i think it's time to try player caps.

[Zamujasa]

I already gave one suggestion but let's expand it to a few other ideas.

your suggestions all have the same problem, though.

the problem: high player counts make it harder to RP.

"Station cap"
Once the station is capped (so no infinite staffies), no one can join into the station to do a job.

So where do we dump the next players? Well they could be space diner patrons. And they can go to the station but will have no ID and we know how well that goes.
The idea is that Space Diner Patrons will get an uplink to the station to order things or ask for things.
No radio, no ID. Only an uplink terminal.

this is just a staff assistant under a different name, except now they don't even have basic access. if the problem is poor RP, dumping a load of "here's a bunch of people with no role, no access, dumped in the middle of nowhere" isn't... going to help RP be better.

"CentComm'd"
I know admins do not like shifts in cent comm as an idea... but.. hear me out.
Same as the station Cap one. Anyone spawning after the cap is hit will spawn in a "Section" of Centcomm, waiting to be send off to a station.
These players will basically be stuck in location till centcomm deems it nessarcy to send them to the current shift.

"you are stuck in an area where you can't do anything until an admin intervenes" is a DOA idea; you may as well replace it with "afterlife bar", which already exists

"Cyborgs only allowed"
Simply put.. station cap is reached, only cyborgs can spawn. Now robotcists can decide the flow of extra players.

again, the problem is "too many players to RP well", and this is literally "more players, just different"

"The crew beyond the veil"
I know we don't like dead players giving away info and such and that REMAINS. But now dead / players who couldn't get in. Might be able to do lil things on the station if they join forces as ghosts.

this is just halloween, and again, this doesn't make for better roleplay

The whole point of this player cap is to make em move to Goon 4

the point of the cap is that too many players on one server make proper roleplay increasingly difficult, up to nearly impossible, not to get players to move. the problem isn't not enough on 4, it's too many on 3.

No one likes to see: "Due to a cap limit you will not be allowed to roleplay this round." 

and it isn't fun to be in a round that's already over-full of players, where you don't have any opportunity to roleplay.

all of your suggestions are "you don't get to play the game, either, but you can not play it in this little secluded area for other people who aren't allowed to play", when those people would be better served getting redirected to a server where they can play for real.

This can be especially annoying if you wanna play with friends and they are doing a round in goon 3 and then you get to see: "YEA NO BUB"
Have a way for these friends to sorta interact with eachother without it becoming chaos and a mess.

and that's unfortunate, but sometimes it happens. sometimes you wanna play a game with your buddies in tf2 and the game's full.

because the alternative is like playing a 64-player match of TF2: yeah, sure, you technically can, but it's not really TF2 at that point, it's glorified team deathmatch.