Give every station a prefab meteor shield

[JohnnyJohn]

I've been meaning to say this for a little while but I've been trying to find the right words for it. I probably haven't managed here but please understand it's coming from a place where at the end of the day I want you to be having fun with a game you're playing and it seems like right now you're getting frustrated rather than having fun. Please feel free to disregard it if you don't agree with what I'm saying, I'm just another guy playing the game.

I don't actually think the game design here conflicts with itself as much as it conflicts with what you want to be getting from the game. I risk suddenly finding I'm horribly wrong about this but: for the majority of players that basic chaos, risk and danger is what makes achieving those longer task from round to round more fun. It's reflected in the disclaimer we have at the round start too about things going badly for a player at any time and accepting that. Lots of people play a lot of rounds and find the challenge involved with random events mean they actually do not get to achieve what they want on a round. Which hopefully, makes when they do manage all the sweeter. Or maybe they might work with others to make those goals more achievable, which is an important part (at least to me) of this social game.

But that's very different to what it seems like you're looking for I agree. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like your ideal goals here, going by your ideas threads: A game where you can just focus on engaging entirely with the mechanics with no interruption as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If I'm right about that I certainly agree goonstation is definitely doing a lot of things that conflict with that: Player interaction, events, not providing every ability to every job class at once, all things you've brought up get right in the way of that. What I'm suggesting and I fully accept I could be wrong: That's actually very intentional and a part of what helps keeps the game interesting for people.

If that's something you really don't want I understand too, sometimes you just want to enjoy the mechanics of a game without interruption, but I also think to change the game to match what you seem to be looking for in so many areas actually would be quite a shift in the game philosophy. If lots of people piped up with similar suggestions I think that's worth looking into, but as best I can tell and I could be wrong: That's not so much the case. It's good to keep putting up ideas too the culture of this game has changed more than once over the years, but I personally think there's quite a gap between what seems to be what you enjoy and what we have right now. 

I think there's solutions available: Either learning to love and accept that obstacles are a general thing that are going to happen while playing (though absolutely still keep putting ideas up, as it's always debatable whether something is a good obstacle or something that might want a QoL change), have a look around at similar SS13 codebases and see if there's something that does what you want a little better, or taking what you like, forking your own repository and working on either a goonstation iteration or another public codebase that's more like what you're aiming for.

It just doesn't feel that way to me. I never have a triumphant moment like that. I never see a triumphant moment like that. The only thing I experience is trying to build a sandcastle, and someone knocks it over. Again. And again. And again. Even on the rare occasion I finally manage to start putting the finishing touches on it, it gets kicked over again. And on some level I do understand the chaos thing, but to me that's basically just resigning myself to sitting at a beach and staring off into space doing nothing until I get kicked in the face. That's not very fun.

And forking? I need to emphasize that's beyond me. I don't mean laziness, I don't mean not feeling like doing it, I mean it's simply out of the question. I genuinely do not have the bandwith or sanity in my life to take on a project like that. If that weren't the case, I would have resorted to doing everything myself a long, long time ago.