As it stands, MPs have almost no content outside of the occasional shitter that shoots up req, or RnD/CL growing bugs, etc.
Atleast 75% if not more of all MP rounds wind up being absolute slop snoozefests because the only thing you can do is sit in brig and alt tab until someone yells on comms for MPs
Having a Minor Agent Antag that scales with MPs would spice up the round shipside for MPs (and shipside crew) for the better. Of course taking into account the effect on the round, these antags would get effectively the same objectives they had before to ensure their impact on the round is minimized, being stuff like steal/break X thing, or poison X person with moldy bread, upload a virus to some random email computer and break it.
Eh. I have mixed feelings about it. Firstly, it makes the MP department prejudist against the roles which can have the antag role (MT, research, CL, etc.), and second, if it lands on a researcher, they will now do antag stuff and either not do their job, or be found out and be perma’d.
Like sure, you get stuff to do (at times), but for the most part its just some dude putting a poster on a hallway, and boom they are job evicted.
ofc we can just limit it to certain non-essential roles like Nurse, MT, MST, CT, CL, etc.
and as for prejudice, you could probably make a case for metagaming in a player report should MPs be specifically targeting only antag-enabled jobs (also to note, listening device usage is far more heavily restricted now than what it was)
But still, antag missions and being an antag in and of itself was just kind of bad. The missions were dogwater, and finding out who actually did the missions was piss easy.
Lets take the poster mission as an example. You have to place a poster in a hallway. Once you set up the poster, you leave scratchmarks next to it for about 10 minutes. If an MP gets the prints, its just over for you as you will now be targeted as a spy and either get exiled planet side, or simply permabrigged.
Like, its a high stakes role, with litterary 0 rewards.
all of this can be worked around
soap for fingerprints and/or fingerprint-less gloves
the missions themselves aren’t hard to do, or even get away with if you have half a braincell, I have seen people literally, in the current code, practically get away with shit like stealing Jones, all with somehow leaving no fingerprints, I only even found out cause the cat meowed inside of them
as for rewards, maybe after you save up or earn some amount of points you can call a shuttle to head to your ERT station, or you can increase the weight of your respective factions distress beacon if you are in hijack and you want to hold out
it can all be heavily refined from what it was long ago
CM has no “classic” fingerprint and detective stuff. Fingerprints just appear when you place a poster, or break a window pre-hijack. I’m not 100% sure about current state, but in the past those prints appeared even when you shoot a bullet to break glass, somehow.
And no, it shouldn’t be shipside roles, there is so little of them and it is so obvious. Agents should be choosen from marines, MPs already are biased against PFCs, they can’t keep an eye on every single one.
All of this should be low-key objectives, nothing too distracting, placing posters, getting marines to sign some shit, spreading propaganda and paranoia, stealing USCM data and technology.
Reward could simply be respective faction gear, UPP rifle, CLF handmade shotgun, etc. Isn’t too big, marine side isn’t forced to sabotage itself in gameplay meaningfull way and they aren’t getting rewarded with something busted. Win-win.
Just add in xeno cultist as a full time job role that is randomly given to someone based on population numbers. Maybe 2-3 xeno cultists during high pop and only 1 during low pop. Their whole job is to kidnap the MPs and bring them down to the colony to get face hugged. After that they just kidnap random useless shipside roles like the Mess Tech or XO.
I like the idea, but there’s a reason that survivor CLF are considered to have surrendered if they’re captured by marines or defibbed/healed from critical by them. Having someone fucking up the marines’ supply chain at a critical moment would be a lot of fun for the saboteur, but having to deal with that shit every round would honestly get old fast. It could make for a fun event, but we barely ever do those.
Having cultists will give griefers a legitimate reason to… grief? They can kidnap anyone and answer ahelp as “i mistook my target lol, my bad” while giving xeno the GP or sole CT in req. What can staff do to them as it’s their role to grief?
No, I do not. Simply there is not enough shipside roles to choose from. We don’t need MPs looking funny at every cook and nurse.
Very minor PFC antag that has a goal to do small things shipside in exchange for CLF/UPP/WY gear.
Such a minor inconvenience that it was tedious just handling them (You needed mountains of evidence, which our system isnt setup for, and they’d get released and immediately start doing same thing)
The security system and MP role as a whole needs actual features and QoL improvements before we try put a bandaid on with a feature which failed in the past.
Which like I said is grounds for a metagame PR should it be bad enough in the first place.
Give the MST tg-style CQC, nothing could possibly go wrong
Besides “lets add more ways to arrest and brig marines”, not sure there really is any room for RP fluff fun stuff on their end while keeping in the setting
I think considering MP state as of now, it should be a Staff only roll.
Hear me out, MPs already have so much OOC protections and they deal with stuff that Staff cannot be bothered to handle or will punish someone OOC without dealing with it in-game.
I feel like a separate game mode like normal space station 13 would be where its more appropriate. Antags here would be cool but it doesnt look like we have enough competent or motivated devs to make it work.
A dang set of rounds that start on the station would be balling. The planet is in normal shape, with medical, the bar, and everything else working correctly.
Antags could be
xeno cult breaking out the WY secret lab.
Could be CLF spys.
Synth revolt
Theres several options that a WY themed SS13 server could have, i think it’d be a fun set up.
Even the weather could be an antag. Theres always those horror movies where it feels like the world is trying to kill you. Some kind of “Zeus” that controls weather, can cause station stuff to fault, or glitch out containment cells, like a malevolent entity, would be neat.
the problem is that CM pop is just too high to have things like this be low-key like SS13
in reality marines would cover most of the entire map with no challenge and anybody getting up to stuff
(like trying to break into labs) will just start a free for all
or if things take too long the round will devolve into open warfare like most other RP events