replaces BoH in the jewvend with advanced clown shoes

[Probe1]

I've been observing it for the last 11 days and I'm yet to see a trader sell their bag of holding once. Yet I see it almost every round there's a trader on their back.

Bad theory. You can't give players something they'd find more valuable with the intention of them selling it.

🆑

• tweak: Trader vending machine now has advanced clown shoes rather than bags of holding. Don't try putting them on if you're not a clown.

[Probe1]

#13381 (comment)

For posterity @Durgen was right.

[despotate]

Fuck, this removes the new meta of rushing the vends, stringing your coin, buying two bags of holding, rushing the bridge and portable singuloosing by 12:07 for that sweet antagonizing.

Realistically, though, most items in the tradevend are much better when used for oneself:

• The bluespace beaker is pointless to trade because they can be made very early by research using only iron and glass, so it tends to be used in the traders' chem dispenser or grinder
• Peridaxon and Rezadone are much more useful left in the vox outpost in case of injuries since medbay has cryo and traders spend most of their time in the outpost anyway
• Nanobots are the same deal as above: the Vox Outpost sucks at healing and defending itself compared to medbay, so medical and combat nanobots provide much more utility to the traders than to medbay or security
• The box of bluespace crystals only needs you to trade one crystal away to the mechanic, who will mass produce them in his general fab, and you can keep the rest plus the bluespace tomato for teleportation
• The borer egg is also much easier used at the outpost (you start with rglass, a pipe dispenser, tools, and two canisters of plasma...) than at science, who can just order crates for 100 bucks

Really the only item that is purely for trade would be the box of marauder circuits which no one will ever trade you for because it has a missing circuit.

Honestly trading mostly sucks because the shuttle docks in the middle of nowhere and you'll be lucky if a single greyshit accidentally stumbles onto it while fleeing the law, which is why it's much easier to steal shit instead. I always thought we should just switch the trade and escape shuttle.

[Probe1]

We'll have to observe and see. And some of those arguments are pretty theory heavy. Your opinion of bluespace beakers rely on RnD/Mechanics always delivering supplies to Medbay. Which is very wrong.

[Kurfursten]

I've successfully sold the borer egg a few times as well as the bluespace beaker. Chemists WILL buy it if you offer it first thing in a round, they're happy to have it.

The problem with the trade vendor theory is this. You either

• Give them items anyone could want (like a bag of holding) - the trader might want to keep it for themselves
  OR
• Give them items that are only useful to very specific players (e.g.: virus samples, borer eggs, bluespace crystals) - but then if that person doesn't want it the item is totally useless, it was a terrible investment.

To make matters worse, half of the things you're trying to sell (marauder circuits, borer eggs, bluespace crystals) are for the department that can just steal them out of your ship with telescience. The trader ship isn't shielded against teleportation. This isn't theorycrafting, I actually watched this happen to a trader. They offered to sell science their crystals, so the telescientist simply stole them.

[Probe1]

God help me I need an issue with all the places that should be shielded against telescience.

[despotate]

• I've tried trading bluespace beakers to medbay twice and they won't accept them
• I've successfully traded peridax and rezadone to medbay once but won't do it in the future given the propensity for miners to cause internal bleeding when they gibtonite and raid the vox outpost
• Never used nanobots but I'm going to trade them and see what's up
• Traded the box of crystals to mechanics twice
• Tried trading the borer egg and they wouldn't accept it. I think it's usually from apathy, scientists tend not to care about using more than the one egg they start with, and when they do, they just order crates. But Kurfursten seems to have had success doing it roundstart - and I agree, if your first actions are rushing the vendor and selling its contents, then you're much more likely to succeed, but it's still a cause for concern that trader items are only useful if you sell them in the first ten minutes.
• Traded the box of marauder circuits succesfully once, surprisingly, even though they knew it was incomplete... so, uh, there goes my theorycrafting.

@Kurfursten that's when you use your 100 potency bluespace tomatoes to steal it back with interest.

But really we all know the easy and correct solution here is to just remove telescience :^)

[Probe1]

We aren't designing stuff to work every time. That's a bonus but it isn't the requirement. We're designing stuff that can work. Bags were an edge case that might work but demonstrably did not.

Beakers on the other hand, if I hear it I will drop everything I'm doing and pay any price I can pay for one if I'm in service/medbay.

Think along those lines. Things that can work.

[despotate]

So it's okay that traders are a role that has to put on a hardsuit, take a shuttle trip, walk across the entire station, and haggle over and sell a single bluespace beaker because the white labcoat guys 10 tiles away don't feel like printing dozens and distributing them for free?

I know inefficiency isn't everything because >RP, but this is still a horrible game mechanic.

[Probe1]

I'm not really sure what you're asking or saying. The issue isn't in vox traders. It's in scientists/mechanics not automatically delivering supplies every round. That issue isn't a code or (really) a design issue. It's a player issue. Players will play how they want to play and most choose to efficiently complete research and tasks they wish to do instead of help others by default. Traders have nothing to do with how research players choose to play.

On the other hand, it's an opportunity for traders to sell something other players want to buy.

[despotate]

What I'm saying is that traders are to scientists what janitors are to janiborgs: completely inferior in almost every way in selling bluespace beakers that can be easily mass-produced by science. Unless the very first thing you do is rush to sell them.

[Kurfursten]

Time has value all its own, having 200 units of space early in the shift when you're massing up your pills and making cryo mix is a lot more useful than 200 units of space an hour into the round when nothing's happening. That's just always going to be true, scientist or not.

[ihadtoregisterforthis]

Comments out bags of holding and adds adv clownshoes to the trader vend.

Phrasing

[Zth--]

It makes me happy to see this thing improved the traders game. I agree with this PR. I'll be looking into new stuff to add to the vendor.

[Intigracy]

phrasing

also shouldn't this have a changelog