Part-Time Vice Officer
| This page is about discontinued content. The following information is not current. It is kept for historical purposes. |
The Part-Time Vice Officer (capitalized in-game as "Part-time Vice Officer) was a member of security responsible for keeping the crew's entertainment and excesses in check, with particular emphasis on drugs such as weed and booze. Aside from that, the Part-Time Vice Officer really didn't do much and were treated more as really chill Staff Assistants with benefits.
Instead of Medbay and Research Sector access like regular Security Officers, they got access to the Bar, Kitchen, and Hydroponics. They could use some Security machines, such as the SecTechs, but they didn't get Security Equipment access and thus couldn't open the Security equipment lockers or give authorizations for the armory computer. They got an "assistant" requisition token, so the only thing they could buy from the Security Weapons Vendor is the Assistant loadout. They didn't get the Security Training trait, but they did still get doubled HP recovery from eating all types of donuts.
Part-Time Vice Officers were available only to those who join after a round has started, and they appeared exclusively on Saturdays, as that day's Job of the Day. They could not latejoin as antags, be converted over to the revolution, or join a Gang. They were still vulnerable to the mindslave implant.
A Brief History of Dope-Pushers
For most of the job's history, Part-Time Vice Officers were just called "Vice Officers". They go quite a while back, having existed during the Devstation and Donut Station 2 eras. On January 21st, 2011, all the Vice Officers got "shipped to Space Miami" (i.e. discontinued, courtesy of Procitizen, an old dev) due to excessive weed smoking, drug abuse and general uselessness. They were later as brought back as a Job of the Day that appears on Saturdays.
Then, on September 5, 2020, Vice Officer was renamed to "Part-time Vice Officer". Back then, before that change, there were actually two versions of Vice Officer, one that was part of a "special" series of job slots that started off closed but could be opened by admins and spawned with a (regular) requisition token (this version is still around today), and one that didn't but was included in the Job of the Day line up. Because there were two jobs with the same name, the game got confused, and the job would sometimes spawn without a requisition token. To fix this, a dev, pali6, gave the job that was Job of the Day version a requisition token too and renamed it Part-time Vice Officer. Later on, Part-Time Vice Officer's token was downgraded into an assistant requisition token.
Part-Time Vice Officers were eventually removed once again in January 2022 for two reasons. First, the Job of the Day system is meant to provide roles for doing gimmicks, and as it was a Security role, Part-Time Vice Officer didn't really work very well for that. Second, it was unclear what their actual role was. Back then, Security used to crack down on drug use, so the idea of a role devoted entirely to that made perfect sense. Over time, though, Security culture became more tolerant of drugs, and a result, Vice Officer lost much of its appeal. It could work as a trainee role or as a job for veteran players who wished to play Sec but wanted something more laid-back, but those niches were better filled by the arrival of Security Assistant, essentially making them redundant.
Thus, they were taken out of job rotation and excised from the game's code, and the Saturday Job of the Day was replaced by Musician. There's a certain irony to how a role charged with keeping the crew's entertainment in check was replaced by more entertainers.
Vice Officer
A version of this job is technically still around, as a holdover from when the job was initially removed. It's just called "Vice Officer" (presumably these ones are full-timers), and it spawns with the exact same equipment, access, and attributes as the Part-Time Vice Officer, but instead of an assistant requisition token, they get a regular one, with loadout, ammo, and utility credit. It is only available if an admin opens up slots for it.
Supplementary Video