Cooldown on ghost role respawns to combat metainfo

[skoglol]

This is something I have been thinking about for a while now. With any ghost role that has respawns, there is a lot of people using metainfo from previous lives in their new lives. It is often pretty blatant, but not something most people would ahelp due to proof being hard, or just not being aware of what happens.

Example 1: Xenobiology spreads spiders. You manage to fight off a spider in <remote location>. A moment later, a single new spider appears. Rinse and repeat until you die, since spiders can effectively have unlimited respawns.

Example 2: You crit an ash lizard outside their nest. It goes catatonic, and a new basic geared ash lizard appears to fight you. Rinse and repeat until out of eggs.


A cooldown of maybe 3-5 minutes between respawns as (the same) ghost roles would make abusing them for anything useful harder, as well as make the respawning roles value their lives somewhat more. Spiders can today just keep throwing themselves at death until something sticks without any regard for their life.

Thoughts? Better ideas?

[Arathian]

Once there are enough spiders where the same player can fling himself at you specifically over and over again over multiple lives, you are dead regardless of any metagaming.

Things like eggs or "empty" spiders or golem shells etc etc are there to represent potential. Their balance is what was required to create them. Because there are not unlimited players, you had 5 spiders come to you 1 by 1 instead of 5 spiders chasing you at the same time. The spiders always were there however, so the "potential' for them to chomp you down always existed. It's not like the ghost created the spider or the ashlizard egg.

[deedubya]

Once there are enough spiders where the same player can fling himself at you specifically over and over again over multiple lives, you are dead regardless of any metagaming.

Things like eggs or "empty" spiders or golem shells etc etc are there to represent potential. Their balance is what was required to create them. Because there are not unlimited players, you had 5 spiders come to you 1 by 1 instead of 5 spiders chasing you at the same time. The spiders always were there however, so the "potential' for them to chomp you down always existed. It's not like the ghost created the spider or the ashlizard egg.

You're missing the point of the OP. It has nothing to do with the ability to spam ghost roles, it has everything to do with people using info from ghost/a previous life in their new body.

That being said, it's already against the rules to do so. I'm not opposed to putting in something like a 5 minute cooldown after ghosting before you can inhabit a ghost role(specifically, so you aren't prevented from reentering your body), I'd prefer just more enforcement of metagaming with a ghost role.

[Arathian]

5 minutes is a ton of time and severe overkill. That's above 10% of the total of an average round time.

If the goal is to prevent metagaming and people that keep flinging themselves at the same person, a more appropriate cooldown would be 30 seconds or so.

But really, if you can't deal with 2-3 single file ashliggers as a fully equipped miner, maybe fuck off back to killing mobs. They are literal spear chuckers and you start with a gamer gun.

[skoglol]

It's not about what you as a player can deal with, it's how the code allows for people to abuse it. We can enforce it administratively all we want, but noones got time to look up what spider (673), spider (94), spider (123), spider (424), spider (465) all controlled by the same person did or did not do in any given round. If you got four of those people, well, do you see the problem with laying this on admins yet?

To clarify, I am suggesting a cooldown between for example two spider lives, not between your human life and a ghost role.


As for spider balance, thats not really the main topic here. I am sure we will be discussing that in a topic/PR soon enough though.

[MisterPerson]

Could be a scaling penalty where the first time you die is like 30 seconds, second time is a minute, third time is 2 minutes, and each time after that is 5. Or whatever.

The idea is if you just die once or twice over 40 minutes, it's not too bad, but if you keep throwing yourself into danger and die right away, you get punished.

[Screemonster]

I wonder how hard it'd be to detect and automatically alert admins if a mob controlled by a particular key kills or is killed by something with the same key as something that previously killed or was killed by them within the same round

so like, X kills Y
Y becomes ghost role
shortly afterwards Y kills X, system flags this up as something that might be worth paying attention to

[wesoda25]

Should be a scaling net cooldown on all ghost roles plus you can only go as a type of ghost role once. Say I go golem and die. I can't pick golem again that round, and have a 5 minute cooldown until I can pick another ghost role. Then I go ash lizard and die. Now its 10 minutes and I can't play golems or ash lizards anymore. etc

[Indie-ana Jones]

Should be a scaling net cooldown on all ghost roles plus you can only go as a type of ghost role once. Say I go golem and die. I can't pick golem again that round, and have a 5 minute cooldown until I can pick another ghost role. Then I go ash lizard and die. Now its 10 minutes and I can't play golems or ash lizards anymore. etc

This would essentially destroy spiders and ash lizards.

[nianjiilical]

i feel like this would have to be done on a per antag/role basis

imo it makes perfect sense for things like swarmers to have no cooldown between dying and jumping in another body

[Reyn]

I wonder how hard it'd be to detect and automatically alert admins if a mob controlled by a particular key kills or is killed by something with the same key as something that previously killed or was killed by them within the same round

so like, X kills Y
Y becomes ghost role
shortly afterwards Y kills X, system flags this up as something that might be worth paying attention to

Now that is a good idea instead of a cooldown being forced.

[Cobby]

should just be a scaling penalty, as some roles make sense to simulate waves/reinforcements/etc.

If you're going to enforce NLR you need to also have a time when players can come back. Can a player return to their death location 1 minute after? 5? 10? ever?

Where do you draw that line?

[skoglol]

NLR wouldn't work on tg, also just a pain to enforce. Preventing people from going back by preventing them from taking a new body immediately is a simpler solution.

[Shadowflame909]

Doesn't this code already exist in Whoneedsspacee's infestation game mode?

[Cobby]

what's that :smirk:

[vkalls]

I like a cooldown of seven minutes, especially for spiders. It combats metainfo (somewhat) while still having players able to join back in to the round. It will obviously have to be adjusted for other spawns. I think carp portal, if it needs any changing, should be maybe two or three minutes.
Also, would this time start from the time of you taking the spawn, or dying?

[Stickymayhem]

this destroys many mob based antags on low pop.

Especially something like space dragon where often the carp end up being run by one person.

I'd much prefer a logging solution rather than punishing all players for a few bad actors.

[SkeletalElite]

7 minutes is a really long time.
I think maybe 1 or 2 minutes is more reasonable. That's enough time that things will change up enough that previous life info will have mostly the same significance that it would have after 5+ minutes.

[skoglol]

We can see how many players are connected ghosts, and apply cooldowns based on that for certain events. Some might not need this too, like space dragon carp that are essentially tasked with protecting an area.

[XivilaiAnaxes]

This is awful - if there's a huge spider nest going and 5 ghosts, let's say 4 want to play spider.

All 4 spiders die because individual spiders are pathetic and easily murked.

Great you just killed all the spiders for the next X minutes regardless of the amount of spiders the nest can/should spawn. Now you can just burn down the nest and the spiders are gone forever.

These respawning ghost roles are usually balanced around being dogshit and only being able to achieve victory through numbers.

[cacogen]

no

[Cobby]

I dont think anyone is considering a 1size fits all for literally every ghost role. Like I said earlier, some roles make more sense to simulate swarming/waves/reinforcements/etc. Their times or power would need to be adjusted for this.

[ATHATH]

Ash lizards already have a mechanic where they need to sac corpses in order to respawn (not just to make new eggs; you can't ENTER those eggs unless you've proc'd an RNG chance from sac'ing a corpse, and you can only hold one "charge" of egg-possession at a time).

7 minutes would be an absolutely cancerous respawn timer for ANY ghost role. The timer for awakening after headslugging someone and the 3 minute timer for respawning as a lich are both already agonizingly slow; something that'd take even LONGER than that would be awful.

[Learner]

Agreed. Adding respawn timers is going to do jack shit to solve the issue of combating metainfo because apparently, everyone's forgotten the one thing in common with all of these ghost roles... they become free-floating, teleporting x-ray vision ghosts who can hear all when they die!

We're operating on a 'faith and trust' system that you won't be naughty with the stuff you've learned. We all often tend to use this info to some extent now and again... noticing your backpack was removed and left somewhere, looking at what's around in Lavaland before you take up a role, looking around the station only to notice burning holes into space and avoiding them once alive... frankly, the proper solution then, is to look at how much of this meta info can be used and abused by ghost role respawns, and make adjustments to those directions.

For spiders, it's often as simple as 'locate place with people, break or find path to people, attack people, die, repeat from step 3 until no more people'. Maybe adjusting how easily they can get to people will make a big difference to wear down meta info. If spiders couldn't break doors down, then to make the meta info dated and thus useless simply requires one to get into a door. It won't do much though to stop a freshly killed spider from remembering where a badly wounded, downed, or dead person is though, regardless of how long we make them wait. It just opens up a larger time-frame that something else gets to them.

And as for ashies who aren't so much a swarm intensive mob like spiders are, we've already got the system in place which cuts down their respawns.

As for Xenos... xenos aren't a swarm intensive mob, but they're also dependent on having units to maintain their very lofty perch on the station threat level chart. Of course, on this matter, their issue is something else entirely, but that's unrelated to the metainfo issue.

And I don't remember what state swarmers are in now.

[Stickymayhem]

Upon reflection and thinking about this further


I still hate it don't do it