Skills System Feedback Thread

[hellfirejag]

Post your feedback for the testmerge of skills here.

[greenjoe]

Couple of ideas for education additions

some kinda pilot education that gives you piloting skill + some others? Some low level engineering stuff for basic stuff in the shuttles a pilot would be expected to do?

Corpo trained sec officer education. Similar to police academy but some stuff a bit different?

Stuff can also be a bit rough for some heads like OM. One with the finance background for example uses up ALL of their occupational points on piloting.

Edited 17 hours ago by greenjoe

[ASmallCuteCat]

Right off the top of my head - I feel like cutting people out of hardsuits shouldn't require Robotics, otherwise that means anyone in Medical will need to take Robotics just in case someone gets trapped in a hardsuit.

Are we supposed to get 8 Everyday skills, 8 Occupational skills, and 4 Combat skills? I was struggling to find skills to put those points into that made sense for my surgeon, and now he's somehow wound up with an exosuit license xD

[Stradfarian]

Please make cutting people out of hardsuits a surgery skill, i dont think there should be a chance that no one is capable of doing that in a full medbay.

[Melariara]

Were the various species teams consulted about how their species affects their education and the like? I can already see the various subspecies of Tajara being affected, not to mention IPC datapacks and the intense education that skrell have, as well as the bloodsucking/knowledge gaining of dionae.

[CatsinHD]

Right now the point distribution feels off. For example:

Quote

 

Operations managers must know how to fly. They additionally only require experience. No degree, just experience. Therefore we can assume that they became OM from an HT or Roboticist (such as one of my chars). Let's say HT. This is perfectly reasonable.

In order to be a HT, you need to be a trained exosuit pilot. That is 4 points. To be OM, you need to be a licensed shuttle pilot. That is 6. Occupational skills get 8 points to spend, meaning you cannot, as an OM, be trained in exosuits and piloting at the same time. This is problematic- indeed it means you either lost your edge with exosuit piloting or were a roboticist. Except roboticists should also, ideally, also be trained in exosuits. So we get back to the same issue.

 

If I were to sum it up. It feels like I either have too many points to spend or not enough. 8 points for occupational either covers your entire job or barely gets you the skills you need. In many cases, it feels like you can cover your primary skill, but supporting skills you'd expect out of a role get unnecessarily restricted or sidelined because your job has other requirements. See surgeons needing robotics to cut open hardsuits, which is such a fundamental procedure even paramedics are permitted it on the surgery table.

This may be the intent, but to echo a friend "Like essentially the root of my problem is that it feels restrictive rather than permissive... You're taking gameplay opportunity out of a sever that already is noted to have issues with gameplay engagement..." 

Either this requires a shift in how skills affect gameplay (which is impossible in some cases) or leads us to something like being able to transfer skills from every-day or combat. I'm not totally sure on an answer for that. However I can agree that, ftmp, it feels like many roles are very stretched thin in terms of skills and what they are expected to perform. That might also be a server culture shift, idk.

Edited 16 hours ago by CatsinHD

[CatsinHD]

4 minutes ago, Melariara said:

Were the various species teams consulted about how their species affects their education and the like? I can already see the various subspecies of Tajara being affected, not to mention IPC datapacks and the intense education that skrell have, as well as the bloodsucking/knowledge gaining of dionae.

AFAIK no. The Tajara team was not at least. If I missed the consultation then lmk and we can come back around to it.

[Roostercat]

I've noticed that it doesn't seem like surgeons have the points required to fix mechanical organs. the second tier of robotics doesn't allow it and damaged augments/organs are pretty common in the department, and the wiki chart states Surgeons are able to do so. It means that if there isn't a machinist available (there usually isn't) then people just have to live with super damaged augments. 

[GeneralCamo]

34 minutes ago, Melariara said:

Were the various species teams consulted about how their species affects their education and the like?

This was brought up during development, specifically in regards to skrell's multiple degrees. It was decided to push back an expansion of education to handle this until the skills were fully implemented, lest the PR take forever with potential critical bugs or issues with skills themselves still lingering.

Edited 15 hours ago by GeneralCamo

[NewOriginalSchwann]

There is no option for security-related skills for any character under 25, meaning you cannot* play as a security character under 25.

 

*You can at the cost of being unfamiliar in every combat skill aside from firearms, which is not ideal.

Edited 15 hours ago by NewOriginalSchwann

[Roostercat]

I think skills might have accidentally borked necrotic surgery. When trying to remove necrotic tissue you can either amputate the entire organ or stab them directly in the head. No in between. 

[Melariara]

2 minutes ago, Roostercat said:

I think skills might have accidentally borked necrotic surgery. When trying to remove necrotic tissue you can either amputate the entire organ or stab them directly in the head. No in between. 

That might be better posted on github.

48 minutes ago, GeneralCamo said:

This was brought up during development, specifically in regards to skrell's multiple degrees. It was decided to push back an expansion of education to handle this until the skills were fully implemented, lest the PR take forever with potential critical bugs or issues with skills themselves still lingering.

Sure. Thank you very much.

[Loorey]

Hello!

I've heard (not tried myself) that CPR is now actually locked behind medical skill. I think it's very reasonable to expect everyone aboard a spaceship like the Horizon to know basic first aid, and with that comes CPR. Not only because it is really mechanically frustrating not to be able to do something as basic as CPR but also because of straight up realism, you'd expect every crewmember to at least be able to apply a bandage to themselves or a co-worker and do something as basic as CPR. 

[maxspells]

7 hours ago, Loorey said:

Hello!

I've heard (not tried myself) that CPR is now actually locked behind medical skill. I think it's very reasonable to expect everyone aboard a spaceship like the Horizon to know basic first aid, and with that comes CPR. Not only because it is really mechanically frustrating not to be able to do something as basic as CPR but also because of straight up realism, you'd expect every crewmember to at least be able to apply a bandage to themselves or a co-worker and do something as basic as CPR. 

Counter argument, I think having the option to play someone that is unskilled in CPR is good too. I like playing stupid characters and I think there are use cases where someone might not know it. Inherently I think this creates RP on its own ie "What do you mean you don't know CPR?", and medical/sec doing training exercises/refresher courses in game to teach someone/re-teach how to do it properly, and ICly this could simply be chalked up to not paying attention during their initial training, or forgetting it.

 

 

9 hours ago, CatsinHD said:

Right now the point distribution feels off. For example:

If I were to sum it up. It feels like I either have too many points to spend or not enough. 8 points for occupational either covers your entire job or barely gets you the skills you need. In many cases, it feels like you can cover your primary skill, but supporting skills you'd expect out of a role get unnecessarily restricted or sidelined because your job has other requirements. See surgeons needing robotics to cut open hardsuits, which is such a fundamental procedure even paramedics are permitted it on the surgery table.

This may be the intent, but to echo a friend "Like essentially the root of my problem is that it feels restrictive rather than permissive... You're taking gameplay opportunity out of a sever that already is noted to have issues with gameplay engagement..." 

Either this requires a shift in how skills affect gameplay (which is impossible in some cases) or leads us to something like being able to transfer skills from every-day or combat. I'm not totally sure on an answer for that. However I can agree that, ftmp, it feels like many roles are very stretched thin in terms of skills and what they are expected to perform. That might also be a server culture shift, idk.

I had this idea to give all jobs a baseline amount of skills that allows them to place the bare minimum amount of skills needed for their job, with more skill points being given the higher their age is over their minimum age requirement for the role. Every three-five years is another skill point or something, and jobs can be re-designed and re-balanced around three different tiers: the young upstart, the experienced professional, and the ten years+ in the field veteran. This, I think, would fix a lot of the issues regarding 90% of the characters being played as the minimum age, and helps softly disincentivize playing minimum age, and would help the "corporate flagship ship full of 20 year old kids" awkward reality which has sort of plagued us for a while. Overall I think this would create more realistic and varied characters too.

This would need balancing depending on the job and occupation, rather than flat restrictions and need tweaked on a case by case basis since a veteran security officer might be 35-40, while a veteran surgeon or medical doctor might be 50-65 years old, etc

[Nagito Komaeda]

Piloting feels extremely expensive as a skill to take. Spending 6 out of 8 occupational points on piloting feels very punishing, especially when it's required for Mining, Bridge Crew and for some, Science. Additionally, needing to spend 6 points on being 'a licensed pilot' when there's a big difference between ship classifications feels weird. I think it could work to split it between small, medium and large crafts, where the Spark, Quark and Canary fall under small, the Intrepid (and a ship like the Lone Spacer ship) fall under medium together with the targeting console, and the Horizon and most other ships that can't land on planets fall under large.

There is also no education that allows for someone to 'be' a pilot. So being a Bridge Crewman means you have to have a different background than a full pilot's background, which I could foresee causing issues with a lot of character archetypes.

A Xenobotany degree should realistically also entail having at least familiar atmospheric knowledge, or if anything, permit you to take the familiar/trained level. Xenobotany has been intertwined with atmospheric systems significantly over the past months, and if there will be mechanical consequences for not having atmospheric knowledge, Xenobotany will really need at least a baseline level of skills in it.

For Science in particular as well, not being able to have a 'familiar' level in any other field of science feels really off. While they're not expected to have full knowledge over the entire Science department, I'd argue that a Research Director is at least familiar with other fields in research. Not being able to spend your skill points on Science fields when playing a Science character is a little strange to me.

Edited 2 hours ago by Nagito Komaeda
Edited to add a blurb about targeting systems.

[ASmallCuteCat]

A shower thought turned into a question: Will the skill system be able to account for character skill growth over a long period of roleplay?

For example, if over the course of a year or two, an established engineer character befriends a gaggle of miners, and decides to get a piloting license of their own - so they study, they have the mining buddies show them the ropes, they finally take some time off from the Horizon to take a proper class and get their license. Would that be possible to reflect with the skills system, without their having to lose other skills and "forget" things that they already knew prior to getting their license?

[Hawk]

Heya,

Not necessarily the most concrete feedback but I just wanted to make a point or two about the melee/hand-to-hand combat skills.

Basically, I feel like this is pretty overrestrictive and a little damaging to the engagement of non-security characters in antagonist rounds/high-intensity events (Which, lets be honest with ourselves already prominently feature security). I understand and agree with the way firearms is treated as something that would need to be honed and trained. But for melee/hand-to-hand the way that it currently functions essentially makes characters that aren't built for security skills entirely useless in combat, statistically never landing a punch, not aiming where they hit, etc. Realistic I'll grant you, but its not particularly fun.

I can just imagine a series of events wherein characters are now basically forced to either flee or submit to a character with a superior skill, instead of a scrappier engineering/cargo/service crew working together to take down two mercenaries in close combat, they must now lose or run away and scream for security, because the random number generator dictates that they simply must (Not even counting a hypothetical situation where antagonists remove most of security and the crew basically have to sit on their hands because now it's no longer just an equipment advantage, it's a "We can't hit them even if we tried advantage", and commonly I think in these situations, the players mentally check out and basically stop caring about the gimmick because they can't meaningfully effect it). And I think players would get pretty tired of this, it's always frustrating to be locked into a powerless role through no real fault of your own. It reduces character variety. Take Hiskyn for example, I'm happy to have her be worse with a gun than a trained soldier, but not every character is supposed to be a helpless bystander with no capacity for violence, and having to write that into the character or pigeonhole them into that archetype, strikes me as pretty unengaging. 

I think it'd be interesting to see the system be permissive instead of restrictive: Instead of "At trained hand-to-hand you no longer fumble no matter what.", you unlock the ability to jointlock/dislocate people. And that would organically make something like jointlocking more interesting, and the site of RP, whereas currently it's "That thing you accidentally hit while trying to aggressively grab someone." this could be combined with a system wherein hand-to-hand affects grappling people, and resisting out of them, instead of it being a species-based top trumps. Melee could allow you to use the crazier and bigger things such as the Hegemony's big shields or an esword. While also increading the chance to cause aterials, throat slitting speed, etc but even the most random of cargo technicians can still stick someone with the pointy end of a combat knife. 

A possible solution I think would be adding an athletics skill that makes people run faster, have more staminia, jump farther. Encourging people at the character design level "Is this character a fighter, or a flighter." and that'd add an extra level to the security gameplay, you might be the fastest responder on the scene, but you've willingly made that choice at the cost of your melee combat, or something along those lines, and that'd help balance out the current meta of "Whoever sprints to the scene first gets the most roleplay." which I've heard a couple of Sinta players, including myself complain about. 

Apologies for turning this into a mini-rant but I actually had a whole opinion for once.

[Captain Gecko]

I quite like the system so far, but obviously we're gonna need to add and tweak things over time. But that's why we're here! Anyways, to complete what's been said above about Research...
- There is a Xenoarcheology skill, but no Xenoarcheology education, which means that Xenoarchs HAVE to spend their points on it while others do not. I assume that's just an oversight, but yes, we should add some kind of Xenoarcheology education.
- Limiting players to a single skills in the same field makes no sense. A character like a research director should be able to at least have spend points to have "familiar" levels in other fields of their department, so we should leave an option to pick other research fields to spend points on; and even beyond that, there is no reasons why a Xenobotanist couldn't be familiar with the basics of Xenobiologist due to working closely with co-workers. Obviously this applies to other Department Heads too if they have the same issue.
- I also agree that a cost of 6 for piloting is way too high. I have two solutions: Either make incremental skills with lesser and lesser debuffs as you progress like with the exosuit skills, or, make it about the ship type- in other words, the equivalent of familiar skill for piloting would be cheaper than 6, but your character would only be trained in flying shuttle-type vessels (The Spark, Quark, Canary, Intrepid), then have the more expensive 6-point price reserved for piloting larger vessels. Basically what's been said above, once again.

Besides research, I'll add that I agree with the few comments I've seen about age. It makes little sense for a trained 40-years old department head to have roughly the same budget as an 18-years old lab assistant. We need some kind of age-based mechanic, characters in older age categories getting a greater point budget to represent experience, but perhaps some drawbacks in return (I don't think a 60-year old character would have as much in the way of combat skills than a 20 years old for instance). This would also hopefully limit the aforementioned issue of the "ship full of 20 years old". 

Now on the topic of general budget, I'd like to bring up the case of one of my character to show off how limiting it is. Perhaps it IS the goal to limit the scope of what a character can do to that point, but I think it currently makes many character feel way more limited that whan they should realistically be. Do of that what you will:

Spoiler

Hey it's your old friend Sezrak Han'san. You'll notice that I'm assuming a lot of things, since I imagine that updates and tweaks will come quick; I want to be as charitable as possible. Let's check out what he needs.

• Sezrak started his research career as an Anomalist (Xenoarch alt-title), and it remains his specialization even as a director, so of course he'd have the proper training for it. Though it's currently not in the game, I assume it's due to an oversight and will be added later. So he gets Trained in Xenoarcheology for free.
• As a Research Director, he should be familiar with the other fields of his department. How else is he supposed to not just lead these departments, but also train a lab assistant that wants to learn this or that field. Assuming we are granted the possibility to increase these skills later on, Sezrak gets Familiar knowledge of RnD, Xenobotany and Xenobiology, so 6 points in total.
• As a Research Director, Han'san is often required to pilot the Quark, or whatever other shuttle he's meant to take, so that's a piloting licence for him. I'll assume the licence costs was either reduced, or that a cheaper "shuttle licence" exists, and we'll go for 4 points (Assuming 2 points is too cheap; if it is for familiar-level knowledge, I don't think someone can learn to fly a space shuttle and space navigation just a hobby.)
  As an extra note, before anyone says "call a bridge crew", this is not an option. For players that like me often play on dead-pop with crews of 10 characters tops, the chances of meeting a bridge crew at all are quite low, and the point of the Quark's existence is to give the research department independance anyways.
• Being an Anomalist involves a LOT of EVA work and a lot of dangers and obligatory wounds. Sezrak and many other Xenoarchs/Anomalists HAVE had to do first aid on themselves or co-workers on many occasions, due to how brutal the job can get, and being unable to do CPR and stitch some wounds is a death sentence. Sezrak himself saved the life of several co-workers this way, keeping them alive long-enough for them to head back home and Medical to take over. In other words, familiarity with medecine, 2 points.
• Being an Anomalist/Xenoarch, working in the atrium with anomalies, you have access to tanks of various gases and a network of pipes all over the lab to fill individual cells with, both to experiment with anomalies, or to extract gases they might produce. To be enable to interact with these means being barred from interacting with at least a third of the anomalies you get (in the case of procedurally generated anomalies they either react to ambient temperature, atmosphere/gases being present, or energy transfer) This means that some kind of familiary in atmospherics is required as well, so another 2 points.
   

All in all, this gives us a grand total of 14 points- we're limited to a budget of 8, currently. and this is not only with being charitabe about future updates, but also ignoring a lot of skills I'm ready to put behind to play along with the sytem, such as Sezrak supposedly knowing some robotics too (Ex-Aurora Station Director having to oversee the robotics wing of the station), or some degree of mechanical engineering (being a researcher involves some amount of building contraptions too, whether it's done in the lab, or making do in EVA with what you have on the field to survive.)

And note that these 14 points are not for "roleplay" skills linked to any kind of backstory, these are points that are required for the job as far as I'm concerned. A Xenoarch that can't pilot is useless, and one that can't patch themselves up to survive long-enough to walk back to their shuttle is dead at the first carp encounter. A Director that can't have at least some degree mastery of more than a single field of research is as good as any other scientist being raised to interrim head of department roles, etc.

Other issues I spotted:

• The military education grants you familiarity with all combat skills with 4 extra points to spend, but you cannot spend these points in any way. I assume this might actually just be a bug with the menu, but we never know.
• Oh, and a final note, you guys should check the age limits on some of these educations. I don't play any security officers, but I was made aware of the Secoff education being made for characters aged 25 and above, when the age limit for this role is 18. Oh wait this part was already brought up, I just red the whole thread again, my bad.

Edited 34 minutes ago by Captain Gecko

[hellfirejag]

Heya everyone, I appreciate getting all the feedback. I've seen a few outright bugs last night that I've gone ahead and fixed. But the majority of the feedback I've seen so far is on how severely restrictive the uneducated skill maximums are. I had a feeling this would be the case. So this is now my first priority to address when I get home.