disagreements about some recent balance changes

[Technature]

People stop replying if they have nothing to say, not to ignore you.

This thread alone has gone on for more than 24 hours and has more pages on it than a lot of threads that have been on here for weeks.

You are not being ignored.

[millichips]

People aren't replying because while it is nice for them to listen to you they aren't obligated to cave in to your demands and readd poisons to botany

beef with me doesnt take away that salicylic acid and histamine are in the same plant

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judging us on such a short time scale feels dishonest.

we're judging whats happening "now", thats the game we're playing right now!

[Cal]

I don't have beef with you. It's very weird you would say that. In fact, I like generally have a positive opinion of you since you taught me how to do robust botany.

[TDHooligan]

not only is creating the second thread to hide your first responses in incredibly bad taste, and having jabs at provoking the admins behind it in your post further so, all of it is over some changes to things that are often painfully exploitable and/or used by botanists almost constantly, and while i'm not internal to the balance team, i have some educated guesses on their rationale that could perhaps slake your disagreements somewhat:

as a preface - you seem to consider time gating a wholly negative part of gameplay, yes, a small number of rounds end in 15~20 minutes and that is frustrating, but you have to realise every other department is time gated in some aspect owing to job complexity. botany is incredibly easy and not having time to perfect your botany murderplants is annoying but also a very real part of nukies' advantage, as having you throw ten exploding tomatoes is probably going to trump them fast.

Meth changes:
methnuts had practically become common knowledge. botany is already incredibly good at making very potent cure-all foods, with stomach absorption amplifying this effect by dodging overdoses. meth is a very powerful chem and the change targets two things:
1. preventing meth from having near-permanent uptime digesting insanely potent foods (though you can still smoke it forever, should you be willing to give up your mask slot and vomit all round)
2. requiring more splices to make such powerful plants less immediately available two minutes into the round.

Poison change:
hotboxes have practically plagued the server for a good while now. i'd say 2/3rds of the shuttles i've been on have been hotboxed. curare is *incredibly* strong. it permastuns as fast as a sleepypen, it penetrates skin and it takes 10 units to crit someone.
i do agree that the response on the sulfonal pull comes off as a bit rude and could do with at least some rationale being given- but histamine is significantly more interesting than sulfonal, which is arguably the least interesting poison in the game, while histamine has a fun combination with the fairly large number of folk taking the hyperallergic trait.

watermelon juice:
if you aren't aware the odds of getting a gene strain by infusing unstable mutagen is 30%. it really isnt hard to get hyperaquicity in less than a minute. funnily enough lettuce is also closer to onions (splice enabler) and bananas than watermelons. the comparative ease of exploding bananas really didnt encourage any sort of experimentation either - a good % of botanists dont even know about gene strains, and people will probably even learn about them through tutelage in making the explosive bananas of the future.

erebite removal:
it's slow but it is also a literally effortless source of erebite that only gets faster and gains more yield later into the round, compared to mining which requires actual effort

acid:
still delivers fat BURN damage, the whole point of the acid change was to do exactly what you're complaining about - rather than having their round end immediately because assistant McPubbie made two glasses of red hot fluoro, they take fat damage and have to retreat, be it to replace their hat or heal. it's not like wizards carry infinite hats.

win condition rounds:
was there a change made to these? nukie and revs have always ended like that. just how it is. better than half the people who've been murdered participating in a heated revolution waiting in deadchat for 30 minutes so you can futz away with your money tree silently or whatever. they're short so you can get in and get yourself/others dead without having to wait 60 minutes.

crusher not being instant:
personally not actually witnessed this change, or if you can even be saved in it. though instantly and reliably being removed from the game with no hope of cloning is a bit sad.

light lotus having luminol
omnizine is a powerful chemical (which is why it has no recipe) and you can easily get a light lotus in 30 seconds of roundstart. be it through one of your botanists' two job reward seeds or one of the set debris spawns. while luminol is useless it's better than having omnizine on tap every round

[Vocalpocal]

Froggit_Dogget pretty much nailed my feelings on this subject so I wont go too in depth with these things. Removing content would be fine if we got other toys to play with. I mean we do have a lot of ranch content but I am not a big fan of animal abuse and it seems like it is the only way to get anything done before 50 minutes.

I am not complaining about Emily's in general either, I think she is doing a great job overall with tons of experience on these things. There is one other admin I disagree with almost everything and had no positive experiences so far, but I wont talk about it here.

erebite removal:
it's slow but it is also a literally effortless source of erebite that only gets faster and gains more yield later into the round, compared to mining which requires actual effort

Erebite could not be abused without a lot of effort put into it. I had the pleasure to use good erebite plant only once, and that was achievable only after 60 minutes of nonstop splicing and infusions, and waiting for the rock plant to turn into erebite in the first place (which was a 5% chance on plant). It was an extremely niche gimmick which was used only once, and I doubt anyone would risk doing it again because it really took an hour to make, and shuttle usually gets called around 40-50 minutes. It was fun to use, though, and I really can't see how something which requires such a long set up could be threatening the game enough that you would have to remove it. Getting all the strains spliced and infused takes a very good understanding of botany game mechanics that you could say that it was borderline secret plant. But alas, now there are no strange seeds worth investigating... except Plasma plant with immortal is quite fun still.

light lotus having luminol
omnizine is a powerful chemical (which is why it has no recipe) and you can easily get a light lotus in 30 seconds of roundstart. be it through one of your botanists' two job reward seeds or one of the set debris spawns. while luminol is useless it's better than having omnizine on tap every round

The point of this thread is that we are disagreeing with the approach of these changes. I totally understand why people wanted to nerf godnuts, because they were quite easy to make, requiring only basic Botany knowledge. However, lotus is now utterly useless, and I believe there are many other options to balance lotus, such as changing its GN from 0 to 20-30, giving it terrible gene strains such as seedless/terminator or replacing omnizine with another healing chem like, idk, Epinephrine. But for now, there is no point in growing any of the strange seeds because they are all honestly quite bad.

Also as additional bitching I also find it very odd that Police Baton traitor item was removed. I never ever saw it being "abused", and I only heard it was removed because one admin had bad time against it in one shift. It is just another example of how things get removed for seemingly no reason.

[TDHooligan]

The point of this thread is that we are disagreeing with the approach of these changes.

totally understand that - the admins have covered their reasoning for the approach here though, i just thought i'd chime in with rationales for these balance changes to maybe offset the percieved irrationality of them.

to be honest, advertising a nerf is rarely going to be helpful - the admins between them have a lot of knowledge of the game, know the most experienced players and have a huge volume of statistics we can't see.
a lot of public access balance threads become a flamefest & thinktank for dozens of ideas of massively varied quality. in my personal experience, a lot of people who abuse a particularly powerful feature will fight for it hard, while others who have been slighted will fight to get it banned.

Also as additional bitching I also find it very odd that Police Baton traitor item was removed. I never ever saw it being "abused", and I only heard it was removed because one admin had bad time against it in one shift. It is just another example of how things get removed for seemingly no reason.

it is an infinite use stun baton - most likely a victim of the several patches a while ago that are trying to change combat to be less stun-oriented. like CSaber having its stun removed etc.

[Souricelle]

Doesn't the light lotus act as a grow light?

[Vocalpocal]

Doesn't the light lotus act as a grow light?

I don't think so. Maybe radweed does? Lantern plant would be very cool, especially if it worked with decorative plant pots!

[Ikea]

Also as additional bitching I also find it very odd that Police Baton traitor item was removed. I never ever saw it being "abused", and I only heard it was removed because one admin had bad time against it in one shift. It is just another example of how things get removed for seemingly no reason.

it is an infinite use stun baton - most likely a victim of the several patches a while ago that are trying to change combat to be less stun-oriented. like CSaber having its stun removed etc.

It was primarily removed just because it made baton.dm code way more shit then it is (and that code is already really bad). Several hundred lines of code were there just because the riot baton needed it to work. The weapon itself wasn't that fun to fight against, so it wasn't really worth spending hours refactoring hundreds of lines of code for a weapon that all together isn't great.

[UrsulaMejor]

Doesn't the light lotus act as a grow light?

this is actually a really cool idea!

[mralexs]

Doesn't the light lotus act as a grow light?

this is actually a really cool idea!

Would really help botany get another grow lamp w/o begging mechanics to come scan their stuff

[Vocalpocal]

Honestly Lotus could just include Lumen. I have no idea why that chem is a secret anyway, managed to smoke it the other day and it was very unimpressive.

[Mouse]

Not gonna lie I actually assumed that lumen was what it contained until I remembered that luminol was a chem.

[Frank_Stein]

Doesn't the light lotus act as a grow light?

I was wondering that too and I think a growable light source could be a good direction