One person converting instead of this 3 person bullshit

callanrockslol · Mon Jan 26, 2015 6:03 am

Its dumb as fuck and you can barely get enough people to convert most rounds because everyones retarded

ACTUALLY CRITISICM

It makes a hard start even harder, especially because the server is currently infested by powergamering AIs that don't understand the concept of no harm.

Balut · Post by **Balut** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 6:23 am #62918

Removing the need for teamwork is probably bad. I heard there was talk of making conversion possible with less people, but instead have it take time if you've not got the correct amount of dudes, though. Probably in the one thread you'll find if you search "Behelit"?

**EDIT**
https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... lit#p56956

Cik · Post by **Cik** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:49 pm #63094

i think converting should be 1-2 people, sac should be 3. as it is sac is used far too heavily when it should be a choice not to. as it stands unless you have to get 20 people off station sac is basically the name of the game, especially when you'll need the 10 juggernauts to fight security in a medium / highpop server.

timed incantations should probably be a thing anyway, so the idea that it takes time (and less time with more people) is a good thing. personally i think the higher level spells should probably take time (though personally they never really see that much use just because 80% of the people you drag into cult just don't know what they're doing; i don't know how to fix that)

the nar'sie chant esp. should probably take some time.

anyway yeah convert should be more viable. construct cult is fucking boring imo

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:51 pm #63097

>Rev with magic

Steelpoint · Post by **Steelpoint** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:52 pm #63098

I personally think Cultists should be focused more on making themselves more powerful instead of being Rev2.0

Snakebutt · Post by **Snakebutt** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 7:57 pm #63152

Steelpoint wrote:I personally think Cultists should be focused more on making themselves more powerful instead of being Rev2.0

I had an idea for cult/bloodmagic to have 2 different 'brances', ritual and physical. Ritual blood magic is what we have, acolytes and words and runes and ceremony around the circles.

Physical is going out and collecting a blood toll for Narnar. They start off with the same slip, but there's another option to summon a magical dagger instead of the arcane tome. By attacking humans with the dagger, you collect blood/blood power, which you can 'invest' into a solid blood crystal which can also be shared, or used to cast spells. The physical casters start off with all their spells, it's just a matter of getting enough blood to use them. Problem is, they can't convert, nor can they (directly) summon Narsie, but they can provide enough blood to need less people to do it, to the point that a REALLY good one might just need one ritual user and feed him the blood of most of the crew somehow.

You can hit yourself with the dagger for emergency power, but healing the loss takes more than you gained, so you need to make it worth it. Dagger should be 15-20 damage, pretty damn robust, with the cultist given robes by default and access to an energy sheild-type device.

Pros would be a very robust front line for the pretty fucking pathetic cultists, and an alternative way to play the gamemode.
Cons are you're loud and obvious as fuck and don't have a reliable way to get through doors other than collecting IDs, so people could just hide in their department from you, forcing you to hack through every door.

Cik · Post by **Cik** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:07 pm #63183

Ikarrus wrote:>Rev with magic

>rev without magic

GEEZ

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:16 pm #63186

Cik wrote:i think converting should be 1-2 people, sac should be 3. as it is sac is used far too heavily when it should be a choice not to. as it stands unless you have to get 20 people off station sac is basically the name of the game, especially when you'll need the 10 juggernauts to fight security in a medium / highpop server.

timed incantations should probably be a thing anyway, so the idea that it takes time (and less time with more people) is a good thing. personally i think the higher level spells should probably take time (though personally they never really see that much use just because 80% of the people you drag into cult just don't know what they're doing; i don't know how to fix that)

the nar'sie chant esp. should probably take some time.

anyway yeah convert should be more viable. construct cult is fucking boring imo

Sac no longer gives soul stones

Bombadil · Post by **Bombadil** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:17 pm #63187

Ikarrus wrote:>Rev with magic

It used to be 1 person conversions before and there was no problem until Malkevian and other fucks did their half assed reworks of cult that never got finished. Used to be a time when I went to derelict and made a base while researching.

Now we're back to Sac no longer gives a soul stone. Now you need to buy a soul stone and shell with paper which got its charges reduced from 5 to 3. Research is also potentially lethal and some people want to make the runes always random to prevent research so we HAVE to sacrifice. Which now takes people out of the game permanently. That or you got a guy with a upgraded sleeper and a friend researching.

Make it 2 people to convert its not as bad as needing 3 if you really think "Magical Rev" is so bad.

Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:25 am

Spoiler:

To quote myself from the other thread:

PKPenguin321 wrote:How about conversion runes can use 1-3 people, but with two people all chanters and the person on the rune have to stay still for maybe 30 seconds and with one person it takes like a minute or something. Still encourages teamwork without making you absolutely fucked without it if your team is incompetent while also disallowing "surprise convert rune in hallway mlg 1 man converts ayy lmao"

tldr: Convert runes can be used with 1, 2, or 3 people. The less people, the longer it takes. With 3 people it's instant like it already is.

This solves the issue of being completely fucked if your team gets dunked or are horrendously bad at standing around a rune for more than four seconds. At the same time, it doesn't allow the oldcult strategy of putting a single convert rune in a hallway, tazing people, and dragging them to the rune for easy quick converts (and by preventing this it means it's not just "cult is magical rev lol" (looking at you ikarrus)).
It also means that while you can convert people yourself, teamwork is still more efficient and therefore more viable and will most likely still be used as the primary conversion method unless something goes horribly wrong or your team is too awful to coordinate.

Edit: And for reference, converting someone by yourself would take a LONG TIME. Like, changeling absorption time. So it definitely wouldn't be as easy as converting someone with three people, further backing up the points already mentioned.

Post by **lumipharon** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 1:09 am #63266

I was literally saccing peolpe for soulstones yesterday, unless some change I didn't see just got merged.

You ony don't get a stone if they shitter ghosts before you sac them.

Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:40 pm

Bumping. I'd like some actual criticism or feedback on my thoughts for the 1-3 person conversion system. If it's a shit idea that won't ever be implemented, at least tell me why.

Xhuis · Post by **Xhuis** » Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:59 pm #63938

I have code ready to PR. Basically, converting takes 900 ticks by default (1m30s). For each person around the rune, the time is reduced by 30 seconds, making the minimum time effectively one total minute for solo and thirty seconds for two. I could extend that if you feel it's warranted.

Wed Jan 28, 2015 11:33 pm

Xhuis, why are so based?
That sounds perfect. If it turns out to still be an issue despite it taking a full minute, we can always change it later.

Steelpoint · Post by **Steelpoint** » Thu Jan 29, 2015 12:37 am #63973

I like the three person conversion as it means some guy can't just convert his entire department with a little time, never underestimate the power of a stun paper.

Xhuis · Post by **Xhuis** » Thu Jan 29, 2015 2:55 am #64018

Steelpoint wrote:I like the three person conversion as it means some guy can't just convert his entire department with a little time, never underestimate the power of a stun paper.

Indeed - the real issue with solo converting was that it could do this, and even a minute is still short enough to convert if you're in a good hiding spot. However, I think that's truckloads better than the method we have now which is apply paper apply tome apply sacrifice. In addition it makes things like people screaming "NEED TWO MORE FOR CONVERT AT -blank-" a zillion times not an issue.

For now I am going to avoid PRing it though, if only to give it more time.

dezzmont · Post by **dezzmont** » Thu Jan 29, 2015 3:23 am #64024

The problem is while the idea that cult should, in theory, be about teamwork, it also really is super unfun to play rev when you are either unable to slip away from your job or others won't help you.

The mode should allow and encourage teamplay without literally breaking down if you can't do it.

Saying "Oh but it is rev with magic" is kinda missing the point. Rev is probably one of the best antag modes because it is set up to be relatively stable and the round doesn't abort itself by accident if one guy is dumb, it is no nonsense, gets straight to the point, and doesn't really have crappy mechanics out of tradition or to make it special. Flash guys, get riots, have fun.

Cult meanwhile already has plenty of conditions that make failure really likely from the get go over minor mistakes and while the end result may feel balanced, having a huge skill gate to even start isn't fun for anyone. Allowing one cultist to get the ball rolling isn't a bad thing, and allows weaker cultists to still get into the mode without literally throwing the round because they did something dumb like make runes in an easy to find place. Cult is designed entirely around bullshit that isn't really interesting and doesn't offer anything to the round, like forcing cultists to have to devote pretty much all their effort to early coordination while also making the only item they can use to coordinate early super overt and conspicuous to use, or forcing the cult to convert using extremely obvious "secret" bases. Sacrificing early to start with makes cult even more rev like because you end up just having a rev riot but with constructs instead of revs.

I honestly would like a cult mode where cult was not a converting force at all, if we really are afraid of making it too much like rev

Spoiler:

Making the cult start out "pre-converted" with enough cultists to have a decent chance without letting them just engage in full blown riots really could trim a lot of the cult fat we have just because it is tradition.

paprika · Post by **paprika** » Thu Jan 29, 2015 3:53 am #64033

Ikarrus wrote:>Rev with magic

qft

Post by **lumipharon** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 9:37 pm #64494

It's honestly not super hard. Don't even need stun papers.

sually I just go into medbay with two other cultists. The other two hide in one of the patient rooms (one lying on the bed, one hiding in the closet, it's pretty funny) with the shutters down.
I just cryo every fuck that comes in hurt, which is effectively just a long ass stun which won't raise suspicion, then drag them to the patient rune, convert, spawn tome and repeat. For the other medstaff you'll probably have to use stun papers, but for the rest of the crew, especially with newshitchem, people don't have a problem usually, with me cryoing them.

Anyway, if you make people able to one person convert (slowly) they're just going to stun paper, cuff, remove headset, and drag into some hidey hole while they convert.

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:06 pm #64504

For single-person conversion you'll need real cuffs, though, since cablecuffs break before the one-thirty is up. Hell, even before the one minute marker.

Post by **PKPenguin321** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:22 am #64540

lumipharon wrote:Anyway, if you make people able to one person convert (slowly) they're just going to stun paper, cuff, remove headset, and drag into some hidey hole while they convert.

Well that's a bit of the point, but see, converting with 3 people has every advantage over converting people by yourself. Like someone else said, cablecuffs could be broken before the conversion is even done. People could walk in on your "hidey hole" while you're converting someone and then you'd be screwed. It's not supposed to be easy, and it's not supposed to be efficient. Those are the drawbacks to converting people by yourself.

Say your whole cult team is dead or in the brig (which has been the case for me on more than one occasion). You've got no choice left but to risk converting someone alone. It's about as hard as absorbing someone as a ling, except you have to make sure the person you're converting doesn't die. If you can manage that, then once you've converted one person, you've suddenly gotten a team member that can help you convert faster, and suddenly you have a small cult base going instead of the round drawing on and forcing the admins to send in a death squad.

People solo converting is technically already possible (manifest rune, astral journey rune), the only drawback is it requires rune research. Manifest rune solo conversions are a lot stronger than the method I propose, so being able to use a convert rune but having to wait a minute for it to work would hardly be a buff, just something to make standard converting more viable instead of "murder, soul stone, lol artificers" and give cults that are caught very early on a chance to get themselves back on their feet.

Post by **Vekter** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 6:24 am #64568

What if we made it where you could substitute candles for people involved, but they're single-use? Like they get removed as part of the ritual. It'd let someone convert back from being the only cultist without it being super overpowered.

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 8:12 am #64578

Vekter wrote:What if we made it where you could substitute candles for people involved, but they're single-use? Like they get removed as part of the ritual. It'd let someone convert back from being the only cultist without it being super overpowered.

>Cult QM
>Order religious supplies
>Space the holy water
>Keep the candles

Post by **Vekter** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:43 am #64585

DemonFiren wrote:
Vekter wrote:What if we made it where you could substitute candles for people involved, but they're single-use? Like they get removed as part of the ritual. It'd let someone convert back from being the only cultist without it being super overpowered.
>Cult QM
>Order religious supplies
>Space the holy water
>Keep the candles

Remove candles from religious supplies. They don't serve any gameplay purpose anyway.

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:46 am #64586

They provide light and romantic dinner options.
What do you mean, you don't arpee with your spesswaifu?

They are also the most civilised way to set off a plasma fire.

Post by **lumipharon** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:32 am #64595

Honestly I think it comes to this.

Cultist mcculter has some scrub he wants to convert. He cannot (for whatever reason) get two other cultists to help him.
He now has two choices.
A: Slow conert over a minute +
B: beat to death and sac in 10 seconds.

Hm, I wonder which option people will pick.

Saegrimr · Post by **Saegrimr** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:59 am #64598

Vekter wrote:Remove candles from religious supplies. They don't serve any gameplay purpose anyway.

You're joking right?

Balut · Post by **Balut** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 10:19 pm #64701

TIL Vekter is Paprika.

Post by **PKPenguin321** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 4:06 am #64742

lumipharon wrote:Honestly I think it comes to this.

Cultist mcculter has some scrub he wants to convert. He cannot (for whatever reason) get two other cultists to help him.
He now has two choices.
A: Slow conert over a minute +
B: beat to death and sac in 10 seconds.

Hm, I wonder which option people will pick.

There are so many moments when you would prefer another human cultist 100x more than a giant construct who can't do anything but punch stuff and instantly give away the fact that you're a cultist, that if it came down to this, a lot of times people would choose A.
Also if Xhius's changes go in it wouldn't be a minute+, just exactly a minute.

Scones · Post by **Scones** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 4:07 am #64743

2-man convert or vekter's candles idea

choose one because both would make cult at least somewhat more interesting

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 9:20 am #65492

I don't understand why cult needed the nerf in the first place on converts.

I may be wrong but it has seemed to me like cult has the lowest success rate of any antagonist mode, way below 50%. Maybe somewhere around 33% or even less?
It's also the least wanted antagonist role. Frequently when I am asking ghosts for a volunteer so I can swap someone into a cultist that has to leave nobody wants it. Lots of "Eww no thanks."

People have played cult wrong a lot over the years because it's complex and it's really hard to teach people to do it right when you're in play. There're still a lot of folks who don't quite understand how the fuck they're supposed to benefit the cult once they've been converted beyond "go pretend it's rev."

My initial reaction to the change to the 3 person convert was nothing short of pure outrage. One of those moments where I really question if the people making these changes actually play these modes. Shit that sounds good on paper but can't possibly work in action.

And I feel like it still doesn't work, but we're still learning. This change is telling you to sac more people and convert fewer. It doesn't matter what it was intended to do because that's what it DOES. We can work with this. This builds towards a more aggressive, more murderous, more construct dependent cult that has fewer living members but a comparable number of overall people on the cult team. Just a lot more of them have previously been murdered and brought back as constructs.

I still see most cults failing, I still see few players wanting to be swapped into a roundstart cultist when someone has to go. I see a lot more cults giving up and just murdering as many people as they can.
And I feel like we're learning something here I'm just not sure what it is.

Saegrimr · Post by **Saegrimr** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 9:30 am #65495

An0n3 wrote:I see a lot more cults giving up and just murdering as many people as they can.
And I feel like we're learning something here I'm just not sure what it is.

That a lot of players don't care for objectives and methods that aren't "kill a person, take a thing"? I recall a similar recent problem with a ninja.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 9:50 am #65497

Saegrimr wrote:
An0n3 wrote:I see a lot more cults giving up and just murdering as many people as they can.
And I feel like we're learning something here I'm just not sure what it is.
That a lot of players don't care for objectives and methods that aren't "kill a person, take a thing"? I recall a similar recent problem with a ninja.

It seems silly that we have a whole team antag built around a potential objective like "Sacrifice so and so" when one traitor with an uplink is arguably better equipped to accomplish that all by themselves.
And if he fucks up he doesn't single-handedly blow the whole roundtype to everyone.

Cult, in its current implementation, really cant avoid boiling over into a full-scale war against the station for their objectives at some point. They need to hide but nothing they have helps them do that sufficiently well.

Travel in packs, have one guy with a stun rune and two or three more guys with books. Stun your target and bash him to death with your tomes like you're a bunch of crazed fans trying to get his autograph on a first-edition copy. Drag him to the sac rune and do the deed, then sit and wait for the sec force to show up and permabrig/murder you all for doing it. Hope the other cult members left can convert enough people to satisfy the escape objective or summon Nar-sie before the shuttle leaves.

Post by **lumipharon** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 10:09 am #65501

If you have competent cultists (which is rather rare) you cando all sorts of things.

Last cult round where I was round start cultist, we had to sac the chaplain.
I researched all the words, then used an astral projection rune to stalk the chaplain.
Once he went somewhere quiet, we silently jumped him, sacced him in a hidden room in maint, and no one was the wiser.

With a tome and a folder full of stun papers, I then proceeded to kill most/all of sec, one by one and saccing them, without the crew realising anything was up, until a sudden swarm of constructs spewed out of maint and we raped everyone.

Anyway, back on topic.
3 person conversion is shit because 90% of the time, other cultists are literally mentally retarded chucklefucks that are completely useless and can't even stand around a rune.
1 person convert was bad because it was just rev, and every got flash converted sanic fast.

The 'slow convert' for less then three people is better then nothing, but I remember someone suggested/made a pr, to let multiperson runes not require cultists to be adjacent to the rune, just within X radius, which would make it A LOT easier to manage.

Saegrimr · Post by **Saegrimr** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 10:09 am #65502

I can trace at least a couple issues back to population, but we should probably try to accommodate for that.

Post by **PKPenguin321** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 5:24 am #67201

PR is up, made by the one and only based xhuis
https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/7610

Post by **oranges** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 5:37 am #67204

An0n3 wrote:I don't understand why cult needed the nerf in the first place on converts.

Quote Cult was unfortunately abandoned by Malkevin after their first round of changes went through.

It's gotten very little love from anybody since then, so it's not unsurprising that it feels a bit funky.

I feel like we should run an adoption drive for gamemodes.

edit:Slip of the thought there

Malkevin · Post by **Malkevin** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 4:43 pm #67304

An0n3 wrote: And I feel like it still doesn't work, but we're still learning. This change is telling you to sac more people and convert fewer. It doesn't matter what it was intended to do because that's what it DOES. We can work with this. This builds towards a more aggressive, more murderous, more construct dependent cult that has fewer living members but a comparable number of overall people on the cult team. Just a lot more of them have previously been murdered and brought back as constructs.

The cult saccing more people than converting them was entirely the point, thats why I made it so getting words from saccing worked a lot better.
Sabbot's convert the entire station in the first 5 minutes was absolutely awful to play as security, thats why the 'nerf' was necessary.

Anyway, I honestly thought that having 9 round start cultists would be enough people that atleast 4 of them would know know what they were doing and be decent enough to be able to work together, but I guess the playerbase is incapable of that.

I gave up on coding on tg for 'reasons' so I gave my blessing ages ago to revert cult to Two-Word cult, but no one seems to have cared enough to take me up on that offer.
Do I really need to do it myself?

Malkevin · Post by **Malkevin** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 4:57 pm #67308

oranges wrote:
An0n3 wrote:I don't understand why cult needed the nerf in the first place on converts.
Quote Cult was unfortunately abandoned by Malkevin after their first round of changes went through.

It's gotten very little love from anybody since then, so it's not unsurprising that it feels a bit funky.

I feel like we should run an adoption drive for gamemodes.

edit:Slip of the thought there

Actually it got abandoned by me when I brought up the second batch of changes and because of a few people I realised that tg was akin to playing in a slurry pit, and because I was going through yet another rough patch irl, I decided that instead of getting myself worked up and making myself even more miserable it was time to close up shop and take an extended break, so I locked the thread and closed the PR and had no interaction with tg station for many months.
The branch is still on my github so its not like someone couldn't have forked it and tweaked it themselves.

Drynwyn · Post by **Drynwyn** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:47 pm #75526

Can we just start cultists with all of their words? You can get them all in <10 minutes anyway if you have a single cultist who knows how to research. It's just a pointless thing that screws over cults that don't have any experienced starting members even harder than they were already screwed over.

Steelpoint · Post by **Steelpoint** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:51 pm #75528

Less than five minutes if they know what they're doing and have a quite spot for that duration.

Atticat · Post by **Atticat** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 6:47 pm #75542

What if cult starts with more peeps but the catch is they can only convert people if one of the starting cultists died on a 1:1 basis. This could also open up some interesting possibilities for starter cultists literally sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Like make a maximum number of cultists and that maximum number is also the starting number.