It’s bad. Really much so.
One of the main problems, amongst many :
Our antag playerbase is solely focused on greentexting.
During a majority of non-team antag round, 95% of non-sec/antag players will never encounter an antagonist.
Every single round repeats itself as a “wait 1H30 doing a boring job not meant to be done for more than 30min because tg code”, then round end, then repeat ad infinitum.
One day, your round may involve an antag, which will 90% of the time boil down to an instant stealth win like sleepy pen, flash into bsb or whatever other methods you wish to think of.
Then the round ends. And it restart.
No matter how much you love roleplay, a story needs fucking conflict. There is NONE here. You sometimes get to join into a cool gimmick that MAYBE will not get you noted for not doing your job (sop breach), but most of the time it’s sitting around waiting for something cool to happen.
Which leads to most players to either :
- instantly jump at the chance to validhunt when an antag appears, because, guess what, they’re fucking bored. as most antags do shit stealthily and never bother to try anything new or anything cool.
- spend their round acting “LRP” seeking a way to squeeze fun out of whatever boring job they chose, as they already did everything they could 30 mins into the round
The only solution to this is metaganging. Staying around with your group of 3 friends all round for the sole purpose of treating ss13 as a chatroom. This is the most fun you can squeeze out of this game after having enough hours to know basically every single job on station.
Except this worsens the problem. Now, the interesting players don’t interact with anyone else, staying in between themselves & never bringing anything to the table for all other players. Meaning most players are even more bored of the lack of action.
hence, this loops back to the beginning. When said players manage to roll antag, by chance, their first instinct will be to try and win as this is their only chance to have fun. Queue insane salt when they die, and expect epic stealth gameplay, since there’s no other way for them to have fun. apart from murderbone.
Because if they try to do a simple gimmick or something cool, since basically everyone is bored and looking for action, well, it’s just not going to be fun whatsoever, unless they’re insanely robust. And there aren’t that many robust people on bee.
which leads to sec players. most sec players are normal players who, to avoid the boredom of a normal job or the fact that they can’t construct friendships as easily as some of our social butterflies, or who happen to not be the best at roleplay, end up there.
As a result, they also treat the game as a “win or lose” scenario. After all, it’s that or the antags wont bother do anything, right ? which leads to all the sec shittery you can think of. Anything to make this memorable.
Seriously, there’s no winning this. I see no way to improve bee in its current state, and what I described pretty much applies to most servers, especially the ones using tg code.
The only solution that i can see would be to incentivize gimmicks, reward players doing them massively, while being less severe with dumb gimmicks that end up being bad. Allow people to find ways to express themselves, which will obviously lead to a lot of problems considering how most ss13 players are severely skull-dented.
Remove antag objectives, or try to make them force the player to adopt a more open/visible playstyle.
Add more events in the code, too. Organize actual events more, too. Anything to help people think that, being bored constantly is not necessarily the way ss13 has to be played.
I don’t know. it’d be a massive change in about everything of bee. it’d be a massive change for most server anyways.
But i just don’t see any other way to fix this, as it stands, I do not have the social capabilities/extrovertedness necessary to enjoy sitting around doing nothing but talk about whatever or roleplay a “story” with no conflict for hours and hours.
My favorite rounds are the ones where everything went to shit, the ones where I ended up guiding a poor paraplegic player through a xeno hellscape or the ones where I was left with a few people stranded in a tesla destroyed station, roleplaying how to get out and how to reach the escape shuttle/not be killed by a deathsquad.
The ones where there was actual conflict. Where shit happened. These basically never happens anymore.
Thanks for reading through my schizo ramblings.
