disagreements about some recent balance changes

[millichips]

this was a long discord message that efrem told me to post on forums because discord is not the place for thoughts structured into 1 long message. it has bads and goods.

heres my complaints:

- meth isnt spliceable with food now cause ipecac makes you puke (and also its gn16 instead of gn3). "shrug" says tonedeaf anonymous 1.



- quivering contusine's curare (a very deadly poison) got replaced by a pretty much inert chem that gets countered by the other chem in the same plant. "but histamine can be useful to **extract!**

- tonedeaf anonymous 1, oblivious to the existance of histamine in omega weed.

someone sent a PR to replace it with sulfonal (still weaker than curare) but...

- tonedeaf anonymous 2, same one that made the histamine change in the first place, refusing to elaborate further.


same anonymous talking about extracting and isolating the hsays "if you wanted chems just go play scientist". wha- what is the point of nerfing botany then, just remove all chems from botany if you want it to be that way

- poll your changes before they go through please.
** trigger warning, admins get aggressive when called out on this one **
ask players and other admins if these changes are ok to make, yes you do need our input to push changes, you're making the game for the players, not yourselves. --
please stop kneejerking changes because you thought "oh this seems broken" without even putting it in context. botany is a VERY time gated role, most of the even slightly strong shit we have takes MANY many minutes to make and is easily interruptable by -- a secoff walking in, a miner breaking a window, another botanist hotboxing, a rev breaking in, nuclear weapon being deployed, vampires, lings, wizards, bombs. Compare this to chemistry which can do what we do in 30 minutes, but in 1 click macros from a notepad.

- watermelon juice
"but lettuce still has water"
lettuce is gn12 i believe, requires a bunch of mutagen (or generations of the plant if you do it in a tray) and THEN try and splice it with your gn17 tomato.
again, more botany timegating, this is very tight to do in nukie rounds for experienced botanists, and impossible for the regular playerbase.

- erebite being removed from botany.
this was a plant with an extremely low growth rate that took 15 minutes to get the **first** harvest from, and now we get uqill in the same amount of time IF WE RUSH IT. which mining can do 9 times faster.

- acid and wizards
wizards show up to places, stomp and leave, acid taking time to melt their hats just gives them even more time to react/escape/put on a new hat and continue stomping.

- win condition rounds
rounds that end after x thing happens. this forces most players to drop whatever they wanted to do because either they need to stop the bad thing from happening or they know they wont have enough time to do their fun gimmick because the round will end in 10 minutes. i believe having uncertainty to when a round will end gives you actual room to work instead of being pressured into changing activity because what you're doing is just not gonna work in your little timespan.

- light lotus having luminol

chem that REQUIRES to be extracted or smoked to work in an **edible plant**
not even the detective uses luminol...

and heres what i agree about the recent changes:

- crusher not being instant
you can rescue people if they're getting crushered right beside you if you're lightning fast to get them out

- light lotus not having omnizine
while i disagree with the choice of new chemical, omnizine being gated to white weed only makes it take at least 9 minutes to acquire, which is actually fair considering how strong omnizine is. (this makes long botany healing splices take about 6 minutes longer than usual, totaling about 25 at the fastest)

tl;dr
pls dont just make grudge-changes because one player in one shift did a gimmick after it had already happened 3 years ago and then say "this had it coming from a while ago", then go "not my problem" when requested to elaborate further. please? thanks.

[DimWhat]

Use admin complaints instead of a general thread. This is a post to inflame the community instead of providing feedback towards the developers behind these changes. Gonna be honest here. I could tell who you are talking about and referring to them as "tonedeaf anonymous" is pretty damn rude.

[millichips]

Use admin complaints instead of a general thread.

no

[ZeWaka]

[millichips]

dude same lol

[THISISANICEGAME]

Acid nerfs were undeniably a good thing, you can't delete people with a pitcher anymore, the game is way more fun if people don't go around killing antags with acid and wizards are pretty balanced right now, if you ask me only prismatic spray needs a little tweaking and the rest is fine, they can't easily stomp the crew anymore.

Crushers are supposed to be escapable now, you can even escape it by yourself without any outside help, insta killing people simply isn't good for the game, people start quitting if some guy just goes around batoning people and tossing them in the crusher because it just isn't fun

Edit: not gonna say anything about botany changes because I don't play botany and I don't care.

[ZeWaka]

"ask players and other admins if these changes are ok to make"

i hope you know admins have a channel practically dedicated to this sorts of code/balance discussion, and it's always active

[millichips]

Acid nerfs were undeniably a good thing, you can't delete people with a pitcher anymore, the game is way more fun if people don't go around killing antags with acid and wizards are pretty balanced right now, if you ask me only prismatic spray needs a little tweaking and the rest is fine, they can't easily stomp the crew anymore.

Crushers are supposed to be escapable now, you can even escape it by yourself without any outside help, insta killing people simply isn't good for the game, people start quitting if some guy just goes around batoning people and tossing them in the crusher because it just isn't fun

Edit: not gonna say anything about botany changes because I don't play botany and I don't care.

i disagree with acid changes, wizards could get out of getting acided, but crew cannot get away from wizards, it had some balance to it, now just wizards win by default

also crushers are escapable? wait a minute...

also thanks for not commenting on botany from the point of not having any idea

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"ask players and other admins if these changes are ok to make"

i hope you know admins have a channel practically dedicated to this sorts of code/balance discussion, and it's always active

i did not know that, and that makes me question even harder how some of these changes went through in fact.

[Froggit_Dogget]

Yea, im taking a break. Yea, it has everything to do with recent changes. Ive been playing goon for about a year, and up until 2021, there was just constant new features, new things, new content. However, since, well, it feels like since the original atmos agent b nerf, was that in march? Nothing new, content wise has been started, and the only thing finished, was podwars. Yea, theres tons of small minor things, but nothing new since chickens. 


Anyways, regardless, every time I look at the changelog, I find myself going, "why!". For months now, its felt as if every coder has their own plan of the game, and theyre all trying to push their own plan. But this game is far too large for one person to plan out everything. I thought the town hall would provide insight to where the game was headed, but the only thing I got from the town hall was that, well, nothing was planned. The other thing the changelog shows is that, every balance change is a removal of some sort. The game is being balanced by the removal of content versus new counters being created. For a game like this, thats not neccesarily a bad thing, but this has been going on for months, and it feels really bad.

As Millicent said earlier, Lots of these changes are without player approval, or even a reason. For example, one of the biggest changes, the hellburn changes back in march~, I posted this poll over a week ago.

the image wont work so im just going to link the thread/poll: https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=16736

Over 2/3's of the people who voted don't like the changes. I thought there would be some insight to where the engine was headed when I posted this, but not one admin/coder replied. Azrun, replied, that was nice, but nothing from the actual devs. It feels like theres been alot of silence on lots of changes recently, and even when most of the community doesnt like a change, nothing gets reverted. Im not saying this change in particular needs to be reverted, but when engineering has had a major change, with lots of flaws after, and those don't get fixed, and its been.. 4? 5? months?.. thats not good.

Ive seen alot, that its "the devs game" and we're subject to whatever. That is 100% true. it IS your game, but goonstation is known for its community. The community should have some say into changes that have been made. youll also hear that goonstation has changed since its creation. Lots of things goon used to do doesnt happen anymore. Since goon went open source, the devteam has basically changed. You often hear people say, "We're more transparent then ever". Thats true, cant hide much when open source, but trying to do things how the old team did stuff when theres a completely new team is just not working. Im not here to complain about the admin team, I think all of you are amazing. However, theres no direction for goonstation, no plan. The old team also had a bit more structure. Wizards, had more say, and were older admins. Now, its just, when someone becomes an admin they join the group that can merge PR's. I joined TG's discord, and there are tons of people on the devteam. There are also tons of different ranks, too. Bee has like, 4? 5? different admin roles too. Theres no leadership on goon, and anything needs leadership to survive.

With no direction, and a bunch of content removal, it feels like the only direction goons going is down. Its a fun game. But logging on each day and seeing removals without much clarification doesnt feel good. You guys say you're being more transparent then ever, and thats true, but your completely different people then before, the "structure" is gone, and you have the community submitting PR's too. In some ways, the transparancy is great. In others, PR's pushed without feedback, Lack of taking feedback, and lack of reaction to feedback. It looks like alot of these changes get made, then abandoned for further updates.

I love you guys, I do. But, there needs to be a plan, a direction that goons heading. Theres alot of struggles in a community this big too. Everyone has differing opinions on things. Hell, theres even two different communities, RP and main. Theres not going to be a split codebase, yes, but goon RP has stricter rules. A change that benifits RP doesnt always benifit main, and vise versa. However, if something bad is being abused on RP, that is a rules issue, not a code issue, but players dont have much say into the rules, only the code. 

Im sort of just rambling my thoughts into this post. Theres alot I didnt cover, but, I got my main points across.

Oh god the image 1 second

[GORE]

Botany nerfs were really unnecessary IMO.

Give me 7 minutes or less as a scientist and I can get between 8 and 16 pills going that take no hard recipes and kill someone in an extremely boring way...but extremely quickly.

Botany should be cut some slack...they are the easiest overwhelmed by anyone of the outside world barging in.

[millichips]

Botany nerfs were really unnecessary IMO.

Give me 7 minutes or less as a scientist and I can get between 8 and 16 pills going that take no hard recipes and kill someone in an extremely boring way...but extremely quickly.

Botany should be cut some slack...they are the easiest overwhelmed by anyone of the outside world barging in.

yes!

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Im sort of just rambling my thoughts into this post. Theres alot I didnt cover, but, I got my main points across.

miss you bro, hope goon comes back to glory to see you play again

[Technature]

Oh boy, here we go again.

[Leeanei]

Haven't people started hitting 30 TW without Agent B in the new engine after experimenting?

[UrsulaMejor]

If you're gonna rehash your other thread here by copy pasting critiques from it, you might as well also copy paste the responses you got instead of pretending you were ignored:

- meth isnt spliceable with food now cause ipecac makes you puke (and also its gn16 instead of gn3). "shrug" says tonedeaf anonymous 1.

As for my "tone deaf response" to the meth thing, you also conveniently ignored that I gave you an alternate solution to your problem:



puking up stomach contents doesn't affect blunts.

Also, you're giving me whiplash, here:

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Also, if you're gonna quote me several times in one thread, You prolly should have made an admin complaint instead of dragging this through general discussion. Real class act, that.

[GORE]

If you're gonna rehash your other thread here by copy pasting critiques from it, you might as well also copy paste the responses you got instead of pretending you were ignored:

- meth isnt spliceable with food now cause ipecac makes you puke (and also its gn16 instead of gn3). "shrug" says tonedeaf anonymous 1.

As for my "tone deaf response" to the meth thing, you also conveniently ignored that I gave you an alternate solution to your problem:



puking up stomach contents doesn't affect blunts.

Also, you're giving me whiplash, here:

---

Also, if you're gonna quote me several times in one thread, You prolly should have made an admin complaint instead of dragging this through general discussion. Real class act, that.

That thread here is a big OOF then.

O O F,...