/tg/Station 13

AKA the shuttle problem.

It is extremely difficult to coherently balance this game, because there is no minimum baseline for how long a round goes for.

This makes it extremely hard to buff or nerf departments, jobs or antags, because somone who plays on one server will experience rounds on the 20 minute average, and someone who plays on another will experience 2-3 hour rounds.

one idea I had sloshing around was simply to make it impossible to call the shuttle before 40 minutes had elapsed, or only 10% of crew were still alive (both numbers could be configurable, so as to allow tweaking)

This means that there is a minimum baseline at which a round lasts for and we can tune jobs and the events system to that timeline

I'm not sure about what to do about wizard, or nukie, if you let them end the round early, they are still going to cause balance issues, which maybe can be mollified by just turning their roll chance down so it happens less. Personally I'm of the view of simply annoucing that x or y has happened and then proceeding. (Nukie is kind of unavoidable given that it destroys the entire station, maybe we should remove stealth ops to make it so people don't waste time on projects when it's nukeops)

The rest of the gamemodes should be fine with this restriction, as either the damage is so severe it's unrecoverable (in which case most of the crew will die) or things can continue and people can work on projects (even if they happen to be revs who just murdered all the heads and loyal staff)

PS if you respond with "I'm bored by the 20 minute mark and want a new round because there's no antags" then please go commit die before rolling for midround antags.

What do you do if you don't have any big project

I don't think hard restrictions are the way to go because of how unpredictable a round can go, sometimes there's legitimate reasons to call the shuttle early.
At the same time I think the issue is any shmuck with a head ID can call the shuttle, or just ask the AI to do it.

I think a good compromise would be to change the requirements to be much stricter until the desired minimum round duration is reached.
Example: up until the 40 minute mark calling the shuttle requires swiping 2-3 head IDs within 30 seconds or so, if there's a real emergency the heads can all get together and decide to call the shuttle instead of one bored guy that got his hands on all access making that decision for everyone. Past the 40 minutes, current requirements apply.

Please don't work backwards again trying to artificially extend the round length, and instead address the issues causing the premature shuttle calls. Here, let me help you start:

-remove captains spare id
-tone down explosions and station destruction

The reason rounds on tg tend to last so short is because roleplay is not encouraged and there isn’t enough end game content for each department to keep it interesting

I do think it being easier to call it than fix it is a problem, though, and engineers doing their job is kinda the point. Maybe the station should start out weaker/with less prep and worse equipment, to discourage restarting the round. Otherwise The game is too safe without antags, mood doesn’t have nasty effects, hunger is harmless, diseases are a meme naturally and the chemist fixes them not the viro blah blah

Except Sybil and Larry regularly get 2h hour+ rounds. And Bagil rounds are not shorter because people don't want to rp or because it's too safe, it's exact opposite. Bagil is a deathmatch server.

I wouldn't recommend it Oranges.

Hasn't the mindset of /TG/ always been a stream-lined and faster-paced variant of the ss13 experience?

The writings on the wall that we're shifting towards a new mindset. Well, at least the codebase portion of the game would like to do so.

But, I would prefer that we'd not do it this way. If you want to inflate the time spent on the round, It'd be better to give jobs more fluffy content.

A Scientist, Virologist, Cook, Botanist, Chemist, and Miner are all willing to be at their job department for at least an hour. Why is that? Well, they just have enough content to sustain themselves for such a time period.

Your average assistant, sec officer, and Medical Doctor don't have the same luxury.

We're already on a good pace, with all of the jobs listed above having enough content for long shifts. But one clear flaw to this is that average Captain just simply cannot find anything to entertain themselves for such a time.

So, to clarify. Shifts ending are not the means of the jobs listed above, but simply bored captains or crew-members without as much content. If they have more content, the round goes on longer. Excluding the grief of antagonists.


Finally, I would not recommend extending the rounds artificially because of the Burn-Out effect.

This may be just akin to me, but after spending the same 3 hour long rounds as a Chemist on a server like Paradise stocking up the fridge with healing chems over and over again. I get bored of the game entirely, really fast. Compared to the fresh and intense rounds that /TG/ has to offer.

We have a spark that High-Rp simply cannot match. The vibrant intensity of a Roller-Coaster, compared to a make-believe office job.

/TG/station really captures that Sci-Fi feeling of "When a Space-Station Experience goes off the rails." So, this is why I'd prefer we'd not do this.

Tldr; Give more jobs more content, not more arbitrary time-limits. That'd just lead to Burn-Out from the weaker jobs.

I am astonished that engineers now all have rcds that can be refilled with glass and they STILL can’t fix a hull breach.

if you post in this thread claiming that RP is the reason round length is so short/not long enough, you're a fucking dipshit

there is no point in giving more content to jobs because you'll never see it because the captain sprained his ankle and called the shuttle in 20 minutes.

I do agree that toxins probably needs to just go completely, or construction of station infrastructure like pipes, wires and grilles/doors/windows/tiles needs to be made much much easier or simpler.

There should be enough content in the jobs as is, to sustain at least 40 minute rounds, which is about the average on /tg/.

We know that it's possible to go much longer, but there's almost little to no reason to go shorter, save for the fact that everyone is already dead, which is why the crew percentage escape hatch would exist.

oranges wrote:there is no point in giving more content to jobs because you'll never see it because the captain sprained his ankle and called the shuttle in 20 minutes.

I do agree that toxins probably needs to just go completely, or construction of station infrastructure like pipes, wires and grilles/doors/windows/tiles needs to be made much much easier or simpler.

im fairly certain I put up a PR to block early shuttle calls before a certain percentage of the station was dead or whatever, but it's lost to the void now lol

if I can find the branch name i'll see if I can recover it but github doesn't show you any of your PRs in the Pull Requests section if you're banned

found it
does this sound good for you oranges, if so I'll pull the branch down and patch it

Yeah, I remember that PR. I think somebody made a more up to date version (coiax? Incoming? maybe one of them). I was surprised when it didn't get merged

That's a pretty convincing argument, antag-rolling captains are the bane of ss13. Along with Captains who buy the asteroid/Hi-Daniel every shift and don't do anything of substance.

But we should realize the source of these short rounds, the freedom of grief.

Those Lavaland Xenos and Round-Start Xeno Eggs always causing the shift to end on station.

Those Tesla-Singulo Bounties that always go haywire and never end up contained and always destroy the station.

Why the fuck did the Scientist think making Sentient-Spiders was a good idea. The master may listen to you, but the slaves wont.

All in All, as another player put it. "it's reaching critical mass; there's too many timebombs on the station to supervise them all."

There's always some method of mass-destruction brewing about. That may be fine as an Antag, but personally I think there's too much leeway and incentives for the Non-Antagonists to cause destruction.

It never ruins the rounds of them, as they find it fun. But the players who long rounds appeal to, like that miner, virologist, botanist, xenobiologist or really dedicated engineer will surely get sick of it.

Tone down the Mass-Death at a press of a button. Tone down the Incentives for it.

Shadowflame909 wrote:That's a pretty convincing argument, antag-rolling captains are the bane of ss13. Along with Captains who buy the asteroid/Hi-Daniel every shift and don't do anything of substance.

But we should realize the source of these short rounds, the freedom of grief.

Those Lavaland Xenos and Round-Start Xeno Eggs always causing the shift to end on station.

Those Tesla-Singulo Bounties that always go haywire and never end up contained and always destroy the station.

Why the fuck did the Scientist think making Sentient-Spiders was a good idea. The master may listen to you, but the slaves wont.

All in All, as another player put it. "it's reaching critical mass; there's too many timebombs on the station to supervise them all."

There's always some method of mass-destruction brewing about. That may be fine as an Antag, but personally I think there's too much leeway and incentives for the Non-Antagonists to cause destruction.

It never ruins the rounds of them, as they find it fun. But the players who long rounds appeal to, like that miner, virologist, botanist, xenobiologist or really dedicated engineer will surely get sick of it.

Tone down the Mass-Death at a press of a button. Tone down the Incentives for it.

There's another solution though; make the longer jobs shorter.

Not that I'm suggesting an either-or approach, I'm just saying there's multiple ways to skin Runtime. I agree 100% with oranges about repairs being way too goddamn slow, for example.

Maybe I'm not thinking about this at all, but I feel like sec just doesn't keep a good enough eye on toxins. Sure it's hard to fix, but people just don't notice issues until they actually prop up, people aren't conscientious enough. Prevention is as important as repair.

Its usually good practice to check cams and write down who is manning Toxins or Xenobio and akin. But most players don't check

Goofballs PR wouldn’t be half bad, to a degree. Certain round types such as blood cult and nuke ops should have some sort of bypass. Of course, there would need to be a mechanic to prevent meta.

But you should add whatever content you have planned to jobs before putting it in place. Its fucking awful whenever a half finished PR/idea gets pushed and players half to wait for updates for the game to not be shit again.

But what do you mean by making it more brutal goofball?

We have cult currently balanced on the shuttle needing to be called ASAP, it just snowballs out of control too fast and a decently competent cult can't be stopped that easily.

Making disposal pipes and air pipes not become damaged by explosions would be a simple fix that would make fixing places actually decently fast.

You could still sabotage both, but you would need a welder and wrench instead of just any bomb, ever.

Qbmax32 wrote:The reason rounds on tg tend to last so short is because roleplay is not encouraged and there isn’t enough end game content for each department to keep it interesting

To go along with this, we keep removing and nerfing their endgame content as well.

A question: Does the problem you are trying to fix actually exist? Most early shuttle calls eventually get recalled.

datorangebottle wrote:

Qbmax32 wrote:The reason rounds on tg tend to last so short is because roleplay is not encouraged and there isn’t enough end game content for each department to keep it interesting

To go along with this, we keep removing and nerfing their endgame content as well.

endgame = 20 mins in

Thats not a proper response chief. He said nerfs and removals to the content, not "nerfs and removals to the time it takes to reach that content"

All in all, we should port citadel xenobio.

Hopefully without the gold slime extract fauna removal though.

Dr_bee wrote:Making disposal pipes and air pipes not become damaged by explosions would be a simple fix that would make fixing places actually decently fast.

You could still sabotage both, but you would need a welder and wrench instead of just any bomb, ever.

Nice idea but good luck finding engineers who actually do their job, much less repair piping in the aftermath of bombs.

also lmfao trying to get longer rounds after removing cloning prescanning

Half the issue to me about engineering isn't easy tools, even with easy tools someone still has to do it.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=21264 <- this idea could help. Rounds can be pretty much killed if all access gets out and is spread around

When I play engineer, all my attempts to fix the station up are meaningless. Restoring an area back to pristine condition takes a lot of time, and by the time I finish that, something else has blown up. It doesn't matter if I fix the station or not, the shuttle is being called anyway.

Mark9013100 wrote:also lmfao trying to get longer rounds after removing cloning prescanning

Yeah, even if engineers can fix the station, if most people are dead waiting to be cloned then I am just gonna call the shuttle. I'm not letting them be bored to fucking tears.

Ayy Lemoh wrote:

Mark9013100 wrote:also lmfao trying to get longer rounds after removing cloning prescanning

Yeah, even if engineers can fix the station, if most people are dead waiting to be cloned then I am just gonna call the shuttle. I'm not letting them be bored to fucking tears.

See but you’re thinking of this as a game meant to provide fun to players. That ain’t right.

Do what High-RP servers do.

Force an ERT before the shuttle comes.

maybe make a formula, where there is an exponential decrease in "minimum wait time till you can call the shuttle" depending on how many people are alive, noone dead? 1 hour, 75%? 45 minutes, 50%? 25 minutes. etc.

Rather than changing when the shuttle can be called, why not change how long it takes to arrive?

Right now, the minimum time is 5 minutes (red alert), which gives practically no time to finish what one's working on. 10 minutes is not much better, as that's roughly how long it takes for engineers repair the station. By the time the station is repaired, the shuttle has already arrived.

It'd be more reasonable to have the timer be set to 15 or 20 minutes, no? And to remove red alert, which serves no purpose other than ending the game early.

Hathkar wrote:When I play engineer, all my attempts to fix the station up are meaningless. Restoring an area back to pristine condition takes a lot of time, and by the time I finish that, something else has blown up. It doesn't matter if I fix the station or not, the shuttle is being called anyway.

This is the biggest problem I run into when I play engineer. Sure I can fix the gigantic hole that was once medbay but the heads will just call the shuttle even if I have a backpack full of metal and sleeper boards ready to rebuild it.

Its a circular problem.

any emergency where red alert can be performed isn't an emergency that requires red alert.

It's equally difficult to find an average roundlength to balance around when on one hand we have "sneaky" traitors who can take a while to do their objectives and on the other we have team antags that just turn the game either to a frantic TDM or a frantic TDM after 20 minutes and one team is stacked to hell but not dead yet.

Also big bombs are dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb I hate them. They're not fun for anyone who has to remotely clean up the mess. The only reason they've managed to stay so long is probably because le epic cuban pete meme.

Also big bombs are dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb I hate them

Is it time for 4dplanner's most unpopular removal yet

4dplanner wrote:

Also big bombs are dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb I hate them

Is it time for 4dplanner's most unpopular removal yet

Don't, the community would explode with outrage

as dumb as bombs are, surviving getting hit by one and/or a singulo is one of the most exciting things in the game for me. therefore, every map should have a singulo but no bombs.

Increasing the bomb resistance of walls and R-walls would be a better fix. you could blow the hell out of a room but breaching through it would be harder.

Cobby wrote:It's equally difficult to find an average roundlength to balance around when on one hand we have "sneaky" traitors who can take a while to do their objectives and on the other we have team antags that just turn the game either to a frantic TDM or a frantic TDM after 20 minutes and one team is stacked to hell but not dead yet.

Also big bombs are dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb I hate them. They're not fun for anyone who has to remotely clean up the mess. The only reason they've managed to stay so long is probably because le epic cuban pete meme.

I think part of this would probably be reviewing our TDM modes and looking to reduce their roll chances, so you have shorter rounds less often.

Why not just remove big bombs from the standard traitor uplink.

I'm not sure we can target all the sources, given how deeply embedded this particular issue is in the game.

The idea behind my approach is to cap it, feel the pain of things that now stand out as round ending, and rebalance them, using player pain as the motivating factor.

if I try to shove through a bunch of nerfs without that, It's just asking for slapfights.

Shadowflame909 wrote:Why not just remove big bombs from the standard traitor uplink.

The issue isn't and never has been syndie bombs. While super destructive, unless they're on sale you can only get one. And they're expensive enough to discourage people from doing that unless they have a specific plan with it. It's not too difficult to repair the damage of one bomb, it's when multiple areas get hit with bombs that things start becoming an issue.
Even then, in a hypothetical round where they get like a 90% discount or something crazy like that and everyone is stocking the fuck up on 2tc tatorbombs, rounds where the station gets blown to fucking smithereens are fun. However, they're only fun when they're a rare occurrence instead of being every couple of rounds.
What still could be a good change is enforce a 5 minute timer minimum on them, remove the ability to unlock and move them, and turn defusing into some kind of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes-esque microgame. You could easily set up a simple yet poorly written ruleset for how to defuse bombs that requires a little bit of puzzle solving per bomb.

Quick question: What round length do you considere desirable?

I'd say that a one hour round is a pretty optimal length, stealth traitors can do a long con, people can make an autism fort, and the 'long game' departments like Botany and Xenobio have a chance to get online. Few things suck more than getting Ambrosia Gaia and hearing the shuttle get called, and with regular 30m chaos-splosion rounds jobs like Mining, Atmos, Genetics, Virology, etc, all become "why bother" when there are 2d spessmen to go flat and big boom damage to do. Hathkar made a great point. The shuttle is getting called anyways, so why bother? This lack of commitment to keeping what is, ostensibly, an important research and moneymaking station alive seems to be a Nanotransen corporate problem as well, especially after the disaster of the Derelict station. This also leads to a lack of game-driven RP encouragement because the station is ultimately a platform for spessmen to go flat and the round ends.
We have the advantage of having multiple servers. Perhaps consult with the headmins of the various servers to implement a test scenario for longer/shorter rounds - I've noticed Bagil has skewed shorter than Sybil lately so perhaps require minimum roundlengths on Sybil to see how it works out?

Well we need a bit of room to add complexity to jobs, so 1 hour would be the range that would be targeting yeah.

That's about enough time for people to drop in, enjoy a round or two in the evening or day and then pop off again to other stuff.

Phony_Name wrote:Perhaps consult with the headmins of the various servers to implement a test scenario for longer/shorter rounds - I've noticed Bagil has skewed shorter than Sybil lately so perhaps require minimum roundlengths on Sybil to see how it works out?

All three of our servers are under the same headadmins? Did you mean the downstreams?

i logged back into my account just to type this citrusfag

you could make the minimum shuttle call time adaptive to the following variables.

-round type (shorter minimum call time for explosive rounds, like wizard, blob, ect)
-previous round length (if the shuttle was called because calling conditions were met before the timer expired last round, the shuttle timer would be longer by a few minutes, and for every minute the shuttle wasn't called after the expire timer, two seconds would be added to the shuttle timer the following round)
-average of all previous round lengths in a 24 hour period previously.

(dog took a shit on the floor brb)