MGP wrote:Making it so that the round has to be at least forty minutes long means that in a lot of cases people are being forced to play the current round when they'd rather it ended fifteen minutes ago.
Which is why recall griffing can be so utterly aggravating to the ever-growing base of ghosts that it becomes ahelp-worthy and results in metagrudges. This is true.
Destruction is too easy.
The destructive potential of any random player is very high. When multiple players with destructive tendencies act in parallel it results in a lack of order that incentives heads of staff to call the shuttle.
Which is the entire point of SS13. You're just some random spessmen trying to do your job when suddenly the clown bursts in and chops your fucking head off before you can react. Or maybe you know your coworker is acting seedy and is only making explosive grenades or adding plasma to distro or setting up the SME in a bizarre way. That's part of the fun. Remove the destructive potential and you have a bunch of idiots just walking around doing nothing, getting bored, unable to burn their own hands on the stove, and waiting for traitors to spice their lives up. Nothing needs to be done about this, because allowing destructive potential for any player means that the same destructive potential can be accessible by traitors. The only thing stopping some random crew member from blowing up half the station is the threat of permaban, and that's just fine. Because the more comfortable they are with the mechanics, the better they will be as traitors, leading to amazing traitor situations where they do more damage than all the 20+TC traitors, yet only use readily-accessible resources or their own departmental privileges. It's a badge of honor. Hence that BADASS icon when a traitor gets greentext and uses no TC. Nerfing destructive potential by any one crew member is
simply the wrong way to go.
Antagonists antagonize too early
Based on my experience a good amount of antagonists start their antagonizing as soon as the round starts. Traitors aren't so much traitors as they are unhinged murderers let loose on the station. No attempt is made by most traitors to actually act as a crew member, they instantly go loud and blow their cover.
To some extent, yes. It's a feedback loop depending on the common sentiment of the server. I know I've have traitor rounds in just the right role and just the right context to make a great 1+ hour round full of intrigue and betrayal and sneaky but complete victory, but then some traitor successfully goes loud in the first 10 minutes, blows up half the station, gets no resistance at all, and the shuttle's called in the first half-hour. My plans are shot, and all I can do is try to cause mayhem and just brute-force that ebin greentext. Is this a problem with destructive potential or TC balance? In most cases, save for le ebin desword+ebow combo, no. It's a problem with the mindset of traitors. Some people just want to make spessmen go sideways, nothing more. This is where server temperament comes up and all the social feedback loops.
As for the solution, this is much more difficult than station fragility.
No, it's not. On Sybil and Terry, traitor rounds can last 2+ hours on the regular. Why? Because the traitors are generally high-skill players who care more about entertainment and gimmick value rather than
making pixel spaceman go horizontal. That's the beginning and end of it.
Calling the Shuttle As Meta
Certain game modes like Cult or Nuke Ops strongly incentivize calling the shuttle as soon as possible.
Nothing needs to be changed about the shuttle save for player attitudes and admin policy. The entire reasoning behind the calls-must-have-a-stated-reason system was to avoid shitty calls like "
it's 30 minutes in and Ian is bored, let's go home". But recall griefing is real and too lightly punished. Nothing else needs to be changed.
Despite what Goof says, a higher standard for RP actually does result in longer round times. RP should not be enforced from an administrative perspective
Yes, it should come from the playerbase. Hence why the three servers have stratified into Bagil TDM-fest, Terry mRP 4-hour rounds, and the happy medium in Sybil where rounds can be 30m-2h. Sybil is a comfortable medium, and if Bagil has to be the Designated Shitting Street, then so be it.
but elements should be added or removed from the game to encourage stronger roleplaying.
No, no, a thousand times no. Bagil, Sybil, and Terry operate on exactly the same codebase. The only difference is the type and amount of players. Even Sybil gets Bagil-tier around 50 players, but it really shines at 30-40 players. Terry has its own magic with user counts of ~20. The real magic, to me, of the /tg/station code is that it can handle this
vibrant multicultural diversity. Servers like Goon and Lifeweb are centered around lowpop and servers like Hippie and Paradise are centered around highpop. The mechanics break down rapidly under different contexts, and the /tg/ code is still robust enough to handle varied counts. Nothing needs to be done to the code, concerning roleplaying via hardcoding or mechanics. The utter backlash against hygiene should prove that much.
Immersion
These paragraphs ultimately boil down to this word which is so shakily defined as per your usage that it's meaningless. People don't care about immersion when they go to /tg/station. They care about the lackadaisical attitude that's common-sense enough to not need heavy-handed rules. The interplay between IC and OOC is comfortable and flexible enough where icky-ocky is a meme and nothing more. There's certainly cases of powergaming but almost entirely centered around greytiders, which, on a long-enough timescale of consistent characters, gets metagrudged to the point of banning. It's fine as-is.
In my opinion, to increase immersion, you could stand to reduce the wackiness and silliness by a degree or two. It is hard to believe you are actually on an elite secret research station when there is so much, to be frank, retarded bullshit.
That's because the magic of SS13, in the words of some fucking neato shitter on the internet somewhere, is that SS13 is like a realistic cartoon. It's a casserole of settings and genres and movies and books and shows and works. You're affected by hunger, temperature, pressure, radiation, disease, madness, brain damage, body damage, but there's also threats like a wizard from the Wizard Federation. He might animate objects to come alive and attack you. You can manipulate atmospheric mixes and pressures, but you also have the threat of a god-like being invading your station. You can fine-tune chemistry mixes to take advantage of biological half-lives, but you're also being fucked over by a plague of magical monsters from the Xenobio shitters. Every round feels different, like with cultists, or traitors, or revs, or it's nothing but a greenshift where all conflict comes from your interaction with others and the challenges the station faces. It's at a nice happy middle ground. That's the magic of it. Nobody cares about immersion, just about the experience and fun they get from a given round. If they wanted IMMERSIVE ROLE-PLAYING they'd just go over to Baystation 12 and roleplay their go-nowhere janitor or their miserable doctor. Simple. But /tg/station strikes a happy balance.
Ultimately round length depends on a mutual, communal agreement on how long it should be, and on the population of a given server. Sybil and Terry are what all of these weird "let's make round lengths longer" proposals are trying to aim towards, but the mechanics and code are exactly the same, it's only the playerbase that's different. The only way to modify the playerbase is to change the player count, or change the admin policy. Whether it's by opening up another server for full no-RP DM Designated Shitting Server like Sybil 3.0/Bagil 2.0, or simply driving away enough shitters via admin policy, then those are the only real methods without driving away everyone or changing /tg/station into something nobody wants.