Willingness to engage - admin vs dynamic?

[nukularpower]

TLDR: How do you feel about admins interfering with midrounds as defined by dynamic?

As someone that has played almost all of the major SS13 servers, I believe I have somewhat of a unique viewpoint on certain issues that may not be apparent to someone that sticks only to TG. One of the more subtle issues, to my mind, is the dynamic system. It is an idea which sounds great in theory; however, I believe that it has created a hands-off culture among the TG admin team (though I will also note that the newest admin crop has been fighting valiantly against this trend and are much more involved than the previous group seemed to be.) Still, it is extremely rare that admins will spawn antags on their own, or even interfere with whatever dynamic brings - it may be 1 hour 40 mins into shift, there might be 5 durands stomping around, with 30 laser crates sitting in sec to be opened, but you are still getting the same 3 pirates, and good luck to them!

On other servers, the admins seem to take a much more direct role in things, often setting up antags directly or customizing midrounds based on how prepared (or not) the crew is - severely arming up the station can be seen as asking for a smackdown from the gods. On TG this sort of thing is much rarer as admins tend to just let Dynamic do its thing. I like to compare it to playing a CRPG that rolls dice to determine what happens next, vs playing DND with a live dungeon master - the live DM is almost certainly going to give a more customized, original, and fun experience.

Of course, there is a fine line between contributing to the round and overwhelming it, and not every admin event will be a winner. I definitely get that player feedback can be ridiculously harsh if they happen to be on the losing side, too - the player culture is part of what I see as the problem.

So with all of that blabbering out of the way, hopefully I've given an outline to my actual question/s - do you have any thoughts on the typical level of involvement you see or experience? What about custom antag spawns, or editing them/replacing them based on what is going on with the station? Would you do more? Less? Do you feel players are too sensitive/harsh/critical of events that do occur, or is that even really a factor when making a decision to mix things up? Are you happy with what dynamic typically puts out?

As a final note, I will again call out the current admin team on Manuel, who, in my experience, have been typically way more involved than the prior group, which is great to see. Thank you!

[Cheshify]

Admins should always interfere with Dynamic. Humans can make much better judgement calls than an algorithm, so any round where the threat can actually dynamically scale to the stakes on the station is better than a computer injecting 30 traitors into every blue shift. However, the condition here is that when an admin makes a mistake it can feel to players like it was made intentionally unfair and unfun. I think it's a reason why you're not allowed to admin complain over events, as an admin should never be punished for trying to make a round more enjoyable.

[Sightld2]

I will toy with dynamic as I PLEASE. That means letting threat get wasted some times, and other times it means, ok yeah I'm sending a wizard. I don't do it super often, but I love editing antags to be relevant to the shift, which is usually an extra objective or maybe changing a target.

[WineAllWine]

where've you been? In my experience admins loathe a greenshift, if dynamic fails to spawn anything admins will either make an event or just spawn in some random antags as they feel fit. This should continue, and if there are servers where this isn't happening it should start

[iain0]

Yes, play with dynamic. Personally I tend to follow its "guide" a little, a lighter shift I will keep a lighter trickle of antags going, usually replacing them with new spawns when they die, and if its a heavy threat shift (which dynamic can still mess up, like a 80 threat shift with 0 round start spent will be a very very slow roll probably into a bored shuttle call at some point) then add lots of flavour.

I usually just add more threat and let the game roll random thing ; i'm more likely to throw things like spiders and aliens and ERTs in if the dead count is climbing because that gives more things for dead people to do.

Generally I prefer to take subtle less obvious paths when I'm "guiding" the game (versus directly getting involved with announcements for events and similar), there's a few other places this plays in, but dynamic gives it away on the round end report (or used to, probably still does) because the threat allocations dont add up properly.