Remove merchant RNG spawn.

[Timirald]

The merchant job is something that spawns based on a coin toss, if you are lucky, you will spawn in three times in a row and get to enjoy it, if not, you will leave frustrated because RNGesus thinks today is not your day.

I think it's kinda silly, and I'll set out my very dumb reasons as to why:

For one, it's really frustrating, imagine having the captain role spawn only after a coin toss, or warden, or quartermaster, or chemist, or and or and or, if you wanted to play a round as any of those jobs, wouldn't it be frustrating to hear the "Welcome to Space station 13!" ring out and you are left with the main menu staring you right in your face? "Oops, choose something else now!"

Two, it's pointless. The merchant as is, is very RNGish in it's nature, sometimes the stuff you can get will be game changing for an antag equipped with a decent amount of cash, but a lot of the times your stuff is more useful for the crew, at times, you get basically nothing in terms of decent merch to sell, it's all a game of dice as to what you get, who wants to buy, and most importantly, what round it is.

An antag may want to buy your guns, sure, but don't forget that security may also want to buy your fancy stuff, and out of the impressive two times someone wanted to purchase arms from me, one of them was a departmental purchase.

Now, third point, time. Setting up your ship with various bits and pieces to sell takes time, trading with NPC traders to get better stuff takes time, and a lot of it, from what I've seen, traders tend to arrive at least 40 minutes after round start, with me it usually takes a hour, because you want to sift through all the stuff you go, take out the good, then put it up, and maybe do some minor ship adjustments.

By the time you might get to Aurora, it could be too dangerous to dock with it, so the merchant will have to juggle whether or not to dock, by the time the merchant does dock, a traitor would probably already have all they need, if not, well, the merchant might not have what they need, so it's just RNG on RNG on RNG.

You might not even know there is a merchant to plan around them, since they don't show up on the crew manifest (no duh), and the only knowledge of them you'll have is what they give you, when they give you. Again, time and RNG.

Final point, that being, having a merchant all the time doesn't make sense since Aurora isn't a trading hub! Well, for one, merchants won't be on all the time, since not many players choose that role every single round, second, Aurora is a:

A - A mining station, a phoron mining station no less, with plenty of goodies to trade.

B - A research station, if resources weren't enough to have ships docking with it, the various fancy stuff that Aurora produces behind those closed science airlocks definitely will, since fancy gadgets that do little useful will interest many people still, especially One of a kind!™ gadgets.

And the same could be said about antags, it's a game.

 

Edit: Courtesy of Chada, Jade and Happy_Fox, issues plus solutions.

Issue 1: The Merchant is currently limited to create novelty on the role. (We want it to be more common)

Issue 2: The Merchant is also limited to prevent player culture forming around aiding security / antagonists and to artificially create tension in crisis' aboard the station, which its' shuttle makes it hard to do

Possible solutions:

Solution 1 (For issue 1): Make the Merchant 100% common on Extended, and just raise the RNG on secret to keep the novelty but make it more common.

Solution 2 (For 1 - 2): Remove the limitation and instead randomly limit the selection of round-start items for the merchant.

Solution 3 (For 2 - 1): Make merchant no longer able to be an antagonist role or put more emphasis on it being neutral in station conflicts.

Solution 4 (For issue 2): Lock the Merchant shuttle on code red, make the merchant shuttle clamped to the station, give the merchant a bluespace override that rips apart a piece of the shuttle in return for an escape.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Timirald

[canon35]

At the very least I'd like to see the merchant spawn chance increased to something like 75% if it can't be 100%. It can be a genuinely good role to augment rounds and change things up (Revs using the merchant for weaponry to fight, vampire dens in the merchant shuttle, science getting a load of toys to play with.). Plus I have seen people play developed merchant characters and taking advantage of the unique situation of the merchant to have some fun with it. 

 

[Hocka]

1 minute ago, canon35 said:

At the very least I'd like to see the merchant spawn chance increased

I think this would be cool - as someone who just plays on-station roles, it feels like merchants spawn regularly enough, but I can see that from the point of view of someone who actually wants/likes to play Merchant it can be annoyingly rare, especially since it's a one-man slot and there's no garauntee they'll open an assistant position.

[Arrow768]

Moving to policy suggestions.

[Myazaki]

I'd love to have a well-established Merchant character that I can play regularly, I don't manage to catch many rounds currently due to developer stuff / life.

But I don't think a constant Merchant slot will be good for the role, I think its rarity / novelty is important -- It suffers from the problem of Supply having very powerful tools, and it being unnecessary for actually doing what merchants do outside of selling some guns or occasional weird items like clothing.

Currently I think the configuration has the Merchant slot available once per five rounds.

I'd be open to ideas to allow the crew to call a Merchant and open the slot, perhaps... maybe make it cost some money? Or depend on round-type.. voted extended only? Idk. Needs some thought.

---

It'll be on my to-do list for the NBT, to make Merchant more frequent / a permanently open slot, and see what can be done to make it more useful to the other players. Potentially expand the Merchant slots a bit depending on how complicated piloting ends up being. Plans are currently built on a lot of unknowns. 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Myazaki

[Timirald]

17 minutes ago, Myazaki said:

I think its rarity / novelty is important

But, it already is a rarity and a novelty, hear me out.

To play as a merchant you need to, for one, select the independent role, which not many know how to do (meaning that the role is somewhat hidden), then step into uncharted waters and figure the role out, which will drive away many people, in addition, there isn't a learning job for it, unless you count your own server / an assistant, which, considering how small the vessel is, isn't exactly useful, so few merchants will ever get one.

So the amount of players willing to play the merchant is already low as is, and on top of that there is also an RNG coin toss that just ends up leaving a sour taste in your mouth, it doesn't really improve gameplay in my opinion, it just makes playing as a merchant frustrating as it's a "Pray to your favorite deity for that to be the round!"

[Myazaki]

19 minutes ago, Timirald said:

<snip>

Sure, you have a point there I guess.

I'd still like it to have a bit of a rework if/when it becomes a more common / constantly available role. There are some significant gameplay problems with it imo, other than the supply interaction thing I mentioned above.

I'd need to ask some lore people about how attractive the Aurora actually is to Merchants, too. Does NT just sell phoron to Independent merchants? Do they allow the normal crew to handle those transactions? I've no idea. We don't really produce anything except from mining.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Myazaki