/tg/Station 13

I was told by Arm to make a thread to discuss the current standing issues with Space Dragon, as apparently, it has recently struck a lot of nerves. What I'm currently getting out of the small cuts of discussion I've seen is:

- Dragon is too hard to take down, likely stemming from the fact that as of the original rework, a lot of the crew's previously-owned tools for handling something like SD have been removed, such as shotguns.

- Carp spawns are extremely abusable when mixed with metagaming, leading to some rather unsavory interactions with them and crew participants in the round.

- SD can use locations such as the AI satellite as rift locations, creating extremely one-sided areas for fights against the crew

I'm sure there's a good deal more to discuss, so I want to hear some well-explained commentary on this. I'm more than willing to make changes so that we can keep SD without it being awful, and hopefully make it fun. Even if you have no thoughts persay of your own, just some reaffirmation of whether the issues listed above are what's on everyone's mind would also be helpful.

Space dragon is interesting to me because if the Space Dragon is really dominating, most dead players can join in on the fun by spawning as carps (which also stops the round from dragging on too long- they help the winner win). It's a dynamic that you don't really see with other antags, and I like it a lot.

My only problem with space dragons (that comes to mind anyway, I've only played dragon once and the server crashed) have been that the carps will, wave after wave, just suicide bomb with welding tanks and blow up massive areas, then respawn and do it again.

Jaredfogle wrote:My only problem with space dragons (that comes to mind anyway, I've only played dragon once and the server crashed) have been that the carps will, wave after wave, just suicide bomb with welding tanks and blow up massive areas, then respawn and do it again.

I could see a few possible solutions for this:

- Prevent carps from attacking welding tanks, on grounds that the mob IC isn't willing to kill itself to do it. Give a little flavor text in chat to reaffirm why this happens

- Add a respawn timer before a player can accept a carp position again, perhaps make it start as soon as the carp spawns, meaning that if you spend your life well and live for a while you can respawn pretty quickly compared to just suicide bombing. Alternatively, allow a ghost to spawn from every rift only one time until SD succeeds in the objective (when infinite carp spawns happen)

- Reduce carp spawns overall, making each individual more valuable

Indie-ana Jones wrote:I was told by Arm to make a thread to discuss the current standing issues with Space Dragon, as apparently, it has recently struck a lot of nerves. What I'm currently getting out of the small cuts of discussion I've seen is:

- Dragon is too hard to take down, likely stemming from the fact that as of the original rework, a lot of the crew's previously-owned tools for handling something like SD have been removed, such as shotguns.

- Carp spawns are extremely abusable when mixed with metagaming, leading to some rather unsavory interactions with them and crew participants in the round.

- SD can use locations such as the AI satellite as rift locations, creating extremely one-sided areas for fights against the crew

I'm sure there's a good deal more to discuss, so I want to hear some well-explained commentary on this. I'm more than willing to make changes so that we can keep SD without it being awful, and hopefully make it fun. Even if you have no thoughts persay of your own, just some reaffirmation of whether the issues listed above are what's on everyone's mind would also be helpful.

I like space dragon, rounds I've seen play out like it's an actual threat, and fighting it feels properly scary. Ya did good

Indie-ana Jones wrote: - Prevent carps from attacking welding tanks, on grounds that the mob IC isn't willing to kill itself to do it. Give a little flavor text in chat to reaffirm why this happens

This is papering over the real issue to me of carps having no reason to want to live. By doing this, we're just kicking the can to later down the road for when they find other ways to cause damage, knowing they can jump right back in later,

Indie-ana Jones wrote: - Add a respawn timer before a player can accept a carp position again, perhaps make it start as soon as the carp spawns, meaning that if you spend your life well and live for a while you can respawn pretty quickly compared to just suicide bombing. Alternatively, allow a ghost to spawn from every rift only one time until SD succeeds in the objective (when infinite carp spawns happen)

- Reduce carp spawns overall, making each individual more valuable

These are both more favorable to me.

Today, i killed two carps at the entrance to atmos which left me with red health, then like 15 seconds later, a carp with the same ckey as one of the ones i killed shows up and kills me before i can treat my wounds.

This was a very bad experience for me.


I think maybe a short respawn cooldown after death might alleviate metagaming.

Maybe this could be combined with a mechanic that lets carps grow into a beefier carp if they consume enough meat, this would offset the previously mentioned nerf slightly and make players care more about dying.

Fighting (almost) infinitely re-spawning players with perfect meta-knowledge that they're allowed to use is unfun. Same goes for spiders too.

Oh yeah also fighting a bit beefy simplemob that can't be stunned and is difficult to outmaneuver is also unfun. There's no strategy besides "do I try to flank its portal or do I try to maintain distance and pepper it".

mrmelbert wrote:Fighting (almost) infinitely re-spawning players with perfect meta-knowledge that they're allowed to use is unfun. Same goes for spiders too.

Oh yeah also fighting a bit beefy simplemob that can't be stunned and is difficult to outmaneuver is also unfun. There's no strategy besides "do I try to flank its portal or do I try to maintain distance and pepper it".

First thing was already discussed, but I can enable the simplemob stamina system on SD as well, letting security use their stamina damage weapons on it to some effect. Could open up more potential counterplay as well.

Indie-ana Jones wrote:I was told by Arm to make a thread to discuss the current standing issues with Space Dragon, as apparently, it has recently struck a lot of nerves

One round on Sybil I experienced I am sexy killing everyone with it and then later on the forum I saw him calling it overpowered in this thread apparently due to a lack of buckshot and the fact they can't be stunned (actually I think he said the latter in OOC but whatever).

It makes me wonder if what prompted this thread is simply that deus sex used the role to ruin rounds and believes it needs to be nerfed as his vision of the game is murderbone proofing everything from himself. Not that I don't think it's stupidly overpowered at the moment. The muscular S blows on you and you get stunlocked by fire stacks while the fish finish you off.

And of course that thread was killed by oranges who had to exercise power over the movement such as it was and express a contrary opinion despite not playing so the opinion being almost worthless although it did seem like a "give me back my gamer gear it would be good for you because it would return counterplay for this bullshit that could just be nerfed in other ways" thread.

Anyway, adding a timer and/or spawn limit to carp spawns and opening the space dragon up to stamina damage are definitely steps in the right direction.

TheFinalPotato wrote: I like space dragon, rounds I've seen play out like it's an actual threat, and fighting it feels properly scary. Ya did good

Why would you want the round to devolve into everyone sitting out unless they're playing carp and dogpiling the remaining survivors? If the round could just return to normal after that sure but how the fuck would that happen without cloning and the medical system in its current state (slow, fiddly, tiring, easily swamped)? Everybody just has to sit out until the round ends while a minority of people have some semblence of fun at the expense of anyone remaining. It's stupid as fuck.

only 1 paragraph in your post is not just shit talking a specific person, please leave constructive feedback for the op asking for it

Cacogen wrote:

TheFinalPotato wrote: I like space dragon, rounds I've seen play out like it's an actual threat, and fighting it feels properly scary. Ya did good

Why would you want the round to devolve into everyone sitting out unless they're playing carp and dogpiling the remaining survivors? If the round could just return to normal after that sure but how the fuck would that happen without cloning and the medical system in its current state (slow, fiddly, tiring, easily swamped)? Everybody just has to sit out until the round ends while a minority of people have some semblence of fun at the expense of anyone remaining. It's stupid as fuck.

It might be a bit strong right now, but I'm a big fan of chaos devolution, especially since ghosts can become carps. Round shouldn't return to normal after all that, if it goes well it makes for an amazing ending. Maybe a bit too strong, but I really like what I've seen of it.

Jaredfogle wrote:only 1 paragraph in your post is not just shit talking a specific person, please leave constructive feedback for the op asking for it

There's more to those paragraphs than just criticising people.

1. Why is this suddenly an issue? imsxz murderbonering with it?
2. If imsxz prompted the discussion then his creating the problem by murderbonering with it is relevant even if his criticism is accurate
3. oranges killed a valid feedback thread, which is relevant here because it describes potential counterplay to the space dragon
4. Reducing carp spawns is actually a good idea!
5. How is anything good about the space dragon at the moment, it takes up a bunch of time while most players have to observe and leads to the round being unsalvageable. All it does is remove people from the round.

Dragon feels either too common for what can easily (apparently, since a 60 hour player wiped a station) end a round, or too strong for what it is as a midround antag.
RNG is RNG but when you get 5 out of 7 rounds ending because of a dragon appearing and wiping everyone who could do anything, you start to get tired of it.

The sheer destructive power of the dragon is immense, especially against people who simply *aren't* sec or people who have fnr powergamed superweapons in order to fight a dragon. They'll fly faster than you, roast and toast you, and bite you to death if you're lucky, and if you're unlucky you'll burn for a bit before a carp slaps you twice and you slowly die from oxyloss on the floor.

I'm mad online, but it really feels too damn strong at the moment for something as common as it is

Most issues were introduced or reinforced from your buff PR a few months back. Until then it was at a fairly decent point where it was pretty evenly balanced power wise.

Haven’t read any of the posts other than the title so I’m sorry if I’m repeating information. I’ve seen space dragon a bunch recently, and personally played as it twice, mainly on medium to highpop sybil, so that’s what I’m basing my views off. I don’t remember the specifics, but I won both of my dragon rounds without feeling like I was close to dying ever, and I think most of the other dragon rounds were wins too except for a couple.

IMO dragon being too tough to kill is more of an issue with anything that resists stunning currently - the lethal options for security are shit at the moment. That said, I definitely think a good change to the dragon would be limiting the amount of corpses it can eat in a short period of time, and or make it so it can’t eat its own carp. It’s very easy to heal to full if you ever have a few seconds to spare.

An issue I personally have when playing against space dragon is that I tune out most of the centcom reports in chat unless they have a unique audio cue(I.e. level 5 biohazard, unidentified life signs) and generally sometimes don’t even know about the dragon until I see it or a carp or look at radio messages(I don’t do that a lot either). This is pretty much me being neglectful but I can’t imagine I’m the only one late to realize that there’s a dragon.

If issues persist, I’d suggest turning the dragons fire breath into a less spammy ability, maybe with a wider spread of fire and longer cooldown or something, it’s not very punishing to miss at all but has a pretty high reward on hit unless the victim immediately extinguishes it while running away. The projectile also does 20 burn damage(I think) if it passes through you which is worth noting. Again, this is mainly a suggestion for if other tweaks aren’t effective.

I wish that events like space dragon gave admins more than 10 seconds to cancel it.

Totally agree with a lot of the spawn fish issues and probably solutions by blocking welding tank detonation and adding a spawning cool down. Most dragon waves result in a small number of players respawning ASAP and rushing the same spot over and over again. The welding tank approach is mostly a continuation of that mentality ; to throw yourself at the enemy causing as much damage as possible because you can just click respawn and do it over and over again without any real penalty.

Strongly dislike the current way many dragon/carp events play out as a result - for no reason to do with the dragon (don't generally go fight it myself), just the way the spawner works. Some ghost info meta gaming too (fish that happen to know where the AI is, hidden in a wall somewhere, seen that. Just really seems to attract poor play. What does a space fish even "know" of welding fuel?

Some possible ideas (some original, some not) that I think might help in various combinations:

• Ramping personal respawn time based on how many carp you have incarnated as, if that's possible. The more you suicide attack or whatever, the more carp spawns go to people who deserve them.
• Have the rift's growth rate scale with how many carp already exist, perhaps? Or make it take a penalty to its current growth when a fish dies. Something so that big suicide attacks are penalized.
• Make the dragon able to die from literally anything other than getting caught out by a Shaft Miner with ten metric tonnes of Gamer Gear. If there's another way Space Dragons can be seriously threatened, I haven't seen it.
• Welder bombing fuck off.
• Sound indicator of a dragon spawn
• More clear communication of rift mechanics to all players?

Before anything else, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who provided feedback in the thread. I wasn't expecting much personally, so to see this much feedback in only less than a day's time is really great. Now, I have a list of some planned changes as well, which I'll post here so you have an idea of what I'll be doing to resolve the issues.

- Space Dragon max health reduced to 350 from 400
- Space Dragon now only gains 25% of the max health of the victim when consuming them, decreased from 50%
- Space Dragon now takes 50% of stamina damage inflicted as opposed to 0%. While he can't be stunned, damaging his stamina slows him down a considerable amount.
- Each rift can now only spawn 6 carp as opposed to 11 carp (one at initial spawn, and one every minute while the rift charges), for a total of 18 possible carp as opposed to 33. If SD charges all the rifts fully, infinite carp will still be capable of spawning.
- Players cannot accept a carp spawn from an individual rift if they have already done so, unless there is 2 or 3 (still considering the value) carp spawn charges on the portal. This removes an individual taking all the carp spawns, but allows them to still use the charges if a buildup of them occurs (in cases where say, there's only one ghost). This restriction is lifted once SD completes its objective.
- Space Dragon can no longer use the AI Sattelite as rift locations.

I think these changes should make the system much more healthy, but I'm still interested in feedback, so let me know what you think.

yeah, you should delete it

Indie-ana Jones wrote: - Players cannot accept a carp spawn from an individual rift if they have already done so, unless there is 2 or 3 (still considering the value) carp spawn charges on the portal. This removes an individual taking all the carp spawns, but allows them to still use the charges if a buildup of them occurs (in cases where say, there's only one ghost). This restriction is lifted once SD completes its objective.
- Space Dragon can no longer use the AI Satellite as rift locations.

Does this mean that a rift with few ghosts can get "stuck," unable to spawn its last few carp because of a lack of ghosts? Say, players A, B, and C each take spawns 1, 2, 3, and then A repeats and now B maybe can and then C can't?

Some weird miscellaneous stuff:

How will Z-levels affect its spawns? Looking specifically at stuff like IceBox's xenobio maint, Tram's weird ULTRA-narrow back areas of the first level, etc.

On IceBox, does the Dragon have the same fall-through-floors problem that carp do, despite their apparent flying? Is that intended behavior?

Is there any reason for the space dragon not to take over xenobio or virology first every time other than the lack of easily available welder bombs/wanting to save one of those for a later rift?

Pandarsenic wrote:

Indie-ana Jones wrote: - Players cannot accept a carp spawn from an individual rift if they have already done so, unless there is 2 or 3 (still considering the value) carp spawn charges on the portal. This removes an individual taking all the carp spawns, but allows them to still use the charges if a buildup of them occurs (in cases where say, there's only one ghost). This restriction is lifted once SD completes its objective.
- Space Dragon can no longer use the AI Satellite as rift locations.

Does this mean that a rift with few ghosts can get "stuck," unable to spawn its last few carp because of a lack of ghosts? Say, players A, B, and C each take spawns 1, 2, 3, and then A repeats and now B maybe can and then C can't?

Some weird miscellaneous stuff:

How will Z-levels affect its spawns? Looking specifically at stuff like IceBox's xenobio maint, Tram's weird ULTRA-narrow back areas of the first level, etc.

On IceBox, does the Dragon have the same fall-through-floors problem that carp do, despite their apparent flying? Is that intended behavior?

Is there any reason for the space dragon not to take over xenobio or virology first every time other than the lack of easily available welder bombs/wanting to save one of those for a later rift?

- If there's advantageous parts of the map such as those, there's not much I can do to police them all. AI Sat just consistently happens to be quite the shitburger, and is thus easy to solo out for blacklisting.

- No and no

- Metastation's xenobio is the only one that strikes me as extremely advantageous, and the rift can be damaged by lasers, so having windows which allow the rift to be shot from the outside make it a bad choice of location for a rift.

PR is up: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/60259

imsxz wrote:IMO dragon being too tough to kill is more of an issue with anything that resists stunning currently - the lethal options for security are shit at the moment.

Gee, I wonder what could have caused this.

clearly the answer is to power creep everything instead of solving the minimal cases

Really, the nerf was unnecesary. All you need is COMPETENT PEOPLE to kill dragon. Or one idiot suicide bombing rift with maxcap. Dragon cant do shit about that. Except maybe bodyblocking the dude. But maxcaps hurt and you aren't always in on a way route

adamkad1 wrote:All you need is COMPETENT PEOPLE to kill dragon.

Yeah but that's not a reasonable requirement on Sybil I'm not super into "Dragons win by having waves of suicide welder-bomb carp, but the crew can win by pushing back with a suicide maxcap," as far as how the round plays out.

Pandarsenic wrote:

adamkad1 wrote:All you need is COMPETENT PEOPLE to kill dragon.

Yeah but that's not a reasonable requirement on Sybil I'm not super into "Dragons win by having waves of suicide welder-bomb carp, but the crew can win by pushing back with a suicide maxcap," as far as how the round plays out.

Yeah me neither

skill issue

The problem with space carp is their only use in direct combat is their numbers and even then they suck at helping the space dragon/eachother because they cant even bodyblock crewmembers.

Having less carp spawn is just going to force carp to avoid fighting all together and focus on sabotaging the station by breaking apcs, external windows, the sm cooling loop, etc. Because thats the only way they can pitch in and help without wasting their life.

Not everyone who dies takes a carp too. Some people are just content to watch, and that nerf to people respawning just gonna dry up the pool of carps sooner than before

Yeah lasers suck but we can just make improv shells until coders realize that buckshot isn't OP at all and security autorifles are already just as good if not better, except if you're like 1 tile away from the threat, at which point you can just be batonged by humans anyways.

Improv shell shotties fuck up space dragons pretty well, just carry a fire extinguisher and use bootknife for the little carp mosquitos that distract you from the dragon. I've never considered them OP in my experience as sec. But improv shells are annoying to make and there's not really a good reason to not have buckshot at that point. Also making lasers do more damage would be a terrible balance issue and not a good solution to this, if that was ever in the air, because lasers travel an infinite distance and go through windows which scatter ballistics don't.