Make it so you need a special glasses, to be ordered through the gang uplink, like sec glasses, to see who is and isn’t in your gang. You should still be able to see heads by default but other than that you shouldn’t visually be able to know. Give each gang code words, so that there’s a way for them to know who is and isn’t in your gang. As it stands, revs is just a game of “follow the head and ambush him when you have enough fellow revs around or an opportunity strikes”, and gangs is just multiplayer revs. With this, it makes it require actual coordination on the part of the gang heads or the head revs to tell people who is and isn’t rev/gang.
It makes it act more like actual gangs or revolutions.
With the gang there’s at least a secret way of knowing who’s who instead of magically knowing as it is now.
With the revs I don’t think there should be an easy way (perhaps outside of the glasses) to tell who is rev and who isn’t. That way it will cut down on the murder bone and the mobbing of the heads if you have no idea who would be with you if you started shit. It helps differentate the two very very similar antags. What do you guys think?
While in theory the idea would be fun and I like it, I don’t think it would end up playing out as you’d like. You have to remember that even in the best of rounds, conversion antag gamemodes once rolling are pure chaos. Adding extra difficulty and nuance to conversions usually would just cause the gangs to fail faster, newer folk to mess up more, and people to complain.
In my head I am imagining a dominator phase, with a defending gang and an attacking gang. Everyone would all look the same and in a frantic fight would just be attacking everyone. Fights are way too chaotic to track and figure out who said what codeword, and then how could you trust them after the other gang just heard the said code word. Without a clear enemy, fights usually just devolve into mobs beating the shit out of each other. That is why the emergency shuttle is very often a hell of human behavior.
Aside from that you have to make the gang detection item invisible, otherwise anyone could walk down a hallway and point out likely gang members. It means that either street gang bois would be unequipped to work as a team and just do everything solo, or risk being killed on sight for an observable item.
I don’t mind conversion antags getting kill happy in the late stages of the gamemode. At that point most of the crew should already be converted or mindsielded, and everyone should know there is a conversion crew. The problem is individuals being too kill happy early on and forgetting that in order for their objective to succeed they need to convert first and foremost.
My solution is to just make it look like regular glasses, kind of like the traitor items. And it’s not like the other gang items are inconspcious. Or even other conversion antags. The Cult has their glowy eye thing. Clockies have the loud sounds they do. With tators you just search them. With gangs it is a bit of a problem, but in my head it just incentivizes tagging so you can up your (prestige? I don’t remember the word) points for important point management. It’s not like people won’t know there are gangs anyway, they’re literally going around tagging large swathes of the station.
With revs, real revolutions are super chaotic. At least on MRP, you’re not supposed to stop antags unless they are a threat to you or you’re sec, right? The update seems more of and MRP thing (requiring more coordination etc than a light rp scenario) so maybe just try it on MRP. People might get mad, but they’d get mad over anything like this.
one might argue cult already has to deal with this to an extent, with the runes and whatnot
All the more reason to devote time to tagging, as well as resource management, instead of “CONVERT CONVERT CONVERT, KILL KILL KILL”
That’s what the fix aims to solve, hopefully. Later in the round, with points acrewed, you’d be fine handing out the sunglasses as much as you need. Perhaps a balance is that if you see someone in your gang also wearing sunglasses you’ll be able to know that they too are in your gang, but that might be too overpowered as it would let you know who is in the other gang.