Gatchapod

We should make the Anti-CQC. Anti-CQC Kick heals brain damage of downed targets. This way, Blueshields can cure the stupidity of their principals. Absolutely not. Blueshield already is a stupidly powerful job. It's not hard power, I guess, like having better armour or weapons. They are, in fact, a security officer minus in terms of gear. However, they have some stupid soft power. Roundstart lethals, "do whatever" SOP that makes it stupidly hard to hold them accountable for anything IC without CentComm involvement, captains granting them AA for no good reason whatsoever and certainty that they are not an antagonist making them straight-up invisible to at least 80% of security players. This combined with the cool factor of bold text, unique drip and being the only confirmed lieutenant on the station makes many Blueshields absolutely insufferable and powertrippy. Consider this and ask yourself is it a good idea to give Blueshields more mechanical power. I am of the opinion we should nerf their soft power. Banning captains from granting AA to anyone without a valid cause would be a good start, I'd say, but that's not the topic of this thread.

I believe you're suffering from a confirmation bias here. Yes, some people play silicons to fight antags. As Nerfection said, this is not fine. Ahelp them and administrative actions will be taken. However, I still maintain that more often this is an outcome of an otherwise boring gameplay. Furthermore, adding actual tasks for AI would already support taking additional administrative actions against them. If AI is hunting antags at the expense of doing its job, that is a clear rule break. I'm sorry, but slapping more OOC padding on antagonists will not improve the gameplay. OOC padding inevitably breeds even more resentment. "Toxic gameplay", as you say, is a result of your own vitriol. You refuse to learn, improve and adapt. You want admins to save your greentext. It's quite literally a buzzword (phrase?). Even if we agree, hypothetically, that gameplay is toxic, this only further reinforces necessity for mechanical solutions to the problem. Policies could fix toxic behaviours. Toxic gameplay requires different solutions, since the issue clearly lies in how the game plays. You're also plainly wrong about my suggestions not being counters. AI has no way to counteract sabotage of its equipment outside of having an engineering cyborg or hoping crew engineers help it. I cannot believe you're making me defend silicons, you know? My street reputation of a sillycon hater is ruined. Anyway, I wrote my rants and don't plan on inflating the thread any further, just in case someone actually wants to read through it. Good luck, even if I largely disagree with how you are trying to fix the problem.

Subvert the AI, cut cameras, cut AI control wires, jump into disposals, use thermite or C4, get creative. AI relies on specific tools. You can deny it access to these tools or entirely bypass them. If non-antagonists can help against antagonists, they absolutely should. If you plan to attack a crowded area, you should prepare to fight off multiple people. Consequently, if you plan to do something that might provoke the AI, you should prepare to fight off the AI. It seems extremely arbitrary to forbid AIs from interacting with antags they catch red-handed when everyone else is allowed to intervene. Let me address something else, too. Current meta is to put AI on NT Default, because people expect NT Default to "do the optimal play" against antagonists. Sometimes Corporate for the same reason. If we add the suggested policy change, it will inevitably shift the meta in one of two directions: Command/security issuing a blanket order to assist security however possible the moment antags are confirmed. Then, sometime later, another thread will be made in suggestions forum to somehow forbid that. Command just defaulting to PALADIN/Robocop immediately to fight antags. I believe the suggested policy change would be very quickly bypassed. This is why I claim, once again, that only a code solution can actually affect the situation in a lasting positive way.

I still maintain that the underlying issue is that AI is a rather boring job. Cyborgs are self-sufficient. Crew expects you to set up T-comms once, open airlocks once every 10 minutes at most and do an odd request or two. Bored AI is, whether you want it or not, pushed towards interacting with the most interesting and unpredictable part of the round - antagonists and security. Ideal solution to this problem is not changing silicon policies, but rather giving AIs actual responsibilities to distract them from validhunting. Sadly, this idea runs into many design problems the more you think about it. AI tasks should be crucial for the well-being of the station at large to encourage focusing on them, yet not to the point of round-ending in case of an inexperienced AI. Additionally, crew should be able to fulfill these tasks in case of a missing AI. AI should ideally be able to simply complete them more easily. As for the actual antagonists vs AI problem, it is one that many people struggle with in my experience. However, there are skilled players who plan ahead appropriately and stay a step ahead of the AI. It is possible to achieve, I have seen them do it multiple times. As such, I believe this to be largely a skill issue. However, we could lower the skill floor here a little. Currently, the ones suffering from bolting the most are traitors. Most other antagonists can do relatively fine in my opinion. Due to that, we may want to consider a new uplink item - AI jammer. This would ideally outright prevent the AI from interacting with machinery around the traitor, letting people not worry about that much about being boltshocked the moment AI finds them trespassing. Alternatively, procdrone's solution would be an even easier and simpler solution. My point here is that I deeply believe AI problems can, with enough creativity and effort, be addressed via code solutions. Making more precedents and complex policies is a very artificial way of handling it and it is prone to failures. Players not knowing the policies, players not wanting to ahelp, admins not being available, to name a few. If the code no longer supports certain actions, players have no choice but to comply with it.

Making the channels visible sounds like a poor idea. While I do believe our contributors are mature enough to simply accept decisions of the respective teams, I am less confident in non-contributors. I can very easily see random people championing PRs they like in DMs of relevant team members instead of on GitHub. I'd rather avoid sending overly upset people at anyone. Henri's idea would increase the workload of the teams, but probably not by a whole lot. We all know and love the anecdote of "yeah, no" being the whole input from maintainers before a PR was veto'd. While the teams alleviated many issues, this kind of pops up as one from time to time. Ideally, I think, the team that ended up objecting to a PR should leave a brief comment on the PR. Nothing exhaustive, but just enough to not leave people confused. Maybe I'm just stupid and it's somehow obvious, but admittedly sometimes I don't even know which team objected to a specific PR.

I like Nerfection's idea there. Largely because it slightly increases the likelihood of antag-on-antag violence, which is always a great thing. This is a good paranoia that we should promote. Antagonists should be dog-eats-dog world. If your buddy promises to watch your back, check their pockets for a garotte. Yes, I avoid other antags and, when met, always lie about my objectives to them. How could you tell?

I once saw a vox dip their donk pocket in chocolate milk. What sort of a deranged psychopath does that? Vox are pox.

I am not certain if this is actually a good idea. Even if Discord forums work well, it is effectively splitting suggestions into even more places. I think this might make following suggestions actually harder. Then there is the issue of accessibility. Maybe I'm just gatekeeping, but too much convenience might lead to low quality. I am nearly certain it would see a fair share of reactionary "suggestions" such as "vampire robusted me last round, nerf them". How would you ensure an easily accessible idea guys' forum keep enough quality to actually be worth reading? Because, I assure you, people will not bother reading it if every two hours it's flooded with "i ded nerf pls". Part of the charm of this forum is that suggestions here are very rarely reactionary. Most of the salt is filtered by Discord #PRT. People here are driven by genuine desire to improve things, not just venting anger after a bad round. GitHub is often even better place, because it's largely populated by people at least slightly involved in development of the game. This often leads to suggestions that take into consideration complexity of implementation. So my question is: What would be the benefits of a Discord forum, taking the above into consideration?

How is that a problem? You fail, you learn to not repeat what led to a failure, you rinse and repeat until you succeed. There is close to no reason to wear a BRH ever. Space explorers already have space suits. Miners already have better combat armours. Putting one on serves no other reason than to provoke security. Play with fire, get burnt. Continuous reduction of antagonists in a round is fully intended. The other options are no reduction or round-ending all antags at once. Both are even worse than what we have. It is also countered by midround antagonists. Security gets a lot of freedom between perma, labour camp, exile and execution. Giving security an option that is basically not round-ending for an antagonist would only breed more salt, as all antagonists would expect to get it regardless of their actions. Antagonists being hostile towards security is fully intended. They're antagonists. I don't see how it limits RP, either. It actually gives you new RP opportunities as you can be openly hostile towards security and back your words with actions. Bad luck happens to everyone. All you can do is learn how to reduce chances of it happening. But let's assume we give antagonists leeway for bad luck. Do we also give security leeway for bad luck? I.e. running alone into two changelings is really unlucky, and the antagonists will freely take advantage of that. This goes back to point 4, where everyone would expect leeway because luck is almost always a factor. This barely affects antagonists. I think I have never temporarily brigged an antagonist for more than 15 minutes. It's non-antagonists who rack up insane timers, and they usually deserve them. Antagonists who play full stealth usually know they're clean and are cooperative, leading to security often minimizing sentences or outright turning blind eyes to pettier crimes. Overall, this is yet another suggestion that heavily favours antagonists at the expense of security players. Should it be implemented, security players would deal with even more shittalking for genuinely just trying to do their jobs and having some fun in a video game.

We already have people preparing unreasonable self-defense measures even without that. If someone knows they're a target, they'll immediately turn off their suit sensors, grab stunprods, prepare cable cuffs, put on a mask, hide ID and attack absolutely anyone who as much as pulls a pen out on their screen. If they're part of some clique, now they're absolutely inseparable and a poor antag has to fight probably about 4 people to even touch the target. Your idea might increase paranoia in theory, but it will not improve quality of the gameplay. It will increase validhunting. It will increase security workload. It will, in fact, remove "assassinations". They'll become more like duels and losing a duel will be a round-ender. Antagonists are players, too. They don't kill people out of actual malice, but to add drama to the round. I absolutely do not understand why would you want to punish people who actively put effort into making rounds more interesting.

My issue with this section is actually the fact lethals are recommended for "Uncontainable Individuals". This probably needs to be worded better, because people like to brand perfectly containable individuals as uncontainable because it's slightly inconvenient to capture them. This was extremely noticeable back in the days of shadowstepping, where I've seen people consistently refer to any vampire with barely any blood as "uncontainable". The vampire would do absolutely nothing but try to run away and get shot dead simply because it was more convenient for security.

Wouldn't that be a noob trap, though? With knockdown instead of stun, the target can just pick it up, no? Alternatively, you now see secoffs hoarding stunbatons for robust (read: powergame-y) throw into melee hit combos. While the mechanic had fun parts to it (new secoffs will never play catch the baton), it should probably never come back.

I'd rather not give pets too many rights. While you specifically were pretty chill (I was the captain who told the HoP to just leave you be, especially since he was about to spawn 3 wild slimes by making you split), many people actually pick these ghost roles for thinly veiled griefing. Slimes trying to pick up fights, Ians beelining important papers to eat them, Renaults dragging banana peels to slip literally everyone, Toms... actually, Toms are cool. Personally, I'm one of the people who cares about killing pets IC, though. The issue is that you, legally speaking, were not a station pet. You were an escaped slime, so HoP did a reasonable thing IC. Nobody claimed your ownership, nobody said they're releasing a domesticated slime. Even if it was painfully obvious you won't attack us, all we knew is that you're an escaped specimen and slimes out of pens should be either re-contained or killed. I recommend making sure your master informs command he's your owner and plans to release you, so you're actually protected by the Space Law. As such, it was a genuine IC issue and admin ruling is not surprising whatsoever there.

First and so far the only issue I see: I don't think missing circuit imprinters can be easily replaced? They can print their own subtype boards, sure, but that would require preemptive preparation. However, if the imprinter is destroyed and the board is gone, the entire station loses access to everything restricted to that imprinter. Possible solutions: 1. Add spare boards of all types to the tech storage. Good because it gives antags a chance to acquire machines through illegal means. Bad because it'll be used by non-antags with tech storage access to powergame. 2. Add board crates of all types to cargo crates list. Good because it gives significantly more control over who accesses the boards. Bad because it might turn supply into the optimal antagonist department. Additionally, bad because cargo is now an even bigger target for major midround antags.

Right, so here is a PoV of a security officer with over 10 times more playtime than you: I point at someone 5 times, use hailer 3 times, point some more, chase them through half of the station and they keep running. Finally, exhausting all options I fire a disabler. I don't even cuff them, I just use the time they're down to type, because up until then I literally could not. Then I hear how I'm shitsec for disabling on code green and after the round I'll probably keep hearing this. And the actual reason was probably something like a minor trespass I wanted to discuss. Not arrest them for. Discuss and likely let them go with a warning. Sadly, no matter how little force you try to use, tiders basically force security to use weapons. Coincidentally, this usually happens with non-antags. Antags usually outright attack me, so we skip the pleasantries and exchange blows (something, I assure you, both sides are fully prepared for). In the rare case antag doesn't immediately attack me, I try to demand they lie on the floor. If they do, I cuff them. Yes, I cuff them anyway. This is roleplay, even if you dislike that. As for ending rounds of antags, I plainly don't understand. Server rules tell us to play the role we've picked. Security is held to a higher standard of that rule, too. Security job is to contain Enemies of the Corporation. Therefore, ignoring them and letting them go willy-nilly is quite literally against the server rules. I'm not saying security is perfect. We're humans, we make mistakes and even break our own ideals when rounds get particularly stressful. We are, however, held to the aforementioned higher standards. I assure you I was questioned by admins a few times regarding my actions to confirm I followed both the Space Law and server rules, in both letter and spirit. I've seen countless other officers being held accountable for the misbehaviours, both IC and OOC.