/tg/Station 13

So! In that fantastical and far-off future where somebody gives a shit about Ninjacode...
What sort of things would make for a balanced, interesting antagonist type?

Personally I'd like to see it shift more towards Wizard; perhaps selecting certain kinds of "Shinobi Gear" or preset loadouts in the same way they select spells. We've got a whole universe full of cool cyberninja junk to pick from, including the abilities that already exist. Just having to choose between your energy sword and telegib might be a big step towards making them 'fun'.

Honestly this is only so I can mention explosive riot shields; made for informing the crew about how FUCKING INVINCIBLE you are.

That said we all know Ninja is never getting reworked for practical reasons. Let's all sperg about what-could-be?

Explosive ninja stars that act like lower powered C4, stick to whatever or whoever they hit and explode after 5 seconds, not an instant gib but enough to hurt or blow through walls.

Stealth feeding on APCs, you "hack" an APC like a malf AI and it gradually gives you a small amount of energy wherever you are, will show up as a larger power loss on the power console and they need to be disassemble to cut the feed.

Electro-caltrops. Turn a space into an electrocuting nightmare for the first 5 people that walk in or 10 seconds or something. Like a more evil banana.

Voice changer or holoprojector. Don't know why current ones don't have this.

Subversion dart, limited number of darts that make people survivor antags like in wizard gun mode.

Summon evil pets like synd Ian controlled by observers.

An actual reworked Ninja user interface would be futuristic!

Removal.

Replace all instances of Ninja with Wizard.

Fig the broke bits, make more common.

ANd there arent many broke bits.

Oh don't get me wrong. Everybody knows they're terrible, broken and a coding nightmare.

This is just about all those pointless "what-ifs"; removal is the obvious choice!

Actually, I dislike ninjas for reasons other than their awful code. The awful code has, slowly, been improved since it was introduced. No, the reason I hate them is that ninjas get, hands down, the worst UI to work with out of anyone in the entire game. Verbs? A non-javascript powered browser window that makes the PDA look sleek? Some abilities require right-clicking? A verb that toggles a power without describing how to use that power? An entire objective that's not explained how to do in-game at all? Objectives that are impossible to finish in some situations? Ewwwwww.

Don't even get me started on the qdel() related runtimes ninjas cause all the fucking time because a spawn() sleep(10) loop is SO much better than just using the goddamn processing_objects list like everything else in the entire fucking game that needs to process.

Ninja is fun, but ultimately a broken antag.

You CANNOT win as a Ninja unless a admin personally ticks off the objective, this is because one of the objectives is a Role Play objective. Furthermore many of the ability's are poorly explained and are fragmented among three menus. Your power level is in one tab but all your abilities are in two other tabs so lord knows how much power you will have.

Using a Capture Net on someone is useless as you need to restrain them via other methods or they can walk out of the net, also the capture targets objective is poorly explained and I had to go out of my way to look at the code to figure out what the objective means and write it up on the wiki.

Also the objectives are extremely difficult at time, downloading around 20 research levels (Assuming RnD did their job which is never) as well as possibly keeping someone alive and stealing someone's brain. In addition to the fact that Ninja's spawn in randomly to the round which may well be 5 seconds before the round ends. Also there is no noise indicator that you are a Ninja.

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If someone really wants to make Ninja playable, the User Interface needs to be overhauled so that all the ability's are in a single tab, and that the Ninja can see its current power levels on its screen like how Aliens can see their plasma. Then the Capture Net needs to restrain a target as well as the objectives needing a better explanation.

The actual difficutly of the objectives is fine considering how powerful the Ninja is.