Kaed

Weeeeh I lost in a vampire round because the vampire knew what they were doing, pls nerf so I can win more often. This is what I am hearing right now. These threads pop up basically any time someone loses against an antagonist and, filled with salt and a lack of understanding into the nature of the antagonist mechanics involved, decides that the fault lies with OP GAME MECHANICS and not skillful use of what they have. Like jackboot said, it is not cheap to enthrall someone. Nor is is fast to gain enthrallment. So let me explain the mechanics, as someone who has experienced them. It takes 300 units of blood from living players before you can use enthrallment. To give you some perspective, you can gain approximately 100 blood from a player before they begin to fall unconscious and be at seriously be at risk of dying. Generally, if you are not going for MurderSucc mode, you have to moderate your bloodsucking to about 50 units per kine, if you want them to be able to walk away just feeling a little lightheaded. Leaving corpses is problematic, as is dragging people to medical who have passed out from mystery bloodloss. So, if you're trying to be subtle, that's about 6-7 people you've bloodsucked, assuming no one found you, or interrupted you, or something else didn't come up that caused you to take less than your ideal 50 units per victim. Even going for full kill, that's 2-3 people you're sucking dry, because the moment they die, your blood gain is halfed per 5 second tick and it stops accruing to your 'total blood' score (the one that unlocks abilities) Finally, when you actually DO get enthrall, it costs 150 blood to accomplish. That is fully half of the blood you probably took just to get the ability in the first place. You probably also had to spend 20-25 blood just getting someone in a good position to be enthralled, via dominate or glare/hypnotize combo. The amount of work and risk you put in makes enthrall worth what you get in the current code. It does not need a nerf.

Yes. Pugs are ugly and dumb. I don't see the appeal. Anyway, I guess telling apart diona nymphs wouldn't be a bad idea, but you can already pick a name for them when you spawn as one..

Not that anyone cares, but I think this is a dumb idea and people should stop obsessing over dressing up animals. I do like the idea of naming them though, even if it wasn't the original suggestion.

I have to agree with ben or whatever here. Anything that makes an AI's crashtastic experience worse is a definite no. I remember someone once talking about giving you a device as traitor that lets you know if the AI is watching. Not sure if it went anywhere. But that seems the only reasonable thing of all these ideas. The AI doesn't need a nerf. People just need to learn how to deal with it. The sense of self-entitlement that people have about being antags in an AI round is obnoxious. There are so many ways to counter the AI.

How about no. Wizards and ninjas can be some of the more fun antags. The fact that they can also be really boring doesn't make them unworthy of being in the game. Many of the other and tags that are off station also only really interact with security, the difference is that all they have is a pile of weapons instead of magic tricks and teleports that encourage shenanigans instead of invasion and kidnapping.

Currently, two races have a tail, unathi and tajarans. But since humancode is all derived from ancient mobcode where humans were the only species, there's a whole lot of 'just making it work with what is there'. As such, tails are just sort of a sprite that sits there, attached to the mob's body, unable to be interacted with in any meaningful way by game mechanics. According to my code confidante [mention]Lohikar[/mention], it's feasibly possible to add a special zone to the targeting UI specifically for tails. Obviously, it would just come up with some 'That person doesn't have a tail!" message if you try to intent-use an action it on one of the tailless heathens, much like of a limb was severed. But with a tail zone, you could do all sorts of things that were previously impossible when tails were an intert sprite tag. You could step on a tail while on harm intent, drag someone around by the tail in grab, yank a tail for disarm. Plenty of things. Urist McFurry pets Ssalazar Yinzr's tail! Local furry found in several pieces under elevator shaft. On the other end, you could also fire weapons at a tail, sever them, all the other stuff that comes with it being a body part. Bones could be broken in the tail, requiring the normal surgical procedure to realign their broken tail.

This is one of those suggestions where I wonder why someone even made it. I mean, I get where you're coming from sure. But there's more to being an antag then using the most efficient method of converting people? You must have been really lucky too, because most of the time on cult rounds I have several people who refuse to be converted. Just because you have someone helpless on a medical table doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to want to join Nar'sie. And then how are you going to explain how they died on the operating table to severe burns? This isn't a broken or overly easy method of antagging. It's just one way of doing things. There's no need to add extra regulations for the sole purpose of fucking over and tags who want to try this. They already get fucked over enough by uncooperative conversion targets like timid, stuttering pink haired chefs with a will of titanium that would somehow rather die an agonizing death than serve the Geometer. As for vampires, it's actually really hard to get someone that you can feed off of in this game because there's a pretty strong mentality to be on the lookout for antags. I'm all for giving vampire doctors a break so they can actually do something that's interesting rather than lurk around trying to get people to come into maintenance with them. Or try to engage and thinly-veiled ERP about sensually biting someone's neck.

Oh boy. Another changeling rework thread. This must be #10 this year. Not that I think you're wrong, and some of these ideas are interesting. And it's true, changeling is probably one of the worst/most tepid antags. Almost no one actually enjoys playing them, and those that do still probably prefer playing other antagonists. But let's be real. The likelihood of changeling being significantly reworked at some point in the near future is incredibly low. The coders are all busy with newmap still, and I have not detected a large amount of general disinterest in doing more than occasionally poking at their balance. A full redesign does not seem in the cards at this time. I mean, feel free to discuss and bounce ideas around. Suggestion threads aren't only allowed if something is viable. But don't be surprised when this thread sinks down into the murky obscurity of the deadthread pile just like every other changeling rework thread has done since I started visiting this server.

Fair enough!

Most of this was already covered in this thread by other admins, but let's cover this part. This reply was an irritable late night reply made 6 minutes after your warning was issued, and while there certainly isn't a question mark in there, it seems pretty clear to me that I'm addressing to you that the link doesn't work. You also read this, because it was moved to my Sent folder, and then chose not to respond to it, even with something as simple as 'The link isn't fucked up, I just linked you the post without realizing you couldn't view something in the moderator forums, here is an image of the post'. You took no time to explain any of this to me outside of this thread, which has happened a month later, and you are currently reiterating things that Sharp and Coalf has already told me... In an admittedly much more abrasive fashion. "Mind your own business", reallty? That wasn't a 'pity ripost', it was me being annoyed that you did not actually read the opening post in my thread. I don't know how you can call it a 'misconception' about the thread to tell me that the drug I actually made the name up for in my OP (inhibidone) 'didn't exist' when you replied to my question that involved the word. It's not 'misunderstanding' to miss out on a keyword in a topic. It's just not paying attention. I feel entirely justified in feeling irritation when an exchange like this happens. None of that, save for your original comment, feels that could be construed as you misunderstanding the topic, but rather that you failed to actually process the information given to you. You also never actually answered the question, instead opting to point out, needlessly, that my imaginary drug did not exist. I started writing this post before I noticed that someone else had already pointed that out to. At that point, I deleted a large portion of the post that detailed the same thing, that you didn't seem to have read the topic, and replaced with with a nod towards Doc's post instead. Let me also point out that Coalf has also agreed that you locking the thread was little more than a powerflex. There was absolutely no need for you to lock the thread to resolve an issue between you an a person in the thread. ShameOnTurtles did recently issue me a warning about reporting off topic posts instead of snarking about them (which is probably what you should have done in the first place, like I said earlier). But this still leaves the issue of why you felt it was necessary to lock a thread 'for administrative review' after someone snarked at you. The thread hasn't been derailed, nor did it contain anything particularly inflammatory to anyone but you, personally. You could easily have just directed an admin to the thread to allow it to be reviewed without locking it. Your administrative powers do not exist to service your ego, Scheveningen, and I'm having a hard time thinking of any other reason you would do this. I'd like to address this bit last. Your desires to (pretend to?) psychoanalyze my motives and place off-handed jabs against me rubs me as nearly as inflammatory as you seem to think I already am. I didn't say 'you embarrassed yourself' because I, myself, am secretly embarrassed about something. I said it because I felt your entire behavior here involving this thread stems from you being embarrassed about your lack of attentiveness, and doing your damnedest to backpedal and call it things like a 'misunderstanding', followed by locking the thread so no one else can comment on it. It's entirely possible you did out out of some noble desire to preserve the community from my 'constant negativity', but I have strong doubts about that. Your behavior actually seems to fit more into what you mentioned earlier about 'pity ripostes', which is somewhat ironic, because you told me not to do them in the same post. I might have issues with the community at large, and this has been evident from my threads about server policy but in this situation, my beef is with you, personally. Don't try and redirect the issue with a degrading paragraph about how I am sick and clearly hate myself. That is not and will never be a productive way to address a problem.

Thank you for clarifying that, though I should point that I did not post that in Please enforce Vaurca treatment laws in some manner., a thread made by a banned player named tmmytbbt , but rather Really serious gameplay affecting Vaurca Complaint (https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=9051), a suggestion thread involving vaurca mandibles not spawning equipped by Diggy, which had already been closed and was en-route to archiving at the time of my comment. This is important context. The suggestions forum that the thread was in is one of the few places on the forum I regularly visit, and my attention to races and their lore(masters) that aren't unathi is fairly low. So if it was somehow constituted as an attack on someone who was banned and not even involved in the thread rather than the intended 'lol vaurca suck' joke (on a thread that was already resolved, and in the process of being closed out, so by my logic process at the time was not really 'on topic' anymore, since it ended), then there was a serious misunderstanding by both you and delta. Either way, the main crux of that portion of my complaint was not entirely because I didn't know why I was warned, but also because Schvenigan declined to respond to a respond to a request for more information. It doesn't look like it was hard for you to dig up this information, Coalf. Is there a particular reason you had to do this, rather than Schvenigan answering it a month ago? Generally speaking, unban appeals are given to the person that gave out the punishment. If they wish for an outside look on it, they can make a staff complaint since it would mean they don't agree with their assessment from their appeal thread, then we will look into it. I admit, this misconception is at this time our fault and we're currently in the progress of bringing the forums up to date with information and such, it's simply tedious and exhausting at times, I'll see about getting this topic sorted and clarified. Okie dokie, thanks for clarifying. I should also point out the General Forum Rules thread is STILL missing, and has been for months. Just as an aside.

I was going to make a complaint about literally this exact subject, but not only did someone get to it first, but the covered the exact threads I was going to bring up, too. So I will pitch in my two cents here, as someone involved in part of the content of this complaint, to express that Schevenigenhas repeatedly abused his powers as an administrator and forum moderator to fulfill personal goals and exert his weight to quash when people make him feel embarrassed or upset. I was going to reference an archived thread I made about being issued a forum warning by Schevenigen for disagreeing with him under the pretense of 'being off topic', but it appears to have mysteriously vanished. Presumably, it was placed in a location I didn't spot and not simply deleted by someone, but the gist of it is that he was told of by Garn for issuing a warning for an issue they were personally involved in. I will also bring up this bit that happened last month on the 22nd of September. I was issued this warning, with a broken link that lead nowhere. I attempted to request more information about this warning, but to date have never received a response. I was under the impression that people are supposed to be given clear information about the reason they were issued warnings, but I might be wrong. Maybe I am not allowed to ask clarification about these sort of things. Schevenigen and I have a history of abrasive interactions with each other, and I admit I do not rather much like them. I'm sure the feeling is mutual. But neither expressing that I would like to be rude to someone without actually being that rude, nor jabbing him about not reading the actual thread and instead picking apart my question rather actually answering it does not seem worthy of locking the thread. If they really felt personally attacked, they should have issued a warning against me personally, rather than locking the thread in which they embarrassed themselves. I don't really think they had enough to go through with that with what I said to issue a warning, though, so they did this instead. Rather like claiming someone was threatening to assault you by saying "I'd really like to punch you right now, but I'm not going to." This just seems to be more of Schevenigen fulfilling their personal whims by waving around their administrative powers, much like when they doubled Munks ban for not saying what they wanted while they were issuing said ban, then refused to lift the ban because 'it would expire in several days anyway'. The lock thread function does not exist as a bail out button for when you say something dumb and are called out for it. As much as Schevenigen tells people (me) to stay on topic, I find it interesting that this is his response to my pointing out he did not sufficiently pay attention to the actual topic before replying. It's also interesting to me that in this thread where Munks appealed his ban, the only one who even responded to the ban was the person that actually issued it. Is it not usually considered reasonable for an unbiased third party to weigh in on this sort of thing? Especially when the individual in question has already demonstrated problems with separating personal bias from their decision-making process.

That chemical doesn't exist. The only individuals that do this are ERT. No other character that I have seen "abuses" hyperzine. It is rarely, if ever, prescribed to crewmembers as combat chemicals. I really wonder what goes through your head sometimes. But at the risk of being as rude as I'd probably enjoy being, I'll let Doc's comment answer for me. Suffice it to say you in no way actually answered my question by pointlessly arguing about the content of the question rather than actually answering the inquiry. I feel like it might need to be one of those phoron-catalyst things. I mean, it's doing something pretty weird and impossible, suspending your body processes without making you fall unconscious. -

I don't really understand why it should be ingested only? Are you suggesting that people would run around injecting themselves with Inhibidone constantly for the sake of being immune to any poisons? I guess they could do that, but I figure it would be treated the same way as people who suck hyperzine all shift - as powergaming. It should also definitely have an unpleasant overdose effect at a low quantity like 5-10 units, so people don't just treat it like invincibility potion (even though it also stops you from being healed)

Currently, aside from the short time delay from pills, reagents start applying their effects the moment they enter a mob. This is fine for medicines, but in situations where, for instance, you're trying to poison someone, it is somewhat of a giveaway when they start taking toxloss the second they bite into your cyanide burger, causing them to scream that the chef is poisoning the food. What I propose is a new chemical that, when present, stops the processing of all other reagents, until it runs out. It would probably process somewhat slowly, losing about 1 unit a minute or something. By mixing this chemical into your poison laced food, you create a time delay before they start feeling the poison affect their body. Potentially you could also use it as sort of a time-lock after filling your body with medicine. Just take a new inhibidone(?) pill every 5 minutes or so when you're in a dangerous situation, and if you get get shot into crit, all the medicine in your body kicks in a few minutes later, potentially saving your life. Conversely, you could inject a victim with it as they are dying, and laugh as you listen to medical panic about how the medicine and cryo tube aren't working over your traitor radio key, you fucker.

Currently, attempting to apply gauze/bandages or similar to a simple mob seems to consume the medical gear and heal only the most microscopic amount. You can go through literally dozens of bandage packs attempting to slowly heal a simple mob back to full health. I know it does SOMETHING, because I've seen it eventually change them from very wounded to slightly wounded. Off the top of my head, I suspect that simple mobs are unable to process the slow regen function that medical kits normally cause, because they do not have any kind of bodily functions simulated. So they only get the initial smidgeon of health, and then the effect of the medical kit just stops. Perhaps recoding them to just heal a fixed (and more significant) amount when a medkit item is applied would help with this problem. Yes, it's very niche, and almost never do you have a player occupying a simple mob, but having that player stuck in a body that is nearly impossible to feasibly heal is very frustrating.

I mean, it would look inconsistent for maybe a few weeks, before everyone just stops noticing them anymore because they are such a trivial part of the game. I just didn't think I've ever seen 'inconsistent illusory perspective' as a reason for not using sprites. But it's it's super important to everyone else I guess leave it.

While you're not exactly wrong, it's uh. It's a low res simulation game where where characters are seen from the side despite the game being top down, most sprites don't have more than one direction, and computers suddenly shift from being side-slanted bulky boxes to fancy front-on holoscreens the moment you add a glass pane.. I don't think anything that makes the graphics look a bit nicer is going to be very amiss.

I feel like you have missed a key point here in your haste to rush to tell me antag roles are hard and to deal with it and stop trying to win. Antagonist roles are indeed hard, and it's ideal for you to create a narrative rather than rushing a win, sure. But I'm not talking about limited help from borg making it hard to win, I'm talking about it making it hard to even have an impact on the round. Since newmap, AI players, malf or otherwise, have been plagued with crippling crashing because BYOND can't handle the amount of map space we have now. (@Lohikar has vague plans on the backburner to fix it, but he's a busy man) It is difficult to 'create a story' when you can crash as often as every 30 seconds and spend another minute just loading the map up again because BYOND makes you watch an ad. So setting up plans for your synthetic helpers to work on is the best way for you to actually accomplish something effectively, because a lot of AI rounds is spent reloading the BYOND client. So, I'm making an appeal here to reconsider your traditional kneejerk response to say 'just arepee' and 'leave drones out of it' for the sake of giving malf AI players a dang break. At least until the crashing issues are worked out. Unless you have a better idea, but this topic is already becoming about malf AI more than drones.

I would have to disagree there. People who play drones are only slightly more numerous than the people who play borg. Many rounds, you are lucky to even see 1-2 borg the entire round, and most of them tend to go afk or robo-storage. Even in malf rounds. And malf AIs flat out need helpers, they're a struggle to play, with how AI constantly crash and how big the station is now. Keep in mind these 'infinite, malicious, tiny engineers with all access' also have like 5hp and can be instantly killed with a single card swipe from an engineer. Allowing AI to do something with drones, like hack them to gain some limited directive control over them (but probably not directly command them), would be interesting. You say it's supposed to be an observer role, but there's like, no actual IC reason why they can't be touched by a malfunctioning AI. Just an OOC one, 'traditionally drones are supposed to just dick around because they're like mice borg'. It would give them something to work for, like all the drones get an extra law about fortifying the AI chamber.

I dunno about red alert, but it was repeatedly discussed to keep the common channel tied to intercomms.

No. Keep your filthy robots out of our head positions. It's bad enough we have to suffer shells being in there due to some arbitrary antagonist contest. Robots are not people. People do not like being ordered around by glorified toasters. They barely even like being ordered around by people of the same species. This isn't 'cutting off potentional RP', it's 'sticking to the narrative of a setting', rather than allowing special snow-flaking. IPCs should stay in their lane and just do the jobs they were built to do, lest they receive the Ion judgement. -1 Robots, man. You give them an inch, and they try to walk all over you.

-No, it's not. I do not know the names and voices of every person at my place of work. I would presume few people do, because you don't interact with everyone at your workplace regularly, especially in a workplace that has distinct departments that most people are not allowed to access the entirety of at will. I'm also recommending this be enforced for reasons such as 'fake names' showing up on voice changers being immediately recognized. Bob Bobert doesn't exist, how does everyone immediately recognize his voice when it shows up on the radio due to voice mimicry mechanics? If that doesn't make sense, why instantly would recognizing any other strange voice make sense? -There were a lot of behaviors that had to be beaten out of people when we created the server rules, like shrieking AI MALF over comms the second a dark blue APC shows up. And yet, here we are now, and hardly anyone does that now. "it's difficult' is not a reason to dismiss an idea. -That's a fair point, and I'll concede the ID thing for AI. -The staff is NOT doing this, or if they are, it is not happening consistently. Not even a week ago I had that specific example happen about someone shrieking in all caps that Hephaestus Industries Commandos were in command maint after spotting us through a doorway in a dimly lit maintenance. I ahelped it then, and was just given a shrug by the moderator who replied. I was told he could see it on their ID so it was valid. It was, in fact, the very inspiration for this thread. What personal testimony are you looking at exactly? This conjecture of yours doesn't seem to have any grounding in what I seem to remember doing on server. I frequently ahelp things I think are shitty metagaming and am told to deal with it. I also don't think, even if you are correct, that my behavior on server has anything to do with the validity of this suggestion. This is a frequent topic I see you make on suggestions, trying to dismiss them on the basis that the suggester is somehow hypocritical or barely plays on the server. What the crap does that have to do with the actual content of the suggestion? Stop doing this, Delta. Attacking a person to devalue their ideas is one of the most basic logical fallacies.

Uhm, I already discussed this earlier in the thread, but I guess I can run through it again. This is roughly what I would consider acceptable, non-metagamey realism. -Don't identify the names of people over radio outside your department, unless you're friends with them or they've told you. -Don't recognize people's identity in person unless you've been in close proximity and been able to see their ID or something, unless you have a reason to previously know them well -Take into account distance and environmental aspects. If you see a mercenary from the other side of a dim maintenance tunnel, through a closed airlock, you should probably only be able to discern 'some guy in a red hardsuit is over there', not "HEPHAESTUS INDUSTRIES COMMANDOS IN SCIENCE MAINT SEC HELP", regardless of if their ID actually says they are a Hephaestus Industries Commando" -AI (and synths) cannot recognize voices and names instantly over the radio. They can recognize faces immediately though, if they center their camera on someone and they are not wearing a mask. Borg can read ID cards at close proximity, but AI cannot read ID cards, only faces, clothing, body features, and the job tag that shows up on SecHUD. (though maybe add a feature that lets AI see an ID you use on a camera, similar to papers?)

Yeah, I feel like this needs to be something that is enforced in roleplay standards more than mechanically.