Remove gang from rotation entirely

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

Personally I'm not sure gangs should be able to sell drugs and guns for points. Drugs are already everywhere all the time, it's not an inherently antag-y thing. As for guns the danger comes from them having them, not selling them. Hence why it might be a better idea to have gang more geared to buying them. Back to points like you mentioend, I think maybe they could be more from things that hinder the station. More dangerous gang rewards might help since the crew wouldn't want them to get points to be more dangerous. That way sec would want to fight points.

The actual process of getting them could be more dangerous, too. IE putting hits on certain people on rival gangs, converting certain people, stealing objects from the station, etc.

[kyle2143]

There are some good points broughy up here and in a couple other gang threads I've seen over the last couple months.

Right now, I'm the only dev who has worked on gang in the last few years. I've made some changes over the last year but I never really *finished* my changes to be in line with the vision I had to make gang a fun round type. I started working on gang because it was in rotation and I never really liked it too much, but I wanted to improve it. Unfortunately I haven't spent too much time on it due to other projects I work on and just general life/motivation stuff.

But I have heard that there are people who do really like gang, despite its flaws, so I don't want to just remove it from rotation just because of one thread saying they hate it. What I will do, is sometime later tonight or tomorrow, make a stickied thread with a poll for whether or not to keep gang in rotation currently. I'll also include in that post some of my plans for the mode that I haven't gotten around to implementing.

[Dickles]

I've had a few really great and memorable gang rounds, but mostly they feel like ass day rounds to me. Last time I joined a gang, the clown had found a cool chembomb artifact and we were looking at it. Oh hey, it's gangs, and someone just offered me a flier. I'll join with the clown so we can use that artifact because it's a chance to use it. To be honest that's really not a great reason, I'm not joining because I want to do objectives, but when I rarely join gangs, this is why.

I feel like the problem with gang rounds is it's a team gamemode like revs/blob/nukie but it plays like you're a hardmode traitor with a group. Points make you win at the end of the round, but it feels like greentexting as a traitor. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't have the impact of say, winning a nukie round.

I think gang should have an objective that ends the round, would make it more engaging. Kill the other gangs, claim enough of the station, get enough points, something. That would make it more comparable to other team modes, make people want to do those objectives more. Solo antags you're free to do as you please, but team mode antags are different and gangers are kind of an exception right now. You don't say, roll nukie then immediately rush in on your own. That's not cool. I think having a game-ending objective would make it more not cool to just join a gang to make bombs/grief or roll for leader so you can play it like a hard-mode traitor and not even put your locker down.

I do like team gamemodes; I don't think gang should be removed entirely, I've seen some great gang rounds.

[Frank_Stein]

I think Gangs need a stronger connection to their territory.

I think Gangs should be tasked with extorting diffrent departments, with the rival gangs being tasked with defending them.

[vampirate]

Why not penalize gangs points for injuring non-gang folks who did not attack first? Or damaging the station....

[Roomba]

No amount of objective tweaking/gang penalties will fix the core complaint: gangs are invariably commandeered by the same type of people who loot the armory/build a dozen TTVs on reflex at roundstart, then sit around waiting for an excuse.

[vampirate]

Why not make gangs water map only? No bombs to build.

[kyle2143]

Penalizing gangers for destroying parts of the station is something I had planned yeah.

[BatElite]

I don't really want to see gangs gone, and certainly I don't feel like we should limit game-modes because people don't know how they're meant to be played. There's still the mismatch between intent and reality though.

Gangs having functioned as more or less extended is interesting though, and maybe that's a nice way to go about it. "Tackle the goddamn antags" and "I want to do/get good at my goddamn job" are probably going to always be in conflict (save med/sec) by the nature of the game's design, gangs seems like a good candidate for a blob/nuke/revs analog where you can kinda be a hermit for 45 minutes without missing too much. You'd "just" have to find a way for anti-antag crew to get in on the NT/sec side of gangs that doesn't pit them against several armed members on their own. Maybe a vigilante mob you can join with a loyalty implant?

(I figure I'm going to have to copy-paste this idea into the poll thread)

[Spoodle]

No amount of objective tweaking/gang penalties will fix the core complaint: gangs are invariably commandeered by the same type of people who loot the armory/build a dozen TTVs on reflex at roundstart, then sit around waiting for an excuse.

How about gang members being chosen at round-start? Iirc somebody suggested this before, or I'm just dumb and this was how it was a long time ago.

[Lady Birb]

No amount of objective tweaking/gang penalties will fix the core complaint: gangs are invariably commandeered by the same type of people who loot the armory/build a dozen TTVs on reflex at roundstart, then sit around waiting for an excuse.

Gangers actually were briefly incapable of using or making bombs, but it was removed because turbonerds whined about it.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

No amount of objective tweaking/gang penalties will fix the core complaint: gangs are invariably commandeered by the same type of people who loot the armory/build a dozen TTVs on reflex at roundstart, then sit around waiting for an excuse.

How about gang members being chosen at round-start? Iirc somebody suggested this before, or I'm just dumb and this was how it was a long time ago.

The ability to spread is one of the key aspects of gang.

[TDHooligan]

The issue of direction in gang is a big one - I'd say the current situation is fairly similar to what goes on in GMod's DarkRP, with a lot of camping for cash followed by people acting out against whoever they can with all the gear they stockpiled. 

There's quite a few issues with the current points generation:
 - There's not much instant gratification in making more points, and you can do it better just taking hidden areas
 - There's no limit to tags, meaning gangs end up tagging more than they can track, reducing conflict
 - High priority targets are a crapshoot and don't feel worthwhile

There are some things I think are good, but could be improved:
 - Making a druglab is a cool concept, but it encourages sitting idly in the middle of nowhere
 - The gang lockers are also nice, but their point pool being shared is a common issue when one player can scoff it down.

Things I do like:
 - I do actually think the kidnapping objective is good.
 - High priority targets are a good idea to direct gangs to an out of the way spot for conflicts.

I think there's room improving gang tags: 
 - Make tags occasionally do a LOS check and provide a bonus based on non-braindead people who can see it, ensuring gang members want to keep it intact.
 - Make spray bottles consumable, so that players only have enough tags to keep track of and make them need to take care of it.
 - Provide spray bottles as rewards for participating in objectives

To throw my suggestions in:
 - Add more opportunities for gang conflict. More random, timed objectives.
 - Reward gangs who participate in conflict with instant benefits! A previous suggestion I had was changing High Priority zones so that they dropped a briefcase/crate after X minutes that could only be opened near a gang locker. These crates could be packed with goodies of different levels of power that increases as the round goes on. 
 - Randomly generated Mob Overlord names

[TheMaskedMan2]

I'm just going to say remove gangs. It sucks, it's not fun, and it's basically like "Do you want to antag this round?" which the same tiders always lap up eagerly while ignoring their gang and just going on rampages.

Even when you try to follow it "Correctly" it's just spamming really boring shit like making guns or drugs for 30 minutes to be able to afford a d-saber which you lose in 2 minutes.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

I think, judging from other servers, gang could actually have potential to be highly destructive and engaging. Lots of servers do this sort of "cross-fire" thing where two groups of antags are trying to destroy eachother and the crew is caught in the middle. If gang was more focused on that it would be far more entertaining. Goon also doesn't have any antags like that besides kinda rev and I think it's a niche worth looking into.