Clockwork Cult (now off of rotation, suggestions go in this thread)

[EagleWiz]

Bottom post of the previous page:

mass conversion is too strong and honestly fucks the game mode.

Remove conversion entirely, give cultists the ability to respawn at the cost of power. Keep marauders for support during the finale.

Boom, saved the game mode right there.

Thats a cool idea, but it would require some massive buffs.

You could keep some of the conversion aspect (but remove the exponential growth problem, where if one or two cultists die early the cult is boned, but if they convert people quickly the cult doubles in power) by replacing cultist brains with a clockwork posibrain-analogue, and having the conversion rune make unimplanted people go braindead and replacing their brain with a posibrain-analogue that the starting cultists can upload their consciousness into on death (or they could have the eminence/other cultists construct golems for that purpose for a cost in power/materials). This would still require some buffs to the finale defenses.

Possible other things
- have one of the later spells download ghosts into the pesudo-converts, but either lock it at the highest level, or restrict them to stay on reebe?
- re-theme the cult into a group of advanced semi-immortal body jumping aliens/humans with a doomsday device that would mindwipe the entire station if it went off so that we move away from the awful magic steampunk theme and back to something more sci-fi
- have the braindead people stored on 2x1 platforms with one way portals to reebe that are on the sides of the cult area and are separated by the white space (and maybe impervious to weapon fire too) so that the crew can easily see their coworkers who were turned into a row of backup bodies when they assault reebe. For that "oh shit" factor.

[ShadowDimentio]

I warned you about conversion Xhuis my dude

New clockcult is just old clockcult but with a space autism fort, where the clocks do nothing for an hour and then steamroll the crew and win. You gotta remove conversion.

[PKPenguin321]

why the FUCK does the finale still take 5 minutes if it's a 50 v 3 in the cult's favor

please fix this

[Xhuis]

As I've said elsewhere, my inspiration for cc has been dried up for quite a while. I've been pretending I could still hop in it whenever I wanted, but I honestly immediately lose motivation whenever I code for it, and have since just after Eminence came out. Coding gamemodes is boring as shit and completely thankless. Not only that, but when it comes to balance, I've always been weak, and similarly dry on ideas. I still think CC's fun and in a playable spot, which is why I've allowed myself to do other things that I enjoy in the meantime, but were the admins to make it admin-only ala devil with how controversial it is right now, I wouldn't whine about it. I'm okay either way, though I still don't want to see it gone completely from code without a legitimate reason.

In short, yes, I know it's got problems. I shit on people who act like children about them, but as people have rightfully pointed out, there are legitimate issues with the mode, and I've never tried to hide that. And while I'd love to fix them and make it more fun, I'm dry on motivation, ideas, and reasons to work on it. It's either I try to fix it and have people scream at me for not doing it perfectly, or I stay out and have them grumble about it plus be able to do things I enjoy. It's an obvious choice! I don't think I should ever have picked cc back up - I think it's better off now than it was when I revamped it, but the tremendous baggage and large target on your chest that comes with maintaining a gamemode is frankly something I don't think I have the maturity to handle long term. I'm way happier working on small projects and additions, especially as I stray away from coding and ss13 as a whole.

[PKPenguin321]

last time there was a round when the clocks converted the entire crew except for 3 people and waited 10 minutes through the headache inducing finale, i put up a vote asking if anybody would mind if i just hard ended the round next time that kind of thing happened and it was overwhelmingly in favor it

needs to be fixed

[Xhuis]

With all due respect, did you even read what I posted in even a minimal amount?

[PKPenguin321]

With all due respect, did you even read what I posted in even a minimal amount?

i know youre tired of it so it wasnt necessarily directed at you. if anybody could touch up the finale and maybe make the time scale i would be happy with it. i am giving feedback on the mode itself not on you, sorry if it comes off that way

[Oldman Robustin]

We just entered a freeze so its pointless to discuss now anyway.

As I've said elsewhere, my inspiration for cc has been dried up for quite a while. I've been pretending I could still hop in it whenever I wanted, but I honestly immediately lose motivation whenever I code for it, and have since just after Eminence came out. Coding gamemodes is boring as shit and completely thankless. Not only that, but when it comes to balance, I've always been weak, and similarly dry on ideas. I still think CC's fun and in a playable spot, which is why I've allowed myself to do other things that I enjoy in the meantime, but were the admins to make it admin-only ala devil with how controversial it is right now, I wouldn't whine about it. I'm okay either way, though I still don't want to see it gone completely from code without a legitimate reason.

In short, yes, I know it's got problems. I shit on people who act like children about them, but as people have rightfully pointed out, there are legitimate issues with the mode, and I've never tried to hide that. And while I'd love to fix them and make it more fun, I'm dry on motivation, ideas, and reasons to work on it. It's either I try to fix it and have people scream at me for not doing it perfectly, or I stay out and have them grumble about it plus be able to do things I enjoy. It's an obvious choice! I don't think I should ever have picked cc back up - I think it's better off now than it was when I revamped it, but the tremendous baggage and large target on your chest that comes with maintaining a gamemode is frankly something I don't think I have the maturity to handle long term. I'm way happier working on small projects and additions, especially as I stray away from coding and ss13 as a whole.

I can definitely relate to you on that. I know I gave you a hard time (you were also pretty defensive about anyone else touching anything) but its because I desperately wanted to see you stick it through and make the necessary changes to keep the mode alive. Since I started playing here in 2012 we've had 0 new mode survive in the long run. I didn't create blood cult, but bringing it back was a goddamn herculean task and even two years later it's still such a huge headache. I think there's a nasty cycle when people only make an effort to lobby about a mode when its got a coder working on it, so the people who make the questionable decision to create a mode will get absolutely dumped on. If Revolution didn't exist and someone coded it up tomorrow, I sincerely doubt it would ever get close to merging but now people barely even bother to discuss it - outside of OOC bitching when we get another 5m round - because they know that nobody is listening. If you experience bad gameplay with Clock Cult and bad gameplay with Wizard, do you visit the customer service desk with a coder working hard to appease everyone or do you visit the desk that's been empty for years and just consists of a room with a dildo tied to a ceiling fan spinning around at face-level?

Best of luck - I wish you'd stick around and keep at it but you're probably making a much saner decision.

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

Despite all its flaws, I have enjoyed Clock Cult quite thoroughly, both as the cultists and as the crew. Yes, there have been a few boring rounds, where one side crushed the other overwhelmingly, but it can be said the same for every round, there are always great rounds and terrible rounds. I am sorry to hear you have gotten burnt out, and I wish you the best in whatever you decide to work on in the future.

[Xhuis]

Honestly, I don't even think it's burnout on SS13 in general. I haven't just up and left the community, and I haven't stopped active work on cc due to being jaded or unhappy. I've just kinda lost motivation to work on the same thing so much. If I were burnt out in general, I wouldn't have made a massive addition in the form of traits. CC just saps my creative energies since the initial phase of "let's see how this mode can be" has worn off and it's now a slog of balancing and sifting the good complaints from an endless sea of bad ones. I just enjoy other things more nowadays.

[Grazyn]

I saw a server poll about clocks last week, how did it end?

[factoryman942]

https://atlantaned.space/statbus/poll.php?id=191

not ended yet but statbus says it's 50/50 roughly

[Armhulen]

https://atlantaned.space/statbus/poll.php?id=191

not ended yet but statbus says it's 50/50 roughly

That's not that bad all things considered

[ShadowDimentio]

https://atlantaned.space/statbus/poll.php?id=191

not ended yet but statbus says it's 50/50 roughly

That's not that bad all things considered

On one hand, it means half the voters hate the mode. On the other, people are retarded about modes and love or hate them pretty much at random.

[factoryman942]

well 50/50 isn't necessarily good unless we have similar results for other gamemodes
we've had some rank-in-order-of-preference polls before, but would you be able to make a multi-choice poll as a sort of "select all the gamemodes you enjoy" or something?

[Armhulen]

I'll make a poll for traitor, a fairly liked mode, and see the results

I'll also do changeling, a fairly disliked mode, and see the results

then we can compare this to what clockcult got

[Armhulen]

And I am really happy with just putting yes or no instead of yeah i kind of like it but...

gives me some numbers i can understand

[Oldman Robustin]

I'll make a poll for traitor, a fairly liked mode, and see the results

I'll also do changeling, a fairly disliked mode, and see the results

then we can compare this to what clockcult got

Please do it for every mode so we can get a sense of where things stand. It doesn't have to be all at once but we're so starved for basic feedback data its ridiculous.

We've only tried to get general mode feedback once before but the methodology was atrocious and made the results all but useless. I think your simple approach of Yes/No to enjoying it will give us a useful baseline for seeing which modes need attention.

[DemonFiren]

so why not do the preference voting thing for all modes as has been said before

[EagleWiz]

so why not do the preference voting thing for all modes as has been said before

Yes/No is less effort, is idiotproof, and the preference voting doesn't tell you which modes people want gone.

[ShadowDimentio]

so why not do the preference voting thing for all modes as has been said before

Because it tells us the most liked/disliked mode, not how many people enjoy them. I might enjoy cult more than ops, but that doesn't mean I want ops gone.

[DemonFiren]

so why not do the preference voting thing for all modes as has been said before

Because it tells us the most liked/disliked mode, not how many people enjoy them. I might enjoy cult more than ops, but that doesn't mean I want ops gone.

uh
i get the feeling you don't know how this kind of vote works but my fever is preventing me from coming up with a good explanation
check back next week

[Bluespace]

cut the time before invasion by half
war should be auto-declared
remove the whole golem thing

congrats u fixed it

[factoryman942]

171 yes / 178 no is final poll result
49% yes

[onleavedontatme]

171 yes / 178 no is final poll result
49% yes

I should make a collage of these 50/50 vote results to post whenever people complain coders dont listen to feedback

[DemonFiren]

they only listen to feedback when it suits them obv

[Stickymayhem]

171 yes / 178 no is final poll result
49% yes

So 51% absolutely fucking hate clock cult and it's ruining ss13 for them and 49% can just about tolerate it.

[factoryman942]

no, sticky
the poll is "do you enjoy clock cult", not "do you not completely hate clock cult".
for all we know, the 49% absolutely adore the gamemode, and most of the 51% are simply apathetic towards it. We don't really have a "baseline enjoyment" statistic for these.

[DemonFiren]

another reason preference lists are preferrable

[Dr_bee]

The game mode is saveable. The concept of fighting guerillas while preparing to raid a base is an interesting and unique idea for a game mode. Right now it is just muddled from its roots as a blood cult clone.

Hopefully someone will take over for Xhuis as I think the mode can be great if a little extra work is put into it to remove conversion and keep it balanced.

In the mean time it probably should be made admin-only until someone tries to fix the mass conversion issue.

[Dr_bee]

another reason preference lists are preferrable

Use a Likert scale. it helps you understand exactly the level of enjoyment or hate people are getting. Just dont add a "undecided" option, as that is a cop out choice that leads to piss poor data.

[Xhuis]

Likert scale sounds good to me, especially because with a roughly 50/50 result like now people from either side are going to be arguing that the other side isn't in significant enough of a majority/minority to warrant its removal. As stated before, admin-only due to its controversy if the polls are fairly negative sounds fine to me. I'd still like to make it more fun myself, but everything I've tried has failed, so I feel like I'm out of options at this point. I can come up with ideas, but they're sapping to work on and if they fail it's just more wasted effort.

[Stickymayhem]

no, sticky
the poll is "do you enjoy clock cult", not "do you not completely hate clock cult".
for all we know, the 49% absolutely adore the gamemode, and most of the 51% are simply apathetic towards it. We don't really have a "baseline enjoyment" statistic for these.

yes that is the joke I was making

[Armhulen]

so why not do the preference voting thing for all modes as has been said before

Because it tells us the most liked/disliked mode, not how many people enjoy them. I might enjoy cult more than ops, but that doesn't mean I want ops gone.

omg dude

[Xhuis]

[Yakumo_Chen]

Clock Cult continues to be the most boring mode for AI, getting an entire ~10 minute span at the end where I get to do nothing but watch people jump in portals and only maybe come out.

[Oldman Robustin]

Likert Scale or Yes/No

But for the love of god lets get some polls going for all the modes so we can get some real data in here.

Even 50/50 doesn't say much until we see other polls with the same parameters.

Between that and Statbus being offline/broken I feel like we're only regressing in terms of our ability to make informed decisions.

[LifeReign]

To be honest, clock cult was seriously flawed from the very start. It was supposed to be a defense-orientated conversion antag, which is just silly when you think about it. Conversion works best with aggressively grabbing converts to steamroll security under the sheer weight of the tide. Meanwhile static defenses are extremely easy to destroy in SS13, unless you cripple all explosive/mech/BoH construction capability, which again is an aggressive tactic. Moving the Ark off-station was supposed to give the clocks time to construct defenses, but we all know what happens instead.

Maybe it would've been best to have clock cultists spawn on station as normal crew, but have the opportunity to permanently abscond to Reebe to construct defenses.

[Xhuis]

I don't see any inherent flaws in the design, the concept just can't work with tg and I probably should've let joancult eventually get removed instead of making it fun again for a month or so

[Shadowflame909]

I guess you just need some sort of player gate. Xhuis, make something that'll prevent either side from getting too strong. So we can have a fair war.

[Dr_bee]

I guess you just need some sort of player gate. Xhuis, make something that'll prevent either side from getting too strong. So we can have a fair war.

Like just starting with a certain amount of cultists with an ability to respawn with an energy cost?

the thing that Ive been suggesting for weeks.

Remove the kidnapping aspect from clock cult and you have 40 minutes of stealthy sabotage and stealing then a big fight with the crew having a numbers advantage and the cult having the defenses.

the focus was put too much on keeping conversion. ditch that and the mode can become its own thing with the focus being on the building and defense.

[Shadowflame909]

Yeah, what if clock cult wasn't a conversion mode? But instead, the opposite. It'd actually bring more into the ratvar versus nar'sie perspective.

[DemonFiren]

what's the opposite of a conversion mode?
a mode where the cult is stronger the more non-cultists are alive?

[Not-Dorsidarf]

what's the opposite of a conversion mode?
a mode where the cult is stronger the more non-cultists are alive?

thats actually pretty interesting, gives the antags more reason to not go on a slaughtering spree and means that if they do, the actions of the last few crew have more impact

[DemonFiren]

let cuck cult tag crew as living batteries for ratvar energy or some shit
if these crew die the cult loses juice
then make power matter if it still doesn't

or do something else I don't know

[Grazyn]

Or just let cock cult day like it should have years ago

[Bombadil]

Saw an incredible setup by clock cultists they made the portal room into an instant kill chamber using 4 watchers as you couldn't break into the place fast enough to not get killed. Balanced

[Xeroxemnas]

Main problem with clockwork cult is that, similar to the current blood cult, a robust group of roundstart cultists is literally impossible to stop and they convert people way too easily. Blood cult is frankly even more OP in the sense that they turn implanted people into constructs so even implants wont save you from them. Conversion antags in general tend to be the most OP for obvious reasons and unless you powergame roundstart to stop them you are utterly screwed.

[Xhuis]

since my words are for the most part falling on deaf ears and the freeze prevents me from doing it myself, could I formally request one of the headmins to cut this from the rotation until either a. I have the motivation to work on it again or b. someone else picks up the mantle? I still maintain that the mode is feasible and worth salvaging but I'm sick of and fed up with all the shit people dump on me for the crime of existing and with an admin now losing his position because he was too childish not to restrain himself to blow up a round he didn't like I don't want to be associated with the cause of it for any longer.

[BeeSting12]

say what you want about me but im not childish. everyone was thankful for the rounds ending

[Xhuis]

say what you want about me but im not childish

given your demeanor, uncaringness, and willingness to sacrifice months of working to be an admin just to end a single round, I respectfully disagree