/tg/Station 13

It's been around for a bit of time now, permanently still and assumably fully fleshed out in nature. Inspired by the conclusion maintainers have come to for families, I feel like thieves should also be struck down under that same conclusion. Here are my simple reasons.

Firstly is that thieves is also a headache for administration. In other threads you had admins discussing that their enforcement of thieves tends to be very different. Since it is an antag that cannot kill, yet must obtain items or things from crew that will create hostile and potentially lethal circumstances it can lead to admins having different opinions on how they should be allowed to go about it. An antag needing to admin shop to see what they will be able to get away with is not good for the health of the server.

Second is that thieves leave no influence on those living in the round. Well you might say, stealing guns from the armory, looting peoples ids, or hiding bodies in maint should definitely serve to increase friction. But I say that if the thief is able to get away with these things already, enough friction has occured to where they are not exacerbating anything. Blob/War-Ops allowing thief to steal guns? Well their already not a threat and instead are pretty much just a regular crewmember. Hiding bodies? The dead ghosts will probably be upset, but this has no effect on anyone. Stealing IDs? You probably looted an SSD guy or a corpse. So like with issue two, still not very interesting or engaging.

My final reason is that Thieves just does not fit the type of game SS13 is. Unlike other minor antags, thieves looting and pilfering is done by non-antagonists too. They have no tools to help them achieve their goal, like abductors. They don't cause havoc and annoyance to crew whilst being weak like revenants or morphs, or nightmare, and they have no core strife between players like fugitives or obsessed. (Other minor antags done much better!)

Thieves are bad and a removal from them frees up threat that'll summon antags who actually cause engaging conflict, while thieves will once more continue to exist in the game as their non-threat taking title. Greytide. Since their is no difference between the two.

Yeah, I agree thieves have really just become a threat dump. Even though I like the core concept of thief as a way to sort of enshrine greytiding as an actual role it really doesn't work. Even having like five or six thieves in a round is almost unnoticeable since they basically have to go about their objectives in the safest, most boring way possible, and actually avoid antagonising people too much or else they'll get killed or worse, bwoinked.

Unless thieves get reworked somehow it's probably better to just have the threat get put towards other antags.

I've had thieves disabled for a while because they really dont get to do much and sometimes you just get a shitty objective like blackbox that doesnt even let you make anybody mad when you steal it. I'm not exactly sure if I'm right about this but I have a hunch that rolling thief has the same "priority" as real antags so by disabling thief you wont be blocked from rolling other antags on rounds you would roll thief.

Thieves sould be limited to like one or two in a round. It's a neat idea, but the only real impact I ever see is when one is being overly aggressive with their ID objective and an angry mob forms.

I often observe rounds (mostly on low-ish pop) with one traitor and 3+ thieves and basically nothing happens until at least the midround roll.

zxaber wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 6:04 pm Thieves sould be limited to like one or two in a round. It's a neat idea, but the only real impact I ever see is when one is being overly aggressive with their ID objective and an angry mob forms.

I often observe rounds (mostly on low-ish pop) with one traitor and 3+ thieves and basically nothing happens until at least the midround roll.

Thieves cost ~4 threat, roll a bunch of thieves, and can only ever run once. What would lowering the number of thieves really change?

Also it's a code change but Dynamic 2022 Part 2 changes the thieves ruleset into traitor+minor antagonist, so that thieves don't "use up threat" without creating a standard antagonist.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 7:36 pm Also it's a code change but Dynamic 2022 Part 2 changes the thieves ruleset into traitor+minor antagonist, so that thieves don't "use up threat" without creating a standard antagonist.

instead of traitor + thieves just make it traitor + traitor
this doesnt really address the issues he presented in that a thief is just a grey tider with a permit to tide

Sent this thread to the other two head admins and none of us think the future for thieves is bad enough to warrant this.