Should Vox Traders start with / be able to easily acquire PDAs?
Created by: despotate
As we all know, Vox Traders start with only a shitty, torn intergalactic passport ID and a station-bounced radio as their connection to NanoTrasen. It might seem obvious at first glance that no, we shouldn't give Traders even more fancy toys via a PDA. Hear me out as to why I think it is kind of necessary for them to have a PDA or something similar to it:
- Trading relies on communication. Screeching over commons about your box of Marauder circuits when realistically only the roboticist is gonna be fooled by those is unnecessarily painful compared to just PDAing him directly. Yes, if you're particularly robust, you'll rush the miner's and botanist's headsets roundstart and pop their keys together to have access to service, supply, and science, but that's likely an oversight and just department-wide communications aren't specific enough. It'd be great to be able to individually message people to tailor your trade towards their specific needs and I'd be more than happy to have the roundstart radios removed for this. Speaking of which,
- Trading relies on knowing who the fuck you're even Trading to. Missing a PDA means you're missing the crew manifest. It takes a very long time to prepare goods to sell and it's really important to know beforehand who your customers are. The size of the science department determines whether you should get the bluespace beaker or the borer egg, for example. The worst offender is buying clown shoes when there's no clown. Now, it's possible that this is a fair challenge and traders should just spam common for the first fifteen minutes of the shift begging everyone to tell them if there's a clown or a roboticist etc., but the problem is that the arrivals computer can be heard from everywhere so Traders do already start with a limited set of information, ie, who arrived on the station, just not who started on the station to begin with. And I'm sure adding a PDA to the Traders is easier than fixing hearing the arrivals computer everywhere :^) (plus you'd still hear it if you were docked)
- No PDA means no station time. No way of finding that out on the vox outpost or vox shuttle. I'll freely admit that I only care about this because I've been running a contractual Trader gimmick where I'm hired to do a service for x minutes, but seriously, it's stupid that I have to set up a timer for x + byond_lag minutes on my phone instead of just negotiating using the station time. And it's just good to have awareness of what time it is in general so you know what you should hawk and to who.
- There's probably more general utility functions on a PDA that are necessary for Trader QOL, I dunno.
But why open an issue instead of getting one from:
- The PDA vendor: you can't, it's one of the few vending machines that won't take cold hard cash. The other problem is that 37% of the time you won't start with enough cash to buy one anyway.
- The HoP: fuck this guy. Remember, you're basically relying on an assistant with all-access for mercy. So many problems. Sometimes they don't exist. Sometimes they don't come to their desk. Sometimes they don't know that they can print a PDA. Sometimes they refuse to print one and just tell you to get one from the vendor. Sometimes they just start arguments with you. Sometimes the line is super long. Sometimes he wants money that you don't have for the PDA. Sometimes you get bullied in line. Blah blah basically everything that can go wrong will go wrong. I'm not exaggerating here, I've been in every one of these situations and it's definitely not worth it for the 20% chance that you might get a PDA in less than five minutes and be able to return to your now-looted shuttle.
The other problem with the two above approaches is:
- You need to get onto the station to get them and getting on the station means you're gonna get deported for looking at someone the wrong way. We shouldn't encourage Vox Traders hanging around on the station by crippling their ability to trade unless they get x item from it roundstart. Also, time spent on the station is time assistants spend law 2ing silicons into opening your shutters and looting your shuttle.
- These approaches take too long and are too inconvenient in general, you need the information and messaging capabilities before you leave for the station, not after you go through the five minute bureaucratic slog for it. Time is money for a Trader, and your wares are most valuable early on in the round, forcing them to go through this shit roundstart is just hell.
Of course, I'm aware of the following point against the idea of giving Traders PDAs:
- We're giving Traders PDAs
Maybe we could split up the functions of the PDA into a portable crew manifest with station time and a messaging handheld device. But I'm not spriting that.