Bring back round voting every once and awhile

[Ed Venture]

Am I the only one who is extremely bored of the same old four gametypes that mostly get randomly chosen over and over again? Sure we get mixed, gang and disaster every now and again but I feel they are few and far between. In fact since I've been playing since late 2009 I've noticed that more gamemodes have been removed then there have been gamemodes added, such as. Zombie, Waldo, Revolution, Spy. Granted most of those are still in the code and when an admin is feeling nice we still get to play them. But so far after all these years we've got Wraith that is so rare and most of the time in Mixed that I see people saying they still have yet to play as one since they were added. I've been a wraith three times so far and two of those was because of admin intervention it's an amazing game mode that forces most of the crew to use teamwork but it's far too rare to have any real enjoyment out of. I think a change of pace would be nice and letting us choose what rounds we want to play every now and again would be a nice way to change things up.

The only downside to voting is knowing what the round is going to be before hand. I completely understand why that right there is a deal breaker and for the most part I agree. But I'm at the point where I am so bored of the same old four gamemodes that we get most of the time that I don't care. There is no idea when any new or old gamemodes will get added or re-added and I feel like this would help change things up every now and again. Re-working Nuke was a good idea but it was clearly added to the game unfinished and despite the good changes to just make it work it still to this day feels unfinished and I would much rather have both forms of nuke in the game somehow as I feel there were multiple ways to play Nuke with the old play-style then there is with the new nuke mode. I've been saying since last summer that we have been losing players and now I think everyone is really starting to notice it and adding new/old game modes might help with it or just giving us the option to change it up for once might work wonders. Variety is the spice of life and new content will always bring new players.

[Remmon]

The only downside to voting is knowing what the round is going to be before hand.

Blind voting anybody? Everyone gets a pop up and 15 or 30 seconds to vote. As soon as the vote is complete, the round begins. The result of the vote is never shown and the round type for anybody entering late is 'voted'

Now everyone knows what THEY voted for. If you want an extra barrier, make it against the rules to discuss said votes. Otherwise, rely on the majority not revealing what they voted for.

[Erik]

This would only work if votes are blind, and the result is blind as well, otherwise you'd get a lot of metaknowledge and that'd be unfair as fuck.

[Ed Venture]

Agreed Blind voting would be best. Should have thought of that as I was writing the OP

[atamusvaleo]

Remmon's idea seems to be a great solution to your voting issue.

I was thinking about this last night after a nuke round on Destiny where I had to detonate the nuke in the non-existent pool. What if the syndicate nuke mode became a death match round? Hear me out...

The round starts, an alert pops up:
WARNING! Syndicate ship inbound! Prepare to be boarded. Arm yourselves crew. Don't let the Syndicate commandeer this vessel.

Then it's pretty much a scramble free-for-all, as the crew attempts to gather supplies and fortify while the syndicate (nuke) team suits up and preps to board.

Have a time cap for the rounds around 45 minutes and maybe something to discourage folks from just fleeing into space, similar to desertion for heads in Rev rounds.

[Vitatroll]

I'm all for blind voting sometimes; especially with an added variety of game-modes.
I think the real problem might be people voting for the same thing over and over. It tends to happen with maps and other things you can vote on, so I imagine it'll happen here too. :uhaul:

[ZeWaka]

I'm all for blind voting sometimes; especially with an added variety of game-modes.
I think the real problem might be people voting for the same thing over and over. It tends to happen with maps and other things you can vote on, so I imagine it'll happen here too. :uhaul:

What about randomizing which game-modes we can choose from? We could always have plain secret on there, but the special gamemodes could be completely randomized, with some chances lower than others. It would be interesting if we got a rev round every 100 rounds or so w/o admin intervention.

[Haprenti]

What I see as a good solution is a randomized choice based on blind votes.
That is, players are invited to vote for a game mode, but the gamemode is still chosen at random.
The weights of gamemodes in the selection are determined by the votes, but also, and that is important so we don't end up with, like, 4 wraith rounds in a row, taking into account the gamemodes of the last N rounds, a gamemode having its wheight greatly reduced when having just being played. Maybe also take into account the number of people online, for (hypothetical) gamemodes that would be better on low-pop/high-pop.

Let's say we have 5 gamemodes with default weights respectively being 18, 18, 12, 3, 2 -> Total basic weight of 53
There are 35 players on the station, the results of the vote are 5, 8, 10, 5, 2.
You multiply these results gamemode-wise by some factor depending on the number of player and the total basic weight, for instance here 53/35 (So that on low pop the votes still matter, and that on high-pop the basic weights are still part of it, even though the formula used here is  just basic, you get the idea), and add them to the weights.
We get 25.57, 30.11, 27.14, 10.57, 5.02 -> Total weight 98.38
Now we look at the number of occurences of gamemodes during the last 20 rounds : 5, 6, 4, 3, 2
If we just divide by number we would get 5.11, 5.01, 6.78, 3.52, 2.51 -> Total weight 22.93
So for the next gamemode the chances are :
22.2%, 21.85%, 29.57%, 15.35%, 10.94%


The last step could also be replaced by a factor for each gamemode depending on how long a gamemode has not been played, or that could rather influence the weight given by the votes.

It's far from being good just like this, as it is a bit too uniform, but you get the idea, players get to influence the next gamemode, without being able to cheese it and vote 4 times in a row for wraith. Think about a formula, plug in vote results to see if you get what you wanted, modify formula, rinse and repeat.

Independently from vote, to add more variation to the rounds, having gimmick variants of antags could help a little bit, like, a traitor having a chance to be one of them, providing special traitor gear. Wizard variation gimmicks with special spells, etc. But I'm getting quite off topic.