Economy System Feedback Thread

[iamgoofball]

Bottom post of the previous page:

hopefully someone with the know-how makes the change from id cards to PDAs otherwise we can change ID cards to look like something more

lmao, looking forward to buying Detomax carts en masse and crippling the economy every antag role

Except you just go get a new PDA like you would get a new ID card?

Sure, until I've blown up all your extra PDAs.

[obscolene]

It should be done via PDA and you can swipe the PDA to pay for things.

This is literally no different from the ID mechanically except that people can blow up your PDA and you now have yet another way to lose access to your cash, and PDAs are harder to replace than IDs

I don't care if my shitcode makes things difficult for people, I only care about difficulty if I can use it as an excuse to NOT do something!

[MMMiracles]

hopefully someone with the know-how makes the change from id cards to PDAs otherwise we can change ID cards to look like something more

lmao, looking forward to buying Detomax carts en masse and crippling the economy every antag role

Except you just go get a new PDA like you would get a new ID card?

He's gonna throw those out the airlock too.

I guess to prove the point that as a system on the station, an antag can deliberately sabotage it to hinder/stop it completely. Especially if they're willing to spend 18 of their 20 TC to blow up a whopping 12 PDAs. Then there's also the fact that certain PDA cartridges actually have a higher chance of causing the detomax to fail and lose a charge, so he might not even get the whole 12.

[Mickyan]

If only there was a way to disable incoming messages and not have your PDA blown up

If only there was one, it would completely foil your master plan of not letting assistants get their morning coffee!

[Xeroxemnas]

I'm still confused as to what the economy system does with cargo. Is money able to be converted into cargo points? I saw someone complaining about how easy it was to mass order shit now.

[BeeSting12]

hopefully someone with the know-how makes the change from id cards to PDAs otherwise we can change ID cards to look like something more

lmao, looking forward to buying Detomax carts en masse and crippling the economy every antag role

Except you just go get a new PDA like you would get a new ID card?

Sure, until I've blown up all your extra PDAs.

This is a shitty argument. Besides a single traitor item which is rarely bought anyway, PDAs are just as hard to steal as IDs.

[BeeSting12]

Also re: the space credit/cash issue:

XDTM made a PR turning cash into holochips.

[Grazyn]

I must have missed some important part of the conversation because I don't understand why people are pushing for PDAs to be used for economy instead of IDs

[iamgoofball]

I must have missed some important part of the conversation because I don't understand why people are pushing for PDAs to be used for economy instead of IDs

Their only reason is "something something common sense immersion" but won't explain deeper. Almost like they realized they don't have a reason but don't want to back down.

[Stickymayhem]

The problem with introducing money into the game is that now there's another incentive other than the good of the station to work for. Certain unsavoury characters are just going to abuse this.

Now when you want something done, some sleazy desperate individual is going to slap together whatever garbage they can get away with.

Yeah, this sounds like emergent gameplay. The free market will provide, after all.

Let's take engineering for an example.

You have an engineer and you want them to set up the engine, so you throw in a dollar incentive so he does the work for you and you get a working engine. He literally does the quickest shittiest job with no care for quality and the engine is inevitably going to fail. Now there should be checks and balances here. The Chief Engineer should be checking his work and ensuring it's acceptable. But what about if this engineer is a sycophant and the chief engineer is his friend?

Now that engineer is just going to be putting straight garbage together, the chief engineer is gonna pass off on it and we have shoddy work permanently etched into the station.

And now you've got shoddy work that can down the line be a force of conflict if used by an antagonist or whatever to generate unrest on the station.

It's working as intended.

Read that post more carefully

[wesoda25]

I must have missed some important part of the conversation because I don't understand why people are pushing for PDAs to be used for economy instead of IDs

Their only reason is "something something common sense immersion" but won't explain deeper. Almost like they realized they don't have a reason but don't want to back down.

> Makes PR
> “Hey, about this system you made, we don’t like this, this, and this”
> lmao not my fault I got payed fix the system I designed yourself
> PR to fix system
> lol this is shitty you have no reason and are too far in to back down

[Xeroxemnas]

24/7 feedback loop of autism continutes.

[DemonFiren]

It's an open loop tho

[Nabski]

It needs a spot in the end of round report.

Most money.

[iamgoofball]

I must have missed some important part of the conversation because I don't understand why people are pushing for PDAs to be used for economy instead of IDs

Their only reason is "something something common sense immersion" but won't explain deeper. Almost like they realized they don't have a reason but don't want to back down.

> Makes PR
> “Hey, about this system you made, we don’t like this, this, and this”
> lmao not my fault I got payed fix the system I designed yourself
> PR to fix system
> lol this is shitty you have no reason and are too far in to back down

>Only person PRing is xdtm
>I.like all his PRS

[PKPenguin321]

Was going to purge this thread of all non-responses goof was giving to feedback but there's just too fucking much

Which I should say is a real shame because I want the economy system to be a thing and I want it to be fun not just for me but for everybody but it looks like the issues everybody's taking with it aren't being so much as addressed

[Mickyan]

I think this is a good opportunity to get rid of the waste of space we call art storage and turn it into a small vacant shop for people to set up. Especially on meta/delta they're in high traffic areas and there aren't many other usable spots you can easily build in.
The art supplies can be moved to the library just fine

[Snuffleupagus]

I must have missed some important part of the conversation because I don't understand why people are pushing for PDAs to be used for economy instead of IDs

Their only reason is "something something common sense immersion" but won't explain deeper. Almost like they realized they don't have a reason but don't want to back down.

> Makes PR
> “Hey, about this system you made, we don’t like this, this, and this”
> lmao not my fault I got payed fix the system I designed yourself
> PR to fix system
> lol this is shitty you have no reason and are too far in to back down

>Only person PRing is xdtm
>I.like all his PRS

Most people I know round start ID card in Left hand. PDA in right hand. ID goes in the PDA. PDA goes on the belt. Having to pull your ID card out constantly and insert it into an machine is annoying. It's tedious. Second. It opens you up to be fucked with. You're staring at a god damned screen, meanwhile someone walks up behind you and slips you. Steals both your ID and the money in it. (Seen it happen) This is going to make people in departments completely ignore going to pull money out of an ATM or collecting it, or even using it. This is pretty much what already happens. Incentivizing use of your mechanic by constraining the rest of the way the game functions is not a proper solution. If you're implementing something into a game that requires a game to conform around it you're changing the game. From my understanding as a maintainer your TestPulls and things you're implementing are supposed to revolve AROUND the integrity of the initial game without changing it wholly.

The merchant tables. People are putting this shit right out in the middle of already cramped hallways. No one's going to build them in Dorms. They're a pain in the ass. They also cause congestion.

While the testpull might have merged with Bagil or another server as far as I can tell the merge happened on Sybil two days ago. I don't recall any rounds prior to that where we were earning "money."

The inconvenience of it. Your methodology to fix this is less is more. Take away more things in order to get more people involved. It's a convoluted thought process. Its only going to create a rush for departments where things are already out in the open. Why pay $200 for a medkit when I can just kick the fucking door in and get some patches? I was present in a round where medical care was charged. It was a logjam of people dying and bleeding all over the place at the front entrance. Meanwhile it circumvents specific mechanics and undermines the lawset of something like a Borg or AI. Suddenly you've got medical people refusing service. (Given how little you know about the medical field. Specifically wireless/mobile devices.)

Knowing that you have another department by the balls and exploiting it. This happened in a round where I was a roboticist and we were making fire mechs for mining. I went to Cargo to get Plasteel and it was the station where the ore redemption machine is behind the desk in Cargo and only accessible by Cargo. They wanted $50 per sheet of Plasteel.

In my opinion. The way it's currently set up as free market capitalism your biggest issue the glaring issue is the Nash Equilibrium. It's one thing if everything hits a point where it levels out and EACH department can be just as effective as medical. Part of that is because it's wholly up to the players. Which means you're spending more time playing Economics station than roleplaying your job. What I mean by this and what you can't seem to understand is that industries pay people to set the bar (Equilibrium) in a capitalist economy. There are people in the construction industry toiling over the cost of specific materials and what other companies are doing in order to set a price so that they can maintain just enough demand to facilitate the supply side of things. So the expectation is for Robotics. Or chemistry to watch what Medical is charging every shift and when they CHANGE their prices every shift to undercut them? Further this gets even more complicated when you interject businesses and consumerism. So now you have someone who opens up a stand. Forwards money to someone else to buy up supply. Create an artificial shortage while filling their vendor with a trickle of the items for 40% increase. (These are things that are regulated by the way) so you're creating more work for admins. They now need to draft economy related rules. What player bases are and aren't allowed to do.

Seriously? Your dream for the next phase of SS/13/ was to turn it into Jewstation/13/?

Some positives of the economy: Organized Crime. Go to a department. "Pay me $$$ for protection." department says get fucked. If you're robust enough. Get your gaggle of associates to gang up on the department and proceed to bash shit in. "Next time you'll pay me." Could make for an interesting game mode.

Special items that can only be purchased through the vendor. Not taking already free items and turning them into special items. But actually spending time going through department by department and adding things that can be purchasable that are cool to experience in the game itself.

Paying fines for specific crimes sounds cool too.

There's tons of things you can do to bolster and actually CREATE an economy outside of TAKING things away from players that are ALREADY free.

[teepeepee]

I find jewstation13 fun though, can we ake a poll or something? I bet I'm not alone

[Grazyn]

If someone is hoarding supplies to artificially raise prices on goods, captain/hop can just buy more supplies from cargo with the station funds, or simply nationalize his shop with a security raid.

Those are all IC issues. Let the market regulate itself. Not to mention that rounds are too short for complex economic evolution anyway.

[Zarniwoop]

Were people even asking for this? Do we just merge goofcode because somebody, anybody, bothered to code something?

What is even the point of this? I get constant paychecks, I can just get tools from an autolathe, the money isn't persistent so selling things is pretty much pointless. What am I gonna buy with a hundred thousand credits in the last 5 minutes of the round, since it took basically the whole round to accrue? Buy the station? If people wanted to RP here, we wouldn't be the bottomless pit of norp and meta/powergaming that we all know and love.

Just feels like more half-baked goofcode nobody was asking for but gets pushed on us anyways because, hey, someone coded it. Will goof even maintain the shit? His responses here don't inspire much confidence.

[zxaber]

Well, it did get tons of upboats on github ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But I agree. The system, as is, doesn't grant any real advantages to survival. The only reason to want money is if everyone else wants money, and we're not high enough RP for that to be the case.

[somerandomguy]

Also re: the space credit/cash issue:

XDTM made a PR turning cash into holochips.

Also solves the "why do id cards print money" issue

[Dax Dupont]

All this thread seems to indicate is that we should revert it till goof makes it less shit or that everyone else needs to clean up after goof as per usual.

gooffoam 2.0

[Dr_bee]

All this thread seems to indicate is that we should revert it till goof makes it less shit or that everyone else needs to clean up after goof as per usual.

gooffoam 2.0

I couldnt agree more at this point. There is no point in putting a system in game when the creator of said system wont listen to constructive criticism from users

[Rustledjimm]

I think this is just evidence that you should never let goofball take a code bounty. He will do the minimum effort to get it PR'd and if it's shit he won't give a fuck and will tell everyone to fuck off. He has his money and that's all he wanted.

Goofball is just destroying his own chances of making money from future code bounties with this.

[DemonFiren]

but the tactic worked with headmin candidacy, at least for a few years
so why bother changing?

[Grazyn]

I think this is just evidence that you should never let goofball take a code bounty. He will do the minimum effort to get it PR'd and if it's shit he won't give a fuck and will tell everyone to fuck off. He has his money and that's all he wanted.

Goofball is just destroying his own chances of making money from future code bounties with this.

Goof writes excellent code, he just doesn't like to be stuck on a project for too long, so people get angry because his work feels unpolished. But if you look at the stuff he codes, it's always extremely complex, interesting and peculiar, like dwarfs, guncrafting, pick up animation and so on. I don't think it's fair to accuse him of putting minimum effort into this code, just look at the ancap mode he added inside it and that's just an admin only event thing.

[Dr_bee]

I think this is just evidence that you should never let goofball take a code bounty. He will do the minimum effort to get it PR'd and if it's shit he won't give a fuck and will tell everyone to fuck off. He has his money and that's all he wanted.

Goofball is just destroying his own chances of making money from future code bounties with this.

Goof writes excellent code, he just doesn't like to be stuck on a project for too long, so people get angry because his work feels unpolished. But if you look at the stuff he codes, it's always extremely complex, interesting and peculiar, like dwarfs, guncrafting, pick up animation and so on. I don't think it's fair to accuse him of putting minimum effort into this code, just look at the ancap mode he added inside it and that's just an admin only event thing.

The problem is this is an entirely new system that effects almost every aspect of the game so making it also requires tweaking and maintaining it.

Goof was the worst person to pick to do that job if he dislikes sticking on one project for too long.

Best bet is for someone else to take over for him if he dislikes taking criticism that much.

[Grazyn]

What kind of maintenance though? Let's take vendor prices, they obviously need tweaks, but we can't expect a single coder to fix them all, surely not goof who doesn't even play and consequently can't understand the real value of items

[Scott]

What's the point of it? You're just changing RP/fun based motivation to play and do things in the game with money grubbing. It also won't work if rounds are shorter than a couple of hours, an economy needs to get going to matter.

A sense of pride and accomplishment. See, I'm going to give a meme answer because despite this question being answered all over the place, you aren't reading it and don't actually want one, you just want le epic rebuttal zinger.

As far as I can tell, this only exists because someone paid you to do it. Capitalism was always a terrible idea in tgstation, it just doesn't meld with the play style of the userbase. The end result will be a corrupt station, where everyone is out for themselves doing anything and everything for money and nothing works well. There are real life examples of this.

[iksyp]

As far as I can tell, this only exists because someone paid you to do it. Capitalism was always a terrible idea in tgstation, it just doesn't meld with the play style of the userbase. The end result will be a corrupt station, where everyone is out for themselves doing anything and everything for money and nothing works well. There are real life examples of this.

"there are real life examples of this."
socialism seems to go down this route a lot

also everyone being out for themselves is nothing new, for you newfags we call it bagil

[Xeroxemnas]

It's not like departments worked together without some kind of incentive before the economy thing.

Miners would literally hoard all of the ore for themselves if it didn't mean they couldn't get their cool toys from science.

[Farquaar]

My experience with playing a good round as a traitor Head of Personnel:

- Money didn't really seem to be a problem for me as my salary was quite high. I probably could have bought anything I needed no problem.
- I was a lot more keen on accepting bribes from people who wanted to bypass HoP paperwork
- Prices for items at vendors seemed arbitrary
- What on earth was that department budget for? It just sat in my satchel all shift.
- Holochips/credsticks seem like they would be a more intuitive currency holder than IDs

I'll be sure to give my thoughts and experiences playing other jobs if I have the time.

[DemonFiren]

for you newfags we call it bagil

definitely only for the newfags

[iamgoofball]

when you guys remove ID cards holding your money and shove it into ATMs, it's gonna fail

[DemonFiren]

I see goof's ability to take criticism remains unmatched

[iamgoofball]

hey wow look at that someone actually bothered to explain WHY they want PDAs to handle money other than "common sense"

this still isnt worth my time to implement but hey look, someone actually providing reason to do so

[Stickymayhem]

i am clever here we go

make pda do the money thing for these reasons

1. I want my belt slot back
2. a pda in space can print money an id cant. this makes gameplay sense and makes thievery less rampant. this thievery is still possible but shouldnt occur because of limitations of the engine (pop up windows)
3. you could send your space money to your peeps via pda message wouldnt that be a clever modern solution in this space age
4. I want my belt slot back
5. Now PDAs have a specific value they didnt have before.
6. You can put the ID in the PDA slot now
7. So I can have my belt slot back

[PKPenguin321]

I thought other people already said that in this very thread.

And we should just have tablets instead of PDAs.

personally i prefer PDAs, tablets look and feel so much clunkier

[teepeepee]

in-game irc really needs to be a thing on PDAs if we're not moving over to tablets tbh

[Farquaar]

Alright, so I played a round as curator on Sybil. Here was my experience.

- I wanted to make a tray of muffins/sugar cookies with some glasses of milk, like I usually do to make the library a more comfy place to visit
- I got access from the HoP, made the pastry bases. Had to fork over $30 for a kitchen knife and $30 for a tray because no chef.
- I had to grow some berries and cocoa to spice up the selection. However, I was forced to rely on the botanists because after the tray, knife and first drinking glass I couldn't afford fertilizer or botany gear. Needless to say, the muffins had no berries that day.
- I wanted to fill a few glasses of milk and tea to sit by the tray. I could only afford two glasses because they were prohibitively expensive.
- In the end, I settled for a tray of plain muffins and two glasses of milk.
- Seriously why are drinking glasses so exorbitantly expensive? And why are they $50 at the bar and $30 in the kitchen?

After this whole fiasco I didn't even have enough money to get the tools I needed to renovate the library to make a comfy reading area and custom labelled bookshelves.

My conclusion: Economy is incredibly unfinished at the moment. While it doesn't inconvenience head roles much, it inhibits creativity on part of civilian/service players. And as a service main, I say that this needs to be addressed.

[iamgoofball]

It doesn't care about access, it cares about what job is on the ID. OTHERWISE, vending those is free for service.

[iamgoofball]

Curator is also a civilian btw

[oranges]

why didn't you sell your body to earn some more money?

where's your hustle and grind buddy

[oranges]

as a machine goof, not as erp

[Farquaar]

I know how the system works. I just stated that it's unfinished at the moment and hampers player creativity. It's the little projects that make SS13 fun, and at the moment arbitrary pricing hampers these little efforts to make the station a fun place.

why didn't you sell your body to earn some more money?

where's your hustle and grind buddy

Become the library loan shark
Don't return your book you borrowed? I don't return your kidneys.
Librarians sell assistant organs to stay afloat.

[Grazyn]

You can make glasses for free (at least for now) at the autolathe

[DemonFiren]

in-game irc really needs to be a thing on PDAs if we're not moving over to tablets tbh

back when it was no one ever used it

[BeeSting12]

This weekend, I should have some time to overhaul the prices so it's not stupidly expensive to get shot glasses.

[WarbossLincoln]

It's turning out better than I thought it was going to at first. It's obviously a first draft and there are a lot of issues but they're known and being addressed.

The three biggest issues IMO are:
Item prices too high for basic stuff - This has been talked about a ton, and it sounds like the Bee is going to look into helping with the code for that.
Item prices too low for some stuff - An RCD is only 25$, it should be a lot more.
Lack of stuff to buy - This ties into the second issue. I've played Sec and assistant mostly since this was merged and every round as Sec I end with like 2k$ and nothing to buy.

Good items should cost more and be more accessible. Now anyone can buy items from vending machines if they have the money. Most of those machines should be more accessible and maybe have more stock in them. If they're gated behind restricted access doors it doesn't matter as much that anyone can purchase from them if they have the money. We should update tool storage to also have some department specific vending machines. Like the Engi-Vend and the medical vendor. Couple that with cheaper basic items and much more expensive good items and you'd get a lot more use out of the economy. An RCD should cost like 500$ to a non engineer.


I've found that the player base has been pretty receptive in game so far. There's always loud people who complain a lot but a lot of the players are going with it and it does generate some level of RP if you want it to. I've found that a lot of departments will pay assistants to actually assist(who would have thought). I've made some money collecting strange objects to sell to Science for like 50$ each.

One idea I think would be good is for the HOP's console to be able to send cargo currency to someone's account. This would allow the Captain or HOP to remotely pay someone for a service done for a department, and not have the funds necessarily come from a personal account. For example, lets say someone kills a bunch of space carp and brings back their meat. The chef doesn't make much money, but they could ping the HOP and ask them to pay the person some money directly to their account in exchange for the meat. If Science gets a lot of cargo points from a bomb HOP/Cap could send money to the people in question. The remote nature of the payments also gives the opportunity for lying and fraud, and then getting SEC involved which could be amusing.