Brainstorming - Aurora's Combat Problem

[Kintsugi]

6 hours ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

"lowest common denominator"

This is a video game - to the people who use this sort of phrase and then turn around and talk about how we used to praise "gimmicks and planning", I will point out that players would have much more time to work on their gimmick if the concern over being ganked by a slug-wielding officer (there has been no shortage of these, recently) wasn't so prevalent. All in all, I think this using this sort of phrase is very poor form.

 

Sparky_hotdog obviously is just quoting someone else, so this isn't directed at him.

Edited January 26, 2021 by DanseMacabre

[Cnaym]

8 hours ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

In regard to this, what's being suggested isn't to make it easier for people to play crew as a new player, but to provide alternatives for antagonists. You could (hypothetically) have played for years and have never learned brainmed.

My issue is that learning brainmed takes all of two rounds as intern with someone to show you the basics, the rest is trial, error and quite frankly chance. This would be a far better investment than spending telecrystals on a gimmik item for both antag and crew play, even if your character might not know medical, the OOC knowledge does never hurt.

Let me use the door hacking tool as example here. It is a replacement for the complex door hacking game. I see how this can come in handy in an emergency or for someone who got tossed into antag and suffering with a concrete issue like the somewhat more complex vault / ai airlocks.

My issue is not the concept or existence of that item. My issue is that people rely on it. Instead of playing the engineering apprentice and learning to use the tools that can be found all around the station, people invest their crystals into this device and lock themselfs out of more useful tools (be that for gimmik stuff or just combat efficency). By giving out a simplified alternative we are incentivising the use of it without considering the downsides. This in turn leads to antags who value this tool far too highly and will not stray far from it since they are used to it / require it to perform the basic task of opening doors.

Spoiler

 

I absolutely get that antaging is hard, even more so for newcommers, but by railroading people into using the simplified mechanics we lower their chances to grow in the respective skills or become creative at solving problems. You may be a pharmacist for example, so maybe you have never interacted with tools in spessmen before. There is a chemical solution to melt things, this is an example of a viable alternative that does not rely on spending your antag tokens.

We used to have photon grenades as an uplink item that would basicly work as a super strong smoke screen. Newcommers would use it to escape from a dangerous situation as antag, while the more experienced antags would combo it up with things like thermal googles to use those grenades as offensive tool and cause a ton of chaos with it.

There is always going to be a different implementation for the different tools at different skill levels. The door hacking tool for example can be used to give forensics a run for their money, while someone knowing the right wires might wear medical gloves to send security searching in the wrong department. The goal here is to keep playstyles varied and have new things to learn and discover even after years of antag experience. A tool focused for a single purpose like a healing injector or the before mentioned vault drill does not offer such. They are made for one single task to avoid having to interact with the complex systems thus not requirering any knowledge nor improving upon such.

It may just be me with this mindset but raising the bottom is not the problem here, making it comfy is. I had to witness an entire merc squad despair at a blast door because none of them considered bringing any hacking tools, nor just taking their drills to open the basic wall right next to said blast door. The issue was so frustrating that they decided to shoot each other after salting in looc and aooc, followed by almost an hour of staff having to handle that cluster.

 

Failing as antag should not be considered as loss but as incentive to improve. Comfortable antags will have more energy to invest into creative gimmiks and problem solving. This makes rounds differ from each other and memorable.

[Cnaym]

2 hours ago, DanseMacabre said:

Sparky_hotdog obviously is just quoting someone else, so this isn't directed at him.

I'll bite.

Looking at a knowledge and experience based game, focusing a topic on mechanics, it is in no way poor form to be honest about calling this the absolute entry level.

There is a ton of different stages of both in this game, some of us know their one job a little, others have a more diverse skillset across different department. Some claim mastery in certain aspects, others seek to master every obscure mechanic in the game. Being new is not a bad thing, but one should keep a realistic picture of their own strengths and weaknesses in mind when going for the more difficult roles (see team modes like raider VS solo modes like wiz).  The idea here being that more difficult tasks come with higher rewards, while failure at the difficult tasks should still be enjoyable enough to promote retrying and improvement.

Slugs are a great example of where our balancing attempts fly out the window from a mechanics viewpoint. They shred everything except vampires and changelings, yet oddly enough there is little middle ground and they are almost required to handle those two antag types in combat.

I absolutely agree that they are seeing a horrible rise and abuse in recent application and frequency and urge everyone to ahelp such. Blowing the head off of someone who is swinging around a knife is absolute garbage and will neither find much support with the experienced players nor the staff team (at least from my experience from both sides of the fence).

That being said they are still an option for situations that escalated far enough. Example here being the infamous minigun or just outright dragging a nuclear bomb around the hallways. Common sense being the critical part here, otherwise staff has to handle such situations.

I am still not against helping the antags out in the suggested way of a medical solution, I just urge such implementations to be well thought out, since many in the past seem to have done the players and gameplay a disservice in the end.