Who is the server made for now?

[phyvo]

I think a lot of good points are being made in this thread. I guess I will also weigh in.

• I think players these days have a much lower tolerance for damage to the station. Surviving to the point where you can get onto the shuttle is actually much easier than it used to be even if you spend the whole round wandering around hoping to bump into something murderous. Medical used to blow up all the time, now it does not. The nerfs to powergaming and abuse have made the rounds less interesting overall on Classic because nothing has been added that really fills that vacuum.
  
• Midround antags really suck. That is why, aside from fire elementals and the occasional flexing timberdoodle, they all act friendly. Their players want to play the game, being a ghost is boring, and they've learned from getting bashed in all the time that they can't actually do anything fun. I guess the gunbots tend to actually shoot people too but then they tend to instantly die to flashes.
  
• Most changes in the changelog are pretty darn small. The only major gameplay feature or system added to the game while I was on my haitus was the Rancher, which is literally 1 job position a round and is very insular. Since then Arcfiend was added but it's still a work in progress... and I haven't seen arcfiends accomplish all that much, yet.
  
• Flock mode was mentioned in the changelog last spring but now it's on the shelf again and Flock remains admin-only. Makes me very very sad. I just want weird teal birds to run around stunning people and turning them and their chairs into gnesis.
  

Minor opinions:

• Flamer rework was very ehh and has its own kind of weird jank with the way it makes floor containers. You can set the temperature high and spraying people won't burn them from the temperature, so you have to pre-heat your chems to do that damage. It is also just flat out bugged. Why can I shoot through windows and glass walls? Because the code does a simple check for opacity and nothing else.
  
• I have come back around to my original opinion that secret chems are not good for the simple reason that the way you discover them is just not fun. Recipe hints are an improvement but get worse and worse the more you already know.
  
• Adventures are too hard to get into.
  
• Blobs need more hotkeys and some streamlining, also an easy accessible viewport button. They're just a very complicated antag with a very high skill floor that very few people get to practice.
  
• I used to like helping the medical department from chemistry. Now medical can do everything themselves, sometimes better.
  

In short, the net effect of all the changes in the past-year plus has been a game where rounds are less chaotic, but not many actually new features have been added. I wish I had more time and energy so that I could contribute more to development, unfortunately I have my own problems right now. v_v