davidchan

You can't have rules stating players are to respect admin judgments and be respectful to admins during discourse and wait to appeal such actions on the forums as appropriate and then immediately turn around and have admins judge and grade players on notes they have no means to review or dispute. If you want or demand the players to respect the admin decisions the admins have to respect the players enough to keep relevant information on how the players are tracked transparent. This argument of the need for secrets is simply false, if the information can't be shared with the relevant players it should not be saved at all. "Innocent people have nothing to fear" cuts both ways. If admins stand by all notes being appropriately applied and relevant why can't a player view them?

Upgrading Body Scanners in medical (used to at least, don't know about now) allowed you to identify objects embedded or implanted in the body. At base level, it will just mark an UNKNOWN, for things from shrapnel and bullets to loyalty implants and cortical stacks. Not the most useful thing, but certainly helps prevent a new(ish) doctor from ripping out an Officer's loyalty implant and getting them all harassed by security for why the sacred green dot was turned off.

I don't know where you're getting this idea that Lavaland is supposed to be fair and balanced, it's an extended gateway mission turned into a job and relies on players knowing exploits of SS13 mechanics to win. If you want to melee a megafauna you better be bringing as many stabilized legion souls as you can carry.

Death timer doesn't matter. Cloning exists. And like cloning, after 20+ minutes of being dead the player may not be interested in returning to the round if they are still there. IPCs are no easier to repair than any organic is to heal. In fact, it takes much more effort to heal IPCs than it does to heal organics even without considerations for things like NewCrit. BS You say? Oh I argue strongly. Welders heal 15 damage max and a cable coil heals 3 per length with a max of 24 burn heals, compare to brute and burn kits healing 25 each. Chemistry patches can heal much more than this, with styptic, silver sulf and synthflesh all capable of healing 100+ damage across the entire body instantly. But welders and cabling are common! They say, but round start a very generous estimate puts there to be maybe 10-15 complete sets of tools in public access, with 30+ assistants in a round if you don't grab them immediately they won't be available to an IPC hoping to repair themselves after the first 5 minutes of a round. But Cargo and Science can make more tools! And Medical and Science can make more healing patches. Far easier and without reliance on Mining to do a thing. Botany can make healing plants and anything with nutrition will heal the organic that eats, so the Chef's food, the donuts in security to the junk food in vendors will all heal an organic based upon how much nutrition, protein and vitamins are in the plant. But IPC surgery can be done anywhere! So can organic surgery. IPC limbs break faster and break from more sources. Burns don't break organic limbs, but IPCs need surgery after eating a few lasers. Going into crit doesn't cause an organic's ribcage to suddenly implode. But an IPC takes constant brute while in crit across their whole body, meaning a single person trying to repair 200~ damage may find themselves repairing over 400 because of how asinine the repair goes. IPCs also bleed from less damage dealt to them compared to organics, and do not regenerate their oil blood at all, where as organics can regenerate blood from food, saline and iron intake. TL;DR Easy to Damage, Easy to Repair is a myth. Only the easy to damage part is true. In every other sense organics have advantage when it comes to reliable means to heal and return to a round if their body can be found. If IPC buffs were nearly as potent as people made them out to be, how come nobody uses Prosthetic limbs, which are available to literally everyone and carry all the same pros and cons as IPC self repair. Because IPC healing is inconvenient at best and a time and effort time sink in its worst cases where the tools available to heal robotic crew are laughably underpowered compared to anything a competent medical bay can accomplish.

This is a bad idea. The biggest complaint against security is they use their power to abuse people they don't like or find annoying. Making it a crime to criticize them only legitimizes that behavior, especially when no other part of your post implies any enforcement of security being professional themselves. This is literally going to lead to security players baiting people they don't like into vocalizing their distaste and critisms so they can arrest the person. If security mains think security should get more respect, they need to actually play the role in a manner where they are respectful to the crew and not needlessly making the round worse for non-security players for their own benefit.

You want my honest opinion? Adjust the Librarian role to be Media Curator in general, not just print media but digital as well. Books should be a nice throwback to simplier times in the 26th century and a large collection of them in the age of digital media something for niche audiences. Move the holodeck to the Library and give the Curator/Librarian authority over it. People want to goof about in it they can ask the Librarian for access or to load a program. Add programs based on books and stories. Give the Librarian a random set of programs the start of each shift that can vary from random Shakespearean play, a movie of some sort or some last stand like Thermopylae or aliens with hostile holographic entities attacking everyone in the room (non-lethal knock outs of course). With a few upgrades from science/engineering the LIbrarian could outfit mini shows for entertainment to any place on the station with a holopad (which the AI uses to talk to folks.) There is no reason for anyone to really want books in SS13 when books in the library don't do anything. Even if we slipped sleeping carp scrolls and wizard tomes randomly into the shelves, nobody would explore the library after the round start. The Librarian needs more to do than write fanfaction and run a gossip column. The ultimate ideal implementation of this would for a digital library of entities and customization tools the librarian could use to craft their own stories to put on shows or run Holo-LARP D&D campaigns.

Not fond of this. Warden already has a full plate with monitoring the brig, seeing go prisoners are safe and compliant and ensuring sentencing is appropriate and taken care of. Picking up slack of the HoS is no good and neither is hand holding officers. Security Officers patrol outside of the brig and Warden should be in the brig at all times unless on break or an emergency. The overlap between these jobs is minimal and the two should only have direct interaction when brigging crew and antags. If the HoS doesn't have the time to direct security and train one or two rookies I want to know what they are doing instead because their job in the current state of the game is make sure security doesn't die and make sure security isn't killing people without approval.

I feel the HoS needs better defining at what their role is and more discipline to HoS's who shirk their duties to go valid hunt. I've never been a fan of how much combat gear they get in the first place (much of it being on par or within spitting distance of Captain's gear.) For a job people profess is vital to the well being of the station, Chain of Command should have it last in line for Captainship if that is true, since someone competent needs to be in that job and other departments can still function with their head serving as Acting Captain. If more HoS players did their actual job of running security, dealing with incidents as they come up and firing incompetent officers Security would be better department to play in general. I count on one hand the number of rounds I've played Warden and had a competent and capable of HoS running the department and not leaving all the administrative duties to me while they ran around in maint alone. There also needs to be more attempts to kill this 'Us vs Them' mentality that has taken hold in Security. Security trusts no one who didn't spawn with an implant. They don't hire from the manifest, they don't let engineers and doctors in to do their job as needed, and they certainly don't interact in any meaningful ways with the crew unless it's to arrest them, beat them or brutalize people. Yes, I'm aware there is a sizeable greytide population that makes it their goal to harass Security and make their live shit. But hard to blame the playerbase for disliking a role that is professed to be entirely combat based, that gets authority over the rest of the crew and is given almost free reign to do what ever they want in the name of valids. I could write novels over everything that is wrong with our current security meta and policies, but it generally boils down to their SOP is a joke that disappears the instant antags are confirmed, their chain of command and checks and balances to keep them from overbearing on the crew for no reason simply don't do their job, their over reliance on the concept of mindshield/loyalty implants makes them actively avoid interacting with other players when they are aren't arresting them. Not all of our security players are bad, but a significant portion of our regular security players certainly reinforce the stereotype that security players only play the game to kill people.

I can't speak for the entire community of IPC players, but myself personally and those I have chit chatted with about the current state of IPCs is that the people who 'main' IPC characters do not want their immunities or vulnerabilities tweaked. EMPs are an entirely different bag but that's a topic for another time. What IPC players want is the 'Easy to damage, Easy to repair' philosophy to be true. It currently is not since IPCs require the most outside/second person help to repair what any other species might consider a minor injury. Having to run to robotics for 5-20 minutes of surgery and topping off on oil multiple times per hour is not easy to repair, especially if the roboticist doesn't know or doesn't care to work on anything but their mechs and borgs. Allowing them to quick disconnect limbs (or even their head) to make repairs themselves is something that might be desirable. Becoming space proof tincans is not. To some it makes sense that an IPC would survive in space without much problem, to others it does not. Me personally, I consider them air cooled so taking damage in space makes sense to me, take away the atmosphere and all that heat has to go somewhere. TL;DR: 'Easy to Fix, Easy to Repair' is a Myth in the current build. Making IPCs space proof or rolling back damage they take isn't what people want. Giving IPCs a viable route to repair themselves on par with MedChem and Virology heal viruses is what players want.

I'll preface this saying I am against IPCs getting space proof, but just want to point out IPCs are in a bad place balance wise, and have been for sometime. But hey were still waiting on vulps to be balanced since colorblind was decoupled from darksight. The major difference between organic broken bones and IPC malfunctioning limb is that an organic can heal the damage to the limb once it's broken, an IPC can not. The threshold for dropping items is very low on IPCs (I've dropped items with only 5 brute on an arm while mining plenty of times) so they are hit with the penalties sooner. If a human takes 30 damage to their arm, breaking it preventing it's use, they can still use healing items on themself to remove the damage and splint it if surgery isn't an option. An IPC on the other hand will break a limb and be stuck with that damage, unable to repair it. They can't splint it and because they can't self repair internal damage they are stuck with that damage, and thus closer to critical/death. As for nanopaste, it repairing internals without surgery must be new, since I've made attempts to use it in the past to rapidly repair IPCs and borgs and ultimately found it not doing the job. That and nanopaste has a relatively high metal cost that science will rarely print it for anything other than MedSurgery to use to repair implants. I'll have to test that but I'm not holding my breathe. Cyborg chargers definitely do not repair internal damage. If the limb is broken the charger won't fix it, I've shoved IPCs in chargers before and it only repaired topical damage I could have repaired with my own wire and welder, the limbs stayed broke. And this is over the caveat that the vast majority of science players do not upgrade chargers, if ever. I've seen more drones upgrade chargers than scientists, and they have to drag each component one by one to accomplish that.

Honestly I really like the tg Slime people. They don't have 'blood' persay, but rather slime jelly that is innately toxic to other carbons. Toxic reagents and food heals their own toxin damage, and they can generate more blood by eating lots of food. The catch is, their blood reacts poorly to medicine and chemicals that normally cure toxin damage, so things like Charcoal, Omnizine and Pentenoic Acid are extremely dangerous to them. Normal Anti-toxin medicines purge their jelly and if their 'blood' levels drop to low their limbs start to pop off until they are nugget on the floor.

Inb4 engineering borgs/drones just start spamming tables through the kitchen so chef doesn't have floor space to allow ants to propagate.

I've seen it abused but I'd rather Security get their own morgue for EOCs or other dangerous personnel who the entire station would be better off dead with a DNR tag on them. It is kind of baffling how many security will drag vampires, changelings and occasional shadowling to the cremator, completely bypass the access restrictions to it (the door and cremator button itself requiring Chaplain access to use.) and not even blink an eye about permanently removing them from the round, but these same players raise hell in saltchat (and presumably ahelps) if an antag kills them and takes steps to prevent their own eventual revival. IMO Cremator should only be used when there is an actual threat that the subject can self revive, or Security has confirmed that co-conspirators will attempt to revive them (thus Security admitting they are incapable of containing the threat.) Idealling, with a signed and Stamped Death Warrant from the Magistrate and/or Captain (which can easily be prepared in advanced if Security already knows such a threat exists on the station), or at the very least a fax sent to CC to get approval A more desirable solution would be coding in new methods of containing such threats alive and in the brig that don't involve bucklecuffing them a roller bed with an anesthetic tank forced onto them. Allowing antags to continue existing in the round, RP or seek out an escape if they would like to continue pursuing their objectives.

If the NT Rep does anything worth lynching they probably are already banned.

This just sounds like a Janitor with a paybump.

Add a glove wrangler too and surgery sentry who watch over their respective tools of trade and only issue them in extreme emergencies. :honk:

I'd welcome a change where antags are given a list of High Value Targets. This could vary the NAD or Handtele to something more mundane but still rare like CE's boots or Lamar. Each item on the list is given a point value and objectives are simply to acquire X amount of points. With all the antags in a round going after the same items, they'd still be free to betray each other or work in coordination to achieve harder, higher value items. Murder objectives would be harder to fit into this system unless all the traitors got points for the kill or each were given different lists with only a slight chance of overlap. Hijack would be the most difficult to rule into as you'd have to make a system where only select traitors are given hijack as an acceptable outcome or all traitors in the round are given hijack.

Heads of Staff too chicken shit to actually fire and cull the incompetent, incapable of downright intolerable from their departments. If you get multiple reports of a security officer harm batoning non violent crew on green, a virologist that releases a harmful but non fatal disease without permission or a genecist abusing their job to hand out powers of defective SEs to force transform someone into another person, and your first instinct isn't to drag their ass in cuffs to the HoP for demotion, you need to stop playing head roles.

Bring back Vox Traiders. Add 5~ Cryosleepers to the skipjack, 20 minutes into the round ghosts are given an notice that the pods are now active and players can take control, giving them a grocery list of goodies they need to collect from bars of gold to a kitchen knife or even some used or useless trash items and the occasional kidnapping 'Guest of Honor' objective. Enforce the involaite, so as side antagonists they can't start shooting and killing people, but they are free to loot anything they feel they can run away with, and are encouraged to defend themselves or capture anyone continuing to show hostile intent towards them (such as overzealous security officers and tiders trying to get aboard their ship.)

Beepsky just needs to have an option to react hostile to anyone without valid records attached to their identity. If you don't have a security file then it's safe to assume you don't belong on a secret state of the art research station. also HoS and CMO should have hardcopy backups of round start records in their office.

FTFY

Another idea for Data 6+ item(s): Advanced Departmental HUDs. Adv Med Hud would allow the wearer see a person's health stats on examine (Brute, Burn, Oxyloss, Toxin) as well as any sign of broken bones and such. An optional overlay for the Health HUD could be added for Adv models that shows what kind of damage and gives a more real time representation of that user's declining or improving health, or a clever coder/spriter could attempt to make overlays that would highlight body sections or limbs that are damaged or suffering internal injures. Adv Diagnostic HUD would work like the Medical but for robots, allowing the wearer to see component damage, if any, upon examination. Adv Meson Scanner would add material scanner to the meson vision, allowing the wearer to see items through walls and darkness. This could also be used to examine machines to see status of internal wires (cut or what lights/functions are active) or even immediately highlight which wires control which functions for hacking, as well as allowing to them to examine cabling, pipes and tanks to their contents (how much power is in a wire, how much gas is in a pipe and composition, ect...) Adv Security Hud would likely just be relegated to showing a person's intent while moving around, or even flag automatically anyone carrying a weapon or dangerous contraband level item I don't really know how you could improve Science and Hydroponics HUDs except perhaps to see the tempature of reagents or the last reagent, if any, that was in a container, or the age of the plant and estimated time until next stage/when it will be harvestable or die. Beyond that, a combination HUD might be in order, such as a Med/Sec HUD or Meson/DIagnostic HUD

Add inductors would be neat, I believe tg code has them where they can transfer power from a cell in the inductor to another object, be it an APC, SMES, Borg, Stun Baton or other battery powered equipment. Could split it up so power 2 or 3 gives a low efficiency one that only passes 50w per 100w used, a mid level one at power 5 that does 1 for 1 and power 7 could be a bluespace inductor that can remotely transfer power to anything in line of sight. Engineering 7 could be an Advanced RCD, 'Clone Tool' that could scan and detect an area up to 5x5 tiles and then build it somewhere else. As for Data 7, hard to say what would be applicable. A remote body/surrogate system perhaps, VR-like pods where you build an IRC or similiar body then hop in the pod and control it remotely, good for allowing crew to work on radiation or toxic hazards without putting themselves at harm, though obviously leaving the controller completely blind and oblivious to any dangers around their actual body. Or a pAI implant that allows you to directly install one into your head and chat privately chat with them in psuedo-telepathic whispers (think Cortana plugged into Master Chief's helmet in Halo.)

Not to get off topic or beat a dead horse, but on the topic of reviving methods and what is broken and what is not, it never ceases to amaze me how people claim IPCs not reliant on the cloner is too strong of perk and they need to be nerfed farther, then you turn around and people say the cloner is too powerful and needs to removed out right because it's too good and requires no work to run it. So which is it? Because it can't be both.

Aside from keeping new or inexperienced players out of certain roles, I don't actually think this is a good idea. Head Roles are the only ones that should be time gated behind certain amount of hours in a department, most other jobs should have enough variance between them that playing them requires different kinds of thinking and play to succeed. For example, Security Officer, Detective and Warden all have very different responsibilities and play styles. The only shared ground and responsibilities they actually have are Space Law. Requiring 5+ hours as a Sec Officer before unlocking Warden could perhaps wrongly influence a person into thinking it's okay for a Warden to randomly patrol the station or spend most of their time in maintenance, when in fact their primary duty is to stay in the brig to watch prisoners and the armory. Doctors and Paramedics have similarly different roles and Virologists and Geneticists have very little in common with Medical Doctors. For Head Roles, I'm a little more willing to see department play time locks, though I'm skeptical about those as well as I feel a head of staff should be familiar to competent in most of their department and able to fill the gaps as needed, but heads of staff shouldn't be exclusivley working a job unless nobody else is available to do it (such as the RD running RnD alone, CE setting up the engine or CMO doing chemistry/setting up camp in Surgery, their primary job is getting other people do theirs, not do it for them.) A far better system, in my opinion, would be for a backend where the game tracks player hours in certain roles, such as Head Roles or slightly more complex ones like Virologist or Warden, and if they have less than 10 hours in such a role, Mentors who are logged in (or via the Discord bot if that function is working) are notified and given a link to message the person directly to greet them and offer assistance and their knowledge as many new players don't know or seem to remember Mentor help is a thing but would probably engage in a PM conversation if they were more directly made aware mentors were active and willing to help without disturbing everyone else's rounds. Beyond that, I would like to see interns added in some shape of form, dept specific assistants who can help during high pop rounds as an extra set of hands and during low stress and drama moments fully fledged dept members could try and help teach interns the ins and outs of the job. TL;DR Time locks rarely improve the quality of play for most players since many locked jobs don't share the same responsibilities and mechanics as the jobs often used to unlock them, and a more proactive use of the mentor system would help educate players willing to learn a new job.