This is why we can't have nice things

[Aurorablade]

I realize this might step on toes, but this has become an issue. I am unsure the exact tactic here but apprently you have people in Xenobio spamming gold cores for headslugs (thats supposed to only be on a hostile core reaction if i understand this code correctly), sentience potion them...and slowly make a nice changling army. Given the mobs are supposed to be hostile i am unsure if they are useing the xenobio cam consoles for this or what.

If so an solution would be to allow the xenobio cnsoles to interact with slimes/monkeys and them only..anything else you go do by hand.

I am sorry but I and a few other people disagree with this. I mean in concept..it would be cool, if it was abused to all hell.

Sorry fox. All do respect to you here.

🆑Fethas
rscdel: Removes the !!FUN!! of having headslugs gold core spawnable.
/:cl:

[Fox-McCloud]

First off, not the proper way to remove it. You'd just remove gold_core_spawnable altogether.

second off, I'm not in big support of this, given the amount of work, time, and investment required to do this, though I realize people will debate how "hard" that is, all day long. I know someone will inevitably draw the conclusion that "well ED-209's and pAI" control.

To which I say (1) that hasn't been merged yet. (2) That can be done from round-start with basic pre-spawned sec equipment. (3) Unlimited ranged stuns with 0 cooldown trounces anything and everything.

👎 from me.

[Necaladun]

"Army of changelings" or even 1 changeling (I've seen 3 at a time, though), is a stupidly powerful thing for them to have.

Xenobio can cause enough trouble and have enough fun mobs to spawn as it is. Changelings are completely over the line.

[ghost]

i personally think non-antags bringing random people back as antags that can really fuck up shit is bad

besides, there's already twenty million ways to bring yourself back to life as a human mob.

[ScratKnapp]

👍

We don't need personal bodyguard or validhunter lings.

[Aurorablade]

@Fox-McCloud I will remove this..but i did seriously watch someone..just spawn alot of hostile mobs just for headslugs...and make it look easy with no reprocution to themselves. I mean for the average person its cool, really it is. heck i spawned as a headcrab one round..xenobio looked like a warzone...

Some people have apprently got this down to a low risk art. but i will close the PR if needed..I really really do not like upseting people, espically over work they may have done or coded in.

[LightningLynx]

Time invested into making a feature isnt an argument for keeping it. If it sucks and can be and is easily abused, then so be it. Sorry if you spent a lot of time working on it but you should have known that people wouldn't be able to handle the responsibility of being able to create potentially infinite changelings.

👍

[Spacemanspark]

👍
This is bad, and quite honestly shouldn't have been added in the first place.

[Aurorablade]

@LightningLynx i think he meant time invested in Xenobio not a feature..and on that point i agree.

[Necaladun]

If there's a better way codewise to do it, go for it.

But as for xenobios being able to create changelings - especially on top of everything else they already can - that should not be a thing at all, no matter how hard it is.

This was a major change that space law, SoP, etc should have been updated to reflect when it was brought in regardless.

Science have enough toys as it is. They don't need changelings to add to that.

[ghost]

👍 It's just too powerful.

[Magikarpet]

I really do believe I started this trend as xenobiology was barren and never done before I started constantly making headslugs/morphs/ whenever I was in science... So, why don't you just make it so that once they're a ling they arent loyal to the person who made them after they've layed their eggs if the feature is that bad as one way to fix it?

Most xenobiologists would get killed by their sentienced ling near immediately, not to mention that spamming lings is literally one of the very few "endgame" things xenobio can do that puts them on par with deathmech shitting roboticists, saber SMG spamming scientists with adrenals and other implants, GBS viruses from virology, fully kitted geneticists with every power, chemists with a ridiculous healmix and killmix, old xenoarch being able to ninja themselves/exterminate the station/wishgranter themselves with artifacts, security having their armory and the ability to order wt-550s(really is an endgame for them) that are nearly on par with saber SMGs, cargo's ability to order an entire's station armory or more, and toxins bombs.

The lategame accessible things xenobiologists have currently are hostile mobs that are copypastes of each other with slight alterations in health/strength/wall breaking with most of them, blobbernauts for wall breaking, headslugs, and (the sadly removed) morphs for consuming things are the most unique. Their other abilities not tied to the gold slime core are to turn people into shadow people(Have fun getting killed by borgs/security/people because they think you're a shadowling!), stopping time(which bugs in grenades and freezes you at times when you use a timestop grenade), spawning adamantine golems, turning people into slimes(strong in combination with foam+plasma and is their single most OP ability for mass murder), gold slime core grenades, heatproof/weightless clothing, and bluespace floor tiles. The only impactful things they really can have that wont get killed near immediately by civvies thinking hitting the sentient blobbernaut/alien queen/space carp and then going into crit because of retalliation means that they have to cry to security for them to kill the "hostile aliens".

This ignores that it's one of the very few entertaining features for dead players/observed players... If people are so adamant about removing this and ignoring my initial suggestion, why not keep it in as an antag feature? Emagging a slime scanner/slime processor allows you to produce gold cores that can produce "greylisted" mobs to maintain the antagonist potential for traitors, while removing the way for nonantags to obtain them? It maintains the effective removal of it, and turns any spotted changelings into something that always has a hostile/malicious intent.

[Necaladun]

Xenobiologists are not a subtype. Currently they're scientists, and thus have access to everything in science. That means, you have changelings, with saber SMGs, implants, and chems.

This whole idea of "endgame" is stupid IMO, anyway, and we should not be balancing around the idea that we're some kinda RTS that is techrushing.

Once again, as we see over, and over again, science gets something that huge amount of people say is overpowered and a problem, and a few core science players argue that it's not.

I see no reason at all dead/observing players need any guarantee for heavily round effecting things. We were hesitant to even let them play as Ian at one point, now people are acting as if they have a right to play as a changeling.

Arguing that the ability to have changelings slaved to them and able to be armed with all of the toys of science isn't OP is amazingly single-minded. No other department has anywhere -near- that power. It's...it actually honestly amazes me that I'm having to argue creating changelings and having them slaved to you isn't OP.

We've survived a long time without being able to shit out armies of slaved mobs. I don't see why it suddenly needs to stay.

[ghost]

Why not make them their own job again, given the latest revamp gives them a lot more to do?

[HereticChurch]

Allowing the station to get friendly changelings is an awful swing of balance, and will royally fuck over just about any antag.

A changeling is possibly one of the most dangerous antags that can show up on the station, only just a bit less dangerous than wizards or high-power shadowlings and vampires (while still being fully capable of out-dangering them if played right). One of the reliable counters to changelings is numbers, having someone with you, or at least managing to get the word out that a changeling is about so people can be prepared.

If you throw a changeling on the side of the station, they basically become the most effective tools to hunt down antags. 1 on 1, a changeling can probably take down just about any other antag, and even if they can't, the entire station is on their side, so the antag can't call for help. They can't even reliably kill it unless they decapitate it or cremate it. Hell, their abilities are focused on taking down single targets, and most antags work alone, nullifying one of the only reliable ways to counter a changeling. And if R&D is shitting out more than one of these a shift and arming them? Antags won't stand a chance unless they go out of their way to get rid of scientists attempting to create changelings.

I seriously thing we shouldn't keep this as a feature. If there is still insistence on keeping it, it HAS to be more balanced. Restrict xenobio changelings to being monkeys, or something to that effect. As it is, it's asking to be abused, especially now that everyone's gonna know about it now due to it coming up, and are now gonna be wanting to go out and make their own changeling/hover around xenobio waiting for their chance to be John Carpenter's The Heroic Thing.

[ProperPants]

Xenobiologists are not a subtype. Currently they're scientists, and thus have access to everything in science. That means, you have changelings, with saber SMGs, implants, and chems.

Why aren't they a subtype? I'm a science player, and I'd love to see the alt-titles be actual jobs with different accesses. Atmos techs don't get access to Engineering and Engineers can't get into Atmos, AFAIK - Science should be the same. There's a pretty nice suggestion thread on the topic that, even if you disagree with aspects of it, actually makes an effort to address the issues of scientists having too much access. It would be a lot of work, but it would reduce a lot of the power of science by not giving everyone access to everywhere.

Thread: http://nanotrasen.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7432

saber SMGs

Is this true? I really don't know, because I never have a need to go gung-ho with guns, but aren't all guns lockboxed? They should be.

Changelings in science does seem over the top, and I'm astonished that it even got added in the first place, but making the alt titles of "Scientist" actual subtypes (expect the currently useless xenoarch ones) addresses a core problem of science which magnifies other problems. I'm not trying to imply to keep headslugs - I don't really care - but I'm addressing a related problem that permeates all of science.

[Spacemanspark]

Xenobioloists were once subtypes.
I can't remember why that was removed, though.

[ghost]

I think it has to do with the job being very shallow until recently.

[Dinarzad]

@Spacemanspark
It was changed because, at the time of said change, Xenobiology was kind of a barren wasteland. They were were frequently sequestered off into a room only they had access too, that at the time was the ass end of the station and totally isolated, in addition to being a job barely anyone ever did..

They got merged into Scientist so that they would have to interact in the round and be able to RP and do things with people.
But given we now have a Chemistry Lab right by Xenobiology, it's probably not as big of an issue anymore.

[FalseIncarnate]

I can't say that I much care for xeno-biologists having the ability to create antagonists like changelings, especially given the power of the sentience potion in combination with this. To me, golems have always filled the niche of "grown minions" for xeno-biology, much like un-synced borgs for a roboticist, which was fine because they didn't possess antagonist powers.

Sentience potions have led to a big surge in the number of people doing xeno-biology, and the number of people utilizing gold cores as a non-antagonist. Perhaps we should just make headslugs unable to be sentience potion'd and only spawn as hostile, to avoid the concerns of a xeno-biologist making an army of antagonists under his control?

[Aurorablade]

i like falses suggestion...but someone needs to tell me what to change.

[Robertha89]

better yet, lets just split xenobio from rest of science. Make it's own job, again.

[Regen1]

@Robertha89 outside of the scope of this PR

👍 💯 this PR, changelings from xenobio are being used to validhunt to the extreme, being "captain's personal pet" to listen inn on changeling chat and walk around with an armblade to kill whoever's a threat.

Basically what @FalseIncarnate is saying, let's not have xenobio create antagonists please

[TheDZD]

Going to agree with @Regen1, @FalseIncarnate, and @Necaladun. Crewmembers should not have the ability to make antagonists that are subservient to them or the station. It makes for incredibly boring rounds similarly to how old loyalty implants did the same thing, but with already existing antags.

[Regen1]

@TheDZD merge time