Updates discussion thread

[Hastati]

I don't normally care enough to comment on changes, and prefer rolling with the punches, and don't mind a stacked xeno winrate, but this is straight up a terrible idea. Surgery is already completely overwhelmed every round from bone fractures, torn off limbs, and other large scale traumas, and now we've gone and made it so anything that causes IB or organ damage also requires a trip topside. This straight up will make it utterly miserable to play as a medic, doctor, and marine.

It's one thing to make a marine nerf that makes people dead, it sucks but you can go roll xeno or spectate at least. It's another to instead impliment a change that will result in spending large chunks of several rounds admiring the new coat of paint on the medbay walls because there are now 10-20 inline for surgery before you.

[Renomaki]

I am not playing at the moment, but hearing this news is fairly distressing, although for different reasons.

See, a lot of doctors tend to rely a lot on quick clot and peri to easily fix organs and internal bleeding. With this update, now all of a sudden medical staff are going to have to learn how to use other tools and do things different than they were comfortable with. Not every doctor packs a brute pack for organs, and that bio cable? Most just toss it in the trash, because quick clot is the easy way to fix bleeding.

But not anymore. I have a feeling that this is going to take awhile for marines to adjust to this change. Maybe it'll be adjusted overtime to be a bit easier (doctors now start with advanced tools, which means faster surgeries somewhat), but for that to happen, we need to play a few rounds first and have the staff observe.

It won't be the first time marines got buggered. Remember when cloning was removed? We got past that. Armor and gun wielding slowing us down? We fine tuned it until everyone was happy with the results. And the new surgery system? It'll no doubt be fiddled with to find a comfortable middle ground. Maybe they'll rework peri and Quick Clot to have slower consumption rates so marines have more time to get to medical before they fall to their wounds?

Either that, or the marine meta will suddenly see an increase in field doctors due to the dangers of internal bleeding and organ damage.

[Bmc777]

The changes to Quick Clot and Peridaxon were made for a few reasons:

1. It's unrealistic that internal bleeding or organ damage can be permanently cured with a miracle drug.
2. We're constantly trying to separate the rolls of Medics and Doctors as much as possible, being a Medics should be about fixing up lightly wounded Marines and stabilizing heavily wounded Marines for transfer ship-side. Internal bleeding and organ damage are heavy wounds, so it's a ship-side transfer not a quick fix.
3. Surgeries were getting stale, this way we've added two more to the batch to give some variety.

We will of course be watching the affects of these changes closely as always. With the changes also came quicker bone surgery times and the addition of IMS's to all surgery rooms. If needed, we will provide further balancing to the changes.

[kooarbiter]

Can someone provide me a reason why is it a good idea to make a change that forces you to spend 30 minutes in medbay each time you get an IB/poped lung, while not even being able to talk to people around you because you're unconscious due to oxy damage?

!FUN!, Obviously

[Steelpoint]

Organ damage is one thing.

Making Internal Bleeding only be fixable via surgery seems like a bad move. IB is very easy to afflict someone with as even stray gunfire with bad RNG could inflict it.

[Jonesome]

1. It's unrealistic that internal bleeding or organ damage can be permanently cured with a miracle drug.

But isn’t that about as realistic as stuff like bone gel, when in reality it takes broken bones weeks to heal, even with plates and screws? Not to mention how people normally suffer from blood loss with missing limbs.

[Sodium]

I once tried to rework the standart ss13 medical system to work like a real one, it turned out to be the most tedious and boring system ever. In my personal opinion realism is, in most cases, a mortal enemy of fun. Also from all my experiences of laying down on medbay floor I have learned that rehab is not fun either. The only way to fix that right now is competence of field medics backed up with a planetside surgery setup, which I was lucky enough to observe once.

[NescauComToddy]

I did not know the existence of this update until the moment, and unfortunately for me, I will not be able to know what its impact in the gameplay until later.

Knowing that both Peridaxon and Quick-Cloth were vital components to avoiding a greater number of unnecessary surgeries in medbay, I am curious to know how doctors and combat medics will cope with this new obstacle. As much as it defines that combat medics are only stabilizers and that the doctors are the true healers, I believe that this alteration in the medbay was not a good idea since a minority of the players that main doctors will not accept this new adaptation and will simply stop to play as one.

Internally bleeding will most likely be fatal, and knowing that these bleeds are not very difficult to obtain from time to time, this will be a notable disadvantage for Marines. Although, of course, this will make the Marines take more care as they advance through enemy lines, which will slightly increase the more 'realistic experience', as the developers themselves say.

How to overcome this? As much as that is a meta and I argue against it, sending more than one field doctor to the FOB with surgical equipment will definitely relieve the situation for the Marines. I'm against any kind of meta and I will never do that, but I'm sure we'll see more doctors in the FOB performing surgeries in the future, which is a good thing, in a way.

I can not wait to see the medical ward become a Brazilian public hospital.

Joking aside, we already had nerfs of this level before, such as the exclusion of cloning and etc, as Renomaki said. You can be sure that the developers will be evaluating this change in the next days and soon, an update to optimize the Peri and QC nerf will happen.

[Bronimin]

It's not metagaming to know that marines that get internal bleeding WILL die if not treated within minutes and therefore a field surgeon is REQUIRED.

It would be amazing if all the doctors went groundside in one mega Field hospital one of these rounds.

[davidofmk771]

I hope this will lead to more doctors being sent planetside mid-late game when the gravity of the situation is fully realized. I think command and medical staff are a bit to scared to authorize that sort of thing even when it becomes reasonable (or necessary).

[Karmac]

I'm honestly genuinely confused as to why so many features are just being changed to become more time consuming and complicated, if people wanted a more realistic mil-sim they'd play literally anything other than CM, I'm really not sure what crowd CM is supposed to be attracting or catering for at the moment, but it clearly isn't caring about the majority of ite playerbase.

[SovietKitty]

I don't like tedious actions personally.

[Casany]

I'm honestly genuinely confused as to why so many features are just being changed to become more time consuming and complicated, if people wanted a more realistic mil-sim they'd play literally anything other than CM, I'm really not sure what crowd CM is supposed to be attracting or catering for at the moment, but it clearly isn't caring about the majority of ite playerbase.

[Kavlo]

I didn't like this update and looks where it got me lads. In all honesty why was this needed in any case it just made shit take longer, take more people out of the round and made the whole ordeal of treating someone more chaotic.

[Karmac]

So like real quick

How does one abuse robolimbs

Its literally something you can just have by selecting it in the character screen, like its an honest to god feature thats been there for ages

what the fuck

[Steelpoint]

Robolimbs always had the drawback that a stiff breeze would send you into perma-pain crit until someone found a Engineer to help you, and unless you are the Engineer you won't get reliably attention to heal robolimbs.

[shyshadow]

In my opinion the robotic limbs added flavor to certain characters. If they did it right at least. I just had one for certain moments, just to have something to talk about. But I guess now I'll just be a regular good'ol 100% human.

[Challenger]

The only example I can think of off the top of my head for abuse of robolimbs is that one delta static who had all 4 robolimbs and only ever went engineer, not to actually do any useful engineering work but for the guaranteed self heal by welding and coil.

With the other vector for abuse being IB, where having 4 robolimbs roundstart means (if you get hit in a random spot) you've effectively decreased your chance of accruing internal bleeding by 72%.

Won't miss it too much, most (not all) people who made a big deal of having robo limbs were very snowflakey about it and it was baldie bait. Only makes me wonder why none of the marines waking up have any robolimbs from previous operations, but maybe they all just get sent to a robo battalion where they become MEC troopers or something.

[NoahKirchner]

Unless you OD the person on bicardine, which may or may not be possible in CM (not entirely sure), does this not make internal bleeding planetside a near death sentence? Evacuations are slow and these can be caused by more than just xenos - most of the internal bleeding i've ever recieved has been recieved by friendly fire and being pushed around with broken ribs. When xenos damage you enough to be able to cause internal bleeding, chances are you're either infected or not making it out of the situation anyways. This wouldn't be a marine nerf in a perfect world, seeing as how without marine incompetence IB is an exceeding rarity. However the existence of people unable to aim with AP rounds and the high server populations result in a really undesirable and unfortunate outcome. Marines being punished, not for a mistake that they've made like running too close to xenos, but being punished for a mistake that their friends make. This mistake then, in a best case scenario, sends them up to the Almayer to be treated by doctors and, eventually, sent back down to the planet.

Generally, the treatment lines are long enough to cause people to tab out in boredom because all they are doing, can do, and are allowed to do is lie on the floor and wait for a doctor to wordlessly patch them up and toss them aside. It's not their fault, but the server population combined with the severity of the injuries constantly flowing into the medbay result in an understandable lack of roleplay which leaves any injured players bored and unfulfilled. In this scenario, assuming the player is treated right away and the PO doesn't take too long to evac the wounded - that's at least twenty minutes of downtime, not counting the shuttle ride back down because that isn't as unbearably and mind-numbingly dull as lying on the medbay floor awaiting treatment /meing "groans" every three seconds.

In most rounds, however, especially assuming an uptick of medbay visits due to the lack of treatment for organs with peridaxon (AP's a hell of a drug), and now fatal and urgent internal bleeding, these medbay visits will take twenty, thirty, potentially fourty minutes. A majority of the time, since you were on the planet prior to getting shot in the back by AP, by the time you're anywhere near getting treated, the shuttle has already been called to the almayer or the marines have already retreated. All due to someone shooting you in the back. Frankly, this type of nerf does little to punish marines for being bad. If marines are stupid and rush forward like rambo, they most certainly deserve to be punished. They took a risk, they made an action willingly and their failure was punished by game mechanics.

While you cannot completely avoid punishing other players for the actions of their peers in a multiplayer game, completely removing a marine from the conflict planetside because of their friend's incompetence for at least a quarter of the playable round is unnecessary and not fun. It encourages people to log out on the spot as soon as they're injured to the point where internal bleeding is likely, because at that point they are just in deadchat without the unending cacophony of sin coming from your fellow ghosts. Logging out, however, especially repeatedly or as important rules, is a wonderful way to get banned.

Solutions are simple. For one, the update is really not necessary in the first place. There are ways to encourage differences between medics and aliens without punishing players for their comrade's mistakes. Doctors and medics, as it stands, are different enough without a massive rework of the medical system. As it stands with this new update, medics only exist to feed people bicard+dex+ pills and give them burn packs ad infinitum and en masse. If you come across a marine with internal bleeding, especially while dealing with a large group of marines and ESPECIALLY if they're dead, there is no reason to help them. They're a waste of resources, they are absolutely and undoubtedly going to die before they can be reliably treated. Prior to this, the severity of injuries (Specifically with internal bleeding) lent depths and intensity to different levels of injury. Fixing a marine with internal bleeding, broken bones and heavy damage was exciting. You knew that you could fix the injured marine, but it would take quick timing, precise clicks and the ability to prioritize treatments. That aspect has been severely dulled by removing the ability to treat these wounds.

Doctors were buffed by giving them an incision system. While useful strictly speaking, it adds no depth to the doctor role. The good news is that internal bleeding now requires surgery to fix, which would be wonderful if they would ever actually have the chance to be brought up to the Almayer to be treated despite being a nuisance and requiring constant babying before given surgery. The only depth this update adds is allowing doctors to use lesser used surgeries slightly more often, namely the fixing of organs with advanced trauma kits. This was, however, something that already happened when planetside medics were under-supplied and sending up marines not capable of receiving full triage as a result thereof. All this update did was, in essence, removed a large amount of the appeal to playing medic and gave half of that, roughly, to doctors.

Solutions could have been made to add further depth, and even necessity, to the role of doctor. Different types of injury, severe burns requiring skin grafts to give use to the organ printer and to make fire damage not a literal joke to anyone but people with robotic limbs. It's not up to me to think of different types of injuries and the specifics behind them, but in general I believe that the best solution to this update isn't to bear with it because it's not an update really worth keeping. One could say that hard work was spent on it, sure, but the update changes very little outside of some minor mapping updates, adding a bottle with peridaxon in it and listing it inside of marine vendors, changing the OD values of peridaxon and QC and removing half of the effects of quick clot. It already stopped all bleeding when applied, at least I thought. Regardless, these aren't particularly time consuming changes and it would have been well worth the wait for changes that add depth to marine gameplay while further separating doctors and medics as opposed to what, frankly and as respectfully as I can possibly put it, seems like a quickly put together solution for an issue that is far more engrained into SS13 than can be fixed by changing a couple values and adding a var to a vendor list.

That said, it's not the largest nerf in the world, but I do believe that it continues a concerning trend of complexity being sacrificed for simplicity, something which is detrimental to a game with long preparation times, incredibly slow respawns and topped off with three hour rounds. Longer round times require more complexity to keep people occupied, lest it breed boredome. The engineer role, the research role. Both wonderful roles beforehand, granted with their significant and powergamey downsides, were roles that kept their base SS13 complexity. This made them engaging to play for a three hour round, or even multiple in a row, because they had substance. Depth. At a glance it may seem like the update adds things to do, sure, but only for doctors which generally have more than enough to do already. It takes away, as a result, from the marine role. Being out of the round for someone else's mistake for so long makes playing a role like that boring, and removing the complexity of injuries to treat from a medic removes the depth that the role had prior.

The dev team does good work, there's no doubting that. But I think they get it wrong sometimes, most people do. Frankly, this update is one of those times, in my opinion, and little harm would be done in retiring it, if you'll excuse the pun.






tl;dr donut remove depth please

[OatzAndHoes]

The changes to Quick Clot and Peridaxon were made for a few reasons:

1. It's unrealistic that internal bleeding or organ damage can be permanently cured with a miracle drug.
2. We're constantly trying to separate the rolls of Medics and Doctors as much as possible, being a Medics should be about fixing up lightly wounded Marines and stabilizing heavily wounded Marines for transfer ship-side. Internal bleeding and organ damage are heavy wounds, so it's a ship-side transfer not a quick fix.
3. Surgeries were getting stale, this way we've added two more to the batch to give some variety.

We will of course be watching the affects of these changes closely as always. With the changes also came quicker bone surgery times and the addition of IMS's to all surgery rooms. If needed, we will provide further balancing to the changes.

1. The impression I've always gotten from the devs has been that gameplay>realism/lore. Things such as the queen hijacking a shuttle, ayys bursting in 15 minutes, ayys being able to heal giant wounds in seconds, marines being able to defib a guy back to life who just lost 3 limbs are all examples of this.

2. The issue with this update is that it almost completely sidelines medics. Wounds are now pretty much in 2 categories: Either they can be fixed by yourself without much trouble (flesh wounds, burns and light fractures) or require evac (organ damage, multiple breaks, internal bleeding). Why would I waste time getting treated by a medic when all they are doing is delaying my trip to surgery? All I need to do now is inject tram, splint broken bones and sprint for the dropship. The only time I'm going to waste time with a medic is when I need a revive.

3. Nearly every game past the 1.5 to 2 hour mark has a full medbay with doctors having no downtime. I don't think overworked doctors need more to do. Never mind how this is just extending the worst part of the game for regular players. When you are wounded lying in medbay most people just alt-tab until they are fixed. You can't fight, and you can barely RP because you're blacking out half the time so trying to hold a conversation is nearly impossible without saying "sorry I missed that I blacked out" 20 times. Being dead is generally more enjoyable than lying on the floor awaiting medbays wild ride. At least when I'm dead I can watch the game or play xenos.

That said, it's not the largest nerf in the world, but I do believe that it continues a concerning trend of complexity being sacrificed for simplicity, something which is detrimental to a game with long preparation times, incredibly slow respawns and topped off with three hour rounds. Longer round times require more complexity to keep people occupied, lest it breed boredome. The engineer role, the research role. Both wonderful roles beforehand, granted with their significant and powergamey downsides, were roles that kept their base SS13 complexity. This made them engaging to play for a three hour round, or even multiple in a row, because they had substance. Depth. At a glance it may seem like the update adds things to do, sure, but only for doctors which generally have more than enough to do already. It takes away, as a result, from the marine role. Being out of the round for someone else's mistake for so long makes playing a role like that boring, and removing the complexity of injuries to treat from a medic removes the depth that the role had prior.

Hit the nail on the head. This point right here honestly deserves it's own thread. I get trying to discourage powergaming, but it seems like more often than not it's at the expense of experienced players having more mechanics and things to experiment with. I could get into depth about this, but I've got a gameplay story that demonstrates it best. A few weeks ago I rolled survivor on prison. I met up with a bunch of other survivors and we RP'd being an escaped convict gang. I accidentally got shot by one of my comrades and got a collapsed lung. We went to medbay, only to find it had no power. We then fought our way to engineering while I relied on dex pills to stay alive. We held of xenos to get power up, then fought our way back to medbay to hack the weymed and get some peri. Tons of teamwork all around and everyone was looking out for eachother. Lots of great RP and movie-like moments, with everyone working together to accomplish a goal. We get to medbay and what happens? There was a stealthnerf implimented that round in which weymeds couldn't be hacked. That round had all the makings of a great ss13 story, and instead ended with me coughing to death in a closet and then the rest of the prisoners getting gunned down on sight by marines. I feel like a lot of the magic that makes ss13 great, like being able to use deep and complex mechanics to solve problems are being lost in this misguided crusade against powergaming. The whole game is suffering just to prevent a few players from loading up on all the best items and trying to rambo.

[NoahKirchner]

The whole game is suffering just to prevent a few players from loading up on all the best items and trying to rambo.

The lack of complexity makes playing any job that isn't planetside for more than a round almost entirely unbearable for me, at this point. That was essentially all I played, too.

Chief Engineer's supermatter, something that had a lot of issues but that could be changed to become a CM-specific engine, using some of the basic tenants (And even code, if you really wanted to), of the supermatter while removing the exploding bit, removed because it was easy to grief and replaced with a shipside geothermal generator.

Research and Development, a department that did encounter a fair bit of abuse, yes, but also one that gave the Corporate Liason crewmembers to work through and which helped to develop a story of development and triumph for the marines, entirely gutted to the point of being hardly functional. Everything was removed, from the ability to use the protolathe, the abused part, down to even the removal of the weyland yutani autopsy tool. I asked snype about this a bit ago, and the updates for this are apparently on the backburner, leaving the researcher really no reason to exist, at all.

Executive officers, shipside crew previously responsible for handling matters of personnel and taking up any duties which the CO can't allocate time to has become diet CO, where players prove their worth to the community about how they can lead as opposed to actually handling any situations. Alternatively, they are glorified SOs in the presence of a CO because of the ID rules and incredible lack of shipside crew to preside over.

That said, combat has had some interesting additions, namely the skill system (Which, aside from leadership and weapons knowledge, seems largely nonfunctional beyond a roleplay standpoint. Piloting, for example, doesn't appear to effect much unless it messes with the time shave from pre-flight calculations, but maybe that's a good thing), the marines have received new toys and had some of their older reliances stripped away and replaced with new methods to combat the xenomorphs. Xenomorphs, likewise, have received new and interesting shakeups to their combat, namely the now ancient egg changes.

But these updates largely came at a cost, those being the complexity of the almayer in functionality. Sure, it looks fantastic visually and it's very well mapped, but the Sulaco still had far more to do on it. Every job you rolled had something to keep you occupied for the entire round, all of them. Now, rolling researcher essentially boils down to either trying to find ways to bypass researcher nerfs, like making grenades, making chemicals in the chemlab, or writing down a copy pasted analysis of the xenomorphs based on the inevitable "WE're ALL getting eaten by THE LIZARDS" report from SL Urist McNCO forty seven minutes into the round. You write down some psuedoscience nonsense about chitin, go "Wow, that thing's HUGE" a few times, before you continue to go AFK infront of the chem dispenser and alt-tab so that if an admin PMs you about going afk without cryoing you have an excuse saying that you were testing new chemical mixtures.

Are the devs all shit who should go and die? No, absolutely not, they've done some damn good work on making the Almayer look and feel like a proper ship.

Are features which are necessary to retain the importance and fun being stripped from the crew-side jobs on the Almayer? Yes. Not intentionally, but to combat powergaming mainly.

--

There are most definitely solutions that do not require full reverts of systems that were previously had on the Sulaco. Here's some I've thought up of now that could keep everything the way it is while giving the aforementioned jobs a reason to exist, because as it stands, if you play Researcher you're wasting your time (Unless you're like every other researcher I've played with who talks to the baldie CL to make hyperzine and then OD's or gets arrested)

1. Add in a new, less destructive engine (Relative to the supermatter.) The workings could remain similar to the supermatter, if you want you can even make it some kind of Nuclear reactor, the semantics are up to you. A simple reactor that requires gas input to radiate heat to prevent the ship from cooking the crew alive. If you'd like to keep the constant repairs required with the current engine, have the power from the engine lead into a set of capacitors located on the upper level of the Almayer. These capacitors put out a steady stream of power but requires maintenance to operate at peak functionality. A way to keep lowpop rounds without any engineers from requiring any sort of CO/XO help would be to have the capacitors have a low breaking chance with low/normal output, but if an engineer is trying to maximize the efficiency of the engine, the capacitors are more likely to fail and require restoration. The reactor slagging could just be a non-possibility, if you'd like to prevent griefing, or it could send out an EMP or something to screw up the marines for a bit due to their CE's incompetence, it's up to you.

2. Give the researchers something to do with the xeno bodies they get. Even if it's not overly fancy, some nice flavor text and an autopsy tool to investigate xeno (and marine) corpses with would allow you to write neater reports for the CL about what the xenomorphs are. Furthermore, if you decide to bring back getting resources from tearing apart a xeno, allow those resources to be used more widely than previously, but for more logistical purposes. A good example is the anti-acid spray from the Sulaco, chitin plating always seemed a bit wonky but I'm sure there are other ways to improve xeno research. Hell, if you really want to, make hyperzine no longer react with peri and make it only available from studying xenomorphs and using some of them in the mixture. That way people no longer run around the ship on hyperzine, and it gives researchers a reason to exist.

3. Give the XO a reason to remain on the CIC. Something I think that could be utilized a hell of a lot more than it is, is the bridge. Adding a helmsman would be a tad difficult to pull off, but one could perhaps add sensor arrays to the bridge proper of the ship. A functional map of the ground that shows current squad positions, if you'd like to be really fancy, maybe a console that allows you to work on calculations for the orbital strike's firing solution, allowing one more round to be fired at a time (With something needing to be done beforehand so that it isn't easy peasy lemon squeezy, like needing to be calculated on an already set beacon) or finding a way to use a console to reduce the cooldown from firing the main gun again. This could even be integrated with engineering changes, allowing OB cooldown time to scale with engine output with diminishing returns once you breach a certain level. Hell, if you really wanted to, you could move all supply drops and orbital beacons up to this room and add an ability to select one OB or supply drop at a time, giving the XO a reason to live when there's a CO aboard. If there's not a CO aboard, this could be staffed by an SO temporarily or just entirely ignored and done the ol' fashioned way.

4. CLs, by and large, have very little reason to exist. It's fun for roleplay, but with no responses the CL lacks a sense of direction. I'm not, by any means, suggesting that the CL turn into an antagonist role, but a randomized selection of objectives (Or even a single objective every round) could be added to give the CL a purpose aboard the Almayer. I don't mean that their goal should be "Hey, buddy, go kill the XO and usurp the crew", but instead something like "Send back as much information as you can on the damage to the colony", or "Find out what happened to the colonists and send us a compiled list of your findings." "Please closely inspect the actions of the marine crew on this operation and hold the acting Commander to scrutiny to ensure that they follow company regulations, please send us a detailed report of their doings". There's a lot of options and, while being strictly optional, they would change how the CL interacts with the crew, in theory. After all, the CL is just a corporate nobody and they would surely receive some type of direction, even if it's trivial busy work to ensure that the Company has a busy work on the Almayer.

--

Those are all of the potential solutions that I can think about right now, but depth is something which separates SS13, and CM in particular, to a really crappy top down shooter. That's dreammaker's fault, not the coders, but the depth of the actions you can take is that distinguishing feature. The fact that you can cut people open to dig out shrapnel, or reroute the colony's powernet from a nonfunctional room to use to power the cells your sentry gun requires to operate is what defines SS13, CM and every branch thereof from forks of the original baystation like lifeweb to the modern TG and Baystation. They all have one thing in common, and that's the complexity of nearly every job on the station. From janitor to Captain, you have a purpose that keeps you busy for the entire round. Unfortunately, to combat powergaming, it feels as if those features are being slowly stripped away. Yes, they are exploitable in a PVP server, and yes a decision on them has to be made, but the jobs has to be kept in mind, even if just a little bit. Replacing entire core features can't be done lightly, at least not without a replacement soon to follow.

Hell, the removal of depth effects more than just gameplay. It effects roleplay, there's no way to properly roleplay doing your job unless you blatantly make things up. As an engineer, when your job is to wrench, wirecut or weld, there's not very much you can say when someone asks you what and why you're doing it. As a researcher, there's only so many ways you can re-quote the xenopedia article on Xenomorph. It also effects the kind of players attracted to the server, people who will invest time into the deeper complexities and learn more about SS13 as a result - things that effect server culture and even potential moderators.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's definitely not some impending doom of CM, there's no sign of it slowing down or stopping in the foreseeable future, it's on the top of the hub and no amount of reddit drama or staff complaints will change that for the time being, but the goal of feedback and constructive criticism is to make the game as fun as it can be, for as many people as it can be fun for. Since I've been around the block a time or two, I expect the "The majority of players are having fun" response. Yes, that very well may be so, but there are always areas of a game that can be improved, and there are always changes that can be made to departments to change "I'm having fun on CM" to "Wow, this is the best server I've ever played." CM won't die, I expect it to last to about 2020 at least, maybe longer, but it's still disappointing to see features gutted like this for no real progress beyond stopping powergamers. It's ruined a lot of shipside jobs, frankly and bluntly, and I'm hoping that they'll at least get partial functionality restored.

tl;dr playing researcher is lame and add new stuff for people to do on the ship

ps: typing goddamn essays like this is great practice to get used to a new keyboard, it makes me look like a super-nerd though, putting 20 minutes into an essay on a spessman game, alas

[Bmc777]

tl;dr playing researcher is lame and add new stuff for people to do on the ship

I agree.

[Blade2000Br]

I agree.

...
If you agreed it means you are actually thinking on adding new toys for shipside roles have fun...

I sense a new immense update that will be extremely complex and crazy at same time.
You better give us that BMC.

Its all a theory though.

[Jroinc1]

I agree.

Please don't "update" that one too, the other roles have suffered enough.



Edit: That comes off as WAY harsher than intended, but everything that Noah said goes for me as well. It seems like the lifecycle of features under current dev policy is-

An existing feature allows skilled players to do something that non-skilled players can't do, and which gives them a significant advantage. (Making perdiox, combat drugs, supermatter , ANYTHING to do with heat generation or electricity, mesons, phoron, atmos bombs, moving ALIVE xenos, mining, egrilles, RSR grenades, R&D, thermite, using medical supplies as a non-medic, and many others)

The feature is either-

1. Considered undesirable to the game as a WHOLE and is removed (Dragging ayys, using medical supplies as non-medic, thermite, ANYTHING to do with heat generation or electricity, mesons, phoron, mining)

2. Considered unbalanced and nerfed so hard as to render it unusable (Combat drugs, egrills, RSR grenades)

3. Considered unbalanced and removed with the promise of an eventual replacement, which never comes due to "reasons" (Supermatter, atmos bombs, R&D)

4. Replaced with something with a much lower skill ceiling and floor (Making perdiox. It used to be chem only. Then it was added to vendors to make it more accessible roundstart. Then it was nerfed into dex+, because it was too good to be there every round at roundstart).

Like Noah said, please stop removing depth. Allow skilled PLAYERS, not CHARACTERS to do more efficient things due to their experience, and not just because they can press a button on a magic ID-locked console.

the next thing I expect to see axed is the chemmaster. there's no way we have that many bottles in the weymeds for any other reason, and it let's you axe all the "unauthorized" recipies in one go

[Crab_Spider]

Make every other role suffer.