Cyborg QoL - and feedback concerning #15759

[durin]

Hello, first post on this forum. My name's durin and I've been playing on Goonstation for a little while now.  I'm not quite sure where to place this thread since I haven't seen any Feedback sections, so I'm posting in here. I've been running into a lot of minor issues while playing borg since shift+click got removed, that have been making my game experience a lot more awkward, boring, and often annoying lately. So to address these problems, provide some suggestions and give some sort of feedback regarding #15759, I'm here (not posting on Suggestions since this is also feedback. I don't know if it's the right place but anyhow).

Please mind that I'm not writing this to create drama around cyborg balance or pointlessly complain. This post is about exclusively cyborg QoL and ways I'm suggesting improvements upon it - ways that could help make the game more fun for veterans and new borg mains alike.


0. My credentials
I've been maining cyborg for, give or take, a full year and two months. I'm well acquainted to how cyborgs can impact the game and most ways how they do it.
To add some background about myself, I'm a 4 main.


1. Shift+click, and what it did
With shift+click interactions, a cyborg could:

- Climb ladders
- Quickly drag items
- 'Pet' critters
- Ring bells/interact with stationary items eg. paper bins
- Take items from containers eg. toolboxes
- Punch windows (and I'd like to personally add, inefficiently punch them)
There might've been some I missed while writing this, but these were the main functions of shift+click.

With the loss of shift+click, every single one of these functions were gone; last I heard while drafting this post, ladder interactions were added again, and some of the others may or may not be added later on. My issue with the removal of these 'features' (bugs), in short, is that they weren't harmful, problematic or in any manner gamebreaking/actually exploitable, and for as long as they were around, they made the experience better (as opposed to, like bugs commonly would, make it worse).

In not so short, I'll address most of these 'features' brought by shift+click and how they improved the game, presenting common scenarios, and comparing how shift+click and the lack thereof respectively impacted said scenarios. Sorry, playing bug's advocate. Please bear with me.


QUICK DRAG

COMMON SCENARIO: A cyborg has a stack of things they need to sort, separate and/or move elsewhere.
PRE BUG PATCH: The cyborg spams shift+click to drag stacks around quickly.
POST BUG PATCH: The cyborg has to either 1. ctrl+click then click a tile to pull one at a time, OR 2. find a crate. In some cases, they might have to do both, which wastes time and is frustrating to the player.

MY CASE: Quick drag makes most, if not all the jobs much, much more pleasant.

"PET" CRITTERS

COMMON SCENARIO: A cyborg is in front of a capybara/baby seal/bird/Dolly/cute critter.
PRE BUG PATCH: With shift+click, a cyborg could 'pet' a critter (it didn't actually show any text, it wasn't even actual patting, but the green help intent hand showed over the critter, signalling a pat. Ish. Sort of.)
POST BUG PATCH: The cyborg does nothing. The player stares at the screen.

MY CASE: pleasepleaseplspls i need to pet the capy plsplssplsplssssplssssspls

RING BELLS/INTERACT WITH STATIONARY ITEMS

COMMON SCENARIO 1: The head of Personnel OR the chef has placed their service bell on an easily accessible counter/table.
PRE BUG PATCH: A cyborg could shift+click it and ask for service.
POST BUG PATCH: They cannot ring bells anymore.

MY CASE: I'm a roleplayer. Asking for services is fun! At least, more fun than having 'yell for the HoP' as the only option.

COMMON SCENARIO 2: A human asked for a piece of paper OR the cyborg wants paper to write on.
PRE BUG PATCH: Shift+click to interact with the paper bin - and SO many other things a cyborg could interact with using the 'function'.
POST BUG PATCH: Cyborgs are now restricted to the thermal paper typewriter/civilian (maybe brobocop or some other if I recall) module paper bins. Mildly annoying, and unnecessarily restrictive.

MY CASE: I don't think limiting borg's access to paper bins will prevent the Paper Apocalypse. In face of such inevitablity, they should be allowed to use those, I think.

TAKE ITEMS FROM CONTAINERS

This is a huuuuge pet peeve. In fact, it's the #1 reason why I'm writing this in the first place.

COMMON SCENARIO: The cyborg needs to take an implement/tool/object from a container (toolbox, O2 box, package box from cargo (eg. mime apparel box)) for one reason or another - such as a human asking for a wrench, or themselves ordering clothes in a box for Silicon Fashion.
PRE BUG PATCH: The cyborg could drag+click the container to itself, showing what's in it, then shift+clicking to retrieve an object of their choice.
POST BUG PATCH: The cyborg has to ask for help. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Not only it annoys the roboticist and every other hapless person that has to help them, it is unironically frustrating, inconvenient and awkward. 

MY CASE: I shouldn't have to humiliate myself for the 6th time in 40 game minutes to get a small item from a box.

PUNCH WINDOWS

COMMON SCENARIO: A cyborg is near a window/catwalk.
PRE BUG PATCH: The cyborg can punch the window/kick the catwalk. While destructive, punching the window was several times less effective than using an extinguisher on it.
POST BUG PATCH: The cyborg can't punch windows or kick catwalks.

MY CASE: I don't actually advocate for this. This can go, honestly. Might have been good for RP once in a while, but it wasn't as essential as some other 'features' included in here.


So these are some of the common scenarios, and what tends to happen in such cases. Mind you, these are all coming from a full roleplay perspective- like I mentioned before, I'm a 4 main, and I have pretty much no experience in Goon Classic or any non-RP form.
The point I'd like to make with each and every one of these, and lastly address some alarming takes I've seen post #15759, is that, well...
In Space Station 13, almost all parts of the game are oriented towards characters that can grab things/use things on hand. This tends to cause unintentional oversights related to other in-game individuals' lack of capabilities, such as individuals without hands (cyborgs not being able to do most things in the game), or people with only one arm having an unnecessarily awkward experience due to game mechanics tailored towards ingame two-handed people - mind you, I still defend both of these cases' rights to be awkward-- people have the right to want to play a more challenging, different experience, which is what certain limb traits and cyborgs are all about, BUT, my defense is, different should not equal worse, nor it shouldn't equal counterintuitive.

WERE THESE EXPLOITS?
No. In one year and two-ish months of borg experience, I did not see these be used exploitatively at all, not even once.

WERE THESE UNINTENTIONAL FEATURES?
Yes, but as far as unintentional features go, they could easily be called 'happy accidents'. They made the game experience a lot richer.

BORGS SHOULDN'T HAVE HANDS.
I agree that cyborgs should stay handless, but they shouldn't stay helpless. And, honestly, a little hopeless.
Removing QoL because they're 'supposed to be without hands' isn't something I can agree with.


My suggestion is that in some way or another, these 'features' make a return to the game, because while they were bugs, they also happened to be some of the most necessary QoL bugs a bunch of cyborg players had. Playing without them sucks so bad I had to get over my social anxiety and talk about it here.

Anyway, thank you for having me. Hopefully this bunch of text isn't too boring or too convoluted to read. Here's a boogiebot! 

[Paai]

Not much to add to this- but yeah, at least from the heavily biased perspective of a silicon main, shiftclick was super important for a lot of silly little features that didn't hurt or give silicons any real tactical or gameplay advantage, but were still very nice to have on-hand.

Being able to shiftclick a small item to quickly move it under yourself specifically feels horribly crippling to work without- It didn't provide any tactical advantage, as the items were still on the ground and anyone with hands could just nab them either way, but it made handling large item piles INFINITELY less frustrating.
I can see in this future the wasted seconds and minutes and hours of my life that'll need to be spent hunting down a crate for every stack of more than two items I want to move, and it's harrowing.

That and, as mentioned, removing items from boxes. Once again, no real advantage provided-- just some basic convenience. The other day, someone asked me to fetch a welding torch, and because of the shiftclick being cut, I wasn't ABLE to fetch a welding torch without going and bothering ANOTHER human to get the torch out of the toolbox for me. It just makes the process more frustrating and time-consuming for everyone- what should have been a 10 second job turned into a minute and a half one.

Not even to mention the stationary item interactions- Not being able to ring service bells, or interact with paper bins, or close manual doors behind me, or pull out my own power cell after opening my interface or whatever else drives me insane.
Just the other day I was dragging the AI core around, and they suicided for a joke because normally I would be able to turn them back on like anyone else, but I couldn't, because no shiftclick. It took me five minutes to track down someone who would turn them back on- because apparently omnitool screwdrivers aren't sufficiently thin and pokey to function in place of a finger for buttonpressing purposes.

Codifying those things as features by making them work on regular click and not just shiftclick would be really nice- if not then just leaving them be. They're so ingrained into my playstyle that it feels horribly unpleasant in a really bad way to not be able to do them.

[444explorer]

Yeah, sums it up well. A lot of things I didn't even consider that'd be removed due to how comfortable I got with them. Crazy to think it's been unintended all this time. I guess this is the reason the bug fix was test merged.

[jan.antilles]

(Moved to Ideas and Suggestions since it's a PR feedback post/feature request and these usually go there.)

[UrsulaMejor]

First and foremost, cyborgs are not meant to be self-service or to be able to do all the things humans can do. They are not meant to interface with the game in the same manner as other players. Especially in regards to interacting with "items", they are meant to be limited to the items in their modules, and not to explicitly manipulate other items in the game world.

They are a highly narrowly focused playstyle, meant to be supremely good in one activity at the cost of other activities. Some modules have fallen behind their human counterparts in their field, but many of them remain exceptionally good (mediborgs, for example).

Of the things listed, here are my personal opinions (from a dev standpoint, but still my personal opinions):

Click drag items to stack/sort them:
I think borgs could have this.

Pet creatures
I think this is cute, but could see it as one of the things you're meant to lose when you become borg. Borgs cannot hug. At the very least, I'll probably personally code it so that borgs can pet robochickens and roboroaches

Climb Ladders
I'm ambivalent to this one. I don't think cyborgs need this by any means, and this usually only comes up in adventure spaces that are very rarely designed with cyborgs in mind.

Ringing Bells/Interacting with paper bins and donut boxes
Cyborgs don't need this and this is one of those things that crosses the line between "human gameplay" and "Cyborg gameplay". Humans eat donuts, ring service bells, and scribble on papers. Cyborgs don't.

Take items from containers
Solidly human gameplay. Cyborgs don't need to pull items from containers because they cannot use them. Either ask for help from a human or tell the human to help themselves.

Punch Windows
Don't see a reason for this. It's fine, but there are clear workarounds in the meantime.

[Silent Majority]

I always thought the various produce satchels would be the primary way cyborgs would move things.

Do you have specific examples of the sort stacking things necessity? Cause like the only thing that i can think of imdieately is emptying lockers without moving the locker

[Lord_earthfire]

Honestly, most of the stuff losted here, except moving crates, borgs simply don't need.

I think climibing ladders is kibda important, mostly because falling into the trench is a thing.

But besides that, if we wamt to add interactions like that, and i doubt we do on many of these things, we should add tools to borgs that have these effects.

[durin]

First and foremost, cyborgs are not meant to be self-service or to be able to do all the things humans can do. They are not meant to interface with the game in the same manner as other players. Especially in regards to interacting with "items", they are meant to be limited to the items in their modules, and not to explicitly manipulate other items in the game world.

They are a highly narrowly focused playstyle, meant to be supremely good in one activity at the cost of other activities. Some modules have fallen behind their human counterparts in their field, but many of them remain exceptionally good (mediborgs, for example).

Of the things listed, here are my personal opinions (from a dev standpoint, but still my personal opinions):

Click drag items to stack/sort them:
I think borgs could have this.

Pet creatures
I think this is cute, but could see it as one of the things you're meant to lose when you become borg. Borgs cannot hug. At the very least, I'll probably personally code it so that borgs can pet robochickens and roboroaches

Climb Ladders
I'm ambivalent to this one. I don't think cyborgs need this by any means, and this usually only comes up in adventure spaces that are very rarely designed with cyborgs in mind.

Ringing Bells/Interacting with paper bins and donut boxes
Cyborgs don't need this and this is one of those things that crosses the line between "human gameplay" and "Cyborg gameplay". Humans eat donuts, ring service bells, and scribble on papers. Cyborgs don't.

Take items from containers
Solidly human gameplay. Cyborgs don't need to pull items from containers because they cannot use them. Either ask for help from a human or tell the human to help themselves.

Punch Windows
Don't see a reason for this. It's fine, but there are clear workarounds in the meantime.

Respectfully disagree regarding ladders. We have two maps which people need ladders to move about.
That, and I have to disagree about taking items from containers. The one thing I can add from my experience (I'm sure theres at least one borg main out there that can add a dozen more to these) is that there's plenty of objects cyborgs should have access to in their respective lines of work, eg. civilian cyborgs handling cooking might need to access, say, the food boxes - egg cartons, cheese boxes, butter trays, so on, so forth. Mediborgs might have to retrieve something from a medkit for someone else, or an empty IV bag from a box. And I'm just mentioning these from the top of my head - there's a lot more of these that cyborgs don't have access to anymore. I think it's reasonable to say that restricting their access like this makes the gameplay pointlessly tedious, not just for the cyborg player, but for players around them.

I always thought the various produce satchels would be the primary way cyborgs would move things.

Do you have specific examples of the sort stacking things necessity?  Cause like the only thing that i can think of imdieately is emptying lockers without moving the locker

Yeah! Lots of non-satchelable items have to be moved around, such as beakers, glasses, plates, general clutter, modules, and so on. Click dragging made moving every pile of objects from 2+ onwards a lot quicker. One specific example I can offer would be cleaning a table with a glass, a plate, and a fork on it. Click dragging these takes a lot less time than ctrl+clicking it. A sorting example I could provide is, say, managing cargo. If you've printed too many cargo holds for one crate, for example, click dragging makes sorting these really, really better. It just allows for better hauling. 

I think I've covered these and any other possible points in the main post. I'll refrain from making any further posts, because I believe I said my peace on this.

[Paai]

I'd argue that even with the shiftclick functionality, borgs were VERY FAR from self-service, and EVEN FURTHER from interacting with the world the same as a human can. In regards to interacting with items, they still couldn't! They could move them around, or move them from very specifically item storages to the ground, but they couldn't use them like a human would- They can move things around without shiftclick, too, just in a way that's a lot less fun to work with.
Having openhand hit functionality in a limited capacity is a far cry from self-sufficiency!

There are still several points at which borgs EXPLICITLY REQUIRE a human operator, even with shiftclick. Namely, doing anything with items not in their module, constructing things, taking items out of anything more complicated than a literal box, or putting modules in a rewriter.

All shiftclick allowed for by way of manipulating items was taking items out of containers-- be that container a paper bin or a box or a cupoard. Those items just ended up on the floor, for the cyborg to awkwardly drag away- they still couldn't USE the item.
I don't think any of the things being removed here explicitly count for 'human-exclusive' behaviours.

With ringing bells and such- Humans eat donuts, ring service bells, and scribble on papers-- and cyborgs also do, from my experience! Apart from the eating, I mean- but removing donuts from a donut bin isn't EATING them. Two of the modules literally have crayons or pens in them, I think that's pretty explicitly an endorsement of the ability to scribble.

Mechanically removing their ability to do these things on the basis of "borgs aren't people, and as such shouldn't be able to do these things because it's UNNECCECARY for them" seems a bit arbitrary and limiting in roleplay and interaction potential to me. Because really, there's no reason a borg, even without hands, couldn't hit a service bell, or awkwardly dump an item out of a box and onto the ground.

You're the HoP, and there's a cyborg at your desk, irritatedly ringing the service bell! What's up with that? They don't have an ID, what could they possibly NEED? It's interesting! Allowing that bit of humanlike behaviour in a way that doesn't actually make any balance difference is fun!

As with borgs not being able to hug-- they can, hehe. The *hug emote works for borgs.

(Also, yeah, no, the punching windows thing is the one thing i'm in firm agreement with going. That's silly and actually has damaging potential.)

[Lord_earthfire]

Respectfully disagree regarding ladders. We have two maps which people need ladders to move about.
That, and I have to disagree about taking items from containers. The one thing I can add from my experience (I'm sure theres at least one borg main out there that can add a dozen more to these) is that there's plenty of objects cyborgs should have access to in their respective lines of work, eg. civilian cyborgs handling cooking might need to access, say, the food boxes - egg cartons, cheese boxes, butter trays, so on, so forth. Mediborgs might have to retrieve something from a medkit for someone else, or an empty IV bag from a box. And I'm just mentioning these from the top of my head - there's a lot more of these that cyborgs don't have access to anymore. I think it's reasonable to say that restricting their access like this makes the gameplay pointlessly tedious, not just for the cyborg player, but for players around them.

What stops us from just adding an IV bag to the medbay borg module?

That's what it boils down to: if we want borgs to have a certain interaction, give then the tool for it...

Above that, i think we should deviate what each job means for borg or humans. E.g. i think we should gut bartending/chef equipment completely from the civilian module and add bottles and a drink/umbrella dispenser to the brobocop module. Hands and skill are the main mark of the chef and bartender. A borg should have these interactions replaced with synthetic options that are more efficient than humans, but not high-quality.

Thus way, if we have borgs in catering, they can play brobocop and be a walking food/drink dispenser. It does a fairly equal job like a chef or bartender, but it does it differently enough to feel like a cyborg catering service AND work without hands.

In general, by restricting borgs to tools, we can geniuly play then differently. And this does not bring the same RP opportunities like humans do, it brings different ones. And this us a big problem for borgs on RP currently: they don't differentiate themselves from humans in their RP opportunities, even though it has so much potential.

Though, maybe add a petting glove (or maybe a cushion?) to their multitool, so they can cuddle animals and chickens.

[sunkiisu]

I don't understand why "Borgs aren't humans, and should be restricted from doing xyz like humans can," Even applies here, respectfully. Like the window thing, absolutely could go, but the rest of these points, such as "petting" animals or people, for one does literally nothing to said mobs so it's purely for flavor when used - Unless you're petting other borgs! Which works? I don't know why, but I thought it was cute - I see no reason why that has to go just because borgs aren't functionally the same. (I'd like to point out, for hugging people - You CAN use the hug emote as a borg. You just aren't prompted to hug any nearby players, and instead can only hug yourself, which is always a little sad. But aside from that, you can custom emote things, like hugging, or patting, or shaking people by the shoulders. As a mechanic, this does nothing but visually convey in a much quicker fashion something you could custom emote, so I think it would be nice to keep, however that's my opinion.)

As for things with actual functionality, like the containers, like it's been pointed out by others before me the most functionality this sees is that should I be playing a borg, I can remove things from a box. I can't use it, pick it up, or even put it BACK into the box, but I can take it out in case it's needed. Like with cheese, and butter, and maybe someone needs a mannitol pill from the medkit and can't get it themself, who knows! By the logic of that, just remove borg arms. Why do you need them? you don't have hands.

It was unintentional, but it doesn't actually make for something that's abuseable, and if anything I had no idea it was a bug until it was fixed because it honestly made sense. Opening a box is feasible, and taking things out, sure! But that autoinjector is still gonna fall through my robot claws because I don't have opposable thumbs. And you know what, shucks! You got me, I signed up for that.

I also don't see how shift clicking to quickly drag items onto oneself (with all items still ultimately dropping onto the ground unusable) actually causes many issues. I know I HAVE used this as a borg, but I also rarely use it because either which way I still can't use these things, and if I want to take it with me, I need to stop, shift click, move a tile, stop, shift click... It means you can move multiple items instead of making five round trips, but it's still fairly clunky and inefficient because you can't actually pick things up. I can't reasonably see this being abused, because if you wanted to be a nuisance as a borg there's at least 10-15 more efficient ways to do it, you know? And ladders are actually, I feel, still important. Nadir and Oshan use ladders! Also again, WHY, reasonably, would borgs not be able to use ladders, even if they didn't have hands? Again, at some point, just get rid of my ability to have arms. (Tangentially, while some azones aren't very borg friendly, why make azones that were at least accessible inaccessible?? It just discourages people from playing borgs in general.)


And I understand the argument, again, that borgs are intentionally functionally different, and it's one of my favorite things! I don't see why their functional difference needs to equal zero QoL functions or changes. It's discouraging to hear that argument as someone who's been playing borg / AI as one of my mainstays for a little over a year now, when there's an issue about not having some level of accessibility. I love borg, and I stick with it because I love it, but it feels like when there's a problem over even small things like this I see what sounds a bit like a catch-all, "You signed up for it, so deal." kind of attitude.

I don't want to sound accusatory in any way, I just hope people can understand where I'm coming from when I say that the bug was in general? Harmless, made my experience on goon as a whole a little more fun. The parts that could actually cause issues with intended borg gameplay I have zero issues seeing go, but as a whole feels like this is the kind of energy that just pushes less towards actually diversifying player races (? Is it considered that idk) and more just.. dismissive, if you wanna have fun just play a human. Which stinks. 

Anyways, to wrap up, I apologize if any of this (again) comes across accusatory, or aggressive in any fashion, it's a bit late when I'm writing this.   tldr, let me climb the ladder, i still gots arms

[Cal]

Climbing ladders is way too important to get around imo

The box thing seems pretty annoying too I think borgs should be able to just grab stuff out of containers but nothing more

The rest I don't really care personally

[JOELED]

It's worth noting that borgs climbing ladders was already readded several days ago

I don't play borg outside of dying and being borged midway through a round (so nearly always on classic, not an RP perspective) but from the non-borg point of view I agree that borgs being able to paw stuff out of containers onto the ground is better than the alternative (them having to ask humans to stop what they're doing and take an item out of something)

My only other opinion is that adding specialized tools to the cyborg kit for things like petting animals feels like it's just going to add more bloat to the modules (the civ module is so much scrolling) for things that could be solved by custom emoting

[TemThrush]

I think others in this thread have laid out my own personal thoughts very well so I don't have much to say besides a solid "I agree". I don't think shift-click at all made the cyborg experience less unique or more human-like, it made navigating as a cyborg easier, but still in a fresh way that had its own hiccups and was different from humans. 

I personally would really like for the shift+click feature to be reimplemented in an intentional way or for the functions it provided to borgs be reimplemented in some way. Preferably not by adding new tools. Like JOELED said, I think that just adds unnecessary bloat to the cyborg's already scroll-heavy toolbar, especially for something that used to be a regular part of borg gameplay.

[eggcereal]

Its nice to know that certain things have already been added back, I know I absolutely agreed when it came to needing to be able to use ladders. Oshan and Nadir would be abysmal otherwise.

I think that at the very least being able to take things out of containers should be brought back. When it comes to things like the service bell and paper bins, I just think it's inconsequential and would be easy to do even if a person didn't have- say- fingers. Realistically, borgs being able to bap a service bell to ring it or drag a piece of paper out of a bin are doable and it feels silly to take that away. It's not as if borgs can say- take paper off of a clipboard or read paper on a clipboard. This is the same kind of reasoning that supports being able to 'pet' critters or people, its just... moving a metal appendage down to initiate some kind of "contact". (There not being action text for this has always read to me as it not really doing anything substantial)

Hitting windows and stuff seems like it would require far more force then all the other actions, so I really don't think it should come back.