Scheveningen

did u even read the post

?

The intention isn't for them to have any power, just to be an influencer like the rest of the consul roles.

yup that's right

I have some misgivings about how consuls work at the moment, but it's pretty easy to get over and the issues pertaining to them are small and subjective to interpretation. What isn't subjective though; Apart from the fact that any foreign national consul essentially neutralizes the chance for any other representative (including Nano reps) to appear in the round once a consul has taken the slot. It strikes me as a bit strange that we don't have at least one permanent NT Corporate Rep slot and then +1 Consul from any nation, -- or any other corp rep, etc. -- that can appear on the station in a round. As this is a NanoTrasen station that is our setting, I think it's really important NanoTrasen get its own representation first. Another thing is that while I don't want to see Corp Rep go in the direction of the old IAA, they should be the go-to person for crew resources issues, as with the HOP being a crew resources-oriented head of personnel is optional and not a required part of their job, seeing as how the HOP has two departments to run and access changing as their primary responsibility after that. Corp reps having their own NanoTrasen-y office seems pretty important, too, a given demonstration of lip service as payment rendered.

Yeah, suggested that, I definitely want nearly open borders as far as the station is concerned. Everyone should have basic maint access if not full ability to (almost) explore the whole station. It'd give antags plausible deniability and also would create patterns of regular characters walking into places, being accosted and carefully explaining their good intentions. Gives antags the ability to take this same approach and lie about their true intentions to get off scot free, and then not be technically punishable.

What are you even talking about? Literally no one here is threatening to protest this by attempting to do publicity stunts that would get them banned or whitelist stripped. The one person who I expected to be melodramatic about this in this thread in defense of the station roles didn't even bring the melodrama in with them today. Nobody is arguing against this. But assuming someone wants badly to "rush after antag and kill he with big grug club", they will do so regardless of what is mechanically changed. Reduce security officer slots or make them departmental if you want to reduce the over-saturation of security officers running through maintenance with a fine-toothed comb and catching antagonists without much effort. That's the way you fix this. Don't turbonerf the access that people lobbied for assistants to get, that CTs have had, and various other dept. jobs have enjoyed adjacent access to their department maintenance for. This is a game balance problem that's being addressed, moreso than it is a behavior problem. Legitimately embarrassing and disrespectful, prate, considering what your first edited post looked like, I think I would've preferred if you didn't edit it.

To correct you, then, if correcting people is deemed very important right now - Let's establish first-hand that even 4 people in security searching maintenance at a given time is an incredibly unrealistic scenario. Unless a sec officer has a partner with them and they're both armed to the teeth, they are absolutely not going into a maintenance shaft with an antagonist alone unless ordered to. The HOS has no place searching maintenance while he has officers available. The detective is intended to be a people person and resident interrogator. No real reason to endanger themselves in maintenance, alone with a dangerous antagonist on the run when they only have a particularly weak revolver. The warden certainly has no place to be in maintenance, ever. For reasons that should be self-evident. The CSI would only enter maintenance to get to a crime scene or a body dump. They have no legitimate reason to be searching maintenance even with a partner unless they had a direct lead to another crime scene. Officers are generally unreliable, at best you will have 2-3 officer presence and only between 1-2 of them is trying to work at their best. Cadets are far more unreliable than officers, with an average of 0-1 cadet presence with an exact 0 rating of them being 'competent' in a sense. They cannot be blamed as much as non-present or daydreaming security officers, though. They are just innocent cinnamon bun rookies. To say that even 9 people could be searching maintenance for a single or group of antagonists at once is a gross exaggeration of what really happens during gameplay. Security is not always fully stacked, only during very high-pop rounds. So, in reality, 2-3 sec staff could be searching maintenance, and on average they probably catch the antagonist alive in maintenance regardless. Which may or may not say something about both the suboptimal security grunts getting work done, in addition to the antagonist that somehow got caught when not outnumbered that badly.

The funny thing with maintenance contraband is the only useful things I ever find in there as an antagonist is soap to plausibly powergame slips with. Once in a blue moon an EMP grenades box shows up but I'm fairly certain it's because Brutish knows exactly where to find EMP grenades, the Treasure Island nerd that he is.

Then speed-merge Departmental Sec to deal with the bloat of the security department, if this is what you're arguing here. This is a non-fix to the actual problem. This 4D chess stuff never works. You need to actually hit the problems directly on the head to solve them. Remember force gloves? They're not game-breaking OP anymore where most melee weapons would break your legs or lower body nearly instantly. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7003 Remember stun batons and pain cheese? Almost all stun batons got nerfed and many clothing and armor items protect far better against electroshock now. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/6679 Remember the traitor revolver when it was also the de facto best uplink weapon and it was also a ruthless ganking tool? It has AP now, but doesn't have ridiculously short time-to-kill now. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/5983 Not to toot my own horn but those are decent examples of previously cancer game mechanics that aren't a problem anymore because they got directly fixed. I could write novels of the deeds of Geeves, Moondancer, Wildkins, Matt, several others who are not to be intentionally discounted but aren't off the top of my head right now in terms of names. They see an issue, they address it with a direct and decisive solution. Directly fix security's gameplay oppressiveness virtually any other way beyond what the PR suggests here. You'll find better results in a week post-merge than you'll find in a month with the PR here as it stands if it gets merged.

I'm sure there was more to the situation with Garnascus than that, but even assuming he did an uber-bad, one person or even a few people doing something the "not best" way doesn't change the fact that you can do better to set a good example for others and that there is never any harm in continuing to try, no matter how many people in the future behave in a way that incidentally shows they don't care about learning to do better. Beyond that, though, I don't find your assessment correct in that a problem will blow up later down the line. Brainmed works perfectly well for Baystation and their cult is only slightly different than ours. If they can make it work, we can too.

I feel like everytime we have this discussion it always devolves into a "your concept of fun is inferior to mine" and that is never fun. Fun is not completely subjective, only partially. The pursuit of 'fun' is better overall when your objectives involve boosting your own fun/engagement level in the round in tandem with other players and their characters. And trying to contribute 'fun' for as many as possible is not a subjective goal, it's definitely a goal in mind that tries to offer up an objectively interesting and engaging experience. SS13 is a game of deception, and while it may appear to have competitive elements thanks to its combat elements and overabundant violence, it is largely a cooperative game. Antagonists get beaten a lot because most antagonist players don't play antag on a heavy round-by-round basis, largely due to how chance weighting works, and the other times it's due to infrequent play overall. Combine also with the fact that "teamwork is OP" (or alternatively, bad teamwork breaks a team), and most solo antagonists get their ass handed to them. It's hard to scratch out what constitutes as a 'victory' in a roleplay sense as an antagonist, since the largest priority entails survival above all. Antagonist is genuinely the most difficult role on the server. You're probably going to be in a disadvantageous position a lot, or you may die a lot to the station's crew simply because they played their cards better as a crew than you did alone. But honestly, it's high time antagonists just got the blunt adult talk and get outright told to stop asking for better training wheels than the ones they already have. There are many things that need reworked with specific antagonists, absolutely, malf/rev/etc can definitely stand to be more powerful on their own. Indirect buff/nerf changes like this doesn't actually help antagonists at all to grow and execute interesting stories, it just gives license to powergamer-style antagonists to powergame as they usually do, but much easier than is the norm.

That's just what happens, unfortunately. Everyone is inexperienced at least once, or is at least once in the position to not know what the 'good' decisions are in certain situations or even what the 'gooder' decisions are. Respectfully advise them with reason and they'll correct their mistakes eventually.

Or you know just cut their limbs off, bleed them out enough to soulstone them if they're really wanting to fight cult conversion that much. You have alternatives as a cultist when things do not go to plan, you may as well use them.

I don't want to see this, yet it's exactly what will happen because officers will essentially be useless having to stand at a maintenance airlock for someone (often their direct head of staff) to help them in and then back out. Out of curiosity, was it not enough that assistants, CTs, etc got maintenance access and thus full reason to loot a good portion of maintenance loot before security does? This is the equivalent of trying to close the gates again after there was community outcry to keep them open. Why don't we just make the majority of the station Open Borders Station 13 instead of continually adding more access creep into the game and allowing for more situations where people can be accidentally trapped? This is legitimately a better solution for antagonists and the crew.

more work for engineering, then

That looks better. Forgot to say that.

The only way you're going to enforce this is by bomb-collaring sec right now or bomb-collaring department sec in the future if they stray too far away from their post. Which is technically something I'm on board with so long as it only applies to security officers, as it sounds very amusing and dystopic. Beyond that, I think we need to be a little more skeptical and cynical about continually suggesting new policies as if they're going to immediately fix the game. The more OOC policies we have to continually stack up, the more policy bloat there is and the more there is to remember. Take Directive 11 for example. If there is no heads of staff, the directive is useless. If a head of staff doesn't know what is going on but raises the code level anyway because someone turned up dead under foul play, the directive is useless because the head of staff knows just as much as you do. If the same head of staff forgets to brief everyone regarding what was uncovered, there is still no penalty for failing to keep everyone reminded of what happened as if they're Microsoft Word Clippy in space. This issue is largely fixable on a round-by-round basis if there is a head of security rigidly enforcing dispatch policy in their own department to curtail the unnecessary flood of security personnel. If there isn't, tough luck, but you generally have to deal with the same symptoms of a disorganized department that doesn't have a department head bearing down on them to not be disorganized or useless.

Pulling the "sounds like a you problem" card instead of saying literally anything more constructive for the conversation. Yikes. I get what Naelynn is saying. Due to the nature of multi-Z it's extremely discouraged, disadvantageous and near-bannable to use a bomb once to cripple the security department because it will always cripple departures too, which is flawed map design. Would be nice if we did something about this, so that bombing one place doesn't necessarily cripple a completely different part of the station.

Can you look into how long it takes before you instantly die from not being able to breathe in a vacuum? I was on a test server running these changes and it didn't take longer than 5 seconds to die in a vacuum due to a lack of oxygenation causing brain damage for that long apparently killing people ridiculously fast.

I love this +1. It's really great quality.

That's not what the wiki says, Marlon... I think there's a stronger argument for not having TCFL vols. among crew, it makes more consistent sense that way.

Seems like a good idea.