I don’t necessarily think those two perspectives need mutually exclude one-another, but I do think that the synth whitelist is suppose to be an elevated platform of roleplay, not a balancing mechanic.
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i think nobody coming in should follow the earlier council steps of focusing entirely on game mechanics and acting like X person is trash cuz they use X chem
dont tell me that didnt happen i dont say stuff in vain
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Synth WL has the same issue the CO whitelist and Predator whitelist has.
It is meant to be a whitelist you get to heighten the servers roleplay but the server itself is anti-RP.
Roleplay at the level people want to see in whitelists requires downtime. It is hard to roleplay a believable personality when taking a second to breath and write out a properly articulated sentence as a CO, for instance, means 10 marines will die and be left to permadie since you are taking precious extra seconds (which equate to a faster Queen Screech cooldown) to type up a critical CIC announcement that can relay information that will save the game.
The same with Synth; the more time you take to play a believable character and not just a surgery / engineering bot, the faster the front falls, which means the faster the FOB falls, which means the faster the game in general ends.
For Predators it is different since they are “optional side content”, but because engaging with Predators means putting the game on hold (the actual HvX part of the game) it ends with most people not engaging unless they are non-critical personnel. And most non-critical personnel are either super robustos that want to murderize you with some epic combo like M39 extended + flamer, or are complete newbie PVT’s that do not know better the threat a Predator is to a marine.
This ends with all the whitelists circlejerking and showing their roleplay ability in things such as the CO Observers that show up to talk to other CO’s, Survsynth’s like Willard that choose to stay on colony to RP with Xenos as a lizard caretaker on LV / just in general acting like a Predator player but with less restrictions, or Predators finally having fun RPing or killing people freely during hijack when marines evac early so they are basically free game since their round is already over.
Roleplay as people envision it died when rounds became shorter because you have to sweat now to keep the round alive on both sides, and if you stop sweating, you get perma killed by those who do sweat. Do not like it? Look at OWL rounds where marines are not on their top game; rounds end before the Gauss turrets even turn off. I pick on OWL but other Prime xeno players like BOMB Rav or WAR empress can do the same.
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This guy is cooking ^^
Going to edit this comment to add something valuable to the discussion that hasn’t been mentioned yet. The complete lack of oversight on synthetics in-game and the prevalence of combat heavy synthetics which undermine the faith players have on the whitelist.
Marines see synths as groundside doctors that hardly speak and xenos see them as a “better kill them now or they’ll abuse us later”. On the rest of the points, I agree with NuggetsonToast.
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Hi WestRover! I’m happy to see you’ve become a councilor, Congratulations on the promotion! As always, a personal opinion declaimer. I’m not a member of staff nor do I hold any whitelists. I’m just a player who roleplays a lot and as such, this will primarily be focused on roleplay Vs. mechanics of the role, my opinion does not reflect the views of any whitelist holders, staff or mentors… With that out of the way;
Collapsible Feedback So It Doesn't Clog The Thread.
I believe that synthetic players are amazing roleplayers. I’ve never had a bad interaction with any whitelist holders, a few synthetic names spring forth immediately like Malcolm, Grace and Finn I’ve RP’d with a few times. I believe their de-facto role of being a glorified robot surgeon-Engineer ground-side is overall a bad thing, as it limits their ability to be roleplayers first-and-foremost, groundside surgery also takes away a core task of the shipside medical team - while a human doctor can deploy, they have limitations to their capabilities and where they are allowed to operate. I also have thoughts on doctors deploying, but thats for another thread.
On the topic of roleplay, some of my best RP moments and bits have been with synthetics. I remember my interactions with CorpSec Synthvivor Malcolm when I was still getting my RP skills up as a junior executive - I’d say something about how the CLF are a threat and he’d respond with something like ‘Do not worry, Executive! I have the strength and speed to be able to snap a neck within the blink of an eye!’ and then hit me with the line ‘Its not magic… its Malcolm!’. I’ve had several dozen memorable interactions with I’d say, a quarter of the whitelist players. I could go on and on about how great the roleplay of the WL holders are, but again, thats for another time.
This all begs the question - what do the players, and more importantly the whitelist holders, Councillors and development team want of the synthetic role? Should it be a role where the in-game mechanics take priority, with synthetics being all-in-one builders, surgeons, that are equip with encyclopedic knowledge on nearly every threat and issue they would ever have to face - a force to be reckoned with?
Should it be a role where roleplay is first-and-foremost prioritized, second to mechanics?
Should it be a mix of both?
My personal take on it is that roleplay should come first-and-foremost for all roles, but ESPECIALLY whitelist roles such as synthetics. As far as I see it, the team-death-match style of rounds we currently have don’t help this problem - Roles like combat correspondent and corporate liaison are bandaids for a larger problem. I don’t know how to remedy this, and any ‘easy’ solutions are made impossible by the fact the majority of players do not want a radical change to the core teamdeathmatch gameplay loop of Colonial Marines Space Station 13.
Phew. That got a bit ranty. I hope it makes sense overall - I play CMSS13 primarily for roleplay with everything secondary to roleplay. I hold no ill will to any synthetic players and I even have an application in the works! Remember - everything can be improved, and I look forward to seeing the new council work on it. While the task ahead will be difficult, you have my sympathies.
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Being blunt. But what the hell kind of roleplay are people expecting from Synthetics?
Isn’t diligently doing your job and simply communicating one great example of roleplay? Especially by our standards.
You can’t shove Synthetic in as a role that demands hyper-competence and a command over all mechanical systems such as medical and engineering and then have a community expectation that Synthetic must be doing support work to their best capabilities. While also then expecting an unrealistic degree of “roleplay” that is so ill defined that it comes across more as a political slogan than a word with any real substance.
You have 15 minutes to get prepared to cover the job roles of a Corpsman, Doctor, Combat Technician at minimum, let alone field intelligence, body recovery and the one person who will build half the FOB, and if you fuck up something you either get yelled at or God forbid someone threatens a player report.
Synthetics are doing the job they want to do and are expected to do. Being the master-of-all-trades.
I will state that I do agree, however, that Synthetics are way too tanky. The amount of seeth and anger that hivemind chat generates as they watch helplessly as a Synth dived in and recovers a dozen dead marines while the hive barely can slow them down could be directed to powering the server.
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The way applications are handled and emphasize a supreme competence in especially medical lends credence to toast’s perception. To the point we had a well recognized, great roleplayer with a superb app being denied because of minor inefficiencies in medical play. Not maltreatment or failure to treat, just not doing it to the fastest “meta” standard. The wall of DENIED creates an air of gatekeepiness that has discouraged me and a few other players I’ve spoken with while working on mine and honestly has made even trying to go for it insanely stressful. (A lot of the denied ones are very obviously low effort, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t very good applications that are in there and are denied over seemingly incredibly minor things.)
It also feeds into the perceived medbot9000 thing, the current synth standards require a high standard of expertise in medical and simultaneously provide you with the best medical tools in the game, for much the same reasons people see medical survs and go “oh they’re just a powergamer PFC+ with medical skill” despite the role being setup excellently for roleplay.
People who put that kind of time into learning the medical system are naturally going to enjoy helping others & optimizing their craft, which leads to people assuming the synth will fix their fracs etc, which leads to them being seen as just a convenient walking autodoc.
In lore, the capability of the synthetics are balanced against their cost, they are supremely expensive assets and to discard one or risk it in frontline fighting should be a very hard choice.
This creates a decent incentive to not be overly impactful and focus on RP but it is hit with a road block both mechanically and via the OOC guidelines synths are bound by.
In terms of gameplay, synths are reasonably tanky but more importantly they are immune to most of the CC abilities xenos are accustomed to, and very hard to slow, or otherwise keep down, this isnt necessarily a bad thing-- it feeds into the synth’s supposed reaction which is to just get out of dodge and run away.
The issue comes with the second part, the OOC regulations on self preservation and how it applies are quite vague and seem to leave a lot of room for actions that really do not focus on preserving the self. Realistically, the player knows and understands how much risk there is in a maneuver such as running into the xeno mob to shake someone up from a warrior lunge, they can make the judgement that the survivability afforded to them to run away will allow them to shake the guy up or pull him away and retreat, and so they do.
This leads to the most frustrating part of dealing with a synth as a xeno, in my opinion, Having a synth running around recklessly on the frontline or backline because you and them are both aware that for the most part they can get away with it, grabbing your kills or interrupting your combos, etc. The salt would exist in some form either way obviously, people like to complain, but if synths really were in the FOB or the back of the frontline quietly working with the other medics I don’t really think there would be such an air of vitriol between xeno players and synths. This is compounded by the fact that even if you do kill them in the course of some reckless action. (which is very uncommon to begin with) you can’t actually keep them down like you can a marine.
The issue I see with fixing this is that fundamentally player reports are how synths are policed, and filing a player report requires you understand to some degree the nuances of the synth guidelines, as well as taking up a lot of everyone’s time and being generally stressful to deal with. If you just made self preservation rules far more strict you would have to deal with a lot more of these reports and would still have behavior that goes unreported go uncorrected. (Dealing with getting reported every time you get caught off alone and a xeno walks up to you doesnt sound fun for anyone.)
I don’t have the perfect solution for this, but I think an intermediate way to improve it would be to take a page from stalker’s book and start doing “RP reviews” on synths as they’re playing from time to time. I don’t mean 1984 stalk synth players and harass them for little mistakes, moreso just when councillers have free time observing rounds and watching how the synths do, giving them constructive feedback on how better to fit the spirit of the WL, stuff like “Hey it was a little reckless when you ran and completed [y] objective alone”, etc. this might already happen to some degree internally, I wouldn’t know of course, but that gets onto the next thing.
Part of the issue with the WLs though is the perception that self policing does not happen. For the average person all they really know about WL behavior scrutiny is being told “make a PR” if something happens they don’t understand or had a bad time with, if the average person truly believed the WL was watching and working on these issues there wouldn’t be as much of a feeling that nobody is punished for misbehaving or straying from the spirit of the WL unless it’s egregious enough to warrant a PR.
I definitely agree that it has been lessened as rounds became shorter and the direction of staff and maintainers has shifted in the direction of more of a TDM, roleplay is still there but you have to dig a little more to find it. There’s not so much the synth WL itself can do to alter this state of affairs, other than nerf the crap out of synths so they feel less impactful. The feeling that you “need” to be on your A-game or the round ends faster/you lose is a somewhat flawed mindset that will burn you out no matter what, no individual person should feel as though the round outcome is personally hinged on them (if you play CIC and only track your success by wins and not something more nebulous like “Fun” you will burn out insanely quickly.)
this is pretty much the TLDR, yeah, the tankiness supposedly exists to enable synths to evade combat but it often used instead to effect it by intervening in the front line directly. having seen synths do silly stuff like run through multiple tiles of fire to grab a marine off a warrior and instantly fling them back towards the marine line, etc. Likely either the mechanics will have to change to make this kind of behavior more risky or the regulations will have to tighten. We could probably populate a whole thread on ways to mechanically disincentivize this kind of thing, honestly. One example could be something like;
Nuking smartpack repair, making welding tools/cable only able to restore synths to a very basic level of HP-- e.g. you can only weld/wire a synth enough for them to get out of dodge/take one or two hits, more significant repairs require a more invested solution that cannot be performed at the front line.
I haven’t spent time brainstorming all the pros/cons/gameplay impacts of such a change-- so do not consider this a serious proposal, but the somewhat binary HP of a synth compared to a marine makes them able to take risks that marines otherwise wouldn’t; the average marine doesnt usually rush a warrior to interrupt a lunge because being in such an aggressive position will likely net them a fracture or two, which is a significant investment of time and reduction in capability to repair. Synths don’t really have “fractures” as such as repairing the limb removes the malus’ like dropping items, and internal damage is not particularly common.
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The whitelist suffers greatly from what’s the servers main problem.
There is no roleplay standard for the most filled role, the Rifleman. (And this also extends to most roles because you’re supposed to LEARN how the game functions as a rifleman.)
Nobody is making them roleplay and create fun characters, because we’re still trying to pretend that a TDM oriented game can somehow co-exist with a game that’s supposed to be a roleplaying game. So marines don’t even have to listen to their superiors…
Additionally, there are absolutely zero community-made or easily presented resources that would make people learn what the universe is about and how a marine behaves. This is super apparent because there is a lot of people who just say “unga unga hurr durr”, spam warcry or talk about “le xd funyn warcrimes” which is just plainly LRP. You could always tell people to just go watch Aliens but that doesn’t solve the issue.
Most people don’t say much except for the occasional “splint please” or “woyer”, because they’re here just to shoot xenos, not to roleplay. You could always say “Oh, just go play a shipside role if you want to roleplay!”. Every role is supposed to roleplay. You are playing a character.
Most of the focus is on gameplay, and in a enviroment where there’s very little people who will actually respond to a Synth who wants to talk and show their quirk how can you expect the whitelist to not slowly degrade and become a MEDBOT900 whitelist instead? The feeling that you “need” to be as good as possible will burn the player out and they lose interest in their whitelist, sometimes just totally ignoring that they had a quirk since nobody bothers to answer.
Besides that I don’t think Synths have any problem - They’re not unreasonably tanky. They have only one charge of the Super Unkillable Mode on their smartpack and what looks to be their “tankyness” comes from the fact they don’t go into crit and don’t feel pain unlike marines.
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I just want to say that synths seem stronger in game then in the movies.
in alien, ash gets hit once with a small fire extinguisher and goes haywire, a second blow to the head and he’s decapitated, compare this with CM where they don’t really have the “go haywire” feature and take way more damage then a pocket fire extinguisher and keep on going.
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Even in the newer movies, they are often stronger and more precise than humans. But not superhuman. You can just look at David for that.
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Synthetic is an usual role. On one hand we want roleplay, unique quirks, and not to be able to tank damage… yet the way the game plays…command and marines want you frontline, no one has time to talk, and xenos will do everything in their power to ambush, fling, bait, and spin on your dead body while launching reports on self preservation. Its a difficult balance.
Roleplay: This kind of starts with you. Personally and with bias I think my quirk is great; River is a hippie, everyone knows what that is, everyone can see I am a hippy from a mile away. I mention this because how obvious it is makes it easy for marines to respond. So I get a great deal of roleplay.
Even with that. I’d say 85% of the marines I see only ask me to fix their bones. Thats it.
10% tell me they hate synths or I dont have a soul or am not a person. ( I counter this with Hippy garbage about “allbeings” and “all of us made of starlight”. One of the reasons I actually made River a hippy because of amount of this I got on my previous synth).
Only about 5% of marines bother to talk to me… and only from prebriefing to the drop.
RP on CM is dying and has been for a long time. Cutting first contact, making rounds shorter, removing complexity… we are where we are. If you want to see more roleplay from synthetics, then interact with them.
Quirks: Id like to see council step more toward identifable quirks. It should be more visual. We fall into a catch 22 here though as the identifable a synth is the easier to roleplay with… but the more they can clash with the universe. A fat synth in a chef outfit on the front line with a giant pizzacutter… who WOULDNT talk with that guy…" butmylore! " The synth with brown hair and military fatigues…“boringandcantrp”
Role: Id like to see synthetics busted less for “performance” but thats difficult because marines dont care they are permaing because the synth is roleplaying to the patient they saved… they just care they are permaing.
Regarding shipside… we were in discussion regarding generations and not deploying before I went on my “vacation” which I will resume if/when I return. But even that comes back to… practicality. If you bother to ask command where you can help? You are on the frontline… everytime. Command wants to win… marines want to stay alive. If there is one and only one synthetic… it makes sense to send them to the front. Im not sure what else you could do about this but let doctors deploy… or maybe add synth spots.
I know this is rambly and again not to self brag but above is the thoughts of myself as one of the highest played synth players. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours on synthetic. Ive been synthetic off and on for something like 6 years.
The good news for all the doomsaying… these are problems we have always had… and although not going away… are probably in some ways better now than at times in the past.
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If you want to make Synth more RP remove their “Multitool” status. They should not have maxed every single ability under the sun.
Roll them all back to Gen 1/2.
Something like “module chips”, or whatever, kinda like vanilla SS13 borg, where they pick something and stick with it, unless they really need a change, so they go back to their small synth closet with stationary device to replace their “medical” chip with “engineering” one.
Synths should be (ironically) more robotic. What is the point of having a robot perfectly pretending to be a human? That is just roleplaying a super-strong human. Almayer should have some hand-me down crappy Synth, not top of the line G3s because snowflake whitelisters don’t actually want to RP a robot. Almayer synths should be G1s only.
Synth should ever only deploy groundside when marines actually need that support. CE doesn’t go planetside unless there is like two comtechs alive and CMO doesn’t go planetside unless there are no doctors to do it.
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Synths are not Robots 
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I mean, synthetics are made to be jack-of-all-trades I believe, I’m not the biggest Aliens lore geek since I’m now investing myself in Warhammer 40k, but I believe this wouldn’t even be possible, since their vendors have everything ranging from engineering and medical, so I don’t know how coders will handle that other than removing more than half of the vendors content
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Heya! I do wanna say that it takes at least some courage to just open up the whole can of worms of asking the entire community for feedback. So cudos for that.
Fair warning. I ramble a lot in forum posts so if you want to skip to just a TLDR just head to the bottom of my comment and it’ll be there.
I think if I read through this chat and from absorbing some community sentiments the past few years I can identify two main things that people want to change with synths.
- Synths are mechanically unbalanced/wrongly balanced
- Synths are currently noRP/LRP/MRP/HRP and there should be more RP
When it comes to synths being mechanically unbalanced or not I dont really have a strong opinion or a horse in that race. So I’m not gonna comment on it at all.
I do however have both opinions and at least some, although maybe a tiny bit outdated (although it seems mostly things have been kinda the same!), knowledge when it comes to RP on CM.
- Synths are currently noRP/LRP/MRP/HRP and there should be more RP
When I say this what I mean is that there are a lot of different kinds of people in the community with totally different but equally strong opinions on synthetics.
Some will say that they are noRP/LRP powergamers and some people will say that synths are very much an RP role that does a ton of RP.
What unites both of those groups is that they would like to see more RP with and out of synths, and the synthetic whitelist in general.
Everyone will have their own silver bullet of a fix that will make synth RP perfect and instead of trying to list all my ideas I’m just gonna try to identify the underlying issue.
Speaking from my personal experience, if you want RP to happen you need to HAVE EXTRA TIME for RP. And that is something that synths are sorely lacking.
General stuff about RP
Let me clarify that statement a bit.
In general when RPing with players or seeing RP happen you need a willingness to RP, something to RP about/around and the time and space to do so.
The first two there is never a shortage of. We have a decent setting and in my experience almost every player who plays CM will try to RP with you if given the opportunity to do so. (Even if some people in the community believe otherwise)
That third element is what is often missing though. Its the reason that you barely see people roleplaying while at the front, when medbay is overflowing, when req line is filled up with 20 people, etc.
You have to stop achieving the goal of the round to RP.
Thats not a bad thing or anything that needs fixing per se, its just something that is inherent to roleplaying.
Taking the time to write out a sentence, facing left and right (with a dramatic pause in-between) to look around, writing on a piece of paper and typing out your emote all take time that you could be spending shooting bugs.
Like I said, not a bad thing per-se. Just an observation and explanation as to why you see a lot more RP in the FOB and shipside instead of during a marine push/retreat or in the middle of a hijack hold.
Synths just do not have that time at all. They are always running around from one priority to the next. Always busy, always working.
There are a ton of arguments you can make as to why and they will all be valid. The synth whitelist expectations, the tools synths have, what the playerbase demands of synths, the synth skill-list, the orders that command gives to synths you could even say that xeno gameplay or round length force synths into a no nonsense gameplay loop.
Because of this reality, where synths are always busy, the amount of roleplay opportunities get limited.
So if you want synths to roleplay more you need to decrease their workload. At least that is my analysis and opinion regarding it.
How you do that is entirely up to you. I can spitball all day and come up with a ton of different and contradictory solutions. But I’m not gonna do that unless you ask for it since I dont think that’s too productive.
Anyways that was just my little thing that I wanted to add to this thread. Best of luck as council and with the whitelist!
TLDR: People want synths to roleplay more. Synths are currently too busy playing the game to roleplay more. Decrease their workload and they'll be able to roleplay more.
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I say we buff synth health and in exchange, they can be delimbed. They can re-attach limbs with a like, 10 second process, it could use some tweaking but yeah.
They need an arm to reattach limbs though. Imagine how fucking kino it would be to get that double arm synth delimb as runner
Why? Because this sounds fun
Anyway, gameplay is roleplay. Balance is there to make sure roleplay doesn’t get too far in front of mutual fun (my xeno roleplay is being a horrific genocidal monstrosity that spits acid)
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Personally broadly like synths in general but I do think their tankiness is a bit farcical for xenos when they can just waltz into where xenos are holding to collect bodies completely consequence free. I also find in longer rounds it’s not uncommon to see synths stretching the boundaries of the rules by trying to sneak into hive by themselves. In these situations there’ll always be some excuse or technicality but it just seems against the spirit of the role. I think there are plenty of synth players who roleplay well but a some are just bad actors
I have bemoaned the existence of the smartpack since the very first day it was added, I think it is a toxic part of game balance. You had at least passing interactions with marines by talking to them as a commtech patches you up, and the smartpack removed that by rubbing your hand on any APC which will always be powered because you should get power up, no xeno can kill you by the time you get back to FOB on all but the largest maps.
The new PR of dedicated shipside synth is based and I’ll play that a lot, this was a long term suggestion of mine to just vibe and RP instead of the genuinely toxic attitudes towards synthetics groundside from marines and xenos in different capacities.
IMO synthetics in general because of their ease of repair do some obscenely risky plays like dragging bodies away from the queen simply because they know that they can’t die from it and can fix it all relatively quickly. Welding/cables at least is a finite resource and a punishing period of time to be repaired for taking the risk, vs 7 seconds channel and touch an APC
EDIT:
I also think the super suited up synthetics with coif, helmet, armor and 0 exposed skin look far too edgy for a synthetic designed to be personable and relatable. That’s just me tho
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Quirks always felt a little too emphasized to me given how much of a fixation there is on trying to have a novel and interesting one. I’ve started to feel like it feeds into one of the ideas surrounding synthetics, that they’re here to kind of entertain marines a bit while fixing their bones rather than being a fully realized character in their own right.
That aside, I’ll echo what others have said about the overall foundation of CM. For roleplay in general whether it’s as someone in a whitelist or just as the base rifleman there seems to be a sort of… resentment to roleplay. To a jaded or just more game-focused player, you’re getting in the way and detracting from the round. Roleplay is a two-way street though, if you make no real effort to engage with someone else and expect them to just amuse you I don’t think it’s really fair to criticize them as harshly as I’ve seen done.
What Joooks said about having resources available for the world and the lore would be absolutely huge to me and I think would be the largest positive change for the synthetic whitelist even though that’s not really in the synthetic council’s hands. While many don’t care for roleplay, there’s so many people who just need a little push before they start trying. It’s really cool to chat with a new player and have them open up even if it’s nothing earth-shattering. A lot of CM’s roleplay is in the small details that are easily overlooked in favour of something more bombastic. They’re some of my fondest memories too. It’s awesome and the reason why I’ve stuck around longer than I expected.
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https://cm-ss13.com/wiki/Lore_Home
I wish this got updated, or if people knew of the many books on the aliens universe (I am so close to just linking all of the Alien RPG books + Tech man)
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