Motives discussion + feedback

[Ion Mage]

Having the natural anti-tox gene purges food, water, coffee, etc from your system so rapidly you virtually need a fully loaded IV drip of whatever to make a dent in your motive needs.

[Mopcat]

honestly the drawbacks to ignoring motives are more annoying than anything, and makes refilling them a pain in the ass because, despite feeling like you could drink the ocean, you still just don't feel like drinking that cup of water. maybe replace the "lol you didn't actually click that" drawback with some minor general debuffs mimicking the actual real-life effects of not drinking/eating for too long? stuff like mild stuns, stamina penalties, dizziness, misstep, etc. with the effects and chances for them to occur ramping up as you get hungrier/thirstier, eventually getting actually debilitating when they reach 0? would honestly rather deal with that than needing to click 3-4 times just to take a single bite out of a food item.

[Mordent]

For reference, with current motives the chance of a dropped click scales between 0% if your average motives score is 50%, to 100% if your average motives score is 0% (i.e. all at 0%). We should probably cap that at 90% or something to stop the "so hungry, thirsty, and stinky that I literally cannot self-care" effect for e.g. geneticists who haven't had to interact with anything for ages so haven't realized their motives got so low or something.

Once you treat 50% as your personal target to avoid (i.e. treat motives dipping to 50% as a fail state, not when you start caring) they're not really a problem. We could probably improve communication of this.

If you need to click 3-4 times to take a single bite of a food item, you're either very unlucky or have just not looked at your motives until you're dropping most of your clicks (to have a 50% chance of dropping 3 clicks in a row you'd need an 80% chance of dropping a single click, meaning your average motives score is 10%). I'd consider this a non-issue as "oh no, it took me 5 clicks to eat something" is hardly a huge inconvenience when you're moments away from fixing it. A couple more seconds isn't going to change anything.

I solve the problem personally by carrying a bottle of water and a snack with me, and chugging/chomping whenever I get a free moment (then restocking when I next have a chance). I only really get into noticeable dropped-click territory when I'm playing a doctor and medbay has been popping off for an extended period, and stepping out for a minute to "catch your breath" between cases is perfectly fine. The cloning machine exists for a reason.

I think we could probably cap the effect at a less obnoxious 50% or something (i.e. chance of 0% at 50% average motives, and 50% at 0% average motives) as a bandaid "fix" to make it a little less annoying while still rewarding those who take the time to reap the benefits of the chef's labor. I think random stuns/dizziness/lower stamina would actually be far more obtrusive and annoying. If we went that way, we absolutely should add a motive readout to health analyzers so that doctors can see the reason you're falling over is because you thought spending time staring at engine-numbers-go-up was more important than popping by the cafeteria.

[Lady Birb]

My feedback regarding penalties for low motives: rng is shit game design. rng stuns is very shit game design

[Ion Mage]

Perhaps have it so there is instead a debuff for having a low motive.

I do agree, I really dont like the "you don't feel like doing that" stuff.

[Studenterhue]

I think the current system is okay-ish by Mordent's explanation, but I do think there are better ways. For one, it could at least have a more descriptive message than "You don't feel like doing that."

I'd do debuffs too like Ion Mage suggested. Movement speed, health, stamina regen, and max stamina debuffs specifically. Nothing too crazy, maybe -15 health, -2 stamina regen, -20 max stamina, stagger levels of movement slowdown--basically, if you neglect all (currently three) of your motives, you're working at about half normal capacity. So if you're on a dangerous telesci expedition, you might want to pack some snacks to be able to tank those monsters, or if you're on the run, you might want to keep your motives up so you can flee from sec better.

Potentially interesting change would be to make it so the higher levels of motives give you buffs, while lower levels give you debuffs, with the middle area being the standard experience where you get neither buffs or debuffs.

[Kamades]

Honestly, if we could just make dropped clicks apply to everything except food vending machines and food\drink, that might go quite a long way towards aleviating the bad feel? It's really annoying if you let thirst fall too far (whoops medbay happens), but honestly I find the current method overall just fine.

[Technature]

I feel it would be good as is, but maybe change it so that if you're doing the thing to fix your bad mood to ignore the random action drop? It doesn't make a lot of sense to avoid eating your cheeseburger because your high hunger makes you not want to.

It's very minor and it's easily fixed by just doing it again, but it's still very silly.

[Sundance]

Bringing your attention to this thread where I've made a few pointers:

https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=12106