An analysis of the biggest problem with goonstation: apathy

[ferriswheel1]

A related issue to apathy is a lack of cooperation and interdependence between departments and players in general.

edit: I think the main areas lacking in cooperation are hydro-medbay, chem-medbay, mining-everybody, chem-hydro (but not vice versa), everybody-qm.

The key reason departments don't cooperate is that there's nothing significant to actually provide. Mining, for example, is only useful for a few robotics upgrades and pod parts. QM is a desolate wasteland half the time because most of the resources it provides can be gotten far more easily elsewhere. Hydroponics is useless for any meds other than omnizine because medbay has such a large supply. Reducing the current pool of resources, as well as making resources more useful would go a long way to fostering cooperation.

In addition, cooperation works best as a mutual relationship between partners. If I send some resources to robotics as a miner, I'm not likely to see anything coming back apart from thanks, which would probably encourage most players to keep their resources to build stuff for themselves. Likewise, as a roboticist, I can't really do anything for the nice QM or miner who chose to send me resources. If I could build, say a mining drone or loader-bot for them, they would be much more inclined to send me resources in return. The same goes for most producer-user relationships like medbay and hydroponics.

[Sergeant_Crunch]

There's definitely way too much shit on cog2 for cooperation to really be necessary. 

As for traitor apathy, I've personally been trying to play the vigilante more often. Chase off baddies if I see em, make the occasional patrol around the station to see if anything's fucked, respond to calls for help, keep a stunner zip gun and full medical kit on me, etc. I don't like hunting antags down for valid kills or anything like that, but being able to help someone out in a pinch is a nice feeling and I wish more people were willing to pick up some of the slack for security because you usually only have a couple of officers and you don't usually have an HoS.

Of course if more people start doing this it will, without fail, devolve into people gearing up to go valid hunting every round and the cycle will continue.

[Superlagg]

Problem with less materials is that the station becomes a lot more hostile if you dont have someone staffing those areas. This is especially especial in lowpop! Think about it, if Medbay barely had any medical supplies and nobody signed up to be a Botanist, Medbay won't be able to do their job very well. (Course, less people means less people who need healing.)

Hm. One way to work around this is to make some of the products of certain departments persist between rounds. Higher-pop rounds could generate materials for the station, sustaining the needs of any later low-pop rounds. Basically time-traveling space communism.

Though, that would require rebalancing a lot of the material generation dealies, mainly so one round doesn't make an infinite supply of omnizine or styp and put Botany out of business forever.

Of course I'd suggest solving a problem with round-to-round persistence.

--

As for vigilantes, I'd recommend a bit more lenience on murder, mainly to ease up fears of killing the wrong guy and getting banned as opposed to going to prison. I'd say that if you killed someone (mostly) innocent, but were reasonably sure that they were a badguy and you didn't permanently take them out of the round, and you're not a total jerk about it, you should be punished by in-game methods than by administrative intervention.

Or it's always been that way and I just never noticed. I dunno, I don't make a habit out of killing people.

[misto]

Problem with less materials is that the station becomes a lot more hostile if you dont have someone staffing those areas. This is especially especial in lowpop! Think about it, if Medbay barely had any medical supplies and nobody signed up to be a Botanist, Medbay won't be able to do their job very well. (Course, less people means less people who need healing.)

Hm. One way to work around this is to make some of the products of certain departments persist between rounds. Higher-pop rounds could generate materials for the station, sustaining the needs of any later low-pop rounds. Basically time-traveling space communism.

the ai, any borg, probably most heads, anybody reassigned by the hop, all these ppl can literally just buy more meds and materials so, so easily using qm. but i cant blame u for forgetting that qm exists

[Frank_Stein]

Problem with less materials is that the station becomes a lot more hostile if you dont have someone staffing those areas. This is especially especial in lowpop! Think about it, if Medbay barely had any medical supplies and nobody signed up to be a Botanist, Medbay won't be able to do their job very well. (Course, less people means less people who need healing.)

Hm. One way to work around this is to make some of the products of certain departments persist between rounds. Higher-pop rounds could generate materials for the station, sustaining the needs of any later low-pop rounds. Basically time-traveling space communism.

Though, that would require rebalancing a lot of the material generation dealies, mainly so one round doesn't make an infinite supply of omnizine or styp and put Botany out of business forever.

Of course I'd suggest solving a problem with round-to-round persistence.

--

As for vigilantes, I'd recommend a bit more lenience on murder, mainly to ease up fears of killing the wrong guy and getting banned as opposed to going to prison. I'd say that if you killed someone (mostly) innocent, but were reasonably sure that they were a badguy and you didn't permanently take them out of the round, and you're not a total jerk about it, you should be punished by in-game methods than by administrative intervention.

Or it's always been that way and I just never noticed. I dunno, I don't make a habit out of killing people.

How about when the map is being generated, it does a check for server population, then stocks the departments based on that?

Less people=more items
More people=less items

[Noah Buttes]

I have to agree with misto's assessment regarding QM. Any round with a population low enough to prevent consistent access to QM won't really run into shortages anyway.

[Nnystyxx]

vigilantism used to be a good idea, then it was an idea that would get you fuckin banned and so people became extremely afraid of retaliating to the point of it being too late for them and made them easy pickins (that, combined with security's unfavorable reputation)
remember when there was a 'get the station to lynch you' miscreant objective (that would never work because it would be effectively a ban trap)?

[Roomba]

As for vigilantes, I'd recommend a bit more lenience on murder, mainly to ease up fears of killing the wrong guy and getting banned as opposed to going to prison. I'd say that if you killed someone (mostly) innocent, but were reasonably sure that they were a badguy and you didn't permanently take them out of the round, and you're not a total jerk about it, you should be punished by in-game methods than by administrative intervention.

Or it's always been that way and I just never noticed. I dunno, I don't make a habit out of killing people.

Despite how it may seem at times, not everyone is a raging validhunter who would be a syndie-slaughtering machine were it not for those pesky admin laws holding them back. What needs to be encouraged is people playing sec, not people playing vigilantes. The people who would be empowered by this aren't the helpful MD hamstrung by being unable to use his gun, they're the jerk MD who shoots assistants for the crime of standing in medbay at the wrong time. Easing up on vigilantes doesn't mean the average Staff Assistant is going to become a hero of the station, it means that guy who spends every round simply shoving you and stealing your ID for no reason now has a license to strangle and space you on the basis of 'they looked shifty'. And IC consequences? The only people who could reasonably enforce that are sec, and even on the off chance they exist, the vigilante has free reign to slaughter them for the crime of 'SEC ROGUE', and often the skills and weaponry to do it too.

Also, take out the bit about minimizing collateral damage and it'll just be suicide bombs for days. (I know I'm hardly one to be too sanctimonious on the subject, but I do try to ensure absolutely no one except me and/or the antag is going to be hurt if I use one as a non-antag.)

tl;dr: easing up on vigilantes isn't going to make the station at large less apathetic, it's going to give jerks free reign to be murderous jerks

[Vitatroll]

Punishing the station for one guy or gal not doin' their job is dumb. You guys see how regularly the engine isn't set up, right? It's generally only set up because someone wants to benefit themselves with hellburn rewards.

On antags: the closest thing I've heard to a solution on antags running unrestricted is forcing (not something I want) sec roles. Though that'd probably just lead to more dead bodies in sec, early round. Which is a good example of the above.

[misto]

if youre worried that the station will be left without supplies in the unlikely event that no one would sign up as a qm or as something capable of using qm (ais, borgs, most heads) or as someone capable of changing access to use qm(most heads), we could ask for the qm console to be able to have its wires hacked to have qm id restriction removed. ta da! the problem is solved again

[Noah Buttes]

if youre worried that the station will be left without supplies in the unlikely event that no one would sign up as a qm or as something capable of using qm (ais, borgs, most heads) or as someone capable of changing access to use qm(most heads), we could ask for the qm console to be able to have its wires hacked to have qm id restriction removed. ta da! the problem is solved again

That's actually a really good idea.

[Vitatroll]

That is a good idea. Kinda runs counter to the objective people seem to have, though.

[misto]

its all about compromise, and about shooing dirty staff assistants out of your workplace and fixing the damage theyve done to your qm console

[Noah Buttes]

That is a good idea. Kinda runs counter to the objective people seem to have, though.

We don't want to force cooperation, just encourage it.

[misto]

as long as -someone- is working as an impromptu qm its technically still cooperation.

the console should still record the name of the user so security knows whose legs to break for wasting the budget on costumes, though