SS14 already has a fairly high admin workload, much higher than other games. When we review features, we oftentimes take into account the admin impact and whether it would be seen as a problem. This goes for proposed features in an upcoming design document.
This is why we prefer to have mechanical enforcement, where the game physically discourages - or stops you - from preforming an action that we don’t want happening.
A great example is implanters being reworked. They are no longer shielded, and instead security is mechanically punished if they “get it wrong” or otherwise try to abuse it. No admins necessary to enforce it, and a very large headache around the metashield gone.
Similarly, thieving gloves have been removed from the traitor pool, and the ability simply given innately to the thief, as security is supposed to arrest the thief for the contraband they’ve stolen, not the fact that they’re a thief.
Of course, mechanical enforcement requires mechanics to be developed, and that takes a while - remember that SS14 is an open source project and the people who contribute to it are people spending their limited free time on the project.
A good example of this is the stun meta and traitor spiraling - the stun meta is currently real as upstream doesn’t currently have a knockdown system. Knockdowns give more depth to stuns and allows us to do more things, and increases the depth of combat. It makes stuns not a boolean “you’re out/you’re in”, it gives all players more options and ways to express their robustness.
Traitor spiraling is also another prominent one. Right now, surgery does not exist on upstream, and all wounds can be healed via simple topicals (which traitors can buy) or simple chems (which traitors can also buy). This allows one person to stay in a fight, consistently healed up and at full, indefenitely.
Surgery would introduce multiple aspects to this: limb and body part damage can inflict debuffs. These wouldn’t be able to be fixed using simple chemicals - only alleviated. The idea is that one person would eventually be whittled down and taken care of by multiple people, as they cannot cure their semi-permenant wounds and afflictions in the field.
Right now? One syndie can just heal up whatever they take and keep doing. So they can spiral and kill all of security. If this was a mechanic, we wouldn’t have to enforce this.
On Shuttle Damage
Currently, shuttle bombings are caused by multiple different things:
- Explosives can be easily saved until end-of-round.
- Your kill target has a high probability of being present in a very small area.
- It is extremely hard to see what someone did on the evac shuttle.
- It is difficult to arrest someone on the evac shuttle.
- A very fair amount of players on LRP are just shitters and decide to mess with security for no reason when they’re trying to do something on evac. It’s just what little kids do.
We have tried to alleviate this in the following ways:
- Shuttles now have a robust atmos system and are quartered off, so the entire shuttle is not doomed if a hole is punched in one section.
- Shuttles can now be repaired (but not extended).
- Shuttles can have their hull breaches and air quickly resolved and refilled using the buffed metal foam grenades and newly added air grenades.
- Kill targets now require an explicit maroon. They must not make it to CC in general or else the objective will fail.
- Kill targets/maroon targets are no longer counted as marooned if they take an escape pod.
We’ve thought about (and some people have PR’d) the following:
- Explosives not being purchasable when evac is on the way.
- Uplinks locking in FTL.
- Objectives being more freeform.
Generally they all require some discussion and then implementation - players are also extremely vocal about locking uplinks and restricting bombs.
