Ghost drones ideas and discussion

[Nnystyxx]

I get shadowy silhouettes too, as a drone.

I kind of feel people are being a little too hard on drones, at the moment. Take the shop example: how would a drone know it's a shop? You see a human with stuff that clearly should be filed away in its proper place that he isn't using, you ignore what he's saying about 'LOOT FOR SALE' because you clearly can't communicate with humans, you pick up the stuff and put it away and suddenly people are beating you up. Of course, the drone player might very well know what's going on, but at this point 'avoiding interaction' is pretty much 'a drone is doing something in my general vicinity and I don't like it'.

Like there was one round where a drone drew a little frowny face by the PTL because it was at murdery levels and half the chat was screaming for him to be jobbanned. I can see how drones crayoning stuff on the ground might set a bad precedent, but I thought it was a good way to improve the station. I kind of think the 'avoid interaction' law could be reworked to be a little less vague because right now trying to pretend the crew doesn't exist while at the same time keeping them in mind at all times to avoid anything that could possibly be construed as 'interaction' is a bit of a paradigm shift.

See, there's an astute difference between "beating up traitors & stealing their bombs" and "trying to do mildly helpful things that may, in some way, slightly infringe on a crewman's own abilities or affect them at all even slightly". Aggression towards bad drones is only half justified because 1. we don't know what's Bad yet, except for some really egregious examples and 2. THESE HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR ONLY A WEEK AAAAAAAAAA

Precedents have been set for every other job, yes, but they've been a part of the game for years, and drones are literally completely different from most of them if not all. Dead people, no interaction, et cetera. The rules haven't been entirely hashed out, so we shouldn't come down hard on somebody who makes a relatively understandable mistake vs. like, unscrewing and spacing the nuke in nuke ops.

EDIT: Like, absolutely fuck a drone who walls off the shuttle or something like that, because that'd be rude even for a crewman to do if they weren't a tator, much less a drone. But a frowny face? Yeesh. We can't go from "don't interfere" to "IF YOU AFFECT A CREWMAN AT ALL EVEN SLIGHTLY YOU WILL DIE" because a drone's JOB is to, by proxy, affect the crew by making neat shit for them and patching holes. Just not to cause the crew undue inconvenience in the process.

Also please don't harsh on drones for taking materials from engineering storage or something, they need that to fix the gameplay-crippling holes in the station (so far, until their RCD gets buffed)

I recognize that drones are a second chance for a ghost to play, and limiting their functionality and interaction is sensible, but not turning the role into a dangerous honeypot where you'll be banned or at least demonized for small, at-this-juncture-understandable fuckups. A lack of clarity and historical precedent is why we still HAVE these bone-ups coming from otherwise decent players!!