Originally Posted by
SilentMountain
Yeah except in 2018 it was forgivable, the gameplay had not been sank into TDM hell by updates quite as much, not as much base code removed and there wasn't talk of sinking the game even further into playstyles not fit for the engine nor the game's stated goal. 2018 gave us what ? IOs and Mutators?, IOs had at least the potential of RP at that time since the role hadn't been relegated to mindlessness yet and there was the expectation of making the role more profound than just "grab these and run back to the ship". Mutators ? Barely did anything to impact gameplay to be honest, only a couple were ever worth taking and most xenos preferred to remain base because a lot of mutators were basically hard debuffs for very situational advantages.
Saying SS13 not being a roleplaying game is straight up dumb IMO but let's ignore the obvious for a second and preted you're right and it's not actually designed to be an RP game, you know what it's even less fit for? skill-based action PvP gameplay; and that's EXACTLY where current dev team seems to want to take us with every update.
As other people have stated the PFC and the Tier 3 have been made the be-all end-all of the game, everything revolves around the Tier 3 and the PFC, every update and every OOC rule is thought so as to not to disturb or even affect PFCs clicking on xenomorph sprites, and that makes other roles dull as fuck,
Medbay? empty for 70% of the game until you have to revive 15 dead marines at the same time after evacuation and the xenos crash midway trough heart surgery, kill you and facehug your patient.
Command? just there so that PFCs can pretend they're not metagaming their way into the hive and sometimes deploying with their command snowflake gear (which they're totally not supposed to do unless the round goes for a certain amount of time which it never does anymore) once they get bored of copy pasting "Stay with your SL" enough times in Squad Comms
Engineering? There to be arrested by MPs and to go SSD as CE because there's nothing to do
Requisitions? Button and chair simulator 2020
Corporate Liaison? Paperweight Simulator 2017 Remaster
Military Police? "Let's see how long we have to aggro someone to turn breaking a window into a sedition perma-brig sentence": Nothing to do help me im bored.