OolongCow

Make people who just stood up unable to pick up objects for ~1.5 seconds and a lot of peoples' complaints about people standing back up would disappear. Also, add a surrender emote with floating text that force rests you and prevents actions for a short time (~20 seconds) to prevent people abusing it to fake surrender. If you shoot someone doing it you're very clearly trying to murder them as they're mechanically incapable of fighting back.

This is correct. Engineering has no idea whether engineers are tradies (lots of old 50+ people teaching people in their early twenties how to do stuff through experience and mentorship) or a professional job for 30 year olds with degrees despite these being basically irreconcilably different types of workplace. The only thing that makes much sense as a compromise is the in-between of 4 or 5 year structured apprenticeships modeled off of how union trades work (sending apprentices to what are basically technical college classes while they work full-time). The learner roles would be people in the last year of their apprenticeships now allowed to actually touch things and take on some responsibilities due to receiving theoretical instruction on stuff like the engines.

I think a lot of the issues people have with hivebots comes from their sometimes jank, often unclear, and usually totally uncommunicated mechanics that most people don't interact with until they do and it absolutely dunks them. The oil slicks that aren't seemingly any different from maintenance drones yet will slip (and almost certainly kill you) being spammed when any of them die, for example. Or the ones that rush you and explode, hardstunning you, against enemies that will continue to attack you even while in crit. Or the infamous permanent fire that never goes out bug. I'd rather see a lot of the annoying parts of hivebots addressed and made more clear rather than removed. They feel like unfair relics of 2018 code that would never pass modern inspection at times.

-1 should've applied for unathi loredev nerd

Echoing sentiments others have made before, I would absolutely adore more, smaller canon rounds with low stakes that don't mean a lot, in the grand scheme of things, but give characters something to talk about. To look forward to. That let staff get comfortable with tools for running larger events, find volunteers outside of the staff team they can trust for those events, and are otherwise just comfy, for lack of a better term. A 3 or 4 hour canon event round where the Horizon sends the different departments down to a grove planet to assist a struggling colony as a PR move would be a dream come true. Medical working with engineering to fix up the old clinic and get it ready for surgery to treat chronic health conditions. Security working with operations to end a greimorian infestation in the cargo shuttle port and get the loaders running and moving lifesaving supplies again. Science working with service to grow hardy strains of staple crops adapted to the local climate. I can hardly demand it. At the end of the day staff and the lore team want to play Baldur's Gate 3 and Armored Core like anybody else. But it'd be really nice. It'd really make it feel worth it to have the one or two characters you really enjoy playing have an opportunity to build memories you can talk about in 2025 that aren't "remember when that guy's head exploded during a canon round?"

Hivebots are not antags and so the rules surrounding whether or not deaths caused by random events are canon have always been iffy. There's a certain peer pressure expectation, or what feels like one, to treat them like they are. At least that's the impression I have, and am not alone in feeling. If it was made explicit somewhere, probably the wiki, that "yeah you still get to choose whether that actually happened or not" I don't think as many people would care if people die to them. As is, community expectations and precedent set by those expectations really makes people afraid of non-antag threats.

John Biesel, Engineering Apprentice has awoken from cryogenic storage. A major maintenance drone hijacking has occurred! The inevitable ensues.

because you should be using the deck three lounge that is a designated smoking area and has multiple cigarette machines to hammer this home!!!! smoke to your heart's content but don't expose your coworkers to it without their consent you animal!!!!!!

I was the HoS, and I'd like to quickly point out that only a copy of the second fax, the termination letter, was provided to me, and only very much later once the order to arrest Jensen was already being carried out (which prevented me from reading it until CCIA had already whisked him away from the brig). I was not made aware of any interactions between CCIA and command staff besides a supposed order to jail Jensen for "neglect of duty, maximum sentence". If I'd been made privy to the actual contents of either fax before he was brigged this likely could've been entirely avoided. I was also never interviewed by CCIA at any point, nor did they even really acknowledge my existence, despite me being the only command staff besides the Captain and XO to have been around for the entire shift. I feel as if me being interviewed during the round would have seriously cooled a lot of the tension and offered a lot of context, but at no point was I asked for, nor even invited to comment, only to later be listed as an "offender" on the IR despite being present and available the entire round.

Actually, thinking about it more, I've stumbled onto a revelation that's probably not very new to many people but probably needs to be said: Changeling is just objectively worse than vampire. The modes are already very similar, yet vampire is just objectively a better mode in every way. You're not obligated to kill people, you have to manage your resources better, there's more interesting and stronger powers than just adrenaline glands and armblade, you can convert people, you can be sneaky, you can be loud, you can do more interesting gimmicks, and with the justified exceptions of hulk and veil walk spam, security isn't as eager nor as obligated to blow your head off since you're not an inherently uncontainable monster that has to be put in the no rp box. If we rolled the exclusive stuff changeling gets into it, fixed people's issues with veil walk, and did some minor flavor finagling on it so people feel more comfortable with it fitting the lore, I don't think most of the people objecting right now would actually end up missing changeling much.

Because your only option is to fucking murder someone and remove them from the round, which instantly elevates everyone to trying to stop you IC and OOC because they do not want to be stung, drug to deck two port maintenance, then drained and thrown in a crate so you can ignore them in hivemind and treat them like an obstacle to genome points and a "win". If there was a traitor who parapenned and decapped random people in maintenance "because I'm a monster" they'd be banned faster than the shoechef. Ling having an "excuse" because "that's just how the gamemode is" doesn't make why that's unacceptable behavior for literally every other antagonist type but apparently not changeling any less stupid. The gamemode is inherently flawed and you need to accept that, and that other people are tired of dealing with it.

This issue is that "silent murder" is universally considered a bad thing that nobody wants in their rounds, because "oh four people died, I had no clue" isn't fun for people besides the antagonist.

But that wouldn't change or fix or improve any of the main reasons people hate changeling. It doesn't matter if it's rare. Meteor is rare too, but besides the funny factor, you don't see people genuinely asking for it to be added to secret. Because we all know it just creates low quality rounds with limited opportunities to RP. The fact is, changeling needs a complete rework. The most likely way it ever gets one is if it's "around" but never played until someone decides to kill the old mode for good and add a new one wearing its skin (like a changeling).

Ling does not need buffs. Buffs will not suddenly make people besides the ling have fun in changeling rounds. Ling being "bad" is not the reason other people find it unfun. People besides the changeling hating changeling is why this thread and PR were made. I'm not sure you understood that, since you just advocated buffing the parts people hate most about changeling (silent funny haha murder) while seemingly attempting to defend it. This isn't a "what I think is wrong with changeling" thread, it's a "do you think we should take this gamemode out back and shoot it because it makes everyone else in the round miserable?" thread. Asking coders to buff something a good chunk of the community just said they want dead because of how selfish the gamemode inherently is is not going to have the effect I think you wanted it to. Because you could've said "give absorbed players more to do" or "make morph more fun" or "add stuff that involves people besides security and medical". But instead you asked for changeling to be even stronger, and even more 1v20, and even more "give me all of the fun, it belongs to me because I enabled antag" than it already is.

Geeves lost the will to keep working on it after it was maintainer discussion hell'd.

Because changeling, in its current state, treats other players like obstacles to you getting genome points so you can use the powers that are all shittier than adrenaline sacs and armblade (which you obviously took to start with because you're gimping yourself if you don't) that you should kill as quickly as possible so you can reach a forgone conclusion of security shooting you until you die, revive, and then die again until they get sick of dealing with you and blow your head off. The gamemode tells you and by its design EXPECTS you to kill people who probably can't fight back while giving you basically nothing to work with as far as gimmicks or flavor or roleplay. And that is not going to change unless a major rework comes through, which being very generous here maybe six or seven people in the entire community are even capable of doing. People who may have zero interest in doing so, or be busy with other, more important coding work for the server, or know that people will hate whatever they come up with anyway so why bother? Changeling is not going to magically get better. The people who enable antag and have been playing changeling, are not going to magically get better. You know this, I know this, we all know this. This thread isn't going to singlehandedly convince "good" roleplayers to enable changeling and start pouring their heart and soul into making a difference. If it is allowed to remain in secret, it's going to remain a shitty gamemode that people actively try to avoid at all costs, nothing is going to change, and nothing is going to improve. And the people who voted down this PR will shrug their shoulders and say "I don't get it, why didn't things get better? I told them that they had to 'just make the antags rp more'! Why didn't that work?" while everyone who just had the second round that night turned into a shitshow by a hub player popping adrenaline sacs and clicking people until they went horizontal the moment they had enough justification to avoid a ban discusses whether they should bother bringing up removing changeling again.

Except that it is. Absolutely any code changes made to ling cannot be accounted for in this discussion due to the nature of how coders work in the community. You cannot make any argument based on theoretical changes to changeling, because there is no obligation for coders to either agree with you or do what you or the community says. They're volunteers, not employees. You have to make arguments based on what changeling is. And right now? Most people agree it fucking sucks. This PR is the only PR being discussed. Do not use PRs that do not exist and probably never will exist as an excuse to -1 it.

Except nobody here wants current changeling back anyway. Even you admit current changeling is bad and needs a total rework, which is just a different kind of removal. Coders are not employees of the server and have no obligations to work on anything that they did not directly author or mess up. Saying "coders will fix it" just assumes that coders care about or want to work on things you want them to, which isn't true on literally any SS13 server. So keeping the gamemode around "because it's more content" when that content is regularly terrible and annoying and has no guarantee of being improved is not an argument. Antagonists that take ling and magically start providing a high level of roleplay while satisfying everyone are not going to fall from the sky and start gracing our rounds just because you "saved" changeling. Saying no to this PR is saying yes to the things that annoy the fuck out of half the server and actively make them have less fun, just so we can... keep an antag people don't even really prefer and that is barebones at best around? For a hypothetical total rework that no coder has expressed any interest in tackling? And that it's more likely to get out of secret anyway? I just don't see the reasoning, chief. It's bad. It needs to go until a total rework, and it continuing to be awful isn't going to magically inspire coders (who may not even interact with it) to rework it. It's just going to annoy people and make them go out of their way to not touch it with a thirty-foot pole, as it has for years and especially recently. Even if a coder came into this thread right now and provided proof that they're totally reworking ling as we speak, I'd still advocate current ling being removed from secret. Because it doesn't change the fundamental fact that the gamemode causes way more negative moments than it does positive.

Changeling should be a stealth antag. I know that's a shocking opinion, but that's what its fantasy has always felt like it should be: a stealth antag that becomes increasingly more difficult to deal with the longer you leave it alone. Something that has a natural escalation, instead of getting its two best abilities literally second one of the round because why would you ever not take adrenaline sacs and armblade are you dumb? Do you like losing? But since nobody ever really finds a satisfactory answer for HOW to make it a stealth antag, yeah, I get it. Changeling revive is terribly designed and just needs to go. I would not care if you compensated ling by having them just turn into a mildly nerfed horror form on braindeath, for free: current revive just has to go in an environment with metaprotections. There isn't a single other antag on the server that is handheld as much, and given so much leeway to fuck up and still get a free way back into the round, as changeling is. There's no motivation to play intelligently, or do something smart. I have never seen lings bolt people into a room with them using signalers as they change into horror form, or just make the same chems adrenaline sacs gives them. I've never seen lings use their powers to socially manipulate people, or swap between disguises in order to fool security. They always just... Sit in maintenance, or their department, gank people, drag them to deck two port if they're smart, and then turn the guy's sensors off, drain them, and toss them in a crate. Sometimes the person they do it to doesn't care, sometimes it ruins their round. Does the changeling player usually care? Not really, judging from the many people testifying that their attempts to RP with the ling from inside the hivemind are almost always ignored. That player is just an obstacle to getting more genome points. Nobody really had any good roleplay, nobody really did anything character-driven, nobody actually interacted with the gamemode. The most exciting parts about changeling rounds? Have nothing to do with changeling. It's just the fragging. At least mercs usually do gimmicks before forcing a fight. +1

Sammy has always been a really adaptive spriter from what I saw of her time on CM. She's done everything from major content additions to tiny things that just looked bad and needed to be replaced. It's overused as hell, but Sammy's sprites just ooze soul. +1 please give Sammy the keys to the kingdom, I wanna see what she cooks to update things not changed by 3/4ths to make them fit with the new style.

While I don't have a ton of experience with Sammy on Aurora, she's consistently one of the most pleasant people I've interacted with on it and other servers like CMSS13, where I watched her, for years, do her best to roleplay and make rounds fun for others in an environment that is a little less than optimal. I have absolutely zero doubts that given time Sammy will adapt entirely to Aurora as a server and be a rock of good vibes and good play, and that's not even beginning to go into how wonderful her sprites are and how much love and humility she's shown in that department. Easy +1 from me.

I would like access, if you please.

I actually did need to ask about TGM format and didn't see it mentioned elsewhere, so thanks. This helped.