[NEW POLL] What is bad about "GoonChem"?

[Deantwo]

With the recent changes to chemistry, there are many people that say it should be reverted.
BUT what should be reverted?

First of all, I don't know anything about GoonStation, I have only played /TG/Station.
I enjoy the chemisty in SS13 as a whole because it is static, non-random, and easy to learn and be helpful to others.

I started playing again after a break from SS13 just before "GoonChem" was added.
To me the chemisty changes has made chemisty simpler, there are fewer chemicals that do the same thing, and there is no "fix it all" drug.

The addition of patches may not be huge, they work almost the same as pills except for a few chemicals.
But the still feel like they added something, even though they may still need something to make them more unique.

The only thing that I still think is out of place is the ChemHeaters and reagent temperature system, but I have an idea about how to change those that I will be testing out here soon I hope.

---

Anyway, to the point! The poll:

Since so many changes has been made to chemisty lately, it is hard to tell the good from the bad.
So in this poll, rather than simple ask if you like it or hate it, I'll ask this; What do you hate most about it?

Remember, nothing is final, if one little part isn't working. Then we can fix it with out wasting all the work we have already been doing.

[oranges]

I like all of it

[The Other Sticky]

I like none of it.

[Deantwo]

I like all of it

Like i wrote in my opening post.
It is only the ChemHeater that I find broken.
But I have an idea to make them give more sense and use.

[lumipharon]

It's not a case of 'one part is not good'. It's a case of, goon chem is completely and utterly different from tg chem, and dramatically effects all gameplay, because chemistry is the backbon of medbay (ESPECIALLY with goonchem).

It's like going from playing one game to another, it's a completely different thing, which is why many people are saying revert.

The goonchem has lots of interest ideas and chemicals, but goonstation is different from tgstation at a fairly fundamental level, so tacking their systems onto our server simply doesn't work.
That said, there is lots of ideas in goonchem that canbe used to IMPROVE our chem system, without simply scrapping it.

[Ikarrus]

I just find it terribly unintuitive. Oldchem was at least designed in such a way that a casual player would be able to easily identify what does what on a basic level.

In newchem, the brute and burn patches look identical, and anti-toxin and stabilizer chems are very sporadically labelled, if at all.

It's fine if the more powerful stuff remains more technical and complex, but basic first aid should be fairly simple to read and understand.

[MMMiracles]

I'd rather wait for an actual medical overhaul to be done before reverting goonchem because as it stands, trek chems were boring as fuck and I can't see how people enjoyed it.

And to people who complain about names being confusing, they're about as confusing as trek chem was. Bicardine = Stypic Powder, Silver Sulf = Kelotine/Dermaline. Charcoal = Anti-toxins.

Is it really that hard to remember?

[Ikarrus]

I'm talking about basic level first aid. Bruise packs and ointments were easily identifiable at a glance. The new patches look identical to each other and other patches chemistry produces.

[Alex Crimson]

Bruise Packs and Ointment have nothing to do with Goonchem though. They are still in the game, its just that Goofball, for whatever reason, felt the need to remove them from medkits. Its not a big deal to just put them back, which is what ive been requesting for a while now.

[Ikarrus]

To be honest I wasn't fond of instant-healing bruise packs and ointment. If their replacements simply used their sprites/similar names it would be fine.

[Alex Crimson]

To be honest I wasn't fond of instant-healing bruise packs and ointment. If their replacements simply used their sprites/similar names it would be fine.

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/7239

If it ever gets merged.

[Deantwo]

Bruise Packs and Ointment have nothing to do with Goonchem though. They are still in the game, its just that Goofball, for whatever reason, felt the need to remove them from medkits. Its not a big deal to just put them back, which is what ive been requesting for a while now.

Yeah forgot to add that to the poll.
But that would be an easy thing to change yeah.

[Babin]

In a sentence: If I wanted goonchem, I'd play goonstation, not /tg/station.

Chemheaters are mostly a non-issue to me. Most heated chems aren't terribly complex to begin with. If we had to heat things for, say, Oculine (which has a RIDICULOUS recipe for something so situationally narrow), then it would get out of hand. Heaters are just another step, and steps are fine as long as there aren't too many.

Bugs. Let's get this out of the way: Bugs are temporary. Recipes were broken and uncraftable, they were be fixed. Charcoal bottles were broken, they were fixed. Epipen stuns were OP, that was fixed. Oculine is ridiculous to make, it's being fixed. Bugs will come and go like anything. They're also a non-issue to me for this reason.

I hear some people say that the goal was to make med doctors more involved in their job. I don't know whether or not this WAS the goal, but it doesn't do that at all. Doctors applied bruise packs before, they apply patches now. They used cryo before, they use a (slightly weaker) cryo now. Whatever.

Too many bloated, subpar chems. Salicyclic acid is a perfect example: Weak, highly situational, overdose potential, takes longer to mix than styptic. There's no reason to make it. People spammed tricord before, now they just spam styptic and silversulf. No matter what degree you increase the complexity to, there will always be a set of "go-to" chems which are more accessible than others. Even the robust chemists who make miraculous get-out-of-crit-fast pills will default to basic treatment most of the time.

Traitor chemists have also received a lot of buffs. I won't go into the exact mixes involved, but here are some examples:
tgchem: five second death pills (crits in three seconds, kills in five seconds), all reagents are in chemistry or medbay
goonchem: five second death pills which mute the victim so they can't call for medical or security, all reagents are in chemistry

The whole "change this thing to the way goonchem has it because it's goonchem" thought process is an alarming one. A while back there was a pull request to change lexorin from its current oxydamage effect into its goonchem version. If this were done for balance? Fine, lexorin is pretty strong and you can make a point to weaken it. If this were done because "goonchem does it that way, we're doing it that way" then I take issue with that. /tg/ is not goon and goon is not /tg/.

[soulgamer]

I wouldn't mind goonchem if it weren't for a few things.

1) How ineffective basic first aid medications are
If you liked or didn't like the way that oldchem worked at least you had the option to use first aid. Now if someone is in red health there is no reason to even get out your medkit if you want to have any left. Seriously one person will eat up an entire first aid kit. Its better resource management to just shove them in cryo and let that fix them.

2)The addiction/overdose bullshit
Yes these things exist in real life. No these things do not need to exist in SS13. They add nothing but an experience wall between new players and medbay. Hell I used to play medic all the time but I really don't feel like having to memorize a couple of dozen medicines and how much of each I can give a patient before its dangerous and blah blah blah. You might say "But soulgamer oldchem had no drawbacks! It was too easy!". Yeah it was. Most medics shoved people in a sleeper or cryo and BAM! done. Now medics shove someone in a sleeper or cryo and BAM! five minutes later they are done healing. All you added was a wall of tedium to the bullshit we already had.

3)The naming scheme is terrible
I am not alone in this opinion.

4)The retardedly complicated recipes
Not difficult just time consuming and complicated. The very definition of artificial difficulty.

The worst part is how this entire thing was done without any regard for balance. Instead of laying out what these changes would do and letting coders or the playerbase look at them and point out where things dont work or work too well you just shoved it on us with the line "WE CAN BALANCE IT LATER!". That is just horribly lazy and shows no respect to the players who have to deal with the fucking system while we wait for it to get fixed. "YOU CANT REVERT IT UNTIL THE FIXES ARE DONE GOING UP!" Fuck you why dont we revert it until the damn thing is complete rather than having to deal with a half finished rush job.

Oh and offering to add old chems back but with heavy nerfs is nothing but insulting.

[paprika]

>no 'overdosing' option in the poll

cmon dean

[cedarbridge]

I'm pretty ok with overdosing being left in. I always found it retarded that you could literally just stuff your face with an infinite amount of Bicard/Tricord/Dex and become nigh immortal with no downsides.

[Deantwo]

>no 'overdosing' option in the poll

cmon dean

Yeah, I made the poll at 1am, in bed, on my phone.
I know there are things I didn't get to ask. But it's still more constrictive than any other poll I have seen.

[420weedscopes]

overdosing, if only because it keeps happening with e-pens. rest of it is fine.

[Deantwo]

overdosing, if only because it keeps happening with e-pens. rest of it is fine.

Yeah, maybe another thing can be done to prevent people from just pumping their body full of epinephrine.
But then we need to figure out what that better solution is.

Anyway, I just changed the poll!
Everyone that voted before, please vote again, be as specific as you can be.
Because the first poll mainly seemed to suggest that people don't like the name changes, and that seems like a silly issue to me.
Let's fix/revert the few things that are horrible, and improve it all!

PS: Wish the "Total votes" counter counted the number of voters instead.

[Vekter]

Still waitin' on that rebalance before I really get a good feel for how it works.

[Deantwo]

Actually, if someone can explain what the "Addiction mechanic" actually is, I would be grateful.
That is one of the features that I know nothing about in the recent changes.

[Ikarrus]

Man, these poll options are so vague I don't want my vote being taken the wrong way.

Nevertheless, I've already made my opinion known in my posts.

[Steelpoint]

Jesus Christ this poll.

[danno]

Truly awful poll

[Deantwo]

Man, these poll options are so vague I don't want my vote being taken the wrong way.

Jesus Christ this poll.

Truly awful poll

Your all welcome to suggest better options.
Or at the very least explain what is so bad about it.

Don't know how much use this poll will be in the end, but if nothing else it will give coders an idea about what areas to fix first.
Hell maybe even the areas that I will end up working on next.

[Ikarrus]

For something like this, you can't possibly make enough poll options to cover everything. It's just going to be taken the wrong way/discarded for not providing any valuable data.

[allura]

can we lock this

[Deantwo]

can we lock this

I find it funny you say that after reading this:
https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2660

But yeah, maybe I did this poll most of all to find out why people complain about the current chemistry so much.
It's hard to fix something when the problem is simply what people yell the loudest about.

[Pennwick]

Just a quick explanation of addiction for DeanTwo. A few chems mostly, drugs and Morphine I believe, have overdose thresholds. If you have that amount in your bloodstream you get addicted. If you inject the EXACT amount I'm not sure what happens looking at the code it might be a 50/50 shot. But once you're addicted and the drug is out of your system, either via metabolism or purging chems, you start level 1 addiction. Each 5 ticks something bad happens depending on the chem. For morphine I think its a small chance to drop something and jitteriness. 50 ticks later and you move to stage 2 where the effects are worse. And so on until stage 4 where they can be downright lethal for some harder drugs. If you can survive 10 cycles (50 ticks) at stage 4 you're cured of your addiction. Personally I think its a decent system that could be improved on but a lot of the addiction levels seem to be all over the place and probably should be looked at.

[dezzmont]

It is nice you are trying to collect detailed feedback by a poll but having a million options actually makes a poll worse, not better, and with the tech we have will either heavily dilute the value of someone's opinion, because if we don't group like options together then people with slightly different opinions seem less vocal as a whole on a similar issue, or heavily overinflate them, because grouping like issues gives people multiple votes on that issue.

You really don't need a poll for this sort of thing, you need a survey, which feedback essentially is and has been. Besides, I think the fact that this poll needed this many options to demonstrate what people thought was wrong with it is more telling than the actual results of the poll. There is so much wrong going on here and you already have good information on what people dislike, the question is if you are willing to act on it or are going to try to connect more data you really don't need.

[Deantwo]

Just a quick explanation of addiction for Deantwo.

Thanks! Sounds interesting, but if it isn't giving enough information about what is going on to the user I can indeed see why some may dislike it.

It is nice you are trying to collect detailed feedback by a poll but having a million options actually makes a poll worse, not better, and with the tech we have will either heavily dilute the value of someone's opinion, because if we don't group like options together then people with slightly different opinions seem less vocal as a whole on a similar issue, or heavily overinflate them, because grouping like issues gives people multiple votes on that issue.

Well, the poll is setup so you can vote on everything if you so please. It is in no way ideal, but it should show what the most people is having issue with at least. And the amount of post verses votes suggest that most find the options somewhat acceptable.

You really don't need a poll for this sort of thing, you need a survey, which feedback essentially is and has been.

I agree that the poll isn't the best idea, but I have no clue on how to start a survey. Reading the constructive posts here does help a lot more yeah, but that means we don't get feedback from the people that can't write constructive posts.

I seem to be flipping a little between saying that the poll is just for my interest and suggesting that it is important.
Most of all I just don't want to waste all the chemistry changes, and there for see what is salvageable and what has to be scraped.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Three polls
Unanimous results
The Absent One seizes control and says "nope"
RIP

[Steelpoint]

Is it me or did the poll get even worse.

Just like Goonchem.

[TechnoAlchemist]

I think that the best compromise we could do would be to bring back trekchem healing chemicals(and hyperzine and the like), but add overdose/addiction mechanics so we don't have people with 1000u in their systems.

I do have my gripes about the new chem system but pyrotechnics has no real issues and is fairly in depth which I think is great.

[cedarbridge]

I voted for checkbox.

[iamgoofball]

Why the fuck did you guys revive this thread when you could of just posted in the new one?

And for fucks sake demonfiren quit with the stupid retarded memes, and stop breaking forum rules against necroposting. You too, Doris, just cause you're an "esteemed oldfag" doesn't mean you get to ignore rules

[iamgoofball]

Is it me or did the poll get even worse.

Just like Goonchem.

For fucks sake go play on hippie or somewhere like that. It doesn't have goonchem. Just go, you'd be happier there then you are here, complaining about everything. All the cool players that quit because of goonchem are there too. You obviously don't like it here, so why do you stay?

[ThatSlyFox]

I think the balance is the biggest thing for me. So unbalanced and patches are so powerful.

I think you hated tricord goofball? Well sure the heal all slow chem is gone but it literally takes chemist 5 minutes to make enough chems to heal the entire station instantly with patches. Also last I checked, sleepers were pointless.

Also the fact that you have been working on this for months and it still isn't complete. I doubt it ever will be. No offense goofball.

[oranges]

there's no going back now it is done, accept it move on, make a new life, be teh change you want to see

[MrStonedOne]

there's no going back now it is done, accept it move on, make a new life, be teh change you want to see