Goonhub
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.
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.