We need to do something about antags/security/command.

[BurgerBB]

By "we" I mean the current staff and head developers. There is absolutely nothing I can REASONABLY do as a single developer without reworking absolutely everything from the ground up to solve this issue.

Every single round in Aurorastation consists of the following:

- Antags interact exclusively with security AND/OR antags interact exclusively with command.

- Command tells everyone to fuck off and remain in their departments to let security deal with the problem AND/OR Security tells everyone to fuck off and remain in their departments to let security to deal with the problem.

This needs to stop. It's getting annoying and I'm genuinely considering leaving like everyone else is doing because this server has become repetitive nonsense that I can no longer tolerate. Things need to change and NBT certainly won't make a single difference and end up being a collective waste of everyone's time unless we can come to an actual agreeance on this being an issue and we actually discuss putting policies and additions forward. This discussion needs to be dealt with NOW. Not when NBT comes out, but NOW.

 

Here are proposed solutions in order to fix this hot mess. I encourage others to post their solutions as well.

 

- Put policy in place that enables transparency acts where the crew has the right to know of any emergency situation on the station unless alerting the crew of such a situation would reasonably cause panic.

Example: The crew should be informed that there are 4 armed gunmen patrolling the hall. They should not be informed that there is a nuke on the station and that someone stole the nuclear access codes.

 

- Actually listen to the players and remove/redesign game modes that are known to be terrible and conflict with HRP.

Despite a overwhelmingly dislike for changeling, voted one of the worst game modes of 2018 in the player survey by a majority, it continues to exist because of nefarious reasons. Broken content is currently being kept in circulation because of the fear that developers won't work on fixing it if it is removed. This is one of the worst reasons I've ever heard to keep something in a game and I feel that it's currently damaging gameplay. Keep content in the game because it's good content, not because it's bad content and you're hoping it will be good content one day.

 

- Encourage antag gimmicks that interact with the crew. Discourage antag gimmicks that interact with two or less people.

On other servers you are punished if you're an antag without actually antagging, on here, ChairRPing with the Captain for one and a half hours and then causing 10 minutes of chaos is too common. Yesterday a round was delayed for 30 minutes because the antags decided to go all out in the last 10 minutes and broke a lot of escalation rules. If you spend your antag slot roleplaying with a single person, then you should be punished the same as if you stay on the shuttle as a ninja.

 

- Encourage Heads of Staff to run mini-events and celebrations while working.

Could be anything major or minor like a birthday party to a christmas celebration. A lot of great HoP's did this in the past and they all turned out to be great events. Al-Faysal comes to mind when I think of this. Station-run events rarely happen, unfortunately.

 

I will personally be submitting a command whitelist application in order to assist with implementing all the IC related things, such as player run events and better crew information.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I wrote a manifesto about this.  Command being open to any and all suggestions or projects will be enough.

[GreenBoi]

Alright so, I pretty much agree with a lot of parts of this thing buuut there's one thing that really rubs me like a cheese grater, that being this one phrase here:

8 hours ago, BurgerBB said:

- Encourage antag gimmicks that interact with the crew. Discourage antag gimmicks that interact with two or less people.

I don't have that much problem with the intent behind this, as it'd exist to, you know, make it so everyone has fun and is interacted with! But here's the thing...interesting gimmicks that involve a good amount of the crew is hard and that's not an exaggeration. Doing the task is just really hard. Creating a concept and acting it out in a way that could invest a large amount of the crew can be easy in theory, but in practice....making one that's good is hard and is a path that isn't sauntered onto often for a reason. 

 

Most gimmicks of this size are usually Mercenary or Raider gimmicks, actually, they're typically offstation antagonist gimmicks in general. Why? Because Offstationers can't effectively dig into someone like an Inside Agent Traitor can, so they do simple things that involves everyone, but making complex gimmicks that involve everyone. Crew-wide gimmicks are a very Expectation v. Reality thing that people have to go past. Ever wonder why most Malfunction gimmicks seem lackluster even to the person who tried it? Because it's hard to make it more complex than  "THING HAPPEN. I DO THING. PEOPLE ARE AFFECTED BY THING." 

[Evandorf]

A few opinions/observations:

I think it's unfair to put a majority of the blame on sec/command/antags for a few reasons.

• Unless you are an antag team like raider or merc, it is very difficult to interact with the majority of the crew in a meaningful way that is not loud/violent. This is one of the reasons why autotraitor can be one of the better round types. Not only does it continuously add more antags, but the antags are hidden as crew and can interact one-on-one with crew using exploitable information. On the opposite side you would have antags like wizard/ninja who can get around fast and cause a lot of chaos, but usually they don't interact with a majority of crew in a meaningful way past being a present threat that security cannot keep up with. Once the antag(s) go loud and violent it is entirely reasonable that security and command would try to isolate the crew from them.
• As a non-sec, non-command member of the crew you also have an OOC responsibility to ensure the round doesn't devolve into sec piling on the antag or an ERT/TCFL being called. You can blame sec for clamping down on the round and you can blame command for going to red alert but everyone who's ever knee-jerked into a "Help! Maintenance!" response or run away from a potential antag encounter also shares some of the blame and it happens a lot. This is not to say that you shouldn't RP fear but it varies wildly depending on the situation. Most times you would be well within your rights to stay in an area with an antag as long as they are not aggressive towards you.

I enjoy playing with you Burger and you're a creative and competent developer but I do think you also need to manage your expectations. If the antag is taken out early or is content fighting it out with sec and generally being a criminal then there's nothing wrong with simply having a nice extended round for yourself. Take Tokash for example. I play him from time to time to keep him fresh and to make sure people know who he is but I enjoyed extended rounds with Marwani much more than I do throwing him against merc teams or ninjas. In the end the game is about making your own fun and your own stories and you can't rely on or force other people to do that for you.

[BurgerBB]

I think a more accurate expectation of mine is that relative to the gamemode, you should be expected to interact with your share.

It's fine to interact with 2-3 people if it's autotraitor. It's not fine as ninja to chairrp with the captain for an hour and a half.

I understand not being able to interact with more than a quarter of the crew as as a lone antag, but what gets really infuriating is somehow there are 4 autotraitor and all their gimmicks are "fuck interaction, I'm going to throw grenades everywhere and cause as much chaos as possible."

[DAUnHolyKnight]

I honestly agree with everything Burger is saying here, hell I even know first hand that this is pretty much at least most of the time how things turn out. I learned that through playing numerous rounds of antag as well as numerous rounds of non-antag. I've played in most departments other than two so far and from what I have seen the one department I have worked in that just so happens to almost ALWAYS get the most time and interaction with the antag was security. Granted yeah it makes sense seeing that theyre the ones who perform the arrest and so on but there have been times where as an antag I actively WANT to interact with the crew however the only possible way for me to do so is by going loud and dangerous. Whenever I try to play stealthy or anything of that sort I almost always end up having to interact with security the most just because of the fact that if I don't I'm afraid they'll go all gun ho with their dicks out and fuck my gimmick up. I'm all for any changes that can be made to fix this but theres a lot of different issues at play, validing among sec is extremely high to the point that no matter the gimmick no matter how truthful you are they always seem to be out for blood or out for some form of confrontation. To make things harder is when you have antags who have maybe never played antag before, never played on aurora prior to this antag round or are brand spanking new and playing antag, this sorta shit really makes things a pain in the ass. Not to mention the fact that it honestly feels like people are less and less interested in genuine deep character roleplay and more interested in just having some bloody fight or stupid shit like that. 

[Evandorf]

To be clear, the only points of Burger's that I'm not fully on board with are removing game modes and discouraging gimmicks.

I agree that command needs to be transparent. When I play Captain or HOS I try at the very least to make an announcement everytime the alert code changes, promising updates to come. I don't think command needs to be discussing things constantly over common however. 

Changeling is a fine game mode imo and Kaed is actively working on improving it. Even with the old mechanics there are ways to do it right. I think it's also very telling that REV, a mode which is likely the most inclusive antag round, almost never gets played. I see it constantly fail at roundstart because not enough players have it enabled.

I'm not in favor of policing gimmicks as long as they abide by server rules. IMO, chair RP and peacetags are completely fine. Taking ninja as an example again I think it could be preferable for the ninja to focus on a handful of crew based on their exploitables rather than trying to make sure they include an arbitrary number or percent of the crew and diluting their focus.

[Skull132]

I don't really think that your suggestions will have enough of an effect. They're effectively trying to wrangle an issue with the gameplay loop and setup by way of policy. For the task described, I would consider policy to be a very soft power to apply. That is to say, the amount of work put in for this will bring minimal returns.

Further, the suggestions proposed do not necessarily solve much. And their scope is limited. Allow me to illustrate:

• "Command must be transparent about antagonists." This may have the effect of having research and medical more actively pester command/sec for the antag as a test subject or for equipment to deconstruct, true. However, this wouldn't necessarily stop or even change the way that sec locks down any antag related matter at present. There is only so much you can do as a random job to help/disrupt without getting a bwoink for unmotivated sympathy towards an antag. And thus, the antag interaction would still be with security.
• "Encourage antag gimmicks that interact with the crew. Discourage antag gimmicks that interact with two or less people." This is a hard standard to drive. Due to the way we apply policy, in a passive, report oriented fashion, there is no solid way to "encourage" something. Staff are unable to provide positive feedback ingame regularly, because it would require that they dedicate their entire round to observing the antagonist/the round. Clearly, this is too much to ask of staff, without doing something silly, like doubling our staff count. This means that we are left with reporting peace-antags and eventually getting them job-banned.
  Which, mind you, we have done. But there's another small devil in your wording. "Discourage antag gimmicks that interact with two or less people." From a roleplay perspective, this is damaging. Or, as an uncut standard, it is damaging, anyways. If you're doing a more intricate story line, then simply involving a few picked individuals, in my opinion, is completely valid. It will lead to more valid roleplay, and it is highly unlikely that you are able to, at the end of the day, keep said roleplay down to just 2 people, unless you are literally going peace antag and doing something dumb, like showing your tools to your friends and never breaking space law.
• "Encourage Heads of Staff to run mini-events and celebrations while working." We tried this a bit. This is partly the reason why the head of staff forum exists. And I could easily see CCIAA involved in this as well. I've always kinda wanted CCIAA to do more proactive IC things than just file reports. @Elliot *hinthint*.
• As for changeling. We can, IMO, remove it, rework it however we want to. It may even end up being more roleplay friendly. But this will do little to solve your quandary. Because, IMO, your issue is not really caused by the RP quality of the various single antagonist modes out there. But rather, by the fact that they are single antagonist modes.

Rolling on from the last point. In my opinion, the era of singular antag modes is basically over and done with. I would much rather prefer to see modes like Deity/God, which offer players more control over the round and slot someone into the spot of dungeon master. Someone non-admin. This would greatly expand the capacity for "gimmicks", by allocating a large quantity of resources before a singular idea, goal. A more dynamic gameplay setting in general would help as well, this is specifically referring to more advanced random events, which would involve player controlled NPCs. You have a lot more things to do when security and the station are tied up with a third entity, say a crew of lost Vox traders. All of this would allow for more dynamic round make ups, thus, more replayability and stories.

Could also investigate the possibility of giving players more control over whether or not they can antag this specific round. The issue with the current way antag selection works, is that you have no clue whether or not you're going to be an antag, and thus, cannot fully invest into preparing for the round. If you had more exact control over this, say antag tokens through player upvotes, then we might have more people executing more intricate ideas. It's a small thing, but it could just pay off well enough.

And then there's the question of what to do with security. Though some of the points in said thread are still to be resolved, I believe that spreading out the power of that department will lead to the antagonists being able to do more. Purely because they will no longer be forced to focus their primary effort on evading security. Could also consider heavily gimping the security staff with the present setup, I suppose. You would still lower their operational capacity, which is ultimately what you want to do. Less emphasis on running away from the dudes with the batons from step one should lead to more attention being left over for you to focus on creating roleplay. It worked well enough when we had lower populations: 1 - 2 officers per round, with a crew of roughly 10 - 15 total, was a good enough stomping ground for antags on Exodus, for example. Now we regularly stack 3+ security personnel per round, with a higher crew count. While our antag count is relatively the same.

So, summa summarum. I see more practical and code oriented solutions to these issues. And at least one of these is written into the NBT, though all of these can be implemented way earlier (which is roughly a design principle of the NBT anyways).