I apologize in advance for this… I was trying to RP but keep people from Dunking on a new player, so the round is a bit of a blur.
CKEY: MarvinTheParanoidAndroid42
Offender’s CKEY: Unknown, Multiple.
Offender’s In-Game Name: Miner, Explorer (Brennan Ixia), (RD possibly) plus a few others.
Server (Sage or Acacia): Sage
Date (MM-DD-YYYY): 11/18/2022
Round Number: 41413
Rules Broken: 14 Metagaming, 1 You Must Roleplay
Incident Description:
Arrived late to a station with two decent sized holes in it from “overloads”, and a CMO that needed to be rescued from bridge due to bolted doors. Almost immediately received an MHelp from the Malf AI: “How do I get more processing power?” Within a few minutes, I had at least 4 people bombard me with some variety of “we need to kill the malf AI right now”. Brushed them off with “I arrived late, let’s see what happens”, and was told on one instance IC: “let’s be honest, command staff is not robust enough”.
Additional Information: I feel bad for the new player, and just wish that everybody didn’t attempt to dunk on them right away. They did open up a little bit strong by blowing up the CMO and an engineer less than 25 minutes into the shift… but it still seems stinky to immediately jump to “malf, kill kill kill” without good IC reason. There was some good RP that happened after the AI was carded.
I know this isn’t the best of report, and I’m sorry to add it to the stack because it is a very vague report. I was going to try to get you some more info, but my chat log only goes back to after the malf AI is carded. I’m sorry…
Hey, one of the people playing in this round (specifically the apid miner). In my personal experience people tend to do this sort of thing because you just can’t leave a malf AI alone, or you’re usually going to end up dead. Especially on lowpop and deadpop (like this round), I’ve had quite a few rounds where I just end up dead for no reason because I decided to ignore a malf AI (even as a non-target), and I’ve seen it happen to other people a lot too.
It just ends with “oh I just got machine overloaded in an airlock, now I’m dead. Fun.”
That’s just my own thoughts on lowpop malf AI, and why people’d react so strongly to it immediately.
And I totally get that. Low Pop Malf is dangerous. The amount of damage they can cause in a short period is a lot. I was on the station for no more than 1 minute before the Malf AI was revealed to me, granted, by a witness.
But dying is part of the game. And, people complain all the times that “this was basically a greenshift”, especially in Low Pop, because the antags went full stealth mode. Yet reveal yourself as an antag and you immediately get dunked on.
I’m even a bit guilty of metagaming in this case. After rescuing the CMO from the bridge, I stopped to grab an intellicard and a laser pointer from Tech Storage, BUT, I also grabbed a “reset” board as there’s the potential RP side of “oh, you are broken / got an Ionospheric law, we can fix that with a reset.” And I pushed for that the entire shift.
Yes, mechanically in game, there is no reason for machines to explode without a Malf AI involved, but in universe, it must be possible (see the Exospheric bubble event, where a telecomms machine blows), but would your character know that because a machine exploded the AI was at fault? Wouldn’t it make more sense that someone planted a bomb?
It would, if the AI hadn’t immediately locked down the bridge to prevent the CMO from escaping. That makes it pretty clear that the AI is involved, and so I’d say it justifies what I did (which is grab a flash and laser pointer, then cut cams in my mining base so that they couldn’t mess with me, then alert other people so they weren’t surprise blown up).
And even if dying’s part of the game, at a certain point it just goes past that into not being fun anymore, and that’s been my experience with malf AIs.
In this case I tend to agree.
Malfunctioning AIs are easily a code Red threat especially when they’re going loud, and it’s very understandable for the crew to work together and take them down, even more so on lowpop rounds.
Sorry, but I don’t find anything here actionable.
Thanks for the report, anyway.
