Xenoarch can have alot of fun tools and items that can be given out to crew to assist them, the problem however is the malfunction chance on use is too high that you will over end up with 10 or so uses before a artifact becomes entirely useless/dangerous. This problem is compounded with the amount of timer triggered artifacts as they are basically guaranteed to malfunction over time making them a must sell no matter what useful properties they may have.
Due to these issues you will likely never see artifacts being used outside of xenoarch department.
Suggestion: Stabilizing artifacts
After correctly fully labeling an artifact, an ability to stabilize an artifact on the quantum pad would remove the malfunction chance and make it safe to use. This would allow artifacts to be an actually tool rather than just a ticking timebomb.
Other than that reducing to a very small chance or just removing it would also work.
The old version of artifacts was cool, the malfunctions were chosen at spawn and might reveal themselves a bit late, but they were somewhat rarer and didnt suddenly appear no matter what
Right now, xenoarch is an unusable mess. Everything you find, no matter how useful, will always develop a shitty malfunction to ruin it. They are never ever things you can spin into being useful either.
You used to be able to make funky artifacts that woule heal people on a timer with 0 drawback after searching for like 30 minutes. It wasn’t strong, but it was fun !
You were helping the crew in general and actually contributing to the round !
Nowadays though, you genuinely cannot make anything useful as any artifact is bound to spawn bears, spread fires or be generally super dangerous no matter what.
That sucks ass. This defeats the purpose of most of science - doing xenoarch means doing NOTHING for the rest of the station, which why?
I understand the intention behind the nerf, mind you. At first bananium artifacts were unequivocally good and you never had a reason to buy any other artifact. Adding a reason not to go for them constantly or at least be careful was important.
But nerfing every single artifact and preventing them for ever being used for their main effect, only their side effect, is the worst possible nerf that could have been done.
Please, to any coders listening. Just revert that nerf entirely. Xenoarch never was that strong anyways especially compared to ANY other departments. It was completely overkill and done only to adress a minor issue with gameplay incentive afaik.
if anything, knowing it will develop malfunctions is considered meta-knowledge, but to make something useful you have to meta-game even more by intentionally drawing out malfunctions and seeing if it’s something tame like hallucination/strip vs something like anti-clone/combustible
edit: (and in the process add another layer of RNG before getting something useful)
maybe the only ones who would do anything to cope with malfunctions would be atmosians/engineers if we gave them something like a hypernob porous artifact, but which is already “two layers of rare RNG”-level of rare
Yeah the og was fun because there was already a lot of RNG involved so obtaining one (1) useful artifact was super cool and gratifying to hand out to the crew
Now you have to work even harder to get something that will be significantly worse and that most of the crew does NOT want to use
Again, xenoarch never was that powerful in the first place, even the healing ones without malfunctions still were slow and much much less efficient than xenobio
The fun was in the lootbox aspect and the gratification you got from rolling a really cool and good artifact !
You could even potentially make cool weapons and allow for new antag moves that were interesting and novel
Now it’s … way too much rng for a reward that really doesn’t scale to its rareness.
I think displaying their effect would increase the comfort peopke woukd have to use them. If the artifact started glowing red you’d know it was about ti combust, even if it us just a split second warning. Not enough to get away, but just enough to not be too surprised and locate an extinguisher.
For healing artifacts then clearly showing a beam that is healing that a random crewmember can trust rather than having some weird ass beam hit you and then question if you just got a stage 3 tumour.