Surrealistik

The ease with which a Command role can access and subvert in the upload core itself is also a problem, but yeah, the main issue is Sci being able to easily print upload consoles and freeforms, and upload anywhere without any authentication.

This, with every death cumulatively incrementing a chance for a revenant spawn random event to occur.

After over a month of regular playing, I've yet to see lore materially impede any non-human. Also, having no cons is meaningless when the cons that other races have are likewise meaningless; it's like That Guy who munchkins a gaming system by building his dude to have all the best upsides, and downsides that are inconsequential at worst, or super niche at best to bankroll them. That all said, personally I don't mind the alternative route of nerfing non-humans that are too strong and giving them cons that matter.

Okay, so it's come to my attention that the alien races, particularly Unathi and Skrell, are essentially humans but better, mechanically, with downsides that are practically inconsequential. I'd been considering ways to put humans on more even footing; a couple of ideas (either taken together or separately): #1: Human physiology/biochemistry derives more benefit from certain drugs: like painkillers, curatives, hyperzine, etc... (not necessarily all of these things; one of them or some combination). #2: Humans have better adrenaline than the biochemical equivalent aliens have; this makes some sense in that Unathi and Tajarans have natural advantages humans lack (strength, night vision, claws, etc), and thus humans were more dependent on adrenaline to propagate and survive. This might be reflected in a more potent adrenaline effect, a longer adrenaline duration, or both. #3: Humans are more resistant to disease and more likely to develop antibodies naturally (perhaps humanity has cumulatively had more exposure to pathogens over the course of its existence).

That's not a bad idea; reset module can be used by anyone, non-standard modules require 2 different command-level swipes.

It's actually zero risk, or close to zero risk and all reward if you're Command, or you're working Sci with the materials to build an upload and freeform. Again, it's absolutely absurd you can build an upload anywhere and remotely subvert the AI without any kind of authentication. Further, yes, while authentication means it's more difficult to subvert the AI, it also means it's harder to recover it too; with two ID authentication it actually does become high risk, high reward that you actually have to work for.

I didn't do shit to stop you save lockdowns of you and your infinite spirits, and, after you had already killed the RD once, and kept trying to kill crew with manifest spirit spam, and disregarded my request that you stop and stand down, and I got authorization from the only head on the station and acting captain, try to siphon you (which I got boinked for and had to stop, even though I was following laws by prioritizing the RD's protection over yours via rank). You were also the one who initiated murderboning via the manifest spirit spam. I didn't really follow what the RD was doing 100%, but from what I could see, he wasn't going after you aggressively; there was friction between you two when he became active captain, but I didn't see him actively valid hunt. Also, that this enabled you to hold out against pretty much the rest of the crew solo is pretty clear evidence as to how broken this spell is at present.

The main problem is that subverting the AI can easily be done in perfect stealth and with minimal risk. All you need is materials to build the Freeform or an antagonistic upload set (i.e. EZ if you're supplied and in Research). Let's face it, it's pretty silly and ridiculous IC that anyone can remotely upload directly to the AI and change its laws without any kind of authentication, which is the system that presently exists (all you need is the upload console and the ruleset board).

If you're a head and you manage to Solid Snake the captain before subverting the AI and get away with it, and then also manage to hit the upload, I think that's totally fair. It's harder to subvert illegitimately, so it'll be harder to reclaim legitimately, and heads typically have massive advantages as traitors (personally I think they should be all loyalty implanted in light of this and their IC position, but that's a discussion for another thread). Not being able to reset the AI is more of a problem, but then, keep in mind that the one in the upload chamber is always authenticated; as long as you can thermite/RCD in and deal with the turrets, you'll be fine (unless the HoP dismantles that console of course). Also if authentication can be disabled via a multitool (but then it would make subversion EZ, even if it alerted the AI to the attempt) that would be a remedy.

In the round I saw it abused, valid hunting wasn't going on. Further, even if it was, this is still a problematic feature. I don't think antags should have ridiculously OP stuff as 'insurance' against the occasional StalinSec. Also, it takes just one cooperative spectator/ghost to have an unlimited stream of baldie murderboners fucking people up (which the Cult doesn't even have to be outed as being responsible for; again, hide in the doom fort, teleport them in). More is better of course.

It's a combination of Cult being intermittent to begin with, which compounds the inherent rarity of manifest spirit powergaming there. In the round I just played in where one person (the guy who plays Sean Richter) summoned 20+ Manifest Spirits. There weren't even 5 total cultists and he was capable of doing this. Good luck finding them and penetrating their inevitable doom fortress (pretty easy to hide, then teleport in your manifests) while you're plagued with disposable teleporting murderboning sword wielding zealots the entire time. Gotta break/dust/gore both hands. Again, easier said than done before they inflict significant casualties... and then when fully crippled they can suicide/dust and come at you again less than a minute later. Again, how do you track nevermind fight cultists in their hidden doomfort while they're summoning and attacking you with a limitless supply of teleporting spirits?

Then adminhelp the people "powergaming." Adminhelp function is an open door policy for you to legitimately, politely complain about something happening in-round. An admin and prominent coder has already said they are not changing this. We can talk to people regarding the powergaming and speak to them if it's an actual problem. Because it's actually not a problem in-game, until this thread popped up. But I figure you guys don't want to use it because a.) you would be told "no" more times than you'd like and b.) you wouldn't complain about something if you couldn't win the argument over it. But seriously, we don't like saying no to anyone either, but either you communicate about something you don't like or you don't and it's not a problem. It's actually more that I'd much rather have balanced mechanics than cry to and debate with the admins every single time abuse of Manifest Spirits comes up. Based on prior interactions with the staff, mechanical balance is valued to some extent, so Manifest Spirits seems like a natural target for nerfing given how egregious it is, and completely over the top it can be. The mechanics of Manifest Spirit speak for themselves, nevermind the first hand experience recently being in a round where a total of 20+ Spirits were summoned by one (1) person to butcher the crew. Again, unlimited sword wielding player controlled baldies that can teleport around the station, ignore stuns and pain, and have no cooldown or cost aside from temporary immobilization of a cultist while they permanently cripple and kill crew or at minimum impose far, far more inconvenience on it than the cultists. Massive reward, minimal risk (you don't even have to commit in any respect), minimal cost; the classic definition of OP. They are absolutely gamebreaking when properly utilized with sword + robe talismans, and worse still, teleportation runes. Manifest Spirits are blatantly mechanically overpowered and an issue on Bay albeit a rare one in practice, because powergaming isn't particularly common there, in addition to the infrequency of cult.

The vast majority of things are fun if you're not losing. That said, holding out against the endless tide isn't winning so much as buying time, until the fractures and decommissioning injuries stack up faster than they can be healed. I'm not so sure what's fine about a mechanic that is insanely powerful relative to the effort involved to utilize it; it fits the classic definition of an OP element: vastly disproportionate return on minimal investment.

Because dealing with an endless horde of low effort high reward baldie murderboners that can easily grind down the crew/ERTs via sheer attrition isn't fun.

The damage dealt is tiny and easily recovered (this is why I suggest a blood loss upkeep in which is thematic and much harder to deal with in addition to the heightening of the existing brute damage). I know this by seeing first hand, as an AI, a character who literally did not stop continuously spam summoning spirits for about a full hour to repeatedly attack the crew (and he was almost perfectly healthy despite this relentless volume of summoning). Null Rod isn't much of a counter; there's one of them, unless you're the Chaplain you don't even know it's effective in the first place to retrieve it, and even if you did, you might not be able to. There is no way this is balanced as it stands.

The Cult spell Manifest Spirit is monstrously overpowered; unlimited infinitely disposable player controlled baldies that are totally pain, hard crit and disable immune with cult swords + robes that you can teleport around the station (with a little prep) which cost almost nothing in time/resources. Proposals to Fix: #1: Have each summoning take some time (10 seconds?), and require a meaningful cost in blood loss and brute damage. #2: Make the Spirits each require a small upkeep (fractional small) in blood loss and brute damage from their summoner per tick; perhaps this scales with the distance the Spirit is from the summoner (to prevent the inevitable camping from an impenetrable super fort to fling unlimited geekseeking murderbone baldies at people at the other side of the station). #3: Hard limit on the number of Spirits one cultist can summon, or upkeeps (as above) grow exponentially with each additional Spirit a cultist summons. #4: Have the summoner take a fraction (say 25%; decimals rounded up) of whatever damage the Spirits he's summoned receive as those Spirits are soulbound to him. #5: If a summoner falls unconscious/asleep, each Spirit he summoned disintegrates as if he died or left the manifest rune (needs to maintain concentration). #6: Manifest Spirits can no longer be utilized with the Sacrifice, Blood Drain, Summon Nar'Sie, or Raise Dead runes to prevent EZ circumvention of blood magic costs and use of Manifest Spirits to bring back cultists and act as sacrifice fodder without limit by sacrificing one of your unlimited supply of them, or even using ghosts to end the round outright.

Steve would have died in the former case because no one was intelligent enough to KO or choke him out. Keep in mind that when you're in hard crit, you're already KOed, so ghetto surgery then wouldn't be affected by the increment in failure chance. It's not that you forget how to replace the heart, it's that you fucked up when applying the biogel, you went half an inch too far or too short; you put an iota too much stress on the artery while clamping and threading it with the Fix-O-Vein; vital organs and indeed most internals of the body are tremendously sensitive things, and manipulating them is both a complex and delicate task; certainly more so in many cases than pulling out a slug or piece of shrapnel. There is simply no consistency on this point in the current system. In terms of mechanics and versimilitude the status quo on these points doesn't make any sense at all; that's precisely the problem, so change seems pretty desirable.

And the failure rate of surgery pre-anesthetic was considerably higher for obvious reasons. Again, ghetto surgery remains just as viable with a little more prep; choking your patient into unconsciousness works just fine (assuming he's not in hard crit already). Again, either all surgery steps, particularly ones more complicated than shrapnel removal should have a failure chance, or none of them should.

There are alternate methods of anesthetizing patients like choking and KOing. As long as they're paralyzed or unconscious, you're not eating penalties. Beyond that, strong alcohol (or better yet, alcohol that KOs someone) can also reduce failure chances. Surgery at present is nothing like real life except for the generalities of the steps. Again, that one step has a failure chance and the others don't is a glaring inconsistency; either every step should have a failure chance (barring stuff that's impossible to fuck up), or none of them should. Further, time isn't really a measure of difficulty here; there is no increment of actual difficulty or challenge in completing the procedure. Overall I have to note there's a certain inconsistency in supporting the status quo in #1's case for gameplay reasons and supporting it in #2's case for verisimilitude/simulationist reasons, when #1's status quo is far more egregious a violation of simulationism than the changes proposed to #2 (effectively ignoring the consequences of trying to operate on a fully conscious and unmedicated patient vs taking less time to do a single surgery step), while having less of an actual gameplay impact. This is to say nothing of the fact that #2's status quo is internally inconsistent and silly in the first place: again slug extraction taking potentially longer than heart or brain surgery (which can also have serious complications), with only one step out of the many, including more complex ones, having a base failure chance.

1) It's not really a big change; it affects corner case emergency/improvised/ghetto surgeries which are a definitive minority of surgeries. 2) It doesn't actually make slug removal easier or more difficult; just less time intensive, while making it consistent with every other surgery step in the game. What is rational is either having random failure chance for all steps (barring ones you can't possibly fuck up), or random failure chance for no steps, rather than a snowflaked RNG failure chance for one (1) specific surgery step that can end up making it take longer than whole procedures which is also silly, irrational and inconsistent.

Surgery can still be done without chemicals, or a chemist; the anesthetic tanks aren't going anywhere. This makes emergency/improvised/rush/speed/ghetto surgery more dangerous though if you don't or can't attempt to apply any anesthetic whatsoever, even something as improvised as choking/knocking your patient unconscious. Yes, on an RP server, surgery without proper anesthetic is going to be corner case, but less so than straight up ghetto surgery with tools as surgical implements, and those all increment failure chance. Further, that failing to apply proper anesthetic, or to otherwise render your patient insensible to pain results in no mechanical consequences makes even less sense from a verisimilitude/immersion perspective than a single bullet extraction taking longer than heart surgery which you apparently support as below. This is one of those situations where gameplay > verisimilitude. But my argument also stems from verisimilitude and internal consistency because other surgical steps can also be prone to difficulties and complications yet they aren't. For the sake of internal consistency and 'realism' would you approve of expanding a base failure chance to all steps? Furthermore, it is entirely possible that extracting one or two slugs alone will take longer than an entire surgical procedure which is pretty silly.

I'm pretty indifferent as to the pain killer threshold. I'm not sure if it should be as high as Oxy at 200, but that's a minor consideration either way, so long as soporific is adjusted to provide most of the pain killer rating needed. As to shrapnel extraction, again, yes, it can be difficult to remove, but there is no way removing a single piece of shrapnel should ever take as long as a complete surgical procedure (which it definitely can per the current code base). The number of attempts needs to be capped.

I don't mind a compromise on #2 such as the one I've mentioned with a max number of attempts before guaranteed success, but something definitely needs to be done.

Generally I think it's a problem/peculiarity if the station cannot supply each Officer and Cadet with their standard issue, without them having to scrounge in maintenance or ask other departments for additional supplies.

? I think my proposal isn't being understood; what I mean is that I'd like to have a lack/absence of adequate painkillers feature the mechanical consequence of incrementing surgery step failure rates from the patient moving around due to pain (unless they're paralyzed/asleep), as is the case on say Colonial Marines. Currently I don't believe failure to apply sedative or strong painkillers has any mechanical penalty. As the randomization goes, the sheer PITA factor definitely isn't worth the immersion; failing 10+ times in a row on a single slug is cancerous. If nothing else the number of failures should be clamped, guaranteeing success on the third try or something like that.