Gather unknown signals from deep, silent space · By
Can Dr. Kel have a day off at the end of every week, or can we have the option to toggle it in the save game menu? With everything that needs to be tracked and fixed since the 0.9.0 update, it would be nice to have time exploration, cleaning, or something else without worrying about Bao asking Kel to do his jobs, because once Kel doesn't do his jobs or skips them, it affects the weekly report.
That's an interesting concept. I think I'd prefer it to be a sort of earned paid time off system. As in with the weekly review you get awarded PTO credit (two days for a perfect week? tie it to the difficulty setting?) that can be spent whenever with a button on the email screen and still counts towards a perfect for that week and still awards points as if you did all the tasks. That lets people put the job portion of the game on pause more or less at will for whatever other activity they want to do, or to never use it if they prefer. It would also be nice if using PTO would also pause everything else (servers going down, fuses blowing, transformers degrading, etc) but it's hard to come up with a logical reason for that to happen. Maybe if you have a kerfus, the confirmation for using PTO noting that "someone will be connecting to your kerfus if you have one to maintain the equipment in your absence"?
The only issue I foresee with this sort of system specifically, is the ability to bank them. If the week counts as perfect despite the break days, you'd always get rewarded with them, unless there'd be a cooldown period of not gaining/being able to use them for a week. That would have its own caveats, though, if you get unlucky for example with towers and transformers going down at the same time; if you've used a break day already, you wouldn't be able to send an email to Bao along the lines of, "yo shit's fucked, give me a day to get things sorted".
I do like the concept of earning it, though. I think Sundays being break days makes sense, historically at least, but I think the earning system could go something like this:
* Any drives you missed that week, you have a chance to complete on Sundays. For example, if you sent 4/5 drives on Friday, but were otherwise perfect, you can send the fifth on Sunday for a slightly reduced reward. Essentially, drive debt.
* I find it odd how all drives get discarded unless you give the exact amount requested, which isn't realistic; they still get useful information despite there being 4/5. Drive debt would fix that, while giving you some optional obligations for Sundays.
* If you decide to not redeem yourself on Sunday, it won't be counted as a perfect week, and that's that. The debt is reset for the next week.
* This could depend on difficulty, too. On hard, the debt could carry over to the next week, and you still have daily tasks on Sundays.
* For a perfect week, there's no debt for Sunday, so you just need to send the log tapes.
I think something along those lines would be a fair system, while making it feel earned. Log tapes would also make sense as a daily requirement no matter what, since they require very little of the player. Drive debt would help in catastrophe cases if you know you can skip the drives and do them on Sunday. The satellites can be a hassle, especially if your ATV exploded in a mountaineering incident, so giving the player a bit of room to breathe on that front would be nice. For a perfect week, the day could either be spent on exploration, or banking signals, so people can choose to do more of their specific interest in the game. Obviously mine is one idea of many good ones, but the core concept of having a day off is, at least in my opinion, a great one.
it makes sense with game lore too since you're there to literally discover and draw out alien entities, the signals are just bonus information really, you are the bait in a trap.
Spending all your time on the bonus part of the plot you're tangled in instead of stirring the pot and getting things moving is contradictory to the real goal.
Just don't do the task for the day if you don't want to. There's no penalty unless you set one yourself. They say you did bad in an email but nothing actually happens. Nothing is forcing you to do the daily tasks. So what if it affects the weekly report? All that does is make them pay you less. There are other ways to get money. I've gone several days without doing signals, earning money by farming or passively with the bitcoin miner. Just doing signals when you feel like it is much more liberating than feeling like it's a daily necessity.
