Kaed

This is something I can moderately get behind. Though keep in mind that when we in the US were testing the first nuclear weapons it was extremely hush-hush. The world at large did not even know what they were or their capabilities accurately until Hiroshima and Nagasaki got hit. Yes, there were weapons tests, but they were done out in a desert, and that doesn't entirely show the scope of destruction on a populated area. The effects of radiation fallout were particularly horrifying, and worse than the actual explosive damage done to either city, but not something they could have planned ahead for. I'll talk to Jackboot maybe about slipping in a news article about a mysterious horrifying station/outpost whose walls were covered in carbonized gore and no one knows why, a bit before the new thing is implemented.

This might be a problem with transparency somewhere, then. Because we hear nothing back, and the behavior we ahelped keeps happening. What are we supposed to think here? Someone is being ignored, most likely, and since the admins are the ones with the authority and power, it's generally easier to believe they were arbitrarily lenient towards the person you ahelped than that they gave them a talking to and were ignored themselves. You ask of us to have blind faith in the staff team's benevolence and process, but you allow people on staff who behave with extreme bias towards players they like and bwoink people the moment aggression starts against one of their friends, or try to make up situations not covered in the actual rules that you violated because it's how 'they think things should be'. You ask me personally to have faith in the staff team effectiveness when the single time I volunteered to be a trial mod I had to endure streams of msay memeing and spam, and any attempt to request people act professional was largely met with 'take a chill pill, dude', before being rejected from the mod team because 'I didn't get along well with people on the team'. Well, that made sense at the time, because we clearly seemed to have different ideals on acceptable staff conduct. It's been over a year since then, but I have no reason to believe this isn't still the case, and while it's all good and fun to have fun playing your spessman game and you are all unpaid volunteers, the fact that I have personally seen that in game staffchat is a stream of memes and shitposts during my long-passed tenure along with some interactions I've had with mods where I literally had to argue with them over issues outside of the scope of the rules that they were trying to force on me does not give me a strong feeling of confidence about their objectivity and professionalism. I'll grant you that maybe you personally can act without inherent bias, I don't know, I've rarely dealt with you in ahelps, alb. But when it's a crapshoot what will even happen based on which mod or admin you get to answer your ahelp, and your experience follows little in the way of any particular visible procedure or process is not encouraging. Some mods/admins will communicate with you clearly that something happened, others will just close the ahelp ticket without a word. The staff team isn't all bad or anything, it's just not consistent.

I have noticed a tendency on the server for certain groups of people to form metacliques where their characters will always support and look out for each other, at the expense of literally everyone outside of their friend circle. While this is a fairly realistic representation of how people act in real life in a casual setting, it can be extremely frustrating to have to deal with it in a setting that is supposed to be professional and corporate. The biggest offenders are in the medical department, as far as I know. I barely play in medical, and I mostly just hear things on the grapevine, so I can't particularly give many firsthand accounts, admittedly But I have seen a particular things in person, sometimes in character, other times as a ghost, such as a CMO threatening to hang themselves in the bathroom for attention, a different one literally running off to hide in maintenance like a child when faced with a minor security charge that apparently they'd been ducking all round, trying to wait out the end of the round, CMOs leaving the medbay in code red to run out and go negotiate with terrorists, ignoring security telling them to back off. CMOs who rush into conflicts to hypospray-inject combatants with drugs to stop the conflict going on so they can be the hero. These are all actions that are the prerogative of their players to do. You can play your character however you like. But what is frustrating to me is that these actions never seem to result in any sort of punitive action that might cause the character to need to change. I have literally seen captains who I assume must have been part of their metaclique bail some of them out of their own actions, and ahelped when I see it, and nothing happens. Some people just seem to be above consequences on this server because other people like their character and they don't think corporate policies or professionalism should apply to them. Or maybe they just somehow are psychologically incapable of seeing how frustrating their behavior is to other people and just think everything they do is right and okay. I don't know. I'm not these players. How are we supposed to deal with issues like this. Appealing to the admins/mods for help isn't working. Appealing to security in-round doesn't do anything, because there are too many people floating around in the server base who surround these people in a protective hugbox of consequence immunity. You may have noticed I haven't named any names here, but the people who I am pointing out probably know who they are. Good for you, nameless people. This isn't a complaint thread, this is a frustrated rant looking for answers on how to deal with the way the playerbase has become of late.

So, since I've had time to stew on it a while and am incapable of making a simple process stay simple when I have ideas, I think I'm going to create a new process just for this round ending superweapon. First there will be some sort of graphical effect like shimmers or sparkles around the person, something like that, then the start vibrating, and getting scary messages about how their body feels, before finally exploding. Because knowing you are about to die is much more interesting than mass sudden gibbing at random! ... Maybe I could make a gun that does the same thing but in a much slower process with some way to fix it....

You're inventing problems where there aren't any out of sheer stubbornness. I see plot holes being fixed, not created. Like I said in the original post, I'm going to make it stagger out gibbing so that it's not 50 people at once. People will explode as processing time becomes available. The logic of bluespace is perfectly sufficient as a reasoning, and top secret weaponized bluespace technology developed by Nanotrasen is not something the details of which are going to be publicly available. You don't need to know how it works. It just works. This also, incidentally, fixes the problem of the mysterious need for the mercenary superweapon to have a NT auth card and code - it now becomes a stolen superweapon that they have on their ship, and they're raiding an NT research station to obtain the auth card they need to sell/activate the weapon. They might even test it on the station before leaving with it if they know what they are doing.

I don't plan to have it related to nar'sie at all, but that's an amusing idea. I'll probably have some sort of crazy scifi device of doom with glowing arcs of energy that activates when you turn on the authenticator.

No. To reiterate: No, this is incredibly overthinking it to the point of inanity. This is a 100% non-canon round ending event, like Nar'sie's release, or a supermatter cascade. The amount of time, generally speaking, before the server resets and it is reconned is less than 10 minutes. The only reasons I'm doing this is Everyone dropping dead where they stand on a completely intact because 'a nuke exploded' is somewhat silly and has always been a tongue in cheek 'formality' death code. Blowing up the entire station properly is also not worth the enormous lag spike that would occur trying to delete three huge floors worth of turfs and objects. It creates a marginally more interesting experience than sudden, universal dropping dead to have everyone start randomly popping into bloody bits. I was indulging you when I pulled an explanation out of my ass, but to be frank here, this is not a piece of lore that NEEDS to be expansively fleshed out, any more than the other round ending events I mentioned earlier. Your inability to deal with soft scifi elements is frankly your problem at this point. It is impossible to feasibly make an actual nuclear explosion happen realistically on this sever and medium (BYOND) without chugging the server to a standstill, so I'm making an 'everything dies' scenario that functions, on a mechanical level, more coherently with what is supposedly happening to the station. Spraying every electronic with an EMP effect will just lag everything to a standstill even more, and is not feasible for the simple purpose of making you feel like the scenario makes more sense. The 'logic of the lore behind it' is almost completely irrelevant to me. It is not a situation that carries over to any round or that should ever be talked about by players as something they remember happening in character or wish to question the workings of. Only the captain would even know about it. For that matter, it barely even happens. (though it might happen more until the novelty of it wears off)

Thank you for the information, less work for me!

Fine, geez. It's a prototype semi-sentient AI that runs a bluespace destablizer that can see the entirety of the station and asteroid and telegibs anything on the station that is not part of the station architectural layout using the mechanics we already have in place in telescience, just applied for hostile purposes. They don't even need to figure out destination coordinates, it just splatters whatever it finds all over the hallways with an improper teleport.

Bluespace magic. Baloneymancy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like jackboot said, it's sci fi, and SS13 can get pretty soft at times. You don't need to explain everything, the important part is it's a more interesting way to all die than everyone on the server being perma paralyzed and the station crew just dropping dead because 'explosion' that can't be processed on the map itself. The real reason is that it targets all mob/living on the map, which includes some tiny bots and all pets and such.

I think you might be misunderstanding slightly what I'm doing here. I've already patched out the exploit itself, the PR is made and waiting to be implemented. What I'm going to do is create a mechanic where you can choose to absorb more DNA at once from a victim at the increasingly high risk of immediately blowing your cover as a stealth ling.

It's become abundantly clear after a few months of playtesting that my original plans for lings and what I thought people would do with them was entirely misguided. I had thought people would use the gift I gave them to be able to be a ling without murder to roleplay with their victims. Instead, I find out that not only are they not doing so, and instead just silently sucking DNA points from people and wandering off with little to no interaction, hiding behind people's confusion about 'the radiation damage' until they horror form at the end, but I also just learned a particular bug I left behind by accident is being exploited for extremely rapid DNA point gain. Well, looks like I'm rolling out some new features, then. Here's what this update will involve: The 'bug' in question allows for spamming the silent absorb ability, allowing you to queue up multiple instances of the ability. After some consideration, instead of blocking this, I have decided that instead of removing this ability, I will allow it, with the caveat that having more than one active at a time creates and exponentially increases a chance that your ling will get too greedy and careless and their active hand will become a creepy tentacle hand that telegraphs trying to burrow into the persons body to everyone nearby. This will even replace your hand organ's sprite (making it difficult to use tools with the mutated hand, but possibly will be better for fighting), and encourage them to move away from you screaming. Don't be greedy unless you have a good reason to. Changelings can no longer use prosthetic limbs to silent absorb. If your active hand is not organic, then it won't work. If you have two prosthetic limbs, then you can only deathsucc people. If you are a snowflake with two prosthetic arms, don't worry - you can crawl off somewhere and do a fake-death regen, I'll make it drop all prosthetic you currently have and grow you new organs/limbs. Aut'akh cannot be lings. Lings cannot be aut'akh, but they can gather their DNA. It just makes them an unathi instead, similar to how cloning works. (if this is possible. I might just block it if it's too fucky) The more DNA you have, the less subtle your stealth absorbs will be. You'll start acting creepy and emoting things at people that make you suspicious when you use the ability. No more of this 2 hours of people standing wordlessly next to each other and walking off bullshit. There will probably be an 'instability' variable that will slowly increase the more DNA you gather, and it will be harder to be unnoticed the higher it is. This is not so much to punish stealth lings as acknowledge that stealth has a place early game, but late game you need to start doing actual antaggery as a ling.

Eh. I would argue it's out of style. Sensitive data is less valuable than an entire three floor station built into an asteroid. You can retrieve stolen sensitive data once you get the news of the station being purged. As for 'other threats', lol. I don't think you understand how powerful this is going to be. Any mob on the map, from the smallest floorbot to a big juggernaut, will explode with this 'bomb'. The only things that will survive it are ghosts, the AI eye (but not the AI itself) and Nar-nar. It's a little stronger than a neutron sweep, and uses baloneymancy to affect all living and synthetic entities, but yeah.

This is kind of a pointless quibble. Swords on leaders for ceremony is traditional. The fact that today, it's mostly in third world countries is completely irrelevant to the point. Having a sword in no way represents that you are a dictator, that is just a modern trend. We can make up whatever trends we want in the sci-fi future. As for the sword training, I never suggested, nor do I think anyone else did, that captains should all know how to use a sword. The point is they have access to one, and license to carry it around for ceremonial purposes. If they want to abuse it to be a bushido master 4noraisin, ahelp them.

So, it doesn't come up very often, but the station self destruct/nuke is really dated and ancient code. It plays an animation of what I assume is the original SS13 station model (nothing like the station you are actually on) exploding and then everyone on the server is floored and locked into paralysis, and everyone on the station itself is just set to dead. It also causes a bit of lag at times. So I came up with a more !!Fun!! way to do it, and I thought I'd ask for some feedback. Instead of the station exploding with a dated animation, the MD causes all organic, positronic, and mechanical 'life' to destablize and explode. What this means is that everyone on the station gibs. Due to gibbing being a particularly expensive process as far as processing power, a check will be included that staggers out the gibbing to prevent the server from lagging. This also means that there will be a lot of screaming and things during laggy/highpop days where people around you are exploding and you know your doom is coming but you can do naught to stop it but pray to the unmerciful gods. No one will be paralyzed anymore, nor will people off the station itself be affected but this mass gibbing. Eventually, all that will be left is oil and gore and piles of organs. Threats neutralized. This makes a bit more sense in the context of Nanotrasen, because why would they blow up their expensive station when purging all life on it and sending in a cleanup crew would be so much cheaper? Might need to sprite and redescribe the mercenary nuke to be a portal MD. Or just remove it. What do you think on this one?

Hi. I can't believe there's this much fussing over a captain having a sword. It has some nice flavor and allows the captain to walk around not looking completely defenseless without actually carrying a laser beam that they're not allowed to have out except on Code Red/Blue. Just let them have the sword. It's really not as big of a mountain as you're making out of the molehill. If you're concerned about a permit, just give them a nospecial round start permit like the bartender gets for their shotgun only not quite so limited to one location. It is really not uncommon for a leader to carry a ceremonial blade. You don't even have to be military for this. Or have your character know how use the sword. I know for a fact that my captain if they wore it would just be wearing it as a deterrence. She would have no idea how to engage in sword fighting. Random antag Urist McTraitor has no idea if they know how to use the sword, so they are less likely to impulsively pull a knife on the captain.

Our current rules are kind of lax and it has created situations where people in danger can actively be dismissed when they don't respond to hails because the first assumption seems to be 'oh they must be SSD' and then write them out of their perception because we are sort of encouraged to ignore SSD people. Sometimes there is a manhunt for them, only to find them passed out on the floor somewhere or just sitting in a cryo tube, which is kind of annoying. So I have some suggestions for new policies that will help stop breaking immersion and reduce false SSD flags. -Unresponsive people should be given five minutes to respond. After this time, they are assumed to be missing and should be looked for. If they are found SSD, put them in cryo or a bunk in the dormitories. (Preferrably cryo, because it clears the slot) -This applies especially to heads, but anyone should be doing it: If you plan to cryo/leave the round, you have to ghost so your mob is deleted and people get a notice. Otherwise you're just going to sit in the tube impossible to find for 10 or so minutes and everyone is trying to find you when you show up on the cryo report. Not one likes this. It takes you less than 5 extra seconds to type or hit the ghost button. Just do it. If you think you're coming back, don't put yourself in cryo and go to a dormitory bed (or tell someone to drag you to one if it's urgent. Again, ~5 seconds of effort required here.)

I think this should be in policy. It's not really adding content so much as suggesting a new weekly event. That being said, I hate Highlander as a concept so I also hate this. I don't come on this server to randomly chop people's head off with a laser sword or a Claymore. There's other places where you can do this that it fits in a lot more.

I just want to be clear on something that might have been misinterpreted here - saying the phrase itself does not transfer the memetic trigger. It's only transferred when the actual antagonist mob uses an ability to force the person they are currently possessing to say it. A normal person, or even an infected person just saying the phrase of their own accord does not spread it. However there's no way to know if a given use of the phrase is a memetic transfer or not. People going around muttering the phrase won't make you transfer to you but they might do it at any time if you're not careful.

Probably psychologists would get involved, a communicable verbal tic is very much a mental malady. There would not be a push to round up affected people until the first psychotic action (likely as a result of someone being nudged or pushed by the cognitohazard to break or attack someone). Yes, it's possible for the meme to just lay low the whole round and be utterly boring until end game when it suddenly orders two dozen infected to murder sec and dismantle their department, but we also have the same problem with slow burn antags like vampires and malf AIs, so no different here.

Haha, I'm the dev that's going to be doing it, silly. It's not in projects yet because I just haven't started it. Anyway, as for the other suggestions, yeah, some kind of defense would be good, and maybe psyche could be involved but I hate all their hokey psuedoscience stuff a lot so I'd have to think on that. Memetic hazard is a potential idea, but the problem is putting the term 'meme' anywhere up front is not exactly a positive thing, since like Conspiir said, the word has been used to death on this server. On the note of the trigger word, I've already had plans for the game to track what 'stage' the cognitohazard is in, and the stronger it is, the more obvious the infection is. People will periodically mumble the trigger phrase against their will, and it will become more common in late game. Maybe they will occasionally be inflicted with brief bouts of vertigo or dizziness at the endgame stage. Hm, speaking of psyche, what if an ability they got to defend themselves was the ability to give people nearby uninfected a special phobia trauma of the trigger phrase? That would probably play well into it being a mental attack explicitly, and since phobias have distinct effects on people's ability to function it might make it harder for that validhunter from sec to chase you down when just hearing "Have a Nanotrasen Day!" makes him shut his eyes in terror or freeze up. Actually being infected would clear the phobia. This is only enforceable by admins, but I think I might also implement a meta requirement that the trigger phrase has to be something that would not be said in casual conversation, and ideally be more than one word. Something like "Hello." or "What's up?" is really not menacing or fair to use as a trigger phrase, because it doesn't really stick in the mind as a weird thing to have been said. "Have Nanotrasen Day" is a good one though, because only total corporate tools would ever say that and people hate corporate tools.

I wish people would stop trying to give humans extra bells and whistles. They are the neutral starter race they don't have any special benefits or weaknesses, add in addition to what delta just said about alcohol tolerance, they are in the unique position of not having to give a crap about lore, unlike everything else. That's their real benefit and strength, that literally anyone can pick them up and play them without having to worry about roleplaying them wrong, as long as they're not a complete idiot. If you want to play something less 'boring', apply to a Xeno whitelist. It's really not hard.

Right now I'm thinking of just calling it a 'cognitohazard'

AKA "Kaed reads SCPs can you tell?" Many of you may be aware that there is such thing as a 'meme' in the game code, but it is mysterious and admin only. There is a good reason for this - while once created to be a game mode, it's been disabled for years due to it being a buggy piece of garbage that makes players and admins cry. Not only do some of its abilities fail to work, but they're all way too expensive to be worth what they do, and the targeting menus for them are fucky as shit. On the admin side, they struggle to even interact with the meme mob, and can't view its player panel. Anyway, point is, it's really shitty and bad. After having a chance to try it the other day, I really wanted to unfuck memes, and possibly have them re-added as a valid game mode. I'm still in early planning stages but I'll run my ideas by you all. (Yes, I know I offered changeling too in the past, but after some looking into it, I don't have the coding experience yet to do what I wanted with lings. Maybe at a later date.) One of the first large issues with memes is they are basically like weird, buggy versions of borers.They can hurt or help their host, possess them, even inject them with painkillers. Their only special defining trait is being able to jump from host to host and an ability to talk through their mouth. I'm not a fan of this. Borers are their own thing, and while they have problems, they function just fine as a parasitic brain monster. We don't need a second one. So here is what Memes (henceforce called Cognitohazards) are going to be instead: A cognitohazard will no longer be a mob that lives in a person's head, it will be an abstract, invisible mob that is bound to a single individual that it follows everywhere, similar to how a ghost works when following someone, only you can't move away. Functionally, it's about the same as being in their head except it probably will cause less fucky problems by being a separate mob hovering over them. Cognitohazards will also be unique antagonists, like wizards and ninjas, except in special adminny circumstances. The cognitohazard cannot speak freely in the normal fashion. Either aloud or through someone else's mouth. It has little direct control over any host, except in very specific circumstances I will elaborate on later. Its main form of communication is implanting thoughts and emotions in their host(s). If possible, it's advisable that we try to enforce that cognitohazards don't 'chat' with people at all, but rather emote sensations and thoughts at them as if it was the host's own thoughta speaking to them. I don't know how much roleplay dedication we can force on people but it's a dream to work for! The cognitohazard is a conceptual entity that spreads through specific knowledge, in this case a memetic trigger phrase uttered in the right circumstances and inflection. At the start of the round, the Cognitohzard player chooses a specific phrase, such as "Do you like bananas?", "The clown walks at midnight.", or "Tranquility through ignorance." Whatever. It doesn't matter so much, the point is, that the cognitohazard spreads itself through this phrase. Initially, this can only be done via whispering/murmuring in someone's ear (i.e. you have to be adjacent) Unlike with oldmeme, this does not transfer the cognitohazard to the new host, but rather spreads your tainted information to that individual. Thereafter, you can switch your cognitohazard mob to anyone who has been infected with your cognitohazard in sight. Later, you will be able to jump to anyone on the whole map that is infected, but the long jump is visible because it makes the recipient act weird for a moment, stumbling and mumbling your trigger phase to themselves. Late game, you will be able to shout your trigger phrase and infect everyone who can hear it around you. Note: This trigger phrase is not transmittable over electronics and when you do it you are likely to out your host as infected by the cognitohazard as well as everyone around them. The cognitohazard can also give its hosts certain buffs, like the ability to ignore pain, surpass physical limits, etc. The goal of the cognitohazard is to infect as many people as possible and accomplish some motive of its own. During the late game, it will gain the ability to switch from making the host think and feel things (aka encouragement) to sending their host direct commands, ala the vampire dominate command. First it will only be to hosts the cognitohazard is currently occupying, then it will be to any infected individuals nearby, until finally at the end of the game they can target single individuals anywhere on the map or use their ultimate ability, a mass directive that affects every infected individual. At this point all the people you've secretly or not so secretly been infecting become a mass of memetic zombies with a single directive. It could be anything, like 'leave the station and spread the word' or 'lynch the captain' or whatever else you think would make for an interesting cognitohazard experience. Counterplay: Cognitohazards are sentient, dangerous knowledge, and it is difficult to destroy information. Once the cognitohazard is discovered, it may have already infected any number of crewmembers, depending on how subtle it was. Anyone could be a sleeper agent for a the cognitohazard. That being said, this format of cognitohzard has some significant weaknesses - it can only be spread via sound, thus deliberately deafening yourself with something like earmuffs will prevent you from being infected. Staying away from other people is also a way to counteract it, and I like the idea of people being terrified to approach each other and only communicating over radio. A sense of isolation and mistrust of your fellow coworkers should define a cognitohazard round. As for actually destroying it, I think that (this is subject to change) the only way to remove infection would be to put someone to sleep long enough that they aren't thinking anymore, and that clears away the memetic thought hovering in their subconscious or whatever. Since the mob can jump to ANY infected mob, depending on the part of the round you're in, that means everyone who is infected has to be cleared away. Once everyone who is infected has lost their knowledge of the memetic trigger, the cognitohzard 'dies', having no one else whose thoughts it can reside in. This will likely involve a number of earmuffed security guards draggong screaming people to medical to be sedated or such. Idk. If someone has a better idea how to make someone 'forget' their cognitohazard infection, let me know. What if I added a drug that causes amnesia, instead of forcing people to be sleep toxin'd? You'd forget the round events up until now but that's about it, it would also have uses outside of cognitohzard rounds for traitors and such. There will be progression levels for the cognitohazard, and it won't have immediate access to all abilities or a very high 'meme points' (to be renamed) pool at the start. It can upgrade itself once it has infected so many sentient individuals, forcing the cognitohazard to actually go out there and be active, spreading itself with its weird trigger phrase, instead of that thing some Malfs do where they act completely normal 90% of the round then suddenly go delta.

... Huh, okay. I thought they removed all of them except for the chaplain's office. Alright then. I'll add them in.