My Take on Dynamic Mode
Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2021 2:21 am
When I first started playing these kinds of games, I started in chatroom style games which where similar to mafia. In fact I was in one of the first mafia games which came after werewolf. In these games, they're fairly balanced between the awareness of the majority of players and the small number of mafia/traitors. The closest one in my experience to space station 13 is going to have to be trouble in terrorist town, specifically the gmod servers. Every 4 players, there would be 1 antagonist. Every 10 players, there would be 1 detective. This kept a good balance between exponentially growing imbalances between the innocent players and the guilty players. Players would have to keep track of the names of the player and when everybody was dead except themselves and one other player, it would be obvious who the bad guy was. Every player was given tools similar to that of the detective role, but the detective was given more so super tools to counter act the antagonist version of the super tools. Some of these servers would build up to 40 players at a time, having 4 detectives and 10 antagonist. The issue comes up where antagonist can mob together and single out players, but they have a timer before they fail their mission and the innocent players win. The antagonist have to kill every innocent player before the timer is up or the innocent players have to do the same or survive to win. This gives innocent players a slight advantage in survival, but also in witnessing behavior, players could kill others based off rather or not they ran from a dead body without calling the dead body out for everybody to be aware of the location of the dead body. In these games, there was balance and innocent/guilty would win an equal number of times.
In dynamic mode, there's more so the currency of threat which makes a threat slightly smaller than what players can handle. In reality, the threats can all be handled by players if they all play their part to the extreme. Players are going to die, but as players leave the round due to death, threat doesn't raise quite as fast. Instead there are more innocent players per guilty and so many types of guilty players that not all of them can get along and most of the time xenos end up fighting dragons or spiders. All of these threats have hard counters. Spiders and xenos become dust when an engineer begins burning maintenance tunnels with fire, blob has a number of ways to be countered, pirates can get splashed with bone hurt juice, ect. Players are also always joining the round throughout the day, keeping a fresh flow of innocent and guilty players. This means that when shuttles get called depends ultimately on when specific key highly skilled players get antagonist roles or when the crew is too incompetent to continue. Rounds could last hours if antagonist kept getting destroyed. Dynamic mode is like a carburetor in an engine which balances the flow of innocent and guilty players to keep the engine going, however there is one thing that comes to mind. The engine stops eventually because the shuttle eventually gets called. Rounds end. Maps have to change.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that dynamic mode is so good, I can't think of any way to improve upon it at this moment other than refining specific antagonist such as the dragon getting more powers or something.
In dynamic mode, there's more so the currency of threat which makes a threat slightly smaller than what players can handle. In reality, the threats can all be handled by players if they all play their part to the extreme. Players are going to die, but as players leave the round due to death, threat doesn't raise quite as fast. Instead there are more innocent players per guilty and so many types of guilty players that not all of them can get along and most of the time xenos end up fighting dragons or spiders. All of these threats have hard counters. Spiders and xenos become dust when an engineer begins burning maintenance tunnels with fire, blob has a number of ways to be countered, pirates can get splashed with bone hurt juice, ect. Players are also always joining the round throughout the day, keeping a fresh flow of innocent and guilty players. This means that when shuttles get called depends ultimately on when specific key highly skilled players get antagonist roles or when the crew is too incompetent to continue. Rounds could last hours if antagonist kept getting destroyed. Dynamic mode is like a carburetor in an engine which balances the flow of innocent and guilty players to keep the engine going, however there is one thing that comes to mind. The engine stops eventually because the shuttle eventually gets called. Rounds end. Maps have to change.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that dynamic mode is so good, I can't think of any way to improve upon it at this moment other than refining specific antagonist such as the dragon getting more powers or something.