Revamp the post-sol disaster round

[Roomba]

Recently people have taken to speedrunning the solarium bad ending, often achieving <30 minute runs solo (and potentially less with a capable group). This in itself wouldn’t be an issue if it didn’t A: immediately crash the ongoing round and B: condemn everyone else on the server to a twenty-minute slog of a disaster round.

For the most part, the disaster rounds are a solved problem where everyone knows that the optimal solution is ‘hole up in escape, fortify with closets/walls, shoot things occasionally’, so your choices are between standing around in the same location for twenty minutes, or deliberately playing suboptimally, running off and taking out whatever you can before getting yourself killed, then spending the rest of the shift ghosting through a wrecked, empty station.

Either revamp the post-sol disaster round to make it actually interesting, or remove it so that people aren’t condemned to a boring slog of a round because some nerd decided to play single-player SS13.

Couple of ideas off the top of my head to make it actually interesting:

• skip the whole ‘crash into sun’ thing, spring the disaster on the players 10-15 minutes into the next one (with the round type just showing as secret).
  

• Automatically send an ahelp whenever triggered to the admin channel as a signal to go ‘hey, someone triggered a sol disaster round, now is your chance to run silly destructive gimmicks and spawn pet space bears and whatnot’
  

[NateTheSquid]

i agree with all of this

[LuigiThirty]

I support disaster rounds being admin fun times, they're just boring otherwise

[Ed Venture]

i agree with all of this

Yeah. These rounds used to be intense as fuck with at most three people making it out alive. Now it's easy to survive and just results in everyone camping out at escape while building lockers. What was the most tense mode we had got turned into a boring round were we all just sit around waiting for the next round like we were in a waiting room at a doctor's office.

[Technature]

I support disaster rounds being admin fun times, they're just boring otherwise

[Whoneedspacee]

As the person running these disaster rounds, I was testing and exploring things in the disaster rounds so having them be "admin fun times" would kinda suck. Most of what makes the disaster round boring is that the station barely changes and just becomes a spamfest of adventure zone critters while the station lacks any proper way to deal with them other than hiding and gains nothing in attacking them.

There needs to be something for the people who stay on the station to explore, create, whatever, the jobs later on are good but considering the hallways are just filled with enemies there's really not a whole lot you can do.

I don't have the solution to your problems, but I will say that we learned what we needed to learn and the solarium runs will definitely be less frequent (unless someone else runs them)

[Roomba]

Yeah, I predicted someone would come in and go "No, there are *~deep sol~* reasons why we can't change anything about this." Personally, I'm not buying it. Either explain in plain language why it is vitally important that the sol nerds must be allowed to hold the rest of the server hostage like this, or stop fucking doing it.

[Boon Yoon]

Since the mob spam doesn't really matter all that much, what if it was turned into a spooky hardmode antag round (but with mobs)? I remember once people were given antagonist a little while after the fun began, and people like Cherry Fields starting screaming about how "she comes from the darkness" or something creepy like that while attacking with a knife.

Have a spooky thematic prompt, and maybe issue one antagonist at first, then a second a little while after, and so on, up to like five or some random number.

[Ed Venture]

Either explain in plain language why it is vitally important that the sol nerds must be allowed to hold the rest of the server hostage like this, or stop fucking doing it.

[NateTheSquid]

Since the mob spam doesn't really matter all that much, what if it was turned into a spooky hardmode antag round (but with mobs)? I remember once people were given antagonist a little while after the fun began, and people like Cherry Fields starting screaming about how "she comes from the darkness" or something creepy like that while attacking with a knife.

Have a spooky thematic prompt, and maybe issue one antagonist at first, then a second a little while after, and so on, up to like five or some random number.

yeah! one of the best disaster rounds i ever had (and i've had a decent amount of admin disaster rounds) was when everyone became hard mode antags and basically everyone cordoned off bits of the station as their territory and had like, solo gang wars. i formed a gang with shitty bill and crew and killed everyone who showed up

edit: we had an objective that was something to do with 'the darkness' and everyone took it to mean they were insane and did this in very different ways, it was very interesting, especially as it was on lljk2 not 1

[Sundance]

A very simple fix for this would be just to enable mixed antagonists during the disaster round.
A few caveats:
- This would not effect your antagonist stats if you roll one (as the round is guaranteed to end in 20 minutes)
- Players who were antagonists prior to the sol round (with the round promtly ended unfairly), get tokens. This already occurs afaik?

This would stop players crowding escape when other players are actively removing the barriers or blowing shit up in the name of whatever insane bloodgod they have conjured up.

[Frank_Stein]

Actual objectives that needed to be completed during a Sol disaster would be nice. Maybe make the monster spawning less random, and have portals that spawn them that the players need to close in order to end the round.

[PH77SER]

fix: finishing sol doesen't crash the current round, just that when it ends the shuttle goes into the sun instead of the whole station

[Paineframe]

Sounds like drastically upping the chance of random events happening might shake things up a bit. Hard to turtle up in one place for twenty minutes when black holes, radiation storms, and disease events are pushing people to stay on the move.

[Whoneedspacee]

Rad storms in targeted areas might be nice, maybe an event that targets if too many people stay in one place for too long so you have to stay moving. Wormholes could be nice as well because you could accidentally walk into one then have to make your way across the station.

If we're going to do these random events though I recommend adding more ghetto weapons scattered around the station so people aren't totally defenseless. I recommend making it so there's something that can screw you over if you go into crit, because right now if you go into crit then you can just walk away and the critters won't target you at all.

It needs to be easier to defend yourself but there also need to be ways to actually die.