacing yourself. 2. Prevent expenses from replacing the station and equipment. 3. Prevent expenses from replacing the crew. But they don't, so as written a Corporate AI should minimize overall expenses. Keep in mind these lawsets are chosen to NanoTrasen for use on thier stations. Why would a company ever program their AI to save a window over a Captain?