/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

How do you miss cloakers they were absolute ass cancer to get robusted by

Wow oranges i know the title is older players but not THAT old

i don't have any specific thoughts in my head about this but i would like to bring up the fact that "older player" at this point means anyone who played before combat mode more or less
good majority of the ppl on the servers started playing during or after the pandemic. several times on the servers ive made jokes about like, cloning or something, and multiple people don't even know the game used to have it. you don't have to have been in sligcord or whatever to have some thoughts, it's just elitist noise

I returned to play some rounds again this Christmas holiday and nothing could sum up my feelings more than the comments in this thread. It was great because you had easy systems that combined in uncountable bullshit ways. Today everything is just railroaded into the desired or expected outcome. Also the war against "greytide" and "murderboning" cut out the heart of the game.

Much like CPTANT, I came back after a short hiatus as I do from time to time, because I like to check in on the game I spent so much of my time on. I approached it with a sour attitude, since I know that a lot of the mechanics and rules have been changed from what they once were. Almost every player I know have went and disappeared without a trace, and I didn't know what to expect.

Out of the three rounds I played, my first round, the Syndicate nuclear operatives challenged the station to a basketball game for the nuclear disk. The Captain drafted the three most promising candidates (the clown, one of my cargo techs, and a scientist) to play against the nuke ops. It was going surprisingly clean, besides a few dirty game moves. Towards the end, somebody in a space suit snuck in to the spectator stand (in the nuke ops ship), injected me with a poison that gave me a heart attack and killed me in five seconds, and snuck off. In the midst of the game, nobody could hear me screaming until it was too late. Then the ship blew up because somebody else was messing with the on-board bomb that was being used as a timer for the match (the syndicate insisted it was a dud). Everybody in the game died, and the crew hijacked what was left of the syndicate ship.

The second round I played, I earned my righteous title as Captain back , among 15(?) other Captains. A lot of the round was a blur, but I spent a lot of my time working with a psychopathic HoS who cut the heads off of anybody who slighted him with a fire-axe, against a team of syndicates disguised as Centcomm officers.

The third round was nothing too crazy, but a revolution occured and I discovered that Quartermasters are now considered Heads of Staff

Through these rounds I reflected on something. Despite all of the very controversial changes made to the game, the heart of the game comes from the community interactions, not from the mechanics. As long as nobody plays like an asshole, the game will always remain fun. And while I will dearly miss the people I once played with, the new guys aren't so bad either.

CPTANT wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 1:37 pm Also the war against "greytide" and "murderboning" cut out the heart of the game.

for greytiders and murderboners like you

I think they meant more that it's a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" type situation

oranges wrote: ↑Sat Dec 24, 2022 8:54 pm

CPTANT wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 1:37 pm Also the war against "greytide" and "murderboning" cut out the heart of the game.

for greytiders and murderboners like you

I have 0 notes for greytiding. On the contrary, I often played security, it's just boring as hell when nobody creates conflict.

But yes, this is indicative of the "old players" bad attitude that seems to have developed.

I think I wanna come back and play again.

What do. What gimmick. What did I even used to do aside from incompetent doctor/robotics

ThanatosRa wrote: ↑Sat Dec 24, 2022 11:35 pm I think I wanna come back and play again.

What do. What gimmick. What did I even used to do aside from incompetent doctor/robotics

1) Play on Sybil, the best server

2)
Off the top of my head,
-Charge for your services and see people's reactions
-Construct a big area and see how many people you can get involved in something
(Rage cage, cooking contest, I once directed a 'movie' with scripts and managed to get xenomorphs to work with the crew but you could also just use the theatre for that)
-Build the emergency shuttle with that package Captain can buy
-Start a movement campaign for something (such as the Kars 4 Klowns charity)

You've got this, bro

I admit Manuel always felt more my style.


Also I kinda forget how to do a lot of shit that isn't robotics or medical. Should just be Grey tide

ThanatosRa wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 9:52 pm I admit Manuel always felt more my style.


Also I kinda forget how to do a lot of shit that isn't robotics or medical. Should just be Grey tide

don't do it

ThanatosRa wrote: ↑Sat Dec 24, 2022 11:35 pm I think I wanna come back and play again.

What do. What gimmick. What did I even used to do aside from incompetent doctor/robotics

Go with an active captain gimmick. So you can be something like naming yourself Augustus Caesar, tell the crew you're creating a legion and then hand your followers guns and armor from the armory, and create a secondary police force that answers to you.
Set yourself up in the medbay, and treat that and the crew monitor as your HQ. People are getting hurt or dying where the problems are. Not only can you know that 1 atmos tech dying and another getting heavily injured means there's a problem in Atmos, as the captain your headset is able to access all frequencies means you can co-ordinate between departments to solve the problem.
You could also be the money captain by taking a tracking beacon to Cargo bay, set your hand tele target to cargo bay, and as you wander around the station, empty every crate you find and push it through the portal to cargo. Then use the points to order whatever you want. Robotics assembly kits and medkits when there's a medical crisis, bullet proof armor if there's nuke ops, and so on. Making friends with the miners and asking for them to spend all their points on medipens or mining hardsuits also allows some shenanigans to happen

Bit of context, I played before the 100x Less Lag update, way back when the game HUD had an internal frame and Space Stabilisation was still a thing.
The things I enjoyed the most were the feeling of a problem to solve. The station's been bombed, the station's been hit by meteors, the station is being swallowed by a black hole, the station is being overrun by wizards, kudzu and cows. You could find yourself in a dire situation, and people would pull their socks up and try to find a solution, and things would play out naturally. Frequently it was a fight to repair the console and call the shuttle, to get the station in a working state before it was required, to hold on against waning odds, amidst the backdrop of fear and mistrust over who could give you a small prick and a burning sensation. There was even a bit of roleplay.
The reason why I stopped playing is because the game turned into CoD. Accomplish objectives in the quickest, most straightforward ways - no story. And by far the worst cancer was the fact that the round was seen as a thing to be ended as soon as possible, rather than a game to be played. Every single inoptimal scenario was immediately met by a chorus of people demanding that the shuttle be called - there were xenos somewhere, and how dare they be antagonised; they didn't roll antagonist themselves; they stubbed their toe. If you complained that RP was dying, you got accused of wanting to turn the server into Bay by people actively trying to destroy RP entirely. People took an endlessly fresh storytelling experience and turned it into an incredibly stale speedrunning combat simulator, where the same things happened over and over again, increasingly quickly. Since stuff unlocks in a round over time, through science, mining etc., a lot of content that was designed years ago essentially just stopped being accessible.
I look back every so often and play a few rounds, but it's never going to have the same sense of adventure I was experiencing back when I was in university. I don't know if it's changed recently, much or at all, but my experience was that people didn't want to be antagonised, didn't want to play the game - they wanted the game to be over so they could start the game again, endlessly.
I don't know how to paint the picture clearer, so I'll just leave one specific example - I remember one round the station was torn apart by meteors, so I found myself stranded in a 3x3 supply room in upper arrivals maintenance with a few random supplies and a severely injured crewmate. With our oxygen running out and there being hard vacuum outside, we had to try to come up with a plan to escape to the bulk of the station - admittedly we did get a cookie from praying, not that it made much of a difference, but in the end I spacewalked with a firesuit, taking damage on the way, with my exposed comrade dragged behind me, having set myself on fire to improve my chances at maintaining an optimal temperature, barely making it to the main bulk of the station.
By the time I stopped playing, I hadn't personally seen that scale of scenario in literal years.

Space Station 14 gives back a lot of wonder of discovering something new currently by the way.

oranges wrote: ↑Mon Dec 26, 2022 10:43 pm

ThanatosRa wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 9:52 pm I admit Manuel always felt more my style.


Also I kinda forget how to do a lot of shit that isn't robotics or medical. Should just be Grey tide

don't do it

I'll probably be fine oranges

I used to rp more than the average spessmehn back in the day

I wish sybil was more like it used to be before bagil's pop dropped and came over
low-medpop, hour and a half to two hour long rounds, conversations that had more than 2 words a line, people who didn't aggressively rush the most meta loadouts to powergame and shitfling in the hallways

it had RP without the restrictions or "forced to RP" feeling that you get from MRP/HRP servers

Born to tide
Forced to RP

Omega_DarkPotato wrote: ↑Wed Jan 04, 2023 2:12 pm I wish sybil was more like it used to be before bagil's pop dropped and came over

Why don't you try bagil

I haven't tried yet
Too busy

I do not consider myself a real old player, but I shall post nonetheless since the game has significantly changed in the time I have played:
I miss station-breaking threats. Not round-ending threats, but station-breaking ones. Shadowling, plasmafloods, large cults, hour+ revolutions, the kind of thing that smashes up the station without just destroying it immediately. The kind of antagonist where you step outside your isolated office and all the lights are out, there's blood in the halls, and something moves in the distance. I want an Alien Isolation meets Dead Space experience where I'm scrounging a space suit and a gun and just trying to hold out until the shuttle arrives. I want to barricade myself in a room as monstrous things pound against the walls, I want comms to be dead silent, the power to be fading, I want to have to band together with random employees and pray that they won't get me killed. Nowadays it feels like the shuttle gets called just as a formality because "TIme to go home." This might be the result of dynamic, or the result of changes to prevent large scale boning, or a Bagil specific thing, I don't know.
Also the Singularity engine bring it back.

to add on to what oranges said, thats a whole lot of forum accounts not created in 2014 posting in the boomer thread.

its the people and the narratives they create, some of the rounds I had back then and the stories they created were euphoric, like a duo nuke ops round with oldman robustin or getting saved by static name shaps playing as CMO in north solars while trying to solo oldman robustin in a seperate round he was playing as a traitor in.

there is some nostalgia at play, but the stories /tg/ created were some of the best I had in ss13, as fwoosh said, some of us played on other servers before coming to tg while /tg/ was called ntstation. I also played on yog and liberty's last army (you get one oxford token if you tell me what Perseus was)

CoffeeDragon16 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 6:45 pm "older player" at this point means anyone who played before combat mode more or less

this is super subjective, "older player" to me can mean anything between clock cult and gangs to stun gloves and security borgs

Perseus was the ERT of LLA. Since we're on the topic of older servers, here's a recorded and fond memory of a time on facepunch station. My first account was called Ipwnnoobs0, which I changed out of sheer embarrassment

ADMIN: Carnwennan/(Elly OConnell)X: I can't believe he actually believed me when I said a -smart-fridge was for storing brains
Jamarion Magor puts the monkey (718) on the table.
the monkey (718) is beginning to have his head cut open with the scalpel by Jamarion Magor.
...
the monkey (718) has his spine's connection to the brain severed with the circular saw by Jamarion Magor.
The monkey (718) lets out a faint chimper as it collapses and stops moving...
ADMIN: Pisest/(Henderson Minnie)X: that's pretty fucking funy
PM: Ipwnnoobs0/(Jamarion Magor)->Pisest/(Henderson Minnie):
The SmartFridge smartly refuses The monkey (718)'s brain.
The SmartFridge smartly refuses The monkey (718)'s brain

Togopal wrote: ↑Fri Dec 23, 2022 5:22 am Out of the three rounds I played, my first round, the Syndicate nuclear operatives challenged the station to a basketball game for the nuclear disk.

This round is what inspired me to rework basketball mechanics so it would be easier to keep score. What started as a simple PR to add a scorecard and buzzer sounds, ended up as a 3 month PR as I added sounds, stamina mechanics, and an actual minigame. One of my biggest motivations for coding is when I come across silly stuff or bugs as a player that I want to work on.

Togopal wrote: ↑Fri Dec 23, 2022 5:22 am Through these rounds I reflected on something. Despite all of the very controversial changes made to the game, the heart of the game comes from the community interactions, not from the mechanics. As long as nobody plays like an asshole, the game will always remain fun. And while I will dearly miss the people I once played with, the new guys aren't so bad either.

All the old vets I played with have grown up, had families, careers, etc. It's sad, but real life is just like spessmen sometimes. As one shift ends, a new one begins with an entire new crew. If you are lucky, some of the old crew will still remain but inevitably people have to move on...

Fond memories from long ago.

Rocco Ward wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 9:42 am
This round is what inspired me to rework basketball mechanics so it would be easier to keep score. What started as a simple PR to add a scorecard and buzzer sounds, ended up as a 3 month PR as I added sounds, stamina mechanics, and an actual minigame. One of my biggest motivations for coding is when I come across silly stuff or bugs as a player that I want to work on.

Thank you for this



Pottery. I miss those times, but I'm glad I was around for them regardless, lots of good memories

I have love for the mechanics that I first joined the game with but /tg/ is still and seems to always be the source of great people to meet online

excatly man ss13 feels like it is the only place to meet actual real people
i dont get attachments like here from other communities

I just want this endless greenshift to be over. I miss when threats were major and could actually play out some as opposed to a firelock stubbing the captain's toe and the shuttle getting immediately called. The vast majority of rounds don't have any bite to them and the shuttle gets called at 45 minutes when the firelock hell starts and nobody fixes it. This game's main draw was never the job sim to me, it was the crisis sim where the odds were stacked against you and shit really hit the fan. Only a few rounds out of many scratch that itch anymore.

stop playing on manuel

oranges wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 10:20 pm stop playing on manuel

Progtot defanged traitors, the most common antag.

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:19 am

oranges wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 10:20 pm stop playing on manuel

Progtot defanged traitors, the most common antag.

It's a seriously bad psychological effect. Because all it really did was slap a time gate behind stuff like bombing medbay roundstart, though people believe there's more to it

Armhulen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 3:32 pm

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:19 am

oranges wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 10:20 pm stop playing on manuel

Progtot defanged traitors, the most common antag.

It's a seriously bad psychological effect. Because all it really did was slap a time gate behind stuff like bombing medbay roundstart, though people believe there's more to it

It incentivised them to spend most of the round doing errands that only mildly inconvenience people.

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 4:39 pm It incentivised them to spend most of the round doing errands that only mildly inconvenience people.

True. It seems like a lot of the easy objectives are just busy work that, at best, serve as a time sink and, at worst, increase the chances a traitor gets caught before they can do anything interesting at worst.

Makes me think: would progtots be better if objectives were presented as a side thing? Or even funnier, if progtots were hard time gates instead of ones you can work towards lowering?

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 4:39 pm

Armhulen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 3:32 pm

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:19 am

oranges wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 10:20 pm stop playing on manuel

Progtot defanged traitors, the most common antag.

It's a seriously bad psychological effect. Because all it really did was slap a time gate behind stuff like bombing medbay roundstart, though people believe there's more to it

It incentivised them to spend most of the round doing errands that only mildly inconvenience people.

sounds like a you issue

oranges wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 7:43 pm

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 4:39 pm

Armhulen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 3:32 pm

CPTANT wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:19 am

oranges wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 10:20 pm stop playing on manuel

Progtot defanged traitors, the most common antag.

It's a seriously bad psychological effect. Because all it really did was slap a time gate behind stuff like bombing medbay roundstart, though people believe there's more to it

It incentivised them to spend most of the round doing errands that only mildly inconvenience people.

sounds like a you issue

This is not an argument and I don't see what it adds to the conversation.

Armhulen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 5:59 pm Makes me think: would progtots be better if objectives were presented as a side thing? Or even funnier, if progtots were hard time gates instead of ones you can work towards lowering?

unironically i think literally just removing progtot and adding hard time limits to items would be preferable

You have to convince oranges and watermelon, and removing progtot is not going to pass by either of them. And I don't even think progtot is an issue, just that it's presentation encourages... I'll have to think more on it, it's a very unique and odd issue

Armhulen wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 9:12 pm You have to convince oranges and watermelon, and removing progtot is not going to pass by either of them. And I don't even think progtot is an issue, just that it's presentation encourages... I'll have to think more on it, it's a very unique and odd issue

i title this "The Arcodian Sheperd"

Confession: I liked rolling for traitor and murderboning. My goal was usually, but not always, to kill as many people as possible one-by-one to show how good I was at the game, then walk onto an empty shuttle victorious to show I could do an old hijack no problem. I had other gimmicks involving kidnapping, but those were also partially about showing how robust I was. In later years I enjoyed tg for a variety of other reasons, and I generally keep non-wizard antagonists disabled.

I used to absolutely enjoy the game for the variety of situations and problems thrown at me, using your entire environment to figure out ways to survive in a very, very hostile environment.
Often times that environment would end up just being hostile because everyone is on edge from some vague unknown threat that might not even exist. Everyone could be your enemy and kill you in an instant.
That feeling is 100% gone now for multiple reasons and over time I've kind of figured out what removed this feeling for me.

The doubling down of dynamic (not dynamic itself), the removal of cloning (for very ironic reasons), unarmed combat being made mechanical and maybe a touch of heretics being badly designed. Also there's a general problem of the skill ceiling being way too high when it comes to fixing things, but way too low when it comes to causing problems.

Yeah so, problem with dynamic is you can't have secret extended anymore. Now every single round is "Oh boy, what antag are we fuckin with today...", which is stupid and dumb. Part of the whole point of SS13 was just the insane amounts of paranoia and chaos causing even more chaos, leading to the station destroying itself for what turns out to be nothing at all. That's just straight up gone now.

The removal of cloning and rework of medical was in hindsight, badly handled. Ironically, the big problem with medical now is that death is absolutely meaningless. Now, this might just be from playing around with a circle of friends that tends to be above the skill of many /tg/ players, but revival from "soft" death is an inconsequential amount of time. Chems just heal way too damn much and surgeries feel too fast. Even "hard" death feels trivialized with how easy it is to get a monkeyperson, I want to see podperson blood banks and not just "grab one of em' monkeys from gene". A good doctor can probably bring you up in less than 3 minutes from getting absolutely blasted, provided they've prepared their equipment. That's less time than even cloning had.

Unarmed combat got made more mechanical, and it never really got too many changes afterwards. Right now I'd consider unarmed combat to be one of the strongest weapons in the game, which is stupid. This is a game all about your environment and using it, why is rushing down someone who's holding a gun using nothing but your fists considered to be occasionally a winning move?? Why can you even knock-out someone without long fights using only shoves and grabs?

Heretics, yeah, this one is less of a problem but heretics are just badly designed. It feels like nobody really knows what they're even intended to be so they're kind of a mix of everything. The result though is that a good heretic player can just avoid fights, yet is also a combat powerhouse at the same time. Not a particularily good combo. Considering they're a common antagonist, this just leads to any round with Heretics having most players drop everything and start hunting, a sign of pretty poor balancing for a solo antag.

And yes, the skill ceiling on fixing is way above that of causing problems. I host my own server and considering a large quantity of the server is highly skilled at the game, it leads to a pretty clear picture of how badly the game is balanced for real. Bombings + Wide-Station Atmospherics Issues getting solved in 5 minutes, death is considered trivial, combat is an absolute mess... There's more to go on like engineering and atmos being pretty much gutted via a different approach to game design, but that's going into grognard territory.

Critawakets wrote: ↑Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:43 am A good doctor can probably bring you up in less than 3 minutes from getting absolutely blasted, provided they've prepared their equipment. That's less time than even cloning had.

Isn't that the point though? The cloning removal wasn't because people were getting revived too fast, it was that being a doctor was meaningless and you literally just set up cloning and went to the HoP for a job change to assistant. Yeah you can potentially revive people really fast now, but there's an element of skill and player interaction that wasn't there before. Now I'm not saying med and chem are perfect in their current state, but they are almost certainly more engaging than they were in the cloning days.

I played again tonight for the first time in ... fuck I dunno.

Yea I miss secret extended. Trying to relearn stuff is a little hard when It's 5 minutes in and there's already nukies.

you know what was really funny was when assistants had 3 spawn points, all in primary tool storage and all within arms reach of each other, and there was no assistant cap/maps and maint loot was hard coded. you would spawn on top of 10-20 other people and a fight would instantaneously break out. four or five people would immediately run to do "maintenance mario kart" where they would go to the spots where the good maint loot spawned to scoop it up before everyone else. the primary tool storage toolbelt probably has more player deaths associated with it than fire. if it was a rev round and an assistant started as a revhead then you would know fear. twenty revs going to the hop line literally 1 minute into a round changes a man

ThanatosRa wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 4:44 am I played again tonight for the first time in ... fuck I dunno.

Yea I miss secret extended. Trying to relearn stuff is a little hard when It's 5 minutes in and there's already nukies.

That’s why I wish we still had the occasional game mode rounds instead of what we have now. I've said it multiple times but dynamic can be shockingly undynamic at times.

Give us raging mages, give us six heretics, give us five lings, give us three rat kings, for fuck sakes I'm tired of every rounding having traitors and heretics.

Don't even get me started on red star/black orbit nukie rounds, literally aids for the crew. Have fun having all the lathes and the ORM bombed five minutes in because it's one of the only objectives traitors can do within a 20 minute timeframe. (before the nukies run in with esword + eshield + elite modsuit + fungal tb* for the tenth time that day)

*fuck fungal tb, all my homies hate fungal tb, at least romerol doesn’t make you randomly pass out, and it lets you play as a zombie if you die. Chemistry rarely makes fungal tb medicine, you can get reinfected with it almost instantly even if you just took fungal tb medicine, and players are smooth brained morons when it comes to not spreading illness as is.

I love robusting

Jonathan Gupta wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 12:32 am I love robusting

You don't even play

Timonk wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 1:52 am

Jonathan Gupta wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 12:32 am I love robusting

You don't even play

Fuck you look at scrubby dickwad

I dick wadded your mom