Dinarzad

I did attack their idea, repeatedly, several times in the PR that brought the changes to begin with. There was never any real rebuttal to those arguments. I also gave alternative suggestions, I didn't just say "Idea's shit lol" and carry on, I provided thought out suggestions. Calling someone salty and saying they're letting it make them irrational is not a personal attack, it is absolutely calling into question the motives for WHY they're making their suggestions and motivations can be important to know. It's literally the entire reason that "i ded pls nerf" github tag even exists. If you disagree withsomeone, attack their idea, don't try to dismiss it out of hand because it was delivered in a way you don't like. The point of the maintenance drone is not to INTERFERE in the round, not have no impact, that notion is literally impossible. You cannot be involved in the round or exist in it and have no impact in it. Drones have engineering tools, can repair breaches/various items, can clean and even set up atmos layouts. ALL of those things impact a round rather heavily. If someone like an antag blows a hole in the station and a drone fixes it, it has impacted the round rather heavily, potentially foiling an antag's plot. If a drone repipes atmosia to be more effective, thus handling a plasma fire efficiently, it effected the round quite heavily. If it sets up the turbine/solars and helps power the station, it is impacting the round. By cleaning up a room of blood and gibs, it's potentially wiping away a crime scene before anyone saw it. That's another massive impact. Doing ANYTHING shy of being your normal everyday civilian RPing in the bar, is going to have tangible impact on the round. You cannot avoid a drone having impact in the round, by the fact it EXISTS, it has impact and always will, you;re taking that interpretation far too literally, or far too strictly. The goal is for them not to INTERFERE in the round, not to be seperate from it entirely. Earlier your quantification for "Emagging drones to work" was knowing that a drone didn't do so intentionally, that they didn't purposefully get themselves made an antag, but a positronic brain can do that EXACT same thing. They are both ghosts joining into the round, both can just as easily tell who is and isn't an antag prior to joining if they had a mind to. They are both designed to have impact in the round, just to differing levels. A borg can have MORE of an impact in a more open manner since it can talk. As for oversight, Drones have just as much oversight as Cyborgs, the problem isn't that they DON'T, the problem is the crew is too lazy to ever give a shit to do that. That shiny drone console in engineering tells you the location and name and status of every single active drone. It can be used to resync drone laws (Mostly a hold-over feature from when there was an occasional bug that caused drones to have borg laws instead of the KEEPER laws.) and to give a remote kill command to any NON-EMAGGED drones. Each drone has a unique number identification, and unlike cyborgs, blowing every single drone, while a dick move, is a lot less of a big deal, considering those non-antag players can also respawn. Currently, emagged drones do not appear on that console and are thusly, immune to it. Something emagged cyborgs can't say. That was why the number one suggested nerf was to have them show up ON that console and able to be remotely blown, just like a cyborg. Thus keeping drones from being tiny murderboner bots, because that's a great way to get yourself instagibbed. The choices taken to get to this point were illogical and irrational. Most people AGREED nerfs needed to be had, what people argued was for a series of smaller nerfs until we got to a good place, as opposed to taking a sledgehammer to the entire thing, repeatedly, in several areas all at once. Again, few people said they didn't need ANY nerfs. The problem was it was 3-4 all at the same time, instead of 1 or 2 to bring their power level down safely and slowly. It was all about a knee-jerk quick-fix instead of doing the job correctly and precisely.

Positronic Brains, mid-round join cyborgs. Still can't stop 'em from knowingly getting antag'd. And yet, you still don't give cyborgs a 5 minute lifespan. The current design is good for no one. It's terrible for antagonists, cuz it just broadcasts their existence. It's terrible for the drone who gets 5 minutes to live and if it's player wasn't keen on antagging to begin with, now has to stop everything it was doing for 15 minutes, the length of a major crime brig sentence, for doing nothing. It was a kneejerk reaction that went WAYYY too far. The alternative people gave wasn't even minor. Just make emagged drones appear on the drone console to be remotely blown, just like cyborgs. Now Drones have to play with a measure of caution, just like borgs, else they just get remotely blown. Why all this OTHER stuff happened is beyond me, the fix was simple, it was easy, it was the ultimate nerf that didn't ruin everyone's good time. But instead of going down the easiest, clear-cut path, we elected to take weird and horribly confusing paths to achieve the same goal an all we got was obnoxious design because of it. A Good compromise is one that everyone can live with and tolerate, that works out for both parties. This was never a compromise. This was one side's salt overdose hitting lethal quantities and letting it cloud their judgment with irrational thinking.

Sort of. 5 minutes limits your misery, but before you could be given orders to go an chaos havoc, to be a saboteur. Now, five minutes is barely enough plan to lay out a plan, get there and enact it.

A PR was made to do exactly that, and it was shot down. And to be honest, at this juncture I find it the most preferable option. It's better to justn ot be able to be emagged at all, then to be emagged while you're on some other project an be forced into an Antag's personal all-access ID card for 5 minutes instead of doin somethin like pipe atmosia or somethin'.

That's no different then, as a civilian, running at a Shadowling or cult to get converted, but you don't suddenly make it so all converted greytide gib after 5 minutes or making Emagged cyborgs blow after 5 minutes. There are somethings that cannot and should not be handled via mechanics for these kinds of reasons. That is something for administration. As I recall it, few people disagreed Drones were TOO strong, but the nerfs applied to them were far and away too much, and that was the toned down edition. It's of dubious use to most antags and it's a direct killjoy on the Drone to go "Welp you got 5 minutes lol gg no re". Because bear in mind the death also forces that 10 minute cooldown on being able to rejoin. So as somone is playing a drone, gets e-magged out of the blue and toddles on to a death they can do nothing to stop, their entire gameplay interrupted, they now have to wait just to get back to what they were doing, a total of at most, 15 minutes. The equivalent of a Major Crime brig sentence, just for being caught out. It was to the point a LARGE portion of people in the debate when it was happened said to just make drones unable to be e-magged BECAUSE the nerfs were so extreme. They needed to be toned down, but what they got was ridiculously overkill. You want to make an e-magged drone not a combat machine, I'm fine with that, make thme utterly unable to attack things while emagged so they can be nasty little sabotage bots, I am fine with that. But their current state is easily the most painful experience I have had on paradise since it went through. Making something painful to play as a 'Balance' to discourage an activity you will NEVER be able to stop, is not good. It punishes a player who did nothing wrong and does nothing to stop the other kind of player they'll still do it for a chance at 5 minutes of murderboning. Drones are actual players too, they should PROBABLY be allowed to have fun now an again.

The Kinetic Accelerator is far and away the most useful and powerful mining tool you can get. Even in it's basic state you still end up mining faster with it then a pick axe. And even if science utterly ignores you, 2 cooldown mods and 1 damage mod, leave you able to clear things out fast, shred through mobs and pop open abandoned crates in relatively short order. If science DOES give you the mining AoE, then every shot is mining a 3x3 radius, more then a RIPLY drill does, ona shorter cooldown at range. As for the Crusher, I've always assumed it to be a very intentional "Hard mode" for mining, that's why it's so unwieldy. It's also justn ot quite up to "Par" as it should be however, as it's something that heavily involves Lavaland stlye mining, where, on killing creatures with the Kinetic Crusher, you have a chance to drop special trophies from that that you slap onto the Crusher to improve it. (Killing Legion mobs for example, which are basically reskinned Hivelords, can grant you a 'Legion Skull' which reduces the cooldown of the crusher))

The problem is, the "Death alarm" is the radio. It's just the innate fact a pAI, as soon as it's master is in trouble can shriek wildly over the radio, and that a pAI itself can be so thoroughly hidden that an antag might never even know they have one until it starts screaming. To me, personally, that's just some of the risk of using chemical silencing instead of EMP, but it is seemingly enough of a concern that it bothers people so, that's why I suggested making the radio a purchased module so that if a pAI DOES grab it, they're limiting themselves elsewhere in exchange, and maybe making the radio more impressive in the process (Departmental channels an the like.)

Well, what I want and what I can get away with are often two very different things. I would love to just shower pAI with additional goodies an keep the rest as is, but any time a suggestion to improve pAI is made, there are people who get up in arms about aspects of them and the most commonly cited is the "Death Alarm+" aspect. This is something that clearly DOES bother a lot of people, enough to be a genuine balance concern, and one I am trying to find work-arounds for. BUT this is only done with the condition that other more exciting and useful modules are added to make pAI more then just a talking PDA, to make them a genuinely useful tool. Well the goal with this thread is to try and find a game plan to go forward with, that would make people WANT to play a pAI and make people want to GET one. That way it's no longer just a talking chat role as you said and it can better compete with the other, newer options we have since brought on board. Because right now, their primary use is inhibited by their limitations and the majority of crew never even bother with them because it's little else then a chat buddy an those are plentiful in the bar to the point no one really feels the need to just pick one up. Like I said, in the initial post, ideally I want them similar to holoparasites in the sense that they're useful enough to traitors that they get considered a decent amount, but they're not so useful that players might feel gimped without one. That's the ultimate position I want to get a pAI into, especially since as a pAI player, there's little I can actually do to assist or help anyone.

Hello, this is the thread where I mention ideas that make everyone hate me. *buzz First off, let's set some context for the suggestions before we get TO them. "Why do you suggest pAI should be overhauled?" Right now, as someone that plays a great deal of pAI and has a real fondness for the idea of them, they seem to be too confused to really fulfill what our intent for them seemingly is. We seem to have this general consensus that they are a simple means for ghosts to fiddle about in the round, to RP and be someones 'Pocket Pal'. This idea isn't terrible, but this, in practice, doesn't pan out. Who WANTS a pAI? Either someone that wants an RP buddy, or someone that wants a pocket secretary, generally speaking. The problem is, the person who just wants a pocket pal, is usually the same person who just wants to RP, and they head to the bar to do that. They hardly need another little voice added to the mix, they have plenty of people to RP with if that's their sole desire here. Meanwhile the person who is out for a secretary pal to help them sort through all their information and comms, is gonna leave this party a little disappointed, because pAI can only speak on general comms and with a module download, address people via PDA messages. This is probably where most of the pAI's "Power" is, but it isn't in the way most people WANT. They can hear their master's radio by virtue of being on their person, but can't SPEAK over it. They can't really help someone like, the captain, handle all those little nags from over the radio, and they're really the person who might need that secretary the most. They can't PDa message people, but why message someone's pAI when you could just PDA the master themselves? This leaves the design goal of a pAI feeling confused and inefficient. They're not very effective at just being a pocket secretary sorting information out, and they're not all that desirable on anyone else really, they provide few to no functions your day to day crew gets much use of. "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DEATH ALAR-" This is, from what I have seen, the main elephant in the room and the primary "Power" of a pAI. The fact that as soon as you stick a toe out of line around one, they're whoopin' and hollerin' on the radio that you're up to no good and startin' up some trouble in the neighborhood. And it's true. It's hard to really justify giving pAI even more things when this feature remains present, why WOULDN'T someone get one if you can have a Death alarm on every player once you address some of those concerns I mentioned up above? Well. For THAT I think it;s time we actually go into the suggestions... Radio Removal: And in two words I just made so many people spit out their tea. First suggestion is to help keep the "Death Alarm" aspect of a pAI in check. No longer will a pAI have access to radios as a matter of course. This would be rolled into the "Messenger Suite" Module and it's RAM cost increased to reflect it. PDA Messaging and Radio messaging both into one package. Why seperate them? Because all of a pAI's power is in this module, it's WHY so many people are hesitant if not immediately in an uproar when suggestions get made to give a pAI other/more tools. By making this more expensive and stripping away it's base line radio, you free up more of a "Power budget" to make tweaks elsewhere, and potentially could even make the radio more effective of a tool if you DO take it, so now it is an actually effective radio instead of just a Commons channel. Giving players a choice Or, Smartphone Addictions in space!: With the removal of radios as a base feature, you free up the power budget to give pAI more quality of life and physically useful/immediate tools and modules. The flashlight PR is a good example of this, something that is of an immediate benefit to a player. My vision here is something like the SS13 version of a Smartphone or a tablet, something chock full of useful Quality of Life goodies or just general benefits that various crew would genuinely like to have as they go about their life. Give people a reason to WANT to have one of these little fuckers, why SHOULD they grab one? Because it can be a fuckin nifty little widget. What Modules to expand upon? I have no fucking clue. We don't want anything obnoxiously powerful or TOO impressive, because that's not the point of a pAI, we don't want them so valuable that everyone breaks into Science to print one out, we just want them to be desirable enough that on seeing one around you might think "You know what, that might help me right now..." A nanotrasen friendly, non-lethal version of a holoparasite if you will. Maybe a poor comparison because holoparas have enough power to MURDER people, but they're something not every traitor wants, or even has to get. But they are still useful to the point traitors DO grab them to help make their lives easier. In expanding these modules you could have a pAI better tailored to fit a player/job. Modules that might help sort information and help another player process lots of incoming things at once, to keep on the ball. A pAI with modules to help the captain keep his finger on the pulse of the station he's in charge of to sort out the heathens valued crew's requests and cries on the radio, to keep him appraised of the state of the station via an atmospheric alert module or whatever your imagination can insert here. Most importantly this all comes at a COST, it comes with a CHOICE. Those more physically impressive widgets or broader toolsets? Those may not come cheap. You might not be able to have a pAI with both a radio and all these fancy gadgets. you give the player a very important set of choices, your pAI is there to work with you, to make yourl ife easier and be your only friend on this murder-pit. Do you want that extra line of communication that possible lifeline in case things go sour? Or do you want the extra toolset the other modules may provide? Being a flashlight, acting like a personal body scanner (Seeing locations of broken bones, etc.) Perhaps even changing the door jack to be a more valuable hacking tool now that the radio power is being scaled back. "Why the fuck should we do this anyway? Also, you have so many problems in this diatribe..." I'm sure I do. That's why this is a suggestions forum, so that we can have a discourse, talk pros and cons and hopefully work out a solid gameplan for a feature that I feel is criminally shadowed by it's potential. Right now, pAI don't serve to have much of an effective role in any position For ghosts to just rejoin the round well... there's a plethoria of other options these days. Swarmers, Maintenance Drones, Positronic Brains, Revenants, blob spawns, Abductors, Terror Spiders, and soon to be /tg/ style space ninjas. The desirability of BEING a pAI is kind of lacking. You provide few to no benefits to most people and the few people you might actually help out tend to have better options. I love the idea of this role, what it COULD be, I LIKE being someone's little helper buddy, to play that "Super Siri" role and make someone's round/life a little bit easier. But right now, I genuinely feel the role falls short, especially in comparison to the new ones. It needs something, but what it needs the most is not something a simple tweak here and there could really fix. What it needs most is NOT going to be easy. It's gonan involve some, probably nasty code work, to dig into the fuckin spaghetti factory and sort shit out and basically remake a feature. That's not a small ask from the people with the skillset to do it, but... I end up asking because I think it's worth it. Final Thoughts: Ultimately, this is just my personal vision for things, how I see the state of them now, and how I see them going forward and maybe a means to get them there. But maybe you disagree. How fucking dare you That's fair enough, maybe you see a flaw where I don't, or you just think this was an hour of typing for generally little payoff. That's probably true. So that's why I wanna leave a few questions here for people. What are your thoughts? What do YOU think pAI need changed to make them pop out more? Do you think they need changes AT ALL? If so, why? If NOT, why? What makes you feel, if you do feel it, that pAI are OP as is, or too close to being OP as is? What, in your mind, would be the balanced path going forward, what is YOUR ultiamte goal for the feature? Like, comment and subscribe and Let me know what you think.

Will do! But never fear, surgeries get to be second nature after a while, and lungs are PROBABLY one of the easier ones, easier if chemistry has been on the ball. Also tend to play as pAI "H.E.X" alot and if you see me, feel free to pick me up and bombard with questions. I have done pAI crash courses in medical, engineering and such before ●‿●

Hoi. I'm the player behind Hexa Decimal the IPC if you ever bump into me, also usually more then happy to help people learn the ins an outs of Medical and Engineering (At least what I know of them.) Well... at least when medbay isn't a sea of blood and corpses.

Playing as an NPC/animal does not even slightly compare to a pAI, which has to be researched and printed from a protolathe to be produced and only 2-3 exist on station at round start, requires a dead/observing player to control, and a person to want one. If you make a role or feature useless or not fun to play as, it gets tossed aside, such as why Kidan have been under review for changes multiple times. The ability to emag a maintenance drone was not toxic, and the issue itself was highly divisive as the SEVERAL PR's attest to, it was far from being a unanimous opinion. Portraying it as such is disingenuous. These are ideas. Please respond to them as such and critique them instead of immediately crossing your arms and going "Nope", it stifles conversation and further reduces desire for players to input any work into the server itself. As for the ideas themselves, 1: This one is probably the most feasible and has been requested several times in the past. I am unsure as to reasoning of not implementing it, it could just be as simple as lack of desire on the part of people to code it, it's not like they're required too or anything. Frankly I see no reason, balance wise, NOT to implement it, as the entire point of a 'medical assistant' would be to act a Nurse of sorts and assist doctors with diagonsis and monitoring health of patients. But that's me, you'd need someone on the Staff for a more accurate/in-depth take on why it has not been done or their feelingso n it. 2: This one is... sketchy. pAI are supposed to be handy assistants, helpful tools for certain jobs and a constant companion, interfacing with computers or machines is starting to hit a borderline. Personally, I'd love it, but definitely not with remote access, that feels like it would definitely be too much utility, able to, say, remotely activate a telescience computer or such. Record keeping is lacking, as far as I know, mostly as "Troll protection". The fear is someone could play a pAI, even as a clown and just go diddle in the records, setting everyone to arrest, etc. Which is a justified concern, assholes will be assholes. I think it'd be fine to let them write in records but not change status', but that's my own take on it. 3: I can't see much inherently wrong with a printer module, aside maybe giving chemists an infinite supply of Ash for things. (You can burn paper into ash piles and slap it into a beaker in order to make some chems.) Could even make a noisy printer sound if balance was a concern for something, no hiding in tunnels to print a forged document for example. 4: EXTREMELY often requested, and a damned shame they can't. THIS one though I CAN explain a bit. pAI radios do not function as normal headsets, instead they are literally just given a station-bounced radio built into them, so that means it can only talk over the general channel. You can change the radio's frequency, just like SBR's, but justl ike SBR's it can't go into department frequency ranges. This would take a more in-depth's recoding of how the feature works, again, more reliant on someone to have the drive and desire to want to go muddle into that spaghetti pile. As for them ore extreme suggestions, 1: Opening doors isssss... eh. I think they should be able to open the general use doors, like those in the hallways, but aside that, I don't think they need to. They should not have wandered so far away from their owner if they get stuck in the middle of the bridge or Security. 2: Dragging tihngs. I believe, at one point, they COULD drag things, small things. The problem was, players used to to yakkity sax around with people's ID's I think. Not entirely sure, but another case of "Assholes ruined it for everyone." 3: This is the one that, flat out, will probably never happen and I don't think it should. pAI SHOULD be defenseless, you are a glorified iPhone, you are what happens if Siri becomes a true AI with sentient knowledge, or Cortana was put into a smartphone. You are there to be a virtual secretary/friend, and adding a self-defense option just isn't going to fly, because then anyone with a pAI could have a form of self-defense, from a device that already is going to shriek and scream bloody murder if their master is under assault. Which is itself another problem and the main reason pAI's don't get much attention I think, is the Death alarm aspect. Any sort of pAI overhaul or re-feature would likely need a means of bypassing or disabling that, in order to get much in the way of buffs or additional utility.

I'd go 1 tile larger then the PDA light personally. Worse then a real flashlight, but better then a PDA that you already have baseline, otherwise picking it up over other software is kind of a dubious choice.

I could see how they might be glowy, if they were a race of tunnel-dwellers. Like if they're so ant-like that they prefer underground environments to surface ones. Not so sure if that's legit their lore though.

A lot of this. I stopped playing IPC in favor of moving more to Grey or Human, because I got sick and tired of no counter-play 1 shot kills, and nobody having the faintest idea what to do on an IPC to heal them other then "WELL I WELDED IT AND IT'S STILL DEAD RIP I GUESS WHATEVER" The amount of dangerous toxins is FARRRRRRR Outweighed by the amount of healing chemicals, and even then, IPCs can still suffer chemical based damage, that's the entire reason Degreaser had to be made. Disease immunity is usually more con then buff, given you miss out on the super stronk beneficial viruses virology makes. Lethal viruses are scarcely ever made, since virologists are only really allowed to incite mass death with them if they have the hijack objective. Initially it was fine cuz IPCs were so easy to repair/self-repair. Easy to fix, easy to kill. Seemed legit. But that's been nerfed through the floor, use times on self-healing, plus their primary boon, never needing surgery, is now effectively moot because after a damage threshold you need "Surgery" to repair the internals of a limb. Add to that how many Antags have ranged EMP options, which go through walls... IPCs just ... aren't much fun to play anymore. So. No. Most IPC complaints come from people who have played both (And they HAD to, to unlock IPCs in the first place) and have come to a realization that IPCs just get a raw deal in more ways then people really think.

Sorry to say but you've gotta just deal with it on this issue. Your preferences do not dictate what other people can and can't do. I deal with other people who do stuff I hate all the time, things that make the round obnoxious on me, I fuckin' loathe vomit grenades or blood grenades, especially as a janitor. You know how often people make that stuff? How often I've been working a job to have someone else suddenly show up cuz they went to the HoP? If that's what the round is, then that's just what it is. Someone else wanted to play AI, they found someone willing to make them an AI, found the RD willing to approve it and a Captain willing to sign off on it. It's ICly all legit. If it isn't legit then you have methods to handle that in-game. They went through about 4-5 other people to do the thing they wanted to do, you can too. Your fun does not take precedence over theirs, not when you have viable IC means of handling it all. I understand WHY it throws you off and am sorry to hear that you feel it ruined your round, but that's just not a reason to enforce it with a rule. You are playing an AI. A machine. You don't get a say in it and are not asked about it because you are a trillion dollar laptop to the crew. You do not have rights as an AI, you have laws that you follow. That's the curse of playing a synthetic, you basically don't get a say in anything. You can suggest and handle things after the fact. You gotta take the good with the bad, especially with something as uncommon as multiple AI. I can go months at a time without seeing a round with more then 1 AI functioning at the same time.

Like.... like you know you can do all that ahead of time, right? That the entire point of dividing tasks between people is so, as things come up, you DON'T have to run thingsb y people all the time? Like isn't that the ENTIRE REASON Departments exists? A CMO can just as easily run the entire medical bay by himself, he has all the access. But he has a department he can delegate to do various tasks so that he doesn't HAVE to do all of them. Delegation isn't.... really hard. Or you can just respond to valid ways of handling the problem you're having with reaction images. That also will totally help solve your problem and will, in no way, be any sort of detriment.

It's division of labor, not deciding "Well I guess it's not my problem anymore" One AI focuses on one half of tasks, the other and the remaining half. That doesn't mean they ignore things they see just cuz "That's not my job anymore" It means you would probably tell the other AI about in binary so they can handle it. Like, you can have multiple of something and still have teamwork while seperating tasks. A team of medical doctors don't or shouldn;t scramble over a single patient, it's inefficient. You each handle something/someone else, but just because you do that doesn't mean you go "Well Scrub McBob's patient is in crit and gasping on the floor and he has no idea. Damn, sucks to be him, that's not my patient can't do anything." People make multiple AI cuz Paradise station gets *insane* on busy shifts, usually more then a single AI can adequately handle at times. To some AI players, it's a welcome helping hand. Some people still prefer to just go it solo, and I can respect that it would be annoying to them to suddenly have a partner but... that just is what it is. If the construction of a second AI went through all the legal channels, then... Yeah, it was all done legit. You may not like it, I totally get why, but your preferences do not dictate what people can and cannot do in the game. If it wasn't done legit, mention that. If it wasn't done legit and the captain refuses to give a shit, then PDA the IAA about it.

This is harder then it seems, but I would agree it'd be really needed. To explain: pAI do NOT have a normal headset style radio. Instead they have a built-in, Station-Bounced Radio. You can even go in and turn your microphone on to broadcast eveyrthing like an SBR and change up frequencies. (Albeit not to department frequencies, again, just like most SBR's) This feature also means a pAI's radio is not really bothered much by Telecomms failures. Solving this radio 'problem' might also solve the pAI's most annoying balance issue, that being a sentient death alarm who can scream to everyone, since they aren't impaired by radio failures. A pAI can hear their master's radio because, since you are being held/equipped onto someone's person, you can hear everything on the tile they occupy. You can achieve this same effect as a Maintenance Drone actually. If you and the captain stand on the exact same tile, you'll hear his radio chatter. So you're not actually even tapping into a particular headset, but just hearing chatter passively. Which might be an option to take, linking a pAI to your headset, if you want them to be able to use your comms channels, idk. Maybe making pAI occupy an ear-slot and change the appearance to be like a hyper advanced Google Glass kinda thing, and someone can pop their radio key into them, who knows I'm not a coder. POINT IS: That's why the radio problem exists, in a layman's summary.

The problem is though, that's just how the game plays. If it DOESN'T, then you get dreadful expierences for everyone involved really, Sec runs out of things to fight, Crew has nothing eventful happening and the antagonist player is likely not so thrilled he was shot on sight before he even got a chance to cause some trouble. That mind set of "But what if" is, and I fucking hate myself for having to use the phrase, a slippery slope. Because it's what enables power gamers most of all. Not that you ARE power gaming, just that it is a VERY problematic mindset, because "What if that Civvie in the tunnels is a traitor" "What if that clown is a cultist, he's always kind of beat up." is the go to for a lot of people who ARE. As a more non-specific general statement to anyone playing Security OR Antagonists, Winning/Losing isn't even really a feature of SS13, you get no achievements, you unlock nothing special, and you get zero points for doing all objectives as an antagonist, or stopping antags as Sec. The goal of the antagonist is/should be to cause trouble, to make shit happen in a round, and for Security is to keep order on the station and protect the crew, NOT to hunt down and murder enemies of Nanotrasen. That just usually comes about as part of protecting the crew. Remember, you're dealing with other players and SS13 is a role playing game first an foremost. To what degree of an RPG it is, is kinda up to debate an the server you are on, but Roleplay IS an element. Cops don't usually resort to shooting people to death for being scary, and when they do it causes a PR shitstorm and makes people furious. Even murderers/known killers usually get an attempt at an arrest before police start going for the lethal option. But I digress an that's beyond the scope of the discussion at hand.

I think you are drastically misinterpreting "RP Friendly" with just "Friendly". Vampires are not friendly, and security should brig 'em. Vampires are, however, not obligated to be murderbone-y or thrall on sight style antags. You cannot summarily execute them just because they are vampires, just because players murderbone as an antag a lot, You may as well commit Greytide genocide cuz they are almost always shitters, using that logic. You can (And should) absolutely throw them into the brig and throw away the key. If the vamp gets out for being fully powered up an just misting away, then execution is on the table, because it is no longer viable to contain the threat. Just killing antags outright for being antags is one major way you get boring, non-eventful rounds where nothing happens for 85% of the station's crew, because Security wants "Dat sweet red text" on antags. Conversely though, a soul-less bureaucratic hyper corporation, so large it functionally has it's own military and black ops squads WOULD want this teleporting ultra strong entity for scientific study to apply for their own forces or for possible methods of controlling them, even at the expense of "expendable" crew members, that DOES seem very much up their ally, especially if it pushes the company's profits higher then their competitors, no? Was that not the entire basis of the "Alien" universe? Aliens were scary shit, but companies wanted to control them, thus leading to terrible scenarios for the grunt levels?

Actually, I think that's even better. Like this is a bona fide ALIEN entity, it's not something comparable to any other creature, it's something that strains the mind a bit to comprehend, existing in a wholly different state that regular carbon alien life forms. The fact it stands out so differently then anything else is, I feel, a big appeal to it. It's alien, weird and juxtaposed against the rest of the station and crew.

Sprite is fancy as shit, and the con cept of what it does mid round is nice. I do love me some non-lethal mid-round antagonists that exist more to sow discord an cause problems for the stars of the show to take advantage of.

The idea of stagnant vomit possibly causing random infections if left alone for several minutes, is both amusing and terrifying to me. (And would actually encourage people not to make fucking vomit grenades.)

And get fired or possibly even bwoinked if you're pretty clearly greytiding instead of doing your job. Because as soon as you take that alt title you ARE taking a job, you're no longer safe from "Responsibility" like the Tide is, because you are giving yourself a job, you are learning a department and helping out in it, where Assistants are just free to roam and scream at people for things or to be given access/jobs. You just have a lot less responsibility and people can see at a glance, you are not the skilled loremaster of the given department and to not expect you to know all the tips an tricks. This is, in practice, the middle of the road option between being a Civvie and Being a Security Officer or Doctor, etc. it is the step between before you feel comfortable enough to take the full thing on your shoulders. But since it is them iddle road, it means you're going to be expected to do things like a job, just not perfectly, or without someone's help.