/tg/Station 13

From: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 76#p598776

Naloac wrote:Sec scaling changed from 5 to 10.

Booooooooooo.

I haven't heard about security being overplayed. What I have seen is security being horrendously understaffed to the point of uselessness. This makes it much, much worse. I'd like to hear the justification for this, or to have it reset to 5.

I’m guessing it’s curated more to terry where they do have a sec issue

Cobby wrote:I’m guessing it’s curated more to terry where they do have a sec issue

We do have the ability for per-server configs.

Ive always been under the impression that all the servers bar terry have the issue of too little sec. This wont change much if thats their issue.

I’d hesitate changing it based on servers that don’t ever contribute to the “too many sec” issue anyways.

If it becomes an issue where the cap is being filled then I think we can gauge if the bar is being met or not. I’m not sure preemptively “fixing” it will do any favors.

This is a terrible outcome for Manuel honestly, where sec is more often than not tremendously understaffed. If there is no sec team at roundstart, then the likelihood is that there'll be no real security presence for the entire round outside of command.

I'd like to know what discussion prompted the change

A cap would be better than scaling. Or best of both worlds, normal scaling up to a certain threshold (40 maybe) and then scaling is increased

A lot of people seem to be missing the point. If your server does not have sec this will not affect anything. This will only be a noticeable change for high sec pop servers.

dumb change made because lepi couldn't nerf sec on github. configs were a mistake.

security is a bit too strong anyways

The maths behind the change, since the headmins discussed this in private and nobody got a chance to chip in about it.

tl;dr -
Old: 5 sec officers minimum at 1 pop, increasing by 1 at 28 pop and by 1 more every 5 pop thereafter, hard capping at 12 upon reaching 58 pop.
New: 5 sec officers minimum at 1 pop, increasing by 1 at 55 pop and by 1 more every 10 pop thereafter, never reaching the hard cap of 12 as server pop limits are too low, soft capping at either (75 = 8 officers) or (85 = 9 officers) depending on the max number of players the 90 pop servers cap out at.

This does not impact the HoS, Det or Warden. No matter what the Sec Officer config is set to, these 3 will always join and do not count towards the Sec Officer cap.

The number of available Sec Officer job slots is
Where J.spawn_positions is the spawn_positions of the Security Officer job datum, which is 5.

And ssc is the security scaling coefficient, which is currently configged to 10 and was 5 before the change.
Practically, at all population levels there can be no fewer than 5 sec officers since that is a hardcoded value. Similarly, there is a hard coded cap of 12 sec officers.

Prior to the config change when ssc was set to 5, new sec officer slots were opened up starting at 28 players (28 / 5 = 5.6, rounded up to 6) and every 5 players thereafter up to 58 players (58 / 5 = 11.6, rounded up to 12), where the code would then cap the max to 12.

With the ssc set to 10, new officer slots are opened up starting at 55 players (55 / 10 = 5.5, rounded up to 6) and every 10 players thereafter, up to whatever the population cap is for non-observers on the 90 pop servers. Theoretically, all the way up to 9 sec officer slots at 85 players. The 70 pop servers will cap out at 6 sec officers at 55 pop, since players above 60 pop are limited to observer only.

1 to 5 is already laughable, 1 to 10 is a downright joke that will mean security is ineffective.

If nothing has functionally changed except on the extreme end, what's even the point of this thread?

It's not like you can make people play security.

Rest in peace large sec gang, killed by terry. So when do we scale assistants?

NecromancerAnne wrote:If nothing has functionally changed except on the extreme end, what's even the point of this thread?

It's not like you can make people play security.

Nooo you cant just go make config changes without arguing publicly about it for a week!!!!

oranges wrote:1 to 5 is already laughable, 1 to 10 is a downright joke that will mean security is ineffective.

wacky opinion to be honest. In what sense? against lone antagonists? if so I dont really know what your talking about even just a few people vs one lone antag is a death sentence for most antagonists. For Team antags? where the crew is encouraged to join up with sec and fight off the team with them? normally leading to way more people on the crew side than the antagonist? what are you comparing to when you say that its laughable?

dendydoom wrote:This is a terrible outcome for Manuel honestly, where sec is more often than not tremendously understaffed. If there is no sec team at roundstart, then the likelihood is that there'll be no real security presence for the entire round outside of command.

change wouldnt effect a server with no large sec pop, just those with it.

when i go antag and i kill sec just for a new sec wave to respawn was problematic

Naloac wrote:

dendydoom wrote:This is a terrible outcome for Manuel honestly, where sec is more often than not tremendously understaffed. If there is no sec team at roundstart, then the likelihood is that there'll be no real security presence for the entire round outside of command.

change wouldnt effect a server with no large sec pop, just those with it.

I don't understand half the people's logic here. "Noo you're nerfing sec and making it trash!!!" ok, if your server had 0 sec pop it will still have 0 sec pop. It's making it so there are less sec slots open. How will this in anyway nerf sec on servers that have none?

Why is the head coder concerned about low numbers of security when code changes stop people from playing security (and the game altogether : ))) )

Naloac wrote:Ive always been under the impression that all the servers bar terry have the issue of too little sec. This wont change much if thats their issue.

Do you have any data to back up this "impression"? Did you make any attempt to ask anyone for it?

I'm extremely peeved about a fundamental design change like this happening out of the blue (I literally didn't even know until I saw oranges interrogate about it in policy-bus) and without any discussion amongst the standard designers of the game. It's especially personally annoying after I spent a good while going through the design talk and implementing a feature that relies on and encourages more people to play sec. I will be more peeved if it turns out no actual data analysis was done for this change, something I would've required on someone making this change to the codebase with this reasoning.

If there was any problem at all, discussing this publicly with maintainers likely could've yielded a more apt solution. Instead, it feels like Lepi was ticked off that the last time this happened (stun baton nerf), it ended with their PR being closed. If this is truly the case (and if it's not, the optics here are dreadful), then I am not happy that there is incentive for me to treat a PR from a head admin any differently because I have precedent that they'll just try to get what they want anyway.

Any change like this would've had to go through serious design discussion on the code end, and I don't agree fundamentally that head admins should just speed bike over that (even though config gives them the *ability* to do so).

Pugie wrote: Why is the head coder concerned about low numbers of security when code changes stop people from playing security (and the game altogether : ))) )

Literally what are you on about, dude?

Jaredfogle wrote: words

Do you have any data to back up this "impression"? Did you make any attempt to ask anyone for it?

Asked both bobbah and ned for this they didnt get back to me so I did it manually with both their services. over time speaking to just regular players about their experiences.

If there was any problem at all, discussing this publicly with maintainers likely could've yielded a more apt solution. Instead, it feels like Lepi was ticked off that the last time this happened (stun baton nerf),

Had I done the same thing with no PR this wouldnt be spoken about. I did the PR to fix an issue I saw that wasnt being fixed. After that we took one of the avenues to fix the same issue in a different less obtrusive way. I personally had spoken to both you, oranges cobby and skoglol at different points over this. So have other people about the same issue. With the general consensus being from maintainers being that isnt much of an issue.. Since it wasnt being fixed on the code side we did something that would effect no server but the one having this issue.

I don't understand how this is that big of a change anyway. 16 sec job for 80 pop won't ever get filled anyway

Somepan wrote:I don't understand how this is that big of a change anyway. 16 sec job for 80 pop won't ever get filled anyway

On the whole I don't think people are taking issue with the config change
I think the issue here is more

Coders ask headmins to make sec more attractive and lower the freedom given to assistants to validhunt (See the assistant scaling pr, a request to remove assistant maint access https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 33&t=27061), both of which are attempts to solve via code problems the admin team doesn't appear to be able to solve at the moment.
Headmins nerf sec in a manner that limits how big the sec force can get, in an attempt to solve issues with overly mechanical sec forces on terry after a pr made by one of the headmins was closed.

This seems more like miscommunication then anything else, I know Lepi has said they want to solve the assistant issue, and it doesn't seem like most people are mad at the change on its own, since it's reasonably harmless, they're more mad about either headmins trying to pr something, getting denied, and then just doing it anyway, or doing this and not addressing other worries.

There might also be some backlash because policy-bus is a thing, and it just wasn't used here. Maybe an expectation of it being used for this sort of thing has been built

Some data on this would be nice.

Perhaps a chart showing % of antags alive at the end of the shift at different security populations? I'm specifically interested how sybil would look, because it can get high security pops and I've seen it a good couple times in the relatively few connections I've had of late.

Still at the end of the day this doesn't seem very radical to me, an HOS, warden, detective, and 5 officers for 54 pop station and then more officers for every 10 after that? That is a substantial security force.

TheFinalPotato wrote:Snip

Basically this opinion, I just wish anything was communicated before we all had to ask.

pugie wrote:Why is the head coder concerned about low numbers of security when code changes stop people from playing security (and the game altogether : ))) )

I'm obviously concerned about the low number of security, which is obvious because I have knocked back two sec nerfs and considered multiple solutions to increased greytiding, but nice false equivalence.

wesoda25 wrote:Some data on this would be nice.

Perhaps a chart showing % of antags alive at the end of the shift at different security populations? I'm specifically interested how sybil would look, because it can get high security pops and I've seen it a good couple times in the relatively few connections I've had of late.

Still at the end of the day this doesn't seem very radical to me, an HOS, warden, detective, and 5 officers for 54 pop station and then more officers for every 10 after that? That is a substantial security force.

IIrc its HoS + Warden + Detective + 5 minimum Sec Officer slots + scaling 1/10 pop

i dont play security because the HOS keeps demoting me for information gathering using enhanced interrogation techniques

Naloac wrote: I did the PR to fix an issue I saw that wasnt being fixed. After that we took one of the avenues to fix the same issue in a different less obtrusive way.

You are not a game designer. You are glorified middle management for a department completely separate from game design.

You were told your ideas on game design were incorrect by the actual experts who have been doing this for over 10 years. You then chose to ignore them and force the change you wanted through anyways.

This is grounds for you to step down in shame, honestly, and is more evidence you and the other headmins cannot be trusted with game design configurations.

Naloac wrote:Since it wasnt being fixed on the code side we did something that would effect no server but the one having this issue.

I think you just accidentally said the quiet part out loud

oranges wrote:

pugie wrote:Why is the head coder concerned about low numbers of security when code changes stop people from playing security (and the game altogether : ))) )

I'm obviously concerned about the low number of security, which is obvious because I have knocked back two sec nerfs and considered multiple solutions to increased greytiding, but nice false equivalence.

Security being strong is not what will make people gravitate towards the role since that is the present state of things. The wider issue is a general reluctance to becoming a target while possessing a significant degree of importance in the round. i.e. your death = more deaths which you are vicariously responsible for. This is why there was backlash towards the assistant caps too. Everyone wants to be a nobody, because being a somebody either gets you shot in the back or blamed when things go wrong.

This uncertainty about taking on that responsibility also is compounded by a lack of any other job content for security beyond fighting and preparing to fight, which can be exhausting on a round to round basis, and so security also has turnover rate problems with newer players. The people who stick with it long term probably found some way to kill time between fighting or security defeating all the antags will force an early shuttle call, which isn't too uncommon either.

I doubt, as a hypothetical, that if you made the role literally invincible that it would change anything about the perception or player interest, because playing on easy mode merely cheapens the experience more while increasing the perception of responsibility given the amount of power allocated to that player.

This is the same reason why we have a lack of heads. And no amount of advantages given to those players will necessarily fix that problem either. Their responsibilities are handled by their subordinates, and they themselves don't do anything much at all. I think only the CE truly has any unique power in that he is able to easily bridge between engineering and atmospherics to create more elaborate engines. Maybe the QM as a pseudo-head of staff does as well.

NecromancerAnne wrote:

oranges wrote:

pugie wrote:Why is the head coder concerned about low numbers of security when code changes stop people from playing security (and the game altogether : ))) )

I'm obviously concerned about the low number of security, which is obvious because I have knocked back two sec nerfs and considered multiple solutions to increased greytiding, but nice false equivalence.

Security being strong is not what will make people gravitate towards the role since that is the present state of things. The wider issue is a general reluctance to becoming a target while possessing a significant degree of importance in the round. i.e. your death = more deaths which you are vicariously responsible for. This is why there was backlash towards the assistant caps too. Everyone wants to be a nobody, because being a somebody either gets you shot in the back or blamed when things go wrong.

This uncertainty about taking on that responsibility also is compounded by a lack of any other job content for security beyond fighting and preparing to fight, which can be exhausting on a round to round basis, and so security also has turnover rate problems with newer players. The people who stick with it long term probably found some way to kill time between fighting or security defeating all the antags will force an early shuttle call, which isn't too uncommon either.

I doubt, as a hypothetical, that if you made the role literally invincible that it would change anything about the perception or player interest, because playing on easy mode merely cheapens the experience more while increasing the perception of responsibility given the amount of power allocated to that player.

This is the same reason why we have a lack of heads. And no amount of advantages given to those players will necessarily fix that problem either. Their responsibilities are handled by their subordinates, and they themselves don't do anything much at all. I think only the CE truly has any unique power in that he is able to easily bridge between engineering and atmospherics to create more elaborate engines. Maybe the QM as a pseudo-head of staff does as well.

I agree, which is why there are also no buffs in the works, these issues are entirely administrative problems which the headadmins still do not address, admin enforcement of chain of command would be a bare minimum.

oranges wrote:I'm obviously concerned about the low number of security, which is obvious because I have knocked back two sec nerfs and considered multiple solutions to increased greytiding, but nice false equivalence.

Generally speaking sec is played if you want intense fights against antagonists, but the real fun of it, I think, is that you have a unique dynamic where you can 100% trust the other officers working alongside you (since they can't be evil). I think supporting and strengthening that dynamic, some way to work in teambuilding, would make sec a lot more attractive to people. I don't think the gear matters, really, or the greytiding. If anything the greytiding is kind of fun, in a weird sort of way, and is a part of the culture of sec.

I find the best rounds as sec are the ones where the threat is strong, but not overwhelmingly so, so you are kept busy but there is some leisure time to chill and talk about the stuff that's happening. These are often the "wave" sort of rounds where there's a threat, it's defeated, then another threat comes several minutes later, etc., as opposed to all at once. Often times there is so much going on it's hard to justify taking a few minutes to just chat or RP with people, especially if people are being murdered during that time. I think that limitation is what turns a lot of people off of sec. Fucking with tiders or arresting for petty crimes (i.e. shitsec behavior) is probably just a way to take a break from the real work which is silently walking through maint to find cult runes and stuff.

In an ideal world the threat would be determined by the number of security, so it's somewhat balanced, but that probably has all sorts of practical problems. Anyways, just my 2 c on the matter.

iamgoofball wrote:

Naloac wrote: I did the PR to fix an issue I saw that wasnt being fixed. After that we took one of the avenues to fix the same issue in a different less obtrusive way.

You are not a game designer. You are glorified middle management for a department completely separate from game design.

You were told your ideas on game design were incorrect by the actual experts who have been doing this for over 10 years. You then chose to ignore them and force the change you wanted through anyways.

This is grounds for you to step down in shame, honestly, and is more evidence you and the other headmins cannot be trusted with game design configurations.

Funny enough I actually went to college for game design. implying that this is a massive change when it wont effect the servers your shouting about is either dishonest or stupid. or is implying that you dont know much about game design.
to the second part, lol, To the third part lol. Also I did originally want this just on terry but it was changed to all for uniformity + it wouldnt effect the other servers just terry. MSO himself says that the configs are needed because one size cant fit all the servers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wesoda25 wrote:Some data on this would be nice.

Perhaps a chart showing % of antags alive at the end of the shift at different security populations? I'm specifically interested how sybil would look, because it can get high security pops and I've seen it a good couple times in the relatively few connections I've had of late.

Still at the end of the day this doesn't seem very radical to me, an HOS, warden, detective, and 5 officers for 54 pop station and then more officers for every 10 after that? That is a substantial security force.

I agree I wanted to get data on this first before doing it but no one was willing / it was alot of effort so it didnt happen so I had to manually do it. the second part I highlighted is kinda? what I asked for. I asked for sec population related to antag death %. For the third part I agree. it is quite a large sec force having them be able to have effectively near unlimited amounts of sec just seems like over kill. Its also not just sec, its the fact that if antags start getting noticed its not just sec that will go after them but the crew, when a cult appears people with mindshields will begin *with sec* to stop the cultists. same on Revs. This also happens to lone antagonists as most of the time lone antag v seccie thats been spotted will have the crew jump in to help.

Replace "vault alchemist" with "players"

Replace "government" with "codebase"

Naloac wrote:

iamgoofball wrote:

Naloac wrote: I did the PR to fix an issue I saw that wasnt being fixed. After that we took one of the avenues to fix the same issue in a different less obtrusive way.

You are not a game designer. You are glorified middle management for a department completely separate from game design.

You were told your ideas on game design were incorrect by the actual experts who have been doing this for over 10 years. You then chose to ignore them and force the change you wanted through anyways.

This is grounds for you to step down in shame, honestly, and is more evidence you and the other headmins cannot be trusted with game design configurations.

Funny enough I actually went to college for game design. implying that this is a massive change when it wont effect the servers your shouting about is either dishonest or stupid. or is implying that you dont know much about game design.

TV on the forums

I just can't think of a reason you'd do this to be honest.

I get that you have an idea you really think will help the servers. I think all of us can relate to that. But discussion is how we refine ideas into solutions. Why would you bypass that? If the codebase isn't interested, you should talk to them about it. Despite what r*dditors seem to think, our maintainers are pretty reasonable guys. Why would you step past them and use your power to implement a change regardless?

Is this some critical issue? Was this breaking every round? No. I don't think so, anyway. This wasn't an urgent issue that required immediate attention. So why did you tell everyone to go fuck themselves and just force your change through anyway?

OK so this means that instead of having a maximum of 15 members of security at 58 players you now have a maximum of... about 9 sec members?

I can't remember the last time I saw 9 people in security even on terry tbqh. I've been off for a few weeks is this some recent epidemic of stations that are 1/4th cop?

Doesn't matter. People pick security because they want to validhunt if there is no security spot they will still validhunt just with a greysuit on instead. changes does nothing I don't understand why people are so dramatic about it and nothing will change at all with traitors getting stomped on high security servers. 5/10 meh

iamgoofball wrote:

Naloac wrote: I did the PR to fix an issue I saw that wasnt being fixed. After that we took one of the avenues to fix the same issue in a different less obtrusive way.

You are not a game designer. You are glorified middle management for a department completely separate from game design.

You were told your ideas on game design were incorrect by the actual experts who have been doing this for over 10 years. You then chose to ignore them and force the change you wanted through anyways.

This is grounds for you to step down in shame, honestly, and is more evidence you and the other headmins cannot be trusted with game design configurations.

For the record: Admins are DMs, you just create revisions to fifth edition. Everything you do on the subject of game design are suggestions at best and admins have the final authority to ignore it.

I do want to bring up that the HoP/Captain/Acting captain can still just open new sec slots nomatter how low the sec scaling is set to. If you've run out of slots for sec and still require more then you can just get whoever has access to raise the number of slots. The HoPs ability to open new job slots is pretty underused as is and is generally relegated to flooding the crew with chaplains during cult shifts or raising the station clown population. Lowering the sec officer cap gives more opportunities for the HoP to open more slots when the going gets tough.