Should Battle Royale be a game mode?

[UrsulaMejor]

What if BR was available on Ass-Day only?
What if BR was available with a prerequisite task, the way disaster does?

+1 for battle royale on ass day rotation

[Firebarrage]

If im online on ass day it already is :p

[FishDance]

The pillars of SS13 are shenanigans, social interaction, and antag gimmicks. Additionally, many people frown upon people who rampage and murderbone because it's noninteractive and boring for people who are not the rampager. A game mode, then, that focuses on exclusively combat with next to no social interaction between players being part of the main rotation sounds like a *great idea*. I get that you put a lot of work into this, and it was a pretty good silly goof joke, but it's not a good fit for SS13 long term.

[kyle2143]

My main problem with BR is mostly the way the storm works, not so much the murders. I had a couple BR rounds where I made it a bit more interesting than random murders.

I'll never like a mode that forces players to memorize all the areas of the half dozen maps and their names. I think that if that can be fixed and the mode can be capped at 15 minutes or so, then it would be acceptable to put it on 1% chance.

[Haprenti]

many people frown upon people who rampage and murderbone because it's noninteractive and boring for people who are not the rampager.

That concern doesn't seem very relevent to me. People frown upon rampages and murderboning because it indiscriminately removes people from a 50min round. They get killed halfway doing something, you lost any time you spent trying to do that, and the same is going to happen to a lot of people.

BR rounds :
1 - From the start you expect to be murdered brutally, no surprise, hopefully you won't get murderboned while trying to learn pathology or chemistry, unless you're basically asking for it.
2 - Wouldn't last even close to 50min, so you won't be forced out of the game for a huge amount of time.
3 - Considering 2 : come on, 1% occurence or less, for a 15min round. I don't understand people that dislike it enough to not want it in rotation, can't you take a 15min break ? You'd deny those 15min to those that enjoy it ?

Also yes I understand the storms were fitting this gamemode as a joke, but if it's to become an actual rare gamemode they need to go or be changed completely, this was the biggest source of frustration in BR rounds I played. No time to get to a safe zone because it's too far, because the hallway is vented and too cold, because the timer is too short, or even because it isn't recognizing the room layout properly.

[warcrimes]

IMO the battle-storms ought to either force everyone into
a) all hallways
-or-
b) all maintenance (kinda like a radstorm)

Instead of needing to crawl 200 tiles across a vented station to crew bathroom left beef - just force them into generally tighter-ish but generic spaces.

[Zamujasa]

Perhaps go more Battle Royale style in that areas are gradually added to a list of no-go zones that are permanently bad places to be.

[qwertyquerty]

I say keep it as a gimmick round, because more rounds where anyone can kill anyone kind of removes the magic of ass day.

[KikiMofo]

If it does it needs to be very rare and have a very strict time limit so that rounds don't last more than 15 or so minutes. Battle Royale is wildly different from every other game mode.

Its easy enough to autocall the shuttle at 15 minutes. I can get behind that.

I suppose then - don't announce it? Let it just happen? But yeah, let it be a quick hot and heavy round where players scratch that itch and the shuttle is called at the 15 mark.

My main problem with BR is mostly the way the storm works, not so much the murders. I had a couple BR rounds where I made it a bit more interesting than random murders.

I'll never like a mode that forces players to memorize all the areas of the half dozen maps and their names. I think that if that can be fixed and the mode can be capped at 15 minutes or so, then it would be acceptable to put it on 1% chance.

Why shuttle at 15? We already have a way of making people have to fight. The battle storms. Just make it so at the 20 minute mark everyone has to get to a certain area or they just fucking die.

[warcrimes]

dying to the robust fists of BeefHard McToolbox is fun
dying because the hallway was too cold for you to play Simon Says Find Tool Storage B is not.

[KikiMofo]

dying to the robust fists of BeefHard McToolbox is fun
dying because the hallway was too cold for you to play Simon Says Find Tool Storage B is not.

I agree. I personally love BR mode and love scrounging around the station for a long time without fighting just to gear up but it seems others do not want it to be long so thats where the whole battle storm shit comes in so really I have no idea what to change to make everyone happy.

[kyle2143]

Calling the shuttle doesn't make sense for the mode. When I said it should be 15 minutes, I meant more that it should take 15 minutes for the storm to reach its peak, so that you only have a tiny area in which to fight. But it could be 20 minutes too, any short-ish duration.

I think that in my last post I described what I meant poorly. The storm is the main problem with BR mode. Here are the main issues imo:

1. You have to know where the listed safe places are by memory. You're given obscure areas and it's just a memory test or you get lucky and happen across a glowing area.
2. The way the storm functions is counter to how it works in all BR games, it's basically a weird musical chairs sorta thing. 
3. The storm is too immediately deadly. In actual battle royale games, the damage starts out relatively low while in the storm and scales up the longer you're there. Given the way healing chems can be very effective, you'll have to scale up the max damage cap pretty high. But currently, being in the storm for one or two seconds without anything to heal you afterwards is certain death iirc. That's no fun.

1 and 2 could be fixed like this:
It should be changed either to function more like storms generally work in BR games where a central point is selected and then turfs moving in slowly turn into storm turfs where you'll take damage. I don't know how to explain that exactly, but it shouldn't require explaination if you've ever seen or played any BR game. 

The other option is to instead have the command report list areas that will soon be off limits instead of listing areas that will soon be safe. And those areas will stay off limits for the rest of the game. That's how I thought this game mode worked the first round I played it, because the flashing areas denoting safe zones was non-intuitive to me and well that is more similar to BR storms than what it currently is like.

[Frank_Stein]

I feel like this is one of those things that if there was a mode for it, it would work best with a map made specifically for it.

Then you'd just vote for that map, and if it wins the gamemode is switched along with it

[Haprenti]

For each map manually make a list of rooms, each belonging to one of several class of rooms depending on how far they are to a target endgame room. Then randomly pick rooms from the farthest non-empty room class and add them to a permanent danger zone.

Say if on cog1 you wanted the EVA hallway (central primary hallway?) to be the end room, the game could pick one or more rooms among those to add them to the danger zone : armory, hydroponics, mining, qm, test chamber, chapel, genetics, arrivals.
Once they've all been picked up it starts picking from : security, medbay, what's left of research, escape, bar, chapel hallway.
And so on, with an order such that the safe zone always remain path connected so you don't end up trapped somewhere cut off from the rest of the safe zone where other contenders are.

[KikiMofo]

I feel like this is one of those things that if there was a mode for it, it would work best with a map made specifically for it.

Then you'd just vote for that map, and if it wins the gamemode is switched along with it

I like this idea. Someone make a neat Battle Royale map. About the size of Cog2 with lots of tunnels and hideaways and shit like that.