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[Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Fri May 01, 2020 6:37 pm
by PKPenguin321

Bottom post of the previous page:

For some reason, a great deal of people think that playing a friendly antag is better roleplay when it isn't.

Examples of friendly antags that would NOT be banned (hence "soft ban"):
- Antags who do their objectives and from then on are essentially like ordinary crew
- Antags who opt to do the inverse of their objectives (IE protect rather than assassinate) assuming this is still allowed

Friendly antags who need to be thrown in the shitter:
- Antags who immediately hand their uplink to R&D/sec and say "yeah I'm a traitor but I think this makes us even" which is SHIT RP, it's SHIT
- Changelings that join sec within the first minute of the round and openly declare that they are a sec-ling
- Blatantly hostile/lethal antags (slaughter demons, space dragons) that opt to antag hunt instead of antagonize

What I really want to ban but find hard to enforce:
- Antags who do nothing antagonistic and make no attempt at any objective

Antags need to drive the round for roleplay to actually be interesting. Immediately betraying your allegiance to the syndicate/the hivemind is shitty roleplay. Think about the character you're playing; a cold syndicate agent who has trained for this moment has finally infiltrated the station, bypassing all security. His missions have been burned into his mind, his code phrases and uplink passcode memorized, and his first action is... To immediately side with the station for no reason because "durr u get syndie tech that way!!!" Bullshit, and worse still, that's not interesting at all. You've provided nothing to the round and have in fact made it worse. You deserve a temp antag ban.

"Friendly" antags who actively hunt other antags are the worst of the bunch imo. They're meant to provide interesting conflict to the overall story of the round, but they steal that interesting conflict for themselves by turning their tools to create this conflict on other creators. What you end up with is not only a person who is NOT providing the conflict they're supposed to, but actively stopping the other conflict creators from doing so. This creates a defacto extended which sucks. People who do this need a harsher antag ban than those who murderbone on Manuel.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 9:43 am
by Cimika
I don't see how being an antag, if you're not actually acting like one, is supposed to be a reward. If you roll antagonist and you don't use your tools / status to make the round progress, you should be antag banned.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:01 am
by cybersaber101
Cimika wrote:I don't see how being an antag, if you're not actually acting like one, is supposed to be a reward. If you roll antagonist and you don't use your tools / status to make the round progress, you should be antag banned.
That's the hardliner shit I'm against. If an admin perceives an antagonist simply playing the round as they'd normally do without that status a simple boink reminding them of their status(some people actually forget/don't see the notification) and if they're aware nudge them in the right direct, help them and encourage them. Bans achieve nothing besides making people who arnt used to being antags more nervous or worse comes to worse, they simply keep the antagonist roles off in their preferences.

A player whom plays the friendly antagonist every round should simply be talked to with REPEATED behavior being actionable, more often then not using admin powers to create new threats is preferable to just BAN BAN BAN.
Also on friendly antagonist, being friendly as an antag can be novel to those who haven't tried the gimmick yet and punishing someone for enjoying a new way to play that role isn't right either. Help the antag, don't just ban, that is dumb.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:40 am
by Cimika
Of course, it's implied that an admin should have talked to them about it before, and they keep doing it.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:46 am
by NecromancerAnne
There is also a completely reasonable excuse in that you're looking to prepare and wait for ideal circumstances for your actions. There is value in deniability from lack of action up until you start operating. You are an espionage agent after all. A cover is meant to be exactly that. Some rounds I literally do nothing until the very last second because my plans are that narrow in terms of window of opportunity to pull off successfully.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:00 pm
by Tiviplus
Honestly my main issue is that antags can be broken up into 3 types
The friendly antag
Just tries to exchange gamer gear for greentext or use it to become a super valid hunter, very boring and nothing the crew can do without it being validhunting.
Doing “gear shops” is literally this and is just powergame antag items traded for greentext. Although bribing people to look the other way is NOT friendly since you’re still antagging.

The loud antag
Does something flashy, like a bomb threat. Fun, but sec and command will try to remove them asap, sometimes assisted by valid hunters or dying to people with job-specific gamer gear. They then end up roundremoved or weakened to the point where they can’t antag, meaning they just end up sitting out the rest of a ~3 hour round with nothing to do, and because of this usually turn into a friendly antag or the last type:

The prepared/sneaky antag
These antags will either spend all round preparing or waiting for the last second to quickly and unnoticably do their objectives, and because of this have a high success chance and fun for the antag but usually not for everyone else making them boring.

You signed up for being an antag so do your job and provide conflict in the round, instead of taking it as a gamer gear token and buggering off to powergame with your metagang.

Manuel’s issue is that all the loud antags get shut down because they’re too scared to lose their greentext and/or don’t want to spend hours looking at their screen with nothing to do.

Having more antags in general and a rule forbidding friendly antags will help imo but the main issue is the rounds being wayyyy to long, though I personally don’t know how to fix this.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:39 pm
by Tarchonvaagh
One word: dynamic....

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 2:05 pm
by Cimika
Honestly yes. I'd love for Manuel to be made Dynamic only for a while, just to test things out.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 2:12 pm
by Screemonster
NecromancerAnne wrote:There is also a completely reasonable excuse in that you're looking to prepare and wait for ideal circumstances for your actions. There is value in deniability from lack of action up until you start operating. You are an espionage agent after all. A cover is meant to be exactly that. Some rounds I literally do nothing until the very last second because my plans are that narrow in terms of window of opportunity to pull off successfully.
Yeah, there's a huge difference between maintaining your cover or simply playing the long game, or even ignoring your antag role entirely, and going full-on friendly-antag.

If a changeling does nothing the entire round then whatever, the other lings or traitors can still make things interesting.
If that changeling beelines straight to security and starts relaying lingchat to the HoS without a stupendously good reason for doing so, then that's worse than if they just went braindead in a locker. At least if they went braindead in a locker the admins could make someone else into a ling and have the round continue as normal.

"don't be worse than a literal non-entity" is not a very high bar to clear

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:22 pm
by NecromancerAnne
To do a loud antag invariably will end up with you either getting shut down, or you end up wiping out a good amoubt of people coming to kill you. Which will wind up looking like a murderbone if you do it well enough, even if you're only killing people who come for you and anyone in the vicinity of your targets.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:03 pm
by PKPenguin321
NecromancerAnne wrote:To do a loud antag invariably will end up with you either getting shut down, or you end up wiping out a good amoubt of people coming to kill you. Which will wind up looking like a murderbone if you do it well enough, even if you're only killing people who come for you and anyone in the vicinity of your targets.
Just wear a disguise

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:21 pm
by NecromancerAnne
Disguises don't work for anyone who doesn't look lik Rob Robinson, PKP, and haven't for years.
Spoiler:
Unless you buy the Infiltrator, as seen in the blockbuster film, Neon Greed!

Only 5.99 tc from your local blackmarket retailer! All proceeds go to the Orphans Without Glocks Foundation!
Spoiler:
For real though it's actually a disguise just a big brain one.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 1:03 am
by PKPenguin321
You don't necessarily have to appear as someone else, just be indistinguishable as yourself

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 9:47 pm
by remanseptim
NecromancerAnne wrote:To do a loud antag invariably will end up with you either getting shut down, or you end up wiping out a good amoubt of people coming to kill you. Which will wind up looking like a murderbone if you do it well enough, even if you're only killing people who come for you and anyone in the vicinity of your targets.
it's almost like the antag rules on manuel are fucking dumb

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 11:13 pm
by Cobby
self defense isnt murderboning so it wouldnt be an issue

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2020 3:06 pm
by Ayy Lemoh
NecromancerAnne wrote:Disguises don't work for anyone who doesn't look lik Rob Robinson, PKP, and haven't for years.
another reason why baldies are secretly envied by the community

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2020 1:48 pm
by Sylphet
nolic wrote:Semi-regular Manuel player here.

Friendly antags are annoying as hell, yeah- functionally a hidden greenshift for everyone except the guy who gets to play changeling cop- and I agree with the last couple o' posters that antags should be required to antag.

That said.

Unless something is done about the rampant validhunting, the policy change will usher in a different problem of every shift being functionally green after 30 min. As it stands, even on the MRP server, any assistant is allowed to beat antags to death/perma with a toolbox at the first sign of an emag. I find the 2-hour-mark-magdump as annoying as everyone else, and with the higher expectations being put on antags, the least we could do is enforce some degree of being nice to antags. The lowest common denominator on an rp server brings everyone to their level- you won't see cool and engaging antag gimmicks if every greytider jumps them at the first sign of gamer gear.
I really couldn't agree more with this, though I'm not sure how it would be handled from an admin perspective. If we were to bwoink everything that could possibly be seen as validhunting, people would play security even less than they already do, and antagonists would be left with no real threats to them. But, if we continue with where we are now, no one has any fun, antags in space get dunked by shaft miners, Officer Changeling gets to completely ignore objectives, and the station stays on an eternal greenshift. Admins clicking the antagonist button, like some people suggested here, isn't a sustainable solution since it just moves this problem to times when admins aren't online rather than actually solving it.

Re: [Manuel] Put a soft ban on friendly antags

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 3:38 am
by Coconutwarrior97
This has been addressed in some updates to the Roleplay Rules:

Rule 5 Precedents:
1. In general, make an effort to roleplay as the antagonist role you've been assigned. If you want to break with what is expected of your role then you can but it should make sense for your character to do this and should create some form of conflict. A traitor immediately outing themselves to security and acting as a regular crewmember for the rest of the round is boring and is a waste of the role. However one who pretends to do so in order to get security gear, falsely imprison their target, and kill them while they are isolated in prison contributes to the round.