FTL gibbing made sense at a time to fix the immediate problem of people waiting in space as evac arrives to emag the console, instantly triggering it to leave in order to get maroon objectives completed, while this was a valid way to prevent the issue and can make sense logically with inferring an insanely large amount of brute damage being inflicted on the player i believe in practice it is too sudden a punishment on the player and typically causes a lot of anger when it occurs.
This is a larger problem especially when involving the arrivals shuttle which is not in much regard as ‘predictable’ for when it will appear as to its evac counterpart. Though some maps do have timers, they are not noticeable from all positions that the arrivals shuttle will appear especially when in space, and with the potential for arrivals to be blocked by the increasing amount of event shuttles that can arrive, it is more likely for arrivals to be appearing in random locations such as the chapelroid on Marathon station, or old any of the many auxiliary evac options on Origin station, to name a few examples.
I dont mean for this to be a call to remove evac gibbing as it does currently act to solve a problem, though there are other methods that could be implemented to prevent the same issue;
Proposed solutions;
- Remove gibbing and instead inflict 100 Armor-penetrating brute damage causing anyone to instantly fall to critical health.
- Copy the method used to eject people on the exterior of evac and launch anyone inside at a high speed away from the station (via teleport and motion, moving aside with only a teleport may also work)
- Remove the property of FTL gibbing entirely, and only have it be a property of evac arriving at its default location only
- implement an FTL arrival warning chime that is played in the area where FTL is occuring (currently there are only sounds for take-off and post-appearance
- do as many newer maps such as sentipode fland and core have done, encase the arrivals area with lattices and grilles to prevent people using the area as an entrance/exit to the station.
Multiple of these changes could be invoked together to give better results, but currently I feel that the system of gibbing a body outright with no inflection on physics is a very lazy approach (combined with the fact that other forms of minor teleportation such as bluespace anomalys and scram implants seem to be fine with sending you into walls occasionally) and often leads to anger while also having almost no effect on roleplay other than another shock gibbing instance.
I’m open to hearing feedback and opinions on this, as im sure we’ve all watched an antag doing their thing, random innocent person, or have been the victim yourself, of a random arrivals appearing ontop of you
Squelch → VRuouuuummmmm → ghost