Carver

This forum keeps shooting errors and I refuse to quad or quint post just to respond to all of these fucking augments. Have a pastebin of my responses. https://pastebin.com/dxkS5Yjk As before, I love all of these. Simple, and for the latter two quite packed with flavour.

Post 1 of 2/3 because the forum hates all these quotes. Probably far too strong! While perhaps a cute thing for antags to buy, at a baseline magboots are incredible utility that everyone and anyone wants their hands on. This is not remotely a lower-quality product, nor should it be in the loadout. Weird, but why not. Cute utility for more clerical characters. I was neutral on the thought, though I think drinking fuel for it is a bit gross and implies it's far more integrated in the body than any regular augment. If this were added I'd suggest having you activate the tool and 'tap' a welding tank like a regular tool. Certainly a fitting possibility for a Hephaestus exclusive. This uh.. This doesn't make much sense. Maybe a built-in piggy bank instead would be fine, but the 'flavour' of an ATM augment seems incredibly strange and prone to illegal use. This is very cool but I don't know why it costs so much more than a welding tool. Flavourful stuff should be proportionately quite cheap compared to items with mechanical utility.

I've never been a fan of irrationally stretching my character's knowledge for antag roles. A great deal of other tools were designed with 'an idiot could use', such as the advanced door hacker that does the work itself or the cryptographic sequencer being a debit card of utility. Of course, can't forgot the old syndicate donk pockets that were just 'use to heat up, eat for an oral dose of healing chemicals'.

They're a very cute tool for antag Xenobiologists and Wizards. But, that's all they're really designed to be, a tool for antag schemes. Find a way to lock them only to antagonistic shenanigans and they'd be fine and dandy.

Yet it raises the question of why flashlight eyes are company specific, why would they have a patent for making optics glow brighter? Objectively superior is in strong regard to built-in binoculars, which are such a strong utility that near-every role can get strong use of them, especially if rolling or pressed into antagonism.

I quite like all of these, flavourful without breaking anything.

As mentioned earlier, the binocular eyes if unbalanced probably shouldn't be an augment to begin with. The flashlight eyes are just.. strange. Does Z-H have a patent on making your optics shine or something? The only ones with flavour are the memory/emotional augs and the plate, with the former two making no sense that they wouldn't be on the market given how profitable they'd be. 'This is a roleplaying game' is why their addition at all struck me as dumb. No other faction needed these to get players - if someone truly cared about a faction, they'd play it for the aesthetics and leveraging the lore to make their character a bit more interesting. There is no roleplay in either the binocs or the flashlight. The amusing thing is that I'd seen next-to-no Z-H characters for years. They did indeed flock to it, given there was no population of Z-H contractors before these augments. As for Unathi, that's a poor equivalence given they're renowned for being incredibly unbalanced in their mechanics as a whole. Taj on the other hand are kept in check by both potent mechanical downsides, and a strict whitelist oversight on their behaviour. Skrell advantages are effectively non-existent, and counter-balanced by humans having their own advantages. Factions so far were exempt from all of this. There was no upside or downside to playing a particular faction, barring NT being allowed into Command roles. You did not have Zavodskoi Officers being objectively superior to NanoTrasen Officers, yet now you have Zeng-Hu Medical being objectively superior to NanoTrasen Medical. At the very minimum remove the binocs entirely and make the flashlights available to all. The emotion/memory ones are fair in being RP-only (if unfortunate to be locked as they are), and the faceplate is a stellar example of how faction-locked augs should be - wholly aesthetic and giving a point of flavour to spark conversation.

Ah yes, encourage people by making a faction objectively superior to the others available. Lore and writing should be what gives people a draw, not having mechanical augments arbitrarily locked to a faction (especially when a majority of them are so trivially mundane in design that anyone could replicate them). If the zoom-eyes are a potential balance problem, then why do they exist at all? Instead this means you're liable to have antags with free binoculars which is no better.

Psych is so separated that I'd honestly forgotten it exists. Pretend that I'd thrown it into the 'auxiliary pile' with CMOs and learner role that I had put into parentheses.

If you want a real spicy take, I'd just go back to the classics: Pharmacist, Physician, Nurse (and obviously CMO and the learner role). No nonsense, just 3 clean and defined core roles.

I've always wished for some kind of auto-doc that could be purchased and used, even if it rendered you vulnerable (out cold) for the time it would take. Bonus points if it's re-usable but quite slow, effectively a paid-for technological version of changeling regen that you need to carry around or hide between uses.

To accurately simulate a character's economic situation unfortunately requires some level of in-depth personal record-keeping, and that's not even taking into account in-round shenanigans and gauging whether it was related to canon or non-canon circumstances. As interesting as this kind of reference may be, it is unfortunately a resource that most players will not refer to. It is also somewhat countered in effect by the weird RNG nature of the in-game 'station accounts', which are given small variables already based on role, species and for some reason NT loyalty (Something that was going to be changed to economic background in a PR some months ago, had the coder of the previous PR not been harassed away. Fortunately said PR was revived by another contributor, so we'll be seeing that soon enough).

This would be an awful regression. I remember the horrible times of when a cheap lighter would burn you, leaving a minuscule amount of damage that would invariably progress into an infection because of no regen. I remember regularly playing characters with prosthetics and getting a piece of paper thrown at me that hit the prosthetic, leaving a damage indicator on the doll that required a full weld to fix. All the tiny little things that do pea-sized damage would become infuriating.

I do like the line of thought behind this design. Makes the glass feel more 'plated'.

I would potentially hope for some form of Death Domain that makes use of skeletons and undeath, but that's my love of necromantic themes speaking. Despite what people may say, there is also absolutely nothing wrong with stealth.

I don't hate how this looks.

I'm down for killing RnD set-up but I'd hope for some significant mining nerfs so that post-30 minutes antagonism isn't 'break into research and print out the best 1-shot tool, while prepping to deal with the same bullshit spread around the station'. Bonus points if breaking into RnD to wipe the research servers puts it back to where it is now, so there's a strong incentive to do so. As for overpowered being a supposed non-issue, we have too many powergamers for that to be the case, but when shit gets abused shit (ideally) gets nerfed. What finer way is there to balance everything than having it readily available and thus easily judged?

If I was 'trolling' you I'd aim for the plethora of low-hanging fruit on offer instead of going through the effort of testing a mechanic to prove you wrong about soap, and to the topic, why cleaning is nowhere remotely near (both the skill requirements and 'bwoink-worthiness' of) hacking into a room or performing surgery as a crate hauler.

Sprites are 32x32, you would need the cross to be 2 pixels in both horizontal and vertical width to truly be centered. Example after 5 minutes in paint.net: 10x enlarged example: Forewarning if you use these for some reason, I couldn't be assed to bother with transparency. This does serve a fine example of showing you the method.

Auto-passports would be obnoxious without an auto-wallet to store these things, but I'm down for them being free in the loadout. Only argument against it is the weirdness mentioned on a past PR for making loadout things free about the game flipping a shit if you have over 15 loadout items or some such.

This is both standard greytide behaviour, and in a majority of cases is a crime. No one will bwoink you for hacking into maintenance with a valid reason (getting away from danger). I decided to humour you and test this. Soap does not 'perfectly clean' clothes or items, Luminol will reveal the 'cleaned' blood handily. Only for floors did Luminol not work, but I made an issue on that as I suspect that the changes to soap in the last few years didn't take into account the forensic mechanics (let's be honest no one takes those mechanics into account). So in a case of intended behaviour, it does not 'disintegrate' stains.

I'd open to prisoners only if we started phasing a few low-income jobs to be replaced with prison labour: i.e. miners, janitors, etc. But this would perhaps be a bit strong of a tonal change (though far less grimdark than cyborgs, funnily enough) and no matter the implementation they shouldn't be self-antagging (only working with antags or rolling antag themselves). There's a reason most servers with prisoner roles go 'don't try to break out every round', no one wants to deal with that shit all the time.

I'd enjoy this just to giggle at sub-6' characters who set their visual height to 'average' or even 'tall'.

How is cleaning up messes 'boink-worthy'? Just because some clown overpaid for an education for a job that hundreds of thousands the world over do without 'years of studying' doesn't mean that cleaning things is hard, doubly so when characters have access to the same cleaning materials as anyone else. 'Special cleaning equipment' already has an advantage, spray bottle cleaner and cleaning grenades cover much more tiles in the same time than soap. What in the fuck. What kind of shitty soap are you using that burns your hands, and why do you assume people can't close their eyes or hold their breath like an average human of triple digit IQ? I've used plenty of soaps bare-handed, and regularly use industrial-grade cleaners and pesticides that would kill a household pet without any 'years of studying' or other nonsense. Common sense prevails, you don't sniff chemical fumes, everyone on the station would know this given they're developed and (purportedly) functional adults.

I really don't like the bay system of mechanical skills. Skills should unlock jobs, Jobs shouldn't unlock skills. Just because you're off-duty or were demoted you shouldn't suddenly be entirely incapable of doing something you normally do, nor should you be insanely boosted because you were promoted to command. If skills aren't tied to character I'd rather they just not exist to begin with. Though, currently, I'm fine with the system we have - the surgery thing is a bit silly but the provided example of a CT is rather extreme (if you're that trained/talented, why are you working as a literal crate hauler - doubly so if you're practicing the skills you have).