Unfuck Codebase, Decide on direction

[Tornadium]

Going off some shit in another thread, the development direction for TG is incredibly disjointed and shit kinda just gets added for the hell of it rather than to improve the round experience.

Some people feel that we have wayyyy too many antagonist types, others want more.

Some feel we have wayyyy too many methods of getting back in the round while again others want more.

We can't decide on a direction for security, some people want cargo removed and merged, some people want a research station, others want a complete overhaul of the entire playstyle of TG with a lot more PvE content. I'll eventually try to reach a point that I'm trying to make.

I'm not sure how we would even go about getting started with this but I think the adminteam/coderbus/community needs to decide on a direction for TG and what kind of experience it is going to offer, It just feels like it's pulling in 20 different directions at the moment and everything is mediocre or terrible.

Lets fix.

[Shaps-cloud]

There is no singular correct answer or path to take, there are too many people who enjoy the game in too many different ways, and that's fine. If everyone played the game the same way, it'd be terrible and boring, trying to declare that one way of playing the game is the correct and supported way would just alienate a ton of people because they enjoy the game for different reasons.

[Tornadium]

There is no singular correct answer or path to take, there are too many people who enjoy the game in too many different ways, and that's fine. If everyone played the game the same way, it'd be terrible and boring, trying to declare that one way of playing the game is the correct and supported way would just alienate a ton of people because they enjoy the game for different reasons.

I'm aware of this and I'm by no means suggesting we throw everything out except one singular playstyle. We do however have wayyyy too many conflicting ideologies and paths of development and they are having an impact on the overall enjoyment of the rounds. This is something that cannot be avoided with this many development paths going on at once, you can't satisfy two polar opposites and there is a lot of that going down at the moment.

This is less to force a singular play style and more to try to bring some kind of order and direction to how the tg codebase evolves.

For example you can't add more antags and have less antags to satisfy both groups.

[ShadowDimentio]

Oh wonderful another thread complaining about a nonexistant problem they have no idea how to fix

[Tornadium]

Oh wonderful another thread complaining about a nonexistant problem they have no idea how to fix

I wouldn't say it's such a non-existant problem.

Especially if you have been playing recently, seems to be a big disjoint over what experience the server should offer. The round length thread is a pretty good example of the common issues and discussions that are going on right now.

[TechnoAlchemist]

It's not a non-existent problem, but it's complicated and would require more design lead oversight.

[Scott]

A lot of people love to shit on paprik, but he's totally fucking 100% right with what the game is and was. I'm just gonna preface this with saying that /tg/ as a codebase is like Minecraft in terms of focus. It's utterly disjointed and unfocused to the point that it feels really unenjoyable to do much of anything despite having way more content than other codebases due to its open source nature.

What I'm also saying is that because of our open source nature, we've been able to spam out content for years, with some of it agreeing and disagreeing with the focus of the game to create a big disjointed mess. Back when we didn't have the sheer amount of content we did now, rounds were long because people actually rp'd.

This is a bad thing.
Yes, I'm saying rp is a very fucking bad thing because people were forced to do it to enjoy the game in any form.

This meant that you'd have people doing what is essentially a workplace simulator at some point after they've run out of things to do, making it boring and stagnating the playerbase to the point where we have people who have wasted 6+ years playing it near constantly due to the ties they've created in character. This is also why team antagonist rounds have multiplied in the last few years, they help to ensure that there's constantly something to engage players and keep things happening in a round and ensure that players cycle in and out more rapidly due to more of them leaving from a lack of rp and persistent relationships. This creates a significantly healthier environment for a game and is a large reason why we're the 2nd most popular server that SS13 has.

tl;dr RP is the rot of the game due to how it stagnates the round and playerbase, and the only reason people did it was because there was nothing else in the game that was even remotely enjoyable.

[oranges]

It's not your codebase. It's our codebase. You can imply soft power as much as you want, but you don't have it. Division between the server and project is absolute. I'm not interested in reading tornadium platitudes for the billionth time and won't be checking back in this thread.

[onleavedontatme]

It's not a non-existent problem, but it's complicated and would require more design lead oversight.

The secret is that nobody actually wants that oversight because it would require telling half the coders/admins/players to fuck off no matter what direction we chose.

[Cik]

action on this front is literally impossible because if it was democratic no one would ever be able to agree on what should go and what should stay, and if it was unilateral it would be a shitstorm of extraordinary proportions.

[Tornadium]

It's not your codebase. It's our codebase. You can imply soft power as much as you want, but you don't have it. Division between the server and project is absolute. I'm not interested in reading tornadium platitudes for the billionth time and won't be checking back in this thread.

I'm not really following. I don't believe i assigned ownership of the codebase or whatever you mean by soft power?

Or is there some weird politic drama shit that I'm blissfully unaware of surrounding the codebase.

It's not a non-existent problem, but it's complicated and would require more design lead oversight.

The secret is that nobody actually wants that oversight because it would require telling half the coders/admins/players to fuck off no matter what direction we chose.

It's starting to happen indirectly anyway, Sybil especially at this point seems to only cater to 30 minute meme rounds with very little structure and depth. It usually just consists of 10 minutes of grief, then 10 minutes of explosions and mass murderbone then shuttle time. You can see from just idling in ooc or reading forum threads that it's becoming more and more noticeable and I hope people start getting more vocal about those kinds of issues.

Regardless could someone clear something up for me?

What's this drama preventing the server having a focus? Why is a disjointed and somewhat broken development direction preferable?

[Hornygranny]

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 660#p61410

on a serious note if you can't corroborate your assertions that it's the code making people play that way i'm just going to close this now

[ShadowDimentio]

Because we're not an actual game in the sense there's not a specific direction we're going.

[PKPenguin321]

kor design lead will deliver us from this pain

[Tornadium]

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 660#p61410

on a serious note if you can't corroborate your assertions that it's the code making people play that way i'm just going to close this now

https://www.tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewt ... =33&t=6722

This thread is an expansion on some discussions that have been happening recently.

Outside of that it's kind of hard to corroborate gathered opinions without having some kind of poll or central resource of those opinions. The point of the thread is less to actually decide on a direction and more to understand if this is even possible to do, hence it being in the ideas section. I had an idea to see if this was possible.

It's also impossible to fix a single issue because most of the issues are exclusive to one another, I can't fix the issue of having too many ways to re-enter the round because it will piss people off who like that. Hence the thread to try to gauge if having some kind of direction is even feasible. I personally can't grasp why we keep adding content that doesn't compliment or actively works against the enjoyment of other features.

[onleavedontatme]

>reentering the round is an issue
>having the rounds last only half an hour is an issue

Pick one

[Tornadium]

Why are they exclusive?

To be honest I think they're both connected issues, people rush and do thinks with no care in the world because they know even if i die early as an antag I can go ashwalker and still kill people.

[Cheridan]

lmao this whole thread

[MisterPerson]

I'm torn on this being a good idea or not. Generally speaking targeting a specific demo is a superior marketing strategy than trying to appeal to everyone by being a jack-of-all-trades. This leads to more player enjoyment and possibly even more players. On the other hand, what we have now works and trying something new could upset that. There's also the practical problem of "who decides what direction to take?" which just leaves the idea DOA as far as I'm concerned.

Good luck convincing people to give up control.

[Tornadium]

I'm torn on this being a good idea or not. Generally speaking targeting a specific demo is a superior marketing strategy than trying to appeal to everyone by being a jack-of-all-trades. This leads to more player enjoyment and possibly even more players. On the other hand, what we have now works and trying something new could upset that. There's also the practical problem of "who decides what direction to take?" which just leaves the idea DOA as far as I'm concerned.

Good luck convincing people to give up control.

That is kind of the purpose behind the thread. To see if this is even feasible or if anyone in the community has an idea.

I would argue that what we have right now while functional does not work. It's disjointed and doesn't feel like it goes together correctly, Again no solid metrics on this but from threads and player comments there are clearly issues with what TG has become (purely from a feature perspective).

[MisterPerson]

It might help if you could point to another codebase that is better at this than us and identifying why that is. Hint: Size plays a factor.

[onleavedontatme]

Why are they exclusive?

Okay lets pretend you get home from a long day of work/school, you sign, and within 10 minutes you get killed by something or other.

Are you going to sit and stare at the game angrily for 2 hours/the rest of your evening waiting to play again? Or are you going to give up and go play one of those 300 games in your steam backlog?

Are you gonna go shrug it off as "just another day on ss13!" or are you gonna try and get the other guy banned (since he has now prevented you from playing the game for the whole day more or less)?

Wont you try and get this thing that killed you nerfed, or make extra rules about preventing meaningless death from antags, if death kept you out of the game for significant time periods?

Having large numbers of players sitting out and being angry is sadistic game design, and it's really, really, really unhealthy for the community and generally awful to try and administrate.

[Tornadium]

Why are they exclusive?

Okay lets pretend you get home from a long day of work/school, you sign, and within 10 minutes you get killed by something or other.

Are you going to sit and stare at the game angrily for 2 hours/the rest of your evening waiting to play again? Or are you going to give up and go play one of those 300 games in your steam backlog?

Are you gonna go shrug it off as "just another day on ss13!" or are you gonna try and get the other guy banned (since he has now prevented you from playing the game for the whole day more or less)?

Wont you try and get this thing that killed you nerfed, or make extra rules about preventing meaningless death from antags, if death kept you out of the game for significant time periods?

Having large numbers of players sitting out and being angry is sadistic game design, and it's really, really, really unhealthy for the community and generally awful to try and administrate.

Kor, you seem to be under the impression that I share this opinion. I actually like having multiple ways to get back into the round if they add something to the experience and i prefer rounds to be on the shorter side. I'm saying that other people do not like either and it's starting to show.

As for what you asked,

- I'm going to spectate because I like watching the round play out, I'd probably play Eve or something chill while I'm watching.

- I tend not to get angry at getting killed if it was just part of the game rather than someone being a douchebag.

- See above, If it's a legitimate kill that I deserved or was from an antag then I'm not going to get mad. You're a fucking child if you do.

- No not really.

I do see your point about it being shitty to administrate but that's kind of the point of having the administrators to deal with it, yeah it sucks but someone has to do it.

It might help if you could point to another codebase that is better at this than us and identifying why that is. Hint: Size plays a factor.

Okay I think you're misunderstanding the point of this thread.

This is not X codebase is better than Y.

Each codebase provides it's own content and it's own experience. My point at the moment is that TG's codebase seems to be all over the fucking place in terms of the experience it provides. I could probably explain this better over mumble or whatever you're interested but the best example I can come up with at the moment is Colonial Marines (yes it's geared towards a VERY specific experience but hear me out).

The only ways to get back into the round after death are

- Alien spawns (contributes heavily to the progression of the round). Limited by player creation of larvae
- From distress beacons or admin/moderated intervention when deemed appropriate.

Again this is only an example taking respawning as the focus, the ability to re-enter the round only ever adds something to the round. It doesn't take anything away from the round and usually adds to the ongoing narrative of that round. Additional aliens grow the horde, PMC reinforcements can add friction and infighting between the Marines and the PMCs. Again this is hard to explain just by writing it down because my thoughts aren't fully formed on this, Could explain a whole lot better just talking about it.

TG on the other hand we have 5 billion ways to get back into the round and most of them detract from the round experience. Revenants run around griefing the shit out of people, Ash walkers are just an excuse to /suicide and start murderboning miners if you didn't get antag, drones don't really contribute jack shit etc. They don't add anything to the round and encourage people to play like complete and utter retards because they know it doesn't really matter. This kind of playstyle is in direct contention/opposition to other recent feature additions. There would be no point adding any depth to other departments that require long rounds to function, there is no point adding time consuming PvE content because the rounds will be over that much faster because other features encourage a specific playstyle.

If this isn't clear please tell me and I'll try to explain it a little better.

[MisterPerson]

I meant better at having some kind of direction like you're proposing, not better in an absolute scale of quality or anything like that.

[onleavedontatme]

Cononial marines is a very tightly controlled experience where everyone has clearly defined roles to play. This is reflected in their rules. The aliens fight the marines. One side must kill the other.

There is no objective in ss13 other than chaos. Everyone is doing whatever the hell they want while it all comes crashing down around them.

Their respawns feed into the war, our respawns feed into general disorder.

[Tornadium]

Cononial marines is a very tightly controlled experience where everyone has clearly defined roles to play. This is reflected in their rules. The aliens fight the marines. One side must kill the other.

There is no objective in ss13 other than chaos. Everyone is doing whatever the hell they want while it all comes crashing down around them.

Their respawns feed into the war, our respawns feed into general disorder.

Not SS13 inherently, the server culture and experience of SS13 may suit it (I disagree personally but that's an opinion). Bay provides a SS13 experience that is not chaotic at all as do many other servers.

The features and codebase tends to get built in a direction that supports and compliments the playstyle that server culture is attempting to promote. So really it boils down to what the TG server culture is and what kind of playstyle are we trying to promote. Like I said before we see features added which barely ever get used because they don't feed into the murderboner meta (don't provide you with lots of ingame advantages for valids) or take too long to do and the round time is so short.

Is there a point to these code additions at all? Should we not be trying to promote features which improve the play experience of shorter rounds or a "chaos" based experience?

[oranges]

The fact that you call this TG server is disgusting

[Tornadium]

The fact that you call this TG server is disgusting

What do we call the server then.

[oranges]

/tg/station