Rule 2 Precedent 5 Needs better rewording

[Ezel]

The precident in question

Atmos techs are not allowed to edit atmos at roundstart so that the AI cannot use it for malicious purposes. While this might not make sense IC, it's a necessary OOC precedent for some game mechanics to work. Atmos techs are allowed if they have any reasonable suspicion of the AI being rogue.

This would give the general idea to a player that they aren't allowed to do any edits that would prevent malicous plasmaflooding from the AI This would include swapping to manual valves or disconnecting the piping from the airmix entirely.

If i ask admins if its ok to do this some say yes and some say no
the admins who say yes argue they did something like making a bz chamber and the ones that say no fall on the exact wording of the precedent that points more to any edits to atmos in general to prevent this. this makes the precedent kinda confusing in general

And the other part is that the atmos in maps kinda sucks and that everything has to go trough the airmix chamber for ai being able to flood but its also the perfect chamber to mix BZ



This link shows you a example of this

But i think the ruling needs rewording so it can be more clear

[Timberpoes]

I don't think it's confusingly worded.

Obviously the truth for why an atmos tech repipes atmos can literally be "just because I wanted to optimise it better" and there's not much an admin can say to contest it, even where this outcome is functionally 1:1 identical to "I'm repiping atmos at minute 0 so a possible malf or subverted AI cannot exploit it" outcomes.

Which means either the ruling prevents all OOC fuckery with atmos at all, or exists as a trivial test where honest players get punished and liars do not, for there is little way to actually prove a liar a wrong if they tell you they were just editing it to do some autism project or set up some atmosian fuckery or whatever.

I think the core issue with the ruling as it stands today, is that since it was made the codebase have sort of forgotten about it. At the time of the ruling, atmos job content was reacting to atmos problems that came up during the shift. They had no reason to """optimise""" atmos until after something had gone wrong, which gave any malicious AI time to quickly flood distro with plasma if it so wished.

I think the codebase also back off from one of the overarching dread setpieces of the malf AI being the plasma flood by giving atmos all new job content which involves never leaving their department and instead drags them directly into repiping it. Unless that atmosian is an antag they're not going to mix their exotic gas mix with any piping that heads to distro incase they fuck it up and get a month ban for killing the station.

So the ruling can probably be removed, the codebase can probably just design default atmos to not be so ass that the first thing any sensible atmos player will do shiftstart is unplug the entire thing and repipe it so whatever exotic gas mix they're making will not infact connect to distro, and we can all accept that the age of AIs plasma flooding without also using engi borgs or an engi shell are dead.

Because the alternative is the headmins re-affirming that any roundstart edits to atmos that prevent an AI plasma flooding are not admin discretion to allow and are globally prohibited except where there is some reasonable suspicion the AI may be malf or subverted in some manner. To protect an integral part of malf AI gameplay. And somehow I don't see this headmin team doing that, cuz it'd probably just cause them more minor annoyance via vocal malders than scrapping the ruling entirely.

[MooCow12]

This was a disconnect of tanks to pure rather than a repipe, followed by them immediately screaming “malf” as soon as i, an engie borg, went near, which was incredibly confusing. Because they were also pointing at their own broken connections (which i didnt know was theirs) they made me believe they were either complaining about the broken connection or suggesting that only an antagonist would have been allowed to disconnect it and they thought i did it.

Im still confused about what was going on and what round start pipes in atmos youre allowed to touch because of this situation.

[MooCow12]

For all i know this might not even be an issue with this explicit policy it might just be some unspoken terry atmos meta that i breached by being in atmos as a borg too early in the round and setting up atmos like this is just a standard

[DaBoss]

Reword it so that it applies to everyone, with more of an emphasis on the problem behaviour (prepping against possible rogue AI or other antag for no reason) and less focus on whatever is meta strat currently. This will likely change over the years.

[Cobby]

this isnt even a problem anymore with latejoin borgs, i think the ruling never caught up with the codebase unless you specifically want to protect the ability to T0 flood to distro which no one would do anyways if theyre trying to win.

Rule 4 already covers preemptively BTFOing antags, which covers the specific intent that this rule wants to cover. Calling out this specific action just implies people to be RAW and ban any roundstart deviation, so the rule should just be removed.

[Timberpoes]

Rule 4 itself doesn't prevent you editing atmos roundstart in a way that'd cuck over malf AIs as long as you're not doing it to cuck over malf AIs. And there are now more valid ctrl-c ctrl-v reasons that apply in 100% of shifts without exception than ever before for atmosians to roundstart repipe due expanded job content since that ruling was made.

The basic job content of making and mixing gasses is all the reason they need to mess around with the piping of pretty much everything the AI could use to flood distro.

When there is no difference between "I wanted to cuck potential malf floods" and "I need to repipe everything to do my core job content shiftstart" then it's no longer really enforceable in practice, and only serves to punish honest people and reward liars since admins will hyper fixate on the nebulous motive, but they'll be unable to challenge the player on any answer.

[Cobby]

This isnt unique to the Atmos default configuration setup when we look at the other rules, or even rule 4 itself in other situations. Rule 4 prevents preemptively hindering antags which would include doing something (in this case tweaking the pipe setup) specifically to hinder the AI. There being a lot of plausible reasons doesnt change that the same way there are many plausible reasons for say killing someone or being a dick that could secretly be you just being a stinker but you have enough plausible deniability with the mechanics of the game and the context of the round to get away with it when you should have been in trouble for it. We do not try to navigate those individual instances through an explicit mentioning in the rulelist though because the list would become unwieldy AND because the intent, which is detailed in the overarching rule (in this case r4), is the important part anyways.

I understand and even agree with the premise that how atmos currently works gives the malicious action plausible deniability. I dont have an opinion on whether that ought to change or not. I'm arguing this is not a unique situation when looking at other situations, but for some reason this one gets called out explicitly, making it fairly reasonably assumed to be viewed as a no fun allowed rule ergo should be removed. Are you suggesting the concept be unenforced as well as the actual rule itself (IE if someone honestly said "I made this configuration to btfo the AI" you would allow that post a removal of the rule, even when rule 4 exists?). Maybe misreading and/or talking parallel to each other, but I dont understand if we both agree that the rule itself should be removed what nuance is left to tease out unless you think rule 4 *shouldnt* or *wouldnt* cover the situation after the explicit "pipe configuration" rule removal and people should just be able to edit the configuration without even a mere question from an admin because it only hurts the people that didnt read the rule to know to lie, and not the people who know the rule well enough to lie but wanted to do it anyways.

I understand admins cant ascertain intent if the person is lying, but Im having a hard time piecing out the "so what" if it still has potential to catch people who dont know the rule BMing. Especially in the context of apart from maybe the really great fallback thats not so reliably usable in other situations, what makes this situation different than any other intent-based ruling where one user can have more knowledge/command of the rulelist than others to mask said intent?

[iain0]

We've discussed this internally, most of the points have been suitably discussed already, but our intent for these rulings would be to prevent intentional metagaming of a potential antag's actions, without making atmospherics into a risky situation where removing a wrong pipe might get you bwoinked because it was related to flooding strategies. Intentionally pre-gaming a malf, bad, messing it up while doing normal atmos things, no issue.

We have agreed to take the following actions regarding this policy thread:

• Removal of rule 2 precedent 5. Our intention is not to allow pre-gaming of AI flood potential, we simply feel this is already covered under rule 4's coverage of pre-empting antagonists
• We will add a head admin precedent to the headmin rulings page to clarify our intent here, under General rulings: Pre-empting AI atmos floods - Intentionally disconnecting the AIs ability to atmospherics flood without good IC reason is not permitted and covered by Rule 4. This is not intended to cover the accidental breakage of relevant connections during normal atmospherics work (i.e. unintentionally).

These changes likely don't alter anything about how these rules are currently being handled.





In a less official capacity (they let me have the speaking shell, the fools!)

I feel like this used to be a headmin precedent, I wonder if we're just reverting something previously done, but I don't care to check the wiki history to find out and doesn't change the results.

This is completely out of our scope, even to recommend, but it may be that mapping work could help here too ; I learned distro/waste from meta and that layout is all over that floor. Didn't mean much long ago but atmos has become a hive of activity over the years. Given everything is kind of wired up together and in the way an alternative might be to redo the way "distro control" room works, maybe give it its own selection of feed/mix chamber/stuff that's suitably walled off to be inconvenient to do normal other atmos work in, and separate from a good "work area" (perhaps which also has gas feeds and similar so they're ready to work there rather than refitting external ""tank"" (box of gas in space) connectors.

This is no guarantee this is a good idea or that any map change would get merged, I/we hold zero actual power there, merely that there are perhaps multiple answers that lie elsewhere, and these ideas maybe best spark a discussion in the relevant area of coders or mappers if anyone feels inspired to try solve this (go talk to the people who approve those areas).