Given that exactly what is going to happen with the robotics console, along with meta checking if Borgs are emagged by seeing if they blow up or not, I think it is far too cruel that they even have the expectation of having fun with their new laws.
Seriously though, a round removal button for Borgs is perhaps the worst “feature” I’ve seen added to the game. This is an admin tool, it should not be in the hands of players.
I’m with you on the fact that walling off borg removal behind just one button is not a good thing, but you don’t need to be this agressive.
Added space-station-14
I mean, my level of aggressiveness is proportionate to the amount of borg players who are just going to get their rounds destroyed and often times not know why and have no recourse or counter play to it. It’s a very, very bad feature that targets a small part of the player base that can already feel very abused. It feels malicious in its intent. Like, how would sec players feel if there was a round removal button for them?
Yeah, as jajsha mentioned, the aggression and sarcasm are not particularly helpful.
This seems like an issue that should be addressed with rules against that kind of powergaming or some sort of counter.
Some kind of counter like what? How do you think a counter can be designed for a gib button.
There are already rules in place, but design is supposed to move against mechanics that will generate excessive ahelps.
If this is good design, then the criminal console should also have a gib button on it for passengers.
Anything from adding costs and restrictions to how much or when the console can be used. Maybe have ion storms and emags disable the killswitch (while also adding a chance for switches to be randomly faulty). Maybe the ion storm affects the control consoles rendering them temporarily unusable or somehow unreliable (scrambling names, etc). Maybe the killswitch can be sabotaged by someone with a multitool.
Just any potential means of mitigating it being an instant kill button everywhere and always while still keeping to the theme of having a contingency killswitch.
At the end of the day, the kill switch’s nature fundamentally contradicts borg laws. If a borg doesn’t immediately just space or deconstruct it, they are either not following law 3, because it is something that represents a threat to their ability to protect their existence, or law 1, because it means at any moment the borgs can incidentally cause crew harm if someone flicks their switch and they are in the wrong place. It just isn’t something that should exist.
the law 3 issue is probably powergaming but any good rd would immediately order all borgs to not touch the console
The borgs can never know if someone will run towards them. It doesn’t fix the law 1 problem. Every borg is a walking bomb.
By hitting the destroy button, you can check all the borgs just by seeing which ones get destroyed. If one doesn’t get destroyed, it is emagged.
The entire purpose of the feature is to give an instant I-win admin button against ion-stormed borgs. Its bad.
That PR doesn’t stop metachecking emag status. All security has to do is get the RD to disable a borg standing in front of them and if the Borg flees or doesn’t get disabled then they must be emagged. The Borg player can’t lie their way out of this situation, they’re completely trapped and are going to get caught.
This WILL happen frequently, because once one Borg is suspected or confirmed to be emagged, players PANIC and place ALL Borgs under suspicion, regardless of how lawful they’re being. I can absolutely see Security and RD’s ordering a mass reset and destroying and remaking all borgs “just to be safe”. This sounds absolutely miserable for Borg players, and it ruins any Ion Storm fun.
I honestly think the Robotics Console, and by extension the law governing change, are mistakes. Instantly and remotely disabling or destroying borgs is NOT a tool any Scientist or Research Director should ever have, and having no way to confirm emag status is just going to lead to murder of any borg acting slightly weird. The tool’s only functionality should be the tracking of names/modules, and eventually law editing if/when that arrives.
I think that, in its current iteration, the robotics console raises two major problems: The fact that it’s a reliable emag check and the fact that the cyborg’s only counterplay to being destroyed remotely is a preemptive act which, arguably, is against metagaming rules.
No matter how it winds up tuned, giving unfakeable feedback to functions which do not affect emagged cyborgs (The brain plopping out on its own, the cyborg itself exploding) goes against the principle that emagged cyborgs should be intuited over them behaving irrationally, in the same way as traitors are found.
There should not be a 100% reliable way to “test” a cyborg, as that leads to some behaviors which are unfun. You wouldn’t want an “uplink checker” in security’s possession, for instance, as syndicates would be in constant fear of being randomly checked by a potentially powergamey security officer and having their round ruined. The same principle can be applied to cyborgs, and this reasoning is the main reason behind the PR removing the law governing internals damage message.
The second issue on hand is that getting remotely blown up is simply not fun. Players play the game to, well, play, and usually like having agency in their actions. When a player gets killed, they can usually attribute their death to them not being knowledgeable enough, skilled enough of cautious enough. What I mean is that players usually have power to affect their likelyhood of dying in any given situation.
Now imagine if syndicates had a “Instantly kill this person” button. You’d walk around, being as cautious as you can, and then you suddenly explode without much in the way of counterplay on your end. Your round is effectively cut short by someone on the other side of the map, with literally nothing you can do to prevent it.
This is basically what borgs have to deal with now. Of course, 9/10 times they won’t get blown up and no one will touch the robotics console, but the mere possibility of exploding or having your brain roll on the ground and losing all motor function is an ever looming threat that is uncounterable and unfun. Of course, you could destroy the console round start every time, but that is powergaming in most cases, so it isn’t a real option.
The concept of the robotics console isn’t the issue here, I don’t think. Having a way to remotely monitor, and even potentially maim, cyborgs is a very fine addition to the science gameplay loop. I just think that the current implementation misses the mark. The main reason why people are discussing it this much in the first place is because it came just before the feature freeze, and it’ll be impossible to fine tune the feature for a month.
Security might not have “uplink checkers” but they do have “implant checkers” that they can use as long as they have reasonable suspicion to check for it. I don’t know why creating a mechanic to “implant check” Borgs for emag or ion storm status isn’t allowed when implant checkers already exist.
The biggest issue I have with not being able to confirm or deny accusations is Security will gun down borgs, take them to Science, tell the Roboticist or RD that the borg is emagged and to rebuild the body, and Science just HAS to comply, even if the borg is innocent. If Science could implant check the borgs, it opens a lot of opportunity for roleplay and deception and gives Science the chance to defend Borgs from terrible officers.
Yeah, I think this is a really good solution. Like, it still makes figuring out if the borg is emagged or not up to the player reasoning it out, but gives a way to actually confirm it when the borg is taken to science. It should be a long doafter like the implanter check is so it can’t just be like, proactively done on borgs like screwdrivering them open of course.
Security does have implanters, but not only do they not work as a “traitor test” of sorts (they just remove implants), but using them as a mock traitor test is so controversial that a rule clarification has been made disallowing implant checking in most cases.
I’m not arguing that there shouldn’t be some ways to check cyborgs, actually there already is a semi-equivalent to the implant check, which is checking the cyborg for syndicate modules. I’m just explaining my thoughts on the place emagged cyborgs should have in the game.
Besides, this is mostly off topic. This thread is about the robotics console.
I understand that you are frustrated with the change but you should try to be a bit more descriptive with post titles. At a glance no one is going to understand that this is about the R&D console self-d mechanic.
There is reasoning behind having a remote kill-switch for emagged borgs:
Borgs are very powerful and in the right hands they can be used to completely overpower unprepared security.
Borgs are not crew, they are a tool that is used to help crew. If you’re playing borg with the expectation of full crew-like agency, you should not be playing borg.
One of the biggest issues with borg is when players do not roleplay their laws properly and a remote RD self-destruct helps counter this by creating an incentive to not fuck over crew at the first convenience (as this will result in you being xploded).
Having to rebuild all the borgs on the station after an ionstorm is alot of work and not really something I see people doing regularly. The RD console having a self destruct is no different from ordering all borgs to RD for disassembly.
Now that there is a way for crew to enforce borg behavior without having to physically subdue a borg, this would allow us to decrease the playtime requirement for borgs.
Borg is an RP/rule heavy role by design and prior to RD self destruct existing there wasn’t an easy way to take down a rampaging borg that wasn’t following their laws other than relying on admin intervention. Borgs are SUPPOSED to be subservient to crew, that is why crewsimov exists but prior to the RD console Self-D there was no mechanical enforcement for this fact, just the threat of being bwoinked by an admin
That said, I am slightly concerned about the explosion issue you mentioned. I don’t think self-d borgs should explode like a bomb (not sure if they do or not). If anything they should just burndown/break without damaging their surroundings. Although it could be an interesting idea to allow someone to emag the R&D console to cause borgs to explode…
I have a quick question or two, can emagged borgs be exploded? And is the console a one of a kind thing or can more be printed?
If I am not mistaken, I think a lot of people are forgetting that the ion stormed / emagged borg can instantly and effortlessly steal and space the console, but I might be missing something so forgive me if I am wrong.
I mean, fair enough, I shouldn’t have made a sarcastic topic title. Here are my problems with this reasoning you’ve given, though I appreciate that it was given.
A console that issued a wanted or sus status to borgs would be much more useful for stopping actual Armok-styled borg strategies. It would leave sec not having to guess which borgs they need to crit down and which they don’t. Borgs are ridiculously easy to crit down, they are less powerful than other roles and their main advantages are having AA, not being able to be slipped, and being able to repair each other from a crit state very easy, and the console doesn’t change any of this and doesn’t effect emagged borgs. The ion rifle we see in the advertisements all over the station is being worked on and will give sec an additional way to deal with these. But another reason security gets overpowered is that the people who know borgs in and out, the antag gamers, don’t play security because of the security rolling issue. Security doesn’t use the tools it already has (like reflective vests to counter the borg’s laser) to deal with them, which is a major problem.
The three laws cover a borg’s lack of agency. There is no need for them to have a bomb collar. Players play borgs to fulfill a certain fantasy of a role, and this console destroys that fantasy.
Like, I agree with you that this is an issue, but this is not the way to fix this. This is fundamentally putting an admin tool in the hands of one player to solve an RP problem and admitting that is the reason. We wouldn’t give HoS a button to detonate every tider on the station because of a problem with shitters (Though I’m sure this would fulfill more than a few HoS’ power fantasy). Its also a problem though because borgs don’t answer to RD, they answer to crew and their direct report is the AI (Which doesn’t currently exist, but will eventually). This ruling creates more RP issues by making borgs hallucinate extra laws regarding the RD. For many borgs, pleasing the RD or avoiding them is going to be law 1 regardless of law order. And in places where there are lots of problems with borg RP, there are also problems with head RP. On Lizard in particular where head RP is in an awful state and its more common to see a shitter head than any other role, I look forward to hearing to all the power abuses.
Most of the laws an ion storm creates are not destructive. That being said though, default borgs probably shouldn’t be as equipped to deconstruct a station as an engineering borg is.
The ion storm event is usually a fun event for creating unique RP in a round, and this basically just is a change that nullifies it in a tedious way. It is fun for exactly one person, the RD. I’d argue that from a design standpoint though, there is no problem on the station that should be solved at the push of a button. There shouldn’t be a “kill event” button.
i believe trying to explode an emagged borg just notifies the borg and removes them from the console’s list.