/tg/Station 13

Does anyone enjoy this? It has a huge drain on dynamic mode where 50 threat will be spent on 3 pairs of BBs. Either: get rid of BBs entirely, (the policy route) or make BBs more balanced with the rest of the game (coding route)

Utter bore of an antag mode it ends up when it does spawn it's the exact only 4 people on the server with blood brother toggled to on who gets it.

even if we dont remove it, please limit the amount of threat it takes on dynamic. 80 threat does not equal 2 trios of BBs

This antag sucks.

I've thoroughly enjoyed every blood brother round I've played. It adds a social dimension to the standard antagonist schtick. I don't play dynamic though, so I can't comment on that.

WineAllWine wrote:even if we dont remove it, please limit the amount of threat it takes on dynamic. 80 threat does not equal 2 trios of BBs

Isn't that config?

Edit: Oh

Yeah I think it’d be fine if at most you got two pairs of BBs per round, anything more is just annoying and makes everyone hate it.

Farquaar wrote:I've thoroughly enjoyed every blood brother round I've played. It adds a social dimension to the standard antagonist schtick.

You could argue that the social dimension is significantly more interesting when two traitors decide to organically work together rather than when it's just "mom said we have to play on the same team"

My problem with BB is its just a worse traitor. Forced to cooperate with a random person who wouldn't surprise anyone if they suddenly died without explanation or went the entire round not being visible, and you don't get any TC to have interesting gear.

BBs is... Okay? It kinda feels unfun that you're tied down to someone who can go SSD or randomly die and go DNR and you get nothing out of it. In fact, I'm pretty sure all my successful BB rounds have been when my cohort went SSD and I just hid them somewhere and did my thing. Like, I LIKE the IDEA of a team antag that has to use whatever is on the station to get their goals, but, in practice, it just doesn't seem to work out well enough either due to connectivity issues, real life getting in the way, or people simply missing the antag prompt.

Also getting BB even though it's disabled in prefs suuuuuure is fun. Yep. At least change the sound that plays so that I don't get my hopes up thinking I'm going to get some cool toys to play with and then I read "You're a Blood Brother of X" and get sad.

NoxVS wrote:

Farquaar wrote:I've thoroughly enjoyed every blood brother round I've played. It adds a social dimension to the standard antagonist schtick.

You could argue that the social dimension is significantly more interesting when two traitors decide to organically work together rather than when it's just "mom said we have to play on the same team"

Let's be honest- how often do you actually meet another traitor organically? Even if you do, it's unlikely that they'll cooperate, or even be clever enough to know that you're a traitor too.

I love the idea of just bringing two people together and saying: "Hey, go plot the fall of the station together." Sure, you might get a bad partner that leads you to an embarrassing death. But you also might get a great partner that saves you in the nick of time, or backs you up in a critical surprise moment. It's a multiplayer game- all team-based gameplay elements have that element of chance baked in.

I think BB would be much improved by giving some cheaper random syndicate items to BBs, like launchpads, makarovs, binary keys, mulligan if one brother gets identified, around the 7 TC mark. Or a blood brother contractor team, though thats kind of abductor light until you get robust teams that turn themselves into nukies.

Blood brothers as an opportunity to use some of the lesser-used less-flashy traitor items would be interesting.

Farquaar wrote:

NoxVS wrote:

Farquaar wrote:I've thoroughly enjoyed every blood brother round I've played. It adds a social dimension to the standard antagonist schtick.

You could argue that the social dimension is significantly more interesting when two traitors decide to organically work together rather than when it's just "mom said we have to play on the same team"

Let's be honest- how often do you actually meet another traitor organically? Even if you do, it's unlikely that they'll cooperate, or even be clever enough to know that you're a traitor too.

I love the idea of just bringing two people together and saying: "Hey, go plot the fall of the station together." Sure, you might get a bad partner that leads you to an embarrassing death. But you also might get a great partner that saves you in the nick of time, or backs you up in a critical surprise moment. It's a multiplayer game- all team-based gameplay elements have that element of chance baked in.

people can literally find other traitors by yelling codewords since they have been baby mode highlighted for traitors. Teaming has never been easier.

Codewords are notoriously subtle and easy to slip into conversation

only newfrags have bb on

cacogen wrote:Codewords are notoriously subtle and easy to slip into conversation

april fools?

Just replace blood brothers with the old 4 man traitor incursion team, its better in almost every way.

Teaming as a traitor is the easiest shit there is, I think I've played just as many normal traitor rounds as teamed traitor rounds.

I like that BBs are an antag without special tools purely for the fact that you can't be sure whether someone is just a tider or an antag but at the same time they're super boring when theyre ACTUALLY in the round

just make them rarer
or make them a mid round event rather than a round driving antag

ITT Terry players share their greatest antag wish.

Editing the config/code sounds better than getting rid of it.

BB is a team antagonist so going SSD and not telling anyone is kinda a yikers.

Yeah BB sucks. It's just traitor but:
- You can get paired up with a moron and get denied greentext cause they fell into the supermatter or something
- You don't get any of the fun and unique gear that traitors get
- You feel obligated to only do your objectives instead of a gimmick because it's team antag

Last time I got BB, my other teammate suicided by cop roundstart so he could stop playing BB and the other suicided by cop while entirely ignoring me as well a little later.

The time before that my fellow BB entirely ignored me, later shot me into crit while going postal on the shuttle after doing all the (theft) objectives without my input at all, and died by cop, and then got antag banned because he killed me. I disabled BB after that. The only reason I got it again was because Dynamic is fucked and forces people into antag roles they have disabled, which still isn't fixed because Dynamic is a trainwreck.

Both of these are highlights of the problem of blood brother. We have players who can be selfish, self-centred and unwilling to be attached at the hip to someone else, and the spotlight MUST be on them, even to the expense of others in the case of anyone who would suicide over playing the role they're given. The opposite side of this extreme, the person who is too new to know what the fuck they're doing at any given point and just enabled every antag to learn, probably ends up feeding into that mindset and justifying this behaviour for the players on the other end. This is the kind of juvenile shit you'd even see in competitive games like MOBAs and is probably a bleedover from those.

(Do note, I've had some good bb rounds but those were usually showing the ropes to new players and helping them get through stuff while clearly being a bit in over their head. It's not common you see people use the role to guide new players to gaining new knowledge, but it's actually really useful for that)

blood brothers is absolute garbage because 99.9999% of the time your blood brother (provided they are actually active) doesn't want to do what you do
it's either accomplish your objectives and do nothing else, and get sperged at because you wanna go loud, or they suicide by cop when you wanna go stealthy
for actual team antagonists this is different since you have unique goals and mechanics. blood brothers? all you get is traitor with no gamer gear and a headache in the form of your nematode-brained partner.

t. nematode-brained partner

Blood brothers is an incredibly frustrating antag that is rarely rewarding to play. With such a diverse player base with varying levels of willingness to roleplay paired with a substantial amount of players turning the BB antag option on to get an additional valid role is an extremely toxic relationship.

The relationships of Blood Brothers on the round itself though creates an additional level of paranoia that is unmatched by any other antagonist. Since they have no explicit tools or tells(unless they have an objective that gives them tools such as stealing the nuke core) anybody can be suspicious of being one for simply being in an area or having a powerful item.

I believe Rave is correct that a config option may be the way to go but in a perfect world I would like to see those who turn Blood Brothers on to be able to commit to the time and be ready to roleplay a minimum amount to make this antag shine. Additionally maybe re-tooling blood brothers to be initially a lone antagonist that gets to choose their "brother" in game from others who have rolled it may be an interesting way to solve the "being paired with somebody who is SSD or they suicided by security" problem.

Those are just my thoughts and opinions on Blood Brother currently and I still want to see what people have to say about them.

The one good thing I see about blood brothers is that they (mostly) don't have items that say "ah yep this is anteg" for security to 100% valid them.

With this gone security will only be looking for open PDAs or traitor items, rather than trying to prove their antag-like actions.
Tho most sec just go unga shotgun so this'd not change much.

BrotherBeyond wrote:The one good thing I see about blood brothers is that they (mostly) don't have items that say "ah yep this is anteg" for security to 100% valid them.

With this gone security will only be looking for open PDAs or traitor items, rather than trying to prove their antag-like actions.
Tho most sec just go unga shotgun so this'd not change much.

just hide your items or buy an implant to store them

Mechanically the only way to make blood brothers more bearable without significantly changing around how they play is giving them a way to communicate securely and reliably.

I think it would be a lot more fun if BB teams had almost ling-like chat method to communicate within their team.
When it comes down to it I think that's actually BB's biggest problem, they are a team antag with no way to reliably communicate. Team antags need a way to communicate that isn't just the PDA messenger.

SkeletalElite wrote:Mechanically the only way to make blood brothers more bearable without significantly changing around how they play is giving them a way to communicate securely and reliably.

I think it would be a lot more fun if BB teams had almost ling-like chat method to communicate within their team.
When it comes down to it I think that's actually BB's biggest problem, they are a team antag with no way to reliably communicate. Team antags need a way to communicate that isn't just the PDA messenger.

>Ling chat
Oh poor soul...

I can see them having a disguised radio that'd let them talk to each other without frequencies. Like in their pen, rotate it to a certain degrees and boom you can talk.

BrotherBeyond wrote:

SkeletalElite wrote:Mechanically the only way to make blood brothers more bearable without significantly changing around how they play is giving them a way to communicate securely and reliably.

I think it would be a lot more fun if BB teams had almost ling-like chat method to communicate within their team.
When it comes down to it I think that's actually BB's biggest problem, they are a team antag with no way to reliably communicate. Team antags need a way to communicate that isn't just the PDA messenger.

>Ling chat
Oh poor soul...

I can see them having a disguised radio that'd let them talk to each other without frequencies. Like in their pen, rotate it to a certain degrees and boom you can talk.

I know ling chat was removed, but blood brothers should get something similar to it in function. Able to be used discretely without any tells.

>be me, having fun on dynamic
>see anomalous exogeology
>"oh ok that means there's atleast some antags"
>endround
>30 threat - Blood Brothers
>only bloodbros spawned
can we fucking remove this antag already nobody likes it

blood brothers suck but i like that they must make do with what they have on the station, i always play traitor with no items because i think its more interesting

giving them a ling chat thing sounds cool to me since it would fit in line with the no items thing, and also cuz people already meta know that pda messages round start mean blood brothers (maybe i should random name and pda a random person just to see if anyone games with it)

id be up for giving bbs radio implants that only let them talk to each other

also a lot of the dynamic problems could probably be solved just by lowering the cost and limiting it to 1-2 teams

Something about BBs that makes them semi interesting is the fact that they have no means of identifying one another outside of IC stuff. IMO if we’re gonna buff them, we definitely shouldn’t be giving them the ability the communicate easily. If they want to talk, they can use a radio on a specific frequency.

I haven't checked but I'm guessing it hasn't changed that you can't hear Common when tuned to a specific headset frequency. Station bounced radios exist but they don't make for very clandestine communication. It would be nice if you could tune it and both listen to and talk on a different frequency while still having the same access to Common.

I think part of the failing here is that we have this notion of "lol blood brothers always afking or murderboning and outting instantly" but also like to pretend we treat them like a team antagonist.

coconut lol'd at me (jokingly) today when I asked during the community meeting if they were actually team antags but then we check out this thread and you have admins buying into this notion that it's just part and parcel to the antagonist when it sounds like there's very much an enforcement problem here.

Maybe if we banned people from the role that took it to instantly get themselves killed with their otherwise antag freedom the people who like the role no longer played it (why wouldnt you its a free antag role and seemingly admins dgaf what you do) and it would be a much better job. There's no point in "fixing" the role on a code end if we cant even bother trying to fix it admin side first.

Cobby wrote:I think part of the failing here is that we have this notion of "lol blood brothers always afking or murderboning and outting instantly" but also like to pretend we treat them like a team antagonist.

coconut lol'd at me (jokingly) today when I asked during the community meeting if they were actually team antags but then we check out this thread and you have admins buying into this notion that it's just part and parcel to the antagonist when it sounds like there's very much an enforcement problem here.

Maybe if we banned people from the role that took it to instantly get themselves killed with their otherwise antag freedom the people who like the role no longer played it (why wouldnt you its a free antag role and seemingly admins dgaf what you do) and it would be a much better job. There's no point in "fixing" the role on a code end if we cant even bother trying to fix it admin side first.

cobby u didnt get it, boners like to get some cool antag gear and start killing roundstart for dopamine, they dont want to snooze fest farm department shit to be able to bone, they dont have bb on.
for veteran players bb is just bad cause i can just play assistant join any metagang and you have bb anytime you want without an rng troglodyte and it doesnt offer anything as what you have is farming department shit and then poof hhaha maxcaps haha STEALIN DAT HAND TELE SO NICE AND INTERESTING, so they turn it off
and in the end only ppl with it are those who dont play enough to get antag daily or noobs which causes the: "lol blood brothers always afking or murderboning and outting instantly"

bb isnt necessarily a bad role - make it like a mid antag roll or something not a main gamemode as it gets stale half the time u get bb the other person doesnt even do objectives

BBs were good when they could powergame more with the typically large arsenal of weaponry available to them such as chems botany xenobio etc (when it was accepted that non antags playing these roles would not go off and make weapons etc)

As the potential of those jobs for killing has decreased due to balance PRs, so has the killing power of bbs as a whole.

bbs are also unfun to play against as sec because you can never really get a concrete antag confirmation, such as traitor items. Therefore sec is more hesistant about killing them because the difference between bbs and general autistic assistants/shitters is so minor that you can only really see it once the killing starts

BBs are both unfun to play as and to play against. It's just like a ticket to be allowed to ignore normal escalation rules. Antags are meant to improve the experience of the round by providing a threat to the station, and just having 2-8 people who are allowed to ignore most rules as your antags offers no uniqueness or intrigue.

Much like revs they are an outdated relic and should be taken out behind the shed

Why not just add a code/config option (not sure if this is possible in config as of right now) to make blood brothers only spawn if another antag already has, in addition to lowering their cost?

This would solve the problem of only BB showing up in a round (as I think we can all agree that BB can't progress a round on its own) while keeping the paranoia aspect of BB.

This was a topic at the community meeting right? Did anyone say anything interesting there?

The fact it has ignored whether you have preferences disabled or not for over a year kind of shows how untouched it is.

Blood Brothers have been removed from all dynamic and secret configs.

APC destroyed mission accomplished.

Headmin Rulings:
Domitius: Remove
Naloac: Remove
Coconutwarrior97: Remove