/tg/Station 13

So this is a discussion that i think we have needed to have for a while, not only related to our game policies but the type of game we want this to be. While I felt compelled to make this thread after the little snafu this morning with Elynia's note for impersonating security, thread here, it is not i think the only reason we need to talk about it.

history lesson wall of text spoilered Cut to current day. Because of these exemptions and lax restrictions on sec we have seen a few fallout effects. Security has this sort of weird OOC meta trust which in my opinion has become very unhealthy for gameplay. As seen in that note appeal if an antag successfully impersonates someone from security (in my opinion a difficult and interesting way to use your traitor round) they become nigh untouchable because people are too afraid to retaliate against obvious shitsec due to fear of admin repercussions. This also means that nonantag sec are able to get away with more flagrant acts of shitcurity, as they will likely not get any OOC intervention due to sec having more leeway and everyone being too afraid to retaliate IC.

This also causes secondary problems such as a lack of minor IC crime, people are less willing to fuck about and get in conflicts that do not fly to murder on either side as non antags for fear of overwhelming security repercussions and being labelled a shitter. This has been the status quo for long enough now that it is becoming more accepted as the norm by admins and players alike, and i really really truly believe that this is seriously hurting the game and making it less fun overall.

I am a firm believer in less admin intervention/more IC resolution of conflicts, but regardless of how you feel about these things i think that at the very least it is worth trialing security and captains in antagonist roles again. In a game that was built on paranoia, mistrust and imperfect information people having more OOC guarantees about things really takes away from the experience and causes administrative nightmares. Sorry for the fuckhueg wall of text.


TL:DR please consider bringing back antagonist security and headroles, I really believe that it will cause an increase to the quality of gameplay once the initial shock has passed

This is the first thing I thought after reading that note appeal:

If someone sees antags interacting maliciously with players as grief then I am seriously why they bother to even play the game.

I understand where you are coming from, and while I admit my bias I also can admit that having 100% trust in secuirty to be the 'good guys' is not necessarily a good thing.

The biggest issue with antag security is that even the stock Taser is better than the majority of items a Traitor can buy, not even the Captain or HoS can do much when a Officer pulls out a Taser and fires away.

I'm not 100% set on the issue, I want there to be paranoia and, more accuratly, distrust but I really remember, and hate, the older days where as HoS I could simply not trust anyone in my department to help me at all, and the headaches it would ensure.

At minimum, I think that the Head of Security should never be able to be a antagonist. The crew needs at least one person they can trust.

That is another issue with the way our combat system works (one stun and done is fucking trash) but i did not want to cloud the waters of this cloudy thread any further.

I used to be on the other side of the issue but it feels like at this point something has to give

I just can't see antag security working by simply giving a security officer, or god forbid the head of security, a uplink and carte blanche to do whatever they want.

While I understand it may seem off topic, but I think our current combat system goes hand in hand with the issue of security antags.

I will state with one hundred percent confidence that a humble Taser is superior to any item a Traitor can buy. That free round start Taser, coupled with the authority and power of the security officer uniform, is better than any energy sword or revolver.

Yes but the idea is to weaken that authority to the point where people no longer trust sec 100% and have fewer guarantees about how people will act

Steelpoint wrote: At minimum, I think that the Head of Security should never be able to be a antagonist. The crew needs at least one person they can trust.

This is a pretty good point. Perhaps the captain/HoS cant be antags, but the rest of the heads can (and sometimes do) become simple antags. (traitors/lings/etc)
Traitor HoP is the best HoP

I can name like 2 HoS players I could ever actually trust, regardless of whether HoS could be antag or not
I think it's at least worth a try to bring back antag sec.

(hmmmm hmmm weird how our one stun system is causing problems, hmmmmmmmm)

I agree with all of this, have agreed with it basically since antag sec was removed and will add some points:

- There were two points to the original removal of sec/captain antag:

1. Security not being antag was implemented under the conditions that security would be held to an even higher standard than before. The "Trustworthy Security" post in which this happened no longer exists, but this was the reason. I'll leave out the speculation about SoS's own thoughts about security and just say that this is one of the two direct causes of sec being bwoinked for everything. (The other direct cause is players complaining if you don't.)

2. Security not being antag would, theoretically, stop graytiders/griffers, depriving them of a reason. This was false then and has been false for every year since. Griefers don't need a reason to grief. That's why they're griefers. They do it because they can, then make up whatever reason they think people will buy. I personally find the "there's no IC crime" threads very overblown, as admin and sec alike I have not noticed any downtick.

- Security being untouchable for meta reasons completely nullifies the the lawyer and HoP existing as checks and balances on security. It was in the wiki at one point that, if you're the HoP and security asks for maintenance access, that this is inherently at least somewhat suspicious -- do they want to more easily arrest criminals, or be criminals? Similarly, as a lawyer, if everything sec does is assumed to be valid, why exist at all?

Of course, the lawyer's job DOES exist. It's just been shunted onto the admins, which is IMO a poor use of admins' time (most admins hate bwoinking sec as much as sec does) and poor for the gameplay as well.

- People often make the argument about trust among sec officers. I have never experienced this mythical trust, whether as non-sec (the odds of an officer actually coming to help are nil, in practice) or as sec/HoS. This kind of trust depends more on the RP levels of the players, which is something our server has been moving away from -- to its detriment -- for some time.

- The issue of stuns is an entirely separate question, but traitors can already get stuns with minimal effort as it is, especially considering the move toward making most dangerous items only available via uplink and not on station.

Things are starting to go duplicate because of this thread, the escalation thread and my greytide thread but anyway:

Stop giving security special OOC protection.

If you taze someone you are instigating a conflict with that person.

And when you instigate a conflict you should be prepared to accept the results.

Also one thing i forgot combat wise is that the ebow is basically a quieter stealthier taser anyways, only real downside is that it is a tell that you are a traitor.

CPTANT wrote:Things are starting to go duplicate because of this thread, the escalation thread and my minor IC crime thread but anyway:

Stop giving security special OOC protection.

If you taze someone you are instigating a conflict with that person.

And when you instigate a conflict you should be prepared to accept the results.

That is part of why i feel this is so important, as i feel like fixing this issue would as a side effect help to resolve or mitigate these other policy woes, giving people more leeway to commit IC crime without fear of unanswerable repercussions and take away security's snowflake escalation protection

1) Antagonist security would be a fucking nightmare with the way the balance of the game has changed (adrenals, for example). Traitor HoS buying two adrenals, grabbing the armory, and killing literally everyone would get old very quickly.

2)The years and years of "people who commit minor IC crime deserve CDB style enforcement, security is always right" would make it difficult for both admins and players to adjust to killing security being a very viable and even desirable reaction to them acting suspicious. It'd be messy for a while rules and culture wise.

3) Since we have had a proliferation of snowballing conversion antagonist modes, it is kind of important that security be able to trust each other 100% so they can compete in the team death match

4) Kind of like 2, but lots of non antagonists will end up getting killed or attacked by non antagonists and it would be a huge adjustment for our admins.

5) Lynch mobs on the brig every time someone gets arrested again

I do not see the need for antag sec because antags can already impersonate security.

That someone sees this as worthy of applying a note for is beyond ridiculous.

Come to think of it there are more ways in which no-sec-antag completely fucks with the game:

- The detective. Detectives being unable to be traitor leads directly to detectives being recruited as quasi-sec officers rather than, you know, actual detectives. After all, why "waste" a guaranteed non-antag roll? Obviously, this is metagaming reasoning and pretty shit.

- Silicons. One of the biggest ongoing arguments we have is how much silicons should be allowed to interfere with sec causing human harm. It doesn't help this argument at all when one side of the conflict has this weird OOC meta-trust.

I'd be VERY reluctantly in favor of trying this for a bit, under the pretense that if the crew harass me for dragging off their traitor buddy I'm still completely allowed to shoot the shit out of them.

This still sounds like a shit idea though. Sec is already hard enough without having to constantly check if the people you're fighting all the antags on the station with are also antags themselves. One decent sec traitor could easily wipe the floor with the entire sec department, loot the whole armory and slaughter everyone.

These are all valid. That is why i included the caveat of "when the initial shock has passed" in my post. There will be a bloody transition period of adjustment, full of kicking, screaming and crying. Aside from the normal "dont change things ever" resistance we will probably see more arguments between admins, disagreements on rule enforcement and bans, and that sort of thing. It will not be easy, but the alternative is this constant backsliding into team deathmatch shittery.

However i think there is precedant for it as well. Hopefully this would go hand in hand with more lax enforcement of the rules and more focus on IC resolution of conflicts. The handful of times were stickymayhem trialed low rules rounds people were generally pretty fond of them.

As for point 2 I don't know what to say other than conversion antag modes are horrible cancer and i hate them, but obviously not everyone is going to agree with me on that

Kor wrote:1) Antagonist security would be a fucking nightmare with the way the balance of the game has changed (adrenals, for example). Traitor HoS buying two adrenals, grabbing the armory, and killing literally everyone would get old very quickly.

A lot of these changes should be removed anyway, IMO. Adrenals, for instance, have no reason to exist in an uplink. If a traitor wants adrenals they can persuade the chemist, or kill the chemist, or break into chemistry. As far as traitor HoS being able to grab the armory and kill everyone, you were around back then, you know for a fact this didn't happen all the time. And if it does with our playerbase, there are checks and balances in the form of other sec officers, the Captain, other traitors/DAs. Murderboning goes both ways.

2)The years and years of "people who commit minor IC crime deserve CDB style enforcement, security is always right" would make it difficult for both admins and players to adjust to killing security being a very viable and even desirable reaction to them acting suspicious. It'd be messy for a while rules and culture wise.

The fact that something will suck for a while at first isn't really an argument against it, given that every major change to the game causes this kind of temporary confusion.

3) Since we have had a proliferation of snowballing conversion antagonist modes, it is kind of important that security be able to trust each other 100% so they can compete in the team death match

This is more an issue of balance of conversion antag modes, and if datum antags ever happens there is a perfect opportunity to revisit that balance.

4) Kind of like 2, but lots of non antagonists will end up getting killed or attacked by non antagonists and it would be a huge adjustment for our admins.

This already happens, press the IC Issue button and be done with it.

5) Lynch mobs on the brig every time someone gets arrested again

This also already happens. The primary factor in whether this happens is how many long-term griffers are banned at the time.

I'm in favor of tator sec

Antagonist security can be really fun, I mean being an exceptionally incompetent officer when I was an antag was a huge amount of fun, but I can also see how the warden turning the brig into his own personal deathcamp might get a little boring for some people.

I think in the games current state we would lose more than we gain from antagonist security.

The pros

• Distrust of Security: Security personal would no longer enjoy the near universal trust that the crew places on them.
• Crew Feat of Retribution: With antagonist security, crew members would be fearful of antagonising officer for fear that they are interfering with a traitor officer, who would have no qualms with escalating the situation, and likely getting away with it.
• Security More Contained: With the loss of Security trust, we would see security being less able to access areas of the station they don't have access to and people will be far more wary of security inside their departments.

The cons

• Loss of Security Cohesion: Security personal will move away from departmental cooperation into only trusting themselves. This will see officers fail to rely on fellow officers for assistance. In addition this means officers will be less effective in working togther when the round type is confirmed to be a crew conversion game mode or similar.
• Decrease in Security Competence:With Security being free to be antagonists, more people will likely sign up as officers, as such we may see a increase in security population but at the disadvantage of less competent people playing the role.
• Increase of Security Frustration: Security personal already suffer from one of the most frustrating jobs on station. Officers having to watch their backs around fellow officers, and the many deaths and betrayals from 'friendly' officers will serve to disenfranchise people from playing security, this ties in with loss of security competence as veteran players may turn away from playing the role due to the overwhelming frustration in playing the role.
• Ease of Being Sec Traitor/Overpowered: A traitor officer has access to one of the most heavily armed and armoured areas of the station, from the gulag to the armoury. A officer, warden or HoS have so much useful equipment at their disposal that they don't need to buy expensive traitor weapons or equipment.

Steelpoint wrote:[*]Decrease in Security Competence:With Security being free to be antagonists, more people will likely sign up as officers, as such we may see a increase in security population but at the disadvantage of less competent people playing the role.

this is kind of a fucked-up argument; you can apply it to literally anything that encourages new players to play the game

Tator Sec and Detectives would be nice to see roaming around again, though they should fairly rare. Tator Wardens I'm on the fence about since most are able to get away with shit behavior as. HoS/Cap should definitely be protected roles in that they can't be antags but given their ability to abuse their authority there should be no special protections if IC escalation results in them getting robusted or murdered. Escalation is a two way street and both roles have a ridiculous amount of lethal options they love to jump to.

As for Steelpoint, your first two con points aren't much of points at all. Security has almost no cohesion right now and just the mention that security should patrol in pairs or coordinate is scoffed at. Most security aren't comptent enough to arrest someone without first tasing them an everyone around them before trying to cuff them because as above they refuse to work with a partner and all seem to claim that it's impossible to take a diplomatic approach when dealing with someone you don't actually suspect is a violent antag.

Point 3 comes with the territory and is only made harder by secs refusal to deal with crew who may be antags and don't have a loyalty implant. Half the point of Dept Sec was so that officers could work closer with dept crew and build up some trust, most of them just use it as an excuse to get more access.

Point 4... well just look at your own PR history.

I mean my points are not coming from a vacuum, once upon a time traitor sec was the norm and we did not see antag sec officers killing the whole sec team/whole crew round after round

Back then everyone was a high speed glass cannon who could outrun gunfire and it only took one assistant stungloving you to end things.

The AI is considerably weaker now as well.

You know what the problem was with antag sec? People treated as a free taser and stun baton instead of the authority it gave you. Rarely did anyone ever actually play like a dirty cop and give/sell the contraband that was collected, they didn't extort people, they didn't open the doors for their fellow traitors stuck in perma. They picked up their taser round start, stunned the security officer next to them, and beat the fuck out of them.

I personally enjoyed traitor sec, but I honestly don't think our current player base could handle the shift back to it and I'm not looking forward to traitor+ again.

what if we made tasers only have disable mode )))

as someone who has been playing a lot of security lately i'd say that this is entirely false. people still shit on sec and sec barely has the tools to deal with it most of the time, and the people that are "too afraid to retaliate" are that way because they know they were acting shit and only complain about it in ooc. if anything, sec needs more streamlined brig and buffs.

I'd say make warden and HoS antag-protected tbh.

At most one corrupt officer only

so few people play sec anyway that one corrupt officer would mean a huge chunk of sec force is gone, most rounds i play as warden im damn lucky to get two officers and a hos, let alone competent ones. this is the same thing that happened with silisec, dunked tators get their murderboners stopped and then suddenly sec is all powerful and omnipotent and must be nerfed.

Deitus wrote:so few people play sec anyway that one corrupt officer would mean a huge chunk of sec force is gone, most rounds i play as warden im damn lucky to get two officers and a hos, let alone competent ones. this is the same thing that happened with silisec, dunked tators get their murderboners stopped and then suddenly sec is all powerful and omnipotent and must be nerfed.

I never run into these problems as someone who mains security

Depends on the server your on and the time.

At some times of the day, far more so on Sybil, security suffers from being understaffed significantly. I have run into these concerns on Sybil as I'll oft be the only member of security on shift, or I'll have a bare handful of officers at all.

kevinz000 wrote:

Deitus wrote:so few people play sec anyway that one corrupt officer would mean a huge chunk of sec force is gone, most rounds i play as warden im damn lucky to get two officers and a hos, let alone competent ones. this is the same thing that happened with silisec, dunked tators get their murderboners stopped and then suddenly sec is all powerful and omnipotent and must be nerfed.

I never run into these problems as someone who mains security

maybe its just because i only play on sybil and nobody wants to play sec on it, or maybe i get unlucky, but a good chunk of times i play warden i have a lawyer and a det MAYBE, then a latejoin officer later on if i'm lucky. sec isnt considered a fun role to play by a lot of people, and the vast majority who play are inexperienced at best and mind-numbingly incompetent at worst, from my experience.

leave sec the fuck alone, it needs buffs to deal with shits, not nerfs because "waah tasers made me drop my ebow now i cant murderbone the entire station"

Not spoiling the round, but go look at Sybil right now.

Over 30 people playing, the only security role on station is the Head of Security. No Warden, no Officers, not even a Detective.

I do think Sybil suffers from a lack of a strong security population.

Deitus wrote:

kevinz000 wrote:

Deitus wrote:so few people play sec anyway that one corrupt officer would mean a huge chunk of sec force is gone, most rounds i play as warden im damn lucky to get two officers and a hos, let alone competent ones. this is the same thing that happened with silisec, dunked tators get their murderboners stopped and then suddenly sec is all powerful and omnipotent and must be nerfed.

I never run into these problems as someone who mains security

maybe its just because i only play on sybil and nobody wants to play sec on it, or maybe i get unlucky, but a good chunk of times i play warden i have a lawyer and a det MAYBE, then a latejoin officer later on if i'm lucky. sec isnt considered a fun role to play by a lot of people, and the vast majority who play are inexperienced at best and mind-numbingly incompetent at worst, from my experience.

leave sec the fuck alone, it needs buffs to deal with shits, not nerfs because "waah tasers made me drop my ebow now i cant murderbone the entire station"

Ideas subforum for improvement ideas.
Also heads up that I'm nerfing/buffing flashbangs soon.
Really depends on how good you are though.
Edit: give me a good idea to buff sec with. Items only.

I never play on sybil so i have no perspective on that matter

Whilst the idea and could open alot of doors for paranoia in the game the only place I really see it going is in 2 ways:

1: antag mcsecurityofficer orders an esword at relative roundstart and slaughters everyone or dies trying.

2: everyone screams OFFICER IS A TRAITOR the second they are tased, not that its really a difference from now (replace traitor with shit), but could invoke distrust within the force and weaken security as a whole.

bonus: Security officer murderbone will be even more lame than any other job because they'll wipe out the security force first and have the entire armoury before they even move on to the crew. Its not much different than normal murderbone currently but sec usually gets a heads up that a murderboner is on the loose rather than being slaughtered within their own brig by surprise.

If this happens, there shouldnt be certain numbers on sec antag, but it should still generally be unlikely to have multiple. Maybe do it like this- by default if a traitor rolls antag they have a 40% chance to be rolled to another job, 50 for ward, 75 for cap, 90 for hos. Your chances of stickint are halved for every sec antag, default chance for regular sec rrom 60 to 30, for ward 50to 25, you get the idea. Halved again flr third and fourth so unlikely but possible.

Are we talking they can be anything from cult to ling to normal traitor?

In terms of likely chances to grief for players I would say double agent<traitor<ling<cultist. A cultist security member is going to be encouraged to take out his department ASAP, or at least work heavily against them.

Could some use of tracking implants or chem implants by default tone tone it down? Joke: Maybe if they had a member of security like a borg that couldn't be converted to keep everyone in line.

Is a traitor security guard really all that different from a traitor HoP in terms of starting power? On steeljacks point of "Less people will play security" I think more people would want to play because now they can both be security, and win the grief lottery.



I've actually had a very entertaining round where we thought an agent was a traitor because of how they were treating some people. It ended up with 4 of us in the interrogation room going back and forth actually arguing at each other. Dark Ef. and the guy he was trying to randomly stop the timer on both ended up in perma at the end of it.

I assume just regular traitor. Revs would be impossible for obvious reasons (Implants de-convert revs and break in revheads). Cult sec at roundstart would be too strong (same reason why the HoP can never be a roundstart cultst), same with gang. Lings would be screwed at being roundstart sec offs because the implants stay with you unless they've been surgically removed, and an assistant running around with an implant is suspicious as fuck.

I assume it's going to be a lot like traitor detective, only now everyone is equally untrustworthy.

I think it's fine where it is, Sec starts out trustworthy and will decay over the round (which happens if they act like shitsec anyway), any kind of admin enforcement preventing antags from impersonating sec is a horrifying idea to me

edit: It strikes me that the people who think sec are underpowered are the same people who's "win" condition for security is when every antag is locked up and zero crime is being committed on the station, this contrasts with the view of others who see sec as having different win conditions (make it to the end of the round, do your best in the face of the chaos, be liked as a security officer by the crew).

I know I prefer the second, and don't consider sec underpowered compared to the rest of the station

beerobot wrote: edit: It strikes me that the people who think sec are underpowered are the same people who's "win" condition for security is when every antag is locked up and zero crime is being committed on the station, this contrasts with the view of others who see sec as having different win conditions (make it to the end of the round, do your best in the face of the chaos, be liked as a security officer by the crew).

I know I prefer the second, and don't consider sec underpowered compared to the rest of the station

I agree I prefer the latter "win" condition, but we have so many modes now that either

1) End in every antag dead

2) End with big THE STATION LOST text and literally everyone dead

In traitor/changeling or wizard rounds or whatever you can save a life or two, make a little difference and still "lose" but in cult/clockcult/rev/nuke/gang/shadowling/hand of god there is a very clear line between winning and losing both mechanically and lorewise.

just remove all of them except rev and then we can go back to 2011 hurrah

Kor wrote:

beerobot wrote: edit: It strikes me that the people who think sec are underpowered are the same people who's "win" condition for security is when every antag is locked up and zero crime is being committed on the station, this contrasts with the view of others who see sec as having different win conditions (make it to the end of the round, do your best in the face of the chaos, be liked as a security officer by the crew).

I know I prefer the second, and don't consider sec underpowered compared to the rest of the station

I agree I prefer the latter "win" condition, but we have so many modes now that either

1) End in every antag dead

2) End with big THE STATION LOST text and literally everyone dead

In traitor/changeling or wizard rounds or whatever you can save a life or two, make a little difference and still "lose" but in cult/clockcult/rev/nuke/gang/shadowling/hand of god there is a very clear line between winning and losing both mechanically and lorewise.

Once upon a time as clockcult with the Escape with x:people objective I decided to have fun with it. The HoS declared they were fine with our cult so long as we weren't committing crime or harming people. We set up all the caches/conversions in the theater and HEAVILY advertised it over the radio. Some members of security were hanging out with us for protection but not converted. A single officer decided this was no fun and he should try to get his valids in on it, but he was shut down by the other officers. We still didn't succeed as not enough people were willing to walk into the theater to be converted to the peacecult. That's not even an option anymore, but it was still fun.

I'm not sure what the point of that story was, other than when it didn't have to end with THE STATION LOST text shitcurity was still shit, but the good members went for it. Could a weaker security force be more convertible? Could some of securities gear be rigged to be more effective against security items reducing the issues with red on red crime?

My goal as sec is to protect the crew. If an antagonist isn't doing things why bother valid saliding them?

Becausae at any moment for any reason they could kill anyone and everyone.

It's like leaving a bomb in the hall. It's not armed, so it's not gonna hurt anybody to leave it there.

Yeah, what's the point if you're not trying to defuse the conflict that drives the game as fast as possible and at every opportunity?

I kinda have mixed feelings on this. Both sides have pretty serious drawbacks, but I think the current system is probably superior. How often do you actually see antags going the distance to acquire a perfect sec disguise that even other officers cannot see through, and actually getting away with it? It's pretty uncommon.

Sec is my main job, and I was playing back when sec antags were a thing. Back then, it was actually very common for people that you were arresting to start yelling bloody murder, and for the crew at large to actually BELIEVE them. You'd have 3 different people trying to play hero and "save" the prisoner all the way to the brig. Jail breaks were substantially more common, and they could justify it all with "I thought they were actually going to kill him" if ever questioned by an admin. Getting stunned and your shit stripped as an officer was a very common occurrence. In the end I think the pros outweigh the cons here, and we should prolly learn from the past instead of going full circle.

Pretty sure the "people will play sec if they can be antag" idea is a myth. If you have sec set to high you can still be selected for traitor, it will just put you in one of your other job preferences, so you aren't losing out on your antag chance by trying to be sec. People don't want to play sec because it's a high stress, highly scrutinized position of responsibility to have with a big red X on your head for every antag that walks by you while you receive an unending stream of negative reinforcement. The majority of people on this game don't want that, they just want to dick around and do whatever they feel like. Hardened sec players don't give a shit and have learned to burn the pain as fuel for their journey, but when a new player tries sec out they are going to take those things to heart and be scared away from the department.

When I was a new player I assumed if I had security turned on it would give me that first, then decide if I'm an antag or not. I kept it off for 9 months until I found out otherwise.

Is it really so bad of jailbreaks happen or people are broken out? How often do you see the windows entering into medbay broken down? Every other shift? How about moonlighting in R&D. The windows out from the disposals? Eva, the teleporter and the captains room? People are going to break in and out of interesting places. If it turns out that players are freeing people too often from being taken back to the brig then maybe security could have additional tools to assist with that rather than trying to drag someone halfway across the map. On an unrelated note DELTA's extra cells in the different departments are so nice for this.

I'll start marking every issue revolving sec as IC and tell them to fight back next time.

R E S I S T