/tg/Station 13

Mulligan is great when antagonists quietly die in rounds like cult or gang by keeping the round going. but it is having exactly the opposite on rounds that have one main antag (wizard/malf/blob).

In these rounds when the primary antagonist dies people WILL call the shuttle. It doesn't really matter if you think this is what should happen or not but this is simply what is happening now. This means all that mulligans does for these roundtypes is add another 15 minutes of evac to the round.

What is the added value of 15 extra minutes compared to the old situation of the round just ending?

The idea is that people wouldn't leave if things weren't fucked badly and let new antags build with the tools and damage the first antag did.
The reality is that people seem to enjoy restarting endlessly at the slightest excuse.

All I can say is that the config options to mess with where and when mulligans happen already exist, and admins have the option of ending on antag death every time it happens, so someone out there still has faith in the system (or can't be bothered to change it).

[quote="Incoming"]The reality is that people seem to enjoy restarting endlessly at the slightest excuse.[/quote]
[/b]

FUCKING
THIS

What the hell is wrong with the playerbase? Do people think we'll have more playtime if we spend more time evacuating?

That's because the round was over when the major antagonist died.

Again, this is Wizard, Blob and Malf. These three are the single most powerful individual antagonists in the game, and defeating them is a massive challenge. After all that time, effort and people killed by them many people just want to end the round afterwards.

@Incoming/AnonymousNow: That would be equivalent to playing a round of Counter Strike, and after you defeat the Terrorists and disarm the bomb you now have to wander around for a hour cleaning the place up and standing still doing nothing, or wait for your extraction to return in 15 minutes.

The round is over, don't force Mulligan to drag the round out when people don't want it to drag out. Mulligan is only useful in very specific circumstances, and even then its something that should be more at the whim of a player Admin and not a automated system that can't adjust for the round and general mood.

Steelpoint wrote: @Incoming/AnonymousNow: That would be equivalent to playing a round of Counter Strike, and after you defeat the Terrorists and disarm the bomb you now have to wander around for a hour cleaning the place up and standing still doing nothing, or wait for your extraction to return in 15 minutes.

The round is over, don't force Mulligan to drag the round out when people don't want it to drag out. Mulligan is only useful in very specific circumstances, and even then its something that should be more at the whim of a player Admin and not a automated system that can't adjust for the round and general mood.

That's some pretty poor false equivalency, and I'd expect more from you, Steelpoint.

Think of it like Killing Floor - now the antagonists have been beaten back, you have some breathing room and resources to improve yourself before another lot, probably stronger, inevitably get sent at you. We hardly ever see lategame dynamics anymore, because people call the shuttle too early.

This is why I suggested a Mulligan roundtype that checks for admin presence and spawns a random antagonist if it gets no admin input in five minutes.

The reality is that people want their restart so they can have a go at being the antagonist.

Except the correct analogy for Killing Floor would be you fighting the Patriarch (Or Hans), if you win the game ends, if you lose the same happens. With Mulligan what happens is that after you kill the Patriarch you now have to fight ten more waves of far weaker enemies.

Its called pacing, the game is built to last for around 30 to 45 minutes, most content can be finished within 30 minutes or less (depending on skill and RNG), beyond that point the game's quality starts to decline. This is primarily due to the station reaching the height of its power, and as these activities cease due to completion people turn to constructing weapons and other systems to pass the time, or they start making their own fun.

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Mulligan simply drags out rounds that don't need to be dragged out, the three antags in the OP usually leave a lot of death and destruction in their wake, with the now spawning Traitors are either too impotent (due to the power of the crew) or are able to easily finish off the few scattered survivors with ease.

This is not fun, and at minimum drags the round out for 15 to 20 more minutes. Which means the round likely will now go beyond the 1 hour mark.

Mulligan can work for lower key rounds like Traitor or Changeling, but even then its not reliable as, again, it does not account for mood. Something on a player or admin can judge.

Rounds need to end, they should end on a high note after defeating the major antagonist, not on a low note after you've spent 30 more minutes picking your nose.

Can we just have the tensioner back on full power for these situations and a fixed 15 minute shuttle call.

Wizard dies? Time for 2 more, a ninja, a third of the crew going traitor and a slaughter demon on the shuttle.

Personally, I think you're looking at it the wrong way.

Some of the very best rounds I have ever played have mostly involved fighting through a hostile station alongside my other survivors after a disaster; in several of those, we just about recovered just in time to get a bit of warning about the next looming threat, and fight that one off whilst waiting for the shuttle (using an adminspawned something). You don't get much of a breather after breaking through burnt-out corridors and avoiding all the shocked doors, but it's just enough to get you on different, interesting footing for the final encounter, usually involving plugging in research in a badly damaged lab, maybe throwing together a mech whilst security and medbay round up survivors.

If you think prepping for and encountering a second antagonist like this isn't worth it, isn't exciting, then you just haven't played such a round. But translating that into Mulligan could be difficult.

Mulligan is a bit of a let down after these high power antags because the sloppy solos it serves are usually weaker.

The original idea with mulligan was that eventually high power antags could follow other high power antags. It just never got there because:

1. Every game mode handles how it tracks its antags and what qualifies as "a completed round" differently
2. Every game mode needs to understand every OTHER game modes methods for them to work together

If you were around for when mulligan was in active development you might remember that every time I attempted to expand it crazy edge case bugs would fly out of the woodwork. This was so maddeningly exhausting to debug that once I got the system in a position where it all "worked" on a general level I resolved to just rewrite game mode code so I wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. That evolved to datum based antags, which is still a thing but is gonna take a while.

So yeah, mulligans as they exist now are basically a prototype of one of the features of a system I hope to eventually get you guys, and when/if it gets here all this will be moot. In the meantime feel free to turn on/off mulligans however you feel fit. It does work in some cases, but whether people things it works in louder rounds is all a bit subjective (again it would work better if you all weren't so quick to leave [but I can't control that {sadly}])

This trash has gone on for so long, so many shit rounds are the result of a dragged-out mulligan

We worked FINE without it and we'll work fine without it, this has been a greatly extended test and I think it ultimately failed; or at least, it showed that extended rounds is (as people have always said) only fun for certain jobs but amazingly unfun for everyone else.

I still maintain that people who prefer jobs with a lot of wind up time (mining being one of the worst hit here) who do their due diligence at roundstart only for the round to end right as they come into their own are getting a raw deal without mulligans.

I always wanted rounds to be more organic with proper early/middle/late games. I feel that rounds that just STOP because something critically important to progression died are failures in terms of gameplay. Mulligan works sometimes, but people aren't game to it oftentimes so it just becomes a lot of faffing about. These are still the goals I'm trying to fix here, but it's become clear that mulliganing by itself often doesn't work for single antagonist roundtypes.

"mining has a lot of windup" sorry what

Science is really the only department that suffers and that is again, only from material gating

It's no suprise that the usual security/ai powergamers are against this

Put up a poll please. I'm strongly convinced that this is a case of a vocal minority of [a certain type of player] or just plain old "I'm dead restart pls."

Edit: Oh wait. We've had a poll on this in the past. Do we need another one for the specific scenarios outlined in the OP?

invisty wrote:Put up a poll please. I'm strongly convinced that this is a case of a vocal minority of [a certain type of player] or just plain old "I'm dead restart pls."

Edit: Oh wait. We've had a poll on this in the past. Do we need another one for the specific scenarios outlined in the OP?

Yes, because these are the "specific" scenario's where it is a problem. Mulligan in the other roundtypes is a good addition and adds to the rounds. For the rounds specified it adds nothing but 15 minutes of evac. Which is not fun even if you have a job with windup, because the whole station grinds to a halt while people prepare for the evac anyway.

AnonymousNow wrote: What the hell is wrong with the playerbase? Do people think we'll have more playtime if we spend more time evacuating?

That's always been my single biggest complaint about /tg/ in particular: once the shuttle is called, we spend about 30 minutes doing the whole evacuation and restart procedure, and then very often less than 30 minutes before the next shuttle is called.

I think invisty is right that people want a restart so that they can get their chance at antag, which is a symptom of there not being enough conflict / chaos affecting the lives of non-antags, or enough problems for them to try to solve. There's no simple solution to that. We could try to steer the coders away from adding yet another bunch of guns and toward working on this, but volunteer coders will work on what they want, not on what anyone tells them is important.

I've previously suggested removing the evacuation shuttle and going to fixed-length rounds, but nobody seems to like that.

rockpecker wrote:I think invisty is right that people want a restart so that they can get their chance at antag, which is a symptom of there not being enough conflict / chaos affecting the lives of non-antags

This. This is why I get bored. There's nothing fucking happening. It will be 15 minutes into your average tator round and I wouldn't even know we have syndies, and only becoming aware after someone syndiebombs part of the station. Tator, and ESPECIALLY ling feels totally inert in most cases, and, making up 35% of all rounds, I'm frankly bored to tears, even as a validhunter.

I miss the days where as detective I could do a circuit around maint and find 1-3 new corpses each time or a murder in progress. I still can't do that.

Really, Wiz should be short sweet and to the punch. Blob should never be mulliganed because half the station is usually in disrepair and the crew is utterly exhausted from killing a blob/apathetic at that stage. Malf should never mulligan because it's not plain fun playing with all the doors shocked for another 30 minutes while most of the crew doesn't have insuls and there being no AI or cyborgs.

What if you dropped a 10 minute unrecallable shuttle and dropped a bunch of random traitors. It would allow the rounds to end 'normally' with a shuttle ride/celebration and allow some extra gameplay afterwards.

As it is though I think the extra time is not productive in most cases. No one rebuilds, they just let all the late joiners suffocate in arrivals.

Maybe the approach is wrong maybe instead of throwing random garbage in after antags that change the layout of the station significantly there should be specific second wave side antags to follow up things like malf and blob not sure about wiz.

Like maybe after blob eats out part of the station NT sends heavy construction drones over but they don't stop remodeling and eventually start to force some of the crew to mine or use them as building materials or something because they prefab stations usually and aren't considerate toward the inhabitants. Like turn "we can fix it!" into a semi antag people eventually revolt against. Or send invasive electricians to try and rewire everything after malf. Or militant chaplains to purge magic once the wizard dies + a light summon magic event after all the wizards are dead to make sure they have something to do.

The complete lack of direction, purpose and struggle for the crew is the single biggest issue with the game and what I tried to address with away missions/lavaland but it's such a massive effort and a pain in the ass to try at.

Redesigning the core of the game to involve exploration and building would be hard enough on my own let alone trying to cram into a constantly shifting open source project I have zero control over. Not sure if it'd even work out anyway.