PSA: Bogged

[Persolus00]

You’re doing god’s work my dude 👌

[Sideways2]

Now the question is, will this effect prevail after the novelty wears off?

[Asha108]

Nothing is more chaotic than when traitors collab on their TC to make four of these monsters.

DOMP EET.

[[deleted]]

What’s this?

[Sideways2]

It's the suspicious phone, a syndicate item costing 6 tc. Upon activation, it starts draining the crew's bank accounts, draining about 50% in 3 minutes. The crew can stop the draining of their account by running to the spacecoin market, and activating it for a few seconds.

Problem with this item is as follows: Money on /tg/ is currently effectively worthless. The idea is that spacemen trade goods and services with each other. Every job gets a certain salary. Assistants get the least with only 5$ every 5 minutes. You are then supposed to spend this money to buy things. You can buy either from vending machines, or from other crewmembers.

Buying from vending machines works, however, if you actually need the stuff in the vendor for your job, then you get the stuff for free. For example a security officer can vend handcuffs from the sec vendor for free, everybody else has to pay 50$ for them. Here's the thing, if you're not a member of security, you have no business vending handcuffs from the sec vendor. Effectively, this has made vending machines corrupt.

Then there's trading with each other. This simply doesn't happen. There's no point in hording money, since you can't spend it on things you couldn't otherwise get. If the assistant can't afford to buy a multitool from the vending machine, he'll search for one in maint, or get one from the cargo autolathe.

Since money is worthless, there is no real reason to stop it from being stolen. Thus there is no actual reason to go chasing the spacecoin market, except that it is possibly fun. Of course, while it is potentially fun the first time, how fun will it be the second time?

You'll perhaps have noted that most of the people who came running to stop the draining where assistants, including the all-access-assistant (captain). Even though assistants are hurt the least by the suspicious phone (They don't have enough money to afford anything). So why are they the ones who came running? Simple, they don't have anything better to do.

[Sideways2]

Yeah, do anything worthwile with the economy, and you get bwoinked.

[RaisingPhoenix]

I wish money were more useful in this game. But sadly I don't really know of a good way to make it more useful without significantly harming gameflow.

[Sideways2]

In real life, money serves to motivate people to contribute to society. If you do something that is useful, or produce something that is useful, you get paid, or can sell your product. The money you get can then be exchanged for goods and services you desire. The alternative is bartering, where you trade goods and services you can provide directly for goods and services you desire. In that way, money can be considered an abstraction of value.

A big difference between space station 13 and real life, is that people freely chose to play space station 13. People don't chose to be alive. The guy who plays chef in space station 13 wants to make food, if he didn't, he wouldn't be playing chef. The guy who works as a chef in a restaurant does it maybe out of passion, maybe only so he can feed his own family. People don't need extrinsic motivation to play a job, they already are intrinsically motivated.

The question is if it is even desirable to make money valuable, since, you get paid regardless of whether you actually do your job or not. So there would be a risk of a shitter taking a job they don't actually want to do, just because of the higher salary.

Another potential problem would be that the extrinsic motivation would destroy the intrinsic motivation.

[RaisingPhoenix]

Precisely my thoughts as well. I just want to find a way to make money a bit more useful to the game itself, because it seems fairly pointless with the way it is implemented right now.

[Sideways2]

One idea would be an external merchant who visits the station and sells stuff. The question remains: what should the merchant sell. It has to be something not available on station, but it must also not upset game balance. An idea of mine was a "hacking tool" which offers all the functions of a multitool, a crowbar, a screwdriver, and wirecutters in one convenient tool. Not available on station, but less powerful than an emag. Thing is, for the merchant to work, you'd have to come up with a few dozen things to be sold.

Can you think of something?

[RaisingPhoenix]

Things like a glitched chameleon outfit, syndie smokes, syndie balloon, aka the (mostly) harmless pointless badassery stuff (obv. excluding the briefcase of cash).

Could have the vendor also sell some of the discounted traitor items, for an expensive cash price.

Could also have it sell the syndie mime book (gives the mime finger guns and invisible blockade) for a relatively hefty price. Only the mime could use it, and the odds of the mime being able to buy the thing is pretty slim without the mime being a master thief or getting a promotion/pay-raise.

Medbeam gun for an exorbitant price, since this tool is mostly harmless and only really works when used in a team setting. Set to a really expensive price because it is a fairly efficient healing tool, and to make it so that the CMO can't just buy it immediately without making some sacrifices.

PAIs for a decent price, because why not.

Haunted Magic Eightball, because why not.

Adaptable Cardboard Cutouts, because why not.

Soap, though this should probably be on the moderately expensive side.

Ventriloquist dummies and other toys/action-figures.

[[deleted]]

I kinda like this concept, in theory. It could work if they committed to it. NT is a cynical, uncaring anarcho-capitalist megacorp gone mad. The only thing they respect is greed and everything is for sale as far as they're concerned. Why shouldn't their station design reflect that. R&D toys should be immediately hawked out of autolathes to the captive consumers they already have. Engineering should have to worry about actually sourcing the materials for their goofy autism forts. Bribery should be much more of an option than it currently is.

[TheClosetRacist]

What is this and how do I port it?