Have faith in the spooky honor system! [Ghost Drone Chat Ideas Here Please]

[warcrimes]

Drones should either get ghost talk, or machine talk. Either they're players, or they're not. 

At a certain point, theres so many possible channels to meta, theres so much that can be gleaned as a ghost and returned as information by cloning, chair divining, and ouija boarding. We rely on rules and common sense for people to not abuse those things. Just like you rely on asimov laws to keep silicons being silicon. If that's enough for an AI, it should be enough for a ghost drone. The blurred names and garbled talk is great for preventing kneejirk reactions, but they've still got radio receipt, and we just trust them not to recognise chatter and act on it. No reason we couldn't trust them to either coordinate with the AI / Borgs to keep the station in order, or to just have ghost chat to direct them to major breaches.

Please post all sorts of ideas about how to make Ghost and Ghost Drone in particular less of a punishment / consolation prize and more of an afterlife / thank-you for a good round.

[PH77SER]

i guess this isn't really a ghostdrone idea and more of a ghost idea

adventure zone roles (with no radio headsets!!!) appropriate to that adventure zone, which are meant to just do adventure stuff

theta abandoned researcher, biodome botanist, museum-goer, etc

also for ghost drones just give them ghost talk and not macheen talk

[Sundance]

No to machine talk.

:s "help my body is in robotic maint!"

Yes to ghost chat. Although its been shot down before.

[Wire]

I'm changed my stance on this over time and I now think allowing deadchat access for ghostdrones could be a good idea. Think it would be prefixed (e.g. :d foo) or a separate command (e.g. dsay foo)?

[warcrimes]

:s "help my body is in robotic maint!"

There's still nothing stopping drones from dragging themselves back to medbay in a crate, nor is there anything stopping them from blowing up the engine, nor anything stopping them from just logging into another BYOND account and playing a double round- except, you know, all of the rules against that. 

All i'm hearing in a lot of arguments against giving drones coms is that we really don't believe anybody knows how to follow the rules.
How simple is "Don't meta in IC chat?"

[babayetu83]

yes literally every argument ive seen regarding this is some outlandish situation that would never happen

and really most ban appeals i see nowadays are from people calling someone a faggot or killing someone and logging out so i think it's just another case of slippery slope fallacy

overall i think this is a good idea

[Sundance]

Sure, maybe that was a poor example.

How about

:s "Dirk McSwiss killed me, hes a vamp"

Sure you could get a crayon and write it but machine talk is just pushing the trust issue to the extremes which is just more shit for admins to deal with.

Here how about they can hear machine talk but not speak it? That way AI could state something if they notice a few drones floating around and could actually use them to fix things. A passive system, so to speak.

[Wire]

I mean that's fine and all but I would like to remind people that ghostdrones can already hear radio and AIs have access to radio so extending that to machine talk is only really a small quality of life thing if anything.

[warcrimes]

Enabling 2-way machine talk would allow the AI or other silicons to help drones get to hard to reach breaches.

As for "Hey my corpse is over there!" That's usually as simple as farting on the AI.
That gives the AI your name, and the fact that you're clearly dead, so any so-inclined AI player can just Track you and find you.
Or you can chairspin medbay.
Or you can weegee board.

But all this is moot because the real point of Ghost Drones is to give something constructive and useful for dead players to do, keep people occupied, and paying attention in case they get cloned or something. Make being a drone less boring than being a saltyghost and you've got engagement. Make it engaging and you've got breach repair. Repair breaches and the round is more fun.

[NateTheSquid]

yeah y'all are way overestimating how much people break the rules. and by y'all i mean sundance, who seems the only one who's against this. ghost drones having deadchat is just letting them talk, if they use it to meta, apply banhammer. anyone could meta just as much with out of game meta comms. but they don't

[Frank_Stein]

Here's how I feel about ghost drones:

The restrictions on their ability to recognize players was an unneeded overreach, since it neither impedes people who use the ghost drones to be disruptive, nor them being banned for breaking that rule

The rules we have in place about ghost drone's not influencing the round should be enough of a limitation on them

[Ed Venture]

Can people who are ghost drones be cloned? I was always under the impression that once they choose to become one they revoke their right to be brought back. I could only see the metagaming concerns be a issue during low pop since so many already get away with so much during it. Also Ghost Drones do get away with alot. I've seen lots of people complaining about some walling people in or ruining their projects and I cant stress this enough that I seen alot of people complaining about this in deadchat.

If your going to be giving them more privileges then start cracking down on them. This is not me saying no to this idea by the way. I think they should at least have access to deadchat. Kinda hard to metagame about your body in Deadchat seeing how the dead can't save you.

[Studenterhue]

Can people who are ghost drones be cloned? I was always under the impression that once they choose to become one they revoke their right to be brought back. I could only see the metagaming concerns be a issue during low pop since so many get away with so much during it. Also Ghost Drones do get away with alot. I've seen lots of people complaining about some walling people in or ruining their projects and I cant stress this enough that I see alot of people complaining about this in deadchat.

If your going to be giving them more privileges then start cracking down on them. This is not me saying no to this idea by the way. I think they should at least have access to deadchat. Kinda hard to metagame about your body in Deadchat seeing how the dead can't save you.

For a while, I thought you could be cloned/borged while you were a ghostdrone, then I heard someone say that being a ghost drone set you to DNR, which seems backed by this section of the code from the public release.

Code:

G.mind.dnr = 1

And, now I'm not so sure.

[Roomba]

I think they can be cloned/borged, which tosses them out of the ghost drone body and into their new form. I vaguely recall it happening to me before. The DNR bit might be referring to how people who set DNR are restricted from becoming ghost drones (which is a limitation I’ve never understood, myself).

[NateTheSquid]

if people are being shit about ghost drones: adminhelp it! so many people complain but barely anyone actually ahelps it! and then it keeps happening