An analysis of the biggest problem with goonstation: apathy

[Frank_Stein]

Problem with less materials is that the station becomes a lot more hostile if you dont have someone staffing those areas. This is especially especial in lowpop! Think about it, if Medbay barely had any medical supplies and nobody signed up to be a Botanist, Medbay won't be able to do their job very well. (Course, less people means less people who need healing.)

Hm. One way to work around this is to make some of the products of certain departments persist between rounds. Higher-pop rounds could generate materials for the station, sustaining the needs of any later low-pop rounds. Basically time-traveling space communism.

Though, that would require rebalancing a lot of the material generation dealies, mainly so one round doesn't make an infinite supply of omnizine or styp and put Botany out of business forever.

Of course I'd suggest solving a problem with round-to-round persistence.

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As for vigilantes, I'd recommend a bit more lenience on murder, mainly to ease up fears of killing the wrong guy and getting banned as opposed to going to prison. I'd say that if you killed someone (mostly) innocent, but were reasonably sure that they were a badguy and you didn't permanently take them out of the round, and you're not a total jerk about it, you should be punished by in-game methods than by administrative intervention.

Or it's always been that way and I just never noticed. I dunno, I don't make a habit out of killing people.

How about when the map is being generated, it does a check for server population, then stocks the departments based on that?

Less people=more items
More people=less items