The new addiction system

[Trololiver112]

Greetings!

I would like to start this thread of by saying that i don't really do this types of threads and that this one might not the greatest. 

I was in a discussion on the discord with some other people earlier today about the new addiction system. To me it did seem like most of us had the same ideas about this new system. That it's cool and we understand why it's in the game, but do not particularly agree with the current state of it. We were told by Kyet to make a thread if we wanted to share our thoughts and be heard so we agreed on some points and i made this.

This is therefore not only my points but some of those brought up on the discord. I Also had some problems setting up a test server with the latest addiction changes and therfore don't have the most information on it, other than the examples from the game under.

Here are some of the examples brought up:

* IPCs get addicted to the Alcohols(or the synthetic ones anyways). This makes little sense ICly, even making them gag and wretch. 

* Nicotine is waaay to addictive now. making one cigarette enough to totally ruin you. Nicotine withdrawal is also very hard to stop. even when you continue getting nicotine in your system.

* The problem with alcohol addiction is that you get addicted to the drink itself, not the alcohol. For example: you could drink some wine and then be addicted purely to wine. Then no other alcohols would help against the addiction at all.

* You get addicted from alcohols to easy now aswell. This one is one of the most annoying ones, as it stops you from ever drinking even really small ammounts of alcohol unless you are ready to be collapsing while gaging for a while. An example of this was when i was having a single glass of Vodka with the NT rep one shift. I died shortly after to an ash drake, but got to watch the NT rep go around addicted to Vodka without even being drunk at all(if so before i died and started spectating. whitch was not a long period of time anyways)

* The coffe products like the latte is also addictive, and very much so. Once again it gets you addicted on the specific drink, and not the caffeine or whatever.

 

Also sorry for my English if any of this was hard to understand. 

I am now mostly asking for your opinions on the change and maybe some thoughts behind it from when it was being merged.

 

 

[Spacemanspark]

Personally I do think the new addiction mechanics are very, very over the top.

Realism or not, people shouldn't get addicted to alcohol or caffeine in a single sip.

IPCs shouldn't be impacted by this at all.

You can't have a small little break at the bar without causing the rest of your round to be filled with annoying messages and side effects unless you keep drinking.

[PCPorterro]

I wholeheartedly agree, it actively discourages people from visiting the bar in a way, which is annoying.

[Gaty]

I see WAY too many people addicted now, I think it needs some tweaking for sure.

[Darkmight9]

Yeah I very much think something went screwy somewhere with the addiction thing

[Denthamos]

Agreeing with this.  The addiction chances feel way overdone with the change.  

[E.I.G.H.T.]

Throwing my two cent in, but 100% agreed. Addiction mechanics can be fun, but incapacitation at levels where irl it would make you a lil tipsy or charged up (in the case of caffeine) is unreasonable. Also addiction to specific drinks or IPC addiction dont make sense in any capacity, it for sure needs tweaks.

[Lalchi]

Same here, i agree.

Some addiction are very annoying.

I can get it for addiction on meth or Omnizine. I'm not necessarily against it as it can add quite a balance to the game.

But for cafeine, alcool or other addiction that doesn't give you great advantage and still makes you addict way quicker, it's very annoying.

I had this quirk on my Kidan character where he always had a cigar on his mouth because he is from the clan Smoke (just a little funny detail).
I had to drop the quirk because if i have the cigar on his mouth for one minute, my Kidan is getting addict immediatly.
As he is often on Command roles, i can't permit that anymore

[Dalron]

So this wasn't some kind of bug? It was a conscious decision on the developers part? The change was just so absolutely absurd that I thought it had to of been a mistake.

I have to fully agree to everybody here. It's just unrealistic to become hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and to be suffering withdrawals before the cig has even gone out. I mean, I like the idea of there being an addiction system but not what it is now. Maybe if you've been chain smoking cigs for 30 minutes straight with only tiny breaks of sobriety in between.

As somebody else said, it kinda feels like this game has become an ill-informed straight edge advertisement. I absolutely love the Paradise server and you will seriously never know just how much of an impact this game has had on my life. I really appreciate the work your team puts in. But this is just too much and really makes me wonder if Paradise is the right home for me.

Edited March 14, 2020 by Dalron
Clarify My Arguement

[Spacemanspark]

Without trying to be disrespectful, I feel we should be more thoughtful about the things we pick and pull from Goonstation. 

Don't get me wrong, Goon is fucking great with many features that would be quite interesting to implement here. 

But I can't help but feel that we went a little crazy when they released their most recent open source edition. Things like this don't really make sense for our environment and haven't really added anything. The system prior to this was largely fine and while it could certainly have used some tweaks, this took it way too far and is now having, what I believe, a very negative impact on people's enjoyment of the game. 

As I pointed out before, you can't take a small moment (or even larger ones) in the bar for a quick drink without suddenly requiring booze for the majority of your remaining time in the round, lest you spam your chat and others with messages of wretching, gagging and falling over at random intervals.

Things pulled from other codebases, especially ones so radically different to our own (While /tg/ has a similar vein to us in some ways, as /tg/ itself is the base for Baycode/ vgcode and many others, and came from goon revision [numbers I don't remember] many, many years ago, Goonstation took its own, muuuuch separate path from tg and others, remaining closed source) should be adjusted to accommodate our server, player base, rule standards and mechanics. 

While not always possible (sometimes we do need to play test things live to see how they fit in. New antag types, weapons, larger changes, et cetera. This is the purpose of test merging), we should be looking more closely at what we port. 

As a minor example, I recently made a PR to add a proper deathgasp sound effect to IPCs after a PR was merged giving everyone an organic sounding final gasp of breath on death. 

The change it would have taken to add this to IPCs (which we already had the sound file for) was one line long. The PR is two lines total, but only because I adjusted one other thing unrelated to the sound itself. In my opinion, it should have been in the original PR--and it was something I brought up in the PR itself too, and was responded to by other members of the community. 

While this is an example that doesn't involve major changes of mechanics, it illustrates my point that we aren't considering the impact or our own code base when porting things as much as we should be. 

I could also stand to bring IPCs into this very discussion, as they were also thrust into this redesigned system without much thought towards them. And they don't have sleepers to run towards (and if they do, that even further shows they/the code base weren't considered when making the PR). 

I appreciate the hard work and effort our maintainers and coders put into the server over the years, and I'm not saying any of this to bash or put them down. They're trying to add to Paradise, and that's always a good thing. Without them, we wouldn't likely have a server right now, or this community. 

But I'm here imploring them to please, please conduct more test merges on major changes like these, and to take it a bit more slow when porting features from Goonstation. We should take our time in getting these new things properly implemented so as to not overwhelm and alarm the player base.

 

As is, I'm considering making a revert PR if my technically poor code abilities are capable of it, or having a wide conversation with others to figure out how to adjust this feature so it fits properly with our server. 

 

(God this took me so long to write because the touch pad on my phone is going bad or something and if I don't constantly delete and retype my stuff it ends up coming out really jumbled and with periods all over the place. If some of this is nonsensical, I apologize. I'll probably look over this statement again later on, as it's quite bold and I'd rather my thoughts be clear and concise.)

Edited March 15, 2020 by Spacemanspark

[thatdanguy23]

20 hours ago, Dalron said:

As somebody else said, it kinda feels like this game has become an ill-informed straight edge advertisement. I absolutely love the Paradise server and you will seriously never know just how much of an impact this game has had on my life. I really appreciate the work your team puts in. But this is just too much and really makes me wonder if Paradise is the right home for me.

I do implore you and others to stick around; changes like these that cause a stir in the community are not an indication of the direction that the staff want the server to go. They are often implemented without much, if any, approval from the admin team or playerbase. Considering the amount of backlash this PR and some other recent ones have garnered, especially from a good chunk of the admins, there's a good chance this will be reverted at some point.

[Birdtalon]

10 minutes ago, thatdanguy23 said:

I do implore you and others to stick around; changes like these that cause a stir in the community are not an indication of the direction that the staff want the server to go. They are often implemented without much, if any, approval from the admin team or playerbase. Considering the amount of backlash this PR and some other recent ones have garnered, especially from a good chunk of the admins, there's a good chance this will be reverted at some point.

Highly seconded. The codebase changes all the time and anyone is welcome to make a PR adjusting this stuff to a more reasonable level.

From a game design perspective - the addiction system currently is quite frankly ridiculous and needs a good looking into. Players shouldn't be punished for having a single drink or a few cigarettes or instantly become addicted to chems. It's nobody's "fault" per-se it just needs looking into.

[Rurik]

I honestly figured it was a bug. Being addicted to a SINGLE cigar four times in a row via hopping in a sleeper each time addicted before it ran out was ridiculous and not at all what Fox's PR description sounded like was intended. 

[nedak]

I never post here, but have been playing on Paradise on and off since 2015 (~300hrs) and this is probably one of the least fun feature adds to the game that I can remember. I was recently detective and started the round smoking. Immediately I became addicted to nicotine and my character was getting withdrawals WHILE smoking. 

I've also noticed that doctor rounds consists of mostly treating tons of alcohol addictions all early game. 

[Drakeven]

I'm also agreeing with this, from what I've seen the addiction threshold is way to low.

[necaladun]

This is def something that is intended to be tweaked, the values are clearly not working out. Most likely booze will be made nonaddictive.

[Pokebro2000]

I have nothing unique to add, just the same as everyone else. IPCs, one dose = addicted, restrictive addictions, heavy downsides, honestly I'm not sure the addiction system adds anything positive to the game. As a whole, it seems to just detract from the experience.

[Machofish]

I don't mind the nicotine addictions to an extent--before this change, cigarettes were a minor buff to someone's abilities, so at least this is somewhat more sensible that someone who's huffing cigarettes won't be in very good shape compared to someone who doesn't smoke. That said, I agree with what's said here that the withdrawal and addiction thresholds are ridiculous, especially taken in direct regard to each other. It's stupid to experience nicotine withdrawal to the point of having a paralysis-inducing migraine while actively indulging the addiction by smoking. There's no way to sustain or keep up with a nicotine addiction as it is, it's basically just a near-immediate penalty that sticks with a character for several minutes after the cigarette runs out.

Also, I'd like to see nicotine addiction symptoms changed, if possible. Sneezing and twitching don't really make that much sense, though I'd be happy if it were replaced with something like involuntary coughing.

[Spacemanspark]

I'm reviving this, mostly because I've been seeing a bajillion recent statements that people are getting addicted to coffee and tea now. 

[Drakeven]

In my experience being addicted to Coffee is a realistic experience @AffectedArc07

[Vallidian]

I mean, sure. I have withdraw symptoms from lack of coffee if I skip a day.

I don't have withdraw symptoms 3 minutes after the first cup however.

 

I also tried cigarettes and after that shift, I won't try them again.

Having the prompt "you crave nicotine" or something of the like in red text before the first cigarette is done is sorta .. not conducive for repeat business.

[Spacemanspark]

I'm probably going to drink coffee until my teeth rot from it. However, like said, I certainly can skips days of ingesting it and be just fine

 

However, it's not realism that I care so much about. Realism doesn't always make good gameplay, nor does consistency. Things like coffee and tea should not be addicting like they currently are. It actively hinders small character quirks--for example, I have a human character that starts out every shift with a cup of coffee. With this system in place, that one cup ends up forcing them to drink coffee for a good long while or pester medbay to fix the issue--neither of which really make any sense or add anything interesting. 

[AffectedArc07]

2 hours ago, Drakeven said:

In my experience being addicted to Coffee is a realistic experience @AffectedArc07

The funny part about this is I cant compare the ingame experience to the real one.

The IRL addiction to coffee isnt super bad, in my opinion

[PeakPerformance]

What if addictions worked like amanitin : takes in consideration how many cycle the chem was present in the body, and applies addictions in relation to that.

You were on meth for  thirty minutes straight ? as soon as the chems leave your body you're hit by it. You drank a cup of coffee or had a smoke shiftsart ? Maybe in ten minutes you'll feel like you'll get the craving again. Rewards you from pacing yourself and makes a lot more sense compared to IRL addictions.

Having more defined addiction tiers that could be capped depending on how much you consume could complement that pretty well.

 

I assume this would take quite a bit of work though, not only code-wize but also thinking about how to rebalance every chem's addiction effects (Especially considering different metabolization rates, for example).

 

My biggest, biggest gripe with the current system is the fact that even if your plant-based rollies have zero addictive chems, simply the fact of smoking will give you nicotine addiction. I realise that being addicted to the gesture of smoking is something very real, but it's extremely annoying to not be able to make any kind of healing (or pure CBD VIBE) smokies without ever being able to avoid addiction, especially since the addiction kicks in the moment the chems run out, which often doesn't match with when the rollie itself runs out.

[McRamon]

Addiction can never be realistic in ss13. Even if we count our 2h shift as a  12h, nothing, not even hardest of drugs can develop.addiction in such a small period.

Therefore, addiction here is only a game mechanic meant to counter combat wise strong drugs.

My suggestions:

1) drugs have perfect property irl which could be added in game as a counter measure: hangover. Outside of OD, if you take lets say meth, you also become slower after effect is gone, and most importantly, during the hangover period drugs are non effective.

2) you cant get addicted from anything. To keep the forensic importance of the addiction, make this:scanned blood with forensic scanner will also tell chemical trails (only strong chemicals like drugs or poisons)

3) keep addictions. Let them be added in character creation. They should not stun you or anything, just messages on screen. Also, you dont need meth each 5 minutes to fight addiction. 1-2 times a shift, so in order to fight it you dont have to work in meth lab and could instead buy 1 or 2 units. For cigs or coffee obviously you have a higher rate of consumption.