Abductors and Mindcontrolling

[Taylork2]

As a foreword, this isn't about abductors harmbatoning to kill crewmembers, in fact for this I'm going to assume that the current headmins would rule that abductors cannot directly murder anything outside of extreme circumstances.

Policy change: Abductors should be allowed to give kill orders as long as it isn't for simple mass murder.

Recently abductors have become far more popular, enough so to occasionally see two separate solo abductors during rounds, and I've even seen a Blood Brother team become an abductor team. So I suppose this is time to discuss the limit of their brainwashing.
Specifically, should abductors be allowed to give partial/full antag/murderbone permission with mindcontrol commands.
Keep in mind that abductors can theoretically mind control 20 crewmembers in a single instant with the mindshock gland, so a kill command could go out to half the station if the abductor does it correctly.

There are valid reasons abductors would want to give crewmembers murder commands.
A malfunctioning AI is doomsdaying so the abductor releases an abductee next to the core and brainwashes them to kill it.
Genetics has unlocked hulked and giving it out to crewmembers to prevent the Abductors from stunning, so you brainwash the crew to kill all hulks or to kill anyone who attempts to use the genetics console.
The other antagonists aren't entertaining the crew so they early call the shuttle, so you use mindcontrol to recall the shuttle and kill those who try to call.
Roboticics and the RD have decided to start mass producing AI, and Cyborgs to counter you.


There's also the idea that creating fights and murder is more entertaining and motivating for both the player/s you mind control and the people your targeting compared to most alternatives.

Some players simply don't care for what you mindcontrolled them to do and will purposely take the least generous interpretation of your command making murder commands the most direct and easiest one to carry out. If you mind control the RD to stop Roboticists from producing AIs/Cyborgs or geneticists from printing hulk injectors with the commands, "Stop X from doing X" they can just interpret it as requiring them to say "Don't build AIs" once over the radio as they proceed to return back to their job.


There are also 'fun' reasons.
The escape shuttle is about to launch so you give the departing crew a mindcontrol like, "The escape shuttle is a battle royale. Kill or remove other crewmembers until there's only one left!"
The round is actually getting boring for most of the players.

So should abductors be allowed to give out kill oriented brainwashing? And where's the stopping point?

[Tlaltecuhtli]

adbductors are fine except for the AoE mindcontroll gland thing which caused this:


dude had recall and kill shuttle callers mindcontrol and the abductor accidentally forgot to change the brainwash text and he pulsed the same order 2 or 3 times next to people trying to call, creating a snowball effect that lasted 20 minutes until abductor noticed and removed mind control

[cacogen]

the infinisleep baton is not fun for the victim and prevents roleplaying with the abductors in their ship while they probe your asshole (unless this has been changed, it's been awhile since i had the pleasure of eating shit by being abducted)

"I don't see any difference between abduction and rape." - Errorage

[wesoda25]

I bought a brainwashing surgery disk a couple weeks ago and worked hard to brainwash 3 people, just to see at round end that a lone abductor did triple that with probably half the effort. Not entirely sure what the problem is here or how to fix it but it was a feelsbad moment.

[pugie]

The AOE mind control item affects whole rooms and how would we expect an admin to react to people not following an abductors roomwide orders to immediately suicide? This has happened before and I'd like to know if it was meant to be disregarded as a rule break or not.

[Taylork2]

I edited the initial post to contain a policy change suggestion.

The AOE mind control item affects whole rooms and how would we expect an admin to react to people not following an abductors roomwide orders to immediately suicide? This has happened before and I'd like to know if it was meant to be disregarded as a rule break or not.

I wouldn't know, but I wouldn't want people who are brainwashed to commit suicide to be admin-enforced to use the suicide verb or to even have to fireaxe themselves into crit.

I bought a brainwashing surgery disk a couple weeks ago and worked hard to brainwash 3 people, just to see at round end that a lone abductor did triple that with probably half the effort. Not entirely sure what the problem is here or how to fix it but it was a feelsbad moment.

Abductor brainwashing works differently, when they give a gland and release a target they get a random brainwashing objective that's usually something like "Do x random thing now". Abductors can use a Mind Interface Device to brainwash them to give them a custom command of the abductor's creation for between 30 seconds and 5 minutes(depends on the gland). Using the mindshock gland it instead mindcontrols everyone nearby but the target for 10 minutes.
Most glands can be activated multiple times, but each one mind controls for a certain length of time with a certain number of uses.

[XivilaiAnaxes]

the infinisleep baton is not fun for the victim and prevents roleplaying with the abductors in their ship while they probe your asshole (unless this has been changed, it's been awhile since i had the pleasure of eating shit by being abducted)

"I don't see any difference between abduction and rape." - Errorage

I have fond memories of being a carded AI in the captains bag as he got probed.
The entire rest of the crew was on a fun white ship adventure...

[Fatal]

adbductors are fine except for the AoE mindcontroll gland thing which caused this:


dude had recall and kill shuttle callers mindcontrol and the abductor accidentally forgot to change the brainwash text and he pulsed the same order 2 or 3 times next to people trying to call, creating a snowball effect that lasted 20 minutes until abductor noticed and removed mind control

Whilst Im not going to discuss precisely what I did, administrative action was taken against the abductor in question here

That round was a total shitshow because of those mind control shenanigans and multiple people got murdered for it, I'd rather not see any more rounds like that

[Cobby]

Side antags need to realize they are the sidepiece and stop doing their best to take over rounds. Abductors should not be putting people in situations where they are brain controlled to sit in a corner or whatever should they lose their gland, or causing people to mass suicide/die. You capture, experiment, release, repeat and you might lose if you dont make it in time.

Abusing the role like this is how you get it nerfed/removed if admins arent going to tell you to knock it off, if you abuse your toys and admins are gonna let it slide people are gonna want to clamp down on it codewise.

[Misdoubtful]

Side antags need to realize they are the sidepiece and stop doing their best to take over rounds. Abductors should not be putting people in situations where they are brain controlled to sit in a corner or whatever should they lose their gland, or causing people to mass suicide/die. You capture, experiment, release, repeat and you might lose if you dont make it in time.

Abusing the role like this is how you get it nerfed/removed if admins arent going to tell you to knock it off, if you abuse your toys and admins are gonna let it slide people are gonna want to clamp down on it codewise.

This to be honest. There's a limit where abductor things would just encroach on the whole, you know, 'being a dick'. Ruining someone's round by brainwashing them and telling to go stand in time out for the next half an hour is just anti-fun.

[cacogen]

Coders should code better instead of expecting players to play suiting their expectations.

[XDTM]

Coders should code better instead of expecting players to play suiting their expectations.

I'd love it if we could code an AI that judges if players are ruining a round with bad commands, but since that's a pretty tall order, admins and rules are the next best thing.
We could add restrictions that make timeouts or excessive murderbone impossible by restricting commands to a predefined list, but that kind of solution also stifles any potential creativity that could emerge from the mechanic, and frankly i'd rather take the approach of punishing only those who abuse it instead.

[Ayy Lemoh]

Side antags need to realize they are the sidepiece and stop doing their best to take over rounds.

So, anyways, then a blob spawned mid-round and took over the round.

Hating blob aside, I think only a few side antags are actual sidepieces (abductors, obsessed, NT space ninjas maybe, etc). Every other side antag is literally meant to murder fucking everyone while a few are strong enough to even take over the entire round. Despite this, yes, abductors should still not be allowed to purposefully slaughter the entire fucking station.

They're lawful good, not chaotic evil like everyone else. no bias.

[Cobby]

Coders should code better instead of expecting players to play suiting their expectations.

if your playstyle is forcing people to sit in a corner for the rest of the round or risk being banned you could just realize you're going to be shit regardless of what feature we throw at you.

[cacogen]

If it's in a player's best interest to do something using the mechanics they have access to, it's dumb to fault them for doing it. Either make it impossible or disincentivise it instead of expecting admins to pick up the slack and enforce your expected playstyle. It's like nobody here understands the fundamental aspects of reward and punishment in video game design, despite wasting their lives on at least one of them.

[XDTM]

There's two main branches of players we're dealing with, those who play to see interesting situations and those who like to achieve successes. The former have an internal incentive to make things interesting even if they're not advantageous in gameplay, but creating an incentive for the latter to do the same is not that easy. It would require making things like 'not executing antags' or 'not only giving boring-but-practical mind control commands' lead to a personal victory of some kind, which i can't fathom how to do properly.

What we can do, in lack of a good incentive, is using restrictions to shape player behaviour. Since code restrictions need to be rigid to be functional (especially when dealing with text-only stuff; hard to automatically tell the difference between a good command and a bad one), they would end up preventing creativity that might emerge from the mechanic in question, therefore a decent middle ground is a fuzzy restriction handled by human admins, so that creativity is possible but abuse is punished.

[Coconutwarrior97]

Abductors should not be using brainwashing as a means to murderbone or make people stand in a corner for the rest of the round.
Kill oriented objectives are fine as long as they don't end up with murderbone. They are a side antagonist meant to inject some chaos and funny shenanigans into the round, not ruin it for everyone.

Headmin Votes:
Coconutwarrior97: Yes.
Domitius: Yes.
Naloac: Yes.