TrainTN

Any lawset can be "interpreted" to a ludicrous and asinine extent to "justify" being an asshole to other players. This usually ends with a ban. Corporate is not special in this regard whatsoever, and I haven't seen anyone abuse it in such a way in-game; only hypothetical situations and imaginary dilemmas that no halfway-decent player would actually do.

Yes, just give the psychologist an actual medicine cabinet, or at the very least a pill bottle that starts full. He already lives in a closet and nobody cares he exists, at least give him more than a measly four pills to play with.

Funny coincidence, Baystation just updated yesterday or so to give the bartender and cook access to each other's areas since there's usually only one.

*squish is the unique slime people emote. it makes a squish sound. Humans can *squish if they have a limb cut off and replaced with a slime person's. Yes, it is lewd.

Head roles can be hard enough to fill as-is. If you want to start banning people for not living up to standards then you may as well just white-list the jobs. And I despise whitelists.

The wiki says their home planet is essentially a wasteland of harsh climate as well as environmental damage from strip-mining, so the vast majority of kida live in underground hives. So that would make some sense, for a civilization more advanced than an ant farm.

You're right. I just think making it a character-specific thing would exacerbate the issue. If you know Character A is always a goody-two-shoes but Character B can be any antagonist in half the rounds he's in, one of them is going to get a lot more suspicion than the other all the time. I think it takes a bit of fun out of it, it's already a bit of a problem where you can almost predict who is an antagonist depending on who is online, but it's not like you can force people to be bad guys if they don't want to. Unless it's a conversion game mode. Let's bring back Revolution.

Yes, I read suggestions of similar things, of kida leaving hidden pheromone messages for each other, or being able to read a location via scents. There's a lot of things you could do with an insect-like race, which might be making it difficult to decide what should be done, at least as a start. I would gladly swap out the glow-in-the-dark power for something like that, though. I don't really understand why kida are bioluminescent in that way.

I do feel the same way, that kida need a unique upside to balance out their unique downside. I am totally willing to play a character who can't benefit from glasses so long as they have something interesting to compensate for it. Even if it was something simple like being harder to kill, like a cockroach, though obviously not too tough. The exoskeleton idea does sound good, I do like the idea of them being "easy to break but easy to fix" as others say of IPCs, like an organic equivalent. I agree the original PR was unsatisfying and came off as a slapdash bandage just to give kida glasses again, which I don't think would actually encourage people to play as them, since they still wouldn't have much to offer in terms of benefits. So I had hoped to take the general idea of "resilience" and expand it to give them some unique biology to set them apart. Course, I don't know the slightest thing about coding, let alone BYOND's code, so for now I'm trying to keep my suggestions grounded and relatively simple.

I'm still against making antag options specific to characters. It removes a lot of tension knowing that this specific person can always be 100% trusted. Not that it's not possible already if you can quickly alter your options before readying for the round.

The PR has been up for a number of days now and there's been a lot of back-and-forth discussion over it. I am growing concerned that no one will be able to agree on what they want from kidan, and nothing will ever actually get changed. I must admit that even I am stuck on my own idea and can't agree with other people's suggestions on what to do with them. Overall, what I wanted from kida was for them to be the hardy species. With the lore update up above, I liked the idea of them being immune to infections (even if infections are broken right now, it's the thought that counts) as well as being tougher than most, but still having their own unique weakness, i.e. being more vulnerable to blood loss, maybe even suffocation in general. Specifically, they would merely incur more damage at the same tick-rate as every other species when reaching the low-blood thresholds; if they bled faster it would nullify the brute resist too much. If having tougher bones and/or organs was possible, I think you'd have an interesting race where after being hurt, a kidan's biggest concern wouldn't be broken bones or damaged lungs, but instead finding gauze or a trauma kit to patch up the bleeding so they could find fuller medical treatment without fear, or even just walk it off after bugging the chemists for iron pills. I liked imagining kidan players tending to carry around their own bandages "just in case." I would sum it up as "tough body, sensitive blood." Especially if you threw in the toxin weakness, though I feel that one is unnecessary since kida are already weak to pest spray, something easily found in maintenance. I hoped that kind of balance would increase their survival rate in dangerous terrain and make them overall better at staying alive in bad situations, but not make them too robust to fight against, especially when they're just as vulnerable to laser beams as any other crewmembers so hopefully kidan antags could just get e-gunned. The no-eyewear weakness, while a very strong weakness, was also pretty unique, and made sense in regards to their biology, their compound eyes. My only complaint about it was that kidan's strengths didn't come close to reasonably balancing out this weakness, which is why I made this thread in the first place. The most serious problem of this weakness was how it almost totally disabled kida from the mining role, ironically. Jountax working on an "ore sense" is a welcome effort, though there's other possible ideas like creating meson eye implants, or maybe giving kidan a natural meson vision, possibly balanced out by having it only work when they stand still and toggle it on to "sense" the area around them; they are a subterranean species since their homeworld's surface is so inhospitable, so I think it would make sense for the species. There's a number of things you could try to do to work around the problem, and if implemented, I'd call the no-eyewear restriction fair so long as it was combined with a more impressive strength than minor brute resist, which is why I wanted to propose making their health hardier in general. I think that covers all my thoughts on kidan now that it's been discussed here and on the GitHub for a while now. I hope that a consensus of some kind is reached. I hope that any change will lead to a better state for kidan than the one they're in now, so I'm looking forward to what happens, and playing as them if I like what I see.

That doesn't sound fair. That could be metagamed incredibly easily if you can tell who is never antag and who is always an antag. Isn't this supposed to be a roleplaying game about paranoia in space? It's supposed to be a game where almost anyone could be a traitor, it's why they exist in the first place. If I can just meta who is always innocent and who is always guilty, what's the point?

This, more or less. Not a lot of people enjoy playing antag, myself included, because antag is very difficult. It should be difficult, but it is why few people play it. You're either good at playing antag and play it regularly, or you're not good at antag so you never play antag so you never get better at playing antag so you rarely retain new antags in the player pool. It's a role where even the slightest mistake or just simple bad luck can screw you over and get you either immediately executed by Security, or thrown into the permabrig for the rest of the round and left to rot and/or suicide. An early-round error can leave you dead or imprisoned for upwards of an hour or more, and Security can and will go every extra yard to sniff out any possible wrongdoing on your part because it's not their job to give you a break, it's their job to beat you in the head with a stun baton. So you end up in this situation where you see the same people as antag over and over, not because the system is improperly weighted, but because they're the only people willing to do it, and are probably the only people capable of doing it too. Turning the system against those people isn't going to open more opportunities for other players, because other players just don't want it. My antag rounds have never gone good because I'm not good, and getting good at antag takes a lot of time and experience and failures to learn from. So I prefer to just play the game normally, I get more out of it by playing it safe and I spend fewer rounds dead and imprisoned and humiliated. The idea of playing the bad guy is fun, but it turns out playing the bad guy is extremely hard. Especially when killing people is messy and unpredictable and usually not even worth it because reviving the dead is VERY EASY to do, and stealing high-value items usually involves killing people for them anyway.

In truth, when playing Colonial Marines as a doctor, I found their menuless, freeform surgery much more practical and enjoyable. I'm not sure why this server uses the menu surgery system, as it seems like it just takes up more time by requiring additional surgeries. I'm sure there was a reasoning for it; maybe the code just doesn't exist, I'm unaware of any details.

https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/8580 This PR was posted recently. I'm not sure how I feel about it, personally. Since it was relevant to the topic, I figured I could give it a bump.

If it's doable, I approve of the ore-sensing. It's logical and puts them on the same level as other players in a specific niche so I see nothing wrong with it. Combine it with another adjustment or two and kidan would be much better off than they are now. And I appreciate anyone doing it, much better than no one doing it as most suggestions tend to be. But more input from other people would be great, I would like to hear others' thoughts and opinions myself.

I don't understand bug biology well enough to understand how backwards it was, but that snippet is definitely a more interesting read than the original selection. And yes, no one really wants to play them. I do want to play them, which is why I made this thread, but I don't want to buy into a 30KP race only to realize it's so held back by mechanics that I can't really enjoy being one, as is sometimes argued for other races like diona and IPCs. I don't want to choose race based on what is "strongest," I just want to choose whatever looks fun, but I don't want to play as something that has burdensome downsides with little apparent upsides. Some disadvantages for a unique advantage is fine; Greys are squishy but have telepathy, vox and plasmamen are spaceproof but need special internals constantly, slimes have unique biology, IPCs have no biology, and drask eat soap. Kidan don't really have anything like that, other than burning nutrition to glow in the dark, which is something anyone can replicate with a flashlight and at less personal cost.

Granted, it might have had something to do with usual ghetto surgery penalties, not pain penalties. It's difficult to deal with how random those can be, but still worth a check, I say. And good luck with the kidan tweaks too, I hope those work out well eventually.

I heard they're not immune, mostly from comical stories of somehow failing the initial step of loosening their panel with a screwdriver. I would agree that they should have no pain fail chance at all.

I remember hearing that an IPC can survive an EMP if at the very edge of it. I don't know if it's possible in the code, but if I could, I'd make it so that EMPs only kill at direct close range, and anything beyond that just stuns/knocks out and inflicts tons of burn damage. So you either have to use an EMP grenade, or take the risk of getting right up in your target's face to one-shot them. But again, I don't know if that kind of thing would be possible to code, if it would require changing how all EMPs operate, etc.

Out of curiosity, what changes did you make to IPCs that you considered "fixing"? I'd like to know how you balanced them yourself.

There are a few in-game books that don't seem to work at all, like the engineering guides and the bartender's recipe book. If someone were to go fix all those, it would be convenient to throw in a book about IPC repair as well. I had this problem once as well, forgetting that IPCs could take brain damage at all and that Liquid Solder exists. And I'm still not sure how you even apply Liquid Solder and Degreaser, is it possible to inject IPCs with a syringe or are medical patches the only way? It's unclear without trying yourself.

If people actually took it seriously, Code Red would essentially shut the station down into a full-on police state/martial law situation. Which would be effective if it somehow didn't cause half the server to riot since everyone has an inner graytider in 'em. But more importantly, Code Red is to be initiated when there is a certain threat to the station, which can range anywhere from nuclear operatives to a single traitor with a stetchkin hiding in maintenance. Both are equally valid threats in the eyes of SoP but the latter shouldn't enforce such an iron grip on the station and its going-ons. It would stifle the round for anyone who isn't Security, and personally I don't want to be forced to sit in my closet for an hour as janitor. Speaking of nuke ops, the suggested idea of affecting cargo would mean you can't have Code Red and order guns for the crew to defend itself at the same time. Just a thought. Personally, I would rearrange the alert levels some. Maybe add in a new Code Yellow to take the place of the current Code Red (there is a threat to the station), and bump Code Red up to this more extreme "martial law" state (there is a threat to the station forcing an immediate state of emergency)?

Code Red is easy to turn on as-is, and it'll stay turned on the entire shift. Not that it even matters much anymore because people will still act as they usually do, since the majority of the round is Code Red most of the time it's hard to really pay attention or care about it. Making easier to turn on or harder to turn off isn't going to alleviate any of that. No one ever really has a reason to turn it off either because by that point some of the antags are probably going loud and will be spending the rest of the round yakety saxing through maintenance and robusting all the officers, and even if they all somehow get caught, Code Red will stay on purely out of paranoia. Which, again, doesn't really matter to anyone who isn't Security. The alert blares are just background noise, the blinky red lights are just decoration.

it would solve the problem of the department they're most hindered in. Combine that with my original post's proposals, and kidan would be pretty good miners. Then the only department they'd be seriously hampered in would be Security, but that was the point of the eyeglasses weakness in the first place.