give us back our paychecks

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remanseptim
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by remanseptim » #581843

Bottom post of the previous page:

charging people for services is an excellent way to get lynched and have your shit stolen because anybody can do anything provided they have the tools
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by legality » #581894

Arcanemusic wrote:snip
i mean maybe i'll change my mind later and issue a giant takedown but i don't feel like responding to this wall of text

but i just wanted to let you know you're wrong about a lot of it

maybe i will dm you later and tell you how i think you're wrong in a format that takes less out of me

edit: snipped me being snippy
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by NecromancerAnne » #581938

So I've had some time to process my impressions of the current state of economy. Bear with me, there is a lot to be said, most of it isn't good, but I'm sticking with being critical about this.

Cargo being a hard requirement to participate in the money making process, it falls apart if they don't exist and adversarial at worst
Spoiler:
What I mean by this is that since cargo, as a department, must both exist and be willing to play ball to even allow you to be able to make money. This can be despite going out of your way to do the bounty you've been given to produce a bounty cube, because you yourself cannot sell that cube. There are several ways in which you can get burnt in the process without doing a single thing wrong and without you even knowing why or how. Most of it is incompetence, a smaller level is malice, and a large amount is confusion about how the system works.

Stuff gets lost in the mess that is cargo, and the fact that cargo is a hard requirement in this process only serves to make this more confusing and more difficult than necessary compared to just directly paying out to the person who cashed in the bounty.

Which means unless you have cargo access, you also probably need to tide into cargo, which utterly shuts down the entire economy process dead in it's tracks, since you've incenitivzed breaking and entering to even participate in the process that now everyone is mandatorily subject too, whether they want to be or not. And not one person ever wants to be forced into that position unless they're already banking on getting killed for it, or looking to fight people to the death anyway, so about 90% of our player base bows out here, and this is a feature set to die before it's begun.
There isn't enough player obtainable information as to what the fuck is going on with the bounty system, the payment system and cargo income and export
Spoiler:
There is zero feedback for when money comes in, when bounty cubes are shipped out, what your cut of the money is or what cargoes cut was.

It requires tools that anyone who isn't in cargo cannot utilize to work out what a specific bounty cube is worth, since export scanners aren't printable and they require shuttle console linkage to use in the first place. You also have no identification methods for bounty cubes to determine who the cube who pay out too and what the completed bounty was that generated the cube.

Additionally, with no records kept for any of this, you can't even reliably identify at what point the system failed. Right now, there is a bug with being able to redirect where bounty cube money goes when you barcode an object the cube is contained within. You can't identify where that money went accidentally, so from a player standpoint you can't possible work out that there was a bug happening and how this exploit is occurring. Obviously, this is an exploit, but it is one made worse but the complete lack of player feedback and information that can be obtained.

Hell, even just a console or cargo app that tells you what has been sold and where the money went would be fantastic just for needless recordkeeping purposes in a round.
Since job specific equipment is no longer free, many jobs now have round life expectancies unless they're already coasting by on infinite materials and supplies, or are unevenly punished for acquiring their job supplies.
Spoiler:
The jobs most deeply affected by this process include several service jobs like janitor, botanist and partially chef and bartender, but also consequently clowns, mimes and chaplains simply because their pay are some of the lowest and they have no goods production to rely upon. These jobs make frequent purchases out of vendors as part of their role, and they all should be able to acquire money as a direct result. But since money production is hardlocked behind bounties and also cargo finishing the transaction, they often cannot without cargo being involved. These are the jobs that should see the highest amount of money turnover and production, since they're also tied into goods production. But instead, they get chumped the hardest and paid the least for their investments.

Every purchase in a vendor for job equipment should as a result see some return on the investment if the person who purchased that item used it correctly and intelligently, if they're expected to participate in the system that requires them to produce goods. But that's the problem

For the most part, some roles don't require as many vending purchases as other roles to perform their own role, since many of their job critical items aren't in vendors. Security, cargo, medical (to a point) and most science roles do not make any or many vendor purchases unless it's a single fairly decent purchase for convenience. Mining has a completely SEPARATE system for vendors as well, making their productivity completely independent from the economy to begin with. Otherwise, they operate normally with their beginning equipment and supplies.

Even here, there are inequalities. If I got to buy a piece of medical equipment, like a hypo, from a medical vendor as a doctor, I'm obviously going to use this in select situations in an emergency, but it's an investment in that it's going to ensure someone is alive. But I'll need to keep making those purchases unless I take the time to fashion my own goods and own supplies, which sometimes is impossible given there are several other doctors competing for the same equipment, and I need to also be doing my job at the same time. The obvious expense here is time, but my time is never going to be spent on bounties, so I'll never participate in that system to begin with, and so I'll just simply find any method to get around being involved in the feature at all. Essentially, I'm not interacting with it unless I literally rob my patients to pay for their medical treatment.

Meanwhile, when I purchase handcuffs out of the security vendor, those cuffs are going to see repeat use constantly over the course of the entire round. There is no upper limit on that investment unless they get destroyed (entirely possible, lings can do that), they get lost (sometimes you just lose cuffs), or I hand them off to someone else (usually in prisoner transfer). But it's a considerably more sound investment as a result. However, I'm still being charged to arrest someone without any pay in return. The only way to get money out of this is if I rob prisoners.

Did you look at the ANCAP mode and think 'Okay but what if this was actually how our economy worked' and didn't get the joke?

At the same time, as a botanist, my purchase of a seed pack has potentially a lot of value if approached properly, to the point I can multiply that investment hundred fold and never have to go back to the vendor again for that product, because I make seeds off the plants I grow and I make nutrients from that. It produced it's own value several fold, so long as nothing goes wrong, but given we have a 35 purchase overhead, we likely aren't going to see any negative impact from that purchase or loss from a failure unless we just allow all our plants to die one after the other. I've made a single purchase to then never be subject to the system again for that purchase, unlike the other two roles, who may need to make further purchases. I still never see any credit value out of this without cargo, but I am still in the best position to produce bounties since my goods have infinite returns. The only limit is time.

With the system pricing every vendor item to the intended user for that vendor at what would be 35 purchases from their starting payout, some roles pay significantly more for their goods while getting much less investment on them than others, and it also softlocks some roles from being able to move into those roles because of their starting payouts. They can't even then go to make up the difference with bounties, because the system falls flat on it's fucking face without that initial investment or just being impossible to produce credits from.

And if we really wanna talk about roles that completely sidestep this problem in either an elegant or unelegant fashion, miners can directly turn their mining points into credits, one for one, so they can basically ignore this entire process completely and STILL have a foot in the race.
The bounty system as it stands needs a complete rework for it to ever be functional.
Spoiler:
Most if not all the bounties in the current list were copy-pasted from the previous system. But these were bounties that were either already a tall order for a single department to go out of it's way to acquire, or were static and non-renewable goods that came at some steep cost individually for shipping them out.

Very few of the bounties are produced goods. But not every role is even expected to produce goods in the first place. So it made sense that cargo was given a huge list to which they could approach at their leisure. Some bounties just seemed unreasonable, but since they paid the most, made them lucrative for pursuing them. It worked for them, since often they also got very basic bounties to do in the meantime and to help divvy duties among techs.

Let's use botany as our example again. Most of their bounties have you produce various plants and ship them out. That makes perfect sense, you're doing this as part of your job, it's a sink for all your produce. As is most of the service bounties. Make plant, plant goes into good vacuum, money come out. It's a basic as fuck system but it works until you get to the bounty cube bit. It's a way to move all these goods being produced into something you can do with them other than make nutrients for the biogen.

However, then we get to security, who are asked to; produce handcuffs (that's cargo's job since they have the autolathe), produce license plates (they don't make these, prisoners do, so that's ANOTHER assumed member of the station doing their job for them or some security officer having to make license plates to finish a bounty which is just absurd and not what they do as part of their job), or literally ship the unique and limited riot shotguns for 5k to which they'll see only 500 credits. This bounty might as well not exist, and even if the system was changed to produce and manufactured goods, the only one that security can produce reliably is stuff locked behind technodes that often don't get touched unless science has points to kill, like weapons and basic security items.

Some roles have even less productiveness than security, like the clown, who is a goddamn performer and by their very nature will not be producing any tangible goods whatsoever. Why the FUCK is the clown at the mercy of this system? Nobody is going to pay him for his job, he's just a hobo in a clown suit begging for scraps.
One bounty at a time, with the chance of rerolling the same bounty again, can cause you to get softlocked out of the system for some time.
Spoiler:
If I slap in the ID, and my bounty tells me that I need to acquire some product that I'll never see in the entire round because there is literally no way I am able to reliably acquire that item without killing the man who possesses guaranteed or it just isn't something I will ever see because it's so outrageouly a rip-off to be insulting that the system asks me to sell it at my own expense for the rest of the round, I'm rerolling that bounty. If I get that bounty AGAIN, then that just prolongs the problem even longer. Especially if it keeps turning up as the round goes on.

I'm not making money for that entire time or even aware of what I should be doing in the meantime to get ready for some other bounty. The fact you don't even have a list or options for what bounty to work towards at a given time means you can be left with nothing to do that entire time.

The beauty of the previous system was that you could do the bounties in a given round that were reasonable to acquire first, and then get to the ones that take some time to do later when they become relevant.

This is especially true for roboticists, which I'll now talk about.
Roboticists are almost always going to be producing the bounties that matter, and no other role need apply.
Spoiler:
Roboticist is my main role, and they are grossly overvalued for the bounties they get for the products they make. Sure, they can roll a bounty that takes very late tech to produce, like a durand, but they almost always can produce those goods eventually and they almost always pay immensely large sums of money for effort. They will almost always benefit from the reroll system as well. I can load those mechs with the shittiest parts imaginable and get obscenely large sums of money per cube as a result. they're at least always above 10K, making the 1K some assistant produced to get back 100 credits look like a fucking dumbass for the effort he put in for that bounty. The only limit is minerals, which elegantly roboticists can resolve as well thanks to public mining and a mining mech, which mines minerals faster than someone on foot, and safer too.
This system needs to get completely axed and replaced with a focus on manufacturing and production. Even if that means finally merging the two departments that have been tangentially attached to one another for this entire time. Service and cargo into one department, producing and manufacturing goods for cargo to sell, should be how the station's money is made.

Additionally, this department, with enough tools for production to allow it a wide variety of potential choices for how they go about it, should be from which everyone is paid. The way our roles are set up makes it absurd to expect everyone to be a part of this process, and so a paycheck system makes sense. If the problem is where the money is coming from, it makes even more sense that the department meant to produce goods to rack in money is where that money comes from. Even at the expense of cargo being able to buy a fuckton of guns, at least then the money production is going to something, right?
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by RaveRadbury » #581942

I've tried out the system and it's fine. It could use improvement, but the coding metagame is constantly tweaking and polishing, so this is to be expected of almost any feature.

Money hardly mattered before this, to be honest it still kind of doesn't matter now. If a non-human service worker can afford all of their gear, some accessories, a snack or two, a hot drink, and packs of cigarettes, what's the problem?

Could the people who feel like they can't afford their playstyle please describe what job they are doing and what purchases they can/can't make?
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Tlaltecuhtli » #581953

i have examined twice the bounty console and it didnt show your current bounty, is this FAKE NEWS arcadedefence??
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by carshalash » #581960

My biggest issue is how often fucking with the bounty cubes with wrapping paper happens to fuck over the people actually doing the bounties.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by NecromancerAnne » #581976

The ability to steal bounty cubes with package wrapping and tagging it is a bug. When I asked Arcane he said it was meant to always pay back 10%. But it would appear as though the cubes are being overwritten by barcodes, and likely it's just checking for the first barcode of the contents of package wrapping and paying out of the combined credit cost to whoever tagged the box.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #581977

I have never wrapped someone else's bounty cube. I don't know about other people playing cargo but credits are not that desirable
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Cobby » #581993

It had a considerable amount of thought put into it, I mean the guy is literally trying to extract excels out for people's viewing pleasure to illustrate the design and problems with the old system (bold calling it a system when it was never really curated byond hey this sounds cool).

If you want to have a conversation with him where you push back ideas of what an ideal economy system would look like im sure he would be all ears, but just coming here and going "this is shit/bad/horrible/etc." is counter-productive assuming your intent is to actually improve the game through constructive feedback.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Tlaltecuhtli » #582001

as cargo:
-only downgrade from old bounty system is that you cant "stack " bounties like planting the plants in public garden and do pie/muffin/hotdog and pass by bar for the drink ones all in 1 go, u have to do 1 at time and while looking around for dead people ids for better ones if you rolled something too hard, or rely on metafriends to do viro ones or stand there and recycle 3 whole monkeys by bounty pad which is RNG.
-if before i would do 6-7 bounties in the first 10 min of game where nothing important happens now i can only do 2-3 and maybe end do tider ones to get cash fast because its ops/blob/cult and there is no time for other kind of bountys.
-the highest amount of bounty i ever done was when i stole aa from a clumsy hop and was giving aa for bounty and i did like 20+ while instructing people how does the machine works. i think there is still a problem of people not knowing how shit works (just like any system), but i had to spend the $$$ in guns to pay off bribes to sec so it wasnt that profitable
-if i see people doing bounties outside of cargo its just ppl "donating" like for example the officer assigned to cargo is commonly doing bountys when nothing happens

as not cargo:
-i feel like the 10% pay from the cubes conflicts with private buy, if i need a bunch of constable costumes from cargo or guns or gloves i will just go in and order em and if anyone complains i throw cubes at them and tell em they are making a profit, like there is nothing good to private buy that doesnt require a minimum of 1000$ (stun baton crates)
-cash that cant reach the minimum for cargo crates is useless. tiders spawn with enough cash to buy nuka cola AND grey bull, most job specific shit in vendors is useless as game becomes literally techno-communism (ebolas, rcds, pinpointers) i think vendors should have more unique items than the ones printed 4 free
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Flatulent » #582006

cargo should be able to manually select fee they want to pay for bounties
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by remanseptim » #582013

demanding any cooperation from departments that isn't strictly 100% automated, such as ORM going to R&D, is a fool's errand
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by oranges » #582036

That's your view, it's not one I share, and the issue is orthogonal to the issue at hand.

You might disagree that "departmental cooperation is ever possible", but I have decided it is and it's valid, if you want to dispute that then in the face of the overwhelming evidence I am not listening then make a separate thread.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Critawakets » #582044

Honestly the whole "the crew should do an entirely seperate job for their paycheck" thing should be axed and the entire station budget be based around cargo exports. That way cargo still affects literally everyone's economy, but now it does not break the flow of gameplay and there is more of a job for cargo. In essence, pretty much just the old system but paychecks are dynamically allocated from a budget linked to the cargo budget that gets some of the money collected by cargo.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #582046

I agree it's probably misguided for people to need to do cargo bounties in addition to their jobs to get extra money. But making everyone's pay depend on cargo's competence and presence is also misguided. What I thought you were going to suggest was departmental produce be exported for money for that department which its workers would then be paid out of which makes more sense but isn't applicable to every department nor is each department's output equally valuable.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Flatulent » #582050

no, the system is alright but could definetly use some thought. it just doesnt make any fucking sense considering what bounties you get.
I remember stealing a Botanist’s ID and getting a pen bounty with it, and for some jobs the entire system just does not work. Why does Security have to do fetch quests to get paid? The only feasible way to get cash for the funny grappler gloves is to steal money from prisoners.
Bounties should ALWAYS be tied to your job if you have a static workplace, and jobs without any actual job(Assistants, Mimes, Chaplain, etc.) should get fetch quests.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Tlaltecuhtli » #582051

Flatulent wrote:no, the system is alright but could definetly use some thought. it just doesnt make any fucking sense considering what bounties you get.
I remember stealing a Botanist’s ID and getting a pen bounty with it, and for some jobs the entire system just does not work. Why does Security have to do fetch quests to get paid? The only feasible way to get cash for the funny grappler gloves is to steal money from prisoners.
Bounties should ALWAYS be tied to your job if you have a static workplace, and jobs without any actual job(Assistants, Mimes, Chaplain, etc.) should get fetch quests.
if the dude had aa id renamed to botanist it ll default bounties to "captain" aka assistant bounties
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by WineAllWine » #582251

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:
Flatulent wrote:no, the system is alright but could definetly use some thought. it just doesnt make any fucking sense considering what bounties you get.
I remember stealing a Botanist’s ID and getting a pen bounty with it, and for some jobs the entire system just does not work. Why does Security have to do fetch quests to get paid? The only feasible way to get cash for the funny grappler gloves is to steal money from prisoners.
Bounties should ALWAYS be tied to your job if you have a static workplace, and jobs without any actual job(Assistants, Mimes, Chaplain, etc.) should get fetch quests.
if the dude had aa id renamed to botanist it ll default bounties to "captain" aka assistant bounties
That's dumb though - it should assign bounties based on job not on access (I guess custom jobs / unassigned default to assistant)
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Aeri » #582397

This is going to be a retread of some other shit people have said but I don't use the forums much so whatever.

I really dislike that we don't have paychecks now and I think that's dumb because that means you aren't getting any money unless you fanny about playing scavenger hunt/fetch quest with the civ bounty terminal and cargo very frequently forgets to mail them, people also often neglect to tag them correctly, I feel that something that would go a long way towards making the system suck less would be to add description text to bounty cubes that explains their use better IE "This cube needs to be wrapped and marked with a barcode using an [ITEMNAME] so you'll get money when it's sold by cargo".

I get the point of the civ bounty terminal, but I don't approve of gutting cargo and making it the only option, not everyone signed up to be a cargo tech, and I've heard whispers that they may be plotting to remove cargo techs entirely(?) That would also make me very unhappy, cargo is an integral part of "SS13 culture" or whatever it would be like removing [Insert other entire department].

As an aside, I've noticed that some prices have not been correctly adjusted for this change, that's a lesser issue. It's very annoying though.

Cargo literally doesn't have bounties now because ???? That's like their entire job? Ordering and selling shit? Cargo should at least retain their own bounties to do. I really enjoyed cargo having their little list and going around meekly asking you to give them some odds and ends.

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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #582437

I can't imagine people valuing money enough to not give you enough to buy one non-premium item when asked.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Cobby » #582446

Ideally you would sell what your job produces, or you would sell your services to people. Ideally those items are priced at how the STATION values them and not whatever immersive pricing you give it (No plasma is not rare, no pills/surgery are not rare either).

Money will never and i mean literally never have any value if the only interactions it is meant to have is between you and the game master/banker/coder/etc. It NEEDS to be valuable as an interaction piece between players. How that manifests I dont really care.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by nianjiilical » #582447

Cobby wrote:Ideally you would sell what your job produces, or you would sell your services to people. Ideally those items are priced at how the STATION values them and not whatever immersive pricing you give it (No plasma is not rare, no pills/surgery are not rare either).

Money will never and i mean literally never have any value if the only interactions it is meant to have is between you and the game master/banker/coder/etc. It NEEDS to be valuable as an interaction piece between players. How that manifests I dont really care.
the only way buying and selling is going to give money inherent value is if you find a codebase method to remove every player's ability to just break in and steal/do whatever they want, and i dont see that flying on anything but mrp
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by XivilaiAnaxes » #582449

I'd comment that trading money between players should probably be more intuitive.

Buying clothes from the vending machines was 'click buy and hopefully your job paid you money'.

Actually giving money - pull the id out of your pda, fuck around briefly with it to get the money chip out. You had to know this process despite it not being an obvious interaction (you pull coins out of your RFID card?). Compare that with 'oh I got a paycheck notification cool let's spend at a machine'.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Megarop » #582461

Armhulen wrote:If cargo refuses to sell your bounty cube, begin the countdown. Make their life increasingly deeper levels of hell until they comply.
why would that make them want to sell your bounty cube instead of just making them want to kill you
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by wesoda25 » #582462

I don't like cargo because when you order something, it is very unreliable and you often have no control over whether or not you will actually get your order. If cargo doesn't have both the credits and good will, you're fucked. Because of this I find myself trying to avoid interaction with the department whenever possible, which makes them seem detached and unimportant to round progression.

Assuming this is a real problem and not something just I experience, bounties are a great first step towards remedying it. It gives the player a chance to proactively interact with the department in actions which are mutually beneficial. By doing bounties, you not only secure credits for and good will from cargo, you also get some pocket change you can use for personal purchases.

With this in mind, I think an active method of getting money, which requires player input, is far preferable to a time gated one, which requires a player to patiently wait for money with zero control over getting it. There are obviously some wrinkles that need to be ironed out (balancing bounties), but overall I think this is a great improvement to cargo and economy.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Farquaar » #582491

wesoda25 wrote:I don't like cargo because when you order something, it is very unreliable and you often have no control over whether or not you will actually get your order.
Just use Fedex if you don't trust the postal service.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #582585

There was a bug recently I don't know if it was fixed but any private orders were not appearing on the shuttle and the order wasn't clearing from the list of approved orders. Maybe that's why you've found cargo unreliable. If you've seen Castaway, when I've played cargo it's usually like the scene at the beginning where he's lecturing his employees about the importance of the punctuality of deliveries and nothing like the scene where the cargo plane crashes or any of the scenes afterwards when the parcels start washing up on shore and he starts opening them (very unprofessional).
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Stickymayhem » #582589

I would kill anyone following armhulen's advice so quickly it's unreal
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Armhulen » #582600

Stickymayhem wrote:I would kill anyone following armhulen's advice so quickly it's unreal
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Rohen_Tahir » #582645

Megarop wrote:
Armhulen wrote:If cargo refuses to sell your bounty cube, begin the countdown. Make their life increasingly deeper levels of hell until they comply.
why would that make them want to sell your bounty cube instead of just making them want to kill you
Because once you're done the techs will be dead in space and cargo will be run by the people's principality of toolboxia
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #582654

Everyone can have empty toolbelts and insulated gloves but only if you support cargo in any upcoming interdepartmental civil wars.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Armhulen » #582813

Rohen_Tahir wrote:
Megarop wrote:
Armhulen wrote:If cargo refuses to sell your bounty cube, begin the countdown. Make their life increasingly deeper levels of hell until they comply.
why would that make them want to sell your bounty cube instead of just making them want to kill you
Because once you're done the techs will be dead in space and cargo will be run by the people's principality of toolboxia
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Super Aggro Crag » #582826

so you put the bounty on the pad

the stuff is teleported to centcomm

centcomm sends you a cube of photons

then you have to physically ship the photons BACK to centcomm

and they digitally update your bank account

this is perfectly sensible!!!!!
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Misdoubtful » #582831

Super Aggro Crag wrote:so you put the bounty on the pad

the stuff is teleported to centcomm

centcomm sends you a cube of photons

then you have to physically ship the photons BACK to centcomm

and they digitally update your bank account

this is perfectly sensible!!!!!
It'd be more sensible if I could just deep fry the photons and eat them. My family is starving we need money NOW.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Cobby » #582841

nianjiilical wrote:
Cobby wrote:Ideally you would sell what your job produces, or you would sell your services to people. Ideally those items are priced at how the STATION values them and not whatever immersive pricing you give it (No plasma is not rare, no pills/surgery are not rare either).

Money will never and i mean literally never have any value if the only interactions it is meant to have is between you and the game master/banker/coder/etc. It NEEDS to be valuable as an interaction piece between players. How that manifests I dont really care.
the only way buying and selling is going to give money inherent value is if you find a codebase method to remove every player's ability to just break in and steal/do whatever they want, and i dont see that flying on anything but mrp
Intended aspect, you can risk getting trashed if you wanna steal (or maybe we can even have officers arrest you so they get cash too :omegalol:)
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by remanseptim » #583520

bounties range from hilariously easy (find pens) to so tedious i have literally never seen anyone do them even once (99% of engineer objectives)
it's totally up to chance whether you get one that's reasonable to do or the ss13 equivalent of drinking hot sauce with your eyes
furthermore, as above posts have stated, money is useless after like 25 minutes for any job but botany
this just isn't fun. it's either agonizing tedium or skyrim quests, both of which have nothing to do with your job, nor do they contribute to the station, it's just an item and time sink.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by confused rock » #583968

why do I even earn money for looting random shit instead of doing my job? Why's a sec officer gotta sell half the pepper spray cans for cash?
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #584000

confused rock wrote:why do I even earn money for looting random shit instead of doing my job? Why's a sec officer gotta sell half the pepper spray cans for cash?
I know, right? Instead of selling departmental supplies and random odds and ends it should at least be the product of your job or some measure of your productivity, which is often hard to quantify in this game. I've always felt though that in lieu of trying to code the game to measure productivity in every job, it would be better if pay cheques worked as they did before (time-based) but came out of a department's budget and could be adjusted by heads of staff to reward productivity or award one-time bonuses. The problem with that though is that even if the menu to adjust pay were available by default on head of staff tablets, most heads of staff would overlook or forget about it unless they were somehow incentivised not to. The people who would use it most would be antagonists and bored players looking to steal money.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Horza » #584083

One thing I've noticed with the paycheck-less system is that people just loot ID cards instead of doing bounties or selling things. It's way easier to loot a random corpse, whether still in-round or greytide or catatonic, than to actually do bounties. Unless the round has gone tits-up I don't actually expect my ID card to have any money on it by the time I'm revived, and thus can't expect any sort of economy usage after the fact. It's like access except instead of being able to access maint I can't even buy cheesy honkers.
Except in the case where I loot aforementioned corpses and losers in which case I compete with 2-3 people for the useless "most money on account" end-of-round useless boldtext prize.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #584274

I was thinking about this problem as not an economist and I thought what if money could be exchanged for telecrystals? Would that give it an inherent value if enough money could be converted to traitor shit (which everyone loves or at least agrees has value)? The problem though is it would only benefit people with uplink access and even if a crewmember found an uplink the worth of traitor shit to a non-antag is debateable.

But I think the wider point here is that the money in this game is something I'm ambivalent about whereas in nearly other game or in real life money is something I want more of because there are things I'd like to spend it on. If you could buy a pulse rifle in this game for a feasible amount of money for one person to attain in a round I think you'd find people a lot more greedy for cash.

Note that I'm not suggesting a pulse rifle backed economy I'm just using the item as an example of something most people would agree is highly valuable due to its strength and rarity. I'm also not suggesting TC 4 cash would work well in practice. Assume a can opener.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by stewydeadmike » #584681

The process for acquiring/fulfilling bounties should really be decentralized, because having to run from your department to cargo to get a bounty that is often times not really worth the effort, back to your department to complete it, then back to cargo to claim it can be tedious at times. Also is there any reason to deal with the bounty cubes instead of a direct deposit into your account and cargo's? I suppose it gives a reason to keep cargo staffed and feels better to hand in a shiny money brick but iunno feels like it's more hassle than it's worth.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #584712

stewydeadmike wrote:Also is there any reason to deal with the bounty cubes instead of a direct deposit into your account and cargo's? I suppose it gives a reason to keep cargo staffed
No. It's a dumb reason that means I'm endlessly calling the shuttle, loading usually one but sometimes two or three cubes and sending the shuttle because I believe people should receive their bounties in a reasonable time while the QM and other cargo techs aren't around or just don't do it presumably because it's tedious and boring. It's a wildly inefficient process and my assumption is that Arcanemusic added it so obstructive third wheels wouldn't whine about how cargo doesn't have a role in bounties anymore.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by confused rock » #584809

I decided to consider engaging with bounties as security.
My first bounty was the best bounty I could've gotten. Four prisoner uniforms for 800 bucks.
I thought about it. Brig has like what, twelve of them? And my cut would be what, 240 bucks, maybe more?
I thought about if every sec officer took this bounty, or if I took it several times. This is completely unsustainable. I would need like ten of these if I wanted to buy something related to my job.
I further imagined if I had to brig a prisoner in a regular uniform because I sold all the uniforms for change. gameplay wise that's fine, but IC that's ridiculous.
This was the best bounty I could have gotten, one that was fast to do so it didn't distract me too much from doing my actual job as it wasted my time, but I still didn't take it.

Fuck bounties. Give me a paycheck if we're not going back to having no economy, which worked perfectly fine.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by wesoda25 » #584824

Yeah I think security and engineering bounties need to be reworked.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by confused rock » #584833

Even if the bounties were something else the fact remains that doing bounties is not doing your job, and let's pretend bounties work well. The fact is that that means I would be being paid more when I'm doing my job less. Maybe I have to focus on my job 24/7 because I'm overworked this round. In this case I could probably benefit from money, and I don't get it. The inverse is a round where I have very little, so I get fuckloads of cash I don't need. I don't really think money should be a positive feedback loop.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by cacogen » #584852

As people point out, the current system rewards absenteeism and wasting departmental resources. Returning to a wage system with optional bounties would reduce these problems. Adding head of staff control over pay would reward productivity. If someone's dead or absent, why continue to spend the budget on them? Productive employees could receive pay raises or bonuses. Bounties would remain available alternatives for the underpaid.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by iwishforducks » #584862

I don't know if this is bias confirmation, but cargo- or at least on Manuel- has been completely empty (bar miners) as of recently. Most of the time, you get the newbie to play Quartermaster who buys guns because "thats what the youtube mans did". If you're lucky, you'll get the old geezer Cargo Techie who decided to get a little nostalgic, and ask where the bounty consoles are, and like a father telling his son that Santa isn't real, you have to ease the blow into the techie that the cargo bounties were removed. That old geezer usually ends up catatonic or SSD before the 30 minute mark. I remember seeing 3-man cargo tech teams all communicating to each other what bounties they're up to, but I haven't even seen a 3-man cargo tech team ever since the cargo bounty list was gutted. At first I was excited for the bounty cubes because it meant bounties were renewable (which is a step in the right direction) but after a week everyone that I've talked to in cargo has expressed nothing but dismay for the system.

Here is how my shift goes as a Quartermaster:
Buy gloves and belts. Cry because there's no cargo techs to even share the gloves with. Push crates onto shuttle like a dirty peasant because there's no cargo techs. Some random joe schmoe assistant is knocking at the glass door to turn in a bounty cube because they were tricked into thinking they would have fun with the bounty system. After sitting around and just throwing cubes onto the shuttle and sending it back and forth, RPDs are finally researched and I can set up a chute that people can throw their cubes in to send directly to the shuttle's conveyor input. Leave cargo for 5 minutes to look for something to do because I'm bored. Get PDA messaged by the botanist to send the shuttle because I left cargo for 3 minutes and come back to see they're sitting at the desk with the bounty cube, not using the disposal chute I set up specifically to send it to the back. Do nothing for the rest of the shift because I've already done every construction gimmick I can think of.

Bounty cubes should not be the crux of cargo. We should not have to rely on the station doing our job for us. There is no interesting interaction with the bounty cubes. Period. I appreciate the gesture of renewable bounties- but this is not the way to implement them. Add the bounty list back, but tie bounties to departments. Implement departmental budgets Gooder™ by making it so paychecks are tied to how much money is in the departmental budget. Add paychecks back, but do not reward people who are dead by making it so they have to cash out their paycheck at an ATM machine or some other form of bare minimum interaction like accepting your paycheck in your PDA. Add useful and unique items onto the catalog so that people actually buy things. This also expands to vending machines as well.
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Super Aggro Crag » #584895

Hm you raise good points sir
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by oranges » #585201

cargo has been a bit of a shell since map roundstart item bloat kicked in when we went multimap

we should probably ditch miner and make minerlas go through cargo and relegate lavaland to xenobotany or something
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by Misdoubtful » #585219

oranges wrote:cargo has been a bit of a shell since map roundstart item bloat kicked in when we went multimap

we should probably ditch miner and make minerlas go through cargo and relegate lavaland to xenobotany or something
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Re: give us back our paychecks

Post by remanseptim » #585281

day 10000000000
bounty cubes are still bad
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