space-wizards
Traitor Corporations [Traitor Objective Rework]
This is a proposal for a rework of the Traitors game mode. It is not a rework of the Traitor antagonist.
This proposal adjusts some of the current game mechanics surrounding the game mode. It is designed to build a stronger round narrative and give players involved in the round more fun and engaging experiences.
This rework primarily focusses on the role of distinct corporations within the Syndicate and their interactions with NT and each other. It reworks the "every tot for themselves" approach of the current Traitor game mode, allowing for a more diverse set of things that can happen. It also proposes some further work that would build on the intitial rework, that would touch on the Traitor game mode more commonly.
This does seem to fundamentally change the traitor antagonist from a solo antag to a team antag. Especially with the corporations giving out the names of the people working for them, which would make traitors less of a "trust no one" kind of gamemode and more of a team death match or team extraction kind of game mode. But on the other hand, I can see this design make more emergent RP and stories come along, as well as more tools being developped for syndicates to counter other syndicates
I am a fan of this design. I like how it is based in the reality of the game instead of a gameified system like we have now.
One thing I worry about is that antags being given the names of other antags allows for plea deals to be made, so even if an antag hasn't done anything yet they can be sold out to Sec.
I also like the inclusion of pink texting, and while I've heard of it conceptually I've not seen how it works when implemented. My one concern is that an antag may think they killed someone and hid the body well enough when really the person was revived and went to centcom in a pod (I know this isn't considered making it to centcom right now, but frankly that's just wrong).
One final thing that I think this would allow is for late join traitors to be implemented more easily. If the number of traitors in a round is chosen based on population, then once the station gets full enough a new hidden traitor slot could open and if someone with traitor enabled joins if their job can be a traitor a coin is rolled and they may be assigned traitor. This would work just like sleeper agents, but would happen more randomly during the round, and would make late joins less metable as safe.
I like the idea of corporations mattering, but i have a lot of concerns balance wise. Usually tots have the ability to get better gear than security, something they need since there tends to be more sec than tots.
If you have three tots, usually they all need different things and sometimes the same item. This leads to a conflict of interest in a way that stops them from acting with the unity and thus allows cracks from Sec to stop them. But if three tots all have the same goal, they are basically half the effectiveness of a nukie team now.
I would argue an entire person fully acting with your same goals is more powerful than any single tc item.
SECONDARY CONCERN I FORGOT TO INCLUDE IN MY INITIAL COMMENT
Changing traitors from a primarily-solo antagonist to a primarily team-based one has major balance concerns with regards to the uplink. With the current balance, even if traitors are aware of each other and collude, differences in objectives means that there is at least some incentive to play greedy and keep TC and equipment for yourself. If people are regularly teaming up, have ensured alliances, and don't have a reasonable fear of betrayal, there will likely be a lot more extreme TC sharing where an individual is able to acquire excess of 20 TC to spend on extremely overpowered nukies-tier gear. I consider this to be a major issue that will very likely skew traitors into being far too aggressive and dominating as a mode.
I think a much more logical way to do it would be to pretty aggressively weaken each individual traitor's gear and abilities in exchange for the increased leverage you get by working with a team of people. If cooperation is the major element you want to emphasize by adding teams to the mode, then cooperation should ideally be the default operation and not provide people with ways of becoming substantially stronger (like it does in the current traitors mode, where solo play is the assumed default).
While I do love making lore (as it is) more prevalent in SS14, despite what the intro says this proposal does change the Traitor antag significantly, from a primarily solo antag to a primarily team antag. This also makes syndie vs syndie violence more likely, which nudges traitors towards a self fixing problem for the station (which is undesirable). This rework also makes codewords mostly obsolete.
What I'd suggest : keep the corp politics mechanic, but make them more subtle by making the Syndicate keep their agents on a strict need-to-know basis so they have to interact more.
- Traitors shouldn't magically know who their allies are. They should use the existing codewords mechanic to signal and recognize each other. This method encourages social interaction and is not foolproof, which is good. Also, it leaves room for the highly funny paperwork mixup situation, where a Traitor has to kill someone from their own corp.
- Traitors shouldn't magically know who their competitors are either, for obvious reasons. However, it could be a fun idea to have them know about one codeword of the feuding corps so they can soft-identify competing agents.
- Agents from allied corps should have objectives that encourage cooperation, such as marooning/killing the same target. They don't have to know the allied agents' objectives, or even if they are in the same corp or an allied corp.
- Agents from competing corps should have mutually exclusive objectives, such as stealing the same high-value item, or killing someone vs keeping them alive. That someone can be a clueless crew member. Traitors don't have to know they're competing with other traitors.
- Shifting corp alliances midround would be really annoying for Traitors who already completed the corresponding, now obsolete objective.
- The DAGD marker is a great idea even if the rest of the proposition doesn't go through.
Thanks for the thoughts! I will need to go through in detail.
Emo: you're right on saying it would/could badly distort balance and it could end up needing traitor abilities/TC amount etc looking at. Balancing this in the design phase is probably impossible though so it is hard to debate specifically about it beyond "yeah".
"Team antag": yesn't. This change proposes being able to customize things like corporation count and number of traitors per corporation via YAML. The idea is to be able to make an underlying design that can flex into both the current style of traitors and one that can have a role for alliances/enemies.
My hope would be that it can be a bit like Nukies where "stealth" and "war" are essentially two variants of the game mode.
I like the flexibility idea because it allows for more experimentation inside the Tot antag than is currently possible.
Really the main thing I want to tackle is trying to find ways of keeping "help this guy complete his objective" or "stop this guy completing his objective" or "two traitors are fighting over the same objective" without the current design problem where it is easy to end up with a Tot with 20tc and "help the SSD guy with his objectives" as the to-do.
Ergo "where are these objectives coming from and how do they work, and how can we make the world feel a bit more alive in an LRP/MRP friendly way".
I think this rework could make syndicate agents into a proper main game mode, so it COULD be that we have both kinds of syndicate agents, one round they are a sub game mode, working as they are currently implemented, and another round they are the MAIN game mode, and this rework is used
I've always liked the idea of making traitor corporations a bigger part of gameplay but I think that making them into full fledged teams removes a lot of the espionage vibe from traitor rounds. I disagree with the idea of corporation members knowing each other from the get-go, but others have noted that concern already.
I think having team-based objectives are interesting but probably more trouble than they're worth for similar reasons, as they allow players to figure out their team size and give them a leg up on coordination. I also think the proposed interaction with corporations and sleeper agents would be pretty annoying - it'd be pretty demoralizing to complete your objectives at the cost of ending up permabrigged, only to find out later that an enemy corporation spawned in a sleeper agent which you were tasked with sabotaging. I think just keeping individual objectives is preferable.
I think there's easier ways to add additional flavor to the different corporations. Corporations could have a list of specialty items in the uplink, one of which is randomly picked per traitor for a "Firesale" with the maximum TC discount (Cybersun providing a discount to Holoparasites, or Donk Co. selling Hyperzine for dirt cheap). Give it a flashy tag in the uplink for a little more color. Each traitor in a corporation would get a different item from the list for their firesale, to prevent something crazy like 4 discounted Juggernaut suits.
