[MRP] EMP lings in the vent. Harambe edition.

[carshalash]

Any time a changeling decides that their gimmick will be emping from the vents, it just leads to the crew agreeing to rush a shuttle call. The changeling in question is aware of it each time. It's very boring and unengaging, which leads to all crew members having a bad shift due to someone wanting to rush the shuttle call as fast as possible.

Is there any chance we can make a ruling against this tactic?

[Aeri]

I agree that the EMP vent monkey gimmick is pretty tired and bad.

[Moltov]

But their greentext : ((((( in seriousness this is super fucking lame to do. There is a whole two players who do it in MRP consistently.

[spookuni]

It's boring as hell, but also countered by any enterprising crewmember with a crowbar and a wrench. (crowbar up floortiles and then dismantle atmos around where you know the ling is from the EMP screech locations, shrink net until ling has nowhere to go, they can't even leave the pipe network if you manage to cut them off from any vents or scrubbers. At which point if they're somewhere unimportant you can leave them in a GBJ of their own creation or break them out with batons ready and the chaplain prepped to use the cremator)

I really don't think this needs to be a policy concern - the tools are already in the game to handle the strategy, and when they're employed they generally lead pretty quickly to a hardstuck changeling entirely reliant on the now extremely angry crewmembers they've been fucking with to let them out of the atmos vents.

[Yulice]

Well you see spook, this requires knowledge of the pipe network which frankly only atmospheric technicians reliably have, as most of the crew barely realizes it exists until either A. Someone starts ventcrawling, or B. someone starts using the network to flood funny gasses. And even if they're aware of the problem, they may not have the knowledge of how to tackle or fix it because atmos is an evil dark eldritch beast, on top of being boring to tears.

[spookuni]

Well you see spook, this requires knowledge of the pipe network which frankly only atmospheric technicians reliably have, as most of the crew barely realizes it exists until either A. Someone starts ventcrawling, or B. someone starts using the network to flood funny gasses. And even if they're aware of the problem, they may not have the knowledge of how to tackle or fix it because atmos is an evil dark eldritch beast, on top of being boring to tears.

I question whether it is known to only atmos techs that you can hit pipes with a wrench to deconstruct them. It's hardly dark and forbidden knowledge that things that ventcrawl move through pipes and they need pipes to crawl through to in order to move through them?

At the point where it's too hard for players to realise they can hit the pipes in the floor with a wrench to make them go away, I think we've past the point of reasonable expectations of player engagement with the game systems and moved towards simply flattening anything that isn't simple "left click on problem until it goes away"

EDIT:

With that raised though, there are other even more effective methods for dealing with annoying serial ventcrawlers, ranging in complexity from "mess with distro pressure to trigger either low or high pressure damage to mobs within" to "shut down all active distro vents and then set off a contained plasmafire within the distroloop itself until whatever's inside is turned to carbonized ash" Those strategies work and are effective, but yes they do require some knowledge of how atmospherics functions. Certainly more than "hit pipe with wrench"

[Sylphet]

If someone is doing the exact same thing round after round, and its this obnoxious, ahelp it. I will tell them to find a new gimmick. We don't need a policy ruling, especially only if there's one or two people doing it.

[Mothblocks]

We don't want to waste our time discussing every meta strategy that comes up, especially on MRP where admins should already be very comfortable asking antagonists to reign in, so I'm just going to close this now.

Feel free to ahelp repetitive, unfun strategies. From there, it's up to the admins online how to act, but we are not going to have every strategy that comes up be ruled as okay or not okay as head admins.