RP antag ratios are fucked, maybe add antag caps?

[Mopcat]

seriously, it seems like recently on the rp server we've been getting 6-8 antags per round on a 40 person crew. obviously, this is a fucking nightmare for everyone involved, as security cannot possibly handle so many antagonists at once without breaking rp rules even with a full team (assuming det isn't also one of said antagonists and isn't doing it Well), and a lot of those antagonists just... don't seem very interested in even the concept of roleplaying or the rp rules. add self-antags, vigilantes which we're obligated to stop, and the obligatory greytider on top of that and it makes rp sec just Not Fun a lot of rounds, and by extension rp is less fun because a non-antagonist decided to set off 5 ttvs across the station and sec was too busy getting raided by clowns to respond to it.

contrast this to main, where on 40-player crews i'd often see 3-4 antags, sometimes less. what the fuck is up with this. why is rp like this??????

[nefarious6th]

So, I wanted to float this thread out there for some thoughts; people in Discord have been noticing a lot of 70+ player RP rounds that start with 8 roundstart antags (and end with any extra sleepers, changeling parts, mindslaves, and thralls collected on the way). From what I hear, people generally think this is probably too much for the RP servers, especially when we're looking at only a maximum of 6 filled and reliable officer slots (including HoS; sorry detectives, not you). 

That said, I wanted to test the waters and general thoughts on what a more ideal number of antags might look like, and would potentially be interested in taking any feedback on this and working on a PR for this!


Sorry to Mop for dupe-posting after you; thank you Flourish for merging! Cheers!

[Leeanei]

my frank response is: RP doesn't happen when there's too many antags. 5 would be a good upper limit at even 70 pop. Sub 30 pop, probably 2 antags would be good. Might seem like not a lot of antags, but high chaos means more people spend time holding movement keys than chatting about the issues.

It gets quite bad with self-antags included because they generally care *even less* about RP.

[Superlagg]

As someone who doesn't play RP, why would a large number of antags be bad? While on non-RP I get it, antags can do whatever they want with little regard for the overall round, which is okay since chaotic havoc is kind of a staple. But, aren't antags on RP supposed to self-limit their murder potential or something, so as to be more sources of drama and intrigue and RP shit, and not just a station depopulator with more words and ahelps?

[KikiMofo]

Don't mean this to be jerky or anything but shouldn't this topic be on the RP discussion subforum or does it not matter? I see so few suggestions for RP servers on Ideas and Suggestions that I'm not sure.

[Technature]

As someone who doesn't play RP, why would a large number of antags be bad? While on non-RP I get it, antags can do whatever they want with little regard for the overall round, which is okay since chaotic havoc is kind of a staple. But, aren't antags on RP supposed to self-limit their murder potential or something, so as to be more sources of drama and intrigue and RP shit, and not just a station depopulator with more words and ahelps?

Supposed to?  Yeah.  Doesn't necessarily mean they do.  Some people may not necessarily know how without just not being an antag.

And as mentioned before, this is assuming there's no one self-antagging at the time which introduces its own problems.

[Kamades]

So, this has been a... really noticeable issue for a while now. Hell, I've had times where I've rolled antag and just... not done antag things, because whomever else is antag has already absolutely fucked up the round.

Superlagg: Technically, the rule is "have some escalation" - but even with escalation, 3 different people setting off bombs\doing murders\taking over the radio station and screaming about their bomb threats makes the chaos extremely intense.

Personally I'd set the caps at 2 antags for up to 20-30?? people, +1 per 20 people after that, plus maybe sleepers? You REALLY do not need many antags for the round to be exciting\busy, and on RP at least, half the time the antags aren't even the most interesting thing on station. Antags should feel like a nice spice in a dish, not a 1,000,000 scovile hot sauce that you took a 10u shot of, in my opinion.

This goes hand in hand with the "Be Kind to Antags" rule, too - Sec tends to catch and release antags, including turbo-murdery ones like Changelings, pretty consistently on RP.

[aft2001]

As others have said/implied, the role of antags is not to exist for the sake of existing, but to make rounds exciting and interesting. *However*, as others have again said, this isn't even an issue at very high populations due to the amount of people playing - gimmicks, self-antagging , general incompetence (come on, haven't you caused a nanite swarm or explosion or misprogramming of the AI in your time playing?) will all cause things to get chaotic in the round.

As an added caveat, could there be SOME metric to determine roughly how chaotic a round is? I'm not even sure what would be a good place to begin with, but it'd probably be some function based on: The amount of active Security (aka non-braindead alive sec), how many explosions and how intense they were have occured on-station, deaths, the amount of intact turfs in key areas such as Medbay and Security, how much blood/DNA vamps/lings have, etc. Too much damage/death/chaos would cap the amount of new antags that can spawn, but low amounts would actually slightly increase the probability of one spawning (ion storm, sleepers, latejoin, etc.).

[Leeanei]

The issue at its heart is that RP antags only need to do a bit of escalation before they start murdering folk like its main, and its not like we can ahelp people who are silently murdering if they never get caught! We've seen a lot of RP rounds where most of the crew died. When we hit 8 or more antags(and it has happened) the rounds become outrageously violent and chaotic and roleplay is the first casualty.

[Varali]

While I generally agree that the antag amount has been really high on RP servers, I don't agree with the limit of 2 antags sub 30. The roleplay heavily suffers with a ton of antags, but it can also end with Security not having anything to do all shift. I've been recently playing a ton of Security and while yes, it can get busy, sometimes entire rounds can go by with the antags all being new or not doing anything. Aft's idea of some sort of metric seems like the best bet, but that requires effort and might not happen. I'm just afraid of setting the limit too low, but I'm not against testing it out first.

I feel like a simple limit would to be add 1.333 (rounded down) antags every 10 players. For example 1-10 would have one, 11-20 would have two, 21-30 would have four, 31-40 five, 41-50 six, 51-60 eight and so on. And of course adjust based on antag type. Maybe tone back changelings spawning in pairs usually. Usually Security spends all round dealing with one changeling while the other silently kills and escapes on shuttle. Same with vampires. I think there should be a limit of one of each of those per round, or at least per 40 players. Of course this might still end up with way too many antags, six for 41-50 could end up with 10+ with thralls and syndie borgs. 1 antag per 10 could work just as well!

[Leeanei]

Vamps/lings are definitely more chaotic where conspirators are not, but basically anyone with an eye to bombing plus one or two other active antags results in the "too much violence, can't RP" situation. I dunno if hard numbers is the right answer because sec will just count the valids, but I'm seeing where you have a valid worry about RNG resulting in too few antags. Of course I think extended is just as good fun as a shift with antags so maybe I've got biases?

[nefarious6th]

Would we be okay with maybe testing out a 5-6 cap on antags?

With what Varali is suggesting, I think we'd still end up seeing approximately the same ratio of antags that we currently see at 60 players (between 8-10 roundstarts, plus whoever they might convert/sleepers); effectively, this might mean that for around 6 hours of the day, when population is above 60 players, we wouldn't see much change from current ratios; although I believe it's these rounds where we're having the most complaints about this particular problem! Where I see the real influence on that suggestion is in maybe reducing the number of antags rolled roundstart at sub-30 players, which could be nice for RPO, but RP1 doesn't go sub-30 that often anymore (maybe for 2-3 hours a day between 4-7AM EST?). So we'd still be looking at some high antag ratios for the 30-80 player ranges!

I also think the idea of maybe trying to mix it up with paired changelings and/or vampires could be a very good solution, versus rolling 8 changelings on roundstart. We could look at maybe adjusting for there to be something like two changelings, one or two traitors and one or two spy thieves, in a 5-antag round, for example.

I'm happy to start digging around in the code next week when I'm on break and maybe trying to get a tester PR done by the second week of December! I think I just want to know where we're all at with regards to what we want our initial cap to test to be set at; I am particularly interested and appreciative of opinions from regular security players, and thank those of you who do play a lot of security and have already chimed in!

[Studenterhue]

There are actually already antag caps, in the sense that there is a maximum number of antags the game will assign, dependent on game mode (rather than per antag).

Changeling mode has a cap of 4 and tries to assign 1 changeling per 15 players, though sometimes the game randomly bumps up player count slightly during calculation to add in another changeling. It's pretty small, but it can make a difference sometimes e.g. if there's 40, it won't use anything higher than 45, which is enough to push it to 3 changelings.

Spy Thief mode is capped at 7, always has at least 2 spies, and makes 1 spy per 6 players, again sometimes with the player count being bumped up a small (<6) amount. I imagine this would be able to get the rounds with 6 spies for 40 crew, maybe 7, though 8 is not possible.

Vampire mode has 1 vampire for 20 people. There's no cap.

Conspirator always has 1 conspirator per 5 players, up to a max of 6. Unlike the other modes, where it adds a random number to the player count number before calculating number of antags, this mode doesn't do that at all.

Traitor mode has a max of 5, with 1 traitor per 6 players. But player count gets inflated during calculation by a random amount, and that random amount can actually be pretty high, which basically means the game often makes more traitors than that ratio suggests.

Finally, mixed rp has 1 antag per 10 players, up to a max of 8. Like with traitor, the game takes the player count, adds a random number up to 25, then divides it by 10 to get a number of antags to make. (Side note: mixed action does the same, but some antag types are equivalent to multiple antags, i.e. "weighted" differently, so, for, say 40 people, 4 traitors is possible, but not 4 blobs or 4 wizards)

I should note it'd probably be pretty easy to code different caps and ratios for RP, via using #ifdef RP_MODE, which is how traitors get different objective sets for RP and how security officers get much more access on RP.

[nefarious6th]

Very useful information

This is super interesting because I think the rounds we're thinking of distinctly had 5 or more changelings on them, which has not been uncommon. If caps were recent, is there a chance they were accidentally un-done? If not, are we just getting unbelievably unlucky rolls on mixed?

I'm not sure how weighting works on latejoin things necessarily, either. Within the past week I have definitively seen two mixed gamemodes with 8 and 10 roundstart antags (8 antags were seven changelings and one traitor; 10, I honestly don't remember, I think it was a majority vampire round, but I remember the astounding number of antags). We were rolling these numbers on 60-75 people on RP1. Never more than 80, never less than 60.

Maybe the answer is mixed intrigue needs a bump downward?

Thank you for clarifying! I figured there WAS a cap, it just was maybe too high, but now I think we know specifically which gamemode is giving us the problems.

[Varali]

good stuff

From what I can see, it's mainly Spy Thief, Traitor and Mixed that could use tweaking from the current caps. I'm no developer or knowledgeable enough to make good suggestions but it might just be good enough to bump the player amounts up per antag? I feel like Conspirator could use a tweak too but then again they might need the number advantage, far too many rounds have had conspirators ignore their objective because they just couldn't do much with just two people.