A No Pagers Mod: A discussion

[The British Wolf]

Pros: It's realistic. Cos why do they only use them the second someone is dead/cuffed? And why only the once? There's a few logic issues with them.

Cons: Removes one of the major challenges of Stealth, meaning if you kill everyone silently then that's that. In which case, why bother being sneaky in the first place?

I'm not sure if I like or dislike the idea. What do you guys think?

[HiJustHi]

There's a mod. if you stealth kill the pager isnt activated..

[Zero [HU][VR]]

Makes stelf way too easy. That's why a lot of players consider it cheating. Most don't care. Use it if you like, but if you run a public lobby, you can get some salt over it.
Silent Assassin, if you weren't aware.

[BreakinBenny]

I suppose using Blackjack is a more suitable experience if you plan to Silent Assassin, with the challenge being you are incapable of bagging guards because:

1. They are "waiting" for the pager to check-in.
   
2. They aren't considered "dead", and thus you don't get a kill if they are knocked out from behind with anything blunt.
   
3. This definitely only applies to guards with pagers, and thus the ones without 'em aren't affected.
   
4. You must still watch out for cameras and patrolling guards who will eventually find the incapped guard.
   
5. ...But in the end, it's a cheat-y mod that provides balance to make it not too cheat-y. I can only see this stuff ending up in RAID World War II.

[Goggles Paesano]

This game isn't realistic. At all. It's not meant to be. It's a game. The pagers are there to make stealth a challenge. There would be exactly zero challenge in stealth if you could just kill all the guards without consequence. Basically, what you're suggesting is, is it okay if I cheat because stealth is too difficult for me. You're only cheating yourself, son.

[O_T]

The pagers aren't absolutely unrealistic. There are pagers that can trigger automatically a alarm when a guard is falling for any reason by monitoring the high and the angle of the pager.

[The British Wolf]

Originally posted by Goggles Paesano:

This game isn't realistic. At all. It's not meant to be. It's a game. The pagers are there to make stealth a challenge. There would be exactly zero challenge in stealth if you could just kill all the guards without consequence. Basically, what you're suggesting is, is it okay if I cheat because stealth is too difficult for me. You're only cheating yourself, son.

I have no intention of using a pager mod unless I fancy going full silent killer on private solo heists. I merely brought up the idea to see what others thought. Besides, no thrill if there's no danger. Much as I like sneaky murderizing, I enjoy professional crime more. :3

Honestly, until reading the comments, didn't even know pagers mods actually existed. Figured no one would see a point to making them.

Originally posted by O_T:

The pagers aren't absolutely unrealistic. There are pagers that can trigger automatically a alarm when a guard is falling for any reason by monitoring the high and the angle of the pager.

Really? Only pagers I ever heard of was the vibrating, beepy text type. Basically a text only phone. That said, last pager I saw was in GTA3, so... Yeah. :p

[O_T]

Originally posted by The British Wolf:

Really? Only pagers I ever heard of was the vibrating, beepy text type.

I'm from Germany and what you described is known as a pager here. Maybe I misunderstood something but I'm shure the radio that is used by police and some security man Is called pager too.

[marijn211]

The idea itself is great, but should always be balanced and with the 2 well-known mods that have been released that obviously didn't happen properly(SA and BJ) (ofc only using their abbreviations) leaving an option menu that lead to most users using it as a cheat.
SA, considered a cheat, could be set to be balanced, but the problem is that if the settings are abusable, they will be abused, same for CS and other mods like that (the mod, not crime spree), you can't expect people to play the mods on balanced settings

[The British Wolf]

Originally posted by O_T:

I'm from Germany and what you described is known as a pager here. Maybe I misunderstood something but I'm shure the radio that is used by police and some security man Is called pager too.

Never heard a radio referred to as a pager myself. That said, I don't have any knowledge of pagers past the 90s, so maybe I'm just outdated. :p

[Goggles Paesano]

Originally posted by The British Wolf:

Originally posted by O_T:

I'm from Germany and what you described is known as a pager here. Maybe I misunderstood something but I'm shure the radio that is used by police and some security man Is called pager too.

Never heard a radio referred to as a pager myself. That said, I don't have any knowledge of pagers past the 90s, so maybe I'm just outdated. :p

The reference to pagers in PD2 is not the same as a typical 1990's consumer device by Motorola and others. It instead represents more of two-way voice communication device with a dead-man switch that has fall detection - essentially a two-way radio with fall detection and a panic button. Hence why when you kill or dominate a guard, you must answer a voice call to explain why the fall switch or panic button was activated. Of course, the comical way this is done in game is not the way it would work in real life.

[The British Wolf]

Originally posted by Goggles Paesano:

The reference to pagers in PD2 is not the same as a typical 1990's consumer device by Motorola and others. It instead represents more of two-way voice communication device with a dead-man switch that has fall detection - essentially a two-way radio with fall detection and a panic button. Hence why when you kill or dominate a guard, you must answer a voice call to explain why the fall switch or panic button was activated. Of course, the comical way this is done in game is not the way it would work in real life.

Well, that makes sense (in a crazy, "wasn't this set in the 80s?" way). Though you gotta wonder who demands all pagers on the most pointless of guards be so advanced. :p

[Goggles Paesano]

Originally posted by The British Wolf:

Well, that makes sense (in a crazy, "wasn't this set in the 80s?" way). Though you gotta wonder who demands all pagers on the most pointless of guards be so advanced. :p

I wouldn't call the devices advanced, and I wouldn't call the guards pointless. Law enforcement has had specialized radio equipment for decades. Guards at banks and military contractor installations are not pointless. As far as this game being set in the 80's, I'm not sure but I don't think it is. The cars seem too new for that. Hell, some of the lighting at the safehouse looks like it's meant to look specifically like LEDs. Many screens are 16:9, though some are definitely 5:4. I'd have to say it was meant to be contemporary with it's release date.

[The British Wolf]

Originally posted by Goggles Paesano:

I wouldn't call the devices advanced, and I wouldn't call the guards pointless. Law enforcement has had specialized radio equipment for decades. Guards at banks and military contractor installations are not pointless. As far as this game being set in the 80's, I'm not sure but I don't think it is. The cars seem too new for that. Hell, some of the lighting at the safehouse looks like it's meant to look specifically like LEDs. Many screens are 16:9, though some are definitely 5:4. I'd have to say it was meant to be contemporary with it's release date.

Most communication devices I see on security, even cops, has just been a two way radio with panic button, so it's more advanced than cops in England now. XD And the pointless guards are more mall cops or night shift guards at a gallery that can bar artwork (why not just keep the bars down at night!?). You know, civ jobs. As for the 80s comment, I just remember reading there was 80s in the timeline. Plus Jacket has a cassette player, the animated show is made like a VHS and the president is the 45th I think (and I think Obama is one of the 50s, but don't take my word on that). I could be wrong or it could just mix stuff up timewise, cos GTA Online is set both before and after the main game so Payday could space out over a peroid of times too. Might even have a few non-canon sections, but the secret ending suggests that's not gonna be true.

[Thermal Lance]

Bringing realism on the table is kinda dumb at this point. Pagers are there because stealth in this game is about AVOIDING guards. Not kill them.

[carl ruins everything]

What Lance said. Some games are inspired more by realism than cinema, but PAYDAY 2 is not one of those games per se. If PAYDAY 2 were a more realistic emulation of bank robbery, it would be so brutal that it would absolutely not be fun to play at all. Hence why stealth in PAYDAY 2 is the way it is - guards having pagers that go off whenever anything happens to them even if they're caught with their pants down is extremely unrealistic and goofy, yes, but since stealth in PAYDAY 2 is intended to prioritize evading guards like you're some sort of jewel thief in a 1960s heist flick instead of just grabbing a suppressed shotgun and Anton Chigurh-ing your way through the map was a mechanic that absolutely needed to be put in place to force this behavior in players.

All of this being said, however, it's not like having a means of nopeing pagers would be an absolutely terrible idea. A lot of the bad reputation Silent Assassin gets is from people who turn off the pager limiter and view it as a cheating tool and little else, when in reality Silent Assassin is fairly balanced if you keep the pager limit set at 2 - you get to eliminate guards and hold greater control of maps that would otherwise be hell to stealth (cough cough alesso cough cough) freely, but keeping this in check is the fact that you have next to no margin for error if you make even a minor mistake and you also can't just ECM rush everything to get around that. It's just that completely disabling pagers in general basically ruins all the challenge of stealth and anything that involves disabling of pagers needs to have an additional mechanic to balance it out.

A good example I can think up off the top of my head is that, in the game code, there's some leftover stuff indicating that, at one point, there were plans to add a skill/perk deck that would make guards not drop pagers when killed with melee (i.e. the heister "stole" the pager before mister pager man could hear anything happen). This, in itself, would be fair enough - you can get greater reward out of eliminating guards now that you have a means to safely do so and you have some margin of error available in case you screw up, but you also have far greater risk involved simply because, well, you have to get within melee range of said guard without getting detected and cuffed first.

tl;dr Absolutely not a good idea unless you can think of some sort of trade-off for it to come with. Higher reward needs to have higher risk attached to it as often as possible.