FantasticFwoosh wrote:Admins egging on traitors to do things, then abusing their powers to support them doing it for second chances. They shouldn't be on the natural side of antags, and should be interested in preserving the station rather than pushing it closer to destruction. When nothing antagonistic is happening, admins like yourself go AFK and just screw off to IRC and let RNG events & IRC button presses do the work meaning you're less involved with watching the round closely for little issues.
- There must be something wrong with progression in that its not interesting enough to keep your attention or all admins are secretly attention deficient and impulsive.
Like that prior complaint about Kor Jacough mentioned, i know of many instances where Kor has bascially said "Sure go do that, i'll pretty much support your quest for revenge/ or to do X" just because it might be interesting.
You have to realize that admins are not players. The admin plays a game master role rather than a player participant role. The mere fact that admins can send messages with Central Command's name on them (which we can change as a whim) does not mean we have some stake in keeping the round stable or operating to some sort of equilibrium against the antags. Its the players, security specifically, who are tasked with handling crime and antag behavior. The mere fact that we can create more antagonists merely means that we can push the storyline, for lack of a better word, forward in a round that has stagnated or, as you say, make something interesting happen.
I can't think of a time in recent memory where an antag was given a second shot at something. More often than not players will attempt to "TC trade" for a saving throw or a revive or somesuch. The rule for that is generally "You're too dead to trade TC."
"or all admins are secretly attention deficient and impulsive"
Want to tell me the general player reaction to seeing the Extended notice outside of lowpop? Its not "oh good, I get to build my projects and do interesting RP things without having to eat an ebow to the ass." Generally the response from the current player culture is "suicide hopline." As has been explained already, our server culture has gotten to such a pitch and tenor that there is no spark to do things that aren't bash the antags or griff when there are no antags. That's why we get so many "valids secured, call the shuttle" or "I didn't roll antag but we know the roundtype now, call the shuttle" style round endings. That's not even a lack of tools. We have all sorts of tools specifically crafted to make and create things. We have increasingly easy tools to use to make interesting projects on station and things the players can do to interact that don't involve making some other dude's sprite explode or turn 90 degrees sideways. The problem is, players are just not interested in that right now.
If we want to complain about antags, lets get to brass tacks. Antag status has been, for as long as I can remember, a coveted "reward" from RNGesus that players would and still do enter rounds just to see if they get it. If they get it, they participate in the round because 1) they get OOC protection for being a dick to other players as per the rules and can generally just do as they please 2) we've coded a huge laundry list of toys that only antags get to play with and those toys are almost without exception stronger than anything you'll find or make on the station. When the player doesn't get antag status they'll afk in the dorms or whatever until the round antag reveals itself and then either charge off to hunt valids or just wait for the next round.
A lot of this comes from ease of design. Its much easier to design a new traitor item or weapon than it is to design a new or interesting system for construction/engineering/science/medical. We've attempted or considered changes for these departments to make them more interesting or at least give them some more interesting interactions and the response is often that the changes would interfere with the "high speed action" that the server culture craves. We've shaved more and more of the roleplay out of a roleplaying game (on a server named after /tg/ of all things) and slowly converted it into a griefy combat simulator that just happens to take place on something calling itself a space station. That's not something you can just code out. You can't suddenly convert the server back to where it was 3ish years ago where we prided ourselves on being the middle ground between Bay and any of the infinite hub RDM servers without a shift in server culture and that isn't going to fix itself when we go through wave after wave of hub players joining, finding 80%+ of the server just fucking off and tiding around or validhunting and joining in on what's apparently expected. Grief gets noticed because it is loud and visible. Players roleplaying amongst themselves or doing their department jobs without grief doesn't get noticed and its harder for new players to see. They can definitely see Static Name #3435 running around, yelling and smashing windows to get whatever it is they want without response. They can see sec getting swarmed by non-antag greys for trying to make a reasonable arrest and thing "yeah, that's what I'm supposed to do because they're doing it."
tl:dr - You aren't going to fix tiding without a culture shift away from grief for grief's sake.
You aren't going to motivate new players to play the game without turning into battle griffons themselves without some enticement.
You aren't going to make some players stop being griffons without motivation to stop because they thrive on the attention they get for doing it.
