I’ve noticed that lately many departments are highly undermanned (particularly Command, Engineering and Security) even when the server has reached max capacity. This can frustrate the crew’s shift enjoyment in a number of ways if problems occur such as breaches needing to be fixed, antags needing to be stopped or access needing to be given out. This change over time is probably due to the addition of Exploration department and Gimmick roles.
Curious what the overall sentiment is, and if popcap should be increased (or decreased even)?
The sad part is, the usual round is already chugging at the current max pop, the server struggled enough to allow us to do matrix shit like dodging projectile easily
Personally - Decrease the MaxPop so Acacia isn’t just the Runoff server, and is actually an auxiliary server as it is more than likely supposed to function as.
Are each of the servers run on separate physical hardware? Then you are correct.
However, if all servers(IIRC that would be Sage, Acacia, NSV), are run on one piece of hardware with multiple instances of Dream Daemon(this is possible, each server instance I opened had a different address), permanently removing a server would free up resources for the others.
Now, unless something has changed, the servers currently are in the latter situation in some form(can’t remember if it’s a box running multiple instances or a box running 3 virtualized systems running one instance each). I’m inclined to say 1 box, three virtualized systems, since that can allow for allocation of resources per server.
When there are too many moving parts to a round it can prove difficult to maintain a coherent narrative, which usually leads to people not really interacting as much as individuals, more so as herds which happened to click at the start of the round.
The existence of acacia has a zero to negligible impact on the performance of sage. (Including minor performance slack such as disk IO and other tiny bits of resource sharing.) It’s resources could not be ‘used for sage’
All the resources possible are already dedicated to sage.
This isn’t a pop issue, it’s a playerbase issue. You can (and I’ve historically taken part in), servers where late-night you’d have 7 people fighting off Apocalypse Meteors, because people chose to staff each of the departments.
Gimmicks are at most 3-4 slots, same with Explorer, that’s only 6-8 people, making the count of 54-52 if you subtract those.
Alot of servers have historically preferred to have 30-40 pop for managability (and it used to simply be the norm, a bunch of consistently 20-30 pop servers with the playerbase spread over many many servers. With alot of people actively avoiding joining 40+ pop.), and would get properly staffed departments with just those numbers.
You won’t magically get security/command by having more pop if you already have almost no security and a miniscule portion of command at 60pop.
It’s not uncommon to see 10+ assistant-tier roles on the manifest.
Increased popcap won’t get people suddenly making cooperative role choices to help the round.
Pretty much the only hope is to ask people to fill those roles and hope. (And also not constantly berate and bully people in those roles).
