/tg/Station 13

CLF3 on monkeymen for TW spam. Radium spills from janitor. KA with mining explosion over plasma cutter and advanced scanner. You saw it.

Current skill system encourages doing current meta for best skill gain, even if it does not help station. Sometimes people get so good at exploiting it you remove other system involved in exploit (see pile of monkeymen on fire and TW burns multisurgery resulting in multisurgery effective removal, please return it). I propose we remove mechanics defining current meta for best skill gain. Make xp gain constant.

Doing surgery step, applying suture, breaking rock (with any tool please, plasma cutters did nothing wrong), eliminating mess (mop, soap, space cleaner spray) or trash (just place it into disposal bin or collect with trashbag and empty it into bin) are all acts of doing your job. However, if you are rewarded with xp, you naturally would love to repeat those as much as you can. This was especially bad with medbay, where people would create job for self by harming and healing monkeymen. R&D researched experimental surgeries and combat implants? No, you can't ask MD to do those, too busy TWing corpse in case of things going south and legendary skill being necessity to verticalize all the bodies. Can't chat with that MD in bar either. Janitor getting radium and spraying it everywhere to clean it up next second does not make much sense either. So... I propose following:

• Make performing action belonging to skill apply long-term (my initial suggestion is around 3 minutes) status effect specific to skill.
• Having status effect active slowly raises your skill xp. There's nothing you can do to change how fast. You either gain skill or not.
• Repeating action refreshes expiration timer on status effect. Doing action from other skill replaces current status effect with one of that skill to remove jack-of-all-trades meta of repeating actions from each group once a while to gain all skills at once. Maybe after multiple repetitions so minor things like said placement of trash into bin is not punishing for MD.

There. With that, players are free from doing the "current meta thing" for xp farming and can actually do their job at normal pace, not miss out xp gain because they needed short break and be rewarded as long as they don't AFK when there's job to do.

I also believe this will allow easy introduction of skills for things that don't feature do_after() kind of timers. Have those tiding assistants gain hacking skill and enjoy lower chance of electrifying airlock with wirecutters. Chef's food is actually more enjoyable than from said tiding assistant. Engineers do their things faster. Xenobiologist is more accepted by slimes even without mutation toxin shenanigans.

or what if we just remove this system altogether and tie it’s mechanics like faster surgery to department items because skill system by itself brings absolutely nothing into the game

I think it's good when leaving job to someone who's supposed to do it has mechanical advantages. Were not sleepers removed just because people kept walking in with their buddies to handle entire thing of healing them (place buddy into sleeper and tap button)?

Is the idea that it's balanced by the fact it's slow enough that even if you found a way to cheese it in a way that you are constantly under the status effect you still only get like Expert by the 60 min mark?

It'd probably be best as a hybrid, where standard means of acquiring skill are gated by the status effect, and extraordinary ones that require resources or have limited opportunities can be an instant boost.
Less useful skills can be made easier to level as well, like gaming or skateboarding, by either increasing the passive rate or leaving more insta-boost opportunities.

how about this; you have an oversaturation level for skill training where if you gain too much XP in a short time you will gain exponentially less xp, and over time this level will go down again and you'll get normal exp again? Prevents grinding.

I personally don't even like the skill system as an idea at all. In its current state I completely hate it. Doctors spend the first 10 minutes grinding surgery on 6 bodies at once. Someone will probably make a PR (if it hasn't already been done) to remove surgery on multiple people but that's not the problem, the problem is the shitty skill system which discourages interactions between players so players can grind on skills like it's some kind of MMO. I don't think this is something compatible with ss13's round based nature.

the healing skill itself was just a mistake, the other skills literaly dont hurt anyone and are fine.

constantly under the status effect

My idea makes this part extremely easy in a way it does not make it look like cheese. After all, there is a reason doctors used to CLF3 bunch of monkeymen - to actually enjoy said speed boost to heal people. Surprising? I don't think so. I think doctors willing to do occasional surgery / healing / whatever else related to their job (feeding medicine to someone, making such medicine come to mind) should enjoy easy to get speed boost that does not depend on R&D getting experimental / alien tools that's not "legendary in 5 minutes" nonsense either. Some upgrade that will come as long as you actually work.

There should be no "extraordinary" acts. Then you'll have people skipping job to do those. Don't implement that.

Ivuchnu wrote:

constantly under the status effect

My idea makes this part extremely easy in a way it does not make it look like cheese. After all, there is a reason doctors used to CLF3 bunch of monkeymen - to actually enjoy said speed boost to heal people. Surprising? I don't think so. I think doctors willing to do occasional surgery / healing / whatever else related to their job (feeding medicine to someone, making such medicine come to mind) should enjoy easy to get speed boost that does not depend on R&D getting experimental / alien tools that's not "legendary in 5 minutes" nonsense either. Some upgrade that will come as long as you actually work.

There should be no "extraordinary" acts. Then you'll have people skipping job to do those. Don't implement that.

I wanted to allow some variance in the skill distribution during a round, allowing higher skills earlier in unusual circumstances. For example, if dissecting an alien queen gave you a lot of surgery xp, it would be fine if a doctor took time from his job to do it, since it'd be a one-time thing.

The time of each round both lorewise and IRL is such that skills are seemingly vestigal at best, it seems like they were designed to make some depts better at their own job at roundstart and then because people pushed back on that they just ended up as kind of pointless

jannie skill lets you mop super fast at legendary
i can use this to powergame

If jobs are supposed to be better at their tasks it doesnt make sense for everyone to start equal and necessitate busywork just to have advantage

saprasam wrote:jannie skill lets you mop super fast at legendary
i can use this to powergame

or you could use floor buffer or make a janiborg and kill it and drag it around
both of these are literally 5x faster than mopping and you don't have to think about signs or walking on each tile to dry it

confused rock wrote:

saprasam wrote:jannie skill lets you mop super fast at legendary
i can use this to powergame

or you could use floor buffer or make a janiborg and kill it and drag it around
both of these are literally 5x faster than mopping and you don't have to think about signs or walking on each tile to dry it

making people slip is funny tho idiot

Healing skill is terrible. I will have rounds where I'm in medbay doing surgeries for the entire time, and don't think I have never gotten anywhere close to even master.

remove healing skill tyvm

you did this cobol

i would say it was a mistake but it was actually my brother who merged the change, ybboc.

Cobby wrote:i would say it was a mistake but it was actually my brother who merged the change, ybboc.

is ybboc straight

Remove healing skill - lol.
I'd love to see lazy as fuck CLF3 monkey pile fix reverted, since everywhere else do_after stuff does not block new actions, so stuff like weldering three walls at once was natural and seen everywhere. Parallelized similar surgeries did nothing wrong and kept skill ceiling a bit higher where it comes to player clicking spessmen with scalpel.