How did we manage to get to the doorjack.

[Itseasytosee2me]

It's been a while so I think its worth talking about, what they did to my man the EMAG is messed up.

The justification originally posited by goofball was that the emag was a TAX and a NESSEICTY for any good traitor round. The way it could easily open doors was over powered and too easily made a mess of the station.
Fair points here, it was stupidly easy at the time for traitors to emag literally all the doors on the station and turn them into a smoldering mess. Perhaps it would make sense to put a delay or charges on emag use It not even by my judgement not even a crazy mindset to think "Maybe we ought to remove the door opening in it's entirety, and give it some other effect, or maybe none at all." The emag does not appear to be the issue here, its the door opening capabilities that are the problem.

So why the hell did we specifically move the door opening capabilities to another object? We gave it a timer, so the problem is solved. But what is accomplished by putting this specific feature on the doorjack instead of keeping it on the emag and giving the charge system to the emag? It seems counterintuitive to the original purpose.

[zxaber]

I assume the idea was that the other features of the emag don't specifically need a timer. Which I agree with; door hacking is the only thing you can reliably chain constantly, and is also the most annoying of the hackable things to fix en masse.

Since the two tools are individually cheaper, it also meant that people buying the emag for the door breaking and no other reason got an effective discount, as did people who bought the emag specifically for uses other than door breaking.

[Timberpoes]

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26520&p=557923 was the topic of discussion. May be good to review that thread, since we discussed it outside of Github.

[Pandarsenic]

My takes from playing around with them:

- Airlock Authentication Override Card has too few charges and/or charges way too slow for nuke ops. Yeah, they get Syndicate Jaws of Life, but those are slow-ish, and reinforced windows are so absurdly strong that shooting them out as a nuke op isn't a feasible option - you'll run out of ammo before the station runs out of windows.
- I mostly see emags used for Funny Shuttle shenanigans, but I could be wrong. If someone can pull Airlock Authentication Override Card use rates and Emag use rates, that'd be cool. I'd also be interested in seeing how often they appear relative to Esword/DEsword
- The parallel charging system (each charge is spent as comes back in its own separate track) feels extremely weird and unintuitive to me. I don't like that if you use all your charges, your Airlock Authentication Override Card is sitting on its ass for a while with no use, and then you're suddenly able to burn 3 doors at once. This wouldn't feel so bad if the timer weren't 9 years long.
- Unless I'm mistaken, the Airlock Authentication Override Card still doesn't open bolted doors
- Edit: Cobby's post reminded me the name "Airlock Authentication Override Card" sucks. It doesn't sound cool like Cryptographic Sequencer.

My conclusion:
- Broadly, nerfs to antags are bad for the game.
- By reducing the power gap between antag gear and tider gear, you make tiders/validhunters closer in threat level to antags. Airlock Authentication Override Cards/Emags need to be better than Toolboxes and competitive with RCDs; D/Eswords need to be better than spears and competitive with Batons; Revolvers and E-bows need to be better than pneumatic cannons and comparable to E-guns/lasers. Antags who want to be effective should not view traitor tools as a stepping stone to getting the best station tools, but as useful and powerful gear in its own right.
- This has gotten to the point that many antags (Heretics especially, but also low-rep traitors) are less dangerous in the average player's hands than a bored tiding Assistant main.
- This also reduces the relative value of security because security's gear also having been nerfed generally offers less of crucial a power spike (outside of batons and batongs) when any asshole can make a bola with a wrench to deconstruct chairs and some spare cable coils
- This sec gear power spike is not even needed for exceptionally skilled validhunters, who can do things like the shove-grab permastun after throwing a bola and/or body at someone.
- Everything predicted in https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/50636 happened and it all sucks

My off-the-cuff suggestion:

► Show Spoiler

- Restore the door function to the Emag at its current speed or maybe a tiny bit worse. The Emag can still do its other hacking without the rate limiter.
- Allow the Doorjack to be a dedicated item, probably with a higher cost to account for TC inflation from progtot (a cheaper version for Nukies could be cool, or you can just say "pay the cost or take the syndiejaws if you don't like it")
- Give the New Doorjack many more charges and/or a faster charge rate that restores charges serially instead of parallel (e.g. every 45 seconds it gets 1 charge back)
- The New Doorjack should be capable of supporting the most basic use for a roundstart traitor: walk into a department with a weapon, find your target, kill them, calling card or whatever, then leave through the nearest door. Using MetaStation Science as an example, you need to be able to enter through R&D maint, look at genetics, hit the hallway door, hit the robotics door, hit the RD office door, then bug out to maintenance, so probably looking at having 6 charges with a slow-ish recharge to be ideal for actual traitoring?

tl;dr I don't want "ha ha hee hee hoo hoo I have emagged every door on the station open!" back, but I'd take that over what we have now.

[Cobby]

the emag sucks because its a copout for actually putting the interactions in the game in an accessible way. It would be MORE powerful for antags to have a plausible way to sabotage entities without having this big tell item that only a specific subset (those that can afford it) of a specific antag can access.

I dont have qualms with a door-opening device despite the original pr, whether its called "emag" or "door authentication jack". I DO have a problem with this specific item being a crutch for adding otherwise neat sabotage methods for the general crew (aka other antagonists who cannot buy the emag) or even for other traitors who dont want to have to dump TC to specifically do 1 interaction of the 50 million the magic item offers.

I guess the answer is it needed to be moved out along with every other interaction on that dumb item, why that specific function needed to be moved out but not the others is just a matter of nobody wanting to do the rest.

[Itseasytosee2me]

the emag sucks because its a copout for actually putting the interactions in the game in an accessible way. It would be MORE powerful for antags to have a plausible way to sabotage entities without having this big tell item that only a specific subset (those that can afford it) of a specific antag can access.

I dont have qualms with a door-opening device despite the original pr, whether its called "emag" or "door authentication jack". I DO have a problem with this specific item being a crutch for adding otherwise neat sabotage methods for the general crew (aka other antagonists who cannot buy the emag) or even for other traitors who dont want to have to dump TC to specifically do 1 interaction of the 50 million the magic item offers.

I guess the answer is it needed to be moved out along with every other interaction on that dumb item, why that specific function needed to be moved out but not the others is just a matter of nobody wanting to do the rest.

What would you suggest as an alternative to unlock unique sabotage functions?

[Cobby]

why do they have to be "unique"? They obviously werent unique enough to get their own interaction, just plopped on the item everything else seems to go on.

It should be largely integrated into the normal hacking system (EMPing sucks too since thats also an option). The follow up question I dont have an answer for is how do we enable interactions that we want to be harder to obtain in our current hacking system without throwing it into an item only one antag can unlock.

Obv some of the interactions should stay exclusive to the traitor arsenal (like borg conversion without lawboards) but for most of them I cant find myself understanding why does it have to be traitor only, with the follow up of why does this interaction need to be combined with all the other interactions on a single item rather than making a unique, cheaper item that the user can purchase and save TC to buy actual items on.

[Pandarsenic]

Because the core identity of the Traitor is that they have an assortment of cool syndicate tech, all obviously distinct from station tech, that allows them to do Cool Syndicate Things.

Each of the low-threat antags has a different core identity - Traitor is Tech, Changeling is biochem, and now we also have Heretic with the core identity of Magic and Thief with the core identity of not being a real antag so they don't get anything.

[Farquaar]

I think Pandar said it well.

The gear power balance should fall along the lines of traitor > standard security > common criminal/tider > average crewmember. Relatively recent nerfs to traitor and security seem to upset that balance.

[Cobby]

Syndicate will still have cool syndicate tech without retaining all of the functions of the currently-existing emag, its not an argument for why say a bot going haywire MUST be exclusive to a syndicate presence rather than a malicious non-syndicate (or even syndicate who doesnt purchase the emag) actor, regardless of the "core identity" of each individual antagonist in the game. Thats not to say EVERY function should be gutted from pure-tot, but we should at least force that justification when people consider adding another item to the kitchen sink.

Its like giving the changeling a special way to do eye damage and no one can else do eye damage, then we start adding heart and lung damage cause wouldnt it be cool to have different effects for different organs but hey non-changelings can at least damage the bodyparts. Organ damage would just be absurd and take away from the changelings biochem identity, we've had changeling organ damage since 2013, and traitors should just stick to their wacky pda.

[RaveRadbury]

Because the core identity of the Traitor is that they have an assortment of cool syndicate tech, all obviously distinct from station tech, that allows them to do Cool Syndicate Things.

Each of the low-threat antags has a different core identity - Traitor is Tech, Changeling is biochem, and now we also have Heretic with the core identity of Magic and Thief with the core identity of not being a real antag so they don't get anything.

Thief was removed recently.

[Pandarsenic]

Because the core identity of the Traitor is that they have an assortment of cool syndicate tech, all obviously distinct from station tech, that allows them to do Cool Syndicate Things.

Each of the low-threat antags has a different core identity - Traitor is Tech, Changeling is biochem, and now we also have Heretic with the core identity of Magic and Thief with the core identity of not being a real antag so they don't get anything.

Thief was removed recently.

So that's why I don't see them anymore That's just how much Thief isn't a real antag

[oranges]

I decided the emag was too good value for being both a door hacker and weird machine modifier and maintainers were hesitatnt to add new emag features because of it.

doorjack is designed soley to allow entry/escape in a hurry to one dept for B&E objectives where the traitor doesn't want or doesn't have time to hack.

emag can now be expanded to have more weird interactions with more machines without worrying about the value proposition as much.

[EmpressMaia]

Does the doormag leave your prints and fibers?

[Helios]

I decided the emag was too good value for being both a door hacker and weird machine modifier and maintainers were hesitatnt to add new emag features because of it.

doorjack is designed soley to allow entry/escape in a hurry to one dept for B&E objectives where the traitor doesn't want or doesn't have time to hack.

emag can now be expanded to have more weird interactions with more machines without worrying about the value proposition as much.

What do you think about adding unique interactions to Doorjack with navigation computers?
Leaning more on the -Jack side of Door jack. When used on Mining shuttle, public shuttle, or escape pod computer, they can travel in a unique way?