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

[Mordent]

I don't like the idea of a hard cap (outside of any that we impose for "an actual limitation on how many we can have before the game server starts catching on fire"), but wouldn't be opposed to a slightly softer cap that perhaps reminded people the other server exists after a certain threshold (even, like, 100).

I don't know how easy the data would be to get, but I wonder if we could add (even approximate) player counts to the list of servers on the game start screen?

[KikiMofo]

Ive always thought around 60 players is the perfect amount but I dont think we should force that cap UNLESS we capped one server at 60(or 69 heh) and then the second server was uncapped. I dunno how much that would change because people would probably still flood the uncapped server like they do now.

[Carbadox]

or by redirecting to the current overflow more

I thought that was implied from the very start and didn't have to be stated but I'll just take that as my mistake for not mentioning it.

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

Is Goon not a thriving community? Even before the tides of Tomato, SSeth, etc, Goon had a managable player population without any outside influences. I think even just going open source would have resulted in a player boost. Yeah, maybe it's not comparable to other servers regular 100 pop, but those servers are coded and designed to handle fluctuating player numbers, with more access automatically being given on lower populations and a higher number of jobs to choose from.

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.

Open sourcing was a good move and I'm happy to see the number of contributions rise but the 10 months of new PRs doesn't make up for the 10 years (or however many) of QoL features, optimisations and enhancements that other servers have gotten during the whole time that Goon has been closed source. Goon has a splendid unified artstyle compared to the mumble-jumbled mix of old sprites differing artstyles of TG but there's a distinct number of laggy interfaces (QM console, engine statistics computer,Security cameras computer), abandoned / in dev-hell mechanics (mat-sci, manta vault, nuclear engine, etc) and janky features (RP motives, skateboards, segways and clown cars sharing the same stiff movement code).

I'm not saying Goon is bad. I wouldn't be playing/mentoring/making bad PRs if I didn't love this place. But in it's current state, it's not yet properly suited to accomodate the player counts we're reaching. I'm wholey welcome to any work to change that, however realistically, it'll take time before that comes into effect. Everyone who contributes does it out of their own free time and will. And no one says we have to lock people out of playing Goon, just direct them to the Overflow servers so that they can enjoy the game the way it's intended. Not in a clusterfuck state where they die due to a welderbomb without even knowing what the controls are.

[Sov]

if people choose to connect to the server with 100 people that's the server they wanted to play on. If people avoid the server with 100 people in favor of the one with 50 people then that's our natural soft player cap. The players get to decide when the server is full enough that they want to play on the less populated one, a population limit is just us forcing them to make the call.

Personally if I wanted to play the server that was capped I'd just idle in the lobby connecting to no server spamming the retry button. This behavior is hardly unique either as it was commonly observed with the nightshade servers.

I am of the opinion that caps are unneeded and possibly even detrimental.

[THISISANICEGAME]

Personally I dont really get performance issues when there are 80+ people in and I also dont like the idea of a cap because it wouldn't really solve the greytiding issue and would just make it so that people who like to or have to play at the more crowded times can't do it. I think a better idea to solve the greytiding would be to either make it so more officer(or every other role so people have something to do) spawn at higher player counts or to give the staff assistants some sort of objective.

[Tribaja]

There certainly are different flavors of gameplay that come with different player numbers, but I really don't want the main to be capped. Despite the inevitable chaos that 30 greyshirts will bring there is a certain undeniable charm to it. Maybe it's just me since I play SS13(and DF) mainly for the emergent storytelling that arises from the player interaction between themselves and with the game mechanics. The more players, the more interactions and conflicts will arise.

A high pop also increases the chances that people will join in on gimmicks of other players and this will in turn encourge more people to try more gimmicks that require participation. Like the rage cage with a 100 pop is a very different experience than one with only 60. With 100 pop you can be sure that there's at least 20 greyshirt looking for shit to do and will gladly fight for honor and glory, but I've had a hell of a hard time trying to get even a couple people to fight in the cage with around 60 players. Participation gimmicks rely on population and the larger it is, the better.

Now I do acknowledge that this is a very narrow view so I have a suggestion. I think some of the redirection could be handle with a change in branding on the servers. Maybe "Spicy" for no cap and "Mild" for the capped one? Add some descriptive flavor text to the roundstart screen with the servers too so that people know what they're getting in to. As it stands now "overflow" kind of feels like it's the lesser server of main. With a change in branding it can be seen as a different gameplay experience. Get your space legs on the mild and then join the fray for some spicy chaos on the main, or perhaps you wish to relax with a more milder experience and don't want all that chaos.

I get that people like the experience of what used to be high pop (around 60), but the new high pop is an experience that a lot of people enjoy as well. These differences in gameplay experience should be reflected in the server names in my opinion as that will draw people to try them out more readily. Think of it like this, if you are a new player and have only played on the new high pop of around 90+, going down to 40-60 on a server named "overflow" might seem like a downgrade, which it isn't, it's simply a different experience and changing the names might make that more apparent.

This was way too many words for a post about player caps, but here we are.

[Frank_Stein]

Now I do acknowledge that this is a very narrow view so I have a suggestion. I think some of the redirection could be handle with a change in branding on the servers. Maybe "Spicy" for no cap and "Mild" for the capped one? Add some descriptive flavor text to the roundstart screen with the servers too so that people know what they're getting in to. As it stands now "overflow" kind of feels like it's the lesser server of main. With a change in branding it can be seen as a different gameplay experience. Get your space legs on the mild and then join the fray for some spicy chaos on the main, or perhaps you wish to relax with a more milder experience and don't want all that chaos.

I agree with this idea. We did it for RP and that seems to have worked.

Maybe even encourage some server competition, like sharing the other servers station score, so you could try to score higher. Make it fun.

[Drago156]

So I just want to pick apart a few things I think should be answered from an opposing view.

There certainly are different flavors of gameplay that come with different player numbers, but I really don't want the main to be capped. Despite the inevitable chaos that 30 greyshirts will bring there is a certain undeniable charm to it. Maybe it's just me since I play SS13(and DF) mainly for the emergent storytelling that arises from the player interaction between themselves and with the game mechanics. The more players, the more interactions and conflicts will arise.

A high pop also increases the chances that people will join in on gimmicks of other players and this will in turn encourge more people to try more gimmicks that require participation. Like the rage cage with a 100 pop is a very different experience than one with only 60. With 100 pop you can be sure that there's at least 20 greyshirt looking for shit to do and will gladly fight for honor and glory, but I've had a hell of a hard time trying to get even a couple people to fight in the cage with around 60 players. Participation gimmicks rely on population and the larger it is, the better.

I think I'll start here. As it stands with regards to interactions or conflicts, I don't think population is really the best determining factor of if such things will happen or arise past a certain point and that once you start getting to a point where there's a large amount of information to process, those interactions and conflicts can start becoming less valuable then they would be at say a lower population. You can absolutely still have decent interactions and conflicts with even 20 people, or less! The old RP crew is a very prime example of that and I think at a lower population environment you get to take more advantage of building a story, or narrative, or even some character depth out of these interactions and apply them to future situations compared to higher pops.

As with participation with gimmicks and kind of pulling the second reason why I don't think population is the greatest determinant for conflicts and interactions, it really more depends on the personalities and people you have. You can have 100 people in one place and ask all of them the same single question, and chances are you will get varied responses. Population just increases your chance that someone will be the kind of person that will create or seek an interaction and follow along with it or get others involved.

I get that people like the experience of what used to be high pop (around 60), but the new high pop is an experience that a lot of people enjoy as well. These differences in gameplay experience should be reflected in the server names in my opinion as that will draw people to try them out more readily. Think of it like this, if you are a new player and have only played on the new high pop of around 90+, going down to 40-60 on a server named "overflow" might seem like a downgrade, which it isn't, it's simply a different experience and changing the names might make that more apparent.

if people choose to connect to the server with 100 people that's the server they wanted to play on. If people avoid the server with 100 people in favor of the one with 50 people then that's our natural soft player cap. The players get to decide when the server is full enough that they want to play on the less populated one, a population limit is just us forcing them to make the call.

Now for this. I've mentioned this before but perhaps it should be expanded upon, as it stands currently the overflow server can and often times has a very lackluster population amount ranging most times when I look some where between 20-30 people while the main server can be at well over 85 people. A majority of the time, people (myself included occasionally) will choose the high pop server over the server with dead or lowpop, and this really doesn't help the argument of it really being a per player decision for population count. If you're wanting to play a game and your usual server or area or whatever has well under what you would prefer and the game is suited around multiplayer, chances are you're going to pick a place with more people, even if it's out of your comfort zone, or you're just not going to play at all. That's the biggest issue here is that there should be a balance, otherwise you drive out players by favoring one population size over the other.

At the very least I don't think having some sort of pop-up or notification when people log into the main servers past a population of maybe 65 that tells them about the overflow server is a bad idea, and worth considering.

[Studenterhue]

If you're wanting to play a game and your usual server or area or whatever has well under what you would prefer and the game is suited around multiplayer, chances are you're going to pick a place with more people, even if it's out of your comfort zone, or you're just not going to play at all.

The capped Goonstation Nightshade servers demonstrated this isn't quite true. Yeah, there were some people who played on the servers below the cap, but there was also a lot of people who just waited for a slot to open up in the capped servers, in about the manner Sov described. Again, like I said earlier, while server population is the biggest deciding factor for a lot of people, for a lot of people, there are other factors that are more important.

I think caps and mandatory redirection of other players is unfair to the huge portion of players who like high population or prefer to stick a certain set of servers. I don't know what specific percentage they make up, but I'd say they're big enough to matter. They choose to play that way, and I don't really see their choice being so problematic we need to deny them that.

With that said, I'm still for the suggestion that the game advise--not force--people to join other servers when one's at high pop, which both sides of the argument seem to be okay with. I don't think it should be particularly crazy. Maybe pressing Declare Ready should give you popup saying something like "The server has a high number of players connected. This can impact game performance, and job slots may be limited. You may want to visit the other servers [links to other servers]. Do you understand?" (can take other forms, generally should try to be objective), and if you type in yes into a field, you'll finally join the round/get the usual Spacebux and latejoin job selection menu.

[UrsulaMejor]

As others have brought up, for a lot of players, playing with their friends is more important than the number of players on the server. If their friends are on Main, and they can't join due to cap, they just won't play.

The reasons why player caps won't work or are bad are numerous, and I don't believe in the supposed benefits to having one; most importantly, I don't think that the game actually has a "maximum operating" point beyond performance

[Drago156]

If you're wanting to play a game and your usual server or area or whatever has well under what you would prefer and the game is suited around multiplayer, chances are you're going to pick a place with more people, even if it's out of your comfort zone, or you're just not going to play at all.

The capped Goonstation Nightshade servers demonstrated this isn't quite true. Yeah, there were some people who played on the servers below the cap, but there was also a lot of people who just waited for a slot to open up in the capped servers, in about the manner Sov described. Again, like I said earlier, while server population is the biggest deciding factor for a lot of people, for a lot of people, there are other factors that are more important.

I think you took what I said in the wrong direction Studenterhue, I was arguing that if a server has a lower population under the amount that you prefer or would deem necessary as the bare minimum for playable, you're not going to want to play on that server that has not enough people, and would rather opt to play on a different server with more people, even if the different server had a population amount that was higher than what you preferred, or you would opt to not play at all.

[Studenterhue]

Maybe, but I don't think the direction really matters, for my main point again was that for many people, there are other factors besides server population numbers (high or low) that make them want to stick to play on a certain server, and to implement a hard cap (or floor, or minimum, or whatever word) based on ideal pop number rather than performance and a system for forcefully moving people to other servers would be disrespecting that not-insignificant group of people (whether to offload people off a server with higher than max player count or fill up a server below a minimum).

For sure there's people who join servers primarily based on how many people are on it (whether it's based on higher than a personal minimum or below a personal max), and, once again, I think a reminder that it might be a good idea to join other servers when population starts getting high is a good compromise to those both for and against enacting player caps and/or relocating players.

[fosstar]

A possible compromise solution might be to delist RP and RP Overflow from the hub, leave them on the wiki, and set an extremely high, redirecting cap on main at something resembling 80 players, with a soft-limit at 60-70 that consists of some big text in the vein of "HEY BUDDY THERE'S AN OVERFLOW SERVER YOU PROBABLY WONT GET ANYTHING BUT ASSISTANT HERE PLAY ON OVERFLOW." Combine that with adding another overflow server and you have 3 servers at a maximum of 80 each, more than enough to handle even the highest of high pop. Plus, by delisting RP and RPO, you can both stop drive-by griefers and ensure that players there have at least enough experience to know the wiki exists.

holy fuck this post looks bad sorry in advance im very rambly right now

[Sundance]

I'd be against player cap personally, even though I loathe anything above 70 because my prehistoric set-up shits the bed, but the thing is I have that choice not to play and go on overflow instead.

Can we all agree on one thing and that it would be preferred if both servers had more equal share? It's just the nature of the cap that's on the table here. It's good to remind that this would also be beneficial for overflow, where on lowpop where it's numbers are 7-8, it could be bumped up to 15-20.

I think there should be some proactive encouragements to the population numbers.
I like the idea of player counts on other servers being shown. I'd recommend a player count also being shown on the text box when new rounds are announced currently.
One idea that I was toying with is that Mentors / HoS get a click-to-join message if the other server is low on Mentors / HoS ? This could give overflow servers a needed boost, while maybe causing a little bit of a drain on the absolute units of main and RP main.

I agree with Carb in that high pop isn't a desired state, there is undeniably a performance issue when it comes to the code at pops 85+. There is a lot of wonk that needs to be ironed out and I hope that the TGUI stuff (is that what it's called?) will rectify some of the interface jank.

The point that was raised regarding after a certain threshold of 80-90, the station just devolves into Staff Assistants everywhere and Security becomes a hellish nightmare. Here's a bright idea maybe at High Pop, increase the number of slots on most jobs, add in the "Trainee" option such as "Medical Trainee, Security Trainee (see other thread), etc" on limitless and actually put a cap on the number of Staff Assistants on the station, say around 15 or less?

What this does is in high pop is it limits the amount of station degradation and encourages job performance without being too heavy handed.

[GORE]

If I want a relaxed experience I go to Overflow with 10-30 folks.
But sometimes I wanna meet 80 people on main.
So why equalize them?

That leaves only one preferred server size to choose from.