Abductors are unfun

My experience with being abducted:

Being stunned in a single hit. No counter you’re just on the ground asleep.
Being chain bonked while waiting on 4 or 5 people to have surgery done on them. Oh boy, I love not controlling my spessman for 10 minutes.
For your trouble, you now have a 50/50 shot of getting some kind of incredibly cancerous surgery. Like chemical gland, hope you like randomly being on fire and unable to do what you were trying to do beforehand.

Some suggestions (not all of these, a single one would help):

  • Stun cannot be refreshed - You’re grabbing a guy and 3 people rush you? Bonk them all but you can realistically only abduct one without the others waking up on the ship and you can’t grab the same dude multiple times.
  • Stun/sleep duration much shorter - You can chain bonk a dude, but realistically one or maybe two dudes without risking them waking up.
  • Stun has a long cooldown. Guaranteed to be able to get one guy, but you have to be careful to not get caught.

Regardless of how the stun is, abductors should not be able to use bluespace body bags. At all. Ever. They’re horribly broken for abductors.
That would heavily mitigate the “el oh el wait around 10 minutes for 4 or 5 surgeries” factor.

Abductors meta is so unfun for the abductee I just ghost out immediately. I would rather observe, log out, or hell even be carded as AI than be an abductee.

to put it blandly. git gud. if a ling comes from out of maint and BONKs you. you are dead forever

thats the spirit of antags

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Or just not participate, which is what I elect to do. I’m perfectly fine playing a spawner or cyborg instead.

Sad because some of the abductor memes are fun (split personality is hilarious). But it’s not worth the trouble you have to go through for a chance at something neat.

yes because. leme tell you a big secret they are the antagonists of the history
WOW what a reveal, the antagonist that is supposed to antagonice is being an ass… incredible

jokes aside. abductors cant kill in any way shape or form, they also cant masively harm you. everything can be fixed by surgery

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abductor surgery is basically a scientist minigame + a chance for crew to possibly, potentially, maybe escape. it’s also a massive pain in the ass waiting game. so, what’s a way that we could make it better with minimal coding? here’s my idea

  • give abductors the ability to spend their points to purchase an autodoc that can be loaded with abductor organs

Were bluespace body bags used for this?

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It’s not uncommon for abductors to attack a small group of people or otherwise get a decent amount of people in a bluespace body bag, then go back to their ship.
At which point the agent chain sleeps everyone they caught while the scientist does surgery.
Depending on the abductors it could be a fast process where everyone captured gets organ replacement done and is returned to the station quickly and efficiently.

OR what you see happening far more often is the scientist fumbling around and fucking up surgery making it take significantly longer.

This isn’t related, but it’s not uncommon to see abductors take the AI out of the round shortly off spawning by teleporting them to their ship where they cannot interact with anything.

Abductor is personally one of my favorite antagonists but IMO it leaves a lot to be desired both mechanics and policy wise.

Agreed 100% I honestly like them but they really need a good polish on regards of mechanics and policy

In any case i’ll be happy if they remove the bs bodybag dumb strat, that way they don’t abduct 6 people and chain-sleep them forever while they’re waiting to have their surgery done.

This is caused by the bluespace bodybag issue. If players were still playing like abductors were intended (wherein it takes both abductors to get one person on their ship) there would only be one person at a time.

Abductors holding more than one person at a time is a problem in itself.

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If BS bags couldn’t be carried with the abductor teleport the problem would become close to nonexistent because then only experienced abductors would be able to do chain abductions.
That is, scientist retrieving the agent who subdued multiple subjects first, then teleporting there himself and marking the bodies while agent retrieves them.
This sort of coordination usually means they are good enough to do surgery quickly and efficiently.

I kinda want to submit revisions to abductors

especially bcuz i do love them as a concept, and its sad to see that they’re turning out to be antifun.

At the very minimum they need to be blocked from TPing on top of the AI, and something has to be done w/ bs bodybags. (Teleport interference, most likely. but I’m not even sure if abductor teleports even care about BoHs)

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Just make it so that carrying bluespace items fucks with the abductor teleporter, instantly gibbing you and dropping your items on the abductor ship, meaning that the soon waking up greyshits can beat up the nerd grey too.

Issue fixed, im also open at taking the position for the Chief of Gamebalance at bee, pm and we can discuss salary.

ilmeeni_kun

4 Likes

You can actually counter this by having the borgo build security doors in the 3 spots above the AI when abductors or other teleporting nerds show up.

However for abductors specifically I kind of agree with you since they can’t speak, so you’re relegated to sitting on their ship in a card which sounds incredibly boring (i.e. you can’t even meme with them).

If you’re going to do something to prevent them using bs bodybags maybe take the same approach with cards? At least if they kill you you can be revived, or take a spawner without having to ghost.

Wait, people can escape during surgery? How?

Literally just go to medical and find someone not braindead. Ask them to replace your heart.

I mean, if you get out of the Abductor ship and just immediately go to medbay, that seems against the spirit of role play if not an actual policy violation. You’re supposed to not know what happened to you.

If that’s the standard response then why have them at all? All they do then is waste 15 minutes of the players round for no reason:

  • The actual abduction
  • Being chain bonked on the ship because they grabbed multiple nerds
  • Surgery by someone who may or may not know how to do it quickly
  • Being teleported back and sleeping on the floor for awhile
  • Going to medbay and trying to find a heart + not brain dead doctor (Before you could autodoc a cybernetic heart but you have to find an actual nerd now)
  • More surgery

Alternatively remove the round-ruining surgeries and give a policy pass to be a bit of a shitter with some of the nastier ones:

  • Chemical gland does nothing but ruin the players round (random fiery sweat, random knock out, random crit, this is just straight up not fun).
  • Plasma gland IMO is just this side of self antag to the rest of the crew if you don’t get it fixed (I’m perfectly fine having a pass to randomly set parts of the station on fire, but I feel like playing into it would get a player bwoinked and races like Mothman are highly susceptible to fire).
  • Some of the others I can think of fun things to do with, but they may be grey area self antag open to admeme interpretation, so I’d avoid using them (Hanging out by brig with Quantum, oh hey this prisoner is suddenly free and how’d I get here? Hanging out by science with Mindshock, suddenly all our scientists are brain damaged idiots?).
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The most common methods are linked on the wiki.

They’re not fun because they have a high probability of taking a significant chunk of playtime away from you. You can be out for far longer than a security cell timer and the fix is to wait even longer for someone to fiddle around in your chest cavity.

Yeah if everyone’s robust and everything goes swimmingly you can be abducted, get the organ, and then be dropped somewhere safe in less than two minutes and then go see a competent doctor and have your heart replaced in less than one minute for a total of maybe three and a half minutes including travel time.

But that’s not how it goes. You’re out for 20 minutes because you’re person #3 of a 10 person abduction spree using a bluespace bodybag and then you have to wait for the scientist to slowly trial-and-error his way through figuring out how to do the surgery on half a dozen people before you’re let go, and the agent hit you with the sleep baton 500 times while you were on the surgery table so once you get sent back to dorms you’re asleep for another 5 minutes. Then you finally go to medbay but it’s full of people shooting electricity, spewing plasma, plus a random disease that happened while you were out and there’s also some people being revived from a bomb that went off while you were out… oh and medbay is depressurized, and the only medbay staff that aren’t currently trying to figure out how to unhusk a plasmaman are brand new and don’t even know how to start a surgery much less replace your heart. And even if they knew what they were doing, cybernetic organs hasn’t been researched and the chaplain cremated all the monkeys on the station earlier to turn himself into a sentient gorilla so there aren’t even any spare hearts anyway.

Balancing shit for best-case-scenario is disgusting. It doesn’t work.

I don’t see why this is a problem with abductors specifically tho

When I get abducted, I shrug it off and go on with my round, maybe talk about how I had a weird blackout if I get asked. It’s more fun to wait for whatever was put in you breaks then you have a mad dash to medical screaming “It’s in me! It’s in me!”

Bad Abductor surgery. I was abducted as an IPC and had to explain to the alien how to do surgery on me as they were killing me by mistake.