QoL: Visibility of readied roles in pre-round lobby

[Scheveningen]

What this suggestion doesn't want: Specific people by their ckey being flagged for the specific role they intend to join the round with. Not only is that not what I want, but it'd undo a lot of work previously to preserve a degree of player-character anonymity. Hopefully that's settled.

What this suggestion does want: A list of roles in the lobby screen that is updated in (roughly) real time to show how many people are readying for the specific jobs that can be readied for at the beginning of the round. For example, if any 3 people in the round are readying for captain, everyone can see that role is being highly contested. Therefore, the 3 existing people who are readying for captain can make an alternative choice by unreadying for something else less contested or keeping their readied slot going.

Why bother: Roundstart is a coinflip for many reasons. If you latejoin, you miss out on roundstart antag roles. By default every character is also set to "return to lobby" anyway if they don't get their primary slot if only one job is set to High. Arming the players with vague information as to how many people are readying for specific roles can also help people fill out "needs" of the round before it starts over "what I want to play" (wouldn't stop people from not caring anyway, but hey), and would also likely encourage people to actually join the round before it starts instead of only looking at the manifest after to decide if it's worth joining.

Foresight for disadvantages: There is a minute possibility that some people, being armed with this particular information could dick around with it and be ever-so-slightly meanspirited. The biggest issues, however, is that inconveniencing another player in this way is hard to do if you don't know what character or role they intend to play precisely (hence the necessity to intentionally obfuscate who is playing what). One can only guess with predictions based off experience and knowledge of what a specific player knows how to do. It's equally hard to get caught weaponizing information in this way in bad faith but also hard to get any results from this in bad faith if you don't play every day, which by itself makes that person stick out.
The problem with this theorized 'disadvantage' in the first place is that few people are really this petty or even care that much to deny roles to other players. So I don't really think this would be a problem, and this has more benefits than tangible downsides.

[GreenBoi]

This was actually proposed as a project earlier- but all you'd have to do for it is to make it toggleable to turn it off so it's an opt-in thing, preventing meta for those who don't want to be known.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

If it maintains anonymity and tracks how many people have it marked as 'high' then this could be good.

[Carver]

Two reasons against this:

1. I can tell who's readying for the job I want, this is undoubtedly cause people to get mad at each other even more OOCly for 'slot hogging' or just plain not getting the slot they want than they already do.
2. It'll make it even more trivially easy to tell if it's an off-station antagonist at roundstart by looking at the crew manifest.

I get why you'd want it, but unless I have a way to obscure my selection from everyone else, then I can't agree with this addition.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Having a list of the jobs and a simple number would work.

 

Captain - 3

Hop- 2

HoS - 1

Bartender - 6