/tg/Station 13

The PR: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/57685

This is kind of late feedback but only because I legit thought this was a bug because of how dumb it is.
Here's the rationale:

Mothblocks wrote:As a security officer, your survival and fun are greatly increased when pairing up with a fellow security officer.
My solution is to try and encourage, through design, teaming up, while preserving departmental officers.

In my experience as a sec main, this has been completely ineffective. I've never once teamed up with another officer just because we were assigned to the same department. If anything, it's created more conflict between officers - more than once I've had to fight the other officer in my department just to get out of the security post. I also don't find "teaming up" (which I guess just means running around together and patrolling the same area?) any more fun than patrolling solo - if I want to chat with other sec officers I can just use sec radio, and patrolling in groups for the combat advantage just feels powergamey. If there's a situation that we actually need to team up for, we can coordinate over the radio.

Anyways here are some problems caused by this change:
1. You have a lower chance of being placed in the department you want. I don't think I need to explain why this is bad, less people are getting to play the role they want to play.
2. Departmental sec posts are still only designed for one officer. There's only one locker and one desk. More than once I've had to fight the other officer over who gets the locker gear at roundstart.
3. Security is less effective. Fewer departments with officers means fewer departments that sec can raid effectively (The HoS does have access, but they're incompetent/dead/a shitter/nonexistent often enough that you can't rely on them). Ironically, one of the big reasons to team up as sec is when one officer has access to the department an antag is in, so you have to group up with them to follow it.

If anyone has experienced positive effects from this change please post (and list the server, too) but for me, on Sybil, it's just been an annoyance.

I like incentivizing team-work and collaboration, but I'm not convinced this is the way to go about it. What appears to be this features major flaw to me is the fact that it is dependent upon the amount of security, which is something notoriously fickle.

On one hand you have servers like bagil and sybil, which experience regular fluctuation in total server pop as well as security presence. It's not uncommon to see the department go neglected for months on these servers, and I feel as if this feature compounds pop issues by decreasing departmental coverage.

On the other hand you have terry, where sec pop is frequently high and the problem is how terribly powerful a coordinated security team is. This gives rise to problems of it's own, as well as solutions, such as the headmins security scaling change - which seems at odds with this feature.

I feel it might be better done by just randomly pairing two officers together, but not forcing them into the same department. Whether they work with their partner or not is up to them, but perhaps we could give minor features to incentivize or make it easier. An example would be that PR from a while back which allowed them to track their partners, although I think we could come up with something better.

I'm convinced that this pr works if security has players though what i'll say right now is that this does mean we should double the amount of lockers that these outposts have.

I dislike it for the exact same reasons Yenwodyah does. It just feels very forced to me.

For example: I just had a round in which there were three officers roundstart and all three of us were assigned to cargo. This change is kind of killing the point of departmental officers (except maybe on Terry, I'm not a yuro).
Edit: And the exact same thing happened on the following round.

Armhulen wrote:I'm convinced that this pr works if security has players though what i'll say right now is that this does mean we should double the amount of lockers that these outposts have.

Not sure just outright doubling the resources is a good idea, seems like a great way to get even worse tiding of secposts- might I suggest instead a system similar to the extra lockers in main sec that spawn dependant on the number of Sec Officers in the role?