Genetics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[TheOnlyRyan]

Holy Crap, I honestly was not expecting 17 replies, within the first day anyway.

It might be a good idea to move this to suggestions, I agree.

There is 1 thing I don't like in genetics: Stability. This thing is just unfair: you can have colored blood and things in your blood at the same time but nothing bad heppens if you have only good things, you can have a lot of borgs but nothing bad happens, you can have good mutations and your stability goes down and then you start bubling and talking blbl blbl.

I agree with this, however if they were to make it easier to obtain these powers (and if people complain the powers are too OP, nerf them if you must) then I would be more accepting of this, but having it as difficult as it is to get the best powers, you deserve not to sound like an Alien at the same time, just to save yourself from bubbling.

I would like injectors to be cheaper/faster to make now though. so I can hand out powers to people more.

Obviously I agree with this, just how much easier is the question. Ready right away ? 10 minutes ? 15 ? Like some people have mentioned... never? ...

Never had any particular interest in genetics, but from glossing over the wiki page (and bane's WIP) it just seems to me that there isn't enough BAD mutations to make you more stable.

Just yesterday I had a monkey which had all bad mutations except 1 single good one, snapping my fingers to make noise.... yep, not a waste of time at all.

I like the concept of genetics. I think it's a really cool idea that has a lot of potential. But everyone's always talking about how invisible telekinetic Hulks showed up every round before the genetics nerf, and...well, to be frank, I think that's a load of hyperbole. Even before the nerf, getting Telekinesis OR Hulk were practically adventures in and of themselves due to how rare they were, and getting both was practically unheard of. Superpowered people were much more common, yes, but those superpowers were almost always less overtly powerful things.

Now? I just about never see anyone with genetic superpowers. After my work on the wiki page, there were apparently widespread cuts to the genetic research time, but it still does nothing to alleviate the impracticality of genetic superpower research if you're only going to be able to get injectors as shit's blowing up and the shuttle's getting called. I should say, however, that the art of actually bringing people to the lab and offering to scan them for superpowers right there instead of waiting for injectors has practically been lost to the ages, possibly due to the inherent isolationist culture of genetics and everyone's natural avoidance of the place. Everyone's always complaining about how injectors take forever and a day to research but always forget that you can always just go in the scanner yourself. Not every Geneticist is going to lock you in the scanner forever and scramble your genes to death.

The recent surge of mutations requiring the little letter-puzzle locks is, I think, a fine balance of actual effort vs. waiting. Genetics is still primarily a waiting game, but it's rare that I get the sensation that I'm just twiddling my thumbs waiting for a timer to count down. The amount of time it takes to slot together the gene pairs and complete the letter puzzles always ends up being more than the amount of time I would need to wait. Right now, I think it's a nice balance.

The lack of PDA scanning and the thrice-damnable suffocation bug need to be fixed, however. The former was a MASSIVE convenience and probably the one thing that encouraged actual social interaction from Genetics, and the latter makes genetic research needlessly difficult after a certain amount of time. The stability mechanic is, I think, an interesting mechanic and prevents Geneticsts from becoming demigods. Some different numbers might need some tweaking in the future, but the system was an essential balancing component.

This is a much better short version of everything I agree with Sorry If I'm not going into detail on replies to big posts like this but there's not a lot I can say when I agree with everything on it.

It's a general player culture issue. Nobody cooperates, and the only times they accept help are when they're forced to by being literally incapable of doing it themselves. There's also the fact that standing around in the cloner while the geneticist works is boring, so nobody wants to do it. Honestly, the only things I can see fixing it is removing DNA Injectors altogether, cutting the monkey pen population down to just 1-2 people, or allowing genetic experimentation to be carried out on the person in the cloner. The first one mandates cooperation by removing the self-buffing mechanism altogether, the second heavily limits geneticists' ability to get to injectors without leaving genetics in search of more test subjects, and the third one gives geneticists the opportunity to do genetics on players without having to beg for volunteers.

I totally agree, Geneticists are more concerned about getting themselves powers than helping out the dead. I thought about this and would it be possible to praise the Geneticists when they clone by giving them "points" or credits which can then be used in the research of their powers, the more they clone the faster the ball rolls ?

Can anybody actually give me a reason as to why injectors are not readily available at round start?

This

Injectors used to be the hard limit on how fast a geneticist could acquire powers, but stability takes care of that now, so faster access to injectors would be nice.

Yeah I actually mentioned this in a reply above all of this text, if they're going to implement this balancing and stability just let us get the injectors for free, punishing enough with the stability I think.

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If an Admin could move this to suggestions that would be nice, maybe catch the eyes of a few people