[Tana]

Water Sourcer right now is a job that, mechanically, does not have to ever be done. Once you set things up the first time, water is continually added, and regardless of some if it being tainted or not, approval never dips low enough to be mechanically tossed from the job.

Worse still, as water sourcers simply don't have to ever check the water, this results in a negative hit to the associated city's health, which negatively impacts the Medical Head, meaning the Medical Head has to personally do what should logically be the water sourcer's job for the best results of their job, which also makes it so that the water sourcer gets even more money for doing nothing, as well as more approval.

I, personally, sat with an application for water sourcer for two months for a city while the water was not once ever checked, until I finally sat around and burned 2500 mental stamina checking all 500 unchecked water so the city health would stop going down despite the medical head meeting their quota within the first couple hours every time.

Water Sourcer needs either a large change to its quotas and interactions, or, since virtually nobody actually intends to use it for the IC (The point of the roles system), it should be removed.

[Trexmaster]

Water Sourcer to me has always seemed like a guinea pig role. The only real thing it gave us was a system that utilized resources on the map and a system with which the players would direct said resources. From a purely conceptional standpoint it's fantastic, but that's where the good ends.

Water Sourcer was released in May 2020. I can bet you that as Tana pointed out those who hold the positions that were taken back then have held them indefinitely without any need for upkeep after selecting which nigh-infinite if not literally infinite water source to draw from until the end of time.

From my own interactions with the role (I looked at a barrel a few times) there isn't much nuance to the job after you select your water source. The difference between taking in saltwater or freshwater is negligible, as all you need to do is spend a bit of stamina to abuse the fact saltwater sources are infinite. Infinite monkeys on infinite barrels of infinite saltwater produce infinite water supplies. Makes sense. (tl;dr modern day desalination of saltwater takes an immense amount of energy using machines that by all rights would not exist in SL2 since we evidently don't even have factories for mass production, unless we can just magically remove saline from water then why is this even a job, the world would never run out of water. the most basic method, boiling it, would yield far less usable water as all you're getting is the vapors.)

Seriously though, Water Sourcer doesn't really provide anything interesting to the game aside from flooding the overworld with 20+ caravans that can't be interacted with (yet). If we aren't going to see new roles making use of the framework Water Sourcer laid down, can we at least get some love for Water Sourcer itself to make it a more engaging role? At the very least penalizing the acting Sourcer if they're leaving all the water unchecked since they entered office.

Ultimately I think that Water Sourcer isn't going to get any more interesting until we have another system that interacts with it to make water a desirable commodity for something aside from appeasing your local system then forgetting about it. Excess water could be sold off for more Marcs (that's the currency right) which, maybe someday, Marcs could contribute to the local economy of the relevant region for some tangible purpose. Maybe having a minimum number of Militia at the ready if the economy is doing well? Or even increasing the cap for trained Militia. Anything that rewards maintaining a thriving system, really.

The whole role system just screams "wasted potential" but I know Dev's had plenty of other stuff on his plate, though this far down the line (1 year 5 months) since the last addition to the role system? People would've forgotten it was a thing if blood wasn't a resource that role holders needed to constantly upkeep by milking PCs. It's a great concept but it needs way more work to be complete. If done right it could be a major improvement towards making SL2 feel like more of a dynamic, living world.

If nothing is going to be done with Water Sourcer any time soon I'm in agreement it should simply be removed, and reintroduced when it can be accompanied with something that makes it more relevant/at the very least demands some level of maintenance to operate. As it stands Water Sourcer is the Medical Head's job, except they can't control the caravans.

[Shujin]

Ther job system in general seems to be a Pilot, and one of many of SL2s started and then forgotten systems while still being very barebones.

Same like Reputation system, Camps (The fact the campfire/feasttables are entirely useless, cause the only times you need that is when you go dungeon diving, where it doesn't work.), Jobs, New places that are added with no reason to actually be there for longer than 10 minutes, etc.

I do not actually see any of that changing any time soon, as the community as a whole would need to take a step back from Balance Fu stuff and mainly suggest things like this. And right now is a bad time to not touch upon the balance after it was shaken pretty hard.

I remember where Dev mentioned that he considered doing stuff like actual on world basebuilding with resource management and stuff, and I figured the town marshals/Jobs were sorta pilots to something similar like that. Maybe one day!

[Skimmy2]

As the Water Sourcer for Lispool who went about 1 year offline without Internet, I can absolutely confirm with no uncertainty that it's impossible to be fired from the job. I was about to make my own post on the topic if you had not.

currently the quota's only measure Water Collected and the Distribution of Fresh Water. The Role will need more criteria to deal with in order to be more feasible.

[adamkad1]

Worse still, as water sourcers simply don't have to ever check the water, this results in a negative hit to the associated city's health, which negatively impacts the Medical Head, meaning the Medical Head has to personally do what should logically be the water sourcer's job for the best results of their job, which also makes it so that the water sourcer gets even more money for doing nothing, as well as more approval.

Funny thing is, as far as i've observed, negative hit to health means more patients, and more patients means more XP for randos who come to grind the few last levels, or faster quota meeting for Medical Head.