/tg/Station 13

mechas dying has a 33% chance or something like that to explode the pilot on delete. i barely ever see borgs respect this fact.

wouldn't the rule about hulks or future harm count in this case? unless they put a tracker on it so the AI can lock it, they're not much different from hulks imo

hulks themselves arent human, destroying the mecha has a significant chance of critting the human inside

imsxz wrote:hulks themselves arent human, destroying the mecha has a significant chance of critting the human inside

Immediate harm trumps future harm usually, so destroying a mech that is actively shooting people is not in itself harm, as the harm in the future is both random chance as well as not directly tied to the borgs actions.

At least thats how I take it.

Its mostly a justification to make gameplay easier, similar to how borgs deal with holoparasites.

However a silicon is not allowed to cause any harm to stop harm. You could argue its like the holoparasite thing where its the humans fault for choosing not to leave the mech but thats a bit of a stretch.

Mechs taking critical non-destrctive damage can cause very harmful effects like turning off the air system or setting the inside of the mech on fire and cooking the pilot alive.

Didn't we literally change mechs exploding so they could be harmed?

imsxz wrote:hulks themselves arent human, destroying the mecha has a significant chance of critting the human inside

the mech itself isn't human either, there might not even be a human piloting it at all, and if there were, the harm was consented because the pilot didn't step out of the very harmful mech he found himself inside of (the harm comes from the pilot really, but by blaming the mech itself you can bypass this).
that's just my two cents, I bet someone can come up with a better argument.

thats kinda like saying that antags that go loud know theyre gonna get attacked meaning it's "consensual" which is entirely not how it's handled.

if you wanna bring up immediate vs future harm, the way to protect the most people in the immediate situation from being hurt is blocking bullets and or saving dying people. Though that goes for 99% of other situations where humans are actively dying.

Not to mention, there's an almost assured chance that a mech going loud is gonna get the pilot lynched by the crew after it gets destroyed regardless, happens most every single time.

that's how it should be handled tbh.

If a borg tries to stop you then both parties try to reengage it should be considered consensual tbh. I can't imagine this situation ever being enjoyable for an asimov borg.

regardless of what is discussed the final decision should allow silicons to destroy mechs even if code changes need to be made. Otherwise you have silicons unable to do anything as a mech rampages killing people

"If I can't kill it then there's nothing I can do" = you should get off silicon

This thread title causes me human harm.

That's why you turn your sensors on to see damage to the mech and beat it to near crit to disable the weapons dummies

It's difficult for a fact that's not well-known to be respected, especially when it doesn't happen 67% of the time. I certainly didn't know until this thread. A mech exploding after one last hit from a fireaxe isn't intuitive.

Cobby wrote:"If I can't kill it then there's nothing I can do" = you should get off silicon

I bet sitting on your hands while a mech rampages wont get you bwoinked

Silicons should only make attempts to isolate the mech away from the rest of the crew.

Cobby wrote:"If I can't kill it then there's nothing I can do" = you should get off silicon

teepeepee wrote:

Cobby wrote:"If I can't kill it then there's nothing I can do" = you should get off silicon

I bet sitting on your hands while a mech rampages wont get you bwoinked

>not killing = sitting on your hands
get off silicon.

Malkraz wrote:Silicons should only make attempts to isolate the mech away from the rest of the crew.

>close a firelock
>it breaks in two hits
welp there it goes, I did my best, hope an admin doesn't bwoink me for breaking law 1 allowing harm

Firelocks, airlocks, dragging shit in the way, RCD'ing up walls in the path, blocking bullets with your borg body, identifying and dragging injured humans away.
You're not meant to have a "perfect solution" to every problem as a Silicon or in SS13 in general. BOO HOO BAD THING HAPPEN. Your whole shtick about being bwoinked for not killing the mech is garbage and doesn't happen.

teepeepee wrote:

Malkraz wrote:Silicons should only make attempts to isolate the mech away from the rest of the crew.

>close a firelock
>it breaks in two hits
welp there it goes, I did my best, hope an admin doesn't bwoink me for breaking law 1 allowing harm

I'm going to ban you if you play silicon and anyone on the station dies no matter what lengths you take since this means you've broken law 1 and allowed for harm.

confused rock wrote:Didn't we literally change mechs exploding so they could be harmed?

confused rock is right; we did: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/43055

In short, destroying a mech no longer causes harm to its pilot, so this thread is somewhat irrelevant now.

Cobby wrote:I'm going to ban you if you play silicon and anyone on the station dies no matter what lengths you take since this means you've broken law 1 and allowed for harm.

good luck I don't play silicon lmao

If silicons are allowed to not know that killing a holo parasite kills the host, then they should be allowed to not know that damage to the mech can randomly cause harmful effects to the pilot like a fire.

And like it was already stated, mechs no longer explode.

That being said, you can directly shoot the pilot of a MK-1, so it is possible to human harm that pilot.

I would consider the risk of a mech explosion to definitely be immediate human harm. That's like saying smashing a plasma canister with a fire extinguisher is future harm because it doesn't flood plasma in one hit.

teepeepee wrote:

Malkraz wrote:Silicons should only make attempts to isolate the mech away from the rest of the crew.

>close a firelock
>it breaks in two hits
welp there it goes, I did my best, hope an admin doesn't bwoink me for breaking law 1 allowing harm

Silicons don't need to be able to cock block every single method of antag rampage in the game. An AI can't do much about a rogue engineer or decent nuke ops team either. Doesn't mean we need a policy or code change to make the AI super effective against them.

Borgs very rarely get bwoinked for anything inaction related, and even then it tends to be more "active inaction" like watching a human asphyxiate in space when you could go drag him inside.

As for mechs, from a gameplay point of view I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of people entombing themselves in stun immune mech suits and then crying to admins because a borg harmwelded their mech to death and it ~could~ have caused them harm. Mechs exploding in a 1/3 is relatively obscure enough I wouldn't expect most borgs to know it offhand, and a circumstance where a single borg or even a pair of borgs can win against a murder-equipped mech are so rare that this seems very edge case.

From an administrative point of view I'd be loathe to shout at them over it when it could have happened but didn't, and I'd probably at worst warn them that it can cause human harm and to presume a human is inside unless they reliably know otherwise.

Ideally the 1/3 explosion should probably just be removed, it's not like mechs are recoverable once wrecked anyway, but that's not really a policy matter obviously.

give borgs the ability to drain all their charge for an EMP to allahu akbar mechs

Arianya wrote:Ideally the 1/3 explosion should probably just be removed, it's not like mechs are recoverable once wrecked anyway, but that's not really a policy matter obviously.

I'd consider the explosion chance a sufficiently powerful downside to mechs to leave in rather than have it removed over a cornercase administrative non-issue.

cedarbridge wrote:

Arianya wrote:Ideally the 1/3 explosion should probably just be removed, it's not like mechs are recoverable once wrecked anyway, but that's not really a policy matter obviously.

I'd consider the explosion chance a sufficiently powerful downside to mechs to leave in rather than have it removed over a cornercase administrative non-issue.

Fair

The only possible harm from attacking a (non MK-I) mech is the various malfunctions that can occur, like cabin fires or over-pressurized internals. Those are on a random dice roll for if they occur and which malfunction happens. While silicons can see when the malfunction occurs (Diag huds have an icon for the mech that changes, much akin to medical huds and viruses), there is no immediate way to tell which malfunction happened, and at least two of them are not harmful.

ah i didnt know the mech explosion was removed.

any silicons wanna roll some d20's to see if they get a human killed in a mech fire(critical fail), or cabin leak(<5)?

Arianya wrote:science players are whiny bitches and mechs should be removed from the game

i agree, but right now we have to deal with the fact that getting a mech to critical HP has a chance to fuck over its internal air tank and or set the cabin on fire. IMO a reactive playstyle more focused on saving the dying humans is less aids for all parties (admins dont have to deal with stupid adminhelps about silicons hurting mechs, dying people dont get ditched by the asimov borg that wanted to validhunt the mech, borg doesnt risk any bwoink because it's acting in the best interest to save humans from dying)

bonus points: if you dont actually play silicon ever be sure to preface your post with it if you delve into how easy/hard it is to follow basic asimov

Arianya wrote:science players are whiny bitches and mechs should be removed from the game

:^)

Seriously though, how is this a discussion? Hitting mech might set it on fire, so don't do it. It being "rng" shouldn't make a difference.

If you find it annoying because following laws means your options are limited, don't play the role themed around having its options limited by laws.

Locking human harm behind RNG is retarded.

After thinking about it I would say it's not violating law 1 if it *might* cause human harm, like the cabin catching on fire.

plus like someone said the headache of trying to bitch at people who probably don't know that harm can happen from destroying the mech isn't worth what little, if any, benefit from that being a policy. I didn't know that mechs could catch on fire or have their air tanks break because in the years I've played I've only piloted one like twice.

If you can attack holoparasites then this is fine too

I'd rather not go down that slippery slope. Holos make sense because they're 2 separate (players) and you can at least handwave it that the borg "doesn't know" one entity relies on the other to live. The mech always relies on a pilot so a bit different imo. Holos are also things you can get roundstart and spawn anywhere with very little counterplay, for the most part you can only react to them. Mechs are much more manageable and you should sus anyone who is making one to begin with.

Most people thought (as this thread showed) that mechs blow up so most people would also assume you can't beat it up. That seems more than sensible to me.

For the record, the two harmful events (over-pressurized/malfunctioning air tank and cabin fire) do not occur on MK-I Riply mechs. Unless I'm forgetting another harmful event, you're probably free to bash those down.

I feel like AIs have the ability to remotely disable mechs? am I wrong or confusing it with someone else? if not, they should, and that would be a harm-free method of dealing with it

They don't, no. If someone has bothered to pop in a tracking beacon, you can track them and EMP them, but that's the extent of it.

Tracking beacons are pretty useless, you need multiple of them to do anything and one being emped deletes all the others from existence.

zxaber wrote:For the record, the two harmful events (over-pressurized/malfunctioning air tank and cabin fire) do not occur on MK-I Riply mechs. Unless I'm forgetting another harmful event, you're probably free to bash those down.

MK-1's transfer damage to the pilot directly in several cases, if I recall. Which would be an issue.

As to holoparasites: The existing policy on this is that AIs/borgs can harm the holopara as long as they're unaware of the link between holopara and a human, but must stop as soon as this becomes obvious (which tends to be very quickly given that every time you harm a holopara in line of sight of its host the game screams out about how [x] is being wounded for the damage holopara took) so this isn't the best example to base an argument around.

If I shoot a random emitter beam down the hallway it only MIGHT hit someone, perfectly compatible with asimov imo

If I attempt to weld this window it only MIGHT hit someone who walks into me as I click

Arianya wrote:

zxaber wrote:For the record, the two harmful events (over-pressurized/malfunctioning air tank and cabin fire) do not occur on MK-I Riply mechs. Unless I'm forgetting another harmful event, you're probably free to bash those down.

MK-1's transfer damage to the pilot directly in several cases, if I recall. Which would be an issue.

As to holoparasites: The existing policy on this is that AIs/borgs can harm the holopara as long as they're unaware of the link between holopara and a human, but must stop as soon as this becomes obvious (which tends to be very quickly given that every time you harm a holopara in line of sight of its host the game screams out about how [x] is being wounded for the damage holopara took) so this isn't the best example to base an argument around.

um... I don't think it's been enforced like that...

Cobby wrote:

Arianya wrote:

zxaber wrote:For the record, the two harmful events (over-pressurized/malfunctioning air tank and cabin fire) do not occur on MK-I Riply mechs. Unless I'm forgetting another harmful event, you're probably free to bash those down.

MK-1's transfer damage to the pilot directly in several cases, if I recall. Which would be an issue.

As to holoparasites: The existing policy on this is that AIs/borgs can harm the holopara as long as they're unaware of the link between holopara and a human, but must stop as soon as this becomes obvious (which tends to be very quickly given that every time you harm a holopara in line of sight of its host the game screams out about how [x] is being wounded for the damage holopara took) so this isn't the best example to base an argument around.

um... I don't think it's been enforced like that...

I've been told by quite a few mins it's fine to weld holoparasites.

Turns out I was wrong, the existing policy is:

Holoparasites and Asimov
Holoparasites aren't human- a cyborg can attack the holoparasite but not the human. If the parasite recalls and the human is in critical, the borg must give him medical attention.

This policy will also kinda mean borgs have to protect the mech as if it were a human itself due to the heavy RNG behind harmies. I mean, the hulk and holoparasite clause were added due to the fact there is no other way to disable people with those abilities. Every mech besides ody can punch/drill/koolaid through walls and doors easily.

I think the best thing to do for situations like these is to err on the side of not needing meta knowledge . Not everyone knows every little mechanic in the game, I definitely don't and I've played for like 5 years or so. It's a bad experience for the player to get shit on because they're learning silicon and smashed a mech that was on a rampage. It's not intuitive that disabling a mech can cause RNG harm, and most people aren't going to know that until they encounter it for the first time.

Not to mention the code changes. Mechs used to explode, now they might have malfunctions on the O2 or cabin. Those could be gone one day. It would suck to have to keep up with every PR to know if [insert action that is not direct human harm] has had a code change to enable indirect human harm.

Arianya wrote:As for mechs, from a gameplay point of view I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of people entombing themselves in stun immune mech suits and then crying to admins because a borg harmwelded their mech to death and it ~could~ have caused them harm. Mechs exploding in a 1/3 is relatively obscure enough I wouldn't expect most borgs to know it offhand, and a circumstance where a single borg or even a pair of borgs can win against a murder-equipped mech are so rare that this seems very edge case.

Actually borgs are some of the best mech killers because they are also effectively stun-immune blocks of metal. With options like welderbombing, locker dragging and engineer borg self healing, and the fact that they don't slow down when injured, they are actually very capable of whittling mechs down over time. They are such a pain in the arse I've considered having emp grenades/the emp kit implant just to take them out, since emp'ing my mech causes me less issues than a borg endlessly edge smacking my mech only to skitter away the moment I hit it once so it can try again. Note I play a nonhuman, so the borgs are allowed to do this to my mech and therefore I frequently see the potential threat they pose.

To solve this issue is pretty easy. Remove critical mech failures. It's a garbage RNG mechanic at a baseline and quite disliked. It also makes little to no sense as even as much as 1 point of damage can cause a failure. There really should be thresholding put in place for it like borg equipment loss, where mechs could (though maybe not guaranteed to) lose access to equipment as they take damage at various thresholds, incentivising repairing the mech (now much more risky due to climbing in and out being lengthened by quite a bit), and making it so that you can render mechs much more of a nonthreat by dropping it low enough and cutting off equipment. Mechs, depending on rng, being able to operate at 100% capacity from 100-0 is what makes them so horrid to deal with. You sometimes can't ever gain a real foothold on them if you don't luck out and take out it's systems.

Silicons have less of a reason to murder holoparasites than mechs and they're given a pass on that, killing mechs should be completely fine regardless of effect