I believe that it’s a good time as any to bring up how low the bar is to start playing as department heads and even captain
While yes this is a learning server, command players should be experienced enough to be able to mentor their departments if needed, and as you can unlock captain in 30 hours, it doesn’t take much for someone who doesn’t know much of anything about the game to get into that posistion.
What i’m suggesting is raising the playtime of a given department to 50 hours for each of the given heads of staff to circumvent people speedrunning to unlock captain somewhat. Ideally a whitelist would be preferable for certain command roles but that puts too much extra strain on admins to have to deal with another application process.
People didn’t like it because they would have to play a role they didn’t like for an hour or so, but I personally still think it has a lot of merit.
This is really the only way I see this issue being resolved cleanly. I’m sure a medical doctor could gain passive knowledge of chemistry and virology through their 15 hours of play, but from a design perspective, do I want to trust that always occurs?
No.
That’s not to say players coming from other server or just newbies who catch on really quickly can’t get it down to pat and end up performing very well. Sub 300 hours players are very much a big part of our community.
But still, it is an issue.
The most painfully apparent surfacing of this is CE’s who play station engineer, wiring machines, constructing new areas, wiring solars for power. They do this for 20 odd hours, then pick the role they just unlocked, Chief Engineer.
They’ve spent all this time learning all of the tools, the doors that zap to kill you, the grilles that zap to kill you, building renovations when someone cares to ask, and what have you.
However, none of this is directly pertinent for the big fat responsibility of taking care of the supermatter. None of this experience tells them that the roundstart supermatter design is liquefied dogshit that purposefully kneecaps and shags the mother of the one who doesnt change it during setup.
I’ve tried putting it in very clear terms on the peculiraties of the sm(like how it shits out gas if you remove the gas from the room), but thats entirely circumvented if one simply doesn’t read it.
And so, CE’s fucking up the sm and it blowing within the first 15 minutes is a bit of a meme.
.
If you detect a little bit of me being pissy in the first paragraph, thats because I am, but I want to be clear that I am not discounting the current state with something from 2 years ago. Just a whole lot of ‘how does this affect me personally’ is grating
So why do I bring this PR up?
Something I’ve recently learned is that gimmick roles like psychiatrist give medical hours now.
While this is a good avenue towards learning, the consequence of it meant that someone who was a first time player was able to rack up hours in medical and access roles like chemist while they still hadn’t learned how to talk in chat or use their inventory. Needless to say this was frustrating experience for those around them, given chemist wasn’t a roundstart role that is usually accessible to newbies, so people thought they were deliberately throwing the role for the round, which escalated it to me that round.
tl;dr/summary
It wasn’t good, and I don’t think just adding another 5 hours is necessarily fair to players who are engaged with learning the proper facets of their job before moving up to higher roles.
We both want the expectation that the player playing the head of a department has the ability to fill in for the roles in that department, but also that the hours aren’t so restrictive that we are having Head attrition during lowpop where people with good hours are locked out.
All in all, I’ve made PRs that raised hours in the past on some of the problem roles (mostly to combat griefers), but really our whole job xp system of when hours is greater than 7, return TRUE is not refined enough to handle actual people. It isn’t a human system, and when facing a user, it crumbles.
I think something instead of 7 hours for CMO, we could do
Well, one start would be completely reworking the HoP requirements… They’re the head of service and cargo, and second to the captain. The requirements for it should require some playtime with service roles, QM, and command, not just command imo.
Well the thing with the head roles is that they can be appointed during the round by the Captain, meaning if you just play a given role you will be afforded the opportunity to play as the head of the department before you officially unlock it, and with higher playtime requirements you will undoubtedly eventually end up just playing the other jobs in the department.
Low pop generally does have head players around (and I’m going to regrettably mention that people who have the hours for playing heads will still play a different job and just tide for the spare anyways if there are no heads present) , but the issue at hand is when you have people who are ready to play as a head getting the role unlocked and diminishing the quality of the round with a high impact role like that.
I do know Monke has an XP system that they have which doesn’t seem to work very well, the alternative is figuring out how to get a similar system here working since I also understand that time played does not equal proficiency nor competency, and it’s honestly a bad metric to begin with to use for unlocking the roles, but it’s also all we have.
That would loop back to job whitelists really, and unless the task of managing the whitelist was delegated to mentors, it would be hard to manage, not to mention you’d definitely have mentors pushing peoples whitelists through off of favoritism.
I will abstain from commenting too strongly. I joined command when I first started playing through similar means of racking up the appropriate amount of hours and then becoming command for the sake of it (though I also wiki dove for the important stuff like nuke disk and general expectations)
All that to say I will not advocate for the ladder to be pulled up from under me or however the expression goes, but I can’t say inaction is necessarily a good idea either.
The solution arky brought up is really the ideal choice.
Every head needs to play at least 2-4 rounds in each role in their department. Honestly maybe with a lower bound to ensure they have played 16h all in all.
I propose one change though. Critical roles should need more hours in them than non-critical.
So, taking medical as an example.
6h Medical doctor;
4h for chemist, geneticist;
2h for paramedic and brig phys.
Leading to you having to have played at least 18 hours spread out over all of medical to qualify for CMO.
The issue is command is also a lot more than just knowing the job, it’s knowing things like station threats, when to raise to blue, red, yellow, things like space law, what other people should be doing, when you’d need to demote someone, etc, these aren’t things you just learn by playing a job for 10 hours, they’re things you learn through playing the game for an extended period of time.
A player with the bare minimum playtime for a head of staff at the moment will not know most of this because some of it comes from all over. A head even is expected to get the supermatter running if no one else happens to know how to set it up. It’s a lot of expectations placed on someone who is new that probably doesn’t even know how to turn on suit sensors yet while playing roles that are very likely to be antag targets.
The bar is so low at the moment that someone can look at it and immediately go and just rush the bare minimum because it looks doable.
There’s just a lot to need to know for heads and a heavier playtime requirement is going to make it so people end up naturally going and playing other departments on their own rather than forcing them into it.
You shouldn’t be able to unlock a head in a couple days from a fresh account IMO.
Kinda related to this but I feel when you join the game the only role you should be able to pick is assistant and after one hour you unlock janitor and cargo technician and stuffl ike that
Yeah i would say a general system of moving new players into lower impact jobs that are still meaningful to the round would be a good idea, like geneticist is completely non essential but it’s the start of doing the cooler stuff and you’d probably learn some medical stuff from being exposed to medbay while not necessarily being expected to do much of anything. Same goes with roboticist, you should probably play roboticist before medical doctor or scientist as a good example because it teaches the basics of both jobs.
Lets be real. Geneticist is a shit job to learn med. All geneticist does is sits in his office and clicks x and y, gets funny genes and leaves to do whatever. And roboticist has nothing in common with scientists except for r&d.
I like the idea of encouraging players to take their time easing into roles that are more impactful on other people’s rounds, but a lot of what drew me to space station 13 originally was the diversity of jobs available.
I feel like being too restrictive could end up ushering new players to other servers that don’t have these restrictions.
Genetics and roboticist gets you in the mindset of doing things in order for a result, same way you make toxin bombs or do xenobio or surgery.
They’re easy tests that get you used to the same mechanics of getting a tool to do an action over something even if in a vacuum it has nothing to do with the other jobs (although genetics has cloning, something very basic newbies should learn).
Tbh the only problem with them as newbie roles is if no one from outside interacts with them or is willing to teach them. Genetics after discovering a few genes are usually helping in the bay, so that would simply have to be more encouraged for newbies. Basically, like was said, those roles are open to aid in the operation of those high impact roles while not having the same expectations, which is a good, patient, relaxed approach for new players imo. Their role is not all they can do, and they can have things in common with those roles.
(I’m saying this from experience, roboticist was my first role and it unironically helped me go into a scientist’s duties easier once I got the gist of it)
If we are able to actually make sure that the player has a set amount of experience in each role of their department, then theres no need to make it higher than it is at the moment.
Rather melodramatic.
I’m a coder, not an ideaguy. If there’s a particular aspect you have an issue with, that can easily be addressed.
For example, let’s say if you have 25 hours in a head position OR fulfill each of the hours per role in that department, you permanently unlock that head role.
For those of you worried you will ‘lose’ your already obtained head position, this should address that very cleanly.