Remove Security General

[Kintsugi]

I make this thread as a disgruntled sec main, not an antag main, or an anarchist cargonian. I make this thread as someone who is tired of the slippery slope that Aurora is experiencing, where bits and bits of sec are chipped away one at a time in order to not cause so much radical change. I hate being told that sec is a detriment to the server overall. I hate being told that my opinions don't matter because I'm a sec main, or that they should be taken with a grain of salt. Aurora needs to bite the bullet and decide now: Do they want security or not? This is a self-destructive thread for me to make, because knowing myself I'd be unable to adapt and would probably end up quitting, but with so many people saying that sec is bad and is a plague upon the server, I just want to get it over with. With that self-pitying microrant aside, let's get down to the meat of it.

 

I see deptsec as a half-measure. People want to take sec out of the picture, but they don't want to jump straight to cutting out one of the largest departments. Just look at the current iteration of it - it's designed to weaken sec, disorganize them, etc.

 

Remove security as a department. Maybe keep investigations along with a small brig, maybe don't. Maybe add a small exploration department for sec refugees to flock to? Also add a small public armory for command to open up and arm the crew, that'll be fun. Like Bay's emergency armory, in practice. There are those who actually want this to happen, and I encourage them to outline their plans for an alternative. Maybe we should have a week-long test to experience SS13 without security, to get a feel for how play changes.

Edited April 6, 2020 by DanseMacabre

[Kintsugi]

This goes without saying, but let's keep this thread civilized friends

[N.U.L.-D.]

Truthfully. With the addition of landmark shuttles and the under-used research shuttle?
The idea of making security more of a "First-responder" sort of department for threats, while primarily also being exploration would be a good idea. They would still be an opposition to hostile threats and law-breaking, but wouldn't strictly be "This is security, we hunt bad guys."

 

I wanted to add onto this to also include. Putting Medical into that change, as well. It's suppose to be a research station, but we have an actual hospital and police station. They could be slightly merged together to work together, instead of being opposing departments.

Edited April 6, 2020 by N.U.L.-D.

[Garnascus]

5 minutes ago, DanseMacabre said:

I hate being told that my opinions don't matter because I'm a sec main, or that they should be taken with a grain of salt. Aurora needs to bite the bullet and decide now: Do they want security or not? T

Your opinion does matter. Sec have just been on top since the server was created. Naturally sec players are going to defend against any and all nerfs to treat what we in the leadership view as a problem. Nobody enjoys having cool toys to play with for years and then having them taken away. This does not change the fact that security has an overwhelming and majority hold over the pace and condition of the round. THey have an overwhelming advantage against any and all antagonists. This advantage manifests in greater numbers, communication, equipment and utilization of station's resources. For example medical will happily and efficiently heal any sec member wounded in a fight. Antags are lucky to have this happen and even if it does they will be arrested before they wake up. 

There is no conversation that can be had unless this fact is understood. We do not want to remove security. We want to balance it. 

[Aticius]

The removal of security would be a chaotic, horrible, direction to go down if ever implemented, or even sneezed at jokingly.

 

Security provides a counterplay to something deeply important to the server; rounds and SS13 in general; Antagonists. Unless Aurora wishes to remove them, too, Security must remain effective and coordinated; and people who legitimately bully or demean other members of this community need to be corrected. We're playing a game here to enjoy. If people are really saying shit like this; They need to stop.

[Peppermint]

What was the point of this thread? Like I really don't see the point aside from to stir up trouble.

 

As for balance stuff, antags are built to lose. They're fundamentally designed as such, so of course security is stronger. 

Edited April 6, 2020 by Lemei

[Kintsugi]

1 minute ago, Lemei said:

What was the point of this thread? Like I really don't see the point.

 

As for balance stuff, antags are built to loose. They're fundamentally designed as such, so of course security is stronger. 

the point was to foster a dialogue over the very existence of security, whether or not it is a net negative or a net positive, and whether or not Aurora needs it or even should have it moving forwards

[GreenBoi]

An emergency armory for the crew would slowly encourages and rewards more validhunty behavior overall. And, as Aticius commented- it would throw the typical arrangement and defense of the game out of the way. Every server has some form of Security for a reason and so long as antagonists and events exists- so would Security.

[N.U.L.-D.]

Basically..

Short answer; Remove security.

Long answer; security needs to be replaced with a department that can function as both peace-keeper and actual research conductiveness. Like an exploration team. Aka; security officers would primarily be body guards for shuttle missions. But are still contracted officers, expected to help up-hold peace. The warden would still exist and function over the armory and any current inmates. But officers aren't expected to patrol and maintain peace all the time.

[Aticius]

20 minutes ago, Garnascus said:

 

 We do not want to remove security. We want to balance it. 

Antagonists are not, should not, and should never be designed to win in any shape or fashion. They exist to make rounds interesting; nothing more. Winning is not interesting. Losing is not interesting. Security needs to be coordinated and well armed to ensure that there is balance in the force this delicate proceeding.

 

From what I've seen; recent changes to Security want to move towards antag-winning play. This will not end well; as Bay has demonstrated. It will end up throwing the pendulum in the other way.

 

To remain constructive, Security does have one tool that it absolutely needs to have taken away or rebalanced without a doubt: That fucking Ion. Lesser things include how ballistics work, and their balance. While ballistics make sense, ICly, Ballistics leave lasting wounds, whereas energy weapons are easily repaired with medicine. Perhaps a removal of ballistics, and implementing all-energy for Security is in order.

 

Or maybe just give Antags the ability to readily heal themselves.

[N.U.L.-D.]

3 minutes ago, Aticius said:

Or maybe just give Antags the ability to readily heal themselves.

Syndicate donk pockets. Combat medkits. Literally gauz and ointment. Chemistry. Antags have a TON of options.

 

walk up into medbay and ask for a basic first aid-kit. ask for auto-injectors, auto-inhalers. Most medbay will throw it at you, just to get you to leave.

Edited April 6, 2020 by N.U.L.-D.

[maniacalFowl]

Replacing security with a shitty exploration department is just putting us down the same path as Bay. Exploration over there are a bunch of valid hunting fools literally armed with machete's. There are more rounds with those purple idiots chasing antags than actual security. Exploration really isnt that big of a feature here where it demands its own department just for its function. 

Aside from that, removal of security is one of the most mind bogglingly wrong idea I've ever heard or seen. Like Ati and Greenboi, Security acts as a foil to antags as a whole. Removal of them would allow antags to just roll over every other department without remorse. And having recently joined up with security I can say now that I actually appreciate everything they do in moving the round forward in antag interaction. If people have a problem with shitsec, then more than likely its a result of the players populating that role. 

[Aticius]

8 minutes ago, N.U.L.-D. said:

Syndicate donk pockets. Combat medkits. Literally gauz and ointment. Chemistry. Antags have a TON of options.

 

walk up into medbay and ask for a basic first aid-kit. ask for auto-injectors, auto-inhalers. Most medbay will throw it at you, just to get you to leave.

None of those fix the real killers; Arterial Bleeding, Blood Loss, Organ Damage or broken bones as readily as medbay does.

 

Also; All those options are wildly expensive or time consuming; something you A. dont want to waste crystals on or B. have time for.

[Garnascus]

8 minutes ago, Aticius said:

Antagonists are not, should not, and should never be designed to win in any shape or fashion. They exist to make rounds interesting; nothing more. Winning is not interesting. Losing is not interesting.

This is a really weird mindset. By your own logic you have to acknowledge that since security usually wins that is not interesting. Thus we should take steps to reduce the chance for security to win. 

11 minutes ago, Aticius said:

From what I've seen; recent changes to Security want to move towards antag-winning play.

More towards, yes. Its not interesting for EITHER party to dominate the win conditions of a round. Currently only sec does this. 

[N.U.L.-D.]

6 minutes ago, Aticius said:

None of those fix the real killers; Arterial Bleeding, Blood Loss, Organ Damage or broken bones as readily as medbay does.

 

Also; All those options are wildly expensive or time consuming; something you A. dont want to waste crystals on or B. have time for.

Here's an idea, though...

Getting shot hurts.
Try avoiding it more.

you pull out a gun, expect to get assblasted because at that point there's no return

Also Bicaridine overdose stops arterial bleeding.
30u of bicar, 15u Norepinephrine and 15u dylovene. 

Edited April 6, 2020 by N.U.L.-D.

[Aticius]

4 minutes ago, Garnascus said:

This is a really weird mindset. By your own logic you have to acknowledge that since security usually wins that is not interesting. Thus we should take steps to reduce the chance for security to win. 

More towards, yes. Its not interesting for EITHER party to dominate the win conditions of a round. Currently only sec does this. 

Sec does not dominate in any modes that are not Traitor or Rev; Mercenaries, Wizards and Ninjas are more than robust enough to handle security. Ninjas in particular are a violent offender in this.

[Cnaym]

I'm still not sure why we (try?) have to balance it. Game is not balanced from the get go, since antags can just do everything. If you want to win as antag and are able to abuse enough systems you will win. Be that building a mech in maint, making yourself ion immune as borg or just abusing chems as human. If you play to win on an HRP server you will win, simply through abusing the goodwill of the people focused on the RP part of it.

As long as we allow shooting on sight, the one shooting first (sometimes with the bigger gun) will win ^^ it just happens that a good security department can be 3-4 player. A good merc team on the other hand can win with 1. Now if both sides would try to avoid getting shot by taking cover and talking to each other, there would be a lot less salt over who had the more itchy trigger finger. That being said, I don't think security is overpowered.  A well functioning station is. So is a single ninja that got all the mechanics nailed.

What I see a lot is a complete new cadet getting a shotgun. Usually never ends with an extensive RP situation, but I get why one might be tempted to hand out the spare guns after losing 3 officers. ^^

The issue I see with depsec is that the "sec mains" will have this figured out in two weeks top and we are back to normal. I think this is more of a mindset issue than a mechanic problem.

2 hours ago, N.U.L.-D. said:

"This is security, we hunt bad guys."

Maybe one day it will be "This is security, we protect the good guys." Maybe that requires security getting a lot more help from the crew and not the usual "sec man bad" though.

[YourDaddy117]

Local Funny man makes meme thread.

Jokes aside I think this is just a knee-jerk reaction. While some people might want to remove security, it's never happening. Unless we want to leave the crew high and dry when there's antags gunning everyone down. Neither antags nor sec are meant to "win". RP isn't about winning.  It'd also inspire a very shitty valid hunting mindset which I think is already kind of an underlining issue with SS13 RP in general. People get uspetti with/have a crap attitude towards sec because it's not hard to point at examples of bad play from the department. It's easier to point at an Unga generic sol marine Officer using his role as a powertrip and go "Sec man bad" than it is to point at a well thought out and well played Officer. But again that's just a general attitude bred by SS13 and it's usual valid hunting shitcurity memes.  Medical just has a weird hate of it due to clique memes. 

That said I have no idea why anyone thought some of these depsec changes were good. It was obviously born from a need to nerf sec due to all of the new access sec gets, but it's just poorly done and needs to be reconsidered. And it goes without saying that downsizing security (hopefully not in the way we saw in the "test-merge") is a good thing. Someone should downsize the hell out of medical while we're at it.

[Skull132]

Some thoughts from the multitudes of discussions that have been discussed regarding security within the pits of the development dungeon and higher, amongst the head devs and head admins.

First and foremost. Our goal isn't to remove sec. If we actually wanted to do this, we would, well, remove them. Simple enough point, ye?

However. As I outlined in the dep sec feedback thread. Sec, as it currently stands, is getting in the way of future plans. So we are planning on reframing and reworking them. Unfortunately, out of the hyperbolic bullshit and screeching that I've heard and read, only a few people (Sue, Jackboot) have managed to see the core issue and phrase it properly.

So to rephrase them, and to rephrase myself for the n-th time, there are two points:

• Sec (and the station at large) are a weeeee bit too powerful. No, I don't mean weapons wise. No, I don't mean equipment wise. I mean in terms of how easily they can assert control over most situations that are represent by the server's common antag types (specifically, single antags). While a full sec time is well balanced to go tango with a competent cult, merc team, or revs; against single antags, it becomes all too easy for them to envelop and hunt them down. This is confounded by the AI and a few other factors, of course.
• The Setting is a weeeeee bit too hostile to anything that is not clearly NT, and this gets (ab)used a lot. While I can easily cite player culture from 2013-2014 having been good sports about it, relying purely on player culture is a bit of a vain affair. So this, too, will have to be changed. Actually, back in uh. 2017? There was real-talk of making the station a more open trade hub. But for one reason or another, we decided to forego this change. Perhaps a mistake!

Notice how addressing both of these two points doesn't require the outright removal of sec.

Allow me to also address the why of the two previous points. As in, "Why are those two even a problem?" Well, because, as I explained either in the depsec thread or in security discord (or both, likely), the goal of the development team of this server is to provide varied and enjoyable roleplay experience. The way we do it is through antagonists, typically. (Necessary note: antagonist doesn't necessarily mean "Man with gun", we're slowly working on improving on this as well. Our analysis of OTHER avenues, along with observations of how similar avenues ended up being used on other servers, still determined sec or station side armed forces to be a large hinderance.)

So what's the long term game plan? Weeeell. We're a bit up shit's creek with the setting deal. A bit. Redoing Aurora's setting currently seems like a very bad idea, since over the past month or two, we've got a lot of stuff necessary for NBTv2.(3) implemented. So I'd rather allocate whatever's necessary over there. This means that, hopefully as a worst case scenario, we're stuck on the Aurora until the end of the year. But we'll see. But how do we plan to address this with NBTv2.(3)? Well, whatever project ends up being implemented, it will no longer have the cold hard stamp of, "EVERYTHING HERE IS NT!" over it. It'll also have more lax security around it, and will be interfacing a lot more with outside forces-entities. If this can be successfully implemented alongside newer random events, which include docile visitors, we should hopefully see "random civilians" becoming more and more common aboard the station-ship-colony-secret thing.

A side-note would be a question along the lines of, "But what IS NBTv2.(3)?!" Well, currently it is not the NBT that was originally rolled out in the thread about the NBT. But, being all too familiar with the 3 years it took for Nümap (Aurora's current map) to finally be made manifest in its present form, I'd rather leave a full description out of this until we actually start working on the map. Otherwise, God knowing, we'll find another reason to rethink our approach, and it'll just be announcement after announcement of, "Hey, we're doing this now instead!" But the general points of what I listed above will be implemented one way or another.

Regardless of how we plan to manifest NBT, we've also thought about making the central areas of the station more open (originally Amory's suggestion). Specifically breaking up the clumping of departments, allowing more liberal traffic between areas. Command structure (and departmental allocation) is another target for fuckery, regardless of what NBT ends up being, which would allows us to distribute and manage security resources in a bit of a different manner.

But that's all in The Future. What about The Now?

First I will say, both the depsec test merge, the feedback from it, and the reactions to the second iteration have proven invaluable in molding the future designs of any NBT. We saw what it solved and what it didn't. Both are important. As for what we do with this now, well, I don't (personally) fully know. Depsec is a compromise in all meanings of the word. Whether that's a good thing, well, we'll find out I suppose.

[GreenBoi]

9 hours ago, Aticius said:

Antagonists are not, should not, and should never be designed to win in any shape or fashion. They exist to make rounds interesting; nothing more. Winning is not interesting. Losing is not interesting. Security needs to be coordinated and well armed to ensure that there is balance in the force this delicate proceeding.

 

From what I've seen; recent changes to Security want to move towards antag-winning play. This will not end well; as Bay has demonstrated. It will end up throwing the pendulum in the other way.

Here's the problem:

 

We say "the aim isn't to win," but there kind of IS a set endgoal for any given antagonist? I think validhunting's definition of "play-to-win" is just there to easily describe what it is to people who don't know if they're doing it, the actual definition for our circumstances is most closer to "playing to win in classical SS13 terms, without any thought for something else"

 

Antags will win sometimes, and that's ok- the antag actually winning is pretty rare on this server and that kind of sucks, so they're occasionally being given access to some tools that will help them reach their self-made goals easier. You can make interesting scenarios with-or-without winning, but winning shouldn't be tossed out the table:

 

What is very ironic is that people are fine with Security winning, but whenever antagonists win consistently- that's when people begin proposing nerfs or saying it's broken/unablanced/OP because it deviates from the norm so it MUST be broken.

[Scheveningen]

10 hours ago, Lemei said:

What was the point of this thread? Like I really don't see the point aside from to stir up trouble.

 

As for balance stuff, antags are built to lose. They're fundamentally designed as such, so of course security is stronger. 

I am obligated to post this as this is a level 6 bruh moment. 

They are not intentionally built to lose, they are designed to provide intrigue and interesting situations to the crew. That is their function. The concept of winning and losing should not be on anyone's mind, this is a roleplay server, not the run of mill SS13 server.

[Shenaanigans]

I really doubt that any large amount of users actually, in all seriousness, wants to remove security. Objectively speaking there has to be someone around with the clearance and access to weaponry to deal with boarders, hostile xenofauna, and supernatural creatures from the pits of the nightmare realm, so security has to continue to exist in some form. The rotten apple lurking in the bunch is, instead, the mindset that tends to feel at home and take root in the security department-- valid hunting, "play to win" RP style. If it can even be called RP to begin with.

I do have to admit a bias against opinions coming from self proclaimed security mains because of this prevailing tendency to treat SS13 like a first person shooter, though I also tend to feel the same way against antag mains. Are all of either category the unga bunga "make spaceman go horizontal and win" type plaguing HRP servers? Of course not. But even in my relatively short stint on this server I've witnessed time and time again mechanics having to be adjusted for this specific breed of user for the sake of ensuring that the Aurora actually remains HRP and fun for the people who want more than to focus on "winning" or "losing" in a hobby where neither or those is real. Nothing should be built to WIN or LOSE. Only balanced so that it provides the maximum amount of engaging roleplay for the maximum amount of users, which is what I saw depsec as moving toward. I do strongly disagree with some of the proposed changes to the initial testmerge (cough securityradioremoval cough) that hamstring the department in not so constructive ways, but it's extremely inaccurate to take this stance of "oh obviously this is just some intricate plot to lead to the end removal of security entirely" when the staff have said time and time again that the intent is to enhance RP. As much as I'd love a culture shift where the people who only care to AFK until antags show up that they can shoot were frowned upon enough to change their attitudes, shifting mechanics to make it so that they can't so easily stomp on well meaning antags is the more realistic option.

It's not a removal of security, it's (ideally) a shift to a security that helps RP more than it harms it.

[Carver]

Remove all departments if you're gonna do it. Kill the tribalism at it's core.