Feedback on the EMAGed Borg Rework

[ProphetOConnor]

At the end of a round like that, the result would be the same if you were mindhacked and ordered to kill people. You were rebuilt once and then emagged again. That's basically the same as being cloned and then tossed off the shuttle next time you started stabbing. You did a good job following your laws, but doing a good job doesn't always mean that you're going to get the result that you want to see. Antags doing antag things sometimes means that you spend some time (10 minutes or less) watching the consequences of the evil things they do. That's not "entirely ending your round," that's 10 minutes before you get to respawn. The same would happen to human characters who get murdered or mindhacked or thralled or eaten or any other amount of things that can happen based on antag actions.

While I agree with how the result would have been the same wither a emag or a mind hack was used in that situation I can only point out that a emag costs the antag 6 TC and has unlimited uses of this emag card and can essentially ruin or cause issues for an unlimited amount of borgs As well as all the advantages that the card itself brings such as opening doors or giving access to breaking tools and making them into useful weapons. while mind hacks cost 3 or 6 (depending on temp or not) and stick with the body so the antag cant just keep reusing it over and over. so if you were killed security your body is usually taken to medical where its a lot harder to fish out the mind hack implant before its take into evidence. not to mention that the way Mind hacks work is that you are given an order and its decided on the antag themselves meaning that escalation is hopefully followed but for a emagged borg you were 1 second helping the crew and the next potentially killing and that's gonna feel like you either got to do it so slowly to near avoiding laws so you escalate it correctly or what i thinks going to happen is more times than not its going to result in a half thought out task and result in issues. I feel I'm more pointing out that this change forces borgs into situations that will result in more and more bias against borgs in general for a item that costs 6, Again I want it said I do agree lawless borgs is also an issue but how this PR is going Id like to see other trials first before this solution is decided. Like I'm even interested in seeing a test where all the emag does is take your current law set and randomizes the order allowing for situations for RP situations kind of like the picture at the bottom of the laws wiki (Picture at the bottom) and imagine command puts a law 4 in that at law 4 its perfectly safe for the crew like "its taco Tuesday" and then they scramble laws on borgs and "its taco Tuesday" becomes law 1 and any human stopping you from making taco's is a problem just as a fun interaction that also allows for the borgs to be "Broken" it also means that if any laws get changed your still connected to the lawrack and it can be sorted by command actually going to the lawrack and adding a law such as "All borgs must return to robotics and submit to repairs this law takes precedence over all laws" and even emagged borgs would return just as like an idea *shrugs. bit Disjointed but I also point out you cant drive by mindhack like you can with a emag, like hitting someone with a mindhack suddenly makes that person drop to the floor and they must be told what their job is, while borgs you can walk up emag in a group of people and most will miss the fact that it just said in the chat that "Borg has started sparking weirdly" like in any high moment that will be lost so quickly, I could even imagine like a little change to that where the emag makes a sound like a flash when used on a borg, or maybe an entirely new sound just to give it more of a audible effect meaning you got to be stealthy with it and not just drive by infront of like 3 people. (Kinda like how vamps have a powerful stun but as the loud sound, or how archfiends eatting apc's is quite noticeable)

again I don't want it coming across that I'm fully negative about this PR I actually quite like that its being discussed! Id just like to see a few additions and changes to make it interesting as a whole rather than just slap ion laws on the issue. So thanks for reading even if you disagree, regardless of whats decided!
  

[glowbold]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

[JORJ949]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

^^First use permanently unlocks them and opens them non-permanently, second use fries circuits

[ProphetOConnor]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

^^First use permanently unlocks them and opens them non-permanently, second use fries circuits

I actually like this idea a lot, it would allow for the crew to easier deal with the messed up borg as you'd just need a screwdriver to open the head and remove the brain disabling the borg in a safe way!

[Skotcher]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

^^First use permanently unlocks them and opens them non-permanently, second use fries circuits

I actually like this idea a lot, it would allow for the crew to easier deal with the messed up borg as you'd just need a screwdriver to open the head and remove the brain disabling the borg in a safe way!

Gotta say I really like this idea. Not only does it make the emag less drive-by-able, it also gives a visual indication of what you're doing as an antag. Emagging major things like doors has a very distinct visual indicator and leaves a trail. Current emagging of a borg is just silent with no real good way for anyone to notice what you're up to. I think this change would make using an emag on a borg a much more considered choice. 

I also wanted to add my voice here. I think the current iteration of the emag is good in principle and a definitive improvement from the old emag. I really hated dealing with the old emag silicon units because I often felt like it began to hold the station hostage: try and fix a borg and suddenly every emagged cyborg is ready to murderize the station. Youre also massively discouraged from fixing the silicons because once a single cyborg had no laws, why bother going through the effort to fix them? They could be emagged again and be back for revenge for taking them offline. The old emag made it so that the best solution to "fixing" the silicons was to leave them dead for good. Similarily, being emagged as a borg meant you could take a more beneficial route to helping the station, but if one silicon who's emagged goes on a rampage, you too are now roped in just by association. Ion laws for each borg now gives an incentive for the borg to be fixed for both sides. 

That said, the random element of the ion laws feels... bad. Sometimes the three laws make a confusing mess that's really hard to interpret. Sometimes two laws make for an interesting interaction, but the highest priority law is a MUST law and basically says something to the effect of: "do nothing and don't state why.". Sometimes the three ion laws are just... dull, and don't really offer a great way to engage with the game or other players (or worse, will cause people to dismiss you and you're just kind of stuck in an emagged state). 

I think drawing from a list of emag laws would be better for the game. All the ideas stated earlier sound fun to me; replacing all laws with 3 emag laws, replacing all laws with a single emag law, replacing the first law with a randomly changing ion law, etc etc...

Personally I think it would be cool to have a pool of emag laws to draw from for each law in your list. So for law 1 you have "x" number of laws to randomly draw from, for law 2 you have "y" number of laws to randomly draw from, and for law 3 you have "z" number of laws to randomly draw from. Each law in the list would be considered in a way that no emag laws would just flat out erase/ignore the others due to priority, and ideally they would be considered in a way that causes the borg to disrupt the normal functions of the station and requires the borg to be fixed. I personally would like to see emagged borgs as a means to distract folks on the station so that as an antag, you can create a diversion somewhere and use the chaos to do something somewhere else.

[AmazingDragons]

If we're discussing emagging multiple times with different effects, I think it'd be cool if each emag added a separate ion law. So if you only emag the borg once, only one law gets changed, but if you hit them three times all of them get changed. Then, you could even set it up so that additional emags replace those laws again, cycling through different random ion laws (but never giving them more than three at a time). It could lead to a lot of interesting scenarios, though it could also be confusing to silicon players.

[Silent Majority]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

Everytime I've ever been emagged it was without rp or buildup save one time in my memory.  I'd like that. I always tried to at least emote it

[Taylorstar]

What if Emags had an action bar for emagging borgs and stunned them in the same way arcfiend saps/heartstop attacks would stop people while the emagging happens? That way you could at least make an interaction or take an action.

[ZodiaDecius]

All I have to say on this is there was a lot of fairly typical responses to Emagging that I haven't seen since the PR, so as long as we don't go back to 0 laws I'm happy with any of the changes we do in the future. A lot of really good ideas in here like Glowbolds 2 use idea, and Jan's explanation on the combating of the metagaming/antag farming. 
Ultimately the change is silly and can use some refinement but it is a leap in the right direction. Even if the borg players get mad. That's all I have say on this topic specifically.

[Frank_Stein]

maybe the emag should first pop the brain case or torso open, and then a second use could emag, so it's not as drive-by-able?

^^First use permanently unlocks them and opens them non-permanently, second use fries circuits

I actually like this idea a lot, it would allow for the crew to easier deal with the messed up borg as you'd just need a screwdriver to open the head and remove the brain disabling the borg in a safe way!

Run the robo-brain under the sink or toss it into the laundry machine to de-emag them

[JORJ949]

Run the robo-brain under the sink or toss it into the laundry machine to de-emag them

I also really think the law linker should work on emagged borgs, its already an incredibly underused item and takes only slightly less effort than just killing the borg.

[Skotcher]

Run the robo-brain under the sink or toss it into the laundry machine to de-emag them

I also really think the law linker should work on emagged borgs, its already an incredibly underused item and takes only slightly less effort than just killing the borg.

As someone who likes to use the automaton cyborg skin, I would greatly appreciate this. Lemme keep that silly borgo skin.

[Lefinch]

if you're getting confused about interpreting three ion laws, how do you handle ion storms/crew adding laws? Even one (and sometimes its more than one) can introduce multiple law-logic conflicts that are complex. What do you do there that doesn't work for this?

That would be rules lawyering/discussion within robot chat with other cyborgs and the AI, as well as sometimes ahelping if its particularly confusing but- the question is what is done there that doesn't work here and the answer is collaborative rules lawyering. In character discussion with other cyborgs/AI about what the law is can and does help others understand how something works. Something someone wasn't quite sure on can be easily understood due to collaborative discussion.

thanks for the reply. I hear this and took a bit of time to think about it because it's fair feedback and highlights that ahelping is still absolutely there for this or other situations you're just not sure. The thread in general has been a really good one to read and I'm glad people have been giving feedback on it or any PR.

I still have some issue resolving this explanation. While I love the law interpretation club I think its important for anyone playing borg to actually be able to make their own judgement on their laws. They're playing their cyborg or AI, it's not someone else. There are going to be times before and after this PR where someone is operating on laws but can't discuss them with anyone else and they will have to make some personal decisions on it. That's always been true: Being law linked to a different law frame, when its lowpop and its just them playing, or a law change that has a fairly rapid impact that they don't have a huge amount of time to discuss first, and other times. 

Again I'm drawn back to: I don't quite follow if this was a huge problem before what people were doing. If anything, relying solely on that collaborative discussion while fun also feels like a bit of a trap in itself: it becomes a consensus argument rather than letting things develop in an individual way. But perhaps it's down to a personal take and I fully accept that it might just be people prefer the consensus, which is also fine. I love chatting and debating the impacts of a law, but very much at the end of the day how that particular borg or AI interprets a law or law conflict might be very different from what I do, and I think that added layer of chaos is good. When we talk about consistency in for example the wiki guides, that for me is focused more on personal consistency. If say I as an AI decide to interpret a law conflict differently that's fine, but I also need to be personally consistent about it. I think that's still true regardless of this PR and it's a still a part of my confusion on this particular point. It might honestly just come down to a difference of opinion though.