Quick preamble;
these are opinions from somebody who likes playing nukie rounds, both as the crew or as a nukie. I am not a coder and I decided that I never will be after looking into the most basic of basics for just a little bit, so “wyci” is a troll level response. Though I am aware that many of the points I am going to bring up in here will ultimately not be fixable without somebody sitting down and actually tackling them thoroughly.
What I hope to achieve here is maybe raise attention to some issues that I feel like have either been overlooked or ignored and consequently get them addressed at some point in the future. That all aside let’s just get to it.
Everybody is too damn fast.
This ties into many of the other issues here and is a general game-feel type thing. But I believe overall people just move too damn fast in this game. There is no sprinting. Stamina is purely there as a soft HP bar against stuns and thus stuns and stamina need to be hard-balanced around that interaction alone. This just causes so many other gameplay issues that I for one see plaguing this game, even if most people are not even aware of this.
Nukies need proper stun resistance.
AFAIK there exists only stun recovery in the game, meaning you have chemical substances which will decrease the amount of time you spend being slowed/stunned on the ground. Stun resistance just has not been coded and implemented by anybody yet. Most non-lethal weapons will either send you to the ground in just a second or two if they land consequential hits or as is the case with the taser they will just immediately send you off. And once you go down you are helpless and in most cases the round is over for you as a nukie. Either you get cuffed immediately (since stims got a very massive nerf recently of having their uptime reduced and due to aforementioned movespeed officers will always be right on top of you in time to cuff you) or you just get shot to death in an instant seeing as you are just like a dead horse on the floor, ready to be beaten. This is an issue that is only further exacerbated by everybody immediately dropping all of the gear held in their hands upon going down to the ground.
Nukies have very few gameplay options available and they cause stale gameplay.
To summarize; you always go in, slaughter as many people as possible and usually the round is purely decided by brute force and robustness. All other paths to nuclear operative victory are marred by easily metagamed methods or just straight up things not working as they should. This causes nukies themselves to be very plain and often boring. Oh, look. A guy in bloodred. He is going to murderhobo his way across the station, towards the nuke disk. What’s the station’s response? Always the same. You can only arm up and hope you bring more gun to the gunfight than those gun toting gun-buying gunmen in bloodred. Wow.
Nukies are plagued by noob players, not newkies.
To be very clear. Players who play nukies for the first time and are new to that antag role are not the problem. Noob players who barely know how the damn game even works, yet alone how to reload a gun or what the syndicate uplink does? Now those are the problem players. So, every noob player is a newkie but not every newkie is a noob. We need role timers for nukies, simple as. It has to be doable somehow. Play X round as a syndicate agent, accomplish this many objectives, play Y amount of hours in medical to be able to enlist for the nukie agent role. Something at least needs to be implemented to combat the plain and simple issue that we still can have an entire nukie round ruined by some noob player rolling high and getting an antag role they signed up for with no clue what it even entails.
The pendulum of balancing always swings too far one way or the other.
This is one of the things that are most baffling. I get that this is not an esport nor a very mainstream game. Still I think the coderbus should be able to glean from the feedback given by the community both on the forums and the Discord how some changes could impact the game positively and how others would not. I will not go into every example of this that I can give right here but the most recent and again egregious one I can think of is the complete and utter removal of the desword from the nukie uplink. Yes, the desword was extremely popular and you basically saw it in every other round being spammed by an entire nukie squad, with which they’d then proceed to steamroll the station. But instead of just at least attempting to balance the desword further it just got straight up removed. This is exactly what I mean with the pendulum swinging too far.
Inequality of the arms race.
Recently security and the station as a whole have received a stupendous amount of new tools, weapons and gadgets to potentially combat nuclear operatives with. Science is literally a ticking timebomb that will make the station impossible to beat if nukies don’t go RUSH B CYKA BLYAT as quickly as possible. Self-charging advanced lasers are hilariously easy to make resource wise and can be rushed by SCI too. All officers of security now come armed with mk53s, with both lethal and rubber ammo (which is hilarious considering that pistols used to only be handed out by the Warden during high alerts). Meanwhile nukies get the desword taken away, the L6 nerfed, the AKMS implemented and taken away in less than roughly 36 hours, the 40 TC crate is gone and stimpacks got their uptime nerfed from 5 minutes down to 30 seconds.
Every member of the station is a potential hero.
As much as the peanut gallery of ghosts love to cheer on the robust individual civilian casually dismantling half a nukie squad on their own because they got their hands on a random stun baton it is just plainly terrible and should seriously be addressed in a ruling, for at least one of the Wizden servers. There’s this weird contradiction of players on one hand cheering for those hero civilians being a major wrench in the plans for nukie squads, yet many of them will also then complain whenever a nukie guns them down, even though they’re a freshly arrived civie or greytider. And they’re not wrong to complain, they shouldn’t be a threat to a nuclear operative. Thing is though, due to many of the above described issues, that any greytider has the potential to just fuck your day up. So what do you get accustomed to doing then? You gun people down left and right, no matter if they even remotely meant to be a threat to you. Why? Because they potentially maybe could. It is that simple. We have community-wise now arrived at a point where it’s big standard for nuclear operatives to assume that any single crewmember could be a hidden Sosa-Rambo. So they just gun them all down while they are at it. We need at least ONE server where unarmed and undeputized civilians are supposed to use their healthy human instinct of self preservation and NOT rush a nukie just in the hopes that they succeed with their first random disarm attempt and take the 30 TC expensive L6 Saw away successfully. At least some place where I as a nukie can just leave random unarmed greytiders alone and walk past them in peace and go about murdering anybody with an actual weapon or clearly harmful tools without having to magdump a random tider and run out of ammo in less than 2 minutes of being on the station.