i think it's time to try player caps.

[Torchwick]

Nerkson took the words right out of my mouth with this one. As a 4 main of about a year now, it’s been genuinely demotivating to see the population die off. It’s awful to hear about people ‘leaving 4’ because they felt the meta-cliquing is so bad, because it always feels like I’m part of the problem merely for playing there. I’m positive that this is a problem that actually occurs and that it has soured the experience of low pop for some folks, I just wish 4 would be given more of an honest shot these days, now that stuff has, as far as I’ve seen, changed.

Couple days ago, we had the admins pushing for people to join 4. We ended up getting around 30+ pop that night and the 4 mains were obviously both IC and OOC super EXCITED to see new and old faces!! We were so pumped to have action and people to RP with! It was the most fun I’ve had playing in a couple weeks. It wasn’t too hellish, but it was a healthy amount of people to hang out with.

I’d be totally down with at least trying the pop cap. If it doesn’t work out? Back to the drawing board, by all means, but I’d genuinely love to see some sort of change to help bring people back to 4. The folks that have been on 4 recently, while becoming well known to me and regulars, are some of the nicest and most inclusive players I’ve seen in a while. I haven’t really noticed any issues of any set of people keeping to themselves and purposefully shutting out other RP. I think part of the reason it can feel this way, from someone looking in these days, is because there are so few of us, and yeah, sometimes shifts get quiet, or you end up talking to the same one or two people all round. I mean … when you’re only playing with about 6 other folks in the early evening, what else can you do, right?

Point being, as a lowpop main, I’d love to see some new (and old) players coming over to 4, and giving it more than five minutes of playtime. Those of us that frequent it now do our best to greet and interact with whoever we can. I find myself going out of my way just to talk to people I don’t recognize, praying they won’t cryo out of boredom. Some rounds it feels like a genuine ooc fight for keeping population up. I don’t know what the best solution would be, but I’m certainly open to trying anything that might help!

[Wander]

Personally, I believe a cap would be worth trying at this point considering the difficulties with alternatives. If it does not work it can of course be reversed just as easily as it was introduced. The one thing that I would propose is that “ghosts” count towards the cap while “observers” do not. Additionally, observers can be prevented from joining ongoing games through the standard methods while ghosts can work as normal. This would allow for observing to become a choice to commit to watching a round that does not affect the cap, meanwhile active players can flow back and forth between life and death within the cap. This should help with some of the concerns regarding how non-active players affect the cap.

After considering it further, the buffer for observers Zamujasa mentioned would probably be for the best rather than splitting things into ghosts and observers. My reasons for changing my mind being thinking over how allowing infinite observers would affect population shifting and the complexity of what would be required to create a system that would work with that. Currently very much for the current proposed cap, if only to test it and see how it affects things.

[chemtrails]

i don't care how this goes either way, im not too invested in it, but i don't think player caps are the way to go. i think we need to go back to extended rounds like it was done for the last few spikes over the last 4 years, especially considering the chaos of self-antags and antags who aren't escalating lately. the majority of people, when encountering a cap are gonna go 'oh no, ill just play later' instead of going to 4 or to 1. if the pop on 4 can hit 20+ organically, im fine with that. the main issue isnt so much i think people will get clique-y but people will obviously want to play with their friends, just naturally.

no matter what i think one server is always goin to be more populated than the other, and the less populated server will have a higher standard for RP, just naturally. i personally wouldnt wait 15-20 minutes to join a server that might not even have the job available that i want to play, instead of playing a server that might have 1-20 people on it and Nothing Going On. believe me though, id love to play on a server that doesnt vote cog1/donut3 every. single. time.

tl;dr i dont think forcing a cap would help much. i could be wrong, i probably am. but i just dont like forcing the community to fit into boxes, it feels dirty.

[Zamujasa]

i will often say that i do not speak for the rest of the team when shitting out an opinion, but i think i can actually speak for pretty much everyone when i say that nobody liked or wants a return to perma-Extended

[JOELED]

I don't think swapping to perma extended is a good idea with an influx of new players like this because it'll just be a really boring first impressive where you don't get to see a lot of the mechanics

[Glamurio]

(we would also need to add something that, say, boots you after 5 minutes idle on the title screen, though, if that does not already exist. and it might.)

While I am actually generally for pop caps, this one specific off-hand comment concerns me a lot. I like to have the game open in the background sometimes when a round is, let's say, at 70 minutes or so as I wait for it to end to join the next round. Having a boot timer will just cause people to find ways around that. Ultimately, I think this would cause people to join rounds more often and lockernap or cryo, which is arguably worse. But perhaps this issue could be worked around via observers.

And on the topic of extended rounds... please, god, anything but that. I'd rather play with 20 players on 10 different servers than have even a single server run extended.

[Cal]

I like to have the game open in the background sometimes when a round is, let's say, at 70 minutes or so as I wait for it to end to join the next round.

We have discord commands that dm you when a round is starting.

[TDHooligan]

i just watched petey play the Ozy match last night, and it seemed the RP/station was actually pretty good, even at 90+ active players.

[NanoDano]

While i wouldn't mind player caps, I think just having larger maps be chosen when more people are on makes more sense

[Glamurio]

While i wouldn't mind player caps, I think just having larger maps be chosen when more people are on makes more sense

This is actually an excellent point. Just like how we have small maps for lowpop, instead of curbing the player limit, maybe introducing (or using, since I think we have one) a couple new highpop maps could help solve the issue. Meaningful RP can totally happen at high pop, but only if there's enough room to breathe and departments aren't crowded. Double the size of every department, and suddenly you can talk normally again.

[NanoDano]

While i wouldn't mind player caps, I think just having larger maps be chosen when more people are on makes more sense

This is actually an excellent point. Just like how we have small maps for lowpop, instead of curbing the player limit, maybe introducing (or using, since I think we have one) a couple new highpop maps could help solve the issue. Meaningful RP can totally happen at high pop, but only if there's enough room to breathe and departments aren't crowded. Double the size of every department, and suddenly you can talk normally again.

 Played ozymandius for the first time last night and the map looks amazing, and handles 90+ players very well

[Carton]

I like to have the game open in the background sometimes when a round is, let's say, at 70 minutes or so as I wait for it to end to join the next round.

We have discord commands that dm you when a round is starting.

While that is correct, we also have a specific amount of time before the game starts in which to prepare, and certain people have slow computers. Additionally, we run this game on a system that actively makes you wait to play unless you pay money. Before I upgraded my computer, loading times meant I pretty frequently missed roundstart or had to scramble due to that waiting period + network lag + loading time. Especially if you want to change something about your character or job preferences.

Additionally, I dislike the idea of having people be completely unable to join the server for the simple reason of how our save system works. If I had a character not cloud saved and the server was full, I'd be unable to access that save and that character for potentially multiple hours. This could and undoubtedly will lead to people making the decision to simply not play if they can't get onto the server they want. And if they forget to transfer the save over at a later time, then the problem will repeat itself.

[Solenoid]

I know this thread is older now, but I think the conditions which led to it have been alleviated with the latest tide. I'd probably be in favor of introducing player caps in the future if we get back to a similar split of like... 80/8, but I think that as things are now, it's shown that they aren't necessary as long as the servers all have a balanced-ish population.

just my thoughts, with hindsight