Boggle08

You know, It's been talked about before, but losing the Odin and Biesel as external entities has crippled our ability to develop characters autonomously. There are fewer things for characters to pursue in their spare time, and less places to go on outings. Only the residential deck, and variable shore leave options that don't stick around. I think because of this, interest and character growth has become extremely dependent on whatever lore is working on. The last time any of my characters had a major personal change was due to the fallout of an article arc that affected them. There's a lack of external stimuli or incentive to change otherwise. You work, then go back to your cabin. I still want the ship, but, I think we might have to consider ways to replace the extended setting we previously had. Even if it's just a fleet of ships that trails behind us or something.

Really I think a big reason as to why the retention rate is so bad is just because of that mentality. That "I won't play with what I don't recognize" mentality. That's inherently a barrier to entry for new people, and kills investment from people who want to try new shit, or are tired of doing the same thing. Establishing a "regular character" takes like, a month minimum before people start to remember you and treat you as a familiar entity. Less depending on your timezone and how often you're going at it on a weekly basis. I've seen interesting looking concepts come and go, seemingly because of a lack of engagement. Character retention requires investment not just from the player, but their peers.

I think knocking this out of secret is a better incentive for people who want to rework the gamemode to improve it, instead of just keeping in rotation. Getting it back will require action, rather than just brainstorming and theory crafting about how the gamemode could be better.

Eh, it's really something I've only noticed by playing them in the role. If you're bringing just the default mining kit, you're prone to getting rushed down by some of the more dangerous exoplanet spawns, and unable to walk out of the blast radius of your own KA. Lorewise we can say they can build up tension in their arm by forming it into an atlatl-like structure. Throw distance doesn't have to be exceptional, since ideally, they'd be throwing shit around in zero-G, where it don't matter.

I'd rather not further nerf the species I maintain. These guys share a natural environment with space carp, sharks, and eels. This just cuts out options for a playable species that already has few, especially if you're mining.

It's a net nerf to the crew as well, in my view. This makes a matchup between antag vs crew more skewed, which becomes exacerbated when you introduce conditions such as population size or a lack of command/security to act as a buffer. The survival rate of hostages will certainly plummet.

This is going to do weird things to medical, if implemented as is, in the long run. Medical does have enough of a groove now to keep most of their patients stable, even under intense pressure/gaps in specialized staff, but making everything flatly more lethal is just going to raise the skill floor and the expectations from medical over time. Knowing how medical behaves, there'll be a period where more people are declared dead in the sensors console, then the meta will adapt to meet the demands of the additional lethality. On the whole though, I'm very wary of anything that dramatically bumps up the lethality or TTK of combat, because it starts to resemble stun combat that skips over the stun part and just kills you. I'm also not a fan of anything that makes the disparity between regular crew VS. security/antagonists wider. I don't care how true to life it is, no one likes playing as a GTA Bystander NPC. I still think the test is a great idea, though. I disagree with the current implementation as a final product, but something like it could introduce more variation into round outcomes.

Although I've become comfortable being able to do everything, I think differentiation is ultimately the way to go. Implementing the small changes listed by the OP could set the precedent for a new design outline for both roles. I think I'll add onto it by saying that atmospheric technicians should be given more tools to remotely manipulate and analyze the subsystems they preside over, more efficient equipment at regulating the quality of the air, and better tools at combating fires. On the old station, we actually had consoles that could keep tabs on the state of distribution and disposals, and I think we'd also benefit from consoles that can remotely manipulate electronic valves in the place of the manual valves affixed to the phoron supply. Myazaki mapped in atmospheric substations a while ago, I think we can refine the concept further in the long run by remapping these so that there's one on each sublevel, and they feed that particular level they're on. Atmospheric technicians can get their own RCON substation program for these life support reserves, in order to offset cases where high volumes of damage control are depleting distro to critical levels.

I've seen other captains get slapped for putting red up right close to the end. A command whitelist has a lot of OOC expectations that kind of box people into playing a particular way, beyond what could be ICly plausible or acceptable. Knowing how things are, it might be best to include a bolded note on the ship procedures page about it. It'll prevent people from incriminating themselves.

Hey, I'll take that. Fixes half the problem, doesn't have the logistical complications, and it actually got to polling. I feel like any kind of vote or polling about medical's features in the future needs like, a 60% majority or more from the no camp in order to slap it down, because look how productive these threads are.

There isn't any clever or intentional design motivating this behavior. The problem is that people are storming past their crew members in favor of antags regardless of context. It happens too often and too quickly to the point where command can't catch it(often because they're too busy dying to enforce anything). It could be a code red, no-holds-barred situation that concludes in a messy mercenary shootout at 2:30, and the medical team will still play irrational favorites. There's nothing IC or lore friendly about this, it's people who aren't being aware reverting back to their programming. Look at canon events, people don't do this shit because it kills people from sheer negligence. If they play games, their friends get PKed and they might even get hit with an IR. Both OOC incentives and IC policy incentives right there. We could use some of that. Having some kind of policy outline for people to be aware of, and be subject to in egregious cases, is enough to autonomously regulate this behavior. Because no one is calling each other out, or applying the social pressure necessary to keep it to reasonable levels.

Hey, sorry for the delay. Just a few questions: 1. Could you expand further on the gestalt's origins? Who grew them, how, and why? 2. Being in Biesel, the eternal would've confronted them at some point. What do they think about them?

We have these threads every five weeks or so now. Nothing ever comes of them, we just debate in circles and then do it again another time. At this point, there's no way to make a proposition without severely compromising the play-styles of at least several people. We need to start trying shit. Playtesting, test merges. Even if it turns out to be a bad idea it puts us closer to finding the right idea. If half the bay can self supply, it wouldn't be unprecedented to have the fridge stocked roundstart with a small reserve of the tedious medicines that need to be made in bulk(mortaphentyl, saline, dermaline, etc) If medical bay is well staffed and functional, the physician isn't even supposed to be touching the OR. This makes them better suited to their home environment: The GTR.

I should also add, it makes it more straightforward to design features/challenges between the two roles. Rather than having to think about medical as a quasi-political balance of power, it becomes a binary between chemical/GTR problems, and Surgery/OR problems. It will make it easy to conceive of design for the department going forward.

A pharmacist that finishes their 30 minutes of work + surplus can just cryo, wait, and respawn as something that is supposed to be using their chems. A physician without chems is just a shittier surgeon. The wall lockers we added several months ago are a bandaid for a role that can't do much except scan people and pass them into the OR if they can't medicate. Current medical is a big, sloppy, inefficient compromise. It proliferates its existence because everyone is just comfortable with it. I think we feel good about it right now because medical is consistently staffed, but the next time we get hit with a pharmacist populations drought, we're gonna be right back in another thread asking for more chems to be put in the walls. In my view, the best way to merge and streamline these roles properly, is to knock out the pharmacist as a dedicated linecook role, and essentially turn the physician into a pharmacist with GTR responsibilities. With NO SURGERY. The surgeon becomes our dedicated meat technician. No charts. No bullshit. Clear division between responsibilities without redundant intermediaries. With this division, it makes a stronger case for the maintainers to allow alt titles again. No chart bullshit, no finagling over responsibilities, you either pick scalpel, or hypo. Having played a shit ton of solo pharm in the past. It's doable. More than doable. Outside of a handful of important fixes, there are many, many workarounds to problems using chems. And when there is a problem you can't fix yourself, or if it's quicker to do surgery, having one is all the more valuable and appreciated. It doesn't feel arbitrary. Pharmacy work is boring, and there is usually only ever one pharmacist at a time, because late joining as a second usually makes you honorary off-duty. With a more populated, merged role, you get more people to consistently staff both sides of the chem lab, and that leads to divvying up the tedium into something more manageable, and fast. Since physicians will now be able to self supply, they don't even need to make bulk orders like what the pharmacy has to put up with. On lowpop, they can use a mix of wallmeds and a few bottles here and there wherever they see fit.

Oh, just yesterday I saw a fellow meddoid chase after two traitor crew guys trying to heal them when they attempted to pass through medical. Even while security was in pursuit of them, and they were storming out of medical, he was right there between everybody chasing after them with his hypo Months earlier(which has to be my personal favorite for this behavior), The HoS got teleported into port maintenance, endured a torture session with a traitor, and ended up killing the guy at the expense of getting fucked up. I was with security as engineering, and we brought a responder with us. While the HoS was standing in place, shaking violently from the adrenaline, we nudged the EMT to stop staring and help, whereupon they hyperfocused on storing the body, ignoring the twitching bleeding HoS in front of us. I think the reason for this behavior is because more injuries = more gameplay. Because antagonists usually come out more fucked up than the crew does, the triage priority in their brains is biased towards antags. I think policy is the best solution, and it needs to be reinforced with central command announcements to imprint it into medical's brain.

After conferring with others, we've decided that we can accept you, but only on the condition you either rework the tourettes analog to have a more subtle tic, or design a different cognitive obstacle. We believe you did your research on both fronts, but a dionae that haphazardly tosses out profanity is not how we want to see the species represented. You can let us know what you rework it to in this thread.

We're close to a positive verdict. In retrospect, I have concerns about this part here. Could you go further about how this would look like ingame?

I see this as more of a springboard into raising the activity ceiling of engineering. If it is assumed RCON can be consistently turned on, we can consider features or obstacles designed around the subsystem in the future. I don't think concentrating all our effort on setup procedures is a long term plan, because they'll all get done before the first hour's up, and then engineering has not much to do except react. When we design events, we don't often have to think about how to design for medical or security. We just present a problem, and those two and command just do their thing. Mechanics inform the bulk of their involvement. Science has no gameplay to it, and not only is it consistently dead/uninvolved, but we kind of have to force them into our design. There are few problems that make sense from a mechanical perspective to defer to science, and if we were to put them front and center of an event, it would pretty much be the science team pretending to do sciencey things. Completely gutting the videogame of it's videogameness makes it a bad videogame.

This essentially is the primary basis for me making this thread. While I personally believe that safety is an arbitrary concern(outside of niche cases where someone is shocking doors), The use cases and niche versatility of the distributed substation network never get taken advantage of because of the tedium. I am one of those people that stopped setting RCON because of this, and this suggestion, in my mind, is what will get me to start doing it again during peak operation. Setting up the shield network is far more substantial than RCON, but it can be done in seconds compared to the latter. The time and effort spent on a subsystem needs to be proportional to its utility. TL;DR, these changes will make the RCON network more accessible to players interested in the technical aspects of engineering, while trivializing it for those that simply need to check off a box.

Why not merge the pharmacist into this new GTR intermediary role, then? You can achieve a lot of GTR work with just chems, and this new intermediary role will be completely useless without them. It'll also fix the pharmacist's issue of being fucking useless after completing the bay's spread.

I see RCON being done less every time I play, even during peak engineer population. The only utility RCON really has going for it is that ability to have a more flexible and resilient powergrid. Anything to streamline the process of configuring this subsystem, because the juice is not worth the tedious squeeze any more. I’ve had issues with brownouts during peak operations trying to max out the substations like that. I guess it doesn’t matter if you keep the bypasses on and let the substations dump their output directly back into master, but kind of defeats the point in a way. The point of my initial suggestion is to reduce the number of button presses, and therefore time spent on this subsystem. What other case is there to not have preset values in the system? If it’s as pointless as people are insisting, then it’s inconsequential if it gets done.

They’re going to change the RCON values either way, the point is that we agree upon values that won’t cause power issues during peak operation(outside of people trying to charge like, a bunch of fucking guns or hypercells). Having preset values means I can run up and down the list only having to worry about turning everything on. RCON has niche applications that don’t get taken advantage of because of the cancerous setup procedures, and it’s been my experience no one cares about it until a problem that could’ve been fixed by it comes up. Then people loudly bitch.

Does anyone actually like doing this? I don't think we stand to lose much if someone were to give RCON optimal roundstart values. This shit is about as enjoyable as organizing a 60 member crew roster alphabetically based on their ID's DNA hash.

Lanterns are too big to fit in pocket sized slots, and both them and flashlights need batteries in order to run. I wouldn't say this is an improvement on the overall experience, especially given that voidsuit and hardhat helmet lights are right there, being the superior option. The lantern change is especially painful, because that fucks with my miner's loadout economy.