i think it's time to try player caps.

[Zamujasa]

yeah yeah i know. hold off on the rotten tomatoes until you get to the end.


generally speaking, i have never been a fan of them, and when they come up the answer has generally been "they're bad and awful".

i think we should have a player cap on the RP servers of 65.

here is my reasoning.

1. Roleplay breaks down once you have too many people.

this is just sort of a fact of life. if you have 10 people in the security department, it's difficult for anyone to do anything. if you have 10 people in medbay, nobody can even walk in the door before they have 4 doctors swarming them. there are too many people to have good, meaningful interactions.

65 players is a number i pulled out of my keister, roughly corresponding to 45-55 "living" players and 10-20 inactive ones (observers, people idling on the title screen, etc).

2. People will self-organize towards the populated server; sometimes you need to use force.

Much like real-life bias, people will tend to go where everyone else is. We regularly have two RP servers where one has 80 players online and the other has 10. We could easily have very healthy populations of 65/35, and the healthier smaller server would encourage more people to join. Servers need a critical mass to start attracting people, and forcing one to be used as a backup would help.

This would also help deal with the limited but existing problem of "I'm only here because Classic is quiet" people.

3. Previous attempts at gentle redirection haven't worked.

Population switches are either completely arbitrary (like how 4 used to be the "popular" one before 3 took over). Regularly, the only time 4 sees large populations is when 3 is either down or undergoing something like an April Fool's Day event.  We have had in-game messages while dead about other servers when they start new rounds. Classic used to have a notification at the top, like RP's respawn, about their sister servers, and we still regularly ended up with population splits of 100+/10.



there are a few arguments people have brought up that i'd like to pre-emptively argue against:

A. "there's furry/ERP servers that allow 200 people without problems"
while those servers do have huge player counts, i would argue they are not SS13 in the same way "normal" servers are. A 200 population furry server is not having two-hour long rounds centered on the antag-nonantag formula with full crew involvement, they are more like huge hotels with a bunch of private rooms.

B. "people would just wait in line to get into the big server"
unfortunately true, but at least they wouldn't be contributing to the problem of overcrowding. and they might even try another server while they wait -- and if they do, the problem solves itself.

C. "people would just go play monke (or whatever)"
unfortunately people are going to do that regardless, and many have (citing classic's antag rampages and culture problems). i'm not sure what can be done about this beyond just making the goon experience better, and on some level reasonable rp populations are a part of that.


there are no plans to implement player caps right now. this is just a discussion.

this is just something that's come up a few times, and i feel it's worth bringing in for a bigger talk.

[JOELED]

I'm fully in support of at the least giving it a try and just seeing how it ends up feeling and looking. As soon as the news went live about the upcoming nightshade event, I said to Roxy that I wondered if it would lead to revisiting the idea of player population caps lest we end up with like 200 pop goon3 and 9 pop goon4 lol

[Carton]

Honestly I wouldn't mind this all that much, the exact number of the cap would likely need workshopping, but considering how hectic and difficult to RP it can get at HIGH highpop, I think this would be a positive change.

HOWEVER. Considering Nightshade was just announced and big events like that have a tendency to do wacky shit to pop levels, I think any real change should definitely wait a while to see where exactly we are on pop in the months post-nightshade.

Oh and also, I'm not sure players who aren't actively playing on the server should count towards a player cap. It seems kind of odd to set a player cap if you don't want that to be the amount of people active on said server

[TDHooligan]

i think its primarily a map/ mechanical issue. larger maps have handled different popcounts pretty well, i just think the numbers need tweaking.

140 player decarabia was sane, 100 player crash rounds can feel pretty healthy but... 70 player cog1 breaks down, 40 player atlas breaks down...

a lot of #4 players cant handle anything over #4 pop too, so trouble there too if we force the server to be larger (though ik we can just... make goon 5)

the numbers we're using, afaik, were pulled out of the dev's collective rears. perhaps some more tuning there first is necessary to see how splitting players plays out? maybe opening up ideas for a new map? later mapvotes (shuttlecall instead of start)?

[swinglow20]

I'm personally against this, but I understand the points you're making well enough to agree with most of them. I think a large part of this is server culture and game mechanics. I feel like if we gave departments more to do, like -say- research, where we could dedicate a portion of the population to things that needed doing, it would balance out.
For security for instance, have the security records be incomplete at the start of the round, and only have the records complete themselves by interacting with individual people. Not a perfect solution, but it gives the detective or another officer something to do besides sitting around waiting to mob the antag.
For medical, there are 4 subdivisions: genetics, traditional "Doctoring," chemistry, and robotics. We could add more disciplines to the mix, such as cadaver research, but the fear is it would end up like pathology. A REALLY extremem measure would be to remove the medical venders from medbay and say "yall have to start from scratch each round, have fun." But I don't see that ending well.

[Carton]

I think Hooligan made a good point, it would be worth testing adding an even higher pop map to rotation/narrowing which maps you can choose at which pop somewhat before we move to adding an enforced player cap.

[babywrangler85]

/support

[Leeanei]

from an admin perspective there's a few big things I think about in terms of pop caps:

1. the SS13 hub is still one of our primary draws, hub position really matters

2. some people love high pop(60+) and will only play high pop

3. some maps definitely don't work at high pop and some people are very map selective

4. until you've seen the volume of ahelps we both get and the volume of rule breaks that aren't ahelped, you don't understand what a tide looks like lol. 100+ pop is horrific, the reason we had one RP server on Extended was because there were so many self antags people still found the rounds exciting but sec players could also *safely* ahelp every person who broke the rules.

[Solenoid]

I think this is an unideal solution, but a necessary one in order to preserve roleplay integrity.

Rounds on 3 have become markedly less and less RP focused in my experience, gradually morphing into a sort of classic-lite because of the massive amount of people in every single department. You can't get some medbay RP because 10 other people also need medical assistance, you can't get botany RP because the botanists have no time to talk between every order they need to fill out, and so on. This was touched on in the initial post, but I feel it's incredibly important to reiterate.

The problem isn't just that the maps don't fit the number of players we're seeing, but also that the number of players is just not congruent with a healthy RP environment. There is no time to have roleplay because everyone wants something from your job all the time, and we only have an hour and a half to do that. Roleplay has never been the main focus of the RP servers of course, we're not HRP or anything, but it's still showing that it's a struggle to roleplay on the roleplay server.

A player cap would be nice, at least to test it out, because I don't think the current system is working. There are flaws with a player cap, as covered in previous discussions and above, but I'd like to see whether those flaws are outweighed by the benefits of a more balanced server population in practice. 

a lot of #4 players cant handle anything over #4 pop too, so trouble there too if we force the server to be larger (though ik we can just... make goon 5)

Also, I just wanted to touch on your point, Hooligan. I guess it depends on how you define 4 pop(as 30-40, or the current 10-20), but I would love to see 4 have more players again as someone who plays there most(almost all) of the time. I think personally that 30-40 has always been the ideal population for 4, and a change like this would restore it to that population and breathe new life into the server.

[Zamujasa]

i appreciate the constructive discussion so far.

HOWEVER. Considering Nightshade was just announced and big events like that have a tendency to do wacky shit to pop levels, I think any real change should definitely wait a while to see where exactly we are on pop in the months post-nightshade.

Oh and also, I'm not sure players who aren't actively playing on the server should count towards a player cap. It seems kind of odd to set a player cap if you don't want that to be the amount of people active on said server

to the first point, nightshade typically drives a bunch of players during the streams, not after. at this point i think it would be fair to say that the admin team is expecting a tide of players in the next few weeks, not months. if anything, it might be a better time to try it -- so that the population can be better balanced earlier, instead of possibly ending up with a 100+ pop RP server.

re: "those who aren't actively playing on the server counting": the problem is that it is easy to transition back and forth. someone who is on the title screen may latejoin soon, becoming active; an active player may die, becoming inactive; a dead player or observer may respawn in 10 minutes after dying, going to the title screen, and then rejoining to become active again.

the 10-20 space is there to account for this kind of "sludge". (we would also need to add something that, say, boots you after 5 minutes idle on the title screen, though, if that does not already exist. and it might.)

i think its primarily a map/ mechanical issue. larger maps have handled different popcounts pretty well, i just think the numbers need tweaking.

140 player decarabia was sane, 100 player crash rounds can feel pretty healthy but... 70 player cog1 breaks down, 40 player atlas breaks down...

it's partially a map issue, but (as discussed in discord), it's not just that, either. radio channels get busier and busier with players, and you can't easily separate those. same with other departmental functions; you might be able to dedicate the physical space for a second department, but the game isn't designed around "sec A" and "sec B" or "med A" and "med B".

i would not really consider "crash" rounds to be proper/typical RP rounds.

a lot of #4 players cant handle anything over #4 pop too, so trouble there too if we force the server to be larger

skill issue.

the numbers we're using, afaik, were pulled out of the dev's collective rears. perhaps some more tuning there first is necessary to see how splitting players plays out? maybe opening up ideas for a new map? later mapvotes (shuttlecall instead of start)?

they are pulled out of my ass, but pretty much any number would be. population fluctuates a lot.

server 3 right now has 86 players online.

* all 6 heads
* 5 sec + 1 detective
* 2 genetics, 3 robo, 3 cyborgs, 4 sci, 5 docs
* 3 qm, 2 miner, 4 engi
* chef, bartender, 4 botanists, rancher, 3 janitors, 5 staff assistants, clown, dungeoneer

that's a total of 55 living people on the manifest, +/- those who aren't on the manifest (this is based off of the latejoin menu)

a population cap of 65 would put lop off about 20 players, which would likely drop that to about 35-45 -- the ideal zone i mentioned.

they're an ass pull, but they're educated ass pulls.

[444explorer]

Honestly? Sure. I've found myself with rounds that just feel slightly odd, recently, like if you took RP and Classic together but it lacked the exact spark of either that got me into it. Rounds that I enjoy, but really... don't remember or have anything to say about? I really do just want bigger maps to still appear (esp a certain WIP one in the future) and I'm more than willing to see how it goes. Might draw some players (like me, hi, I'm one of them) back into Classic as now there's more reasons to choose others. Combined with what I believe I've heard about as a rumoured of a crackdown on powergaming (I have no source other than discord conversations, oops!), this seems like an honest step in the right direction.

My response is subject to change as I think there's a lot of details and a surprising amount of naunce to it. But yeah!! TM sometime ?? in the near future ??

TL;DR - I play lowpop, medpop and highpop and I feel like this is fair enough. Would want a test period just to make sure it isn't shit and then I'm more or less sold. Bonus points for still having all maps n shit.

[Lefinch]

Hello! This is my first and likely only ever post on the goonstation forums. As such, feel free to immediately ignore this post and carry on to more interesting ones with names you like and recognise.

I think this idea is going to both have a lot of responses that make sense that disagree with a population cap. I think we've seen a lot already from altering the map rotations to reflect the reality of a sticky high cap population on morty, to basic "I want join high pop number see high number I join high number on byond hub click that" basic reality that it's just a positive feedback loop.

I also completely agree with Zamujasa in that the current consistently high population for 3 is causing a lot of non-RP wonk. I don't think comparing and contrasting with other servers means we can simply brush that reality under the carpet. It is. That is happening.

I'll be honest and say that I suspect the population cap is a hard sell. I'd love it if we did but I can't see the idea that it might shut people out, no matter how insensible it is to join atlas with 65+ people to become the 11th Staff assistant. But I also have no idea what else you can try except painting a big "1" over the "3" and swapping the numbers around so that 3 is more in what I'd call the "Coze zone" of 30-50. Or start kidnapping people and forcing them to enjoy the genuine delights of Sylvester for their own good.

[cyberTripping]

As a former RP player, I supported the idea of player caps when we had the initial tomato-tide. Most people weren't very receptive to it at the time. Given that this is still apparently an issue despite all the gentle nudges to switch servers when you die, announcement of other servers restarting, etc, I think I'd agree with the OP. The alternatives provided back then have since been implemented and never really worked in my experience.

For people who prefer a low-pop environment on the "secondary" servers, I doubt you have anything to worry about. I also like lowpop! Problem was, you'd end up in situations where one server had a ton of people, and the other had 3 or so users idling and you'd join to a dead-silent Atlas. People having to shuffle over because of the cap could only help prevent that.

[JOELED]

a lot of #4 players cant handle anything over #4 pop too, so trouble there too if we force the server to be larger (though ik we can just... make goon 5)

In response to this in particular, as someone who spent <~1k hours on goon4 last year, hasn't played much this year due to the pop dropping off to 1-20 instead of 20-40 like it was last year, but still hops on now and then:  I've heard easily a dozen active people on there complaining that the pop is way too low now for every single complaint I heard to the alternative back when it was getting 30-40 on weekends.  I'm not saying that the people on 4 who would prefer it to stay in the 1-20 range don't exist, but I believe there's easily a lot more people who would prefer it to be a decent amount more active without hitting the 70+ ranges that 3 frequently does.  Regardless, I don't think these design choices should really be weighed in the interests of a couple people who want to play entirely by themselves like that.  A lot of the reason that 4s population IS so low is that it's so low that people are driven away from it in a way that perpetuates the problem; I think a player cap for 3 would genuinely be healthier for 4 than it would be detrimental to whoever is playing on there now that would dislike more people playing on it.  Alternatives for solo or small group uninterrupted RP exist in the form of the afterlife bar or just taking it to discord like I know a solid chunk of people on 4 already do.

[KikiMofo]

YEAH CAP THEM RP NERDS