On the subject of RP Security Officer access

[Cherman0]

it's not about "catering" to people, it's about designing with consideration to the fact that plenty of people can and do mainly play rounds with 30 or under people on-station, whether due to timezones, preferring that experience, or just plain unwitting circumstance. designing a critical gameplay balance element with that context in mind is not the outrageously pandering task you seem to consider it to be, it is a necessary consideration for an inevitability. making the game not accommodate lower pop counts for the sake of a hypothetical "typical user" just seems like a design choice that, itself, will drive pop counts lower through alienation

You are missing my point and quite frankly being pretty rude about it too. I'm not saying we should disregard 4 or that its players dont matter or whatever. What I am saying is that for most players, playing on <20 population is an exception rather than the rule. It makes the most sense to design the default scenario to fit the rule and design contingencies to handle the exceptions, rather than trying to always be addressing every possible exception at once. Some exceptions (extreme lowpop and extreme highpop) are inherently contradictory and it is thus impossible to handle them both at the same time. The solution that solves one will likely make the other worse.

Therefore, we should assume that most games have a few people in each department, a captain, and an AI at roundstart. There have been a few suggestions here that I like that handle the lowpop exception, such as generally expanding access during lowpop (ie most jobs can access their whole department and not just their area, say a miner accessing cargo). This could be designed to include giving sec wider access during lowpop. Another suggestion that I liked was having multiple station alert levels that reduce access requirements as they get progressively more severe. This means that in the exceptional case:

* An antag is hiding in an unstaffed department
* There is no AI, cyborgs, engineers, captain, hop, alternate routes, etc
* Security knows about and needs to get to this antag 

Security and/or heads of staff could raise the alert level to gain access to the antag's hiding place. Since in these extreme lowpop scenarios there is likely one or two antags and zero or one secoffs (and we can ignore the zero secoff case for the purposes of this debate since changing sec access would be irrelevant) there is very little that would divide security's attention away from the antagonist(s), a system that impedes sec until they activate a station alert would be helpful in giving the antag a bit more time to breathe.