Revert Cloning, Remove Traumas [1 Dismissal]

[Kaed]

20 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Traumas are really not that hard to figure out. I'm not going to spoonfeed any further here, but the methods in dealing with them are no different from any other step-by-step progress included in the game mechanics. Is it perhaps the fault of Fowl for not adding very exact spoonfeeding information in the in-game manuals that results in the community's ignorance? Maybe: but SS13 is still about discovery and learning. Never assume you have learned everything there is to offer in the game, and that you know all the best ways to do things. Chances are someone already knows better than you do and will immediately humble you with their knowledge. The point of SS13 is to learn something new after every round. So, why not go out of your way to learn how to deal with traumas, ey?

As many Dark Souls veterans have taught me in the past, "When in doubt, learn to get good", because that's the only actual advice that can be offered here. Y'all need to be the agents of your own change, and to be the examples you wish to see. Likewise, don't be the example you don't want to see.

Woah. I feel like I just suddenly stepped into a lifeweb forum for a moment, that was unreal.  But then I remembered that this isn't lifeweb, and there is absolutely no reason we should be throwing around vitriolic words like 'spoonfeeding' when we are not an insular community of smug elitists, have an actual wiki that is supposed to assist players, and have volunteer staff who are supposed to help confused newbies.

Nevertheless, I have to point out that telling the community they are stupid or lazy because they can't figure out this 'entirely logical set of mechanics' is neither productive nor helpful to addressing issues with it, even if it had been such a thing.

But it is not.  It is an utterly arbitrary and nonsensical system that follows only the most tenuous grounding in logic.  We could have replaced all the mechanics of new psychology with color-coded science boxes you have to shove a person into and press a button, and it would be about as intuitive and marginally less immersion-shattered because it wouldn't involve obviously outdated psuedomedical procedures we wouldn't generally use in this year, much less centuries from now.  In both cases it's essentially boiled down to 'look up a guide' or 'try everything until something works', and there is a reason old adventure games where you have to rub everything against everything else until you figure out that you have to throw the pie in the yeti's face have fallen out of vogue in recent years.  There's no joy of discovery in something like this, because there's no reward in discovering it other than relief you can do the basic functions of your job and aren't going to leave a player unable to participate in the rest of round. It either causes new players stress or becomes dull rote for the ones who know the mechanics.  The ideals of discovery and learning being something that has to take effort and hard work should be reserved for things that aren't basic mechanics, like secret chems, finding hidden places and asteroid dungeons, and the entirety of science.

The chief concern here shouldn't be 'why aren't people figuring out the mechanics', it's 'why aren't the mechanics fun and intuitive?'.  Because it's not fun.  We've created a system where people are punished in a way for dying that makes them not want to play anymore, and makes the people around them supposed to be treating them not want to treat them.  This is a bad choice for a game.

[Arrow768]

1 hour ago, Kaed said:

The chief concern here shouldn't be 'why aren't people figuring out the mechanics', it's 'why aren't the mechanics fun and intuitive?'.  Because it's not fun.  We've created a system where people are punished in a way for dying that makes them not want to play anymore, and makes the people around them supposed to be treating them not want to treat them.  This is a bad choice for a game.

Do you have a alternative option for a "fun and intuitive" mechanic that would add impact to cloning and prevent cloning from being a quick 3 minute procedure ?

[Scheveningen]

"Spoonfeeding" is the act of providing information for someone telling them to do something a certain way so that they do not need to think for themselves or try to think and work outside the box. Excessive spoonfeeding is indeed a problem, because it does not mentor the proper mindset involved with the learning process. It takes away certain virtue involved with learning naturally such as understanding context associated with how something works, executing the unconventional to try and innovate more efficient or alternative methods, and many other things that would better belong in a book than in a forum post. One must be self-motivated to learn, to achieve and do great things. If this is somehow elitist in mindset, then I'd hate to be in the position that thinks success and good gameplay is owed to them for absolutely nothing in return.

Spoonfeeding came up in my post because I have zero intention of telling people how to circumvent consequence and how to powergame. I can account for myself and avoid doing damage by not playing in such an excessive and over-the-top way, but what I cannot do is be accountable or responsible for others. Therefore, I'd rather not be responsible for creating problematic playstyles by giving out unnecessary information besides what was already given.

You wrote a lot of nonsense expressing outrage over perceived elitist sentiment in my post that does not exist in the slightest short of what you chose to interpret from it for the sake of creating outrage. You are not adding to a discussion, you're directly attempting to take away from it to create a separate issue that is ultimately irrelevant to this one.
 

1 hour ago, Kaed said:

It is an utterly arbitrary and nonsensical system that follows only the most tenuous grounding in logic.  We could have replaced all the mechanics of new psychology with color-coded science boxes you have to shove a person into and press a button, and it would be about as intuitive and marginally less immersion-shattered because it wouldn't involve obviously outdated psuedomedical procedures we wouldn't generally use in this year, much less centuries from now.

You're essentially suggesting what could've been done better is accomplishing the same thing but different. Which is not actually that different.

Furthermore, this is SS13, with the lore, setting and tone defined around a sci-fantasy feel not unlike Star Wars. We have socialist cats, hegemonic lizards with a faction of individuals being the first in-lore to become literal FBPs, frogpeople that can enter a dream world while catatonic, robots that have almost equivalent rights to human beings and Tau Ceti is the symbol of both a liberal utopia and progressive decadence taken too far at the same time. Furthermore, we have space wizards, vampires, and blood cultists to further muddle the "immersed" universe with rather ostentatious themes that would take a lot of effort and reworks of their tone and mechanics to make sense in any other field of media if it wasn't a video game. 

Immersion is clearly not a focus when it comes to the tone and setting, and it is not my focus personally when I contribute to the codebase. I ultimately seek to add to the game so that it is fun. It was clearly not a focus in the traumas update either, because I very much doubt there's an experienced psychologist among us that actually knows better as to how mental traumas are treated. Nobody claimed the system to be perfect or remotely accurate to actual medical procedures (I mean, have you seen how fast surgery can be done in-game?), but they work and add consequence to having your skull bashed in short of being executed in that manner. And so far it works as intended.

Do feel free to add suggestions to supplant the existing mechanics, as I've yet to see them. Expect a lot of critique for me if anything you suggest defies your own personal standard of being against psuedoscience or psuedomedical techniques, if that is the standard we're setting here.

1 hour ago, Kaed said:

The chief concern here shouldn't be 'why aren't people figuring out the mechanics', it's 'why aren't the mechanics fun and intuitive?'.  Because it's not fun.  We've created a system where people are punished in a way for dying that makes them not want to play anymore, and makes the people around them supposed to be treating them not want to treat them.  This is a bad choice for a game.

As opposed to what, making the station a rustic clone factory that puts more consequence on the antagonist for dying than anyone on the crew? Nah, this consequence is far more preferable and it teaches people to care for their life more. Which, brilliant! Because this is exactly what we needed. It's a very nasty consequence for dying. Do not expect to be rewarded for your carelessness with one character. This can stay as-is. Once people learn to 'get good' and out-game the current system, we will be back to normal since curing traumas is part of a very simple process, and we'll have to review this issue once again in figuring out how to flip this on its head once again to stave off the tide of re-cloned characters bringing the fight back to their murderer(s).

You can respawn as another character in 20 minutes anyway. So. Might as well make use of that, because that's a thing that supplemented this change in the first place.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Scheveningen

[Kaed]

40 minutes ago, Arrow768 said:

Do you have a alternative option for a "fun and intuitive" mechanic that would add impact to cloning and prevent cloning from being a quick 3 minute procedure ?

First of all, removing or tweaking the traumas that completely inhibit people's ability to interact with their surroundings (like narcolepsy).  Then, changing psychology from an array of goofy cartoonish memes like isolation chambers and chakra and hypnotism for 'insert patient get cure' mechanics. 

Since your chief concern here is reducing the time before you're back in action, well... Just as an example (without specific details involved in mechanics), instead of using comedic pseudoscience puzzles as solutions, we use change the purpose of the medicinal trauma treatments to cures, but introduce a latency mechanic on the medicine removing the traumas, so that they are administered the appropriate chemical and then have to undergo an observation period where they can interact with the doctors until their trauma has been treated, sometimes requiring several administrations of small doses of the appropriate medicine.  In this situation, psychiatrists would be an optional support role rather than a required role - any doctor can administer the appropriate medicine and observe a patient until they are fit for returning to work, but psychiatrists have access to a series of tools that can speed along recovery, such as mentally/physically stimulating activities (like squeezing stress balls while you talk to the shrink about your phobia or something, idk, but any time I was at a psychatrist's office they always had stuff you could pick up and do something with your hands while you talked to them).  Potentially the psychiatrist also has a way to pinpoint trauma severity and type more effectively than a regular doctor, too.

This does several things:

-It makes it so you no longer require a psychiatrist to clone people.

-It returns psychiatrist to a roleplay-role instead of fix the patient minigames, while still keeping some mechanical benefits to having one

-It makes even people who just got cloned have something to do, so they can interact with others and know they are being cared for instead of left in a chair because people are confused how to fix them and can't access the area where they can.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Kaed

[Scheveningen]

How is squeezing stress balls to cure a mental trauma any different from having a pendant waved in front of you?

[Kaed]

Ignoring that the stress ball was an general example, because the stress ball isn't required to treat you, it just helps.  Also, it's not a hokey solution you'd see on a cheesy movie.

[Fluffy]

Cloning was removed, so this suggestion is considered implemented.

Locking and archiving.