Fox McCloud

We need more interdepartmental interaction and cooperation on Paradise...not less. Complete Self-sufficiency leads to stagnation and gives jobs less meaning/reason to exist.

I strongly believe that assistants shouldn't be limited. Not everyone wants to play security officer, not everyone wants to play "X" job, but assistants generally give a base level experience to just kinda play and enjoy the game without taking up a job slot or having nay responsibilities. The alternative is worse; civlian slots are even more limited than they currently are, and as a result, we get more people who sign up for job X then don't perform than job because they don't really want to play as that job; they just want to kinda run around doing whatever. I know the argument is "well, then we can just job ban then". My reply to this is: you're quite literally forcing someone to play a job against their will or tell them "don't play on this server *at all*" under those conditions. Keep in mind, there's people who "main" assistant and enjoy it--not every single one is some greytiding "shitter" either; they just enjoy playing the game peripherally. If anything, I think assistant slots should be unlimited with officer slots scaling based on assistant population; that is to say, the max officers is X, but 1 more officer slot opens for every X civilians on station. You're not going to get people to magically enjoy a job if they're forced to play it, nor will it actually stop them from greytiding. The desire to have more people play security is a good one and is a noble goal, but this isn't the way to go about it, either.

I believe the wrench goes back to an older time when canisters didn't auto-connect to ports on initialization.

This was fixed, then promptly removed, actually, and it certainly wasn't all blood. It was only blood that you extracted from someone, put in a beaker, then dumped on a turf. Hitting someone to generate blood on the floor wouldn't trigger this...likewise, even if you dumped blood on the floor (as above), then stepped in it and made blood trails with it....you still wouldn't have any viruses in the blood trails. It was explicitly only blood dumped on the ground. Either case, viruses were refactored to be more sane---they are now handled entirely on a mob instead of a discrete controller. Dumped blood infecting wasn't worth it to keep, and expanding the system to work with all blood would have been incredibly costly (500-1000 blood decals all processing to check if they can infect someone in range).

The health analyzer will report if they're bleeding regardless of their bandages status; this is so you know if they have heparin in them or if you've lowered the threshold below what is required to stop the bleeding to begin with. If the health analyzer says they're bleeding, ti means you haven't addressed the underlying brute damage or they have/had heparin in them and it hasn't clotted yet.

In general, botanists should attempt to provide some basic level of food to the chef, within reason. The botanist isn't the chef's slave, but he shouldn't be making *only* "lol drugs". Wheat is the most important thing to grow, for the chef, by far, unless he's doing something highly specialized like a sushi chef or some other gimmick. Other important plants are tomatoes, corn, chillis, and potatoes; these are kinda your "core" plants that are probably always going to be requested, at some point, by a competent chef. That said, flour is, by far, the most "core" of these ingredients. If a botanist wants to just fiddle around all chef, if he grows at least a decent amount of wheat, the chef can grow an incredibly wide variety of food. Drugs and dangerous chemicals are legal to possess by botanists, same as scientists, but distribution is not. The botanists should not be responsible for animal upkeep (outside of bees), but he shouldn't be prevented from doing so either; animals are a shared responsibility. Co-operation to provide monkey cubes should be encouraged, but not explicitly required. Botanists entering in the morgue should be doing so only to take blood samples. Botanist should be willing to co-operate with the bartender for some exotic drinsk, but by no means *required* to (as with the chef); it's really only very exotic drinks that the bartender can make with botany co-operation; 99% of the time, the basics are available to the bartender. Botany should not b e required to co-operate with medical either, but again, encouraged to do so. All in all, IMO, the botanists primary responsibility should be to provide food for the chef first, then experiment around with various plants secondary; from there, everything is kinda in the "optional, but encouraged" territory. Bees? They should be contained within botany of course, but botanists shouldn't be held responsible for them getting out if a non-botanist opens the door/breaks windows.

Cluwnes are for killing, not for fixing. It's not even murder; it's release.

If IPC lose their EMP vulnerability or it gets nerfed, then they will have to be nerfed in some other form. No two ways about it.

This is a very top-down approach to a problem that makes a lot of assumptions about our playerbase. Not everyone enjoys or wants to roleplay torture, hostage taking, or what have you for most of the shift then killing them or getting caught. That may be fun to you, but there's a lot of people this isn't fun for. For some, fun to them is killing their target silently and living in fear for their life the rest of the shift. For some, it's juggling their job and murder at the same time while attempting to not arouse suspicion by anyone. Others yet, still, enjoy racking up a bodycount by baiting officers into chasing them (whether or not they get killed in the process). My point is, just out and out removing kill objectives assumes that the majority of our players like and enjoy a very particular playstyle (which, from what you describe, is most likely high RP); Para's aims are to be medium, which means that, yes, some enjoy playing in that light; some like a little roleplay with their murder, and others still just want to play with game mechanics. All of these are valid on Para, and out and out removing kill objectives for the sake of "roleplay" is marginalizing a good portion of Para's playerbase (namely mechanical players and medium-RP players).

Not everything needs to be reproducible. There's a lot of things that are intentionally limited for balance purposes or to generate artificial scarcity/value to them. As a general rule of thumb, I'd say most station structures should be replaceable or there should be a substitute.Some things also should never be replaceable, but should probably be fixable (ie: there never needs to be multiple gravity generators). We also have to be careful how we make some things replaceable; just adding things, blindly, to one area can add additional power to departments that may not need it (I don't think giving autolathes the ability to print replacement bandages would be a good thing). There's multiple methods to tackling this problem, but not all are necessarily good ones (ie: lockboxes are a terrible method). Likewise, sometimes substitution for similar devices/objects is just as desirable (chemistry's ability to make patches doesn't really necessitate the need for producing more biopacks). A good example of something that requires little thought on replacing: chem master An example of something that requires more than just blindly adding: telebaton Also, just because something is straight-forward in replacing, conceptually, doesn't mean it's easy, code wise; a chem master is straight forward, conceptually, to replace, but actually implementing it, code wise, would be quite troublesome

The AI is quiet because you're not actually playing the AI. In actuality, the AI is a near useless mob that sits in the core 24/7 and doesn't really do anything, ever. In actuality, there's a special "camera" mob (yes, that's what it's called) that can look around a whole bunch of places and can interact with the world around it based on rules. That's what the "AI" actually is, and why you can hear doors opening near your core, but can't hear anything else.

This would be used in the same manner executions are, only it'll have all the touchy-feely benefits that permabrigging someone and being "merciful" from an IC perspective. From a player perspective it's the same as throwing them into the crematorium; their mob is deleted and they're force ghosted. For all intents and purposes, this is the same as execution, if not worse.

Goon mining is about as mind numbing as it comes. It's a small preset area that cycles various settings in and out and also scans them. There's no combat, and hardly any of the treasures are particularly interesting or helpful. The main "hook" for miners doing their job is set of insanely powerful industrial armor that makes you immune to explosions and reduces melee damage dramatically...that and a pair of boots that lets you run around as if you were on meth, constantly. Aside from that, you typically played miner in the hopes you got antag so you could make hundreds of satchel charges and hack them..then go on a bombing spree. Miners would rarely deliver materials to other departments and typically hoard all of them for themselves or ship it off to cargo for cash; sometimes mechanics (similar to R&D) would see some of them, but other departments? Fat chance. Miners were directly encouraged to do their job for themselves and it ended there; our mining system encourages miners to do their job for a mutual benefit, which means all around less frustrations, a more co-operative environment, and more productivity or "wealth" for the station. The "complexity" you talk about here is really just a gating system; there's no measuring of depths or anything of that nature; there's just hardness of material, which functions the same as it does in minecraft; it prevents you from mining certain materials out the gate. Furthermore, a system whereby you constantly incessantly have to adjust for depth isn't really fun; it doesn't generate any new gameplay or behaviors except introduce tedium; this was the basis of old Xenoarch; it's a prime example of complexity for complexity's sake; that's not beneficial to game design as you're essentially having the player go through steps for no other reason than the game developer wanted you to go through the steps (Bay's old and new detective systems are guilty of this as well). TL;DR Goon's mining system is dull and boring; the only interesting thing about it was giving miners blatantly overpowered gear and a powerful traitor-only kit; it furthermore is a step backwards in terms of encouraging players to co-operate with each other and for department to build on each other; the lack of risk and monotony of the job (not to mention lack of combat) also doesn't allow those who are more skilled to express that skill, in-game, versus those who are just clicking on tiles mindlessly. Lavaland is the future, as it builds upon and improves on the existing systems laid forth in our current mining and improves them, allowing for a better designed experience than what we currently have (or what anyone else offers).

The big problem with species and nukeops is that it's largely a very tight-knight team-based experience where-in you are required and expected to count on your team-mates. To that end, one person being IPC and screaming about using EMPs or demanding certain strats not be engaged in because of their fragility is usually detrimental to the rest of the team (who were usually human). The case could be made for allowing the human-like races (Taj, Vulp, etc) to be allowed, but, for the most part, the experience of being nuke op should largely be about choices each of the players can control and work together on, and shouldn't really be about working around the quirks of other team-mates.

Fat can exist, but it merely doesn't alter your sprites; would make life easier, universally for spriters.

So you're recommending removing one of literal three methods of incapacitating a borg (and one of those is RD+Captain only)? This will make borgs even better anti-antags than they already are and will pretty much mean that if you're an antag, there's borgs about, and you don't have an EMP, you're going to get screwed by one. The duration may need to be altered a bit, but removing it completely, especially from secborgs, is going to genreate a lot of problems.

you can turn on the medical scanner or the security scanner by using one of the buttons to the left of the modules.

All prefs should probably *not* carry over when you're a nukie, for this very reason. I remember IPC nukies. They were the worst. They broadly fell into two categories: those who tried their best and recognized that they probably weren't going to last long...andddd those who expected to be catered to because they were IPC. Diona nukies was also bad "I'll be there in a few days"

This, pretty much. Also, you have people who are solidly medium roleplay and are annoyed at things both the higher and lower RPers engage in. This is a concept that probably isn't ever going to change, unless we choose to go fully one direction or another. As for "well, it's obvious they're powergamers because they're overly paranoid or don't take the cloning process/dying seriously." I Kinda object to this notion. While I can understand not liking that behavior, I think this is an example of "not liking something and using roleplay as a false justification to stamp out said behavior". Much like any roleplay game, such as D&D, there's established paradigms and "laws of physics" within that universe. For SS13, there's a few things that are very clearly established. For one, cloning is available, doesn't cost anything from your paycheck, and is viable----for another, souls do exist and this fact is only going to be more cemented into Para, going forward (ie: https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/5890). Given these two fact, it's fairly logical that people treat death in a nonchalant; dying is going to hurt, sure, but the fact that you are the same person you died as and the fact that "revival is cheap", well, it's going to absolutely cause people to behave differently. Again, I can understand if some people don't like this, but to say that "remembering everything and treating death as trivial is bad roleplay", I would argue, is patently false. On that similar line, due to the fact that shifts are, in some form and light, interconnected, it's also fairly reasonable that characters invariably would become paranoid over time. Not a day goes by without at least 15-20 crewmembers dying, someone shooting up medbay, nuke ops attempting to bomb the station, or aliens trying to dissect you. The frequency of this events happening is extremely high, to say the least. Due to the frequency of these events and the fact that all shifts are interconnected, again, it's only logical that, even from a roleplay perspective, people become paranoid and defensive. Again, I'll repeat; I can understand if someone doesn't like those effects, but again, labeling this as "poor roleplay", comes across as playing D&D then complaining about the wizard using magic (because you don't personally like magic or the impacts it has on roleplay in said game). Now to get on to the main point. Removal of revival methods is only going to further serve to entrench paranoid behavior. Recall that I said that "revival is cheap", earlier; note that I didn't say "death was cheap", because in SS13 death is very expensive; there's a lot of situations where you can die and be out of the game for the next hour (or more). Making revival more "expensive" is going to make death more "expensive", which means people are going to do even more to avoid it, which will include paranoid/overly-suspecting behaviors. This is one reason why I don't think removing cloning is going to have the impact suggested; it's going to make players more paranoid than they already are (and thus going even further in their mechanical proceedings to stay alive) while simultaneously making revival even more expensive. The latter of which, I don't think is needed; as pointed out, death is already extremely expensive in SS13--it makes sense that if is easy to come by and you're likely to stay that way, that if you are under the circumstances to be found, revival should probably be a little bit easier. It's a way of keeping players active and engaged in a game that is a 2 hour slog between rounds. So, at the end of the day, I don't think removal of cloning is going to have nearly the "positive" impact on roleplay as some think; it ultimately requires a very very strict ruleset to address all the behaviors associated with it which are often illogically contradictory in nature (ie: cross round relationships/friendships are allowed, but experiences and events around the relationship are not), as seen on stations like Polaris or Bay. This is an insane level of administrative involvement that isn't going to happen on Paradise because of how taxing and time-involved it is, not to mention, the idea of "feigning stupidity" in a lot of situations isn't too popular with the majority of the community (or admins), either.

Empty out your beer bottle and refill it with something else; I believe it will start reproducing that reagent, instead.

While I think it's conceptually interesting to do this, this is expanding the ballistics available to security. Given the nature of SS13 is "crew has energy guns, antags have ballistics", this kinda works against that. This isn't just for thematic reasons. Ballistics have several large advantages over energy guns--namely EMP immunity and spammability. An officer with one of these can carry around dozens upon dozens upon dozens of rounds on him, completely invalidating the need to ever go back/restock/recharge. In the vast majority of instance, ballistics are superior to energy guns. The few ballistics that are available to the crew are already generally highly problematic, especially when it comes to antag balance; I can't really see these being any different.

Neat in concept, but officers field reloading is a big problem, from a balance perspective, in SS13. This tends to encourage spammable use of range weapons (which are already dominant) and gives officers way too much "stand and fight" against potential antags, particularly more openly hostile ones like Nuke ops and wizard. Officers having to go back is a good thing, from a design perspective, as opposed to carrying one gun and a ton of magazines. These are also inherently immune to EMP, as well (again, not a good thing for generalized station useage).

We already have this; it's been around for a couple of years now; it's just and administrative decision whether or not it should be enabled.

Most engines invariably become set up and forget--even the most "intensive" care engines are usually optimized for low/no maintenance (supermatter) by the players. Mostly because no one wants to sit around doing absolutely nothing but stare at a sprite changing every now and again and pushing a button or two every 10-15 minutes, and nothing more.

This summarizes things quite nicely. Adding additional complexity to a system for the sake of complexity isn't a good thing. As a matter of fact, it just makes a system harder to learn, more inaccessible, and more time consuming. Take old botany for instance--it had a lot of complexity for complexity's sake....and very few people actually mastered it. With new botany, there's a lot more people playing it and generating far more interesting strategies of how to use botany on-station. Adding more equipment with no difference in result is just adding a time sink and additional button presses for "realism". That's not a good thing. Take the addition of the chemistry heater. Yes, it was a realistic addition, but it wasn't added just for this purpose. It was added to create more depth and gameplay for chemistry itself--namely the addition of temperature. This added completely new interactions that didn't previously exist and would make the chemist have to engage in more actual gameplay than he did before (adjusting recipes for said temperature). Systems are best when condensed to their purist form. Yes, this means they can be simplistic at times, but that's not necessarily a bad thing--cutting to the core gameplay of an action/system makes things far more approachable and easy to understand; it also makes balancing easier and cuts down on frustrations.