Increase hours requirements for head roles.

[Cimika]

About this policy

Increase the hour requirements for the following roles : Captain, Head of Personnel, Head of Security, Chief Medical Officer, Research Director, Chief Engineer and AI.

Why this would be good for the game

Head roles are difficult. They offer a lot more possibilities, access, gear and authority than normal roles, but they come with a huge burden : responsabilities. It should be expected that head roles are competent in their departments, and overall knowledgeable about the various basic game mechanics. Too often, I see heads that don't fit these criterias, and that just pick the role for the added gear/access without trying to do their job as command, or failing at it and be a detriment to the department.

When I was a new player, I had unlocked some head roles BEFORE I was even proficient with the game's controls and basic mechanics, and I don't think that should be the case. We should enforce a longer learning period for new players before they can be command. This also serves as a period during which you can familiarize yourself with the rules, which would lead to a decrease in command grief/fuck-ups. A recent incident comes to mind, where a player with very low hours tried to play Captain as soon as they unlocked it, and started soft griefing by selling sec lockers and the armoury because they are not familiar with or even used to what a Head should act like.

As for AI, 20 hours is way too little to become used to silicon policy. I've seen a lot of new AI players fuck that up recently, and I think they would benefit from a longer learning period.

The actual changes

Current values :

You need fifteen hours in the corresponding department to play a job. That means you can be CE with fifteen hours in engineering. Captain only needs fifteen hours as any command role. AI needs fifteen hours as Silicon.

On a side note, you only need five hours as crew to unlock all sec jobs (Warden, Detective, SecOfficer). You need two hours as crew to unlock Cyborg. You need one hours as crew to unlock all research jobs.

I think it should be increased to at least fourty or fifty hours for command roles.

Thank you for your time reading this, I look forward to seeing everyone's opinion on this.

[Sylphet]

God yes. At least 100 hours. Bad heads are worse than no heads at all.

[Nist]

Not a fan. Bad heads add to the round activity by creating active conflicts of interest. Having incompetent heads is fun and gives players something more to do than their job.

Some departments have more relevant and important heads that should theoretically know the role's basics (HoS-CE-AI) but anything beyond that is just purely based on situations. A head IMO should be an overseer that knows the basics of each job without delving too deep, since their job is primarily wrangling their departments.

Adding bigger time limits won't solve the issue of "half the department sitting idly by as the head fixes all mistakes and does 3 jobs at once", which isn't engaging for anyone but the head, or the sec issue of "No HoS, unga activate" that sec suffers from. It will just encourage players who want to play the role to sit longer times as X or Y roles to play an aspired role (Personally seen this with AI and having newer borgs just go "Yeah i just want to be an AI someday"). People won't learn from osmosis, the system needs to be engaging and the unlock a reward, bigger time is just padding to fill an arbitrary number until they get easier access to gamer gear

[Cimika]

The problem is that right now, it's so low that it's not even being incompetent that causes issues. It's that we genuinely have to step in and bwoink heads because they realllllyy are not acting like heads or they are abusing their power. I believe needing more hours would help fix that problem.

[Yellow Wollywog]

Gonna play both sides here, since I'm rather split here.
On one hand, direct timers are NOT a measure of skill or competence. There's a lot that can happen to affect a player's competence as a head that differs from their play time, ranging from time spent on other servers, to applicability of said content, and the player's toxicity.
Bare in mind unlike say, Goon, there's a *ton* of downstreams of /tg/station, so a player who has only 10 hours in scientist on main /tg/station may be more competent than someone who has say, 70, as the earlier may have predominantly learned their content on said downstreams. Since there's no way to bring time data from downsteam A or B to the main stream, this makes timers a bit more innacurate about the player's skill/competence.
Speaking of, content ironically tends to be less of a concern for heads then their subordinates. Usually most of RnD is done by the subordinates to the head, and RD is more or less the person captain/HoP bitches at when its 40 minutes into the shift and advanced mining/miniaturized bluespace hasn't been researched and someone is whining. CMO is very similar, really just there to sit in his/her/their pretty hardsuit and yell at the MDs for being "incompetent" for using an unusual method, and yell at the assistants with ghetto AA- I mean paramedics to actually do their job/grab someone they're already after. Oh and protect the hypospray. CE and HoS are the only ones that require major skill in their profession to be anything less than a negative impact, and ironically those two tend to be the hardest heads. HoP is fine with just its current time spent, as it can be seen as a "newbie head" role, as it requires going out of your way to negatively impact the round. Outside of revolution, this lack of knowledge of content uncommonly impacts the game in a radical way unless its a round critical/skill critical job like captain/hos, at which point it might as well be up to the round.
Ultimately, however, the main factor for heads is toxicity. This, which cannot be measured with big number, is what I've seen separates my "wow the captain is a comdom" rounds from my "alright, captain isn't a 4head" rounds. Closest thing that increasing the time for playing this head could change it is if the player is toxic enough as a non-head to get banned or given the infamous bwoink.

On the other, however, I kinda agree that there needs to be a little more gating heads from the rest of their respective jobs. Slyphet's 100 Hr requirement concept is IMO an extreme amount, as that effectively requires ~75-100 rounds played on main /tg/station to play a single head, and if it is on a per-job basis, you'd effectively need 400-600 rounds in-game to unlock all roles. Instead, I propose going with the pre-existing 15 Hr per job, and a 30 hr global to play any head, effectively making a maximum of 45 hrs (assuming you only play a selected job for 15 hours), and a minimum of 30 hrs to play a headrole. As for captain, bump the global up to 50, and have the 15 hr be in command.
Generally this amount is better as it still requires players to kinda know what's going on in their jobs to play, and knowing the game's mechanics enough that it won't make you ruin others' experiences.
As mentioned in multiple other arguements, prominently by cimika, the player can access a head-role without getting fully comfortable with game mechanics (despite playing 15 hrs), so the 30 hour global will require the player to play enough of the game to know how the game works in the first place, and presumably figure out some/most/all of the jobs roles in the game's entire dynamic.

[Cimika]

As a quick reply to your first argument about downstreams, players from downstream should use this increased time to familiarise themselves with our rules and policies, which may differ from their downstreams.

[mstachife]

Other than being able to laugh at newbies fucking things up, does anyone really think the hours are fine where they're at for someone to somewhat competently play a head? Honestly I feel the requirement should be spread out in the department, for example to unlock hos you'd need 10h sec, 10h warden, and 10h detective.

[Dopamiin]

Other than being able to laugh at newbies fucking things up, does anyone really think the hours are fine were they're at for someone to somewhat competently play a head? Honestly I feel the requirement should be spread out in the department, for example to unlock hos you'd need 10h sec, 10h warden, and 10h detective.

mandatory clown hours to play head of personnel when

[Misdoubtful]

The problem is that right now, it's so low that it's not even being incompetent that causes issues. It's that we genuinely have to step in and bwoink heads because they realllllyy are not acting like heads or they are abusing their power. I believe needing more hours would help fix that problem.

A recent incident comes to mind, where a player with very low hours tried to play Captain as soon as they unlocked it, and started soft griefing by selling sec lockers and the armoury because they are not familiar with or even used to what a Head should act like.

Are these problems caused by someone not having experience in the department or by the behavioral choices they choose to make?

You quite often can see 1000+ hour players 'not acting like heads or abusing their power'. So what does this mean? What standards are heads supposed to be held to? What does it mean to 'not act like a head'?

I'm in the boat that not being required to have knowledge or competency makes things fun.

People can have hundreds of hours in a department or as a head role and still not be competent and know everything, yeah? Even people with thousands of hours in the game. Or with silicon hours you will see 500+ hour players playing AI run into problems with laws and silicon policy. All of those people can also make the choice to grief with the roles.

'Bad heads are worse than no heads' feels like something a skipping stones toss away from enforcement of people having to play a specific way on a narrow spectrum. Manuel doesn't go nearly that far, but it does aim for people playing command roles to put some effort into doing their jobs.

Also dumping a previous hour requirement thread here and its end ruling:

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=22282

Alright, we have now set the required playtime for heads of staff to be 15 hours. Reminder that this is a per-department restriction.
This is mostly to prevent new players from catastrophically messing stuff up as we've seen time and time again with the Ssethtide.
if you're an experienced player and have somehow found yourself caught in this restriction, please ahelp and an admin can make you exempt from this requirement.
Thanks for your input, everyone!

[Jolly66]

Increasing the hours required to play head roles is a very good idea, however, I think it should be applied to 4/5 of the head roles (excluding Captain).
Point I'm trying to make is, the four heads, CMO, RD, HoS and CE, their jobs play up to their roles. HoP? What in service and/or cargo plays up to what HoP will do? Sure, cargo has paperwork that could in someway prepare future HoP players, but it just feels so different from what you played to what you're expected to play. I think HoP should be like Captain, requiring other head/command hours to be allowed to play, considering the heads get access to their own department ID access configuration, which would be an easy way to slowly ease future HoP players into stick of things - of course, ignoring the trims and everything. There's a paper left on the HoP console so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

As for the others, CMO and RD have a decent amount of content before them. I've seen RD just not be able to do Xenobio or even make a Toxins bomb, yet here they are, taking up the RD slot. Same with CMOs, who can't even do virology, chemistry or even simple surgeries (yikes!). CE on the other hand I view as more mechanical. Setting up the engine for the 500th is a no brainer, but then you got atmos, the turbine and HFR are incredibly cool machines, until someone lets the gas out of course. Then there's HoS. HoS still feels like hes in a weird spot like HoP, but has the benefit of the doubt that the roles leading up to them make sense.

All in all, is it funny seeing a bare minimal hour requirement player struggle to figure out everything? Yes. Does it hurt to also watch? Yes. I should also note I watched a bare minimal captain once just, put the disky in a wall safe with a lone op running about. Also, maybe for certain departments (RD/CMO), the required playtime in that department to become the head could be higher than say CE or HoS due to what's lying in the department. Mastery over everything is what should be expected if you're playing a head, since its technically your responsibility to show the ropes to newbies, especially if the department isn't sufficiently staffed.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

1000h for heads and 500h for sec

[saprasam]

absolute fool thinking that this will change anything about the free access and gear then doing nothing

[Cobby]

Being proficient and using it for the extra loot is 2 different things.

On the proficiency point, heads should have a basic understanding of the job. I don’t believe you should be PROFICIENT at the job necessarily, because heads shouldn’t necessarily have to engage to that degree. IE I don’t care if you don’t know how to make a very nasty gas spill container as CE, but I do expect you to be able to clean it up. 15 hours sounds completely fair here. If something happens because you aren’t proficient oh well it happens. That’s part of the game. I can’t remember off the top of my head but the ideal scenario here imo would be 10 hours in each mechanic-based job of the dept that the head might have to step in on (IE MD, Chem, and Viro for CMO but not psych or para).

On the gear+, it’s not relevant to the discussion imo. It’s completely independent on the pre-req hours so it should probably be a different thread with a different approach to the problem because upping the hours isn’t fixing anything. Seems like you need rules surrounding that instead.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Heads should have experience, which is why we require fifteen hours of relevant department playtime before they unlock.

And yet we see the same kind of dumbass bad-head issues as when there was no playtime requirement at all and it was just controlled by how many days since your first connection.

Ultimately I don't think you can time-gate out the idiots who want to play heads abusively and domineeringly.

[cybersaber101]

I'm definitely up for increasing the minimum hours for Ai and Captain as I feel like out of all the roles they have huge potential to direct a shift.

[Fikou]

As a person that plays mostly one job, increasing head amounts to 100h or even something like 50h seems insanely stupid. I've played for almost three years with around 600 hours as assistant, and the fact that someone would need to spend 1/6 of that playing just one department to unlock a job seems asinine. Almost all of our jobs have really basic gameplay you'll learn in around 5 rounds, HoS is no different from a security officer that has more responsiblity, HoP is a job that mostly fills out paperwork and is almost entirely disattached from supply and service, all medbay mechanics for CMO can be learned in a few hours as each job (even less for like virology), science is a weird conglomerate where RD doesn't serve much of a purpose other than screaming at nerds. This leaves the Captain, who exists as a person that commands the station and isn't really supposed to take everything in his own hands, and Chief Engineer, which is probably the head role whose experience with the game matters the most, since he handles the Supermatter, needs to know how to keep it maintained and needs to be able to fix the Distro.

Other than changing silicon needed playtime (since there's just 2 jobs) I don't think anything good can be done without code changes like heads having an unlock system where you need a customly set amount of hours as each job in the department to unlock the head (so we can split something like cmo to need a bunch of doctor and chemist hours while not needing to put them through a lot of virologist/paramedic which are really basic in mechanics)

[BeeSting12]

i think yall forget that not everyone plays the game for thousands of hours. 40-50 hours per head is insane. bad and incompetent heads are part of what makes the game fun and interesting, and i feel like values bigger than what we already have are offputting to newer players.

[Sylphet]

To be clear I know that 100h is high - this is what I want to see because I'm an elitist asshole, and it shouldn't be the number that we're basing this entire conversation on. The actual number will definitely be lower.

[Omega_DarkPotato]

at least on the AI issue, I've heard that being borged post-roundstart and then playing does not increase your silicon time - it took me quite a while trying to get the ONE borg slot each round to get AI.
if you want 40 hours to be AI, this issue should be fixed first.

As for "incompetent heads", I honestly don't think an issue'll be magically solved for 20 more hours after someone spent 20 already learning the job - like everyone else here's said, it doesn't take that long to learn a job. (Save for maybe atmospherics and a few medical tips and tricks)
Certain players being jackasses as heads of staff will not be solved through experience. An asshole head will continue to be an asshole until someone tells them to stop acting that way. Job experience doesn't help when you take a job solely to get fat gamer gear.

[Agux909]

A player that just unlocked a head may play the role better than someone having 200 hs on it.

Some players might start playing the role when first unlocked carefully, trying to not fuck up but being incompetent at it because of lack of experience. Being incompetent in this game as many pointed out already, is part of it.

So, the issue here isn't then the lack of experience but how one wants and will play the role. Unfortunately there's always gonna be bad apples to draw negative examples from no matter what. You will eventually get to the hours needed and then you decide if you wanna be shitty or not. And then what?

Increasing hours is literally the stupidest way to counteract something that is more on the side of rule-enforcing based than anything.

The only job I agree with the increasing of hours required is AI, because it's a role intertwined with the laws and all the clusterfuck of interactions you need to learn from them, plus it's a near-omniscient throne of power from which a lot of what you do can directly impact the round negatively very fast, be it malice or just incompetence.

Since borg playstyle immediately helps you understand the ropes of the laws, and since fucking up with them can be relatively easy to deal with ICly or by a bwoink, it's indeed the best example for when this hour increase can be applied and actually be of any use.

But for the head roles, experience with lesser roles is pointless. You get the experience when you take the step and are pressured and pushed to be better. If you are shitty you get bwoinked. Someone with 20 mins of being head explaining "im still getting used to this, sorry" can get a helping hand from the admin. Someone with 200 hours being shitty gets a slap, a note, or a ban.

[Farquaar]

Please no.
It's all too common to see head roles go unfulfilled as it is. I'd much rather have a HoP that has trouble understanding why a janitor needs medical access than no HoP at all. If somebody is abusing their power as head to the point where it become a rule violation, ahelp it- because that's a bad behaviour issue, not an inexperience issue.

Not to mention a 50 hour requirement is completely insane. Imagine thinking that that you need to have played SS13 for 6-8 days, dawn to dusk, in order to even be allowed to play a doctor with a fancy cape in a video game.

[XivilaiAnaxes]

Cringe hell no

[SkeletalElite]

Hour requirements could use tuning minor increases IMO. Security should be a little higher across the board, HOS especially.

Rather than captain requiring general command playtime it should have the combined requirements of all other heads. Once you've unlocked every head, you can play captain.

[Jaredfogle]

if your concern is competency, might be more interesting to just have some very simple achievements (defibrilate a player, turn on the lasers that power the sm, etc) alongside the existing hour requirements

[cacogen]

I don't think head of staff roles should be taken too seriously or come with the pressure of a whole lot of expectations from other players. Sometimes the game forces them on you unexpectedly. Sometimes you pick it because it's lowpop and nobody else will want to do it. It's a game. It's meant to be fun. Incompetent heads can be hilarious, or at least lead to interesting stories.

[wesoda25]

I agree with beesting. 15 hours is a lot and this is just a game, anything more is silly. The best way to learn is by doing it.

Also agree with skeletal, upping the amount of crew time required for security wouldn’t be bad, since they have so much power over other players and new players are frequently seen abusing it.

[Armhulen]

Yes for security, meh for the other stuff. Players aren't going to be as interested in playing our server if many roles require serious time investments to play.

[Farquaar]

If upping the timegate requirements for security means that security will be even more understaffed, I'd rather stick with the current requirements.

[Agux909]

Also agree with skeletal, upping the amount of crew time required for security wouldn’t be bad, since they have so much power over other players and new players are frequently seen abusing it.

Yes for security, meh for the other stuff. Players aren't going to be as interested in playing our server if many roles require serious time investments to play.

Shitcurity is the exact same. It doesn't depend on experience, but intent and behavior when playing the role. Being incompetent and fucking up as sec isn't the same than going into a powertrip and being a piece of shit.

[Qustinnus]

more hours doesn't equal better players. I thought admins would know that?

[iamgoofball]

God yes. At least 100 hours. Bad heads are worse than no heads at all.

Jesus christ dude, head roles aren't some kind of fucking superpower. It's just extra access and maybe an extra tool.

Are you for real right now?

[Domitius]

Would it be possible to diversify the hours between the other jobs within the department to unlock a head role? As some attempt to make sure the head player is at least aware of the various roles in their department(Omitting roles that require little/no game knowledge where applicable).

For example using the current 15 hour requirement for a CMO split into 8-10 hours as a medical doctor(Arguably the most important job within medbay currently) and the remaining hours split into the chemist, virologist, and paramedic jobs.

I do agree that the hours should be raised. The above example I hope, if possible, would potentially increase a players awareness of the entire department under their care.

[Domitius]

if your concern is competency, might be more interesting to just have some very simple achievements (defibrilate a player, turn on the lasers that power the sm, etc) alongside the existing hour requirements

This would be cool as.

[Cimika]

I feel like I miscommunicated my biggest concern, which is that fifteen hours seems a tad low to get properly accoustumed with our rules and overall what we expect from heads. I've seen a bunch of problematic command behaviour that could have been avoided by just being a bit more familiarized with /tg/.

[Jaredfogle]

Have you checked how many hours the people you consider problematic heads have in order to make a solid assessment?

[MrStonedOne]

at least on the AI issue, I've heard that being borged post-roundstart and then playing does not increase your silicon time

This appears to be true, the system uses your roundstart assigned role, so not only do you not get borg credits, you still accrue exp at your roundstart role while borgged.

This is something that could be easily fixed, and with the new id system, we could likely make it support hop job changes such that you get exp based on your new job. (as long as they use the predefined templates).

How this would look is the code would instead ask the players mob to respond with the role, the current role detection code would move to living/, human mobs would override that and instead look at the id, and fall back on the living checks if it can't find one or it finds multiple, and ai/borg would just override directly, so we can support even mid-round built ais counting for silicon playtime for round start ai.

This could even open up not allowing roundstart cyborg until you get a few hours as a mid round one.

Somebody make a hackmd on this, i have too much on my plate at the moment to code this.

[Flatulent]

i will now afk in a locker on 4 servers simultaneously to grind 100h of playtime

[MrStonedOne]

afk isn't counted, how smooth brained do you think we are? (don't answer that)

[Flatulent]

because I can’t move every 3 minutes to avoid an afk proc, fucking retard

It’s very easy to game playtime hour count, and sitting in a chair for 6000 minutes as a xenobiologist doesn’t make you a better RD.

[oranges]

We should not care about people who are going to script their pc to play on 4 servers at once, it's a literal pointless thought exercise.

All that matters is the impact on the majority, and the argument here has no real relevance to that.

[MrStonedOne]

This post was deleted by MrStonedOne on Mon Apr 05, 2021 7:00 pm.
Reason: spam/offtopic

[BeeSting12]

This could even open up not allowing roundstart cyborg until you get a few hours as a mid round one.

This is the only hours increase I could see myself supporting. An inept roundstart cyborg screws a rogue AI.

[Qbmax32]

no one will want to play on tg when major roles are locked behind 40 or 50 hour playtime locks. incompetency is part of the game and sometimes hilarious. i think the idea of diversifying playtime requirements (IE: splitting the 15 hour sec requirement for HoS into 5 as sec officer, 5 as warden, 5 as detective) is much better

God yes. At least 100 hours. Bad heads are worse than no heads at all.

pure insanity to think we should expect people joining tg, a low-midrp fast paced ss13 server to play 100 hours in a department to unlock heads. at what point do we just move to whitelists like some shitty gmod roleplay server?

if your concern is competency, might be more interesting to just have some very simple achievements (defibrilate a player, turn on the lasers that power the sm, etc) alongside the existing hour requirements

This would be cool as.

this is also pretty cool

[Agux909]

I can see the potential for playtime divide between departmental jobs plus simple achievements that force you to at least having done some of the mandatory stuff you'd expect a head to know how to do (as long as the achievement list is easy to find and each completed item notifies you in a loud, unique way when you complete it). If this is the consensus we want to reach on this policy I agree with it.

The problem is that one of these is more code dependant. And you know what happens when you want something coded...

[Not-Dorsidarf]

If someone isn't competent enough to be a head after *fifteen hours* of living, active playtime in a department I don't think they will be after another 35-85 hours.

[Indie-ana Jones]

If someone isn't competent enough to be a head after *fifteen hours* of living, active playtime in a department I don't think they will be after another 35-85 hours.

Pretty much this. Increasing the requirement for head roles just serves as needless tedium, you could be the world's best scientist but suck as RD if you can't lead properly.

[Nist]

Punish headroles more severely instead of adding afk clock time.

[oranges]

Frankly I don't even think this is a problem, I think the problem is that it's so horrible to actually play headroles that instead of all of our long time 600+ hour players competing for the roles, they're all in assistant slots while the 10 hour players are the only people actually naive enough to enable the headroles.

There's a lot more the admin team could do to make the experience of playing as a head actually improved, all this does is filter the already small list of people who want to play head roles down even further.

[Misdoubtful]

Frankly I don't even think this is a problem, I think the problem is that it's so horrible to actually play headroles that instead of all of our long time 600+ hour players competing for the roles, they're all in assistant slots while the 10 hour players are the only people actually naive enough to enable the headroles.

There's a lot more the admin team could do to make the experience of playing as a head actually improved, all this does is filter the already small list of people who want to play head roles down even further.

Yeah I'd rather see something that would encourage people to WANT to play head roles and WANT to put effort into playing them.

[Jaredfogle]

Frankly I don't even think this is a problem, I think the problem is that it's so horrible to actually play headroles that instead of all of our long time 600+ hour players competing for the roles, they're all in assistant slots while the 10 hour players are the only people actually naive enough to enable the headroles.

alas, like a large amount of other problems, it really comes down to no job content in the end