Overthrow should be removed or disabled

[confused rock]

Thinking about overthrow has made me realise no aspect of it makes sense and that I must urgently type this on my phone. Overthrow is uninteresting for both the antagonist AND the nonantags, it has no new ideas whatsoever(gang implant breaker style conversions and traitor items? Kill heads of staff? Change laws to say only x are syndicate agents?) And, god forbid, it’s too confusing for new players! Unlike other gamemodes, this is simply because it’s poorly explained and too little information is given. When understood, the flaws are so apparent I dont see how this got merged. Let’s start with the smallest issue:
The gear teams are given.
The one thing I like about them is that being given random gear sounds good IN THEORY. It feels now like the teams don’t even need gear but have it regardless.
Basically how it works is the team leader (and each of the two later teammates) gets a storage implant with one traitor item inside which costs less than 5 tc. Here is what I’ve seen or heard people get:
Sleepy pen
Sword pen
Pistol
Chameleon kit
Bar of FUCKING SOAP
Just why? That’s such varience between which almost useless item the traitor is given. It’d be better if they got a choice of 3 instead, or better yet. A hand picked list of items that could be anything, like a switchblade or something, instead of just random bad traitor items. But wait! The team leader gets an uplink too! With... five... telecrystals... okay, what the FUCK? Why did he need an uplink, but giving him enough for an emag was too much? What’s he gonna buy, a codebook? Why not just cut out the random items and give him 20tc? Why not give each member an uplink implant? Why give him the same list that syndies get, but with 90% of it unpurchaseable due to cost? Why does the team even need items? Extremely disappointing.
The conversion is also odd, but I’ll lump the main problems in with the objectives. All I can say is that several times people merely walked up to or slipped me and injected me with the conversion juice.
Each objective is weird, but first off, victory is based off ‘points.’ Points are never explained and can’t be tracked- you only see the winning team’s points at roundend. Each team has 3 objectives, all 3 are the same but one slightly differs-
The difference is each team has to, in order of highest score, convert, exile, or kill a certain person. In order to maximise points, the team will have to walk up to and use one of their two conversion charges on that person, who has no reason to resist.
The next objective is to subvert the ai with the law module in the leader’s backpack. This just leads to the smartest and fastest team raiding tech storage first and placing the console in secluded maint. the end. I still don’t know if points are rewarded based on the ai’s final allegiance, or how long it was subverted for, since nothing is explained.
Last objective is purely broken. The teams have the same goal- in order of points, convert, exile, or kill all heads of staff. The teams only get 2 conversions, so they use the last on a head.
Now to try to exile for more poi- just kidding, here comes rhe most obvious and blatant flaw.
The game doesn’t track which team killed a head of starf. All teams are rewarded.
IF EVERY TEAM IS REWARDED, NONE ARE. The teams have no motivation to exile staff over killing them- in fact, they have no reason to exile them in the first place. By the time the team converts their third member (fourth if you count the ai) they have no other goals. They couldn’t even try to hamper the other teams. How do I know this? My overthrow team won with all of ifs members dead!
Basil has had many short rounds lately, and the longest I’ve been in was 2 hours. It was overthrow. It took 80 minutes to learn it was overthrow (cap found an ai hack mod) and by that time ooc was reeing about the length. The shuttle was finally called because of *pirates* and I was released from the prison sanitarium because they learned that I couldn’t be an antag since I didn’t resist the mindshield implant and as such I must’ve been somehow framed. The captain didn’t even die the whole two hours. The best part? It was a three way tie between three of the teams! That hasn’t happened since the original cars movie!!
The round lasted longer than most extendeds, but it was less interesting than extended.
I don’t see any merits of overthrow. It’s starting to make me miss gang and even SHADOWLING. More modes isn’t fun if the modes themselves aren’t, and though overthrow hasn’t been around long, I haven’t seen a single pr trying to improve it. Maybe I’ve gone insane, but it’s either that or overthrow is a boring, confusing gamemode with an absurdly obvious flaw.

[Anuv]

There's a feedback thread specifically for OT. But I agree on pretty much all accounts. The fact that clockwork got removed but this/hivemind are in is bananas.

[BeeSting12]

There's a feedback thread specifically for OT. But I agree on pretty much all accounts. The fact that clockwork got removed but this/hivemind are in is bananas.

You forget that clock cult was in for almost two years before it was decided it was completely shitty and finally removed. These modes each deserve some time to prove they can be good, just as clock cult had its two years (including a major rework halfway through). If these modes turn out to be shitty after some changes I hope they get removed faster though.

I actually like the concept of a conversion based mode that incentivizes converting security and heads. The first round I played of it was hilarious- I caught out two mutineers close to roundstart but couldn't do anything about them because I was an assistant. I reported them to sec who turned out to be corrupt except for one guy. The one guy threw me in perma at the urging of his corrupt fellow officers. I eventually got killed when me and an enemy mutineer attempted to escape permabrig. I think we killed one corrupt officer on the way out too.

Once the meta set in though, there were problems. The first one was quite possibly the worst: The rush the tech storage for the AI upload board meta. It's just not fun for anyone, including the AI, who just gets shuffled from team to team the whole round after having their board stolen round start. Just remove the objective entirely, or make it so the overthrow board has to be used on the AI core itself.

The second is the awful points system: There's no point to it when only converted count towards your total, everything else counts the same for every team. It may as well not even exist.

The random Syndicate items are kind of useless and I don't see much of a point in them.

I don't see a problem with the conversion method, but with only two implants, they need to be used wisely. And by wisely, I mean there's only two ways to use them if you want to maximize points. It's basically worthless to use the implant on anyone besides your target, the captain, or a head. To maximize points, I'm pretty sure you'd have to convert the captain, a head of staff, and kill/exile your target. Or possibly replace head of staff with your target.

Overall, it feels like the mode tried to be revs but failed at the aspect of revs that makes it so good: the simplicity.

[Cobby]

I will forever say cc was pretty rad when it was first introduced, and the constant shifting of abilities/numbers without actually stopping to get a feel of what needed to be fixed/what was fine is what killed it.

CC has consistently been a gamemode ruined by it's pioneers in both iterations.

[wesoda25]

Clockcult was pretty fun and new. Yeah, at its birth it was blood cult but yellow. But even then it was fun and interesting, and some people long for old clock cult days.

You literally can’t compare it to OT because of how unoriginal it is. There was concept, lore, actual driving factors behind cc. Overthrow is just traitors+rev but asking people not to murderbone. If it’s going to work, a lot of things need change.

First of all, it has to be enforced in code and policy that teams are supposed to compete. I’ve seen multiple games (one of them I was a team leader in) wheres teams don’t necessarily work together, but will murderbone hand in hand. Definitely didn’t try to kill one another. Similarly, as points mesh together, theres no incentive to kill each other. If one team converts AI, it counts for all of em, etc. Similarly, theres no reason to convert heads as opposed to killing.

At this point, the best OT could get is rebalancing, but that wouldn’t make it fun OR original. At the end of the day, its just not a good gamemode.

[D&B]

You two should take those rose tinted glasses off before you crash into that rose tinted wall

[BeeSting12]

Clock cult's biggest issue is that it tried creating a game within a game. The more complicated features your mode has that people have to learn, the more it sucks to play. If it makes use of items already on the station and keeps the action on the station then it's already done right what clock cult (and blood cult to some extent) have done wrong.

also lol'd about the lore behind clock cult. i dont give a flying flip about lore if the gameplay for it sucks. unloved rock is basically correct on everything about the mode though, when you stop and think about it, it's taken ideas from multiple different modes, but has nothing original.

[Dr_bee]

The lore was nice to roleplay with but game modes on /tg/ aren't balanced around the ability to roleplay.

I loved clock cults defense and base building style of gameplay but yes it was too complicated. Both cults had the problem of basically turning cultists into mini wizards. Before numerous cult buffs there was some "maybe magic maybe mundane memetic hazards" style to blood cult.

On the subject of Overthrow, the conversion aspect of it actually works to the detriment of the mode. The fact you can convert the captain and HoS, which are supposed to be roles you can almost always trust, is a bad thing. Also the AI laws are shittily written so linked borgs dont know what to do, and they dont get antaghud to follow them, and honestly converting the AI shouldnt be an objective for points beyond the advantages subverting AI laws already give you.

Putting any conversion, even limited, is a BAD FUCKING IDEA PEOPLE.

[confused rock]

I thought about the fact that overthrow is still new, but what seperates it the most from gang or cc to me is this: while clock cult was struggling with how often it was updated, but, correct me if I’m wrong, not one pr has been made to change overthrow in any way. If I didn’t know any better I’d say this mode was made only for the bounty, but who would do this just for 100 bucks and a wizard token?

[obscolene]

Someone puts up a bounty for a game mode and suddenly we get 2 new really shitty gamemodes. How very coincidental.. it's almost as if when there's motivation to do something that isn't just the will to make good, enjoyable, original content -- you get recycled effortless garbage.

[DemonFiren]

Someone puts up a bounty for a game mode and suddenly we get 2 new really shitty gamemodes. How very coincidental.. it's almost as if when there's motivation to do something that isn't just the will to make good, enjoyable, original content -- you get recycled effortless garbage.

particularly after the requirements were relaxed "just this once, will not be happening again"