How do we extend average round time?

[Kryson]

oranges has expressed a desire to see longer rounds, yet rounds feel shorter than ever.

Short rounds stifles RP, interesting projects and disincentivises developers from creating late game content.

I think this is the biggest problem in the game at this point and feeds into the mindset that everything needs to be faster and easier which in turn creates even faster rounds.

Adding more crew content is a good start, but i don't see many crew content PRs on the tracker and i don't think crew content alone is enough to extend rounds.

My personal ideal would be 90min-2 hour rounds.

What is the plan to address this?

[Calomel]

I am honestly fine with shorter rounds. An average of an hour-long round is good enough for poeple to get things done job-wise and to play
out most things, and it doesn't get boring for people who just want to do their job and that's it.
Even with that, rounds are far longer on lesser pop servers, but I understand that playing with <15 poeple probably feels desertic.

On another topic, the issue of round duration is awlys tied to antag handling. It seems like antags are capable
of producing shuttle-call-worthy destruction really quickly (Fusion comes to mind), which severely shortens rounds; and
some antags by their own nature cause this (IIt seems like calling shuttle early is the easiest way to stop cult, in particular).

Tl:Dr - It seems liek Dynamic mode has created different antag-station interactions and as a result rounds are much shorter,
maybe we should try to determine why this is so and possibly think of ways to modify it to suit people's desires, and not
have 20 minute rounds.

[Shadowflame909]

The majority of the antags are incredibly capable of mass destruction and not many jobs have content that can keep you engaged for an hour +

What's chemistry supposed to do, get banned for being poisonous griefers?

We need more content Kryson. Round Time would then follow.

[skoglol]

1 hour rounds are reasonable, if you can't do it in 1 hour it's probably not worth doing. We shouldn't go much higher as a base, no need to punish people with extreme boredom for picking jobs with a more reactive style of gameplay, like security and medbay, or flat out no gameplay jobs like hop.

How do we achieve this?
1: Round ender gamemodes would have to go. Cult, nukies, revs, wizard (if non continuous). They do not work with longer rounds, and the chance of one of them being picked for any given round is too high.
2: Job content. Currently rolling a job like science gives you a single choice if you want to spend an hour doing something. That's xenobio. All the others are done in 5-10 minutes tops, and you often just end up staring at a screen while you tab out.
3: Prevent shuttle calls over stubbed toes. This kinda ties into the previous point, but for heads. If the captain/hop/hos/ce/cmo/rd get bored, they can call the shuttle. That's bad. We need a way to entertain heads enough to actually roll the job, then play the job until the round ends. How? No clue.
4: Prevent shuttle calls over small shit that seems big right then, but isn't actually a problem. Like a blob, why do we call the shuttle for a blob? Shuttle cant leave anyway, and the blob will be dead before it can. At that point, there should be more focus on fixing the damage and going back to whatever you were doing, but currently blob is a round ender most rounds regardless if it wins or not.
5: Draw the rest of the fucking owl.


Alternatively, reconsider when and how the round ends. Calling the shuttle is deeply engrained in the game, but I believe that being able to force round end as easily as you can hurts us in the long run. Antags have also been designed around the shuttle ending, with the best weapon against cult being a red alert shuttle call. Nukies force you to call and red alert as soon as you can. Wizards and traitors/lings that do well are also met with a shuttle call. The shuttle is the lazy mans solution to 1: missing out on the antag roll and 2: dealing with whatever situation is at hand. Why should you bother fighting the murderboner if you can just red alert the shuttle, hide for two and a half minutes then do whatever? Murderboner successfully cucked.


As for the comment on dynamic, the chaos have been toned down somewhat. Players will need some time to readjust though, we should see longer terry round times soon enough. This is also possible to fine tune, practically everything about dynamic is config adjustable.

[Shadowflame909]

so remove shuttle summoning, replace it with calling an ERT and have shuttles slowly ETA the entire round until docking 1 hour into the round or more depending on the default config

[skoglol]

Forcing round time of an hour is also not the final solution. Honestly, goofs dynamic shuttle timer was a good idea and probably something someone who actually cares to do things properly should implement.

[RaveRadbury]

Part of the difficulty with this is that there are some who want rounds shorter than they are now. I think that if we are going to move towards longer rounds in general that Bagil should get adjusted in the opposite direction. A large amount of change could be effected just by fiddling with the server configs. Round ending modes can be made continuous or set to occur less often. We could shorten the average Bagil round while lengthening all the others.

[skoglol]

Part of the difficulty with this is that there are some who want rounds shorter than they are now. I think that if we are going to move towards longer rounds in general that Bagil should get adjusted in the opposite direction. A large amount of change could be effected just by fiddling with the server configs. Round ending modes can be made continuous or set to occur less often. We could shorten the average Bagil round while lengthening all the others.

This is very possible with dynamic configs, you can tune shit way the fuck up or down per server.

[confused rock]

SS13 is like if in the final level of a campaign in l4d2 instead of having to survive until the chopper arrives you survive until you get bored and summon the chopper

the shuttle should come at a preset time in most gamemodes unless expedited or delayed and for once I don't just feel this way because lifeweb does it it doesn't do it but I still think it's a good idea

[Tlaltecuhtli]

ban heads for incompetence and calling because the meth factory exploded

[CPTANT]

Remove the ability of the AI to call the shuttle.

It's dumb and let's every assistant call the shuttle by shouting "AI law 2 call shuttle" on the radio.

[skoglol]

Remove the ability of the AI to call the shuttle.

It's dumb and let's every assistant call the shuttle by shouting "AI law 2 call shuttle" on the radio.

More of a band aid to the situation, but a good start. AI are compelled through law 1 to call shuttle the moment anything big happens that might lead to people getting hurt, which is dumb. Maybe if you could law 2 the AI to recall, but that gets way too easy again.
Remove AI shuttle calls!

[cacogen]

Make it so you can't call the shuttle until it's 40 minutes in

[wesoda25]

For round enders:

Cult should be returned to a non main antag position. A band of followers tasked with certain things: sacrifice this specific person, sacrifice 5 people total, have x members escape alive, convert 3 new members. Or, remove that last one and make cult no conversion. A small group of 3-7 followers (depending on pop) who work together and have strategy beyond stun and offer assembly line.

Wizard should be removed outside of dynamic, no longer its own gamemode. And in dynamic round shouldn’t end with wizard death (might already do this I’m not certain).

IDK about revs, but having the round not end once one side wins would definitely be interesting, at least to discourage station annihilation.

[deedubya]

I inherently disagree with longer round times in general. A bit under an hour should be the average we're aiming for. Almost all of the people here are adults, and thus tend to not always have the time to commit to those 3 hour slogfests that some people seem to enjoy. Further, having longer rounds tends to result in a lot of other issues. Less diverse gameplay, due to being stuck in the same round type and role for longer. More ghost gang salt, due to having to wait longer for a fresh round. More bored people, as the vast majority of jobs or projects are able to be completed in under an hour.

Having the occasional longer round where everything goes well is fine, but shouldn't be the norm. That being said, we shouldn't discourage having more content for people to do in their jobs. There should be so much content in a job that you wouldn't be able to finish it all in an average round. Extending the round length to the point that engineering can just build an entire new station every round seems rather silly with this in mind.

As for how to shorten round times, the quick and (probably)easy solution is to add scaling midround antag generator odds. Basically, double the chance for an antagonist or catastrophe(meteors) to spawn every half hour. So 2x at 30m, 4x at 1h, 8x at 1:30, 16x at 2:00, etc. This provides more things for the crew to deal with, potentially gets more ghosts back into the round, and ends the round in a more natural fashion than say implementing a mandatory shuttle call after 2-3 hours.


Also, as an aside: Wizard rounds should mulligan when the wizard dies, much like cult rounds currently do if you somehow kill/deconvert all the cultists. It's certainly not impossible to rebuild a station that's been terrorized by a wizard.

[Sandshark808]

How about instead of generating catastrophes, have dynamic be better paced and let people leave the round via a private shuttle (or the crew freezer from Goon)? Then rounds could go on for ages and people could just leave and let others take their place.

[skoglol]

Wizard should be removed outside of dynamic, no longer its own gamemode. And in dynamic round shouldn’t end with wizard death (might already do this I’m not certain).

IDK about revs, but having the round not end once one side wins would definitely be interesting, at least to discourage station annihilation.

Yeah, wizard does not end the round currently in dynamic, and that works well. With the additional removal of summon guns/magic/events, it doesn't break the round for everyone else either, although curse of madness might need to go away or get some tweaking too. Cheaper with non permanent traumas would probably do the trick.

As for revs, rev loss currently doesn't end round in dynamic. It ensures the revolution is over by removing the antag from everyone who was a rev/headrev, and sends a centcom message to confirm it is over. I have plans for changing the instant ending of rev win as well, but that is more work and requires some thinking. I will probably explore this further after the antag freeze ends.

[wesoda25]

If we remove wizard events (or add some actually fun ones like rng loot) and summon guns/weapons I'll never complain about anything ever again.

That all sounds good tho. +1

[Horza]

Pre-ssethtide Sybil was at a very comfy entente between antags and regular players, with counts between 20-50 players. Nukie/wiz rounds were so rare that Sybil was the easiest server to completely steamroll as, as any sort of antag. Was it rules-based or code-based? Nah. Just players realizing that murderboning on a usual Sybil round was like waterboarding a 6-year-old child. Sure, you can easily do it, but why? What do you gain? We had a lot of fun gimmick-based antags and gimmick-based wizzes. One wiz even got acomplained since they outright joined sec and got a warden job since they were doing the pacifist wiz thing and got away with it, mostly.

The best way to prevent the scenario of oh fuck 50% of the station died and nobody cares enough to kill the horrendously powergaming murderboner please sent ERT isn't the usual admeme response of no but rather to do the pre-ssethtide Sybil method of simply publically shaming anyone who murderbones for no real reason. The reason it doesn't work at the moment, or at least one of the reasons, is that the admins don't put their foot down.

Spoiler:

Especially when admins go deadmin, get pirate, plasmaflood the station, murder the entire shuttle, and don't even try to achieve their objectives, whilst shitposting at the entire server in OOC all the while. Yes, I mad.

It's a userbase problem and trying to fix it via code or policy will make it worse.

[Sandshark808]

Pre-ssethtide Sybil was at a very comfy entente between antags and regular players, with counts between 20-50 players. Nukie/wiz rounds were so rare that Sybil was the easiest server to completely steamroll as, as any sort of antag. Was it rules-based or code-based? Nah. Just players realizing that murderboning on a usual Sybil round was like waterboarding a 6-year-old child. Sure, you can easily do it, but why? What do you gain? We had a lot of fun gimmick-based antags and gimmick-based wizzes. One wiz even got acomplained since they outright joined sec and got a warden job since they were doing the pacifist wiz thing and got away with it, mostly.

The best way to prevent the scenario of oh fuck 50% of the station died and nobody cares enough to kill the horrendously powergaming murderboner please sent ERT isn't the usual admeme response of no but rather to do the pre-ssethtide Sybil method of simply publically shaming anyone who murderbones for no real reason. The reason it doesn't work at the moment, or at least one of the reasons, is that the admins don't put their foot down.

Spoiler:

Especially when admins go deadmin, get pirate, plasmaflood the station, murder the entire shuttle, and don't even try to achieve their objectives, whilst shitposting at the entire server in OOC all the while. Yes, I mad.

It's a userbase problem and trying to fix it via code or policy will make it worse.

This is a pretty on-point opinion. Aside from Dornan, who is a server fixture, recently the big murderboners have been Bagil transplants and admins like imsxz, who kill the station and then suicide. It's kinda gay tbh, and if they want to shit the server up go to event hall or stay on Bagil.

[skoglol]

If we remove wizard events (or add some actually fun ones like rng loot) and summon guns/weapons I'll never complain about anything ever again.

Already gone in dynamic. Dynamic is the future.

[NoxVS]

How about instead of generating catastrophes, have dynamic be better paced and let people leave the round via a private shuttle (or the crew freezer from Goon)? Then rounds could go on for ages and people could just leave and let others take their place.

People dont call the shuttle because they are done playing for the day, they call it because the game is boring or everything is fucked. It allows for new antags which might make it FUN and also a station that isnt a headache to fix

[oranges]

if you're a terry player, do not even bother commenting in this thread, your server is misconfigured in a configuration the codebase does not support.

[Tarchonvaagh]

if you're a terry player, do not even bother commenting in this thread, your server is misconfigured in a configuration the codebase does not support.

:thinking:

[firecage]

Honestly. The only way would probably involve adjustments to policies/rules involving random shuttle calls and the freedom antags are given.

[Tarchonvaagh]

Honestly. The only way would probably involve adjustments to policies/rules involving random shuttle calls and the freedom antags are given.

I brought this up a few times in OOC and people just sent me to paradise

[cacogen]

Let people respawn as a different character after 10 minutes. Introduce more antags as the round progresses to keep it interesting, provided they aren't too destructive. Make repairs easier for engineers. Spawn another wizard instead of ending the round.

Look at the main causes of a round ending earlier than you'd like and work on reducing them. The above probably controversial ideas are to address the following: large amounts of dead, bored players and extensive or key area destruction.

[oranges]

i've already commented on this btw, and we're just going to push for longer rounds from the code side and not worry about the policy/culture sides.

Already happening.

[Shadowflame909]

i've already commented on this btw, and we're just going to push for longer rounds from the code side and not worry about the policy/culture sides.

Already happening.

cursed ending because its the worst of both worlds. Murderboning and long rounds as a ghost doing nothing

[oranges]

don't murderbone then

[Sandshark808]

don't murderbone then

I'm going to code a PR where if you spawn with the name "Lexia Black" you instantly die. That should solve everyone's problems.

[NoxVS]

Not enough content to last an hour for every job

Too easy to kill people, most crewmembers are fragile and die right away, murderboners can just powergame and run around killing people unchallenged until someone else powergames to kill them and then the round ends because who the fuck wants to deal with that

Too difficult to fix station damage, too easy to make explosives

[wesoda25]

If we remove wizard events (or add some actually fun ones like rng loot) and summon guns/weapons I'll never complain about anything ever again.

Already gone in dynamic. Dynamic is the future.

Well shit I guess it is

[deedubya]

i've already commented on this btw, and we're just going to push for longer rounds from the code side and not worry about the policy/culture sides.

Already happening.

Please explain how longer round times are a good thing for the people who play this game.

Unless of course what you mean by "longer rounds from the code side" is "implementing more content for the crew so that they won't be "finished" in under an hour," rather than implementing hardcoded artificial time extensions. Because that would be great for everyone if that's what you meant.

[Farquaar]

Isn't an hour-hour and a half perfectly reasonable? It's rare to see a Sybil round last less than an hour unless somebody goofs and blows themself up roundstart as a wizard.

[oranges]

yeah it's quite reasonable

[Tlaltecuhtli]

station breaking items like anything bigger than a meth bomb, plasma floods, bohs take so much time to fix and are unrewarding (an hallway will always look ugly because no d e c a l s) that you just throw a foam nade at it and then call shuttle

[CPTANT]

The fundamental problem of the game is that boring rounds where nothing is happening are long and interesting rounds with lots of action are short.

[Sandshark808]

The fundamental problem of the game is that boring rounds where nothing is happening are long and interesting rounds with lots of action are short.

And some jobs, especially service jobs, have such a slow ramp-up time that it's impossible to enjoy the fruits of your labors unless it's a no-antag boring round. Botany for example, or sometimes Xenobio.

Then other jobs like Engineering finish their set tasks immediately at roundstart and either get bored or have to find something wacky to do until the station is ruined. The entire non-antag job setup is out of whack to have long rounds be viable and fun for everyone.

[Shadowflame909]

Here's an easy one.

The reason so many bored people spring up is because they're antag rolling.

And you honestly can't blame them.

It's well known that the thought of winning a lottery machine gives people a dopamine boost, and dopamine is an incentive.

The antag picking system is effectively that. It's a silent stealthy lottery machine upon which you press ready to join, and hope you get it.

If antagonists were picked first and before the round started, grief would go down EXTREMELY. Because the bored players would not exist since the only people playing would be people who want to do jobs of some sort.

Maybe this would be helped out with a backup system kicking in, or just doing the dynamic method of antags slowly being rolled in. (But that would still lead to early griefers being bored.)

Bored players cause problems. The less of them, the longer a round.

[Tarchonvaagh]

Sorry shadow but this is stupid
Antags scale with the crew size

[Critawakets]

If there is something that would make rounds much shorter, it would be removing cloning which is what oranges wants. There really needs something to prevent reactionary "cap dead, call it" shuttle calls.

[Cobby]

the AMOUNT of antags scale with crew size, but the individual power is all the same.

At 25pop Wiz and at 100pop you still get 10 points.

Each traitor still gets 20TC and discounts are not shifted for pop.

If you want to kill round-enders, we need to look at the individual power for ALL antags. Especially in the wake of medical and stun changes.

[Shadowflame909]

this means current lings must die die die die

I wonder why they never became the "Stealth antag" they were supposed to be, and just became the immortal traitor with an infinite amount of items.

[Cobby]

I hate this argument "make it like the movie" because the whole premise of "The Thing" was finding its hardcounter and hardtell that obviously can't exist in a round-based open-source game without heavy RP restrictions or large balances in their favor which will just be a reskinned version of what we have now.

It's because people did not understand this.

[Tarchonvaagh]

the AMOUNT of antags scale with crew size, but the individual power is all the same.

At 25pop Wiz and at 100pop you still get 10 points.

Each traitor still gets 20TC and discounts are not shifted for pop.

If you want to kill round-enders, we need to look at the individual power for ALL antags. Especially in the wake of medical and stun changes.

meant that

[Tarchonvaagh]

If there is something that would make rounds much shorter, it would be removing cloning which is what oranges wants. There really needs something to prevent reactionary "cap dead, call it" shuttle calls.

Just remove roundstart cloning and lock it behind late game node

[PKPenguin321]

Isn't an hour-hour and a half perfectly reasonable? It's rare to see a Sybil round last less than an hour unless somebody goofs and blows themself up roundstart as a wizard.

yeah that was the goal a year or two ago and we've basically hit it, sure there are occasionally half hour wizard or rev rounds but cmon we need those sometimes

[Calomel]

yeah that was the goal a year or two ago and we've basically hit it, sure there are occasionally half hour wizard or rev rounds but cmon we need those sometimes

I'd tend to agree, variety si the spice of life. Even a murderboning round is interesting once in a while. The important thing is to strike the right balance.

[AnonymousNow]

I've been saying for a long time that the shuttle is the primary antagonist of every round. It stifles creativity, because there's no point in trying to make a cool project if it's going to be wiped away a minute after finishing it (assuming you're going at full pace without interruptions), and it looms heavily. An increase to roughly an hour of average gametime would improve the experience overall, I think.

I have some suggestions:

- Remove the AI's ability to call the shuttle. The main issue with shuttle calling is that it's so damn easy to do in the vast, vast majority of instances, because most of the crew (humans) can just demand that the AI call the shuttle, and it HAS to do so if it's Asimov. In addition, it's reasonable for an AI to call the shuttle if something goes slightly wrong, because Asimov law 1 dictates that it should try to prevent harm, which removing people from the arguably dangerous station does.
- Increase the recall timer from half to something like 66%-75%. Another response to the ease of calling shuttles, in that recalling them is comparatively much more difficult. The pre-eminent shuttle caller role cannot recall it at all once it's done, only people with access can - and they're frequently too busy to care or notice until it's too late.
- Hard-increase the shuttle fuelling time to about 30 minutes. Making it so that the shuttle just can't be called normally before the 30 minute mark is a bit of a nuclear option, but would prove to be effective. However, I've got some alternative ideas to this.
- Make antagweight in the following round higher depending on the length of the current one. With some diminishing returns, calling the shuttle later will result in more, bigger and/or better antagonists being spawned in the next round, which will encourage people who'll want to go for said antag roles. That said, you're not any more likely to get any one role that becomes available just by participating - it's standard picking, so you'll be in the pool for (insert big antag here), or be more likely to get antag status as several (insert small to medium antags here) will spawn instead.
- Ramp up midround antag spawning during the shuttle call timer if said call happens past a certain time. For example, if the shuttle is called a little before or after the hour mark, smaller antags like swarmers, pirates, lone ops or even wizards have a chance to spawn more often during said timer.
- Encourage "Central Command" to recall shuttles and possibly bop the caller if the reason given is shitty. We have a "reason for calling shuttle" field for a reason - it's so when that reason is "i want to go home" or "honk", centcom can shut them down and tell them to post a better reason. I've so rarely seen this being enforced, and it really needs to be. It's usually not even a case of there not being a legit reason, it's just people seeing the problem and putting irrelevant keyboard slappings in the textbox.
- Add/improve independent station victory conditions, and make shift times a part of said victory conditions. I suggested a while back that there could be minor and major victories during, say, revolutions for marooning your opponents alive (which is harder) instead of killing them; you could have it so that one of the crew's conditions is to survive X amount of time without calling the shuttle, where X is based on the overall number of people in the crew. This is in addition to station building objectives, which could in turn be improved by adding more beeg things to build. Build [a working engine type your station doesn't start with], for example. Unironically, give them some greentext for having a good round and a better station.
- Even better, give some station-sided individuals objectives that help the station with the possibility of greentext. Part of antagrolling is, as someone mentioned earlier, "winning the lottery" - if you've got a station-sided objective, that'll help. Maybe you believe you're the hero. Maybe you know there's traitors onboard somewhere, but can't reveal it for fear of people thinking YOU'RE a syndie. They don't have to come up often, but a little change like this could be gold dust for encouraging people.
- Ruin saving. This one is big, but it's potentially a gamechanger. Imagine a system where you could build something freefloating in space, designate the area of your new spacebar or whatever with a blueprint, and then apply to centcom (current admin) directly to have that room be saved. It can be quickly reviewed by an aghost, approved or denied, and then in the former case, saved to possibly appear freefloating in space or sometimes even crashed into Lavaland. Has some restrictions and will require a touch of curation every so often, but imagine the possibilities - and most relevantly, imagine how people will respond with roundtimes.
- Give antagonists specific means of delaying shuttles. Already done with cultists to good effect, having a traitor item that costs a few telecrystals and delays the shuttle by scrambling its navigation protocols would be cool. Yes, in theory every traitor could pool their crystals and delay the shuttle for nearly an hour, but frankly, if they're sacrificing their crystals to do that, that's hilarious, and they've probably got something planned. Or you could put a hardcap on the amount of time it can delay things, if you need to. You could even change the mechanics, so that traitors could, perhaps, instead get a powersink-like beacon that pauses the shuttle timer by sucking the juice out of the power grid (not enough to get sink levels, maybe a local brownout at most), but can be fairly easily found with some standard searching.
- Disincentivise calling the shuttle because of the mere existence of antagonists. This is a no-brainer - if you don't want to be antagonised, play a game without antagonists, don't join this one and call the shuttle at the first sign of danger. The note about centcom slapping down stupid calls applies here. In addition, you could improve the incentive to conquer certain "round-ending" antagonists - xenomorphs could drop more interesting bodyparts, or possibly even random ones, that are prime for research or implanting usage, swarmers get their swarm-mother-beacon thing boss back which can be fought for goodies, and if a station survives a meteor shower, then those meteors are likely to drop more and more interesting materials and perhaps even unique objects based on the length and intensity of the storm. We don't have rounds where people pick their way through broken stations anymore, struggling to survive against the odds - those stories are dead, but they don't need to be.
- If an antagonist is sufficiently loud, and their presence would prevent the shuttle from leaving, have the shuttle not even be callable under standard circumstances. Confirmed level 5? Can't call the shuttle. Prevent metagaming from this by having false alarms disable shuttle calls for two to six minutes. Give headrevs the option to go loud - in doing so, they gain a small buff of some description and the shuttle can't be called as a side note.
- Paint random shuttle calls as enemy action. This is a fluff thing, but as in the major/minor crew victory suggestion, fluff can be a surprisingly powerful motivator. In this instance, having random shuttle calls could be set up by a little in-universe law tweaking as highly suspicious, since "Syndicate agents are known to ilicit emergency shuttle calls in order to hijack them".
- Change Extended, or add a new mode, Extended-Dynamic. Extended discourages a certain kind of person because it doesn't have antagonists off the bat - having Extended-Dynamic instead would change that. Extended-Dynamic is an idea I've been suggesting for years in some form or another, wherein antags aren't rolled until 20 to 30 minutes or so into the round, allowing for a much, much different dynamic than regular rounds while encouraging people to stick around during "green shifts".
- Encourage admin button pushing during extended, particularly buttons that bring in as many people as possible to an event. This discourages suicides during "green shifts".
- Give crew an in-game excuse and avenue to stop playing if they don't want to continue without ending the round. This is mostly psychological, but some people will, even if they've not done anything in the round, deliberately try to end the round with the shuttle because they're bored and want to leave entirely. It's nonsensical, but it exists - so giving people an option to, say, clock out at a personal "end my round" teleporter would be cool. For normal folks, that frees up slots on the manifest. For syndie agents, their objectives could be completed (assuming they're not hijack objectives, but that doesn't change much), and they'll show up with greentext when the round ends proper. You could even set it so that people can remove themselves this way, and if the round is still happening half an hour later, they can join as a randomname with new memories, if you were inclined. Imagine rolling syndie, achieving your objectives, clocking out, getting some dinner, coming back, joining the round as a fresh person, and eventually getting midround antag. Rare, but isn't that a captivating image?
- Tell the players that calling the shuttle won't suddenly cause a massive rush of people to appear. This seems obvious, but time and time again (on Terry, in particular) I've seen people absolutely boggled at the idea and reality of them ending a round full of things happening and ghostroles made, and then going into the next round and seeing just as many people turn up, not the multitudes of spontaneous people they were expecting. People in bed are not going to just suddenly not be in bed because you called the shuttle.
- Give every roundtype an epilogue. This one's a little strange, but bear with me - when cultists summon Nar-Sie, they have a few minutes to dick around and bring remaining humans to her as Harvesters. Make an equivalent for all roundtypes, it doesn't matter what. If revs win, Centcom could decide to send simplemob death commandos by the dozen from arrivals. Same with blob. If heads win in a rev round, the syndicate has a choice to send an army of simplemob syndie interns instead. With the wizard dead, their magic spews wildly over the station. When the station gets nuked, do what the flavourtext says happens - the captain appears, alive, on centcom in front of three ghostrole interrogators for two minutes before probable summary execution. It's two minutes, but it encourages people to draw out a little more interest and flavour from the round, especially if it's an optional button push by an admin, and all of it adds to the worldbuilding aspect like Nar-Sie's "snuff out the light" animation does.
- Make roundtypes mulligan on a wooly bit of logic if the station wins in a surviving manner early enough (that includes revs). Now the station's survived something, they've got different equipment and some damage, and some people have been given a different antag status. Go hog wild.
- Make an achievement for playing a round for five hours without disconnecting. This one is wild, and could manifest in many ways, including making tension between the occasional "just four more hours" nutter and the crew in general, or "guys it's been an 4 hours and 40 minutes, let's leave :^)" memer and the rest of the crew. Obviously this won't be relevant in most cases, but neither is "win a pulse rifle from the arcade machine", so why not?

Though many of these suggestions are mutually exclusive, all of them are considered for a configuration in which there's always plentiful stuff to do, ghostroles can be freely gained for people to drop into games as golems or cyborgs, etc., and projects that won't necessarily be done in 45 minutes flat can be approached without getting only a minute's worth of enjoyment from them. Roughly an hour is a good place to go for, I think. Of course, they should be taken with a grain of salt, but still.