Suggestion for a TC rebalance

[Lord_earthfire]

If you run around as traitor, you are very often faced with the decision to either go for big ticket items or small utility ones. The main reason for this is due to bad combos between traitor items, e.g. cloaker and redsaw.

Also, there are a multitude if items which are either not worth 1 TC, or a bit too strong for 1 TC but not strong enough to warrant a 2 TC cost. I'm not naming examples to not derail the discussion.

Thus, i would suggest to increase the smount of avaible TC on a traitor and rebalance the items accordingly. If we give traitors a, lets say 24tc baseline and double most TC costs, we have a much more granular control over item costs.

I'm dropping this here so we can hsve a discussion if this makes sense.

[Cal]

Completely agree that most traitor items are due for updates. Not sure exactly how to go about it though.

[Kotlol]

I seen quite some topics on "Hey this one item sucks solo, can we buff it or change the cost?"
While others go: "This always get picked since how good it is.. why not change the cost? Cause it combo's with this."

There are several ways of restructing this. But I think flat out changing a lot of costs is just gonna break a lot of fun loadouts on accident that aren't as powerful.

Insted I recommend a different restructure added on top.

"Loadout packets"
These give items for 12 TC right away, but are cheaper overall like for example the random assortment packages.
Now we can make "traitor classes" that still work together item wise and have people get a bang for their buck while we remove overused combo's.

Let's be real some of us have TC loadout ideas on items and some item combo's are just too strong, but changing their TC by upping it would make both items worthless since now you can't mix em match em with other items anymore.. and thus you lower other items, but now these are too good with others and.. it's just gonna become whack a mole.

But let's say with loadouts, we can have Item A and Item B be unable to be purcased seperately cause they are too expensive together due to some other item that's cheap making a too powerful combo.
But in this load out you get Item A and B together since.. well they fit a theme but without the other item that makes it godlike with the three items being in there.

Also I tihnk loadouts will also help newbies ease into traitor gameplay easier since they got a good value starting set, but can experiment on later rounds.

Atleast now we can currate wich item combo's are populary used and nerf them accordingly in costs while adding a possiblity to get similiar builds that aren't as OP.

Example of two fast loadout ideas:
(The swift handed thief)
- Deringer 2
- Pickpocket Gun 3
- Stealth Storage 1
- Floor closet 1 (Either both, or floor/stealth)
- Light breaker 4
- Chameleon Projector 5
(A stealthy person who's all about stealing stuff from the shadows, can make a quick escape, not good at combat)

(The assassin)
- Target ID tracker 1
- Holographic Diguiser 2
- Signal Jammer 3
- .22 Pistol Box 3
- Fibre Wire 3
- Syndicate Omnitool 2
(The set you take for quick inflitrations and executions)

Just as simple executions. "For example" This was roughly done and fast just to get across how loadouts could fix this.

[Soleil]

I still dream of my Agent ID that can have its name changed on the fly.

[Flaborized]

I don't really particularly like the base idea of doubling the prices for more granularity, the higher the numbers go the more mental math you have to do to calculate what you're buying, and at most you'd be able to squeeze out an extra microbomb or something from this. I don't even really think most items would benefit much from it, if items have messed up prices that are unbalanced we're not gonna notice that they're *half* a TC too expensive/cheap. I don't think we should *have* items that are so weak and insignificant that they only cost (relative to now) 0.5 TC, we should buff up items like that. I've done this a bit myself ie: cham suit -> cham outfit, DNA scrambler change, grenades getting pouches for extra storage after you throw them

Also re above comment: I very strong don't like the idea of adding traitor "classes" or kits. Traitor is a gamemode about creatively using a large set of tools that give you a lot of options; if you add a "pick for me" option we're broadcasting to players "this is *a* correct way to make a build" and people are going to be more likely to default to picking that instead of carefully thinking about what they want/need. Surplus crates also break this rule but they at least (in theory) encourage you to branch out and use unconventional loadouts, having a "good generic loadout" button would take a lot of the fun out of it.

IMO the better approach to balancing traitor items is to buff up stuff that feels very weak/useless in most contexts, and (carefully) bop stuff that's so strong you wouldn't want to pick anything else at their price range. Price *is* a way to balance things but it's not really the only way we can do it, and most items don't actually have to be strictly equal in value, they just have to Feel Right at their price.

[meaow589]

All I want is see antag use more vary item cause mostly found common set many round like.12 micro bomb, spas12 , EMAG if rebalance to encourage people to use other more should be great.

[Lord_earthfire]

I don't really particularly like the base idea of doubling the prices for more granularity, the higher the numbers go the more mental math you have to do to calculate what you're buying, and at most you'd be able to squeeze out an extra microbomb or something from this. I don't even really think most items would benefit much from it, if items have messed up prices that are unbalanced we're not gonna notice that they're *half* a TC too expensive/cheap. I don't think we should *have* items that are so weak and insignificant that they only cost (relative to now) 0.5 TC, we should buff up items like that. I've done this a bit myself ie: cham suit -> cham outfit, DNA scrambler change, grenades getting pouches for extra storage after you throw them

Theres only so much you can do to improve the base functionality of an item without adding additional clutter that won't help most use cases at all. E.g. a stealth storage is a very mediocre buy if you don't care about the stealth functionality. Or there is only as much functionality you can add to a voice changer before its design becomes too unclean.

In general, base-functionalities of items have a certain treshold of useability, and buffs beyond that are only possible by adding additional functions or items. And these can turn into "useless" features.

[Flaborized]

I mean, yeah, you should buff items in a way that suits the thing they're going for generally. Not every item will be useful for every situation, and that's fine. I'd argue that some of the weakest items we have are so weak because they basically fail at fulfilling their intended purpose well enough to justify buying. An item that's niche but fulfills its niche very well is Fine and good for the game (traitors should have a big variety on what they're able to do), if an item isn't useful in *any* niche or doesn't justify putting down even a single TC for it currently in the best situation you can think of then it's too weak for a traitor item and should be adjusted IMO.

As an example: Chameleon jumpsuits as an item sucked for stealth; they used to be just a jumpsuit which was not enough to disguise as almost like... any job in the game? Now they're a full outfit with the remote, which doesn't make it better if you have no need or plan to disguise as someone, but it actually gives you a functional disguise now and is more fun to use. Imagine if we instead kept the item the old jumpsuit version and just halved the price because it's Bad. It functionally makes it more pick-able, but it's still a very weak item that's not fun to use comparatively. It is definitely more work to improve items on a case-by-case basis though :shelterfrog: