Who is the server made for now?

[Flaborized]

Hi, as the Main Person In The Admin Team Who Did Human Resprite Stuff I can weigh in on some of the particulars there. I've seen similar points and arguments brought up (sometimes in the form of a question) so I think it'd be useful to display my reasoning here for more people to see. As such this post isn't representative necessarily of the opinions the greater admin teams have on the game, just me.

Icons got changed without any attempt (that I know of) to ask the players if they wanted any change, or to offer choosing between the classic icons and the new ones.

Obviously I don't want to be be at all negative towards whoever put in the time, effort, and clear care for the new icons- but to have the change thrust on me without any input came off as needlessly top-down. 

This has been partially explained in this thread already, but to further elucidate: Having the sprites be a toggle is functionally impossible to put into play. It sounds like an 'All size fits all' sorta solution, but it's not quite that. Sprite artists making new assets that revolve around the human base would have to make two; one for the new one, one for the legacy sprites. You can't just make one since they're not the same shape, including in-hands even. This adds an excessive amount of work to future spriting endeavors and I feel the amount of people who would actually use the setting doesn't balance this out. It's a big trade-off and sadly isn't feasible pretty much.

The resprite thread was open early in the project and it wasn't a hidden thing whatsoever on discord or github especially. There's 118 separate PRs for the resprite, not counting post-resprite adjustments. The whole thing took around five months to complete. I tried my hardest to accumulate and understand what people were saying about the resprite during this time, often searching the discord for 'Resprite' in any posts to try and get feedback that I didn't specifically ask for, since I think that tends to be a very candid source. Even after the resprite I worked on various fixes and tweaks to try and address some specific issues players had, and there was also a period of (non-server-wide) playtesting which caught a *ton* of broken looking things before the initial launch. Perhaps it could've been advertised more aggressively in-game so that even more people could have had vocal opinions on it, but I don't think it's particularly fair to say that it was a left-field thing that was meant to jump out to people or that there was no attempt to gather input. I tried pretty hard though advertising something like that in-game somehow could be useful, genuinely.

I absolutely understand that some people don't like it, but just because people don't like it and it got through doesn't mean that nobody was listened to. I think negativity bias makes it easy to forget that a significant amount of players really like the resprite, not just coming from before the resprite went live but also after. Once the project was started it was always going to upset somebody to push through, but I, judging from my perspective as an admin, see the positive gained from the resprite as very very very worth it. There was no way to please everyone with it which I was cognizant of even starting. Also, from an artistic integrity standpoint, I feel like the work I did was good and valuable and made the game better, it wasn't perfect, but I'm proud of it, and proud of everyone who helped make it. 

---

Less specific to the resprite, I think the player turnover argument is a bit off. The playerbase has shifted a lot, but it didn't *start* doing that recently. People who played in 2012 talk about it too, how the players they started playing with are gone and left and haven't been around for half a decade. I don't see it as primarily an issue of people being unhappy with the game direction and leaving (though this does happen for sure), I think there's a variety of reasons for this sorta cycle. People just lose their free time, or burn out, or move onto something else. I don't see that as a giant flaw, I see that as part of the game. It's kinda somber though for sure.

I also think negativity bias factors in pretty heavily here. Everyone remembers the balance changes that they didn't like, but big feature additions like ranching, small feature additions that add a lot to the game like the QM money scanner thingy, small sprite updates that make the game look cleaner, audio improvements that make the game all around much nicer on the ears, documentation work that makes contributing easier, community projects like the semi-sometimes-monthly contests that are meant to try and create fun and let people leave personal impacts on the game itself, accessibility orientated changes with the intent to make the game more playable for more people, code optimization that makes the game run faster than it ever did before, and bugfixes of varying degree that makes the game much more playable are easy to dismiss since they don't leave as much of an impact as the bad things. I'm probably leaving stuff out too, but my point is: A lot of people do a lot of different skilled work to try and make the game better. Booting up the 2016 code reveals just how far the game has come on basically all fronts. I was there for 2019 Goon and tons of stuff has been added and improved and I'd never go back personally. As such it's very hard for me to personally take on the perspective of like, the game going downhill and watering itself down. I'm also very involved in the game so I see a lot of that improvement pretty directly, optimizations and bugfixes in particular tend to be pretty invisible but highly impactful changes but can't really be stuck in a changelog because they'd mean little to most players.

That said, I don't really wanna escalate or imply you're like... 'bad' through this post. My input here isn't so much to 'debunk you in a game of wits akin to chess or tennis' more as it's meant to just be like, my particular personal perspective as one admin who contributes often to the game. In abstract I can say that it sucks that you don't like these changes to the game, but of course if we reverted those changes more people would be unhappy since they were positively received by some people, so it can be kinda tricky. I'm hoping sincerely this post comes off as a 'why I like being here and contributing things I think are good and don't feel the same way' and not a debunk. Hope my post is helpful or interesting.

[Cal]

I do wanna point out I was around in 2012 when the game had literal shit in it, and it is so so so much better now.

[UrsulaMejor]

Doesn't the fact you have such large scale player turnover signal something is rotten in the state of Denmark to begin with?

No. High player churn is normal for video games. 


The average round runs 50 minutes. 3 rounds a day 6 days a week is 900 minutes,  or 15 hours. 

Go to your steam profile.  How many games do you have more than 15 hours in compared to how many you've started at least once?

[zjdtmkhzt]

I would definitely not want to go back to the "olden" days, I remember when we had two servers, rp was basically always empty and main had like 17 people on during europe hours sometimes.
Throwing the bigger playerbase away because some older players feel nostalgic for an outdated balance scheme is the last thing I think we should do.

[MomoBerry]

Honestly, I'm not as longstanding as a lot of other people in this thread, having only been here for around a year or so, but I don't really understand a specific point you made in regards to communication with changes made to the game. If a player doesn't want to engage a topic, you could light up a runway and put a candy trail towards the forums, discord or git-hub, and they still wouldn't go. There are more ways to engage with the community with Goonstation than most games made today, usually games just have a single discord where nobody pays attention to any suggestions because they aren't looking for input. What more would you want, if I can ask?


I think a lot of people have the Changelog disabled round start because it comes up every single round naturally, there's also the links to almost everywhere above your status and chat window, and there's also a link in the actual hub to the discord... and the changelog also has direct links to the wiki and the discord. I'm not sure what else they could even do to grab your attention if you're that adamant about not investing any effort at all.


Do you want every person who codes anything for Goonstation to make detailed lists of their future projects that they brainstormed and have them posted like a Changelog as well? This is a volunteer project, nobody is getting salary to make code changes or sprites, mapping, or anything else that is made for the server. Expecting everybody to want to set a regular schedule where everybody has to adhere to deadlines or time constraints day by day without being paid, while also living their own lives, would probably just kill off 90% of the current population making features. Not to mention, most of the stuff people talk about as features are just shots in the dark, and most of the time people aren't going to immediately jump in and start coding every idea they have.


Also, and this is actually purely from my experiences trying to get friends to play and my own thoughts, but "Doesn't the fact you have such large scale player turnover signal something is rotten in the state of Denmark to begin with?" is not the features suddenly added or removed from the game, or the rising pop, or any of that. Frankly, i think it's the people who will absolutely powergame and shit on a brand new player who doesn't even fully understand the controls of the game yet and kill them in the most lame and unfun ways for the person that drives new players away. I've seen some people just completely dunk on a person and actively prolong their tedious situations because they find it fun to do it. Wasn't that one of the reasons people were talking about in the thread you referenced early in the thread as well, in regards to the hos application? New players are probably not gonna have a ton of fun when you instantly stun and cuff somebody, hellchem/magdump/crusher/etc them, and walk away without having said a single word.


Not many people are going to leave a game happy when somebody just took all autonomy away from them without warning, stone-faced murdered them without any chatting or silly situation/gimmick/story, and then tossed them aside in a ditch to rot and be dead for the entire game. Despite the classic tag of no RP required, I think most people enjoy having even tiny amounts of RP here and there, and many of the best rounds I've played in had a lot of roleplaying despite no requirements to do so. I also think that's what most new players expect when they come in, since they usually come from videos or streams showcasing the gimmicky silly stuff that happens all the time in ss13. Rambled a bit(a lot), but basically I'm saying the enjoyment of 95% of the playerbase is PROBABLY more important than the 12 people that feel as if the game is awful now. I don't think a veteran player is worth more than a new player who wants to learn the game is worth, and I think having the mindset that you're more valuable than a new player is pretty lame and that's how you're coming off to me.


Also I think saying a nerf to the taser killed security into obscurity is kind of.... excessive? Stuns are still openly the strongest method of combat in this game, and in a prepared 1v1 with a stunbaton and a csaber, I would expect the stun baton to come out on top like 8/10 times. In fact, i think we're currently plagued by antagonists stealing security gear and using it in tandem honestly. You did mention something I think is worth mentioning, which is the "trial period" stuff. I do think we could benefit from testing things out on live more, and letting the players fiddle with it and going from there, and it does happen occasionally to be fair. I remember the pizza sharpener when it was first introduced was crazy strong... but having that like two? days of silliness was actually refreshing, and then it got adjusted to not be as absurd because it was out performing most weapons.


Just my take on things, and it's not objective by any means. And nobody is innocent 24/7, and even I've been pretty unfair to newer players without taking things into consideration, which is why i had taken a 2 month break or so and came back with a fresh mindset because I had begun to get upset playing the game. Sometimes breaks are needed, but at the same time, there are sometimes you need to adjust your playstyle and change it up because you're the issue as to why you aren't having fun, not the game. Plus its free, and i've spent more hours playing this than almost any other game i've played, and i own a fair amount of games. I think expecting it to have unlimited hours while playing the same way you always do is setting yourself up for failure.


Sorry if spacing is jank, for some reason previewing was adding a metric shit-ton of spaces.

[Cal]

Just want to point out we have a whopping 120 players on main right now so the game is not like.. devoid of players

[Xeram]

Honestly for all the complaints about people 'powergaming' or so much as engaging with the station as a game of crew vs antags with all the paranoia and stuff that should entail I'm not surprised "Who is the server made for now?" comes up as a question.

Not in the OP's sense, I think that's silly Instant deaths that take several times longer to process they've happened than to enact are are awful. The sound synth thing is beyond silly and petty, and the whole resprite thing was telegraphed ages in advance with feedback, not that it even needed it for a graphical unification/overhaul beyond "does this not look shit?" imo.

In the sense that in general, goonstation long stopped being a game about traitors and antagonists vs the crew and more of a sandbox with a bunch of little sandboxes and pet projects scattered around in it. People haven't come to play a game, they've come to play in whichever sandbox interests them, and anyone who comes over and kicks over their sandcastle is ruining the experience and bad. This isn't even digging into the fact that a tremendous amount of those 'sandboxes' are typically off limits to you unless you happen to roll antagonist.

This is the only place too where I hear so much pushing about 'not forgetting there's another player on the other end' of things too. Like. I don't think anybody has hello??? I'm sure everyone's played a multiplayer game before. And shot people on an enemy team without a second thought if they felt bad or not at 'losing.' Unless this isn't a game with antagonists and traitors and watching your back anymore and some minecraft-esque sandbox experience.

The game used to be fun because there was a central conflict with antagonists that everyone kept in mind while doing their part for the station. (or not) that always made the place an unpredictable backdrop to the conflict that would affect how it went down. Things were most interesting when everything had gone to shit and the survivors knew they were going to have to crawl through some Dead Space-esque hellhole of a gutted station to a possible confrontation to escape.

Now all I ever see is constant complaining if someone should ever think about causing that much ruin. Because it's not fun to have someone kick over your sandcastle throw rocks into your sandbox I guess.

Fun fact: I've typed something similar to this 3 times and deleted it because "what if I'm just out of touch, I haven't played in a long time because of these feelings, let's take a look to see if they still hold up."

That round was on Oshan, had changelings and quite a number of random antagonist creatures and sleeper agents activate. Should have been a fair bit of chaos, especially for someone seeking it out right? Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened all round was me stumbling over a security officer asking for help, trying to do so, the HoS showing up to also do so, following them out toward medical because you know, lings, and then them shooting me dead on the spot. Every 'hostile' creature I saw after a cloning (about 5 total) were just hanging out chatting it up with the crew until someone inevitably got the drop on them and they were killed. The botanists mucking around growing rafflesias near escape were more dangerous to the station overall.

If I recall the game end screen, there was like, 3/4 lings to the 100+ people on the server, the late spawned creatures, a sleeper agent, and overall a whole lot of nothing for a round.

To answer the thread title, I'd say "Not anyone who wants to play it like a game." or "Mostly roleplayers now."

If there was some better, tangible overall goal for the entire crew to work toward for a given round beyond personal survival and actually required not just adequacy, but excellence across the whole station to achieve it'd probably help. If some of the most interesting parts of the game weren't locked behind having the rare chance at agency to start conflicts instead of having to hope they happen would help. Subsystems having actual interesting non-antagonistic value would help. (Is there ever a reason to not immediately get rid of the toxins part of research besides not being a meta-gaming shitheel?)

[KikiMofo]

To be honest I don't really care about all the other stuff in this thread. I just really miss Ass Day. Was the best day of the month for me and one of the reasons I would come back to play even if I was playing some other game at the time. Now I just show up inbetween my videogame backlog cleanings.

[Zamujasa]

ass day getting removed instead of retooled (especially now that we have proper respawn timers for rp) sucks. i get that it drove people away sometimes but so does any map that isn't cog 1. most of the worst problems with it (ghost drones) could just be disabled. having one day out of a month be a free-for-all is a nice change without having to hope you roll antag and the type of antag you need for certain things

most of the nerfs recently seem to be a case of trying to enforce a certain culture by game mechanics and not direct intervention. nitro too easy and too explosive? remove nitro entirely rather than going, hey, you are running this into the ground, find a new gimmick or you can take a vacation

a lot of the problems with "powergaming" in general seems to be centered on the idea that it should be "harder" to powergame. the problem is that the people who are going to powergame are just going to find new ways to do it, while people who casually enjoy stuff suffer because one or two ding dongs ran it into the ground.

To answer the thread title, I'd say "Not anyone who wants to play it like a game." or "Mostly roleplayers now."

i've been taking a break from goon to try out some other stuff, trip report:

- "mostly roleplayers": basically nobody on 1 roleplays at all, so i doubt this really matters. most of the nerfs are to stuff that, abused the way it is on main, would get you a talking to

- "not anyone who wants to play it like a game"
there are several mechanics that encourage playing it safe over being actively engaged in conflicts, from a crew perspective:

* death is often final. bodies rot incredibly quickly and are impossible* to revive outside of borging in that case. this means that it's often better to stay away from conflict rather than risk getting killed and sitting out the next 30-60 minutes.
** (on other servers, you can generally revive people who have died, cloning is typically a last resort; and cloning needs your head / some gibs / etc only, not an entire body. even if all of these fail, there are constant respawns, and not just antagonist ones -- new exploration events with "NPCs" that you can take control over, other roles off-station, sort of like the afterlife bar)

* spacebux rewards are based on surviving and escaping, especially paid rewards. dying means you lose whatever you have, and not escaping drops your payout by 75%. on top of this, spacebux payouts are further based on what job you're playing, which often has nothing to do with what you actually end up doing during a round.
** (other server: funds seem to be 300 for escaping, 200 for being alive, and 100 for playing, and you unlock items permanently when purchasing them, so you can equip whatever you've bought pre-round)

* general crew apathy. this ties into the above -- actively interfering with antags is a great way to become the next victim
** (other server: i don't have any real notes here, but there are a lot of mechanics that make antag hunting more interesting; the AI can photograph a 3x3 area and send those images via PDA to anyone, or upload them to 'newscasters', either as an alert or as a special "wanted" thing. these broadcasts ping every newscaster on the station and there are usually at least one per room, so this is a good way to do other interesting alerts too)


[sub]* yes i am aware there is a cloner upgrade out in fuckoff nowhere in space, it is retrieved and used about once a year[/sub]

Subsystems having actual interesting non-antagonistic value would help. (Is there ever a reason to not immediately get rid of the toxins part of research besides not being a meta-gaming shitheel?)

no, there isn't. toxins is more or less there strictly for bomb making. there's nothing interesting you can do with it other than make bombs. that ties into the same "subsystems having value" thing -- the other server i've been playing on lately has a bunch of different gases that you can end up with, including one that causes hallucinations, one that acts like super-oxygen and requires a much smaller amount to be breathable, that sort of thing. here: you make bombs. ok great. even the engine doesn't care because the ideal mix for burning tends to just be POO and you don't need any fancy work to do that.

a lot of other things exist there that don't here. science has a bunch of research they can unlock that boosts the effectiveness of various tools around the station like sleepers, medbots, unlocks new, fancier things to build (super power cells, ultra-high capacity bags), and other stuff. chemistry has 'recording' rather than groups, so you can't just paste in fuck:1;shit:2;piss:5;hellfoam:69 and click a button to bomb everything, you have to actually at least spend time doing it the long way first (and they have a limit to how many reagents they can dispense that recharges over time); there's also atmos systems to keep places from just being vented permanently, chemistry factories with pipes and machines to automate mixing/smoking/creating pills, and all sorts of other shit

goon has interesting mechanics in some places, but most of them have little depth. most departments have no reason to interact with one another



on the note about players rejoining the round: one round on this server i was playing, someone (who used to be a goon regular) was on a mild killing spree with an army of golems. those golems? ai at first, but ghost players got a notification to join. so they'd kill people, and then build more golems, so the people that got killed could get back in the game. or sentience potions that let players control the various station pets. and so on and so forth

the only option if you're a dead player on goon is to either go fuck around in the afterlife, go murder dummies in vr, or be a useless ghost critter, unless you get lucky and get an antag respawn, in which case... you're an antag critter now. you can't rejoin as a normal, passive person, or even a force for good.

it's a huge difference in environment.

[gleb09]

>Every 'hostile' creature I saw after a cloning (about 5 total) were just hanging out chatting it up with the crew until someone inevitably got the drop on them and they were killed
I remember seeing stuff like this a couple of times and it made the game really awkward. Vampries and Wizards walking around just chatting to the crew. I'm stood thinking, "Should I not be attacking this antag? Are people gonna have a fit that I'm ruining something"

>most of the nerfs recently seem to be a case of trying to enforce a certain culture by game mechanics and not direct intervention. nitro too easy and too explosive? remove nitro entirely rather than going, hey, you are running this into the ground, find a new gimmick or you can take a vacation
This is a big point as well. A game like this is so lucky to have mods in practically every single game. Huge matchmaking games feel so frustrating when a player ruins things and the "report" feature is just a shout into the wind. Here we can have a player be talked to and said that they're not making the game fun and to try something else.

[ZeWaka]

re: turnover

---

goon has interesting mechanics in some places, but most of them have little depth. most departments have no reason to interact with one another

in my opinion, this is due to them being open source and therefore having hundreds more contributors for a dozen years compared to our 1.75 years

[THISISANICEGAME]

The only time I ever played during ass day there were 2 players online, this was a little early in the day but at that time I was used to 30 people around the same time, I think that is a good enough reason for it being gone.

I don't see how you can defend nitro staying around, it was a buggy and annoying chem that kept getting abused because of how buggy it was, it was like that since forever and no one fixed it, as fixing it would require a lot of effort. You can't convince me some nerd instantly gibbing you was in any way fun, maybe funny at first, but that gets old after a while.

I also agree we lack features to bring people back into the game after they die and just stuff to do in general in some jobs, but I think it isn't fair to complain about that because new features get added every week by both players and devs.

[UrsulaMejor]

it was a buggy and annoying chem that kept getting abused because of how buggy it was, it was like that since forever and no one fixed it, as fixing it would require a lot of effort.

One of the codermins was spending hours a week every week debugging nitro and only nitro. It just wasn't worth it.

[AmazingDragons]

Hi there! A lot of peeps have been talking about player turnover in goonstation specifically, but let's broaden our horizons and see how it holds up to other games. I'm a moderator for a popular game called Untrusted, which is on steam. I can tell you with absolute certainty that we experience the same, if not more, player turnover. 

Every day we see new players, and every day, members of the community leave. The reason being? To most of the world, video games are just that: video games. I care deeply about both of these communities and I highly doubt I'd leave without a good reason, but most people are just here to check it out, see what cool things it has to offer, and move on when they're bored. And that's okay! It's a poor mindset to assume that everyone who plays video games plans to be there for several years and continuously play. I guarantee you that the rather low turnover that goonstation experiences is not indicative of a poor direction of the game or bad management. 

I can't really comment on the rest of this, apart from the fact that it's a bit absurd to take like three things (nitro, ass day, resprite) to decide that everything that is good in this community is being removed, especially when new things are coded every day. I'd appreciate assday being reworked (maybe every other month and/or only on goon2?) and readded, but I don't think it's that big a deal.

[Cal]

I still can't get over the sound synthesizer comment. I should actually like it to be nerfed MORE because I'm tired of broborgs spamming the gunshot noise. Why do they even have a gunshot noise? Deception when emagged?