/tg/Station 13

i made a thread on this and oranges locked it and then when i asked him to unlock it he refused so im taking this to the player's club i guess. i like talking about game design stuff and all that.

original thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33791

it feels like these days a lot of rounds drag on for too long and don't usually end with death and destruction and moreso a boring Crew Transfer Vote. what do you guys think? are rounds too long? what round lengths would you guys like to see? personally i think like an hour is the most a normal round should be and 45 minutes is like the sweet spot in my mind.

Maybe it should have been policy discussion so you could ask to turn down latejoin traitors to zero, and pump up the bigger threats

Armhulen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:15 pm Maybe it should have been policy discussion so you could ask to turn down latejoin traitors to zero, and pump up the bigger threats

... is dynamic stuff really policy? what the hell? what kind of barn are we running here?

Rounds are too short still IMO

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm

Armhulen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:15 pm Maybe it should have been policy discussion so you could ask to turn down latejoin traitors to zero, and pump up the bigger threats

... is dynamic stuff really policy? what the hell? what kind of barn are we running here?

Headmins have power over dynamic weights, yeah

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm Rounds are too short still IMO

why?

I like current round lenghts but I do see the merits of increasing the lenght since heretic needs more time to be successful

Armhulen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:15 pm Maybe it should have been policy discussion so you could ask to turn down latejoin traitors to zero, and pump up the bigger threats

This sounds really fun to try actually.

Well the progression based antagonists work at their absolute best when they start roundstart, and we have some antagonists like Ling that are still missing a latejoin spawn! Let's crank up dynamic, yo

lol ducks i torpedoed your thread by posting a bunch of seething
I am adding this to my forums kill count

also rounds aren't too short persay but they dont reach a satisfactory point of challenge to survive unless you go out of your way to fight antegs

Armhulen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:19 pm

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm

Armhulen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:15 pm Maybe it should have been policy discussion so you could ask to turn down latejoin traitors to zero, and pump up the bigger threats

... is dynamic stuff really policy? what the hell? what kind of barn are we running here?

Headmins have power over dynamic weights, yeah

What the fuck? That seems kickass. I'm tired of late join heretics/traitors. More nukies, please god.

Capsandi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:02 pm lol ducks i torpedoed your thread by posting a bunch of seething
I am adding this to my forums kill count

also rounds aren't too short persay but they dont reach a satisfactory point of challenge to survive unless you go out of your way to fight antegs

adding you to my forum kill count

oranges it's as shrimple as this: a round that ends with a bored call almost guarantees the crews being blue balled on a satisfying ending. boredcalls should exist in some capacity im sure and im sure we can't bring the number to zero even if we tried but if there's too many rounds that are ending like that it just sucks

Dumb question, does threat not increase over the span of the round? Maybe I'm taking a shit angle, but it seems like for x amount of time a player isn't killed by another player the threat should increase until something else is spawned.

And if that is happening, maybe it's not happening fast enough.

Chadley wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:21 pm Dumb question, does threat not increase over the span of the round? Maybe I'm taking a shit angle, but it seems like for x amount of time a player isn't killed by another player the threat should increase until something else is spawned.

And if that is happening, maybe it's not happening fast enough.

threat is fixed and chosen at roundstart although tehre are rare ways to increase it.

oranges wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:30 pm

Chadley wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:21 pm Dumb question, does threat not increase over the span of the round? Maybe I'm taking a shit angle, but it seems like for x amount of time a player isn't killed by another player the threat should increase until something else is spawned.

And if that is happening, maybe it's not happening fast enough.

threat is fixed and chosen at roundstart although tehre are rare ways to increase it.

Is this like leaving the disk unsecured or is it other niche things that happen in the round?

Capsandi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:02 pm persay

you can't do this to us

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:20 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm Rounds are too short still IMO

why?

They're over almost instantly and nothing happens

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:42 pm

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:20 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm Rounds are too short still IMO

why?

They're over almost instantly and nothing happens

perhaps leading with "are rounds too long" is misleading. i agree. nothing happens in rounds these days. though i disagree with them being over instantly; i think they're drawn out for too long and the action in them is far and few between. when i say i think rounds are too long i think that there's not enough things going on to get rounds to wrap up in a timely manner.

If rounds are shorter, then you will burn out within a month out of boredom. Fast paced rounds have less options and story telling potential, and can become repetitive very quickly.

Turbonerd wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:45 pm If rounds are shorter, then you will burn out within a month out of boredom. Fast paced rounds have less options and story telling potential, and can become repetitive very quickly.

tbh i feel like the longer rounds have burnt me out more than the shorter rounds of ye olde days. i want to play tg more but every time i join a server there's like like nothing going on and in order to have anything happen it takes like hours of my time. it really just makes me question if it's worth my time

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:45 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:42 pm

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:20 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm Rounds are too short still IMO

why?

They're over almost instantly and nothing happens

perhaps leading with "are rounds too long" is misleading. i agree. nothing happens in rounds these days. though i disagree with them being over instantly; i think they're drawn out for too long and the action in them is far and few between. when i say i think rounds are too long i think that there's not enough things going on to get rounds to wrap up in a timely manner.

What matters in a round, regardless of action (though more action is better), I think is turnover of players. If we have very long rounds, imagine 5 hours, which I know sounds crazy, but the crew were being consistently replaced with late joins, as other people log out, that could actually be really interesting for the dynamics that go on in the round.
Imagine the ultimate long con by a stealth antag, gods it would be epic.

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:49 pm

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:45 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:42 pm

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:20 pm

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:16 pm Rounds are too short still IMO

why?

They're over almost instantly and nothing happens

perhaps leading with "are rounds too long" is misleading. i agree. nothing happens in rounds these days. though i disagree with them being over instantly; i think they're drawn out for too long and the action in them is far and few between. when i say i think rounds are too long i think that there's not enough things going on to get rounds to wrap up in a timely manner.

What matters in a round, regardless of action (though more action is better), I think is turnover of players. If we have very long rounds, imagine 5 hours, which I know sounds crazy, but the crew were being consistently replaced with late joins, as other people log out, that could actually be really interesting for the dynamics that go on in the round.
Imagine the ultimate long con by a stealth antag, gods it would be epic.

This sucks a lot, it happens on all the HRP servers and it's very very weird. You end up with like 80% of the crew having cryo'd, so the round dynamic sort of just breaks down since antags have targets and heads of staff left or gave their role to someone else... Shit just becomes very very strange. There is a reason people only play on servers like this when they can ERP which occupies 3 hours of their time.

Also throw out the whole greentexting thing if you're a roundstart antag. A FIVE HOUR commitment to escape alive? My god.

antag stories are 10x better if they're incentivized to not worry about dying and having to worry about dying/getting caught and then not being able to play for more than an hour is very deincentivizing

90 minute rounds is a good target for job content imo. Ideally rounds would occasionally, but not all the time, get to 90 minutes to give some sort of scarcity to that job content. Science's cool toys will lose their novelty quickly when you get them every round and have no threat to counter with them. Rounds should rarely end in a crew transfer vote. It's called the emergency shuttle for a reason. If it's a low threat round then around the 90 minute mark threat should start ramping up so players have something to use their cool toys from science/cargo/whatever on. On high threat rounds it may not even get to 90 minutes which is fine. I have the most fun with ss13 with a decent mix of shorter chaotic rounds and longer rounds with a decent amount of action in them.

iwishforducks wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 12:02 am antag stories are 10x better if they're incentivized to not worry about dying and having to worry about dying/getting caught and then not being able to play for more than an hour is very deincentivizing

kill them kill them all, mark... do it NOW... FORCE them out of the round before they can force YOU out of the round... they want what YOU HAVE, mark... they want your LOOT they want your TEE CEE they want your LIFE. and you're going to give it to them because you ROLEPLAYED?

KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL ROUND REMOVE THEM WORDLESSLY. AS MANY AS YOU CAN UNTIL YOUR NATURAL DEATH.

I wish the larger maps like Northstar had longer rounds.

I think a good litmus test of the problem with rounds can be reached by recounting some of your favorite rounds.

Personally, I've found that rounds with more threats, more interesting traitor gimmicks, and more action in long rounds are where most of the fun comes from.

I don't think the issue is how much time spans in the round, it's how little action makes up these rounds. (and how unimaginative traitors are)

Doing a few test rounds without latejoin antags sucking up threat that could be used for a cult at roundstart would be an interesting experiment imo.

remove latejoin traitors & rounds suddenly become more fun

Rounds lengths are policy because we can decide when to tell admins to go ham on spicing up the round by pressing buttons.

There used to be a 1 hour button press rule to keep rounds from going too far over an hour.

Yeah but they're also policy because dynamic weights are configurable by headmins. I have full confidence in our admin team to wrap things up, it's when dynamic is doing all the work that I worry

Rounds aren't too long (for sybil atleast) it's just that the 30ish minute and 60ish minute antagonist spawns are awkwardly placed if they came at around 20 minutes for minor threats and 45 for major it would give slower shifts a lot less dead while the surviving round start traitors/heretics are still staying lowkey.

Also imagine how lame it is for midround threat on a high pop fully staffed security server to be wasted on ONE NIGHTMARE or even worse sentient disease.

Rename dynamic to random.

Because that's what it is. A random crapshoot.

It's even dumber at picking antags than old rulesets were, which could be structured/targetted/focused for a specific type of shift or specific experience.

It's no surprise that it's hit-or-miss when it comes to spawnin antags and controlling shift length, because it's just random.

if you hate it that much you should take some pointers from this thread and try tweaking stuff around

Armhulen wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 1:53 am if you hate it that much you should take some pointers from this thread and try tweaking stuff around

i had an idea where dynamic should pick a major ruleset to follow (traitors only, raging mages, revolution, etc.) and then realized it was just secret mode

the best dynamic could do is sometimes having a major theme, sometimes being a random amount of antags, sometimes only roundstart, sometimes only midround, the whole point is that we should have the next round be entirely unpredictable in what the game is going to throw at you and it should blow your socks off

I don't know if length is the issue, moreso that rounds are extremely hit or miss. If Dynamic decides to only spawn in tots and heretics, your round won't be seeing much action, but if something else spawns, you'll have something exciting happen. My thought on what's going on currently:

- Traitors and Heretics spawn, don't do much of anything
- Dynamic picks latejoin tot and heretic as opposed to other options
- Crew gets bored and leaves before the heavy midround rulesets get picked or leave as soon as they do get picked.

Technically this can happen as well with Changeling/Rev/Cult, but the chances of something interesting going down increases dramatically.

okay thats it i'm making a fking policy thread

Just as one last thing to note, personal thoughts on why picking Traitor and Heretic fucks the system: a majority of players who get these roles won't do anything. I agree with Arm that while Progtot really hasn't nerfed base traitor all that much, trying to get players to do side objectives ends up being bait for new players to do something that will get them caught and removed from the round. Likewise, Heretic has some rather unintuitive mechanics (needing to know you need to wall-shove someone after Grasp of Mansus to actually get a usable stun is a big one) and also expects players to both do a lot of breaking and entering and stealth killing without giving them the tools or guidance to do so.

Also, both of these roles have to contend with batons, which is essentially a one-hit gameover for them if they fuck remotely anything up. By nerfing a lot of the tools traitors had to contend with security's strengths, we've essentially made it so only the hardcore robust can even contend with everything going against them. Despite many changes being made to limit the robust sweatlords in our playerbase, we've also made them the only contenders to get something done along the way.

No idea what Sybil/Terry's round length is usually, but Manuel's is usually anywhere from an hour to an hour thirty (and rarely two hours). I usually feel like that's a good length for a quasi-MRP environment. We still have the occasional forty-minute shuttle call when something fucky happens. I don't feel like every round needs to have half the station vented with high stakes and station-ending threats. The low to mid-threat rounds make the clusterfuck rounds all the more special. I guess that's just the result of being a Manuel player, though.

https://moth.fans/data/round-lengths/

the data

1h30m being the ideal round length would sound a lot more appealing to me if we had more fast burning midround antags.

Indie-ana Jones wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 3:10 am(needing to know you need to wall-shove someone after Grasp of Mansus to actually get a usable stun is a big one)

It doesn’t need to be a wall-shove actually, a shove after the knockdown itself will cause a stun (just as an aside). But yeah no one could expect players to know about this regardless.

Indie-ana Jones wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 3:10 amDespite many changes being made to limit the robust sweatlords in our playerbase, we've also made them the only contenders to get something done along the way.

Strongly agree. It is a shame to see fewer and fewer traitors using their kits, because they haven’t gotten the requisite rep for it. And if they do go for the objectives to get rep, they’ll more than likely be round removed before they can earn it.

personally i think if a round gets to the 1 hour 10 mins point and theres no indication of anything that could potentially end the round, its a good time to manually spawn in an antag or two to make sure something is happening

its hard to say what the ideal round length should be because some rounds end in 40 minutes of fast paced action and some rounds end in 1 hour 30 minutes of continual slow burn antagonism and it wouldnt feel right to forcibly extend the former or try to shorten the latter

though if a round approaches 2 hours its bus time

oranges wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 5:43 am https://moth.fans/data/round-lengths/

the data

It might just be because of my stupidity, but I've looked at this thing for thirty minutes, and I don't understand it. The only thing I get is that the red line = 90 minutes.

each box and whisker represents all round data from that hour for the last 30 days, the box represents the first second and third quartile of data with the middle line being the second quartile round time or median round time for that hour on that server for the last 30 days
if i were to look at 11 AM PST on bagil id see that the first quartile round time is 102.5 minutes, meaning 25% of rounds run shorter than 102.5 minutes during that time frame every day. Same for the second and third lines

Capsandi wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 3:38 am each box and whisker represents all round data from that hour for the last 30 days, the box represents the first second and third quartile of data with the middle line being the second quartile round time or median round time for that hour on that server for the last 30 days
if i were to look at 11 AM PST on bagil id see that the first quartile round time is 102.5 minutes, meaning 25% of rounds run shorter than 102.5 minutes during that time frame every day. Same for the second and third lines

if you say quartile again im gonna drive a steamroller over you

Rounds are too short when I roll antag and too long when I do not roll antag.
This is not a joke wherein the punchline is that these rounds are the same length, the shuttle is consistently called before the one hour mark when I get progtot whereas two hours or higher is the standard otherwise.

remove progtot, readd romerol, game revival guaranteed

drinkdrunkdrank wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 9:45 am remove progtot, readd romerol, game revival guaranteed

based

romerol was a genuinely good and fun thing and was rare