Goonhub
01-13-2026, 11:33 AM
Admins and devs have been talking over concerns around this chemical and its more common use in rounds for at least three months, with increasing frequency in the past month.
Overall, there are several different problems regarding this transformation that need be accounted for and handled:
* Round-start character customization should not be gated behind a secret chemical, and any one secret chemical effect shouldn't be an every-round occurrence.
* We have received reports about meta gameplay based on how recognizable and easily sought out these players are. In addition, we've received ahelps asking about how to handle their non-human status, if frogs are non-human, etc.
* If it's common for people to make *themselves* non-human, even in command or security roles, the effect of antagonists changing laws to make people non-human is greatly reduced. On the flip side, silicon players are forced to care more about some types of non-human than another by culture alone, not through rules or play. We want non-human status to be a clear and important part of gameplay for silicons.
* We don't want to remove the effects from the chemical entirely as it's a unique poison. Permanent amphibian transformation was originally a punishing effect, either through self-abuse or antagonist action. Recent accent changes done to make them understandable have significantly reduced the negative impact. This is not to accuse any players of power-gaming the species change; just an acknowledgement they have no mechanical downsides outside of being nominally non-human at current.
* The amphibian mutantrace needs substantial work to be considered a roundstart mutantrace. New sprites, sound design, uniqueness, balance, technical implementation, and other work would need to be done, which leads into a problem with the extremely limited at best way to add character customization options.
* Separately, and not publicly noted until now, there was an exploit related to the permanent mutantrace changes of the overdose effect.
Given all of these concerns, and others I've sure I've forgotten, the team as a whole decided to remove the permanent effect of one secret chemical for now. We iterated on several other courses of action, but any one other change still left a part of the problem unsolved:
* Make the chemical non-secret: Doesn't address round-start character customization concerns, powerful poison easily shared.
* Make them a round-start mutantrace: Needs too much technical work to do in a reasonable time-frame (months of work at a volunteer pace, minimum)
* Nerf the mutantrace for balance concerns: Doesn't address the round-start/secret issues
* Make amphibians human: Cannot be used as a poison to de-human someone
There may be a solution we didn't think of, but given the technical limitations in place we went with a solution that minimized the overall impact to the game.
Making large announcements for changes brings a big spotlight onto those players where it is not justified, and so there was originally no announcement planned. To re-iterate: we don't think anyone who was doing this did anything wrong, but the design of that feature compromises other aspects of the game as discussed above. Generally speaking, we have not done major announcements for changes that affect a handful of players; especially those changes with which we reached out to affected players directly. The delay in getting a statement together was because we had to talk about what exactly to say in an Official Announcement post.
Overall, there are several different problems regarding this transformation that need be accounted for and handled:
* Round-start character customization should not be gated behind a secret chemical, and any one secret chemical effect shouldn't be an every-round occurrence.
* We have received reports about meta gameplay based on how recognizable and easily sought out these players are. In addition, we've received ahelps asking about how to handle their non-human status, if frogs are non-human, etc.
* If it's common for people to make *themselves* non-human, even in command or security roles, the effect of antagonists changing laws to make people non-human is greatly reduced. On the flip side, silicon players are forced to care more about some types of non-human than another by culture alone, not through rules or play. We want non-human status to be a clear and important part of gameplay for silicons.
* We don't want to remove the effects from the chemical entirely as it's a unique poison. Permanent amphibian transformation was originally a punishing effect, either through self-abuse or antagonist action. Recent accent changes done to make them understandable have significantly reduced the negative impact. This is not to accuse any players of power-gaming the species change; just an acknowledgement they have no mechanical downsides outside of being nominally non-human at current.
* The amphibian mutantrace needs substantial work to be considered a roundstart mutantrace. New sprites, sound design, uniqueness, balance, technical implementation, and other work would need to be done, which leads into a problem with the extremely limited at best way to add character customization options.
* Separately, and not publicly noted until now, there was an exploit related to the permanent mutantrace changes of the overdose effect.
Given all of these concerns, and others I've sure I've forgotten, the team as a whole decided to remove the permanent effect of one secret chemical for now. We iterated on several other courses of action, but any one other change still left a part of the problem unsolved:
* Make the chemical non-secret: Doesn't address round-start character customization concerns, powerful poison easily shared.
* Make them a round-start mutantrace: Needs too much technical work to do in a reasonable time-frame (months of work at a volunteer pace, minimum)
* Nerf the mutantrace for balance concerns: Doesn't address the round-start/secret issues
* Make amphibians human: Cannot be used as a poison to de-human someone
There may be a solution we didn't think of, but given the technical limitations in place we went with a solution that minimized the overall impact to the game.
Making large announcements for changes brings a big spotlight onto those players where it is not justified, and so there was originally no announcement planned. To re-iterate: we don't think anyone who was doing this did anything wrong, but the design of that feature compromises other aspects of the game as discussed above. Generally speaking, we have not done major announcements for changes that affect a handful of players; especially those changes with which we reached out to affected players directly. The delay in getting a statement together was because we had to talk about what exactly to say in an Official Announcement post.