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.