Departmental Security

[Icuris]

I have this concern that the quality of one person’s RP is being measured by how often people are talking with them. Socializing is absolutely a huge component of the game. Another component is the role/rank that each player has while they play.

It seems like there’s a concern that one component of play; the IC interactions is lacking, hence the change. In the name of “balance” parts of the security role have been severely limited to accommodate a problem...that evidently many players feel was never even an issue.

The restrictions are too much and have complicated the security players role beyond that of any other role, and that is simply unfair. While each department has its own unique challenges in game, the new challenges are arbitrary at best, and grossly unbalanced at worst. Others have already gone over this.

My personal concern is that the chance of officers walking in on antag activity in places generally considered safe in the meta to be greater then any restriction we can impose on said officer.

In essence, it will not matter how many restrictions are imposed on the department assigned officer, part of their role is reporting suspicious things and investigating them. The antag roles already have their own difficulties. Having to worry about an armed guard that will shut you down like it’s there job just adds to the difficulty.

Because of this concern, I am not in favour of Sec having any department access and would personally prefer a revert to the original system.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

4 hours ago, Icuris said:

I have this concern that the quality of one person’s RP is being measured by how often people are talking with them. Socializing is absolutely a huge component of the game. Another component is the role/rank that each player has while they play.

It seems like there’s a concern that one component of play; the IC interactions is lacking, hence the change. In the name of “balance” parts of the security role have been severely limited to accommodate a problem...that evidently many players feel was never even an issue.

The restrictions are too much and have complicated the security players role beyond that of any other role, and that is simply unfair. While each department has its own unique challenges in game, the new challenges are arbitrary at best, and grossly unbalanced at worst. Others have already gone over this.

My personal concern is that the chance of officers walking in on antag activity in places generally considered safe in the meta to be greater then any restriction we can impose on said officer.

In essence, it will not matter how many restrictions are imposed on the department assigned officer, part of their role is reporting suspicious things and investigating them. The antag roles already have their own difficulties. Having to worry about an armed guard that will shut you down like it’s there job just adds to the difficulty.

Because of this concern, I am not in favour of Sec having any department access and would personally prefer a revert to the original system.

Fully agree with this.

[Carver]

I don't see this as a potential restriction on antagonists as much as greater opportunity for them, whether they happen to coerce the departmental guard to look the other way or take the opportunity to rob his office for equipment. The concept of a 'meta' on an HRP server is also incredibly amusing, you shouldn't rely on 'consistent safe spots' as much as being able to vary up your strategy on a per-round/per-crew basis, this is no different than if you were caught on camera or caught by any other crew member (whom would be just as capable of either fighting or calling in the crime).

Adaptability is the greatest skill you can have in this game, and it seems like a great deal of arguments against this are overreaction due to fears that the greater change this brings about would be damaging to the status quo in regards to common Security/Antagonist play and strategies. I say, up-end the status quo. Staleness hurts the game more than anything else. Push the update through with a couple fixes/tweaks, and watch as people are fully adapted within a month.

[Rushodan]

Alright, hi. Player of Sophie Hawkins here, HoS main and pretty much a frequent security player in general.

I won't bother making a long post, as honestly lots has been said already and there's not point echoing what has been done already.

1. Keep security radios as they are. There is absolutely zero reason to take them away - if I have an emergency suddenly crop up such as a bunch of raiders fly into arrivals or even just an officer being stabbed in their own department then I need to re-assign people quickly. Shit happens - taking away security radios makes zero sense OOC or IC.
2. The head of security should be able to redeploy assets as and when needed. Take lowpop for example - if engineering has nobody and I happen to have an engineering officer it should be under my discretion to redeploy someone to medical or cargo. Security of the station is my main goal as a HoS.
3. Lowpop is a thing. Lets say we have a round with one officer, and they are in medical. Are they just turbo fucked as there is no command member to re-assign them or move them in case of an attack, or shit going down in another department?

Why not have it like this:

Everyone starts as a standard officer, Head of Security starts their round by assigning people departments. Like - make it part of their training to do this. Make it regulation, so if a HoS is not assigning people an IR can be created or something. This allows them to assign people dynamically based on the largest departments or the more 'important' departments such as science and medical.

If there is no HoS? Security continues as they do normally.

 

They still have their radios, they still have their gear, they still have a head of command they ultimately answer to.

This means that departmental security can be implemented in a way that makes sense, and hopefully that improves roleplay between the security department and the departments officers are attached to. Honestly in general I don't like departmental security forced - I would rather have it as an option to take. Managing my department is how I am supposed to RP, and is the thing I enjoy doing the most. The way it was originally suggested was a pretty bad idea imo.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

On 30/12/2018 at 08:55, Juani2400 said:

The supervision of Security could fall into the jurisdiction of the Head of Personnel, as personnel discipline and actions and staff

As a HoP main this would be a crazy addition of responsibilities that doesnt really fit. It would also give the hop a crazy amount of power. Power over the armed security who they would use to enforce their own dismissals/firings/HR business?

No ty

[Aphelion]

For what it's worth, I have seen this attempted on Best RP towards its death.

It was a nifty idea, the way they set it up was that the specific department sec officer basically only got access to the stuff we give to cadets, they were mostly peacekeepers that allowed for more interaction between security and other departments.

That said, I think it might be bad for the whole warrant system this server seems to have. I really like where security is at tbh, having people able to deny access to departments on the grounds of not having a warrant and just making it a bit more of a negotiation position where RP can be spawned from conflict. Allowing specific departmental officers to exist would revoke the need for warrants, as that departmental officer could just, let in anyone they wanted.

 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I fully support department sec now. hope it comes back perma.

[KingOfThePing]

7 hours ago, Senpai Jackboot said:

I fully support department sec now. hope it comes back perma.

How so? Do you want to explain it?

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I was too pessimistic. The changes were positive.

[AmoryBlaine]

I will in absolutely no way support this, as I've already stated a dozen times before.

[Scheveningen]

On 10/04/2019 at 11:59, Icuris said:

I have this concern that the quality of one person’s RP is being measured by how often people are talking with them. Socializing is absolutely a huge component of the game. Another component is the role/rank that each player has while they play.

It seems like there’s a concern that one component of play; the IC interactions is lacking, hence the change. In the name of “balance” parts of the security role have been severely limited to accommodate a problem...that evidently many players feel was never even an issue.

The restrictions are too much and have complicated the security players role beyond that of any other role, and that is simply unfair. While each department has its own unique challenges in game, the new challenges are arbitrary at best, and grossly unbalanced at worst. Others have already gone over this.

My personal concern is that the chance of officers walking in on antag activity in places generally considered safe in the meta to be greater then any restriction we can impose on said officer.

In essence, it will not matter how many restrictions are imposed on the department assigned officer, part of their role is reporting suspicious things and investigating them. The antag roles already have their own difficulties. Having to worry about an armed guard that will shut you down like it’s there job just adds to the difficulty.

Because of this concern, I am not in favour of Sec having any department access and would personally prefer a revert to the original system.

Gonna reply to this directly just so that everyone past this point reads it, because it's the best case for why the core premise of this suggestion, as is, is not suitable for gameplay. Many core facets of interaction and having balanced experiences just didn't exist with the departmental officers. If you were a science officer, it was objectively the best option to pick with a fully stacked science crew because there was a lot to experience in the department and keep an eye on. No, you cannot go, "Well that's the fault of the other departments being boring!" and call it a solid defense for why this should be implemented in the near future, because the purpose of the other departments have their focus less centric on exploration, discovery and mad science. Nothing can compensate for those core fundamentals the other departments will always be missing.

When the round went code-red, the science officer was almost always kitted out with the best assortment of gear R&D could offer and was the first individual to acquire it, if not the only one. This majorly skewed the value of playing the other department officers against itself, to the point where there was often a fair bit of competitiveness and disappointment in the attempt of getting the science officer role. 

Departmental sec renders the role of the varying security officers needlessly complex while still being single-mindedly focused on one area and that's their own department.

There's also the concern of bias involved, because departmental officers would commonly strike up rapport with the department staff and overlook mild-to-just short of egregious offenses. If anyone values ensuring character accountability is supported to the best of the ability of the game's design and crew line-up, they'd generally oppose this suggestion as-is, because departmental sec ends up creating even more complex tribalism rather than trying to dial it back.

Other methods need to be tried to make gameplay and interactions better, and this suggestion is not one of them. I've seen much of the same weak interactions with departmental sec as I have with centralized security. If the feature was trying to change things up to influence people's approaches to how security was played, it failed in that regard. So what would be the point of implementing this if it didn't change anything in its test phase?

We can't really invest in things that failed to deliver on basic promises in their initial testing phase, and people claiming the feature wasn't given enough time to 'see for sure' are missing the point. Implemented features need to have their effects more than just noticeable, it needs to strongly influence common approaches people normally take in gameplay. Implementation of gameplay features and having to wait multiple months for it to actually pay off in the long run are not good implementations of gameplay features.

As-is, this needs scrapped. There needs to be revised perspective on how to approach the issue more carefully, because this is an entire department people are asking to be changed on the fundamental level. If you'd be pissed if someone tried to arbitrarily increase the difficulty of your favorite in-game job for the sake of adding more difficulty and complexity to the game, then for the sake of fairness you should have a bit more empathy towards people who have voiced their concern and dissatisfaction with this change. Remember telescience? No one who used telescience to positively benefit player-characters in the round actually liked the core change, which was making mild telescience failures near-lethal, and making usage of telescience even less accessible.

And that's generally what we should care about: accessibility. Not at any cost, but hopefully we care enough about new players that we don't deliberately implement roles in the game that have clear gameplay and roleplay superiorities over others that are similar in function.

Edited June 17, 2019 by Scheveningen

[Carver]

Without excessive words, all I have to say is the idea is still wonderful and my support remains.

[Scheveningen]

Smol addendum: I'm as critical as I am about this subject because of the stuff I mentioned in my initial posts. I'm supportive of a hypothetical, progressive situation where this gets merged and is generally a cool and slightly-more-than-simple buff with some reasonable challenges added if necessary. The new PR that is up for it needs to incorporate the following:

1. Dept. Officers need headsets to their respective department and to security. The expectation for dept. officers is that their responsibility divisions are just like the difference between warden and officer, detective and forensic tech, cadet and HOS. Each of them has a different responsibility to attend to and their focus should be that on code green, and should evolve or adapt on different code levels. The idea that security through proxy of dept. officers is more involved in the affairs of each department and has a potential available witness with common interests and goals with security could streamline certain situations 5x easier.
2. Dept. Officers should not lose toolkit they had when playing officer before. Crowbar, handheld radio, maglight, at least 2 pairs of cuffs, etc.
3. Restore their basic access to security. They shouldn't be unable to walk into sec with a detained person from their department to have them processed by the warden for something internally criminal related. Self-sufficiency to a degree is important for any job role so that it's possible to be creative in those job roles. Arbitrarily restricting them because you can instead of because it makes sense, doesn't make them very fun.
 

[Mogelix]

Schev is right on his points against departmental security, and I agree. I less-view the version of dep-sec he has suggested as the 'ideal progressive resolution' and more of the 'least terrible' resolution. I also think Shodans is pretty alrightish too.

Nevertheless, departmental security I will never support fully. There just doesn't seem to be compromise on how it will be implemented, especially with how divisive it is. It either doesn't happen, or security becomes fragmented and ganked.

Edited June 19, 2019 by Mogelix

[Carver]

11 hours ago, Mogelix said:

or security becomes fragmented and ganked.

Assuming Sec radio is restored, then Security is no less fragmented than it would be in it's current state. In the event of anything that'd require a large response, it'd simply reunite as always. With Departmental Security it'd be able to potentially have an easier time calling on support and resources from the various departments as well, due to an innate sense of cooperation that would be present with what's essentially an 'ambassador' in each department allowing people to more readily ask "What's going on?" and offer their help.

[Mogelix]

With departmental security, people aren't given a choice. It restricts securities choice of where and when to patrol. It's initial implementation literally ganked the brig to a hilarious degree, that favoured functionality over departmental roleplay. If they remove the brigs break room, they should also remove cargo, medical, science, and engineerings briefing room. As well as all of the briefing rooms except commands. While I totally disagree with departmental cliques, it is only natural for departments to clump together. This isn't a negative thing, or overly unrealistic. People who work in the same field will hang out. Now, I agree security shouldn't just wander the halls of the brig, but they don't. They patrol the station as is, and if they are competent enough to request a guest pass (a ridiculously underused yet useful mechanic that is handwaved away because people simply don't bother to use it despite it singlehandedly resolving this entire non-issue.) to patrol departmental halls and roleplay with people in their very own department. That is sufficient implementation of 'departmental security'. Security requesting to be allowed to enter your department, or demanding access if they have a warrant.

Warrants, by the way, will become nearly completely useless with departmental security. While I agree that any sane company would want this transparency in their departments, OOCly, it just restricts the player too much, security and non-security antagonist. There's a contradiction in sentiment that justifies departmental securities interaction with antagonists.
"Security is too LRP in it's interaction with antagonists, and their hordelike mentality in chasing antags from the brig is the root cause."
"I want LRP hordelike security in my department so I can attempt HRP interactions like bribing or distracting."

What do you think is going to happen? The only reason you don't deal with dumb shitter officers in your department is the lack of departmental security. If security is so bad, why do you want them in your department, just so you can get some shining star of HRP/metafriends to occasionally roll the same department you picked and vigorously RP with you? 9/10 times that won't happen because security is dumb.

I play security and I think security is dumb. Not because of how it's structured, but because of it's dumb players, like me. If you want to be a officer who goes out, and interacts and roleplays with other departments, (even maybe using guest passes, the still readily available tool that just simply isn't used for no reason), be that guy. There's already people in security who act like such. You know, the people that actually fill the requirement for 'HRP', so why should people who aren't hordelike desk-sitters but who just like having a choice of what they do and where they do it get stuffed over?

Reality is, even with 'select a department' security... which you can already do by the way, by getting a guest pass. You know, the thing that keeps you out unless that department actually wants you, many people are just going to set general officer to highest, longing to be able to still do what they please, but prevented from doing so because hypothetically security might possibly grunt out a few extra says worth of roleplay. And I'm not saying that departmental security isn't allowed to leave their department, but they're undeniably going to have to be punished for not obeying the departmental structure, or this idea wont work, and that would mean taking away securities choice. Security is allowed to have choice, just like every other department. Their not a military. They have canonically dealt with stressful situations, but they are entirely civilian. There is no reason to take away their choice. Their not soldiers.

All departments have the choice to not RP, but all departments RP. People and officers who don't RP and chase valids and antags are a OOC player problem, not a OOC and IC department problem.

[AmoryBlaine]

Bumping.

 

Approaching Dept Sec as an answer to some outdated concept of department tribalism, because there's a mixture of laziness to leave one's own department, or to mistrust Security visiting lobbies, is wrong. If you cannot be assed to leave your department or talk to Sec when they visit, they should not be stuffed into your department to 'interact' with you, when you're the one pushing for an angle based in tribalism.

Security, currently, is nomadic in a sense that they are always moving around. Their department is not where they stay, at most they group up there when AFKing or watching cameras. Otherwise they are out moving, or taking up positions across the station. You have more than a few opportunities to RP with Security not directly linked to them going into your department to do their jobs.

Where is everyone else? What is their responsibility to facilitate interaction between departments?

Why is interaction only on the table when Security is integrated with a departmental sedentary playstyle?

In the current system Security are expected to seek out interaction themselves. We have a lot of shitSec, and they don't do this. But of the active officers who do interact with the station what does tying them to departments add? More so, what does tying them to departments but then letting them leave the departments to do whatever anyways add? Does that not just loop back on to the current system of Officers remaining in the halls? The offices that are wanted to be added are symbolic, and you aren't expected to man them- this is always repeated when I point out that this ties Sec to departments, limiting their area coverage. "Lol, you don't need to stay there you can leave." so, again, what changes here other that Sec getting more access, and being railroaded into certain areas?

The only real change here is Security gets access to every department, which I disagree with because it no longer requires Security to communicate with Department authorized personnel and have them lead them through. Given the AI stands to be removed, giving Sec the option to go where they please is careless, and if anything an unwanted addition to their arsenal.

[JKJudgeX]

Schev and SHODAN's most recent posts seem the most rational and elegant to me.  I was captain during a test round of department sec a while back and it was without sec radio and there was no HoS playing.  So, I raised the complaint that security could not be effectively coordinated this way and was told to have them all tune to a certain frequency and then proceed.  The amount of time and disorganization that this added to an already hectic round was stupid, and the entire time I'm thinking, "no company would ever do this in this way." ...  

From the outset, I understand some of the rationales behind wanting to distribute security around the station...  and I think that such a style of security play should probably be made possible, but not coded to be mandatory in any way.  Department security posts could easily exist and be assigned manually or by selection of a department in occupation preferences with no further changes necessary.  This means that if a HoS is playing who wants to rely heavily on departmental security, they can, and also in events where security needs to act as a cohesive unit (crossfire, merc, heist, etc etc), that would not be taken away from them.  People who don't like the idea of department security are not forced to mess with it, and people in love with the idea can slather it all over themselves.  THIS, is how I would like to see this implemented first, if at all.

Any rationale that is saying that security needs to be weakened seems uninformed to me.  The layout of Aurora alone is an insanely large nerf by comparison with standard station layouts in terms of securing the station.  I'll go out on a limb and say antags have it easier now than they ever have in the past, and the only station-side thing that I think needs a nerf with regard to antagonists is likely the AI, or xeno bonus rebalancing.  Nerfing security is a bad idea, IMO.

 

 

[Zundy]

So was this tested and shown to not work?

[MattAtlas]

It was tested and then the PR died. People are acting as if there weren't any changes between this PR and the last one, which there were - the map is entirely new.

I'd rather have departmental security tested for a week. The last test was only one round and there's absolutely no way you get used to changes so big in just one round, plus with a timeframe so small you get tons of kneejerk reactions from the affected role's mains that help nobody.

I'd argue this PR gives me more choice and more ways to RP with people in departments in ways I wouldn't really have access to. Considering I can probably play cargo officer and go "hey I'm taking a break and walking around for X time", I'm 99% sure they'd let me. Which means I can patrol the same as before. There's no "railroading" from my perspective, it just adds onto the current amount of RP that you can do.

The problem of "security can't be coordinated" has already been resolved. They get stationbounced radios.

[geeves]

I've updated them to have both channels in their radios, but they do not follow the Head of Security's orders explicitly. They still remain under the command of their department's head. Of course this changes if the department has no head, in which case normal operation continues.

 

Cargo Office:

 

Science Office:

(I know you're a bit isolated in this one, but the intention is for you to walk around the department, not stay in the office.)

 

Engineering Office:

 

Medical Office:

(Same as research, didn't really have enough space. You do have a nice view of the lobby though.)

[geeves]

Made Research Less Depressing:

[geeves]

Radio Channels:

[Dark1Star]

I like this. It's something new and differeant. Will the HoS and Wardens have access to each department security? That was one of the problems we had in the past was the fact that Wardens and HoSs couldn't go to each sec area.

[MattAtlas]

34 minutes ago, Dark1Star said:

I like this. It's something new and differeant. Will the HoS and Wardens have access to each department security? That was one of the problems we had in the past was the fact that Wardens and HoSs couldn't go to each sec area.

Departmental officers get access to security radio and dept. radio. Sec radio includes hos/warden.