EvadableMoxie
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Posts posted by EvadableMoxie
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5 hours ago, ZN23X said:
Imagine if Greys were as popular as IPC?
"Nerf water. Remove water"
Before someone says it, I'm aware water cannot kill you through walls. Its also infinitely more common and not questionable to have in your posession in any context.
I'm not sure if you're trying to actually make this argument that people are only complaining about EMPs because IPCs are popular. If you aren't, I'm not sure why you brought it up, and if you are, well you sort of already argued against it yourself but...
While water is clearly easier to get and make than an EMP it's also far less effective. It being less effective is a lot more important than how easy it is to get. You spawn with an oxygen tank in your box which can be used to kill someone. Since you spawn with it, it's infinitely easy to acquire. This has not lead to a string of emergency oxygen tank murders. Likewise, while grays do occasionally die to fire extinguishers it's fairly rare because the best way to kill a gray is basically the same way you kill anything else: Stun, cuff, kill. If a racial weakness doesn't make it easier to kill that race with their weakness than it does to kill them by stunning, then really it isn't particularly relevant because it's only being done by someone choosing not to use the optimal route anyway.
A simple exercise: You have to fight an enemy 1 v 1, and you have to pick either a taser or an item to exploit their racial weakness. The enemy always has a taser. For the sake of this exercise, you're trying to win. No arguing you'd pick the weaker weapon for a more interesting fight, we're talking mechanical strengths and weaknesses here.
Slime person: A syringe gun with Frost Oil or a Taser?
Kiden: Bug Spray or a taser?
Diona: Herbicide spray or a taser?
Gray: Fire extinguisher or a taser?
IPC: EMP grenade or a taser?
In 4 out of 5 of those situations if you took the racial weakness you'd be at a disadvantage against an enemy with a taser. Against the IPC you just automatically win. That's the difference we're talking about here. It's not a subtle difference, it's pretty extreme. The racial weaknesses of other races aren't anywhere even close to what the weakness to EMPs is for IPCs.
Racial weaknesses of other races are simply not comparable to IPC EMP weakness. EMP weakness is on a whole other level.
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More people playing a race doesn't make the race stronger, so saying they can't be under-powered because they're popular is just objectively false.
The fact is nothing really matters except for EMP weakness. EMP weakness is such a massive downside that it's not even hyperbole to say that every IPC alive on the station is only alive because everyone else is allowing them to be. The most robust SS13 player in the universe playing an IPC is trivial to kill.
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On 9/4/2018 at 8:59 AM, ID404NotFound said:
This one is technically false, I've seen plenty die inside of cryotube
Yea, things like infection or reagents that are causing damage still proc inside cryotubes and can still kill.
That said, being at below 170k body temperature stops (but doesn't heal) bleeding and pauses the progression of Internal bleeding, which is handy for IB patients when the ORs are occupied.
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This will only amplify the problem with borers, which is that by and large crew WANTS TO BE infected. Yea, there is always a chance at a shittery borer but you can wrestle control back pretty easily and then sugar it down long enough to be removed. Because borers are almost pure benefit everyone wants them even though they really should be a bit more wary of the idea.
But now you're removing their ability to take over their host, meaning the borer can't even in theory do anything to hurt it's host. Then you're making borers even more powerful by giving them a stun. That's just... amazingly powerful. Think how good vampire glare is, and you're just giving that out. It's an auto win in any 1 v 1 situation.
And then on top of that, you get antag status, which is going to be massively problematic. The abductor objectives are very carefully worded as such to prevent violence and cause chaos without killing. An open ended objective to protect your borer means you are an antag with full authorization to fight security once they know you have a borer since you can assume being detained would mean it's removal. And unlike abductors, people would be actively trying to be infected by borers.
So, think about how bad it is as sec to have to deal with graytide. Now think about having to deal with graytide with antag status allowing them to do a lot more than just resist non-lethally. Now give them unlimited meth and vampire glare. Does that sound fun to deal with?
If borers are 'broken' then the way they are broken is that people don't have enough reason to fear them and instead actively help them spread. These changes would only amplify that problem while introducing a whole hell of a lot of new ones.
And in all honestly, I think borers are fine. Maybe not mechanically, but they're a great vehicle for roleplay and I don't feel like it's necessary for them to be anything more than that.
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I think it's hard to say patroling in pairs is overpowered because at the start security really has no idea what they're dealing with. If it's shadowlings and you're alone, you're boned. They have a screen range 20 second stun. There's nothing you're going to do to beat that. If you're alone they have a literally I Win button. If all of sec decided to patrol alone then shadowling rounds are just a joke. In that case patroling solo actually makes the round less interesting since the shadowlings are going to steamroll easily.
On the other hand, you might be up against a newer player who is very unrobust and 1 on 1 even with traitor gear is a fair fight.
I think, therefore, if we need to pick which evil to go with, I think it's generally better to maintain control of the situation. You can cut an antag you caught because you patrolled in pairs a break, but if you patrolled solo and it's shadowlings, things are now beyond your control.
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If we aren't going to discuss enforcement, and we aren't going to discuss mechanics, then what do you think is the solution?
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It took about half an hour to go into crit. Once into crit I died fairly quickly. There was a toxins refactor fairly recently, that might have changed it. I don't remember vomitting healing you before. Regardless though, the point is that it's really not a big deal for a Vox to removed from their tank for 30 seconds.
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It seemed to be that vomiting caused me to heal a bit of toxin damage, so once I got to 50 toxin damage it was extremely slow because vomit was nearly outhealing it.
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I decided to hop on a test server, spawn a vox, and drop my tank while timing it. It took over half an hour (34:35) to die. Don't believe their bullshit.
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That may have been the original intention but it's generally not how Brig Physican is played. For good reason, in my opinion. If the Brig Physican's job is to just treat minor injures then he is completely and utterly pointless. Any officer can apply a trauma kit to someone. There's absolutely no reason to have anyone dedicated to doing something so immensely trivial. Surgery and full on treatment is a much more involved process so it makes sense to have someone dedicated to it.
It's natural for things to evolve and grow beyond the designer's original intention. That's usually a good thing and the evolution of Brig Physican is no exception.
That said, I don't think the Brig Medical bay should get any more equipment. Having to scavenge and scourge is half the fun, and it rewards mastery.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is a general problem with the "PvE" aspects of the gateway in general, not just wild west.
1. PvE challenges in this type of game need to be fun and challenging not just the first time you complete them, but the 100th and the 1000th time you complete them. As it currently stands, that isn't the case and making this the case is something that's going to require a ton of work.
2. Roleplay considerations. How does someone know where they are, once they step through? How do they know the exact layout and what is waiting for them, as if they've done it 100 times before? It's kind of hard to have immersive RP with that giant elephant in the room. At the same time forbidding meta-knowledge like Colonial Marines is probably even worse.
3. I don't think antag status should be a reward. That is just silly to me, it makes no sense from an in character perspective that being a traitor or not is some kind of internal flag that the characters are aware of. It makes no sense for a character to say "Gee, I'd like to murder everyone on the station, but the magical switch in my head to let me do that isn't on, so let me go through this gateway to a place I've been 100 times before and then I can get the switch flicked and murder everyone, yay!" How does this even approach making any sense?
4. The admins. Look, I don't want to get into a debate about what the admins should or should not do, I'm just telling it like it is from the perspective of a player. We know cheesy tactics have to be done to beat this type of content. And every now and then an admin will see someone in the gateway or syndicate outpost, see they are using cheesy tactics, and then decide to end that player's round. Oh sure, they'll say it's throwing a curve ball at the player, or creating an additional challenge, or making things unpredictable, but the fact is if an admin so much as spawns an enemy behind you as you are advancing along with your office chair corpse bullet sponge, you're just dead. They might as well have just admin killed you. Everything is so fast and you die so easily that anything you don't predict coming in advance will kill you. And this creates a problem of players being more afraid of the admins than they are of the content, which is just a totally messed up situation. But, that's is the situation and all it does is create animosity between the admins and players that we'd really be better off without.
The short of it is this: If there is some type of overhaul, then there needs to be a clear understand between the players and admins about when, why, and how admins are going to intervene so it doesn't feel like an admin just randomly decided to drop a fridge on you that shift, because that's kind of exactly what it feels like right now.
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The only time I dislike gimmicks is if the gimmick results in incompetency at your job. I think everyone should play a character that gives them leeway to be both serious or goofy, depending on if the situation calls for it. A long as you can do that on a character, I say go right ahead.
I also think in some situations a bit of comdomness can be a good thing. Recently the 'Space Ball!' round was one of the most fun rounds in recent memory, and it all started because the Captain decided to outlaw baseball bats. And I don't know how it shaked out exactly since I wasn't there, but a giant bar brawl where everyone gets arrested actually sounds awesome if the round was on the slow side.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Unknown admins, massive shittery
in Resolved
Posted
I would like to second this complaint as someone who witnessed it as a ghost. I would have put a complaint in myself but as it's already filed, I'll just add on here.
If the goal of this event was simply to have some inspectors, then it would have been easy for CC to send confirmation that the officers were indeed legitimate. This was not done. So there are two possibilites here:
1: The intention was to create doubt as to if the inspectors were legitimate or not.
If this is the case, then the station concluding they were impostors and trying to arrest them should have been anticipated. And if it was, I find it hard to believe that the admins thought it would be fun for security and the crew to consequently be gunned down by admins who are nearly invincible due to having admin gear. This certainly comes out looking like admins decking themselves out in admin gear and picking a fight with the crew.
2: The intention was not to create doubt as to if the inspectors were legitimate or not.
If this is the case, then why was an announcement from CC stating the legitimacy of the inspectors not made? Why was there not only no official fax sent, but not even a reply to the faxes from the station inquiring about the inspectors? The admins are certainly aware that fake inspectors is a common ploy and it was fairly predictable that the station would respond with paranoia. The outcome was one that should have been easily anticipated, and action should have been taken to prevent it if it was not the desired outcome.
Whatever the case and whatever the intentions of the admins, the crew was given false information that the officers were impostors and moved to arrest them until their authenticity could be confirmed. The actions of the crew were reasonable. The actions of the Navy officers were not.
It's difficult to believe the Navy Officers felt legitimately threatened by the crew or security. They had admin weapons and gear more than capable of subduing all of security and anyone else who attempted to stop them. But, even if they did legitimately feel security could have subdued them, the worst case scenario is they are arrested, held until their identity is confirmed, and then released. Sure, it would have been annoying and inconvenient but not something you gun down your own men and bystanders to avoid. Lethal force was completely unwarranted in this situation, and using it more or less confirmed in the crew's mind that these were impostors. I know if I saw someone running down the halls with a dual-e-sword murdering security I'm certainly going to think they're a syndicate agent, not an NT Navy Officer.
But, whatever the whys and hows, what happened here is that admins outfitted themselves in admin gear and then engaged in an impromptu deathmatch with the crew. This is something that really should never have happened, for any reason. I'm very disappointed that it did happen and I hope something can be done to ensure it doesn't happen again.