/tg/Station 13

seeing as the results of the test are over, I am again asking to make maint areas All-access again via config. It greatly improved my experiences as a player, and I feel as it has been good for the community at large.

I ran a poll that I need to extract the results from soon.

I missed the test run for this? Dang. I'd definitely like to hear what people's experience was like with universal maint access though.

it was very nice. I was able to pull off a hypnoflash gimmick on kilo I had been wanting to do for a while, and was able to use my newfound maint access to set up in the russian mafia den thanks to it. Antags with maint access have a lot more options on ways to do things and I would like this to stay so that mugging an assistant isnt a requirement anymore

Farquaar wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 12:59 am I missed the test run for this? Dang. I'd definitely like to hear what people's experience was like with universal maint access though.

It ruled

i was legitimately crushed to see all maint access gone. add it back ASAP please

All access maint is cringe please no anything but that

(Note that poll results don't guarantee an outcome, just thought I should post them)

I personally feel like having all maint acess detracts from the game. Maint should be a creepy dangerous place, it should be suspicious to be seen wandering maint unless you''ve got a good reason to be there (ie. maint right outside your department, paramedic, engi or sec officer.) . When literally everyone has all maint access it detracts from that feeling and even assistants having it is too much. I think we should take away assistant maint access, but I also liked the PR that adjusted maint acccess to that roles had better access to the maint immiediately outside their department, such as medical being able to access med maint doors, even the ones that connect to the main hall.

They're dark dingy tunnels without any furnishing, a load of trash, and exposed wiring/piping, not a slightly more convenient way for you to get between arrivals and medbay.

I feel like everyone having Maints Access takes a lot out of maintenance for both crew and antags.

I think for Crew, there's benefit to maints being that kinda spooky place you don't really want to go in unless you need to. The radiation storm forcing the crew into the dank, dark tunnels is great.

For Antags, sure you've got ease of entry, too. But who cares? The benefit to them as an antag is the ability to move around the station stealthily, but if every tom dick and harry can just wander maints freely, then what's the difference compared to if you just walked the main hallways?

I feel like a lot of people posting against free maints access are doing so on the grounds of settings idealism (it should be the dark spoopy place where antags hide) rather than gameplay reality. When antagonists do things in maintenance, they still hide further in maintenance. No heretic is going to set up a rune in the middle of a major maintenance intersection, they're going to find a dark spooky corner of maintenance that has a small room, and set up there. Maybe even hide that with a false wall or something. So, the medical doctor who is taking a shortcut through maintenance to reach arrivals or whatever, still wont see the antagonist's things unless you're really bad at picking a setup location. If the medical doctor is going around checking every tiny room to look for antagonists on purpose, that person is just a validhunter, and frankly, such a person would most likely have gone through the effort of getting maints access at hopline anyway, so, removing maints access from them roundstart achieved what exactly? Forcing them to spend 45-60 seconds at hopline?

TheFinalPotato wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:27 am All access maint is cringe please no anything but that

how do you know so much

Imitates-The-Lizards wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 6:54 am I feel like a lot of people posting against free maints access are doing so on the grounds of settings idealism (it should be the dark spoopy place where antags hide) rather than gameplay reality. When antagonists do things in maintenance, they still hide further in maintenance. No heretic is going to set up a rune in the middle of a major maintenance intersection, they're going to find a dark spooky corner of maintenance that has a small room, and set up there. Maybe even hide that with a false wall or something. So, the medical doctor who is taking a shortcut through maintenance to reach arrivals or whatever, still wont see the antagonist's things unless you're really bad at picking a setup location. If the medical doctor is going around checking every tiny room to look for antagonists on purpose, that person is just a validhunter, and frankly, such a person would most likely have gone through the effort of getting maints access at hopline anyway, so, removing maints access from them roundstart achieved what exactly? Forcing them to spend 45-60 seconds at hopline?

getting maint access at the HoP line takes effort, and eats your limited wild card slots unless you want to wallet and double ID for loads of extra access and basically completely removes the number of people who are just casually strolling through maintenance. People should not be choosing to casually stroll through maint as their way to get around. With all maint access, maints may as well just be regular halls.

SkeletalElite wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 5:48 am it should be suspicious to be seen wandering maint unless you''ve got a good reason to be there (ie. maint right outside your department, paramedic, engi or sec officer.) .

By that logic, Lavaland should be completely restricted to just miners. Are you really going to try to tell me that people won't raise an eyebrow just because you have maint access, even if you're, say, a bartender all the way in medbay maint?

I don't necessarily disagree the stance that maint shouldn't be all access, but all access maint would solve some of the wonkiness with maint accesses in general, and it would mean Kilo's escape pods get used for once.

Imitates-The-Lizards wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 6:54 am I feel like a lot of people posting against free maints access are doing so on the grounds of settings idealism (it should be the dark spoopy place where antags hide) rather than gameplay reality. When antagonists do things in maintenance, they still hide further in maintenance. No heretic is going to set up a rune in the middle of a major maintenance intersection, they're going to find a dark spooky corner of maintenance that has a small room, and set up there. Maybe even hide that with a false wall or something. So, the medical doctor who is taking a shortcut through maintenance to reach arrivals or whatever, still wont see the antagonist's things unless you're really bad at picking a setup location. If the medical doctor is going around checking every tiny room to look for antagonists on purpose, that person is just a validhunter, and frankly, such a person would most likely have gone through the effort of getting maints access at hopline anyway, so, removing maints access from them roundstart achieved what exactly? Forcing them to spend 45-60 seconds at hopline?

Removing barriers from the game because "Well its easy to bypass it if you really want to get it so it should be roundstart equipment" is the second worst kind of pr

This has negative outcomes.

The hallways will feel emptier, people will be harder to find and antagonists will no longer have anywhere to hide. Validhunters will be able to roam maint from roundstart looking for sussy shit.

Another example of us promoting negative freedom with no respect to positive freedom. This will interfere with the options of others in favour of individual freedom. How have we not realized this road is having a negative impact?

I have no faith that the right decision will be made here unfortunately.

doesn't this effectively just make maintenance tunnels a secondary hallway that is just smaller and less lit? really seems like it'll detract from any sense of seclusion wandering maintenance is meant to have when literally everyone will just use it to take shortcuts.

genuinely a bad design choice and i hope this doesn't actually happen.

Maintenance creates an interesting dichotomy between those who have it and those who don't. I would be remiss to have that removed.

In theory and only theory I’d rather less people had maint access than more, so as to preserve and even strengthen the stuff people already talked about (low traffic, good for antags, spooky, etc). I wasn’t there for the test though so take that with a grain of salt.

At the end of the day I don’t think it’s a great idea to remove the already low barrier of entry.

I only got to play like one round with it, but seems to me that antags have the most to gain from it since being able to move around maint quickly makes evading capture a hell of a lot easier. Though I also imagine that this would make hiding any kind of hideout larger than a broom closet exponentially harder than it already is.

That said though I agree with the idea that making maintenance a more restricted area that's inhabited largely by antags and the odd engi/sec officer is probably the more interesting choice in the long run.

Maintenance is just a dark hallway with no chance of plasmaflooding(unless your playing on delta, then its just a hallway) without access requirements, so removing them sucks

Stickymayhem wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 12:34 pm The hallways will feel emptier, people will be harder to find and antagonists will no longer have anywhere to hide. Validhunters will be able to roam maint from roundstart looking for sussy shit.

Validhunters already play sec or assistant to do this, nothing is changed by giving the people with jobs access to maint. Doctors are not suddenly surging into maint because they now have access.

CMDR_Gungnir wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 5:58 am For Antags, sure you've got ease of entry, too. But who cares? The benefit to them as an antag is the ability to move around the station stealthily, but if every tom dick and harry can just wander maints freely, then what's the difference compared to if you just walked the main hallways?

The difference is that in maint it will take significantly longer for help to arrive when you slip on a carefully placed banana peel and a traitor starts impaling you. There isnt 6 people within earshot to save you when the esword starts chopping you into bits. People will still take the risk for the shortcut as they always have, but story wise this is a benefit as it gives our antagonists another opportunity to do their evil deeds without being converged on by every crewmember in the area.

We had nearly every job having maintenance access for years in the early days and it was always scary and dangerous. Passing by someone in the 1-tile maintenance hallway always made your heart rate go up a little bit. I feel like the worries of most people against this are overblown. One way in which it isn't, I think, is that our early maps made a point to make maintenance sprawling and inefficient, with lots of maintenance islands and such that weren't connected to the overall network and thus got low traffic.

blackdav123 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 10:44 pm Doctors are not suddenly surging into maint because they now have access.

[citation needed]

Oh, I missed the poll. Unfortunate.

I dislike crew-wise maint access. Feels weird to even have a maint if everyone can use it with no restriction; Why not just do away with it entirely and create alleyway hallways?

Assistants should only have dorms maint access.

legality wrote: ↑Fri Apr 22, 2022 6:00 pm We had nearly every job having maintenance access for years in the early days and it was always scary and dangerous. Passing by someone in the 1-tile maintenance hallway always made your heart rate go up a little bit. I feel like the worries of most people against this are overblown. One way in which it isn't, I think, is that our early maps made a point to make maintenance sprawling and inefficient, with lots of maintenance islands and such that weren't connected to the overall network and thus got low traffic.

Yeah, but that was because being forced to be near someone back then was terrifying. Anyone could have a stunprod or worse in their bag, almost every antag had an instant-gameover melee option (Parapen, Parasting, to name the most feared), and combats were usually decided by who got the alpha strike. Being in a 1-wide made it super easy to get hit (turn on Harm so the enemy cant rush past you and they're pinned to a single place on your screen as you run into them, guaranteeing a hit). Plus, dying meant sitting out salting in deadchat for 20-40 minutes if you got corpse-destroyed, and there wasnt a huge web of buddy discords and five other servers for you, just a few IRC channels and the forums (And depending on time the other server, which was usually 10 people building autism forts.

The situation of the game has changed a lot since then, and basing balancing assumptions purely off "Well it worked in the old days" is just no longer good enough - you have to consider *why* it worked in the old days. (Also if anything maint is MORE tangly and full of hidden rooms and pointless sections now imo, box used to be really bad for being straight empty lines directly connecting places)

Yeah, running into someone in maint? Better hope they don't have an ebow, because that thing is a 1-tap stun into an instant esword.

Parasting, slips, stun gloves, etc., even tasers were all long, easily-performed hardstuns that had little counterplay in maintenance. Pulling bodies (cuffed or not, standing or lying down) didn't slow you and they weren't a hardstun projectile, so you could drag them behind as you slashed them and ditch them when you needed another, or even cable/cuff someone to use as a human shield.

If maintenance is no longer scary, it's not how many people are in it. It's how hard it is to kill someone.

I will bore holes through the walls and nobody can stop me. You can't find all my tunnels.

lot of assistant mains malding that their escape route is being open to everyone

If this goes through, the "enable emergency maintenance" option on the command console, and when it happens by default before radstorms, will probably be sort of defunct.

That's like the only downside I can think of? It might make antagging/culting slightly harder since more people will be in maint. Also, people already use maints as shortcuts when they have access anyway. It isn't a design issue, it's a QoL issue. If the map's design is undermined from its maintenance tunnels then that's a problem with the map.

That's not the same, since emergency maint access let's you use *any* door in maintenance. You can go to the CMO's office without access through the maint door only when emergency maint is on, for instance.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 11:55 pm That's not the same, since emergency maint access let's you use *any* door in maintenance. You can go to the CMO's office without access through the maint door only when emergency maint is on, for instance.

I realized this in the back of my mind and said it anyway. I was hoping no one would mention that..

sinfulbliss wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 11:28 pm If this goes through, the "enable emergency maintenance" option on the command console, and when it happens by default before radstorms, will probably be sort of defunct.

That's like the only downside I can think of? It might make antagging/culting slightly harder since more people will be in maint. Also, people already use maints as shortcuts when they have access anyway. It isn't a design issue, it's a QoL issue. If the map's design is undermined from its maintenance tunnels then that's a problem with the map.

It's not a QoL issue. Getting maint access is a hurdle not everybody bothers with and some HoPs might even deny you access if they think you shouldn't have it. It adds more people to maint, which makes antagging unseen harder. I don't really care one way or another but anybody who walks into maint and gets killed by an antag simply because they were in a place they shouldn't have been and then dares cry about murderboning should be punted into the sun.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 11:55 pm That's not the same, since emergency maint access let's you use *any* door in maintenance. You can go to the CMO's office without access through the maint door only when emergency maint is on, for instance.

Yeah, but it does make it defunct from a "Anyone has any legitimate reason to activate it" perspective, whereas before it was important to hit the button whenever a radstorm happened (But people could sneak into places after the storm but before command made it back to the bridge and turned the access back on), now only reason to want it is to doortide into restricted areas so it wont be used much, right?

Not-Dorsidarf wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 6:42 pm

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 11:55 pm That's not the same, since emergency maint access let's you use *any* door in maintenance. You can go to the CMO's office without access through the maint door only when emergency maint is on, for instance.

Yeah, but it does make it defunct from a "Anyone has any legitimate reason to activate it" perspective, whereas before it was important to hit the button whenever a radstorm happened (But people could sneak into places after the storm but before command made it back to the bridge and turned the access back on), now only reason to want it is to doortide into restricted areas so it wont be used much, right?

Ya, this makes a lot more sense to me

I enjoyed this change alot when it was implemented. I found myself playing jobs other then assistant alot more, which is not something i usually do, and i also found that i had more freedom to do things as antagonist.

That reminds me that I did want to see if the pickrate of assistant was affected by this, but my gut hypothesis is not measurably, since it's mostly just a nice touch

I think I'll spill my two cents in on the future of maintenance as far as access is concerned on the codebase/mapping end (or what the other maptainers and I have already asked for):

The way I envision maintenance to be would involve persons being able to access their "quadrant" of maintenance. For example, like on MetaStation, where Science, Service, and Engineering all share that little pocket of maintenance? Anyone who would normally have access to those departments will have unrestricted access to that "quadrant" of the station's maintenance (IF THEY DO NOT ALREADY HAVE MAINTENANCE ACCESS). Anyone who has the "Maintenance" access on their card can access the entire station's worth of maintenance, no limits. However, if you're a scientist, you can access your own section of maintenance as well as the doors that go out of the primary hallways (more on this later).

For an example, let's forget that we currently have the config that allows everyone to have maintenance access, a scientist in current mapping already has access to the doors that lead into and out of their department, but they do not have maintenance access. They do not have access to the doors within that section of maintenance, just the doors that they "possess" within their department. This change would allow them access to the maintenance tunnels that border their department, but not all maintenance tunnels. This sort of makes the config "matter" in some way, where you or headmins of future terms will probably have to choose between letting people have access to just those "bordering" tunnels, or unfettered access to the whole station. Irregardless, anyone with Maintenance access (like Assistants) still maintain that unfettered access though.

A lot of these decisions were influenced by my personal experience with this current config run and seeing it play out as both a player and an admin, and I think it's a step in the right direction (as far as the codebase is concerned). Might also be worth readjusting for, but this is going to be a massive project on the behalf of the mapper (who I am extremely grateful for) going through and accommodating every map to fit this schema. Things are still rather WiP, but that's the future we've signed off on.

P.S.: We're also probably going to have unrestricted access for people wishing to exit maintenance tunnels into primary hallways. Hopefully that can help with some frustrations with getting "trapped" in maintenance until someone discovers you and helps you get out.

P.S.S.: I also don't know if my way of describing it above was confusing, feel free to reach out for clarification... I think it'll be more intuitive and will make the most sense when it's actually implemented.

I would rather assistants didn't have maint access in the first place if it was an option but I don't like this either way

Maintenance access drastically opens up the map, it provides protection from being stranded, excellent freedom of movement and places to hide in. As most jobs have maintenance access to their department wings this gives them the turf advantage when they are working within their own department rather than wandering off to hunt antagonists across the entire map. To give everyone full access to maintenance is a step further into homogenizing the capabilities of each job to more easily operate outside of their expected specialization.

PR as an example of what San is saying above:
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/66588

I'm a fan of the kind of access san mentioned in their post, but I still think assistants should lose their maint access. That's a config too isn't it?

Removing maint access from assistants has already been denied this term, so keep on topic.

I had more fun with all maint access because it made it easier to play certain jobs on certain maps.
Please bring back all access maintenance access.

With the recent host lead changes, I’m gonna sunset this thread for this headmin term so we can see the effects of restricted maint access.