One Final Shadowling Discussion

[Pckables]

(I didn't want to necro a 4 year old thread, and I can't really call this a "Suggestion" thread)

Starter note: This isn't a post/thread for complaining about if something should or shouldn't be removed, or about demanding someone else do something you won't do yourself.
This thread is purely for discussion value, brainstorming, entertaining wild ideas, and fun most of all.

Onto the topic at hand:

In light of a long-awaited pull request, I wanted to make a thread for any final thoughts on the Shadowling antagonist.

As AffectedArc has correctly said, there have been many discussions on Shadowlings in the past, but none of them ever lead to any results or changes. Shadowlings have been a stagnant and divisive gamemode for, basically their entire existence.
So if no one wants to fix a problem, the next best fix is to remove it.

But with that said, how about we create a fun set of questions. Feel free to add or remove some, but remember it's all just for entertainment. Don't take things too seriously.

• - Do you like or dislike the Shadowling gamemode?
• - Do you feel Shadowlings are unique as an antagonist? If not, what does it overlap with?
• - What do you believe is the overall round-flow Shadowling rounds aim for, or should aim for?
• - What are the issues with Shadowlings?
• - If you, in theory, had the ability to make all the changes yourself, how would you change Shadowlings?

To answer my own questions:

- Do you like or dislike the Shadowling gamemode?
Shadowlings are very much one of those "Hate to fight, fun to play as" kind of antagonists. They tend to stick far out of the way for most of the station unless the Shadowling is robust or the station is already heavily thralled. Nonstop dethrall surgeries aren't very fun either. Playing as one though, is fairly engaging once you're familiar with the game. They can feel like glass cannons at times, with insane offensive power but a high risk of reaching crit without realizing it. They definitely have some abilities that are 100% unfair for the victim though.

- Do you feel Shadowlings are unique as an antagonist? If not, what does it overlap with?
I feel they are half-unique, in that it's an improved version of Revolution, and shares some aspects with cult. Unlike cult, they're very much solely focused on numbers and mobbing the station. Unlike Revolution, they have clear leaders, slower conversions, and a more straight-forward goal.

- What do you believe is the overall round-flow Shadowling rounds aim for, or should aim for?
I believe shadowlings were intended to be a slow back-and-forth between the forces of the shadowlings and the crew, with Shadowlings trying to push slowly out of maintenance with their army, as the station tried to push them back with lights and lasers.
Unfortunately it doesn't work like that for a multitude of reasons.

- What are the issues with Shadowlings?
Many:

• Armed thralls (security) are too strong, being infinitely better armed than the rest of the crew, causing a snowballing effect. But they're also the ones that are going into maintenance making them the primary targets, convertible or not.
• Shadowlings get stronger as they get a bigger army. Why do they get stronger as a reward for getting stronger?
• Paradise non-lethal combat isn't back-and-forth, it's either disablers or instantly over with stun batons. Stun Batons naturally favor the aggressor, which are the thralls due to having stealth.
• Shadowlings are very new-player unfriendly. They start off with very little, and their abilities aren't super intuitive. Having even a slight chance as a Shadowling requires a lot of prior prep and tool gathering, which new players will have no idea about.
• Rounds ending immediately after Shadowling death sucks, especially if Shadowlings were newbies.

- If you, in theory, had the ability to make all the changes yourself, how would you change Shadowlings?
(Spoilering for length)

Spoiler

1. Give shadowlings a "Focus" meter.
Shadowling Focus starts at 100% and decreases with every thrall taken, and increases when thralls are deconverted.
Mindshielded personnel can be thralled, but deplete 3x more Focus compared to a typical thrall.
Focus cost per thrall is 100 / [AscensionGoal]
Your Focus meter determines what abilities the shadowlings have access to. At 100% they have access to all abilities.
At 90%, you lose Black Recuperation
At 80% you lose Icy Veins
At 70% you lose Shadow Walk
At 60% you lose Null Charge
At 50% you lose Glare
At 40% you lose Sonic Screech
At 30% you lose Blindness Smoke
At 20%, you lose Rapid Rehatch
At 10%, you lose Destroy Engines
At 0%, you lose Veil. (But if none of your thralls are mindshielded, you can ascend at this point)

As you amass a large army, you rely more and more on your thralls protection. Mindshielded targets may be juicy targets, but they also come at the cost of your own powers.
This also comes with options for the crew. As shadowlings get closer to ascending, they become increasingly weak and easier to assassinate, if you can get through the thralls.
Mindshielding crew also becomes an effective method of weakening shadowlings faster.
Capturing mindshielded thralls and imprisoning them rather than deconverting them can be a risky but rewarding strategy.

2. Change how shadowling thralls work. Stealth stuns is already done better by cult, and not a very fun or fair way to amass an army. Instead let's do away with the "Stealth" aspect.
Thralls are visibly enthralled, like a cult halo. Instead of relying on being greytide with stunbatons, they get shadow-hands.
 - Thralls can no longer use guns or activate items such as stunbatons.
- Thralls gain a Shadowshot ability and an internal shadow battery.
Shadowshot is similar to a disabler shot, but half as strong, and half the range. If a shot enters light, it will disappear 4 tiles later.
Thralls regenerate Shadowshots while in darkness. Ammo regeneration halts in light.

Currently, Paradise melee sucks. Trying to be the first to land your stunbaton hit isn't engaging.
Giving thralls a weaker version of a disabler and only that gives them a slight advantage over your standard crewmate, a disadvantage, but fighting chance against security, and quite a war with enough numbers.
Have the bullets be destroyed a certain distance after hitting light makes it so they can't be spammed down hallways, but just enough to get through flashlights.

3. Add additional dethralling methods:
On top of the surgical method, there might as well be some more practical ones:
- Death dethralls. Dead thralls already don't count towards ascension. Might as well just cut out the middleman of dethralling a corpse so players have a chance of coming back after losing to the station's last resort. (Black Recuperation would also work on and thrall corpses, since the ability would dissapear after 2-3 thralls.)
- Being adjacent to a Yellow Slime Core light for 120 seconds dethralls. Slower than surgery, but more mobile and can be done on multiple thralls at once should you be able to keep them still for long enough.

4. Make slings drop anything in hand while shadow walking.
Currently shadow walk is just turning the player invisible and giving them no-clip.
Shadowlings are fully able to equip a stun baton, shadow walk, and stun absolutely everyone while invisible and no clipping. Why.

5. Round continues after shadowlings die, with the potential of a bigger, second wave of shadowlings at a random time after 20 minutes of the last shadowling death. The second wave of shadowlings will be randomly selected amongst non-roundstart-mindshielded crew, and there will be 2x the amount of shadowlings to counter the crew being much more prepared for them.

Second wave optional. It's hard to predict how hard the station can prep and fight incoming shadowlings, even if theres a much larger number of them than normal.

My own final thoughts on the matter to close things out:
I wouldn't be sad to see Shadowlings gone. They're jank, have some bad design decisions, and really just don't work for our current combat system.
Like Xenos (and vamps before Hal9000 made his rework) they really need a massive overhaul. But that can happen literally anytime if someone really feels like they want to work on it.
Until then, no point in having a gamemode that isn't fun for a majority of the server.

Share your thoughts and ideas, feasible or not!

Edited March 12, 2022 by Pckables
Put Shadow walk earlier on the Focus list

[Rurik]

I'm too lazy to answer questions or write a word essay but I'll mention the three below points, since I don't see people bringing it up often:

• Having an antag that is dependent upon greytide running into maints is well and dandy, except when having X number of converts = instant win. I cannot stress that enough. It works somewhat okay for cult because cultists still need to perform the ritual that announces their location AND do a sac objective first. As it stands, slings can win a round without ever fighting sec. Just kiting and thralling greytide.
• Looping back to the first point, it is not a coincidence that when slings are announced half the assistants on station rush maint. imo, ahelping is not a valid solution in a long run. Its more work on the admins, they always have plausible deniability of "i ran into maint cause i wanted a multitool sorry xd" and its near impossible to tell if someone is intentionally getting thralled or got nabbed by thralls unless you are observing. 
• With the slings abilities, it is possible for one to stall out a round for the entire shift with effective use of teleports, even if they are alone with no thralls. They can effectively kite for the entire two hour shift. The only reason we don't see it more often is cause usually they get bored and do something ballsy, or accidently teleport via lag into space.

TLDR: Kiting infinitely is lame, and having an antag that is dependent upon lowkey antag fishers is a bad idea.

[Shadowradar1212]

also another problem with their whole light weakness, is that it forces the crew to rely on trying to cheese their light removal as much as possible. I really don't want to see glowshrooms used, glowshroom spam is already enough of an issue, a gamemode dependant on doing it, doesn't help with any future constraints on how much they can just keep spreading. because it would have affected shadowlings down the line. also light doing damage slowdown snowballs the fact you're basically screwed if you get too far into the light.

oh also mechs cannot be veiled, so you have to break them, this basically means a mining mech can just kill shadowlings by the act of walking up to them and combat mechs are usually unstoppable unless you've already steamrolled so hard the station doesn't stand a chance anyway because they'll just stunlock your 8-16 thralls one by one with their punch and scattershot the rest to crit. and believe me, you won't often get rechargers in maintenance and you'll probably broken the APC too because light tiles are suffering. so good luck using those lasers you stole.

 

also not even to mention that laser guns from the arcade, which any crew can grab with relative ease, are infinite and more than capable of killing a shadowling. and there is roughly four of them, really not ideal to have a weakness obtainable to the entire crew (especally non-security non-antags (you're not getting antags in a sling round anyway)), shadowlings already struggled enough with their thralls against security and legions of ERT down the line, last thing they need is a random assistant blasting all of the shadowlings and ending the round, spontainiously.

 

once shadowlings get announced, they're literally, them, plus whatever thralls they have against the whole security force, which makes the scaling of power even more awful. thralls get night vision, and a five second cloaking with a long cooldown but. it boils down to who is most robust, and believe me, I see too many thralls that don't even know they have their vanishing ability since its probably some new player nine times out of ten being grabbed early, plus their powers that counter cyborgs which have all access from just walking into a shadowling's face killing it with light have to... unlocked is just, silly.

oh yeah, maintenance drones, they use lights and can crank them as high as a cyborg can... you can probably guess why a drone that isn't supposed to interacting with sentient life killing it with this is bad.

 

despite the entire thrall focus, a dead shadowling is dead and they have oldcrit mechanics, so not only are thralls not able to revive their dead masters, their masters are helpless when they hit critical. making the whole point of thrall reliant conversion antags even more moot, till you steamroll inevitably and kill/convert the entire security force on the rare occasion. also due to the whole maintenance restricted from light this also results in a backwards steamroll even the most robust shadowlings can't really do much about.

 

thrall mask checking with vox and plasmamen is awful since well, you don't really want to be dealing with a full several minutes long conflict and pointless manhunt as a security officer during shadowlings because a vox with a gasmask got thralled and turned out to not be. or a plasmaman in which case you can't really check without a shower or just running them a full surgery because their helmet doesn't display they have a gasmask on.

uhh, oh yeah, if you get a 4+ sec conga through maintenance, shadowlings can't really do anything about it. unless they somehow obtain a welderbomb trap, even then ehhh- you'll only have four thralls by then and one of them knows combat slightly but is unarmed so they can't really, y'know do anything about it, likely. shadowlings get called out pretty fast when people meta the lights breaking.

 

winning is just, LRP murderbone everyone and gloat with your supervoice server wide just because you can, while its fun to the slings... its kinda meh to deal with as a non shadowling as it just involves sitting inside of a closet, twiddling your thumbs. that's not really engaging, compared to fighting legions of harvesters from cult, dealing with a doomsday AI, fighting tooth and nail, or rushing to disarm the nuke that the nuclear operatives planted. hell even revolution wins on TG (another server and codebase) as surviving sec in a hostile, anarchy system, picking sides to live can be fun. shadowings is "just die". I mean, it works but uhh- it just feels a lazy win result.

and yeah, even without paradice's intention for shadowings, its just flawed really... it might work for HRP but uhhh- like, it basically needs people to come to the shadowlings first and a ton of metaprotections to even work, even then, it wouldn't. its mechanically flawed too much to work outside of antag fishing and ignoring the blatent threat till its an issue. yeah people ignoring a stationwide threat as security ain't gonna happen, like ever.

 

revolution gets it right, because there are so many of them by the time sec notices and starts cracking skulls and shoving implants into crew, a few deconvertees has minimal impact on the horde of bloodthristy singing people, cult gets it right, because even a lone member is capable of bringing the cult back from the brink even with halos, shadowlings gets almost nothing right and never will apart from one thing, proving that concept can be great, and execution terrible.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Shadowradar1212
correction on (security) its nonsec that can obtain laser tags. aaaaa also correcting a few points I was too tired to right out right, and any grammar issues. and slapping on more points, because I can.

[Pckables]

All very good points.
On top of the new combat reworks, Shadowlings would need a complete and total overhaul from the ground up just to make them work for stamina combat.
At this point it'd probably be easier just to make an new antagonist over reworking Shadowlings.

[dafrek]

Personally, shadowlings were one of my favorite antags, mostly because of how different their playstyle was when compared to most other antags. The main issue that most people seem to overlook when thinking about shadowlings, is their huge skill gap between new and old players, as they are arguably the antag with the largest skill gap, best shown by a lot of newer players spacing themselves and dying while older players can often continue to survive for an absurd amount of time, even after the rest of their team has died. 

As both a security officer and a shadowling I definitely enjoyed the combat, with situations such as glowshroom spam or one last shadowling that refuses to die being less enjoyable than most situations. Being thralled as a mindshielded member of security of command was certainly an extremely different experience from most other antag rounds, which is something we seem to lack after they were removed. However, sadly, it seemed like they were taken down a bad road code-wise not long before they were entirely removed, most notably being the removal of the ability shadowlings to thrall through mindshields, which really encouraged slings to just kill all of sec or, more often, resulted in the shadowlings being overwhelmed as they fought with sec and often died instead of thralling crewmembers.

I believe that if slings were changed to have a smaller skill gap it would make them more fun for most people. Specifically decreasing the speed of their jaunt, which would essentially buff slings for inexperienced players, as they would be less likely to jaunt into bad situations, and nerf them for more experienced players. One change they especially need to make them more fun is to give them the ability to thrall through mindshields again, as, not only did the removal of this ability cause most slings to murderbone sec, but it also made the skill gap even worse, as newer players would be forced to spend time to kill sec, often dying in the process, meanwhile a good amount of experienced players instead just removed sec's mindshields via surgery, meaning that the change that was meant to stop snowballing had much less of an effect on good players, who were the most likely to snowball with slings. These changes have been proposed in the form of PRs, however sadly they were never implemented, despite likely improving shadowlings as a gamemode overall. Some minor nerfs, such as removing the ability to use frost oil through walls, would likely also make them a bit more balanced.

Bringing them back now that our combat is more stamina based would certainly be a bit tough, although examples such as vampires would likely give us a good starting point to base their balance and abilities off of.

[procdrone]

One of the bigger points against shadowlings in my opinion is how the server rules are structured.

Experienced shadowlings/thralls will make a point of kidnapping (and killing/converting) all security as soon as possible.

After that, there is literally no force on the station that CAN do anything about them, while shadowlings/thralls have free reign to kidnap anyone they please and do whatever they please.

The genius design of "antag versus the whole station" where the "whole station" cannot fight back because only sec is allowed to hunt antags rule wise, is absolutely flawed (cultists have a similar issue), leading to an absolute nightmare of a game mode for everyone involved.

Usual antagonists that have so much free reign are absolutely valid for any crewmember to hunt(or lethally defend himself against), and kill. (nukies, blob, xenos, terrors, wizard)

Other antagonists are bound by objectives and therefore, having only sec hunt them is balanced, since these traitors can't overthrow the entire station and do how they please. Cult and Slings are the exception to the usual flow of antagonists.

[Shadowradar1212]

On 9/10/2022 at 7:02 PM, procdrone said:

One of the bigger points against shadowlings in my opinion is how the server rules are structured.

Experienced shadowlings/thralls will make a point of kidnapping (and killing/converting) all security as soon as possible.

After that, there is literally no force on the station that CAN do anything about them, while shadowlings/thralls have free reign to kidnap anyone they please and do whatever they please.

The genius design of "antag versus the whole station" where the "whole station" cannot fight back because only sec is allowed to hunt antags rule wise, is absolutely flawed (cultists have a similar issue), leading to an absolute nightmare of a game mode for everyone involved.

Usual antagonists that have so much free reign are absolutely valid for any crewmember to hunt(or lethally defend himself against), and kill. (nukies, blob, xenos, terrors, wizard)

Other antagonists are bound by objectives and therefore, having only sec hunt them is balanced, since these traitors can't overthrow the entire station and do how they please. Cult and Slings are the exception to the usual flow of antagonists.

yeah, this is an extremely important point, shadowlings literally rely on, removing people that  can do anything about them, to... actually do anything.

and like... even if you changed the rules how do you judge the threat of something deep in maintenance hidden in the dark behind an army of thralls. lots of thralls could just be them grouping out, its not hard for 5 people to look like a ton of thralls, or 20 to split up and look like a few.

 

shadowlings don't scale well, and only the big bosses themselves get scaled up... (excluding converting people into lesser shadowlings but like, by that point you might as well just steamroll the entire station simply because you can.)

rules certainly can be changed to help with this, but like... that just exemplies the issue of people running into the shadowlings to be converted and some people have definitely seen examples from validhunts attempting on slings despite the rules (yes people have ran at slings to try and kill them only to biblefart when stunned to avoid conversion, as non sec... or just to wind up stunned and converted anyway.)

also shadowlings already suffer and struggle enough to fight on par with 4+ secoffs with base gear and not even lethals, even with thralls, do we really need legions of spear wielding assistants?

 

 

revolution can work with crew against revs, because deconverted revs can be given sechuds to assist. plus so many people are revolutionaries that non revs don't really miss on anything or intervene much because they're a minority and revolutionaries can just protect their own. interfering with revs in a crowd of them is a very poor idea.

same for cult, once they get halos, they're practically unable to hide either against the deconverted, albeit with less effort on the crew's side to realise who is who.

 

(even despite this the sheer wound treating aftermath for conversion antags steamroll crew comebacks is hellish to treat and you're better off with a shuttle at critical point, at least until someone simplifies the medical system)

 

oh and this isn't including those that just kinda... y'know, don't wanna partake as a thrall, and just immedately leave and do their own thing, or are too clueless to actually realise what just happened, yeah... yeah. especally when you're encouraged to thrall indiscriminately, including people that might not even engage with antagonistic activity, compared to say... cult or vamp, the former making even bald converts somewhat useful as support roles or an extra person to convert alongside because of how rune mechanics work.

Edited September 29, 2022 by Shadowradar1212
adding the super important point, balder people just don't tend to... partake, y'know, they just... walk around, or people that don't want to antag really.