Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

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Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by NecromancerAnne » #536447

Bottom post of the previous page:

Since manuel started I've been really wondering how well suited our game modes actually are for the much higher roleplay standard some of the game modes we have in the code and are presently enabled. I think, of the game modes, the ones that work best are the solo antags that are largely stealth based, or at least, are not completely stealing the show. Traitor, BB's and Changeling. Not really many, but they fit and they work.

Which leaves four others in rotation that need to be re-evaluated in my opinion. Some have already been hotbeds for discussion over whether they're fun or not and whether they fit the game. For the most part, they've been fine and work well enough in our other servers, but I think they're beginning to pickle in the new ruleset given they are, in many ways, demanding a higher intensity of powergame to either combat or be involved in. Since we disincentivise powergame on Manuel, they often end up just being landslide victories or people wringing their hands because this isn't quite what they were expecting and don't want to break the rules.

Nuclear Operatives/War Operatives: I think Nuclear Operatives at the moment are kind of just anti-fun unless the operatives choose to largely forgo the objective for a while to do something wacky. There is potential, and there is definitely people who want to do that kind of thing and will. But there are plenty of people who want to just game as hard as possible with big shooty guns and those guys aren't really doing anything bad, since the operative uplink is about 70% ballistic weapons and murder tools. It is maybe an issue of the objective nukies have being the destruction of the station rather than some kind of more abstract or more involved operation aboard the station. If nukies were more akin to a covert team looking to cause trouble on the station, akin to traitors without the sleeper agent element, they might fit just fine. Nuking the station being only ONE of the things they can do, more or less, rather than their ultimate goal.

War operatives is a fucking mess. A running theme I'll have here is that I largely don't agree with the idea that TDM is a positive element to have in a roleplaying game to begin with, but this one is really just how hard the station can pull the stops to game these much more heavily armed opponents. The depth of roleplay you'll get here is anyone getting lynched for a lack of access or a lot of people dying because of an insistence people keep out of the way of security. The mode was designed in a way to have the nuclear operatives advertise their arrival and therefore get enough gear to match an entire crew armed to fight them. It may actually be time to add that separate game mode honestly...

Revolution: Playing fair and being nice to antagonists just doesn't fucking work when only one side is beholden to this rule and the other takes incredible advantage of it to win. If we're encouraging people to be kind to antags, then revolution is really going to start grating on people in a very bad way, and quickly. It will exhaust players out of this mindset, and what basically happens most rev rounds is revolutionaries just butchering everyone they encounter that they can't convert. You could try your hardest to be a good cop in this round, or try and keep out of the revolution's way as a standard crew, but honestly the revs just have the numbers game and have every incentive to just kill or convert everything and everyone they can as quickly as possible and you aren't going to see much interesting gameplay other than 'It's just like any other server and the two sides game as hard as possible' or 'the nonantags sit on their thumbs doing the right then and lose because the antagonists aren't going to give them the time of day and they have a mode to win'. This is a goddamn mess and a half as far as I'm concerned for the roleplay rules and I feel like it ends up lowering the standard of play by a lot.

Blood Cult: The fact that a powergamer got his grubby hands on this mode and inserted enough 'I win' buttons into it should basically speak for itself. Blood cult is powergame: the game mode. And people not busting their ass to powergame the shit out of it in turn are going to lose to this absolute monster of an antagonist. The fact that it's a bunch of wizards with nigh infinite resources and slowly spreading it's numbers across multiple crew members makes cult really, really fucking difficult to deal with without going all the fuck out and pulling some serious bullshit yourself. And for the most part, you need more than just the security force to combat cult. The only way to beat cult is to not let them do anything, which means calling the shuttle as soon as you recognize the threat is present. There are no alternatives, and no other way to fight back against the cult proves reliable given someone had the bright idea to make deconversion require one specific role to be alive and on the station, and takes something like 2 minutes a person, in which time there is the possibility they could be rescued, or the loss of that cultist entirely made redundant by the capture and conversion of more people because security quite literally has to babysit anyone they capture for that entire duration. Being fair on cultists is a joke. There is every reason to kill every single cultist in the game because the entire method of trying to deconvert or rescue cultist is a rigged system to help cult win more.

Wizard: I'll be honest, if we could just put in some more wacky, silly spells that don't involve making spessmen horizontal, then wizard might actually be pretty good. And wizard has a really heavy amount of opportunity to be silly and fun. But there isn't QUITE enough tools for wizard to do anything but mass murder. I think it's okay to keep in so long as it's rare but I strongly feel like wizard needs some QoL touchups because otherwise it'll be validhunt mode every round they pop up, incentivizing once again behaviours we're trying to cut down on for Manuel. If a wizard is already doing something that isn't hyperdestructive and threatening the lives of everyone on the station, then there probably isn't going to be much issue since anyone who lolrandom lexorin syringes the wizard doing something unique and nondisruptive to them is hopefully btfo by administrators for not staying in their lane and leaving it to security to handle.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by XDTM » #537140

Kryson wrote:Assistants needs to be given leeway to commit crimes since this is integral to how the game works by providing sec with something to do on extended and providing some cover to antagonists on non-extended. The requirement that you should act like you want to keep your job should be relaxed or done away with for assistants for this reason.

If you are playing medical and have two patients in two hours, or playing sec and have no arrests in the same time frame you are going to have a bad experience. You need a good mix of job gameplay and free form RP gameplay.
An explicit exception of this caliber would definitely push assistant players back into low-rp territory and we'd be back where we started. Hell, it would be nice if assistants actually assisting was the norm instead.
Sec and Medbay needing conflict to work is a bit of an issue, but not solved by trusting the most toe-lining players with the job. Instead it could be helped by either giving some down-time activities to these roles, or alternatively adding minor semi-antags (like vandals in more rp-heavy servers) with the actual license to cause grief, which has a higher chance of working in a server where that doesn't automatically mean license to murderbone.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Kryson » #537141

Screemonster wrote:
Kryson wrote:providing sec with something to do
the problem is that most players that trot out this line don't put any consideration into whether sec players want or need "something to do" right now, and certainly not whether the "something" they want is what the tiding shithead in question feels like providing
They should have signed up for assistant if they would rather do chair RP for two hours instead of fighting crime. Of course negative forms of tiding exists, but crime in some form is essential for the game to work.

I must admit i have only played 3 extended rounds on Manuel, but they have all been really awful, worse than a bad extended round on LRP.
Last edited by Kryson on Fri Jan 24, 2020 11:46 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by XDTM » #537143

Kryson wrote:
Screemonster wrote:
Kryson wrote:providing sec with something to do
the problem is that most players that trot out this line don't put any consideration into whether sec players want or need "something to do" right now, and certainly not whether the "something" they want is what the tiding shithead in question feels like providing
They should have signed up for assistant if they would rather do chair RP for two hours instead of fighting crime. Of course negative forms of tiding exists, but crime in some form is essential for the game to work.

I must admit i have only played 3 extended rounds on Manuel, but they have all been really awful, worse than a bad extended round on LRP.
I don't know if these rounds were worse than normal, but consider that you might simply not enjoy the MRP playstyle.

From my point of view a big plus of MRP is not having to deal with people wordlessly greytiding for their own amusement.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Kryson » #537144

XDTM wrote:An explicit exception of this caliber would definitely push assistant players back into low-rp territory and we'd be back where we started.
No, as long the crimes are RP flavoured in some way it will be fine, rather than just rushing the spare and tabling sec. Having common criminals is important for another reason, so people are not able to metagame and know that someone doing something shifty = antag. This matters a lot even if people have to pretend they don't know.
XDTM wrote:Hell, it would be nice if assistants actually assisting was the norm instead.
Doing shitty menial tasks for other people is not most peoples idea of fun.
XDTM wrote:I don't know if these rounds were worse than normal, but consider that you might simply not enjoy the MRP playstyle.
Maybe, you would prefer play to second life? Or maybe we should stop trying to tell other people what they enjoy.
XDTM wrote:From my point of view a big plus of MRP is not having to deal with people wordlessly greytiding for their own amusement.
Good, because i have never suggested allowing that.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by annoyinggreencatgirl » #537169

Kryson wrote:
XDTM wrote:Hell, it would be nice if assistants actually assisting was the norm instead.
Doing shitty menial tasks for other people is not most peoples idea of fun.
Right... So playing a low ranking member of the station who is there to help people isn't fun if you're RPing the thing they're actually supposed to be doing.
And neither is playing sec, unless you have to constantly arrest tiders.
Hot takes.

Going to repeat what XDTM said; are you sure MRP is for you? Sure doesn't sound like it.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Screemonster » #537183

Kryson wrote: Maybe, you would prefer play to second life? Or maybe we should stop trying to tell other people what they enjoy.
lmao

If you join a game that other people like and you don't like, don't tell them to play a different game when they don't like the idea of changing it in a way that would make them not like it
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Taylork2 » #537184

Wizard gamemode CAN work with it, you could have a wizard with polymorph staff, heal staff, and soulstones, create a literal army and RP from there with his army of xenos, ashdrakes, and changlings.

But generally speaking wizard fucking ruins rounds. I'd say wizard events needs to be changed to be less intense and round ending, and not do gay things like changing your identity. Wizard needs a partial revamp on their spells and maybe on some of their equipment, as well as new spells that work better for RP.

Wizard being able to buy a group of assistants that are magicless might work well for making the wizard more of a mastermind that operates from his ship and sends out representatives to interact with the station and people.

The wizard can teleport people to the centcomm z-level, but I've literally never seen a wizard bring people back to his ship.
Wizard gamemode has a ton of opportunity for RP, but I've never seen it used. Hell a wizard and a destruction apprentice could kidnap people like crazy and do hit and run attacks and even RP crew abductions.
But alas, it's never been done due to how unoften wizard modes appears and how literally only 1 person gets to be THE wizard when it happens. If admins do a Raging Mages round it mainly comes down to the three wizards groupthinking they need to kill everyone or having no real choice since after they leave the ship another wizard will be spawned who'll just kill them since the admins(at least in the past) said wizards can do anything, such as slaughter the other wizards with impunity.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Farquaar » #537192

Vekter wrote:Rev is fantastic on MRP - it's so much less HOLE UP IN SEC bullshit. Actually gets kinda fun for once.
Wholeheartedly agree
Kryson wrote:Assistants needs to be given leeway to commit crimes since this is integral to how the game works by providing sec with something to do on extended and providing some cover to antagonists on non-extended. The requirement that you should act like you want to keep your job should be relaxed or done away with for assistants for this reason.

If you are playing medical and have two patients in two hours, or playing sec and have no arrests in the same time frame you are going to have a bad experience. You need a good mix of job gameplay and free form RP gameplay.
If I wanted to deal with tiding assistants, I'd go back to the LRP server.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by peoplearestrange » #537521

Kryson wrote:Assistants needs to be given leeway to commit crimes since this is integral to how the game works by providing sec with something to do on extended and providing some cover to antagonists on non-extended. The requirement that you should act like you want to keep your job should be relaxed or done away with for assistants for this reason.

If you are playing medical and have two patients in two hours, or playing sec and have no arrests in the same time frame you are going to have a bad experience. You need a good mix of job gameplay and free form RP gameplay.
This is a tired old excuse often touted by people who greytide regularly.

It usually goes like this:
>Assitant breaks into area to steal shit
>sec gets called/someone reports them/security catch them doing it
>10-20 mins of meaningless hide and seek
>sec hauls them off to bring, hos either lets them go and they do it again only to:
>or they get put in perma/gulag and the disconnect from the game.

Im not saying this is what ALWAYS happens, just 90% of the time its wasted boring samey content with no interesting roleplay potential.

The interesting stuff happens when say a chemist causes an explosion, gets arrested, put on trial for murder/malpractice. Not shit done by some greyshirt because they want attention
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Sheodir » #537525

As a resident Sec main in Manuel don't get rid of petty crimes and "tiding", but do get rid of doing it wordlessly like a shitter. If Tom Shmuck the Assistant wanted to steal things for the big money because he's tired of minimum wage that's fine and good, my issue is dealing with the SILENT greytide.
I play Holden Westmacott. Sec/PM main most of the time.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Anonmare » #537564

I like drug trafficking
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Sheodir » #537582

Anonmare wrote:I like drug trafficking
I actually just saw the new Mafia PR and was thinking if we could have MRP only gamemodes made for it. Namely a "mafia" or "drug trafficking" gamemode where the antag mafiosos spawn on a mafia shuttle or some sort and have to sneak an ally out of the station which has cocaine up their ass or special black market internal organs or some shit. Station wins by killing or aprehending all mafia whilst keeping the carrier alive, organs/cargo can be indestructible so a new carrier can have the stuff put on them to win the shift.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by bandit » #537648

gang might actually not be shit on mrp
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by Dr_bee » #537716

bandit wrote:gang might actually not be shit on mrp
Wasnt it completely removed from the code however? Also do not bring back the abomination that was Robustingangs. We already have to deal with the shit that is Robustincult, I dont want to deal with another unbalanced as fuck conversion mode.
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Re: Manuel: What game modes actually fit the server rules?

Post by NecromancerAnne » #537720

bandit wrote:gang might actually not be shit on mrp
If it's the one with turrets and uzis in every gangster hands then no it really fucking isn't.

If it's goon gangs then absolutely.
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