On 9/17/2023 at 1:52 PM, RyanStrudfelt said:
I heavily disagree with lowering the role times.
These should be raised in all honesty. As many people have stated, the number of people in important roles who simply haven’t even figured out what their job is supposed to entail, let alone how to do it. Is staggering.
Lowering role time entry for any role, lowers the entry requirements and standard of all heads. Whether you want it to or not.
What I have found in my own playing of the game is that role timers, on a fundamental level, really don’t do what the game designers want them to do.
I get why they’re there. But, I can also tell you the exact reason why raising then won’t fix anything. Or, frankly, why lowering then wouldn’t harm anything either.
The problem is with the idea of role timers themselves, on several levels. The idea being that time spent in a role equals knowledge/skill increase in role. But, when you really understand what’s going on here, that’s not even what role timers really do. The actual idea is that time spent in an adjacent role equals knowledge/skill increase to the adjacent role.
This is idea only works under one specific mindset. That being, players who want to unlock new roles are actively trying to learn the adjacent role they are next to in the same department.
If the player is not trying to do this. And instead, let’s say, just wants to cheese the timer to unlock the next role, the entire concept of role timers falls apart entirely at its very foundation.
I will now list all the problems with role timers and why they don’t do what the game designers are delusionally hoping they will do. Feel free to ignore me now. But, when the timers are inevitably raised again because “the number of people in important roles who simply haven’t even figured out what their job is supposed to entail, let alone how to do it. Is staggering.” and it still doesn’t work, you can then think back on my post and realize that I was right, and why.
A: Role timers fail to teach players how to do their job.
See, there are several ways to learn how to do a job. One is reading about it. Another is watching a video about it. Another is playing an interactive tutorial about it. Another is just plain and simply playing the job directly.
The problem with role timers is the assumption that players are actively trying to be aware enough of other people doing different jobs around them in the same department to learn how to do that job. Which, of course, usually how absolutely nothing (or very little) to do with the job that they are actually playing. And, as such, really does not naturally warrant their attention to paying attention to these other players. It’s like the expectation is that job skills, knowledge, experience will just seep into the player about Job B while player is playing Job A in the same department via some sort of proximity osmosis. It doesn’t. Why would it?
A good example of this is when I was a kid and played with my action figures and Game Boy in the back seat of the car while my parents drove places. I never really looked up to pay attention to how driving worked. Why would I? My job wasn’t to drive. My job was to be good in the back seat and keep myself entertained and not a distraction to the driver. Once my parents asked, while teaching me to to drive, how it was that I knew nothing about driving after riding with them all those years. My response, logically of course, was that I didn’t know I was supposed to be paying attention to that. You never told me that. So, I had to learn to drive from scratch.
Same thing with work. All those years I worked as a Cashier, I never paid much real attention to how the Customer Service Desk was ran. I mean, logically, why would/should I have? I was the Cashier, not the Customer Service Desk. Even though both are the same department, “Front End.” It wasn’t until I got up into the Customer Service Desk that I then set to work on actually learning how my new job position of Customer Service Desk Worked from mostly scratch.
SS14 works the same way. There is no reason to assume why someone playing Paramedic would ever even think to pay attention to what the Chemist or Doctor is doing. Why would/should he? That’s not his job. His job is being the Paramedic. Why waste time learning the job you’re not actively doing right now? It makes no logical sense.
Same goes for every job position, really. Why would the Doctor be paying attention to the CMO? He’s not the CMO. Why would the Security Officer be paying attention to what the Warden is doing? Why would the Detective be paying attention to what the HOS is doing? Detective and HOS are entirely different jobs requiring entirely different skills. Why would Atmos be paying attention to what other Engineers are doing? It’s called the division of labor. All you really need to know to do you job well is what it takes to do your job well. This, in most cases, takes learning nothing to precious little about what anyone else’s job entails; even in the same department.
You don’t learn new jobs by watching other people do them. You learn new jobs by doing them yourself. Yet, the job timer system denies you this entirely. It forces you to play one role, while at the exact same time expecting you to be paying attention to an entirely different (and usually mostly/entirely unrelated) role, while never even bothering to tell you that this is what you’re supposed to be doing. This ‘somehow’ (again, the bad assumption of skill learning by proximity osmosis) is supposed to teach new players something. Not exactly a surprise to me that it doesn’t…
B: Role timers only ‘work’ if people are trying to learn the roles.
So, let’s say, if someone is trying to pay attention to other unrelated jobs in their same department while also doing their own job while never being told this is what they’re supposed to even be doing in the first place (gasp for breathe) then, yes, they might indeed pick up on some basic facts about proximity jobs along the way.
But… what about people who just want to learn the new job by directly doing it so badly that they… you know… just plain and simply cheese the job timers? Like, you know, do the bare minimum of what their actual job requires to not get yelled at/banned but otherwise just hang out at the bar or wherever else until the arbitrary egg timer goes off? What, exactly, stops people from doing this? Oh yeah, nothing.
Thus, no matter how long you make job timers, people can always just cheese them. They can’t go afk. But, you know, you don’t have to go afk to cheese them. You just have to ride out the clock, no matter how long it is set for, until you unlock your goal. What you’ll learn about the new job by doing this, of course, (no matter how long you set the timers to) is going to be practically nothing. Again, just a few basic facts and that’s it.
C: Learning to do the work of subordinates doesn’t teach you how to delegate as a department head, no matter how long you set the role timers for.
Delegation is more than just learning how to do each job in a specific department. It’s also learning how to manage people are varying skill levels beneath you. It’s a constant game of people skills meats spinning plates. In this way, for example, learning Doctor, Chem, Paramedic, teaches you absolutely nothing about how to be a CMO. Instead, it teaches you how to be a Doctor, Chem, and Paramedic. And while yes, I do agree, the CMO should know how to do every job within medical (just like every department head should know how to do every job in their department) learning each of these roles doesn’t teach you how to delegate subordinates; which, really, is your actual job now. You just moved up to middle management. Yes, and management, you should know how the cash register works. But, learning how the cash register works doesn’t teach you the people skills and multitasking skills required to coordinate your subordinate cashiers. That’s an entirely different and unrelated skill set to being a cashier. It also doesn’t teach you how to interact with your bosses in your new, higher, position; just like in SS14. Your a CMO now, a department head, so… like, who’s my equal? Who’s my superior. Yes, there are charts in the wiki that shows you this. But, nothing about a role unlock naturally teaches you from nothing other than time spent playing subordinate roles exactly what the social graces are of interacting with superiors, subordinates, equals. These are all things you learn over time naturally through… you know… doing. Actually playing the role. Not things you learn by playing the subordinate roles that unlocked the superior roles.
D: Outside of Liltenhead’s videos, nothing really teaches you how to play this game.
Yes, there is the wiki and in game guide. But, that’s reading. So, let’s be honest with each other, almost nobody outside of the hardest of the hard core RPG fans are going to read to learn how to play a game. They’re just… not.
So, this leaves Liltenhead’s videos and learning from other people around you.
D1: Learning from other people around you only works for subordinate roles. There is no other CMO or HOS around to tell you how to do these jobs. (Unless someone is handing out ID upgrades like pancakes.)
D2: Most people in game, while trying to be nice and meaning well, don’t usually teach you how to do your job well. As in, they’re not thorough enough. After all, they have their own jobs to do and their job really isn’t to teach you how to do your job. They do enough to get you started, then basically leave you to figure out the rest on your own.
E: Job Timers do not translate to outside of Network Servers.
While I enjoy playing on Wizard Severs, I don’t enjoy being locked into them. But, I’m not going to play out of network servers if I have to unlock everything all over again. I would suggest out of network servers massively reduce or delete role timers because they (along with low population) are a major reason I don’t play on them. I assume this is true for other people as well.
So, here are some examples of what I mean. Even under your new timers, I can be a CMO. I have no idea how to be a CMO. I don’t even really know how to be a Doctor. When I learned ‘how to be a Doctor’ all anyone ever bothered to teach me was how to scan people and pop pills into peoples’ mouths. So, bicar for brute, derma for burn, dylo for poison. I spent all shift standing in the hallways scanning people, and popping two pills into their mouth for the correct damage category. (At least, I think these are right. Sometimes I still get them confused. Whoopsy Doopsy.) I also gathered that zapping people with the paddles sometimes saves them.
So, I stand in entry to med. Scan people. Pop in two pills. If people are crit or dead, I try to defib once or twice. If that doesn’t work, I hope there is a Doctor around who knows how to actually be a Doctor. If not, well, that person is just dead now because I have on idea what else to do.
I tried to help other doctors, but even when I say out loud what pills I’m putting into the patient, medical is so hectic that they accuse me of not calling out pills even when I do. So, that pisses me off. I’m clearly just in the way. So, no, I don’t stay around to watch what they’re doing to save these people. I either go out to the med lobby to pop more pills into easier patients to treat. Or, say F this, and go spend the rest of my shift drinking in the bar.
As Chemist, I learned how to make these pills myself from the Liltenhead video and the in game guide for the recipes. Poop out a batch of the pills, spend about 10-20 min in bar, come back to poop out more of those pills if needed, go back to bar; lather, rinse repeat.
Because I ‘learned how to play Doctor’ and ‘learned how to play Chemist’ I am now, by your own role timer standards, qualified to play CMO. Now… lean in real close for this one. (Whispers quietly into your ear) “Do you really think I’m qualified to play CMO?”
Oh, and by the way, if you raise the role timers again, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve always done as Doctor and Chemist and the job will just unlock for me naturally over time. Will I have learned any better how to be a Doctor, or a Chemist, or a CMO this way? No, of course not. But the role will unlock for me again… Mwahaha!
See the problem with role timers? They don’t teach anything. They’re an egg timer to be ran down to get to new roles. They’re not a teaching agent. This, coming from me; who actually did take time to watch Liltenhead’s videos to actually try to learn new roles. Which, honestly, is more effort than you’ll see from a lot of casual players who will do nothing but cheese the egg timers and not even bother trying to educate themselves at all. At the very least, I made an initial real effort to at least learn some of the basics of each new role that I played.
Here’s another example. When I unlocked Captain before the timers were extended out, I had no idea how to play Captain. I had to keep asking the department heads around me what to do. Why? Because playing other roles taught me absolutely nothing about how to play Captain. Again, if it isn’t obvious by now, extending the timers doesn’t teach me anything else. When I eventually unlock Captain again when the new timers run down, I will be just as clueless as before as to how to play Captain. Making we wait longer for the position doesn’t teach me through proximity skill osmosis how to be a better Captain. Actually, you know, playing the role does that. The thing your timers keep denying from me. Will I make a lot of mistakes? You bet I will. Nothing in the game yet has told me how to play this new role. But, I’m never going to learn from other roles that are completely unrelated. I’m only ever going to learn from videos and actual hands on doing; trial and error. The longer you keep me from higher level roles; the longer you’re postponing my learning, not helping me to learn.
I don’t know what the solution is to teaching more people how to play this game better. But, upping the egg timers isn’t it.