/tg/Station 13

Please post thoughts, feedback and ideas on what can be done on Basil in order to enhance the experience for all the players there.

I will also be making suggestions here and asking for feedback for any recent changes that are made.

Do you mean all ideas, including those code-based, or just bagil/basil/whatever only stuff?

To clarify this, I can merely make suggestions to coders, and while all ideas are welcome, the primary focus will be on things that effect only Basil.

Well, barring this thread's previous iteration regarding some old shitlers finally getting banned, and my previous post getting deleted mid-typing, lets try again.

Since Basil is on the byond hub now, we get a large influx of new players, and this causes a problem of the new players frequently not knowing how to play, accidentally breaking the rules, going AFK all the time, and just being non-responsive ingame, all of which are large problems, and this is namely because ss13 is an overall obtuse game. The best way to remedy this is to try and make things as clear as possible, Bowman has taken steps in the right direction by changing the MOTD to give useful info, and I intend to rewrite the wiki's new player guide, and these things should help, but one of the things we need to do is try and improve clarity.
Another dilemna is the lack of admins on Basil, there is a select few of admins who actually admin on Basil, with few other admins actually occasionally coming on. The problem is that a good admin on Sybil is not necessarily also a good admin on Basil and usually isn't, not to mention there is still quite a bit of trans-server hatred so usually other admins don't even want to come over anyways. The headmins are typically biased towards Sybil for adminship which is what creates this problem in the first place. (not that it's their fault or they're doing it intentionally but just a product of the nature of the servers)

As for the new gamemode probabilities, I have some concerns about them. Abduction should not be its own gamemode, it works the absolute best as a side-antag, as it creates interesting situations between the different groups. Changeling should also not be a gamemode that can appear, for the main reason that lings in their current state are absolutely awful. Even Sybil doesn't have ling as it's own mode enabled, just because of the fact it's so cancerous. Meteor shouldn't be enabled for obvious reasons. Traitorchan is slightly better than base changeling due to the fact there are multiple antags and far less changelings, but I still don't like it. Until Bowman redid the gamemode chances recently, traitorchan hadn't been enabled on Basil for a looong time. I also personally think Rev shouldn't be a gamemode that can happen naturally either, just because of the fact it is so hated and boring.

Concerning game-mode odds, on their original form something really needed to be done:

This was what it looked like a few weeks ago:

Game Mode Odds:
blob 9.5%
double_agents 6.3%
traitor 9.5%
cult 9.5%
extended 3.2%
gang 12.7%
nuclear 19%
revolution 15.9%
shadowling 1.6%
wizard 12.7%


This led to situations where you could often have three rev rounds followed by a wizard round, and it really didn't tie up to the play-style that Basil has, something had to be done.


Eventually after a few bits of tweaking I have changed it to the following:

Game Mode Odds:
blob 3.8%
changeling 1.9%
traitorchan 6.6%
double_agents 7.5%
traitor 37.7%
cult 3.8%
extended 18.9%
gang 2.8%
meteor 0.9%
abduction 0.9%
nuclear 9.4%
revolution 1.9%
wizard 3.8%


In this iteration, I had raised the traitor possibility to make it the main game-mode, raised extended to the secondary game-mode, since basil extended rounds seem to go really well at the moment, I even decided to add abductor and meteor (albeit at 0.9%) and this had led to some interesting situations and I have had mainly positive feedback over it. I even brought changeling back since they were considered not broken.


I am now considering removing meteor, since while it had been fun at first, players have started reporting negative feedback for this, I believe it has got to the point where it can be gamed too much, what with the amount of EVA suits you have, and by using the mining Z-levels and white-ship, you can easily just fly off to the mining z-level and wait out until the shuttle is called, which doesn't always make for an interesting round for everyone, however I am still open to suggestion if players do want this kept at a reduced capacity.



Given that round-type odds need to be done by feel as opposed to just looking at the numbers, and that so far I have had mostly good feedback where it is at right now for the moment, I am quite happy to say that I have made improvements, but I am prepared to do more tweaking and adjusting in order to get things right, however not everyone has the same opinion on the game-modes for a variety of reasons, but that is mostly mitigated by having traitor as the main game-mode.



I am currently looking to have the following as the round odds on basil, but as I said, it needs to be done by feel more then anything, since we are tweaking the values of an RNG, so you can always expect varied results.

Game Mode Odds:

PROBABILITY TRAITOR 41
PROBABILITY TRAITORCHAN 4
PROBABILITY DOUBLE_AGENTS 7
PROBABILITY NUCLEAR 10
PROBABILITY REVOLUTION 2
PROBABILITY SHADOWLING 0
PROBABILITY GANG 3
PROBABILITY CULT 4
PROBABILITY ABDUCTION 1
PROBABILITY CHANGELING 1
PROBABILITY WIZARD 4
PROBABILITY BLOB 3
PROBABILITY RAGINMAGES 0
PROBABILITY MONKEY 0
PROBABILITY METEOR 0
PROBABILITY EXTENDED 20

This is what it will look like in the config file, they add up to 100 here to make things easy in splitting percentages, but do not have to add up to 100.


Please give me feedback on how it feels currently when you play on Basil, what round-types you want to see more of, and what you want to see less of, I will need lots of opinions so I can get this mostly right for everyone.

The problem with rev is that it is one of the modes that leads to total bloodbath, but on lowpop it almost always ends in either revs rushing heads or sec implanting *everyone* and killing headrevs, without that prolonged struggle that makes rev interesting, though, to be honest, bagil isn't THAT lowpop anymore.
Other nice thing would be a greater insistence that traitors actually work towards their objectives, instead of doing either nothing (and turning round into pseudo-extended) or killing everything that moves (and making round boring for almost every civilian onboard, especially after armory is stolen).
And yeah, abductor doesn't really work that well as a main gamemode. Maybe make it so that when gamemode selection chooses abduction, it runs again and spawns abductors alongside another antag?

Yes Bowman, but what needs to be understood about the original odds, is that traitor and extended were the only possible modes due to the minpop for all the other modes, all the other statistics didn't actually matter as they only happened once in a while.

Bawhoppennn wrote:Yes Bowman, but what needs to be understood about the original odds, is that traitor and extended were the only possible modes due to the minpop for all the other modes, all the other statistics didn't actually matter as they only happened once in a while.

We constantly hit the popcap for the other rounds, playing on basil with those old odds was not a great experience and the players had asked me to fix it, which I have, but now I am looking to fine tune it.

Jazaen wrote:The problem with rev is that it is one of the modes that leads to total bloodbath, but on lowpop it almost always ends in either revs rushing heads or sec implanting *everyone* and killing headrevs, without that prolonged struggle that makes rev interesting, though, to be honest, bagil isn't THAT lowpop anymore.
Other nice thing would be a greater insistence that traitors actually work towards their objectives, instead of doing either nothing (and turning round into pseudo-extended) or killing everything that moves (and making round boring for almost every civilian onboard, especially after armory is stolen).
And yeah, abductor doesn't really work that well as a main gamemode. Maybe make it so that when gamemode selection chooses abduction, it runs again and spawns abductors alongside another antag?

Traitors being interesting is more of a cultural issue which will need to be addressed in the long-term, while I would prefer to not put restrictions on what traitors can and cannot do, I will seriously consider it if it will improve the experience for everyone.

The idea of abductor + traitor isn't a bad idea, I will suggest it to the bus.

Well, as a ganghead I have experienced the joy that is having your goons carry spraycans openly. Pretty much most conversion modes that require some experiemce (Cult, gang) fare badly, while lowpop rev is <reference to my previous post>. Shadowling is disabled.

basil needs admins

I feel like i have kind of failed in this regard. I was recruited to be a basil admin, and i have played there for many years now. I was attracted there in the first place because of the lower population that lead to better RP and a little less chaos while still keeping the craziness of the game we all love. Now that we are open to the hub and gaining more hub popularity we are regularily breaching 50-60 players, and often have more than sybil. I still cant stand regularily playing high pop, so i usually just kinda sigh to myself and go play something else. Feels bad, but i guess it is good that we have more players. I guess i am condemned to forever be the vampiremin who only plays at one in the morning.

Gang in my opinion needs to be more gang vs gang based instead of gang vs station, when it was first played, people got released after a few minutes for petty crimes such as vandalism, which was pretty good because you knew where you stood, and you could do some interesting RP with gangs, however currently its not RP focused and more about killing off everyone so you can hold an area for a certain time in order to end the round.

I would like to see economy stuff happen and gangs be made to get as much money as possible,

But that is digressing from what can be done on Basil itself at the moment.

Super Aggro Crag wrote:basil needs admins

It is true that Basil needs more Admins, I am currently selecting people from the playerbase but I want to make sure I select the right people, so this will take time. More to come on this.

Can there be a lock set on security jobs for people who are new? Especially the HoS and Warden at least.

In the past rounds the wardens and hos's have 1) Suicides after 45 minutes of brigging a person for a single stun and cuff
2)Griefed me for well over 30 minutes because they got mad that they got stunned for trying to brig me for being a "Collaborator" when asking why a dude got brigged.

Maybe make it set to a few days so they can learn as just a regular officer?

sirnat wrote:Can there be a lock set on security jobs for people who are new? Especially the HoS and Warden at least.

Well, the current system we have right now for role locks is based on the time since you first joined, which is a problem since someone can just join once and then log in a month later and play as any role they want. I want to get it playtime based, but apparently thats kind of difficult code-wise, however if we did get a playtime system implemented we'd be on the right track to making it so the random new player joins as captain and disconnects 30 seconds later.

stop running shitter events on basil please

Make pod people a starter choice like plasmamen / flypeople

kust wrote:Make pod people a starter choice like plasmamen / flypeople

C A N T I N A
S T A T I O N

S L I P P E R Y
S L O P E

iamgoofball wrote:

kust wrote:Make pod people a starter choice like plasmamen / flypeople

C A N T I N A
S T A T I O N

S L I P P E R Y
S L O P E

what do you mean ?

kust wrote:

iamgoofball wrote:

kust wrote:Make pod people a starter choice like plasmamen / flypeople

C A N T I N A
S T A T I O N

S L I P P E R Y
S L O P E

what do you mean ?

Cantina Station = Most people are aliens, like the cantina scenes in Star Wars.

Slippery Slope = If we do this thing (6 roundstart aliens), it makes similar things (8, 10, 12 roundstart aliens) more and more likely.

Did I count that right? Human/Plasma/Lizard/Pod/Fly/Cat. Yeah, 6. If they were all accessible roundstart.

Cheimon wrote:

kust wrote:

iamgoofball wrote:

kust wrote:Make pod people a starter choice like plasmamen / flypeople

C A N T I N A
S T A T I O N

S L I P P E R Y
S L O P E

what do you mean ?

Cantina Station = Most people are aliens, like the cantina scenes in Star Wars.

Slippery Slope = If we do this thing (6 roundstart aliens), it makes similar things (8, 10, 12 roundstart aliens) more and more likely.

Did I count that right? Human/Plasma/Lizard/Pod/Fly/Cat. Yeah, 6. If they were all accessible roundstart.

Oh ok thanks

Not to mention potatos are fucking powergame central they are fat all the time sure but they fucking heal just from having a flashlight

The unloved rock wrote:Not to mention potatos are fucking powergame central they are fat all the time sure but they fucking heal just from having a flashlight

But how often dosen't the light go out. Also you could solve the issue with flashlight to make it use battery.

Flashlights should never use battery


Also remove catpeople they're awful

Zilenan91 wrote:Also remove catpeople they're awful

What part of not shitposting in this thread did you not understand?

They're bad objectively. They look very similar to humans and only exist as a fetish.

zilenan is on point today

listen to him for once

Zilenan91 wrote:They're bad objectively. They look very similar to humans and only exist as a fetish.

hell froze over because I'm agreeing with zilenan

Zilenan91 wrote:They're bad objectively. They look very similar to humans and only exist as a fetish.

that isn't what objectively means????? thats extremely subjective and is literally your opinion

Bawhoppennn wrote:

Zilenan91 wrote:They're bad objectively. They look very similar to humans and only exist as a fetish.

that isn't what objectively means????? thats extremely subjective and is literally your opinion

That is what objectively means because it's true. The game is worse when you have people running around spewing cat memes like nya everywhere. It kills the immulsions as you could say, and catpeople provide nothing beneficial or new to the server whatsoever.

One could say the same about lizards but the station would look far too uniform if there was only humans running around.

while it's not technically what objective means, zilenan has a point
maybe like 3 people would want cat girls running around spouting le animu memes (these same people are also likely the type that masturbate furiously to ERP), for everybody else it would detract from the value of the game

I mean I'm not saying I don't masturbate furiously to ERP but I still don't think the cat memes are charming at all

zilenan what you're doing is known as 'shitposting'

first off you don't even play on basil so you have no ground to say shit, second off the majority of people on there want or have no preference about it
theres nothing wrong with having them you're just salty that you can't be as kawaii as them

Bawhoppennn wrote:first off you don't even play on basil so you have no ground to say shit,

i dont play on vorestation but i can still call it a degenerate hole ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bawhoppennn wrote:second off the majority of people on there want or have no preference about it

nice ok i will just blindly trust you on this no poll required fam tbvh

Bawhoppennn wrote:theres nothing wrong with having them you're just salty that you can't be as kawaii as them

>complains about shitposting
>posts this
meme

catfags get out

>waah someone else likes something I don't like

you do not play on basil, thus you are not affected by nekomemes
it is that simple

Right then, we are digressing a bit here.


To try to draw a line under any species issues: I am not willing to add or remove any species, that will need to be dealt with in their own threads.
In that matter I would also prefer to mirror what Sybil does, so there is not a massive divergence between Sybil and basil in that regard.


What I would like to focus on is a positive generation of ideas and continuous feedback of any changes implemented in order to make Basil a different, yet credible alternative to playing on as opposed to Sybil.
As stated before, bigger game changes, such as coding, can be forwarded on to the coders, and can be successfully implemented, however that is not my domain to act on since this will effect Sybil too.


I would like to draw more focus on the possibility of having slight variations on the rules and a more long term culture change approach as we try to integrate the newer players that have come from the lands outside of tgstation.

A white list for all Head of Staff and Sec Roles would be great.

Remove murderboner Immunity for a server that starts with less than 15 people.

A reworking of Silicon Policy would be great for Basil.

Screw traitor it's not the perfect bloody round type.

Also dropping blob odds to remove chaos hue like there is a more unifying and non disruptive antag.

Basil needs to have unbanned ERP.

Think of all the advantages to being one of the only hub servers with ERP

icecreamcohn wrote:A white list for all Head of Staff and Sec Roles would be great.
A reworking of Silicon Policy would be great for Basil.

paprika wrote:Basil needs to have unbanned ERP.
Think of all the advantages to being one of the only hub servers with ERP

I think these are things that are mostly community based. What I mean is, this are pretty big changes that should probably be left up to the headmins. Things like this that directly effect the major rules and running of the servers basic frame work need to be dealt with as a whole to avoid complete server separation.

icecreamcohn wrote: Remove murderboner Immunity for a server that starts with less than 15 people.

This seems more do-able, but even then it would have to be a preference than a rule change. If we change the rulesets we'd end up having to make a second rule page. The changes that should be made are more in the interpretation of the rules, the strictness of the rules and which ones are bent.

I'd also say we should remove meteor from the random events. Its often interruptive and mostly only good in certain situations that an admins overview can choose.

What exactly is wrong with server seperation

2 sybils has never worked

Current round-mode odds set as the following:

PROBABILITY TRAITOR 35
PROBABILITY TRAITORCHAN 4
PROBABILITY DOUBLE_AGENTS 10
PROBABILITY NUCLEAR 10
PROBABILITY REVOLUTION 4
PROBABILITY SHADOWLING 0
PROBABILITY GANG 4
PROBABILITY CULT 7
PROBABILITY ABDUCTION 1
PROBABILITY CHANGELING 1
PROBABILITY WIZARD 4
PROBABILITY BLOB 4
PROBABILITY RAGINMAGES 0
PROBABILITY MONKEY 0
PROBABILITY METEOR 0
PROBABILITY EXTENDED 16


Please leave feedback on how this makes the server feel to you.

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY TRAITOR 35

ok

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY TRAITORCHAN 4

no, changelings are bad

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY DOUBLE_AGENTS 10

ok

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY NUCLEAR 10

ok, should be 15 or 20 tho

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY REVOLUTION 4

make this 5 to 8

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY SHADOWLING 0

ehhhhh

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY GANG 4

make this 5 to 8

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY CULT 7

bring this bad boy up to 10

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY ABDUCTION 1

isnt this not a gamemode anymore

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY CHANGELING 1

see changeling comment

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY WIZARD 4

make this fucker 10

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY BLOB 4

see above, make it 10

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY RAGINMAGES 0

make this prob 1

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY MONKEY 0

make this prob 1

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY METEOR 0

prob 1

TheLongbowMan wrote:PROBABILITY EXTENDED 16

Prob 0, and here's why:

Extended isn't fun at all. We do not code the game to be fun past an hour. the game gets extended(ha ha im gonna go drink bleach) for no reason, and throws the entire game design out of whack, since we've been coding this game around gamemodes. Having Extended enabled in any high capacity throws all our hard work out the window in favor of...nothing. You can still roleplay in gamemodes. You don't need to take out literally half the gameplay experience to do so.


Please leave feedback on how this makes the server feel to you.[/quote]

> opinions about extended

I like extended rounds, and i know that many on basil also do. Maybe a ten would be better but not zero

Goof why are you critiquing the gamemode probabilities for a server you don't play on? Bowman wants feedback from actual Basil players on the probabilities.

Have to agree with you on lings though still

Extended rounds work pretty well on Basil, often they create their own mayhem which admins tac stuff on to. Players also actively (in OOC) ask for extended every few rounds or so. The pace is just more akin to what they're used to.

Also changeling works when the server is slow/low pop. I mixes up the often stale traitor and from what I've seen players actually play changeling sneaky like, must closer to old ling style.

Changeling would be even better if there was a thing against murderboning, since with traitor you know (or at least are pretty sure) that despite all of the uplink items in the world they are still human, and that 100 damage will more or less kill them, while lings can both heal like crazy and get up when killed. A ling bent on murdering entire station lies somewhere between undefeatable and very, very hard to deal with, depending when you discover he is a ling and how much/many he has stolen/killed already