Lowpop Self-Defense Weapons

[Oldman Robustin]

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/16762

Pitching this idea and got some "yea that sounds interesting" comments, spent hours making a PR because I can't code for shit, only to realize that coderbus expresses feedback in Thumbs Up/Down and low-quality shitposts.

I figured I'd come here to get some high quality shitposts.

Summary:

- Lowpop sucks. Really sucks. It's a server killer that makes it harder for the server to reach higher populations because every lowpop rounds is guaranteed to hemorrhage players. Lowpop lacks the critical mass of players that can report, track, and rely on numbers to fight back against low-effort murdering. When Johnny Holoshit comes stomping into your dept. there's usually jackshit you can feasibly do to stop them on lowpop. Security isn't coming, no AI or borg to help you. Hell you probably didn't even know there's a murderboner because of the lack of witnesses.

- These weapons would be a deterrent that could help you alive at a minumum, and with focus fire from multiple crew or just a traitor being careless, you could be the David that stops Goliath

- These weapons suck far too much to be useful to most traitors. They require two hands to fire reliably, do 20 damage, have a 3 second delay between shots, low mag size, and I'm capable of tweaking the strength based on feedback.

- At the very least, given how lowpop problems have plagued us for YEARS without any attempt at a solution, this deserves a test merge. Unlike the other test merges this won't dramatically influence balance, fuck up rounds, or annihilate fundamental game mechanics.

- I'm not pretending I have all the answers or that this is a perfect solutions, it's just that I'm willing to TRY and it's still better than any alternative I've heard pitched. Either way I'm all ears, just try to give me something more than :thumbsdown: "Shit PR"

[TheNightingale]

Two people with self-defence rifles will still be defeated by one person with a taser and holoparasite, and in general, people on lowpop don't want to carry around bulky sniper rifles Just In Case a murderboner turns up (even having stunprods is frowned upon unless there's an active attacker); due to this, people will only get the rifles when the action starts, letting any antagonist space them all.

It might require some effort to code, but how about every player having a button to contact the admins if someone goes on a lowpop rampage?

[CPTANT]

I think this will be completely ineffectual. Those rifles just suck too hard to be meaningful.

Even with a lasergun that can fire way faster you are still completely outclassed by any form of stun or traitor weapon and this just worst because of the bad fire rate.

[oranges]

Personally I'm of the view that everyone should have a sidearm at all levels of Population.

Should make the game a bit more interesting.

[Thundercoot]

Give out Mosin-Nagants! They're too lethal with their standard rounds, but load them with weakened rounds and they'll be appropriate for the role.
Any weaker than that and you might as well send stacks of metal sheets, rods, glass and cable so that the crew can make many floor tiles and spears. You probably couldn't call that surplus weaponry though.

Maybe add a box of zipties or handcuffs to the ferry shipment so that the good guys are formally given the option of detaining an enemy, even if that's not really an option.

We need to encourage lowpop crews to take a break from their jobs to fight violent antagonists. Instant weapons could encourage that as one wouldn't need their job to take advantage of the guns.

[TheNightingale]

There's always the possibility of banning lowpop murderboning outright; this addresses the problem without needing dubious measures to fix it (why does Central send a ship full of guns at 29 people, 6 of which are Security, but not 30 people with no Sec?).

[Incomptinence]

Or you could just turn lowpop to extended.

Really the switch from parapen + c4 to entire server killers made this worse. Then there's the unprecedented removal of secborgs and holos being a non stop stun proof kill machine totally invalidate the simple Ed-209 and securitrons (also tripping) used to be you could make a stop gap sec force but nooooo. The opinion of coders is basically fuck lowpop other than the datum antags guy.

[Oldman Robustin]

I think this will be completely ineffectual. Those rifles just suck too hard to be meaningful.

Even with a lasergun that can fire way faster you are still completely outclassed by any form of stun or traitor weapon and this just worst because of the bad fire rate.

1) Of course youre meant to be outclassed, but a decent player can still hold their own with one.

2) Damage adds up, sure you shrug off the first shot, but after 2-3 you're bleeding and slowed. Multiple crew attacking from different directions would also be very dangerous to any overt traitor just murdering up the halls.

[Oldman Robustin]

Problems:

• Revolution, unless that cannot fire sub and equal to 25 players, I can't find the numbers.
• Fuel tanks and guns.
• Inventory space and essential items.
• Can this be put into a backpack? Backpack full of 20 ranged brute a pop?
• Muh Beepsky being kited.

Thoughts:

• Loyalty pins, removing armoury's contents, moving contents to known roundstart loyal roles.
• Reducing the options from traitor uplinks.

Thanks for the thoughts, those are both tenable ideas, although limited traitor PDA's is kind of lame, I could see the argument for cutting stuff like holoparasites and revolvers from lowpop uplinks.

I'll probably reduce the pop trigger to 20 for this just to avoid rev issues, but spears and pneumatic weapons would almost always be superior to trying to kill a head of staff or security with these. Generally revs rely on spear embeds or a slip/stun to get their targets, at which point you're better using almost any melee weapon over the rifle.

No, they cant fit in a backpack and will fly out of your hand if you shoot one-handed.

[Shaps-cloud]

Giving them loyalty pins so they don't just contribute to random murderboners armories would be interesting

[Zilenan91]

So these are just glocks from NTStation. They even have the same arguments.

[Oldman Robustin]

Giving them loyalty pins so they don't just contribute to random murderboners armories would be interesting

>Implying anyone will even have armory/loyaltybox access during lowpop
>Impying anyone who does will want to help the crew actually survive

I'm sure these are more useful to a murderbone than empty hands, but not by much. I made them so weak so that they couldn't possible contribute to an effective murderbone. You have to 2-hand them and they don't fit in bags. 3-second cooldown between shots. Someone with hotkeys bound could still get better results from floortile spam.

[Archie700]

Oldman, the problem here is that your idea is too weak to combat the murderboners when traitors have access to things like holoparasites, rifles, syndicate bombs, eswords and lots of other stuff that can fuck over a lowpop station.

The best way to combat lowpop murderboners is with admin events, and even then, it's a crapshoot when there are no admins online and adminbus isn't responding.

Also, your idea has the ability to make validhunting more common because if one person pulls out a gun in self-defense, the attacker can just call out, "Urist McInnocent has a gun, LYNCH HE!" and cause a vigilante lynch mob.

[killerx09]

Ask TheLongBowMan how he dealt with the low-pop murderboner problem, he did deal with it on Basil, and now look at it's population.

[Jacough]

Just for the sake of throwing in a cool weapon idea: have it be a collapsed sed rifle that starts in a player's backpack if a round starts with <25 players. When you pull it out it unfolds itself Mass Effect style. The catch is that once you pull it out you can't collapse it again, meaning you're either going to have to lug it around in your hands or hold your backpack in your hand and keep it strapped to your back. Basically if you want to keep your hands free you'd better keep it stowed away until you really need it. Also like in oldman's post it'd require both hands to fire reliably so you might find yourself having to fumble around and drop whatever else you're holding before you can reliably fire it if you just pop it out for shits and giggles.

[Luke Cox]

I use flamethrowers personally. Cool, you stunned me with your ebow, but you're still on fire and you WILL die if you don't stop to extinguish yourself. Plus, the main downside of flamethrowers is collateral damage which is less of a concern on lowpop.

[Steelpoint]

Jacough has the right idea.

It should be something the players spawn with at round start, not something to fish out of some ship in arrivals.

[Davidchan]

Skeleton crew trigger could also just reduce the number of TCs traitor shave at their disposal. Having to choose between an emag and a holo would definitely curb most low pop murders.

[CPTANT]

Skeleton crew trigger could also just reduce the number of TCs traitor shave at their disposal. Having to choose between an emag and a holo would definitely curb most low pop murders.

The other side is that there are also plenty of lowpop rounds in which basically nothing happens for 90 minutes, because the few traitors failed or are doing nothing in the first place.

I personally almost always find the rounds in which there IS someone actually murderboning more interesting than the snoozefest rounds.

[Davidchan]

So your saying ramp up the antag rate in low pop rounds to make it a traitor deathmatch/highlander type set up where each round only lasts 30 minutes until a full crew worth of players logs on?

[CPTANT]

The entire crew having weapons is also a nightmare for the few brave security officers that DO play.

[Steelpoint]

Something tells me a Security Officer, wielding body armour and a taser, will have little problems with someone with a single shot pistol/rifle.

This change simply gives individual players on low-pop rounds some form of defense against muderboners, but the defense is pretty meh and seems less about one guy killing a loud antagonist and more of a situation where the antagonist can possibly die from a death by a thousand cuts, or at least the noise of gun fire will draw attention from the rest of the crew.

[yackemflam]

The best self defense weapon is to make is to that everything is deadly, with toolboxes dealing 30 damage per hit.
Murderboning is now much harder to do when taht assistant with a toolbox can rekt your shit if they catch you doing shit

[Archie700]

...
I'll probably reduce the pop trigger to 20 for this just to avoid rev issues,
...

So rev occurs with 21+? I don't know. I'm not even sure if nuke ops fires on 20+ any more.

I think rev fires at 30 and nuke ops fires at around 50.

[Saegrimr]

Nuke definitely happens much lower

[Oldman Robustin]

This PR will almost certainly not be implemented, but its a starting point for discussion.

I like the foldable weapon alternative.

I disagree with people saying 2weak! It's terrible by traitor weapon standards but it's still a huge improvement over trying to beat a holoparasite user with the toolbox sitting near you when they emagged into department. 20 damage is respectable, getting shot just twice will leave you slowed and bleeding... both of which are REALLY BAD if you want to win a combat encounter.

I will probably try the "everyone gets one" weapon at 20pop, roughly as weak but with the whole "fits in the bag but cant be stuffed back in once deployed" mechanic.

[Super Aggro Crag]

i want a derringer so i can be the riverboat gambler

[confused rock]

better idea then "Here have 6 guns that a syndie can use to shoot open crates or welderbomb"
add "fuck you" points
you get a fuck you point upon death
fuck you points do stuff I guess
a nonantag is weak to fuck you points, a traitor needs three times the fuck you points, same with lings, blobs are immune to fuck you points, only xeno queens can get fuck you points used on them (five times) malf ais need 5 times fuck you points. a rev head takes 7 times, a rev takes 2 times, a gang boss takes 5 times, a gangster takes 2 times. all other antags are almost immune except for the final effect
if 5% of dead players use their fuck you points on you you take 10 shame damage (yes this is a type) and just enough brain for a small chance of the autisms to happen (fuck you point events usually require twice the server population to be dead in order for them to effect, for examlle your 5% fuck you wont work until 10% of players have died, this caps at 75% dead)
if 10% use fuck you points you are permanently 10% retarded and ghosts orbiting you are visible
if 15% use it the ghosts are visible through walls and they get a minor slowdown
if 20% use it they take 1 shame damage every 10 seconds they are not at full health besides shame damage and take 10 shame damage every time the shuttle is recalled (but they cannot take this shame damage more than once every 5 minutes)
if 25% use it bleeding causes 1 shame damage per tick and they are permanently clumsy and will take 10 shame damage per minute unless the shuttle is currently called
if 40% use it (so basically only if everyone hates a shitty rev or its a nonantag) they will instantly take 100 shame damage if anybody intentionally hurts them at all (as in with lasers/thrown shit/punches)
if a whole 80% of dead people use it AND 80% of the players are dead then they instantly die if the shuttle is not called within 5 minutes and their death causes the shuttle to be sent

shame damage can be cured by drinking salt but overdosing on salt causes you to be gibbed by a holoparasite wielding detective xenomorph-morph who robbed the armory just because you are an antag after they pop out of a vent next to you, similarly to the xeno hallucination

[Oldman Robustin]

I was under the impression you couldn't shoot open cargo crates anymore.

Also Kor's removing certain items from lowpop uplinks so that's probably going to be the direction of the lowpop solution. I'd rather see the crew empowered to fights traitors rather than just dialing back on the combat tools available to traitor but that's the way it's gonna happen.

I'm just going to focus my efforts on the Cult PR drama that's going down.

[CPTANT]

I was under the impression you couldn't shoot open cargo crates anymore.

Also Kor's removing certain items from lowpop uplinks so that's probably going to be the direction of the lowpop solution. I'd rather see the crew empowered to fights traitors rather than just dialing back on the combat tools available to traitor but that's the way it's gonna happen.

I'm just going to focus my efforts on the Cult PR drama that's going down.

You can still shoot them, but for some reason someone thought it was a good idea to just make the chance of a shot breaking the crate very low.

[A3STH3T1CS]

low pop self defense weapons requested by oldman?

im taking the next escape pod the fuck out of here

[Scott]

Or you could just turn lowpop to extended.

Really the switch from parapen + c4 to entire server killers made this worse. Then there's the unprecedented removal of secborgs and holos being a non stop stun proof kill machine totally invalidate the simple Ed-209 and securitrons (also tripping) used to be you could make a stop gap sec force but nooooo. The opinion of coders is basically fuck lowpop other than the datum antags guy.

Literally all of those changes were player driven so don't blame "the coders" now that you don't like the mess you've done despite all the warnings.

[Jacough]

This PR will almost certainly not be implemented, but its a starting point for discussion.

I like the foldable weapon alternative.

I disagree with people saying 2weak! It's terrible by traitor weapon standards but it's still a huge improvement over trying to beat a holoparasite user with the toolbox sitting near you when they emagged into department. 20 damage is respectable, getting shot just twice will leave you slowed and bleeding... both of which are REALLY BAD if you want to win a combat encounter.

I will probably try the "everyone gets one" weapon at 20pop, roughly as weak but with the whole "fits in the bag but cant be stuffed back in once deployed" mechanic.

I might just try spriting something for it once I move my computer to my new place. It's been like a decade since I've sprited anything but eh, might as well if only because guns are always fun.

[Oldman Robustin]

This PR will almost certainly not be implemented, but its a starting point for discussion.

I like the foldable weapon alternative.

I disagree with people saying 2weak! It's terrible by traitor weapon standards but it's still a huge improvement over trying to beat a holoparasite user with the toolbox sitting near you when they emagged into department. 20 damage is respectable, getting shot just twice will leave you slowed and bleeding... both of which are REALLY BAD if you want to win a combat encounter.

I will probably try the "everyone gets one" weapon at 20pop, roughly as weak but with the whole "fits in the bag but cant be stuffed back in once deployed" mechanic.

I might just try spriting something for it once I move my computer to my new place. It's been like a decade since I've sprited anything but eh, might as well if only because guns are always fun.

If you do that let me know. People disliked automatic weapon distribution but when I admin there would be plenty of times where I'd like to have an event where emergency weapons get distributed. I'd definitely throw together a PR for adding a new weapon if you sprited it.

[Jacough]

Ancient bump

I'm not much of a spriter but this is what I came up with.




Basically the idea is the rifle starts folded up as seen on top. When the user hits the green LED button, the stock pops out a bit, the grip and foregrip unfold, the barrel pops out to its full length, a holographic sight pops up, and the LED button turns red to indicate it's ready to fire. Thoughts?

[DemonFiren]

The barrel looks remarkably thick, as if it had an integrated suppressor.

That aside, Mass Effect vibes intensify.

[Oldman Robustin]

Looks good, attach the file and ill make a PR for it be added as an admin or cargo thing

[Lumbermancer]

Lowpop is not an issue by itself, it's the Nosec during lowpop, or even medpop that's the problem. Something should be done to make people want to play sec more.

[A3STH3T1CS]

gun reskins

[TheNightingale]

Lowpop is not an issue by itself, it's the Nosec during lowpop, or even medpop that's the problem. Something should be done to make people want to play sec more.

Nosec wouldn't be a problem if people didn't go Postal and shoot everyone they see with a .357.

[Saegrimr]

>120 players
>Each with a stetchkin in the backpack

I don't think i've seen worse rounds. Completely killed my will to play.

[Zilenan91]

How bad was it, I wasn't there

[oranges]

saegrimar ded intensifies

[Saegrimr]

How bad was it, I wasn't there

Sec just lethaled anybody in the general vicinity of trouble.
More people obviously stroll by to see bullets and shit flying everywhere, so they start firing, I guess thinking that they're helping.
It was a fucking bloodbath.

[Zilenan91]

That sounds awesome

[PKPenguin321]

How bad was it, I wasn't there

Sec just lethaled anybody in the general vicinity of trouble.
More people obviously stroll by to see bullets and shit flying everywhere, so they start firing, I guess thinking that they're helping.
It was a fucking bloodbath.

should've wavedashed under the bullets

[Armhulen]

It was pretty hellish but not the worst thing i've ever seen I guess

[A3STH3T1CS]

How bad was it, I wasn't there

Sec just lethaled anybody in the general vicinity of trouble.
More people obviously stroll by to see bullets and shit flying everywhere, so they start firing, I guess thinking that they're helping.
It was a fucking bloodbath.

should've wavedashed under the bullets

I'm losing my shit just trying to imagine that.

[Takeguru]

>Just ban low pop murderbones

No

[Steelpoint]

Encourage more people to enlist in Security on low pop.

That's the million dollar question.