dafrek

Vampires are mostly balanced in my opinion, although glare, Dantalions, and Umbraes are a bit too strong. Umbrae is just a bit too good at evasion, which is not a big problem compared to Dantalions. Dants can thrall their first three victims using the blood they drain from them with the usage of blood bags. This means there are zero victims to go and tell security what is going on, resulting in a 4 man antag squad not being known to anyone usually. Glare's mute is a bit oppressive and should stop working after the vamp reaches a certain blood level. tldr; umbrae a bit too evasive, dants too stealthy, and glare a bit too mutey.

Thats not a bad idea, would at least give the crew a heads up, especially for the roundstart carps which can sometimes cause breaches in the first 30 seconds of round.

Ah yes, explorers continue to have a positive impact on the round with no downsides!

This is a rather simple suggestion, decrease the amount of space mobs that venture near the station. The primary target of this suggestion is the damn explorer mobs such as goliaths, watchers and hive lords. The secondary target is carp. Both of these are a lot more annoying now that new atmos has been implemented. Explorer mobs: These are a pain in the ass, since they not only murder crew and are very hard to fight off without kinetic accelerators (regular laser guns don't do much), but they also for some reason are able to push entire airlocks and windows 1 tile at a time (this can cause some minor bugs with the windows but that's not the important part). A simple fix such as not allowing them to enter station Z level, unless an antag uses something to bring them, would be great as they are clearly intended to be fought by explorers and not to rampage on the station sometimes racking up surprising kill counts. Carps: Carps are not as bad, but with new atmos and the recent carp buffs can be rather annoying. The main issue I have with them, however, is that they can spawn at round start with the carp station trait and depressurize areas within 30 seconds. A fix for this would be to remove the station trait that allows for them to spawn at round start, instead allowing the crew to properly equip themselves before carp appear. These changes would be a nice quality of life improvement for everyone who is not intended to fight space mobs.

I'm not a fan of widescreen. It is admittedly neat to have the game fit computer screens better, however, I don't think it outweighs the downsides. Having 9 tiles of vision in the horizontal directions vs 7 tiles of vision vertically is weird as it means that anyone using ranged weapons will be at an advantage if they stand in a hallway that runs in the horizontal direction since they have 2 tiles extra tiles of vision which gives them more time to react when they see someone, especially if their opponent only has melee weapons. Its already been discussed on GitHub that some people don't have the proper screen/settings for fullscreen, since the solution to this seems to be that fullscreen will be togglable this means that those without fullscreen will be inherently disadvantaged compared to those with fullscreen due to the difference in view distance horizontally. While I think fullscreen looks nicer the gameplay issues that it adds make me believe that fullscreen is not a good thing to add.

Seems like a cool rework, although I would suggest keeping the edagger in the sniper bundle as it really seems to fit that bundle and I maybe keeping the cham gas mask and ID in the darth lord bundle as it was intended for the user to give themselves a funny darth lord name.

I'm really surprised that not only was #8468 merged despite overwhelming opposition by the player base, but vulps/tajarans also haven't been properly balanced since then. While I would personally prefer to see species based night vision removed, since its an extremely strong passive ability to have, as long as they have a bigger downside than taking more damage from flashes, which is extremely easy to completely negate, then they would at least be more balanced.

Vulps really don't have any maluses that counterbalance how their strong night vision is, their two main maluses being a whopping 11% faster hunger rate and extra eye damage from flashes, which, unlike moths, can be easily negated just by wearing eye protection. Tajarans at least have a bigger downside that replaces the hunger rate malus, that being a lower heat threshold, however that comes with a higher cold threshold as well.

The Current Silicon Policy gives basic guidelines for silicons in different situations, however it lacks guidelines/information regarding each lawset, specifically, simple information to help newer players understand how to act under the different lawsets and guidelines for admins and players alike on what things they certainly should not do, such acting the same way in trying to stop antags regardless of lawset. While, as McRamon pointed out, it would likely be less fun if we had very restrictive rules, there are undoubtedly things, such as who is and is not crew, that should be clear to players and especially admins. Having this information written in the advanced rules, or perhaps elsewhere, would be much more convenient than trying to search through forum posts or even discord to see what the general consensus is. Benefitting both new players and admins who are not especially silicon savvy the most.

Having super strict rules for how you should behave on a certain lawset could certainly decrease how much fun it is to play silicon, however certain things, such as who should be and who shouldn't be considered crew, and bad behaviors that are not allowed certainly should be written down somewhere. For example, a while back there was a minor discussion on whether or not changelings should be considered crew, on both sides of the discussion there were regular players and admins who believed they should or should not be considered crew, this is certainly something that I think should be clearly written down as part of a list for silicon players to look up.

This thread is about a pretty simple question. Should we have written rules that go into detail about what AIs and borgs should and should not do on their various lawsets? Perhaps it could be added to the advanced rules or be its own thing. Personally I believe we should have written silicon rules, mainly because AIs and borgs get too much leeway when it comes to interpreting their laws and it often results on AIs going after antags regardless of lawset and regardless of whether or not the antag has broken the lawset. Having written silicon rules would also come with the benefit of having admins on the same page when it comes to enforcement of rules more often, as currently its easy for admins to have different viewpoints when it comes to enforcing lawset interpretation. An example of what the silicon rules might look like if implemented is TG's "Silicon and Drone Related Rulings" under their Headmin Rulings page. This gives a clear list of situations for both regular players and admins to look at so that they know what to and what not to do when playing as a synthetic. Silicon rules are, of course, not the only thing that could benefit from being written down, however with how many lawsets we have it could certainly make it much easier to interpret and understand each lawset.

Personally, shadowlings were one of my favorite antags, mostly because of how different their playstyle was when compared to most other antags. The main issue that most people seem to overlook when thinking about shadowlings, is their huge skill gap between new and old players, as they are arguably the antag with the largest skill gap, best shown by a lot of newer players spacing themselves and dying while older players can often continue to survive for an absurd amount of time, even after the rest of their team has died. As both a security officer and a shadowling I definitely enjoyed the combat, with situations such as glowshroom spam or one last shadowling that refuses to die being less enjoyable than most situations. Being thralled as a mindshielded member of security of command was certainly an extremely different experience from most other antag rounds, which is something we seem to lack after they were removed. However, sadly, it seemed like they were taken down a bad road code-wise not long before they were entirely removed, most notably being the removal of the ability shadowlings to thrall through mindshields, which really encouraged slings to just kill all of sec or, more often, resulted in the shadowlings being overwhelmed as they fought with sec and often died instead of thralling crewmembers. I believe that if slings were changed to have a smaller skill gap it would make them more fun for most people. Specifically decreasing the speed of their jaunt, which would essentially buff slings for inexperienced players, as they would be less likely to jaunt into bad situations, and nerf them for more experienced players. One change they especially need to make them more fun is to give them the ability to thrall through mindshields again, as, not only did the removal of this ability cause most slings to murderbone sec, but it also made the skill gap even worse, as newer players would be forced to spend time to kill sec, often dying in the process, meanwhile a good amount of experienced players instead just removed sec's mindshields via surgery, meaning that the change that was meant to stop snowballing had much less of an effect on good players, who were the most likely to snowball with slings. These changes have been proposed in the form of PRs, however sadly they were never implemented, despite likely improving shadowlings as a gamemode overall. Some minor nerfs, such as removing the ability to use frost oil through walls, would likely also make them a bit more balanced. Bringing them back now that our combat is more stamina based would certainly be a bit tough, although examples such as vampires would likely give us a good starting point to base their balance and abilities off of.

Yeah I definitely feel that, while there are some mechanics and other things we should port from TG, we really don't need to use TG's art style.

The detective's revolver was changed somewhat recently in the first combat update PR. This change removed the non-lethal rounds that caused stamina damage and instead loaded the detective's revolver with lethal rounds. While previously you could load the revolver with lethal rounds this came with the risk of the gun blowing up in your face each time it was fired and took more work than just having them at round start. Personally, I am not a fan of this change as, while the intention of this change was to reduce the amount of det-curity, I have witnessed a lot of detectives still just blasting people with their revolver. And as you can probably guess, for most antags it is a lot worse to be shot by a revolver with lethal rounds versus non-lethal rounds, because of things such as broken bones, internal bleeding, and death. I would like to hear other people's points of view on this change though as there are probably some good things about this change that I haven't covered, such as more bad detectives getting job-banned for abusing their job?