I think corruption is a smart mechanic that's handled well in the game. Once you become moderately corrupted you begin to suffer heat spikes, misdirections, parts fall off, and energy drains. Mostly harmless fluff, but in the right (or wrong) circumstances this can cause a fight to go south. You also have weapons failing to cycle or even worse firing randomly. You can't play cogmind without quickly learning to never carry a launcher around equipped while corrupted.
The one aspect of corruption that I think has some problems is data loss. The worst offender, maprot, has already thankfully been removed. Data loss as it remains essentially takes two basics forms. One, you forget what parts are. As a mechanic I think it works. After you play long enough, you know what parts enemies are dropping after a fight. What this mechanic really does is it forces you to make a decision when you encounter stockpiles. Maybe those unrecognized devices are advanced force fields, maybe they're field recycling units. You can strap one on to find out and restore the loss data but that will cost matter and, more importantly, time. It forces the player to make a strategic decision with food clock ramifications, so I think it works.
My big problem with data loss is that it can destroy data that's effectively irreplaceable. Some of the best rewards in the cave branches are the derelict logs. A log that gives you a branch entrance, zone layouts, or index(machine) for a future floor is huge. The problem is, it's so easy to lose this data, even in the face of extremely trivial corruption.
An anecdotal example: I was in the proximity caves on -3, looking for the exit to research. I found a log giving me the entrance to Testing on -3. That's a huge bit of data! I bumped into a programmer who gave me 2% corruption. I slapped on my system restoration module and made for the exit. In that interval I still managed to suffer two "data loss" corruption events. On -3, I did not get the intel reveal for testing, and had to find it the hard way.
Maybe that was exceptionally bad luck, but I feel like it's way too easy to lose data from derelict logs due to corruption. The whole point of branches is that they're high risk / high reward scenarios, and if the rewards can be that easily lost, they're much less desirable. I know that the derelict logs aren't the main rewards in each cave branch, but they're certainly big reasons why I go in in the first place.
While there are anti corruption devices in the game, I don't think that solves this particular problem this given how easily data loss can occur. A system restoration module can take hundreds of turns to get rid of corruption, and walking around with a corruption screen to block corruption effects 1) is not guaranteed to work, and 2) handicaps your combat abilities. They're certainly useful devices, but they're not going to prevent you from suffering the occasional data loss effect. As it stands, even with anti corruption utilities, as little as 1% corruption in caves can result in you forfeiting extremely valuable intel.
tldr: People are inherently loss adverse. They'd rather not lose something they already have than gain something of equivalent value. (See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion). It's a bummer to lose a branch reward, even if a minor reward, due to an RNG mechanic. My suggestion: Put a corruption threshold before data loss occurs. Even 5% would do it. If you're running around caves super corrupted that's one thing, but if it's extremely minor corruption it'd be nice to avoid corruption effects that are in essence irreparable.
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Topic: Should there be a corruption threshold before data loss occurs? (Read 7694 times)