[feedback] Removes changeling from secret rotation

[rrrrrr]

not 100% sure how dirty it is to bring up Lifeweb: Theater of Pain around here, but, what the h, i'm gonna do it.

how it worked on Lifeweb: Theater of Pain was that the changeling absorbed people and left behind a huge, nasty sack filled with amniotic fluid. you could not move the sack. the sack grew out of the drained husk that the changeling left behind.

what made this "cool" and possibly "good" was that after a handful of minutes, a changeling copy of the guy/gal who got drained would pop out of the sack. gross wet schlorping sounds. gross. and they could keep playing... as an evil alien doppelganger.

this solves the "I have been murdered twenty minutes into the round and now I must sit and watch" problem. i do not know if it would solve the "The changelings inevitably end up 'going loud' (note: I hate this term. I also hate the terms "murderbone" and "chucklefucking") and slaying people/getting slain!" problem. that seems more structural, i.e, well you're giving me the ability to grow an awesome [PROTOTYPE] style Alex Mercer arm blade. why wouldn't i use the awesome arm blade.

keep in mind that i am 1) genuinely not that smart 2) chronically ill/in pain in case this post is incoherent. but:

1. you can easily solve the "I've been murdered early into the two to three hour round" problem by changing it from The Thing into Invasion of the Body Snatchers, i.e, by allowing changeling victims to come back as evil alien doppelgangers of themselves. "bob went missing 15 minutes ago... wait, there he is, but hes acting weird... why does he want me to check out this cool maintenance tunnel with him???"
2. the issue with changelings basically not being stealthy and fighting the security team probably has a lot to do with the abilities they're given. why do they have arm blades?? thats like if you gave every traitor an energy sword and got surprised when nine out of ten times they end up using it.

thanks for reading.

[Evandorf]

Remove the armblade’s ability to cut through reinforced walls and you solve a lot of the constant up and down of the less interesting ling players. They cannot be contained without constant oversight with it and I’d rather a round turn into extended or admins force another antag spawn after the speedsters are thrown in isolation. 

[Boggle08]

I think knocking this out of secret is a better incentive for people who want to rework the gamemode to improve it, instead of just keeping in rotation. Getting it back will require action, rather than just brainstorming and theory crafting about how the gamemode could be better.

Edited August 18, 2023 by Boggle08

[Ricky_the_banshee]

Having gone through the abysmal round where a ling abused adrenal gland to its fullest potential whilst going about murderboning everybody, wheter they shot at them or looked like easy prey, I can't help but agree.

While I'm a huge sucker for a "The Thing" style of suspense and horror, none of that was present in that round, and what lingered of that atmosphere died off when it further escalated down to a goon-server level of "KILL THE ANTAG" shenanigans. 

All of the above mentioned points about the limited options and continuous repetition is something I am intimately familiar with as someone who regularly plays in Investigations. When the ling dies, and security secures the body, Investigations will typically be the first (victim) to witness the resurrection, and while I've had no qualms of embracing (potential) death from the murderous, eldritch, shapeshifting horror, I barely feel that atmosphere. Instead, most of the times I've personally experienced dying to lings just so they could get there "ez" genome points, ignoring my messages as I try to RP as my character's "lingering(heh) memories". I do what I can to feed the ling information to masquerade as them when needed. Now, do they actually use that to their advantage, attempt to manipulate my character's friends and former allies? No. They don't even use it to sneak out pretending to be my character. They just break out the old-fashioned way (by using my ID, changing to lesser form or armblade use), depart, and resume to looking for more kills to probably get their horror form and go on a murder spree, and frankly I'm getting tired of this.

And yet, despite all that, I can't imagine this being entirely on the players if almost EVERY ling resorts to this strategy. What sounds like partially a player issue (And believe me, part of me still believes that sometimes its the player can be held accountable) seems to be stimulated by the tools and limited options that the gamemode itself provide. Vampires at least can get some bobs and twists turned upside down, and many fantastic antagonists have proven this. I've yet to see this come anywhere close when it comes to Ling the gamemode.

I agree, Ling needs to be shelved for the remainder of time until one day (a group of) coders decide to look into the gamemode and consider drastically changing it to match the tone of the server, and give it the well-deserved make-over to bring TRUE HORROR back that doesn't equate the horror of "knowing I have to wait for this body to get up and act all shocked when it tries to armblade me or a wall near me to escape."

 

TL;DR: Ling sucks, shelve it. Perhaps one day a coder or a team of coders feel inspired (or get paid to) rework the ling gamemode to suit the server more instead of inspiring ganking. 

P.S.: I don't want any replies suggesting "alternative changes to the gamemode", suggestions to improve mechanically. They STILL require coding, which has already been confirmed to not be on ANY coder's agenda. I'm not a coder myself and THAT'S NOT WHAT THIS THREAD IS ABOUT.

[Sparky_hotdog]

5 minutes ago, Boggle08 said:

I think knocking this out of secret is a better incentive for people who want to rework the gamemode to improve it, instead of just keeping in rotation. Getting it back will require action, rather than just brainstorming and theory crafting about how the gamemode could be better.

I think this pretty much nails my view on it. Nobody (to my knowledge) is explicitly against a rework, but those don't fall out of the sky, and right now it just seems too far off to be worth keeping in secret.

[Carver]

The rework hasn’t done anything to address my core issues with this mode, doubly after the follow-up PR that made horror form require you to remove 3 people from the round again. Can we get this garbage out of secret?

[Evandorf]

I've actually really enjoyed the changes. I get 10 points to buy whatever I want and only have to kill people to respec, which I rarely need to do anyway.

[Ricky_the_banshee]

The ccurent changes feel like a step into the right direction in theory, but in practice I've noticed little change in the gameplay loop on a surface level. I share most of my concerns with Carver here that the recent addition of Horror form by points obtained from killings are what probably intencivize people to reapplay the old gameplay style, but I also understand that ling partially relies on the "body horror" trope that very much comes with its gruesome killings. 

I think I'll have to stick with the original proposal to temporarily remove it from secret and keep it storaged until a complete overhaul can be done.

[SinfulBehaviors]

Absolutely not.

I get it, it sucks having a bad ling ruin a round or having to deal with them over and over, but that's kind of just an issue with having players be antags and letting players choose their roles. The issue here is that if it's removed from secret rotation, it just leads to the entire gimmick being blown. On-station antags benefit from the secret system the most, but none as much as Ling. Turning it into a vote only round type is a terrible decision that with only lead to the round type rarely happening and if it does happen having everyone be focusing on finding the Ling.

[OolongCow]

None of my complaints about ling have really changed. The PR to "fix it" was how it should have always been, but did nothing except act as a QoL buff for changelings while ultimately addressing literally none of the concerns outlined in this thread. Adrenaline Sacs is still a fundamentally broken ability that violates core design philosophies around incredibly powerful chems being limited in availability and number of uses.

I don't care about "variety". It's badly designed, has constantly shown that there are basically no people willing or able to actually roleplay interesting concepts with it, and inevitably always devolves into headashing or the round ending because it's literally uncontainable thanks to armblade, which breaks even reinforced walls, unless you meta it with chemical/atmospheric sedation. Something admins would probably object to if it keeps happening because chemistry is overpowered, we all know it's overpowered, and the crew remembering it exists would make most antags into a joke.

On 22/09/2023 at 20:52, SinfulBehaviors said:

Absolutely not.

I get it, it sucks having a bad ling ruin a round or having to deal with them over and over, but that's kind of just an issue with having players be antags and letting players choose their roles. The issue here is that if it's removed from secret rotation, it just leads to the entire gimmick being blown. On-station antags benefit from the secret system the most, but none as much as Ling. Turning it into a vote only round type is a terrible decision that with only lead to the round type rarely happening and if it does happen having everyone be focusing on finding the Ling.

This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how people play, I feel. From what I've seen? Security players are at their most understanding, most willing to humor antags, and least validhunty when they know what to expect and are allowed to feel sure of how intense the round's going to be. If they KNOW the round is going to be 1-2 lings, and they OOC know the identity of one of the lings, they will almost certainly "let them cook" up until they kill people. Sure they'll go hard on them after that, but people inside the sec-antag loop tend to be more cautious about just dunking antags thirty minutes in if they know that that's half of the antags in the entire round, and that they aren't going to get surprise mercs at 1:10 because, whoops! It was actually bughunt!

One of the worst parts about playing security is not knowing if you're going to get Trey Tor's gnarly drug dealing adventures and a gimmick, both of which you can roleplay with the entire round, or silent shuffler mercs + ninjas that speak four sentences total after arriving on the ship, and without a HoS or Warden. It incentivizes people to dunk antags because they're scared that otherwise the last half hour of the round will become unmanageably chaotic. It's why there's such a noticeable shift in security player's willingness to RP around the 1:20 mark. They assume that this is all of the antags in the round revealed and then feel confident acting accordingly instead of starting something only to get interrupted because the mercs finally showed up.

The argument against it being voted for isn't from security's end, it's from the crew's end, and people being overly cautious not to get caught by lings while alone. People who do not want to be killed by a changeling out of nowhere will, probably, not follow random people into maintenance. Because they know that they're going to be removed from the round (not fun) by a changeling instead of taken hostage or involved with a gimmick (fun).

Edited September 25, 2023 by OolongCow

[Fluffy]

This suggestion was evaluated and dismissed by maintainers after another PR was merged to alter changeling abilities, and is therefore considered rejected by maintainers.

Locking and archiving.