Alrighty, finally. Now we're going somewhere. You addressed my arguments directly (thanks for that), so I'm pretty exited to start. But to recap, let's begin with some ground rules and summaries. Here We Go.
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I. VALIDITY OF THIS DISCUSSION
cedarbridge wrote:Its called stubborness. You were told by a maintainer that the game will not contain major persistent effects or systems like the one you're forging forward about being added. In spite of this you continue to insist that it should happen. That's also been known as "wasting your breath."
First, let's establish the validity of this discussion and set some victory conditions, luckily, most of this is already established by PkPenguins's "How to Properly Use Policy Discussion", so it's not too much work. Here's the link to Policy Discussion rules.
https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 33&t=11057
Specifically, I would like to quote from the first rule written on that link:
PKPenguin321 wrote:Ultimately, the thread ends when some majority of headmins have made a ruling on putting the proposed rule into action or ignoring it.
You know, I hope that I'm not wasting my breath. Still, for the purpose of debate, I'm going to assume that my delusion is correct and that this forum actually makes some sort of difference. The bell has not rung and the jury has not decided. Neither of us has convinced the majority of the admins to sway to one side or the other and we haven't really even discussed most of the pros and cons of IC Printing. It's too early to call it quits, so I'm very inclined to keep this discussion moving. Anyways, if the intent of this discussion is to improve the game, it's best for both of us to be a bit stubborn. We can't just end it on a one-sentence dismissal of each other's ideas and I honestly don't know why you keep insisting that the rest of us just shut up.
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II. OUR POSITIONS
Let's both establish our stances on IC Printing for the purpose of clarification.
1. POSITION 1 - DISABLE IC PRINTING
Cedarbridge, you believe that IC printing should be disabled because IC printing is detrimental to SS13 and its design. You stated that the implementation of IC printing will destroy SS13's identity and lead to its destruction. By implementing this system, SS13 will become quick and simple, which will dumb down the game. This is my interpretation of your argument, feel free to adjust this position and notify me if I am incorrect in this summary.
2. POSITION 2 - ENABLE IC PRINTING
I believe that IC printing is both compliant with SS13's current design and that SS13 has no such identity issue. Disabling IC printing was an easy decision, a quick fix for the game's balance that both reduces its complexity and bloats the game overall with arduous non-depth and non-complexity.
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III. CLARIFICATION
I need clarification on a few of your statements.
1. FALLACY FALLACY
cedarbridge wrote:
Fixed that for you.
I'm not sure if you're saying that I was making a fallacy fallacy or that I was insisting that you were making one. Maybe I was being unclear, I was not claiming that your argument (that IC printing should be disabled) is false due to erroneous support. My assertion was that your support for this claim (IC printing leads to SS13 not being SS13) was unsubstantiated and was, therefore, a slippery slope fallacy and can't be used to support your central claim.
2. WORD OF GOD
I must be misunderstanding something. If a maintainer decides on a decision, we can't ever dispute that decision? Despite the lively discussion by admins and players alike, it all just stops once one specific person speaks? It's not clear to me how this supposed hierarchy actually works, but I'm going to believe for the moment that there's a lot more nuance to this than just "shut up it's over cus captain said so"?
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IV. COUNTERARGUEMENT
1. THE (SELECTIVE) PERSISTENCE OF SS13
cedarbridge wrote:
>even if it is what it is it can still change
Yes, the game changes literally by the hour. What it does not do is change into a different sort of game. A game with major persistent features is not a game of SS13. By definition. I explained why this is before but you forged on head insisting that it is about persistent features because it can become one. Which is itself a logical black hole. Also bringing up satchels like they actually do anything is a non-starter. Poly is literally a joke character NPC with no in-round effect of consequence. The only thing that persists is that poly populates his dialog text from a list of heard words. That's not persistent gameplay. Its a gimmick. Comparing Poly to literally carrying projects between rounds is so far out of the realm of comparable things it actually baffles me to hear it clung to like this.
First, let me make clear what I mean by persistent. I am not talking about a "persistent world".
persistent (adj.) - continuing to exist or endure over a prolonged period.
Then, let's consider SS13.
1a. Things that are non-persistent in Space Station 13: the physical station. Things like items, research, creatures, ect. Stops you from carrying physical items to the next round, except for secret satchels, I guess.
2a. Things that are persistent in Space Station 13: quite literally everything else.
At this point, I think we're just playing a word game with separate definitions. Again, I never insisted that SS13 is persistent because you can carry items from round to round or that the station isn't reset physically. I also never insisted that SS13 can "become" a persistent game. It is already one, by the very definition of the word. The persistence is in knowledge and information, which gets carried over into the next round. THAT is the persistence of SS13. Just because SS13's world resets, doesn't mean that everything has to.
cedarbridge wrote:
In the true sense the map resets to its default state. Any additions or subtractions to the map are reset to their original states. Any items created, moved lost or destroyed are also reset to their original state of being or unbeing. In a true sense there is no meaningful persistence. The game always resets. The players are not lobotomized between rounds but that doesn't make the game itself persistent or give it mechanics that carry from round to round. Chess is not a persistent board game. The game does not continue after it has finished. The peices move back to their original locations before a new game can be played. The players retain their knowledge of how peices move and maybe even remember how they moved them. Chess is not a persistent game.
Well, here's where we run into a tight spot. I disagree with the notion that chess is "not a persistent game". Again, the persistent that you are insisting is the persistent world. Which, I think we all agree, chess doesn't contain. However, again, "the players retain their knowledge of how peices move and maybe even remember how they moved them", so it's pretty persistent, by definition. Also, yeah, again, mechanics don't carry from round to round, because that's a physical thing. And yes, players are not lobotomized. But just because one part of the game is persistent, and another isn't doesn't make the entire game one thing or another. It's all parts. It's not valid to insist because my car's wheels are made of rubber, the entire car is rubber. Much of SS13 carries over to the next round, which means it contains persistence. But it doesn't mean that because SS13 resets that literally everything must reset. SS13 does contain persistence. I've given some examples but I might not have elaborated on them as much as I should have.
2. IC PRINTING DOESN'T VIOLATE SS13'S SELECTIVE PERSISTENCE
cedarbridge wrote:
>people copy lawsets
Custom law boards do not remain on the station for players to find after being used in the round previous. What you mean is "players remember the laws they've used previously or just store them in text files for later copy-paste use. Which is a non-starter because its still not an in-game system or effect that is causing this. Law boards do not persist.
Well, here's the issue then. If copy-pasting laws to the game directly into the AI isn't persistence, then I don't know what is. Let's just say that you scroll up in chat to copy-paste a law. Would you disable copy-pasting from chat? Is chat in-game? If it is, then what makes IC printing so different? If it's not, why aren't we banning this feature? I think the problem is that somehow we encourage people to write down information, but completely prevent people from having a simpler way to do it. IC printing is an abstraction that allows for a more elegant transfer of information than "take a screenshot, open a second monitor, get carpal tunnel" way of doing things. It's in the same way that you wouldn't' need to re-type the law set from scratch.
cedarbridge wrote:
>ratios, toxins mixes
Player knoweldge is not a game mechanic. You've had a hard time getting past the "storing my work between rounds so I can press a "make what I made 10 rounds ago" button and "Oh yeah I remember how to max clonex."
Yeah, I'm having a hard time seeing a reason why we allow outside copying through notepad but not transfer through a polished in-game system. Is it because you think too easy?
3. TWO KINDS OF "EASY"
cedarbridge wrote:
You gave an example of a quality of life feature. That does not make the feature "Good" it makes the game easier for the player by reducing their button presses. QOL features dumb down gameplay and speed it up in equal measure. You've not explained why either of these things are desirable. You've merely asserted that something is "good" because you've said it is "good" and that it "improves the game" in some undefined way. You do that a lot, actually.
cedarbridge wrote:
Wouldn't chess be a better game if all the pieces moved themselves and were also robots? I mean, it only breaks some of the conventions of chess but its probably ok because I like robots and I'm also lazy.
I think this is the actual heart of this debate, this insistence on the game being better when the player follows directions on a screen rather than figuring out problems. The simplicity and elegance of IC printing IS the problem that you see, isn't it?
It seems we have two definitions of "easy": the kind where we dumb down the mechanics of this game, and the kind where we don't have to suffer through long winded-clicking. Complexity and depth are wholly separate from clicking buttons. I don't think that it's lazy for me not to want to press buttons repeatedly every single round with no interesting mechanics. To make a game "hard" would you add 100 more button presses to do something, or actually make the system more complex? Does adding more buttons really make for less "dumb down gameplay"? From this logic, the best way to increase this game's complexity and depth would be to make the UI even worse to make it harder to do absolutely everything. You can see how this type of design is horrible for game design, right? I honestly don't even think you believe in this "inconvenience is good" principle. It doesn't make a game more interesting or fun. It makes it an idle clicker, or a simon says with predefined patterns.
Oh, and by the way, yeah. A chess game played automatically would ruin the game because it would remove all the complexity and depth of the game. Chess is fun because it contains complex systems that require you to think instead of just following a set path. But the way that you would make it hard would be by putting spikes on the pieces instead of increasing the complexity of the game or putting in new systems.
The "easy" that I'm talking about, the "easy" that would help chess is if you could play it on your phone. Or if it recorded the position of chess pieces for future analysis. Here's a hypotetical, if you could play it with holograms so that you won't lose the pieces, wouldn't that make the game more convenient? If these robot chess pieces were controlled by a sensor in your brain, would you say that it's less complex because it's easier to play with? Difficulty through repetition and inconvenience is a pretty terrible practice, when there are so much more intresting ways to play.
4. ACTUAL FIXES TO IC
So, after we eliminate this notion of "button-clicking = complex", we can start looking at real issues with the IC system. I'm not exactly sure if IC robots are actually overpowered or not, but the only real problem I see with IC printing is that it could overpowered robots easily available. There's already multiple proposals about adjusting supply costs, speeds, connecting it to RnD techwebs, and developing drone countermeasures. These are fun, intresting, and mentally involved system that work with the other parts of the game. Instead, we get a sledgehammer fix by disabling the IC printing system on the grounds that inconvenience will reduce op-ness. If someone wanted to make a deathbot, they could still do it. It's the people who want to use this system as a non-antag who are hurt by this knee-jerk reaction. Again, let's face the problem directly.
5. IC PRINTING MAKES SS13 A BETTER GAME BY INCREASING DEPTH AND COMPLEXITY
This game will benefit from the IC Printing system by actually letting the player experience more depth and complexity. Instead of spending the entire round recreating a past design you already made 5 minutes ago (or making a second robot), spend that time to work on a new design. Or, use that time to gather materials, steal guns, meet other departments, or go the bar and show off what you made. You would figure that a social game like SS13 would actually encourage social elements and some sort of cross-department stuff. But of course, we get stuck spending the entire round in RnD. Ironically, removing button clicking allows for more time for the player to actually play the game, who'd have thunk it"?
In the end, if IC Printing turns out to be a horrible system, it's a horrible system. If IC Printing turns out to be a good system, no objections about preserving SS13's sanctity will remove it. Consider the pros and cons of IC Printing as if the game just came into existence with it enabled. We should discuss if it's a better game overall with this addition, not whether it's new or old, whether it was added 12 years ago or just today.