Gang converting sec/snowballing

[CPTANT]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Video Game development is hard and design by committee is a shit-producing nightmare.

Development works best with a clear direction given by a benevolent dictator (A director).

But you guys whine whenever you're given a direction you disagree with. So nobody bothers.

Nobody actually ever set a series of design goals for the game.

We have only had people trying to push the game into a certain direction without ever correctly relating it to long term goals.

A lot of the controversial (read: plain nonsensical) changes such as Goofchem, the Nuke ops locked suits or macro bombs failed so hard exactly because they did not have clear goals in mind or actually worked against the stated goals.

[onleavedontatme]

The last time Cheridan tried to provide major direction (ruling on armor) you accused him of bring political, got in a fight with him/got banned, and then started undoing the armor changes anyways as part of other PRs after he explicitly told you no.

We don't have design by committee so much as design by sheer stubbornness.

I hope you see the irony in lamenting a lack of direction/leadership.

[Steelpoint]

The last time Cheridan tried to provide major direction (ruling on armor) you accused him of bring political, got in a fight with him/got banned, and then started undoing the armor changes anyways as part of other PRs after he explicitly told you no.

We don't have design by committee so much as design by sheer stubbornness.

I hope you see the irony in lamenting a lack of direction/leadership.

The only armour values I reverted AFTER our conversation on IRC was the Death Squad PR that was more for balancing to remove the Nanite Injector.

If Cheridan flatly stated that he wants the game to go in X direction, I'll piss and moan about it (if I disagree) but I won't put up dozens of revert PR's.

The problem is that he has not done that, he just rarely puts up a massive balance PR with little clear goal.

There is no preset plans, no design documents or discussions, its off the hook changes with little real pre-thought.

[Zilenan91]

On the topic of stun combat, one of the main reasons I ever supported the pistol PR in the first place was because it removed most tasers. I believed and still do believe that tasers are the single worst part and offender about this games combat. They trivialize all combat encounters to clicking on a dude once and it just being over, with memes like adrenals or whatever lings use these days not exactly doing anything to fix it, but instead mitigate it and further building off of what was badly designed in the first place to make it more bearable.

The pistols, on the other hand, gave actual tension to combat. There was no walking out of maint and getting instantly GGNORE'd by somebody, you had time to react to it, and process how to stop yourself from getting downed by them or even fight back. There is no tension with tasers. You get clicked once, you get cuffed, and it's over. The pistols were great. That's why I supported them so heartily, and I truly think the only reason that the test for them failed is because of pettiness towards Steelpoint and unwillingness of the playerbase to change. They would have taken a huge step to finally getting rid of stun combat.

On the other hand, the other problem our combat system has is that it lacks depth. By depth I don't mean types of weapons you can shoot at people, or where you can shoot them at, but how little consequence there is to getting your chest riddled with bullets aside from a horrible death. A more advanced medical system would do wonders for the game, but Cheridan just doesn't seem like he wants to organize something like that. And so we stagnate.

[CPTANT]

The last time Cheridan tried to provide major direction (ruling on armor) you accused him of bring political, got in a fight with him/got banned, and then started undoing the armor changes anyways as part of other PRs after he explicitly told you no.

We don't have design by committee so much as design by sheer stubbornness.

I hope you see the irony in lamenting a lack of direction/leadership.

This was in no way related to any design goals. It was a direct response of "Weapon X is not good enough vs Y, thus nerf Y".

We have NEVER had anyone come up with design goals with a direction for the game to go.

[Steelpoint]

Responding to Zil but if you want to make stuns less powerful you should look to Goon's tasers, in their game Tasers need two hits to stun and the only one-hit stuns on offer are either melee or antagonist (Magic Missile, or Ling Parasting).

If I could I would look at making Tasers a two shot stun, but I digress.

[Zilenan91]

The pistols were 2 shot stuns. That's why I supported them, and it's why they were so good.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

The pistols were 2 shot stuns. That's why I supported them, and it's why they were so good.

However, they were bullets, which is why people hated them.

If they'd been recharging-mag energy weapons with a 2-hit stun, then they'd have been pretty much an automerge, but steelpoint insisted that they had to be projectile weapons, and therefore they weren't merged.

[Zilenan91]

I could see there being energy pistols with two kinds of powerpacks, lethal charge, and nonlethal being a thing which could happen. Literally energy version of the bay pistols like there were before.

[Amelius]

Responding to Zil but if you want to make stuns less powerful you should look to Goon's tasers, in their game Tasers need two hits to stun and the only one-hit stuns on offer are either melee or antagonist (Magic Missile, or Ling Parasting).

If I could I would look at making Tasers a two shot stun, but I digress.

Not a fair comparison given that their lethals do multitudes more damage than ours.

[Incomptinence]

Sounds like they found a middle ground of making both quite effective but not instantly so. Instead of the abomination that was the original dissabler concept of making non lethals almost as much effort as lasering a guy down with piss lasers if not more considering cuffs.

[CPTANT]

Sounds like they found a middle ground of making both quite effective but not instantly so. Instead of the abomination that was the original dissabler concept of making non lethals almost as much effort as lasering a guy down with piss lasers if not more.

This just highlights how much lasers suck.

[Incomptinence]

I did call them piss.

[Zilenan91]

I mean, in real life, it's probably a lot easier for cops to just shoot all criminals but they don't do it because it's inhumane. The nonlethal route will be inherently harder.

[PKPenguin321]

Then nerf slips. The reason everything else was nerfed is because stuns are uninteractive and shit. It's the slow removal of stun combat in action.

or we could un-nerf the other things so that we don't continue the reverse powercreep
if you nerf slips, people will eventually start using the next most powerful stun, and then that will get nerfed
and then they will move on to the next, which will also get nerfed
until eventually there are no stuns and death gets removed for being unbalanced and ss13 gets nerfed to not have any servers

[Zilenan91]

Except all that entire chain of events is is just the perpetuation of stun combat. The slow nerfing of all of these uninteractive elements in our combat system will eventually push lethals into a place where they will be more viable than stuns are. Irregardless, stun combat will never go unless we have a more advanced medical system, but this is a step in the right direction.

[Incomptinence]

We seem to be back at the odd point where people seem to want to be killed rather than arrested. A policy decision could deliver this decisively without the endless game of hunt the thing that stopped me, just let officers kill criminals on the spot.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

We seem to be back at the odd point where people seem to want to be killed rather than arrested. A policy decision could deliver this decisively without the endless game of hunt the thing that stopped me, just let officers kill criminals on the spot.

If someone's resisting arrest and has a weapon, murder them to death. Sec were given more leeway lately.