owenowen101

Get over yourself

My Stuart Atreides fan art. Did I go too far?

It's been said above already, but demand to play on Paradise was very high prior to the server auto de-lister coming into use and high server populations couldn't be accommodated well on the current map (Boxstation). The fact is that bigger and better maps will help us enable more people to play on the server, create a richer diversity of gaming experiences and provide the space for any future expansions. Again, the OP is specifically addressing the potential of a map rotation feature being used on Paradise. If poor maps are part of that rotation, then the maps themselves need addressing and not the rotation feature itself, which undoubtedly brings with it fantastic possibilities for improving users' enjoyment of the server.

This is an issue with the maps in question and not a problem with a map rotation feature itself. You're right in saying that there are some bottle-necks to population capacity within some of the maps, for example only one operating room in medbay on Delta station. However the maps are undergoing serious revision and adjustment, mostly by Purpose2, to remedy this. I know the brig on Delta station is being completely overhauled, medbay edited and other such places are being altered to fix these kinds of issues. Delta station in particular undeniably has the size to support a larger server population and I think it's unfair to say such maps will not help address the issue of high pop. based on a look at their original designs. Any design used on the server will clearly not be the verbatim original map and will be sufficiently edited to accommodate the server's needs.

Another Frankenstein's monster: Gatfruit in botany:

Adding a system for map rotation doesn't mean that it's the equivalent of playing on /tg/ station and this feature obviously isn't the only thing that distinguishes the two servers. In terms of new players learning the game, getting accustomed to map layout is one of the smallest challenges to new players in my experience and doesn't present a big issue when there are detailed maps available on the wiki for you to reference. I'm not sure people will be especially desperate to play on particular maps and can't see them waiting 'hours' to play, unless the other map(s) in rotation are particularly bad in comparison. In which case, this is an issue with those maps instead of the map rotation feature itself. I can't really speak to the point on the possible increase in maintenance required. Though I imagine the same could be said about the addition of pretty much any content. The fact is that before Paradise started using the auto-delister, the server was getting very busy and there were clearly many people who wanted to play on the server. Unfortunately boxstation isn't well suited to accommodating a very high server pop. and this was, as I understand it, the primary reason for its introduction. Bigger and better maps will not only allow more players to enjoy playing on Paradise but it will also add variety, greater replayability and arguably it'll help tackle meta-tactics and/or 'powergaming'.

I also think this sounds quite interesting, worth looking into. But I'm worried that it may be quite a nerf to antags who're trying to keep their murdering business stealthy. Perhaps some kind of cheap syndi-rollerbed should be made available. Or else body bags have a similar or reduced effect?

To be fair, I've had a fair few blueshields ask me to make this for them. In terms of using calomel, there isn't really any need. If you're in medbay and someone is horribly polluted with reagents, you just bung them in the sleeper, dialysise them and give them some pentetic acid. Similarly, if you're outside of medbay pent acid still works adequately and I wouldn't ever feel the need to sacrifice space in my pill bottles to carry calomel. The wiki is more up to date than some pretty old medical guides on the forums here so best to use that for now. I can look into making a more up to date forum guide if people are interested.

XDD great post my friend! ;)) Cool guide!

Definitely agree with this. Far too many heads of staff get overly angsty and neurotic and end up firing people for off-hand slights against them. In my experience this is usually a method of covering up their ineptitude. Also heads who chain-telebaton someone to the HOP line (or steal IDs etc.) are way out of line but have fun ever trying to get them done for assault!

These clash a bit. I've heard many admins say fairly bluntly that they dislike regular updates and I know Tully particularly hates anyone using the 'department ratings' system and updating CC everytime there is a change. I just feel like the NT rep is too much reliant on how bothered CC can be to give feedback on faxes. Though they're still much more of an enjoyable experience to play than the IAA, who in my opinion is a very bare-bones job. But this isn't really the place to discuss that. Nice guide.

Keep the wiki open definitely. But here is what I do at the start when I go chef: Setup Go into the bar and grab the cake hat and the salt/pepper shakers from the table. Fetch the buckets from garden at the back of the kitchen and and put 5u of universal enzyme in one. This is your 'cheese bucket' which you only use to collect milk from the cow. Keep this bucket on the floor by the back door so you don't get it mixed up. Set all your containers, beakers and buckets to a 5u transfer rate each to avoid over-adding reagents to recipes. Go to the botany window and ask them to plant ingredients for whatever it is you want to make. But always ask for wheat as you can do a lot with this. Suggest that they make anything they plant for you 'reharvestable' and hope they know what you mean by this. I like asking for white beats/sugar and cocoa to make lots of whacky sweets. If you want to help them out, one sugar cane seed can be found in the garden near arrivals, which isn't available in the seed vending machine in botany. Also ask botany for a plant bag so you can move stacks of produce from the fridge to the grinder in a couple of clicks. They can get these in the vendor to the left of the seed vending machine in botany. Use the request console on the wall near the grinder and ask for a monkey crate from cargo. You likely will be ignored but you can go down to cargo later when you've got some food done and and order it properly. Food For quick and easy early food to keep people happy, add all the flour you have into your empty bucket and go over to the sink and spam click, filling it with water, until you not longer are producing dough balls. If you want to be thrifty with what dough you have, if you think botany are inept, then roll it all and cut it into dough slices and make plain spaghetti. Otherwise do something more interesting like making a birthday cake, using the hat you got from the bar earlier. Some people refuse to eat anything other than meat so make a couple of steaks with the meat you have and/or make some meatballs for spaghetti & meatballs. Use the rice to make rice pudding. The eggboxes are your fall-back. They're plentiful and its super easy to make fried eggs. Make these if people are nagging you for food. After you've got some room to breathe, start cooking whatever you like. Try making something interesting like a mountain of deep-fried donuts to make everyone fat or a lifetime supply of yum-yum batons and make that one security officer brick-it for a moment thinking that there are a load of stun-batons on the kitchen counter. Make sure cargo are ordering a monkey/wolpin/etc crate for you (for meat) and see if botany are making anything you asked them to make. Other tips: Nag R&D for upgrades to your kitchen appliances. These are super important if you want to make a decent amount of anything. Don't be in the 2/3 proportion of chefs who end up going SSD after 10 minutes without making any food.

Some suggestions I'd like to make just from thinking off of the top of my head: Allow IAAs to conduct department inspections rather than it simply being an NT rep thing and give them some more power to police SoP to an extent. This might make more people actually want to play internal affairs more than once or twice. Add a clause in medical SoP prohibiting the annoying practice of 'reserving ORs'. I see this quite a lot in medbay and it only serves to start vicious arguments between surgeons. A clause encouraging people to respect an attending surgeon and and not barge in and take over would be nice.

:salt:

I think the conversation evolved into something along the lines of 'how far do we go with allowing people the ability to do other people's job and in what circumstances?'. Of course medbay can get overwhelmed as it is but restricting access to the chem fridge is only going to make it more difficult to deal with. The reason being perhaps that you can't get to the chem fridge. This is definitely an issue but more often than not, its the doctors themselves who take all the synthflesh patches or hand them out like sweets to people with a few points of damage. This is just ridiculous and exceptionally poor behaviour. If there are sufficiently competent medical staff available then people shouldn't be doing anything at all, let alone a roboticist insisting on being the one to do a procedure in medbay.

The thing is, cyborgs are powerful and the majority of people who think of borgs in this way are thinking about it in the context of security cyborgs: All access - this is immensely powerful as a security cyborg as not only does it allow you to open, bolt and shock any door but allows you to be incredibly pro-active in patroling. Heard a scream from the chef's freezer? Just pop in and have a look, no need to hang around shouting in chat for a minute asking the AI to open the door. Get to where you are needed very quickly and catch people in the act very easily. Spaceproof - again, can be very useful as a security cyborg and they too have no issues with navigating space as they can use their disablers as a means of thrust. Many antags take to space in order to access the AI satellite, perma brig or the armoury. This is relatively safe as the number of security hardsuits or space-worthy security members is often limited, but security cyborgs can easily navigate space at full speed, in effect always being in a hardsuit without the penalty to movement speed. Lack of stuns and general robustness - being unable to push, disarm, slip or throw cyborgs is a very powerful advantage for a cyborg in combat and makes a fight against them quite unconventional and tricky if you're not adequately prepared for an encounter specifically with a borg. I know many newer players who are not familiar with the meta for dealing with cyborgs (EMPs and/or flashes) get quite thrown off by a fight with a cyborg. On top of this, the ability of a cyborg to 'nudge' people a couple of tiles is quite annoying. You're right, super-cooled areas are uncommon but plasma fires are not that uncommon and rightly so cyborgs take fire/heat damage. And vulnerable to flashes, yes. But I would argue that both EMPs and flashes are hard but niche counters to cyborgs. Sure the EMP kit costs only 4TC as a traitor and is a bargain but if you don't have either of these items, you're badly prepared for a cyborg and the sudden appearance of one can be an antag's swift undoing. Though any traitor can acquire the EMP kit, it isn't always assured that every traitor can aquire a flash. You can't always just ask robotics or someone else for one and get it. Most people aren't short-sighted enough to not realise what you might use it for. This also means no blood, no bleeding and no reagents. You cannot poison a cyborg to death or suffocate it/choke it, shoot it with knock-out chemicals or irradiate it. Some upgrades for cyborgs are very poweful. Vtec makes borgs very fast and improved batteries or yellow slime-core batteries give a cyborg very large or rechargable batteries, respectively. These upgrades are not difficult to acquire either and can easily be obtained within the first half hour of a shift. Not having to eat food isn't a big advantage but needing energy as a borg is hardly a disadvantage considering its insignificance in light of some of the upgrades mentioned above. Finding a willing roboticist isn't hard and recharging stations for cyborgs are easily accessible, since you have all access anyway. If they did have arms and were able to manipulate all items and objects to the same extent as humans, humans would be almost totally redundant. Wot AIs and roboticists generally care about their borgs. If you do die you can often times easily respawn as another positronic brain, ready to be put into another cyborg.

Challenges are of course necessary in making an exciting game, but again, I don't think many people sit there in dead chat, their body rotting in medbay, thinking "Gosh isn't this fantastic? My body has been mouldy for 10 minutes now, and nobody knows how to revive me! Cor I'd love to get back to playing space station 13 but I'm enjoying the ineptitude of medbay too much." Medbay can be bad and this adds to the fun and chaotic atmosphere that SS13 is known for, but when they're so bad to the point that people aren't able to continue playing the game because the bodies are piling up and nobody wants to/knows how to deal with them, then nobody is really having fun and thats ultimately what we're all playing this game to have, some fun. If you get satisfaction out of and enjoy being a victim of incompetance or lack of knowledge without the prospect of anyone else being able to help you, then fair play to you, but I suspect many others don't enjoy being in that position.

I agree that there is a limit and perhaps I should have outlined a little more clearly what I consider urgent. I would define it in this instance as something that would require quick to immediate action to either save your own or somebody elses life or for the greater good of someones' gameplay experience. Now I understand that that latter part is subjective so by that I mean if, for example, someone is dead in medbay and nobody is willing to or knows how to attend to them, patching them up or putting them in the cloner I would consider acceptable. I think it'd be little consolation to somebody who is eager to rejoin the round, having died, knowing that although someone could revive them, they don't want to because they'd rather let the person wanting to rejoin the round sit on their hands, bored, whilst medbay fumbles around. This isn't the same as hopping the desk into cargo and printing some welders because the techs are in the back room eating pizza or even breaking into engineering to get materials to fix a hull breach. Both of these, even the latter, I would not consider urgent (especially with LINDA) to the point where it would be necessary to go over the heads of the respective department. The point at which a situation is actually 'urgent', it would not be possible to find an alternative as you have suggested, such as going to science and banging on the window until they open the shutters, asking for mannitol, then having the shutters closed on you again. Joking aside, for me when it comes to preserving the continued existance of myself or others within the round, even if it as the cost of going over an inexperienced or incompetent doctor's head, then it is justified as being for the greater enjoyment of the greatest number of people.

It sounds fine in theory to restrict medicine distribution to doctors only but all-access to the chem fridge is simply a quality of life feature. Though some people may be fascinated by giving a 5 minute long explanation to a newbie doctor on how you need him or her to get you some mannitol because you can't stop saying things like 'LOL2CAT', personally in a situation such as that I'd much prefer to be able to self-medicate. That isn't to say I am unwilling to help new players, but sometimes you're in an urgent situation. The fact is if you're being seen to by a competent doctor, they'll be giving you the correct medicine anyway. As part of the MRP nature of Paradise, we don't have rules against false-ignorance when it comes to knowing job-specific information, people are able to self-medicate and to treat others and are allowed to know how to. This isn't to say that I would barge into medbay and do everything for myself, but having the ability to do so in the presence of total incompetence, as is not uncommon in medbay, is a great relief to me and a great boon to expediency, when its required. Having said all that, I much prefer the idea of stricter overdose limits and some moderately harsh penalties for OD'ing on regular healing meds. To me this seems a more natural solution to both; people necking all the meds in the fridge in one go and also to limiting the self-service approach that you frown upon, as people will be more cautious about how much of each medicine they should be consuming. Though this change itself would bring with it its own implications for needing more consistently a competent chemistry team, which as it is, isn't all that common either.