Paranoia on a deathtrap

[Steelpoint]

Bottom post of the previous page:

If you want to go hard core minimal information you should effect the below changes.

• Make the majority of the station have minimal lighting, only vital/high tech area's such as Research, Security, Command and Medbay have full flood lighting.
• Maintenance should have almost virtually no lighting.
• SecHuds should remain as is but they require a target to remain stationary for a few moments for the Hud to complete a scan. Making a moving person not get caught out by some Officer taking eating chips who catches a glimpse as they walk by.
• Weapons in general (real weapons) should be more lethal but armour should be more viable to a extent. More so Traitor weapons. A traitor, or antagonist (Changeling with stealth kills) needs to be able to kill someone easily, at least when they are alone.
• Remove the AI period, or make it utterly uninterested in whatever shit the Humans do and focus it on maintaining the integrity of the station. The AI is near built to catch antags, limiting its ability to do is law wise may remove this annoyance.
• No round start Cyborgs. Cyborgs are not linked to the AI sans if its a Traitor and it expends resources to hook them up, this means its not guaranteed a Borg is subverted to a rogue AI but its a possibility.
• At extreme only the Head of Security, Captain and the Warden are 100% guaranteed to be utterly loyal to the station. They get a unique Loyalty Implant that can be detected on SecHUD's. Security Officers and the Detective get a lower quality Loyalty Implant that only shows up, like wanted statuses, if they remain still for a few seconds to be scanned. The higher quality Loyalty Implants are always visible, but can be removed and reimplanted into someone.
• Revert to Oldling or steal Goonling.
• Cult, man.....

Take Kor's idea and run with it, limit information as much as we can to a certain degree. In fact I would argue you allow Traitors and some antags to buy uniquely skinned Traitor items that have a item skin of something job related, a Medipen skinned Energy Dagger, a Clown Pie that is actually C4 or Revolver ammo hidden in a pack of ciggerates.

[leibniz]

...

Maybe sechuds could be similar to mining scanners, you activate it and after a few seconds the status of people around you is revealed.

[Steelpoint]

Either way making it a move active, involved, but not automatic process should at least make it that much easier for people to dodge getting caught out on a whim.

I do agree with Kor and Co that lack of information is the better way forward than anything else proposed, but also adjusting the station to fit with this theme. Right now the station is less of a budget cutback station or akin and more of a state of the art space station right off of the assembly line. Which does not go well with the desires of this thread.

[Malkevin]

Remove the AI speaking on carbon radio again, that was fun.

[CPTANT]

We have had this discussion so many times already, in the threads there is a majority for making things more lethal/limiting information.

Then every time someone tries to make ANY weapon more lethal, it instantly gets shot down.

In fact virtually any balance chance gets shot down, because everyone's first reaction to change is NO. Everyone can always come up with something affected by the change and how horrible it would be if the status quo of that aspect was changed.




Things will simply never change with the system we now have in place for merging PR's.

Things can only change if a group of people is given a mandate to actually work on balance without having to argue for every individual change.

[TheNightingale]

Making weapons more lethal only works when people use them responsibly. If you buff weapon X, then far too many people will get weapon X and murder everyone with it. SS13 isn't about how many people you can robust, but making weapons more powerful (especially antagonist weapons, as this means non-antags can't counter them) only panders to the MLG Pro 420-noscope crowd.

[CPTANT]

Making weapons more lethal only works when people use them responsibly. If you buff weapon X, then far too many people will get weapon X and murder everyone with it. SS13 isn't about how many people you can robust, but making weapons more powerful (especially antagonist weapons, as this means non-antags can't counter them) only panders to the MLG Pro 420-noscope crowd.

We have had this discussion literally 3 times already.

The idea has always been to buff both station and antag weapons at the same time to make lethal combat less of a shitty alternative to stun combat.

edit: And yes more people getting murdered is a GOOD thing in the current state of the game.

[Steelpoint]

-snip-

This is also very true, and is also brought up every time these threads are made.

How are coders/developers/whatevers meant to push changes that are meant to push the game in one direction when the people in charge of the code base, and the player base in general, shout out how the change is bad and works to get it blocked. Only then for said people to start these damn threads again months down the line wondering why things are getting boring or less exciting?

Give some people, trusted competent people, a mandate and the authority to make whatever changes they deem necessary in the pursuit in moving the game in one direction WITHOUT having to explain and get bogged down behind every change the have made until well AFTER all changes they have made have been implemented and have been played with.

Its easy as buggery to revert changes, so there's no reason not to do this.

[CPTANT]

To be honest a large part of it is also that Cheridan just blatantly opposes the game going in that direction.

[onleavedontatme]

To be honest a large part of it is also that Cheridan just blatantly opposes the game going in that direction.

And so does most of the playerbase.

It would be easier to make your own game/own fork of SS13 than to unilaterally impose any one persons vision on /tg/station.

For better or worse SS13 right now is more of a series of loosely related, half finished games and mechanics thrown into a bin together. Trying to organize those disparate elements would eventually lead to you realizing you need to throw half of them out, and that would upset people.

Choosing a focus for the game now would basically be telling a large portion of the playerbase to fuck off.

I also think it'd also be easier to go forward at this point, and tie in all the jobs to an overall goal/effort to survive a hostile environment, than to trash a bunch of game modes/jobs/character customization features and move back to a "paranoia" experience. Not that I disliked the paranoia, I just don't think people have the stomach to reach that point, nor the stomach to deal with it when we get there (it's an administration nightmare).

[onleavedontatme]

Paranoia is the antonym of roleplay. You can target one or the other, but you can't have both. Nobody will roleplay if they are suspicious of everyone.

OpenSS13 of 2007/08 was 'balanced' for paranoia, and it was great. But there was no roleplay to be found.

This is a good post so I did the reasonable thing and made a dumb chart about it.

It's like the prisoners dilemma, but the incentives are completely fucking skewed to discourage ever doing anything but picking "betray that guy."

[LiamLime]

The effect I'd be more concerned about is between two crew members, who are expected to cooperate. Say two engineers. If each is paranoid of the other, they will not cooperate or roleplay.

You can see a bit of the effect already in how the CE, CMO and RD begin the round by first determining whether one of their staff wants to murder them, because it's rev. Only once they are somewhat sure that they won't get themselves killed just by exiting their office, do they actually start cooperating with their staff.

[CPTANT]

To be honest a large part of it is also that Cheridan just blatantly opposes the game going in that direction.

And so does most of the playerbase.

It would be easier to make your own game/own fork of SS13 than to unilaterally impose any one persons vision on /tg/station.

For better or worse SS13 right now is more of a series of loosely related, half finished games and mechanics thrown into a bin together. Trying to organize those disparate elements would eventually lead to you realizing you need to throw half of them out, and that would upset people.

Choosing a focus for the game now would basically be telling a large portion of the playerbase to fuck off.

I also think it'd also be easier to go forward at this point, and tie in all the jobs to an overall goal/effort to survive a hostile environment, than to trash a bunch of game modes/jobs/character customization features and move back to a "paranoia" experience. Not that I disliked the paranoia, I just don't think people have the stomach to reach that point, nor the stomach to deal with it when we get there (it's an administration nightmare).

I disagree with this sentiment.

The playerbase gets unfinished horribly balanced features thrown at them constantly, it is only when someone mentions the word balance that everyone suddenly don't want anything to do with it.

The server HAS moved from its original balance dramatically and I fail to see how bringing it even modestly into that direction again is telling people to fuck off.

In fact this lack of willingness to accept balance changes as a part of the duties of the coderbus is another large cause of the situation we have now.

Balance changes aren't the fucking spawn of the devil, they are a necessity to deal with the constant features being added to the game.

[Steelpoint]

The critical problem here for any progress to be made is for a clear design discussion/document to be drafted and presented as a direction to take the game.

I honestly think that so long as we have a good document that even Cheriden would give it a fair crack of the whip.

But the problem is that we've never really got that far. All we get are a longing to go in a certain direction, but then we get everyone saying it'll never happen (like me) and that no one can agree or hammer out something.

Until that happens, that we get a design document on changes to effect in depth, then I don't see anything happening.

[ShadowDimentio]

the problem is nobody's sure what exactly to change

I've been shilling for the return of parasting for years

[Steelpoint]

Parasting, and oldling/goonline, is just one of many things that would need to be examined and changed. A single change is not sufficient to make any difference and is in fact the root cause of many problems with half finished idea's, from some Kitchen implements, stamina damage, bullet damage at times, etc.

Hell, many changes are just pushed in and never changed afterwards due to possible controversy that might happen, so something that may or may not be bad never gets changed. Look at examples ranging from telecrystals, armour defence, weapons, damage, traitor numbers.

[ShadowDimentio]

Sounds like coderbus needs to pull themselves together and get all the coder monkeys around them dancing in unison for real changes to occur.

But good luck with that ever happening.

[Malkevin]

To be honest a large part of it is also that Cheridan just blatantly opposes the game going in that direction.

And so does most of the playerbase.

It would be easier to make your own game/own fork of SS13 than to unilaterally impose any one persons vision on /tg/station.

For better or worse SS13 right now is more of a series of loosely related, half finished games and mechanics thrown into a bin together. Trying to organize those disparate elements would eventually lead to you realizing you need to throw half of them out, and that would upset people.

Choosing a focus for the game now would basically be telling a large portion of the playerbase to fuck off.

I also think it'd also be easier to go forward at this point, and tie in all the jobs to an overall goal/effort to survive a hostile environment, than to trash a bunch of game modes/jobs/character customization features and move back to a "paranoia" experience. Not that I disliked the paranoia, I just don't think people have the stomach to reach that point, nor the stomach to deal with it when we get there (it's an administration nightmare).

These are good points, but how do you explain the 2010-2012 era where everyone was a power gaming shitlord yet still RPed (rping being at minimum staying in character and not being a meme spouting asshat).

Some of the best stories people told from those days were when they were with another crewman and both of them were hesitant and scared and paranoid of the other, yet some shit goes down that forces them both to cooperate and then when they've overcome that problem (or its spiraled out of control) the traitor shows their true colours by jamming a knife in their 'mates' back.

But its not just the fear of paranoia that's gone, fear itself is largely gone.
Used to be that if the captain had done something controversial people would keep quiet, only talking their discontent with others in hushed whispers, because if the captain heard them they'd quickly find themselves executed.
Compared that today where the captain doesn't even have to do anything controversial before some dickhead says something dumb, usually a stale overused meme, over the general radio - because people know that if the captain executes them only because they said some bad words the captain gets banned. As evidenced here: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5714

[Helios]

>going quiet
>newcult

Just get an artificer and some swords and then everybody is dead from construct snowball

That'd be a lot easier if MM didn't have friendly fire

[Malkevin]

Fun fact, I intentionally used mm so artificiers were less useful in assault, without planning

[Luke Cox]

I posted a long list of suggestions on the ideas board that I think would go a long ways to making everybody paranoid as fuck.

[PKPenguin321]

But its not just the fear of paranoia that's gone, fear itself is largely gone.
Used to be that if the captain had done something controversial people would keep quiet, only talking their discontent with others in hushed whispers, because if the captain heard them they'd quickly find themselves executed.
Compared that today where the captain doesn't even have to do anything controversial before some dickhead says something dumb, usually a stale overused meme, over the general radio - because people know that if the captain executes them only because they said some bad words the captain gets banned. As evidenced here: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5714

While I largely agree with this sentiment, this is more on the side of policy, rather than code.

[Luke Cox]

But its not just the fear of paranoia that's gone, fear itself is largely gone.
Used to be that if the captain had done something controversial people would keep quiet, only talking their discontent with others in hushed whispers, because if the captain heard them they'd quickly find themselves executed.
Compared that today where the captain doesn't even have to do anything controversial before some dickhead says something dumb, usually a stale overused meme, over the general radio - because people know that if the captain executes them only because they said some bad words the captain gets banned. As evidenced here: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5714

Believe me, if mass executions for dissent were legal I would be captain every round

[DemonFiren]

But its not just the fear of paranoia that's gone, fear itself is largely gone.
Used to be that if the captain had done something controversial people would keep quiet, only talking their discontent with others in hushed whispers, because if the captain heard them they'd quickly find themselves executed.
Compared that today where the captain doesn't even have to do anything controversial before some dickhead says something dumb, usually a stale overused meme, over the general radio - because people know that if the captain executes them only because they said some bad words the captain gets banned. As evidenced here: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5714

Believe me, if mass executions for dissent were legal I would be captain every round

I love the smell of latex in the morning.

[Luke Cox]

At the very least, imprisonment and especially demotions to assistant should be valid for people who continually insult the captain or undermine their authority.

[DemonFiren]

Shitters should be fair game for everyone and anyone, yeah.

...wait, aren't they already?

[CPTANT]

That ban Malkevin linked to is absolute horseshit and only makes people playing too afraid to do their role.

[Malkevin]

Btw, vote me so appeals like that don't linger for weeks

[1g88a]

Sec antags, or at least Det antags.

[DemonFiren]

Det antags I could actually get behind.

[Steelpoint]

While I might accept a limited form of Sec Antag if its apart of a comprehensive review of the game. I have to ask people who think that Security being non-antagonists ruins some of the paranoia to go look at game's like Trouble in Terrorist Town where the few Detectives are a confirmed and known role to everyone from round start.

You can have paranoia even with a select few people being known to be friendly, at least at round start initially.

[Zilenan91]

I'd love det detective tbh. Would make detective an actual loose cannon and be a lot more flavorful if he had a chance of being an antag.

[Malkevin]

For better or worse SS13 right now is more of a series of loosely related, half finished games and mechanics thrown into a bin together. Trying to organize those disparate elements would eventually lead to you realizing you need to throw half of them out, and that would upset people.

Choosing a focus for the game now would basically be telling a large portion of the playerbase to fuck off.

I also think it'd also be easier to go forward at this point, and tie in all the jobs to an overall goal/effort to survive a hostile environment, than to trash a bunch of game modes/jobs/character customization features and move back to a "paranoia" experience. Not that I disliked the paranoia, I just don't think people have the stomach to reach that point, nor the stomach to deal with it when we get there (it's an administration nightmare).

Something I've been thinking about recently is that one of the major problems we've got with our server is that we've tried to please too many people at once, but not only that - we've tried to push those two diametrically opposite groups together and tried to run them the same.

Looking at the history of the server we can see this has caused nothing but pain and misery on both sides.
But by strange twist of fate the majority of our playerbase is the low rp high action Sybil type, yet a lot of the coders and admins we've had are the ones that are a high rp low action type. RP meaning "do nothing but sit in the bar and chat made up stories" rather than 'low rp' which is the actually just doing your job and playing your... roll on the station.


There are two solutions to this problem.
Either we could choose a focus and tell the other side to fuck off elsewhere or we finally admit we have too different play styles and actually separate the servers completely - different rules, different players, different codebase, different server entirely.

Whilst the former is nasty (and will probably be ineffectual, if history has shown us anything its that the high RPers despite being told repeatedly to fuck off to bay over the years, they're more than content sitting in the corner and shitting their pants), the latter seems like a waste of resources (high RPers being such a minority, if vocal, that 'their' server has had to be opened up to hubbies to actually get enough players for it to not be a wasteland).

[Steelpoint]

Its pretty damn clear if you've been around long enough that most of the people in the administration or the higher echelons of the codebase tend to hail from a more High RP background than the majority of people on the server. You have those self-congratulatory threads about "praising" other people for their role play or other notable actions, which oft devolved into people talking about each other, to the petty squabbles between the Sybil and Basil servers, with only now does Basil have a somewhat ok player base due to it being a public server.

You could argue that the mix of high RP and low RP people sort of balance each other out, but that's never amounted to much.

----

Off topic a bit but I would be more than happy to do a one over Boxstation and make it more darker overall, meaning less lighting and shit. But that's just one facet of many changes that will never come.

[Incomptinence]

More damage more killing. A twist on killing people in every department. Hunger that kills thirst that kills get people out of their safe spaces so they can be killed, spiked food and drinks that also kill. No regulation on corpse disposing jobs doing their actual job hey maybe chef and chaplain shouldn't have traitors and captains charging in and being the majority users of their drat equipment. Cheap and dirty corpse disposal for antags, husking should mean something no your rotting corpse is not entitled to cloning. Sure you pansy gits may never allow traitor sec again but let sec execute more often sheesh.

Solo antags need more help than I can put down all the powerful shit goes to group antags because d'aww they have more people join in the fun. We tried nerfing stuns and sec and still the the old staples are still second fiddle outside of the 10 pop station a player a week into the game could dominate.

[DemonFiren]

Make everything deadly and pray that survivors, ayys and their experimentees don't bone.

[onleavedontatme]

Malkevin

>used to talk about the captain in hushed whispers

CAPTAINS A COMDOM came from that era, don't really remember that. Maybe being afraid of traitor captains?

Security definitely has looser rules now though, because SoS isn't host.

>how did it work in 2010 etc

It worked in 2010 when the server was a smaller group of mostly friends and people from /tg/, but even then it was basically 24/7 drama for years and 5 page FNR threads. We added more rules because there was endless bickering. The friction/paranoia that the game encouraged spilled over into the forums and IRC. We removed/nerfed things because people would start to use those things for max bodycount every round. As to staying vaguely in character I think that was just the culture then. Not like banning memespouting would revive paranoia anyway.

Its pretty damn clear if you've been around long enough that most of the people in the administration or the higher echelons of the codebase tend to hail from a more High RP background

I think it is natural that the people who spend the most time with the game would start seeking a greater depth to it.

[bandit]

This isn't about roleplay, nor is it entirely about lethality or information, though those do contribute. Here's the thing.

Before, the role of the traitor used to be to use the station's own items and features to their own ends, i.e. turn the station into a deathtrap.
Now, the role of the traitor is to use THEIR OWN items and features. The station is secondary.

Think about it. Right now a traitor can order from their uplink literally anything that would otherwise be found on the station. They can kill people far more efficiently by ordering a meme holoparasite, double e-sword, or the like than by interacting with anything around them. There is no need to sabotage. There is no need to cover one's tracks. Anymore there isn't even any reason to create an inhospitable environment, given that the existence of traitorous activity is enough to get the shuttle called. The only paranoia comes from whether a traitor will decide to directly fuck with you at any given moment, not from whether things around you go suddenly... Wrong.

My proposal is to eliminate at least 50% of the current uplink and un-nerf the huge amount of nerfs to station infrastructure and lethality. Force traitors to use their environment rather than cheesing with yet another holoparasite meme or prefab syndicate bomb. If they cannot use their current environment, they need to find a way to use someone else's, and preferably frame that person.

[Zilenan91]

I could get behind massively buffing a lot of the non-stun melee weapons so that traitors would have an easier time at using them.

[Malkevin]

Bring back shocked door damaging both and arm AND a leg would be a good start.

[Shaps-cloud]

How would making shocked doors do more damage suddenly make you more paranoid? I have to agree with pretty much everything Kor said, the ideals you guys are talking about would require way more far-reaching changes than upping the damage on a few weapons

[onleavedontatme]

lethality

Making the random shit around departments more dangerous is

A) Not going to add paranoia, but it will add variety, which is at least interesting

B) Going to fail if it is too weak/hard to use, and be spammed/abused if it isn't. Throwing chem bottles at people used to basically kill them no matter what, then it got nerfed, and now it isn't worth doing over just stun batoning them or something.

C) Going to be met with massive resistance. See: the balance concerns in my chaplain PR, over a single force 20 weapon. See: The balance concerns in the 30 armour PRs (which aimed to buff every single weapon on the station by nerfing armour). See: The balance fighting in the carrot PR.

Meanwhile genuinely OP shit like lesser summon guns and the original stands (20 firestacks!) got in with almost no resistance or feedback, because it was

-For antagonists

-Didn't have large numbers in the PR. If people see easy numbers to argue about (telecrystal cost or weapon force) everyone is gonna have an opinion.

D) Be used by "validhunters." Traitor still needs an edge from their own stuff or else the oldfag assistant just stungloves/stun prods/slips/disarms the newbie traitor and the round becomes extended.


But yeah as Shaps said I'm right about everything forever and simply making things deadlier won't add paranoia, it will add more killing sprees.

[bandit]

Making the random shit around departments more dangerous is

A) Not going to add paranoia, but it will add variety, which is at least interesting

B) Going to fail if it is too weak/hard to use, and be spammed/abused if it isn't. Throwing chem bottles at people used to basically kill them no matter what, then it got nerfed, and now it isn't worth doing over just stun batoning them or something.

C) Going to be met with massive resistance. See: the balance concerns in my chaplain PR, over a single force 20 weapon. See: The balance concerns in the 30 armour PRs (which aimed to buff every single weapon on the station by nerfing armour). See: The balance fighting in the carrot PR.

Meanwhile genuinely OP shit like lesser summon guns and the original stands (20 firestacks!) got in with almost no resistance or feedback, because it was

-For antagonists

-Didn't have large numbers in the PR. If people see easy numbers to argue about (telecrystal cost or weapon force) everyone is gonna have an opinion.

D) Be used by "validhunters." Traitor still needs an edge from their own stuff or else the oldfag assistant just stungloves/stun prods/slips/disarms the newbie traitor and the round becomes extended.


But yeah as Shaps said I'm right about everything forever and simply making things deadlier won't add paranoia, it will add more killing sprees.

A) Variety and creativity is one of the main aims here, yes. A huge part of the original appeal of SS13 for me was that any role in any department could be a traitor, meaning that any part of the thread holding the station together could snap at any time. Now, there's virtually no difference between even, say, a scientist traitor and an assistant traitor. The same shit happens each time, and that is massively, massively boring, and yet the only solution that ever happens is that the shit gets nerfed and then other shit begins to happen each time.

B) This is already happening. 75% of the traitor uplink is never used for being too weak, the other 25% is spammed to shit. So this will really be a lateral change at worst. However, the difference is that traitor meme items can be used by anything, whereas departmental items are at least limited to who has access to them. You're not a chemist? Either find a way to get those poisons anyway, or do something else.

C) I really don't know what to say to this except I don't agree with the aforementioned resistance. A lot of what I am proposing -- shocked doors/grilles being actually dangerous, crushers gibbing, chloral not sucking ass, etc. -- was in the game and things were not catastrophically awful. They're also not really suited to killing sprees. The thing about the station infrastructure being dangerous is that it requires people to be around said infrastructure, as opposed to something like an esword slip meme, which allows you to juke around willy nilly.

D) Then start banning people for repeated validhunting. Easy.

Alternatively, force traitors to get good. In part due to their easymode uplink items, the job of traitoring has been dumbed down massively. There was just a thread where people were shocked and amazed that traitors might have to cut cameras near where they are doing their traitoring. These aren't newbies, either. These are people who've played at least as long as said validhunters. Being a traitor should be at least somewhat difficult.

[onleavedontatme]

>Then start banning people for repeated validhunting. Easy.

Making everything more dangerous/letting traitors kill more people, and then banning people for stopping them sounds pretty godawful.

Any rational player would suicide roundstart when they dont get antag if

-Things are so dangerous/violent they cant do their jobs
-Things are so dangerous/violent there is not much time for deeper rp
-They get banned for participating in the violence that is being promoted over everything else

[PKPenguin321]

How would making shocked doors do more damage suddenly make you more paranoid? I have to agree with pretty much everything Kor said, the ideals you guys are talking about would require way more far-reaching changes than upping the damage on a few weapons

it's less that, and more that if practically anything can be sabotaged, then you'd never feel safe anywhere. the chef's food and bartender's drinks can be poisoned, so there might be paranoia in drinking those. engineering can be sabotaged to let the singulo/tesla loose, so being in there can be intimidating. stuff like that.

[Oldman Robustin]

I've gotten plenty of silent kills using the silenced stechkin / mutesting +stunprod.

Sorry sonny but if you have to play a traitorling to get a silent kill, that's not really a reasonable condition.


Stunprod + Silenced Pistol = My armor means I get enough time to yell on sec radio while you try to crit me, plus the stunprod makes noise that will attract attention on its own in many situations.

Mute + Whatever = Still going to involve loud shit you can hear through doors/walls.

[CPTANT]

I've gotten plenty of silent kills using the silenced stechkin / mutesting +stunprod.

Sorry sonny but if you have to play a traitorling to get a silent kill, that's not really a reasonable condition.


Stunprod + Silenced Pistol = My armor means I get enough time to yell on sec radio while you try to crit me, plus the stunprod makes noise that will attract attention on its own in many situations.

Mute + Whatever = Still going to involve loud shit you can hear through doors/walls.

To be honest in the majority of cases nobody gives a shit about the murder sounds they hear in the other room.

[Oldman Robustin]

It all boils down to this. Paranoia = Intense anxiety or fear of something. Fear of what? Well the only thing people really fear in SS13 is being taken out of the round, any other consequence is largely trivial to overcome.

But what causes INTENSE fear/anxiety of death in SS13? When nukeops show up I get a pang of fear. I wonder how close they are, how robust they'll be, if they're disguised, if a borg is with them, etc... I fear dying to the ops but is that fear intense? No. Why? I know what the threat is and have general knowledge about what to expect. Death is also a muted concern, if we win then I get cloned, if we lose then its over in a few minutes anyway.

Same story applies to gang war, revolution, etc... the conflict is OVERT and I know what to expect. My mind is prepared for death and if you do die it will be for a cause. There are dozens of factors that diminish fear in these open conflicts.

Compare these to old traitors and oldlings. The conflict is rarely overt. There's no way to identify the enemy, it could be anyone from Captain or HOS down to your coworkers. There was nowhere safe from these menaces and only by exhibiting signs of paranoia (maintaining physical distance with others, avoiding being alone with others, not going into maint or other isolated places) could you up your chances of survival.

Think of it like an airplane crash versus a car crash. People here shouting for more lethality miss the point. Car crashes cause magnitudes more deaths than airplane crashes. Airplane deaths are like 10 million:1 odds. Yet there's much more fear towards planes due to the lack of control. When something goes wrong in a car we believe we can protect ourselves, we believe we can avoid a wreck, we believe we can escape with minor injuries. If something goes wrong in a plane you have no influence on the outcome and either you live or you die. Moreover, you won't know if something goes wrong until its too late to do anything about it. Same thing applies to all the other "super lethal" modes. They are like car crashes, death happens in greater quantities but we have less reason to fear it.

Parapen traitors and parasting lings were like a plane crash. You couldn't fight back, you couldn't have stopped it, and your life is completely out of your hands. Death could come from any of your fellow crew and by the time you realize who that threat is... it's too late, you're dead. Only paranoia could save you. Of course, plane crashes are still exceedingly rare, but in SS13 you had to come to deal with parapen/parasting every other hour. That is precisely why we had PARANOIA.

[Malkevin]

How would making shocked doors do more damage suddenly make you more paranoid? I have to agree with pretty much everything Kor said, the ideals you guys are talking about would require way more far-reaching changes than upping the damage on a few weapons

Back in ye olde days of insta crit doors the prospect of a subverted AI was scary and made you afraid of every door you saw, because just one mistake meant you were doomed. Not like today's weak doors where you can easily survive three or four shocks before critting.

Today: "AI's rogue? Well... I'm guaranteed to survive atleast a couple of shocks, I'll just test the doors"
Old: "AI's rogue? Oh fuck, better not touch anything that can be shocked unless I want to turn into beef jerky"

[Saegrimr]

More like "AI's rogue? Oh fuck, better find a monkey or a dead guy and throw him into doors to test it."

[Malkevin]

At one point it got changed so that thrown mobs don't set off shocks.

Not sure why, but it happened.