/tg/Station 13

This thread is for discussing the possibility of increasing the standard amount of telecrystals a traitor gets in his uplink.

There have been several nerfs to traitor items over time, such as the sleepy pen, e-bow and c-4. These changes have balanced the items but also left traitors weaker. In the mean time changes such helmet cams have made security harder to kill.

You can of course shout "git gud" to traitors, but the overall trend is that traitors have become less aggressive.
It is of course possible for traitors to operate without even using TC at all, but my experience is that the majority of the server population can't really pull this off.
It is especially the low population rounds that suffer from this lack of traitor aggressiveness, as they rely on a select group of traitors to make every round interesting.

To increase traitor aggressiveness somewhat again I propose a moderate increase of traitor TC to 22 or 24. With my personal preference being 24.



Of course everything is open to debate and I would love to hear your opinions on the matter.

I did recently attempt to double the amount of starting TC's. Nice discussion on that PR but it got cut off, also Github's poor for communication.

Anyway it will be good to get more discussion on this.

Another aspect that severly hurt traitors is that since antag rolls before job the security numbers have practically doubled.

There is balance in the world.
Security is over balanced.
No one has nerfed security in a while.
Everyone has nerfed traitors.

Increase the TC count, you have my vote.

Okay, if you're a coder who is currently masturbating furiously and shaking your head saying "NO! PR CLOSED! NO MERGES FOR YOU! MWEHEHE!" then please read this.

How about we increase TC and instead of making things like bombs cost at least 51% of your TC we simply add a limit to how many of certain items you can buy? That way bombs can be a bit cheaper and still leave room for other traitor items instead of instantly making you have no TC, AND they can't be spammed. (Also limit the amount of soaps you can buy to like 5 if people are into that, although I personally believe soap should have no limit and cost 0 TC.)

i'd support that. as it is if you don't spawn with high access you basically have to get a crypto, and then if you want to defend yourself even in a minor way you need a stech or sword, and then your only real choice is overt hand to hand combat against whoever you're supposed to kill. i think a certain set of TCs that can only go to nasty stuff like beacons, syndibombs or sneaky stuff like chameleons and other infil equipment might be neat. there was a post somewhere around here that went into syndicate factions with specific amounts of TC and recosted things to 'specialize' traitors into certain areas. might be cool to tie that in with this.

Cik wrote:as it is if you don't spawn with high access you basically have to get a crypto

A screwdriver, multitool and crowbar won't have you executed for possessing, leave much less evidence, and work quite well too.

TheNightingale wrote:

Cik wrote:as it is if you don't spawn with high access you basically have to get a crypto

A screwdriver, multitool and crowbar won't have you executed for possessing, leave much less evidence, and work quite well too.

and i frequently use them, but they aren't a real substitute if you're in a time-sensitive position, if security is behind you playing around with door wires will just get you slapped with a taser, and once you buy one traitor item you might as well go all-in by buying an emag so you can move faster over obstacles, furthermore you can emag borgs which are fantastically helpful.

i frequently steal low-attention items like spacesuits with tools before buying anything but it's not a real option if you're going to be in a hurry.

It seems the vast majority of 81% is for increasing it and most want even more tc. It would be a shame if nothing was to be done with this.

Increase TC and add my augmentations idea.


I don't know if we could somehow balance augmentations with having them also printable in medbay if Research has done its job and then medaby does the surgery

Make all uplinks draw from the same pool of items.

Make said pool populated based on cost of items. Higher cost = less items.

Could be amazing or utterly terrible.

That would just create a race among traitors to get their items as soon as possible, and put late round antags at a disadvantage. Part of the skills of a good traitor is to save your TC until the right moment.

Ricotez wrote:That would just create a race among traitors to get their items as soon as possible, and put late round antags at a disadvantage. Part of the skills of a good traitor is to save your TC until the right moment.

Which makes for a more interesting round for everyone else: conserving your TC until the "right" (lowest risk) moment, or saying "fuck it" and buying two power sinks and a bomb?

I think the better approach would be buffing antag weapons, as opposed to letting people have more of them.

rockpecker wrote:

Ricotez wrote:That would just create a race among traitors to get their items as soon as possible, and put late round antags at a disadvantage. Part of the skills of a good traitor is to save your TC until the right moment.

Which makes for a more interesting round for everyone else: conserving your TC until the "right" (lowest risk) moment, or saying "fuck it" and buying two power sinks and a bomb?

Did you mean: Buying five surplus crates?

Buying five surplus crates at roundstart with the whole traitor pool seems like a good way to get rule-zeroed, (And also could be hilarious)

Every time this comes up "hehe make all the weapons cost even more!" gets dumped in too.

Like not even saying they should be nerfed instead just plopping it in like it isn't even a nerf.

TC scaling based on current round pop.

Never drops below 20.

Incomptinence wrote:Every time this comes up "hehe make all the weapons cost even more!" gets dumped in too.

That's because the idea is to keep people from having enough TC to literally ebow/esword/thermals, you're gonna have to skip out on SOMETHING.

Everything was doubled when the TC was doubled to 20, this way the coders could do things like reduce barely used things like AI detectors and soap to 1TC, since reducing that to a non-integer 0.5 TC was not possible and kind of stupid anyway. Things that used to be cost 2TC (1/5th of your total crystals) are now 3TC (~1/6th of total), you get the idea..

Now you can ebow/esword AND be able to afford a couple of supplementary tools that you would have otherwise had to give up, or would snub your nose at because while it was still 1tc before, that was still a large investment that could have been made somewhere slightly better.

Raise the TC to 50 starting out, sure. It'd give more wiggle room for pricing utility items but you better believe the high-end gear is also going to get bumped up too so nobody is running around with 5 eswords.