/tg/Station 13

I want to gather some feedback from my first gamemode going forward. I know there was a lot of hate surrounding it, but people never really specified why they hated the mode. I have no reason to believe they will now, but I'm at least hoping that some of us are more mature than toddlers and can outline why they didn't like the mode. Anyhow, leave your thoughts below as to why you did or didn't like it, and vote on the poll.

I personally liked it a lot, very straightforward mode with a clear goal. It's my understanding that a lot of people didn't like it because of the Glare ability though

Ranged parasting.

Another security vs badguys conversion mode complete with team HUDs and hivemind (it's redundant, it will never not be redundant until you remove other conversion modes or radically alter everything about shadowling to the point where its an unrelated mode to your original design).

Either snowballs terribly (it's rev but all the revheads are pseudo wizards and all the revs get parasting) or ends up with shadowlings jaunting in circles for half an hour while people charge around maint with flares.

Shadowlings were weak to light, but had a bunch of spells to just negate light entirely, so there wasn't really much actual light vs darkness going on, just hitting running away until spells were off cooldown and they could ignore light again.

Light vs darkness when the guys with night vision can't even see the dark tiles properly sucks.

Light vs darkness in a game with 360 degree lighting and vision is never going to work.

but I'm at least hoping that some of us are more mature than toddlers

Try leading by example instead of making a passive aggressive post and pretending people didn't leave literally hundreds of comments across github and the forums on what they specifically liked and disliked about shadowling.

I thought it was a bad gamemode.


Ranged parasting was just lame and the only thing you really got to do as Sling was converting people. Actually going out to confront people and use your powers was just suicide, so most powers never got used.

What I did like was the progression based unlocking of powers and I still think this is how changelings should work (absorb people, get more power).

I loved hiding in maint, nabbing a passing engineer for their ID and then snowballing to control an entire department and eventually ascend.

My issue with Sling was that it was a redundant conversion mode during a time when we were swamped with conversion modes.
Plus it was so hard to tell if you were in the dark or not, variable night visions was alright but I don't believe there was just a quick enable/disable to see if there was any light around you.

Honestly I'd prefer it as a non-conversion team antagonist

The ranged parasting was godawful, yes.
Shadowling never got a nightvision toggle, just variable NV, which wasn't really of any help to it at all.
The abilities it got were, uh, really bad; AoE confusion, AoE slowdown, blindness smoke that healed it and allies combined into one thing; it unlocked those, and it could drop in the middle of a group, press four buttons, and leave with a guy to convert, and with the jaunt doing so was basically 0 danger.

It was just too GOOD at what it did and was not fun to play against or particularly fun to fight once the crew got their shit together and spammed glowshrooms, which were basically the only thing that could really stop a shadowling for going everywhere at all times, possibly excluding an AI watching it with camera lights(though that was more of an exploit/only worked in areas with cams).

Design was pretty eh: it was super focused on being uncatchable and getting converts, and it was, wow, super fucking good at that, to the point where it could do nothing else.

Bugs were also something of an issue, as well, mostly to do with veil and not turning off lights.

Anonus wrote: Design was pretty eh: it was super focused on being uncatchable and getting converts, and it was, wow, super fucking good at that, to the point where it could do nothing else.

This is a very important line. There was very little room for creativity in shadowling. You're a naked guy with some very specialized spells, restricted to set areas of the map.

There isn't any customizing your gear/strategy, any room for roleplay or diplomacy, you're just nabbing a couple of guys with a button push in maint before settling in to become a conversion assembly line in some closet somewhere.

Rounds were very samey.

i think the real problem with it was that it had progression, right

but the progression was instant

it went "jumpy conversion machine with marginal fighting power" straight into "unstoppable telepathic god rampage"

imo it should probably be a more gradual "stealthy conversion machine" ----> "increasingly fighting focused, objectives change from recruit people" ----> "unstoppable telepathic god"

the problem with it was that it's endgoal was just to convert the whole station and then ascend, so not only could it not really fight (IE, interact with the crew besides LoL-esque ambush) but it had no actual reason to at all because any fight it got into was mostly purposeless and presented a direct threat.

also, glowshrooms are pretty stupid i mean there's basically no way to deal with this shit so muh glowshrooms every round

basically if you were going to redo it i would:

refluff shadowlings as manifestations of entropy
give them an upgrade tree so they could attack the station in other ways including but not limited to
-degrade the engine
-destroy the power grid
-blow out lights
-freeze the air
-black out the stars (no more solar. maybe an objective)?
etc etc. give them an incentive and ability to play the game and interact with the station besides >ambush >convert >hide in closet >repeat
give them objectives that require them to fight and attack station systems or personnel on a large scale
give them abilities for above
scaling power directly based on lights on-station / near station (instead of converts, which have the effect already of being a boon because you have more converts)
make conversion superpowers reverse engineerable by science

you know etc etc just spitballing here

It was just another conversion, antag vs station mode with damocles' sword hanging over everyone. Fun for a while until the novelty wore off.

Ohw and the fact that the post ascended ling was made snowflake invincible to the few threats that DID harm it initially was super lame, victory condition or not.

A ascended sling thinking; "I WON, I AM A GOD" and then getting blown apart by a bomb or sucked into a singularity were the most fun Sling rounds.