So, I'm one of the newbies that have been mentioned in the discussion/brewingflamewar over Independence.
Personally, I'm all for it. I can't really contribute some super meaningful reason why other then that the current system just...doesn't seem to work?
I think others have given better reasons for this then I could (gameplay not holding up, nonexistent RP, etc.) so I'll just leave it there.
Instead I'll just throw in my experiences with the game so far. The first time I played, I had just heard about the game and its lack of...monetary requirement from another Bay12er (I forget which, unfortunately)
I decided that, being new, I would try and play an assistant so that I could learn basic things from those who needed help. The obvious happened and I spent the entire time doing basically nothing because assistants are seen as roughly equivalent to the devil while having no ability to go anywhere on their own.
So while I was wandering around aimlessly, the AI went rogue or something and basically the place I was in was depressurized and I died after watching another player climb over a table that was blocking my progress.
After this experience, someone suggested cargo as the best place to start, so I played a cargo technician under Quartermaster Red Calciff.
In hindsight, this round went surprisingly according to plan, as this was easily the most active cargo had ever been during the various games I have played. Unfortunately, this was apparently solely because of the Captain and other Heads of Staff instigating a mutiny or somesuch. The round ended in badminnery with a nuke terrorist squad coming into cargo and murderizing me, while I fruitlessly tried to fire the energy gun I had obtained from the craziness that cargo was involved in.
The next few rounds were basically me attempting to find SOMETHING useful to do with myself and thus messing with the labyrinthine machinations of the Supermatter Engine. This ended roughly as one would expect, in explosions and tears. And occasionally in just a random security guard/doctor/clown jumping into engineering and fixing things because they "used to be an engineer" which is up there with "NANOMACHINES SON" in meta justifications.
There was a round after an SCOM game where I forgot to redo my vocation and ended up as a scientist. I figured, hey what the hell, lets go do some R&D. After throwing some stuff in the machine and generally feeling good about figuring out how to make stuff work on my own, a roboticist came in and told me that I had broke all the things, done everything wrong and that the whole department had to be scrapped because I apparently wasn't following the proper way to discover "new" stuff and thus wasn't operating at 4000% efficiency.
All the things I had "discovered" were things that never appeared in a single other round, and I suspect that literally nothing else that you CAN discover would ever appear in a round that didn't last for roughly two days straight.
A round later, I once more ended up a scientist, and in a moment of frustration at having NOTHING TO DO WITH MYSELF attacked the first person I saw with a surgical saw. This person turned out to be the syndicate agent and shot me to death. Security came into the scene and arrested them and the rest of the round I was ghosted and following a rather intriguing (for me at least) investigation where the suspect made all the wrong decisions and the HoS made the assumption that they had murdered me in cold blood. Elsewhere a clown was on a EVA jaunt because no-one ELSE had anything better to do either, since the only antag was tied up in legal proceedings.
I apologized in this thread the next day or so and was met with responses roughly in the line of "meh" because the player who I screwed over was a known metagamer.
I recently attempted to play doctor, as I had been shown the general workings of surgery on a few occasions (once in extended fuckery, the other in SCOM) and managed mostly to be very confused at a hairline fracture re-breaking roughly eight thousand times (because apparently bones can't be set unless drugs are injected into someones eyballs) and to cause an infection due to lack of mask (character was chain smoker)
After I finally cracked and adminhelped to find out bicardine was required, I rushed off to find some when I was interrupted by an engineer who came in to get some toxin taken care of who "USED TO BE A DOCTOR" and proceeded to drag the patient off to a scanner I had already used.
After I finally convinced the "ex doctor" to leave me to my work, a ninjadmin phased into existence and fixed everything while scolding me.
Oh, and one of the first rounds I played was SCOM, which was actually quite fun.
While I admit it certainly needs work, I don't think its a lost cause by any means and look forward to it being implemented in a way that can attract the players it desperately needs to survive.
But yeah, those are the experiences I've had in game so far. I think they help illustrate the problems that others have pointed the game out as having, and hope that you find them helpful.
Author
Topic: Space Station 13: Urist McStation (Read 2126486 times)