What's worse RNG gated content or Difficulty gated content

[Shadowflame909]

Looking at you miners lesser ash drake potions and you toxins anomaly cores

Best form of gating powerful stuff is time gated content. If an antag fails to assassinate me before the hour mark my job should give me antag grade equipment and make it that much more difficult to turn me horizontal. Ala death nettles, Mecha, and virology death coma

Edit: sec should get energy bazookas but I'm not sure what anomaly would fit that

[Rohen_Tahir]

Ala death nettles, Mecha, and virology death coma

If you need an entire hour to get any of those you need to git gud.

[Notgonnabreaktherule]

RNG gated content sucks because shitlords can just get lucky and use them to grief everyone
difficulty gated content is good because it needs actual skill and from my experience skilled players are usually also good faith players (i only play on basil)

[Pandarsenic]

Difficulty is good as long as it's reasonably possible to figure out without consulting the Wiki/codebase directly (e.g. making libital vs. making chloral hydrate vs. making meth)

It's also good to have content that periodically randomized, but skill-solvable (like Lavaland exploration, not like Telescience or Virology)

The closest thing we have to a system that allows people to learn a set of rules of interaction and then apply that knowledge in novel ways to solve problems is Chemistry for Inverse Chems, but even that reduces to "Learn a recipe and write it down after" with little original research (at least here).

Atmospherics only presents or solves three problems:
- Provide air?
- Ruin the station?
- Make a funny gas (which you can only really use to ruin the station)?

Virology is simply "figure out a formula, then fight RNG until the chemicals randomly give you what you want"

Telescience was not reasonably human-solvable so we ended up with the stupid calculators

etc.

[Itseasytosee2me]

(e.g. making libital vs. making chloral hydrate vs. making meth)

I've still not taken the time to memorize the recipes for the basic healing chems ever since cobby chem dropped.
Also, telesci as I knew it wasn't to bad, ever take a trig class?

[cacogen]

When things are balanced around difficulty in this game, they're always aimed at the top x percent of players instead of the average player to stop them using these things to steamroll everyone else. This makes these things unreasonably difficult for most players, which is particularly egregious if it's something that is expected to be done every shift.

When I think of RNG gated content I think of ancient genetics where you had to irradiate certain blocks to get a hexadecimal number between two values in order for a chance at a power or disability manifesting. Some people got really good at it somehow and could get all the powers within the first fifteen minutes, but for me and the people I was always partnered with it was always a dull slog that took 25 to 40 minutes depending on the kindness of the RNG (lag was also a contributor here, come to think of it).

I think gating with difficulty is probably the worst of the two because at least with RNG you can get lucky and get something early. There's always going to be a skill ceiling for different players for different things so gating with difficulty is always going to favour certain players over others.

[Pandarsenic]

When things are balanced around difficulty in this game, they're always aimed at the top x percent of players instead of the average player to stop them using these things to steamroll everyone else. This makes these things unreasonably difficult for most players, which is particularly egregious if it's something that is expected to be done every shift.

Some of this is a poor understanding of skill floors vs. skill ceilings in our code

Part of this is having a bunch of genuine apes who can't meet extremely low skill floors, like completing a human dissection. Are they lazy? Inept? Not guided? I don't know.

How do medics get told they need to complete a human dissection on the pregame morgue corpses other than experience?

[san7890]

-snip-

How do medics get told they need to complete a human dissection on the pregame morgue corpses other than experience?

Being told by someone with experience. It's a sandbox roleplaying game after all. It's unfortunate if there's no-one around to teach them... but I'd like to keep a sliver of sunshine in my heart and hope that at least someone can enjoy teaching other people out of the goodness of their heart to foster and nurture someone new to the job. I did a lot of basic training in atmospherics as a Chief Engineer, where I would spend entire rounds showing them the "floor" as far as basics. I enjoyed doing it because they were always pleasant people and were willing to learn. I hope other people haven't forgotten this fact, and I hope that players still know to teach and be taught.

[Timonk]

Time Gated content is shit because you get stressed tf out in a casual environment that shouldn't be about minmaxing your shit so hard that you can still do your objectives

[Pandarsenic]

-snip-

How do medics get told they need to complete a human dissection on the pregame morgue corpses other than experience?

Being told by someone with experience. It's a sandbox roleplaying game after all. It's unfortunate if there's no-one around to teach them... but I'd like to keep a sliver of sunshine in my heart and hope that at least someone can enjoy teaching other people out of the goodness of their heart to foster and nurture someone new to the job. I did a lot of basic training in atmospherics as a Chief Engineer, where I would spend entire rounds showing them the "floor" as far as basics. I enjoyed doing it because they were always pleasant people and were willing to learn. I hope other people haven't forgotten this fact, and I hope that players still know to teach and be taught.

I'll even teach doctors myself as an AI, as I desperately try to get someone to finish it so I can have a Shell on late night servers, but sometimes it's just agonizingly hard people to listen to you.

But it's true, my favorite rounds these days tend to be introducing someone new to stuff like "How a supermatter setup works and why."

[san7890]

-snip-

I'll even teach doctors myself as an AI, as I desperately try to get someone to finish it so I can have a Shell on late night servers, but sometimes it's just agonizingly hard people to listen to you.

But it's true, my favorite rounds these days tend to be introducing someone new to stuff like "How a supermatter setup works and why."

The college professors (who I tend to respect in high regards) all say the same thing: "Teaching someone is the best way to deepen your own understanding of the subject matter. This is because you must refashion your knowledge into terms that the other person can relate to it in, and that requires you to parse each fundamental concept in an accurate manner. However, you still have to find connections to bridge the gap between your world and their world."

That's why I like helping people learn how to map.

[Turbonerd]

RNG gated content is worse because the task is usually incredibly boring, unengaging and repetitive, so only the most powercreep cringe powergaming griefers will waste their time so they can get their griefing content.

In general I don't like any content you unlock that can be used to buff yourself/others, or assists in hunting antag. Good content is fun content that helps you achieve your job better, such as halon for suppressing fires, or tritium engine to keep the station powered.

[Shadowflame909]

I've noticed a running pattern with atmos mains is that they tend to hate the majority of cool things in the game unless they're atmos

We play two different games. I couldn't do atmos to save my life. (Cant even set up an engine unless its solars)

[blackdav123]

on a side note when does atmos use anything special to fix fires or atmos? backpack extinguisher can solve almost anything and in the event things get bad enough to need a tech the only person capable of causing it is the tech themselves

[Bawhoppennn]

RNG stuff is good
As an IRC quote from Kor in my signature illustrates: <+KorPhaeron> people who don't like rng are not from /tg/ and are likely redditors

[Timonk]

I LOVE RNG
Part of the reason why dwarf fortress is my favourite game
That and the combat since basically everything is RNG in df

[cacogen]

he was wrong, jesus was wrong