I believe the current bounty system is lacking in three areas:
My proposed rework will address the above, and keep in mind the following:
💣 Encourage experimentation & collaboration in plasma research.
💣 Bring bazaar return values more inline with other post-cargo-rework values IRT effort-to-credits ratio.
💣 Improve clarity around bazaar functionality.
💣 Majorly changing the difficulty of bounties, whether easier or harder.
💣 Affecting antag balance or toxins use outside of the basic inevitability of people using toxins more = toxins use being less inherently suspicious.
💣 Touching actual bomb/atmospheric calculations. Only looking at the pressure crystals, their valuation, and the bazaar/bounty code.
Now, what exactly is the plan?
(Specific numbers are not final, just what I'm working with currently)
💣 The currently implemented system of peaks/dips is fairly muddy for predicting results, to a degree that turns away both new players (too confusing) and familiar players (too unreliable). To address this, bounties will be changed from a sloping 'peak' to a tiered set of ranges.
💣 Not only does this create an area wherein a bounty can be "claimed" & feedback given as such, but level of success can be explicitly denoted.
💣 Bounties can be claimed within three tiers of success: Acceptable, decent, and ideal. This will be reflected in the payout scaling, PDA message, the bazaar program, & potentially the end-round credits in a subsequent PR. When a bounty is claimed, a new one will be rolled.
💣 Similarly, duplicate values will be shifted from creating 'dips' in the market to instead create a flat range of 0 value. Bounties will not roll within existing duplicate ranges, opening a potential avenue for nerdy market manipulation.
(Placeholder for header image) VALUE
💣 Value scaling will be shifted away from explosion power scaling in favour of stronger potential bounty rewards. This only affects pressure crystal valuation within TTV/bounty ranges (<310) due to market saturation. This does not affect the credit rewards of larger bombs (artifact & canister), so those are still worth pursuing.
💣 The overall potential payout for a good toxins round will still be very lucrative, but that will be based on time spent aiming for precise values as opposed to the current 'meta' method of making one maxcap mix at roundstart and stacking all of your valves to create a crate of crystal worth 300k at minute 15 and then retiring for the rest of the round.
💣 Bounty specific rewards have been changed from scaling based solely on RNG to instead scale based on level of accuracy.
(Placeholder for header image) FUN
💣Frankly, most of our work has already been done on this front. In my opinion, the majority of the fun factor in a system like this comes from experimentation & practice being rewarded with consistent, understandable results.
💣At the time the current bounty system was added, TTV calculations looked like this:
💣 It was a nightmare. However, in the time since, Romayne reworked it to look like this:
💣 That PR was game-changing. TTV values now smoothly scale in results, creating high degrees of reliability. This is what changed the bounty system from a pipe dream to a workable opportunity, & it's time to adjust the bazaar to reflect that.
💣 However, that is not the only change worth mentioning. The recent additions of gas extractors & freezers to most rotation maps has enabled far more seamless play with both the bazaar and toxins in general, as you can now hit more precise temperatures, faster, while having more canisters to record values with.
💣 Less vitally but still extremely exciting, there have been several other nice toxins PRs lately which have brought people into the lab to see the changes. (x x) As well as more minor QOL/bug fix/mapping touchups which have all contributed to a more seamless experience. (x x x x x x)
💣 All of this to say, toxins IS fun now -- it just needs a reason to play with it. However, this PR is not my only plans for adding "fun factor" to the toxins gameplay loop, as I've got a few other tricks up my sleeve to give them more toys and excitement. And... As a final note:
💣 Purple vendomat.
💣 We made the vendomat purple.