Do we really need Basil?

[Tsaricide]

Do we?

[TechnoAlchemist]

I feel it might be needed purely to keep population on Sybil manageable. At least, MSO thinks that Sybil can't operate at 100+ from what I've seen with the population caps.

[Incoming]

We don't need Basil but we do need a second server that people will actually use. It's just that any second server inevitably regresses towards Basilness.

[Fr05tByt3]

I feel it might be needed purely to keep population on Sybil manageable. At least, MSO thinks that Sybil can't operate at 100+ from what I've seen with the population caps.

I've played Sybil on 100+ and I KNOW that it can.
Is there lag?
Yes.
There's always lag.
It's Byond.

So no, I think the second server is a waste of resources.

[Wyzack]

Here we go again.

That is kind of a big question isn't it? Strictly speaking anyone who plays only on Sybil does not need basil. Why is it that so many Sybil players despise basil?

I realize there is a problem with metafrienders, but it is not nearly as bad as people who never play there seem to think. It just gets a lot of exposure because it is always dredged up in FNR threads.

There are always people who say shit like " go back to Sybil shitter" or "that is not how we do things here" and I am always telling those people to shut up. I have been doing my part to try and reduce these sentiments, and include new people in the arr pee, but there are vocal shitters on basil just like on Sybil.

Tsar I am really surprised that you would make this thread now, basil pops are higher on average than they have been in a year. Not sure what you want from this thread, if you call for a majority vote you will certainly get it simply because there are so many more Sybil players than basil ones.

That said, 20/30 basil regulars are not a completely insignificant part of the population, and it seems so petty to try and nuke server 2 because they stealing
muh server bandwidths or whatever this shit is about. Sorry for the Dezzmont tier post, but we tread this ground at least a few times a year.

Tl:dr Don't shut down server 2 because you don't like our badwrongfun.

[Steelpoint]

If the people paying for the server (in this case the donators) are fine with a second server draining funds (whatever that may be) then why not? Its their money to spend.

[Scones]

It has a lot of problems. I played during a past age of extreme metafriendliness and line-toeing garbage, and I'm seeing it start to slide dangerously back.

I don't think it's really even part of /tg/station at this point

But conversely I doubt it costs that much and it is a very good containment for some very bad players.

[whodaloo]

I don't play on basil but I understand there's a different playstyle and I see the need for a second server for overflow, if nothing else. the stuff like metafriending and line toeing I can't comment on but I don't think it's the kind of thing that you can just step in and solve with policy changes

[Alex Crimson]

We need a second server, but we do not need a second server with a metafriend playerbase. Its not "containment". We shouldnt need to contain anyone on a second server. If there are rule breakers, then ban them.

[Stan_Studnick]

If the people paying for the server (in this case the donators) are fine with a second server draining funds (whatever that may be) then why not? Its their money to spend.

If I recall correctly a big chunk of the donors are almost exclusively Basil players, and that information caused this big bitchfest when An0n3 was host. I suppose the fact that the autism box was partially paying for Sybil (who is funded first) pissed a lot of people off, especially when they said they should cut Basil out.

Now I don't know if those people are still playing on Basil, but...

It has a lot of problems. I played during a past age of extreme metafriendliness and line-toeing garbage, and I'm seeing it start to slide dangerously back.

I don't think it's really even part of /tg/station at this point

But conversely I doubt it costs that much and it is a very good containment for some very bad players.

I'm starting to see exactly what everyone meant when they were talking about the Basil metagangs, and it's really, really easy to get burned out on this game when you're dealing with that. Up until relatively recently I always thought the "oh ho ho Sybil players coming to Basil, bust out the retard helmets boys we're gonna need 'em" thing was just joking around but holy shit I guess I was wrong. I've been wishing my connection wasn't so slow lately because I've pondered playing Sybil, at least then I won't stumble into some stupid web of "ya well this is our rp" shit while this pack of people roam around doing things that don't technically break the rules. Or I come across somebody who gets so goddamn assmad over something that they can't leave things be and I notice their character... at... every... corner... waiting, watching.

You were right Scones. You were all right and I didn't believe you and I regret everything. I'm sorry.

[oranges]

>big chunk of donators are exclusively basil players.

is it true? I looked at the public ones and I've seen at least some of them on sybil before.

[Jalleo]

Yes we do if sybil crashes people need their TG SS13 mix its just got a slightly different chemical mix that they sniff up.

Seriously though 2 are better than one.

[DrPillzRedux]

But conversely I doubt it costs that much and it is a very good containment for some very bad players.

According to the patreon Basil costs $60/mo

[TheNightingale]

See it like this - if you remove Basil, we'll migrate over to Sybil and ruin your game with our arrpees. Sounds fair, right?

[DemonFiren]

Hah, RPing on Sybil you wouldn't last five minutes.

[Steelpoint]

Someone put forward a interesting hypothesis that the reason why meta groups on Basil are more obvious and less tolerable than those that might exist on Sybil is due to the fact that Sybil's very large population insulates most players from these people, whereas Basil's lower population means your only going to be playing with these meta groups.

Eh....

[ColonicAcid]

Do you hear that?
It's buzzwords. Lots and lots of buzzwords.
Le meatfriends Xdddddddddddd

Fuck off. You don't know shit.
This thread is dumb.

[Stickymayhem]

Nah the real reason is just time divided by population

Basil rounds are both longer and with fewer people so you spend more time with each person and your attitude towards them is much much stronger, positive or negative, than with a random person on Sybil.

Look we could probably send some admins to crack down on this shit but honestly who cares. Let the 30 people who enjoy that do it. It really doesn't affect Sybil in the slightest. The second server isn't a huge drain on resources and even if it is I think it's reasonable enough to provide that experience to the people who want it. Let them have their continuing relationships thats where the depth comes in for them. On Sybil the depth comes from the chaotic results of all that shit going on at once. Imagine having to play nothing but traitorling all day every day. You'd probably star

[Saegrimr]

Send me in there :^)

[Tornadium]

Send me in there :^)

I'd crowdfund this as a stretch goal.

[lumipharon]

The amount of server hate (both ways) is so over the top and rediculous, holy shit.

I used to only play on server 2, for well over a year. Now I only really play on server 1 (population reasons only).
All this constant bullshit about metafriends, circlejerks is seriously wrong.

The only real difference is, there is only 15-30 people on at once, and the total number of people that frequent that server is much lower then sybil. This means you get to know a much higher percentage of the total pop, which consequencially means you know more of the crew in any given round far better then sybil where 80% of people you've never seen before or remember.

There is a big fucking difference between getting to knowing people (which is what anyone with atleast the mental capacity of a toaster will achieve), and actually metafriending. ie: Knowing Dick McTickler always starts fights, so when someone accuses him of assault, you're more inclined to believe them. As opposed to: hearing that Dick McTicker and someone are in a fight, so you run over and beat the other person to death without any context.

I mean shit, you can claim sybil has the same 'meta friending' if you look at (for example) Reed Glover, since literally everyone loves and trusts him, and plenty of people have openly admitted to sparing his life during murderbones etc because of who he is.

[Cik]

Send me in there :^)

'the holocaust from this alone would probably eclipse the sack of baghdad

on topic: do we really need basil? no not really

but why not have it? the people there are happy, why take away a place they like?

i've played there a few times and all the complaints are really overblown

they seemed like nice people

??????

[Tornadium]

It seems to be you have good rounds on Basil and you wonder what all the fuss is about or you have a massive shitfest of metafriend fun. There is no middle ground.

[Wyzack]

You forgot the most likely scenario, where the round generates a single changeling, tatorling or traitor, they go loud and get killed 10 minutes in and then we get another pseudo extended. We really need more admin presence on server 2

[Jazaen]

That could be resolved by coding some special low-pop versions of normal antags, since most of them are not really balanced for low pop (in my opinion, even changeling is not really that good on ~10 people). Besides, seeing 2 person is better than waiting until some bored steal-objective traitor relases singuloth.
If I remember correctly, datum antags was supposed to provide a bit more variation.

[Yoshmaster]

Yeah totes. Remove Sybil though, I don't play there. I can't see why anybody would enjoy playing there???

[Akkryls]

Yeah totes. Remove Sybil though, I don't play there. I can't see why anybody would enjoy playing there???

Well the vast majority of players seem to prefer Sybil over Basil, so you can't really use that argument.

[Wyzack]

Whoooooooooosh

[Stan_Studnick]

Someone put forward a interesting hypothesis that the reason why meta groups on Basil are more obvious and less tolerable than those that might exist on Sybil is due to the fact that Sybil's very large population insulates most players from these people, whereas Basil's lower population means your only going to be playing with these meta groups.

Eh....

Pretty much, Basil is one of the only servers I've seen where it causes serious problems though. I think the combination of bad roleplaying and a misunderstanding of what is in-character and out-of-character makes this into a very poisonous thing. Now, granted, I haven't been on every single server ever and I refuse to play on certain ones (Bay, for example) but "metafriends" only become a problem when people start blurring that line between in-character and out-of-character. Knowing people are going to do that, or worse, try to take you out of the round just because makes playing extremely stressful and the game stops being fun and starts being a chore.

You forgot the most likely scenario, where the round generates a single changeling, tatorling or traitor, they go loud and get killed 10 minutes in and then we get another pseudo extended. We really need more admin presence on server 2

This is absolutely true too, though, a lot of us don't mind pseudo-extended when we're all doing something fun. If we do have more admins on Basil, get ones that want to actually do fun things. Hell, create a position specifically geared toward that, make a /tg/ equivalent to the Ultima Online seers who did all sorts of fun things. They couldn't boot people or anything like that, but they could work with the other staff to make quests or events. (on free shards they could do everything except kick/ban/teleport players) I think it was NikNakFlak who turned me into Daphne (friendly goat) and I ran around the station giving "friendship touches" (kicking) and it was just a fun little gimmick that nobody had a problem with.

[Scones]

If you need admins to make the rounds worth playing that says a lot for the people playing in the first place

Either make your own fun or play somewhere with a population supported by the game itself

[Wyzack]

We do make our own fun, but it only goes so far.

On Sibyl without any sort of admin intervention you get ops and blobs and wizards and shadowlings and gangs, you get enough traitors and lings that it is not a binary antags dunked/antags murder whole station scenario. It is not even remotely equivalent. If we could get more lowpop game modes that would also be a solution, but it seems like a more finicky and difficult to implement solution than just having more admins jump on basil to run events every now and again.

[ThanatosRa]

AN overflow i sneeded I think. I see no reason to get rid of Basil.

[Stan_Studnick]

If you need admins to make the rounds worth playing that says a lot for the people playing in the first place

Either make your own fun or play somewhere with a population supported by the game itself

You know that's not what I'm saying at all, I just said that we make our own fun plenty of times. I was reiterating that we don't need more admins to show up but if they do they shouldn't be there to babysit because that always ends in a Sybil admin treating the server like it's full of Sybil players. We have slower rounds on the server for a reason and a bored admin just bombing the station with whatever to end everything is not fun for anyone.

[Yoshmaster]

Yeah totes. Remove Sybil though, I don't play there. I can't see why anybody would enjoy playing there???

Well the vast majority of players seem to prefer Sybil over Basil, so you can't really use that argument.

Do we really need Akkryls?

[Falamazeer]

See it like this - if you remove Basil, we'll migrate over to Sybil and ruin your game with our arrpees. Sounds fair, right?

I don't want to outright shit on basil, but it's pretty much this, I enjoy basil existing because I don't want to deal with the basil archetypes in my favorite servers, Snooty elitist purist RP snobs who demand you interact with every thin watery sob story they want to write up.

Not saying that's all basil, but you guys can't pretend you don't know the type.
And the meta buddies too, because deny all you want, anyone walking in who isn't used to it like you guys are see's is a rampant blatant problem.

[callanrockslol]

See it like this - if you remove Basil, we'll migrate over to Sybil and ruin your game with our arrpees. Sounds fair, right?

I don't want to outright shit on basil, but it's pretty much this, I enjoy basil existing because I don't want to deal with the basil archetypes in my favorite servers, Snooty elitist purist RP snobs who demand you interact with every thin watery sob story they want to write up.

Not saying that's all basil, but you guys can't pretend you don't know the type.
And the meta buddies too, because deny all you want, anyone walking in who isn't used to it like you guys are see's is a rampant blatant problem.

I love the elitist RP snobs, they are usually the worst at fights.

[peoplearestrange]

I love the elitist RP snobs, they are usually the worst at fights.

I love the powergaming snobs, who forget this games UI is trash because it started and still mainly is an RP based game, they usually are terrible at any kind of character engagement.

[Saegrimr]

I love the forum snobs, who forget this is a video game.

[TheNightingale]

See it like this - if you remove Basil, we'll migrate over to Sybil and ruin your game with our arrpees. Sounds fair, right?

I don't want to outright shit on basil, but it's pretty much this, I enjoy basil existing because I don't want to deal with the basil archetypes in my favorite servers, Snooty elitist purist RP snobs who demand you interact with every thin watery sob story they want to write up.

Not saying that's all basil, but you guys can't pretend you don't know the type.
And the meta buddies too, because deny all you want, anyone walking in who isn't used to it like you guys are see's is a rampant blatant problem.

I love the elitist RP snobs, they are usually the worst at fights.

That was a joke, but I do see what you mean. At its worst, both Sybil and Basil have stereotypical players - for us, it's Bay-lite metafriending ERPers, and for you, it's MLG-pro validhunting greytide. Neither is fully correct, but there are little nuggets of truth occasionally. We're not a fan of people doing typical Sybil things (e.g. murderboning, valids, "call the shuttle I stubbed my toe"), but that's more to do with the typical playstyle of Basil rounds - they're slow, they're extended (the traitorlings get caught by the valid-squad, since we don't have any Sec), and more often than not, nothing happens. So we make our own fun, through talking to others, building our characters and the world around them. Eventually, we'll get bored and leave, since even we need the events of a new round to catalyse our RP, or we want to try out a different character. We don't get as many fun events or gamemodes as you do, so we do what we can to make it enjoyable.

Contrast, Sybil, where you don't have time for things like that, especially not when every other round is wizard/rev/cult/ops. You live in the moment, taking the game's challenges and overcoming them - or sometimes not - and when it's all over, and the dust settles down, you have nothing left to do, since the station is in ruins and there's nothing left to fight. You'll call the shuttle, leave for a new round, and join again, repeating the same routine over and over - just like Basil, in fact, but in a different way. Since you have more players, more things happen; and since more things happen, more admins are on. You get the shiny events, the interesting gamemodes - and there's always something happening. Rarely do you have time to sit down and enjoy the quiet.

What I'm saying is, though Basil and Sybil treat SS13 oppositely (we see it as a story; you see it as a game), the servers complement each other perfectly. The people who like MLG-pro validhunting greytide can go to Sybil, and the people who like Bay-lite metafriending ERPers can come to Basil. /tg/ appeals to everyone, in one way or another.

(Besides, Rollo teaches us how to fight pretty quickly. The Basil rite of initiation is to be dunked and spaced by him for no raisin, you know.)

[Alex Crimson]

The thing is, Basil isnt supposed to be like that. Its an overflow server, not a "different experience". Anyone wanting to join Basil shouldnt be subjected to a bunch of metafriends nor should the server be hostile to them just because they are not a regular Basil player.

...so long as that doesnt happen, and Basil accepts that they are not a special snowflake server that somehow has different rules, then i have no problems with it.

[TheNightingale]

Who dictates what Basil's 'supposed to' be like? Not me. That's just how it is. I do agree that we need to be a little nicer to new players, though; it's not the best place to join when you don't know how to play.

[Tornadium]

Who dictates what Basil's 'supposed to' be like? Not me. That's just how it is. I do agree that we need to be a little nicer to new players, though; it's not the best place to join when you don't know how to play.

If we're advocating a vastly different style of play and experience it should be advertised as such I feel.

I think the player limit should be removed to be honest on Sybil. No one should be forced to play Basil.

[peoplearestrange]

I kinda agree with the above. We don't need to force people on to Basil. We still should keep it, I actually occasionally enjoy admining and playing on Basil, its a very different pace.

[Wyzack]

I thought the popcap was put in place due to server limitations

[Tornadium]

I thought the popcap was put in place due to server limitations

It was (I think). The only alternative though is to either wait or play Basil.

We regularly go over cap, Basil population does not rise. If we have an overflow for Sybil it needs to not be Basil.

[Scones]

I'm like 90% sure Basil is there for overflow and always was designed to be overflow, not "offer a different experience". A server gains literally nothing by hosting a separate group for a minority that behaves in a way that chases off the majority.

It's stupid, take a look at Sybil OOC when we've hit the cap. People say they're going to play SS13 elsewhere til a slot opens here, but they sure as hell don't go to Basil, because it's not a /tg/station experience.

[Wyzack]

Regardless of what it started as it has become something different. I do not see how it being different instantly means it is bad, nor why people who don't play there are always so fixated on shutting it down. It has problems and some of us are trying very hard to fix them. Claiming Sybil is flawless by comparison is pretty shit.

[Tokiko2]

I'm like 90% sure Basil is there for overflow and always was designed to be overflow, not "offer a different experience". A server gains literally nothing by hosting a separate group for a minority that behaves in a way that chases off the majority.

It's stupid, take a look at Sybil OOC when we've hit the cap. People say they're going to play SS13 elsewhere til a slot opens here, but they sure as hell don't go to Basil, because it's not a /tg/station experience.

If Basil is not supposed to offer a different experience, why is it running Metastation?

[Alex Crimson]

We are not saying Basil is "bad" or that its a bad thing to play the way yous guys do. We are saying that Basil was never intended to be your little lowpop RP metagang. Its an overflow server. Sybil(Boxstation) doesnt function well with over 60 players. Job slots are mostly taken, and Assistants run rampant. We need a second server for people to join freely without dealing with the hostile community there.

Yall are welcome to have a server that offers a more serious RP experience, but at the moment you are just squatters occupying Basil.

[Wyzack]

Quit saying "your little metagang" like every single player there plays like that. It is outright not true. Some people are dicks, but there are people being dicks on every server.