Somehow prevent starting Crew Transfer Votes without intent?

[Jasorn]

From what the title says, by 'without intent' I mean randomly starting a crew transfer vote just because you can.

I've noticed a lot lately while observing someone will start a transfer vote, and only then do I see them start observing, meaning they have no idea what's going on in the round at all. The vote will usually pass, sure you can say democracy wins, if the vote goes through then it should. Meanwhile ghosts and people idling in the lobby can vote too and muddy the numbers.

Another example is someone who is observing or wanting to leave the current round, typically late NA hours where it's deadpop low crew numbers, but people are roleplaying. Again someone would start a vote to transfer, usually in the reasoning of "this round is boring" or "i'm tired and want to go to sleep." Like I said, it IS a vote, but still goes through usually, despite the ability to leave the round whenever you want.

What the problem I bring up is people 'disconnected' from the round starting a vote, usually making the majority of the vote to end the round, then just leaving/not playing the next round. So what is even the point of calling the vote?

I don't have actual stats on this stuff, but I feel like it's been happening a lot lately with low antag numbers, early morning/late night NA times with extended where it's seemingly going well RP-wise, but then a subset of the players decide to vote end the round, just for the next to be basically empty?

Maybe just me, let me know if anyone feels the same?

[Mr.Popper]

I'm not much of a Bay player but something that stuck out to me there is that only players in the round can call a vote or participate in one. It's not a perfect system- in theory, someone can join to sway the vote, which could lead to funny situations like a grey tide appearing just to vote transfer- but it makes it harder for the lobby bros to override the active players and end the round they aren't in. At the very least they would witness some of the round before they vote to conclude it.

[Fluffy]

People wanting to join the round (as a new round, or try to roll for a slot that is already full or would not make sense to start late in-round) or hoping for a new gamemode to roll have the right to call a transfer and vote when it's called

As you already indicated, most people then vote to transfer. The system requires a 2/3rd majority up until the 3rd hour for the transfer to go through, too.

If the next round is empty, and 2/3rd of the people voted for transfer, that's probably because they wanted to end the round and leave

[Jasorn]

8 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

If the next round is empty, and 2/3rd of the people voted for transfer, that's probably because they wanted to end the round and leave

Then just leave the round?

[Fluffy]

1 minute ago, Jasorn said:

Then just leave the round?

Just leaving the round tends to feel like kind of abandoning your fellow gamers that were playing with you, waiting for the shift to finish usually feels more "natural" to some

[Jasorn]

I'm more so addressing the edge cases of what I said originally, as in low pop rounds, leading to actual dead pop rounds, or just having someone who literally has no idea what's going on (just joined the server and is still in the lobby) starting votes to transfer, and then tons of lobby sitters and other ghosts vote yes with no intention to play the following round. Which is why I ask, why transfer?

[Fluffy]

I'm not sure I am understanding it correctly, however for how I'm understanding it:

- This seems to be an edge case of an edge case, someone who just joined the server and is sitting in the lobby right at the moment a transfer is called seems unlikely
--> That there's enought of them to win a 2/3rd majority if others do not want to transfer sounds exceptionally unlikely

- Everyone has the right to vote for transfer or for continuation for whatever reason they feel like
--> The 2/3rd majority requirement is already in place for the purpose of accounting for lobby votes that might not know what is happening in the round
--> You gain no additional weight just because you're playing, people who wish to join at the next round or just want to try to roll a different gamemode, or do something else using the roundstart, have the right to request and vote for the round to reset so they can do so
---> The same applies for those who wish to end the shift and leave afterwards, as if it was a working shift ending
---> Some people might also switch what character/department to play, using the 5 minutes-ish restart time instead of waiting as a ghost for 20

- The server restarts and rolls a new round afterwards
--> If there are people that still want to play, after a pause of ~5 minutes (the loading time), they can join and continue to do so uninterrupted for at least another 2 hours at the next round
---> If the round reaches deadpop, it's because the people that were playing before at lowpop do not wish to continue playing for another round
----> One might say that they don't want to play a full round, however the proposed thing is to cryo instead, so they would have left around the same time in either scenarios
---> It's possible people who voted for the transfer won't join because they see deadpop at roundstart, I'm not sure how you'd go with showing that they voted for transfer without the intention to join the next round, but I haven't seen any evidence for that

- Any change would apply across the board
--> It's not really feasible and dubiously fair to target specific times or pops
---> Lowpop right before there's a pop surge benefits from having a transfer happen, to let the new connected players join
----> We can't know in advance if people will join after the restart
----> This might introduce additional issues in other scenarios
-----> To try to "solve" what would in practice just be a ~5 minutes pause, if people still want to play
------> So it doesn't seem a good bet from a risk/reward analysis to me

[Rabid Animal]

It can be a little annoying coming from someone who often plays later in the night, I think the biggest thing is you can't just pick up where you left off with interactions or even mechanics because of the server restart. It's not just a five minute break it's an interruption to everything happening. There's times where I would have been down for another hour but commiting to another round of setup and restarting RP tends to be more of a deterrent to me than population.

 

That said; from the other side it can be hard to integrate in a round that's already two hours in, and I've definitely been on the boat of voting to end a round I'm not even watching. I could see it being a pain in the early hours where no one is online.

 

Maybe it's worth testing just to see how it feels? I don't think you can judge what people will do and assuming a wave of people will be  logging on just to vote is idk pessimistic. That kind of thing never happened on bay, at least when I last played it. All that said a compromise to me could be to remove the 2/3rd voting in exchange for only allowing players and ghosts (not observers, ghosts) to vote prior to the three hours mark; afterwards let anyone vote.

 

[Fluffy]

8 hours ago, Rabid Animal said:

[snip]

Off-duty crewmember do not have any setup or preparation, if you want to avoid that part of the gameplay, why not join as off-duty so you don't have to do that?

[Arrow768]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

Off-duty crewmember do not have any setup or preparation, if you want to avoid that part of the gameplay, why not join as off-duty so you don't have to do that?

Well, during lowpop time there aren't a lot of people online.
So, there's a good chance no one is going to be there to set up power if they join as off-duty crew.
And with that power will run out in ~~45min or so.

[Omicega]

You don't have to be in the current round to feel like you'd prefer to join a fresh round. Calling crew transfer without knowing what the current round is like is perfectly understandable if you'd rather just play one from 00:00.

If I had my way there wouldn't even be a provision for round extensions without admin intervention and the rounds would rotate on a fixed ~2h30ish timer for ease of predicting their start times & slotting them into my day. Crew transfer shouldn't be made any harder to effect than it already is.

[Fluffy]

4 hours ago, Arrow768 said:

Well, during lowpop time there aren't a lot of people online.
So, there's a good chance no one is going to be there to set up power if they join as off-duty crew.
And with that power will run out in ~~45min or so.

That's true and correct, however it only applies to engineers characters, everyone else couldn't do anything about that either way

And if in lowpop round the power runs out, I think it would be fine for an off-duty engineer to go in and start the engine to restore the power if noone else did already, there's also the matriarch drone that can do it, borgs, the AI I think also has all the tools to? So it seems fairly well covered on that front

Ah, and you can also take the generator from the Intrepid, set it down and power the area with it

[Jasorn]

I guess I'm wrong about this suggestion, if more of the community don't reply it can be closed.

[hazelmouse]

During European hours, you can't really expect many people to ready up for a new round between around 8am - 8pm UK time. The best way to keep population up in those hours is usually to carry population over from earlier and keep the round going for a very long time, even overnight. People leave the round over time but a few stick around, people see there are still people playing and new people join, and it often works out to keep the server populated during the quieter hours. 

If there are constant crew transfers during lowpop, this never has a chance to happen and population sizzles out with the transfer. I'm honestly a little bewildered by why people ghosting or in the lobby call crew transfers while there are still people playing, and then don't even bother joining in the next round. I'd fully be in support of prioritising people currently in the round in some way. I think the round is the business of the people playing it, not the people in the lobby.

I'll also note that this is mostly exclusively a problem with lowpop. The 2 hour round standard in highpop doesn't work during European hours, and it kills population if you try to enforce it.

[Crozarius]

I do actually have issues with these lowpop crew transfer votes, and I want to chip in my two cents, with the context that I am a terminal lowpop player, coming from Australia. During the weekdays I am only able to play on lowpop, essentially.

There is a repeated trend of people (Mostly one person in particular, to be frank) calling crew transfer votes during these late hours when there's only a couple of people on, while these people are happily roleplaying. The vote has passed, oftentimes in my perception to be because of observers or lobby sitters (think 10-15 people connected, 4 actually playing in round) outweighing the people actually playing the game. 

While this is annoying, it disrupts actual RP, and usually kills the server population when it happens, the real egregious part of this is that it will happen while I am the only person currently playing the server. I have power due to someone previously setting up the Engine, and this vote will happen, pass, and then in the new round the power goes out due to no engineers setting up the engine. If they didn't join, and I was the only one playing, what, legitimately, was the point of calling the vote if not to essentially grief?

My consternation is largely directed to one individual who does this frequently, and honestly the attitude that they display in OOC is getting on my nerves because they seem to derive some kind of smug satisfaction from doing this, which is increasingly pissing me off. 

[Crozarius]

If nothing else I would like to at least see some kind of culture change, and maybe encourage people to think about what the effect of the crew transfer will be; If there's no Greimorians, the engine is running, and you KNOW that nobody is going to join the next round, there is legitimately zero reason to call a transfer. 

[Shimmer]

13 hours ago, Omicega said:

ould rotate on a fixed ~2h30ish timer for ease of predicting their start times & slotting them into my day. Crew transfer shouldn't be made any harder to effect than it already is.

No. Absolutely not. And a fuck no to that. This already happens during high-pop hours because they're antagonist oriented and resets aren't that big of a deal. During lowpop however? This would fuck with flow so badly I personally wouldn't bother even signing on to lowpop.

So this would achieve nothing in highpop, and just put an arbitrary time limiter on those not playing in American hours.

 

Seeing as this thread have been largely skewed towards one opinion, I feel the need to add my two cents in. I wish players actually playing in the round and not those sitting in the lobby or D-chat had more of a sway on the vote. It happens constantly that someone who has no intention to play, doesn't join the next round, just fires off a vote. And you'd think the 4-6 people that vote yes would at least ready up for the next round but they don't, it just breaks up any flow of ongoing RPs and has the potential of outright depowering the ship if no one is kind enough to matriarch or borg to give the ship power.

There is no point to rounds changing if it doesn't serve to reset the ship after an antag round or if such a reset would bring in a bigger pop. All it does it ruin the flow of ongoing RP because now you have to spend 10+ minutes just getting back into it, which isn't a minor inconvenience it can outright cause you to just not bother, pauses like that in a cool moment just ruin the entire thing.

 

Imagine if you were watching a movie and in the middle of an intense conversation a 15 minute ad roll was shoved in with no rhyme reason or thought. That's what lowpop random shift changes feel like.

I don't think ghosts should be prevented from starting them, but their vote IMO should count for less. Especially since there's not mechanical obligation on them to actually join the next round, which they frequently don't.

[Comet Blaze]

I can see the legitimacy of someone requesting transfer because their preferred job is full or they'd like to roll for a different mode and if this was the intention behind all transfer votes I would be fine with it, but none of those problems apply to lowpop (or at least not with any regularity), which I believe is the largest victim of detached transfer votes.

It's extremely rare for any given job to be filled out and even if they are, with such a low crew count, you could probably play off-duty and not loose out on anything. The same can be said for rerolling modes which just doesn't happen because no one plays antags on lowpop so it always rolls extended anyways.

This means to only valid reason to request a transfer in lowpop would be because of some catastrophic event that severely crippled the ship (i.e. greimorians, atmos issues, etc...) which would be fine if that was the reason those votes were being called.

Instead, some people vote to transfer purely for the sake of voting with no actual intent of joining the following round which, aside from being somewhat aggravating if you had interesting RP going on, frequently kills the server for hours on end. A poorly timed transfer vote can be the difference between interesting RP between characters who would not normally interact during regular rounds and an empty ship for, sometimes, the rest of the day.

I'm hesitant about adding vote weighing or restrictions to who may start a vote, but I do believe there should be some policy put in place about actually joining the following round if you call for transfer.

[Carver]

I don’t have any major opinion, but I’d just like to clarify as a regular lowpop player that when a vote comes up if I vote to transfer it’s because I feel compelled to play every round to the end if possible. It simply feels like proper etiquette not to leave a round early once you’ve committed to it, unless I truly have something else I absolutely need to do or if the direction of a round is horrible (Greimorians without medical and with only a Secoff being a more common example).

Don’t point the fingers at lobby sitters as the ones fueling the vote to transfer, some of us in the round just don’t feel right leaving early if we can avoid it.