Goonhub
09-16-2023, 07:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-16-2023, 07:30 PM by TDHooligan. Edited 2 times in total.)
AZone loot has fallen from its grace of 'crazy items you rarely see' to 'marginally more powerful items you see every other shift'.
Years ago, goon was a small enough community that telescience abusers stuck out like sore thumbs. Nowadays there's dozens of people, running various azones and loot spots. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect the admins track these abusers individually.
I think it's a huge shame that the upper end of design space (outside of antag gear) has been axed in the name of letting people turn telescience into a speedrun. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or not but it's how it is for some people.
HOWEVER!
There's currently a lot of vagueness around how telescience & shifts work (loose ties to the void, space-time weirdness, etc)
Perhaps this vagueness could be repurposed into a feature:
Traversing lootable AZones ticks up an account-wide variable by a few points, that ticks down 1 point at shift-end.
This represents timelines all merging into one point or something. You keep hopping across space to specific places at a certain point in time, and things start getting weird. Coders can build stuff they think would be fun (or just mean things because tsci abusers deserve nothing)
If players are showing up to desirable Azones regularly (tracked by maybe specific tiles, or items, or interactables), they start getting hit with weird side effects. Polite warnings at first like a teleport to arrivals (You could swear you've been here before! Wait, something's wrong...)
Eventually, the warnings get rude. Dark matter materializes and rips parts of your being away, bizarre entities start showing up to take you away, you're thrown into an astral-shame cube and laughed at.
If these warnings are ignored, players are eventually hit with insurmountable odds (death) and a bump up to this score (AKA. chill out with telesci for a while nerd)
I think the depth of these mechanics can go as deep as coders want to mess with people. Now players that want to exploit AZone loot may have to do a cost/benefit (If I roll traitor next round, do I really want to deal with the odds of dismemberment/death so I can have a blaster this shift?)
Making the effects ramp up in severity also incentivizes players to slow down, but doesn't entirely stop them using these itesm a couple shifts in a row. When they're struck with inspiration, they'll just need to put some more work in.
Years ago, goon was a small enough community that telescience abusers stuck out like sore thumbs. Nowadays there's dozens of people, running various azones and loot spots. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect the admins track these abusers individually.
I think it's a huge shame that the upper end of design space (outside of antag gear) has been axed in the name of letting people turn telescience into a speedrun. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or not but it's how it is for some people.
HOWEVER!
There's currently a lot of vagueness around how telescience & shifts work (loose ties to the void, space-time weirdness, etc)
Perhaps this vagueness could be repurposed into a feature:
Traversing lootable AZones ticks up an account-wide variable by a few points, that ticks down 1 point at shift-end.
This represents timelines all merging into one point or something. You keep hopping across space to specific places at a certain point in time, and things start getting weird. Coders can build stuff they think would be fun (or just mean things because tsci abusers deserve nothing)
If players are showing up to desirable Azones regularly (tracked by maybe specific tiles, or items, or interactables), they start getting hit with weird side effects. Polite warnings at first like a teleport to arrivals (You could swear you've been here before! Wait, something's wrong...)
Eventually, the warnings get rude. Dark matter materializes and rips parts of your being away, bizarre entities start showing up to take you away, you're thrown into an astral-shame cube and laughed at.
If these warnings are ignored, players are eventually hit with insurmountable odds (death) and a bump up to this score (AKA. chill out with telesci for a while nerd)
I think the depth of these mechanics can go as deep as coders want to mess with people. Now players that want to exploit AZone loot may have to do a cost/benefit (If I roll traitor next round, do I really want to deal with the odds of dismemberment/death so I can have a blaster this shift?)
Making the effects ramp up in severity also incentivizes players to slow down, but doesn't entirely stop them using these itesm a couple shifts in a row. When they're struck with inspiration, they'll just need to put some more work in.