Decide the future of cult in this poll

[Oldman Robustin]

Right so I made a long post yesterday about this and when I hit submit the servers had gone down and I lost everything, so I'm going to keep this short and sweet:

1) I reverted newcult with Shadowlight's help

2) It was always my intention to keep updating oldcult for the improvements it needed, but I had to get feedback first. Cult was out of rotation for a while, and its min_pop requirement was too high, so it took a month just for me to see a few games in action.

3) The update finally came two weeks ago, but the next day Joan created a "challenge" PR basically meant to defeat mine (that was the old thread).

My PR: https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/16778
Her PR: https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/16791

4) In the two weeks since, both of our PR's have seen dramatic changes. While my PR mostly involved adding more content/features, Joan's PR had many of its substantive changes (invisible stunmines, paperslap talisman creation) withdrawn over criticism. Joan adopted my talisman system, I took her teleportation rune improvement along with several other usability imrpovements I've credited in my PR. At this point, in my view, my PR represents a step forward for streamlining cult and making it a more enjoyable experience for everyone, while her PR is basically a roadblock designed to stop mine for the purpose of asserting authority over future cult changes that she has in mind.

5) As our PR's grew more similar, it was made explicitly clear that neither will get merged without some kind of resolution, and Joan insists on being the one to control the future of cult. I'm not a coder, I put a ton of time+effort into this PR and I think it will be a huge improvement. Joan supports newcult and has explicitly stated that she wants to move cult in that direction. I think that my dedication to the game mode, my extensive experience as a player/cultist, and my general alignment with the community on gameplay preferences (I'm with the 80%+ that preferred oldcult, Joan stands with the <20% who wanted to stick with newcult) make me a much stronger candidate to shape the future of cult mode. Joan is a good coder but she's out of touch when it comes to balance. For example, while she made a lot of technically competent additions to blob, those changes gave us regenerating EMP blobbernauts. Even after all the reactive nerfs, regenerating blobbernauts single-handledly depreciated blob mode by making the early-game effort (welder brigade) irrelevant and basically forcing Xrays as the only finisher available once the blob hits a decent size. It's just stuff that like and supporting invisible stunmines (her PR initially made stun runes stun any noncult that passed over them) while not understanding precisely WHY invisible stunmines were OP and unfun to deal with, that convinced me she is going to just bring us NewCult 2.0.

You can read the changelogs of both PR's for a gist of what each will do, I've included screenshots for mine: http://imgur.com/a/iQim3

If Joan wants to post her position I'll add it to this post, but basically it's been "I don't like Oldcult, I want to take cult in another direction, your PR would prevent that, so I will continue to fight it". If you have any questions about my PR I'd be glad to answer. We did run a test of it a week ago and I was very pleased with it, the cult had no "experts" but was still able to leverage much of the cult's magic because of the new system. The round ended with an attempt to place the Nar-Sie rune in the bar, followed by one of the best SS13 free-for-alls I've ever seen. Batons, knives, swords, and absolute mayhem as the entire crew rallied to try and stop the cult.

TL;DR I want to make cult great again, but lyin' Joan Lung is cockblocking my delegate count because she prefers newcult - so we need a community poll to break the stalemate

[oranges]

I'm disappointed that Joan doesn't recognise that your're actually quite reasonable and willing to listen to people who back up their opinions.

[Man_Shroom]

I like Oldman's because it simplifies and streamlines cult which has been bloated and overly complex for a while now. Also, more emphasis on talismans instead of the shitty runes.

[PKPenguin321]

at first i was full team joan but oldman actually listened to feedback (a rare and desirable action among coders) and now im all for his, it does basically what joan's does but feels a lot nicer

[Zilenan91]

Can we have a remove option

[ChangelingRain]

I'd like to note that my position isn't as simple as supporting newcult; I liked some of the ideas but a lot of it had problems, such as random runes, infinite stun mines, and the nar-sie summoning having only one message and no status tab indicator, as well as the still general "nobody has any idea what to do" problem, though not having to deal with convertees offset that a little.

The main issue is that I've got plans(tm) for stuff I want to do, including cult armor having a shield, artificer MM being replaced with a projectile, possibly nar-sie rune summoning a shell(a la newcult, except it's active immediately and would probably have a way shorter delay before summoning), cult bolas(yes, Oldman implemented these first, but I produced the sprites and saw no reason not to give him them), and mine runes done properly(no mines within X tiles of other mines, can't be hidden via runes/talismans) and I have frankly no idea what Oldman's got planned, so I don't know if my plans will conflict with his.

[Oldman Robustin]

Given that few of those things are strictly incompatible with the direction of my PR, I don't know why you'd still dig in this hard about it. Adding stuff like shields, construct tweaks, whatever are not the kind of big-picture stuff I'm worried about.

Doesn't mean I won't disagree sometimes, but I'm not a purist about this stuff.

I'm not a huge fan of runes as mines, but if they were changed to say, a stamina reduction that would set your stamina for ~50, basically actings as a slow field, that would be alot more tolerable than "LOL YOU WALKED ON THIS INVISIBLE STUN MINE AND NOW YOURE DEAD GG DUMBASS FOR NOT SEEING INVISIBLE SHIT".

Plus every day we keep at this is another day for bola sprites and icons.dm to have another merge conflict.

[Zilenan91]

So how about that remove cult option

[PKPenguin321]

So how about that remove cult option

reminder that zilenan is still salty about being absolutely BTFO in his opinion on newcult

Spoiler:

[Shadowlight213]

Just a note. No one person can claim complete direction in code changes.(See: Kor trying and failing to disable lavaland) Once you submit code to the repo, you forfeit ownership and direct control. Unless you get cheridan to back you and make it official with him telling the maintainers to abide by it, anyone can submit changes to the code and the choice of merging is up to maintainers. I'd recommend bringing this up with cheridan as a next step.

[PKPenguin321]

Just a note. No one person can claim complete direction in code changes.(See: Kor trying and failing to disable lavaland) Once you submit code to the repo, you forfeit ownership and direct control. Unless you get cheridan to back you and make it official with him telling the maintainers to abide by it, anyone can submit changes to the code and the choice of merging is up to maintainers. I'd recommend bringing this up with cheridan as a next step.

Honestly, once it's in the game, I don't really care what people do to it (short of re-adding the melee block chance which was kinda shit and buffing it to the point that it's overpowered so they have an excuse to remove it). I try not to codebaby. I'm okay with other people interacting with what I've made.

edit: o fuq i thought this was the krav thread

nah but yeah who cares tbh if joan wants to make tweaks after robustin's thing gets merged then let him, we can decide if that should pass when the time comes

[Oldman Robustin]

Yea my goal from Day 1 has just been to get this shit merged, only by forcing me to campaign for my PR and other silly shit would I get some sense of entitlement over the level of deference future PR's would get...

[Man_Shroom]

ARISE FROM YOUR GRAVE, FOR I AM A NECROMANCER