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I would agree that it's less fun to be an emagged drone now than it was before. However, the goal is to increase how much fun everyone has. This is similar to the self-antagging and antag-hunting rules. They make the game less fun for some people, but they are necessary to keep the game fun for everyone. We're getting into subjective things here, but I've always felt emagged drones were incredibly unfun to deal with, and that's a sentiment I've seen agreed with by a lot of people. Obviously this is opinion, and if you disagree that's valid, but my impression of it is that we're all better off now not having to deal with them.

Being emagged by itself is not terrible. Being told "Welp gg no re you have 5 minutes to live then a 10 minute wait period, no matter what you do" is a problem. While some may not seek out being converted, it's not like there are players who would despise the sudden freedom to be an antag. There is actually a middle ground that exists between "Run at people and ask to be made antag" and "I never want to be converted ever." Personally, I don't like being emagged, don't like being antag period, but that doesn't mean I suddenly like what was done, because I'm thinking beyond my own personal feelings on the matter. The problem is, right now an emagged drone serves to be fun for no one. It;s not fun for the traitor, it;s not fun for the drone player, even someone who might be able to get into the "I am an evil sabotage bot" role and have fun with it, can't, because they have a whole 5 minutes to live. It is a change that benefits no one, harms a majority of players in multiple playstyles and does nothing to impair the one type of rule-breaking player that it was intended to stop.

Just to put this out there, since most people didn;t read that PR in question by all accounts... My original argument (And still my current stance) is that if drones are going to be nerfed this hard and it;s the ONLY state that current staff will allow Emagged drones to be in, then yes I'd rather have them removed utterly. Better to remove them, then leave them as this broken, mess that is more of an active impediment and misery that they are in now. This was, is and will continue to be, my stance. Either tune it back, or just remove the option altogether, better that then to unintentionally fuck with people's heads.

It has been said here before, so I hope you don't mind me repeating. The thing is, it's not just 5 minutes of unwanted gameplay style. Let's consider just this particular part of the problem. First, it is not 5 minutes. It is 15 minutes, respawn delay included. When you die as a drone, you cannot just go on to respawn in a new one, you have to wait 10 additional minutes before being able to do so. Were working on that beautiful pipe atmosia, reworking the bar or gathering resources for making a Vox-box bar in space? Well, too bad, because that another civilian you just passed by happened to be a traitor, and now you have to drop everything you wanted to do and rig the Toxins to explode or something. You'll most likely fail to accomplish anything significant in these 5 minutes, your project might be rendered undoable by the time you are able to continue it (the work already done might be undone as well), and no, you can't just bail out and ignore them (as it would be going against the laws you now have and would even be ahelpable) - but hey, at least they will have their free unwilling saboteur for this meager span of time. Second, as it was already pointed out, sighting of an e-magged drone might be followed with exploding of all the drones and disabling the fabricators, especially on the red alert in the presence of significant threats, when worrying about the drones too might be too much of a headache to the already overwhelmed Security. Third, it's not just another type of gameplay, it's... a sharply different type of gameplay. Unlike literally any other role, maintenance drones have no real responsibilities and minimum interactions while actually being able to contribute to the round in a significant way. As long as you are not harming anyone, you have free reign to do things that can be loosely classified as maintaining, improving or repairing the station, which is... well, a lot. Even if you decide to make some nice wire-art in the escape hall, for example, it still falls under this classification (as it positively contributes to the aesthetics of the station). Cyborgs might be forbidden from doing their pet projects, recalled to do other things or be locked down because AI ROUGE, Station Engineers are entangled in a web of social interactions ("Urist McCreative, you are to stop doing whatever you were doing and come back to the station at once, because cult activity and everyone in space might be evil traitors and we have your fingerprints on the Teleporter's door so you are to report to the brig and what do you mean space bar, there are breaches that need to be fixed and we are on Code Red!!1"), but drones are essentially given a free reign to do anything non-harmful, while being largely ignored by the crew. It's a relaxing, calm activity over an extended period of time, when you can do some repairings at your leisure or something nice for other people to enjoy or simply for your own amusement. By contrast, being an e-magged drone (in their current state) is a deep reversal of this. The rush, the death clock, full obedience to the master, sabotage and harming, strict stealth... For some players suddenly switching between the two gamestyles would be easy, but for others it could be a rather stressful experience, especially when taking in consideration the first two factors. Being an introvert myself, I can confirm how uncomfortable it might feel to be suddenly ripped out of the cozy, relaxing stream of normal drone activities and being unwillingly thrown into someone else's plans and problems that the drone's player had no desire of dealing with. Of course, this happens all the time with the other roles, and there already exists a lot of conversion antagonists, but the difference with the drones is that how distant they are from politics and other players' activities to begin with. I'm not saying that drones should not be able to be "converted" into antagonists just because they are drones, but it just... feels wrong, compared to their gameplay style in general. Sorry if that sounds silly or confusing; I hope I managed to communicate what I wanted to say. As it is, current state of things ironically hurts everyone but the intended audience of the nerf. Traitors can't really accomplish much in just the five minutes they are given (most of the time), and the stealth aspect will most likely be ruined too as the e-magged drone is very likely to be eventually spotted. Players that want to play the normal, good drones lose 5 minutes having to go through a sharp shift in gamestyle and then 10 minutes waiting until their timer ticks down. And then, the players that are actually willing to be e-magged to the extent of intentionally seeking an encounter with a traitor would get their 5 minutes of legal antagonizing, followed by 10 minutes of observing the sweet consequences. As for solutions, I mainly support the separation of e-magged drones to a specialized, purchasable object for traitors to buy (as described in mine and @Machofish' posts above). As an alternative - some un-nerfing, according to what community actually decided they wanted in that original PR (that is, to choose the nerfs carefully, implement them slowly and see how it goes, not hastily slap everything at once). That being said, if neither of these or other viable solutions are available for some reasons, I would prefer having e-magged drones removed entirely over leaving things as they are. It's just appears to be too much of a headache for the drone players who didn't want to be e-magged to begin with. What do you think?

Do you mean like the way I said it was a painful experience to play as, said that it did nothing to stop the actual problem but punished the people playing regularly, that it turned it into a noob trap for new antags to screw themselves over with? That the restrictions put on were horrifying? You mean THAT discussion of what was changed and how it made the server a worse place? Because I am pretty sure I did all that. So. No, I'm pretty sure you're looking for a reason to shut down my argument without ever having to address it. Moving goalposts isn't necessary here. Your comparison is flawed. You liken it to driving to a T intersection where you can only pick the pre-existing paths, but that's not what happens when a PR is made, is it? A PR is about CHANGING something, you are adding, removing or tweaking something. To work off your analogy, it is more similar to BUILDING that road, or in this case going back to a road already built and discussing with people how it should be changed. So again this binary logic does not work and I am still not sure where and how you are getting there. This was not a paid commission of code, this was not a set in stone truth of the universe, it was a PR providing a smorgasbord of options to do a thing, in this case to nerf Emagged maintenance drones. At no point, is someone obligated to push their PR EXACTLY as initially submitted, it can be changed. If you don't believe me, you can go read through older closed PRs and see how many of them were changed and tweaked from their initial submissions. So no, at no point did ALL OF THOSE things need to happen at the same time. And while you might not like this line of debate, you might deem it "of no substance" and irrelevant. It is actually, really really important we acknowledge this flaw, and acknowledge why it was bad, so that going forward we can, perhaps, not repeat the mistakes of the past. Something something not knowing history and being doomed to repeat it? Because this PR has already come and gone, it's a done deal. The least we can do is learn why it was a shit storm, so that we avoid future shit storms of that nature, going forward. And in the process we all learn the problems that shit storm has caused, but since you seem to think I didn't address this already, I'll indulge you with playing the broken record and repeating myself. The changes harm the server, because it's no good to the player base. It punishes the drone player for doing nothing wrong. It seeks to prevent people from intentionally being converted, and to make the drone far far less impactful when it IS emagged. In the former, it doesn't do a single thing. Someone who will intentionally be converted, will still do that, for a chance at a 5 minute murder/antag spree, no fuss, no muss. The latter was done so intensely that it has been left in a worthless/nigh worthless state. 5 minutes is not enough time to coordinate a plan from the traitor who emagged you, it is barely enough time to travel the station and begin your sabotage, it is all but impossible to do this quietly as you are painted with a giant "I AM EVIL" sign, and it is a clear giveaway that someone has an emag and is fucking with synths. So, stealthy sabotage bot is not quite in the cards, but their combat ability was also tanked as well on top. You cannot sneak. You cannot survive an attack. So what GOOD are you? This all, in addition. puts people on high alert REAL fast, so it actively strips some of your element of surprise away. It is a Noob Trap. Looks good on paper, but in actuality is inefficent and terrible, serving only to make people more guarded then if you had just left the Drone alone and just emagged into some location to do the sabotage manually. Drones may or may not have needed A nerf, but they did not need ALL the nerfs. TL;DR: It doesn't punish the people it is specifically trying to punish, instead it punishes the average joe who played the way they are supposed to. There is, after all, no way to know someone is holding an emag until he is emagging you, and running away is not an option, given you are slower and vent crawling takes time. In addition to punishing players with a shitty experience it punishes the traitor for doing it, by instead screwing him over, in the IDEAL case of the drone listening to his master, you get some minor sabotage at best, and your job made harder. In the case of someone just fucking off into the blue, you get nothing, and your job made harder.

... What? What.... does this even mean? You realize the PR was to apply a general nerf to emagged drones, right? Like thE PR was literally called a "Menu of Drone Nerfs", like a menu to pick from. As in... it wasn't to specifically do any one thing. It's not a binary state of "Everything" or "Nothing". It is... it is entirely possible to do ONE thing and not the other thens based on feedback given from other people looking at your PR. You can order just ONE item from a menu, you don;t need to order the entire thing. It's not like adding a feature, where you either add it or do not add it. This is a balance change. There's a LOT of numbers to tweak. You could add the 5 minute timer in isolation, or do one of the other nerfs first an then see how that effects balance before proceeding further with further changes if it proves necessary. A Suggestion can be options. They are suggested alternatives to what is being proposed in the present state. This entire suggestions sub-forum is to suggest options and ideas for code-savvy people to jump if they so choose. I... I don't understand where this binary thinking of "You either leave it alone or do five different changes in one PR" thinking is coming from, man, I need help here.

It was always an option, there were a ton of suggestions when that PR was active and relevant. Most of those suggestions were not taken and the one that WAS taken, the 5 minute lifetime, ignored the critical second half of that suggestion, that the 5 minute duration would be enacted to the exclusion of the other nerfs. Instead it was rolled into the other existing ones, and followed up with a PR that made E-magged drones very very obvious, by giving them red eyes. So, another nerf on top of already game-changing nerfs before they had even settled. (Red-eye PR may actually have preceded the nerf PR, I cannot recall which came first.) Going back in time to change it is not an option. Acknowledging it was handled horribly during the affair so that it can be avoided going forward, is, however, very much an option. The key problem here is how many nerfs were made, massive balance changes, done in so short an order with little to no time for consideration or seeing what was necessary. It would not have killed people to take it slow, nor would it kill them going forward. Baby steps are better then yanking out 4 things at one time, because then if things go south, you have no idea which one of those things was the problem and which one was the vital component that made it all work. To draw a parallel, Fox recently added the Gloves of the North Star, letting them work with Hulk. He did this because he was already working on refactoring our Hulk code to be generally better all around, and when that refactor was done, the gloves would no longer work with Hulk. The consequence: This meant for a while Hulk + North Star was broken. You could kill people from 100 to dead in sub 3 seconds. It was timed. This was objectively broken more then Emagged drones ever could be. But it was a process that had time taken on it, because the end result was healthier for the game. What happened here was instead of each nerf being it's own PR, or each step taken bit by bit to get things done properly, overtime. Instead of asking people to live with it a little bit (They'd been just fine with it up to then, it wouldn't kill them to take it at a slower, deliberate pace), it was all lumped into one PR and jammed out of the gate as fast as possible, to the dismissal of everyone that was arguing it was going too far. This is the core problem. Not that it was nerfed, that it was nerfed too much and done so faster then any other PR, most other PR's get chided and finger wagged at for trying to jam through multiple major changes with that kind of speed, this one should have been no different but for some reason was.

Don't listen to those hotkey nerds. Classic control scheme has a hotkey for this, it's Page Up.

I'm sorry but your argument doesn't make any sense. Yea, everything you said about getting emagged and having it be a jarring change of playstyle is true, but it was true both before and after the nerf. If anything, it's a good argument for not having emagged drones in the first place. If the point is that it sucks to get emagged how can you say applying a timer that limits how long you are emagged be a bad change? How can giving traitors less incentive to emag drones and thus having less emagged drones be a bad change? What you're saying is it sucks to be emagged but then saying changes that reduce the frequency and duration of how often drones get emagged are bad. It makes no logical sense.