The State of Goon RP

[Azungar]

Disclaimer: This is purely my personal opinion on how the Goon RP server currently is, what needs to be improved and what is actively being worked on. This is just me giving you a brief glimpse inside my head and how I see things, not necessarily the whole vision that is shared between the admins. 

So, where are we right now in terms of how the server is? Honestly, I feel like we are not in absolutely terrible shape since we have a lot of potential, but in terms of new players and our roleplaying player base in general, I feel like there needs to be major improvement. Historically our numbers have never been high and they keep fluctuating from low numbers to a decentish population of 10-20 players. I feel like the lack of interest comes from multiple factors such as:

• Goon is just not for everyone and our choice of the intensity of roleplaying is not what is really "meta" across Space Station 13. 
  
• We genuinely lack roleplaying specific content. The only more specific thing for roleplaying is the motive system that was converted from an April Fool's joke. And conspirators. Beyond that, we haven't pushed things that would solely benefit the roleplaying server. I will later explain why this is the case and what could be perhaps done to alleviate the lack of content. I would agree that we majorly lack things to do on the roleplaying server apart from the very usual ideas that are used there. None of the antagonists exactly have a great toolkit to create roleplay and it is way more up to the player themself to figure the best way to do this.
  
• Our player culture is very specific. We're such a tightly knit community due to a rather low amount of players that it by itself creates a rather high entry point for new players. On top of this, we have had players from many "generations" of the server who had things ever so slightly different from each other, which creates a gap between how each of us views the server and how it should be. This combined with the fact that the nature of roleplaying is very abstract at best makes it very hard to agree on what is the direction the general behavior on the server should be. This is also a very highly contributing factor why admins who have little to no experience in roleplaying usually don't wish to handle admin helps on the RP server, purely due to them having no base to judge cases fairly. 
  
• While I am not exactly sure how this is alleviated on other servers (if at all) or if they can avoid this issue due to higher numbers of players, death is rather heavy on the roleplaying server. Dying 10-20 minutes into the round sucks if you are not able to be revived as rounds can drag for a couple hours. This can also be applied to anything that is affected due to low player numbers such as no security, no medical crew, no engineering crew and no heads with certain access. 
  
  

I will be first to acknowledge that the potential for Goon RP has always been there, but I also continue to believe that we have yet to tap into the full extent of it. I think the less intensive and more casual roleplaying experience can be fun and in general, we have managed to strike a rather interesting niche between the HRP servers and the LRP servers. 

The good news is that we have managed to attract more admins towards the RP server and to work on features that would support it by giving you access to more content. I am mainly directing this praise towards people like Gerhazo, Pali and Zamujasa who have been sighted more and more on the RP server, which is an excellent thing. I personally never saw our coverage in terms of admin helps to be bad, just perhaps not as instantaneous as some people would have perhaps preferred them to be.

Another honorable mention goes to Urs for actively working on a system that can be hopefully (hopefully because we don't have any real data on how this system would handle itself on live servers) imported as a separate new game mode and as a new addition to existing "ship" based maps. While I don't agree that this would become the new meta for roleplaying (mainly because I think the station experience is the classic one) but I am still very excited to see what new opportunities can be created through this. Hopefully, this is something that can be further expanded to be a very core feature of Goon.

And in general, I would wish to encourage the whole community to actively work on more things that they would like to see on the server. If you can sprite, create new things, new outfits, new objects. If you can code to some extent, feel free to submit an RP orientated patch. I think our general philosophy should remain to provide content equally between the two servers but I also feel like that there should be distinct systems for the RP server in place that could provide additional depth and alleviate some of the issues that are caused by the low player amounts. If all else fails, feel free to come up with interesting and well-thought-out ideas or events for us to run. (Or better yet, ask to run them yourself.)

Speaking of which, let's talk about some genuine features that I am personally working on right now:

• The motive system rework. Slowly chipping away at this, wishing to create a balanced system that doesn't discourage anything (if you wish to shove 500 units of meth into yourself, you're free to do so) but yet rewards you slightly by following your needs and allows you enough time to react and roleplay accordingly to them. I am also making sure that there won't be anything that forces you to act in a certain way. (I'm looking at you, random drunk rambling.)
  
• Framework for more decoration items is also under work and while this is not an RP specific feature, I feel like the ability to decorate the station in more ways would perhaps give you a bit more opportunities and freedom to create your own areas. You can look forward to craftable posters, woodworking things, and plant-related stuff.
  
• I'm taking a step back with the events to flesh them out a bit more precisely in my head and to create systems around them which would allow the players to track the whole "campaign" from in-game. 
  
• I am potentially planning to create a couple more unique, rotating areas that the roleplayers could use to do some more interesting "adventures". This would be akin to the adventure zones but without any bigger plots to tie them together and more likely made from re-used content.
  

That being said, I would encourage people to share their opinions on the server and what needs to be done here. I won't promise anyone that anything will be acted upon, but at least we can have some healthy discussion and collect some opinions. You are more than free to also ask questions, I will try my best to answer them and hopefully, other admins might chime in as well.

[jpnh]

As a new player, I just wanted to chime in and say I prefer the RP server to the general server and appreciate the work you folks do.

As a complaint, I do not understand why motive's degrade so fast. I understand the need to increase interaction with food and drinks, but why does everyone need to sleep so much? It's like we're all a bunch of narcoleptics.

Also, please allow me to pee in bottles so I can mail them to the bridge and have mark make another station announcement about mailing garbage to the bridge.

[Azungar]

As a new player, I just wanted to chime in and say I prefer the RP server to the general server and appreciate the work you folks do.

As a complaint, I do not understand why motive's degrade so fast. I understand the need to increase interaction with food and drinks, but why does everyone need to sleep so much? It's like we're all a bunch of narcoleptics.

Also, please allow me to pee in bottles so I can mail them to the bridge and have mark make another station announcement about mailing garbage to the bridge.

Much appreciated.

The motive system is something that is still very much a work in progress so the values are still fluctuating and being altered. I am also trying my hardest to try to map out where they are being used so I know exactly where to find them and how to apply them. For example, all of the values used to be applied via procs inside each chemical, now they are just simple variables that can be tweaked easily. Sleeping is vastly overtuned right now and I will be pushing a fix to this very soon to alleviate this. Sleep as a motive should be one that only needs to be taken care of once or twice per round in a very rapid fashion. Not to mention that if you just choose to drink coffee/use drugs instead, then you don't even need to sleep at all during that round. 

Hopefully this answers your question?

[jpnh]

Much appreciated.

The motive system is something that is still very much a work in progress so the values are still fluctuating and being altered. I am also trying my hardest to try to map out where they are being used so I know exactly where to find them and how to apply them. For example, all of the values used to be applied via procs inside each chemical, now they are just simple variables that can be tweaked easily. Sleeping is vastly overtuned right now and I will be pushing a fix to this very soon to alleviate this. Sleep as a motive should be one that only needs to be taken care of once or twice per round in a very rapid fashion. Not to mention that if you just choose to drink coffee/use drugs instead, then you don't even need to sleep at all during that round. 

Hopefully this answers your question?

Makes sense.

Since I have to *piss to pee, can we get *sleep to sleep when in bed instead of the right-click->sleep? Inconsistent use of UI bothers me.

[Azungar]

Much appreciated.

The motive system is something that is still very much a work in progress so the values are still fluctuating and being altered. I am also trying my hardest to try to map out where they are being used so I know exactly where to find them and how to apply them. For example, all of the values used to be applied via procs inside each chemical, now they are just simple variables that can be tweaked easily. Sleeping is vastly overtuned right now and I will be pushing a fix to this very soon to alleviate this. Sleep as a motive should be one that only needs to be taken care of once or twice per round in a very rapid fashion. Not to mention that if you just choose to drink coffee/use drugs instead, then you don't even need to sleep at all during that round. 

Hopefully this answers your question?

Makes sense.

Since I have to *piss to pee, can we get *sleep to sleep when in bed instead of the right-click->sleep? Inconsistent use of UI bothers me.

Definitely. This is already in my to-do list alongside other more clear interface changes that would help with this. I have also planned some indicators that really encourage you to handle your needs when they start to drop below 20 %.

[Carbadox]

please allow me to pee in bottles so I can mail them to the bridge and have mark make another station announcement about mailing garbage to the bridge.

hold a reagant container in hand and pee and you'll pee in that container! Neat. Disgusting, but neat.

The only thing I can really offer to the topic of this thead is just my observations.

One of the things that RP1 has always had a problem with was player count. With very little players, theres not enough people to fill in all the roles around the station, because of this interaction is severely stunted. People cant really chat to each other just because they happen to come apon each other when you've only got a Bartender covering their station, a scientist theirs, QM their own and so on. While there's probably a miriad of reasons people don't specifically play on Goons RP server, I do think it's mainly just like it was mentioned in the original post, Goon doesnt really offer anything special roleplay wise. It isnt that it doesnt offer enough, it offers nothing. So very little seperates Goon1 from Goon2, that people don't have a reason to either play on our servers at all, or play on Goon1 at all.

I think that's all I can say if I still mean to be helpful. Everything else would be suggestions, on how to make Goon Roleplay more interesting EG more in-depth medical, giving Janitors off-station paid assignments, a "black market" for QM to sell Sciences bombs and drugs, QM food deliveries for Chef, making robotics and mechanics have some sort of research thing they could do.
However, everyone has suggestions and not all of them are good and not enough people are implementing them.

So I guess, yea I think adding more unique stuff to the server would be cool

[MarkNstein]

Also, please allow me to pee in bottles so I can mail them to the bridge and have mark make another station announcement about mailing garbage to the bridge.

*Shakes fist

I'm currently "OK" with sleep the way it is right now, since I can get through a 2-hour shift while only needing to sleep once. However if buff/debuffs are applied for high/low motive scores then that could sway my mood.

I too agree that "station goals" are a good idea.

[Frank_Stein]

I personally would love to see more scheduled events on RP. This could be as complicated as Day of Destiny style events, or just regular round mode schedules so you could play a round with an established setting a mood.

[Flourish]

This is a good and thorough post by Azungar. I'd like to elaborate on some of the things he mentioned, and also add a couple of my own thoughts. 

Goon is just not for everyone and our choice of the intensity of roleplaying is not what is really "meta" across Space Station 13.

This can be a barrier for attracting new players, and also an issue in player retention. Our culture is pretty distinct from other servers', and the way we approach roleplaying is pretty different. I'm not sure if there's really a straightforward solution to this though. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share them.

Our player culture is very specific. We're such a tightly knit community due to a rather low amount of players that it by itself creates a rather high entry point for new players. On top of this, we have had players from many "generations" of the server who had things ever so slightly different from each other, which creates a gap between how each of us views the server and how it should be. This combined with the fact that the nature of roleplaying is very abstract at best makes it very hard to agree on what is the direction the general behavior on the server should be. This is also a very highly contributing factor why admins who have little to no experience in roleplaying usually don't wish to handle admin helps on the RP server, purely due to them having no base to judge cases fairly.

Similar to the first point, this is another case where I'm really stumped as to what to do. I think it's important that we have a single coherent and cohesive vision for what the server should be, at least on a high level. It's totally cool and fine if individual players have varying ideas of what the server should be, but it's important to have some sort of baseline, especially for administration purposes and to sorta target where we want to go next. It's difficult though, because I'm not sure how exactly to bridge these gaps and to come up with something that feels "right" to everyone.

I think our general philosophy should remain to provide content equally between the two servers but I also feel like that there should be distinct systems for the RP server in place that could provide additional depth and alleviate some of the issues that are caused by the low player amounts. If all else fails, feel free to come up with interesting and well-thought-out ideas or events for us to run. (Or better yet, ask to run them yourself.)

+1 on all of this. Especially if you're a mentor, please don't be shy, and please reach out on Discord if you have an idea for something you'd like to run. Sometimes admins may be busy, but we can always figure things out and make your good and fun event ideas a reality.

Something that I think is also very important to address is the potential distance and/or disconnect between the admin team and the playerbase. A lot of us don't ever venture on the RP server, and for the ones that do, we typically don't play all that much. So we definitely have a different perspective on things, which can sometimes pose a problem. What we see as priorities or issues or things that are fine and okay might not be what players see. So it's very important to keep open lines of communication and to constantly ask for player feedback. Having places like this thread where everyone is invited to express themselves is a good step towards that. But we can do even better, especially with making everyone feel welcome and like their opinions matter. Something I've been wondering about; how do people generally see the admin team, or even individual admins? Are we seen as people that are on your side and here to improve the game experience for everyone, or just people who ban wrongdoers and yell at creeps?

[jpnh]

Something I've been wondering about; how do people generally see the admin team, or even individual admins? Are we seen as people that are on your side and here to improve the game experience for everyone, or just people who ban wrongdoers and yell at creeps?

Unless there's some admin shenanigans about (like being made a traitor near the end of the round and hearing a voice in my head telling me to "have fun") I generally don't think of the admins as existing outside of "oh hey look at the neat offices in centcom why the hell is there a floor cluwne in Readsters office oh god."

[Nnystyxx]

I think it'd be nice if there was a way to supplement other players with like. . . QM access that isn't QM-only, like, ordering deliveries, or having certain thing synthesized.

Maybe cute little robots that do things for you. IDK.

[Flourish]

Unless there's some admin shenanigans about (like being made a traitor near the end of the round and hearing a voice in my head telling me to "have fun") I generally don't think of the admins as existing outside of "oh hey look at the neat offices in centcom why the hell is there a floor cluwne in Readsters office oh god."

Do you prefer it this way, or would you want to know the admin team better? I feel like the more relatable or "they're just people too"-ish someone is, the easier it is to feel comfortable sharing your actual thoughts with them, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say.

[jpnh]

Unless there's some admin shenanigans about (like being made a traitor near the end of the round and hearing a voice in my head telling me to "have fun") I generally don't think of the admins as existing outside of "oh hey look at the neat offices in centcom why the hell is there a floor cluwne in Readsters office oh god."

Do you prefer it this way, or would you want to know the admin team better? I feel like the more relatable or "they're just people too"-ish someone is, the easier it is to feel comfortable sharing your actual thoughts with them, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say.

I'm almost 40. I don't care. I know we're all here just to have a good time. Getting to know the admin team better would be cool, and it might even help other players out, but I'm literally the wrong person to ask this question to. You're not a bunch of celebrities to me, and I'm just here to have fun and maybe contribute code (if I could get this damn terminal working).

To put this into perspective, I regularly troll my bosses and the CEO of the company I work at.

[Sundance]

To offer up a perspective of an old hat who doesn't primarily play on the RP station (so take hearty grains of salt plz) here's some floating, potentially non sequitur points

Another honorable mention goes to Urs for actively working on a system that can be hopefully (hopefully because we don't have any real data on how this system would handle itself on live servers) imported as a separate new game mode and as a new addition to existing "ship" based maps. While I don't agree that this would become the new meta for roleplaying (mainly because I think the station experience is the classic one) but I am still very excited to see what new opportunities can be created through this. Hopefully, this is something that can be further expanded to be a very core feature of Goon.

Here's something I feel strongly about.

The nature of the static "station" based maps suit the main server for a variety of reasons, but the main point is that it's a PvP environment.

The RP needs to make a departure from this if it wants to hold its own. I agree that it shouldn't be the new meta and there are plenty of servers that show you can RP just as easily on a static station, but to attract new blood it would be essential for us to gear the RP server to a PvE scenario... and the ship based maps perfectly encapsulate this as the E for Environment is constantly changing due to the nature of a "ship". 

There was a point Urs made in the other thread and i'll touch on it here. What exactly is the crew doing as a whole? Just bumbling about doing their job.. but for what? And who's the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy?)

The BBEG should be the environment, with the player antagonists geared towards assisting the environment, both as a whole being detrimental to the crew. 

Antagonists (ranging from your average traitor to your hungry changeling) should have specific objectives that they must RP and adhere to, rather than tracking objectives (such as KILL Mr Bojangles the clown).

To provide you with an example, a RP traitor objective would be specifically to keep the ship shields down when the ship is being bombarded with asteroids or whathaveyou. Or to destroy the station morale. Or to poison and/or starve the crew. Depending on what the crew comes across as they travel, the antagonist could be geared towards stealing or collaborating or destroying whatever they come across.
Something like the bad guy in the Sunshine film (underated film imo), where the actual badness is the fucking sun dying, but the antagonist wants the sun to die and wont stop until he cremates Cillian Murphy and the rest of the crew.
We can get really creative when it comes to other stranger antagonists too. But the main point is that antagonists must adhere to these objectives - it's not free real estate as it is on main goon.

I am potentially planning to create a couple more unique, rotating areas that the roleplayers could use to do some more interesting "adventures". This would be akin to the adventure zones but without any bigger plots to tie them together and more likely made from re-used content.

Important and needed. There's no concrete reason to move the ship otherwise. Some other points:
- While we have a plethora of sprites available on the station to create unique zones, there needs to be BADNESS there. Empty spooky rooms get old quick.
- There needs to be items that either upgrade the ship, upgrade machinery and/or upgrade crewmembers. Progression is important and, well, empty spooky rooms get old quick.
~controversial opinion that may overshadow all my other points (plz no)~ But remove Sol on the RP station and make room for other rotational maps. Give the cool items uncovered on Sol and dot them around randomly on these rotational maps. Sol to me seems like a bloated sidequest to what could be some important "missions" and ultimately sidetracks players and their motivations to something potentially greater. But I already hear the angry sol nerds furiously smacking at the keyboard and oh no they're com-

Anyway I disagree that there should be no bigger plot tying them together. There should be, even if loosely tied. They should also be tied to Sol, but more referencing in a "goon" style lore way. 

/ramble.