/tg/Station 13

Forgive the quick dashed off nature, it's late on a Saturday night, extrapolate. This is more a general feedback thread about the direction of the game, more than about any one specific issue; it affects them all.

A lot of coding decisions are made on the grounds that it should be difficult to "remove people from the round." A moment's thought should reveal this as flawed in almost every possible way. This is a euphemism for permadeath, and you cannot have paranoia without the fear of actually dying. When death is cheap, it feels meaningless. Traitors are unable to cause lasting damage without resorting to high-stakes methods like bombs or the singularity; lings are unfun and nerfed to hell; wizards mostly just fuck around; gibbing is near-impossible; the station is being systematically scrubbed clean of the "death trap" elements that are so intrinsic to spessmans they're on the damn front page. It affects non-antags too; shitters feel free to be shit with very little compunction, because they know that there are no real consequences; nobody's going to truly remove them from the round (in this case, a good thing) if they line-toe well enough.

Furthermore: Rounds last two hours, tops. If you cannot go two hours without playing spacemen, and if you can't figure out how to locate another server to do so even in those two hours, then you are the problem.

In addition, there are more ways than ever for players to return to a round, albeit not in their original body:

* Drones
* Posibrains
* Sentience potions
* People are even suggesting actual respawn mechanics

In addition to the existing ways:

* Golems
* pAIs
* Aliums
* Adminnery

If a player wants to play, there are more than enough options (as a xenobiologist, half the time I try to make golems or use sentience potions, there are no ghosts left), so this argument has turned into a bit of straw ma.

Dying is not very meaningful in SS13. You can get cloned. If your body is destroyed, Science has you covered.

The OP pretty much just says that in a more long-winded sense, and it's true

100% agree with OP. I honestly miss the old parasting, parapen C4, or even stun gloves days. At least then you were afraid of being near people alone. Nowadays the risk level is so low that you don't have to be paranoid to survive, and, unless you go out of your way to find danger, 99% of the time, danger will not find you.

That's not fun. It's silly to make coding and design decisions revolving around minimizing the number of people being removed from the round, when typically, that's what makes rounds eventful. As another has already stated, there's a plethoria of ways of 'keeping people in the round' even if they're incinerated or whatever, but really, the objective here, from a design standpoint, should be fun for those alive, not making it impossible to remove people from the round. It's always obscene when you space a corpse and 1 minute later someone calls out 'CORPSE AT ESCAPE/ARRIVALS IN SPACE' (the problem of which has been excaberated by cubespace), and borging / cloning / backups are always a single step away so folks can call out that dasterdly criminal's name.

It's basically just shit. Bring back the paranoia, I really don't give a fuck if the new players cry OP pls nerf to whatever is added, because /tg/ has gotten ridiculously hugbo x gradually over the last few years, and I'd rather see parapen c4 from every traitor than this declawed shit we have now.

It is a gradual effect of not thinking of the round as a whole but just about your own fate.

A lot of the lost shit could contribute to the flavour of a round while it might give you personally a bad round unless some asshole killed absolutely everyone the round was usually a net positive.

People put in the complaints they get these nerfs and hey latter on they get to taste the bland bread they have left behind they've subtly ruined the game for everyone piece by piece individually creating an environment where everyone loses by default because the objective of a game is to entertain.

If death was indeed meaningless, wouldn't it be much better? Players being able to respawn guaranteed even when nobody is working xeno/robotics would be pretty nice. I am certain that people would get a lot less upset over dying when they knew they could just respawn in a few minutes and keep playing. People not being angry at dying would very likely encourage coders to add more dangerous things to the game aswell.

If you instead insist that death should be meaningful and permanent to cause paranoia, then naturally people will be angry when they die and can't keep playing the game(especially the people who can't spare a lot of free time) and coders are going to balance around that. Then again, I find it rather silly to suggest that permanent deaths add anything meaningful to the experience.

I honestly have not played much, if any, SS13 on /tg/ in a while simply because my last few rounds resulted in me being bored out of my skull in the HoS's office with the only event that was engaging was an hour ago.

The first step in trying to get ontop of this, big, issue is to increase the lethality of antagonists while toning down the ways for people to get back into the round (at least as their original person).

Honestly the only way your main character should get back into the round is if someone clone's you, Drones or Migrants or whatever are fine but anything that takes your existing corpse and revives it in a way needs to go.

Amelius wrote:100% agree with OP. I honestly miss the old parasting, parapen C4, or even stun gloves days. At least then you were afraid of being near people alone. Nowadays the risk level is so low that you don't have to be paranoid to survive, and, unless you go out of your way to find danger, 99% of the time, danger will not find you.

Though I can't really get in on the "muh paranoia" fetish train, I do feel there's a lot of things missing in the feel of the game. I think its right that we should do things to make players fear death and have incentives to avoid dying to stupid shit (would cut down on a lot of the random stupid "I was bored" greyshit fights too if they realized dying wasn't just a wait in a cloning queue.) However, enough departments depend enough on cooperation to a degree that I can never really get behind "add paranoia so nobody wants to stand in adjacent squares!" thinking. It makes getting basic things done in science really tedious and slides us closer to that top-down FPS mentality that seems to guide a lot of players. I get that there are players who simply don't give a shit about being a guy on a space station doing a job. That's not really my problem. I do think it is an important part of gameplay that needs to be preserved, though.

With that said, no, fuck parasting and parac4. They were removed because there was zero counterplay to them outside of "oh god I hope nobody stands near me" and that's bad on its own. Its pretty easy to see how awful it gets on a meta level. When players go into a round with this mentality they walk on eggshells and cooperation within what should be normal workplaces kinda sucks because everyone's being scared of eachother's super secret pens or whatever. And then nukeops show up and everyone sighs relief instead of being thrown into panic. "Oh good, I can stop being paranoid, its just this other antag who isn't right next to me." That kinda takes the excitement edge off of that off-station antag at the same time it takes some of the fun out of what is essentially the foundational backdrop of the game.

By all means, find a good way to inject finality to death or at least make it more desirable to survive than suicidally throw yourself on an esword with the expectation of a swift revival. Just don't do it in a way where the thing people are most afraid of is adjacency to other players.

I really think the best way forward is in rebuffing antagonists to be more powerful WITHOUT buffing or reverting changes to weapons with no counterplay.

Eswords and guns are very noticeable and can, to a extent, be countered and will draw attention. Whereas parapens are not.

People are simply not getting killed in any appreciable numbers anymore. Most of the crew usually survives.

However, the number of crew evacuating is significantly lower



Look at that shift in the graph

Are tons of people unable to reach the shuttle?

I find that unlikely given the high survival rates. The station can't be in that bad of a shape if everyone is still alive. So why aren't they reaching the shuttle?

I think it's much more likely that large numbers of people have simply gone braindead by the time the shuttle docks, something which I've noticed walking the halls.




The round is far too safe and dull if nearly as many people are missing the shuttle because they quit the game as people who missed it because they died.

Nothing has impact or weight anymore and it won't be reversed.

If your going to be pessimistic about it then sure.

Steelpoint wrote:I honestly have not played much, if any, SS13 on /tg/ in a while simply because my last few rounds resulted in me being bored out of my skull in the HoS's office with the only event that was engaging was an hour ago.

The first step in trying to get ontop of this, big, issue is to increase the lethality of antagonists while toning down the ways for people to get back into the round (at least as their original person).

Honestly the only way your main character should get back into the round is if someone clone's you, Drones or Migrants or whatever are fine but anything that takes your existing corpse and revives it in a way needs to go.

Then maybe stop playing HoS and do something else like talk to the crew?

Maybe I'll ignore his argument and attack him!

Does it matter what role I play? Janitor, Head of Security, Captain, Head of Personal or Chief Engineer the problem is all the same. At least with the Janitor I can always do something but simply put idle talk can only get you so far.

How many times do I have to make idle conversation with the same people for several hours at a time to make up for the lack of anything going on at all? Simply trying to say that you should 'talk' to people to fix the issue of the game being boring then your just delusional.

I'm surprised this got so much support, particularly for a drunken late-night post.

Departmental coordination is something that gets brought up a lot, but right now nobody really cares about traitors if they don't interfere with how the department runs. Anecdotally when I'm a traitor in a department, or when my partners are a traitor, nobody cares unless I start picking people off in my department. I've been cargo tech who emags the console in front of the QM and the QM doesn't care, or xenobiologist (I play a lot of xenobio lately) watching my partner breed gold slimes and golems for nebulous purposes.

The thing is, people will say that they want the station to be dangerous but then bitch for hours in deadchat that they died. All the shit that got nerfed like parasting or doorshock instacrit, those were all done based on feedback at the time. People have only started to complain that the ground is too soft afterwards. There's a disconnect between the ideal that people say they want: "more danger", and what they really want: "to actually play the round instead of laying dead in a closet somewhere."

The solution that people propose to fix that is basically respawns, in the form of drones/golems/other. But really... how is that any better? "Oops, I died, but it doesn't matter at all that I died because now I get to respawn (as something that's probably more fun than doing my job anyway)"... So if death doesn't matter, then why does danger matter?

People will always be annoyed and angry when they die, I will just as easily admit that as will many people.

Being able to easily respawn into the round completely guts the whole concept of death since suddenly there's no fear of death or anything that can cause death.

Cheridan wrote:The thing is, people will say that they want the station to be dangerous but then bitch for hours in deadchat that they died. All the shit that got nerfed like parasting or doorshock instacrit, those were all done based on feedback at the time. People have only started to complain that the ground is too soft afterwards. There's a disconnect between the ideal that people say they want: "more danger", and what they really want: "to actually play the round instead of laying dead in a closet somewhere."

The solution that people propose to fix that is basically respawns, in the form of drones/golems/other. But really... how is that any better? "Oops, I died, but it doesn't matter at all that I died because now I get to respawn (as something that's probably more fun than doing my job anyway)"... So if death doesn't matter, then why does danger matter?

We've run into the uncomfortable problem once again that SS13 is a flawed game at its core. It more or less relies on making other players miserable.

And yeah I agree all the things we removed were dumb individually (I did several myself!) by I'm wondering if it was a good idea in the end.

The culmination of shitty individual game features created a core game that, somehow, worked. Right now we've refined the game to the point that in removing all those bad features from the game has actually been a detriment to the game rather than a boon.

I'm not suggestion we should start reverting every single change made to the game in the past few years, but I do think we really need to try and turn the game around from what we have now (2 hour rounds with little going on) to what we used to have (30 minute to a max of 1 hour rounds with a lot going on).

bandit wrote:or xenobiologist (I play a lot of xenobio lately) watching my partner breed gold slimes and golems for nebulous purposes.

Antag or not, I always made a beeline for golems (even more now that they aren't foiled by broken glass.) They make great soldiers/distractions when you're an antag and great antag-fighters in a pinch. (Bred a golem army that fought off and looted swords and shields off nukeops once. That was dabes.)

Cheridan wrote: The solution that people propose to fix that is basically respawns, in the form of drones/golems/other. But really... how is that any better? "Oops, I died, but it doesn't matter at all that I died because now I get to respawn (as something that's probably more fun than doing my job anyway)"... So if death doesn't matter, then why does danger matter?

The functional difference is those alternate spawns (not calling them respawns intentionally) still remove your original character from the round permanently. So, whatever little story or interaction within the game that Joe Fuckass had built up to that point was over. Drones can't interact with other players directly or influence the round outside of several degrees of separation, golems are bound to another player's will, etc There's value in that death in the sense that the real round population decreased and whatever function that player was responsible for (and whatever authority they had) is now vacant. This probably means nothing or next to nothing to the common greyshirt, but that's fairly in line with how much people notice or care about the death of the common greyshirt.

cedarbridge wrote: The functional difference is those alternate spawns (not calling them respawns intentionally) still remove your original character from the round permanently. So, whatever little story or interaction within the game that Joe Fuckass had built up to that point was over. Drones can't interact with other players directly or influence the round outside of several degrees of separation, golems are bound to another player's will, etc There's value in that death in the sense that the real round population decreased and whatever function that player was responsible for (and whatever authority they had) is now vacant. This probably means nothing or next to nothing to the common greyshirt, but that's fairly in line with how much people notice or care about the death of the common greyshirt.

That's basically what I was trying to get at, though.
With alternate spawns, we've created a system where death only screws you over if you:
A. Care about those interactions your character had previously (Roleplay, in other words) and/or
B. Have a role that is important to the station.

That's exact opposite of what we want!!

Respawn creatures should never be more interesting than human/lizards.
Drones are a pretty good start, you can only really build shit and steal hats, its a fun way to kill time but you wouldn't want it over being alive.
Golems are sort of on the edge, but they are not easy to come by so I'd say its okay.
Android brains have the most freedom, and I'd say they are a bit on the cheap side. Maybe make them a tad more expensive. No one ever makes them though.

I agree things should be more dangerous, but para+c4 and other such things were never a good thing.
Basically I think you should have a chance in a fight, if only briefly, but if you're down you are fucked.

And then you have aliens, which turn people into happy victims because they know that with the added larvae coming out of the monkeys in xenobio/viro/genetics there's a 100% chance to get their antag on within moments of death.

It's no surprise Aliens almost never lose.

Celdur wrote:Respawn creatures should never be more interesting than human/lizards.
Drones are a pretty good start, you can only really build shit and steal hats, its a fun way to kill time but you wouldn't want it over being alive.
Golems are sort of on the edge, but they are not easy to come by so I'd say its okay.
Android brains have the most freedom, and I'd say they are a bit on the cheap side. Maybe make them a tad more expensive. No one ever makes them though.

I agree things should be more dangerous, but para+c4 and other such things were never a good thing.
Basically I think you should have a chance in a fight, if only briefly, but if you're down you are fucked.

Actually, I regularly drone instead of playing meat. It affords a tiny modicum more protection from the GAS THE LIZARDS shitbags because now I can ventcrawl and have a tiny sprite.

Cheridan wrote:The thing is, people will say that they want the station to be dangerous but then bitch for hours in deadchat that they died. All the shit that got nerfed like parasting or doorshock instacrit, those were all done based on feedback at the time. People have only started to complain that the ground is too soft afterwards. There's a disconnect between the ideal that people say they want: "more danger", and what they really want: "to actually play the round instead of laying dead in a closet somewhere."

The solution that people propose to fix that is basically respawns, in the form of drones/golems/other. But really... how is that any better? "Oops, I died, but it doesn't matter at all that I died because now I get to respawn (as something that's probably more fun than doing my job anyway)"... So if death doesn't matter, then why does danger matter?

It's important to distinguish between salt ( ) and actual game design suggestions. Unfortunately there is a contingent of people -- funnily enough, often the same people who are now complaining that the game is too safe and forgiving -- who tend to post "I DED PLS NERF" threads.

An antag's ideal interaction with a player involves only him and that other player, and NOBODY ELSE. There is no real incentive to make the round interesting.

The good rounds, the fun rounds everybody remembers, always come from somebody with enough balls to run a gimmick and enough luck to have other people play along.

>we have to make death miserable because it's a core part of the game
>we can't let anyone die because it's miserable

We need to drop one or the other of these attitudes. We can't have long rounds, miserable deaths, and few people getting killed when all the game modes are about killing people. We need to pick and choose something coherent ie short rounds with no respawn or longer rounds but with ways to keep observers engaged. With the mulligan system which basically strings multiple rounds together so that research/fort building isn't reset I don't see why we couldn't have ways for players to get back into the game as well.

Also

>respawn roles are bad because they're more fun than doing your job

That speaks more to the nature of the jobs if doing them is so boring that people would rather be a drone or golem.

Kor wrote:>respawn roles are bad because they're more fun than doing your job

That speaks more to the nature of the jobs if doing them is so boring that people would rather be a drone or golem.

THIS
So many jobs that get fun stuff get absolutely shit on by the code
Look at genetics
Look at genetics RIGHT NOW and tell me it's still as good as it was back in the day
When was the last time you've seen a geneticist, twenty minutes in, be a hulk with telekinesis but WITHOUT aid from virology?

Look at miners. They've had ups and downs for a while, but their highlight was when kinetic accelerators were broken as fuck, because the job actually had some sense of decently paced progression. Now they don't even have plasma cutters by default which are specifically kitted for mining. Have you ever had to mine with just a slow as fuck pickaxe? It's not what I would call fun. The only time a miner is able to do anything decent is if there is someone doing research.

My most played jobs lately are atmos tech, scientist, and virologist, mainly because those are the only jobs with either a sense of involvement (atmos projects like setting up the incinerator), a sense of progression and rewards as you go along (scientist, research, xenobio), or highly powerful rewards (viro, with regen and stimulus). With every other job I feel like I may as well not even be playing them.

Jobs being boring is because a lot of core mechanics are boring

Construction for Engineers? Boring, good god I love waiting for the "Building girders..."

Medical for the average MD? Honestly not the most dull considering the workload, but still crazy simplistic

Combat for Security? Boring as fuck, because I know that if I play things right, I will win. If I misplay, I will lose. Security gameplay is black and white in that regard, because while there is huge room to screw up, if you do everything procedurally you WILL win.

Respawn roles being too interesting is not a symptom of a problem with them but rather an indicator of the current jobs being in need of some attention.

Scones wrote:I know that if I play things right, I will win. If I misplay, I will lose.

And?

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:

Scones wrote:I know that if I play things right, I will win. If I misplay, I will lose.

And?

I think, judging about the next line about procedure, Scones means that playing sec by a formula will more or less guarantee your victory against certain antag types. There is little "I played well but he played better" if the balance between the two of you is so skewed.

I've already bitched about how boring "aoe flash you lose" is elsewhere though so I'll leave it at that and let Scones explain further if I was mistaken

Kor read what I was saying right, but allow me to elucidate:

Combat as Security has no depth to it. My equipment allows me to win provided I do not mess up - There is little to no room for someone to outplay me. It is rarely if ever a matter of "this person played better than me" and moreso one of "I played poorly and caused my own loss". I'm not sure how to fix this but this entirely the reality of Security play right now.

It's a discussion for another time, but I was really just relating to how boring it is.

I honestly am not a fan of completely sitting out of a round should I be killed and my body not found.

I think the biggest part of what makes jobs so boring is that we've all done it a billion times.
There is not much variety in how a shift goes for most jobs, you always start out the same and do mostly the same stuff, unless someone is doing something silly and you join in, but that doesn't happen too often.
Things only get interesting when something disrupts your job somehow.
Respawn roles are more fun because people on average get to play them a lot less often.

Not sure how that'd be fixed though, rotating jobs for yourself helps in making things a bit less repetitive but that's not really a solution for the game.
I think we should look at jobs that do work and are interesting almost every round and see why they are that way.
But again, that can differ from person to person. I find science to be pretty boring usually, because it's just a repetitive grind to get to cool stuff.
Though I really like robotics, since I feel like I'm really helping folks out. I also like playing engineer/atmos, though if stuff doesn't break I tend to get bored after a bit.

Honestly though, It will be impossible to make everyone happy every round, people will get burned out and take a break from time to time.
You kind of have to accept that not every round is "your round" and just have to be a background character sometimes to make this game work.

Moving the cloner to an R&D thing is a surprisingly good idea.

As for RNG rolls at roundstart, they had better be interesting and not at all shit because Aspects were the worst thing to happen to lifeweb

PRAISE THE LORD: NOBODY IN THE FORTRESS KNOWS HOW TO FIGHT

pr posthaste

as a medbay regular i endorse this in full

what if

you needed biomass to clone a person

the machine in botany could generate biomass "cubes" after feeding it lots of vegetables, monkey meat, fruits, etc

this way random greyshirts wouldn't get cloned unless you're swimming in cloner fuel - right now it's essentially free and effortless to bring someone back from the dead

mosquitoman wrote:what if

you needed biomass to clone a person

the machine in botany could generate biomass "cubes" after feeding it lots of vegetables, monkey meat, fruits, etc

this way random greyshirts wouldn't get cloned unless you're swimming in cloner fuel - right now it's essentially free and effortless to bring someone back from the dead

If you grab the watermelons from the garden roundstart you will be swiming in thousands of biomass really quickly and if you don't get them it takes like a minute to mutate pumpkins to have high potency and high yield to shit out even more biomass.

OR you have no botanists so noone gets cloned ever until one of the chemists nicks a tray and mutates the pumpkins by themselves.

newfren wrote:

mosquitoman wrote:what if

you needed biomass to clone a person

the machine in botany could generate biomass "cubes" after feeding it lots of vegetables, monkey meat, fruits, etc

this way random greyshirts wouldn't get cloned unless you're swimming in cloner fuel - right now it's essentially free and effortless to bring someone back from the dead

If you grab the watermelons from the garden roundstart you will be swiming in thousands of biomass really quickly and if you don't get them it takes like a minute to mutate pumpkins to have high potency and high yield to shit out even more biomass.

OR you have no botanists so noone gets cloned ever until one of the chemists nicks a tray and mutates the pumpkins by themselves.

same can be said about making cloning an unlockable technology, but at least it requires the crew to put some effort into cloning and prioritise cloning some people over other

Cloning with biomass was a thing on Bay, and was rather reviled as far as I remember.

That is, fucking awful.

DemonFiren wrote:Cloning with biomass was a thing on Bay, and was rather reviled as far as I remember.

That is, fucking awful.

why?

It's a thing on Goon, IIRC, and everyone there is just fine with it

honestly i dislike the idea of making it harder to clone, that effectively makes every single death ever the equivalent of gibbing
making gibbing more common =/= making death into gibbing

mosquitoman wrote:

DemonFiren wrote:Cloning with biomass was a thing on Bay, and was rather reviled as far as I remember.

That is, fucking awful.

why?

Because it means relying on Botany, and they're alwayss busy growing dank/mutating the shit out of their trays. Even on Bay, before Xenoflora was added and YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO USE MUTAGEN BAN HE became a rule for regular hydro- sorry, 'gardeners'.

You could have a resource system elsewhere.
You could just have a machine in genetics that grows genetic material to use, something that needs some player maintenance/other resources.

I dont know how anybody could enjoy parasting. That mechanic was broken, unfun, and unfair as hell. It also resulted in the meta of nobody standing next to eachother, which was super lame IMO. Honeslty, if you can't find a better way to cultivate paranoia than 1 hit GGNORE invis weapon attacks then maybe you should take a break.


( I support more ways to make death permanent and scary, BTW, doesn't mean they have to be stupid as hell)

Scones wrote:Moving the cloner to an R&D thing is a surprisingly good idea.

As for RNG rolls at roundstart, they had better be interesting and not at all shit because Aspects were the worst thing to happen to lifeweb

PRAISE THE LORD: NOBODY IN THE FORTRESS KNOWS HOW TO FIGHT

Yeah but it's not even that all aspects are bad. I've seen some AMAZING aspects (baron cursed with randomly shooting fire out of his mouth) and some terrible ones (what you've described). I think the important lesson is that execution of an idea matters, a lot.

Parasting was strong. It wasn't enough to make oldling not a stinking turd on legs alone though.

Yes, that would be interesting.

But yeah there are some real SHIT TIER ASPECTS, like:
- 3k pain
- 1000 years of alcohol
- nobody can fight
- everyone is in love

Cosmic, if you want to make what YOU'RE talking about, you should make a thread and take suggestions. Just ensure they aren't in a space where someone will just pocket them at roundstart, I guess.

Yeah aspects have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Let's get back on topic, please.

I would like to add that the current climate and code of the game makes for very little danger on most rounds, and as a result the average crew robustness has plummeted as we get new players who weren't around for the old, dangerous SS13.

Team based antag types are a joke, conversion based antag types are laughable as the vast majority of people you convert have no idea of what they're doing or even a basic grasp of movement and combat.

Security used to be a training ground but has more recently become a procedural affair where the strength or weakness of Sec is based around the order in which they use foolproof items, rather than any skill, luck, or response time.


I know how much the administration hates the term, but the game is becoming a hug box, and the player base, starting with the newest players who have never played anything else, are becoming a bunch of useless herbivores who are entirely ineffective when they end up in antag roles, and either useless or, even worse, actively salty about being converted in Rev, Cult, and Gang War.


It used to be get good or get knocked out of the round. It hasn't been that way for awhile.

I just looked at a post by Tunderchief and thought : "Yes. He gets it."


The end times have truly come