thirtiethelement Wrote:This is probably one of the worse ideas I've seen cross the suggestions forum, for a few reasons:

If none of you know, ingame, my name is Matt Dales. I'm somewhat notorious on the extended servers for being an avid researcher, collaborating with friends to create what I'd like to call the ultimate hellpill. In the meantime, we have created such wonders as a quintuple-stacked knockout chem recipe, optimized for length of disable, a hilariously unstable mixture of chemicals that ends up creating a ticking timebomb out of the body of the poor sap dumb enough to get hit, and an insidious mixture of pyrotechnic and poisonous chems that clocked in for a record-setting death of just under twelve seconds. All of this is possible mainly because we are able to immediately go straight to the lab, grabbing whatever outside resources we need, and cooking up the next trial of our mixtures.

With this suggestion in place, all of that would fall apart. The most creative floorpills, oftentimes a much-loved after round party favor even from non-traitor chemists, would cease to be, simply because of the fact that some of the best, most interesting ingredients would be impossible to create in the tiny time constraints of LLJK 4, where the best chemical fun can be found.

In addition, the testing that me and my friends work on? We'd have to painstakingly work through randomizations to create some of our more complex concoctions, eating up a good thirty minutes trying to test and re-test formulas before we're allowed to actually begin testing. We never know what sort of chemicals we'll need before an idea pops into our heads, so hiding all of the more dangerous chemical formulas would make our job so much harder.

Rest assured, chemists have plenty of research set out for them. Learn the Chemicompiler, figure out secret formulas, create optimally helpful or harmful mixtures, and, if worst comes to worst, actually provide drugs to Medbay once and a while. And don't set the lab on fire. I'm going to agree with Musketman that trying to do this would likely just result in annoying implementation and make it impossible for new people in the art of blowing shit up with chemicals to figure out what they're doing.

Frank_Stein Wrote:I dunno, I don't really do chemistry because I don't want to bother with trying to recall all the recipes, so take my opinion with a grain of salt

I think I like the idea? Reminds me of roguelike potion randomness. Like, if there were a few substances in the lab that were given a random description like "A green fizzy liquid" and you had to use a few methods to identify it based on things like it's pH value or how it reacts with temperature and exposure to other chems, and the effects to a monkey when it is injected/ingests some of it.

From what I understand the more dangerous stuff is restricted by the difficulty in getting all the ingredients during a round and it's secrecy. This would make it more in line with things like genetics research progression where it's part skill part luck.

Frank_Stein Wrote:I wanna clarify, I don't think every non-medical chem recipe should be randomized, but some additional mystery chems that require investigating to see how they can be added to known chems to make stuff would be neat. Maybe the best way to test an idea like this would be some new unique recipes, that can either be super beneficial or incredibly dangerous if you put the wrong mystery chem in.

Like, let's say there's one combination that uses known chemicals plus a mystery one and it makes omnizine, but that same recipe and another mystery chem makes an instant explosion. So then you'll have to run some controlled tests with new tools to identify the individual mystery chems.

Nnystyxx Wrote:I can't imagine this at -all- for something other than fun gimmicks. Chemistry is supposed to have some element of reliability. If the nonmedical recipes are randomized, how can taterchemists get anything done? If they even bothered to make horrible poisons, they'd immediately be noticed because the only person who'd even spend the time to make them would be a (very determined) traitor.

Basically don't do this.

Berrik Wrote:This is probably going to be extremely controversional, but whatever. Let's be honest: chemists have little to do that is actually research. Either they already know how to make everything worth making thanks to offsite spoilers or they're some newbie who doesn't know shit and will spend half the round flashing/deafening/igniting their coworkers until either they die, the chem lab burns down, or their irritated coworkers beat them and cram them down the disposal chute.

Some limited randomization of some of the ingredients on the nastier chems probably wouldn't be a bad idea to slow down obnoxiousness to an extent and encourage people to actually have to try out recipes. It could also probably lead to some hilarity when people complain about their recipes having unexpected ingredients! (oh god why does rajaijah need beff this round)