An analysis of the biggest problem with goonstation: apathy

[Superlagg]

Problem with less materials is that the station becomes a lot more hostile if you dont have someone staffing those areas. This is especially especial in lowpop! Think about it, if Medbay barely had any medical supplies and nobody signed up to be a Botanist, Medbay won't be able to do their job very well. (Course, less people means less people who need healing.)

Hm. One way to work around this is to make some of the products of certain departments persist between rounds. Higher-pop rounds could generate materials for the station, sustaining the needs of any later low-pop rounds. Basically time-traveling space communism.

the ai, any borg, probably most heads, anybody reassigned by the hop, all these ppl can literally just buy more meds and materials so, so easily using qm. but i cant blame u for forgetting that qm exists

That would be part of the nightmarish rebalancing act, where buying pre-made things would have some kind of a downside compared to making it yourself.

For instance, store-bought items could be expensive or limited, or just not as good as the stuff made on-site. The beginning budget could be fairly small, relying on materials saved up over the past rounds to get it somewhere workable.

Course, that would kinda limit the QM to spending money on emergency supplies.

He might be useful to turn massive surpluses of stuff nobody really needs into bits of useful resources the station can't make or doesn't have. Then again, that PTL is going to end up flooding the station with ~stuff~ and render that part of his job pointless.

Hm. Yeah, this would be an absolute nightmare to work out, as it would end up needing to rework almost everything. QM especially.

tl;dr: easing up on vigilantes isn't going to make the station at large less apathetic, it's going to give jerks free reign to be murderous jerks

True, now that I think about it, what I suggested wouldn't really do anything for this problem.

But, while getting Sec to exist more often would give antagonists more resistance, I don't see how it would lessen the ambient apathy in the rest of the crew. Unless that's not really the point of doing that, in which case never mind!

[69andahalf]

The number of times I have wanted to use the QM console as a with an I.D that doesn't have QM access makes me love that idea automatically.

[misto]

the downside of buying things is that the shipping budget eventually runs out and people are rarely assed to fuck with the bank records to do anything besides drain everything into their own acct

[Noah Buttes]

the downside of buying things is that the shipping budget eventually runs out and people are rarely assed to fuck with the bank records to do anything besides drain everything into their own acct

If you've bought enough stuff that the shipping budget has run dry, then you need to do one of two things.

1. Sell stuff using the outbound mass driver.
   
2. Call the shuttle because the round has gone on for far too long and needs to die already.
   

[Roomba]

tl;dr: easing up on vigilantes isn't going to make the station at large less apathetic, it's going to give jerks free reign to be murderous jerks

True, now that I think about it, what I suggested wouldn't really do anything for this problem.

But, while getting Sec to exist more often would give antagonists more resistance, I don't see how it would lessen the ambient apathy in the rest of the crew. Unless that's not really the point of doing that, in which case never mind!

The crew being apathetic about antags is only really an issue because the crew is often the first line of defense against antags due to sec being nonexistent, which really shouldn't be the case. If sec was properly staffed and doing their jobs (and ideally competent, but let's not get ahead of ourselves), they would be the first line of defense against antags, and the crew would know that shit was really going down once sec is down.

The basic premise of this game is that in spite of everything crazy going on, life on the station goes on and everyone tries to do their jobs best as they can despite everything. The crew banding together and getting their weapons out should be a measure of last resort (and on modes like nuke/blob where that is in fact the case, the crew generally does so to the best of their ability, despite what the naysayers would have you think). If a clown is smacking you with an extinguisher, it's one thing to yell for help and expect the next person walking by to intervene, but it's another thing to expect everyone from the chef to the janitor to drop everything and rush to the other side of the station fully loaded for battle.

[misto]

hm hm

perhaps we could

buff sec

[Vitatroll]

Sec isn't fun for most; if ye got a way to make it fun, then sec will take care of itself. Good luck with that, all.

Not sure what's all this about laxing on vigilantes? They don't get treated badly at all these days. They only get yelled at if they cause undue collateral damage, and sometimes not even then because it's warranted.

Valid hunters, on the other hand. A good example of this was a guy who beat a clown to death because he was offering rides in a clown car. Yeah, fuck that guy. I don't even think the clown was a traitor. 

[Dr Zoidcrab]

The current size and layout of the station, slowdowns from hull breaches and how easy it is to depressurise large areas along with armour and other sources probably has a lot to do with it. If you're at the bar and call for help and everyone is at medbay with the PTL active, good luck getting anyone to rush to your aid.

If I respond to a call for help only to spend five minutes trying to get there and find the guy was just being an ass then yeah im gonna be apathetic at best.

[Noah Buttes]

things about buffing sec and other things complaining about the station being too big to respond quickly

Make police segways distinct from civilian segways by making them somewhat faster and by giving them some kind of implant based ignition interlock. I say implant based rather than ID based because IDs are too easily stolen or given out to really restrict access.


Additionally, give them a high-stability mode that, in exchange for slowing the segway down to just slightly above its current speed, would make the segway stable enough for the rider to be able to fire his weapon and to avoid crashing into things.

In my vision, the "hot pursuit" speed would be either equal to or somewhat above normal sprinting speed, while the high stability speed should be slightly above normal running speed.

If you want to take it even further, you can have the ramming capability be a separate toggle from the speed setting. 

If we want to make full-blown patrol cars segways, add built-in dashcams, rechargers, ticket machines, gps units, police radios/tickers, and loudspeakers. The ticker might accept both sec radio traffic and sec department PDA messages.

As we enter the realm of absurdity, we can consider something like a shitty fold-out plastic seat for perps to be buckled into for transport back to HQ. We might also consider an automated combination handcuff fabricator and donut dispenser.

For full on keystone cops level shenanigans, let segways traverse the chutes between the various security checkpoints and let the riders joust with each other using spears and stun batons.

Ideally, police segways would provide an interesting vehicular dynamic that no other department currently has while also addressing several key issues with security, namely lack of mobility and lack of FUN.

I can totally see a full squad of segway cops engaged in a high-speed pursuit with a methed up staff assistant running for his life from the untiring wheels of the LAW

[Ed Venture]

The current size and layout of the station, slowdowns from hull breaches and how easy it is to depressurise large areas along with armour and other sources probably has a lot to do with it. If you're at the bar and call for help and everyone is at medbay with the PTL active, good luck getting anyone to rush to your aid.

If I respond to a call for help only to spend five minutes trying to get there and find the guy was just being an ass then yeah im gonna be apathetic at best.

This is more or less why I feel Cogmap 2 is a bad map. Too big, too many roadblocks and it was made with things we never needed in mind that hurt the game in the long run then it added to it. Cogmap 2 really changed things for the worse.

[misto]

some stuf abt segway

yes, making the segways into a valid transport option rather than a mostly ignored crashing gimmick nuisance might be a good idea.
additionally, any criminal worth a damn can hack into the armory easily enough, to the point that its content are more often used by criminals than the security force. thus, consider giving security officers access to the armory. if you feel its still too great a responsibility for a lowly officer, demand multiple sec ids to be inserted in a sort of nuclear keyturn type of setup

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https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid...5#pid94495 here is the thread ive made for compiling the good ideas from this thread

[Nnystyxx]

The current size and layout of the station, slowdowns from hull breaches and how easy it is to depressurise large areas along with armour and other sources probably has a lot to do with it. If you're at the bar and call for help and everyone is at medbay with the PTL active, good luck getting anyone to rush to your aid.

If I respond to a call for help only to spend five minutes trying to get there and find the guy was just being an ass then yeah im gonna be apathetic at best.

This is more or less why I feel Cogmap 2 is a bad map. Too big, too many roadblocks and it was made with things we never needed in mind that hurt the game in the long run then it added to it. Cogmap 2 really changed things for the worse.

The PTL is interesting but the fact it slices the map in half one way seems like it creates a lot of really frustrating issues
Engineering is in the dead center tho so what can you do

EDIT: I do miss how in Cog1 you could pretty much run a circuit around it unbidden, rather than 2 where you constantly bump into the little circular space-holes (VERY EASY TO BREAK AND SUFFOCATE EVERYONE) at engineering and sec

[misto]

engineering is in the dead venter but that doesnt mean the ptl has to be. we have wires

hm hm

hey guys

what if we could

unbolt, move and redirect the ptl

maybe there could even be multiple valid directions to shoot it in whose pay for power shifted throughout the round, besides the obvious murder applications

[Vitatroll]

Pathing on Cog1 was C shaped. Pathing on Cog2 is O shaped. The PTL makes Cog2 pathing C shaped. I think the major whine is that it makes bar-to-medbay the blocked path, which is the opposite of cog1. It was put there to be a health hazard and general PITA. Pretty sure that's always gonna be a theme with the PTL.

What apathy-caused effects are we concerned about here? There's a good chance that most of this is just in our heads. And by us, I mean those of us who have played enough to be jaded. Sure, it changed since donut2. Since 2 years ago? Not so much.

[Goonman]

Two reasons for this Apathy that may plague the station are antags that only do their objectives. Like a traitor whose objective is to blow up a captains Bonzai tree. Most traitors who get that objective are going to look for the path of least resistance instead of trying to robust the Captain, steal his id, go into his room with an explosive, and then book it for the next available hiding spot. At least that's what I have seen in my years of playing. Shroom station man. Like what point is there in trying to space the traitor when he's done traitoring. Hell there was this one time I got caught and put in a fight pit with another traitor and told to fight to the death, I won and they let me go without killing me. I got on the shuttle and left like everyone else. 

Although I'm pretty certain everyone I played with has gone away to new things by now so this new generation might be different. I think the way to fix this is to get the antag to continue to screw things over enough to warrant the crew mob. The way Changeling, Vampire, Wraith, and Blob are set up warrants that type of mob. Even though I've seen Changelings walk around in station before without much aggression, but that's few and far between.