Replaces the FR Hardsuits with Voidsuits - Feedback Thread

[Flpfs]

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17749

[FearTheBlackout]

I'm honestly mostly okay with this. Having an FR who can't wear the rescue hardsuit anyway (V*urca), I find that it's not a necessary resource, however much of a boon it may be because of the attachments, for doing your job, and consistently wearing the module, even outside of emergency situations, is a strange commonality that I can take or leave.

[La Villa Strangiato]

With the inevitable As A First Responder Player out of the way, let me first say that the medical hardsuits were already nerfed to be on par with other hardsuits in terms of speed. They've already been nerfed. Why remove them?

Second of all, hardsuits are excellent quality of life to have for a First Responder because of two things; built-in jetpacks and leg actuators. If someone gets flung out into space, you don't have to waste precious seconds trying to grab a jetpack so you also don't get flung into space. Leg actuators, apart from being very fun to jump around on, are especially useful because they stop you from getting owned super hard if you just happen to fall down a hole while responding to something (since you land on your feet with them enabled).

If you're picking up a pattern here, congrats. The hardsuit is good for keeping yourself alive, which nicely dovetails into keeping a patient alive. It has its own disadvantages of being slightly slower, taking up a back slot, and taking a long time to put on properly. Inb4 "people could just put it on before code blue starts and then powergame it" well, they shouldn't really be doing that, should they? Ahelp it.

Overall I don't think making it harder to rescue people is a great idea.

[Sniblet]

Hi, my FR is a vaurca too. What are these balance/power creep concerns? You trade away walkspeed, and the ability to carry either your stabilizer or roller bed, for quick travel between z-levels in certain spots and space immunity on demand. Isn’t that just a trade off? Is there something wrong with that trade? Is space immunity unacceptable? Do we want being spaced without warning to medical to be an unavoidable death sentence even more than it is already? Do we want to remove vaurca FRs to lock that in?

I don’t see the RP issue with an on-duty EMT wearing the hardsuit - see also, being ready to respond to a crisis - at all times. If the hardsuit is part of their  life-saving gear, would they really discard it just for comfort?

I don’t see why a balance issue in this state matters much either. FR response can be unreliable, but when it exists it’s pretty fast. Okay. Is that a bad thing? Should people die more? Are antags mad that they have to work to KC people who don’t succumb? Show me one so I can hit them.

If there’s anything I don’t like about the rescue suit, it’s that it’s work that a machinist (if there is one, the poor abused dependent creatures) could be doing. Not the assembly itself, because for whatever reason it’s the only one in the game that asks for phoron, but it already has all but one of the attachments a responder could want. That’s a shame. But that’s the machinist’s whole existence right now anyway.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Sniblet

[Noble Row]

I believe taking away the EMT hardsuit from first responder would be akin to taking away the Ambulance for their real world counterparts. I just don't see the point. They've already been nerfed, as others have mentioned, and they're exceptionally expensive to make for the machinist. Removing them from the first responder lockers would basically be removing them from the game as it stands, and if you made them cheaper to produce, then they'd just get them anyway. I see this as a reactionary fix, a band aid as opposed to a real fix for a different problem entirely.

[rrrrrr]

the real problem is not that the FR hardsuit exists and is good at what it's supposed to be, but that people wear it for the entirety of the round, which is a cultural issue, not a mechanical one. i also find it puzzling that some FRs will wear it when responding to regular calls that do not involve going outside the ship/into a depressurized area, but i guess leg actuators are just that good

[Ramke]

I don't get the balance concerns because we've just had a swathe of medical nerfs come through, and more being considered. One of the developers asked to outline these concerns and arguments when you make the thread, if you could?

It's been mentioned before that the FR hardsuit has clear downsides - slowdown, loss of a backpack slot. It's also been mentioned that putting on the FR hardsuit on round start is ahelpable. LVS brought up very good points regarding QoL and EVA/hazardous rescue, and I agree with them.

[CampinKiller]

18 hours ago, Sniblet said:

I don’t see the RP issue with an on-duty EMT wearing the hardsuit - see also, being ready to respond to a crisis - at all times. If the hardsuit is part of their  life-saving gear, would they really discard it just for comfort?

The main issue is that it’s a heavy and uncomfortable thing to wear all day. You could extend that argument to security and say, “well a combat hard suit is part of their life-saving gear,” which I think everyone can see why that would be a problem. As LVS said this is an ahelpable thing.

Regardless of that, we should just have one hardsuit and not two

 

[Boggle08]

This is one one of the few roles that gets hardsuits without needing to be a head, or investing time and resources in acquiring them. Not sure about bridge crew, but FR's have the modules to get some immediate use out of them. I like how this role exposes people to Hardsuit use, it makes what the machinist can produce more valued.

Most of the problems with medical are cultural, and most of the powercreep they've received are band-aid solutions made as a consequence to the weird fractured nature of medical's interdependencies. I know it's in style to beat down on them right now, but it won't fix anything if we don't think about what we're doing. There are better ways to ego check bad responders.

Edited November 10, 2023 by Boggle08

[KingOfThePing]

Wearing the hardsuit all the time (deployed or undeployed on your back) is against the rules for as long as I can think for. If that is the main concern, ahelp the rule break instead of nerfing medical even more.

[BravoBohemia]

I’ll just rehash what I said on the PR itself, granted it seems like everyone else has already hit the high points. Truth be told I think some clarification needs to be made on what is meant by power creep because by my count the hardsuit has been unmodified for as long as I’ve been playing over the course of the last few years, aside from the most recent movement speed nerf. If you’re talking about power creep in terms of the new tools that medical has been afforded, like the stabilizer harness, why is it that the first responders best piece of EVA capable equipment is the one getting the axe? As LVS said earlier in the thread, the whole purpose of the suit is to make operating in a hazardous environment actually feasible and keeps you from having to play a scavenger hunt at the start of each round to get the various pieces of kit to give you that capability; barring the suit injector suite whose capabilities are only replicable by the premium hypospray. 

Again piggy backing off what LVS stated, this seems to be one of a long list of PRs recently tuned around making medical’s job “harder”, be it the removal of sensors, downsizing of first aid boxes, or in this case, the removal of the rescue hardsuit. I just don’t see what we gain from removing a piece of equipment that only three people can use in any given round in the interest of “balance”, or who that balance is in the favor of. 

[MrGodZilla]

I'll preface this by saying that I believe the PR should swap out the oxygen tank for an oxygen jetpack - First Responders are expected to conduct EVA rescue and it would make sense to at least supply them with a jetpack.

Barring that, I mostly support this, partly because I've grown to dislike some of the culture surrounding FR and this is one of the more blunt ways of alleviating it. There is no reason to be wearing the RIG the entire round. You're not working out of an inner city clinic, you're on a corporate ship staffed with vetted employees. I know miners exist, but their high mortality rate is realistically the exception and not the expectation. Besides that, staff have made it clear that wearing it start to finish breaches rules of character comfort.

The RIG has downsides, yes, but they're incomparable to the benefits. The slowdown is made up for the ability to traverse entire Z-levels in seconds and the lack of a backpack slot just means you one-hand carry the duffle bag and get space vital to your role. If these two downsides meant more you would see less people wearing it the entire round, but it's hard to pass up an armor-ignoring 80-unit storage minimal delay autoinjector packed with every lifesaving chem you can ask for, leg actuators that completely negate the need to even worry about falls and let you bypass railings, and a jetpack that allows you to traverse Z-levels and also not worry about falls if you just leave it on. You're also rad and space proof for the rest of the round and if you catch a stray bullet your suit will auto-splint anything broken. Why wouldn't I take that deal?

However, none of that is the issue. Like botanist mentions the RIG being mechanically strong is fine, but the culture of medical assumes that powergaming is sometimes fine if it's to extend someone's round. Powergaming in medical is not fine, but wearing the RIG from the start of the round is one of those things that has been singed into medical for so long that the thought of ahelping it for being powergaming seems asinine. There's a reason this has been going on for years and only last month did the RIG get hit with a nerf - one half of medical don't perceive 24/7 wearing the RIG to be an issue, the other half find the thought of ahelping someone every other round till it becomes clear that this rule is being enforced to be exhausting. I'm sure multisurgery or the medkit exploit could've been ahelped for the years those were around, but they weren't, and people used those two, and now they're gone.

I hope nothing I've said came off excessively pointed. I'm not here to call people powergamers or put them down for their playstyle, it's just that in my opinion this particular topic relates to medical's more blatantly gamey side. The reactions on the PR bring me to believe that a lot of people are against this; I'm not 100% sold either, and I'd like to hear more reasoning on this.

Edited November 11, 2023 by MrGodZilla

[Robotic Potato]

Hardsuits are cooler, hardsuit haters perish.

[vayrarae]

lvs hit the nail on the head imo. first responders are, by name, the frontline of all the stress that comes with playing medical. it is really not as easy or cozy to play as physician or surgeon, where u have so many tools and devices (sleeper stasis and adrenaline, lol) to make up for any personal deficiencies in mechanical skill or mental quickness in dealing with a given situation. fr is not a "chill role" by any means like engineering is - whether the frs are up to par for skill, speed, and generally picking up on what injuries occurred is what dictates whether ppl live or die.

really dont see where this staunch belief that medical's equipment is too strong and is somehow ruining rounds for antags. i'd point to several more rounds lately where security's involvement in a situation greatly damaged an interesting situation more than medical saving someone from a death they may or may not have deserved coming to them

[Fluffy]

I took some time to ponder on the suggestion, and after reflection, I didn't find any reason why this change would be good

I acknowledge you indicated "powercreeping and balance concerns" in the PR, but it was never elaborated what those would be, despite the request to do so, and the rules of this specific subsection indicating that "The reasoning behind a suggestion should be elaborated upon in the initial post to a reasonable extent", so I am not sure what this change is aiming to address exactly, can you please elaborate on what those concerns are, and why the proposed way to address them is removing the FR hardsuits entirely?

[Fluffy]

The PR was closed by maintainers as not needed, therefore this suggestion is considered rejected.

Locking and archiving.