/tg/Station 13

A disguised device that is very expensive to purchase that can unlock other syndicate uplinks and only has one or two uses. If you use it on a PDA it will charge one of the uses whether it's an uplink or not to prevent metagaming with it. What do you think?

I was just in a situation where I needed this. I am sure you took this idea from my ahelp.

Should be a thing.

I did steal it.

I see this being used in double agent rounds where a double agent tries to make nice with security by admitting they're an agent, outing their target as an agent to security; and purchasing this item for security so that they may confirm the identify of more double agents. Really, any item you can buy with TC for security to make them believe you're on their side is okay in my book.

So you waste all/most of your TC in hopes that you stumble on another uplink which will most likely have zero to little TC left? Seems kind of useless.

Lo6a4evskiy wrote:So you waste all/most of your TC in hopes that you stumble on another uplink which will most likely have zero to little TC left? Seems kind of useless.

I'm inclined to agree. It sounds cool on paper, but in practice it's just a waste. If you dunk another traitor and they've already bought their shit, you don't need this. If the PDA is unlocked, you don't need this. It's only useful if they haven't bought their stuff yet and locked the PDA, which just makes you wonder; how do you know they're a traitor? Maybe they bought one thing but not all their tc? That could happen but it seems awfully rare tbh. If it's double agent, you don't need their TC's, your objective is already complete.

And the pricing on this is impossible. At >6TC with 2 uses or less, the odds of making your investment back are impossible. But with 3 or more uses, the ability to sell out to security gets really strong. I'm not sure if selling out to security is something we really want to encourage. I guess if other people like it, ok sure, but it sounds awful to me.

MisterPerson wrote:

Lo6a4evskiy wrote:So you waste all/most of your TC in hopes that you stumble on another uplink which will most likely have zero to little TC left? Seems kind of useless.

I'm inclined to agree. It sounds cool on paper, but in practice it's just a waste. If you dunk another traitor and they've already bought their shit, you don't need this. If the PDA is unlocked, you don't need this. It's only useful if they haven't bought their stuff yet and locked the PDA, which just makes you wonder; how do you know they're a traitor? Maybe they bought one thing but not all their tc? That could happen but it seems awfully rare tbh.

"Steal papers from opposing syndicate agent" or "Kill opposing syndicate agent" pretty much indicates that they have uplinks of their own, and if they don't have syndicate items on them, chances are they have some or all TC left.

The uplink unlocker would have to be cheap for this to work obviously.

One argument against is traitors not working together just so they can get more TC, but from my experience, antag players already never want to team up (unless they're team antags of course).