Please, let's set a population limit for the servers

[Carbadox]

The quality of the Main server has been infamously dreadful to a point that a number of players stay away from it like the plague. The code for it exists and while I know that it apprently needs a number of tweaks but I think it's about time it's activated.

The game straight up isn't prepared to deal with the current player numbers. 90 player rounds are becoming common place, but a number of things can't keep up. It takes only about 50 players to fill in all the job slots if you include HoS and NTSO, gimmick jobs but don't include the infinite Staff Assistant job slots. I don't think its fair to anyone and especially to new players that for 'normal' rounds, they don't get the chance, or get forced out of a job just because there's too many people.

While the Staff Assistant role may be infinite, the Security Officer role isnt. A team of 6 Security members (7 if you're foolish enough to trust the Detective) can't possibly deal with a station averaging between 70-90 players. That's upwards of 10 crew members to one Security officer. And this lack of strength in Security results Sec not being to handle everything at once and properly, which in turn means greytiders and self-antags are more free to get away with like mobbing Security, breaking into the brig, breaking into the armoury and being an overall nuisance.

Some maps can also only fit a certain capacity of people. At a certain point, Medbay can't effectively heal people due to the lack of resources and staff to match the number of players. With that comes the lag of loads of players all playing at once.

Why a population limit though? Because it's the easiest implementation as of now.

There's always a better way of doing things. However, currently to do that you'd need to implement a system of dynamic job slots increasing depending on the number of players or any other fitting system. However, that's a considerable project that would take time to design, implement and test. However, the code for player population limits already exists and we now have overflow server that would be able to accomodate the people who bubble over from the main servers and let them enjoy the game in their own way.

Personally, I think a limit of somewhere between 60-70 would be perfect. Alll the job slots are filled and that leaves a solid number of 10-20 to take the rest of the slots. It's also just before the lag starts to really kick in and the right mix of enough players to be a bit chaotic but not obnoxiously too much

[UrsulaMejor]

population is how we get to the top of the hub.

getting to the top of the hub is how we get new players.

getting new players to move over to our other servers is how we maintain them with decent low-medpop instead of being deadpop.

Sorry to say it so bluntly, but player caps are an absolutely terrible idea. In an ecosystem like this, if your player count isn't increasing, it's decreasing, and we are in competition for advertising space on the hub.

And, to be quite frank, people like high pop main. We know they like it because they're on it. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't be there. Sortof a self evident thing, that. Not my cup of tea but it is what it is

[Drago156]

So as a person who almost exclusively plays overflow when it's not dead, I'm in favor of pop limits. I've played main rounds with 70+ players and it's just awful and miserable trying to keep up with even a quarter of what's going on or to keep to yourself to do stuff on your own.

As Carbadox mentioned we do have the overflow server, which was doing fine until maybe 2-3 weeks ago, when it started getting under 20 pop while main was maintaining 80-100 pop. As much as I don't like 50+ pop rounds, there's no reason overflow should be a wasteland while main has too many people.

Of course the argument of "I like rounds with lots of people, and more people is always better" should probably be addressed. There's a point where a lot of people is too many people, and that point is apparently obvious when all the job slots are getting filled, there's not nearly enough supplies on even the largest maps for everyone, and that the current job slots don't accomodate or account for such an increase in population well over the slot limit or expected population for the map size.

To address what Urs said: Why should the game be about popularity and advertising over enjoyment? Goon has been a stable server longer than any other server AFAIK and we still get plenty of new players from tides and people telling their friends about the game or from people from other servers checking out goon. Also, I wish people WOULD move to the overflow servers, but they don't. As I mentioned, in the last few weeks Main has maintained 80+ pops while overflow was under 20 people, even during prime hours.

[Carbadox]

Snip

I'm very much lost in that somehow quantity is being implied to be better over quality. Competition for advertising space? What? Is Goon a corporation now? Since when are high numbers a priority? I'm baffled by this. Goon worked perfectly well on a population of 60 players but suddenly we're fresh off a tide and now we're competing for top place on the Byond Hub, while being the most under-developed code base?

So many HoS players are repeatedly talking about how horrible main is to play on now. Ask them on the Discord server and each one will give you a different horror story. High numbers that directly make the game less enjoyable only encourages expirenced players to leave.

[UrsulaMejor]

These are just my personal takes, I'm not speaking on behalf of all admins

If you want more good players, you need more players. Getting more players has always been a priority.

Of course quality is important. But in order to have a thriving server, you need both.

As far as being "the most under-developed code base", that's just plain not true. Most of the best slam dunk features that have been wildly ported to every single server (the most recent example: overhead text, but before that, goonchat, and before that, the process manager, etc.) have come from here. We're lean and mean, not underdeveloped. Sure, we don't have the breadth that other servers have, but we have depth, and now that we're open source we're getting people from other servers contributing back to us. Since we went open source back in april, we've had over 1500 merged pull requests. In 10 months.

Goon's star is rising, and honestly, we're at the best we've ever been. There was always going to be some growing pains, and the overall population on the servers will normalize eventually.

Overall, I think that efforts should be put forward to have more flexible job slots and equipment so that we can expand to meet the growing population rather than artificially kneecapping ourselves. We've already seen the start of that kind of stuff with engineers/mechanics now starting with their full toolkit, as well as sec equipment being managed with tokens instead of lockers. A good next direction might be have miners start with everything they need, since they have two bases of operation and other than their basic equipment don't have any real need for additional station space.

[ZeWaka]

In favor of high limits. High being 90 or so.

[Lady Birb]

perhaps a sort of soft-cap where above a certain threshold you can still join preround but latejoin is disabled. Once it hits that cap it will start telling latejoin players to go to the overflow server instead.

[Flourish]

In favor of high limits. High being 90 or so.

Agreed. A lower cap for the RP servers would also be good; things get way too chaotic with 50 or 60+ players. We don’t have to be like “no you can’t play on Goon at all”; we could just redirect people if there are already too many players.

[Podrick Equus]

I disagree with population limits on Goonstation for the following reason:

If a new(ish) player loads up BYOND and is looking for servers to play on, they'll typically pick one of the servers at the top of the BYOND hub. The hub is sorted by number of players. If a new player clicks on Goonstation and is met with "You cannot join, there are too many players." They will likely pick a different server and not get to experience what we have to offer.

So no.

[Boxta]

Im gonna have to say no on this, 90~ player rounds are actually fun when you get used to them, lag isnt really a problem, and some really funny, and crazy shit happens, which is really refreshing and nice to see and play with, ive had rounds where there was like 10 of us just riding around on a cargo train for like 30 minutes, and some other stuff'
As for resource and job limits, whata bout a dynamic amount of jobs and gear, vending machines would increse the ammounts they have depending on the pop, job limits would increase that can support it depending on the pop

[Studenterhue]

The Goonstation Nightshade servers we set up for TomatoGaming had player caps (upon Tomato's request). There were three servers, two with tomato's RP rules, one that had RP rules at first but then became no-RP, so it was sort of like our current structure. They had a cap of 69 (nice.) at first before it was bumped to 55, became tomato felt it was harder to have good RP at higher populations than that.

Interesting thing we saw was that if Nightshade 1 was at cap, people would usually either wait for a spot to open up or play on our servers with their lack of cap, both when Tomato was and wasn't streaming.

Even if you don't think the Nightshade servers can't be compared to the mainline Goonstation servers, I think it's worth at least acknowledging that players won't necessarily join other Goonstation servers just because one is full, and it's not solely numbers that drives people to play on certain servers. Maybe their friends/favorite people play on a certain server for example. Or maybe they're just too afraid to venture out onto other Goon servers.

Because of the phenomenon above, if the intended goal is to balance out server populations, I don't think player caps are the answer. I'd be more at home with Urs's idea to make jobs and job equipment distribution scale better to higher populations, so that whether we have 10 people or 100 people on a server, they can all have something to do.

Now, if the caps were put in for performance, I'd totally be up for it. "The game isn't coded around X amount of players" is more objective measurement than "It is not fun to play with X players, even if the game plays okay". So I've heard from MBC, 130+ is when the game lags so much from all the players it's objectively unplayable. The performance-based player cap should be at that then.

[Flaborized]

For performance, sure, but if people didn't find highpop fun, highpop wouldn't exist. If it's not your cup of tea, play on overflow; no need to get rid of a population that clearly lots of people enjoy (as they play it)

[Flourish]

I dunno about others, but I find the game to perform significantly worse when we're at 80+ players.

For performance, sure, but if people didn't find highpop fun, highpop wouldn't exist. If it's not your cup of tea, play on overflow; no need to get rid of a population that clearly lots of people enjoy (as they play it)

Lots of things exist, but that doesn't mean everyone who participates in them find them the most fun, or even fun at all. The ideal solution here would be to try and maximize people's enjoyment.

For instance, I could find highpop a 5/10, lowpop a 3/10, and mediumpop a 8/10. Right now we often just have highpop and lowpop, which overall isn't super great. If we had a cap and a redirect, our player numbers could balance out more.

[Mrfishstick]

I think we can all agree that a round on a high pop server of like 90-100+ can feel extremely different from a round with 20 people. There also seems to be folks who strongly prefer one type over the other. And with that said, I honestly don't see any reason to impose a cap if the people who play on the very high pop servers are content to have play on that and we maintain additional servers which tend to have lower population levels for those that prefer that experience.

Capping the upper limits would just prevent players from having the high pop experience that desire that in the same manner that would happen if we refused to allow a round to start on a server if it had a population under 20.

[Wisecrack34]

I agree with Urs, if we have more people wanting to play Goonstation then we should put our efforts towards accommodating it, either by making more overflow servers to accommodate it or by redirecting to the current overflow more