3) Or FD have never really taken note of the requests/suggestions from posters that these modules should not use regular slots?
4) Or FD don't understand/agree yet more slots = more tanking in combat builds etc?
5) Or FD simply went ahead with the simplest implementation of the mechanics, with the least resistance
, not (overly) concerned with the/any negative outcomes.
Personally, I think (5)...
Honestly I think a lot of these "hey let's add a cool new thing" features are taken from the point of view of how cool it'd be to use in solo/private, or in open with friends in a quiet backwater - just like healbeams, they're really fun for co-op gameplay against swarms of NPCs to have your healer zipping around and patching up the big aggressive corvette that's pulling the entire CZ's aggro and so on, but the point where they become a problem is when they're used against another player. Fun to use, not so fun to have them used against you.
In PvE encounters it can be handled by limiting the number of healers that spawn (and this is something that comes up in AX CZs - kill the regenerator scouts first!) but there's nothing stopping a wing of players from making
everyone a healer.
That, and there's little consideration given to the knockon effect these little QoL things have on other items/effects. Drag slowing you down and disabling boost is powerful in its own right, but when you combine it with reverb torpedoes that you can no longer outrun due to the drag, that simple effect becomes a gateway to an absolutely devastating 1-2 punch. Extra size-1 slots so you don't have to sacrifice anything for the new modules? Unintended side-effect that people can now move their existing size 1 modules that are currently sitting in oversized slots, freeing up the larger slots in the process. My cutter, for instance, effectively gained a size 3 slot back when the need for an ADS was removed.
The latter is something I've seen happen a lot when I've been following the development of various Space Station 13 codebases - someone will code a cool new thing and add it to the game, and very shortly the players will find some other use for it (or combo with another item/ability) that utterly breaks things because nobody in development thought "wait, what effect will this weapon have if you combo it with
this?"
Example: there was an item added called the Rapid Part Exchange Device that would allow you to swap out components in the various station's machines in order to perform upgrades faster and without dismantling them.
Later, someone added the "Bluespace RPED" which used teleporter technology to allow you to swap parts out on any machine you could see. A really nice QoL upgrade for people upgrading the station without waiting for people to open doors they didn't have access to, right?
Except SS13 is also a game about traitors and sabotage, and one of the things you can do is rig a power cell to explode when it's used.
Then someone discovered that the line-of-sight check allowed you to use the BRPED through security cameras.
Suddenly this nice little convenient upgrading tool allowed you to assassinate people from anywhere without warning by rigging a power cell, finding them on a camera, waiting for them to walk past any active machine that had power cells as a component, and clicking the button to blow a hole in the station. Emergent gameplay at its finest.
