General Feedback

[Rich0rd]

Hey there, I have a few too many points to bring up about this game. Creating threads for each of these individual points would be spammy and counterproductive, while only bringing up a single one of these issues feels unfair seeing as these are all issues that in my opinion need to be dealt with or at least addressed.

For anything that'll be said here please do keep in mind that this is from the perspective of somebody who's been exclusively playing on Lizard, my opinion is not fact and can be wrong and the order in which I raise my points is of no relevance either. I welcome anyone who would disagree with me to give their take on things and would especially like to maybe see some admins comment as well.

• SHITSEC:
  I think this has always been the case but this is genuinely a problematic thing. There is no positive to this and I feel like it needs to be dealt with from an admin side, with rules being set in place and being thoroughly and harshly enforced, seeing as the community clearly can't police itself in this regard. You see, I have been predominantly playing security recently and there is just this constant attitude of "SHITSEC" permeating nearly every single shift. And I do not mean the average greytider having authority issues and doing a bit of trolling. Nor do I mean the usual happenings of clowns and mimes throwing pie into a sec-off's face or making them slip. What I mean here is the CONSTANT, DEPRESSING, BITTER, and absolutely HOSTILE attitude towards security. This comes from nearly all ranks of the station hierarchy and at times even from security itself. I will try to weave a little story here to showcase what I mean.
  HoP gets bombed by an unknown. Security doesn't immediately find the perp? "Shitsec."
  Blue alert is on. You ask people to show their bags so that you may conduct a random search. "Why? Shitsec!"
  One of them refuses to be searched and runs off, trash chutes themselves. You actively spend the next 10 minutes to find and end up detaining them in front of bystanders. They cry wolf and everybody cries out in one voice, some even attempting to shove you. "Fucking shitsec!"
  You arrive at security with the detained person and put them in a cell. You search them inside the cell with the 2 minutes timer running. HoS suddenly breathes down your neck, starts questioning why they heard that you detained an innocent person. "Stop being shitsec!"
  The delinquent's timer runs out. You escort them out of security, wish them a good shift. They turn around. "Shitsec!"
  You carry on through the shift until the end. Whether you survive the shuttle ride or not, there is something that will always happen in OOC chat at the end. "real shitsec this round ong"
  I find myself to be built from sturdy stuff, I can somewhat take the constant abuse. And I say somewhat because even OOC people seem to have a genuine and psychopathic hatred for any and all security players, no matter if you do your job right or not. It just inevitably breeds this "us versus them" mentality, both IC and OOC. This really needs to get addressed and stopped somehow because it just sucks and no other department needs to deal with such a massive amount of bullshit.
   
• Suicidal Hero Lemmings:
  I know we on Lizard are in a LRP environment, thus nobody should take life all too serious. But it is still something I would call borderline antag-griefing when you have people throwing themselves into the line of fire against antags, knowing they will 100% die a horrible death. And I understand why they do it. That half C20r mag the nukie pump and dumps into you, a silly greytider or assistant? That's a lot less bullets they will have for security and the captain. Purely from a strategic point of view you have done a great job taking all that lead! But to the antag it just sucks. This is especially baffling whenever people then complain about nukies / agents killing every random bystander during a rampage. Of course they slaughter station inhabitants left and right when even the most unimportant of targets, the average greytider, could suddenly decide to charge and try to disarm Operator Golf and try to steal his L6 Saw in a spur of heroism. And since this is LRP you get away with it scoff free too! But I still think this should be addressed in some way because it just ties into the contradictory OOC-IC mentalities where IC you have people going full kamikaze but OOC everybody then complaints about the antags killing everyone. Just weird, man.
   
• AKMS' confused implementation:
  So a couple of days ago the AKMS was introduced to the Syndicate uplink and then about 24 hours later I believe it's been removed. The reason being I guess that the AKMS was just overperforming and way too good. And yes, the AKMS was a fantastic weapon for Syndies and I was looking forward to even giving it a try on a Nukie run. 
  But what exactly made the AKMS so damn good? It's a loud-as-hell assault rifle with alright damage. It cost 12 TC, which for an Agent is more than half their budget. For anyone with body armor you required a hefty amount of bullets to mow them down.
  But it was still too good. Simply because there's this ancient and silly purchasing option on the Syndie uplink. A box of six .30 caliber mags, 180 rounds in total at the cheap cost of only 1 telecrystal.
  So, on it's own the AKMS was an okay weapon. With the 6 mags -> 1 TC option though? It became amazing. You were able to literally get more ammo than you might possibly need to take out all of security by just spending 1 extra TC. 
  So I would like to know; who and why was it decided that the AKMS needed to get removed and why wasn't the 6 mags option adjusted instead? To me this just makes very little sense, considering the 6 mags option could have just been adjusted or removed and we would've ended up with a lethal and loud option for antags with a high risk - reward factor instead.
   
• Zombie-Griefing:
  Really quick and small point. Please make it so that zombies just can not hurt each other. Accidental or on purpose; biting another zombie just happens too often and especially with silly folk getting frustrated over being zombified and then griefing other undead it just sometimes becomes questionable why zombies can still hurt other zombies. If I am not mistaken this kind of tech is already in the game with the Holoparasite not being able to punch it's host.
   
• Melee and hurting yourself:
  Why exactly can we even attack ourselves with melee weapons? It serves no practical purpose as far as I am aware, except for cauterizing bleeds but this is such a fringe case that it may as well just be included as an exception. Allow welders and cauterizers to hit the person holding them just for this purpose. But every other melee weapon being able to hit it's wielder is just not gameplay friendly when we are dealing with a melee system where you have to click the opponent's 2d sprite which can move through you because there is just no collision.

[deltanedas]

afaik zombies were recently changed to deal less friendly damage

[Del]

Shitsec:

I'm sorry to hear it's that bad. It seems some folks just like to be hostile, and hostily towards sec probably feels extra acceptable. I'm not sure there's much more admins can do. It's already in the rules: don't be a dick. But it's a blurry line, and admins will probably only intervene in particularly egregious or persistent cases of harassment... that they're aware of!

To put it differently, some petty IC conflict is acceptable. The problem you mention is sec being a constant target, but it'd be hard to make rules to fix that without disallowing all petty IC conflict.

I think the best you can do is try to be a good cop and try to talk and keep everybody calm. And be open to the idea that maybe you actually made a mistake at some point and people have good reason to be mad. Try to clear up misunderstandings. And when it's too much, take a break and, when not sec, show appreciacion for sec.

Funnily, on Estação Pirata, there's this weird anti-engineer attitude. Somebody punches a wire, causing a half-a-second blackout? FUCKING ENGINEERS DO YOUR FUCKING JOB. Then, when I'm not engi, I go on the radio, I LOVE YOU ENGIS! THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE!

 

Suicidal Hero Lemmings:

When I first started playing, I got a new character every time I ended the shift dead. My goal as to keep my characters alive for as long as possible. One of the things I remember from those days is that prioritizing survival is a lot less interesting than the alternative. It means hiding, it means not taking chances, it means not dragging your crit friend to medbay because it's so damn risky.

Nowadays I try to survive, sure, but I have my suicidal hero moments. I can't judge anyone for choosing to fight against the odds, sometimes the alternative is too dull. And if you're going against nukies, then you might feel even more compelled to fight. Unless maybe the shuttle gets called soon.

 

Zombie-Griefing:

After Deltanedas' comment, I looked it up, and zombies deal only 25% damage to other zombies. Sounds good enough.

Holoparasites are quite decisive for their owner's success, while some infighting between zombies doesn't mean all that much. And the biggest issue with holos is probably not outright griefing, but accidentally hitting the owner, or the owner thinking they were hit, when they weren't (I've seen it happen). So it's more important for holos than for zombies.

Still, I don't quite see the benefit of allowing damage between zombies. Is it the little drama of figuring out who's a fellow zombie and who's not? And perhaps making it possible for someone to pretend to be a zombie? Okay, that'd be pretty cool. Or maybe it's a decent tool the admins can use to find shitters. Just find zombies persistently attacking zombies in the logs.

 

Melee and hurting yourself:

Agreed. I've hit myself on accident. =(

There's some comedy in it, but it's very limited.

I've seen talks of reducing self-punching damage to 20%, but I don't really know how Git works... I think nothing's been changed yet.