procdrone

An assistant job is an essential tool for both worldbuilding and game experience. Civies while would make sense considering the general trend of how players play, it makes 0 sense for them to be on the deep space private research station. The problem is its 0 effort 0 responsibility & 0 overhead position with 0 requirements job to get into, so it is the main goto for people that intend to abuse in one way or another. You are mostly recalling the bad examples of assistants, or well, greytiders that give the whole role a bad taste. But its still important to have a role that allows people to play the game without any duties. There are many service areas for these players, but for unknown reason, it became server culture to stare at the captain. What would be a fix, however? Thats hard to say. maybe loitering could become a minor crime? during non-green alerts? But thats likely impossible to enforce.

maybe instead of changing how the assassinate objective currently works, add a new objective "teach XX a lesson by killing them, take photo proof"; which would bring some variety into violent objectives and sometimes just wouldn't force you to permakill your objective thoughts? /s shower thought

It's actually funny, but the cloner is the supposed duty of the geneticists, not doctors. But what could the doctors do on downtime? What kind of tasks that are useful so anyone bothers doing them?

the way the damage, shock and crit, considering this is a text-based game, if you're typing/trying to RP, you aren't doing anything else; and the conditions become worse, timers expire, and people die when you blabber on. So yeah, you just have to focus on fixing people. it might be a thankless job but at least you never find yourself bored on most rounds. (for example, engineers who are almost always bored). And yeah while basic stuff is usually well, basic to fix, sometimes you get a patient so fricked up much more effort is required. for example, reviving vox or slime people past their timer. There is a lot of surgery involved in reviving dead organs and limbs. This hurried style of medbay also works for the players on the receiving end. I'm sure people want to continue playing the game, not spend half the round in medical because medical is too complicated to practice efficiently, or because procedures take an arbitrarily long time. Gods know enough people experienced malpracticebay.

Considering the setting (corrupted future space corporation without morals or ethics) I doubt NanoTrasen cares

my own perception is quite screwed, because I almost always disable antagonists. (and incidently, many people do, too!), but whenever i forget to disable it, it seems I always get antagonist. Make sure to consider this in your data. many people do have antagonists disabled, so the actual antag roll is only a percentege of the whole server population at any given time. This also causes seemingly to give antagonist to the same people over and over again, bc sometimes, they are the only people that have antag enabled.

psych being able to confirm and undo mind control from various antagonists would be, indeed, nice mechanic to have. It should take a very long action time, but having this option would be indeed nice.

I feel like this would add way too much bloat only to give psychiatrist something to do. Psych is a RP role, and as such, "make your own fun" role. Adding mechanics to it IMO would hamper that aspect. My advice to make psych more engaging - don't just wait around for things to happen. YOU cause things to happen. mental inspections of command, security, prisoners, doing psych-related events to make your time more engaging. Unleash your creativity!

My own opinion on undercover officers: Dont. From OOS perspective ; there is a lot sec vs antag dynamics that change whenever the receiving end of antag is either a random crewman or an officer. Its very underhanded considering a normal crewmember *cannot* interfere with an antagonist much, and surely, cannot end their round by an arrest. they are only permitted to defend themselves and do their best to disengage. This makes antagonists know what to expect when acting (and imo that's a good thing, antagging should be harder than it already is). if you add paranoia of "what if there is an undercover sec here", or even confusion whenever that crazy baldie is trying to valid you. it makes it much harder for antags to act - meaning more boring rounds for everyone. (because sec effectively removed all antags early due to tricks) Not to mention, Antagonists fighting officers will behave differently; as they are permitted to kill pursuing officers, while killing normal crewmen is not desirable. One could even argue how its not "playing your job responsibly" and "valid hunting" but I'm aware most people will find that a stretch. It even makes a lot of sense from IC perspective. Officers are people of the law, and considering they have a very special position within the law (permitted to use weapons, assault on officers has a different charge, allowed to enter restricted areas during emergencies), any would-be officer must be easily identified and probably in uniform. Of course, I don't want to take away people's drips, I don't use stock uniforms either, but I still think the outfit should easily identify you as an officer, and not try to gimmick you into looking like a completely different role. and I agree that it should extend to command roles, as they also hold special place in law and special authority on station. They should be easily identifiable as their position and not roleplaying as a different job entirely. I remember having a round with a HoP who insisted on wearing a skinsuit and there was nothing in law or SoP to enforce proper dress code. I would very much welcome some slight moderation from SoP. Even a simple "should wear easily identifiable attire or uniform of his position" would go a long way - since it would be SOP, it is not law and therefore can be ignored for emergencies or other edge cases(or just ignored so people can wear their drip), and gives the heads and IA departments some hook to help maintain proper dress code among command and officers when these people dress ridiculously.

Im aware this is hardly on topic, what do you think the AI player has to do for 2 hours? What is the AI purpouse? What are their tasks? Why im playing this game as AI? Have you ever played Silicons for any greater lengths of time?

help

There is an additional layer of problems coming with stealing the AI. unless you law it a certain way, it WILL inform its cyborgs via Binary (which works globally, through z-levels, and cannot be disabled no matter what); which makes stealing the AI very hard. (unless you kill all the borgs or leave AI in an area in Space which is hard to track, real fun for the AI player).

sorry for the doublepost. The problem with the AI's is, both the rules and lawsets make it quite chaotic to understand on how you should play silicons. You're supposed to follow your laws, and most lawsets tell you to protect the crew and/or station, and since you're knowledgable on antags, you know they are going to hurt either. so the laws themselves tell you to stop these evildoers and that its something you're supposed to be doing. (even if its not fun for the receiving party) On the other side of the fence you got the rules and admin rulings that outline how you should behave as silicon, you're expected to not tryhard too much but still follow your lawset. Its a very delicate balance to strike and most silicon players struggle with it. Which in effect practically makes you ignore whatever laws you have as flavours of practically the same behaviour sets. Obviously, there are valid hunters that relish in the opportunity to win, but I feel like they are a margin of AI players, not the Majority. I dont really see any clear way to improve silicon situation. It would require either heavy changes to the rules/wiki pages and giving clear directions for silicons, or some mechanical curbing to prevent being too OP. (PS, borgs are so easy in direct combat i dont think they are particulary risky enemy to deal with, AI would be the main problem here)

I still think adding an interraction timer on doors and equipment interactions (with malf upgrade to remove the timer) to be a great way to curb AI ability to fuck over antags.

I also dont like your proposed change, i dont have time RN to write a full wall of text explaining how, but it would disrupt the whole balance, make antags even more insufferable, oversaturate the round with evildoers, and make security even more pitiful to play (it already quite is, everyone who plays HoS is either new or wants a terrible time, you can't prove me wrong)