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+--- Thread: What jobs need an update? (/showthread.php?tid=8731)
RE: What jobs need an update? - Tincan Man - 05-20-2017
Mostly just going to be repeating what everyone else has said, but from my time it seems there are a few jobs that really could use some work.
Cyborgs
They feel strangely and unnecessarily clunky and unsuited for many jobs, resulting in them being unused. How many cyborgs do you actually see being a Hydroponics Borg, for example? Or a Janitor Cyborg? Usually everyone just picks Medical, Chemistry or Engineering as those are the three modules that are most relevant to the station's problems and also because Chemistry can kill people very easily. Brobots are only ever really used for when people are bored out of their brains and have nothing else to really do, and run around spamming sounds before throwing themselves in the crusher and hoping nobody noticed or asking for a module change. All of the other borgs I almost never see, and there's some very strange decisions with their design that I can't tell if it was done fore 'balance' or because Cyborgs haven't been touched since Spy was in rotation.
For example, the Medical Cyborg. It has a seemingly infinite amount of styptic powder patches and silver sulfadiazine. If you find someone that's injured, or being attacked/was attacked you can just endlessly slap them with the patches until they're okay. Apply some stuff to make sure they won't die of oxygen damage and you're done. But then you have the Chemistry Cyborg, who has to make all of those chems for himself and has the absolute worst interface out of all of the borgs - as you're forced to navigate a drop down menu and scroll around for the chem you want, then the amount you want, one at a time. If the chem you're making has 10 units too many, you can't just flush it out using the device like everyone else can - you have to go over to your mini-chem dispenser thing and remove five units at a time. It's terrible.
Balancing borgs is very strange because of their inability to pick up items and robot-ness. However cloning is another alternative to borging and it's much easier to do, as well as not making the player feel like they can't do anything any more because of how many downsides cyborgs have. It feels more like a punishment than an actual job by now as humans can do so much more than the cyborgs can.
Chef & Barman
Let it be known that I think the Chef is in a very good spot for traitoring. His job doesn't put himself in too much of an important position and his traitor items actively compliment his job. The syndicate sauce lets you poison your food to turn them into deathtraps (which I'll explain why this isn't very helpful later), and the Butcher Knife is down right one of the best traitor items in the entire game - allowing you to instantly stun and bleed out your victims in mere seconds and then turn them into meat you can later use for your foods. Both of these open up opportunities for the Chef to kill people and do traitor stuff while still being a Chef, unlike other traitor items that are either just underpowered/overpriced or generally don't make sense with the job they have to work with.
The issue is that the Chef is overall a gimmick role. If you're not a traitor the only real thing for you to do is make food, and nobody gives a shit about food because half the time the food is always poisoned - or does absolutely nothing of interest. This problem plagues the Barman as well, as he has a million different drinks he can make that are all just the same. The Barman has a chemistry dispenser too, which results in him using that instead of his alcohol dispenser. This means the Barman is just a glorified Chemist making liquid poison instead of custom made alcoholic liquid poison. As a result of all of this, I rarely see the Chef's food get eaten or the Barman's drinks actually get drank when he isn't forcefeeding it to people, or when they aren't hot dogs.
On top of that there are very strange inconsistencies. After seeing how the brainburger gives people prions you'd imagine that all of the other kinds of foods involving brains would also give people prions, right? If you're literally eating mashed brains with a spoon, you'd be dead from kuru in seconds flat. At least you'd think so, because in reality the ONLY brain related food that gives you kuru is the brainburger - so if you were out to poison people with brain food then you're out of luck. So people don't even bother, they'll just shove the brainburger into the reagent extractor and kill people with forcible injections of prions instead of trying to get people to eat their totally-not-poison.
I frequently see Barmen doing nothing but abusing their shotgun and their still before running off and getting killed.
AI
The AI is terrible. His cameras are awful. There's nothing for him to do. He doesn't even get free movement. He isn't even allowed to kill himself. He sucks.
AIs will either be people hoping desperately that a traitor subverts them so they can have fun, complete asshats, or people who whine until they get a cyborg shell and then just run around being a cyborg.
On other servers the AI has plenty of other things to do as he had control over everything he could see - including telecommunications. He was easily able to set people to Arrest, he was able to fuck with robots if he saw them (even setting them on harmful modes if the time called for it, resulting in emagged-ish effects) and he was capable of clearly seeing everyone and could stalk them without having to pop over from camera to camera wondering where they just vanished off to. This made subverting him a dangerous situation for the crew - as he, again, had control over literally everything - usually leading to plasma flooding the station and a sigh of relief from the admins as all of the players collapsed in fire therein letting them adminparty and get drunk instead of having to do their jobs. On Goon you just charge the AI with a reset module or killswitch it the moment it looks rogue, and it is laughably easy to fix or take down unless it has 8 cyborgs.
I'm not really sure of a solution for the AI, besides free camera movement. He feels very restricted and unfun to play as.
Staff Assistant
You might be a big surprised about how I'm complaining about the Staff Assistant's "job" but really it's mostly about what the Staff Assistant does and how little variety he has to carry it out. Staff Assistants typically do three things: rob everything in sight, attack Security, stupid gimmicks. I'd personally expect Staff Assistants to be maintenance hobos, people who run around looting everything they can get their grubby mitts on and making improvised weaponry and tools to get the job done.
Instead they just try and slip you with lube or uppercut you with boxing gloves. The Assistant could really use some more improvised weaponry or devices other than just a Zip Gun. This could even work in favor of the Quartermaster, as you could be making random shit for vendors like improvised weapons and sell them off to the not-syndicate.
Miner
I think Miner would be better off if there were actual places in Space to take the pods so he and others could go on big mining expeditions on weird asteroids or planets that aren't just the Debris Field. Instead, telescience ruined that idea and the Miner has nothing to do except excavate the same area over and over. Sure, he might have things to do other than his main job - but the issue is that his main job isn't fun.
Out of all the jobs, AI and Miner seem like they could use the help the most.
RE: What jobs need an update? - Nnystyxx - 05-20-2017
^ all those AI criticisms pretty much
the cameras are incredibly fuckin inconsistent, from not going in the same place if you retrace your 'steps', to certain arbitrary parts being invisible, to having no idea which general part of an area is covered by 'Bar 1' or something like that
AI would immediately be far easier to play if there was a blob overmind mode so we stopped having to deal with that herky-jerky camera movement, but of course that would still leave his actual functional toolkit quite sparse
(also +1 to more improvised weapons, it's one of my favorite features that's more prominent on other code bases, all you can really make on Goon is a flamethrower that gets you arrested, zip guns that blow your arms off, and pipe bombs that probably get you banned if you're unlucky enough)
RE: What jobs need an update? - misto - 05-20-2017
since ppl are mentioning borgs some, construction borg has been rendered nearly redundant with the advent of ghost drones and should be melded with engi borg already
RE: What jobs need an update? - Musketman12 - 05-20-2017
(05-20-2017, 07:13 AM)Nnystyxx Wrote: AI would immediately be far easier to play if there was a blob overmind mode so we stopped having to deal with that herky-jerky camera movement, but of course that would still leave his actual functional toolkit quite sparse
The thing about this is that it would have to be made fast, with current cameras I can get from one side of the station to the other in 3 seconds while the blob overmind is slow with movement and the teleport thing is disorienting and is basically what we don't want.
RE: What jobs need an update? - amaranthineApocalypse - 05-20-2017
(05-20-2017, 07:15 AM)misto Wrote: since ppl are mentioning borgs some, construction borg has been rendered nearly redundant with the advent of ghost drones and should be melded with engi borg already
I'm working on it! Patience!
RE: What jobs need an update? - misto - 05-20-2017
bless u
RE: What jobs need an update? - Salami Sam - 05-20-2017
I'd like to see the Chaplain get a few new goodies. Maybe some more things that ghosts can interact with, like the ouija board.
RE: What jobs need an update? - Roomba - 05-20-2017
The thread's moved on a bit, but I have to say I don't like the 'mash mining and QM together' solution because it's just sticking two incomplete jobs to get 1.5 of a decent job, rather than fleshing them both out so you get 2 complete jobs. If QM becomes a miner's duty, then actual quartermastering will go from occasional to nonexistent. A dedicated QM might as well do their job to the best of their ability, because they've got pretty much nothing else to do, whereas a miner/QM will just stick to mining because mining's straight-up more fun, and will thoroughly resent having to be dragged back to the station on the off chance someone actually wants a bee crate or somesuch.
RE: What jobs need an update? - Frank_Stein - 05-20-2017
(05-20-2017, 07:41 AM)Musketman12 Wrote:(05-20-2017, 07:13 AM)Nnystyxx Wrote: AI would immediately be far easier to play if there was a blob overmind mode so we stopped having to deal with that herky-jerky camera movement, but of course that would still leave his actual functional toolkit quite sparse
The thing about this is that it would have to be made fast, with current cameras I can get from one side of the station to the other in 3 seconds while the blob overmind is slow with movement and the teleport thing is disorienting and is basically what we don't want.
Please read what I wrote regarding AI shit, because it solves this problem in a incredibly fluid way.
RE: What jobs need an update? - warcrimes - 05-20-2017
Hot Take on Chef and Barman :
Get rid of 90% of the vending machines, make the vendable products cookable / mixable.
Need an emergency Lime-Aid? go see barman. Want a pizza? go see chef. Donk Pockets, noodle soups, everything. Make a recipe for Ramen that imparts a random chem to it just like Discount Dan's. Even coffee should be something the barman can whip up stronger and better than Robust Coffee.
The vendable junk food is such an integral part of being robust, so if you want job demand that's where you'll get it.
E: Give Barman kitchen access too. It's not like Chef doesnt have bar access.
RE: What jobs need an update? - ferriswheel1 - 05-20-2017
Add a (non-lethal) hunger bar that slows your speed as you become hungrier. Bam, now you have to actually eat a square meal to be robust.
RE: What jobs need an update? - NateTheSquid - 05-20-2017
(05-20-2017, 11:45 AM)ferriswheel1 Wrote: Add a (non-lethal) hunger bar that slows your speed as you become hungrier. Bam, now you have to actually eat a square meal to be robust.
see: motives on lljk1
RE: What jobs need an update? - The_Rain - 05-20-2017
Honestly, the biggest thing that bugs me about QM outside of RNG is that is gets raided all the damn time. People run in, order a bunch of crap and run out.
RE: What jobs need an update? - misto - 05-20-2017
all of the plastic flap things need a security shutter type door thing. at least make fuckers have to bust a window or something to sneak in
RE: What jobs need an update? - Vitatroll - 05-20-2017
When used I play QM it was:
- Get budget emptied by Cap or QMs. Usually powergaming gear or funny clothing.
- Turn QM into a growop.
*- Mine.
- Return with minerals.
- Sell weed and minerals.
- Get budget emptied again.
- Repeat from *.
It's always better for producers to sell their own stuff, as QM will just embezzle their gains. It's quicker and more profitable for QM to produce their own exports. There's no 'progress' to QM; no goals, no glory. Almost all it does could be replaced by allowing people to place orders through their bank account to a general area. That doesn't bode well for the job, as is.
As is, it's only value lies in RP. The job needs something to achieve. I've always been partial to the station upgrade idea, but I have no idea how that would work. Depending on how it would be implemented, people might actually care when the HoP empties the budget.