Science is no longer balanced to roundtimes.

[AnonymousNow]

I've got back into playing recently, and whilst I thought that people calling the shuttle over a stubbed toe to cycle the rounds as soon as possible (for another chance at antag) was near its worst two years ago, I didn't anticipate how truly awful it would get. A lot of intrigue and suspense has been thrown out of the window in favour of quick, cheap action, and frivilous shuttle call rules are never enforced. This is even in traditionally longer lasting roundtypes, like cult and changeling.

Science is suffering the most. As the department which requires the most time and effort input to get its best toys, and often lacks vital components in doing so (no miners? You're fucked.), it never gets to see its full potential anymore. And by "never", I mean NEVER.

A scientist has to work from the start of the round to the end of the round, nonstop, with good miners on hand, just to reach that endgame content. And there are literally always interruptions.

The last time I saw a combat mech was literally last year. I haven't seen a single one in the past couple of weeks, because everyone knew that they didn't have the time nor the resources. If we're ever going to see science's true potential again, it needs to be rebalanced.

tl;dr - rounds are too short for science's best toys, fix now plz.

[Ryahask]

I've got back into playing recently, and whilst I thought that people calling the shuttle over a stubbed toe to cycle the rounds as soon as possible (for another chance at antag) was near its worst two years ago, I didn't anticipate how truly awful it would get. A lot of intrigue and suspense has been thrown out of the window in favour of quick, cheap action, and frivilous shuttle call rules are never enforced. This is even in traditionally longer lasting roundtypes, like cult and changeling.

Science is suffering the most. As the department which requires the most time and effort input to get its best toys, and often lacks vital components in doing so (no miners? You're fucked.), it never gets to see its full potential anymore. And by "never", I mean NEVER.

A scientist has to work from the start of the round to the end of the round, nonstop, with good miners on hand, just to reach that endgame content. And there are literally always interruptions.

The last time I saw a combat mech was literally last year. I haven't seen a single one in the past couple of weeks, because everyone knew that they didn't have the time nor the resources. If we're ever going to see science's true potential again, it needs to be rebalanced.

tl;dr - rounds are too short for science's best toys, fix now plz.

I would be personally opposed to balancing departments around common round times now. The round times are insidious and ruin a number of aspects of game-play; in many cases the round time is fueled by how self-sufficient everyone is. If Science, for instance, was capable of reaching their end-game fantasy in 20 minutes with limited mining assistance, then they would be an audience of players who seeks the end of the round - even though the remainder of the crew might still have plenty to explore in their department.

The answer isn't to adjust all departments with longer life cycles in a round to the new shorter common round as that simply inflames the current issue further. I would instead suggest enforcing rules about frivolous shuttle calls.

[AnonymousNow]

But with almost literally every round ending prematurely and people responses to that being "GB2/bay/", how do we fix this element of our culture which overwrote older elements?

[oranges]

get good

[AnonymousNow]

get good

Are you going to contribute to the discussion?

[oranges]

no

[Ryahask]

I think a large part of the issue is actually a large number of roles which are still fundamentally lacking. Too many departments are not enjoyable on their own merits and it leads to a large portion of the crew who escalate the pace of the round.

Notable problems:
- Med-bay (Geneticist and Virologist not included - if they're unlucky. If they're lucky they can be done in 20 minutes or less)
- Engineering (No directed tasks beyond setting up the Singularity, their rounds are entirely reliant on significant station damage or the choice to create an ultimately meaningless addition)
- Security (In hectic rounds this proves to be untrue, but during calmer rounds Security has nothing to do. These players get bored quickly and look to create the chaos that leads to a shuttle call)

Science & Cargo are the two that are relatively fleshed out and serve a continued purpose throughout the entire round. Gradually creating more meaningful options in every department would, ideally, keep players interested in continuing rounds for longer periods.

Sadly addressing this would require a great deal of effort, but I believe if even one department (Specifically Medical) were made more engaging the flow of the game would rapidly shift. One of the larger problems I tend to notice which transcends server issues is that when Medbay inevitably stops functioning (As every Doctor has fucked off to greytide due to boredom) the shuttle call quickly follows. Too many people are dead, roles start to deteriorate, the station becomes abandoned, and ghosts join as antags en masse which further incites the issue.

[Ezel]

Its now litteraly have level 1 on everything? Cuck a combat shotgun in bam level cuck another shotty in ban 6 cuck a engineering prototype in bam engineering level 5 its way faster now

[AnonymousNow]

Its now litteraly have level 1 on everything? Cuck a combat shotgun in bam level cuck another shotty in ban 6 cuck a engineering prototype in bam engineering level 5 its way faster now

I saw the word "cuck" multiple times in that sentence, and I'm still not sure what you're talking about.

[Ezel]

Talking about cucks that doesnt git gud

[AnonymousNow]

Talking about cucks that doesnt git gud

I'm seeing two meaningless buzzwords.

Now, I've brought this up before - not specifically science, but the short roundtimes - and people have reacted with everything short of violence. Is there something I'm missing to peoples' behaviour?

[Ezel]

Talking about cucks that doesnt git gud

I'm seeing two meaningless buzzwords.

Now, I've brought this up before - not specifically science, but the short roundtimes - and people have reacted with everything short of violence. Is there something I'm missing to peoples' behaviour?

Little hole in brig? Call the shuttle!
Murderboner? Call the shuttle!
Nothing happening? Call the shuttle!

[AnonymousNow]

Little hole in brig? Call the shuttle!
Murderboner? Call the shuttle!
Nothing happening? Call the shuttle!

Exactly. So much cool shit we could do if only we hung around long enough to do it. But people seem to NNNNNNNNEEEEEEEED to cycle.

It can't just be antag rolling, can it?

[Ezel]

Little hole in brig? Call the shuttle!
Murderboner? Call the shuttle!
Nothing happening? Call the shuttle!

Exactly. So much cool shit we could do if only we hung around long enough to do it. But people seem to NNNNNNNNEEEEEEEED to cycle.

It can't just be antag rolling, can it?

1.poeple are 2 lazy to fix things
2.GOTTA ROLL ANTAG
3.welp im bored

[BananaSenor]

It's because Sybil is a deathmatch. There is no rp, there is no goal except valids. I feel the game needs to add some value to someones life, so that trying to survive is higher on the list than trying to get that disarm on that double e-sword.

[Actionb]

tl;dr - rounds are too short for science's best toys, fix now plz.

Play RD, recall the shuttle if you think it isn't necessary to evac. Most heads just don't give a fuck about the shuttle coming too early. Why would they? They're not payed per hour (or at all..).

Also: science is even faster than before for the most mundane toys (combat mechs, mining gear, autocloning). You don't have to move AN INCH to achieve tech level 5 across the board (except: bio & illegal).
Combat mechs have always been rare. Maybe they're even rarer now that robotics is kinda useless (only two worthwhile cyborg modules to choose from). Boy, do I get bored playing roboticist these days.

[Incoming]

A lot of people say they want longer rounds, but every time a coder tries to slow game progression down players do their best to subvert it.

Examples:
* Midround Antag/Mulligan Antag system gets turned off 95% of the times it would fire
* Admins not recalling stubbed muh toe shuttle calls
* Red alerts raised for no other reason than to speed up the end of the round
* Players just generally running from danger instead of fighting it, which in turn forces all antags to use rush tactics or risk wasting 40 minutes setting up for a fight that never happens

Alternatively when something is added to the game that escalates game progression people latch onto it as the new meta and grow too dependent.

Examples:
* Slime management consoles makes xenobio a cakewalk
* Patches become more abusable than the bruise packs/ointments they were intended to replace (and didn't)
* Cryo abandoned for being too slow to get people on their feet fast enough
* Ample ghost roles making death cheaper than ever before, making spessmen not fear risky behavior/killing themselves for fun
* The tesla being a straight upgrade that also kills everyone faster than the singulo

So people say one thing and do the other. It's mystifying and really hard to try and push ideas that make the round longer given this attitude.

[InsaneHyena]

rant

I haven't seen anybody speak so much truth since paprika's posts on state of security. The "muh longer rounds" people are a minority, most of the players just want to win the grief lottery and speed up the shuttle call when they lose it, so they can have another go. Majority of times engineers don't even bother fixing shit, because it won't matter in 20 minutes.

[Aloraydrel]

>half of a max cap bomb goes off

>shuttle called and engineers put put the plating down.

Hmmmm

[Ezel]

That isnt fixing thats preventing low pressure CUZ IT MATTERS IF YOU GET 5 BRUTE!!

[Zilenan91]

If any of you have ever built something in this game you'd know it takes around 30 minutes to rebuild, repipe and put the atmos back in a maxcap hole.

[Shaps-cloud]

Certain admins are also to blame. Without name-and-shaming

DEAD: ADMIN(redacted) says, "if you guys want to just do fun rp because of lowpop, i can do that next round, but as a tatortot round, going for 1h is just way too long"

They then went on to spawn a certain very dangerous antag that I believe trashed the round from there. Some admins aren't really helping things on this side

[Zilenan91]

Long rounds aren't fun and don't work

Every single mode we have is designed to "end" at some point. Keeping the game going after that devolves into everyone who is left alive basically masturbating until they've done what they want to do and then the shuttle is eventually called so that they can do it again next round.

[Wyzack]

Zilean stop presenting your opinions as facts. Lots of people like long rounds

[Zilenan91]

You can like long rounds but long rounds are still bad for the game. They make it far less accessible and the game is just not designed to go past 40 minutes.

[Ezel]

Paradise easily go trough 2 hours just fine

[Zilenan91]

Paradise isn't /tg/. They have a community so different it's like night and day, and their code is super duper huggbox compared to ours.

[Ezel]

Paradise isn't /tg/. They have a community so different it's like night and day, and their code is super duper huggbox compared to ours.

The only difference its a rp server what this game really made for we got from light rp into DANKMEMESLMAO

[Incoming]

I blame mobas for ruining peoples time perception in round based multiplayer games

[Only a half joke]

[Scott]

Who will end up quitting first, the people who make these threads or the people responsible for this deathmatch server?

Will the warnings ever be heeded?

[Ezel]

Enforce light RP remove MEMES!!

[Jazaen]

Memes can't be removed without mass-purging the playerbase and the code, and that is never going to happen. Best we can do is discourage them, enforce naming policy, and such.

Also, there are still some mechs getting made, see http://www.ss13.eu/tgdb/tg/latest_stats.html#mech , although it's half (or in some cases, quarter) of what was made before the change. Also, that might have nothing to do with Lat's change, and with ORM change, and I am too lazy to look up when it was merged.

[AnonymousNow]

That's a drop in the ocean, consistent with the reduced rate at which I'm seeing them. TBF I play at busier times, but that's out of necessity (and covers a roughly 12 hour period during which I could be playing, where my actual appearances vary).

Perhaps it's because I stem from a different time, when our rounds were longer and had more mystery (and when nothing was going to happen, something was made to happen instead of people giving up and leaving), but I don't see what's happened to our playerbase.

[Tornadium]

The round length seems to be tied directly to the game mode (at least from my observations) :

-Nuke/TratiorLing/Wizard are all incredibly short and over quickly.

-Both cult variants and gang variants can either be a short blitz or take 40-50 minutes easily. Blob is blob so fuck that.

-Rev tends to be on the shorter side too but there can be some long rounds.

The main concern for me is here is traitorling or double agent rounds, they are over so incredibly fucking fast that it goes from all quiet to half the station dead with bombs going off in less than 5 minutes. I believe this has something to do with the number of active antagonists at any one time. I don't ever recall rounds being this short when we had maybe 5 traitors in a 60-70 player round. An example from a round last night with 50-60ish average pop was 4 changelings and 8 traitors.

When you have nearly a fifth of the population being antagonists in the bread and butter round type of course the rounds are going to be short as fuck. I honestly think the number of antagonists in these rounds are to blame, there is no reason for you to go subtle anymore (this is also influenced by the lack of consequence death has with ghost roles).

Maybe try a change to traitorling or double agent rounds where the overall number of antagonists are reduced? Or better yet can we have additional antagonists activate over the course of the round rather than being active all at once?

[starmute]

Observations.

Science (read not robotics) is one of the more popular jobs on the station and everyone enjoys being the traitor who releases gold slimes, blows up half the station ect ect. Sometimes it can be helpful but in general they contribute less than the cook.

Long rounds can be fun but not when over 50% of the player base is dead and bored.

Also I noticed that people don't enjoy roles that make the round last longer. Specificly GOOD atmos players and engineers who patch up the station when its ruined or refill the air correctly and quickly.

[Ryahask]

Observations.

Science (read not robotics) is one of the more popular jobs on the station and everyone enjoys being the traitor who releases gold slimes, blows up half the station ect ect. Sometimes it can be helpful but in general they contribute less than the cook.

Long rounds can be fun but not when over 50% of the player base is dead and bored.

Also I noticed that people don't enjoy roles that make the round last longer. Specificly GOOD atmos players and engineers who patch up the station when its ruined or refill the air correctly and quickly.

I'd suggest it isn't actually the fact that they make the round last longer, but rather that the roles are too reliant on activity to be enjoyable.

SS13 has two broad types of jobs - self-contained and station reliant.

A self-contained job can do their job without conditional occurrences on station (Science, Viro, Genetics, Cargo, Mining).
Station reliant jobs cannot perform their job without the station facilitating it (Security, Medical, Engineering, Atmos).

In my opinion station reliant jobs tend to be disliked by players as they are not reliable. One round Security might have tons of assistants to beat to near death, have a credible threat to the station they can combat, and have awesome toys distributed. The next round every antag assasinates their target in the first 5 minutes and Security just has to patrol until the end of the round hoping for things to happen. To be clear Security is the best out of all of the station reliant jobs. Medical, Engineering, and Atmos are often useless or inconsequential to the round; leaving practically nothing for those players to do.

[Cik]

engineering is ded because of the fuck engineering negative feedback loop

>engineering requires a ton of time to fix anything, meanwhile that place is airless and dangerous
>shuttle is often called regardless if it's being fixed or not
>because of the above, it's seen as pointless to fix anything
>because it's pointless to fix anything, no one does
>because engineers never get any experience fixing anything, they are slow at it
>because engineers never have any experience (even if they bother) no one trusts engineering to fix anything
>shuttle is often called regardless if it's being fixed or not
>goto 1

[AnonymousNow]

ENFL

I wish there was a way I could immediately think of to keep engineers engaged other than what we have now (the ability to make new additions to the station etc.) and enforcing the no-frivilous-calls rule directly a little more.

Maybe add a way to add a room's content and construction to a blueprint library that can be pulled up like our books?

[Incomptinence]

Bring building steps back to basics. Remove lattice and reduce goofy construction delays across the board. Fuck realism even if people want fast rounds building is too slow to keep pace.

[Zilenan91]

Building isn't just too slow, it's also boring. Why would you want to fix a fucking room that people barely use anyways when you can just reset the round and actually do something you enjoy instead of sitting there clicking on things.

[Gun Hog]

The CE's blueprints will show default map piping and wiring. Perhaps it could be expanded to include other things as well!

[Wyzack]

What if holding the blueprints plus enough requisite materials would allow you to sort of auto repair an area? Like it would still have a decent timer and you could still do it custom if you wanted, but it would automatically fill the breaches and properly reset all the piping/disposals so you do not end up clicking a bajillion times to make everything right again.

[DemonFiren]

Sounds like some kind of upgrade you could slap onto floorbots to make them not-useless.

[MisterPerson]

I don't want rounds to be longer because a 2 hour round is not any more fun or interesting compared to four 30 minute rounds, but it's more work to design and balance engaging and entertaining people for that long. There does reach a point where rounds get too short, but considering the bare minimum round length is 25 minutes, I highly doubt that'll ever be a serious problem.

What if holding the blueprints plus enough requisite materials would allow you to sort of auto repair an area? Like it would still have a decent timer and you could still do it custom if you wanted, but it would automatically fill the breaches and properly reset all the piping/disposals so you do not end up clicking a bajillion times to make everything right again.

I'm against this idea for at least two reasons. It's just a huge amount of work for a coder to do relative to other things that could be done which would provide vastly more entertainment, but more importantly it wouldn't actually help with encouraging engineers to rebuild. First off, accessing the blueprints is not as trivial as you might think, especially in emergencies. Second, even in the best of cases it's not easy to acquire large stacks of metal and glass which will be needed to rebuild even small holes. Third, unless this thing moves really fast or is completely autonomous, how fun do you think it really is going to be to literally stand still watching the game play itself for 10-20 minutes? Fourth, is everyone else willing to wait that long? What about all the dead people? What about the loss of resources? These factors will still drive shuttle calls to be made and depress the willingness of people to do the repairs.

[Steelpoint]

The only, only, way you're going to get rounds that last longer with a better semblance of roleplay and ACTUAL time investment is to force admins to enforce rules and similar that benefit the round and don't serve to end the round ASAP. As well as to remove most ghost roles all together and make calling the shuttle a really difficult affair.

Consider making a shuttle call something that requires a admin to authorize, and only when the admin believes the station is fucked enough that a evacuation is permitted. Take it a step further and make it that someone wielding the Captain's ID needs to be at the Command Console on the bridge to allow the evac shuttle to leave, so someone has to force themselves to stay behind.

I highly doubt that anything will ever happen to enforce better rp standards because I have no faith in anything the administration, coders or players attempt to try and enforce some semblance of role play or time investment into the round.

Edit: This is also the reason why I've grown board of /tg/ station after five years. Mechanics can only take you so far.

[Oldman Robustin]

It's easier than ever for engineers to fix things and honestly aside from cut cables to critical grid areas (90% of the time damage doesn't really affect a broader part of the powergrid), replacing stuff like atmos and disposals is 100% optional fluff stuff. Popping open an oxygen canister or two is all you need.

I agree that rounds going over an hour are rarely enjoyable though. I think 45-60 minutes is the sweet spot for most rounds. Long rounds have their own feedback loop where people get bored and go AFK or braindead, the remaining players are still building their autism forts or whatever and passionately resist shuttle calls... pretty soon without intervention you're at the 2 hour mark, 95% of the original crew is braindead, and yet latejoiners and people with pet projects will still scream THERES NO EMERGENCY if anyone raises the prospect of a shuttle call.

Longer rounds shouldn't be enforced by rules or hardcoded mechanics. I still think that the 20 minute recall limiter has done more harm than good. It should trigger for stuff like NukeOps, but there are honestly rounds where a 10 minute shuttle is completely justified and being told "Shuttle is refueling for another 8 minutes" after 80% of the crew has been killed by the sing/maxcaps/murderboners is far more hellish than the rare asshole who successfully calls an early shuttle when its not justified and yet nobody manages to recall either. If you want longer rounds, make events or mechanics that make the crew want to stick around. That means the entire crew, not just one asshole in xenobio who's trying to get all the rare slimes at the expense of dozens of other players who are ready to leave and benefit in no way from one dude's slime breeding.

IMO this is what megafauna should have done. They should have been balanced to require a full crew deployment of 10+ players with all the advanced goodies that RND/Xenobio/Viro/Genetics/Cargo can offer in return for insane rewards that would give the crew a purpose if conflict with the traitors/lings/whoever has run its course. I'd also like to see ling/traitor progression mechanics added. Traitors should be able to "complete" an objective early (i.e. add a way for them to send their target's head, or the requested item, to the Syndicate via a shuttle) in return for more TC and more difficult objectives - rather than murderboners who accelerate the round's end (either by dying early and leaving the crew without active antags or by killing a bunch of people and leaving the crew desperate to leave).

[AnonymousNow]

If our mulligan/pressure system actually sodding worked, longer rounds would be fantastic again. As it stands, it seems that what little dissent there is to getting back to longer rounds comes from the idea that A) it's boring to build things and B) nothing happens after a while, which can both be fixed.

We've added lots of ways in which people can return to rounds now, but almost all of them need - spoilers - time and effort investment to manifest.

In addition, encouraging people to band together with high-end equipment for high-end missions, such as taking down megafauna, is a great idea. Normal antagonist rounds should never stagnate to the point where there's nothing happening.

I miss event rounds. Like people having an hour to prepare for a massive attack, and so on.

[Actionb]

Just throwing this into the room:
Maybe the (loyal) crew isn't capable of dealing with the threats that present themselves in a round? Be it due to convoluted mechanics (holy water vs cult), insufficient numbers (gang), simple incompetence/unwillingness (engis not fixing stuff) or due to there being a huge powergap between crew and antags (a single robust traitor being able to do so much damage that an evacuation is required). Or all of them.
Fighting an uphill battle is always a dumb idea. So why not just leave?

Coffee-induced rambling, read at your own discretion:
However... you can't pick out just one bit of the whole system and say 'THAT IS THE PROBLEM!' when all bits of that system and the correlations between one another determine the outcome. Example: there might be enough security to fight a gang in a given round, but that won't help if the station was blown to bits.
If the system tends towards an early shuttle call, because the likelihood of most bits aligning themselves to favour a longer round (f.ex.: sufficient security with low station damage and a manageable amount of violence and excitement) is very low, then an early shuttle call is what we are going to get most of the time.
In nerd-terms this is called Entropy.
There's more configurations of bits (high entropy) that lead to a short round than there are for long, but still enjoyable rounds (low entropy). Entropy naturally tends to increase. So of course, shorter rounds are the norm.

If you wanted to change the outcome of this, you have two options:
1.) Make the states that favour long rounds more probable: so that the state with low entropy becomes high entropy, and vice versa the high one becomes low. Or, at least, achieve equilibrium between the two.
Very difficult to do. It would include tackling the famous 'playerbase problem'. And all factors that have a say in the outcome of a round (see above). AND their effects on another. Think of it as a very complex rubrik's cube.

2.) Do not allow the outcome to happen.
Revolution and, to some extent, gang are the only modes left that don't let the shuttle leave, forcing the crew to fight no matter what. During the age of changelings we also had constant recalls: shuttle ping pong. Funnily enough, nobody liked these never-ending rounds, because option 1) is not given.

Some time ago, we also had sticky's marathon rounds.
They achieved a long round by including both of the above solutions: no shuttle call allowed and a lot of manipulation to keep all the factors of the system pointing into the direction of a long round. Obviously we can't ask that much of every admin.
Entropy is often explained by using a box with hot gas in it: assume all the molecules of the gas are tightly squeezed into one of the corners at the beginning of the experiment. The gas starts out in a very low entropy state since the probablity of all the molecules randomly ending up in a very specific configuration (in a corner) is very unlikely when they could just all be scattered in many different other ways across the available volume of the box (high entropy) - which they will most likely end up doing (gas dispersing; entropy going low->high).
What these marathon rounds did was reduce the size of the box (no shuttle calls allowed) and forcing the molecules into a corner as best they could. You can keep entropy low by expending energy (nerd bit: but the entropy of whatever thing is investing this energy is, in turn, increasing). Also imagine new features to the game as adding more gas: the system becomes more complex, the likelihood of all molecules ending up in a corner gets even lower.
On the same token, the event of adding more content is, obviously, much more likely than nothing getting added for the rest of eternity. Entropy increasing strikes again!

In case you haven't fallen asleep yet you are probably asking: So what's the solution?
Well, Timmy, let's apply what you have just learned about entropy! We would have to invest a lot of time and energy to rearrange everything to make long rounds more probable than short ones! How likely is this investment going to happen when there's so many more ways of not investing instead? Very unlikely! And even if you did invest, remember entropy: in the future the problem will most likely recur! So... what do?
Just deal with it! But thanks to statistics magics you are going to get long rounds as well, so savour them if you like them.

[PKPenguin321]

stronk science that unlocked everything in 10 minutes every round was pretty bad

i'd like airhorns to be easy to acquire again though

[Ezel]

stronk science that unlocked everything in 10 minutes every round was pretty bad

i'd like airhorns to be easy to acquire again though

Science just got easier and shorter all it requires is a little more greytide