/tg/Station 13

I've seen a lot of people very adamant in OOC of their distaste for prog traitor recently, so I'd like to see how the community stands and hopefully spark more discussion about what can be fixed about it. I'm fairly sure maintainers are against reverting it in the entirety, but I do know that many players just want it gone.

overall i dont think progtot is awful but i do think it would be fun if oldtot still had a very small chance of showing up, like a 10% chance every progtot is an oldtot instead

I think that progtot solves one problem and adds a significantly worse one - removing the boring 2m any% medbay bomb was cool and good but now traitors are mechanically incentivized into performing incredibly boring randomly generated objectives instead of there being no incentive and everyone being free to do whatever they feel like doing.

In a situation where you can do whatever vs doing random objective given to you the opportunity cost of your freedom is however many TC you're passing up on - this deincentivizes creativity and user agency in exchange for "more gamer tokens".
In a perfect world we'd keep the reputation ticker and remove all benefits granted by objectives - completing objectives would not gain TC, nor would it gain reputation points. In exchange, rep costs could be dropped down a bit or passive generation could be increased, but everyone would be free to tator as they pleased instead of being incentivized towards shitty, randomly-generated boring-as-fuck objectives.

On one hand prog-tot is good because it gives you the chance to snowball over time into a 20+ tc build. But on the other hand it time gates half the fun shit leaving you to hide in a locker for ten minutes after killing a pet.

So I've been opposed the idea of prog traitors before it was released. I was somewhat swooned by the novelty of it for a couple of rounds. But now that I've spent some more time with it, my opinion is its really bad. I see three main issues. It incentivizes aversion to conflict, it replaces open ended objectives with rigid ones, and is a thematic fail overall. The upside, and the reason this got merged in such an unpolished state in the first place, is the glorified timer on uplink items, which does indeed solve a problem, but this could also be solved by just a normal timer. Quick explanation of what I mean:

Reputation is a glorified timer:
Reputation increases slowly over time, you can buy the tools you want when you get a certain reputation. Objectives give you reputation meaning you can get your stuff faster. Reputation gain is scaled with how much time has passed, and how much reputation you currently have. This is represented as a dreaded -X% reputation penalty whenever you complete an objective and the game decides you have "Too much reputation." This feels just awful. You are punished for completing multiple objectives in a short period of time, rather than rewarded. This is not an uncommon thing either. I very often can finish two easy objectives 15 minutes into the round, and after turning in the first one, the second one was basically for nothing(-94%). This system seems like it should reward good players by unlocking equipment faster for better play, but really it does nothing for the user except give poor players pity reputation so they can get equipment they didn't have to do much for. The solution, is just to make it a TIMER. After you've done that, you can throw out all the shitty objectives that were built around it.

Aversion to conflict:
Objectives that don't involve other players and only exist so you can acquire your e-bow a little bit faster are boring. Bugging the ce's office does nothing to impact the state of the round, and band-aids to make poorly thought out objectives "cheese proof" such as bugs exploding feels janky. The killing objectives encourage only one type of playstyle, which is ambushing. This is unsatisfying for your target, leaves little room for roleplay, and hardly ever gets other players involved.

Rigid objectives:
Killing comes to mind as the most obvious example. To plant a calling card or behead, you need to be alone with the target's body. The only reliable way to do this is to ambush them and drag them away somewhere private you can do the deed. So many previous avenues for murder are closed off.
-You can't gib your target
-You can't push your target into the SM
-You can't have someone else kill your target for you, be that brainwashed suicided bomber, slaved borg, converted AI, partner in crime, unwitting assassin, constructed golem ect
-You can poison your target outside of a combat scenario
-You can't throw them in a pit
-You can't notice they are already dead and bribe or threaten the medical doctors to just chuck em in the morgue
-You can't bomb your target unless you intend to scoop their body out of the rubble
And anything else within your imagination, is not a possibility for a completed objective under prog traitor. The maroon objective is now also impossible to implement under prog traitors.

Thematic fail:
Before progtots

You are a syndicate secret agent sent to preform a specific set of tasks aboard an enemy corporation's top of the line space station. This might have been for money, through blackmail, or because you truly believe for what you fight for so much you are willing to die for it. This might be a suicide mission, and what an honor it would be to die for the glory of the syndicate. You have been provided with an uplink that can supply you with the equipment you need. If you return back to base without all of your specific objectives complete, you should have died back at the station instead. Good luck agent.
You may also

After Progtots

Your a syndicate agent. We gave you some free shit (but only the really cool shit once we think you are cool enough or some amount of station and do nothing) do whatever you want. We will give you more cool shit is you do little tasks for us most of which will have little consequence in the big picture. Your only goal is getting a certain amount of reputation (which is trivial and can be done by waiting around), and maybe do your final objective if you want to and no one gets there first. Live or die, we don't care. We don't care if every single soul is alive and well back at Nanotrasen, even if you were specifically ordered to kill someone earlier. Its just about "sending a message." You don't ever need to do anything of lasting impact, just "send the message." We don't want you to steal anything, just put little bugs that last an hour on them so we can scan all of the information out of them, you can take off the bugs early too, it doesn't really matter, guess we didn't care about getting a complete scan or whatever anyways.

Also, alternative traitor flavors (internal affairs agent, gone postal, and legal trouble) all work much better with oldtots, and don't make any sense at all with progtots. Why is a Nanotrasen agent accepting syndicate contracts? How is doing random fetch quests for the syndicate supposed to get someone out of legal trouble? It made sense before, but now its just dumb.

How to fix.
Remove
Replace with a timer on uplink items.

My experience mirrors easy's. I was really excited when it first came out, but after playing with it for a bit, it seems to put traitors in a box that isn't particularly interesting.

Waiting to buy items is really shitty and currently the only antags that still really create a big bang in the first 25 minutes are nukies and wizard. Dynamic 2022 has attempted to spread out the antags throughout the round but because of the time locks and fetch quests you're still only getting anything big happening much later.

Endless TC sucks and the crew killing one traitor and suddenly having enough loot to arm every crewmember sucks for every other antag.

I miss romerol and I've literally only seen adminbus cascades

It went way too much in the other direction of trying to prevent round start murderbone. It just prevented any hijinx at all

I would be very interested in seeing this as a server poll

progression traitor suffers from a massive skill issue by the playerbase where people treat objectives as the entire game, rather than using the additional items to augment whatever they feel like doing. rep locks are iffy, but i actually do enjoy having a somewhat intact station at the hour mark.

i think it's alright, though i do wonder how just item locks wouldve went

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 5:11 am i think it's alright, though i do wonder how just item locks wouldve went

Item locks?

locking powerful stuff in the uplink until enough time has passed

an easiest middle ground solution would be to simply change objectives back to old objectives. That way progression traitors once more becomes optional side-objectives the syndicate will pay you more TC to do.

Most people are only in it for the greentext. So its best to just make the greentext more sandboxlike. Instead of do insert number easy - hard objectives then do nothing else all shift

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 4:20 am Rigid objectives:
Killing comes to mind as the most obvious example. To plant a calling card or behead, you need to be alone with the target's body. The only reliable way to do this is to ambush them and drag them away somewhere private you can do the deed. So many previous avenues for murder are closed off.
-You can't gib your target
-You can't push your target into the SM
-You can't have someone else kill your target for you, be that brainwashed suicided bomber, slaved borg, converted AI, partner in crime, unwitting assassin, constructed golem ect
-You can poison your target outside of a combat scenario
-You can't throw them in a pit
-You can't notice they are already dead and bribe or threaten the medical doctors to just chuck em in the morgue
-You can't bomb your target unless you intend to scoop their body out of the rubble
And anything else within your imagination, is not a possibility for a completed objective under prog traitor. The maroon objective is now also impossible to implement under prog traitors.

I think the sandbox aspect of old traitor is what I miss the most. The assassinate/maroon objectives were broad in the ways you could complete them, and because of the 20 TC you started with your toolbox to do this with was very limited. This encouraged finding creative solutions and making the absolute most of what you were given. In the current system you are given a much larger toolbox with a much narrower problem to solve. When I get 30 TC I usually wont even find an opportunity to use most of the items I buy.

Old objectives were an optional puzzle that I and I'm sure many people enjoyed completing. I dont need to kill anyone at all but because it gave me the challenge to kill one specific person by any means, I happily did it and enjoyed creating an elaborate plan to catch the whoever when they least expect it and kill them before anyone can notice. I would never pick this person to spend all 20 of my TC working on a trap to kill them, but because fate decided it was their turn I gladly played along.

bastardblaster wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 4:53 am progression traitor suffers from a massive skill issue by the playerbase where people treat objectives as the entire game, rather than using the additional items to augment whatever they feel like doing. rep locks are iffy, but i actually do enjoy having a somewhat intact station at the hour mark.

I agree with this completely. The entire system is a noob trap designed to force you to get your grimy fingerprints on every door and pet on station so that the detective can call you out and you can be a big loot pinata when some paramedic shovestuns you and lands a cuff combo.

If the emerging best solution to make the most out of traitor rounds is to completely ignore the whole system, why do we keep it anyways?

It does nothing uplink timers can't accomplish, gives less weight to traitor objectives, and some of the items are disproportionately rep expensive (300 rep for a hypnoflash that requires other tools? Come on).

its bad revert pls

its like playing superman returns and being like "this is fine" but then you play a bizzaro level and get more freedom your like "this is great" and then you have to go back to the superman protect the town the town is your health bar level and your like "Booring"

We had a taste of something so good and now we have something much more linear....this must of been how people in 1890 felt when they ate crab all day because it was super common. Not knowing it would become the overfished delicacy it is today now.

I liked the sandbox aspect of old traitors more. I feel like item locks could have accomplished what prog tots set out to do without removing the sandbox aspect completely.

I like to do a lot of gimmicks as a traitor- these are what makes the game fun for me but prog tot acts like an enemy to them. The item locks means I either need to wait 30 minutes into the round for items I need: by which point the crew is geared to shit already or do some stupid objective (plant bug) from which I will 99% get caught and the traitor round is gone.

I miss doing gimmicks based on the syndie kits, I miss gimmicks on the random item crates and I've really struggled to get tot content for youtube videos.

Prog tot also means people have uplinks unlocked to spawn bugs and other trash, which basically assures that every round security can easily get upwards of 15+ tc by just doing low level sec work, I tried this with sinful on sybil and we got 40 tc alongside other loot from these easily caught traitors such as: A desword, ebow, noslips, thermals so now security every round has an absolute load of tc to use as well.

In my eyes it's pretty poor for the above reasons.

Every single time i rolled traitor back in the good ole days I would buy the 20tc random surplus crate and let the contents decide how I played my traitor round. It allowed all kinds of fun creative ways to cause havoc. That is no longer possible because the crates are gone. I personally don't find traitors that much fun anymore after the 30th time hacking into a heads office to kill their pet.

I think the limited set of objectives makes it far to easy to figure out who the traitors are.

I think it has been a net negative to the game. Sure it prevented the whole medbay getting bombed at shift start thing. But was that really that big of a problem? I don't think it was. Go rebuild medbay in maintenance it wouldn't take that long to get a triage center up and running. People just hate having any inconvenience and are to prone to shuttle calling at the first breach.

i hate prog tots because they mechanically de-incentivize this https://youtu.be/jC-6EPgoWbI

revert with time locks please

Prop tot wasn't too bad when it first came out and the objectives paid more. Atleast then you got an incentive to wait around for unlocks but whenever I do a traitor round now 80% of my objectives are "fluff" with no reward and very little impact on the round ex. steal the intellicard for 60 rep and 0 tc.

The way I'd fix prog traitor is
1 make only explosive equipment subject to timers.
2. Make the original traitor objectives the only green text, not your reputation for doing the prog traitor objectives.
3. Add more progressive traitor objectives so they're not as predictable.
4. The progressive traitor objectives are "side missions" that reward only TC.

I think this makes it so the coders don't feel like they wasted time, it keeps medbay from being bombed immediately, it allows traitors to do riskier side missions in exchange for TC rewards, it allows people to play the old traitor style without many changes (except for perhaps a time delay on explosives)

I dont get why people don't like the idea that you can earn bonusTC now the objectives aren't that hard you only have to do around 2-3 easy tasks to gain access to your murderbone gear. Honestly I don't see why we should go back to old traitors which was pretty dull for the round (prog tots can add fun to the round) old traitors was always the occasional murderbone or sabotage attempt if not literally nothing.

If you are not willing to do 1 or 2 easy tasks to gain access to your murderbone gear then you don't deserve your murderbone gear sorry to say

In the r case somebody does something with prog tot they spawn can end up spawning pirates or fugitives <--- adds fun to the round btw then you have the final objectives which are like the heretic's ascension except they are even better romerol & battlecruiser are one of the best objectives in terms of injecting fun into the round. Yet again if you don't wanna work for your murderbone you do not deserve it

I haven't seen a tot get an endgame objective in months.

I think the best outcome would be if we have both old tots: traitors, and prog tots: 'aspirants'

I’d just like progtots to be slotted into what contractors used to be. I’d be fine with some timelocks on stuff like the syndie-bomb. I really miss the old freedom and lack of structure of old traitors and hope we get it back.

Another thing is in the original PR it was championed by oranges as one of those difficult decisions that are ultimately better for the game. It’s been 8 months yet I feel things have just gotten more formulaic and less interesting or unique. Traitors now have a script to follow which they do.

My last complaint which is very random: when I first saw the pet killing objective I thought it was super cool and funny. But since then it’s just become low hanging fruit and we’ve seen it find it’s way into the meta. Pet killers aren’t assholes anymore, just suspected traitors. Feels bad and doesn’t give me much faith in the future of prog tot objectives, if this is what happens from the most unique it has to offer. Just scripting what formerly was RP. : (

With progtraiters, I feel like every traitor does the same thing. There's always a bug in a office, the pets are dead, the lathes are unlinked because they were disassembled/reassembled.

And with traitors carrying bits of contraband like bugs or leaving fingerprints on them, it makes it easier for security to come to the decision to execute and loot them. Also I liked surplus crates.

I played a server that was essentially 2020 TG and I have to say, old traitor was better. The freedom to do whatever you liked right out the gates, a true sandbox without being held to farming rep and TC in boring ways that will inevitably get you outted to the security team.

Surprised to see people are advocating to keep the objective system/rep locks but to simply remove the TC you earn. The TC earned is the only thing that makes the objective system somewhat bearable, and it's because now a whole plethora of antag gimmicks open up when you can go beyond 20 TC. That's the only real benefit to prog tot in my view. Setups like northstar carp, cham proj/esword/ebow, and others are now possible and it spices up the variety you see in traitors.

The rep lock is only useful for explosives. All other items that are replocked shouldn't be - noslips, hypnoflash, carp, and IMO even things like 357, ebow, and desword should not be replocked. These items don't cause mass station grief like a syndicate bomb does. All that restricting them accomplishes is forcing traitors into the formulaic kill-pet-bug-office-steal-chip rhythm which will get the vast majority caught by security before they can do something actually interesting.

Can someone give me a good reason why explosives ought to be timelocked? It’s not as if they’re a round-ending threat on their own, and people have the tools to repair nearly all damage well before midround.

I was on board with them when they were first merged, but as they've been "optimized" over the past few months I am much less fond of them now.

A big issue I have with it is that every traitor is now a round ending threat, and that leaves almost no leeway to give them as security.
I used to love to give traitors a second and third chance if they were doing something fun or had an especially hard set of objectives.
Now, every one of them has the power to speedrun a team of mega-nukeops (which soft ends the round), become a dragon (which soft ends the round), cause a cascade (which HARD ends the round), etc. Why would I give them leeway if I want to keep playing the game?
In the past if a traitor wanted to end the round they had to do it through robustness or some large scale sabotage.
But now you can pretty much effectively do the same thing without even seeing most of the crew. (Kill pet -> Bug office -> Steal tech -> Steal high risk item -> Hack comms console -> bam, you pretty much got the final objective)

Final objectives aside, most of the objectives are lame to me. The weakpoint one comes to mind. All it does is encourage "play lame, win game". Buy the meta traitor kit, make a maint comms console, speedrun objectives.

One other thing I would point out is the motd concerning how traitors shouldn't excessively recall shuttles when most of the crew is dead to do objectives is a direct symptom of prog traitors.
If a static traitor only had two objectives to do it's not needed to recall the shuttle more than once on low pop.
When the traitor objectives are basically unlimited then the player has a direct incentive to recall to keep doing them.
In other words the server is scolding players to change their behavior over what is actually a game design/coding failure in incentivising "bad" behavior and I don't think that's great.

dirk_mcblade wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:04 am One other thing I would point out is the motd concerning how traitors shouldn't excessively recall shuttles when most of the crew is dead to do objectives is a direct symptom of prog traitors.

I don't want to derail the thread too much but this was definitely a huge problem before new traitors as well. Dunno if it was made worse but it definitely is not new

Not sure if it was something necessarily incentivised by progtot now, but I can see where someone would use their progression to justify recalling. We definitely quietly allowed tots to do it without much admin attention to enable their objectives to be completed maybe once or twice. But the bigger reason for why people would recall the shuttle repeatedly was to prolong their murderbone.

I can't immediately get a syndie bomb and run around the halls with it, so I hate it.

but I completely understand that that's one of the reasons it was probably made in the first place

I forgot to say earlier but I don't like progtots because significant amounts of troubleshooting have yielded no succsss in getting progtot uplinks to open on my desktop, so I can't be what is - by a factor of like 5 - the most common antag. So I just have to grief with no TCs.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 2:02 am

dirk_mcblade wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:04 am One other thing I would point out is the motd concerning how traitors shouldn't excessively recall shuttles when most of the crew is dead to do objectives is a direct symptom of prog traitors.

I don't want to derail the thread too much but this was definitely a huge problem before new traitors as well. Dunno if it was made worse but it definitely is not new

A bit of A, a bit of B. It was mostly because of coalitions of traitors taking over the station and using their massive collective TC incomes to farm Toys and be tyrants while awaiting grand finale objectives actually opening up, despite most of the resistance (like 2 officers and a few assistants) having eaten shit or popped sleeper agent activation already.

I like being able to earn more TC but I dislike the time gate on most items.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:53 am A bit of A, a bit of B. It was mostly because of coalitions of traitors taking over the station and using their massive collective TC incomes to farm Toys and be tyrants while awaiting grand finale objectives actually opening up, despite most of the resistance (like 2 officers and a few assistants) having eaten shit or popped sleeper agent activation already.

Heads of staff traitors were already pretty bad before, but prog tots have made heads of staff traitors 100000x worse. At least before heads of staff traitors could be opportunists while still doing their job, but now they’re encouraged to be doing dumb little side-quests. The major blockade of all of these side-quests is access as well, and heads of staff have plenty of access. Don’t even get me started on acting captain traitors.

I dont play traitor so I only have external perspective but i sure dont see a lot of traitors doing classically traitorous things these days. Recently got killed by a mad grenade spree bomber 15 mins in while getting a patchup in medbay and was like, utterly bemused at the fact that it happened?

I like having to either not care about surviving or having to plan how to get away with everything and survive on shuttle

now it's just like

get points and most of time i just used tc to do stupid shit and whatever project im working on in round

Oh, I forgot to mention, SOMETHING is broken with the rep system because I've greentexted, quite literally, without the ability to open my uplink

I think I somehow got rep from killing pets and destroying a fire axe by making Lord Singuloth?

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 3:17 pm Oh, I forgot to mention, SOMETHING is broken with the rep system because I've greentexted, quite literally, without the ability to open my uplink

I think I somehow got rep from killing pets and destroying a fire axe by making Lord Singuloth?

Nope. You need to accept objectives for that to happen. The reason is you gain reputation over time at a rate that makes it impossible to not greentext past a certain round length.

the only thing that could feasibly use a timer lock was bombs

batongs still beat deswords and they're not really an issue. i just see nothing happening these days. romerol was good, too. it's a genuinely good antag. one coder doesn't really like it, but romerol is >>>>>>

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 3:57 pm

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 3:17 pm Oh, I forgot to mention, SOMETHING is broken with the rep system because I've greentexted, quite literally, without the ability to open my uplink

I think I somehow got rep from killing pets and destroying a fire axe by making Lord Singuloth?

Nope. You need to accept objectives for that to happen. The reason is you gain reputation over time at a rate that makes it impossible to not greentext past a certain round length.

Weeeeird. They showed as complete in the round end report, and I assure you the round was very short for speedrun singuloth reasons

Also add back romerol

Having to go around doing tedious fetch quests as traitor is really lame. Really sucks both in terms of gameplay and rp. So much fun content had to basically disappear for this new, worse system to work too; like contractors, surplus kits, and romerol

Some of the objectives are actually really cool though so Prog-Tot isn't a total fail.
Ex. Graffiti, Summon Pirate, Structural bombing.

We had progtots. They were called contractors and they were vastly more fun. Could we at least get crate/kits back? Otherwise there's no way to get access to some of the unique and fun items they contained.