Remove pre-hatch thralling for Shadowlings

[Oldman Robustin]

Here's how every fucking Sling round turns out:

1) 75% of Slings never hatch. They run around doing stupid shit like breaking lights, then they start trying stunprod + cablecuff people thinking LOL EVEN IF I GET CAUGHT THEYLL HAVE NO PROOF.

2) The victims scream their location while being cablecuffed, the unhatched shadowling gets caught, the victim reports that the aggressor tried to hypotize them, sec attempts to implant the unhatched shadowling, shadowling resists the implant, VALID VALID VALID

3) One sling hatches, gets spotted now that everyone's crawling maint with flares since the unhatched retards got caught, gets swarmed and burnt to a crisp

4) The round is essentially over, 50 crew vs. 3 idiots trying to convert the crew with stunprods and cablecuffs.

Don't encourage this stupid shitty behavior, there is nothing redeeming about it.

Also scale up Slings a little better, right now its like 2 in a 50 person game.

[callanrockslol]

Just remove them they are awful right now, a competent person will stomp every time and idiots get wrecked.

[Steelpoint]

I never liked the whole stealth conversion part of Shadowling.

There's quite a few things I would change to match the original admin event version but I digress.

Removing the stealth conversions would be a good change. Being in Human form should not get you far as a Sling, enough to maybe get some better access or some equipment.

[PKPenguin321]

Just remove them they are awful right now, a competent person will stomp every time and idiots get wrecked.

holy fuck you people and your "just disable it/just remove it" attitudes
first ling then cult now sling
why don't we just remove every game mode and play extended forever

[MisterPerson]

Just remove them they are awful right now, a competent person will stomp every time and idiots get wrecked.

holy fuck you people and your "just disable it/just remove it" attitudes
first ling then cult now sling
why don't we just remove every game mode and play extended forever

Your shitty slippery slope argument is meaningless. Do you disagree with Callan that a competent person will stomp unhatching shadowlings? Do you think that there's fun to be had there? Come on now.

[DaemonBomb]

Shadowlings actually encouraged to be shadowlings instead of slow rev.

why don't we just remove every game mode and play extended forever

NO ITEMS.
ABDUCTORS ONLY.
FINAL BOXTINATION.

And MisterPerson, thinking that shadowlings shouldn't be completely removed is not the same thing as thinking that they need a buff.

[PKPenguin321]

yeah yeah i know slippery slope, i'm just kinda in a shitty mood today
that aside,

Also scale up Slings a little better, right now its like 2 in a 50 person game.

We had this for a while and there were so many slings every round that they would win almost every time. Apparently, the balance of shadowling relies very heavily on the scaling of slings per person.

If you put THAT aside as well, then let me just say that slings being shitty by not hatching and doing retarded shit is a player problem, not a gameplay problem. RIP

[Amelius]

No thanks. All my successful sling rounds are pre-hatch enthralling by cutting comms then using slip + cuff memes. I only transform iff circumstances force me to, or everyone knows I am one.

Also, 2 slings/round is too low. Most sling rounds no one KNOWS it's shadowling until the redtext.

[DaemonBomb]

player problem, not a gameplay problem

Player behavior is very much affected by gameplay. For instance, in Rev, the ease of deimplantation very directly affects how murdery the game mode is. Sure, Revs could operate on people and remove loyalty implants (and with the number of revs there usually are, having a few of them hang out in medbay to remove loyalty implants would be more beneficial than not) but they don't because the gameplay doesn't encourage that.

[onleavedontatme]

They're really boring/frustrating to fight. They have a bunch of buttons that stun you/freeze you/turn off your lights/make them vanish and you cant do anything about it. There isnt an attack to avoid or anything, shit just happens.

On the other hand they seem to be so weak that they cant really do anything afterwards either if more than one person is involved.

I spent 40 minutes chasing a shadowling around maint with a few other assistants, nothing really happened. It felt like the absolute worst aspects of chasing a wizard with none of the action.

[Zilenan91]

Honestly, while I have a huge problem with long stuns/mutes in general, slings kinda get away with it because you can avoid them by just not going into maint alone later on in the round while still contributing to said round. Though for real, the sling stuns are a bit of a problem, but they're easily solved by not going after slings alone. As far as I know, their stun can only stun one dude at a time so your buddy can just drag you away.

However slings do have a huge problem dealing with groups, and it would be great if they had another escape ability/lowered cooldown on their jaunt to compensate, because unless the slings are collectively Xhuis, they just get btfo'd from around a corner with a taser or pneumatic cannon and die.

The way to solve the yakkity is to call the shuttle. Laugh as their few amount of thralls run towards escape and get instantly cut down when people examine them.

[Steelpoint]

The Admin version of Sling had a Armblade in reserve to use in defence.

Problem with Sling is that they lack any actual offensive weapons, their powers are purely defensive or single target stunning, I think having a Armblade will give the Sling some room to manoeuvre in combat.

[PKPenguin321]

player problem, not a gameplay problem

Player behavior is very much affected by gameplay. For instance, in Rev, the ease of deimplantation very directly affects how murdery the game mode is. Sure, Revs could operate on people and remove loyalty implants (and with the number of revs there usually are, having a few of them hang out in medbay to remove loyalty implants would be more beneficial than not) but they don't because the gameplay doesn't encourage that.

have you ever heard the term "railroading"
i feel like whenever we try to fix a player problem via gameplay changes, all we're accomplishing is railroading, which is such a shitty thing to do especially in a game like SS13 that's supposed to be really emergent

[Zilenan91]

The Admin version of Sling had a Armblade in reserve to use in defence.

Problem with Sling is that they lack any actual offensive weapons, their powers are purely defensive or single target stunning, I think having a Armblade will give the Sling some room to manoeuvre in combat.

please no

Slings are entirely designed around converting, with loads of escape abilities, relying on their thralls to do the killing for them. The second we start adding in lethal abilities is the second the mode dies. If we want to stop slings from getting btfo'd then reduce their conversion times slightly or give them more/lessened cooldown on escape abilities.

[Steelpoint]

>the second the mode dies

I was the damn person who initally pushed for this game mode to be on the server, I was the first person to play as the admin spawned custom Changeling who had psudo shadow powers.

The Proto-Shadowlings having armblades gave them a good way to fight off threats, but were not too powerful and groups of armed people were still a threat.

If anything the Proto-Shadowling was more powerful simply because their jaunting had a 15 or 10 second count down and was not restricted to light levels.

But it was also skilled based, as a armblade is not a instant win button.

In fact the Proto-Shadowling had to crit their targets to enthrall them.

[Zilenan91]

What you're describing here is a completely different antag than what we have now, adding an armblade to the new sling would do nothing but make it worse.

[Steelpoint]

What are you on about?

Even if it is a different antag, it still is the progenitor of Shadowling. I still think a form of arm blade works and will work well with Shadowling, but I digress as this is going off topic.

I still reinforce the feedback of removing thralling from non-hatched Slings. Sling does not work well when you can convert people as a Human.

E: Also anything to shit on Amelius (AKA: The Physical Manifestation Of "Slip n Cuff") would bring a smile to me.

[Oldman Robustin]

Kor that round you're describing is what prompted this post.

When you've got 3-4 slings converting early, you get an interesting conflict that has some merits. In the round youre describing the sling was literally 1v50, the other retards got caught before hatching and so the entire crew was hunting a single shaodwling. So of course the shadowling is going to focus on evasion, never commit his presence where he doesn't have an escape route, and generally be a boring evasive motherfucker because he has to survive against the entire crew while being the equivalent of a shitty wizard.

[Oldman Robustin]

This thread is still relevant.

[TechnoAlchemist]

I've had a lot of success with pre hatch thralling especially for developing support for when I have to hatch.

[Amelius]

I've had a lot of success with pre hatch thralling especially for developing support for when I have to hatch.

This. Also you can explain away an attempted abduction as a joke or whatever, possibly serve some time but not get removed so long as they don't know about slings.

I honestly don't think I'd be anywhere near as effective if I had to hatch to enthrall. Not only would be I have no initial power base making me extraordinarily vulnerable, but it increases the number of 'flukelings' that get spotted/die early on while validhunters swarm maint, and the remaining sling is utterly fucked.

[Oldman Robustin]

For every success story you have 99 other attempts where Slings get out'd extremely early because it turns out that loudly abducting someone and then carrying out an action that makes you valid to everything while needing like 30 seconds to channel, is not something the average player should do.

Basic Sling has a very easy stun+mute spell, that's always going to be better for flukelings than stunprodding and hoping nobody comes to investigate while you stare into his eyes.

Plus beating up a human shadowling is super boring, I'd rather chase down a terrible sling in maint for a bit than just pummel some greyshirt and destroy the body.

[Zilenan91]

Then they can git gud. I don't see why we should cater to the lowest common denominator. Also if you don't want to chase a sling just call the shuttle and decon the consoles, problem solved.

[Oldman Robustin]

Then they can git gud. I don't see why we should cater to the lowest common denominator. Also if you don't want to chase a sling just call the shuttle and decon the consoles, problem solved.

When it comes to Shadowlings, 90% of this server is the "lowest common denominator", you have to adapt the game to realities of its players. Pre-hatch thralling is why you have shadowling games where the entire effort against antagonists involved harmbatoning a couple crewmembers who had nothing more than a stunprod or water bottle for self-defense and survival.

Also plz read gud, I said I'd rather chase down a real live shadowling... even a bad one... rather than have my entire antag experience be "I walked in on someone hypotizing a crewmember, I tased them and then beat them to death and now we win.

[Zilenan91]

Then they can git gud.

Challenge is interesting. It's good. It makes players want to be better at the game not only for themselves, but so others don't have shit rounds.

[Amelius]

Here's a solution: give unhatched shadowlings glare.

You still have the unhatched thrall cap (3~ I believe), but you now have a way of muting/stunning people and not having an instant shuttle call.

[Zilenan91]

How about they just get good. Giving unhatched slings glare would make slings literally never want to hatch. It's the sole reason they do it in the first place.

[Helios]

It's hard to get good, when most people have played Shadowling less than they've played Wizard or Blob.

[TechnoAlchemist]

It's hard to get good, when most people have played Shadowling less than they've played Wizard or Blob.

Since shadowlings have no powers pre-hatch, being good at them is just being good at basic game mechanics.

There are also numerous situations through RP and other systems where you can get a guaranteed thrall.

[DaemonBomb]

It's hard to get good, when most people have played Shadowling less than they've played Wizard or Blob.

One, if we're talking pre-hatching, it's literally just being good at the game.
Two, I've never once rolled Wizard OR blob. I've played Sling quite a few times.

[Helios]

It's hard to get good, when most people have played Shadowling less than they've played Wizard or Blob.

One, if we're talking pre-hatching, it's literally just being good at the game.
Two, I've never once rolled Wizard OR blob. I've played Sling quite a few times.

How long have you been playing?
Sling and Gang are "relatively" new game modes.
If you've been playing for years, then you've gotten Wizard and Blob more, simply because they were in the game longer

[Stickymayhem]

Original admin version was like this:

Original shadowlings start hatched with their powers in maint
they are overtly shadowlings from the start, but have all their powers and can go invisible standing still and shit
Conversion was done by husking. The thralls were shadowpeople, so they could just about cover themselves up but on closer inspection are clearly bad guys. They got perfect nightvision/thermals and healed in dark, was harmed in light to a lesser extent that the main dudes.
After a certain number of thralls/darkness/whatever the shadowlings turned into grotesque monsters that could show themselves without immediately being killed, but weren't entirely immortal either.

I think thralls should be obviously shadow people and business should be conducted from maint primarily. At the moment it doesn't feel different enough from rev and it's not spooky. Two random guys drag you into maint, whatever. Two people in full masks and suits not saying anything stepping out, smashing lights and sinking back into the darkness is way spookier. By making them more obviously antags you force them into scarier behaviour naturally.

[Xhuis]

-snip-

If I do this, it will be experimental and influenced by player feedback. The main issue with this is that not everyone has easy access to maintenance.

[Steelpoint]

Access to maint was never a problem as Slings were highly mobile thanks to their quick to recharge Shadowstep (15 ticks).

The thing with modern Sling is that it shares little with the admin version aside from the name. Trying to better emulate the original admin Sling would be a good step.

[Amelius]

They got perfect nightvision/thermals and healed in dark, was harmed in light to a lesser extent that the main dudes.

Speaking of NV, why do core shadowlings get thermals instead of NV thermals?

[Oldman Robustin]

Sticky, we already have a face identification system where thralls can be identified if their face is unmasked. I think its a fair system and when the crew catches on it can lead to paranoia where you get really uneasy around groups of masked people. I think that fits the purpose of the gametype without making it super easy to identify thralls by skin color.

I think one of the design flaws, and I've said this since the beginning, it that Shadowling lacks a "climax" like other conversion gametypes have.

In rev, storming the brig or cargo is the final battle and almost always entertaining.

In gang, you got the dominator which is almost always entertaining.

In cult, going loud with constructs and storming the brig was the final battle and almost always entertaining. Although with conversions made easier and research removed, cult is facing the anti-climax issue too where conversions start to snowball and then the target gets grabbed and nar sie summoned before anyone is even fully aware of the threat. With shuttle escape you typically see a final showdown of some kind though.

With shadowling? You hit magic number #15 and you have no incentive to have your boys hit the brig or anywhere else. Drawing attention is never in your favor so you just continue to sit in science maint converting until you ascend and kill everyone.

There's just no reason to ever go outside of maint as a shadowling. I think it would be very interesting if, in order to ascend, you had to destroy X% of lights aboard the station, but right now I'm waiting to see if my Sling scaling change (tl;dr: more shadowlings) actually results in some ascensions. One idea I really love is that in exchange for having a new lighting requirement to ascend, Shadowlings no longer have a long "channeled" enthrall spell. Rather enthrall will be a very short channeled spell (like 5 seconds) with an appropriately long cooldown. Once the channeling is finished the victim will be stunned but still able to yell once the glare mute has passed. While stunned they will have some obvious visual effect going on above them while another channeling process is underway, if they get dragged off, shaken up, or otherwise disturbed in any way that would disturb regular channeling then the process breaks... but otherwise if the channeling finishes then they are thralled like normal.

This means that thralling would be almost identical to how it is now, the victim must be secluded and guarded, but it frees up the shadowling to continue to do shadowling shit. I know as a successful shadowling, once you get a few decent thralls you pretty much spend your entire time thralling people and it's just not fun when you're "winning as an antag" and your reward is just sitting in a dark corner of maint channeling a spell over and over. The tradeoff for this moderate Sling buff would be the requirement to make sure like 75% of the station is unlit before ascension can occur, which would bring the fight onto the station and have a lot of interesting dynamics at play. My only concern would be that once you've got enough thralls to consider ascending, taking over the station would just be a stomp anyway... but that can be balanced relatively easily.

But regardless of how we can envision improvements to Shadowling, the most fundamental change is that we encourage/force people to actually play the antag and not some half-assed stunprod assistant who gets offed in 5 minutes.

[Amelius]

They got perfect nightvision/thermals and healed in dark, was harmed in light to a lesser extent that the main dudes.

Speaking of NV, why do core shadowlings get thermals instead of NV thermals?

This needs to be changed, it's kind of obnoxious not being able to see doors or equip mesons or whatever. In fact, I'm better with mesons than the flat NV.

[TehSteveo]

I actually felt Shadowlings were more productive when pre-hatching conversions were bugged and thus not possible. It still boiled down to players but it seemed to at least progress somewhat more than it does now.

[Oldman Robustin]

I actually felt Shadowlings were more productive when pre-hatching conversions were bugged and thus not possible. It still boiled down to players but it seemed to at least progress somewhat more than it does now.

I discussed this in my PR, basically pre-hatch thralling is bait for bad players because it's low commitment with the illusion that if you get caught you'll just get a slap on the wrist for kidnapping. It never works out that way and 90% of the pre-hatch thrallkids end up dead before succeeding in a single conversion.

Meanwhile Shadowlings themselves are very newbie friendly once you grasp the basic spell mechanics, but people need to actually HATCH to get better at those.

[Incomptinence]

Holding live conversion targets is probably slowing stuff down too. Maybe husk conversion was better since it could be done to corpses thus not needing to babysit every abducted player and enabling some violent play, use ghost recruitment soulshard stuff if babies chicken out.

[Helios]

If this gets committed, take out implant rejection.