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[garfield751]

I do agree that making people slower would solve the saxxing issue. Melee combat is hard enough when your clicks don't register because either you or your target is moving between tiles, or when your facing a robust person who can dodge stun shots like a champ. I finding it hard to think up other ideas that would fix the issue to the same degree as making people slower, however, the arguments against it are just as compelling to do nothing about the issue, least it create new problems.

I had an enlightening experience when I had the good fortune to be a traitor that ordered a syndicate bundle which contained 2 energy swords among other things. As some of you may know you can make a two sided e-sword that has a 100% chance to block all energy based projectiles, but despite being able to close the distance with impunity, I found it hard to hit them at all until I backed them into a corner. In fact I had an easier time using the energy guns to fight then the energy sword which is confusing as one would think the energy sword would be the king in close quarters combat.

If you gave a person the choice between a taser or a stun baton, it would be safe to assume that they would choose the taser over the baton. The regular taser has about four shots over the baton's ten(or more), so clearly it is not over the issue of performance. The inference that could be made from the above evidence is that ranged weapons are much preferred over ranged combat even in situations where one would assume a melee weapon would be better. Saxxing is really only half the problem that the game has, the other half is the luck based robusting system to land a hit in the first place.

I do have an idea to solve the hitting issue, but like most ideas it's not perfect. An automatic way to hit your target when your adjacent to it like beepsky. Something like intents/arming system where you mark a target when you have your baton out. When you mark a target everyone around you will see that "X security officer has raised his/her baton at Y assistant". When your target gets in range you automatically try to hit your target which goes through the same checks(Riot shield, e-sword, hulk, etc) like normal. Now this is obviously gonna need some major balancing and tweaking, a chance to miss or whatever, but it should take most of the clickspam out of the game, make combat much more predictable and make it viable to chase a suspect with a baton.

Now obviously people are going to say this make stunning people too easy and that this will make the baton the win stick or something, which is a valid concern. It does however make a commonly used weapon for keeping people down after they have been stunned into a much more viable weapon. This marking system wouldn't be limited to just stun batons but to all /weapons like glass shards, spears, energy swords, and everything in between. It might break melee with guns but gun melee does next to no damage anyways and instead of a straight click it could be an alt click or something to mark for auto-melee to preserve the ability to hit like normal.

[miauw62]

Batons aren't viable because of disarming. If you're disarmed of a baton you're dead. With this change you can reasonably batonstun somebody.
Reducing the runspeed causes the least other issues of everything, and it also solves other problems like the map not loading fast enough.
It's by far the best solution.

[Nick K]

Batons aren't viable because of disarming. If you're disarmed of a baton you're dead. With this change you can reasonably batonstun somebody.
Reducing the runspeed causes the least other issues of everything, and it also solves other problems like the map not loading fast enough.
It's by far the best solution.

Well, I'm not entirely convinced. After all, the only benefit of homing projectiles over non-homing ones is that they can't be dodged. The entire point of the runspeed change is to stop people dodging projectiles. So, I don't really see how they'd be too powerful seeing as 'no more dodging' is the entire point of the change.
I also question whether a 'saxing' player can both run away from a sec officer before they click a UI icon and also dodge from side to side to avoid taser shots at the same time. Also, a lot of saxing isn't done in open corridors where a player can run away completely, but in rooms where they can evade an officer for a long time despite not being able to get away without stopping to open a door.

As for batons and disarming - I don't see how the speed change makes batons stronger against disarming than garf's auto-attack idea? I mean, basically it still boils down to who gets the first attack which with equal skill players is a 50/50 chance. Of course, disarm doesn't work every time so the baton person has an advantage because their hit is a guaranteed win, but that's always been the case. Garf's melee autoattack suggestion actually sounds like a good idea for stopping the 'sax while clicking wildly' approach that melee currently can boil down to.

I'm also not convinced that a 1 point slowdown will stop saxing and silly melee dodging. After all, didn't armour give that same slowdown in the old version? Were sec officers in armour really unable to dodge?

Maybe your playstyle is very different from mine. I get involved in a fight with saxing perhaps 1 round in 10. I get involved in a situation where I have to deal with slowdowns etc maybe 8 or 9 rounds from 10. I also often play roles like miner (in particular) or engineer that involve lots of moving round the station. I kinda feel that this is a change that will add more tedium to my play experience almost all the time, just to give a minority of players in each round less frustration during a relatively rare situation.
Imagine the total time spent by players dealing with saxing in the current system in an average round. Is that really more than the total extra movement time this change will require in a round across all players?

Runspeed is a very wide-ranging change to deal with a specific problem, so it seems like it has a lot of knock on effects:

- Reduces fun for every player who has to move long distances. I mean, I'm surely not a crazy outsider when I say that walking from one side of the station to another is not a part of the game I take active enjoyment from. For people who want to experience what this change is like, play an entire round without shoes.
- Stacks with other speed nerfs to make them even worse. Mining and Engi hardsuits in particular are already a pain to move distances in and yet there are important jobs that often require players to do so. This also makes space exploration even more tedious.
- Slows down how quickly people (e.g. security, medics) can respond to threats and issues. Makes it more likely critted people will die before they can be dragged to medbay.
- Generally slows down how much a player can do in a given amount of time. This will have an impact on e.g. traitors trying to rush their objectives because someone's called the shuttle early. Also reduces what people can do in a shift if they take breaks to walk around the station and roleplay with other people. For busy jobs like xenobio or genetics research, that might encourage a 'sit in my lab all shift' approach even more.
- Makes it harder to do quick 'in and out' raids for players who want to e.g. perform a theft while an antag-hunter AI is looking for criminals
- Makes persistent AOE threats stronger. Fire, smoke grenades, hull breaches, gas flooding will all take longer to run away from, making them more deadly
- Buffs borgs. Borg speed has not been affected so they are now stronger compared to human players.
- Makes the AI stronger, as it has more time to react to movement and shock/bolt doors
- Buffs aliens.
- Buffs carp, slimes and other mobs
- Probably other stuff I haven't thought of - this is just off the top of my head.

That's a lot of potential issues. Now, given that the opinion on the tg forums seems dead-set against this change, I'm hoping that it will be reverted. If it isn't, then please:
- Cut the slowdown for all clothing items by 1 across the board. Even in the pre-nerf world hardsuits are dull to walk around in all the time and this contributes to problems getting people out mining. Even bio-suits are kind of annoying as your main clothing item unless you're not leaving one room very much.
- Consider a cap on slowdown. For example, when I first encountered gibtonite it exploded next to me and took me down to about 5% health. The damage slowdown combined with the hardsuit made movement so slow I seriously considered just logging off for that round instead of walking back to the outpost to use the medkit there. At the moment I believe slowdowns all stack which can get very bad in some situations
- Consider reducing hunger/damage/cold slowdowns.
- I remember some changes to mechs in this PR. I'd like to point out that the ripley was already too slow to be fun to mine with - I'm not going to say 'just make it faster' though because the ripley probably needs a proper overhaul.
- Revisit alien/borg balance. These are probably already too strong even without a boost to their comparative movement rates.
- Nerf mob movement: well you already said you were doing this and I agree it seems to be needed.

[scrdest]

I like garfield's autobaton mode, and as a bonus, while we do that we can also port the BS12's gunpoint system, which would be A Nice Thing (it allows you to click on a person while you are in the mode and wielding a gun; if you do, you lock on the person and you can set it up to allow the person to move or use items without triggering auto-fire).

Alternatively, instead of binding it to the baton, make it bind to Disarm as a prepared tackle. If you had it locked on a person for x seconds, you could make a leap, that would knock both of you for the ground, with the grounded period for the tackler being much shorter. Couple it with a possibility to fail (maybe if the defender is using Disarm or something) and you have a nice play/counterplay for capturing people.

[Cheedows]

I honestly save more people from crit by rushing them to medbay than actual fighting. I really don't support this change, I think there might be another way to do it. But hey I don't know jackshit about code so what do I know? 

[Nick K]

I like garfield's autobaton mode, and as a bonus, while we do that we can also port the BS12's gunpoint system, which would be A Nice Thing (it allows you to click on a person while you are in the mode and wielding a gun; if you do, you lock on the person and you can set it up to allow the person to move or use items without triggering auto-fire).

So, that's like code support for the whole 'me "points the the energy gun at the Captain"' thing? That'd be awesome. At present that sort of thing suffers a bit because you need their player to go along with it instead of escaping or stunning you while you're typing your emotes

[MrWillsauce]

I got to administer four lethal injections as the HoS last night. The fifth one was used on me.

[Slayerhero90]

I got to administer four lethal injections as the HoS last night. The fifth one was used on me.

And I got to watch someone with a 15-minute bomb on them go off whilst they were playing the violin.

[BigD145]

I got to administer four lethal injections as the HoS last night. The fifth one was used on me.

And I got to watch someone with a 15-minute bomb on them go off whilst they were playing the violin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YqMgUkQPf8

[wlerin]

- Stacks with other speed nerfs to make them even worse. Mining and Engi hardsuits in particular are already a pain to move distances in and yet there are important jobs that often require players to do so. This also makes space exploration even more tedious.

This. Even pre-nerf I was popping hyperzine whenever I had the chance while in a hardsuit.

[Octobomb]

Sorry James. My Internet broke. At least the round was short.
In other news, the effects of a truth serum (and balances thereof) a out of my depth, but I'm sur someone could do it. I'm wondering what else I could do (I still want to add my own feature to UMcS, not just bug fixing).

[hops]

Here we see the Lesser Idiot in its natural habitat: A dangerous place

[Pwnzerfaust]

Admins, we just had some major bullshit griefing going on. Character name was Robert Fabreras. Was the Chief Engineer. Wasn't a traitor. Destroyed the R&D servers and released the singularity.

[Eagle_eye]

Crash? Crash.

[hops]

Oh, I thought it was my internet being stupid.