AZone 'void' corruption (please stop ruining azone loot, tsci nerds)

[TDHooligan]

AZone loot has fallen from its grace of 'crazy items you rarely see' to 'marginally more powerful items you see every other shift'.

Years ago, goon was a small enough community that telescience abusers stuck out like sore thumbs. Nowadays there's dozens of people, running various azones and loot spots. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect the admins track these abusers individually.

I think it's a huge shame that the upper end of design space (outside of antag gear) has been axed in the name of letting people turn telescience into a speedrun. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or not but it's how it is for some people.

HOWEVER!
There's currently a lot of vagueness around how telescience & shifts work (loose ties to the void, space-time weirdness, etc)
Perhaps this vagueness could be repurposed into a feature:

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Traversing lootable AZones ticks up an account-wide variable by a few points, that ticks down 1 point at shift-end.

This represents timelines all merging into one point or something. You keep hopping across space to specific places at a certain point in time, and things start getting weird. Coders can build stuff they think would be fun (or just mean things because tsci abusers deserve nothing)

If players are showing up to desirable Azones regularly (tracked by maybe specific tiles, or items, or interactables), they start getting hit with weird side effects. Polite warnings at first like a teleport to arrivals (You could swear you've been here before! Wait, something's wrong...)

Eventually, the warnings get rude. Dark matter materializes and rips parts of your being away, bizarre entities start showing up to take you away, you're thrown into an astral-shame cube and laughed at.

If these warnings are ignored, players are eventually hit with insurmountable odds (death) and a bump up to this score (AKA. chill out with telesci for a while nerd)

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I think the depth of these mechanics can go as deep as coders want to mess with people. Now players that want to exploit AZone loot may have to do a cost/benefit (If I roll traitor next round, do I really want to deal with the odds of dismemberment/death so I can have a blaster this shift?) 

Making the effects ramp up in severity also incentivizes players to slow down, but doesn't entirely stop them using these itesm a couple shifts in a row. When they're struck with inspiration, they'll just need to put some more work in.

[Soleil]

Alternatively I thought a lot about having to take a large part of a shift to actually calibrate and set up the teleporter to prevent this stuff. Having to for example, actually do the math instead of use a website, and maybe fabricate some specific pylons and place them at various coordinates around the world so you can triangulate and stuff, ideally with a lot more random elements? You need a pylon at this coordinate, with a copper head and a plasmaglass lens, but at this coordinate you need a pylon with a battery and two electrum rings, etc. But of course, people could just website it all so I wasn't entirely sure. Don't mind your proposal that much personally, but it doesn't quite fit the spirit I feel like?

[Kotlol]

Why not randomize some elements of the Azones? Like where some rewards are....
Or some reward chests are now mimics and such?

Just to help make Azones less of a speedrun and more of... "Rush in and die"
Forcing players to take it abit slower and safer unless they wanna die horribly.

[Lord_earthfire]

I think i would wait until artemis is a thing. That will shake yp azones on a fundamental level.

[PowerfulXtian]

This idea's pretty good. It appears to me to solve the dynamic of balancing of azone loot and explotitation of that azone loot.

[Haprenti]

I would rather tie the counter and bad effects to picking up some "marked" objects (for the first time during a round, per player), that way players could still repeatedly go in azones without getting punished, whatever the reason might be, like helping new players, or being part of a team with no intent to get these objects.

I'd also add a global timer shared accross players, that would alter how much one's counter get increased. That way a non-abuser doesn't immediately get punished when picking it up the first few times, but would still get warned/punished faster if they started getting comfy with it at a time when the thing was getting abused a lot by different people.

That way, one person that stops because of the bad effects couldn't immediately be replaced by another one whose counter isn't elevated, or would start getting punished much sooner because of the global counter. Otherwise you could continue seeing the items being used just as much, just in the hands of other people.

[BadShot]

I would rather tie the counter and bad effects to picking up some "marked" objects (for the first time during a round, per player), that way players could still repeatedly go in azones without getting punished, whatever the reason might be, like helping new players, or being part of a team with no intent to get these objects.

I'd also add a global timer shared accross players, that would alter how much one's counter get increased. That way a non-abuser doesn't immediately get punished when picking it up the first few times, but would still get warned/punished faster if they started getting comfy with it at a time when the thing was getting abused a lot by different people.

That way, one person that stops because of the bad effects couldn't immediately be replaced by another one whose counter isn't elevated, or would start getting punished much sooner because of the global counter. Otherwise you could continue seeing the items being used just as much, just in the hands of other people.

I like this one, cause some azones are hard, and trying to complete one can take multiple tries sometimes, especially Sol.

[Cal]

doesnt make sense to me. in-game code version of punishments for running zones? people will just figure out how to push it to the bounds

[TDHooligan]

doesnt make sense to me. in-game code version of punishments for running zones? people will just figure out how to push it to the bounds

Not for running zones, for *repeatedly* running zones without giving it a break. 

'pushing it to the bounds' means what, exactly? hitting the limit of how many times you can run it before it decays? that's going to be less than how often problem players run AZones. Or 'run it as many times as possible before they are outright killed' - now it decays just as slowly but is 20x harder.

I left the specific implementation of how the penalty is applied vague because there's a lot of ways to do it. Some have obvious workarounds (have someone else pickup the item for you) and others might punish newbies (marked tiles).

The suggestion is on the concept, not how exactly it's done.

[Kotlol]

After reading this post... I think I can say this.

"This will be more a hinderance then a mechanic to stop abuse."

Alt acounts, newbies and such will be used.
I'd say just randomize loot locations.. as someone who did the void azone a lot... There are just some sections I will never go to cause: "It has nothing to find but death."
But by randomizing loot locations.. suddenly those weird pointless dead ends can suddenly be loot chests.

I am not saying this is a bad idea, it's a neat idea for sure.. It's just not what will deter players from using azones for loot. If anything... it will just make people spread the problem so everyone can get loot.
But if no one knows where the loot locations are... they can speedrun azones all they like but they will be detered by the random loot locations and enemy harrasment.

Why do you think players go into mining field more then the debris field? Cause the mining field could yield random fun loot!

[444explorer]

All this made me think of is the 'Heat' mechanic from Hades, would be cool to see that in some way.
Not sure how I feel about this way of stopping a-zone rushes. Tagged items could be looked at. Dunno.

[Haprenti]

If people are dedicated enough to make alt accounts to bypass a personal counter, they will be dedicated enough to find a route to speedrun all possible locations, unless there were so many possible spots that it would take long enough on average to make it not worth doing, but then at that point it might also make looking for loot feel like a huge timewaste for players that are new to azones.

I'm not suggesting marked tiles, I'm suggesting marked items. If a player picks up the item, his counter increases. If the player passes the item to another player or another player picks it up... maybe the counter increases too? by a lesser amount? unless their role is allowed to carry contraband so security and command can still deal with the weapon?

A global counter would deal with alt accounts to some extent, as their counter would increase much faster if someone else (or them) abused the item in some recent time window. New players wouldn't necessarily be affected, unless for some reason they decide to come back multiple time for the weapon when it was being abused a short time before. Picking up a marked item could display a generic ominous red message like "you feel like this thing is unstable, better not get used to picking these things up, they look unsafe" potentially along with another informative message to explicitly tell the player what this means, a bit 4th wall breaking but I don't think it's a big deal.

And even then, so what if alt accounts can be made? Not everybody is going to go through the hassle of changing accounts just so they can carry a weapon they might not even use, especially if their counter increases faster and would force them to make yet another alt account sooner.

Worst case scenario a few players make some alts and the situation is still better overall as less players abuse the items and those that continue doing it do get punished when they try with an alt one too many time. Big deal?

Same thing for having people get the item for them, in case only the first players picking it up counts. At least it would involve someone else, which is more constraining, and the counter would eventually get to the helper too if they're always the same. That's still one additional layer of annoyance.

And that can also be combined with the idea of randomizing locations (requiring less randomized locations to meet some "annoyance threshold" that could make someone stop doing it).