The Role of Security and Antagonists on RP Servers

[jan.antilles]

This has been a long, difficult conversation on Discord in the #rp-server channel, but it's too important to get lost in backscroll, so I'm moving it here.

Currently there appears to be a lot of burnout among the Security teams on the RP servers, with some expressing that they feel they are being held to difficult standards for handling aggressive behavior from antagonists and non-antagonists on station. Things like packet hacking and bombing are becoming more commonplace on the RP servers, and at the same time, some players feel like it has become a higher priority for admins to crack down on aggressive "shitsec" behavior. The security players who are trying to perform their role well and encourage good RP are feeling pressure from the increased scrutiny and amplification of bad behavior from antags and self-antags alike.

Do you agree? Disagree? How do you think this balance should be maintained?

[subjectparfait]

Solution really for the bombing problem would be to add a legitimate use for toxins bombs

[Mopcat]

copying what i said on discord earlier

i'm just super fed up with how this game is being handled right now, by its players and admins alike. admins expect sec to be angels to even the shittiest antags, self antags, and vigilantes, even the ones not even remotely interested in role-playing or respecting our rules, because we "aren't meant to enforce the rules". meanwhile on the admin side of things, the rp rules feel selectively enforced, when they're actually enforced, and people just see admin warnings as a slap on the wrist and keep doing shit. antag-to-crew ratios are insane and higher even than main antag-to-crew ratios, and it's honestly impossible for sec to actually keep the peace when there's 6-7 round start antags with sleepers, latejoins, and miscreants mixed in. and of course, non-sec players are absolutely awful to security players. of course, nothing is done about that and it eventually leads to even mentors powergaming towards sec and nearly bullying them into quitting sec or the game all-together, as i experienced earlier this weekend. i don't think i can play this game anymore until this shit is addressed well, honestly.

[Zergspower]

Agree on how they’re held to a higher standard.

To be honest all RP players should be held to a higher standard and treat it as they would be working an actual job. Yelling at your boss, punching them for no reason etc would get you arrested and what not irl.
‘Shitsec’ is fairly easy to identify and nail down since there are so few roles there, genpop shitters on the other hand are a bit tougher as you don’t have a pool of ~5 people to figure out who was doing it. Imo the amount of times we have to remind people of the rules each day is enough to warrant a talk here, from the shuttle bombs, darkness spam, auto-clicker spam, self-antagging and general shitty behavior that falls in a grey area that gets the f1 ignored in the long run. We have people that every round do everything they can to push the buttons on sec players and then cry foul when sec responds in kind. It’s starting to become a toxic affair of us vs them whereas playing Sec drains you about as much as AI simply due to the amount of people who play like that.

Of course I don’t have a grand solution, that’ll probably take a while before we all come to an agreement there, but I think reasonable changes to the rules and how we enforce them (I really only see an admin on late at night for example) would be a good first step.

Rule examples/highlights/thoughts:
- Redefine what it means to be a self-antag to where it includes specific examples
- Try and narrow the grey area on behavior, routine aggressors should be warned to a degree or at least talked to.
- Cannister bombs such as plasma and welder bombs are just an annoyance at this point, non-antags should be punished for using them imo
- Security persons should expect a mallcop experience but instead get the ‘spit in your face’ people every round

I of course don’t have solutions or ideas for every single problem, but if we address the big elephants in the room that are causing the most pain now we can worry about the tiny stuff later on.
TLDR:
Everyone treated at the same level respective to their role (You are RP'ing a job, dont do things you wouldn't do irl in that job)
Rule tweaks/enforcement
Repeated grey-area aggressors should be dealt with

[nefarious6th]

I agree.

I think one of the biggest problems I see is that we maybe have some different groups of people "talking at different frequencies", if you will. Some people treat RP like it's LRP, some people treat it like it's MRP; maybe neither are right, but what you end up with are different groups of players with totally different expectations. Extended mode is boring for people who don't want to flesh out a character like MRP folks might. Getting the station bombed with a canbomb, or being yoinked into space by a teleport gun without an individual word to you by whoever's doing it might pass for LRP folks but frustrate others. I just want clarity, I guess, in really what RP is or isn't. We have things now that are going on that people have been Grumped at or banned for in the past (notably TTV making and discharge [will insert that ban appeal when I have a moment to edit]).

So I want some clarity about what "level" or "levels" we should expect to operate at when on the RP servers.

To a different extent, I re-read the rules again today because I just want to find an answer. Here are some thoughts from that perusal:
Rules 2 and 4 I think we have consistent problems with. I really do. Escalation always seems off; when things are escalated, it's done with one other person or a few people, but the outcome usually affects a much, much greater number of people than that. A few examples from recent rounds are individually escalating with one Security officer for about 5 minutes but bombing and overthrowing the entire station; or the not-inconsequential number of changelings I've seen that have developed a small dynamic after catching someone and then being caught trying to kill them, but deciding to go abomination form in a hallway with 15 people and instantly eating and killing people who never had any clue.

Rule 5 we have some trouble with, again. Specifically, this part: "At the end of the day, it is very likely your character wants their employment with Nanotrasen to continue. As such, they should act like it." We have people making "self-defense" bombs. Captains that aren't antags giving really, really dangerous laws to AIs. Other non-antags that selectively target, harass, beat, and sometimes kill other players for no reason other than their gimmick was to "headhunt and kill the clown 3 times, because I, personally, hate clowns."

Rule 7 + 11, "Stay in your lane", we have problems with too. In particular, I've noticed a lot of vigilantism. Someone's on lockdown with erebite and making threats, while we wait for Security to gear up and intervene? Insert Chaplain with a Gun.

Finally, always, Rule 10: "Have you been made an antagonist? Treat your role as an interesting challenge and not an excuse to destroy other people’s game experience. Your actions should make the game more fun, more exciting and more enjoyable for everyone; you can treat your objectives as suggestions on what you should attempt to achieve but you are also allowed to ignore them if you have something more enjoyable in mind. You do NOT have to act in a nefarious or evil way, but you are not allowed to just go on a silent rampage and eliminate all the players in a power trip. It is the experience of everyone that matters, not just your own."
I don't really know what to say other than that seeing changelings or vampires, single players, consistently kill upwards of 10 people, in the ranges of 15-50% of the server population, feels wrong and gross. I can't remember the last time I saw an antagonist attempt to do a gimmick that WASN'T the greentext object.

I just want to know what to expect. I want to know where other people are at on understanding these rules. I want to know if I need to scale my expectations differently.

EDIT: I just wanted to say that I really come from the standpoint of this being a collaborative venture in storytelling. I don't think I get that in kind often enough. Maybe I'm in the wrong, but then, what's right?

[jan.antilles]

TLDR:
Everyone treated at the same level respective to their role (You are RP'ing a job, dont do things you wouldn't do irl in that job)
Rule tweaks/enforcement
Repeated grey-area aggressors should be dealt with

I get why Sec is held to a higher standard than other jobs. Our entire role and kit is focused on interacting with other players in an interfering way, from handcuffs and TicketMaster to our loadouts. Other jobs like, for instance, Hydroponics don't have the same access to disruptive tools than we do, so they aren't given the same level of scrutiny and that's okay.

But I agree on the issue that all *players* should be held to a higher standard, since we've chosen to play on the roleplaying server. I know Bill in particular has stated and reiterated that "our RP expectation is 'please try'" and on the one hand I agree... I don't want to raise the barrier to entry for roleplaying. But on the other hand, some people have come over with the expectation that RP is "main with more talking" and that's not the culture that we've tried to create here.

I know that admins *do* deal with repeated-gray-area aggressors. I have seen it happen. I appreciate that the general attitude is to try to help people improve rather than giving them the boot. The problem right now is that the pressure on RPers, especially Sec RP, is coming from multiple angles and it's creating a difficult atmosphere for them to have fun doing their job.

---

I think one of the biggest problems I see is that we maybe have some different groups of people "talking at different frequencies", if you will. Some people treat RP like it's LRP, some people treat it like it's MRP; maybe neither are right, but what you end up with are different groups of players with totally different expectations. Extended mode is boring for people who don't want to flesh out a character like MRP folks might. Getting the station bombed with a canbomb, or being yoinked into space by a teleport gun without an individual word to you by whoever's doing it might pass for LRP folks but frustrate others. I just want clarity, I guess, in really what RP is or isn't.

This is a really difficult sticking point, I think.

When I first started playing (in June, lol) RP was just getting to the point where having 27 people was high population, and there was no RP overflow. The tone, as I remember it, was much more patient and measured. Then the Tide happened, and it has been FANTASTIC for Goon RP. We have two servers now! TWO!! But the difficult part of that meteoric rise has been that the tone of RP has changed.

Over the past month or two, the general perception I've had was that RP1 was low-mid RP, and RPO was mid RP. People who wanted fast-paced rounds that still had RP structure and expectations and higher pop would go to RP1, and people who wanted the patient measured RP of the pre-Tide days would go to RPO. The problem is that this started a perception that the RP on RPO was "better" than RP1, and that RP1 was "Main but no wiz/nukies and please eat/drink." Neither of these was helpful, so we've mostly done away with them, but now that the Tide is starting to decline, RPO is getting to the point where it's... not even fair to call it "low pop" anymore; it's nearly dead. So now those of us who deeply love the patient environment are playing on RP1, and the culture shock is real.

This may seem off-topic, but I think it's an important piece of the problem: what do we want RP to look like on Goonstation? When we eventually condense down to one server (sniff, sob), what do we want that server to look/feel like in terms of pacing and expectation?

A lot of this is going to be player driven, obviously. We are the ones farting in space. But I think it's also a good idea to get some sort of information from the admins about what the expectation from The Powers That Be is for RP, so that we can at least all be working toward the same goals.

[Adhara In Space]

(my personal takes, not the administrations)

i think a large factor in several people not enjoying certain roles on the rp server (or game) as much as before is their own personal burnout. not as much to do with everything sucking and being bad because of new people, or inactive admins who don't care, or shitty people. it just feels like that because youre no longer having fun and want to find a reason for it. there are some legitimate complaints here, but i wanna make sure people recognise that blaming the server because you are tired of the game is something we can't fix. and fixing legitimate issues with people being underpunished or vague rules or an unclear message of what the rp server is wont always fix your issues with it if they stem from you just not enjoying playing the game anymore.

that being said, i think some more concrete examples of bad behaviour in the rules could be good, as well as tightening up some stuff. but i really want to avoid too much rules stuff. people already dislike rp for "having too many rules" already, and i dont wanna further drive that by making everyone comply with more or broader rules. tightening up existing rules and providing examples of common behaviour that breaks those rules would be good though.

also, maybe it doesnt feel like we punish enough rule breaking or whatever. sometimes stuff falls through the cracks and most first offenses are dealt with with just a "slap on the wrist". banning people for first offenses when they understand why what they did was wrong sucks. if they have a pattern of breaking rules, or a pattern of toeing the line, or they just flagrantly break rules and dont care to fix their behaviour, they get bonked. if people view it as slaps on the wrist, thats on them. i always say "dont do it again". if they ignore it, we have records of this stuff. if they keep doing it, they get banned.

as far as the admin standard for security: youre a player. dont break the rules. you have extra power and authority, so if you abuse it im gonna get mad at you. if you gotta deal with a griefer, ahelp and deal with them as normal. if someones breaking the rules (like shouting slurs), you can muzzle them, or knock them out, or something. ways to deal with people being shitty within the rules and scope of your job. try not to use super lethal force if you can. if you kill someone, clone them. being talked to by an admin doesnt always mean youre in trouble. if we go "whyd you kill that guy" and you go "ahelped him, he was griefing, wouldnt stop so we killed him" then whatever. sounds like a bad situation, ill try to talk to the player who got killed. you did what you had to to keep the station a safe place to be, and it didnt get dealt with by us earlier. if you cant deal with the stress or having to make calls about being security, or putting up with harassment (ahelp it if it goes beyond the usual "fuck sec they cant tell me what to do" that is common in game) for whatever reason, then dont stress yourself out by playing sec. if sec is literally harmful to your mental health, dont play the job. someone else will fill the gap. this is a community game. you have no obligation to literally hurt yourself for someone elses benefit.

for antags, if its an issue, i can bring it up. i think theres a separate thread about that though.

[AWarriorBunny]

I'm about to go to work so I can't make an effort post until later. However, at this juncture when I need to leave for work in 10 minutes, being a sec main trying to teach new security officers (and sometimes relatively new players) reminds me of this meme:

URS EDIT: HI, PLEASE DON'T POST PICS OF THIS SORT OF THING THANKS

[Is_Dog_Hour]

I end up playing a lot of security on RP1 and it is my favourite job role. So I would like to add my own opinion.

I think that unlike other job roles, security is mainly driven by interaction with other players. The enjoyment in security is found when working with others and whatever they chose to spend their round doing. This contrasts with other roles who may interact with other crew, but their enjoyment is not wholly driven by it. e.g. Botany may speak and work with other crew, but could always move back to growing their plants.

With security, your aim is to essentially ensure that people are able to safely do whatever they want to spend there time doing. The fun found in RP is based of others. It is distinctly more enjoyable to deal with an antag who tries to do something interesting and makes it enjoyable to roleplay with them.

The most enjoyable moments do require both security and whoever they are working with or against to put effort into RP. If you do only ever end up dealing with people breaking the law and never putting in effort I can see how you could end up being burnt out.

Maybe adding some variation into security might help, if there was something additional to dealing with crimes. I don’t really know.

[stagda]

I think Adhara raises a good point in that its good for people to take a step back and evaluate the source of their frustration as a whole. I was starting to get frustrated with  playing sec/certain other roles, which I used to enjoy playing a lot and realized I was feeling burned out more than anything. Not to discount anyone else's feelings or apply my own circumstances to them but taking a break from basically October 1st to this past week has done a lot to eliminate most of, if not all, of that frustration/burnout.

I do, however, think that there is an element of truth in what some other people have shared here already. While it is annoying to deal with constantly being called shitsec for trying to do the bare minimum of anything resembling actual security work, ultimately it's easy to shrug off/deal with by just taking the next round or two off from being sec if it gets to you. There are issues though, in regards to the standards being applied to security.

What I mean by this is that it is frustrating that it seems like we have to keep giving antags more and more chances no matter what we catch them doing. I understand why we can't go shoot on sight and just execute everyone willy-nilly but it is frustrating to have to constantly keep rebrigging someone because anything longer than a two minute timer causes massive salt ic and ooc. A lot of this, I think, stems from the fact that a lot of Sec best practices aren't really codified anywhere. The space law wiki page gives a brief overview but even then if you try to give anyone the high end of the times suggested there you get massive backlash from players and even fellow sec officers. I totally understand again that sec isn't supposed to try and, "win," against antags but a lot of the times I feel like im expected to be purposefully incompetent. This isn't an issue when the antags are being more light hearted or gimmicky but it often feels like I am expected to act that way even when the antags are being a bit more directly antagonistic.

Just thinking out loud here so as to think of solutions and not just the issues is maybe introducing a system similar to what CM does? They have an automated system where sec writes an incident report, selects the crimes they are charged with, and the computer spits out a sheet with the time on it. Maybe a similarish system could work on RP? Obviously would need to do work to make sure it fits the play style of goon etc so just throwing a broad thought out there.

[Wisecrack34]

I think a big issue I have with security is that a lot of it's more severe punishments require the ok from a higher command, being the Captain, the HoP and the HoS. The issue with this is that aside from the HoS, you typically don't see "Professional" behavior from said members of staff, the Captain being a glorified assistant even on RP unless it's specifically someone going for MRP and the same goes for the HoP but to a bit more reasonable extent. If 3 highly targeted individuals on a 20+ person server are MIA, KIA or AFK then you are left with no authority to do anything more than give em 5 minutes in the brig and remove their stolen goods.

I would propose that we give security some means of performing a public execution of players that security find problematic enough to be worthy of it. I'm not referring to giving them a guillotine (Though that would be absolutely WICKED) but instead having a means of deciding if they should execute a criminal via voting for it among themselves (Assuming a trial has been performed, though trials take a lot of players and effort to start and very little to disrupt)

How about something Among Us-esque since people keep comparing SS13 to it? Have a button that plays a loud beep to all Sec headsets and lets them vote by hitting a magic conch shell in the middle of Sec with their badge, giving a binary decision based on the amount of votes. This would be more of a last resort solution but I think it would help increase the autonomy of Security to allow them to execute more people without having to go through 5-10 trials per round for silent greentext Antags.

[data_err0r]

Sec is an incredibly frustrating role on RP. The expectations are so much higher for sec players, and I agree that it seems unfair at times. It feels like you get punished for actually roleplaying in this role.

My stints on sec almost always go the same way. I play it for a few rounds, maybe actually enjoy myself and have a good time. Eventually some player gets mad that sec is ruining their fun, whether self or real antag and get super salty. Lots of after game anger, calls of shitsec etc, it's annoying and I take a step back from sec til I get auto filled it again.

Hell, my first experience on sec was two regular players getting mad at me for not insta-brigging them and trying to figure out what was going on first. It often feels like you can't do anything right. If you try to make it quick and painless with a short brig or just a confiscation of items some players flip out that you're abusing your power, claim its bad RP etc. But then if you try to RP it, play it serious and fair calling in witnesses, detectives and the such other players start calling shitsec and breaking RP to get mad at your for wasting their time.

I think the attitude towards sec players needs to be adjusted in some way. The rules make it clear the game should be fun for everyone, but in practice it seems to be perfectly acceptable to ruin the game of sec, and be outright personally hostile to them.

I don't know if being able to execute repeat offenders is the solution, but maybe a crackdown on "Shitsec" culture? It can be so frustrating to spend 1-2 hours of your time trying to keep things running just to have a bunch of people talk about how bad you and your teammates are without any knowledge of what was going on and how much you had tried to keep things together.

[Technature]

I can say with utmost certainty that security is, very often, THE thankless job of the station. After all, you're there to be the "Fun Police" as far as a lot of people are concerned. And sadly, no matter how much you try, sooner or later someone is gonna have a problem with what you're doing. All you can really do is try to take it in stride and move on, and maybe make a report if it's something that's happening over multiple rounds from the same person.

As for players needing to have the more severe punishments...it can be a little problematic. But if someone is very clearly (I want to make sure that I make the words VERY CLEARLY noticed here) going to murder people if let out and the people who can give you permission refuse or are unable to give permission, then chances are the person has upset enough people that the severe punishment should just be carried out.

And again, VERY CLEARLY going to continue being an asshole of a problem. We're talking person that was caught is very clearly a ling, is doing nothing to hide they're a ling, and is, despite being in custody, doing literally everything they can to be a nuisance of an asshole and trying to escape to the point that they require no less than three officers to babysit them kinds of VERY CLEARLY. And before you ask, no I'm not just making that one up out of nowhere.

[Superlagg]

How about an option to release your mob and respawn? If it'd be un-RP to let someone out and the jail RP isnt so hot, why not let them concede RP-defeat and NLR into another go?

[Kamades]

How about an option to release your mob and respawn? If it'd be un-RP to let someone out and the jail RP isnt so hot, why not let them concede RP-defeat and NLR into another go?

I feel like this might encourage some really... poor play patterns from people that are otherwise discouraged by the current "If you are killed, you have a 30 minute wait to respawn" setup. If you know that getting arrested can lead to an instant respawn, there's no... real consequences to going rampaging, IN ROUND. Yes, there's admin intervention, but I feel like an instant respawn isn't the right answer here.