Station vs Station mode in detail

[BaneOfGiygas]

People aren't gonna wanna mop floors when they can be bashing skulls in instead.

This is the main issue inherent with some of the other game modes, and it's the primary reason why gang, rev, and spy all failed catastrophically: If you give a Goonstation player license to murder dudes, they're almost certainly gonna take whatever opportunities they can to murder those dudes. In essence, a mode like this would basically be a station vs. station team deathmatch; a nuke ops round on a much larger scale.

And that isn't inherently a bad thing! I find the idea of station-to-station combat where each group of players is armed with the same relative amount of equipment and weapons an extremely interesting idea, but I personally don't think that it would mesh very nicely with the rest of how Goonstation functions.

First and foremost, you'd have a lot of people that would immediately abandon their post and start gunning straight for the other station, which is to be expected. This would result in space combat being a lot more widespread, and consequentially, pod weaponry and general space gear would need to be far more abundant. This would also mean that you'd have very few people actually doing their jobs, because as mentioned before, why do your job when you can just go and murder the other guys instead? There's only really one job that's actually strictly NECESSARY, and that's engineering, which can be set up and promptly forgotten about with the right engine burn, or if you just configure the solars.

There's also the matter of the objective. A lot of people, myself included, have put forth a myriad of different reasons why a shuttle call shouldn't be necessary after a nuke ops/wizard round: lack of people capable of calling the shuttle, it being a needless formality as the shuttle will invariably be called by the time the fighting ceases, putting the station at an unfair disadvantage to latejoining antagonists or vice versa, and so on. Pretty much all of those are applicable here, as it entails a similar level of destruction and general action.

Then there's also the simple fact that Goonstation bases a lot of its gameplay and rules by its secrecy and tendency to err on the side of the mysterious and uncertain. There's a reason why nuke ops and wizard rounds are fairly uncommon, as the whole game would lose its appeal if they were the most common round types. A dedicated server to this kind of thing just doesn't strike me as something that would be successful, and this seems like a needlessly large and complex project for a normal round type that probably wouldn't even be played very frequently, or even at all barring admin intervention. So while this is a good idea and definitely has its merits, I really don't see it as something that would likely get implemented here.