PDA ATMs are TICKING me off!

[UpsilonYellow]

hi, roleplayer here

the recentish addition of PDA ATMs kinda irked me, and it's probably best i share my thoughts here instead of waiting for somebody else to post about it.

the two major problems i can put to words are:

1. Physical ATMs & Card Readers are functionally redundant.

(not as big of an issue to me, and from what i've heard, people do enjoy not having to wander the station for the One (1) ATM in aft maints or wherever.)

card readers are arguably obtuse by design, requiring a slight bit of effort to use (around 3 clicks). the upside to using them were that they alleviated the above mentioned ATM problem. with that being said, why would anyone (apart from gimmickers) want to use this system now? they've been left in limbo, simply... existing. it's a shame too, card readers have a lovely looking receipt system, and because of PDA ATMs, new players are almost guaranteed to never see it.


2. Theft is Trivially Easy to pull off.

this is my primary concern.

i've been in rounds where people steal my PDA & ID. sure, that's fine. but now, recently, thanks to modern developments in crime, i get my access removed, my contacts lost AND my money stolen donated against my will, all in the same breath! speaking from experience, being financially crippled from ALL angles isn't very fun.

on the other side, i've also had rounds where i've just been able to pick other people's (dead & alive) PDAs up and print their money with a single button. this is lame. i want to FEEL like i'm putting effort into my crimes! how am i supposed to get my dopamine rush from 4 seconds~ of prepwork? it's not fun for either party involved.


Possible Solutions:

i don't know how unpopular of an opinion this will end up being, but it's probably down there: i'd personally rather see the PDA ATM feature removed, but i know that's a hard sell. i do genuinely believe it'd be in the overall best interest of the game. of course, barring that, a nice middle-ground i'd settle for is at least adding a PIN system to it, like the normal ATMs. (that comes with it's own set of problems i won't get into here)
please do something at least, it hurts to think about 

[Zamujasa]

since i made the change, i feel like replying with my own reasoning and justifications

1. Physical ATMs & Card Readers are functionally redundant.

(not as big of an issue to me, and from what i've heard, people do enjoy not having to wander the station for the One (1) ATM in aft maints or wherever.)

card readers are arguably obtuse by design, requiring a slight bit of effort to use (around 3 clicks). the upside to using them were that they alleviated the above mentioned ATM problem. with that being said, why would anyone (apart from gimmickers) want to use this system now? they've been left in limbo, simply... existing. it's a shame too, card readers have a lovely looking receipt system, and because of PDA ATMs, new players are almost guaranteed to never see it.

this is wrong -- the PDA ATM feature does not let you buy or redeem lottery tickets or spacebux -- but also intentional.

let me explain. i have occasionally gone moonlighting on other codebases. sometimes i see things other places do that makes the game more interesting/fun in some way, and i occasionally bring that back here.

tg's id cards (the cards themselves, not the pda) allow people the ability to easily withdraw and deposit credits onto your account. in general, PINs don't exist. vending machines just work with your equipped id -- you don't have to log in, and you can't similarly forget to log out. it just works.

what i noticed was that this made people way more likely to use money! and that's what happened here when i added it -- people actually use money now, at least more than they did. it ends up in their bank accounts to be stolen later instead of dropped in a box and forgotten about.

re: the credit transfer devices, that's very much intentional, because... i just don't like them. ever since the rework, they're cumbersome to use. there are a ton of steps involved, everyone has to enter their PIN and the price -- there's a reason i only ever saw one person use it. when i've brought it up, people mention they mostly used it for crime, and the rework (adding a PIN requirement) made them effectively useless for that, too.


at the same time, okay, great. ATMs. you know one other thing that made me make this change? sitting in my spot on Kondaru, next to the captain's office, and seeing multiple people, over many weeks, asking where an ATM was.

you know where the ATM is? right next to them. and that's one of the only ones on the map, even! they're limited in number, cumbersome to use, and out of the way.

previously:
bob wants to sell you something.
you go "cool. how much." 500 credits.
you run all the way to an ATM, pull out your PDA, pull your card out of your PDA, swipe your ID in the ATM, put in your PIN again, even though it autofills and the dialog is literally just there to make you click "okay" again, withdraw the required amount, go back to bob
"here's 500 credits"
bob stashes the credits on their person somewhere.

if you had a credit transfer device, instead you could use that cumbersome thing instead.


currently:
bob wants to sell you something.
you go "cool. how much." 500 credits.
you pull out your pda. you withdraw 500 credits.
"here's 500 credits"
bob deposits it in their pda. neither of you had to interrupt what you were doing.


i just do not find "i have to run to the atm" engaging or exciting roleplay, especially when most people don't know where the atms even are.

2. Theft is Trivially Easy to pull off.

this is my primary concern.

i've been in rounds where people steal my PDA & ID. sure, that's fine. but now, recently, thanks to modern developments in crime, i get my access removed, my contacts lost AND my money stolen donated against my will, all in the same breath! speaking from experience, being financially crippled from ALL angles isn't very fun.

i'm going to stop you right there, because, hold up: you already lost your ID and PDA. they're gone.

if you want another one, you need to go visit someone with access to the ID computer ... and whoever has that will almost certainly have access to the bank records, too, so you could have them either give you some replacement money (since the budget now has a built-in surplus) or figure out who the thief was from the massively-inflated bank account.


if you want to stop someone from stealing your money from your bank account, may i, quite literally and genuinely, suggest withdrawing your cash when your paycheck somes in and stashing it in your box? that way when someone yoinks your pda/card, you still have all your money.

on the other side, i've also had rounds where i've just been able to pick other people's (dead & alive) PDAs up and print their money with a single button. this is lame. i want to FEEL like i'm putting effort into my crimes! how am i supposed to get my dopamine rush from 4 seconds~ of prepwork? it's not fun for either party involved.

currently:
* someone who is dead, or otherwise loses their ID, is vulnerable to having their money stolen

with your proposed change of no longer being able to do this:
* you, uh, can't do it at all.
* ... unless you both manage to get and use the genetics power that reveals their PIN (before they're dead, of course), or get access to the ID/banking computer, in which case you can just edit their bank account to 0 and give yourself money anyway

...and when you steal someone's money, if they're dead... they might not be very happy with you when they get cloned! If you're constantly picking people's corpses for ID, they should get mad when they're cloned or otherwise revived and have no money!

Possible Solutions:

i don't know how unpopular of an opinion this will end up being, but it's probably down there: i'd personally rather see the PDA ATM feature removed, but i know that's a hard sell. i do genuinely believe it'd be in the overall best interest of the game.

i genuinely do not see how making money harder to use improves the game. in fact, having to travel to an atm specifically removes someone from whatever situation they are actively roleplaying in.

[TDHooligan]

i'm certainly for just needing a pin to withdraw money. PDAs are a bit bizarre risk/reward atm purely because they are the only thing that are wholly unprotected.

I don't think that Zamu's case of chasing down a PDA is realistic, nor even likely. if you've died odds are you have a bigger problem than a pda thief.

removing the PDA wallets is a bad take though. physical money's return rocks.

[Zamujasa]

i don't like PINs because for the person who has them -- you -- they're yet another dialog you have to click "yes" on. it serves no purpose, and it literally autofills itself.

for the person who doesn't have them -- anyone else -- they are an impenetrable brick wall that stops any and all crime. the literal only way of getting around it is fucking with their bank records (and if you can do that, you already won the lottery) or a genetics power (in which case you still need to gank their id anyway.)

[TDHooligan]

tbh i think thats more an issue with a lack of ways to get people's PIN. you could probably swap it to a biometric lock and require some sort of harm to be done to steal permissions, which would encourage more than just "your pda is gone. so is your money and all your paychecks forever" say for example a fresh blood sample or something.

idk. a good percentage of the time bank theft is a giant nothingburger for both parties. so when it IS actually disruptive, it's usually because it's interrupting another RP gimmick. so you'll likely just go back to that. having some literal skin in the game sounds like a way more interesting way to take PIN theft. It's also less of a nothingburger if someone has to come stab you because they want to make a withdrawal or something.

unrelated i also think it's *really* stretching disbelief that the PDA printer modules that are able to remotely print out an entire ship's budget from a captain's bank account are also wholly unprotected

[Zamujasa]

... "your pda is gone. so is your money and all your paychecks forever" say for example a fresh blood sample or something.

but, again, consider:

you lost your id.

you cannot access your bank account without your id.

either you:

- beat up the person who stole your id to get it back, in which case you should get your money back while you're at it
- go to the HoP/Captain/etc, who can print you a new card, in which case they can fix your bank account

money being easier to steal is a good thing: keep a closer guard on your id! losing your wallet in real life is a big fucking deal involving calling multiple companies and cancelling cards. with the pin/id, losing your id is annoying until you get a replacement.

unrelated i also think it's *really* stretching disbelief that the PDA printer modules that are able to remotely print out an entire ship's budget from a captain's bank account are also wholly unprotected

if you start pulling in suspension of disbelief then we quickly start to get into a slippery slope of why every station system's authentication is simply a matter of having an RFID card and the most secure form of authentication on the station is a goddamn PIN for a bank account


authenticating a nuke only takes swiping three cards, while withdrawing money requires a card and a password

[Kotlol]

I am going to chime in here since this appears to be a RP problem.

"Credits technically do nothing on a person then to buy stuff you "might want" but never NEED"

Yea you heard me. You do not NEED your credits / money to enjoy a round.It helps, but you need drinks? Ask the bartender, you need food? Ask the chef.

Credits are just another resource for fun and people stealing it is another fun deduction game.
Though I think on the roleplay servers it should be an antagonist thing of doing, not any staff member should steal your PDA and loot you. (Is it Ahelpable?)

So if you get robbed often, just stay alert for antagonists.

But personally I am fine with these things. I normally put my ID in my PDA in my card slot since it was always convient, but with this.. there is a RISK with this convience. So now I may rather have my PDA in my bag and my ID on my slot.
As long as the ID only works with that PDA to withdraw money.. I see no problems.

If it works with any PDA? Yea now it's an easy steal... wich I don't fully agree with.

[Fuppy]

I'm a big fan of this feature since its addition, personally. As for the credit transfer thingies... I mean they weren't used much at all beforehand. If anything it just highlights issues with that system as opposed to making it obsolete. Things people here have already mentioned like it being more lengthy to set up and encourage people to use than its worth. As for the PIN idea I thought the same at first, but I've honestly come around to it just being better not having to deal with a PIN. If that means all my money gets withdrawn by the person who killed me then so be it.

The reality is: before this change people were barely using money for anything and would usually just leave it on the floor somewhere to save an inventory slot as opposed to find an ATM to deposit it. Now people use money for all kinds of little transactions, and catering jobs get way more tips out of it being convenient.

[Emimiyu]

Imo, stealing money should be easier. I do not like how hard to rob people before the PDA update. You have to what? Get AA by breaking inside the captain's locker which is just "too much" for robbing money, might as well rogue the AI, took all of the station money to waste it on whatever trader toys. The only other way are also stupidly hard like... again rogueing the AI or having to roll RNG gene that also USE RNG to get someone's pin. "But they could have just roleplay making someone telling their pin" ah yes, because there is definitely a chance for them to give them your pin, not like they are going to fight back, punch you, or stun you with anything they got in their invenrory. There is also no way to guess someone's pin outside brute force too, unlike safe hacking.

Another adition, I can understand if this complain come from classic where stuff happen, you lost your item a lot. On RP? If you lost your PDA/ID, you are mostly already dead which means antags can loot all of the items from your dead body or someone has a pickpocket gun, but even then it is rare. Before this, there is no reason to steal PDA/ID, even spief won't touch your PDA/ID because people mostly find roleplaying to steal someone's PDA/ID without killing them is too hard. Also, now antag can just rob one person if they need money and probably lesser chance of people rushing captain ID to just drain everyone's ATM, which is more fun to roleplay to shank someone in maint to steal their ATM PDA, instead of silently draining my money out of nowhere with everyone's involved. Heck, if robbing one person money is unfun, imagine if this all happens to many people silently becauee someone just rush captain's ID because that's the only way to get money if you are not in certain job?

Another thing to think about, not all antags have access to bank account, give them a way to get money without, again, having to rush the HoP/Cap access.

[JOELED]

This change has been absolutely amazing for gimmicks and just making money more liquid. I don't really think any of the proposed negatives outweigh the positives. Stealing money is easier now, yeah, but like... I don't think that really matters? I mean, before the change it was nearly impossible to steal peoples money without just doing it invisibly from the bank records which isn't really engaging or fun for either party -- trying to threaten someone to go to an ATM and withdraw their money successfully is such a once in a blue moon situation given that they're in public hallways. I've seen a lot more actual back and forth with antags (gangs or spiefs, usually) trying to take peoples pdas and the whole money printing thing being used as a reasoning for the crew to stand up to the antag instead of just giving them the PDA and getting a new one. Which is nice! It's engaging! Prior to this change, a lot of people just straight up didn't care about their credits at all. Some still don't, but from my experiences it definitely feels like less of them now that people are doing more gimmicks involving them. And not just selling stuff -- bribing people! I've had so much fun bribing people now, when previously that was just not something most people would engage with because they'd have to go and find an atm or just have credits taking up space in your inventory.

I really really do not want a PIN prompt added. They're clunky and just another little pointless time waster of a window, generally (if it's your card then you know the PIN already and just have to click through annoying popup) and would make it basically impossible to mug people again. I don't really see the problem with any of this in terms of the "easy to crime" angle; If they've run off with your ID and PDA you've lost access to your account anyways. There's a LOT of ways you can lose your ID and pda in a round, it's irritating but it's not the end of the world.

[Zamujasa]

a serious question i would propose to anyone posting in this thread: when is the last time you actually used the PIN prompt to input a PIN that wasn't yours, and do you ever think you will do it again

[Mouse]

I just want to know where the credits are coming from.

[Zamujasa]

the same place tickets from the ticket writer app come from, and the same place the second stack of credits comes from when you split one. it's a video game

[Lefinch]

a serious question i would propose to anyone posting in this thread: when is the last time you actually used the PIN prompt to input a PIN that wasn't yours, and do you ever think you will do it again

In the spirit of answering: Twice ever that I remember myself.
edit: and sure, it might come up, but not generally for me personally.

[KikiMofo]

I just want to know where the credits are coming from.

I like to imagine that the pdas have little teleportation devices inside that are locked to only specific objects and the Traitor PDAs have their codes to unlock them so then they can get their gear teleported to them. Simple.