Replace Roboticist experiments with positive work tasks
Posted: Fri May 31, 2024 8:50 am
Right now, the sole reason I, and many other people (at least from what I've heard) do not play Roboticist is SOLELY because of the extremely tedious "Scan 2 damaged mechs" and "Scan 2 mech wreckages" experiments. Not only is it awful to do every shift, but it doesn't even contribute to the shift, you know full well you're only just building 2 mechs for the purpose of jumping through the terrible hoops to actually make the mechs you want.
My proposal is this:
For the first experiment (the scan 2 damaged mechs experiment), replace it instead with an experiment to scan 2 simplebots which have been created by a player (not one which started on the station). You could probably accomplish this by making the last action in a simplebot construction apply a player reference tag or something to the simplebot, whereas shift start simplebots could all just be assigned a tag that says "ADMIN" or something, if they even need one at all.
For the second experiment, (the scan 2 wreckages experiment), replace it instead with an experiment to scan one mech which has been created by a player. This will mean that in a large portion of shifts, robotics will make a Ripley and pass it off to Cargo, or an Odysseus and pass it off to Medical. Same idea, give it a tag upon completion that denotes it was created by a player.
This will make it so Robotics will actually feel like they're contributing to the shift and doing meaningful work, rather than jumping through pointless hoops just because coders don't want them to be able to build their Gygax without "doing something to earn it" or something. Like someone being forced to turn a windmill without producing power, or milling grain, just doing it because fuck you that's why, and we will see more simplebots and more non-combat mech usage.
My proposal is this:
For the first experiment (the scan 2 damaged mechs experiment), replace it instead with an experiment to scan 2 simplebots which have been created by a player (not one which started on the station). You could probably accomplish this by making the last action in a simplebot construction apply a player reference tag or something to the simplebot, whereas shift start simplebots could all just be assigned a tag that says "ADMIN" or something, if they even need one at all.
For the second experiment, (the scan 2 wreckages experiment), replace it instead with an experiment to scan one mech which has been created by a player. This will mean that in a large portion of shifts, robotics will make a Ripley and pass it off to Cargo, or an Odysseus and pass it off to Medical. Same idea, give it a tag upon completion that denotes it was created by a player.
This will make it so Robotics will actually feel like they're contributing to the shift and doing meaningful work, rather than jumping through pointless hoops just because coders don't want them to be able to build their Gygax without "doing something to earn it" or something. Like someone being forced to turn a windmill without producing power, or milling grain, just doing it because fuck you that's why, and we will see more simplebots and more non-combat mech usage.