cedarbridge wrote:
The only one of these two that matters seriously (I suppose) is heat threats, but those were already fairly devistating. Simple mobs already don't attack incapacitated (sleeping or crit/KO'd) mobs or characters. There's no heroics there except extracting them around the mob (which is probably hostile to the rescuer and is generally more of a threat to the rescuer than bleedout to the primary.
That is my entire point. Mobs attacking a rescuer can very quickly kill them if they are not able to escape, resulting in two dead bodies. That is the entire point, the risk to the rescuer is being increased. In many cases the person being "rescued" is already dead, and it is a corpse retrieval to get them back into the game.
cedarbridge wrote:Players aren't entirely stupid. If the current mode of dragracing to safety doesn't work new methods can prevail.
Stop. Name a method. You don't get to account for emergent gameplay in this sort of design. If you remove or change a big system you need to account for what will replace it. You don't get to ignore that question with "The players will figure it out." That shit leads to stuff like the 3.5 Truenamer.
cedarbridge wrote:You're making an assumption that it will have to enter into some sort of selfish darkage or something. Currently, disaster containment is a secondary concern. Fires are rarely stopped until they're already in full pitch and probably burn themselves out. This is confusing considering we have so many strong tools for putting out those fires. That's because they really aren't a threat currently. You either get caught in the flash and flood, or you get dragraced(or rush yourself) out of the fire. There's no danger of an approaching fire and minimal reason to contain it. Its just going to burn out anyway. What you assume will produce "selfish" play can just as well breed more specialized (and properly geared) rescuing. In any case, you're going out of your way to assume the worst case in player behavior without anything but an assertion.
This is an entirely seperate change. Saying that removing one of the only current ways used to improve the outcome of a fire doesn't automatically mean other ways will be used. And I am not going out of my way to assume worst case behavior, we can model our expectations on existing player behavior. Players rarely, for example, expose themselves to risk to fight a fire because there is no real gain unless the area is critical and fighting a fire requires you to stay in it for extended periods of time due to the fire code, or understanding atmos pretty well, or having some really high end chemist grenade play and interdepartmental co-operation with botany to boot, or access to an RCD and a willingness to create an entirely different and much longer lasting problem. Meanwhile they do expose themselves to risk to help others esacpe a fire because while there is still a noticable risk, you can consistently survive if you know what you are doing and have minimal protections. We understand based on many common reactions to common scenarios that players generally are extremely risk adverse and tend to only undertake actions with guarenteed rates of sucess. We could talk about the alternative to rescuing people if the players had low risk tools to fight fires, and we really should make some, for real, fire fighting is kinda not worth it at all using anything but lazy atmos or expert atmos, but as is this is a moot point here.
cedarbridge wrote:You left this one hanging. Because I believe that a nonsensical item providing an effect one should not expect is silly, that says what about my position on body dragging or space rescues? You're not even making sense. (much like spacewalks with fire suits or expecting to be able to jump into space for extended periods of time without protection and to be totally unaffected by those conditions.) I'm not really sure what the allergy to using tools that actually fit the occasion is. If somebody needs to go to space, they should generally be seeking gear to allow use of space. Complaining that you cannot operate optimally in space without that gear is frankly baffling. Of course not all gear is plentiful, but that's kinda the point. Gear scarcity exists (mostly) for space reasons and to a degree for balance reasons.
The tools to actually engage in a spacewalk are super rare, and generally exist with about a 1:10 ratio on most days but can dive to 1:18 on a big day, meaning a large hole in the station requires a ghetto response if more than 1/10th, maybe, of the station is going to stay in play. Firesuits are deliberately rather common if you know where to find them because it allows players to interact with space using sub-par tools, while still maintaining the obvious utility of space suits, as well as their functionality as something that generally conceals your equipment and role. Because you often times won't have access to the right tools, either due to being denied them or because you can't access them. At the very least a firesuit allows you to leap across a small hole in the station to reach EVA or escape, and at best allows you to save a corpse floating in a bomb site. Saying firesuits helping you in space is retarded says a lot about your ability to think about gameplay because it is probably one of the most designed aspects of the SS13 map, and just writing off a very major and deliberate act of balance as dumb without any justification shows that you really don't think anything through and are limited to simple surface level explorations of the game. The fact it isn't realistic doesn't tie into game balance, realisim is more of something you pay with in exchange for good gameplay rather than a feature of its own. While it is not realistic, it is important, and saying "That is duuuumb" without thinking about why it is the way that it is really says a lot about how you think about this game: In an extremely shallow way. By all means we could talk about the actual gameplay effects of having very minor space protection, but calling something stupid without explaining why at all is migrane inducing. You don't get to call stuff dumb as an argument, you are presumably an adult, so step up your game. Gear scarcity is indeed something designed into the game, but if you actually think that a firesuit serves all the functions a space suit does I suspect you never have been forced to ghetto space walk. The spacesuit is optimal for extended EVA action which allows you to do many interesting things such as EVA break ins, construction, extended rescues using suit sensors, or even just allowing you to cross multiple gaps in the station at once. Without a lot of anti-burn chemicals a fire suit does not serve any of these functions, it is essentially only good for rescuing people who were clumsily spaced and landed near an airlock or crossing minor gaps in space.
cedarbridge wrote:You're making that phrase mean something it never meant. If I jump into space with a jumpsuit on, I'm about as protected (in most cases) as I would be naked. The concept is that people doing dangerous things without using appropriate gear should EXPECT to be inconvenienced. I'd never expect to have a grand time in a fire without fire protection and internals. The same way I'd never expect to function perfectly in space without a suit and internals. "But pulling people inside will be harder!" no shit. Its supposed to be hard. Its space. You are not adequately geared to operate in space. Math.
Your language had a very specific effect, even if you yourself do not realize it. You used hyperbolic language that made something common and interesting seem ridiculous and rare. So I didn't make it something that it wasn't already, I was pointing out what effect the phrase had.
Now here is actually start talking about the actual game, by adressing the fact you think rescuing people from space should be hard. But you do it from a lens of again what you think would maintain maximum realisim rather than actually being good for gameplay. A corpse rescue from space being extremely hard causes problems, as does making any unprotected contact with space super lethal or debilitating. If you ever played on bay you would know what I am talking about. Holes in the station are actually one of the easiest things to create in the game, requiring only a basic toolbox in many areas, forget about bombs, C4, shooting out windows, RCDs, all sorts of things. It is why fire is deliberately more lethal than space, because it is actually harder to cause a large fire rather than depressurize a large area of the station. Small localized depressurizations, therefore, are designed around being somewhere between "A thing that is a problem we need to get on right away" and "Annoying." It takes only 5 clicks to remove all the air from one of the most important hallways in the game, and this is a deliberate mapping choice. It is also fully possible to just run across this hallway because it is meant to be annoying rather than lethal. Even large depressurization is much less lethal than it would be in real life, ZAS shows how much fun realistic highly lethal and inconvinient mass depressuirzation would be. As is we have an oversimplified pressure code that is designed to make the difference between space and an interior tile very contained and local for a lot of reasons. One is that someone being able to open an airlock and drag someone in really only serves to help improve someone's play experience, and another is that it is very easy to just stumble inside a depressurized area while walking about and not realize it until you are 10 tiles in.
This is all starting to get really off topic though, more of an atmos discussion than one about dragging.