CosmicScientist wrote:Antidepressants sound depressing unless they're named joy pills and I really can dance in the pools of rainbows that leak from the clowns body as everyone hugs him with face splitting smiles, as Miracles said.
Taking pills to satiate your happy meter is just a hunger bar with one more chemistry interaction than the ~two we currently have, though I don't know what moodlets was beyond a hunger bar expansion.
It feels hard to consider mechanic based role play as a bad thing. I mean, players take the mechanic of click until horizontal quite far in their role play, often without even using the chat bar.
They weren't going to actually "heal" the mood but they would suppress bad moods for a time, just like real antidepressants. The point wasn't to give players a quick way out of moodlets, but a different approach that would feel organic and more realistic as an alternative to regular food. They could also have a tactical use: pop one whenever you predict you are going to suffer many bad moods (blood, slips etc.) to negate them.
Also the main problem with moodlets as said before was railroaded immersion breaking RP, e.g. "nothing interesting has happened" when you just experienced the most amazing and zany round of all history, "my belly feels round and full" which made your character sound mildly autistic, "engineers are incompetent" after the SM exploded which would confuse the fuck out of a new player who has no way to know what the fluff post-delamination message means, as well as being blatantly OOC and so on
However, the fact that none of these problems were ever acknowledged by the creator and the only changes of note were the addition of yet more moods and the overall reduction of their impact on the round (also thanks to the implementation of mood traits and the consequent "perfect build" which made moods irrelevant) makes me think that outright removal is probably the best course of action. It doesn't help that the creator blames the failure of the feature entirely on 2 maintainers disliking it.