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Impose Austerity On Station To Improve The Game
#16
Bringing a view from Destiny into this, as a primarily medical player (when I'm not AI). TL;DR is at the bottom. I go away from the main point several times.

Destiny's medbay is fantastic. I would personally remove the Nano-Med in medical storage, and shift things around a bit such that the OR adjoined one of the treatment rooms, which would encourage people to use the treatment rooms more as currently I only really see them as a place to keep braindeads or crazies.

Medbay is fairly secure, and generally the only "problem" crew we get are security or the HoP/captain coming in and self-treating or turning medbay into a place of conflict. I'm generally okay with the level of access, because it's useful quite often to get unruly patients out, but wish they wouldn't abuse it so much. I do think that medbay could benefit from a second entrance area that's away from the sleepers/cryotubes/pharmacy, because currently it just takes one explosion/hull-breach to make medbay pretty uninhabitable for most of the round, and this can be done from somewhere that everyone has access to. In general, I don't like the ability to bring a department down without even being inside it.

In terms of supplies, it's overstocked at round start due to the Port-a-Med having enough supplies to last most of the way into the round and being easily accessible. I'm fine with the scattered medkits outside of medbay, as they only contain a few basics that, really, give first aid at best. They give first responders the ability to feel useful, and give antags a chance to patch up outside of an area with reagent dispensers.

Speaking of, the pharmacy is massively underused. When the doctors get bored they inevitably end up cranking out some custom pills (normally cryostylane-based), but I rarely see folks stocking up on basic meds with it as there's just so many of them already available. As MD I try to pre-emptively boost basic med supplies and keep that stock up, but doctors rarely do it on their own.

The medbay/hydroponics relationship on Destiny is pretty good because of their proximity. Not sure what else needs to be said here.

Medbay/research is mostly a one-way relationship. I almost never see anything from research coming our way, but occasionally we'll get an artbeaker or a scientist will ship over more salbutamol than I know what to do with, which is fantastic as we're often too busy to mass-produce it, but the only thing we get from research most rounds is victims of explosions. I think this is probably okay.

Medbay/engineering has a strange relationship. Most of the time medbay's only real link is with dealing with the burn victims from a rampaging engine fire, but any power outages or hull breaches in medbay can be absolutely crippling unless the engineering department assist in fixing them. I think overall this is pretty okay; both don't see each other often, but when they do it's generally hugely important.

Medbay/mining is a strange one. Robotics need materials to do much more than a couple cyborgs, but generally that's all that's needed. If mining isn't operational, robotics has to go scrounge resources from the plethora of fabricators.

Speaking of, I don't think there'd be an issue with dropping the resources in general fabricators from 50 to 20. This would make mining more useful to the ship rather than just for credits, as the fabricators would need resupplying earlier.

I do think that medbay, and therefore research, should be able to produce things that can be sold via the QM, as currently the two are so disparate. It doesn't even need to be much, maybe something like being able to buy syringe boxes and sell syringes full of <insert medi-chem here> for a small-moderate profit. Essentially, give doctors a way to be useful when there aren't patients coming in. Optionally, have the sale price of those syringes fluctuate like minerals and so on do, so the QM can monitor and work out when is best to sell.

TL;DR: Destiny's medbay is pretty good and has solid relationships with most departments except for mining/QM. Lower the amount of medicine initially available in the Nano-Meds/Port-a-Med to encourage emergency use only, and give the pharmacy something they can make that can be sold at the QM. Somehow add a second (non-maintenance) entrance to medbay that would mean a single bomb can't bring medbay to its knees for the rest of the round from a public area.
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#17
honestly, cutting down supplies for the sake of scarcity is just going to make it way easier to sabotage the station and screw folks over. Medbay's supplies and other important survival gear already regularly get bombed/melted/stolen every other round. People are going to die and get stuck more often, and that isn't necessarily fun either.

I would recommend storing supplies more securely over removing them entirely - this would allow a well oiled crew to deploy resources more readily. Places like EVA are way too easy for the average staff assistant to break into.
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#18
I think, something to consider in relation to the availability of supplies is how money and wages work.

I think you shouldn't be able to get whatever items you need without a little effort and risk, but breaking into places and stealing things shouldn't be your only means to get things.

The problem is the value of items and the availability of cash is all over the place. Some jobs start with a good amount, and some don't, but both can gain ridiculous amounts with low risk gambling or gaming certain systems. Some things are priced to account for one and others the second. 

I think having a monetary reward for doing work and using that to get supplied would be worth it

Also, regarding Destiny, I like the balance of having a more serious server there and retaining cartoon zanyness on Cog2. Though I think both maps could be pushed more towards the middleground
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#19
if nothing else it will be nice to see qm made a bit busier if starting supplies are made more scarce

or more likely, qm will move up a few notches on every antag's mental hit list
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#20
I think what hufflaw was talking about with tone was more making the baseline more sane and reasonable so that the inevitable chaos and carnage are all the sweeter. and yes i too believe the freedom is a big draw here and i do not want to limit that whatsoever by imposing rules. I would simply like to see things more challenging with a simple few tweaks. I want the freedom to be there but i would like gameplay mechanics and such to reward you for working together and also make you feel like a badass for escaping a sticky situation when you dont just have every tool in every room.

It isn't limiting the players freedom, it is simply making you work for your gimmick or goal instead of just running to some maint room and having everything ever
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#21
(09-19-2016, 07:15 PM)Dions Wrote: -snip-
(09-19-2016, 02:59 PM)Nnystyxx Wrote: -snip
(09-19-2016, 03:06 PM)Noah Buttes Wrote: -snip-

I definitely agree with these ones for sure.
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#22
(09-19-2016, 07:15 PM)Dions Wrote: It isn't limiting the players freedom, it is simply making you work for your gimmick or goal instead of just running to some maint room and having everything ever

Agreed!

I think more electrified grilles would be nice. I also think a good place to start might be to look at the distribution of O2 tanks, space suits, and internals supply around the station. 

Anybody remember when EVA was an important room, full of resources only the heads+AI had access to that were saved for emergencies? I liked it - there was room for some fun things to happen centered around this. The AI might bolt this room open to give the crew a fighting chance during a disaster. The captain and his buddies might take all the jetpacks for themselves, leaving lowly staff assistants to make do with less sophisticated equipment as the station is bombed to pieces. Security would keep a passive watch on this area - if someone had broken in, all the supplies were bound to be looted within minutes. Nowadays, the only item people care about in EVA is the RCD.
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#23
I care about the EVA spacesuits, considering they don't have as big of a slowdown as engineering ones or, god forbid, the shitty emergency suits. When the station has a bad habit of breaching constantly, being able to move around quick in the cold areas is a lifesaver.
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#24
(09-19-2016, 07:38 PM)MyBlueCorners Wrote:
(09-19-2016, 07:15 PM)Dions Wrote: It isn't limiting the players freedom, it is simply making you work for your gimmick or goal instead of just running to some maint room and having everything ever

Agreed!

I think more electrified grilles would be nice. I also think a good place to start might be to look at the distribution of O2 tanks, space suits, and internals supply around the station. 
Before you do anything about the distribution of o2 tanks, cold movement has to be fixed. It's already unbearable with the slow movement but at least you don't die all the time because to be honest it would be quite bullshit to die because some nerd accidentally broke a window and you suffocated because there was no o2 tanks anywhere.
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#25
(09-19-2016, 07:41 PM)Musketman12 Wrote:
(09-19-2016, 07:38 PM)MyBlueCorners Wrote:
(09-19-2016, 07:15 PM)Dions Wrote: It isn't limiting the players freedom, it is simply making you work for your gimmick or goal instead of just running to some maint room and having everything ever

Agreed!

I think more electrified grilles would be nice. I also think a good place to start might be to look at the distribution of O2 tanks, space suits, and internals supply around the station. 
Before you do anything about the distribution of o2 tanks, cold movement has to be fixed. It's already unbearable with the slow movement but at least you don't die all the time because to be honest it would be quite bullshit to die because some nerd accidentally broke a window and you suffocated because there was no o2 tanks anywhere.

Yes please fix the fucking breach slow

Also, medicine being reserved to medbay would be better if it weren't for the fact that
1. Genetics gets bombed
2. Robotics gets bombed
3. Telescience explodes
4. Research explodes

Making it a completely unnavigable fucking nightmare 90% of the time, constantly lacking air on either one or both halves of its main mass. You will cool down so fast that you cannot make it from one end to the other if the main area is breached because the hallways are so long.

That's why I like things like the med booth near the bar, because they're in slightly less constantly-exploded areas. But there are several problems in general that range around how trivial it is to blow holes in the station that never get fixed.
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#26
Alright, so if this was all about making Cog2 less overstocked, then why was it worded as if this was intended to be about marking a massive shift in the tone and nature of the game?

I'm also going to second the cold movement issue again. It's been an issue for months at this point. In the old movement system, I don't even know how old it was, but it got fixed for something like two days. Two days before immediately becoming worse than it was before. It's now been like that for about four months or so, despite being continually mentioned across the forums.
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#27
I don't really want to clutter this thread with Cold Movement discussion, but it was actually ninja-patched to be more bearable about a week ago. If it's still unbearable that's fine, but I just want to let you guys know in case this is based on previous experience.
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#28
(09-19-2016, 07:53 PM)Mageziya Wrote: Alright, so if this was all about making Cog2 less overstocked, then why was it worded as if this was intended to be about marking a massive shift in the tone and nature of the game?
[...]

If you removed the "grittiness" and "tone" lines, like, literally the second/third sentences (not Hufflaw's own), we wouldn't have to have this discussion. Those sentences are total fucking chaff distracting everyone and are a horrid idea compared to the actual security/austerity ideas which are good ones. It's caused many communication errors since we first started having this discussion.
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#29
Yeah, I think most everyone agrees that Cog2 is a little overstocked, but starting with the premise of 'MAKE GOON HIGH RP AGAIN' is just going to distract everyone when this was never the case.

No to the windows thing though. A vast majority of the station already lingers in their department working on their own little projects, removing windows cuts down on interaction severely. Make them harder to break/dismantle, maybe.

e: and don't respond with 'ugh you goddamn idiots can never focus on what's important', you knew very well what that line was going to invite.
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#30
Idea: Windows shouldn't be completely breakable with the average amount of damage from smacking them. Instead, they should leave ragged shards still attached to the window frame. You can still traverse through this, but will probably cut yourself up doing so.

Using tools on an intact window lets you pull out the glass sheet, on a broken frame you remove the shards.
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