DrPockets

Going to try to keep this brief, but feel free to ask me to elaborate on anything. Firstly, regarding the alleged metagaming, from my end there was no OOC bias. There were several IC reasons to be suspicious which I will get in to. Ricky's summary of the round's events matches what I remember. While Eva was dealing with the power sink, Clark was dealing with the bug in the consular's office. In the course of the investigation, it was found in PDA messages that the janitor was paid/extorted to put the bug there. While all this was being worked through in the brig, Johnson was nowhere to be found which was the first (minor) point of suspicion. The round got a lot more chaotic around this point, especially over sec's radio, so I might not have the order of events 100%. HoS ordered Johnson detained and searched. Johnson did not readily cooperate so the officers started to baton him. When he went down he dropped the hardsuit, that and him moderately resisting are 2 other IC reasons we were suspicious of him. If someone turned it into the lobby and Johnson did just happen to pick it up right before he got detained, very unfortunate timing for him because it made him look very guilty. Around the same time we found the PDA messages between Johnson and Sarrj. Nothing incriminating in the messages, but given how similar it was to the messages between Sarrj and the janitor which were used to plan the bugging of the consular's office and the prints/fibers suggesting that they did physically meet, this was another red flag. Towards the end of the shift the HoS asked Clark and Eva whether or not Johnson should be let go. With the aforementioned reasons to distrust Johnson, I think there was ample IC probable cause to want him to stay detained while the rest of his case was worked out. Unfortunately, due to the round ending and the numerous other things going on during the round, there was never really enough time to properly investigate Johnson. Happy to expand further on anything, but that's about the gist of it.

While I think it would be cool in theory to make the game more realistic and allow for more stealth-based gameplay, I found playing with vision cones to just be fundamentally not fun to play with. SS13 as a 2-D top-down primarily visual game just doesn't lend itself to vision cones in my opinion. In real life while I obviously can't see directly behind me, it's much easier for me to know what's there. End of the day, this is a game. It's fine for it to not be as realistic as possible and allowing people to see in 360 degrees. I'd rather have that than what I feel is a clunky vision system. I'm not really sure how to best go about improving stealth in the game, but I would prefer buffs to existing sneaking capabilities within the normal system than adding vision cones. I was part of an antag round with cones a few days ago and it only detracted from my experience. Especially as my involvement in the round was mostly talking, it was made much more difficult to keep track of things by the fact that I could only see half the people talking at a time (I was situated between two groups). Not a whole lot of sneaking around there, so definitely not the best way to judge vision cones in a stealth situation. But it's still relevant because a majority of situations with or without vision cones enabled will not be antags sneaking around. I can see fringe benefits to adding cones, but not enough where it's worth worsening the player experience in every other facet of the game. As for the stuff above about trusting players with what they should and should not be able to detect, you can't 100% trust people to act realistically. While it's good to have gameplay mechanics that force realism so people don't have to pretend they didn't see/hear/know something, it's a RP server so there has to be a base level of trust regarding powergaming.