A major point of removing the access to drone shells was (quoting from the
PR):
CosmicScientist wrote:the role is designed for a higher standard of play than everything else. Admins are unable to enforce that consistently and miss bad behaviour.
'Higher standard of play' means:
- understanding when it's okay to impact the round (i.e. fixing a breach in an area with a lot of 'beings') or have an influence on other non-drones (hanging around the HoS for a while playing the star wars death march on the violin)
- not being a dick by abusing a drone's abilities (all-access, ventcrawling) to purposefully fuck with the round
Having the ultimate end-of-all drone policy that perfectly describes what drones can and cannot do would only help with the first point.
If the drone player does not
understand the policy or simply ignores it (because 'lol no admins'), the policy is pretty much useless: "Admins are unable to enforce that consistently and miss bad behaviour".
One proposed solution is whitelisting players fit for playing drones. The PR kinda sorta already does this by requiring an admin to turn you into a drone as all drone dispensers and empty shells were removed.
If you want drones to come back, you are going to have to implement this whitelist and hope that nothing else stops the pull (for example drone code being terrible).
Do drones deserve to have a full comeback, though?
Don't ge me wrong, I love drones. Quaint little silent enigmatic beepboops buzzing around. At first, I was not a big fan of this removal as I have only seen a handful of really shitty drones and let's face it: who else is going to wear all these hats if not drones?
But after having read this thread and the PR's comments, and thinking about it all a little, it occurs to me that drones, in their current form, may be simply outdated.
Influencing the goings-on in a round can lead to a more fun experience for everybody. This is kinda the essence of SS13: lots of random people messing about creating a glorious clusterfuck of events in the process. Drones are strictly forbidden to participate in that. For a drone to 'advance the plot' in a round, means violating its rules. Doesn't that strike you as a contradiction of the general idea of SS13?
Obviously, this argument is a bit too philosophical - when have we ever had a round become boring due to having too many drones. Probably never, but bear with me.
Drones were introduced in a time when ways of coming back into the round were scarce, so people willingly opened the can of worms that are drones.
Today we have all kinds of things that let you keep playing after having been gibbed, most of which can be beneficial to the entertainment of everyone else in the round. So why keep a role that is more trouble than it is worth in the game at that point?
Removing features from your programm is totally legit if the feature is very old, poorly implemented, open to abuse or not up-to-date anymore... heck it is encouraged if a solution isn't forseeable. Think of it as pruning a tree.