/tg/Station 13

scaredofshadows wrote:In the interest of creating a slightly more RP friendly environment, I've decided to take a firm stance on some new antagonist policies.

Lately, I've been seeing the equivalent of cuban pete rounds. I'm seeing players try to dick over anyone and everyone as soon as they land an antagonist role. Particularly egregious are the survivor roles in wizard rounds - 'stay alive until the end' does not mean immediately gun down half the station.

From now on, murderbone behavior as an antagonist may result in permanent antagonist role bans. Players who are already permanently banned from antagonist roles who are placed in an antagonist role (such as being revved in a revolution round) who display this behavior may be issued a server ban.

So what constitutes unwanted behavior as an antagonist? The test I intend to use will be 'is this player trying to ruin the round for other players instead of trying to accomplish their objectives?'. The answer to this question for most of the people trying to argue about this lately is 'yes'. We've fallen a long way as a server and devolved into stupid, mindless griefing which was previously allowed under the rules, but will no longer be tolerated.

We recognize the opportunity for creative antagonist play and will not punish for such behavior. Creative antagonist play differs from murderboning in that the goal of such actions is to foster creative situations (including some murder) rather than rack up a bodycount as if the game were an FPS.

To the players reading this and wondering if they are the type of antag that I'm targetting for antag bans, the answer is likely 'no'. It is almost always obvious who needs an antag ban and who is exercising 'creative license' as an antagonist.

I wanted the playerbase's opinions on the new policy.

Fucking Rob, Killing the dream

Honestly there is no reason for this to be a rule. Mass murder is fine as long as they dont try to delay the round to rack up kills. If someone is going a bit overboard give them a warning. If it becomes a problem antag ban them for being a cunt to other players. Hell some of my favorite rounds have been hunting down these guys or ghetto cloning people from a hidden cloner.

tl;dr
This is rarely a problem save for a few cases and then it falls under the "dont be a dick" clause. Pointless rule is pointless.

Here's betting all the votes in favor are sockpuppets

RogerWilco wrote:Here's betting all the votes in favor are sockpuppets

Or more likely the quiet majority.

Murderboning is one of the ways to get the whole station involved against the antagonist otherwise its just going to be another boring round of research, heal shitlers which beat up each other, make autism forts, etc.

Eventhough people get pissed off by getting murdered as a result of murderboning, they inevitable end up cheering the guy on in deadchat anyway IF he turns out to be good.

Murderboning is only a real problem in rounds like wizard where security is busy, or when the game is not set up to punish undesirable behavior internally.

Openly killing people as a traitor and causing exciting chases and panic isn't bad. What is bad is when one can act openly as a traitor in a rather safe and pedestrian way without circumstances like a power outage or hacked AI aiding it, either because the station is too weak, the traitor is too strong, or, the worst case scenario, stealth items are too strong. Ideally the problem should self correct as players find that acting without any subtility will result in swift reprisals. Ideally security should be strong enough to be able to effectively and nearly instantly take down a lone traitor, where as regular crew should have a slightly worse than 50/50 chance of beating them in a small skirmish with a few allies. Right now a traitor can count on getting taken down by compitent sec officers if they hold their ground at the scene of a crime, but can swiftly escape with minimal access levels or just smartly moving through hallways.

Obviously however there will never be a perfect balancing act, however the current security policies on the server of "Its ok to view spacelaw as a guideline as long as you are not a douche to the station" give the coding team a lot of leway in upping security's power to make overt antags much less attractive, and the stun system helps a lot in this regard by encouraging people to run. However the worst actors are going to consistently be the worst regardless of design.

A very light handed rule system would make a ton of sense. Nothing like "You can't openly be a traitor" as sometimes the best way to go clearly is to just hop out of maint, gun someone down, and not care about the cries for help as you try to lay low for the rest of the round. Heck, sometimes when the security team is small it makes perfect sense to assault the brig if you have an absurdly hard steal objective like the captain's laser. But going around killing people unrelated to your objective, even as potential witnesses, is really poor form.

My main question is how would admins go about spotting this? Admin rulings historically work best when focused on the end result and not on intention, but this is a place where you would really be judging people based on intentions and not end result, because the end result of a traitor choosing to tactically go loud and one choosing to go loud for the lulz is ultimately the same.

What the hell? This is the 3rd time the "murderboning as antag = ban" thing has come up. The first 2 times we had a poll the votes were in favor of NOT having this rule, so now SoS just does it anyway? That is bullshit.

So this means that survivors can't murderbone, which means that survivors, who are created to cause chaos during a wizard round, can't cause chaos.

So no releasing the singularity and making it eat the escape shuttle now?

No. Rules are adequate as they are. We don't need to limit anything.

Instead of making rules, show and tell murderboner monkeys that such behaviour is frowned upon - this is a community driven game after all. If they just keep doing it round after round, admins could tag them appropriately, and fuck with them if them if they persist. Maybe send centcom intelligence to security about them, maybe blow up their toys etc.

There's literally no reason to forbid going on a killing spree to everyone, just because a handful does it all the time.

Lumbermancer wrote:No. Rules are adequate as they are. We don't need to limit anything.

Instead of making rules, show and tell murderboner monkeys that such behaviour is frowned upon - this is a community driven game after all. If they just keep doing it round after round, admins could tag him appropriately, and fuck with him if him if he persists. Maybe send centcom intelligence to security about him, maybe blow up his toys etc.

There's literally no reason to forbid going on a killing spree to everyone, just because a handful does it all the time.

Might as well once I murderdicked hard a while back on meta station. Admin sent in a Nuke team to blow the station because I killed 20+ people thrice over. Lumbermancer has the right ideal to go about it.

scaredofshadows wrote:To the players reading this and wondering if they are the type of antag that I'm targetting for antag bans, the answer is likely 'no'. It is almost always obvious who needs an antag ban and who is exercising 'creative license' as an antagonist.

Well, gee, because vague rules are always so obvious to everyone and especially to admins and nobody will have their own opinion on the matter.

No just for that reason alone.

Instead of making rules, show and tell murderboner monkeys that such behaviour is frowned upon - this is a community driven game after all. If they just keep doing it round after round, admins could tag him appropriately, and fuck with him if him if he persists. Maybe send centcom intelligence to security about him, maybe blow up his toys etc.

something something slippery slope something

also, this rule is shit because it could potentially allow admins to punish people for killing them

Why? Don't fix things which aren't broke. Its part of the game and the appeal. Being able to do whatever you want once in a while if you happen to become antag is a great thing, don't change that.

Murdering everyone on the station because of magboots? Fine, go for it. Makes the game scarier.

Murdering everyone on the station because of magboots, and then ALSO recalling the shuttle repeatedly just to be a huge dick? Not cool, please ban.

I think the main problem behind this whole thing is "i ded pls restart", as in: people are getting bored after they die in the game.

Instead of banning murderboner-sprees (which btw I really enjoyed observing and cheering on the survivors etc.), we should give things for the ghosts to do! The solution we have right now is the easiest and shittiest way of dealing with it.

Or... we could just accept that everything can't be 100% action-fun-time all the time. Like the apparently somewhat forgotten Rule 2 says:

Rules wrote:2. You are playing a game where you are not fully in control of everything. You will be put into situations beyond your control, which will result in some rounds being ruined for you. Man up and deal with it. However, if you are obviously griefed, be sure to report it to administrators by using the ‘adminhelp’ verb.

I see where the admins are going with the antag-policy. They try to make everyone have fun, that is a noble purpose. But this mindset is drifting us further away from the original, cruel-world kinda feel tgstation had, and if we continue like this, every round will be the same, rounds will slowly become bland.

You gotta have shitty rounds to have awesome rounds, like valleys and mountains.

Big part of the SS13 charm is that anything can happen, we should aim to keep it that way.

Alex Crimson wrote:What the hell? This is the 3rd time the "murderboning as antag = ban" thing has come up. The first 2 times we had a poll the votes were in favor of NOT having this rule, so now SoS just does it anyway? That is bullshit.

/tg/station is like congress. If they can't get a bill/rule passed the first time around, they'll keep trying to pass it through as inconspicuously as possible with the least amount of debate possible, time and time again.

Lumbermancer wrote:No. Rules are adequate as they are. We don't need to limit anything.

Instead of making rules, show and tell murderboner monkeys that such behaviour is frowned upon - this is a community driven game after all. If they just keep doing it round after round, admins could tag them appropriately, and fuck with them if them if they persist. Maybe send centcom intelligence to security about them, maybe blow up their toys etc.

There's literally no reason to forbid going on a killing spree to everyone, just because a handful does it all the time.

I support this idea as well. Admin involvement with events instead of banning.

Remember when I was murderboning once, admins made events to spawn people back to try and stop me. Making it so murderboning allows admins to cause things to happen seems to be win-win scenario.

When I've talked to admins in game they are generally all against the idea of spawning in players to stop the murderboners.

The reason being that they don't want to "reward" the murderboner with the idea that a admin spawned in some dead players to put a stop to them.

Steelpoint wrote:When I've talked to admins in game they are generally all against the idea of spawning in players to stop the murderboners.

The reason being that they don't want to "reward" the murderboner with the idea that a admin spawned in some dead players to put a stop to them.

That's bloody stupid. Where are the downsides to this?

> Guy murderboning gets to have more fun (More people to kill! More people to kill that have GUNS!).

> Some of the people murderboned get back into the game as a nuke op or CENTCOMM squad.

> The round in the former case reaches it's final conclusion quite quickly (shuttle call or nuke).

Everyone is happy in the end. People will murderboner whether or not you 'reward' them. You may as well bring people back into the game somehow.

It might make more sense if I get off my rear end and get the Emergency Response Team in the game.

Now you have a legitmant force to send in that is not the Death Squad.

omnitricks wrote:Murderboning is one of the ways to get the whole station involved against the antagonist otherwise its just going to be another boring round of research, heal shitlers which beat up each other, make autism forts, etc.

Why would we encourage antag behavior that encourages validhunting? That's what "the station involved against the antagonist" means in the case of a traitor with ebow-sword. The antag murderbones, the crew gets their valids on and we've then devolved into the exact sort of Deathmatch style gameplay that motivated the murderboning ban in the first place.

You know there is something wrong when nuke ops get called out and there are 15 assistants with toolboxes in engineering before security even arrives all hoping to get their valids.

Amelius wrote:

Steelpoint wrote:When I've talked to admins in game they are generally all against the idea of spawning in players to stop the murderboners.

The reason being that they don't want to "reward" the murderboner with the idea that a admin spawned in some dead players to put a stop to them.

That's bloody stupid. Where are the downsides to this?

> Guy murderboning gets to have more fun (More people to kill! More people to kill that have GUNS!).

> Some of the people murderboned get back into the game as a nuke op or CENTCOMM squad.

> The round in the former case reaches it's final conclusion quite quickly (shuttle call or nuke).

Everyone is happy in the end. People will murderboner whether or not you 'reward' them. You may as well bring people back into the game somehow.

The downside is that the guy does it again next round because that activity has been positively reinforced. I know you know how murderboning works so I'm not going to pretend you're playing dumb here. 2 hour ebow-esword-recall murderfests already reward a single player at the detriment to everyone else. Its literally only there to decrease the number of players in the round so the killing player can wank themself over how "robust" they are. With few exceptions, antags will always have the initiative in every fight because non-antags cannot initiate real combat without getting banned. In a combat system built around stuns and disables, that first shot is usually the only one that matters. That just means that unless called out by name on the radio or blatantly running around the hallways with a sword out, the antag already has an advantage to keep removing players from the round one at a time. As I've read it, this is not a policy against murder (that would be retarded and people pretending it is are being intentionally dumb.

I've said it before, I shed no tears for the end of "muh murderbone."

I'd just like to say that as someone who rarely even reads what their objectives are as traitor, this change really bites. The LAST thing I want is admins telling me how to have fun. When I'm a traitor, I make my own objectives instead of letting my round's priorities be decided by some shitty, rigid rng formula.

This reminds me of a device my gf and I wanted to buy to keep her mouth open when I was face fucking her. It had some stupid circle in the middle to put my wiener through and in the end I had to say HELL no because I want to decide my own destiny and path. Also it was 32 dollars.

that's a steal.

Atticat wrote:This reminds me of a device my gf and I wanted to buy to keep her mouth open when I was face fucking her. It had some stupid circle in the middle to put my wiener through and in the end I had to say HELL no because I want to decide my own destiny and path. Also it was 32 dollars.

This is a horrible, yet accurate analogy

I like this policy in theory, but I'm worried about how it will be enforced: EDIT: disregard this I suck cocks and didn't look at the big thread, most of this was answered

- SoS has already said traitor AIs plasmaflooding is OK. How about atmos techs? Or traitor engineers releasing the singularity / using the beacon? Scientists bombing? Subverting the AI and telling it to go wild? The thing is that rounds do not end without dramatic action, which usually takes the form of mass deaths. Otherwise no one cares enough for a shuttle call.

- Does this apply to mass Rob Ust-style esword/ebow murderbones only, or gimmicks lik, say, a serial killer slowly decreasing the station population, up to 20+ kills? I think the latter could be interesting (I've always wanted to do a gimmick where I leave one syndicate card by each body).

- Does this cover metagrudge kills / kills just because? Not murderboning, but falls under the letter of the law. I can see both sides to this. I don't like metagrudging, but I admittedly sometimes try to, say, kill the clown as traitor in funny ways because it's a clown.

ExplosiveCrate wrote:So this means that survivors can't murderbone, which means that survivors, who are created to cause chaos during a wizard round, can't cause chaos.

This is my only real problem with this.

Cipher3 wrote:

ExplosiveCrate wrote:So this means that survivors can't murderbone, which means that survivors, who are created to cause chaos during a wizard round, can't cause chaos.

This is my only real problem with this.

I don't think this was very well thought out at all.

My best guess is this is just a framing rule so that later on when someone is only appearing on the server to antag roll and then try and kill as many people as possible we can antag ban them and point to this.

That's my optimistic point of view.

Conversely I could see someone angry that they got robusted try to ban a player for it and point to this rule. Which would be super bad BUT it wouldn't be all bad because it would give us a chance to see who would be shitty enough to cross that line.

Wasn't there like a discussion on this before and it ended up being murderbone should never be bannable unless you have a hidden comms console and keep recalling just to murderbone more
I dislike this change, I thought antagonist freedom was one of the highlights of this server and now I'll be terrified of admins breathing down my neck every time I roll traitor or whatever

PKPenguin321 wrote:Wasn't there like a discussion on this before and it ended up being murderbone should never be bannable unless you have a hidden comms console and keep recalling just to murderbone more
I dislike this change, I thought antagonist freedom was one of the highlights of this server and now I'll be terrified of admins breathing down my neck every time I roll traitor or whatever

Multiple discussions and polls, all of which were a resounding NO from the community. Not that it did any good.

An0n3 wrote:My best guess is this is just a framing rule so that later on when someone is only appearing on the server to antag roll and then try and kill as many people as possible we can antag ban them and point to this.

That's my optimistic point of view.

Conversely I could see someone angry that they got robusted try to ban a player for it and point to this rule. Which would be super bad BUT it wouldn't be all bad because it would give us a chance to see who would be shitty enough to cross that line.

What is wrong with using Rule Zero for these cases

I think the problem is like what happened to the old security policy years ago, asshats kept trying to toe the line so they took the privilage away, IE admins used to be much harsher on security arrests until they found that a few people ahelped all the time because they got caught greytiding so they just said 'nope all ic now'.

Like then, I'm not angry at this change, I'm angry that people had to ruin it all for shits and giggles.

I don't want murderboning to end, just to make it a rare occasion instead of this habituatal stupid race to kill everyone to attention whore.

The admins could've used Rule Zero a long time ago to put these shitters in the trash but they didn't

You're punishing a large amount of people to penalize a small amount of people over something you could have just rule 0'd them out over for.

If you REALLY wanted to do something like this you could have just added an addendum to the rules that went something like "extreme, repeated cases of murderboning over a period of time is frowned upon and admins are free to limit your antag time over repeated cases of it".

But this entire thing contradicts rule 2 anyways:

"You are playing a game where you are not fully in control of everything. You will be put into situations beyond your control, which will result in some rounds being ruined for you. Man up and deal with it. However, if you are obviously griefed, be sure to report it to administrators by using the ‘adminhelp’ verb."

Also, this will probably slow round progression to a crawl. Prepare to see two hour, boring rounds drawn out and finally ended with a shuttle call over dumbshit like misplaced paperwork or a cold spreading through the station.

mrpain wrote:You're punishing a large amount of people to penalize a small amount of people over something you could have just rule 0'd them out over for.

really kind of sums this up

danno wrote:

mrpain wrote:You're punishing a large amount of people to penalize a small amount of people over something you could have just rule 0'd them out over for.

really kind of sums this up

Rule 0 just gets ADMIN CONSPIRACY FUCKING ADMINS BANNING ME FNR 3 month long drama shitstorms though. Plus, this is basically what the policy says anyway, to ban that small amount of people who murderbone for no real reason.

Rule 0 is practically impossible with the admin conspiracy hype-trains nowadays. All those cases would have come up to sos anyway.

Stickymayhem wrote:Rule 0 is practically impossible with the admin conspiracy hype-trains nowadays. All those cases would have come up to sos anyway.

Yeah, so lets implement a rule that the community voted against, and that punishes even the non-shit players. That will really help clean up the "admin conspiracy" stuff. Great idea.

How exactly DOES it punish non-shit players? See people claiming it, but maybe I'm just missing the explanation?

Because any antag using their "creative license" to spice the round up can get banned by admins and have it justified as "murderboning" or "trying to kill people despite having no kills objectives".

I hate people who play call of duty station 13 as much as anyone, but limiting the freedom of antags in spite of a few people isnt the way to deal with it. This whole situation is just SoS making rules after watching the game over the weekend, and admins covering for him.

Alex Crimson wrote:Because any antag using their "creative license" to spice the round up can get banned by admins and have it justified as "murderboning" or "trying to kill people despite having no kills objectives".

From the policy itself, I just feel the need to point it out:

scaredofshadows wrote:We recognize the opportunity for creative antagonist play and will not punish for such behavior. Creative antagonist play differs from murderboning in that the goal of such actions is to foster creative situations (including some murder) rather than rack up a bodycount as if the game were an FPS.

scaredofshadows wrote:So what constitutes unwanted behavior as an antagonist? The test I intend to use will be 'is this player trying to ruin the round for other players instead of trying to accomplish their objectives?'. The answer to this question for most of the people trying to argue about this lately is 'yes'. We've fallen a long way as a server and devolved into stupid, mindless griefing which was previously allowed under the rules, but will no longer be tolerated.

scaredofshadows wrote:This is merely the first of a multitude of clarifications that will likely be necessary.

Skorvold wrote:The majority of this rule is left up to admin decision anyway.

Lemme also just add in the two poll topics that were made by SoS and Sticky:

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1761

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1508

Notice how in both of these polls are heavily against the rule, yet is was enacted anyways? There isnt really much basis for trust here when SoS feels the need to pull rank and go against the wishes of the community, and the adminship do nothing.

As much as people claim it only targets the worst offenders, don't forget that SoS bwoinked a guy for acid grenading the escape shuttle as an antag. This has already proven to not be the case

Alex Crimson wrote:

scaredofshadows wrote:So what constitutes unwanted behavior as an antagonist? The test I intend to use will be 'is this player trying to ruin the round for other players instead of trying to accomplish their objectives?'. The answer to this question for most of the people trying to argue about this lately is 'yes'. We've fallen a long way as a server and devolved into stupid, mindless griefing which was previously allowed under the rules, but will no longer be tolerated.

scaredofshadows wrote:This is merely the first of a multitude of clarifications that will likely be necessary.

Skorvold wrote:The majority of this rule is left up to admin decision anyway.

Lemme also just add in the two poll topics that were made by SoS and Sticky:

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1761

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1508

Notice how in both of these polls are heavily against the rule, yet is was enacted anyways? There isnt really much basis for trust here when SoS feels the need to pull rank and go against the wishes of the community, and the adminship do nothing.

I wouldn't use the word 'heavily'. This poll is much more unbalanced.

Rather than having this knee-jerk reaction to the new policy, how about you wait it out a while and see if it gets bad

The ban requests and appeals are quite visible to everyone, and from what I saw of playing today, it didn't seem to effect the gameplay at all during rounds

I do believe it would have been better to not implement a new policy and just outright ban those people are playing only for the antag roles, but, what's done is done, you can complain and whine all about that but, it's done, move on, get over it

The reason people are so fed up with "Just seeing what happens," Is because we have a history of pushing shitty changes on a "trail basis" that never officially ends and then eventually people get tired of trying to change it. It is bullshit. Although given our recent sec sprite changes and this poll here it seems pretty clear that community opinion means staggeringly little.

I have mixed feelings on this, but from what I understand this is basically the 'Dante Smith/Rob Ust/etc amendment for excess Antag shittery'?

Here's an example of something I've done in the past, to help me understand better. I'm an AI that's been subverted/one-humaned by a traitor. I help them accomplish their objectives, the escape shuttle is about to come, they're cozy and safe in a pod of their own and they tell me I'm free to do whatever I want, or at least haven't outright forbid me from anything. So I head to Escape and fuck with the airlock safeties to make the doors eat nonhumans for laughs.

Is this now:

A. Not okay, period.
B. Acceptable, with a reason.
- B1. Such as 'the one human is telling me to do this, with their taking responsibility for my actions'.
- B2. Such as 'I'm just getting back at some human that's been bothering me all shift, and that 5 other nonhumans were using the same airlock and also got crushed to death at the same time was just a happy coincidence'.
C. Acceptable, so long as I'm not doing it every round.
D. Acceptable, so long as nobody's dying/failing to escape for it.
E. Acceptable, so long as I'm not also going overboard by bolting/shocking everything in addition to the airlock munching.