Catnip Posted May 3, 2018 Posted May 3, 2018 Over the past few months a lot of code changes have happened, many quality of life features have been introduced and some old problems with abuse were fixed. You can no longer spam throws, since they're dispelled when you throw a person, regardless of how close the target tile is, and people are able to resist just by moving. However, in the process, grabs have been rendered almost completely non-functional. People can walk out of your grab before it registers, you're able to spam resist by just holding an arrow key. I understand that some areas of the code were outdated and these could be considered quality of life features, but the way it's been executed is removing the depth that made combat actually somewhat fun here. In the past, you could disarm somebody with a grab and use their weapon against them like something straight out of a karate film if you knew what you were doing and practiced, but now that's not possible, since they will just teleport out of it or resist without even trying: Your only option is to spam disarm, and that's not fun for anybody. On throws: I totally understand the decision to dispell the grab when you throw somebody, it makes sense and removes the ability to spam throws, however an alternative could be to just add a hardcoded delay on throws so that you're still able to throw people to adjacent tiles without your wrists suddenly exploding, think wrestling moves. I know there were some antag-only books added that enable similar wrestling combos, but most of these things were already possible with old grabs, and I really don't like the idea of CQC being in the lame and broken state it is right now unless you have an uplink. On the lag/delays: As said, more often than not if you try to grab somebody, they will just lag out of the grab before the game registers it. It's as frustrating as it is hilarious to see a nurse walk out of an Officer's grab without even realising he's trying to grab them. One option could be to consider porting bay's new grabs. They register a lot faster, and you're able to get into a blue grab quicker in turn, it retains some of the depth of our grab code that made combat dynamic such as headbutting, disarming, etc. Since it's faster they're able to have neat things like requiring a grab to apply handcuffs, which we just couldn't have right now because our grabcode doesn't work. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's nostalgia for what combat used to be like here, and the newer, much more fast-paced and simple combat is more fun and accessible for newer and older players alike and it's better this way. What do you nerds think?
MO_oNyMan Posted May 3, 2018 Posted May 3, 2018 cqc code definitely needs some work for the issues listed. However maybe since it's currently on its lowest maybe it's time to revise the entirety of it instead of fixing local problems and bugs? Introduce some new features, change the way mechanics work?
geeves Posted June 4, 2018 Posted June 4, 2018 Posting here because grabs make me want to cry. I wasn't alive for old grabs, but new grabs are so useless without power gloves (and even then) that I rarely see it used, even though it's quite the powerful tool. It's 1/4 of the intent system that's just worthless, so please give it another look.
Catnip Posted June 4, 2018 Author Posted June 4, 2018 To add to this, while reverting the PRs that broke grabs further in first place would be better than what we currently have, and grabs would get more use out of them, there are still other problems with grabs that I'd love to see worked on: With the older grab system you could more easily teleport people to you after they walked away with a throw because of lag, my proposal there would be for yellow grabs to also just lock the person in place unless they resist, which they have a 100% chance to in a yellow grab to work around the teleporting issue. After all you shouldn't be able to just phase through a grab without struggling out of it, no matter how tight.
Scheveningen Posted June 4, 2018 Posted June 4, 2018 Throwing people with grabs and still being able to hang onto them to prevent them from moving away from you was honestly a high skillcap thing to use that made grabs actually deadly enough to be viable. The fact it was considered a "bug" and wiped out without any compensation buffs or tweaks to how grabs work is pretty disappointing, because I pretty much don't use grabs in combat now. It's a waste of time and actions. If passive+ grabs could root people into place until they resist out of it, that'd be fine.
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