/tg/Station 13

Sleeping carp no longer grants outright damage resistances to all forms of damage. Its price has been decreased to 12TC

this is fucking stupid
explain to me how this is good

Who are we supposed to blame now that Oranges retired?

Sleeping carp is a bad traitor item because I've only ever seen it used to do piss easy murderbones. Especially after Necromancer buffed it to give invisible armor 24/7. It was better in its old state when it was at least vulnerable to one shots from people with stunbatons. With stun nerfs I don't really think sleeping carp has a place in the game.

The alternative is giving them iron skin or some shit

BeeSting12 wrote:Sleeping carp is a bad traitor item because I've only ever seen it used to do piss easy murderbones. Especially after Necromancer buffed it to give invisible armor 24/7. It was better in its old state when it was at least vulnerable to one shots from people with stunbatons. With stun nerfs I don't really think sleeping carp has a place in the game.

which is weird because the stun nerfs were meant to invite more melee combat

Can't believe people are actually defending invisible immunity to embeds/syringes/ranged weapons + ~60% global resists across the board + that stupid "random chance to deal 40 brute every second punch" thing, especially since you could still stack armor on top of the global immunities. People legitimately argued that a spear was an effective counter to sleeping carp despite an 18 damage spear being reduced to 7.2 damage without armor and down to like 4 damage with armor. Hell, throw on augmented limbs and you were literally immune to any brute attack that did less than 20 damage (and burn still had that stupid fucking 30% resist despite burning supposed to be their weakness???). Shit, several of the main users of carp thought being stunnable via stunbatons (even with 70% stam resist and 50% stun resist lol) was a flaw and wanted to further nerf stunbatons against it.

Anyone who supported that iteration of carp should be laughed at and ignored on all future balance changes, because it was so transparently self serving. When the PR to remove them went up and got merged, I saw a bunch of people saying "wait, when did that get added?" and "wait, they had all those resists?" in OOC, because most people didn't even know

the problem is not nerfing carp to be a 12tc item with no resistances, the problem was letting 90% resistance carp to happen in the first place(it was 15tc and u could buy the funny stimpack pen)

my hot take is that necromanceranne needs a git ban for making shit balance changes all the time without giving them a single thought

Yikes it wasn't that bad. But it definitely got pretty silly with armor and I'll be entirely honest, at the end of the day I should have just taken it out back when I had the chance.

My reasoning for the changes was pretty much 'if you cannot reasonably combat most opponents in a 1v1 fight and a baton does this martial arts job but better, why even bother spending 17tc on it, just make a prod and bone eith that'.

Taking out the stuns would not be enough since the combo system, quite frankly, is utterly dogshit and I was working with one of our absolute worst systems in the game. So I made it a juggernaut based on some wuxian martial art bullshit about being tough as nails and see how I go with that theme, because again, martial arts just suck design wise no matter what you do. I just barely made krav maga good enough to use and even then it probably could be done away with as well.

Turns out I created the biggest crutch traitors could ever ask for and it was mostly a massive defense boost. None of it was the martial arts bit, it was the defenses. It wasn't invincibility but it was, at the core, going to force you to slog it out with the scarp user to ever beat them. You can't bullshit it. There was never an easy solution (well actually there was a few and a stool was one of them but imagine picking up a stool).

Then I nerfed it asap as soon as I saw how bullshit it was at the first lot of values. Then I didn't hear a word about it until Shaps kicked up a stink, and I was already gearing up to nerf it back down again but I guess we're here now.

I didn't get the benefit of a playtest with scarp, because we don't playtest that. While Shaps gets to make radically game altering design decisions with several months of tests and dodge any accusations of poor balance while slinging shit at me the whole time, I had to wing it and hope I got it right trying to fit this one minor piece of traitor gear into the current trend of design. I did take the time to test Shaps wounds system and found a lot of shit in that which made simple weaponry oblitrate people, like baseball bats being made even worse among other weapons, but I guess that's nothing compared to the evil balance additions I'm adding without the benefits of a performance test to find issues.

Hell, they yelled at me because I added what is about equivalent to a security vest to the uplink for 6 tc. I even upped it from the requested price change because I quite frankly didn't know what the right price would be and we could change it later. Not a peep about that balance wise since, most people like it, seems like I did okay? I'm probably gonna nerf it anyway?

Now I got to test the baton shit and hey, I missed some problems we have at the moment. I can perform pretty well with them but I'm not most people and I am not properly considering how much security relied on it.

Maybe we can put that back on the backburner, work to fix some issues, help sec with gaps in the role, help them actually detain people properly because they really lack that right now beyond batons and flashes, then come back to that change. We don't get game testers, we have to test via live play and let players figure out the problems we don't consider. Much like how Shaps discovered their own issues with the game with their changes, so have I and I'm figuring out with maintainers what might be a good way forward.

TL;DR calm down fellas we can fix shit that's actually broke and test bigger fish changes. I made scarp by winging it. I didn't get complaints past day one so I left it for someone else to resolve until I needed it to be weaker, and weaker I was going to make it. Shaps got to it first, no harm no foul, I wasn't as attached to it and it was maybe my first real major balance change too so it wasn't gonna be that killer.

yeah i was very frustrated with my cat for not coming for his damn insulin shot when i wrote that post and definitely oversold it a bit, i apologize for getting carried away, tone down the frustration in that post by like 50%

as for my changes, the wounds PR was backed up by a thorough design document and about three weeks of work building out the structure before it was first testmerged. The first testmerge, which lasted 2 rounds, was solely to find the main runtime errors that I was unable to find in those three weeks of self testing, and I promptly had the keyholders pull it after I got the data I needed. Then there was another week of building the system before it was testmerged again, and I was active on the servers for 8-10 rounds every other night cataloging and fixing the inevitable edgecases that come with overhauling a major part of one of the core systems of the game. I had clear objectives in mind for what information I wanted to get from the testing, both in terms of strengthening the code quality and in preventing exploits. While I apologize for being unnecessarily aggro in my other post in this thread, and admit it was uncalled for, it's very disingenuous to compare changing how one item functions with a massive overhaul of a core system that I spent probably ~80 hours on over the course of a month before going live on testmerge and probably another 100 hours since then, not including time spent writing guides, observing tests, and answering questions in game and on discord.

And it is equally disenguous to keep saying I'm somehow deliberately trying to break the game all the fucking time and like I'm not trying damn best to get feedback and figure things out with what little we have to work with, because I have always been as much on the level with you on balance and tried to point out and be as open with how I see things as I can.

I'm glad you got a lot of feedback and discussion, because I only got so many people willing to give me any at all for scarp. Sure, I could have had some grand design doc but I floated multiple rework ideas for a few months then landed on what I had because it was a minor thing and I felt I had the best design I could muster for what wasn't a very good structure to work with. I was stuck with a very serious design problem in trying to make scarp stunless when the only thing keeping most any martial art afloat is hard stuns. What I ended up with was what I felt solved that problem (but I suppose created more).

Then I got as much feedback as I could from people both before and after it was merged, gave it a kneejerk slap in under 24 hours and then that was that.

As far as 'powerful expensive bullshit' goes it seemed fine as it was left, and I moved on once people stopped pinging me about it. Most let me know it was actually underperforming, so I figured I had probably done enough.

sleeping carp was my favorite traitor tool because UNGA DUNGA MURDERBONE FUN and it's a shame because now it has no resistances to anything
couldn't it just have had like a 30% decrease instead of a gigantic amount?
since damage resistance got removed can you use sutures and regen mesh again or is that still undoable?

saprasam wrote:it's a shame because now it has no resistances to anything

Last time I checked before I first learned about this bullshit, sleeping carp was supposed to be martial arts where you can do martial art moves while also being able to dodge projectiles. The ability to dodge projectiles itself should have been good enough because it forced melee combat instead of cheap range tactics.

What I didn't fucking remember was it saying that it gave you resistances to damage. That should not be a fucking thing. That's just fucking retarded. I don't care how good you are at a martial art discipline in real life - there is no discipline that makes you resistant to laser beams or bullets. Not a single fucking one.

Carp with resistances was aids in item form, negating all ranged weapons (the most powerful weapons the station has such as the shotgun) and the op as hell stun resistances and the fact that if you get within melee range of a carp user who knows their stuff you are already dead. Not to mention any murderboner worth their salt will powergame sunglasses as soon as they hear the wewlad and become nigh invincible to most weapons. Not to mention the damage resistances allowing carp users to survive space for ludicrous amounts of time, alongside thrown weapons. A combination of dragnet snares, flamethrowers and flashbangs was almost the only way to easily kill a carp user (I.e. a strategy not based on the user messing up somehow). Now the 12tc version leads to north star gloves being combined with it and leading to more cancerous murderbone, but luckily the price is being increased to make this impossible. At least without discounts that is.

carp was the go to murderbone item its better nerfed

compared to how it used to be it’s barely nerfed though lol. Only 13 tc such a bargain

If we want to make melee combat more viable, running away needs to be less viable.

right now carp is at the place where it makes you better at hand to hand but you get fucked if you encounter a competent officer

Armhulen wrote:If we want to make melee combat more viable, running away needs to be less viable.

honestly do we even want to do that? why do we want more melee combat? it's trash
either you circle each other spam clicking and praying the server latency favors you, or you stand perfectly still and spam click each other and the winner is decided by who has the bigger number on for their weapons force value
the actual "skill" behind melee combat has pretty much never been good gameplay, the only time it was interesting was when it had really swingy mechanics, like closing the gap on a desworder so you could go for a guaranteed baton

Ayy Lemoh wrote:What I didn't fucking remember was it saying that it gave you resistances to damage. That should not be a fucking thing. That's just fucking retarded. I don't care how good you are at a martial art discipline in real life - there is no discipline that makes you resistant to laser beams or bullets. Not a single fucking one.

Can you show me a martial art that lets you block bullets? It's meant to be ridiculous, that's the point even for the original version.

Armhulen wrote:If we want to make melee combat more viable, running away needs to be less viable.

Well actually it'll probably need to use a swing system. We can't really make melee decent while it's entirely based around direct sprite clicks, so for the time being it'll just kinda need to suck ass. The only alternative is lowering the movement speed even further, which quite frankly is unlikely to be a thing given how resistant people were to it before and honestly it's kind of a placebo. Kev's got an interesting system for cit around parries and shield shoves, so maybe that might be one solution if it works in that system. Though we'd need to see about porting in a combat mode as well, which also will be helpful with making combat a little more granular and modular.

Ayy Lemoh wrote:

saprasam wrote:it's a shame because now it has no resistances to anything

Last time I checked before I first learned about this bullshit, sleeping carp was supposed to be martial arts where you can do martial art moves while also being able to dodge projectiles. The ability to dodge projectiles itself should have been good enough because it forced melee combat instead of cheap range tactics.

What I didn't fucking remember was it saying that it gave you resistances to damage. That should not be a fucking thing. That's just fucking retarded. I don't care how good you are at a martial art discipline in real life - there is no discipline that makes you resistant to laser beams or bullets. Not a single fucking one.

don't they walk on charcoals to numb their pain to heat

Nah nah, that's not how it works. Basically you walk across the embers and don't stop. Your foot doesn't stay in contact long enough to induce a burn, and the burning embers aren't very good at burning in the first place, so it's more a challenge of self-discipline. It's entirely reliant on physics, no built up resistance.

NecromancerAnne wrote:

Ayy Lemoh wrote:What I didn't fucking remember was it saying that it gave you resistances to damage. That should not be a fucking thing. That's just fucking retarded. I don't care how good you are at a martial art discipline in real life - there is no discipline that makes you resistant to laser beams or bullets. Not a single fucking one.

Can you show me a martial art that lets you block bullets? It's meant to be ridiculous, that's the point even for the original version.

That's too ridiculous. Additionally, dodging a bullet is possible (you shouldn't bet or train on doing that though). However, this is indeed a game that isn't meant to be hyper realistic, but games tend to have a thing called balance though (even if it's balanced by imbalance). I believe that one of the worst examples of balance would have to be if there was multiple people who could do surprise attacks freely however one of them could be able to dodge bullets AND be more resistant to all damage at the same time. I feel like that only works if it's a solo opponent or if they can only have of those advantages, but not if they have all three fucking feats going for them at the exact same time.

Sleeping carp making people being forced to engage in melee combat to fight you is good enough on it's own. If anyone actually requires sleeping carp to make them resistant to damage despite how sec automatically loses most of it's power by entering melee combat then they should actually get better at the game instead.

Originally I wanted to kill off the bullet deflection entirely, but people were so keen to keep it I compromised on it and made it so you hand to have throw mode up to even have bullet deflection. As a result, you couldn't deflect bullets if moving in on the offensive, but you could deflect bullets when on the defensive. It meant filling their hands with junk by throwing stuff was one way to bypass the bullet deflection, and almost meant while a sleeping carp user is fighting at least someone else, they do not have bullet deflection. Ganging up on them was almost always the way to go, and we seem to have no real issue with getting multiple people to tackle a threat on tg. Which is probably why nobody complained about it to me.

Quite honestly, I agree that it would have been more ideal to have one or the other, but people yelled at me when I wanted it that way.

PKPenguin321 wrote:

Armhulen wrote:If we want to make melee combat more viable, running away needs to be less viable.

honestly do we even want to do that? why do we want more melee combat? it's trash
either you circle each other spam clicking and praying the server latency favors you, or you stand perfectly still and spam click each other and the winner is decided by who has the bigger number on for their weapons force value
the actual "skill" behind melee combat has pretty much never been good gameplay, the only time it was interesting was when it had really swingy mechanics, like closing the gap on a desworder so you could go for a guaranteed baton

everything in tg combat related is clicking, why does melee get this sign that it's trash when every other game mechanic for combat sucks fat ass aswell

Well, projectiles are not direct clicks necessarily. You can aim with them and they can be precise enough to hit past walls just a bit. For melee you MUST directly click on someone's sprite, which means latency is an issue. You would have to radically alter the game to make it less of a click spamfest to smack someone with a melee weapon.

Give melee weapons sweep and stab effects, boom fixed (sweep hits anyone in the horizontal 3 tiles in front of the player, stab is just the one in front)

wesoda25 wrote:sweep hits anyone in the horizontal 3 tiles in front of the player

Can you imagine how many items would just be nerfed due to that? It'd probably be extreme enough to get even ENERGY SWORDS nerfed a bit.

I was thinking it deals damage based on where the target it. If you’re in the first tile of the slash, 50% damage taken. If the center, 75%, and on the last its full damage

And stabbing would probably do increased bleeding if its a sharp weapon and deal more fatal blows etc. of course this is all conjecture but I think its a fun idea

It's a super fun idea.

carp should have been fun combos for epic results but instead was click once with grab and they die, then it became ?????????? and then ?????????? but weaker

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:carp should have been fun combos for epic results but instead was click once with grab and they die, then it became ?????????? and then ?????????? but weaker

combos dont work and never will until the stun meta isnt the only good option