[MERGED PR] Joining round as observer prevents the RP Respawn Timer from applying

[Sbmhawk]

I mainly play classic, but I can see the issue of being able to respawn in the way rp does it after observing.

I would fully agree with players no longer being able to respawn with the normal respawn timer, however full DNR, including midrounds and wraith summons seems absurd. An emagged cleanbot, plague rat, predator, etc. Isn't going to be meta gaming with thier buddies in the crew (and if they do thats a giant problem in of itself).

This would alleviate the security swarm that others mentioned, while not making observing lock you fully out of the round.

[Lord_earthfire]

Fully in support of this change. People should not join with full information into a round.

My main problem why i don't zhink "punishing the offenders by admins" works is simply: its hard to almost impossible to ahelp. As a player in round, you cannot see who went into observer to respawn or who just happened to join randomly.

That is why a pillar of player quality control, other people ahelping, just doesn't work here. And because its prolific, like virva said, i agree we have to stomp it with a rather drastic change such as this.

[glowbold]

Hey all, thank you for the feedback so far. I know it's a big shift in observing, and especially in consideration of how this affects classic, this PR is being pared back to just affect the RP servers.

The PR now only affects the respawn timer, which itself is only on RP.

Reminder: Observers have lower priority on mid-rolls than players who have joined the game and died. This PR does not affect that behavior either way.

[Isane]

My primary concern initially was gang recruitment, which the most recent change to the PR addresses. While I'm not the biggest fan of this PR overall, I understand the need and I do definitely feel at the very least that security (and possibly command) roles should be disabled if you observe due to their ability to impact the round. Far too often I will see a flood of security either 10 minutes after round start, once an antag starts popping off, or when the armory is opened or a syndiesona makes an announcement (which is another can of worms outside this topic since those can be seen before joining anyway).

Does joining a round, then going to cryo to observe also remove the ability to respawn, since I can see that being used to get around this.

[CalliopeSoups]

I'm mostly repeating points already spoken but I'll say my bit since I was a bit negative on the github PR.

I think it'll kinda suck to not be able to observe for a while then join in as someone that (hopefully usually anyways) avoids using ooc info for anything but seeing if catering deserves to have an ethereal mouse to descend on them (This part was reverted quickly!). However I firmly believe after hearing admin opinions that it is a frequent enough issue to cause a headache. To the pits with it, I won't personally miss it that badly.

[Edit: There was my reasoning against the classic side of changes here but I just noticed that was reverted. Thanks a lot for that, I think this PR is a net positive for round health now.]

[GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG]

It is kinda one of those ambiguous "How do you even report this" situation. For example, someone latejoin as a doctor because all of their friends are playing meddoc and having their own circle drama.

But the person, virvatuli, I was quoting from clearly says they've plainly seen repeat offenders of those rules. If a developer can see clear repeat offenders they can surely just ban them, or relay that information to the admins or something, I don't know how the role hierarchy works on ss13 servers.

Hey all, thank you for the feedback so far. I know it's a big shift in observing, and especially in consideration of how this affects classic, this PR is being pared back to just affect the RP servers.
The PR now only affects the respawn timer, which itself is only on RP.
Reminder: Observers have lower priority on mid-rolls than players who have joined the game and died. This PR does not affect that behavior either way.

Oh. Well that solves my only concern. Nice.

[Snowy :D]

I always thought that it was kinda weird that you could do that. This is definitely a reasonable change.

However, I am also somewhat interested in an idea that someone posted on another thread here where respawning as an observer will give you a random name and job.

[Telareti]

Sounds like a healthy change to the RP servers imo! My only concern was it'd be a problem for lowpop with the ghost midround spawns being unavailable for observers but that's been changed so it shouldn't be a problem now, like Isane brought up it might result in a few people joining a round and cryoing to bypass it, BUT at least that'll a lot more mandagable to deal with!

[jan.antilles]

If people start joining and cryoing every round in order to observe and join again, please ahelp it!

[Waffleloffle]

all for this, been a long time coming honestly. haven't played in a hot second (need to dig my way out of Coursework Mountain first) but it's always been a mechanic that has allowed for metagaming, even if said metagaming was small and subtle and unlikely to widely affect the outcome of a round

I feel like a lot of players tend to think of metagaming as something you have to actively do. a lot of the more major cases are, sure, but I think it's important to also delineate having certain kinds of in-round knowledge as Meta Knowledge, by its very nature. being able to see how things are shaking out across the station at the click of a button before you join is an inherent advantage over the people who are actually in the round, even if you're just using it to join a strained department and not To Be The Hero

I hope this pushes the rp regulars that observer-join to get more comfortable with rolling with a round's punches, in general. I've done it plenty before and in retrospect I really wish I hadn't - it's much more fun to be on an even field, info-wise

[Taylorstar]

I'm really not a fan of this PR as an RP player who occasionally observes mid game to socialise with other players in the ghost bar or doing things outside of the game before i can relax to play it removes me from the round completely, it also removes any observers from being able to join the round too.

Knowing that if I observe a round that I wont be able to join it later makes clicking the join server button less appealing unless I have a strong drive to join midgame although I prefer to join rounds at the start. I personally think this will hurt the amount of late joiners in a round and at a time where I have seen roles like the captain and sec officers say "I'm not dealing with this today" and cryoing more and more. This PR could lead to devestating effects to the round in progress leading to some harsh downward spirals with no chance of salvaging the round or the antags RP.

There have been a number of rounds where sec and command get hammered by antags and the server pop literally halves, a number of those players start the next round by observing (removing them from ever joining). If people see the leading goon server only having half its usual pop they might be asking themselves why is it only half pop? observe and see a near empty server with nothing going and now with no way to join they themselves won't have anything to add either.

This pulls away from the pool of players who can join and is more likely to hurt server population than add any benefit. People who are undecided on whether to join or observe might not join the server at all if knowing it has the potential to shut them out of joining the round in progress but werent sure if they wanted to commit to playing that shift. If people want to know how much a low server pop hurts an environment ask Goon 1 players or Goon 2 players about how healthy their rounds are compared to when the pop rivalled that of 3 or 4.

The argument that it prevents metagaming while not without merit is something that I don't believe is a well balanced one. Ask yourselves how many times you feel that someone has metagamed you whether it was good or bad. Im willing to bet the answer to that question is not everyround. I'm willing to bet that more people join from observer than those who even get suspected of metagaming.

Only Admins can really tell us what they see from behind the curtain and if they truely believe that metagaming has gone that far out of control that this PR is needed. It will be hard to truely say how much this PR will hurt server population. I also wonder how much more work this is going to cause the admins and how much trouble this will cause players.

The server has a rule about antag fishing where players need to Ahelp if they suspect players are just joining in to see if they get an antag status one of the most obvious signs of this is round start when people have loaded up then immediately cryo. This is going to happen more with the new PR in. whether its because people got assigned a job they didn't like or wasn't ready to do that round (like sec or captain or AI). We will most likely see more of this behaviour mid round as people late join walk around the station not like the feel or energy of the round people might even look at their PDAs to see who is on the messengers and if they don't feel they've picked the right character or the right job go straight back to cryo removing them from the round.

Do we really want a server community where every round were Ahelping players because they joined walked around then cryo'd. Sure admins sound willing to talk to these frequent offenders but that might just put them off from returning and once again.. hurting server population, the trade off just doesn't seem worth it. Would we as players be willing to ostracise people because they werent sure they was ready to commit, would you report players who you've seen have good rounds because every so often they might pop in then pop out 5 minutes later(something which isnt that uncommon). Its something I'm sure the admins have already discussed at length many times before this PR was brought forward.

I think we need to dial back this PR massively, It should only disable the respawn timer if enable DNR is set. I'm sure we had that before and while it wont stop metagaming it could at least curtail it slightly without doing any real harm to players who might legitamately be wanting to join later. I also think locking certain jobs like Command and Sec to being only blind joins (no observer/respawn join) would be a more sensible addition.

[Ikea]

Going to be honest respawns weren't even a thing yet alone being able to observe before joining a round and while I think respawns were a good change the servers were completely fine without respawns or this. Once people spend like a week getting used to it it'll be completely fine to just hop straight into a round like it was for the majority of this servers existence.

[Vulwin_Gilran]

I liked this PR before the changes and I like it even more now.

I am quite confident that the negligible negatives (generally most negatives ive seen is people just rewording saying that they want to metagame) outweight the positives.

I have had the course of a few antag rounds HEAVILY shifted in trajectory because its lowpop and I start being very blatant to give the crew a chance, and suddenly a full security team HAPPENS to materialize from the void. And my personal issue with this kind of stuff is, how can you really PROVE these people actually were metagaming bar them actually saying they were (which some people as has been mentioned, blatantly brag about metagaming in RP chat). This PR would make people attempting to use observing to metagame, by trying to join then immediately cyro, way easier to identify and deal with.

And as I said in my first comment, it just makes sense.

[Chasu]

Heavily supporting this change for the aforementioned reasons, metagaming has become "quietly normalized", so to speak. As nice as it might be for some to hang out with their favourite characters all shift, it is simply not healthy for the game and community.

[Angel]

Really good change, I was mostly impartial towards it at first, but with the changes to allow ghost spawns (like gangs/wraith) and also the amount of people openly admitting they are against it for basically metagaming reasons, this feels extremely necessary.

Honestly, it is quite insane to me to see so many people just openly admit to it and fail to see that's the entire point the PR was made in the first place.