Weight based Mid-round Antagonists

Suggestions
1

I am looking into implementing a very simple weight system based on your crew and ghost hours in order to favour those playing as actual crew members. The regular randomness system would still be in place so even if you got a weight of 0.004 you could still get a ghost role, just don’t count on it.

This is a direct change to discourage hanging out as a ghost and only playing as mid-round ghost roles. I’d expect crew member players to more often be given ghost roles as well with this.

What do y’all think of this?

Here is some examples of what the weight would look like with some random numbers of hours.
CH = Crew hours, GH = Ghost hours, W = Weight

CH: 123, GH: 77, W: 0.615
CH: 56, GH: 144, W: 0.28
CH: 89, GH: 111, W: 0.445
CH: 174, GH: 26, W: 0.87
CH: 38, GH: 162, W: 0.19
CH: 99, GH: 101, W: 0.495
CH: 184, GH: 16, W: 0.92
CH: 70, GH: 130, W: 0.35
CH: 51, GH: 149, W: 0.255
CH: 195, GH: 5, W: 0.975

And some more extreme cases.

CH: 1, GH: 200, W: 0.004975
CH: 20232, GH: 232, W: 0.9897
CH: 2550, GH: 560, W: 0.8209

Here is the formula:

weight = ch / (ch + gh)

Shadowslime wannabes are no more.

2 Likes
2

You can just end the statement right here, because this is what your formula does: Discourages hanging around as a ghost by punishing anyone who does for any amount of time regardless of why they are doing it.

There’s no reason to cast the net anywhere near this wide if you’re looking to implement something to discourage people observing for ghost roles, especially since this will disproportionately affect current and past admins, as well as players who do just like to observe rounds.

No system should punish innocent players outright

If you want to make a system that helps to prevent midround rolling:

  • Come up with a system that disregards observers for role pings unless only observers tried to accept the role
  • Apply the observer flag to players who have left via cryo or suicide
7 Likes
3

What if this excluded ghosted admins and players with a certain amount of messages written in the chat?

Do you mean that the weight shouldn’t be changed unless they partake in the vote for a ghost role?

4

Would this punish players who are unfortunate/still learning the game? Say a new player joins and in their first few rounds, they die learning the mechanics or get iced 20 minutes into a round by an antag. They get 10 hours of playtime in, CH: 5, GH: 5. From what I can tell, they’ll be punished by the system for not playing the game well, and people who are killed early in the round may feel sad that the death will ruin their odds.

I really like this idea! Instead of judging people based on track record, give priority to people based on the current round. I personally wouldn’t disregard observers; I would have it so everyone is entered into a lottery, but people who played that round get multiple entries in the lottery to push things in their favour.

1 Like
5

I would be less against it, but I do still think it should be a per-round basis rather than a lifetime history one. You can’t feasibly keep a list of past admins for the system to work with either I don’t think.

6

I don’t think there are enough mid-round votes for this to be viable. Especially on low-pop with a more restrictive selection of ghost roles.

Though a lot more complicated and perhaps outside of a feasible scope for me to implement. I imagine that perhaps including information such as whether or not they are AFK, sent messages, ghost and crew hours and some other data may get a more ideal result to not punish people too harshly?

I’d just need to check currently online admins, the calculations would be done in runtime when a player joins a vote. Although I have yet to get a working prototype so I have no idea if this would change.

7

Re-read the first thing you quoted carefully: unless only observers tried to accept the role
Observers should be used when only observers tried to take the role.

Then I fall back on how badly this punishes past admins. Look up the hours on almost any retired admin. They tend not to be any higher than 50/50 in ratio due to time spent observing.

There’s also something to be said that even if there are other people doing this - they aren’t necessarily problematic for the game. Shadowslime was a problem because of how he played antag far moreso than because he was sitting and waiting to pounce on antag opportunities. Generally players who observe more than they play crew probably also take roles like he did, but play them in fun and engaging ways for the crew and as a result aren’t gaining infamy.

Before the plans for completely removing lavaland got steam, there was approval for making Ashwalkers a permanent lavaland presence because the typical enjoyer of the role was faithful to it and it made lavaland feel more alive.

2 Likes
8

Why only observers and not dead crew members? Do you mean to only use observers for mid-rounds to prevent potential untimely accidental metagaming when you get a vote for blob just as you’re revived?

Perhaps this would require a third variable to keep track of ghosted admin hours to subtract it from the total ghost hours. Though this would probably require adding it (perhaps with some existing data) to the database.

9

Sigh

The system should use ONLY non-observers and non-cryo if any are available

If none are available THEN it should allow observers and cryo people to take roles.

  • Come up with a system that disregards observers for role pings unless only observers tried to accept the role

Run a loop on all candidates sorting observers into one list and dead players into the other. If the dead player list is empty, check the observer list, otherwise discard the observer list entirely and don’t even try to pick candidates from that list.

This way dead players have absolute priority and observers are only chosen if they’re the only option.

1 Like
10

This would still punish all past admins that already have the bad ratio before this implementation.

This is just a bad way to judge players. You don’t have to use my idea but trying to use played vs ghost hours should not be done because it isn’t a good metric.

1 Like
11

who benefits from this though? Genuine question. Maybe it frustrates you sometimes, but does it NEED change?

I observe a lot. I like ghost roles more than crew roles. They are almost always more interesting, even if they arent antags. this goes for midrounds and lavaland spawners. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that either. I also do like hanging out in dchat sometimes, and just watching the round. This also wouldn’t reduce my chances of rolling the midrounds because i have a lot of hours and my living hours are more than double my ghost hours, because time spent alive as a midround is still time spent alive. My free golem hours are equal to my highest crew role.

This isnt to say I don’t play, I do, infact more now that i probably used to.

This really just pushes more players away from beestation, and i dont see what that accomplishes.

Also I think shadowslime was alright, but thats a different argument.

5 Likes
13

You could include mid round antag hours and that would solve a lot of these issues.
CH / (CH + GH / (CH + MAH))
(or some better formula)

1 Like
14

Ignore previous hours and start tracking from the moment the update is active.

Let admins have a toggle state (on-duty/off-duty) or just don’t track their ghosting time if they have the admin role.

15

I will say it again:

Comparing living to dead hours in the formula at all is bad. If you desperately want a formula instead of a simple system it should compare total living hours to total antag hours (midround and normal), but leave dead hours out of it because this is just going to pollute the data and punish good players because of misguided assumptions about why people might want to observe.

It is a bad core concept to punish players for hanging around while dead, period.

A system comparing total living hours to total antag hours could also function as a replacement for our lackluster antag rep system for that matter, and would double as encouragement for riskier plays as antag too since shorter antag rounds weigh less than safe ones

4 Likes
16

What about, simple solution, we just get rid of the audible ping and windows tab flashing for the ghost roles. You’re paying attention to the round as an observer or ghost that’s fine, you’re alt tabbed doing something else you don’t get it. Since you brought up ShadowSlime, why do you think they always hung around in some far off corner on the centcom z-level as a ghost?

2 Likes
17

Simple, elegant and effective.

18

Only counting alive mid-round ghost hours is a fine idea.

19

I was thinking if a value could be manually inserted for every current and past admin. It wouldn’t be accurate, but it’d be practical and close enough. Tracking would probably be done based on if they started observing or not.

20

This is stupid, this has to be bait
I get the dislike of midround rollers in dchat but actively punishing people who just like to observe with something that is near impossible to counter balance (How the fuck am I ever going to change my ratio with 2000h total playtime on the server ?) is extremely stupid and bad

If you want to do something like this, you can do something as simple as removing the ping noises from midround rolls so that you can’t just boot up the game then alt tab for 2 hours
But even then, that sucks because not everyone will always be tabbed into the game 100% of the time + new players will be even less aware of midrounds

I don’t even think this is a problem anymore considering how the main guy, shadowslime, has been permaed and set an example, I don’t think this needs “fixing” as whatever fix you plan to do will inevitably cause massive drawbacks for anyone who is observing legit, and even lessen the amount of midrolls from a server with a lower pop and lack of action in a lot of rounds.

I feel like this is using a nuke to fix a problem that really isn’t that huge/bothering anyways. I’ve not seen anybody do that lately after shadow got the shaft and was set as an example.
This has to be an aprils fools bait

4 Likes
21

Do note that everyone is equally “punished”. So even if you have a weight of 0.5, everyone else might also have it. Insert your crew hours and ghost hours into the formula and see what the weight is. Now imagine EVERYONE has their own unqiue weight. And this doesn’t gurantee that you will or won’t get the mid-round. And this doesn’t gurantee that you will or won’t get the mid-round.

Why would they care? Especially if they are new, new. My least concern was mid-round antags as a newbie. lol

Then… why do you care so much about this kind of change? Also, for next comments. Drop the hostility.