Of Flouride and Salt

[DrAmazing343]

I'm a chronic Manny player and I talking with a lotta folks and seeing a lot of rounds pass it feels like now more than ever we're entering a new fresh age of people just letting an antag do whatever because ????

I never really want to advocate for crazy trigger-happy validhunting but I've seen a LOT of heretic in medbay moments where all the docs just WATCH someone killing someone in the hall outside treatment center instead of swarming them like a bunch of fucking bees like they used to. Moreover, and probably more of a valid complaint from me, is some moments where the crew just... give up? Like, Dynamic moments happen and it pisses all of us off, but there have been two or three Blobs that have been lost all because a bunch of people just HANG OUT on the shuttle? It's also not fun when the third nukie round in a row happens and a third of the server pop suicides when war ops calls over comms.

Feels like there's just a lot of fatigue around stopping antags, or at the very least an intense fear of validhunting bwoinks, especially considering the moments where it's absolutely beyond reasonably good to take out your crowbar or saw and stop someone snowballing to CRASH THIS STATION WITH NO SURVIVORS!

Honest to God, I don't know what I'm getting at with this thread, I just wanted to share my experience and hear YOURS!

[oranges]

manuel players do not fight back because that would not be in their lane

[dendydoom]

eh, it depends who's playing. if you sit at the helm of ahelps for 30 seconds you quickly realize that there is both a problem with people letting antags do bad stuff and a problem with validhunting because people are free to make both good and bad choices on the game. i've seen rounds where lone ops took the disk basically unimpeded and rounds where a heretic was chased by 20-30 random bystanders wielding whatever weapons they could find through the station for the better part of half an hour.

[iwishforducks]

eh, it depends who's playing. if you sit at the helm of ahelps for 30 seconds you quickly realize that there is both a problem with people letting antags do bad stuff and a problem with validhunting because people are free to make both good and bad choices on the game. i've seen rounds where lone ops took the disk basically unimpeded and rounds where a heretic was chased by 20-30 random bystanders wielding whatever weapons they could find through the station for the better part of half an hour.

heretics deserve 40-50 grey tiders chasing them at all times

[DaydreamIQ]

From what I've seen it's usually the complete opposite with fights in medbay leading to about eight people swarming a heretic until they run away. But sec is usually nowhere to be seen because they're busy dealing with some dog brained non antag lizard who walled off the brig for getting a 2 minute b&e sentence

[RedBaronFlyer]

I think it depends a lot on the round. If the round has been going on for 2-ish hours long round fatigue sets in and the crew just doesn't bother. If it's the 3rd round in a row of an antag gangbang then the crew gives up. So on and so forth. I think a lot of people (me included) have crowd mentality where if no one is stopping the antag murdering a guy then they don't want to be the lone fool that tries to stop the antag (then gets murdered as well)

also shuttle calling for a blob is stupid don't shuttle call for the blob it always leads to people sitting on the shuttle during the blobfight it's STUPID. Ideally it should prevent the shuttle arriving or something (I know it prevents the shuttle from leaving but the blob doesn't overtake the shuttle like it does with the station when it wins)

[zergking]

My theory is heretics temporarily join the medical metagang when they roll heretic. It’s an “ape shall not kill ape” thing
No but for real, I think it’s just people being tired

[warbluke]

We have this on Bagil too. When ~50% of the station is antags you can't really care about it anymore.

[britgrenadier1]

because we get noted when we fight back lol

[Constellado]

because we get noted when we fight back lol

It's this.
I do not fight antags or heretics unless they personally slight me for that reason. The only antags I actively help fight every time is dragon, blob, nukies and revs. That's because they can end rounds. (Apart from dragon I guess)

But I also like being bystanders in most fights that are Infront of me a lot of the time even though I am allowed by the rules to stop it because it's just more interesting to me to be a bystander. That only really happens if it's a bar fight or something. Any really big powerful antag, I try to stop but sometimes I just know I will not be able to defeat them. (Say they have a holopara and a desword) So I just will just run away as I cannot defeat them on a fair fight.

(Plus my character is an apathetic wuss anyway)

[Higgin]

Getting adminPM'd for softcritting a dude who started trying to rob/fuck with my patient as a doctor, picked up a scalpel and started swinging when I shoved him off, and then having that after I tossed him on a stasis bed instead of in disposals (he was not dead, mind you,) sours me.

I've been admin-PM'd about validhunting on a few occasions. It's never turned into a note or ban, but it has a chilling effect on my willingness to do what I'd call a perfectly reasonable amount of collective security behavior when somebody has already very obviously labeled themselves as a threat, out there to play their antag run straight, and have set off running for the red light with a trail of bodies and escalating progtot objectives* in their wake.

People need to stop acting like antags if they don't want to be treated like antags. If they can't handle being treated like antags when they do, they need to turn it off.
---
e1: this doesn't really get at the topic up top. yeah, people get apathetic, especially when they've been inundated with headbanging antags, or one's far out ahead, or they aren't the direct subject of an attack. you get four war ops rounds in a row* and Jeff Gaiman, one of the most cheerful manny soldiers against antags as HoS, is down on lavaland having a lot more fun helping set up an alternative minibase with people who just aren't about this shit any more.

On the station itself: the 'restrictions' around single antags and the rules around validhunting make people gunshy, even though it's entirely reasonable to ask 'hey, that guy whipped out a gun and started shooting at my coworkers, what if he starts shooting at me next?'

There's an uneasy understanding, or card-counting assumption, that if he's not directly attacking you now, he won't if you don't do anything and let him do his thing. So you watch. And if you don't, dive in and run somebody's shit, you're going to get called a validhunter in OOC or even potentially brought up on it for ending somebody's special-boy run. So, you take the safe bet, and you watch.

We used to call this the Citadel stare, and the people who'd just stand around and watch stuff happen (usually assistant mains) 90%'ers. And Citadel didn't even have rules against validhunting like you've got on MRP, it was probably much more like Bagil as described above.
---
I feel it too. More generally, it feels like any sense of shared fate and common cause among the crew is nonexistent or severely compromised. It's a gang war between designated validhunters and valids; you're courting trouble if you try to have a position and defend it without being either of those.

If only we were all so strong at heart.

[dendydoom]

fwiw before i was an admin i had ahelped maybe 2 situations in all my time playing and one of those was someone shovestunning me and spamming slurs and the other one was a secoff beating me to death with a baseball bat in the middle of the shuttle and someone was already looking into it.

i'm big into the "play on" meme and not bringing the game to a stop for any reason. i like to see the show go on and people roll with the punches. i truly believe that is the best way to experience the game as a way to participate in meaningful stories.

when i got given the monitor's pass, the whistle and the stupid little admin cap that gets you wedgies, i had never experienced the reality of what goes on behind the scenes. i have seen how the sausage is made.

to get anything resolved, you have to step on toes. otherwise, it simply does not get resolved properly. it makes me very sad when it affects people because i have to make the scary noise and red text appear, and i try to be that sympathetic ear and respectful of the time i am asking of someone, but ultimately if i'm going to do my due diligence of properly investigating a situation i'm probably going to need at least a sentence from the players involved to get a story as experienced by a human being and me not just parsing matrix code logs of pissed off co-workers trying to kill each other and figuring out what happened like a stoned, terminally online columbo.

if there was a toggle that made kittens appear and an ephemeral, sing-song voice say "dendydoom requests a moment of your precious time my dear space gamer" then i would enable this but alas. ALAS.

[EmpressMaia]

Recently had a rust heretic round with little sec. And I didn't want to be a silly stealth heretic that silently ascends, so I made myself a public threat. The issue was that no one fought me while I was slaughtering their co workers in medical,

[Higgin]

i'm big into the "play on" meme and not bringing the game to a stop for any reason. i like to see the show go on and people roll with the punches. i truly believe that is the best way to experience the game as a way to participate in meaningful stories.

when i got given the monitor's pass, the whistle and the stupid little admin cap that gets you wedgies, i had never experienced the reality of what goes on behind the scenes. i have seen how the sausage is made.

getting asked about stuff is no big deal, it's when situations have ended with a 'tut-tut'ing warning even when there was no final formal action that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. sometimes you do need a twenty-minute ahelp hardstun with the HoS or whoever to work out what exactly the fuck happened that led to the clown getting put in solitary with no arms, the captain getting stripped and looted after randomly attacking the lizard cargo gang, or the nonantag doctor having and using a meth grenade that happened to go off and fuck shit up in a way nobody had any reason to expect but that they might have been justified having and throwing to begin with.

state of mind/mens rea is important and hard to parse from logs in the moment of the round in any timely fashion. a direct ask sucks and can put people on the defensive with their hackles up, but it can also be a much more respectful approach to the time and presumed good-faith of everyone involved. it's also a good way of wasting folks' time and goodwill if you do it without due diligence first or get spun along by somebody banbaiting. it's hard to strike the best course in any given situation that both helps folks 'play on' but preserves the fun and fairness of play - sometimes the price of that is a conversation and fact-finding.

it's more frustrating to me that the standards feel unequal and poorly-informed as to how antags and the non-sec/non-command crew on mrp should interact

[DaydreamIQ]

Recently had a rust heretic round with little sec. And I didn't want to be a silly stealth heretic that silently ascends, so I made myself a public threat. The issue was that no one fought me while I was slaughtering their co workers in medical,

I watched that shitshow unfold. There were people fighting you, just most of them weren't actually doctors and the ones that were. Died before they could do any damage

[CMDR_Gungnir]

[Snip]
People need to stop acting like antags if they don't want to be treated like antags. If they can't handle being treated like antags when they do, they need to turn it off.
[Snip]
On the station itself: the 'restrictions' around single antags and the rules around validhunting make people gunshy, even though it's entirely reasonable to ask 'hey, that guy whipped out a gun and started shooting at my coworkers, what if he starts shooting at me next?'
[Snip]

Something I hated about Skyrat back when it actually had antags, was the culture that had arisen around them where "your antag round is SACRED". It had to go perfectly THEIR way, or they were angry. They used the metaprotections not to create interesting stories or gimmicks, not as a shield from roaming validhunters, but as a sword to accomplish their goals.

I know we don't have the metaprotections, but I DO like, on paper, the rules against validhunting, and treating antags proportional. It allows for situations like a Traitor using Scarp to cheat in a martial arts tournament. Or any number of things.

But it sounds like from this thread, and I've been pretty inactive on /tg/ lately while dealing with Life Stuff, that "MY ANTAG ROUND IS SAAAAAAAAAAAAAACRED" mentality is starting to build here, and I really don't like that, and think we need to figure out why it is, and try to stop it.

[TheBibleMelts]

the Mergening beckons.

[feaster]

I add that command antagonists are part of this problem; if the captain walks into my department and wordlessly decapitates my coworker with an energy sword then I‘ll be mopping the blood off the floor and deep frying the brain if he asks me to.

[Capsandi]

not going to work unless you rename all of the servers and obfuscate which was which. Might I suggest Campbell(but not campbell), Artyom, Beavis, Biff and Urgurdy? I mean we miss the cultured Fawlty towers references but i mean its the only way dude.

[RedBaronFlyer]

I'm 50/50 on the existence of antag heads of staff. Ideally it should be a scenario where you are never quite sure if your boss is a baddie or not but I feel like most people just assume their boss is an antag until proven otherwise. Doesn't help that 99.9% of players are incapable or unwilling of having even the slightest of subtlety. I've seen people bitch and moan in OOC about how they got arrested for running up and shoving a bomb into the ORM/autolathe in front of five people.

the Mergening beckons.

To have a date with a double barrel shotgun behind the barn, sure.

[Redrover1760]

Heads of staff antags can be really boring or they could horrifically and stealthily abuse their power to cause conflict and/or divide the station in half.

Of course no one ever does the latter anymore because we are in the ss13 rpless dark ages.

[feaster]

I really just meant the acting captain problem

[RedBaronFlyer]

Oh yeah I just assume any acting captain is an antag because if we have an acting captain it means that it's lowpop

[DrAmazing343]

> it makes me very sad when it affects people because i have to make the scary noise and red text appear, and i try to be that sympathetic ear and respectful of the time i am asking of someone, but ultimately if i'm going to do my due diligence of properly investigating a situation i'm probably going to need at least a sentence from the players involved to get a story as experienced by a human being and me not just parsing matrix code logs of pissed off co-workers trying to kill each other and figuring out what happened like a stoned, terminally online columbo.

Very understandable, for sure! I do appreciate the admin perspective here, and it sounds like you've got a good head on your shoulders when it comes to stuff like this. I do worry a lot about what Higgin speaks about, though; I've had a few rounds where people have labelled me a "validhunter" but there's been zero bwoinks against me or any action otherwise. The looming guillotine, however, does get me freaked the fuck out when shit hits the fan, though.

I'm very happy to see other's opinions formulated a bit more fully here than in, for example, deadchat/ooc or the discord. I believe I said to start the thread that I've heard it a lot, and this thread is a lot of vindication that it's not just isolated reports or lulz here or there.

I think I'm one of the players that's definitely more on the side of picking up my damn saw/scalpel/boxcutter/toolbox/welding tool or WHATEVER I have on hand to hack at the heinous bastard who's killing my staff or my patients until I die or they do, but even I find myself with the "Citadel stare" every now and then. As I've talked more and more about it, though, I think I'm crouching more on the side of fighting than staring in almost every situation, because otherwise it gets me or my friends killed.

For roleplaying antagonists, though, I will always make a bit of room. Sometimes with a wolfish grin or a wink, or just with a "I'll mind my own business..." because that's always going to have a lot more depth for my character and theirs than a "SEC SEC SEC" after they start fumbling their excuse, or worse yet, my wordless death at their hands when I charge laser scalpel in hand and bleed out. I love to be on either side of the weird excuses/threats/whatever standoffs when people bother to press the goddamn tab key and talk to me.

As a last note, please spread public awareness about the Blob thing. It's such a fun antag to fight when you prep accordingly or have the whole crew on hand, but feels like a tragic "heroic" sacrifice if you don't. Eleven alive on station with a blob having killed like, 30 that SLOWLY trickle in or fall to their death is wild. Durands are so fucking fun to solo them with, though...

[RedBaronFlyer]

Blob is by far one of my favorite things to fight when the whole crew is pitching in. It's kind of similar to spiders (fuck xenos though, xenos are bullshit for so many reasons). I wish we had more teamwork antags to fight against.

Even I throw my hands up in the air and give up when the blob sets up in those spots if they weren't spotted before the level 5 biohazard warning has gone out, though. God, I just LOVE fighting the blob on the same two/three spots on Icebox EVERY TIME! I LOVE Z-LEVEL BLOB FIGHTS! /s

[DrAmazing343]

Blob is by far one of my favorite things to fight when the whole crew is pitching in. It's kind of similar to spiders (fuck xenos though, xenos are bullshit for so many reasons). I wish we had more teamwork antags to fight against.

Even I throw my hands up in the air and give up when the blob sets up in those spots if they weren't spotted before the level 5 biohazard warning has gone out, though. God, I just LOVE fighting the blob on the same two/three spots on Icebox EVERY TIME! I LOVE Z-LEVEL BLOB FIGHTS! /s

Spiders are SIGNIFICANTLY more bullshit imo but that's likely just muh personal opinion, and all that jazz. I'd love to see more xeno fights because they are a downright RARITY these days.

Blob on Icebox is pain but ultimately I think unless it's permabrig spot bashing out ladders for cheese then shit like Lower Atmos and such are really easier for crew to fight than they'd think they just really oughta have people break down or hack maint doors to clear a path and NOT DROP RIGHT ONTO IT LIKE LEMMINGS

[Not-Dorsidarf]

The main reason i dont really get involved in serious fights outside of roles required to care, preferring to run or ignore violence /killing sprees is simple:

Being a patient sucks. The medical system is explicitly designed to be punishing and unfun for the injured person in order to create some actual content for the medical doctors, so being subject to it for 5-10 minutes for any injury more complicated than toolbox bludgeoning is just really, really undesirable.

When antags can blow out alp your organs by smacking you a few times after you’re down, or laser wounds fester while incompetent docs do everything to your critted ass except the right procedures theres a really, REALLY strong incentive to ignore trouble of any kind between “petty departmental tresspassing slapfest” and “STATION ENDING THREAT YOU WILL DIE ANYWAY”.

It seems a pretty clear side effect of making injuries more serious and involved to treat that people will become more swayed to not risk suffering those injuries, especially for departmental roles who actually have content beyond picking fights in the first place.

[Higgin]

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=34973&p=711764#p711764

A lot of my thoughts about where antags sit vis a vis crew are here.

Separate from that, I've been noticing a lot of salt from people getting stopped or even just challenged by me as a nonantag from doing flagrantly offensive shit, mask-off.

I have lost count on over one hand the number of times people have just wordlessly tided to take/make shit, or walked up to a door and started hacking, or started messing with a body/injured person to then be surprised and bleedsalty in IC about getting jumped for it.

Even if you've got a valid reason IC, a lot of people seem to think they're entitled to doing whatever in a perfectly frictionless environment if you're not sec or comnand, and even then. It's exasperating.