/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

lumipharon wrote:^

When I first started playing I died more rounds then I survived.
Most rounds for that matter ended with most of the crew dead one way or another.

Today, 90% of the time when the shuttle leaves, almost all the crew are alive and well onboard.

There was plenty of bullshit deaths, but that just made it more interesting. People used to rage about getting killed 10 minutes into 2 hour ling rounds - now, people just complain about being dead for 10 minutes.

the only rounds where i have to complain about being dead are rounds where i'm an antag and i've been validhunted
crew gets like two autocloners if science knows their shit and basically has no reason to die ever because of things like defibs (unless a traitor goes out of his way to gib every single victim)
and even when I do die as an antag, there's always the 40,000 ghost roles i can come back as :^)

All the ghost roles you can become are a rather large part of what makes death feel meaningless.

Which is why I hate every time people suggest a new way to get back into the round. Respawning, in whatever form removes any weight that dying has.

Death will never be "meaningful" in a video game that resets every half hour (or even 2 hours).

Having a large portion of the players sitting out just puts pressure on people to end the round.

If you don't like ghost roles you don't have to accept the prompt for them.

imblyings wrote: Paranoia here would just lead to things people might label as powergaming anyway. Id wager most other places who have paranoia without tg level competency/powergaming also have a well built safety net of rules and restrictions which make a player feel safe or guaranteed in his fun at the same time.

Pretty much yeah. When the AI used to go nuts every round and shocked doors put you in crit, I just started cutting the RD office cam round start, stealing insulated gloves, carrying the spare robo console board on me, and so on. If you want to make the game super miserable and super dangerous people are going to react to that, and it's not gonna be with deep roleplay.

Kor wrote:Death will never be "meaningful" in a video game that resets every half hour (or even 2 hours).

Having a large portion of the players sitting out just puts pressure on people to end the round.

If you don't like ghost roles you don't have to accept the prompt for them.

Why would I not accept (most) of them?

There's a difference between a player perspective and a game design perspective.
As a player I want everything I can get in my advantage. From a design point of view that's typically terrible.

this thread never truly dies, does it? it's the red wire of ss13 design, "paranoia".

i will forever stick to my opinion that there is nothing fun about a silent kill. it adds a marginal amount of fun for one person: the murderer. a silent kill usually has zero impact on the round, and most of the time there wasn't shit the other person could've done about it without metagaming. do we really want to punish people for not metagaming? things would be much different if anybody actually noticed the lack of a crewmember, but most of the time, if your genetics buddy leaves and doesn't come back, you never actually care. even on lowpop basil rounds, people usually dont care and just assume they're braindead or something. people aspire to the ideal of movies like Alien and The Thing, but these just do not work in our game. the movies build paranoia and tension by people disappearing one by one and people freak out about it. nobody freaks out in ss13. all that happens is that people die an unsatisfying death one by one, while nobody else actually cares. at least a murderboner can provide an exciting chase for sec. parapen+c4 added nothing to rounds except greentext and early releases of the singulo. neither did parasting.

what might actually help would be making the station more spooky. add batteries to all sources of light. add directional mob vision. revamp the power system so darkness is more common. add more features to conceal one's identity (the constant bloat of clothing has sadly made this much harder). remove lowpop ai. make sounds echo through large spaces.

Miauw wrote:-snip-

So Darkstation 13? Got you fam, we have way too many lights on Box. I'm sure we can cut back on the light budget by a bit.

Being serious I do like some of Miauw's suggestions, and suggestions made in the past in general.

Directional mob vision strikes me as something worth looking into, and we already have a new Chameleon PR up to add more disguising options.

I think we tried directional mob vision once, and it was a shitty looking headache inducing pile of garbage

Yeah Erro once made it as an experimental feature, he never pushed it to the code base though so was never tried on the server.

Lifeweb does have cone of view though, its not too nauseating but their run speed is very very slow.

Lifeweb is like a fucking slideshow in comparison to every other server with how laggy it is. You hold down the movement key, and 7 seconds later you're halfway there, and 2 seconds after that you're at the bottom of a pit with all your limbs broken.

Also weren't we at oldspeed back then so much faster than we are now?

Wyzack wrote:I think we tried directional mob vision once, and it was a shitty looking headache inducing pile of garbage

I guess I'd be okay with testing this, but from what I heard it's just really janky/bad and didn't accomplish much except that it was really really annoying

Still relevant.

Wyzack wrote:I think we tried directional mob vision once, and it was a shitty looking headache inducing pile of garbage

the issue was the lag associated with it iirc.

now that we have planes though...

why should i be paranoid if there are 10 million ghost roles floating out there and rounds are nearly guaranteed to end at the 30-40 minute mark? death doesn't matter to me so i do not fear it.

also slick necro lumber

Kel wrote:why should i be paranoid if there are 10 million ghost roles floating out there and rounds are nearly guaranteed to end at the 30-40 minute mark? death doesn't matter to me so i do not fear it.

also slick necro lumber

another reason why lavaland was a mistake

Lavaland is a PvE zone, where you powergame for 10 minutes and then return with full gear and magical memes either to murderbone or validhunt.

yes but it's also a respawn zone

Death just happens, deal with it. Or just respawn on literally another space station and try to rebuild it I guess why not, if the round will last, probably won't though.

As long as the paranoia does not turn to powergaming at the cost of roleplay interactions. Stuff like pizza ops would never happen if the command staff decided to kill them on sight because of the obvious pizza bombs.

Being okay with dying leads to better interactions, in my opinion. This doesn't mean allowing straight respawns, but allowing dead players to have some kind of fun instead of being bored having to wait 40 minutes for the next round means that dying is an acceptable risk when interacting with others, instead of the taze-then-talk policy some people have.

Except that doesn't seem to be the case. Death not mattering at all because you can get your murderbone/valids on via ghost roles anyway seems to encourage the "it's TDM with respawn" mentality.

When you say ghost roles I’m assuming golems because they’re a stupid role currently

golems are the new prisoners