Who is the server made for now?

[THISISANICEGAME]

I don't think features get removed because they got abused, I think they get removed because they simply don't fit the place they were put in, the food synth would make way more sense in a prefab or the debris, traitor items being restricted to traitor uplinks instead of being found in space or azones is another example, these things simply make no sense the way they were/are and I think the game is in a better spot without them. Getting killed because some nerd rushed x feels the same as getting killed because someone happened to come across x that round, abused or not, an issue is an issue.

[Tywren]

We have lots of content, but it's tough to expect to play for literally hundreds if not thousands of hours and not get bored of something.

Lots of content, but how accessible is that content? 

I've seen rounds as a botanist where we spliced Glowing Lotus into all the plants and took out the lightbulbs turning the entire bay into a cool black light painting, but afaik Glowing Lotus is a guaranteed spawn on one map, and a maybe spawn on one or two more. Or what about fishing, if you're not on Oshan or Manta you might as well throw the rod into the fryer and eat it as a snack, because distortion rifts are a very uncommon, if not rare event, and space fishing is either bugged or has been removed. Moving beyond content that is map locked, you also have content that is highly time consuming, such as hatching top tier chickens like Phoenix; how is anyone supposed to get into that kind of content when, at least on Heisenbee, I've seen rounds wrap up in as little as 12 minutes?

[Leeanei]

I dunno, why do people play for thousands of hours if there's no content?

[Yellow]

Why do you care about round time if you’re playing on main, there’s no reason to not do the absolute most in your power to destroy the station if you’re an antag on main. There is no reason to ensure anyone but you has fun. There is no reason to help out anyone that’s on fire when you have something to do because there is a chance they are an antag, not an actual human you sympathize with. A lot of main has what is referred to as “apathy issues” but that’s just how main is and will never change no matter what is done, so balance shouldn’t be focused around the awful players that just ignore everything except their own goals for that round and don’t even put in an effort to be a crew member.

[UrsulaMejor]

All players are subject to falling prey to "dominant strategies."

And a lot of players just feel awkward or not good about feeling like the game is "solved" and that to have fun they have to purposely select bad strategies or avoid good ones for fear of being called a ppwergamer or whatever.

The mere existence of "best options" is a bad state to be in for the game, and one of the best ways to avoid the existence of best options is to make sure that multiple options are viable.

In many circumstances, the dominant strategy is so extremely dominant that theres no way to add to the possibility space in a way that isn't yu gi oh levels of power creep.

For example, when I made it so all botany mutations were spliceable with every other mutation instead of mutations being unable to splice that broadened the possibility space for botany by a lot but... everyone still found themselves falling into the same strategy of making 100s of exploding tomatoes in the first 15 minutes because it took neither significant time nor significant effort and was also stronger than every other possible option.

And it wasn't even that interesting to begin with. It wasn't fun no matter who was doing it, so you were trapped between either being purposely suboptimal or being perceived by other players as an asshole just for playing the game as designed

Struggling with this doesn't make you an awful player

[phyvo]

I'm of the view that you shouldn't blame your players for playing the game that you have created and designed. Admin moderation is part of that, but as has been stated here already admin conversations are not a great way of dealing with someone power gaming every round. I'm also of the view that Main apathy isn't *that* bad. It can be bad sometimes but that's mainly in situations where security is dead/MIA and someone with a csaber pulls it out and starts wailing on someone near a few staffies or the geneticists. The staffies will probably run, the geneticists will probably not even notice.

As far as content goes I'd like to see adventure zones be easier to get into somehow. Right now you need at least one telesci nerd for most of them. I'd like to see some of the meeeeh syndicate items get buffed like the pickpocket gun and the sponge capsules. What if we buff the mindslave cloning module again while we're at it? I'd also like to see more work put into ghost "rejoin" roles, antagonistic or otherwise.

I would say that not every event role even has to be an antag but that makes me wonder about metagrudging enforcement. A lot of other servers where you can just rejoin the game are higher RP oriented or otherwise restrict an antagonist's targets, which main doesn't do. That's currently my only hesitation when it comes to allowing ghosts to come back as borgs or a bunch of diplomats for an event or something.

As far as station rewards go it'd be nice if perhaps a good station round unlocked some special cosmetic rewards for your next round, but those kinds of incentives kinda need a group + individual benefit mixture. I'm not experienced enough with other servers to really know how the "entire station" goals that sometimes pop up actually affect things or motivate people to complete them.

edit: In regards to Urs's point about dominant strategies, I would like to note that expecting a group of volunteers to create a "balanced" form of this farty space game is, in my view, probably unreasonable. We will screw up. Professional game devs screw up. Gamers will always find a new broken strategy because that's what lets them do stuff in spite of security and "win". That's how it works in every non-coop game. The difficult part is mitigating the egregiousness of the broken stuff (so nothing is TOO nuts given the time invested) while making sure the game doesn't get stale or turn into a nerf gun fight. I don't think we should be afraid of big nerfs to things, but only if we are willing to give comparable buffs to underused things to give them their time to shine.

IMO iteration is our friend and we shouldn't be afraid of accidentally making something too strong or too weak for awhile as long as we follow up on it later.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I think the pickpocket gun is already pretty powerful, looking at all the kinds of stuff it can potentially do. It could maybe use a manual, so people are more aware of their options when they get one.

[Sov]

Fishing was a feature added by Adhara who is not currently a member of the active staff. It’s been left in whatever state she left it in last and to my knowledge no one has continued it. I would consider it for removal pending completion, or lack there of

High tier chickens can be difficult for inexperienced ranchers to obtain, but experienced players don’t have to much trouble. Experienced players are able to speed run most any breed other than golden chickens by eliminating a lot of the rng and downtime that inexperienced ranchers slog through until they start to experiment a bit.

Telesci adventures can be assisted by the AI or a cyborg. The AI is usually quite receptive to requests to telesci sent via PDA. That said more recently released adventure zones have moved away from the telesci department (i.e. Owlery, NTRC, DJO, ???) with their alternative entry methods, and this is something that I personally would like to see more of.

[Ikea]

Also its important to note the ranch prefab allows you to fish on space maps. Dont think fishing is a good example of unaccessible content mind you considering its current state is unfinished and highly undeveloped, not much feature depth there.

[Zamujasa]

We have lots of content, but it's tough to expect to play for literally hundreds if not thousands of hours and not get bored of something.

Lots of content, but how accessible is that content? 

I've seen rounds as a botanist where we spliced Glowing Lotus into all the plants and took out the lightbulbs turning the entire bay into a cool black light painting, but afaik Glowing Lotus is a guaranteed spawn on one map, and a maybe spawn on one or two more. Or what about fishing, if you're not on Oshan or Manta you might as well throw the rod into the fryer and eat it as a snack, because distortion rifts are a very uncommon, if not rare event, and space fishing is either bugged or has been removed. Moving beyond content that is map locked, you also have content that is highly time consuming, such as hatching top tier chickens like Phoenix; how is anyone supposed to get into that kind of content when, at least on Heisenbee, I've seen rounds wrap up in as little as 12 minutes?

light lotuses and other weird seeds are supposed to be uncommon, rng-based chance stuff, like loot from the various locked crates around the world. they really shouldn't be an ensured spawn anywhere imo, but so it goes


"rounds wrapping up in as little as 12 minutes" is normal when there are game modes that end instantly under some condition. not everything should or can be possible in every round, and that's part of how things are designed

I'm of the view that you shouldn't blame your players for playing the game that you have created and designed. Admin moderation is part of that, but as has been stated here already admin conversations are not a great way of dealing with someone power gaming every round. I'm also of the view that Main apathy isn't *that* bad. It can be bad sometimes but that's mainly in situations where security is dead/MIA and someone with a csaber pulls it out and starts wailing on someone near a few staffies or the geneticists. The staffies will probably run, the geneticists will probably not even notice.

i mean, easy to say, but this is a game where the butterfly effect is very real: changing or even slightly adjusting things can lead to cascading effects and outcomes that nobody anticipated. while some stuff is surely "designed", a lot of it just comes out of how the various components of this game interact

some of it really is just behavioral stuff, though. imagine playing someone in smash bros. who happen to be excellent at everything. sure, maybe they have fun curbstomping everyone with their skill, but nobody else is going to find that interesting. but at the same time we shouldn't just bash everything into the ground because one person happens to have figured out how to abuse it, they should just ideally realize they're making the game unfun for anyone else and stop being that way

unfortunately, as you know, people

[phyvo]

Unintended consequences of intentional design happen all the time with every game ever. Sometimes the consequences are good (smash bros wave dashing), sometimes the consequences require code changes to fix unfun abuse. We have less coding resources than professional developers and less design experience. We're also serving a smaller community so the lines of abuse don't get tested nearly as much as in a professionally competitive game.

But I'd like to focus more on the following quote because I think it is important to this discussion and close to my heart:

imagine playing someone in smash bros. who happen to be excellent at everything. sure, maybe they have fun curbstomping everyone with their skill, but nobody else is going to find that interesting... ...they should just ideally realize they're making the game unfun for anyone else and stop being that way

In Smash Bros with your friends you might agree to not ledge guard or wave dash for your own fun. If a pro-smash-player friend disagrees with your group they might leave of their own accord or your group might kick them out. That kind of system kind of works at that small scale. But the bigger your community gets and the less intimately connected it is the harder it is to reach those kinds of agreements. How long on the East Coast did SSB:Melee players play competitively with items on? A lot longer than the West Coast.

I would like to bring up my own case in particular (Urs should remember this). I used to do a lot of flamethrowering as a critter bird which allowed me to ignore a lot of the deadly gases and lube that I spread around. I heard complaints about it sometimes in OOC but no admin ever talked to me and it was nothing compared to the rampages the old robust powergamers (most of whom are no longer with us) who would kill the entire station every chance they got. I never had any idea that there was a problem with my behavior except for a few OOC messages, and, given that most people (including myself) have complained about one thing or another while we were dead, and that no staff ever took action against murderboning, it all seemed to me to be within the arena of expected play for non-RP.

Then I got interested in helping with code. I joined the discord specifically because as a beginner coder I needed help, but I got drawn into other channels while I was there. To make a long story short I eventually got into an argument with Urs and a few others about my flamethrower behavior and agreed to a compromise with one of them.

But I still had a bad taste in my mouth. Antagonist vs Crew is, to state the obvious, innately adversarial. I had numerous times as antag where I got shut down before I got to have any "fun", and numerous times as crew where my round was cut short by murder. It's literally impossible to play SS13 and please everyone, unless maybe you expect to have the buy-in of the RP server. So how many people is it my responsibility to keep happy with my behavior? And which people? I had reasoned that I needed to keep the admins happy because they are the final arbitrators of the rules, they are the final authority of the community, but maybe that was incorrect.

More importantly, what if I hadn't invested more into the community and joined discord? I would never have had that argument. If someone from this lastest tide abuses the code but never reads the forums or argues on discord, how are they supposed to be convinced to change their behavior, especially on a high pop server? The client is terrible for hashing out different opinions. Is someone supposed to stop doing something on a 90 pop server because 5 people got angry in OOC? I find it hard to argue with people who say "no".

-----------------------

It is in fact this issue I think that causes some other servers to be more strict with antagonist objectives. Some of them allow murderboning once you have completed X number of your objectives, some of them don't, either way it limits the carnage and lays out exact expectations for behavior. But I never liked those servers because it limited my creativity as an antag. Sure, I liked the overpowered flamethower abuse, but I also liked posing as Heisenbee, turning everyone into Stirstir, and trying to start a force-borg operation in the AI core (never succeeded at that one). And turning people into birds.

So, I dunno. I don't think it's as simple as person X repeats something unfun for person Y and X feels sorry and stops by all by themself because they are a good person and if X didn't do it they are morally compromised. If we're just talking about people X and Y, yeah, definitely. But once you get to the community level things get much more complicated.

I would like to thank everyone for their patience in trying to read and understand each other.

[eggpielord]

I don't think features get removed because they got abused, I think they get removed because they simply don't fit the place they were put in...

this was spam but walp deleted it

Holy moly, big necro from a big nerd, take your suspicious links elsewhere