OPERATIVES INBOUND Alert

[ShadowDimentio]

As Steelpoint has pointed out, Operatives are simply hands over heels better than the crew. The only time they lose is when they fluke, and that's because of inexperience, not bad play. So, I have a proposal to even the playing field.

Much of combat in SS13 is preparedness and shooting first, so similar to War rounds, when the ops move to arrive on the station z-level Nanotrasen will pick up the presence of an unidentified ship moving to intercept the station on their sensors and send an alert to the crew to get fucking ready. Unlike war rounds, they won't have long to prepare, but would allow security to quickly gear up and secure the captain before he's whacked.

If the operatives desperately want to stealth though, they can, for a hefty price, purchase a stealth module for their ship, allowing them to stealthily approach the station.

Thoughts?

[firecage]

No thanks. If I want the crew to with a loud booming message know that I am coming as a nuke OP, I will declare war.

[ShadowDimentio]

The difference is then they have twenty minutes to prepare, while here they have a minute or two tops.

[Steelpoint]

Right now Ops have a 75% win rate, only on high pop (as in 70+ people) does that win rate fall to 50%. Below that ops have a near 100% win rate on all lower pops from 30 to 40 ish people, that win rate being about 80% to 85% when you get to about 40 people..

Ops are simply winning too often.

Would a station alert help the crew? It would definently. It may not be the worst idea to at least give the crew a minute warning of incoming Ops.

The standard Op plan is to blow up Tcomms then to attack the disk holder, this utterly shuts down any attempt by the Captain or Security to coordinate a defense or even to rally up. Leaving everyone easy pickings. Having everyone rally up a moment before that may help boost the station's win rate.

[Actionb]

Not letting the crew know that you are on the station (either by stealth or destroying comms) is a solid strategy.
They had these tactics for ages. AI can vox 'awwwwwwperatives', a head can still use his desk announcement system, anybody can grab a station bounced and most certainly 90% of the crew will be wary when comms go out after a loud explosion.
If ops are too strong now, it has to do with their equipment - or is the crew too weak?

[Zilenan91]

I think this would be a good idea if wizards could choose to move their ships into range of the station so that there's ambiguity as to what it means.

[Zilenan91]

Then again a lot of the Op equipment is fucking insane and in the last year they've had some ridiculous powercreep. Like armor that makes them immune to all stuns and most forms of damage for a time, or an infinite healbeam or armor that's basically syndicate deathsquad armor. A lot of their gear needs to be heavily trimmed because it's just too much for the crew to deal with ops who know what they're doing.

[ShadowDimentio]

This is a solution to the problem of ops being too good without going through and rebalancing everything they've been given in the past year piece by piece.

[Zilenan91]

There's a lot of stuff that got added to Ops that they never needed. If I'm honest I'd just remove the shield hardsuit and medibeam. Those items allow them to snowball across the crew way too hard and wouldn't be missed.

[ShadowDimentio]

I'm not sure about the medgun but the shieldsuit is so expensive it's only really viable in war rounds.

[Zilenan91]

Unless it got nerfed I think the shield suit let you laugh off like 5 taser/stunbaton hits and then turn around and shoot the officer who shot at you. It might've been less or more, I can't remember. It, combined with it having normal op hardsuit armor values and medibeams means that Op teams are pretty much unkillable unless you can bomb them or somehow communicate to the entire crew to swarm them at the same time.

They could also beat this rush by throwing one of their 5 gorillion grenades from their grenade belt which also conveniently includes an infinite lube grenade that was intentionally snuck through by Bawhoppen and fixed a day later by adding a description to the gluon grenade that he had omitted to obfuscate the function of the gluon grenade.

[firecage]

Besides. the majority of the time, the crew gets alerted almost immediatly to the OPs, and real Stealth Ops are rare enough as it is. Like a few days ago I got assassinated as the captain by a nuke op disguised as an assistant after the armory got bombed. Fun times. If they had to buy going in by stealth with telecrystals, well...actual stealthops will never happen, and we will be reduced to just having gun 'n run nuke op rounds, way more than we do right now. So we will very rarely see ops stealthily bombing places before invading, dressing up as the crew, an assistant dragging all the Ops in a locker behind him into the bridge and gunning down the captain.

Edit: Yes, I would rather have that we look, one by one, at the items which Ops have gotten the past year, at the very least the major ones, to see how much rebalancing they need. Whether they are OP and need a nerf, or whether it is something which is weak and needs a buff so Ops are more likely to take it, to add variety.

[Steelpoint]

Well something has to give, I don't think its acceptable to allow a game mode with a near 100% win rate to continue as such.

Unless you force Ops to only happen when there's more than 70 people on the server then something needs to change.

I think this suggestion is one of the better one's I've heard.

[Zilenan91]

Seriously though can we remove the grenade belt entirely. Ops never needed it and it doesn't have a reason to exist on top of some of the grenades being flat out lied about so they'd get merged.

[firecage]

Well something has to give, I don't think its acceptable to allow a game mode with a near 100% win rate to continue as such.

Unless you force Ops to only happen when there's more than 70 people on the server then something needs to change.

I think this suggestion is one of the better one's I've heard.

Don't we have Op scaling so lower pop OP rounds don't have to many nuke ops already? Besides, we can do something which we already did with traitor, at the very least a test run atleast. Some of the gear which Ops can buy are locked unless there the population is high enough. Like how traitors can't buy some stuff during low pop.

[yackemflam]

We JUST reduced the ops pop to scale with low pop better.

Give it time to give us accurate stats on whether ops needs another nerf or not.

[Atlanta-Ned]

I don't think this is necessary.

[lzimann]

We JUST reduced the ops pop to scale with low pop better.

Give it time to give us accurate stats on whether ops needs another nerf or not.

Ya, and if even then the low pop winrate stays 100% or close to it, we can start cutting the more op items(like, shielded hardsuit against 30 crewmembers, 0 of which are sec members, come on...)

[Bawhoppennn]

what is your problem with the grenade belt? i never lied about it to get it merged, and the possibility for friendly fire is so high from it that its super fun

(also nobody ever buys it anyways which makes me sad)

[firecage]

You know. There's prob an even better idea if the Ops are winning to much. Why don't we just remove the fucking syndicate firing pins so the crew can pick up the guns Ops drop and use them against the Ops again? That will definitely SLIGHTLY scale it in the crews favor.

[ShadowDimentio]

Reee get your shitty ideas out of my good idea thread make your own reeeeeeee

[cocothegogo]

ops win so much that we're sick of winning!

[Scott]

fire pins were amistake