Genetics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[Sundance]

Can anybody actually give me a reason as to why injectors are not readily available at round start?

Like old genetics you could have injectors straight up and SHARING powers was pretty easy. Yes there was abuse, you'd get geneticists monkeying people all day everyday, oh god why did they monkey so much people. But these days injectors are CLEARLY labelled when produced, so the only time a geneticist could do this is if they actually stun lock you and force the injectors into you, and that's where it crosses into the grounds of griefing imo.

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I think injectors should be available at round start, but the materials cost upped to 60 instead of 40.
Know that little money scanner on the table in genetics? Wouldn't it be GREAT if that was tied to the research budget? This way geneticists could straight up SELL injectors and it would go back into research budget!

[Purdie]

maybe this should be moved to ideas/suggestions then

[Frank_Stein]

Injectors used to be the hard limit on how fast a geneticist could acquire powers, but stability takes care of that now, so faster access to injectors would be nice.

[TheOnlyRyan]

Holy Crap, I honestly was not expecting 17 replies, within the first day anyway.

It might be a good idea to move this to suggestions, I agree.

There is 1 thing I don't like in genetics: Stability. This thing is just unfair: you can have colored blood and things in your blood at the same time but nothing bad heppens if you have only good things, you can have a lot of borgs but nothing bad happens, you can have good mutations and your stability goes down and then you start bubling and talking blbl blbl.

I agree with this, however if they were to make it easier to obtain these powers (and if people complain the powers are too OP, nerf them if you must) then I would be more accepting of this, but having it as difficult as it is to get the best powers, you deserve not to sound like an Alien at the same time, just to save yourself from bubbling.

I would like injectors to be cheaper/faster to make now though. so I can hand out powers to people more.

Obviously I agree with this, just how much easier is the question. Ready right away ? 10 minutes ? 15 ? Like some people have mentioned... never? ...

Never had any particular interest in genetics, but from glossing over the wiki page (and bane's WIP) it just seems to me that there isn't enough BAD mutations to make you more stable.

Just yesterday I had a monkey which had all bad mutations except 1 single good one, snapping my fingers to make noise.... yep, not a waste of time at all.

I like the concept of genetics. I think it's a really cool idea that has a lot of potential. But everyone's always talking about how invisible telekinetic Hulks showed up every round before the genetics nerf, and...well, to be frank, I think that's a load of hyperbole. Even before the nerf, getting Telekinesis OR Hulk were practically adventures in and of themselves due to how rare they were, and getting both was practically unheard of. Superpowered people were much more common, yes, but those superpowers were almost always less overtly powerful things.

Now? I just about never see anyone with genetic superpowers. After my work on the wiki page, there were apparently widespread cuts to the genetic research time, but it still does nothing to alleviate the impracticality of genetic superpower research if you're only going to be able to get injectors as shit's blowing up and the shuttle's getting called. I should say, however, that the art of actually bringing people to the lab and offering to scan them for superpowers right there instead of waiting for injectors has practically been lost to the ages, possibly due to the inherent isolationist culture of genetics and everyone's natural avoidance of the place. Everyone's always complaining about how injectors take forever and a day to research but always forget that you can always just go in the scanner yourself. Not every Geneticist is going to lock you in the scanner forever and scramble your genes to death.

The recent surge of mutations requiring the little letter-puzzle locks is, I think, a fine balance of actual effort vs. waiting. Genetics is still primarily a waiting game, but it's rare that I get the sensation that I'm just twiddling my thumbs waiting for a timer to count down. The amount of time it takes to slot together the gene pairs and complete the letter puzzles always ends up being more than the amount of time I would need to wait. Right now, I think it's a nice balance.

The lack of PDA scanning and the thrice-damnable suffocation bug need to be fixed, however. The former was a MASSIVE convenience and probably the one thing that encouraged actual social interaction from Genetics, and the latter makes genetic research needlessly difficult after a certain amount of time. The stability mechanic is, I think, an interesting mechanic and prevents Geneticsts from becoming demigods. Some different numbers might need some tweaking in the future, but the system was an essential balancing component.

This is a much better short version of everything I agree with Sorry If I'm not going into detail on replies to big posts like this but there's not a lot I can say when I agree with everything on it.

It's a general player culture issue. Nobody cooperates, and the only times they accept help are when they're forced to by being literally incapable of doing it themselves. There's also the fact that standing around in the cloner while the geneticist works is boring, so nobody wants to do it. Honestly, the only things I can see fixing it is removing DNA Injectors altogether, cutting the monkey pen population down to just 1-2 people, or allowing genetic experimentation to be carried out on the person in the cloner. The first one mandates cooperation by removing the self-buffing mechanism altogether, the second heavily limits geneticists' ability to get to injectors without leaving genetics in search of more test subjects, and the third one gives geneticists the opportunity to do genetics on players without having to beg for volunteers.

I totally agree, Geneticists are more concerned about getting themselves powers than helping out the dead. I thought about this and would it be possible to praise the Geneticists when they clone by giving them "points" or credits which can then be used in the research of their powers, the more they clone the faster the ball rolls ?

Can anybody actually give me a reason as to why injectors are not readily available at round start?

This

Injectors used to be the hard limit on how fast a geneticist could acquire powers, but stability takes care of that now, so faster access to injectors would be nice.

Yeah I actually mentioned this in a reply above all of this text, if they're going to implement this balancing and stability just let us get the injectors for free, punishing enough with the stability I think.

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If an Admin could move this to suggestions that would be nice, maybe catch the eyes of a few people

[Grayshift]

I've posted this suggestion a couple times in recent genetics threads:

Make it so that the more players who have a given mutation, the less stability it costs. It's self balancing against omni-powered geneticists because they literally have to give other members of the crew mutations as well to be able to stack them on themselves without meatcubing. It encourages geneticists to get out and mutate the crew rather than bottle up.

White continuously calculating the number of players with a given mutation might be obnoxious codewise given constant deaths of test subjects, perhaps scale injectors: The first injector used of a given mutation has a 100% stability cost, 2nd 80%, 3rd 60%, all the way to the fourth and all following having 40% cost for that mutation.

Naturally, injectors would need to be much more freely made for this to be workable.

[Ali0en]

I wasn't around for the days of OLD old genetics, so I can't speak to that or how it was in the slightest.

Do you mean OLD old genetics? It was literally RNG. You had to get numbers to a certain range to activate a power, which was always random, by giving them radiation that caused damage. The number you got from each rad dose was also random. By god it was horrible and took forever.

The new system is much much better in every single way and you'd realize this if you played with old genetics.

[TheOnlyRyan]

I wasn't around for the days of OLD old genetics, so I can't speak to that or how it was in the slightest.

Do you mean OLD old genetics? It was literally RNG. You had to get numbers to a certain range to activate a power, which was always random, by giving them radiation that caused damage. The number you got from each rad dose was also random. By god it was horrible and took forever.

The new system is much much better in every single way and you'd realize this if you played with old genetics.

The old old system which is still used on the majority of other stations was difficult for a reaosn, it meant you had to actually learn the job.. You have to learn Robotics, especially with the new research, you definitely have to learn Chemistry, plus the secrets, Science, more learning, getting better.

I don't like the fact almost everything the current Genetics is, is luck based (Finding decent abilities)
Time waiting for research (False difficulty)
and a simple code breaking minigame, GC here... TA here... AT here.

There's absolutely no learning curve in my opinion, just frustration and waiting.

The Old old Genetics praised you for learning how the job worked by making it easier for you to get the abillites, yes maybe on a station like Goonstation this would be OP as hulk every round, but that doesn't mean we can't change how difficult it is to get hulk with the old Genetics.

[Ali0en]

How did it reward you? It was a damn number randomizer.

[TheOnlyRyan]

How did it reward you? It was a damn number randomizer.

You had to learn how much radiation for how long gave you what chance of making the change in block number you wanted.

It took an amount of skill which is missing in the current version.

Keeping blocks clean from coughing, seizures and the like also took a little bit of juggling and "skill".

[franfoer]

It's a general player culture issue. Nobody cooperates, and the only times they accept help are when they're forced to by being literally incapable of doing it themselves. There's also the fact that standing around in the cloner while the geneticist works is boring, so nobody wants to do it. Honestly, the only things I can see fixing it is removing DNA Injectors altogether, cutting the monkey pen population down to just 1-2 people, or allowing genetic experimentation to be carried out on the person in the cloner. The first one mandates cooperation by removing the self-buffing mechanism altogether, the second heavily limits geneticists' ability to get to injectors without leaving genetics in search of more test subjects, and the third one gives geneticists the opportunity to do genetics on players without having to beg for volunteers.

Fix the PDA scanner and allow genes to be worked on without the person present. To create injectors they still have to be in the scanner, but at least I can send a message to the HoS or whoever letting them know I can Hulk them whenever they stop by.

[Paineframe]

Fix the PDA scanner and allow genes to be worked on without the person present. To create injectors they still have to be in the scanner, but at least I can send a message to the HoS or whoever letting them know I can Hulk them whenever they stop by.

Geneticists don't need injectors to give other people powers. Even if the subject doesn't have the gene in question, the store-and-combine functionality from the genetics overhaul can be used to take a mutation off one person/monkey and put it on another. The only thing injectors are needed for is Geneticists giving themselves powers, and frankly, that rarely turns out well for anyone besides the geneticist. Making DNA injectors available earlier is just going to make Geneticists even nastier and even less cooperative with the rest of the station.

I think Geneticists giving other people powers is far more interesting than their usual M.O. of demanding fifty thousand credits from the AI, locking down the department, and silently grinding their way to Hulk injectors. Problem is, Geneticists usually don't bother with it (there's no incentive to do so and Genetics has more than enough monkeys to get to injectors without scanning a single human), and people rarely wanted to be test subjects anyway even when Genetics PDA scanners worked (sitting motionlessly in a genetics pod for several minutes isn't much fun). Rather than making it easier and more rewarding for Geneticists to be as unhelpful and solitary as possible, we should be focusing on giving Geneticists an incentive to use humans rather than monkeys, and doing something the make the genetics pod more fun or rewarding for the test subjects.

[TheOnlyRyan]

Wait wait wait....

am I going insane?

I totally agree, Geneticists are more concerned about getting themselves powers than helping out the dead. I thought about this and would it be possible to praise the Geneticists when they clone by giving them "points" or credits which can then be used in the research of their powers, the more they clone the faster the ball rolls ?

That's my post, then I come on the server and see this.



Genetic Analysis Mode... Did that literally just show up?

I couldn't have missed It I've been played Geneticist quite a lot for 2 weeks.

[Frank_Stein]

That's been there for a bit. Gives you a research boost while the cloner is running. You can toggle it to make the cloner work faster.

[Frank_Stein]

Fix the PDA scanner and allow genes to be worked on without the person present. To create injectors they still have to be in the scanner, but at least I can send a message to the HoS or whoever letting them know I can Hulk them whenever they stop by.

Geneticists don't need injectors to give other people powers. Even if the subject doesn't have the gene in question, the store-and-combine functionality from the genetics overhaul can be used to take a mutation off one person/monkey and put it on another. The only thing injectors are needed for is Geneticists giving themselves powers, and frankly, that rarely turns out well for anyone besides the geneticist. Making DNA injectors available earlier is just going to make Geneticists even nastier and even less cooperative with the rest of the station.

I think Geneticists giving other people powers is far more interesting than their usual M.O. of demanding fifty thousand credits from the AI, locking down the department, and silently grinding their way to Hulk injectors. Problem is, Geneticists usually don't bother with it (there's no incentive to do so and Genetics has more than enough monkeys to get to injectors without scanning a single human), and people rarely wanted to be test subjects anyway even when Genetics PDA scanners worked (sitting motionlessly in a genetics pod for several minutes isn't much fun). Rather than making it easier and more rewarding for Geneticists to be as unhelpful and solitary as possible, we should be focusing on giving Geneticists an incentive to use humans rather than monkeys, and doing something the make the genetics pod more fun or rewarding for the test subjects.

Injectors let you mass produce a single power. The other method only works one way. But using a monkey as a master power key was a strategy I used to use.

What if the powers people started with already in their DNA had a reduced stabilty penalty? Like, their Unique enzymes were just tied those powers. Combine that with maybe some method for the geneticist to make more stable injectors from their blood or whatever and there might be a mutally beneficial relationship there.

[Spy_Guy]

That's my post, then I come on the server and see this.



Genetic Analysis Mode... Did that literally just show up?

I couldn't have missed It I've been played Geneticist quite a lot for 2 weeks.

This has been there a lot longer than two weeks.
I find it funny that you've been playing geneticist for this long and haven't noticed it. Don't you ever touch the cloner?

Also, if you're not a geneticist and cloning someone, make sure to disable that. Makes the process run 20% faster at the cost of no bonus to the geneticists. This is to ensure they are the ones doing the cloning.