An analysis of the biggest problem with goonstation: apathy

[Superlagg]

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.

the ai, any borg, probably most heads, anybody reassigned by the hop, all these ppl can literally just buy more meds and materials so, so easily using qm. but i cant blame u for forgetting that qm exists

That would be part of the nightmarish rebalancing act, where buying pre-made things would have some kind of a downside compared to making it yourself.

For instance, store-bought items could be expensive or limited, or just not as good as the stuff made on-site. The beginning budget could be fairly small, relying on materials saved up over the past rounds to get it somewhere workable.

Course, that would kinda limit the QM to spending money on emergency supplies.

He might be useful to turn massive surpluses of stuff nobody really needs into bits of useful resources the station can't make or doesn't have. Then again, that PTL is going to end up flooding the station with ~stuff~ and render that part of his job pointless.

Hm. Yeah, this would be an absolute nightmare to work out, as it would end up needing to rework almost everything. QM especially.

tl;dr: easing up on vigilantes isn't going to make the station at large less apathetic, it's going to give jerks free reign to be murderous jerks

True, now that I think about it, what I suggested wouldn't really do anything for this problem.

But, while getting Sec to exist more often would give antagonists more resistance, I don't see how it would lessen the ambient apathy in the rest of the crew. Unless that's not really the point of doing that, in which case never mind!