Genetics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[BaneOfGiygas]

Stability is incredibly necessary to stop geneticists from just loading themselves up with every good power and ravaging the station as unstoppable mutant gods.

Personally, I think Genetics needs a nerf, not a buff. And no, I'm not just saying that to be a jerk. The fact of the matter is that Genetics has gotten a number of massive buffs in recent months, many of them apparently crafted with the hope that making things easier for geneticists would encourage them to cooperate with the rest of the station, but instead they've just led to geneticists being even more isolationist and overpowered than before, and were abused so badly that many of them had to be removed or given a balancing factor. It's clear that positive incentives aren't working - if we want Genetics to stop hogging all the powers for themselves, we need to make that play style harder, not easier.

I don't think Genetics needs either.

On the one hand, a Genetics with easier-to-acquire superpowers results in the genetics team getting all of them and carving through the station like power-mad demigods. But on the other hand, a Genetics with harder-to-acquire superpowers also fosters a rather sour environment. Not only will less people be willing to play geneticist in the first place because of how much of a pain in the ass it is, but they will no doubt be much more overzealous and overprotective because of how increasingly fragile their work gets. Make their work harder to do, and they will become infinitely more pissed off if and when that work is ruined.

The whole problem with genetics not sharing superpowers is, if you ask me, intrinsic to the system itself. Geneticists, in their currently defined job, do not ever need to interact with any other people to do their job. And, in contrast to other jobs in which that might be the case, geneticists are borderline encouraged to not interact with any other people because they could be spending that time doing more research and unlocking more things, or someone might break in and murder the monkeys or bomb the place while they're out, or any other number of terrible and bad things. So geneticists stay in the genetics lab.

Somewhere, in some place in time and space, there exists a happy medium in which geneticists are willing to give the crew awesome superpowers with which to fight evil and stuff. But, after observing all of the changes that have been done to genetics over the past few months, I just don't think that's going to happen unless a complete overhaul of the system is introduced. What that overhaul is, I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea. But I thought I might as well get the idea out there.