Co-op vs Backstabbing IC Announcements

[WJohnston]

So presently we have two pretty distinct types of game modes:

Backstabbing: Any kind of mode which involves being a sneaky sly frenchman like traitor, changeling, conversion modes and so on, where the crew tears itself apart. Security typically shoots at its own crew.
Co-op: Any kind of mode which involves dealing with clear-cut outside forces attacking the station, such as nuke ops, blobs, aliens, meteors and so on.

The problem:
Player vs player gameplay is interesting in all its forms. While I personally very much dislike the whole "security has tasers and cuffs and puts people in little boxes for 30 minutes because that guy might be an antagonist" bullshit, there can be some really interesting emerging moments and it'd be a shame to get rid of it in its entirety. Co-op modes do this without the whole security-being-shit-to-its-own-crew deal because you have a clearly defined outside threat to rally against and no fear of an asshole changeling appearing out of thin air behind you. While these are great on their own, they fundamentally do not mix with eachother. There's no such thing as working together when any one the people with you (possibly multiple) could turn on you at any moment.
Unfortunately, getting rid of either half of these game modes would greatly reduce the amount of gameplay options and variety that ss13 provides, and that's too great a loss to do.



So here's a middle ground!



The solution:
The idea here is to make use of the roundstart elevation to blue alert to only occur in backstab type modes, while no such thing happens in co-op modes.
This gives players a meta way of knowing "okay, do I check my back and not trust anyone this round, or do I start preparing for an outside threat?". Basically you can gear yourself up with peace of mind that no changeling will suck out your genes while the ops, meteors, or blobs prepare for 20 minutes. It'll quell the whole "misplaced mistrust" issue we have in gamemodes where not trusting your fellow crewmembers is actually detrimental for everyone involved.

Thoughts?

[kevinz000]

part of the game is not knowing what the threat is.
having this immediately narrows it to "security is going to crack down on crew" or "security doesn't give a fuck about minor ic crime because they have worse things to worry about automatically without having to figure it out themselves".

if players immediately get a cue that it's coop or backstab
1. in backstab mode everyone is going to go paranoia and not let anyone get in two fucking tiles of them while security arrests for the tiniest things.
2. in coop mode everyone immediately helps each other powergame and hand out dangerous shit freely because "hey they're not going to kill me later with this thing I just gave them!"

not fun.

[obscolene]

tfw it's a co-op round and everyone is arming up waiting for the blob/nuke ops to come

[Yakumo_Chen]

>paranoia laden game is the entire premise
>"let's reduce paranoia"

Hokay

[WJohnston]

Paranoia used in modes where paranoia is unfounded and detrimental to everyone is dumb.

[kevinz000]

Part of the game, atleast to me, and I hope to many people here, is deciding whether you should or should not trust someone on a metal deathtrap, and I even think that requiring more trust is good (although not lock-chem-dispenser-by-id or anything idlock/extreme).
This would remove that in about half our modes and dampen it in the other half.

[ShadowDimentio]

If you KNOW you can trust other people the game just turns into a massive powergame-off (see: war ops). War ops is fun as a rare novelty but jesus this would get annoying fast.

[Yakumo_Chen]

Half the challenge of half our modes like ops and clock is that the crew doesn't know what's coming and thus can't prepare, often other meta tells for other modes will throw the crew off like revtide
Take away the surprise and you take the biggest advantage these antag start with

[WJohnston]

Yeah reducing unfounded trust is the entire point of this idea. Because not trusting people early on in gamemodes where you should is a dumb grudge-inducing waste of time. This helps deal with that early game.

Although I understand the fears of basically preparing for war ops every round. Nuke ops, blob, wizard, meteors etc would need some rebalancing to be able to start off much sooner, or for the crew to have a much harder time building up and distributing their arsenal. A lot more rebalances would need to be designed after this. I think this would be the first step in actually being able to balance the game around that 2 minute mark announcement.

It's also a really bad sign of the state of our balance. that such antags have basically no chance of success if the crew actually knows about them and prepares ahead of time. Now though we'll have an actual timer to work with balancing things around.

[ShadowDimentio]

Literally how does your idea REDUCE unfounded trust? It increases it by a billion.

[WJohnston]

I meant to say unfounded distrust, my bad there.

[Yakumo_Chen]

Yeah reducing unfounded trust is the entire point of this idea. Because not trusting people early on in gamemodes where you should is a dumb grudge-inducing waste of time. This helps deal with that early game.

Although I understand the fears of basically preparing for war ops every round. Nuke ops, blob, wizard, meteors etc would need some rebalancing to be able to start off much sooner, or for the crew to have a much harder time building up and distributing their arsenal. A lot more rebalances would need to be designed after this. I think this would be the first step in actually being able to balance the game around that 2 minute mark announcement.

It's also a really bad sign of the state of our balance. that such antags have basically no chance of success if the crew actually knows about them and prepares ahead of time. Now though we'll have an actual timer to work with balancing things around.

Most of these antags have a start time of "as soon as they are ready" so there is no feasible way to balance this outside of giving preset kits that further homogenize game modes

[ShadowDimentio]

Everyone not linking arms and completely destroying every antag instantly is a deliberate design choice. None of our antags, with the single possible exceptions of blob and war ops, is able to go toe-to-toe with the crew at full heft.

What you're proposing will unbalance the entire game, and for what? A minuscule increase in crew cooperation?

[Yakumo_Chen]

This thread is so bad I am agreeing with ShadowDimentio, this should never happen

[ShadowDimentio]

How does it feel to be right for a change?

[WJohnston]

None of our antags, with the single possible exceptions of blob and war ops, is able to go toe-to-toe with the crew at full heft.

This right here is kind of a bad thing. The announcement system is the first step, there would need to be a lot of rebalancing in the end to make the crew less unstoppably powerful.

A full rebalance of the game isn't really possible, or at least no sane person would ever want to do so. Still, our current system doesn't really work on its own, either, because as you just said, something as innocuously small as "OPS" or "WIZARD" or "BLOB" can totally tear these guys a new asshole even right now.

[ShadowDimentio]

The crew isn't unstoppably powerful, there's just like a 15-70 crew to 1-8 antag ratio.

[Yakumo_Chen]

No amount of comms screaming is going to stop ops who have the disk already or a wizard who is already destroying security. The element of surprise is the number one reason the crew must stay paranoid in every round type.

[Qbopper]

i'm all for encouraging cooperative gameplay but telling the crew "lol it a coop round" is not a good idea

[cedarbridge]

You know what would reduce crew distrust too? Blatantly announcing the roundtype. That's stupid too.

[Cobby]

I'm just a bit confused what the end goal is here.

We already give you blatant tells that you can meta work together in war ops and blob. This would fuck over the only two other applicable modes, cc and stealthops, because they rely on stealth and not knowing the mode.

[Deitus]

im personally against this for reasons that have already been stated.

[JJRcop]

I'm not only not in favor of this, I'm excited for the complete opposite direction: datum antag mixed mode, where even though it's confirmed clock cult, you can still be sucked up by a changeling.

[Wyzack]

This would literally turn more of our gametypes into a team deathmatch. what a thoroughly awful idea

[Nilons]

What if we took a top down whodunnit and told everyone whodunnit?

Then we'd just have a top down and that's not very fun is it

[DemonFiren]

so who triggered oranges?

[Ezel]

Just make code blue activate when a traitot buy his first item or cult makes their first move :^)

[Xango]

So presently we have two pretty distinct types of game modes:

Backstabbing: Any kind of mode which involves being a sneaky sly frenchman like traitor, changeling, conversion modes and so on, where the crew tears itself apart. Security typically shoots at its own crew.
Co-op: Any kind of mode which involves dealing with clear-cut outside forces attacking the station, such as nuke ops, blobs, aliens, meteors and so on.

The problem:
Player vs player gameplay is interesting in all its forms. While I personally very much dislike the whole "security has tasers and cuffs and puts people in little boxes for 30 minutes because that guy might be an antagonist" bullshit, there can be some really interesting emerging moments and it'd be a shame to get rid of it in its entirety. Co-op modes do this without the whole security-being-shit-to-its-own-crew deal because you have a clearly defined outside threat to rally against and no fear of an asshole changeling appearing out of thin air behind you. While these are great on their own, they fundamentally do not mix with eachother. There's no such thing as working together when any one the people with you (possibly multiple) could turn on you at any moment.
Unfortunately, getting rid of either half of these game modes would greatly reduce the amount of gameplay options and variety that ss13 provides, and that's too great a loss to do.



So here's a middle ground!



The solution:
The idea here is to make use of the roundstart elevation to blue alert to only occur in backstab type modes, while no such thing happens in co-op modes.
This gives players a meta way of knowing "okay, do I check my back and not trust anyone this round, or do I start preparing for an outside threat?". Basically you can gear yourself up with peace of mind that no changeling will suck out your genes while the ops, meteors, or blobs prepare for 20 minutes. It'll quell the whole "misplaced mistrust" issue we have in gamemodes where not trusting your fellow crewmembers is actually detrimental for everyone involved.

Thoughts?

One of my favorite moments in the game have been getting backstabbed. This one time I managed to acquire the title of captain as traitor. Killed everyone that may or may mot have been onto me (added them to my subverted borg army) and protected a traitor that was caught while killing someone and formed a team with them. I had a secret base in maint where I hid the guy and it had all the command consoles. He and I killed a lot of people and an ERT just showed up. They catch me. I tell them as they are taking me to centcomm that my accomplice is on the station and will bomb it if he doesn't hear from me. They laugh and tell me that he was the one that informed centcomm about what was happening in the first place! Turns out I was his target and I was working with my own killer.

[Xango]

I realise now that what I wrote has nothing to do with what op said but meh whatever its a cool story