Bring back player disruption.
Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2022 2:28 am
In the name of balancing, players have lost agency for the sake of balance.
In genetics, cloning has been removed entirely, space adaptaton has been nerfed into 2 powers. X-ray vision is gone. Thermal vision makes you go blind. Hulk causes you to break your arms if you destroy walls, and kill yourself. In its place, we've gotten new powers, like Webbing, or Transcendent Olfaction. Powers people clamor for every day I am sure. A bunch of disruptive powers wouldn't be typically distributed, so if you look through old space station 13 stories a lot of people mention revolutions starting in science, and using Hulk/Space Adapt to challenge security and the heads.
The Head of Personnel has had his latitude chopped down at his knees. The game from 2007-2021 was fine with having the head of personnel assign as much or as little access he wanted, now even he is locked behind the color of ID cards. HoPs never used to give all access, people would ask for it anyways, and get a job change or something else. This would be excluded if 1. The HoP was an antagonist, and for a long time he had the potential to be. 2. Station emergency. Nuclear operatives have declared war, or blob has eaten half the station and is 10 minutes from victory and it's an all hands on deck situation. 3. He was on drugs/speech check passed/whatever reason he was deciding to be nice that day. Getting captain level access as an assistant was rare but did happen. Now it doesn't
Chemistry has been nerfed many times over the years. A lot of things were removed from the game over the years, which I agree shouldn't have been able to manafacture from round start. The solution to this is bring those chemical reactions back into the game, but lean on other departments. Require it to be derived from something grown in botany, allow mining to collect blood from lavaland creeps and hand it to mining, hell cargo could just have a reagant chemical supply chest that has limited distribution because of the stuff it can make. There's real life limits on the amount of cough syrup you can buy, nanotransen having limits on the amount of certain chems sent to a station is believable.
Guns have been nerfed in a few ways. Tasers are gone, so it's a lot harder for security to catch criminals. Guns are big, meaning they can't be stored in backpacks anymore, so wizards dreams of stealing the armory when nobody is looking is off the table, and security's ability to get stolen from is nerfed.
Ultimately these decisions were "logical" from a balance perspective. It can get annoying when hulk gets handed out like candy every round. (This is the job of security to step in, remove the test subjects, delete radioactivity, strength and hulk from every disc, and steal the test subjects.) So if nobody wants hulk the problem is solved, but the more and more aspects of the game are hammered down this way, people don't want any job, they play as an assistant, and eventually they just stop playing.
In genetics, cloning has been removed entirely, space adaptaton has been nerfed into 2 powers. X-ray vision is gone. Thermal vision makes you go blind. Hulk causes you to break your arms if you destroy walls, and kill yourself. In its place, we've gotten new powers, like Webbing, or Transcendent Olfaction. Powers people clamor for every day I am sure. A bunch of disruptive powers wouldn't be typically distributed, so if you look through old space station 13 stories a lot of people mention revolutions starting in science, and using Hulk/Space Adapt to challenge security and the heads.
The Head of Personnel has had his latitude chopped down at his knees. The game from 2007-2021 was fine with having the head of personnel assign as much or as little access he wanted, now even he is locked behind the color of ID cards. HoPs never used to give all access, people would ask for it anyways, and get a job change or something else. This would be excluded if 1. The HoP was an antagonist, and for a long time he had the potential to be. 2. Station emergency. Nuclear operatives have declared war, or blob has eaten half the station and is 10 minutes from victory and it's an all hands on deck situation. 3. He was on drugs/speech check passed/whatever reason he was deciding to be nice that day. Getting captain level access as an assistant was rare but did happen. Now it doesn't
Chemistry has been nerfed many times over the years. A lot of things were removed from the game over the years, which I agree shouldn't have been able to manafacture from round start. The solution to this is bring those chemical reactions back into the game, but lean on other departments. Require it to be derived from something grown in botany, allow mining to collect blood from lavaland creeps and hand it to mining, hell cargo could just have a reagant chemical supply chest that has limited distribution because of the stuff it can make. There's real life limits on the amount of cough syrup you can buy, nanotransen having limits on the amount of certain chems sent to a station is believable.
Guns have been nerfed in a few ways. Tasers are gone, so it's a lot harder for security to catch criminals. Guns are big, meaning they can't be stored in backpacks anymore, so wizards dreams of stealing the armory when nobody is looking is off the table, and security's ability to get stolen from is nerfed.
Ultimately these decisions were "logical" from a balance perspective. It can get annoying when hulk gets handed out like candy every round. (This is the job of security to step in, remove the test subjects, delete radioactivity, strength and hulk from every disc, and steal the test subjects.) So if nobody wants hulk the problem is solved, but the more and more aspects of the game are hammered down this way, people don't want any job, they play as an assistant, and eventually they just stop playing.
