Lets look at the current round system. That is, the system where you start with a new round, things happen, the shuttle is called, the round ends and a new one starts. It has many benefits but also many flaws. The inherent reset between rounds both restores anything lost, and destroys anything built.
Because of this system, you have to be very careful while adding new content, because it has to remain interesting or at least avoid being tedious through dozens or hundreds of rounds. As well, the loss can be disheartening and discourage any sort of large-scale effort; you hardly ever see anyone rebuild the derelict, or expand the station, or even properly repair damaged areas, because there's little point.
And the constant conflict between people who want the round to end now vs later, the urge to "get a round over with" during any unpleasant round type so that something better can be played/so that you can get a antag roll, the constant struggle to meta the 1 type of major antagonist during most rounds, etc... it's all rather unhealthy.
So, I had a idea to try and completely move past the concept of rounds, without drastically changing the way the game is played. My plan to do such is as follows:
First, there are no more 'rounds', plain and simple. Barring crashes or restarts due to bugs or prudent admin intervention, the game just. Keeps. Going. No shuttle, no leaving. This would normally raise a bunch of problems, so, in no particular order we enable or create:
- Respawning. If you die, you can either get cloned, revived, join a ghost role, keep observing etc, or you can wait some amount of time (say, 30 minutes), and then you can respawn with your previous character or with a new character. Same rules apply as joining a ghost role, you don't remember whatever happened before. ICly, it could be framed as Nanotrasen deciding you've been lost for good, and cloning a new copy of you and sending it to restaff the station.
- Better reconstruction. Minor damage needs to be repaired more easily, and everything needs to be constructable or replacable. This is already mostly here, things like improved RCDs or somesuch could make basic repairs easier, there aren't a ton of things which aren't constructable so it shouldn't be too hard to fill those in. One of the most important things would be, I think, a way to restore a area to "factory default" so that you don't need to work to replace all the little details, signs, floor tiles etc. Something like a regenerative nanobot goop or bluespace time reverser or w/e, which just resets any given area to the exact state it would be in when the station first loaded. We also would need...
- A large scale version of such a factory default reset device. If nuke ops win and nuke the station, someone BoH bombs, etc; first of all everyone would be dead and unable to survive getting off the arrivals shuttle to do any sort of repairs, and secondly no one would want to repair literally the entire station. In comes something like a Nanotrasen Mass Restoration Device. The functionality I'm imagining is it would literally be like a singularity in reverse, except slightly more directed. It floats around the station and restores massive areas to their original, pristine conditions. Of course, details like whether it would be controllable, when and how it is used, and limitations, etc would all be up for debate.
- Antagonists use a continuous system, sort of like ghost roles+mulligan but for any normal antagonist. When arriving at the station, you have a random chance to become a traitor, ling, etc. To avoid a join-suicide-respawn meta when trying to get antag, you could also be revealed as a sleeper agent, deep-cover ling, etc when playing. People could suddenly get fed up with Centcom and get a flash bluespaced to them by anonymous third parties, the syndicate would occasionally send in a team of operatives when opportunity arises, and so on. Antags could overlap and mix, and gone would be the meta of "its traitorlings so we don't have to worry about anything else".
- Many other miscellaneous fixes and changes to correct other, smaller issues. There would probably have to be things like roaming space carp that (slowly) eat bodies, to avoid space becoming a littered graveyard. Space Ruins and Lavaland would have become non-static, possibly by allowing space/mining shuttles to visit randomized, generated-on-demand areas instead of a single static area. There would probably have to be improved cleaning tools available to clean up the inevitable blood-soaked hallways. There would need to be a counter-system (like automatic death squad spawns) for various antagonists which gain strength and don't vanish when they "win", like revolutionaries, revenants, devils, cultists, etc. And so on.
As for why, I think this would solve the common, disheartening issue I mentioned above, where the round end is sort of a insurmountable barrier that destroys all progress and effort. With this, whatever you achieve could be destroyed, but you can actually work to protect it and preserve it now. Research could be saved after major bombings, etc if you take a back up disk and botany could stow away plant seeds, any goodies miners find on lavaland would survive with the miners but could just as well be lost when they are gibbed/fall in a chasm, and so on. People would have reason to expand the station, build and improve things, and more.
The biggest issue I see is that it's such a radical change that it would be difficult to convince people to try it, let alone get people to work on it. No other server does anything like this, there's no precedents or guidelines for anything like this. Also, it can't be half done, the system has to be at least mostly finished and then implemented. Its just like planetstation; you can't have a station on a boring, half-completed, half-functional planet, so most or all of it has to be finished up-front. And we can all see how long planetstation has lingered in development hell.
I think it's feasible, but there are a lot of things which have to be done, some of which are obvious (and I opted not to mention them), and some of which will only become apparent later on. But, what do you think?
