Increasing threat cost will not do what you think it will do.
I'm also not really interested in either:
A. Removing/adding chance to "spawn light ruleset if heavy ruleset fails", because a huge part of the PR was that that does not work
B. Adding in factors like # of security, which would only serve to increase complexity about when a ruleset rolls, which would also need to be balanced around the fact that antagonists, even big ones, should still spawn without security and oh hey look at that we're just doing A again
What you probably want is for the number of midround rolls to be decreased. Dynamic 2022 Part 1 makes midround rolls a guarantee and equidistantly spaced across the round. This is because the previous system regularly barely rolled at all, and midround threat cost did not scale at all--20 midround threat was basically the same as 60.
It's on my radar, but I'm not totally convinced on a lot of the arguments I see.
Consider the following, with the grain of salt that I do not play Manuel:
1. Chaos is not an inhibitor for roleplay.
SS13 is only a game about doing your job so much as it is your IC motivation for being there. But when push comes to shove, SS13 is a game about surviving. Great stories come from great conflict. (Also, sometimes dying for the sake of the story). When the shuttle is called, it should not be because you were bored or because there's no work left to do--it's because you're overwhelmed, the crew is dead, and it's at the point where you consider it an emergency.
When I read that you're too distracted to do your job because of antagonists, I'm not sure why my takeaway on that should be negative.
Given that progression traitors have capped the power level of an individual traitor, it's not too bad to put a good amount of them in,
especially given the fact that the traitors come in over the span of a little under an hour and a half.
2. No external data seems to be negative
I am fairly active in the Manuel discord and read complaints, but at the end of the day, Dynamic 2022 is doing its job given the fact that every time I see some "bad" round get posted, the round length is still about an hour and a half (or more!) in length. Sybil too, more frequently! If the rounds are so frustrating to play with all the antagonists, then why are people willingly staying for so long? That's not rhetorical and it's not meant to be snarky, it's meant to mean that round time has been a consistently good measure for analyzing that the amount of chaos is in that sweet spot. Manuel rounds historically like to get in the 2 to 3 hour mark, which we don't want as much as we don't want thirty minute rounds--it is a signifier that the amount of chaos is not right, and the shuttle is being called based upon "we've been here for too long" more than it is for any story driven reason.
TL;DR for #2 -- For all intents and purposes, everything I see shows that it's working.
3. No security isn't something I want to be unnoticeable (TRIPLE NEGATIVE COMBO)
There's a few failsafes for sub-20 pop, but security numbers are intentionally ignored in Dynamic. One aforementioned reason is complexity. Dynamic used to have a lot of factors that made it horrifically confusing for even me to understand what the hell was going on when a roll would pass or fail. We recently had Campbell which just didn't roll any antagonists at all and no amount of debugging helped out. If Dynamic is hard to understand even for
me, then we are screwed in terms of actually being able to balance the black box.
The other is that this is the same way we treat every other department in the game, at least we'd like to. No engineering means no power. No medbay means everyone has to treat themselves. No science means no research without going out of your way to do it. No mining means no minerals. No mime means no ...
And no security means that antagonists have an upper hand on the crew.
When a department does not exist, historically we have never balanced in favor of it. We give tools to help you manage the problem to some extent, but a medkit is no substitute for surgery.
And there are plenty of tools for defense in Space Station 13. As a Manuel player, do not fall into the belief that security should be the only people handling antagonists. When push comes to shove, SS13 is about surviving amidst chaos. Don't valid hunt, don't power game, but if you know there are antagonists across the station...
knowing there have been murders occurring across the station, and grabbing a stunprod while you go to fix wires in maint is fine.