Random Nightmare Discussion Thread

Random Nightmare Discussion Thread made me think it was about actual nightmares instead of the antag. I was grossly mislead.

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They smash those instantly.

How the FUCK I am suppose to do that as Janitor (my rival to Nightmares) when I have to drag a Jannycart as well?

I don’t blame them since there’s no kind of guideline for what they are supposed to do. It just feels like they added them because Shadowlings were once a thing in the game. They feel shoehorned in to appease people.

make that an actual thread might be fun

unironically
skill issue

Nightmares have been around for years, and their guidelines are pretty much obvious and understood by most players. But I agree it’d be nice if it was expanded into a better role

ah right, let me just put my flashlight into my jannycar… oh wait… that puts it in my trashbag lmao

They just feel pointless.

Their point is to fill the niche that was left by the shadowlings.

Well, they suck because the main appeal of Shadowling was the thrall mechanic and they are just a bootleg Changeling.

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I think the issue that should be discussed is how far are they allowed to go from the moment they spawn

For example:

  • Nightmare spawns(let’s say he gets a lucky spawn superclose to engi) makes it’s way into Engi/Atmos, immediatly targets SM apcs, pacman, misc machinery and all relevant lights, the result? Probably a delam with a varied explosion, because said nightmare might still be in the area to kill engineers that come try and repair/save the damage

Technically the Nightmare is following it’s core reason of being an antag ‘‘of course i’m going for the sm it controls all the lights in the station!’’ but i personally think that if a Nightmare goes for that route…It fucking sucks, because yeah sure, you accomplish something, you get the station to be depowered (gotta wait for apcs to be drained though) but at the same time you just caused a big impact on the entire round the moment you spawned

I think a Nightmare shouldn’t ‘‘meta’’ where the main ‘‘power supplies’’ are, they should start with the classic light bashing–> apc bashing → machinery bashing and work they way up, and maaaybe once they’ve caused enough damage or created enough darkness to keep the crew busy they can try to take down the SM/Atmos rooms.

TL;DR: If the Nightmare spawns and rushes engineer to fuck with SM and pacmans it’s lame as fuck and they’re just taking the shorcut to ‘‘winning’’ rather than trying to be an interesting antagonists, i’ve personally noticed that a lot of Nightmares have been trying different gimmicks lately instead of going for ‘‘full click until horizontal to the entity with light’’

I’m mostly mentioned this because this would be the equivalent of a Captain, upon hearing reports of xenos, immediatly rushing to disable gravity because they know Xenomorphs will have a 90% hard time to fight back, and this is something i’ve seen done and admins bwoinked the Captain and even sent a CC message regarding the ‘‘why is the gravity turned off?’’ Obviously you had the Captain already full speed jetpack with the antique through the hallways killing and searching for Xenomorphs.

When players take the shortcuts to victory it’s lame as fuck because it becomes in ‘‘ruining greentext simulator’’ and there’s no enjoyment for anyone.

As for why pirates-nightmares-xenos-abductors-whatever flavor of the month is appearing more, that’s because we’re running dynamic and, if you play three rounds in a row on a semi-highpop time you’ll probably get ‘‘tired’’ of seeing them because their chances of spawning will increase, months ago when we weren’t running dynamic we had a big issue with abductors, that resulted on multiple threads made, couple months later Xenomorphs, now with dynamic introduced we’re in the middle of ‘‘too many pirate rounds’’ on top of the already asigned antagonists by dynamic

I do agree 100% we’re in need of more midround antags or to increase the weight of others so we have some variety, sure fighting pirates can be interesting, or a nightmare but if we do that five rounds in a row you just get… frustrated as a crew, command, security and probably even the antag ghost main gets tired of rolling it, thus why we’ve had a couple of rounds where Nightmares and Pirates have tried different gimmicks just to try and do something different.

We could use the space dragon rework, the random morph, the random blood demon, the vines with player controlled maneaters, the spider rework, we have a variety of midrounds but the current weight seems to put priority on the same, and to be honest some rounds can end up feeling like too much is happening, because you can roll so many default antags that Command/Security justgets overwhelmed or is very damaged by the time something like a blob or pirates appear, and most of the crew can’t get directly involved 4noreason for RP and rule reasons, i think there should be some rounds where dynamic should just roll no midrounds or try to prioritize rolling others instead of having a trend of ‘‘yeah this week i played 4 rounds in a row and we had (midround antag here) every single round’’

This also doesn’t help the fact that on lowpop rounds and depending on timezone you don’t get to have a competent security team and Command to dealt with the treats ,meaning the midrounds gets to do as they please ruining the RP scenarios other crewmembers might be having, which of course it’s perfectly fine, it is expected that your round will never go your way 100% of the time but… if you get that round after round after round… it gets… tiresome and exhausted, meaning people just burn out very quickly and only the antagonists ends up having ‘‘fun’’ specially if they’re the type of players who prioritize getting their sweet ‘‘greentext’’ rather than do something to drive the round in an interesting way.

I enjoy dynameme when it’s balanced both on crew and antagonists side, but there’s still room for improvement, the other day i reported a round where 40 minutes into the round there were only a Captain and NO SECURITY (40 pop) by the time i joined as the single officer, there were: six traitors and pirates and me joining made a two team of nuclear assault operatives spawn… But that’s for another thread.

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Shadowling was is a pretty cool antag. Shadowlings got removed for who knows what and the idea of being a shadow demon that spreads darkness was waiting to be filled, and got filled by an objectively worse antag. Nightmare and Shadowling are not similar to changeling.

I’m not saying conversion antags don’t have a fundamental problem of turning the round into a CoD-style team deathmatch (I played when revs were enabled and they were all the fucking same shit). But being averse to light and having combat powers was not what made Slings unique.

Honestly, being a Sling thrall had the most opportunity for infiltration (because they don’t have pentagram/eye glow mechanics like cult). I remember when me and another Sling thrall stole three laser gun crates as cargo for our overlord and really hurt sec’s efforts to stop us.

It’s not that darkness was the entirety of shadowling, its that part of it’s gimmick was the shadows. When it got removed, the shadows were open for a new antag.

All this shit you typed explaining the various situations in which a nightmare may or may not be justified in attacking equipment doesn’t really matter because there’s no admins on ever make these decisions in a reasonable timespan. They basically can do whatever.

Then all the threads always loop back into '‘yeah it’s because we don’t have enough staff’.

They can’t do ‘‘whatever’’ this is why this type of threads are good, because they encourage discussions, for example if you’re so against Nightmares, you’re always welcome to create a thread on the forums or discords and, if you have coding knowledge, make a PR with a proposal to rework Nightmare as a midround, at this point we need less removal of things and more tweaks, revamps and QoL Introductions

Also these threads help because when an admin gives input on a matter it sets a precedent on what is allowed and what is not on exceptional cases where the rules don’t manage to cover, another way of finding it is through just chatting on discord ooor eventually finding that something ‘‘wasn’t allowed’’ through the ban page.

All in all, as i’ve said on some threads lately we’re entering the holiday seasons so our current staff will probably be processing reports and being online less, same goes for us the playerbase, this will mean some dumb scenarios might be present while playing through a round on these upcoming days, regardless of that it’s always encouraged to ahelp it the moment you see or think someone might be breaking the rules, and if there’s no admin on and not a reply on the discord after the adminhelp ping, the following protocol is to make a Player Report so an admin can take a look when they’re available but again, you’ll have to keep in mind we’re entering holidays and everything’s going to be a little slower than usual.

Trying to stay positive and giving coolheaded feedback helps a lot because a lot of the coders and admins read the forums, one might think they don’t pay attention to the threads and discussions we do but they’ve shown they do, just as always remember they’re people with their own lives just like me and you and they’re doing their best with their available time on this voluntary job to keep a healthy community, we certainly don’t need a ‘‘yeah gg admins are never on you can do whatever’’ mindset to be spread through the game/discord/forum.

I just want vampires tbh. They were always my favorite antag even if everyone (including me) died to them on Para.

Ided, but also yeah there are too many midrounds. Dynamic has a reputation for being a redshift for a reason. So making it only dynamic was kind of short sighted.

I think we should have another look at the Shadowling. It might be more fitting for the all Dynamic rounds change.

Did you make an entire thread about how “nightmare bad” because you died to one after you tried to kill it as an antag?

Yes, nightmares make the round hard for everyone. Having APCs broken is annoying, and having the lights broken is annoying. however, engineering frequently doesn’t have anything to do besides pet projects, so I don’t think them having to fix some APCs would be horrible.

Nightmares are Murderbone* which means they have some stipulation for murderboning. That stipulation in this case is “Make everything dark, kill those who try to prevent you from doing so”. The only time I found a nightmare really really annoying was when 2 of them spawned around the same time, and there was one sec officer who actively just let them go after they were caught or killed. Luckily, it had already been a long round, and the round ended shortly after medbay went dark.

Random” nightmare discussion thread, this was just a salt thread.

I do have some opinions on the state of midrounds currently, and dynamics use of them, but I figure this isn’t really the thread for it.

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