Thunderdome for ghosts

tempchar1 · Post by **tempchar1** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 2:53 am #24752

So you are fucking dead. Rip
You now have nothing to do except to watch security chase down the antags or hope for (b)admins to spawn aliens or space ninjas or some shit

There is a perfectly functional thunderdome in centcomm just teasing you of the fact that you can't fight there

Make it so that once atleast 2 ghosts are available, they can queue for a game in the thunderdome

Once a game has started, there is a delay for players to equip their gear, and then the fight begins

Once all of a team is dead, there is a delay where the remaining players can choose to queue again, and then the cycle repeats

There can also be types of thunderdome battles that ghosts can vote for in the queueing screen
For example:
Fists only
Ranged weapons with security barriers as cover
Players being resurrected into the thunderdome with the gear they had on their bodies when they died
Mech batles
Free for all where every player spawns around the edges of the dome and fight to the last man standing
Survival where players start in the middle inside of a fortification and have to defend for as long as they can against hordes of enemy mobs
Wizard battles when there is a small amount of ghosts (dodge them magic missles boy)

And I'm sure you could think of many others
This feature would give ghosts something else to do besides whining about how they died and praying for aliens

Spacemanspark · Wed Aug 20, 2014 3:07 am

This would also allow the entertainment channel in the bar to actually serve some use. It shows a camera view of the thunderdome, yes?

Post by **MisterPerson** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 3:31 am #24758

As long as there's a button admins can press to clear it out and keep people from spawning, sure.

Will require a resetter for the thunderdome, which is doable using something like what the holodeck does.

kosmos · Post by **kosmos** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 10:21 am #24789

This could encourage people to suicide at round-start or ghost immediately after other things aren't working out as they planned. Why would anyone wait in perma for anyone to rescue you if you can just ghost and have your fun? If you want ghost fun, make it so it's fun for everyone on the station as well, e.g. make "Boo!" available again and other fun things for ghosts to generate a cool spooky atmosphere to the now-ghost-towned station, and just ban the jerks who use it for metaing.

Instead of making things fun for ghosts we should ultimately focus on how to make the gamemodes more so that they keep people in the round more, providing more fun for everyone rather than 1-2 murderbonerers.

Mono · Post by **Mono** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:55 pm #24806

Or why not just put a forced delay on people going to thunderdome of about 10 minutes when they suicide or observe? Penalties are easily put in place to discourage people not playing the round and admins can easily stop the thunderdome fights with the suggested button

Miauw · Post by **Miauw** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:05 pm #24809

kosmos wrote:This could encourage people to suicide at round-start or ghost immediately after other things aren't working out as they planned. Why would anyone wait in perma for anyone to rescue you if you can just ghost and have your fun? If you want ghost fun, make it so it's fun for everyone on the station as well, e.g. make "Boo!" available again and other fun things for ghosts to generate a cool spooky atmosphere to the now-ghost-towned station, and just ban the jerks who use it for metaing.

Instead of making things fun for ghosts we should ultimately focus on how to make the gamemodes more so that they keep people in the round more, providing more fun for everyone rather than 1-2 murderbonerers.

the problem is that detecting this kind of metagaming is VERY hard.

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 4:25 pm #24843

Why would ghosts have anything fun to do?

There should be less ghosts, not more fun for ghosts.

Fragnostic · Post by **Fragnostic** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:27 pm #24849

Lo6a4evskiy wrote:Why would ghosts have anything fun to do?

There should be less ghosts, not more fun for ghosts.

Well, where would we get our space ninja, wizard, xeno candidates?
But I guess fun would mean meta with ghosts and I don't think players should be able to see ghosts. They should have fun, but not directly involved with the round.

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:28 pm #24853

Fragnostic wrote:Well, where would we get our space ninja, wizard, xeno candidates?

You have a point, but this will be hardly achieved by letting ghosts fuck off into Thunderdome.

Alex Crimson · Post by **Alex Crimson** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 7:40 pm #24864

Eh i dont like the idea. But then i see ghosts as more of a resource for admin events and things like Space ninja/Alien outbreaks etc. Also as people have said, players would kill themselves or just observe so they can PvP in the Thunderdome.

Fragnostic · Post by **Fragnostic** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 10:51 pm #24899

Lo6a4evskiy wrote: You have a point, but this will be hardly achieved by letting ghosts fuck off into Thunderdome.

If there is a short span of time one has to be a ghost before fucking off there, as well as time in between losing in the Thumderdome, plus a reset, there would be ghosts watching the fights. There would be a live audience plus a ghost audience, available for any event. It can be fair, and abuse can be minimized. But I still don't know how you would stop people from observing just for the Thunderdome, or suicides, or ghosting for any little inconvenience.

bandit · Post by **bandit** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:25 am #24921

Just code it so that if you suicide/go catatonic you are ineligible for thunderdome. (And randomize player names to remove meta.) How hard can it be? (serious question)

Kelenius · Post by **Kelenius** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:22 am #24953

bandit wrote:Just code it so that if you suicide/go catatonic you are ineligible for thunderdome. (And randomize player names to remove meta.) How hard can it be? (serious question)

People will jump into space.

Edit: That being said, I don't see a problem with this. After a week or so of 'wow new stuff' awe, not a lot of people will do it.

Scott · Post by **Scott** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:29 am #24954

I think this is a terrible idea. The game is supposed to be played on the station.

Kelenius · Post by **Kelenius** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:36 am #24956

Scott wrote:I think this is a terrible idea. The game is supposed to be played on the station.

Says who?

Scott · Post by **Scott** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:42 am #24957

Good question.

Post by **MisterPerson** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:49 am #24958

If you want to play in the Dome, just observe. Hell we could even add an option on the title screen if it's such a major issue.

Reimoo · Post by **Reimoo** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:51 am #24959

I think the idea is great. It actually gives people a reason to visit the bar for once. As for the wizard/xeno candidates etc., it's not like every single ghost will be playing in the thunderdome. The size of the thunderdome right now can fit maybe 6 people max without making it a clusterfuck. There will be a limit to each round, right?

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 7:51 am #24969

Guys, this really is a terrible idea. If you do not limit number of ghosts who can do Thunderdome, it will draw people away from other ghost roles and possible come back. If you do limit number that, there will rarely be enough people for proper matches, but Thunderdome will lose its novelty all the same.

Come on, this is the same reason away missions are not a thing. People will just go catatonic for Thunderdome. And then either that will happen from round to round and less and less people will be staying or most will become bored of it and it will just be there, forever forgotten, everyone sick of it.

Ezel · Post by **Ezel** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 8:15 am #24971

I hope some poeple
knew old lla? it had this sort system even working with 1 person
it was that person vs carp
en when more came it was against eachother
everything automated
But there was always griefing in the lobby/spectate room

tempchar1 · Post by **tempchar1** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 4:45 pm #25006

as for the potential of no canidates for aliens/ninjas/whatever

make it so that ghosts are automatically pulled out of the thunderdome ring when a special event comes that involves ghosts

ghosts can choose to check off this option

and to those saying that people will rather player the thunderdome than be on the station
let them, if they find the thunderdome more fun than the actual game itself, then they should be able to enjoy themselves

Lovecraft · Post by **Lovecraft** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 7:08 pm #25022

I hate the fact that the idea of being a ghost essentailly means you are exempt from gameplay isn't popular.
You've gotten yourself killed. It shouldn't be fun. You've died.
Granted, there are sometimes where death isn't preventable, but grumble grumble resentment resentment my ideas are correcet I am silly.

Arete · Post by **Arete** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 7:16 pm #25024

If the game can be made more fun for some people without becoming less fun for other people, then I don't think who deserves what really factors into it.

Reimoo · Post by **Reimoo** » Thu Aug 21, 2014 11:06 pm #25046

Nobody has given a reason as to why the ghosts shouldn't be able to have fun. It's a game. People are supposed to have fun.

MedicInDisquise · Thu Aug 21, 2014 11:16 pm

Add back everything from Revision 4876, with some tweaks.

From the wiki:

Revision 4876
This revision completely changed the game forever. Before this revision, ghosts could interact with the living realm. They had the ability to rotate chairs, use the "Boo!" verb which flickered lights on and off, and speech would leak into the world, although in a muffled in-cohesive manner. However, this was considered too fun for the station and was removed with the "justification" of fixing bugs.

Gives ghosts some fun things to do. Remove Boo! or make abuse of it punishable (So ghosts can't just flicker the lights in a PVP fight 4noraisen.), and perhaps remove the speech or make them hear as if their unconscious. (E.G You hear... Ian... or whatever when speech leaks.)

The only thing I can see wrong is that they can be abused to tell people if you're dead or who's a traitor. Not much you can do to fix that besides make a new policy for it, or tweak it further.

Lovecraft · Post by **Lovecraft** » Fri Aug 22, 2014 2:48 am #25075

The incentive to not die has always been a big thing for me. To know that actions actually hold weight in my enjoyment of the game or not adds a whole new level of thought to everything.
People'll think twice about risky business if it means being removed from a round. Though with this it's kind of a free pass out of that.
This is an oddly specific viewpoint I don't think too many people share.

Reimoo · Post by **Reimoo** » Fri Aug 22, 2014 4:58 am #25085

Well, fear of death is important. I'll give you that.

But as it stands right now not a lot of crewmembers value their lives in the first place. Anyone who does genuinely fear death is most likely an antagonist.

Spacemanspark · Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:23 pm

Perhaps if one suicides or observes, they shouldn't be able to participate?
Only people who actually died in a normal fashion (And not by killing themselves with an item over and over.) should be able to go to the thunderdome.

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:36 pm #25259

Spacemanspark wrote:Perhaps if one suicides or observes, they shouldn't be able to participate?
Only people who actually died in a normal fashion (And not by killing themselves with an item over and over.) should be able to go to the thunderdome.

Jump into space. Normal fashion. It's pretty much impossible to track.

Incomptinence · Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:50 pm

Suicidal gits entertaining the ghosts of others sounds like not a terrible thing and I have no idea why you would consider that a flaw. If someone would rather play thunder dome content let them, it isn't like they are griefing.

Miauw · Post by **Miauw** » Sat Aug 23, 2014 5:03 pm #25267

MedicInDisquise wrote:Add back everything from Revision 4876, with some tweaks.

From the wiki:

Revision 4876
This revision completely changed the game forever. Before this revision, ghosts could interact with the living realm. They had the ability to rotate chairs, use the "Boo!" verb which flickered lights on and off, and speech would leak into the world, although in a muffled in-cohesive manner. However, this was considered too fun for the station and was removed with the "justification" of fixing bugs.
Gives ghosts some fun things to do. Remove Boo! or make abuse of it punishable (So ghosts can't just flicker the lights in a PVP fight 4noraisen.), and perhaps remove the speech or make them hear as if their unconscious. (E.G You hear... Ian... or whatever when speech leaks.)

The only thing I can see wrong is that they can be abused to tell people if you're dead or who's a traitor. Not much you can do to fix that besides make a new policy for it, or tweak it further.

No.
Our players couldn't even handle being able to rotate chairs.

Steelpoint · Post by **Steelpoint** » Sat Aug 23, 2014 5:34 pm #25269

The good old days of ghosts moving chairs to correspond to who is a antag.

While I am hesitant in granting an incentive to dying, and would prefer the game modes better support a way of bringing dead players back into the round. A way to allow dead players to participate in the Thunderdome, allowing players to practice their combat skills in a quick and dirty environment, does seems like a good idea.

There should be some prerequisites however, such as:

A way to reset the Thunderdome at regular intervals.

A hardcap on the amount of Thunderdome participants (6 people for 3v3)

A restriction on players who commit suicide, such as a 5-10 minute cooldown.

A way to cycle through players who wish to use the Thunderdome.

A way for admins to halt the usage of the Thunderdome for event/test usage.

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Sat Aug 23, 2014 6:08 pm #25273

There should always be extra ghosts around for it to work, alternatively allow people be pulled into roles like wizard apprentice and syndie borg directly from Thunderdome. ANY ghost, including observers, shouldn't be able to join for a certain amount of time, like 10 minutes. Older ghosts should obviously have a priority.

Alternatively make it just an admin button, honestly, so it's used when there are million ghosts instead of aliums.

Ezel · Post by **Ezel** » Sat Aug 23, 2014 8:45 pm #25279

ask the coders off Lla
they done this before in the old days
before they switched to nt/code

Incomptinence · Sat Aug 23, 2014 10:52 pm

Rather than limit participants and all sorts of pansy arse nonsense gating I think the contestants should discorporate on crit (like manifest ghost) and the weapons should delete once dropped. Gear should be given from dispensers (on a short timer per player so we don't have some daft morons drop spamming to try and make lag) and players should simply spawn once a round. Leaving no bodies or items the ghosts should generate little lag so there is little reason to limit how many can play at once short of prep room size. Also if gear dispensers can be var edited to give different items and ghost cap altered it should be easy for admins to customise rounds also the thunderdome would be self cleaning for most purposes.

Fragnostic · Post by **Fragnostic** » Sun Aug 24, 2014 2:40 am #25315

Okay. Check this shit out.
What if these ghosts turn into holo-contestants. They are technically holograms. They compete in the Thunderdome and like all of you said, the deleting weapons thing.

And when you emag the holodeck in the station, instead of spawning space carp, it spawns the contestants currently in the Thunderdome and are bound to the emaggerr like a Borg. They come with half the health of a real human, being as they are holograms, but their hologram weapons do real damage. Once the console is emagged, it is broken and cannot be used/emagged again. You could have a deathsquad at your fingertips or big fat risky bag of nothing.

Spacemanspark · Thu Aug 28, 2014 12:02 am

Lo6a4evskiy wrote:
Spacemanspark wrote:Perhaps if one suicides or observes, they shouldn't be able to participate?
Only people who actually died in a normal fashion (And not by killing themselves with an item over and over.) should be able to go to the thunderdome.
Jump into space. Normal fashion. It's pretty much impossible to track.

Did someone grab them and throw them into space, did they go into space with a hardsuit and internals equipped and run out of internals, or did they just open up an airlock and run into space?

Cheridan · Post by **Cheridan** » Thu Aug 28, 2014 2:17 am #25888

I fully agree that ghosts need more to do. Lots of ghosts means lot of deadchat tears and I DED RESTART votes. If being dead wasn't so awful, maybe rounds wouldn't have to be so short as a "consideration" for these bored corpses.

I think the best way to go about this would be /vg/-style MoMMis or some other method of getting back into the round in a minorly productive manner. I don't think a literal deathmatch arena sends the right message.

Gun Hog · Post by **Gun Hog** » Thu Aug 28, 2014 4:34 am #25899

Cheridan wrote:I fully agree that ghosts need more to do. Lots of ghosts means lot of deadchat tears and I DED RESTART votes. If being dead wasn't so awful, maybe rounds wouldn't have to be so short as a "consideration" for these bored corpses.

I think the best way to go about this would be /vg/-style MoMMis or some other method of getting back into the round in a minorly productive manner. I don't think a literal deathmatch arena sends the right message.

NT has Maintenance Drones, with a little cleanup and work, they could be deployed to /tg/! Death sucks, and return-to-round opportunities are disgustingly rare. Our death penalty is harsh so people will fear it, but our death penalty has a major flaw compared to other games; You have to wait. You will sometimes be waiting hours to be able to play again. In other games, you may lose all your hard earned stuff, sometimes even your character itself. You lose your progress..but in many other games, you do not have to wait to play again. This is true even for roguelikes. Picking up the pieces and starting over is part of the appeal! Losing is fun, waiting is not.

This can easily be extended to typical experiences with Security. They will put you out of your round for a while and take away your stuff. Often, they will do this permanently. Perma is where Security puts you if they do not want to be bothered to kill you. In my opinion, it is worse than death; Your choices are often just to sit there in your cell and hope someone will help you, try to escape (which will not happen often with competent Sec), or simply ghost. Why would anyone want to keep playing when all you can do is look at your character and wait? At least with death, you may release your ghost and chat with people. You get to watch the round play out as a ghost - that sometimes is sufficient appeal in itself to warrant connecting to the server!

Death should suck, but it should NOT be boring. This is a game. Games are for fun. If I am not enjoying my experience, I will leave.

Lo6a4evskiy · Post by **Lo6a4evskiy** » Thu Aug 28, 2014 7:27 am #25906

Spacemanspark wrote:Did someone grab them and throw them into space, did they go into space with a hardsuit and internals equipped and run out of internals, or did they just open up an airlock and run into space?

I'm not sure you can track someone being grabbed and thrown into space. Being grabbed and thrown, sure.

But even if you can, they can be pulled into space, left near airlock to be sucked outside by air, put in closet/bodybag/coffin/whatever and pulled outside. Hardsuit equipped? Well what if I had it in my hand and then put it on when already in space? It happens sometimes when I forget to put it on. May be they walked out of airlock in firesuit trying to fight somebody and got hit by a meteor.

And how do you define space? May be I died in one tile hull breach in the middle of medbay, without a hardsuit. Will it get tracked? What if the hull breach is very big and I accidentally slipped into space outside of the station?

Too many variables.

Cheridan wrote:If being dead wasn't so awful, maybe rounds wouldn't have to be so short as a "consideration" for these bored corpses.

I'm not so sure that this is the reason. I mean, lots of dead probably correlate to shuttle call, but not because of "consideration". Lots of dead means that something killed them. That something is either out there killing some more and so survivors (or Asimov Ai) call the shuttle to get away. Or it's dead and survivors call the shuttle because nobody likes extended.

callanrockslol · Mon Sep 01, 2014 9:08 am

Fragnostic wrote:Okay. Check this shit out.
What if these ghosts turn into holo-contestants. They are technically holograms. They compete in the Thunderdome and like all of you said, the deleting weapons thing.

And when you emag the holodeck in the station, instead of spawning space carp, it spawns the contestants currently in the Thunderdome and are bound to the emaggerr like a Borg. They come with half the health of a real human, being as they are holograms, but their hologram weapons do real damage. Once the console is emagged, it is broken and cannot be used/emagged again. You could have a deathsquad at your fingertips or big fat risky bag of nothing.

Just make holo-duelsan option on the normal holo-deck and when safties are turned off allows holo-monsters as one of the options.

Also emaging already removes the safties and lets you do all sorts of fun things with fire and carp

Saegrimr · Post by **Saegrimr** » Wed Sep 03, 2014 11:28 pm #26885

Gun Hog wrote:
Cheridan wrote: I think the best way to go about this would be /vg/-style MoMMis or some other method of getting back into the round in a minorly productive manner. I don't think a literal deathmatch arena sends the right message.
NT has Maintenance Drones, with a little cleanup and work, they could be deployed to /tg/! Death sucks, and return-to-round opportunities are disgustingly rare. Our death penalty is harsh so people will fear it, but our death penalty has a major flaw compared to other games; You have to wait. You will sometimes be waiting hours to be able to play again.

I really love the MoMMIs, and the theft idea of the maintenance drones. In the meantime i've been trying to figure out how to disable borg chat and station radio on engineering borgs and sticking bored ghosts on the derelict if they really wanted something to do. Biggest problem i've seen so far is I tried it during a ling round and they kept blowing the borgs.

litmeuplol · Post by **litmeuplol** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 1:02 pm #27439

Maybe a bad idea, but what if you had to ask an administrator/whoever else is there to get in the thunderdome/get in the thunderdome queue?

Probably a bad idea, because on high-pop rounds it's possible this might cause people to spam the admins or whoever.

also, maybe as well as the thunderdome, give us access to the Centcomm bar? Maybe that's a bit too much fun for the coders, though.

Hellafied · Post by **Hellafied** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 6:51 pm #28383

Spacemanspark wrote:This would also allow the entertainment channel in the bar to actually serve some use. It shows a camera view of the thunderdome, yes?

I think that's a great idea.

Might want to make walls and windows unbreakable though. It would b bad to be floating into space and find some dumbass that broke free and now you have an esword.

Aurx · Post by **Aurx** » Sat Sep 13, 2014 12:27 am #28451

Saegrimr wrote:
Gun Hog wrote:
Cheridan wrote: I think the best way to go about this would be /vg/-style MoMMis or some other method of getting back into the round in a minorly productive manner. I don't think a literal deathmatch arena sends the right message.
NT has Maintenance Drones, with a little cleanup and work, they could be deployed to /tg/! Death sucks, and return-to-round opportunities are disgustingly rare. Our death penalty is harsh so people will fear it, but our death penalty has a major flaw compared to other games; You have to wait. You will sometimes be waiting hours to be able to play again.
I really love the MoMMIs, and the theft idea of the maintenance drones. In the meantime i've been trying to figure out how to disable borg chat and station radio on engineering borgs and sticking bored ghosts on the derelict if they really wanted something to do. Biggest problem i've seen so far is I tried it during a ling round and they kept blowing the borgs.

Drones are horrible to play as, and are a stellar example of the pants-on-head mentality of "Let's reinvent the wheel as a snowflake instead of porting anything" mentality that occasionally plagues /tg/station coders. Just port MoMMIs and let them autism up the derelict.

Saegrimr · Post by **Saegrimr** » Mon Sep 15, 2014 12:15 am #28857

Aurx wrote:Drones are horrible to play as, and are a stellar example of the pants-on-head mentality of "Let's reinvent the wheel as a snowflake instead of porting anything" mentality that occasionally plagues /tg/station coders. Just port MoMMIs and let them autism up the derelict.

I never actually got to try the drones, I just assumed they were mommi ports renamed/sprited.
Pretty sure they just want something they can call their own, instead of just being "yet another stolen asset".

Add thunderdome for ghosts?