Ron Posted October 11, 2017 Posted October 11, 2017 I agree with this. Like you said, people can communicate with [*]Holocalls [*]PDA [*]Intercoms [*]In-person chat [*]Request consoles [*]NT Chat [*]News casters [*]Command consoles (heads of staff) There is an excess of methods of communication, and common chat makes many of them useless. As a side note, I've seen 5 different conversations going on in the common channel at the same time. The only reason people can follow that is because they can read the chat. I don't think it would hurt to remove common for a bit and see what it's like.
Munks Posted October 11, 2017 Posted October 11, 2017 One. What will you do when there are no heads AND no AI? This happens from time to time, so unless regular department workers get some kind of announce function, no suit sensor reminders, telling people who to PDA when something breaks, no mentions of anything. And while you can say you can circumvent it by other means, be that as it may, that is just inconveniencing the players. Aside from the already established methods, I think it would be worth considering some sort of actual emergency services alarm system. Alarm panels (common throughout video games) that you can use to either call Security or Medbay, with the former getting an alert to the front desk (enabling some sort of Dispatcher role, possibly) or and the latter to the front desk and Paramedic bay. Honestly, the removal of common just opens up possibilities for more interesting means of communication that would otherwise be redundant or relatively slow. Obviously this isn't the place to suggest these, but it's a hint at the possible suggestions for if this does become a thing. Two. Game feel outside of roleplay. Things like antags turning off your sensors, and then pushing you down a cliff. "Good antag play"? To me, it would just feel incredibly powergamed to remove me from the round entirely. Medical will never, ever find you if it happens and it essentially just amounts to you getting removed from the round because you were the only miner and the antag cargo tech just prevented you from returning as this character to this round ever. Also, while it causes trouble to remove it for certain antagonists, it buffs others very hard (especially sneaky-things antags, like vamps, lings and cult), and will make it easier for them to do anything really. (Because it's so much fun to get ling succd in maintenance without the ability to call for help and essentially be locked out of your character, having to wait 30 mins only for it to happen again.) This already happens, though. All the time. Lings, Vampires, and Cultists all get super easymode silence-stuns. The answer is for people to just stop thinking they're obligated by "RP" to go to obscure, remote locations in maint with complete randoms just to "check out this cool thing I found in maint". Make them work for it. You're on the job and you don't know the person, use the IC consequences of running off into maint with them while being on the clock to avoid it. And as for the asteroid? If An antag is turning your sensors off and dumping you down a hole, it doesn't matter if you have common to scream over. You're done. The best you can do is call out their name and hope they get caught after the fact, but either you're close enough to the entrance that a search party finds you visually, or you're too far away and you're out. This is mostly just an issue of people being powergamers and removing people from the round, but having common isn't going to impact it.
Zundy Posted March 9, 2018 Posted March 9, 2018 Bumping as people have taken a new interest and this thread seemed to be going places until its sudden death.
Asheram Posted March 9, 2018 Posted March 9, 2018 If there's a wish to clear the station from General spam, there's always the possibility of dubbing it an "Emergency" channel, swap the default headset channel to the departmental ones and then go on with our day. It wouldn't be as harsh as removing it fully and would be a nice experiment to see if we could work towards removing it fully.
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