Most secret chems shouldn't be secret.

[fosstar]

i'm gonna play the devil's advocate here for a moment and say that i'm in favor of secret recipes!
why, you might ask? well, i'm gonna break out the metaphor machine and tell you. there's this tiny, obscure game called Furi, where you play as a ninja who's trying to escape from a superprison. the game is set up so you fight a boss, and then fight another boss. most of the fun i have in that game is throwing myself at a boss over and over and over again until it all clicks and i can kill it! that's what happens with secret recipes, i think. you try for a few rounds to make this chemical and when it finally clicks and you make it, you get the double satisfaction bomb of having access to a cool chemical and knowing that it all happened because you threw yourself at it until it worked. that feeling of satisfaction is why i say that we shouldn't declassify any secret chemicals.

If that feeling of satisfaction is important to you there are ways of preserving it like keeping secret chem recipes under spoilers on the wiki. And i'm not saying we should reveal every secret chem recipe, i'm in favor of nitro staying secret, for example.

oh shoot, i also didnt cover that a lot of them are secret for a reason. rotting can make you uncloneable, royal initro gibs your body, so does unstable hootagen, so does feather fluid, so does dragon's breath, etc. what ones don't make you nearly impossible to kill or make a body uncloneable have some effect that you'd want to get after earning it, right? i don't think ageinium would be nearly as fun if every round there were people running around with foghorn screams or anything. just so many of those chems can ruin someone's enjoyment of a round in tons of ways, and i think the admins do take that into consideration when making a chemical secret.

I understand where you're coming from however many chems that aren't secret can make your round hell, Black Powder mixed with clf3 can gib people done correctly, a 100 unit pill of Neurotoxin can throw you out of the round for a crippingly long amount of time. Lots of chems can fuck you up worse then secret chems, plus if unclonable is what we're going for there are many airlocks on the station that can act as a "you'll never find the body" airlock, plus the gibber and crusher.