Goonhub
11-13-2020, 08:46 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-14-2020, 12:20 PM by Studenterhue. Edited 4 times in total.)
Gonna preface that this is my personal opinion and not the Official ™ Position ® of the whole team. I sense there's a higher than normal risk it'll be mistaken as an statement from the admins as a whole, because of how the person making this PR is an admin. It'll probably be misinterpreted as such anyways, but at least I've given that out of the way.
Personally, I think Ass Jam should at least move away from being a day for experimental stuff. The "testing questionable features" and "enabling wacky mechanics" foci are rather at odds with each other. If you want to test something, you'd want to see it in normal gameplay, right? But Ass Jam is definitely not normal gameplay. And you probably wouldn't do just one day of testing. Besides, you don't need Ass Jam to do experimental features. MBC once made an "experimental intents" system and it was done as a verb that you would enter to toggle it on, Flourish has been pretty good at soliciting feedback for cloning changes, a few features like Gang mode on RP were merged under conditions of being experimental and thus liable to be changed/removed/otherwise temporary (and Gang mode eventually was removed from RP a week after), and some experimental stuff is tied to a toggle admins can turn on if some testing is needed.
I think Wisecrack34 and Frank_Stein's ideas of leaning harder into that "weird and wild gameplay" angle are interesting, so is Sundance's idea of actually taming down some Ass Jam features for inclusion into normal gameplay. Personally, I'd like to see it that there's always a few events scheduled every 13th. Just a few--don't want people to get burnout from making so many events each month after all. I'm not necessarily saying events should only be held on that day, but that the 13th be a day where we admins will try our darn hardest to have some. I think it'd be a good way to implement some of the event ideas mentors have proposed and maybe even some from players, which might otherwise stay as ideas due to laziness, time conflicts, etc.
I also want to note this PR only removes the code that basically puts the server in Ass Jam mode. Most of the code for the actual Ass Jam features is still around, e.g. the Fleet/Bellerophon map, crab gun, and Loose Cannon, available for admin shenanigans, but some isn't, e.g. expanded trinket and bush item pool.
Also, honestly, I'm not surprised either about this patch. Like a few other people in this thread, I also noticed the population drops during the Ass Jam, just like with the old Ass Day. Some of my friends did too, and that why some of them wanted to move Ass Jam to Goonstation Overflow and why some of them wanted to re-evaluate some of the Ass Jam features, which eventually led to removal of Kinetitech.
It seems most people so far either want to keep and reform Ass Jam or accept the possibility of Ass Jam going away while sharing something they like about Ass Jam. That's a good sign, for it means at least something was right with this attempt to reform Ass Day, and people were still able to find something worthwhile. (Compare this discussion to say, discussions of pathology.)
Personally, I think Ass Jam should at least move away from being a day for experimental stuff. The "testing questionable features" and "enabling wacky mechanics" foci are rather at odds with each other. If you want to test something, you'd want to see it in normal gameplay, right? But Ass Jam is definitely not normal gameplay. And you probably wouldn't do just one day of testing. Besides, you don't need Ass Jam to do experimental features. MBC once made an "experimental intents" system and it was done as a verb that you would enter to toggle it on, Flourish has been pretty good at soliciting feedback for cloning changes, a few features like Gang mode on RP were merged under conditions of being experimental and thus liable to be changed/removed/otherwise temporary (and Gang mode eventually was removed from RP a week after), and some experimental stuff is tied to a toggle admins can turn on if some testing is needed.
I think Wisecrack34 and Frank_Stein's ideas of leaning harder into that "weird and wild gameplay" angle are interesting, so is Sundance's idea of actually taming down some Ass Jam features for inclusion into normal gameplay. Personally, I'd like to see it that there's always a few events scheduled every 13th. Just a few--don't want people to get burnout from making so many events each month after all. I'm not necessarily saying events should only be held on that day, but that the 13th be a day where we admins will try our darn hardest to have some. I think it'd be a good way to implement some of the event ideas mentors have proposed and maybe even some from players, which might otherwise stay as ideas due to laziness, time conflicts, etc.
I also want to note this PR only removes the code that basically puts the server in Ass Jam mode. Most of the code for the actual Ass Jam features is still around, e.g. the Fleet/Bellerophon map, crab gun, and Loose Cannon, available for admin shenanigans, but some isn't, e.g. expanded trinket and bush item pool.
Also, honestly, I'm not surprised either about this patch. Like a few other people in this thread, I also noticed the population drops during the Ass Jam, just like with the old Ass Day. Some of my friends did too, and that why some of them wanted to move Ass Jam to Goonstation Overflow and why some of them wanted to re-evaluate some of the Ass Jam features, which eventually led to removal of Kinetitech.
It seems most people so far either want to keep and reform Ass Jam or accept the possibility of Ass Jam going away while sharing something they like about Ass Jam. That's a good sign, for it means at least something was right with this attempt to reform Ass Day, and people were still able to find something worthwhile. (Compare this discussion to say, discussions of pathology.)