Remove Revenants from the secret rotation

[DatSamTho]

It's pretty much zombie event lite mode. I'm not sure why it was in the secret rotation to begin with, when it was only just introduced and tested. It's an alright one-off gamemode, but from what I can see everyone despises the few rounds a day of revenants. . . please save us from this torment.

[Skull132]

2 minutes ago, tomkiel said:

It's pretty much zombie event lite mode. I'm not sure why it was in the secret rotation to begin with, when it was only just introduced and tested. It's an alright one-off gamemode, but from what I can see everyone despises the few rounds a day of revenants. . . please save us from this torment.

Mmmmooossstly so we could test it.

I also kind of want to see what kind of reaction such modes would gather from the general audience.

Whether it stays in secret or not, or if it'll even be votable, will be discussed Soon:tm:.

[Butterrobber202]

the general talk in OOC (from what I've seen) is that it's a cool gamemode, but it should be voteable rather than in secret

[EmperorVoyd]

The almost consensus reaction is that this is a universally hated game mode being dubbed "Blue Tide"

I don't know how from a game design standpoint this made it in, that implementing  it  with their current abilities, limitations, and hidden rules was an idea at all,

who said what? and who said yea that will be a great idea for HRP? did anyone even look at it? or are we just making use of something that was paid for regardless of quality?

[Kintsugi]

Revenants as a mode has a place on Aurora. That place is not the secret rotation. I view revenants in the same way one views tower defense - it is a gamemode that occurs when the playerbase has decided roleplay is not their immediate priority, and they just want some dumb fun. As it is, revenants is a RP-less experience that is essentially a TDM. Not something people want 95% of the time.

[Estoytrucha]

There is no way to hold the revenants accountable or Ahelp them when they behave very, very badly. They all have the same spawn marker. This alone makes me want to remove it. Not even cult is this difficult to parse.

[jrphoenix303]

I agree that the revenant gamemode ends up causing simple mass griefing of the station. The general go-to is more often than not "Break all the APC's, then vent the station.". While I do enjoy the gamemode I think it needs to be either moved to be voted-only, or it needs some good reworking of how it works to make it just more fun for both sides.

5 minutes ago, DanseMacabre said:

[snip] it is a gamemode that occurs when the playerbase has decided roleplay is not their immediate priority, and they just want some dumb fun. As it is, revenants is a RP-less experience that is essentially a TDM. [snip]

I agree with this, but again as said above I feel it could be reworked somehow.

[Sheeplets]

I've played Medical for two rounds of Revenant now and I can safely say that as soon as a blue man walks in the room an internal "switch" flicks on in my head, sending me into full on monkey mode and causing me to completely abandon actually roleplaying my characters on account of the fact that I fully expect to be gutted if I pull any punches for the antag's sake. It's fun to gun down waves of revenants but it seems like the meta at this point is to suicide rush in an attempt to do as much damage as possible before you die and then respawn later to finish what you started. It's a fun one-off TDM game mode where everyone has an excuse to chimp out, but there's absolutely no room for roleplaying whatsoever.

It wouldn't hurt my feelings to see it come out of the rotation and be vote-only, but it's definitely a nice breakaway from the norm.

[Bear]

Hard disagree. I think the game mode needs work, and a big change to the ability of the antag's ability to story tell (or lack thereof in it's current form). But removing it only will turn it into malf. Basically nonexistant.

[Faye <3]

As the CMO on the round that sparked this thread, something definitely needs to be changed about revenants (or perhaps they weren't functioning as intended?). By around ten minutes in, we already had crew members attacked. By seventeen minutes in, myself and the other Commander agreed to call ERT. The revenants had spawned and began to randomly attack crew before I could even make chems to allow medical to respond, and I wager that if medical wasn't prepared by the time the revenants began to attack (again, by like ten minutes into the round) that no other department was either. As the revenants spawned so early, they figuratively caught the station with it's pants down. We could not respond effectively because no one had time to prepare, and perhaps if we were given more of a delay before revenants spawn to allow the crew a fighting chance, ERT would not have been necessary so early.

At seventeen minutes, when I called ERT, it was because multiple crewmen had been injured, our only security officer had been downed, they were beginning to corner crewmen in hallways and assault, if not kill them outright and my own character barely escaped intact. Even with ERT, the revenants were dragging around welding bombs, creating makeshift weaponry and at one point had vented the entire main level. At the end of the round, six or seven characters had died. It did not matter how many welding-bomb dragging, metal-spear armed bluemen you killed, because another one would respawn to take it's place and do the exact same thing. The game-mode devolved into 'how much damage can I deal on this life before I respawn' instead of an RP experience. At one point, a revenant ran into medical, stabbed random personnel and beelined into the OR to stab the person who was being operated on before being killed. It isn't an RP gamemode, it's a PVP one.

 

I think this gamemode has potential to be a cool 'the haunting' kinda vibe, but I think there needs to be a delay on when revenants can spawn, and perhaps give them a way to RP with the crew. They cannot currently speak intelligibly and have infinite respawns, so this incentivizes aggressive, TDM-style LRP gameplay IMO.

Edited January 18, 2021 by Faye <3

[geeves]

[geeves]

2 hours ago, EmperorVoyd said:

The almost consensus reaction is that this is a universally hated game mode being dubbed "Blue Tide"

I don't know how from a game design standpoint this made it in, that implementing  it  with their current abilities, limitations, and hidden rules was an idea at all,

who said what? and who said yea that will be a great idea for HRP? did anyone even look at it? or are we just making use of something that was paid for regardless of quality?

would you prefer we do nothing at all

have you contributed anything to aurora

did your mother love you

 

it's an experimental new gamemode using a new system, and it's actively being worked on my one person, me

i like to add stuff to aurora that makes it fresh because i like the server and the community, but comments like this just makes me want to fuck off and do something fulfilling

 

anyhow, it's being worked on. more updates will come, just need more feedback with all the incoming tweaks

 

P.S. adding identifiers to revenants is a good idea that i didn't think of. i'll consider it. i think instead of making them random i'll increment it up from 1 to give players an idea of how many there are or have been

edit: numerical identifier added, hopefully that makes it easier

Edited January 18, 2021 by geeves
identifier

[Caelphon]

Something most players lack is tact, which is evident in this thread. Revenant has tonnes of potential, and just needs honest, critical feedback so Geeves knows what to work on. 

Insulting a developers work (lore/code) is never a good idea unless it's backed by *good* criticism which they can learn from, otherwise you just seem like a dick. Geeves is doing good work for Aurora, give him some time to round the edges instead of baseless accusations. 

 

Putting that point aside, Revenant has potential but I believe the current fixes you have planned is all that I can imagine for now - besides giving them an ability to "possess" people and speak through them like borers. I think this was done before on Aurora with bluespace echos? Not sure tho. 

[Shenaanigans]

Revenant definitely has a LOT of potential and I find the idea of it to be a refreshing departure from how every other roundtype we have works, so really it has my praise and admiration for what it accomplishes so far. I just think that it also needs time to take in the feedback it's gathered from tests and some more fleshing out-- things like more thorough guidelines on how revenants are expected to act, tweaks to their strength/abilities, adjustment to the spawn timer, etc. It's an entirely new gamemode, of course it's going to have growing pains.

I would agree that it should be removed from the secret rotation because of how different it is from everything else in our server's repertoire, but that's sort of complicated by the new "intensity" voting system we have being tested. Not sure how that would work.

[KingOfThePing]

Last round we had revenants getting shitfaced at the bar. It was great. It can be a fun gamemode

 

thanks for your work Geeves

[geeves]

28 minutes ago, KingOfThePing said:

Last round we had revenants getting shitfaced at the bar. It was great. It can be a fun gamemode

i whipped the ghosts up to do it with me, i was the first one that stumbled and dissolved

 

im a bit of a scientist myself

 

1 hour ago, Shenaanigans said:

Revenant definitely has a LOT of potential and I find the idea of it to be a refreshing departure from how every other roundtype we have works, so really it has my praise and admiration for what it accomplishes so far. I just think that it also needs time to take in the feedback it's gathered from tests and some more fleshing out-- things like more thorough guidelines on how revenants are expected to act, tweaks to their strength/abilities, adjustment to the spawn timer, etc. It's an entirely new gamemode, of course it's going to have growing pains.

I would agree that it should be removed from the secret rotation because of how different it is from everything else in our server's repertoire, but that's sort of complicated by the new "intensity" voting system we have being tested. Not sure how that would work.

atm being in secret helps with feedback since the chance of being run at least once is 100%, when you look at a long period of time. my first batch of tweaks got merged a few hours ago which should make it a LOT better.

i also plan on making a wiki page soon-ish that outlines stuff, but i'm still dealing with burnout from my last shotgun of PRs

[Skull132]

So here's my thing.

All of the revenants are player controlled. Ergo, the players (on both sides, specially sec) control how the round ends up. If there's complaining that all revenant rounds end up as glorified TDM, then I would like answers to two questions:

• Why is this so?
• What other tools can be offered to steer away from this trend?

Cuz like. Unlike merc or nuke, where the antags are all clearly armed and some level of "Illegal" or "Bad guy". The revenants are just blu dudes looking to be blue, daba-di daba-do. Meaning, ideally, the players have a lot more freedom to run gimmicks with them when it comes to intent and goals. Why is this not being capitalized on? What can be done to amend this? (Also take into consideration today's fixes, where we mostly removed the language barriers ingame.)

[Doc]

2 hours ago, Skull132 said:

Cuz like. Unlike merc or nuke, where the antags are all clearly armed and some level of "Illegal" or "Bad guy". The revenants are just blu dudes looking to be blue, daba-di daba-do. Meaning, ideally, the players have a lot more freedom to run gimmicks with them when it comes to intent and goals. Why is this not being capitalized on? What can be done to amend this? (Also take into consideration today's fixes, where we mostly removed the language barriers ingame.)

 

Unlike merc, nuke, or any other team-comp antagonist, the revenant players are not a unified group. They aren't selected at round-start- at least the majority aren't- and the role can be taken by any random person dropping in at any random point throughout the round. This makes even OOC coordination through AOOC neigh impossible, because even if the current roster of revenants all manage to come to an agreement on a unified theme or course of RP (which sometimes won't even happen with the unified team antagonists), that roster could be literally entirely different players within 10 to 30 minutes, and any form of cohesion will be lost. Revenants are now faced with the choice to either make up an entire gimmick on their own with only 25 health or however little they have, or just attacking the people that are attacking all the other revenants. One is so much easier than the other, and still completely allowed by the rules and circumstances the gamemode will inevitably generate, despite the near-complete lack of RP it promotes.

There's a few options I see to fix it, but I honestly don't particularly like any of them.

One, admins start enforcing more coordination in general and bwoink revenants who wildly deviate from the initial plan for violating Rule 1 or something, effectively maintaining the cohesion of the round as it goes on in the place of players actually sticking around. I think the problems with that are obvious, but primarily it'd just put a lot of work the staff team really shouldn't have to do on their shoulders for the sake of the gamemode working.

Two, write up and code in more defined instructions for the players as to what the revenants are and how they should be acting- it completely eliminates the issue of inconsistent players equaling inconsistent RP and play, at least to as good as an extent as we ever could, but also severely gimps the freedom they have.

Three, allow the first initial-spawn group of revenants to somehow write the spawn-in instructions that future revenants spawning in will see, so that the initially readied antagonist players have control of creating a unified direction for the rest of the revenants for the rest of the round. Let modmins be able to easily access it to enforce late-spawn revenants purposefully flying in the face of it. The primary issue here being that it's a lot of trust both in the initial players being able not only to come up with an inalterable """good gimmick""" for the entire rest of the round (whereas most other antag types can, to an extent, curve their gimmick as the round develops), but also being able to write up adequately informational instructions for the following late-spawners to actually be able to follow along with the gimmick as intended after reading it. Also, presumably only one of the revenants would be the one to mechanically be able to submit this stuff, which either requires a "leader" role or random assignment of that ability to any of the first-spawn revenants, would could lead to weird power dynamics, although that's a relatively minor concern comparatively.

[Zer0Winds]

So... I want to put in my two cents here.

I think Revenant can be alright. The idea that it generates no RP... is not entirely true. I mean, it generates quite a bit of RP for some people. Let me say not in a good way, but it does generate RP. Someone is dragged off by spooky ghost, into the dark, and either very wounded or killed, the other characters of the round are going to react, ideally. If your character's friend is hurt or killed, your character is going to suffer or vice versa.

I saw quite a bit of good RP that came from it... Albeit from people that didn't even enjoy the round and only did so because they were good RPers but that's besides the point; it still did technically generate RP. The problem is that it generated RP at the expense of another player. This is because players on Aurora don't like to die. I understand why, even if I don't entirely agree with the mentality.

An issue I have is that I'm not sure we know how smart they are supposed to be. I get that an Admin told someone somewhere and those people try to tell others, but there's nowhere as far as I know that details this. Inevitably people aren't going to know just what they can and can't do. Are they just blue people? Are they animalistic? Are they a mix of the two? Like Faye said, during one round we had them building weapons and bombs, venting very specific areas on the station that no one was even in. It was just a place that could have helped us a little bit. Or very much, considering they vented the main level later. I mean, for what reason other than to fuck with Science, does a Revenent vent only Xenobotany and EVA Prep? Alright, I don't know where they spawn; maybe outside so it was just a coincidence as they tried to get inside. But if that isn't the case, then it's just another example of them acting intelligent, and knowledgeable of the station's layout, and purpose. At that point, is that not a bit metagaming?

We had a round not long after that one. Someone did a spooky ghost thing, and darkened the station, and harassed us all. They scared us, and ran off into the dark. They broke lights. They dragged people off, wounded and let them go, for the Doctor to take care of. Everyone fucking loved it. It reminds me of the Revenants on a much smaller, and organized scale. Revenant lacks organization. There's what, five or six? And they are all named the same and look the same. Say two of them are trying the spooky thing, three of them are trying to just harass or whatever, maybe break bluespace related items and things, and final guy decides to actively attack crew. With the last guy, the crew will attack back... including the other five. And even worse is the fact that when those initial six die, other players can take their place. Who knows what those other players have in mind? That is what causes it to devolve into TDM. I will not fault security if they did not attack first. Their job is to protect the station, and if the revenant appears to be hostile and literally attacking crew, why would anyone assume the others are different?

It has potential to be worked on. Geeves has done well in creating something interesting, and I don't want to see it gotten rid of just yet. They are still working on it: We need to actually give them feedback as to how to improve it. Not just saying "It has potential, but I don't like it" or straight up "Delete it this sucks". What it needs is organization. It shouldn't be a Ghost Spawner role. It should be an actual Antag you toggle. Then the ability to ahelp bad revenents needs to be addressed as it is still hard to do at the moment.

[Skull132]

6 hours ago, Doc said:

Unlike merc, nuke, or any other team-comp antagonist, the revenant players are not a unified group. They aren't selected at round-start- at least the majority aren't- and the role can be taken by any random person dropping in at any random point throughout the round.

This is actually a very valid point. Perhaps this mode would benefit from an "Overlord" type of player, selected at round start. Sort of like Bay's God gamemode? A single player whose goal is to direct the revenants. Maybe give him a henchman or two to start with at round start. And even powers.

If we give him like an objective blurb to fill out, it would also help quickly bringing new revents up to speed on what they're expected to do for the round. It would add structure to each round, but still leave freedom up to the overlord to decide what exactly to do for the round.

[geeves]

not a bad idea, seems easy enough to do. i'll look into it once i recover

[Guest]

One thing I would really like to see is more varied spawns for the revenants. It was kind of annoying that everyone spawned at the same little subsection of engineering. I think it would be more fun if the revenants had a chance to spawn almost anywhere outside the station.

[Kintsugi]

19 minutes ago, moom241 said:

One thing I would really like to see is more varied spawns for the revenants. It was kind of annoying that everyone spawned at the same little subsection of engineering. I think it would be more fun if the revenants had a chance to spawn almost anywhere outside the station.

That was a bug and it was fixed.

[Camellia]

On 18/01/2021 at 20:51, Zer0Winds said:

So... I want to put in my two cents here.

I think Revenant can be alright. The idea that it generates no RP... is not entirely true. I mean, it generates quite a bit of RP for some people. Let me say not in a good way, but it does generate RP. Someone is dragged off by spooky ghost, into the dark, and either very wounded or killed, the other characters of the round are going to react, ideally. If your character's friend is hurt or killed, your character is going to suffer or vice versa...

.. - It has potential to be worked on. Geeves has done well in creating something interesting, and I don't want to see it gotten rid of just yet. They are still working on it: We need to actually give them feedback as to how to improve it. Not just saying "It has potential, but I don't like it" or straight up "Delete it this sucks". What it needs is organization. It shouldn't be a Ghost Spawner role. It should be an actual Antag you toggle. Then the ability to ahelp bad revenents needs to be addressed as it is still hard to do at the moment.

Just going to further develop this sentiment as I've been dwelling on a post to make to this thread and well,

I think we should do our best to fix it instead of removing Rev and I have my idea here I brainstormed in dchat sometime ago. 

With Revenant, I think it could benefit from the game mode/tide of blue something that is built up over the course of the round.


The story is this;
Research has a portal from an alien civilization and they run experiments on it, this causes a weakening in the fabric of reality or something. This causes a few things;
Science needs to extract some mcguffin from the portal, let's say its a source of renewable phoron here.
Revs are reaching out into that slight rip in reality and are causing issues, minor ones at the start, this can take the form of brief power outages, communications being disabled, doors being bolted, Research levels being reduced, etc. Engineering has to fix these issues, Service has to export this material, this gives the station money that security can use to arm themselves, this opens up a lot of opportunities for the departments to get involved and feel a sense of dread.

Eventually, the revs breakthrough if Research hasn't prepared enough and what happens then is up to the players.
I'm thinking something like the necromorphs/markers from Dead Space here if further inspiration is needed.

I felt I should contribute with this counter suggestion, hopefully it's useful in a way.

[DriedMilk]

A solid gamemode once the tweaks are in, although it has a couple of things that I'm not a fan of:

-Light shattering ability that after a while the station just goes pitch dark because of how much it gets used. Perhaps change it to not shatter lights and instead disable them temporarily or gives other characters a debuff?

 

-Revenants having to vent areas of the station in order to get inside or using venting for combat/annoyance. This one is certainly hard to tackle on, but revenants actively venting places in order to target crew or to just get inside the station feels 'eh' to me, especially considering how unforgiving vacuum exposure is.