It's been a core design principle for synths for quite some time that they should not be getting into serious danger in the first place and as such do not get armor bonuses in any form.

Thinking back, I'm almost certain the last ?5? game architects had wanted to bring synths more in line strength-wise. I know myself, Nanu, and Harry had some pretty long conversations about excesses we saw within the whitelist. Luckily for some of you reading this, I quit before we got around to working on it. Even those who had added things to synthetic had confided later they questioned if their additions were a good idea in the end.

Synthetics are extremely strong and have high skills in every supporting task. It's not uncommon to see even mediocre synth players capable of surviving incredible situations or even winning fights against multiple xenos when cornered or murder hobo'ing during hijack. They have built in resistances to all damages, don't go down til they legit die (and then can still be revived forever), and even have a snowflake dodge for acid blood damage.

Needless to say, synthetics are not wanting for power in game. This has only been allowed to be the case due to their special status as a whitelisted role and guarantees made to the maintainer team they will rein in excess and keep high standards for RP. I haven't been around recently much to judge whether or not this has slid anymore than it had. I have friends who are current members of the synth council and many who were former. I had gone to the synth whitelist many times for feedback on support changes and there are quite a few intelligent folk there. Even so, synths need no help when it comes to gameplay and I fully believe there has been a slow but sure walk towards allowing more and more anti-team and powergame-y behaviors for a while. Maybe recent events I am not privy to will make me wrong on this.

For gameplay, I believe this change would be another step in incentivizing poor behavior from some synth players. I do not have confidence the synthetic council is willing to look objectively at itself and the oversight that used to come from less biased staff members had broken down back when I was still around. But, who knows, maybe things are better.

As for roleplay/simulation (kind of combined in this context), yes, synthetics in lore are extremely strong and extremely durable and can use guns and and and and. This exception (and frankly the overall design of the role) is dumb from that perspective. On the other hand, these types of weaknesses are meant to incentivize synths to avoid combat and focus on that support and roleplay ideal. I don't see compelling reason to have the intent of the role and the actual role in game be at odds with each other. Saying all that, the helmet just magically not working for synths is dumb.

Helmets not giving a bonus aligns with the current, and eight year old, design. Armor stabilization that forces armor for synthetics to a specific number that cannot go up or down no matter the equipment should be a consideration under this design. It is telling how much push back there was from the synth whitelist when armored gloves/boots were removed from common spawns. It is a bummer to have people put friendships and cordiality on the line when "their" role may be changed in some form.

Bottom line, incentivization of gear based on stats for synthetics is antithetical to the current design.

But more importantly, someone (cough @realforest2001 cough) should really sit down and write down what synths should be and force everyone on the same page. The design of the role being entirely disconnected from the actual application of policy is counterintuitive, dumb, and creates tension between the maintainer team and the player base.

Thank you for your input Morrow, to clarify, I don't intend to add any armor value for Synthetic in this regard. Solely so that the helmet popping mechanic occurs.

I understand the concern about incentivization of poor behavior, but we have tremendously cracked down on that. I don't expect to see a difference in helmet usage before and after, because almost no Synthetic was even aware of this mechanic to begin with. If it does occur, I would believe it to be a result of this PR.

However if that does happen, I would not be completely opposed to it. What I would be opposed to is if this encourages more unnecessary risky behavior along the frontline, but I do not forsee this. The Synthetic Whitelist is held to the highest of standards, and it is 99% of the time self moderating. The times that council is needed to take judicial actions is few and fare between, but if it happens, we will be absolutely ready, and we always are. I'm not at liberty to outright openly disclose who or what has had punishments recently, but information is readily and pubically available if someone chooses to connect the dots. We review frontline infractions with the highest level of analyzation, it just doesn't always seem so because of the boy who cried wolf situation - where people who are not educated on the programming of Synthetic too often make false reports.

The intention of this PR is nothing more than to introduce the mechanic of preventing a decapitation via wearing a helmet now that we have the quite nice popping mechanic. It does not lead to a 'snowball' effect or anything of the sort as many people often believe(not speaking to you Morrow, just in general to others). If anything, over the past 8 months there has been a long string of nerfs and pushes to place Synthetics in position which is debatably 'better', and reeling in the excess as you say. The most recent was a (unfortunately viewed as) controversial nerf to Shipside Synthetics for medical. I was quite surprised to see that some contributors still had extremely old views on Synthetic.

This PR has been inactive for long enough to be automatically marked as stale. This means it is at risk of being auto closed in ~ 7 days, please address any outstanding review items and ensure your PR is finished, if these are all true and you are auto-staled anyway, you need to actively ask maintainers if your PR will be merged. Once you have done any of the previous actions then you should request a maintainer remove the stale label on your PR, to reset the stale timer. If you feel no maintainer will respond in that time, you may wish to close this PR youself, while you seek maintainer comment, as you will then be able to reopen the PR yourself

This is probably about as good of an argument that can be argued for this, but as is no management is in favor of this change nor think it necessary to do so. So I think it best to stick with the current implementation. Sorry to waste your time with this but I wanted plenty of time for management to chime in (at least internally - none messaged here I guess), see the proposed changes, and the argument for it.