There has been a lot of posts recently talking about the issues that you see in our current rounds. Since the issues are kind of hard to isolate and hard to propose solutions for, there is no simple fix and this isn’t just a case of failing to actually see there is a problem. Through what is probably years of trying to deal with issues of our gameplay, there have been many failed attempts at fixing these issues, and now I am finally stumbling across something that I am happy with.
Many of the ideas I am using now feel quite contrarian since the obvious ideas simply haven’t worked, so you will have to bear with me a little bit. For example, saying that greentext should be more important, antagonists should be deadlier, and that security needs to be given metaknowledge sounds totally crazy at first.
Key Issue
The current fundamental issue that we face is that the position of antagonists on the server is not satisfying.
There are 2 complaints which I would assign an equal weight to:
Rounds are too boring, nothing happens in them.
Rounds are too chaotic, there is no opportunity to do anything in them.
While these issues sound contradictory, the important factor being missed is the time of the rounds. If you graph out how most of our rounds go, they look like this:
In the first 1-2 hours of the round, very little is happening, then out of nowhere the entire security of the station breaks down. This leads to a few issues:
Security gameplay sucks. You either have nothing to do, or are entirely wiped out. It feels totally unbalanced and results in a balancing trap for security where the obvious solution is to balance security (but this will never be able to help).
Station gameplay sucks. The station feels perfectly fine, until suddenly everything breaks down without warning. When the situation gets worse over time, you have time to prepare and use your department in interesting ways to adapt to what is happening. This lack of time between getting justification to do something and being able to use something is what I believe the main issue of ‘not having enough time for projects’ stems from. There is definitely enough time for projects; but when you need a project, it is too late.
The Balancing Trap
There is a huge trap here, because on the surface the problem seems very simple, and there is a very simple solution - balancing changes. For the past few years, dynamic has been getting reconfigured over and over and we have generally flip-flopped between rounds having too much going on, or rounds having too little going on. There is no way to create a balance median when doing this.
Why is this happening?
The reason we see this antagonist curve is because of a few reasons:
Players generally do not want to prevent someone else from playing the game, so prefer to complete assassination objectives at the last minute.
The optimal playstyle of antagonists is to do everything last minute when there is not enough time for you to be caught.
Because the roundstart antagonists are doing very little, we spawn midrounds which have become the main drivers of rounds. Midrounds generally appear at full power out of nowhere, creating a sudden power spike for antagonists.
What caused this?
Nailing down what actually caused these issues is incredibly difficult, and this is the part where my answers probably won’t be correct, but I’ll give some simple explanations regardless.
Balancing changes: Due to our origin as a highly LRP server, balancing mechanics was quite important as they could easily be abused. We have had many inconsequential balancing changes which have slowly stacked up over time to make things harder for antagonists.
Lower population: Lower population due to SS13 falling from a peak resulted in us having a design focused on 30-80 players and this did not translate well to 10-30 players. Most gamemodes are disabled at lower populations, and only a few rulesets get the ability to spawn. This results in the same rulesets triggering over and over again, becoming stale and then being removed from the game (resulting in it getting more samey)
Changing player dynamics: The community changes slowly over time, and one big change we have seen is that players do not want to be seen as doing something wrong. Certain strategies such as sleepy penning and assassinations early into the round are shunned because you have alternate strategies that you could take instead.
The solution?
I’m bored of typing now so go read the PR and play some rounds with it on.
Antagonists are completely rethought, the reason things that I mentioned earlier (like greentext being a key thing we should think about) are now plausible ideas is because the fundamental idea of an antagonist has been reworked.
We split roundstart antagonists into two different categories:
Gamemodes: The key antagonist of the round, the driver of action and what should be the center of attention.
Supplementary: The antagonists that exist to spice up a round, they aren’t necessarily all evil but they won’t be regular crew that are good for the station.
Midround: Midround rulesets are executed when dynamic gathers enough points to execute them. They are completely independent from the other two types of antagonists and exist to make rounds unique, even when the gamemode and supplementary antagonists are the same. There are no defined rules for how midround antagonists should be designed, and can range from mundane to round-ending.
There will now only ever be one gamemode antagonist, which means we can get a little bit more crazy with them.
My secret goals?
I stopped liking and playing antagonists myself, and I wanted this to change. I used to get shakey hands when I rolled antagonist because of the excitement or pressure or whatever (I don’t even know why), and I wanted that feeling to return. I wanted antagonist to be fun, and I believe they are one of the keys to making rounds fun to play with the base SS13 design. You can say that antagonists shouldn’t exist, or are artifacts of a flawed system but they used to be one of the most important parts of making the game fun until we started treating antagonists as a bad system.
I also wanted antagonists to be treated as actually bad by the crew. I don’t want to be a terrifying antagonist hellbent on destroying Nanotrasen and then have the regular crew come out with popcorn to be watching my murders (only to ahelp if they themselves get killed). The gamemode antagonist is a true threat, one that justifies reporting suspicious behaviours to security, and if you don’t treat them like a true threat then you just might discover why you should have…
(I wrote this to put my thoughts out please don’t give me 20 essays in the comments, I can’t read things that aren’t bullet points)
I totally agree with you bacon. It’s now a chore to be an antag to me, I want things to be fun for the whole crew. I want the majority of people to have fun and to interact with them. I had an idea for a fighting ring but nobody really cared much for it so it just fell flat and all my tc was gone leaving me dead in the water.
On the other end of it. Antags and sec either shut each other down before any real conflict can occur because they don’t want to deal with it. I long for the day where an antag can just make a gimmick that the entire crew can be a part of.
Stuff like a murder mystery, conversations that lead up to a fight, someone revealing that they’ve been the one who’s been micro dosing the food with mutation toxin. Stuff that requires more than just who can be the better gamer.
I agree with you on all points you mentioned, but I feel like this strait up not gonna happen and everything will stay the same. It is more of the player mentality.
This. I’m all for chaos but I just want a normal round at least once so chaos isn’t the norm as your supposed to play it as it’s a normal day on the station
I just noticed this is exactly why i dislike echo. It’s a great map. But quality is not what i want from a map primarily. It’s gotta sit back and be the canvas, the generic white background.
Maps like echo are too egotistical. I want a normal round and I can’t have normal on echo. Echo is not a normal map.
This 100% I feel like months of dynameme going wild led to a lot of unsatisfaction on how chaotic some rounds were getting if I’ve felt stressed as a seccie/command because of needing to be in 5 places at once but i can’t imagine how ‘‘ugh’’ can be for a random Doctor, a Chaplain, Bartender, etcetera getting caught as a collateral, being a target, becoming a unwilling/willing deputy because blob/zombies/nukies/etc every shift lowpop or not and if it’s high pop it was always going for cult, nukies, wiz, etcetera.
We certaily need to bring back some ‘‘chill’’ moments to allow people to RP and do certain projects without feeling ‘‘why bother lol everything’s gonna explode and we’ll go home or die’’
I do hope with this new antag system Bacon is designing fewer antags will be able to leave more breathing room, though my main concern is how easy some get DAGD at 1:00hs+ which could lead to certainly players that are still very ‘‘greentext hungry’’ and doing the worst stuff just to hijack, the ball is certainly on the Antags to play with good faith i suppose.
