remove the assistant cap

[btcbuster]

The discussion thread where they randomly inserted the idea of an assistant cap into a slightly related thread is locked, I have made this thread for the discussion of the topic. I dislike the cap. Please discuss below

[Jacquerel]

this is the second thread made about this topic and also the second one made in the wrong place

[Super Aggro Crag]

wheres the right place to discuss it jacquerel

[Jacquerel]

It's a suggestion that policy should be changed
viewforum.php?f=33
posting your thread in this subforum means that head admins are required to take some kind of action as a result of your thread (even if the action is to say "no we like it and here's why")

[regie]

Ever notice how you can't spell ASSISTANT without ASSSTAIN??

Heheheheh...

Take that greygoofs

[Super Aggro Crag]

It's a suggestion that policy should be changed
viewforum.php?f=33
posting your thread in this subforum means that head admins are required to take some kind of action as a result of your thread (even if the action is to say "no we like it and here's why")

thank you

[RaveRadbury]

I'll just move the topic for 'em

EDIT: Alright it's officially in policy now. Regie made a funny anagram joke before it was but don't take it as an excuse to shitpost in this thread, please.

[britgrenadier1]

Turn it back, I miss being able to latejoin as an assistant.

[dendydoom]

i have changed the title of this thread to the actual policy change you want. please dont make meme titles if you want to seriously put forward policy changes no one wants to open the thread to know wtf you're talking about thanks

edit: oh i see someone moved this thread from somewhere else mb

[TheLoLSwat]

I don’t think anyone actually likes this (that plays), and that alone should be enough for headmins to end the experiment. One of the big reasons this was tested was that it’s trivial to revert if it didn’t work. Well guess what? It does not work AND nobody is enjoying it.

Many veteran players enjoy just getting on a familiar game / server and talking to the people they know without worrying about anything else. Many new players want to play the universal “level 1 noob” character while learning the game without worrying anbout anything else. Many people with various hourcounts want to have fun playing without wanting to feel burdened by a department or a responsibility (real or imagined). And I don’t think any of those players are wrong in playing the game that way so we shouldn’t be punishing them by keeping assistant locked especially when the issue it solves isn’t even solved

[Lullaby]

the assistant cap has convinced me that we should just ban you inherently for picking assistant and having more than 100 hours in the game. personally im pro assistant cap. its made my quartermaster experience soooo much less annoying

[regie]

I don’t think anyone actually likes this (that plays), and that alone should be enough for headmins to end the experiment. One of the big reasons this was tested was that it’s trivial to revert if it didn’t work. Well guess what? It does not work AND nobody is enjoying it.

Many veteran players enjoy just getting on a familiar game / server and talking to the people they know without worrying about anything else. Many new players want to play the universal “level 1 noob” character while learning the game without worrying anbout anything else. Many people with various hourcounts want to have fun playing without wanting to feel burdened by a department or a responsibility (real or imagined). And I don’t think any of those players are wrong in playing the game that way so we shouldn’t be punishing them by keeping assistant locked especially when the issue it solves isn’t even solved

Naw man, I’m fine with this and I play. Or try to, with all the little issues plaguing the place lately…

[TheBibleMelts]

i don't mind the cap and think there's been some benefits to it, but if it were up to me i'd have it scale according to pop - 5 assistants per 25-30 players seems fair imo.

the action taken was just a nuclear version of a proposal i made that was denied here viewtopic.php?t=36202

[RedBaronFlyer]

Haven't played for a few days but how is the whole thing going? Is it still resulting in players picking a job and then not doing it?

[BrianBackslide]

An assistant cap sure sounds like a good way to prevent new players from having an opportunity to ease themselves into the game.

[Vekter]

An assistant cap sure sounds like a good way to prevent new players from having an opportunity to ease themselves into the game.

If this was actually the concern, we would have implemented the reverse time lock that I suggested years ago, where only players with fewer than 100 hours could play Assistant.

That was never done, because people complained about not being able to play their funny grief role.

[subject217]

As a person who does not play assistant, and does not particularly like assistant players, I feel that to some respect the assistant cap is counterproductive.

With the current cap of 5, assistant is filled at roundstart, and it's exclusively filled by 2000 hour assistant mains whenever there is any pop. This introduces some issues. We currently don't have a good role for new players, and we don't have an overflow role. We also don't have a no obligations role.

I do think that there is value in having a low stakes, low or no obligations role. The problem isn't with assistant as a role, inasmuch as it is the culture of assistant mains on Manuel. I feel that there's a sense of entitlement about gear in assistant mains. I regularly get called nazi, bitch, cunt, fucking cat bitch, worthless cunt, some others that I forget, just for refusing to give assistants insulated gloves or multitools for free. There is generally a server-wide expectation to give assistants free shit if it doesn't cost you much, and people act like you're Hitler if you don't do this. Or if you stop them from stealing from Tech Storage. A number of players are screaming AI OPEN! at the start of every round, and nothing much is done about that, by other players or by the administration. Assistant shouldn't be all the engineering gear without any of the engineering responsibility, but functionally that's what it is on Manuel after 5 minutes of effort. And while the cap has lowered the number of people doing this, there are still people doing this every round.

Capping it at 5 instead of removing it entirely is a strange choice to me. I guess theoretically in lowpop new players can still take it. But I guess what I'm asking is why it's better to cap assistant, a role that does have some value, than it is to work to change rules enforcement and server culture around assistants? Obviously it's easier to say that than to actually do it, but I don't feel that capping it at 5 assistants has helped very much round to round. It has reduced the greytider mentality to some degree I think, but we have tools for that as well like Rainbowtide that we aren't using right now.

[Timberpoes]

I voted for it explicitly to give the admins precisely what they wanted, a dumb solution to a problem that only exists because it's something that wasn't properly changed in the first place and is a result of the MRP specific configs being lost and the LRP ones before restored to Manuel.

And to be clear, I implemented the assistant cap as well. And I implemented it properly. I don't half-ass shitty solutions. I make sure they work and address concerns well in advance, so when they fail there's no excuses.

So the assistant cap doesn't (and has never operated in a way that would) cap the total number of players. If no latejoin job slots are available you can latejoin as assistant anyway. The assistant cap also doesn't prevent new players joining or playing. If the player doesn't have the living hours to join as any job except the our least tutorial-like role we have, whose sandbox space is shared with 2000 hour burnouts that treat it like a pass to act like an antag, then they can also bypass the cap to join as an assistant.

Ever wondered why a shift had 6 or 7 assistants despite the cap of 5? There's your answer. It's been like that from the start. All it does is soft cap the number of assistants in the shift until all other job roles are filled, wherein assistant opens back up. And it's still a dumb idea despite that.

We should turn this dumb solution off and we should just put the damn pop cap back on. I don't give a single flying fuck if there aren't enough leftover players to support an additional server if we capped off Manuel. I care about anything except excuses for why we're not making Manuel the best environment to mix the classical tgstation experience a classical roleplay experience. And in my experience, that means capping the pop off.

Our roleplay suffers at higher pop counts. You're forced into more interactions with players, more often, for what are ostensibly going to be more lulsorandom shifts and shorter length shifts. Each interaction is going to be more terse and you're going to be able to spend less time interacting with each individual player.

There's also only a limited amount of job content and gameplay-related fun to go around, and it scales slower than player count does.

If you were the only player on the server, you gain access to the full extent of the sandbox and can reasonably do any content you want. Go do some genetics, set up the SM, drop down to lavaland and do some mining or megafauna hunting. The entire sandbox lives for you. Midpop you might find your department moderately staffed and you limited only to the job you signed up for, but that job's content and fun is all yours. Highpop you might find your department overstaffed and you may end up competing for your own core job content and fun with your colleagues.

That competition to extra the most personal fun out of the game also hits roleplay standards, as might often makes right and the pen stops being quite as mighty as the toolbox.

And that's all ignoring entirely some of the invisibe or esoteric effects that many like to LALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING THAT DOESN'T FIT MY NARRATIVE over, like the last time the Manuel ghost limit was raised - not even the number of people in shift, but the number of observers we allowed - we saw RP fall as popchasers started targetting Manuel.

Recap Manuel and be done with this circus.

[RaveRadbury]

Our roleplay suffers at higher pop counts. You're forced into more interactions with players, more often, for what are ostensibly going to be more lulsorandom shifts and shorter length shifts. Each interaction is going to be more terse and you're going to be able to spend less time interacting with each individual player.

There's also only a limited amount of job content and gameplay-related fun to go around, and it scales slower than player count does.

If you were the only player on the server, you gain access to the full extent of the sandbox and can reasonably do any content you want. Go do some genetics, set up the SM, drop down to lavaland and do some mining or megafauna hunting. The entire sandbox lives for you. Midpop you might find your department moderately staffed and you limited only to the job you signed up for, but that job's content and fun is all yours. Highpop you might find your department overstaffed and you may end up competing for your own core job content and fun with your colleagues.

That competition to extract the most personal fun out of the game also hits roleplay standards, as might often makes write and the pen stops being quite as mighty as the toolbox.

And that's all ignoring entirely some of the invisibe or esoteric effects that many like to LALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING THAT DOESN'T FIT MY NARRATIVE over, like the last time the Manuel ghost limit was raised - not even the number of people in shift, but the number of observers we allowed - we saw RP fall as popchasers started targetting Manuel.

Recap Manuel and be done with this circus.

2nding Timber and not just because I'm in the screenshot.

We'd be better off cutting Manuels popcap in half and cloning it (which gives (You) an opportunity to avoid that one player (You) don't like! Having a 2nd MRP server would make taking the L on a death easier as well.

If we're willing to try assistants like this we should be willing to try cutting manuel into two so people can remember what it was like to have good RP

We used to be able to say "Having a bad time? Switch over to the other server!" with Bagil/Sybil and denying Manuel this release valve (and insisting that a shift to EU ping would somehow not be an issue) has ultimately been detrimental to player resilience and flexibility.

[Thranos]

All this change has done is encourage popchasing tiders to tide in job slots.
This deprives actual job players from being able to do that, and, as a bonus, stops the actual RPing assistants from doing assistant stuff. Assistant, not tider, there's a difference.
Just ban the goddamn tiders already, and remove the cap. It's consistently like the same handful of people, here on Manuel because "oh it has players". The shit they do isn't what Manuel assistant mains do.
This is trying to solve an administrative issue with a config change.

[BHCipher]

-snip-

-snip-

3rding both Timber and Rave on this. Limiting Assistants doesn't help the issue, while limiting server population (and possibly having a secondary server for runoff) is a step in the right direction. RP standards on Manuel have dropped hard multiple times I feel, and especially following the host transfer they've plummeted because of Sybil runoff. Limiting population would lead to more quality interaction rather than quantity, which is good for an environment that espouses to be centered around a balance of crunch and roleplay rather than pure crunch like LRP.

A second MRP server would also possibly help to keep populations in a sweetspot IMO, though there's no way to tell for sure unless it's experimented with.

[MatrixOne]

Please take back the assistant cap. After a long HoP into Acting Captain shift, I just wanted to kick back and relax, but with Assistant capped I am forced to pick between a job I'm not feeling or just not playing any further. The last thing I wanna do after a long shift is to immediately queue up to roll - I wanna take a short break and come back later. But, of course, it'll be taken.

The quality of Manuel at highpop is still poor, even with the assistant cap. Once pop hits over 60, conversations stop. People run past one another, everyone in a rush.

Please return the uncapped assistant - bring back the low-pressure chill social role to us. And I'd be in favor of the pop cap to what it used to be before we copied the config from Terry. so +1 to Timber and Rave.

[HappyD0gg]

Not being able to late join as an assistant either turns players away for a slightly lower pop or makes players choose a random job to just fill the spot and then go do whatever they would have as an assistant.
Instead of people just being assistants they are now assistants with extra/different access, so they still just run around and don't even try to RP, and when they do RP they just say a few words and thats about it.
Instead of setting a cap to stop shitty assistants why not just moderate the quality of RP and the lack thereof.

[alwaysshining]

I posted about this a bit in player's club thread just after the change but I want to restate my disapproval with the assistant cap in the correct place. In my experience limiting assistants has had only negative impacts on the environment in-game, from the dispersal of NRP greytide behavior into potentially useful job slots, to the increase in tension between sec and crew caused by the boredom of not having a tide to chase around, to the way assistant slots often get filled roundstart with NRPers while our RPing assistant mains just don't get a chance to play. Hallways are empty now, bar RP barely happens, everybody either heads down at their desks all day or runs around griefing with science/engi/paramedic access. It's not good.

I suppose I get if it's all meant to be some 4-dimensional chess scheme to force shitters into job slots so they can be held under more scrutiny for NRP behavior, but from my perspective as a player, an RPer and a jobbie, the change has just led to shifts being more terse, more task-focused, and less social across the board and I'd seriously like to see it reverted.

[Thranos]

The assistant cap in combination with the ungodly wave of shitters that seemingly nothing is being done about has me on the very verge of just leaving Manuel. It's so fucking bad.
Tiders all over, "defensive maxcaps", people yelling incoherent weird shit down comms all the time (IE someone who broke into a room with a command intercomm just so they could loud text about "eating poop from the NT poop caves" (they were only admin-actioned when they changed subjects to "the woke left")), chickenfighting all over the goddamn place. Tiders taking up job slots thanks to this brilliant fucking decision, obvious metagangs giving each other TTVs and antag.

It took OVER A WEEK for a guy playing a transphobic caricature named "Yakub Nabisco" to get banned, despite multiple people ahelping.
Why are ahelps being neglected?
Where's the administration?
Why aren't they just banning the painfully blatant problem players?

Anti-Doomer Edit- Looks like the tempbans are starting to hit, so maybe it's not so bleak.

[Wildorado]

Personally I appreciate the assistant cap. It has been much quieter in terms of people doing absolutely anything they want during shift and usually the things they do are fully devoid of RP. I believe some of the proposed solutions aren't helpful. I don't support splitting the server pop or capping it. I feel both of these solutions will drive players away from tg and into the arms of a new home.

If you've ever played Manuel at 8am in the USA, you'd know there's MAYBE 8 people on, usually half that. Pop doesn't get high until around 3 or 4pm, dies off after 10pm. 75% of the day is spent with a pop under 20 from my experience. Early morning shifts can last 4 to 6 hours regularly. I feel splitting the server will cause some folks to tend to Manuel A, some to Manuel B. You'll have trouble finding or keeping track of your friends, and 75% of the day will be a server with 2 people in it.

Capping the server will just drive folks who can't join to another server. If someone can't normally get on until 5pm in the USA, the server is already packed and they are regularly excluded due to a cap. Eventually those players will disappear and what has this actually solved?

The assistants treat each shift like their personal sandbox and I feel that takes away from those of us who want to RP like we're actually on a station, like we actually work there, and so on. If you interrupt or try to stop them, they're like piranhas, regardless of your rank. I dread the messy hallways and chaos that are usually caused by a group of assistants pissing around because they have nothing else to do and lack self control. ICly how would a corporation hire a load of absolute knob-heads who can't and won't do shit, and then station them on a research lab? They wouldn't.

I support the assistant cap and in lieu of that, we need something to improve behavior, even a little bit. Maybe a review/change of the rules and add some things that give admins a bit of power to enforce or at least ask people to behave a bit. It doesn't always have to be a drastic admin interaction with notes on accounts, just a comment to the player like "hey can you not act like you need lithium?" Perhaps security guards need more freedom and encouragement to come down harder on people. It's easy to keep being a jerk if your jail sentence was one minute.

[conrad]

None of this would've been even pondered if admins just assistant jobbanned griefers playing assistant for like, idk, a month each, or some other large arbitrary period of time.

[britgrenadier1]

[Snipped out quote of deleted post(s) -Timberpoes]

Also remove the cap

[dendydoom]

please discuss the policy (why you want it or don't want it) not whatever paranoid ramblings are going on here thanks

[Timberpoes]

I'm going to back Dendy and will also 1984 some of the contentless posts from after this thread was moved to the policy subforum that do nothing to contribute to the greater discussion on the topic.

[massa]

The topic's original premise was to remove the assistant cap.

Every point pro removing the cap is just behavioral projections, any pro post justifies itself with "muh greys le tiding". That's not real and really never was. Even Timber said it was an absurd, silly change.

I'm not shitposting or anything. These bad changes and PRs consistently come with the same/similar specific chorus casting aspersions about hypothetical behaviors they don't approve of, that they couldn't have played to experience. I don't see any motivation to make the server better or more alive, I just see a homeowner's association putting thousands in fines on someone's house over the color they painted it, hoping to put a lien on it.

The content of my post is that these bad choices are born of and supported by interpersonal control issues, not any constructive intent.

[Lullaby]

this thread has served no purpose other than to make me support the assistant cap even more. "the tide isnt real" is cope. i havent had people break into my department for gamer loot in ages. its fucking awesome. hell even on highpop often times EVA will go unlooted, secure storage unlooted, do you know how crazy it is to see a fully stocked EVA?

[massa]

is the cap just on manuel?

[conrad]

is the cap just on manuel?

Yes. Terry doesn't have the cap and Sybil doesn't exist.

[massa]

oh lmao idrc then sounds like something manny would do

saw a bunch of assistants on terry and realized we good. sybil gamers we are SO back we won again.

[xzero314]

I don’t think anyone actually likes this (that plays), and that alone should be enough for headmins to end the experiment. One of the big reasons this was tested was that it’s trivial to revert if it didn’t work. Well guess what? It does not work AND nobody is enjoying it.

Many veteran players enjoy just getting on a familiar game / server and talking to the people they know without worrying about anything else. Many new players want to play the universal “level 1 noob” character while learning the game without worrying anbout anything else. Many people with various hourcounts want to have fun playing without wanting to feel burdened by a department or a responsibility (real or imagined). And I don’t think any of those players are wrong in playing the game that way so we shouldn’t be punishing them by keeping assistant locked especially when the issue it solves isn’t even solved

I think it has worked out fantastically so far. Not having 20 assistants running around during high pop is a massive improvement. If it has to go because it is quite heavily disliked then I can live with that. But it cant be said it has not done a great job.

[Sonnzer]

Not really a big fan.

Assistant at its core is a low responsibility role. Officially you're meant to """assist""" people but between you and me this obviously never really happens.

As MatrixOne stated, and I'll second, sometimes you just want to relax and the best way to do that is such a role as Assistant.

I'd also like to second what Thranos said in the fact that the individuals who are normally acting up have just switched to actual jobs like engineering, but it has not discouraged them. If anything, it has only given them easier ways to shit up the place.

I'm sure the administration is working hard to fix these issues through noting/PMing/Temp bans but I stand here and can only agree with the people who think nothing is happening. Of course, it's hard to see if the admins are actually doing something if you're not an admin. The only records of punishments you get are either permanent bans on the database, or from appeals made on the forums.

So, while I get people are frustrated with the lack of perceivable punishment, I also get that it's not always obvious.

Anyways, I digress, the cap is bad and I think it only serves as a detriment. I'd rather have actually useful people in a role and keep the shitters to their confinement role. Less access, less avenues to do this sort of thing. I think some sort of encouragement needs to be done for these players because maybe they just need a shove in the right direction to do good.

Remove the cap.

[ju45he]

The cap is a shitty solution to shitter behaviour. If we need to think of a way to go about banning shitters then that's something for a new policy.

[massa]

what if i wanna be there and hang out and chill but not be a jobbie

a crew is a crew brah. assistants still do stuff. they build shops, they ask for EVA access to explore space. they get other jobs, they build forts new departments in maintenance.

when you go to dorms and you see all those toys, those are basically for assistants. the painting easels in maint, the communal chicken and cow. obviously these are for the rest of the crew, but i consider much of these 'assistant content'. assistants are nondescript and free form members of the crew, not just a strange miasma.

[Stabbystab]

It feels like you’re punishing everyone for the sins of a few. Sure shitters are annoying but you should go ban and note them and not impose a punishment on everyone

[conrad]

It feels like you’re punishing everyone for the sins of a few. Sure shitters are annoying but you should go ban and note them and not impose a punishment on everyone

Finally someone who understands.

[drpupper]

assistants should be uncapped for sake of A) veteran players who want to make silly little shops B) new players not yet comfortable enough to be an official part of a department and C) players who want to play the job simulator without necessarily doing a specific job.

as a cargo main, especially one who likes to play QM a lot, it's already annoying enough when i have techs who don't do their jobs and then fuck off somewhere. i'd prefer these players have the option to pick assistant

[Ezel]

assistants should be uncapped for sake of A) veteran players who want to make silly little shops

Nothing stops you doing this as any job

new players not yet comfortable enough to be an official part of a department

I can understand this one, we should have some form of encouragement or indictator that playing these jobs may be better[for low hour players] because cargo tech isn't that far off as an assistant or janitor and all the other low end jobs but that would be a code change but that would still be cool

[Super Aggro Crag]

i wanna play but i cant join

[BeefChunks]

I feel like it just makes things a lot worse for the average player without accomplishing much. Shitters can still join as a different department, where they would have a much better ability to be annoying anyway. I also find it incredibly odd how theres been a very clear negative response to the change for a while now and it still has not been reverted. It might just be me being paranoid but I just have a feeling headmins or maints or whoever has the say on this are going to try to force this change on us regardless of how we feel about it.

[Lullaby]

my opinion on the cap has fermented from enjoyment into "can we just get an actual popcap at this point" now that latejoining is like completely impossible at highpop unless you want to play psychologist

[TheLoLSwat]

I feel like it just makes things a lot worse for the average player without accomplishing much. Shitters can still join as a different department, where they would have a much better ability to be annoying anyway. I also find it incredibly odd how theres been a very clear negative response to the change for a while now and it still has not been reverted. It might just be me being paranoid but I just have a feeling headmins or maints or whoever has the say on this are going to try to force this change on us regardless of how we feel about it.

yeah thats kinda on all of us for not asking for a clear start-end timeline for this temporary change (like what happened with the nonhuman heads temporary testrun last term. We have already been bamboozled though, so its weird that the headmins are still being silent as if 10 buff men are threatening to beat the shit out of them if they communicate anything regarding reverting or not reverting this to us. I think they forgot/keep forgetting

[TheRex9001]

We aren’t forgetting but stuff does keep on rolling in, I will try to see if I can’t get some sort of resolution/official response to this by the end of the week

[Super Aggro Crag]

Beauty, thanks rex

[TheRex9001]

Ok, so what we've all agreed on is to poll on this topic, we'll then read over all your responses. There are 2 polls, one which is a yes/no/idc and one which is written. This poll will run for a week, then we'll take all that feedback and come to a decision, the forums aren't the only picture and we felt it was important to mainly focus on the people in the game. This does however mean that a remove/keep on the assistant cap verdict will wait for the moment.