/tg/Station 13

So apparently some people got problems with these wizard spells. I'd not heard of anything about this until tonight, but hey.

If anyone's got a balance issue on my wizbiz your free to point it out to me here or try your own fix in code yourself. I don't have a codebaby mentality on this stuff, you don't gotta be afraid of me snapping at you for touching it unless you outright try to scrub it from existence without canvasing for ideas on how to salvage it first. If you'd prefer to talk on Github, create an issue report with your grievances / suggestions. If you'd prefer to talk to me privately on the matter, send me a PM on the forums. I am not on coderbus regularly, and will generally not show up there unless specifically asked to. We do not talk on that level, if you have said something to them about this I have not heard it. Drama is bad and I avoid it like the plague.

That said:

Summon Events x5 is a clusterfuck, it is designed to be a clusterfuck. If you really hate the clusterfuck we can put a cap on the number of times it can be cast, or the rate at which it improves with each casting can be pulled back. If a wizard sacrifices EVERYTHING for the shenanigans I expect the shenanigans to be intense, and intense they are!

Make summon events capped at once a round.

Summon events are fun in small doses

En masse summons is just dumb.

I had a fantastic time that round personally.

I'm convinced anyone who hates the clusterfuck spells must not remember what wizard was like before completely retarded shit got added to it.

Do we really want to go back to magic missile ei nath?

No roleplay/real station projects are possible during a wizard round anyway, so better that 60 people have fun in a clusterfuck than one guy have fun while the other 59 run in circles getting murdered

I'm gonna explain what I suspect what some of the more controversial summon events are and my feelings on them currently:

Departmental Uprising
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Departmental uprising is when a random department get objectiveless antag (Not survive until the end) and are intended to play as if they were playing nations.

It doesn't work in a summon events multicast situation because things get too hectic for the department to maintain any sort of cohesion and also many members of the department may have become antagonists in some other way and will just actively fuck over everybody.

It's a fun idea in a vacuum, it just doesn't play nice with a lot of other things that happen in summon events. I am not too attached to it.


Summon Guns/Summon Magic
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Summon guns and magic can be cast for free by summon events, only once each though. This is a very very rare chance to occur, but is apt to occur eventually as the pool is depleted if the rate of events is cranked up.

The summons work a little different when cast this way. For one the wizard gets an item too, but doesn't get an extra charge for his spellbook. Also there's a chance for survivors to appear during this. The survivor mechanic is identical to how it used to work for wizards, everyone gets a flat 25% chance at gaining antag, with no upper or lower bounds to the number of antags created this way.

I know survivors make some people hot and bothered, but I think it adds a lot of flavor to a round even if it is a headache. I can easily crank down the percentage chance for survivor creation to any number you like. I'd personally prefer there was still a vague risk for it at least though.


The Floor Is LAVA
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A big ugly proc converts all the station floors to lava, which over a period of time will do a big (but not enough to go from full to to crit) chunk of fire damage UNLESS you get on top of a structure like a table or chair.

I love this stupid ass event. I love how old it is, how tragically coded it is and it's beleaguered existence over the years. I will fight hard to keep this wacky horseshit in summon events. If people think the damage is too intense or that an announcement should be made to tell people to get on something, I'd call that fair.

Also on the summon magic front all I gotta say is that I see absolutely nothing wrong with what's available.

In summon magic death usually becomes exceptionally cheap thanks to a staff of healing coming into play. I actually personally rank the wand of death as one of the worst wands to get in summon magic specifically because it only generates with 1 to 3 very miss-able shots. It is hard countered by a staff that has the dual benefits of both being easier to aim (cause the dead don't usually move) and infinitely reusable. The dead just WON'T stay dead so long as anyone is on the ball with that staff.

Wand of polymorph is a bit trickier, but your odds of getting stuck with something weak are actually worse than you'd think. There's only a 1:6 chance of turning into a simple animal in any given shot, and beyond that you still have to fail another coinflip to not turn into something fully capable of attacking people. RNG is a bitch but I wouldn't have it any other way, occasionally you just gonna get fucked over by it. Wizards can guard against this with mindswap, unfortunate crewmembers should probably just try to enjoy the unique experience. One of my favorite recent wizard rounds ended up with me as a walking mushroom, chomping at peoples ankles as I vent crawled around with the entire station in hot pursuit.

Summon events have been a positive change to the wizard, for me. The occasional hectic round, where everyone has two spells and three guns, runs hilariously.

Adds a poll for the sake of adding a poll. This is not any sort of "binding" poll, I'm just curious where the ire is actually being directed and in what intensity.

The only unfun thing i've seen is the random mass mindswap and shit like that from summon events. Heard it got removed but I just haven't seen a wizard actually use summon events in a long time.

Saegrimr wrote:The only unfun thing i've seen is the random mass mindswap and shit like that from summon events. Heard it got removed but I just haven't seen a wizard actually use summon events in a long time.

Mass mindswap tends to reverse its swaps after a little while, so usually the damage isn't permanent, more disorientating. Also it doesn't effect the wizard and is a rare thing to happen to begin with.

Also yeah valid point brought up there, it's not like summon events x5 happens much, I've seen it twice in my time here, and one of those times I was the wizard

It's not like the old days when everyone would pick summon magic x5 every other wizard round.

Mass mindswap reverses? I've had it happen twice and had no reversing, but I'll trust you on that. I do enjoy it, though, it's interesting being forced into someone else's round.

The event I don't like is the DnD descriptions on items. Everything becomes the x item of +y. It's only novel once and after that extremely cluttering, at least for me.

Some folks claim to enjoy these but from a gameplay perspective they're all terrible and ICly most of them don't even make sense. Not sure what gives a wizard the ability to turn others into traitors or distribute magic spells and equipment amongst the crew. Seems like it goes against the notion that the Wizard Federation is a secretive group.

An event wizard round plays like babby's first badmin round. And we would likely deadmin anyone who got on the server and pushed summon guns five times or whatever just to see what happened. Not sure why we have an antagonist that is able to do the same thing without a care.

If you like to just watch the station burn and nobody able to do anything or make sense of things you'll like these. If you show up looking for a game that is actually coherent in any way you've lucked out.
I think it'd be better (and faster) to just have a highlander round or some other event than an event wizard.

Cheimon wrote:Mass mindswap reverses? I've had it happen twice and had no reversing, but I'll trust you on that. I do enjoy it, though, it's interesting being forced into someone else's round.

The event I don't like is the DnD descriptions on items. Everything becomes the x item of +y. It's only novel once and after that extremely cluttering, at least for me.

It tends to, Not always. Honestly I didn't design it that way, it's just something I've noticed and didn't mind.

The items becoming cluttering and overcomplicated is entirely the point. Remember this stuff IS supposed to be helping the wizard.

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For information about summon events odds you can get a mostly accurate picture from the initial pull: https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/4521

All that's really changed is fake explosion was removed and RPG items (the ones that give wacky names to everything) was added as an uncommon level event. Keep in mind that events are removed after they occur a specific number of times (varies with event), so the odds of any one event occuring become better as time goes by and other events are exhausted.

The summon events currently supports 56 individual events before running out of things to call (at which point it starts pulling normal events and everyone realizes how biased to anomalies event code is. At summon events x1 an event will run every 1 to 5 minutes (so every 3 minutes over an average). This means that the event ticker will be "magic" for (on average) 2 hours and 48 minutes from the time of initial casting (56 minutes at fastest, 4 hours and 40 minutes at slowest). Obviously this covers the grand majority of wizard rounds in terms of round length and most wizards won't see everything summon events can do in a given round.

Unless they take it multiple times:

Every time summon event is taken the upper limit on event occurrence is reduced by 40% and the lower limit is reduced by 20%. This makes events both more "predictable" and faster.

Summon events x1: an event every 1 to 5 minutes (average 3 minutes) running for 2 hours 48 minutes (on average)
" " x2: an event every 48 seconds to 3 minutes (average 1 minute 54 seconds) running for 1 hour 46 minutes (on average)
" " x5: an event every 25 to 39 seconds (average 32 seconds) running for 30 minutes (on average)
" " x7: an event every 15 seconds running for 14 minutes

An0n3 wrote:Some folks claim to enjoy these but from a gameplay perspective they're all terrible and ICly most of them don't even make sense. Not sure what gives a wizard the ability to turn others into traitors or distribute magic spells and equipment amongst the crew.

It's Magic

The main issue with Summon Events is that the events stay after the round has been mulliganned into a "normal" round.

Miauw wrote:The main issue with Summon Events is that the events stay after the round has been mulliganned into a "normal" round.

I could tie it ending when the round mulligans dead pretty painlessly if that's really a problem for people.

An0n3 wrote: And we would likely deadmin anyone who got on the server and pushed summon guns five times or whatever just to see what happened. Not sure why we have an antagonist that is able to do the same thing without a care.

We'd probably deadmin anyone who spawned a mech and rampaged or set the whole station on fire as well but we have game modes where the antags often do just that.

Baby's first badmin lets more people do things than sit around waiting to die vs an overpowered murderboner.

I thought the whole point of the Wizard's Federation was "Cause Why Not"? They're all about chaos and destruction and Summon Magic spells seem right up that alley.

Steelpoint wrote:I thought the whole point of the Wizard's Federation was "Cause Why Not"? They're all about chaos and destruction and Summon Magic spells seem right up that alley.

I was literally just about to post that

In the big mental design doc for wizards I store safely in my head there are two big overarching phrases written at the top of the page.

The first one is written neatly in a very professional font:

"The wizard should desire to be interesting/funny/clever over being worried about getting as strong as possible. This is not something that should be forced onto wizard, its something wizards should be tempted into becoming."

The second one is just the word "SHENANIGANS" shakily written in oversized monolithic flaming letters across the entire length of the page.

I'm literally like 99.99% sure that's the original inspiration for/based off of the Summon Guns spell, steelpoint, since the file for summon guns/magic is 'rightandwrong.dm'

I don't really find the results of "Summon events" fun, too much random stuff with not much meaningful player interaction, it makes me lose interest in the round.

i'm okay with wizards doing anything so long as it's not magic missile ei nath

The problem comes in that every wizard does it. They don't even try for the objectives. Not to mention spells are hardly used besides magic missile.

Mass mindswap is dumb as fuck. Lava is dumb as fuck. Cursed items are dumb as fuck. Guns have always been dumb as fuck. Add more spells, stop with this lazy summon shit.

Add more possible events imo

I wish the dang stat page worked because unless it's different on badger I really DON'T see many wizards take it.

Badger has a habit of being the more creative of the two servers.

We also never EVER have enough people ready up get anything but tatorchan

How about this?

Here's what the time between events currently looks like for summon events


and here's a proposed version


As you can see the maximum time is linear depending on the number of castings, and the minimum time is always a minute. This allows for summon events to be improved but for it never to become "better" in terms of how often it fires, just a "luckier" version of the base chance.

That seems like a pretty good solution. The problem with Summon Events doesn't seem to be the events themselves so much, just that when you stack casts it turns into saturated madness and carnage.

I'd think it would be better to just cap the normal to 2-3 casts of it.

Wait wait wait, I thought we had it that you could only use one Summon event each in exchange for one additional spell power AND that no antags are created?

Unless that got changed, I have not been a Wiz for a while.

Steelpoint wrote:Wait wait wait, I thought we had it that you could only use one Summon event each in exchange for one additional spell power AND that no antags are created?

Unless that got changed, I have not been a Wiz for a while.

The summon magic/guns found as "the grand prize" of summon events functions similarly to classic summon magic/guns because it doesn't grant the wizard a spell point. I explained this earlier in greater detail.

Honestly I hate summon spam rounds, and I can only imagine how shit it must be for admins. The amount of dickery only compounds now that we have mulligan.
Unless summon events eventually causes highlander, making everyone antag. Then it would be ok/10.

A list of things that are going to be in the pull request:

Summon Events turns off when the round mulligans
Summon Events time between events for multicast gets tweaked to be less nuts (see https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 567#p76516 )
Departmental Uprising gets retired for being an event that requires order in a world of chaos
Summon Guns/Magic through summon events gets a survivor chance nerf (thinking 25% --> 10%)

I think that's pretty much everything given what people have said in this thread, I'm holding off for like another day just in case anyone else has big issues though.

Amusingly, for the first month or so when MAGIC MANIA hit we constantly got ahelps of "Really admins? Can you stop fucking around?"

Its not that bad on the administrative side, we see every event that fires. The shit we have to deal with is every time a polymorph wand drops somewhere, that idiot thinks its a free pass to go turning everybody into xenomorphs and mushrooms.

The nerf pull is up now:

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/8452

The wizard dying should always cause a round end, regardless. Like what's the threat to the wiz after he summons guns and get'd ggnore'd other than red texting? Nothing, half the station will be dead, 90% of the players will be pissed, and the round will still drag on. Original wizard dying should result in a instant round end because he takes the risk of summoning magic or guns.

RG4 wrote:The wizard dying should always cause a round end, regardless. Like what's the threat to the wiz after he summons guns and get'd ggnore'd other than red texting? Nothing, half the station will be dead, 90% of the players will be pissed, and the round will still drag on. Original wizard dying should result in a instant round end because he takes the risk of summoning magic or guns.

If half the station is dead the round won't continue. Admins also have the ability to judgement call end rounds as well, and it seems like they aren't afraid to if a round looks like its going to go down a shitty path.