Skull132

Until our proper one goes gets finished, we use Bay12's standard one. Visible here: https://wiki.baystation12.net/Category:Locations

Hey, welcome to the server! Let's go through these questions, shall we? It's basically a subforum for syndicate oriented roleplay. Imagine it like a chatroom for syndicate characters to organize shit for future antag rounds. Erumg. Lore. Yes. I don't actually know whether to classify our lore as grimdark or not. From an observer's point of view, it seems to be Deus Ex Human Revolution style, as far as the setting and general ambiance goes. Hopefully a lore person can generalize better. Very few, actually. Our admin staff is not as heavy as on other servers (our staff in general adheres to a principle of rolling light), so actual events are somewhat rare. This is why we keep antags enabled, and let the players do their own thing. No. Government attack forces serve as a mechanical replacement if ever needed. Your call on how you want to play your synths, though laws still take priority.

This is an issue that has existed for a lot longer than just recently, tbh. The unwritten rule is that there should at least be one moderator recruitment cycle per quarter. That's about the most we can handle effectively, and it's regularly enough to where we can maintain an active staff rotation -- maintain good numbers without attrition throwing its weight around. What happened, unfortunately, is that we missed one cycle around September/October. And the effects of this stretch quite far: the next cycle needed to be handled in a safe manner, to establish a new set of core staff, as such, recruitment numbers were lower than regular. With this said, I am starting to prep the mods and admins for another cycle to be started in March. And as necessary, I will keep running a mod cycle every 3rd month until our numbers are high enough. Or we may want to look into scratching the cycle system and slouch into persistent recruitment, which has its advantages and disadvantages. We'll see. Proper recovery to full operational capacity, as it were, will take time. But if we keep being persistent about it, which I plan on doing, we'll get there. More of a description of the problem and a plan on what I want to do going forward, and not an answer to your question directly, I guess. The staff do appreciate the sentiment, though.

Mayhaps it might be an idea to make the effect only work on corpses? That way the strategy would be functional, but you couldn't just lolsting a live target. Another alternative is to make it loud and require time to complete. If you get transform stung, the ling could have then very well consumed you anyways. I also realized we're missing Duck's patch on making ling stings loud.

Cryoing with stamps can be disabled: they can be added to the list of shit that doesn't get despawned. Otherwise, no way to get new ones.

You're still thinking relative to yourself, and only relative to yourself. Did they create roleplay for the rest of the crew later down the line? Whether or not it involved your bodies, or your deaths, directly, is irrelevant.

Here is my issue with this. The requirement you pose is completely and utterly arbitrary. What tangible difference in roleplay does it make, if they let you do a little investigation dance and then call you back in again to murder you then? Target to victim RP is only ever interesting and involving if it's made personal, a situation like this isn't personal, nor should there exist a blanket requirement making it personal (lest we railroad people into picking option number 1 of the two I pointed out earlier). Two questions in one. How either situation makes the round interesting: Your deaths contributed towards the antagonist's power, which he is then expected to use to make the round interesting for everyone else. If he simply hides all the corpses and only slurps on them for the victory points, then it's gank and shit roleplay. If he, later in the round, presents himself as a threat to the station and RPs with the rest of the crew, then the deaths were probably well served. How to make it interesting for the victims: Unless they're personally motivated murders, you always can't. But certain gamemodes simply require them to happen.

Nerfing them past the point where they were in old code would completely remove the point of nuke ops. Being a heavy roleplay server does not mean that we have to play around with god damned squirt guns like we're a twelve year old sitting in a pool, because we don't know any better. Our community can handle big boy toys. That is a fact proven by us having stayed afloat for as long as we have, and by the age of the present core community. Yes, we complain about eachother, but it works out at the end of the day, as long as the playfield is level. (Hint: the entire point of Aurora is heavy roleplay, but with antags. This is best accomplished by keeping both sides equally as deadly.) In the old code. It was. Which is why I'm going to disregard any suggestions to nerf it past the point of oldcode.

Also, doubleposting but fuck it. The issue is, once the armoury and cargo are nuked, the single RIG they have is pretty much unstoppable, outside of the odd brilliance of having chemistry make EMP grenades. The general idea would be to also keep ERT removed from the round for as long as possible, as ERT is pretty much endgame. And once they're called, the entire round will focus on their efforts, and little else. Once they mop up, it's usually round end.

I think we've reached the point where they're too secure, and thus can't be fucked anymore. So putting them back on edge, I think, would improve the situation.

Okay, so all nukie rounds that I've observed kinda sorta roll the same route: Launch raid into sec; See what happens after that. Which, usually fails to evolve into something good and ends in a wargarble of uneventful combat. A good deal of this may have resulted from the fact that Nukies have received a good deal of equipment, while sec is kinda left in the dust. Here are my ideas: add consistent energy armaments to the armoury (e-guns, at least 3-5, maybe lasers) - you know, something that sec can actually use to fight against the nuke ops; remove the silly, "You always get 6 operatives" deal, a better balance can probably be found; maybe fuck with the spawning of the syndie RIG. My idea was to make it into an asset worth protecting, sort of how like tanks are treated in the military. They need logistics and other forces around them to work. But this is kind of a point for later consideration. Thoughts?

Wrong. You know nothing of what happened before or after. You only have a snippet of maybe about 5 minutes of gameplay. The standard length of a round is 120 minutes. If you are willing to make a judgement of, "They broke the rules and were shit!" based on 5 minutes of gameplay, then so be it. But I'm not. However, because you and a few others were going all doom and not actually interested in what happened afterwards, I felt it necessary to start from that end, lest I be called out for "Overlooking player feedback."

There are two ways to play ling, and any individual antagonist role: Personal approach -- this is the one you speak of. You take your time with individual targets, you interact with them, etcetera. Nothing wrong with it, but it's just an option. Force-of-nature approach -- this relies on actually making yourself a threat to the crew, and interacting with the crew more, than with the individual victims. You make yourself large and proud, and you generally do this through ambushes like this at the start, as you need to gather strength somehow. If the antagonists used the advantages they gained through this maneuver to create further roleplay that round, for the rest of the crew, then I'd say the rules requiring roleplay to be involved were fulfilled?

You realize that lings have to kill people who are not a threat, yes? It is literally their mode of gameplay: they must target people. As such, trying to force the rule of, "You can only kill people who are a threat to your livelyhood," is very backwards.

You didn't answer my question. Please answer my question. And here's the issue. Were the rules enforced 100% to the letter, as you present them, we may as well remove antags completely. Because they would be impossible to play.

I'm curious (though 90% of what I wanted to write was already written by Dumplinz and Hive just now), and so, do answer me this question. Let's say the engineers lure you into a place where they can take care of you. In the present situation, they just offed you the moment they have you enseird. Now, let's say hypothetically, they didn't. The situation is frozen at where the engineers met up with sec. What would you have had them do, in order for your deaths to be "valid"? Or would you have they just not target you at all? And as a note for all of you "By the books" folks. Ambushes are not mentioned at all in the rules. Just because something isn't outright permitted by the rules, doesn't mean it can be blanket denied. Antags would turn into a laughing stock if they had a silly quota of me-ing and monologue-ing to fill out before they could off someone. As for the EOR incident. Were the other effects of going loopy via CMD played out as well, prior to that fact? Or did it kinda just, go from 0 to max on the shuttle?

I don't even have a clue as to what's even being discussed. I looked at the custom item database, and the only entry for Sierra is a Tajaran with a bandana.

Try fiddling with your BYOND version. BYOND is very fucking picky, and it seems to only get worse.

Even after my buffs to the baton, it works wonders if stacked high enough. The era of stun reigning king is coming to an end.

Mainly because, soundbytes. We only have soundbytes for levels 5 and 7. So we only have those to play around with. If we wanted to rework in any way, we'd need new soundbytes, and we'd probably need to redo all the voice announcements for consistency reasons.

There are only levels 7 and 5. 5 is either a virus, or something else. I forget what the something else is.

Nope, on here, 7 has been blob for as far back as I can remember. And it has only been blob. 5 is the one that could be a few things.

I don't really see the point in that. Raised alert already means shit's going south, so do you need another phase to say that shit's going even more south, and then a final red alert?

I honestly don't even remember the concerns against this. Anyone got any? The AI can already do pretty much anything else, so why not? Specially since it's expected to be lawbound.

Psst. Guys. Waiting on a little bit more feedback before I shove this into the works. Which of the two present end solutions is better, and why, or does it not matter?