i’ve noticed a trend in which balance changes are made to the game with, in my opinion, insufficient opportunities for players to provide their feedback.
for example, the shotgun nerf.
BeeStation:master ← PowerfulBacon:Shotgun-Rebalance-2
opened 10:55AM - 26 Oct 23 UTC
## About The Pull Request
|Ammo Type|Variable|Old|New|
|-|-|-|-|
|Slug|Dama… ge|60|41|
|Slug|Armour Penetration|-20|0|
|Buckshot|Damage|9|8|
|Buckshot|Armour Penetration|0|20|
|Improvised|Tile Dropoff|0.55|0.3|
|Improvised|Spread|25|15|
|Improvised|Damage|6|5|
|Improvised|Pellet Count|10|9|
Makes the minimum amount of shots to kill with the most common ammo types 3. No shotgun will be able to 2 shot unarmoured targets anymore.
Time to kill at certain ranges before and after. There are some quirks with the graph due to the amount of shells hitting a target being discrete and there may be some minor inaccuracies which we will verify in testing.
- Buckshot: Minimum of 3 shots to kill, falls off after a good amount of distance however inaccuracies will smooth the graph out in non-testing environments, particularly with the harsh drop off that happens at 15 and 8 units. (People won't aim directly at a target)
- Slugs: Balanced around buckshot, the same or worse at close ranges but either the same or always better at ranges above 7 units.
- Improvised: Just generally a worse version of buckshot.
## Why It's Good For The Game
This is a follow up PR to #3152 made to address some of the faults that the original PR has.
Many things have changed since the original PR which require addressing with a small rebalance:
- The assumption that antagonists will generally be pretty well armoured doesn't hold
- Threats such as nightmares who cannot take armour and traitors who get caught off-guard are significantly more common.
- Negative armour penetration has strange behaviours and isn't tested for sanity.
- Getting killed in 2 hits feels very unfair, especially for the antagonists which cannot wear or obtain powerful armour.
- Improvised shells are almost entirely useless and super inconsistent. This makes them a bit more consistent as just all-round worse buckshot shells.
This PR aims to reduce the imbalance between shotguns feeling unfair against unarmoured opponents, the primary goal being to **make the minimum amount of shots fired to kill a target 3** while not reducing the impact of shotguns on more armoured targets too much.
For the most part, the damage will just be lower however due to the shotguns being a lot easier to use when compared to laser weapons due to the distrbution chance to hit rather than discrete hit/miss of laser guns I don't think this will make them worse than laser guns even if in a testing environment their time to kill is now lower against an unmoving, unarmoured target.
## Testing Photographs and Procedure
3 shots to kill a human point blank with buckshot.
4 shots to kill a human in bulletproof armour (This is lower than the table predicted, probably since that is 0 range instead of 1)
5 shots to kill bulletproof armour at a slight range
All hit at this range, takes around a range of 6-7 before bullets start to miss as predicted by the graph
3 shots to kill at a good range with slugs
6 shots to kill a highly armoured oppent with slugs
Improvised is actually 2 shots to kill at close range. This is because 10 x 5 is 50. The pellet count has been reduced to 9 to make it a maximum of 45 damage instead.
## Changelog
:cl:
balance: Shotguns now require a minimum of 3 shots to kill unarmoured targets with slugs, buckshot and improvied buckshot.
balance: Improvised shotgun shells are now less consistent and more reliable.
/:cl:
to my knowledge, ooc more-or-less never complained about shotguns. and yet it was nerfed with no player poll. i’d be okay with the nerf if some kind of feedback process took place, but to my knowledge, any discussion of the changes happened primarily on github.
now another big nerf is on the table. in short, ballistic ammo is going to be much harder for antags and security to acquire. since bacon gave his implicit approval, this pr will likely be merged when it’s done.
BeeStation:master ← DarnTheMarn:ammo
opened 04:34AM - 22 Jan 24 UTC
## About The Pull Request
## Damage numbers, cost, materials, etc aren't fina… lized.
To put it simply, this PR makes acquiring high powered ballistics ammunition for traitors and security alike more difficult and further separates their respective paths for getting ammo.
Full strength antagonist ammunition, most notably 10mm and .357, can no longer be made in a hacked autolathe and must be created using black powder in the crafting menu. New recipes have been added where applicable.
Full strength security ammunition, notably 4.6x30mm rounds, .38 special, and shotgun shells can no longer be made an autolathe and must be created using smokeless powder inserted into the techfab. Improvised 4.6x30mm rounds have been added to the crafting menu. Magazines and speed loaders are no longer, what spawns in the armory and in the detective's holster are all you get unless you specifically order more from cargo. This brings security in line with the magazine juggling antagonists have to do. WT-550 magazine have also increased in size to normal to prevent making up for reduced effectiveness by increasing the volume of fire. Plus look at it, how the hell is a 20 round magazine a tiny item?
Smokeless powder is a new reagent whose components cannot be made on the station and must be ordered through cargo. The process to create the powder is simple, combine three parts nitric acid with one part cellulose and a catalyst of sulfuric acid. Combine the resulting nitrocellulose with nitroguanidine in a 2 part and 3 part mixture respectively, and voila you have smokeless powder. The reagents in the crate provide enough for a full tube of shotgun shells or a full magazine of 4.6mm rounds with a very small amount left over.
The obvious question is why security has to go through two hoops, cargo and chemistry, for their ammo while traitors only have to go through one. The answer is that if it was available just through cargo, a stationed cargo security officer could order it and have unimpeded access to unlimited ammo. If it was available through station side chemicals, it would just become another thing for the brig physician to rush round start. By combining the two hurdles I hope to ensure that security is affected by the changes to the same degree as antagonists as well as inject some much needed inter-departmental work with security.
The second question is why black powder for antagonist ammo? The answer is that it is thematically appropriate and quite well suited to it's application here. All of the reagents for black powder can be obtained via ghetto chemistry with modest effort, aside from one. Potassium. Potassium in any real quantity can't be obtained through ghetto chemistry. You have to ask a chemist for it, or get a botanist to make you some bananas, et cetera. The catch is potassium and bananas are both fairly suspicious items to ask for. It doesn't take a genius to realize that you're asking for half of a bomb, or a slipping tool. Another thing with black powder is that it provides evidence of its creation. A robust detective might hear the sound of a grinder and see a pile of bananas and go in to investigate...
<hr>
**Cargo**
Ammunition and weaponry crates have similarly seen an overhaul. Ammo crates of all types have been removed and replaced with magazine and speed loader crates. These provide a pair of .38 speed loaders and 4.6x30mm magazines respectively and both come unloaded. This applies to Russian surplus and Western crates as well. Russian surplus crates still have a chance to spawn with unloaded stripper clips since they are the "magazine" of the Mosin Nagant. All ballistics from cargo now come fully unloaded to prevent people from circumventing the system.
The two contraband weapon crates, the Western and Surplus, also now come in a variant of the code locked abandoned crate. This isn't a security measure, they were easy to break into before and after this change. It's just meant to signify to law abiding crew and security that hey, you really shouldn't be ordering these considering you have to hack the console to even see it and then hack it open once you do get the crate.
## Why It's Good For The Game
It brings the server more in line with the design document, that Nanotrasen primarily uses energy weapons. The code references this with "outdated" WT-550s and so on, but having to actually put some leg work in to use these outdated weapons will make it more clear that they aren't the company's first choice.
One benefit is that increasing the barrier to entry on high burst damage weapons like shotguns and .357s means that more fights will become prolonged endeavors rather than being decided by the first shot and associated damage slow down.
Adds some much needed interdepartmental cooperation to security via smokeless powder production with cargo and medical.
Increased use of energy weapons means more people have the potential to be taken in alive since you can carry an E-gun at minimal cost and still have lethal capability when you need it.
Projectile spam is now a thing of the past. WT-550s were particularly egregious about this.
The changes are designed to affect security and antagonists roughly equally so neither side will be able to steamroll the other.
A good deal of thought went into theory crafting this PR so feel free to ask about why I made the decisions I did. I likely have an answer. I also recognize that this opens up some gaps between items that I look to fill at some point if and when this framework of sorts gets approved.
## Testing Photographs and Procedure
<details>
<summary>Screenshots&Videos</summary>
Coming once its closer to completion
</details>
## Changelog
:cl:
add: Smokeless powder along with its precursor chems to cargo
add: New magazine and speed loader crates
add: Improvised security ammo
add: Improvised traitor ammo
add: Full strength traitor ammo crafting recipes
del: Ammo crates, and ammo from purchased guns
del: Hot load 7.62
del: Security and traitor ammo from autolathes
balance: Various improvised round damage numbers
tweak: Russian Surplus and Western crates come locked in an abandoned crate
tweak: Full strength security ammo now requires smokeless powder and has increased material costs
/:cl:
to be clear, this isn’t about whether or not you or i like these prs. it’s about them getting merged with seemingly little to no regard for player opinion. i get that coders work on this game for free and that they thus hold great sway over the game’s direction. even so, i think balance changes should always be subject to playerbase scrutiny before getting merged.
3 Likes
If we want proper balanced lethals that consider non-uplink antagonists then we should bring back revs
1 Like
In what alternative reality do you live in? People have constantly been complaining about the shotguns
I mean, what’s the point of non-lethal weapons if it gets countered easily? Have the players known that Antags are too strong and can solo kill security given enough time for it?
I think stunbatons and Bolas shouldn’t be affected by EMPs, it’s quite dumb to make the game any harder. EMP disabling anything else is fine. An officer should be able to deal with known station threats, it’s pretty LRP otherwise.
There was a dedicated thread for it in the discord, open for several months .
The PR itself also stayed open for more than a month. There has been plenty of discussion, just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
People have constantly been complaining about the shotguns
there’s not much i can say about this, though i’m sure someone somewhere has had beef with shotguns, otherwise the pr never would’ve happened.
There was a dedicated thread for it in the discord, open for several months .
not everyone browses the discord, and the people who do typically aren’t there to check out thinktank or any other channel in Development Hell, myself included. i still think a player poll should’ve been made for such a major change.
The PR itself also stayed open for more than a month.
which probably means it fell off to page 2 or more at some point.
As a sec main, and a very prominent ?shotgun user, the rebalance was needed, shotgun remains as one of the best tool an officer can use and even after the rebalance it still retains it’s power.
As for the other PR i’ve already voiced my opinions on it, both on the original thinktank and the current draft that’s open, might need to add more later. But you’re right, not everyone reads the pr-discussion, thinktank or check github hell i’m sure some people completely dismisses the changelog but it’s not like it’s hidden, everyone can access them and share their opinion and even make their own PR if they want to tweak/balance/nerf/remove/etc something
If anything the only thing i miss is the more frequent usage of #pr-player-input where people were informed of big changes and ‘’‘‘voted’’‘’ on them (depending on what sort of change it was) since at the very least it informed players of things that are happening for those that never visit the aforementioned channels
6 Likes
system
February 11, 2024, 9:17am
6
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