Let's talk about the Detective

[Carton]

Well, when the secoff mindshield discussion came people pointed that other jobs will get targeted instead....

Then we had the captain mindshield discussion where people pointed out that this will change the target.

Next, we had a PR which proposed a massive det nerf partially because of... you guessed it, them being the next mindhack target.

Now, i am not a fan of slippery slopes, because they very often are bullshit, but damn, that is one of the few times i see one actually going down.

Maybe we should talk about the direction we want to go with the balance of sec in general.

Realistically, it's less of the roles being balanced... and more of a problem with the mindhack itself. People are always going to target the role that gives them the biggest advantage, and the only way to stop that is either:
- Give pretty much every role mindshields, which is obviously flawed.
- Nerf every non-mindshielded role into the ground until none give you an advantage to mindhack. Which would absolutely ruin the mindhack as a concept, as well as most of the roles losing their most fun and useful parts.
- Give the mindhack itself a balance change of some kind. 
All of which is better suited for further discussion in another thread.

Regarding the detective itself, I think the detective in its current state is too intertwined with security proper. I like the idea of the detective being some third party agent who loosely cooperates with security. The detective should be shady, and somewhat of a loose cannon rather than a tool for the HoS to ask to scan things. The detective needs more autonomy from security, in my opinion.

This I heavily disagree with, as it would pretty much give security free reign to simply trample over the detective and do all forensics themselves, which is a problem we already face regularly, and does not need exacerbating. Additionally, I'm unsure what real mechanical changes we can actually make to remove detective from security while keeping the role functional, aside from maybe renaming it to "Private Investigator" or something of the like.

Additionally, if we made detective the only person able to do comprehensive forensics (perhaps in an attempt to mitigate the earlier problem I mentioned), and people regularly chose not to co-operate with security, it would completely kneecap security when it comes to dealing with thefts and stealth, which would trivialize parts of antag gameplay and make security gameplay much more frustrating. 

I honestly believe what detective needs is a revamp of forensics. Perhaps some more electronic evidence in certain systems like the ID computer, or something to incentivize further use of luminol (I know many detectives, especially new detective players, never end up actually using it) or other remaining evidence to make it easier to locate a crime scene.