/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

Even if the bounties were something else the fact remains that doing bounties is not doing your job, and let's pretend bounties work well. The fact is that that means I would be being paid more when I'm doing my job less. Maybe I have to focus on my job 24/7 because I'm overworked this round. In this case I could probably benefit from money, and I don't get it. The inverse is a round where I have very little, so I get fuckloads of cash I don't need. I don't really think money should be a positive feedback loop.

As people point out, the current system rewards absenteeism and wasting departmental resources. Returning to a wage system with optional bounties would reduce these problems. Adding head of staff control over pay would reward productivity. If someone's dead or absent, why continue to spend the budget on them? Productive employees could receive pay raises or bonuses. Bounties would remain available alternatives for the underpaid.

I don't know if this is bias confirmation, but cargo- or at least on Manuel- has been completely empty (bar miners) as of recently. Most of the time, you get the newbie to play Quartermaster who buys guns because "thats what the youtube mans did". If you're lucky, you'll get the old geezer Cargo Techie who decided to get a little nostalgic, and ask where the bounty consoles are, and like a father telling his son that Santa isn't real, you have to ease the blow into the techie that the cargo bounties were removed. That old geezer usually ends up catatonic or SSD before the 30 minute mark. I remember seeing 3-man cargo tech teams all communicating to each other what bounties they're up to, but I haven't even seen a 3-man cargo tech team ever since the cargo bounty list was gutted. At first I was excited for the bounty cubes because it meant bounties were renewable (which is a step in the right direction) but after a week everyone that I've talked to in cargo has expressed nothing but dismay for the system.

Here is how my shift goes as a Quartermaster:
Buy gloves and belts. Cry because there's no cargo techs to even share the gloves with. Push crates onto shuttle like a dirty peasant because there's no cargo techs. Some random joe schmoe assistant is knocking at the glass door to turn in a bounty cube because they were tricked into thinking they would have fun with the bounty system. After sitting around and just throwing cubes onto the shuttle and sending it back and forth, RPDs are finally researched and I can set up a chute that people can throw their cubes in to send directly to the shuttle's conveyor input. Leave cargo for 5 minutes to look for something to do because I'm bored. Get PDA messaged by the botanist to send the shuttle because I left cargo for 3 minutes and come back to see they're sitting at the desk with the bounty cube, not using the disposal chute I set up specifically to send it to the back. Do nothing for the rest of the shift because I've already done every construction gimmick I can think of.

Bounty cubes should not be the crux of cargo. We should not have to rely on the station doing our job for us. There is no interesting interaction with the bounty cubes. Period. I appreciate the gesture of renewable bounties- but this is not the way to implement them. Add the bounty list back, but tie bounties to departments. Implement departmental budgets Gooder™ by making it so paychecks are tied to how much money is in the departmental budget. Add paychecks back, but do not reward people who are dead by making it so they have to cash out their paycheck at an ATM machine or some other form of bare minimum interaction like accepting your paycheck in your PDA. Add useful and unique items onto the catalog so that people actually buy things. This also expands to vending machines as well.

Hm you raise good points sir

cargo has been a bit of a shell since map roundstart item bloat kicked in when we went multimap

we should probably ditch miner and make minerlas go through cargo and relegate lavaland to xenobotany or something

oranges wrote:cargo has been a bit of a shell since map roundstart item bloat kicked in when we went multimap

we should probably ditch miner and make minerlas go through cargo and relegate lavaland to xenobotany or something

Safari monster capture land.

day 10000000000
bounty cubes are still bad

oranges wrote:cargo has been a bit of a shell since map roundstart item bloat kicked in when we went multimap

we should probably ditch miner and make minerlas go through cargo and relegate lavaland to xenobotany or something

To take the bait, it's interesting because mining is perhaps one of the few examples of the enjoyable grind you say you'd like to see more of in the game. When miners come into cargo it's like they're playing an entirely different game. Rather than opting to treat the job like an anomaly that needs to be destroyed, possibly in part due to players finding it fun, other jobs in the game could learn from it.

Historically some coders have felt resentment towards players for enjoying the game simply because these coders are unhappy while the players are not. This has lead to changes and removals with the ulterior motive of being as abrasive as possible in order to pass on the anger, bitterness and resentment of the coder to the previously happy players. Examples of this include pathologies like Aranclanos, paprika and HG. But I'm sure that cooler heads will prevail here now that you've already forgotten you said this.

remanseptim wrote:day 10000000000
bounty cubes are still bad

I want to remove them but I don't want to step on Arcane's toes and I expect not to be allowed

miners kill bosses for loot and only mine the bare minimum in order to get the gear they need to kill said bosses

and i dont like bounty cubes

day 783573735737737357374626276957609869875689758475673563636
bounty cubes make me feel punishment on par with every religion's version of hell times 99,999,999 every nanosecond

cacogen wrote: To take the bait, it's interesting because mining is perhaps one of the few examples of the enjoyable grind you say you'd like to see more of in the game. When miners come into cargo it's like they're playing an entirely different game. Rather than opting to treat the job like an anomaly that needs to be destroyed, possibly in part due to players finding it fun, other jobs in the game could learn from it.

The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

“mining isnt fun so we are going to make it worse by replacing it with mech mining”

I like mining with the advanced plasma cutter because it's fun, fast and satisfying. The slower forms of mining have always been tedium though.

oranges wrote: The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

I agree that mining has design problems but to say that it's not fun is ridiculous. Shaft miner is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Its slots are usually all filled at roundstart. Players wouldn't choose to play shaft miner as consistently as they do if it wasn't fun to play.

He's saying the mining is boring, not the PvE combat and levelling up and getting full dragons. Which means that it's in the best interests of miners to do as little mining as possible so they can spend their time playing RuneScape. The sign of an excellent miner though is doing that stuff, providing the station with more materials than it could possibly ever use and giving cargo piles of plasma to sell.

remanseptim wrote:day 783573735737737357374626276957609869875689758475673563636
bounty cubes make me feel punishment on par with every religion's version of hell times 99,999,999 every nanosecond

I made the PR. It took too long for what it is. I don't know what the reaction will be, but I can't see why anybody would care.
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/55806

Yenwodyah wrote:

oranges wrote: The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

I agree that mining has design problems but to say that it's not fun is ridiculous. Shaft miner is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Its slots are usually all filled at roundstart. Players wouldn't choose to play shaft miner as consistently as they do if it wasn't fun to play.

They wouldn't choose to do it if it didn't come loaded with all the best gear for pvp

oranges wrote:

Yenwodyah wrote:

oranges wrote: The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

I agree that mining has design problems but to say that it's not fun is ridiculous. Shaft miner is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Its slots are usually all filled at roundstart. Players wouldn't choose to play shaft miner as consistently as they do if it wasn't fun to play.

They wouldn't choose to do it if it didn't come loaded with all the best gear for pvp

Mmmmyes today I will use a kinetic accelerator to deal 1 damage to the security officer.

There wasn’t a rush you could have put a little more thought into the post before pressing send

I think one downgrade of the current bounty system has been no longer having cargo techs running around asking people to fill bounties, which was a pretty good system to push people to cooperate.
It's also been mentioned that one of the biggest annoyances of the system is having to constantly run back and forth to the cargo console which is very inconvenient for a lot of jobs.

If cargo techs could accept and fulfill bounties on behalf of crewmembers I think you'd solve both problem at the same time

1. Cargo tech browses the bounties for every crewmember on the manifest
2. Accept bounty and print bounty slip
3. Find specific crewmember and get them to give you what you need
4. Go to console, insert bounty slip in place of ID and finish bounty, bounty cube gets spawned and crewmember gets paid accordingly

Until reading this thread I had no idea that the bounty macine was lying to me and I was being scalped 90% of any bounties I do. Thats how rarely my bounties actually get sent off unless you break in and manually ship them

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:Until reading this thread I had no idea that the bounty macine was lying to me and I was being scalped 90% of any bounties I do. Thats how rarely my bounties actually get sent off unless you break in and manually ship them

I tried to remove the bounty cubes until I was convinced that the station isn't supposed to be well-designed and that it's supposed to be exploitable by bad faith actors such as antagonists in order to create interesting roleplay situations.

I hate the cubes and think it's sad players are putting in effort like the game asks them to only to get fucked over by shitty design that relies on people with cargo access to do something they don't want to do with no incentive to do so. I still haven't thought of a means for bounty holders to get the cubes to Centcom consistently while still allowing shitters to insert themselves into the chain of custody and steal your money.

SS13 is a game that expects interdepartmental cooperation that doesn't properly incentivise it and the coders just expect reality will align with their expectations because they haven't even bothered to think about the basic principles of game design or human psychology. Operant conditioning. Sounds scary, I know. It's a concept they teach high school psychology students that you can understand using Wikipedia in five minutes. You already understand it anyway you just aren't thinking about your code properly because you're a self-serving tyrant and have zero regard for the people playing it. Here is an example of operant conditioning a lot of us are probably familiar with already: Player see wall-mounted health dispenser ~> neuron activation ~> player enter room to heal ~> Gordan gets knocked out in cutscene and brought to trash compacter. Basic fucking shit. Valve wanted to trick you so they baited the hook with something they knew you'd want. Why should cargo techs send the cubes? Because it's their job? Why is it desirable for them?

Rohen_Tahir wrote:

oranges wrote:

Yenwodyah wrote:

oranges wrote: The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

I agree that mining has design problems but to say that it's not fun is ridiculous. Shaft miner is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Its slots are usually all filled at roundstart. Players wouldn't choose to play shaft miner as consistently as they do if it wasn't fun to play.

They wouldn't choose to do it if it didn't come loaded with all the best gear for pvp

Mmmmyes today I will use a kinetic accelerator to deal 1 damage to the security officer.

embarrassing post

oranges wrote:

Rohen_Tahir wrote:

oranges wrote:

Yenwodyah wrote:

oranges wrote: The idea that mining is "enjoyable" grind is ludicrous, it's an extremely boring job, made only palatable because the rewards are outrageously good for skilled players. It's in the firing line because it's specifically an example of the worst possible type of design. The journey of getting something needs to be as exciting and rewarding as getting the thing.

There is no universe where mining is enjoyable in it's current form, but there are many where validhunting and antag chasing is fun *after* doing the boring mining parts.

Totally broken design.

I agree that mining has design problems but to say that it's not fun is ridiculous. Shaft miner is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Its slots are usually all filled at roundstart. Players wouldn't choose to play shaft miner as consistently as they do if it wasn't fun to play.

They wouldn't choose to do it if it didn't come loaded with all the best gear for pvp

Mmmmyes today I will use a kinetic accelerator to deal 1 damage to the security officer.

embarrassing post

No bubblegum drake rant? Damn.

Coffee is a hell of a drug

Rohen_Tahir wrote:No bubblegum drake rant? Damn.

Too tired, the issues with lavaland are self evident anyway, the kinetic accelerator doing damage on lavaland but not on station is just another facet of it.

Kor's doomed attempt to make lavaland not cheeseable with station weapons leading to the Frankenstein of game design that exists now.

The mech firewall is probably just another doomed approach anyway.

oranges wrote:The mech firewall is probably just another doomed approach anyway.

Please I need the mech firewall. Phazon simps must be btfo.

I guess I don't know enough about it because it seems to me the obvious choice Kor and friends could've made was to make guns do less damage on Lavaland or to megafauna. The crab-17 money tumour has a large amount of armour that makes it take several minutes for the crew to destroy and it seems to me a similar principle could apply to megafauna and certain weapons.

they did that, but then you need to add a weapon that can actually kill the damn things, eg. the kinetic crusher.

Then it's overpowered, so you wack in a weird nerf where it only works in zero gravity or low pressure, then it's abuseed

Flatulent wrote:“mining isnt fun so we are going to make it worse by replacing it with mech mining”

Fighting shit in mechs is fun as fuck but all that fauna needs some pretty drastic damage reductions against mechs first. It's NEARLY there. Only Bubblegum is actually impossible to fight in a mech because he requires such precise movements mechs in their current state (especiay since their refactor since they waste steps apparently) can't do. I think I already know the culprit but that'd have to come with the full transition to lavaland.

I think historically the reason mechs suffered into fauna was because they did their structure damage against mechs. I think that's probably not hard to fix now that I think about it.

NecromancerAnne wrote:

Flatulent wrote:“mining isnt fun so we are going to make it worse by replacing it with mech mining”

Fighting shit in mechs is fun as fuck but all that fauna needs some pretty drastic damage reductions against mechs first. It's NEARLY there. Only Bubblegum is actually impossible to fight in a mech because he requires such precise movements mechs in their current state (especiay since their refactor since they waste steps apparently) can't do. I think I already know the culprit but that'd have to come with the full transition to lavaland.

I think historically the reason mechs suffered into fauna was because they did their structure damage against mechs. I think that's probably not hard to fix now that I think about it.

It really isn't though lol. It's literally like fighting without a mech but with a speed debuff and worse damage