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.
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.