Genetics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[TheOnlyRyan]

This has been there a lot longer than two weeks.
I find it funny that you've been playing geneticist for this long and haven't noticed it. Don't you ever touch the cloner?

Also, if you're not a geneticist and cloning someone, make sure to disable that. Makes the process run 20% faster at the cost of no bonus to the geneticists. This is to ensure they are the ones doing the cloning.

I know... I know... hahaha I KNOW how it looks xD...

I prioritize cloning, I always do.

That's why I had to make a post about it because I clone as much as I can and I've literally never seen that before, I think It might be just because I'm so used to the screen I gloss over it, yeah that sounds better

[BaneOfGiygas]

I think that being less tolerant of the more egregious geneticists might help things out a bit. You know the ones: They never clone anything, insistently demand a monopoly on the station budget, and are as territorial as a rabid bear with about as many social skills. If a geneticist isn't doing their job, the most that's usually done about it is barging into the lab and using the cloner yourself. Maybe try wrenching them away from the consoles for ten seconds to attend to the rotting corpses at their doorstep. If they're still uncooperative, stun them and forcefeed them mutadone, zero out the research budget, kill/kidnap the damn monkeys if you have to. Demote them to a Medical Doctor and prohibit them from accessing the lab again, give them a bunch of non-lethal but annoying/debilitating mutations and confiscate the mutadone. If the geneticists are going to be shit, we can't just let it happen.

[Winklabom]

I honestly have -never- seen a geneticist that refused to clone people because they wanted to focus on research.


Most of the time I being a corpse to genetics, I knock on the window a couple of times and the geneticist opens the door, takes the dead guy, scans him, and starts the cloning cycle.

The rest of the time, the windows have been either destroyed or the geneticists have been blown up, and I can just clone the guy myself (even then, they attempt to clone the guy themselves by telling me to vacate the premises peacefully).


The only reason that they are so fiercely territorial is because of the nature of their workplace and job: genetics is absolutely crucial because it lets people get back into the game as THEMSELVES again with (most of) their own equipment. Genetics is nearly ALWAYS bombed by traitors, wizards, and nuke ops so is it really all that hard to understand why the geneticists tend to be so zealous over access to their lab ?


Give geneticists a break. Only very few of them are jerks with the powers of a lesser demon. Hell, since the stability update, the only power that I see being used every round is Brown Note.

[Pacra]

Moved to Suggestions.

[Paineframe]

I'd say the bigger problem with geneticists is that they never share the cool powers, and rarely attempt to experiment on crew at all. Sure, the PDA scanner is broken now and that sucks quite a bit, but even when it worked, nobody was handing out superfart injectors to the whole station or begging for test subject volunteers.

The Port-a-Gene is a perfect example. It was added in hopes that geneticists would get out more, mingle with the crew, and experiment with people on the spot without having to drag them all the way back to Genetics. Instead, geneticists used them to seal themselves away in the most secluded hiding spot they could think of so that they could grind their way to injectors in complete and utter solitude, not showing themselves in public or interacting with the crew in any way until they've shot themselves up with more genetic powers than the entire cast of X-Men. And even then, they just do it to show off their powers (and murder anyone who crosses them), not to share the awesomeness with others. They demand tens of thousands of credits but it all goes toward giving themselves superpowers and no one else.

Of course, the crew isn't blameless either, since people rarely volunteer for genetics research anyway. But sitting in a genetics pod is boring at the best of times, and if the geneticist is untrustworthy then you're totally at their mercy, so I can see why it's not popular. Right now, there's no incentive for geneticists to unlock powrrs in or give powers to other people, and sitting in the pod waiting for powers with nothing to do is totally and completely not fun. It's a shit situation and incentivizes the current situation of genetics hoarding all the powers for themselves.

[BaneOfGiygas]

Painframe hit the nail on the head, really. The only problem, really, is trying to figuring out what to put in that would encourage this sort of thing without mass rage and a severe deficit of geneticists. Lowering the local monkey population would be a good start, as would making the gene scramblers much more dangerous. You can get an absolutely absurd number of mutations from the monkeys you have available from the get-go, so maybe limiting that would encourage using people instead of monkeys? I dunno, I'm throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks.

[Anticheese]

The last time I let a geneticist experiment on me, he slapped me with a bunch of debilitating penalties and locked me in the scanner. When port-a-genes were a thing, I kept stumbling into geneticists who'd fuck off into the pathology lab to do research. And today I got stabbed by one who thought I was a monster for borging someone instead of giving the corpse to them.

Dead body ain't got rights, and geneticists are terrible.

[TheOnlyRyan]

Painframe hit the nail on the head, really. The only problem, really, is trying to figuring out what to put in that would encourage this sort of thing without mass rage and a severe deficit of geneticists. Lowering the local monkey population would be a good start, as would making the gene scramblers much more dangerous. You can get an absolutely absurd number of mutations from the monkeys you have available from the get-go, so maybe limiting that would encourage using people instead of monkeys? I dunno, I'm throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks.

In my experience the only people who are interested in being tested on are either your partner, or people who literally run to Genetics asking to be tested on.
Only to bug out the second the 1 or 2 powers in their genes have been found and activated, leaving you back at square 1.

I'd also like to point out you gain the ability to research injectors through the amount you scan, lowering monkeys would actually drastically hamper research in my opinion.

I can only imagine running out of med-bay and asking people to come back to Genetics to be stuck in a lockable machine wouldn't really work.

At least it wouldn't work if Genetics stays the way It is now, with the rather slow research and lack of injectors early on.

[Dr_Bee]

Painframe hit the nail on the head, really. The only problem, really, is trying to figuring out what to put in that would encourage this sort of thing without mass rage and a severe deficit of geneticists. Lowering the local monkey population would be a good start, as would making the gene scramblers much more dangerous. You can get an absolutely absurd number of mutations from the monkeys you have available from the get-go, so maybe limiting that would encourage using people instead of monkeys? I dunno, I'm throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Instead of penalizing geneticists why not just make sharing powers easier.

I keep saying this over and over, reduce the cooldown of genetics injectors and the price of them. the stability system prevents power abuse now so there really is no reason for them to be as expensive and time consuming as they are. at least have some sort of upgrade you can research to reduce their cooldown or price.

[FloozyBarge]

Hating geneticists is a meme at this point, but yes. Retool injectors.

[Winklabom]

And today I got stabbed by one who thought I was a monster for borging someone instead of giving the corpse to them.

Dead body ain't got rights, and geneticists are terrible.

That's because being borged is a fate worse than death for most players.



Also, I agree that genetics research is far too expensive and unnecessarily long. The new stability system ensures that not a single man can be all of the X-Men combined, but it also severely hampered people's will to research mutations because of the astronomical price and relatively low reward.

[Paineframe]

Stability doesn't prevent sharing powers with other players, it just prevents a single person (like, say, a geneticist) from loading themselves up with every power in the book.

Personally, I think injectors should be almost impossible to get during a normal round without the participation of at least one other human. I'm sympathetic to geneticists but if you want to incentivize a behavior, gating the cool stuff behind that behavior is worth a shot, especially since attempts to incentivize that behavior by giving the geneticists more cool stuff have consistently and totally backfired. I think it's time to make the shitty behavior harder and less rewarding.

Of course, we also need to make it easier to find experimental subjects. The obvious one is to make being in the genetics scanner less unpleasant, since it is both risky and utterly boring currently. Right now, there are only two common experiences more boring than being in a genetics scanner - being sleepypenned/neurotoxined, or being cloned, both of which render you blind, deaf, and completely unable to move for the duration. That does suggest one potential remedy, though: Geneticists have trouble getting people to climb into a pod and not move for several minutes, there is already a pod in genetics that people will gladly allow themselves to be pulled into despite the fact that it renders them blind, deaf, and immobile for a couple of minutes. So why not make the clobing pod double as a genetics scanner? Not only does it encourage cloning, but it gives a geneticist the opportunity to scan and experiment on everybody they clone, and it gives them captive subjects who are guaranteed to be in the pod for a certain period of time. And as an extra bonus, it allows for more usage of the joke genes, because it's a lot harder to complain about being turned into a fat smelly glowing fire-resistant Swedish dwarf when it was done by the person who brought you back from the dead.

[BaneOfGiygas]

So why not make the clobing pod double as a genetics scanner? Not only does it encourage cloning, but it gives a geneticist the opportunity to scan and experiment on everybody they clone, and it gives them captive subjects who are guaranteed to be in the pod for a certain period of time.

You...do know that the Genetic Analysis Mode on the cloner is a thing that exists, right?

[Paineframe]

So why not make the clobing pod double as a genetics scanner? Not only does it encourage cloning, but it gives a geneticist the opportunity to scan and experiment on everybody they clone, and it gives them captive subjects who are guaranteed to be in the pod for a certain period of time.

You...do know that the Genetic Analysis Mode on the cloner is a thing that exists, right?

I thought all that did was give a bonus to materials regen rate, and existed solely to punish geneticists for letting non-geneticists break in to clone people?

[Anticheese]

And today I got stabbed by one who thought I was a monster for borging someone instead of giving the corpse to them.

Dead body ain't got rights, and geneticists are terrible.

That's because being borged is a fate worse than death for most players.

Bitter borgs are dumb, and living people who get mega salty for me doing my job are incredibly bad.