Goonhub
10-12-2021, 12:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-12-2021, 12:58 PM by phyvo. Edited 4 times in total.)
Unintended consequences of intentional design happen all the time with every game ever. Sometimes the consequences are good (smash bros wave dashing), sometimes the consequences require code changes to fix unfun abuse. We have less coding resources than professional developers and less design experience. We're also serving a smaller community so the lines of abuse don't get tested nearly as much as in a professionally competitive game.
But I'd like to focus more on the following quote because I think it is important to this discussion and close to my heart:
In Smash Bros with your friends you might agree to not ledge guard or wave dash for your own fun. If a pro-smash-player friend disagrees with your group they might leave of their own accord or your group might kick them out. That kind of system kind of works at that small scale. But the bigger your community gets and the less intimately connected it is the harder it is to reach those kinds of agreements. How long on the East Coast did SSB:Melee players play competitively with items on? A lot longer than the West Coast.
I would like to bring up my own case in particular (Urs should remember this). I used to do a lot of flamethrowering as a critter bird which allowed me to ignore a lot of the deadly gases and lube that I spread around. I heard complaints about it sometimes in OOC but no admin ever talked to me and it was nothing compared to the rampages the old robust powergamers (most of whom are no longer with us) who would kill the entire station every chance they got. I never had any idea that there was a problem with my behavior except for a few OOC messages, and, given that most people (including myself) have complained about one thing or another while we were dead, and that no staff ever took action against murderboning, it all seemed to me to be within the arena of expected play for non-RP.
Then I got interested in helping with code. I joined the discord specifically because as a beginner coder I needed help, but I got drawn into other channels while I was there. To make a long story short I eventually got into an argument with Urs and a few others about my flamethrower behavior and agreed to a compromise with one of them.
But I still had a bad taste in my mouth. Antagonist vs Crew is, to state the obvious, innately adversarial. I had numerous times as antag where I got shut down before I got to have any "fun", and numerous times as crew where my round was cut short by murder. It's literally impossible to play SS13 and please everyone, unless maybe you expect to have the buy-in of the RP server. So how many people is it my responsibility to keep happy with my behavior? And which people? I had reasoned that I needed to keep the admins happy because they are the final arbitrators of the rules, they are the final authority of the community, but maybe that was incorrect.
More importantly, what if I hadn't invested more into the community and joined discord? I would never have had that argument. If someone from this lastest tide abuses the code but never reads the forums or argues on discord, how are they supposed to be convinced to change their behavior, especially on a high pop server? The client is terrible for hashing out different opinions. Is someone supposed to stop doing something on a 90 pop server because 5 people got angry in OOC? I find it hard to argue with people who say "no".
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It is in fact this issue I think that causes some other servers to be more strict with antagonist objectives. Some of them allow murderboning once you have completed X number of your objectives, some of them don't, either way it limits the carnage and lays out exact expectations for behavior. But I never liked those servers because it limited my creativity as an antag. Sure, I liked the overpowered flamethower abuse, but I also liked posing as Heisenbee, turning everyone into Stirstir, and trying to start a force-borg operation in the AI core (never succeeded at that one). And turning people into birds.
So, I dunno. I don't think it's as simple as person X repeats something unfun for person Y and X feels sorry and stops by all by themself because they are a good person and if X didn't do it they are morally compromised. If we're just talking about people X and Y, yeah, definitely. But once you get to the community level things get much more complicated.
I would like to thank everyone for their patience in trying to read and understand each other.
But I'd like to focus more on the following quote because I think it is important to this discussion and close to my heart:
Quote:imagine playing someone in smash bros. who happen to be excellent at everything. sure, maybe they have fun curbstomping everyone with their skill, but nobody else is going to find that interesting... ...they should just ideally realize they're making the game unfun for anyone else and stop being that way
In Smash Bros with your friends you might agree to not ledge guard or wave dash for your own fun. If a pro-smash-player friend disagrees with your group they might leave of their own accord or your group might kick them out. That kind of system kind of works at that small scale. But the bigger your community gets and the less intimately connected it is the harder it is to reach those kinds of agreements. How long on the East Coast did SSB:Melee players play competitively with items on? A lot longer than the West Coast.
I would like to bring up my own case in particular (Urs should remember this). I used to do a lot of flamethrowering as a critter bird which allowed me to ignore a lot of the deadly gases and lube that I spread around. I heard complaints about it sometimes in OOC but no admin ever talked to me and it was nothing compared to the rampages the old robust powergamers (most of whom are no longer with us) who would kill the entire station every chance they got. I never had any idea that there was a problem with my behavior except for a few OOC messages, and, given that most people (including myself) have complained about one thing or another while we were dead, and that no staff ever took action against murderboning, it all seemed to me to be within the arena of expected play for non-RP.
Then I got interested in helping with code. I joined the discord specifically because as a beginner coder I needed help, but I got drawn into other channels while I was there. To make a long story short I eventually got into an argument with Urs and a few others about my flamethrower behavior and agreed to a compromise with one of them.
But I still had a bad taste in my mouth. Antagonist vs Crew is, to state the obvious, innately adversarial. I had numerous times as antag where I got shut down before I got to have any "fun", and numerous times as crew where my round was cut short by murder. It's literally impossible to play SS13 and please everyone, unless maybe you expect to have the buy-in of the RP server. So how many people is it my responsibility to keep happy with my behavior? And which people? I had reasoned that I needed to keep the admins happy because they are the final arbitrators of the rules, they are the final authority of the community, but maybe that was incorrect.
More importantly, what if I hadn't invested more into the community and joined discord? I would never have had that argument. If someone from this lastest tide abuses the code but never reads the forums or argues on discord, how are they supposed to be convinced to change their behavior, especially on a high pop server? The client is terrible for hashing out different opinions. Is someone supposed to stop doing something on a 90 pop server because 5 people got angry in OOC? I find it hard to argue with people who say "no".
-----------------------
It is in fact this issue I think that causes some other servers to be more strict with antagonist objectives. Some of them allow murderboning once you have completed X number of your objectives, some of them don't, either way it limits the carnage and lays out exact expectations for behavior. But I never liked those servers because it limited my creativity as an antag. Sure, I liked the overpowered flamethower abuse, but I also liked posing as Heisenbee, turning everyone into Stirstir, and trying to start a force-borg operation in the AI core (never succeeded at that one). And turning people into birds.
So, I dunno. I don't think it's as simple as person X repeats something unfun for person Y and X feels sorry and stops by all by themself because they are a good person and if X didn't do it they are morally compromised. If we're just talking about people X and Y, yeah, definitely. But once you get to the community level things get much more complicated.
I would like to thank everyone for their patience in trying to read and understand each other.