The HRP setting and being 'ready for anything'

[Omicega]

This might read as more of a rant or ramble than an organised series of thoughts, but I started playing earlier this week after a fairly long break and even after just a handful of rounds, I'm already kind of struck by the sheer level of hyperfixated preparedness and dedication to optimisation that permeates Aurora culture & gameplay nowadays. It might be hitting me particularly acutely as an engineering main these days, but you genuinely cannot have anything go wrong on the ship at all for more than maybe five minutes without at least one (usually two or more) people taking off like a missile to fix it as quickly as humanly possible.

I don't really think this is a new problem by any means -- I could name more than a few players who have always approached their Aurora jobs like they're genuinely getting paid to fix the ninth issue of rampant brand intelligence this shift -- but it's striking how bad it feels to play alongside, at least for me. Do people really enjoy pre-emptively optimising all the possibility for things to go wrong out of the round as quickly and efficiently as they can, and then furthermore swarming all over any tiny issues that do crop up anyway? You could break a window in the chapel on highpop these days and if someone called it out you'd have three engineers minimum showing up to squabble over who gets to click the window frame with some reinforced glass.

I can't really think of anything more exhausting than trying to play believable characters in these kinds of environments, especially when the behaviour seems to have become so normalised. I'm really looking to treat this game as a laid-back vehicle to enjoy the story, atmosphere, and potential character relationships I can develop from those; not to be placed into a constant battle for any gameplay-related content whatsoever that you either fully get on board with or get left behind from entirely. I haven't played security or medical in a while but I don't doubt that the same gameplay issues probably still crop up there -- the only caveats I can think of for those departments, though, are that security and medical-related situations can sometimes get serious enough to merit the preparatory legwork being put in.

It feels a bit like some kind of switch trips the second people detect 'gameplay' cropping up in any sense, a bit like someone just flicked their roleplay switch off and replaced them with a weird, semi-IC caricature of what the character used to be. Watching the full engineering department stampede towards a breach that only needs one person to fix it until six people are crowding the hallway with inflatables and voidsuits, or all of security showing up to pretend like they don't know what a changeling is for the third time today, or physicians motoring out of the GTR at light speed because they think the responders might not be fast enough -- maybe it's just hitting me particularly acutely at this point but I really am sick of it. I spent a large portion of my break playing CM, and I can say with absolute confidence that even the most die-hard powergamers there -- a game that's a glorified team deathmatch with a fraction of the worldbuilding and roleplay atmosphere Aurora offers ( or should be offering) -- don't even come close to matching the level of devoted, slavish dedication to failsafing the ship that Aurora players can manage. The problem only exacerbates at higher pops too, I think, where the already limited amount of 'stuff to do' being divided among so many players leaves them with far more time to invest effort into showing off their optimised routines.

A related issue is how high-intensity antag stuff seems to still hang over the server like a spectre -- we are at the point where one single antag main with enough means and motivation can casually kill half the manifest once red alert turns all your co-workers into brainless squad marines marching off to the crew armoury to play at trying to gank the antag (and dying en masse to punji traps or welder bombs or just an assault rifle, you name it), and I feel like maybe the possibility of these rounds cropping up is what's helped to feed and encourage this kind of behaviour? I think it definitely contributes.

My point, really, is that I genuinely wonder if this is what people enjoy having the server atmosphere feel like. I don't really feel like I'm part of a department when I log into Aurora now -- in fact, the ideal manifest for me would be one where the server is full in every department except my own. I hate having co-workers because I know from experience that having other people in your department is almost never treated as an opportunity for working together these days, especially when having higher character turnover like myself contributes to you having a lack of 'recognition' from the established names in the field. Having a fuller department instead just means you're being sucked into an ever-worsening battle royale for stuff to do whether you like it or not. People will not wait even ten seconds before mashing out a .hResponding! into their radio when someone reports a vending machine throwing stuff around, or a power alarm here, or an atmosphere alarm there, or a greimorian somewhere else. Past a certain pop threshold and once secret is taking precedence over extended, it feels like people just log in to sit around in a glorified waiting room hoping someone more interesting than themselves will cause something to happen, and then the second that finally occurs the starting gun fires and everyone races off. I think people would actually have more fun if they sat back for a microsecond and actually roleplayed moving towards things, getting their gear together, and overall just treated it more like an extension of the opportunity to tell a story together rather than an opportunity to 'fix the problem' like it's literally just a video game. Maybe there's some kind of clout-chasing going on here too, I don't know, or maybe it is just a really pathetic form of validhunting where you aren't even hunting another player but the breach they left behind.

You can always opt out of this behaviour and just play very laid-back on your own initiative, of course, but then you wind up being pigeonholed into playing a character archetype that would feasibly sit around peering at the camera console or monitoring computer or whatever else while other people actually get on with performing their iRP function. It's fundamentally very difficult to try and play characters that are meant to be industrious, dutiful, hardworking and caring etc. without also backing that up by participating fully in the rat race for whatever department you're part of. I've been back for like a handful of days at this point and I already find it to be exhausting -- I cannot express my distaste for the current 'meta' of preparing response kits/loadouts/whatever else every round for upwards of 20 minutes on end for the sole purpose of having the best chance at being the guy who gets to fix the problem when someone calls about a broken window across the ship an hour later, and I wish I was exaggerating.

Am I just seeing the problem exacerbating in the light of high-intensity canon events becoming more of the norm? I know things were always somewhat like this, but I can't shake the feeling that the problem has only gotten worse since I've been away. How has one of the most gameplay-lite servers on the hub wound up feeling like more of a chore to fit into in terms of expectations and character setup than something like CM has? I really am curious to know what other people think here, whether it's specifically related to engineering (my current bugbear for veteran players and/or characters exterminating the remotest hint of anything going wrong with the ship at record speed) or to other departments.

[Rabid Animal]

28 minutes ago, Omicega said:

You could break a window in the chapel on highpop these days and if someone called it out you'd have three engineers minimum showing up to squabble over who gets to click the window frame with some reinforced glass.

This is an issue that stems from players wanting things to do, and not having things to do. If destruction was more encouraged as something antags /do/ engineering would likely be less prone to jump on every little thing - you can only sit around the engineering lobby rping about nothing or working some weird niche project that gets stonewalled by code blue so many times before you crave literally any kind of gameplay. 

You can see how destruction is discouraged by the fact you can't repair the outer hull, and nearly all welding tanks or any other way to make a bomb were removed from the map. Engineering doesn't even /have/ the tools to do their job appropriately. Now I'm not saying the ship should blow up every round, I'm just saying having more to do would make the down time feel better.

 

30 minutes ago, Omicega said:

I haven't played security or medical in a while but I don't doubt that the same gameplay issues probably still crop up there -- the only caveats I can think of for those departments, though, are that security and medical-related situations can sometimes get serious enough to merit the preparatory legwork being put in.

While I do play engineering and therefore understand where the issue lies there, I don't play med or sec; from what I understand as an outsider looking in is that its not as bad but people definitely have their preferences. I actually think its an opposite issue where they only ever have gameplay and if they stop to rp they can impact the round negatively, which creates this tension of 'always needing to be good or else.' You can see this in effect when you try to rp with medical over minor issues or projects and get shuffled out to make room for the possibility of an actual emergency. Or when security refuses to follow procedure on someone they know is an antag because if they escape there is meta knowledge they'll cause trouble. See: every vampire who acts kind of weird and gets locked in isolation or interrogation for an hour.

 

40 minutes ago, Omicega said:

You can always opt out of this behaviour and just play very laid-back on your own initiative, of course, but then you wind up being pigeonholed into playing a character archetype that would feasibly sit around peering at the camera console or monitoring computer or whatever else while other people actually get on with performing their iRP function

I suffered this exact issue playing engineering on the old map, so its not a new issue but it 100% is much worse than it used to be. There is a reason I started playing departments with strictly RP focused gameplay - service, science, etc. 

 

 

I've thought about this on and off for a long time and it almost always is a major contributor to whenever I take a break from the server. I don't know the exact cause, and all my solutions tend to be nuclear in flavor. I remember playing on bay eons ago and these issues didn't crop up; they had almost no lore and never ran cannon events but I don't think that's the issue. I think their laid back approach to antagonism helped a lot, people were less thirsty for action because there was /always/ action, it was a nice break when there was less going on, it made the laid back RP feel more meaningful. As it stands now, people loose their mind over sextended as if extended has ever been a bad thing. My advice? play the game as if every round is extended, yeah your shit might get interrupted but thats okay - at least you're not twiddling your thumbs while antags get set up.

I also think think there might be some issues with how aurora approaches gameplay, in the RP should inform gameplay, not the other way around. Game design is hard and I wont claim to be any good at it, but I consistently see development decisions that seem somewhat backwards to me that are made in the name of 'RP' not 'gameplay.' So, as the gameplay becomes more and more stagnant, people look for more and more ways to have 'fun' by actually playing the game. There's a balance to be had somewhere, but idk if my input would even be particularly valuable.

 

Regardless of all that;
I understand your frustration. Be the change you want to see, ignore other people being shitters. I see groups of people pop up who really can change a department for the better by choosing to do these things and inspiring other people to do the same. Server culture doesn't change overnight.

[Mr.Popper]

As an engineering main I understand where you're coming from. People are eager to fix problems as they crop up, and I guess there is some "competition" in the sense that if you don't do it, someone else will, yet I don't think you should see it that way. What's more important to me, and this is just me OOC, is that everyone is doing their fair share of the work so that one person isn't bogged down and kept from RPing with the others. It does get silly and even tedious having an overflow of engineers for one small problem, yet in a department where most work is a team effort those instances are in themselves opportunities for RP. Also, we usually don't know how severe the damage in a breach is until someone is there so it's easy to overcompensate, and unlike sending five security officers to deal with one rowdy drunk there is little to no drawback to having extra engineers when the integrity of the ship and lives of everyone aboard are at stake. We're not talking about forcing someone out of the round where they can't RP, we're doing the exact opposite; restoring sections of the ship so that people can RP in them (ie. yesterday when the entire service department was vented, taking every service member's gameplay loop until it was fixed).

I do agree that people go overkill sometimes, particularly with the more trivial jobs like vendor repair, but it all depends on context. If you're chilling with your coworkers enthusiastically talking about sports it might be weird and distracting (depending on the character) to blast off at the first mention of a faulty machine. But if you're sitting around the lobby doing nothing running off is 100% fair. Also, how you fix those minor things should be considered. If your character is sociable they should probably exchange some words with the person reporting the issue, but again if there's no one to actually RP with then speed running it's fair enough. In cases like that, I don't see anything wrong with getting the RP-free work done as quickly as possible so that you can get back to the RP. Why would you want to spend valuable time in the round writing prose about your character cutting some wires that no one but a ghost or two will see? The same applies to basic start-of-round setup like the engine.

[Fyni]

I agree very much with Rabid Animal. People jump on things happening because they want something to do. As someone who very much enjoys sitting in the cafe/library/longue/any spot and RPing, I do also like to be drawn away to do something mechanical and to add roleplay on top of it. Antags should have the capacity to blow things up restored a little - more fuel tanks, more bombs and I think the Aurora should have more random events of varying intensity more often. Engineering jumping to the emitter on hivebots shows that engineering need more exciting things to deal with.

[Sheeplets]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

Honestly, Aurora has always felt like sort of a 'feast or famine' kind of environment. Pacing feels way too quick for what we want to be, just as a consequence of being an SS13 server, and it's pretty rare to find a sweet spot when it comes to engagement versus urgency. You're either getting bored, or you're stuck in the trenches while everything is on fire around you. So I think it's fair to assume that these people who are generally starving for something to occupy themselves with are also worried about things picking up too quickly and getting out of control. So they lunge at the opportunity to jump on issues as they appear - because 75% of the time they're either competing with half a dozen people for crumbs, or they're trying to get the jump on things before they get overwhelmed. Usually both. It's probably different with Engineering, since you specifically mentioned that - beelining towards vendors honestly doesn't really sound very exciting to me, and it sucks to be peeled away from interactions to pulse wires for ten minutes.

For clarity, I'm only subjectively looking at this through the lens of a Medical player, so I'm not operating with a full understanding of how things work elsewhere. But with Medical you constantly toe a line between your cases being either non-issues capable of being handled by a single person while five more patiently wait for their opportunity to play, too, or immediate life or death scenarios that offer zero opportunity to pace yourself and RP things. In one of those latter cases where everything's falling apart? It makes it unimaginably hard to prioritize playing your character over playing the game without also feeling like you're placing a burden on your teammates and jeopardizing other peoples' rounds. I share your frustrations and I wish we could roleplay things out in the way you've described without patients dying at our feet while we're trying to play out the scene, either from injuries or boredom.

As a side note, with antagonists it seems like it's excruciatingly difficult for them to be engaging without either: A) pulling punches and getting immediately shut down by an (understandably) hypervigilant crew who are extremely paranoid that they'll overdo things and sweep us away with the tide, or B) holding the round in a suffocating stranglehold so we can't wrestle control away before they've done what they intended. I don't play antagonists for that reason, and I don't envy anyone who does -- at all. They're in an impossible position that always seems to upset people. To that point, there seems to be a lack of trust between the two parties to act in good faith with one another, probably just due to poor experiences had by both in the past, and it fucks absolutely everyone over tremendously.

TL;DR - Mirroring others in this thread, I think that people behave like that because they're going stir crazy and want things to do, and more leeway to RP them without failure being a consequence. Giving more breathing room to accomplish tasks and tackle challenges without RP hindering things (and vice versa) would be a step in the right direction. I'd like it if we slowed things down and padded them out so we can better enjoy our time spent without climbing over each another for a chance be a part of the story.

Edited May 4 by Sheeplets
trimmed down, no one wants to read all of that

[rrrrrr]

Looking at this from the perspective of someone who plays engineering: I think I'm guilty of this, to be honest, mostly because when there's something to actually do --- boy, do I wanna go out there and do it. It triggers the rat portion of my brain that lights up when I "accomplish" something. I got a similar feeling when I had to fix the dishwasher at the restaurant I used to work at. The issue here is that one is a complex task that takes time (and one that I wasn't qualified to do, but had to, anyways!) and the other involves, at most, a few clicks. There is no middle-ground when it comes to fixing engineering problems in this game. You are either doing it as quickly as possible or you are not doing it. The best you can do is drag your feet and draw it out for as long as possible, which I try to do, if it isn't important. The issue is (like Sheeplets said) that people go stir crazy.

I'm actually kind of struggling to understand what the real problem you're getting at is. The reason people fix minor problems so quickly is because they are minor problems and the map is not very large. In an ideal world, you would have to do quick-time events to fix a broken vending machine. (That isn't sarcasm.) This isn't an ideal world. You click on it with a debugger and wait... or, you click on it with a screwdriver, click on something with a wire cutter, click on it again, then click on it again with a screwdriver. For the hypothetical broken window at the chapel, you click on something and wait. If there are five other guys behind you doing rock-paper-scissors to click on it, this is because they are excited that there's something to do, even if it's totally mindless.

also i like running everywhere because i like going fast

Edited May 4 by rrrrrr

[Desven]

I don’t want to sideline this thread but as a medical player, the amount of optimization is also insane. I don’t get why everyone rushes to fill air canisters to the max if they’re so rarely used. You’re even berated if you don’t do this as soon as the round starts. I would go as far as suggest to limit this behavior because you don’t need the first responder rushing in to fill an air tank that won’t be used at all (even in highly deadly situations) in the IV stand.

Also, the amount of O- blood packs is ridiculous. I would go as far as to limit it to one so that medical players are forced to actually check the blood type instead of minmaxing everything. I’ve been campaigning for a long time to add a unique blood type for Vaurcae but it hasn’t been done yet unfortunately.

[hazelmouse]

One thing engineers in particular can do to help with this problem is to delegate tasks throughout the department when they start getting gameplay. Instead of scouting maintenance, finding the blob, and immediately bolting to hard storage to kill it by your lonesome, you can ask another engineer to fetch the emitter for you. In the meantime, you scout out a good position, prepare the wires, and coordinate where you need the emitter. Now at least two people get gameplay, not one.

Engineering is mechanically always going to be most efficiently completed by just a few people working silently with optimized loadouts. Roleplay slows you down. If you want it done as quickly as possible, that's how you do it, but it's not a particularly inclusive or enjoyable way to play the department. I'd like to see people communicate and delegate tasks, and consciously try to give everyone in the department something to do even when it slows things down a little.

[Peppermint]

I agree with bits of this, disagree with others? Mostly because fighting over jobs as people rush this way and that has been a staple of SS13 in general for basically forever. We've always had medical players drag patients off of one another for something to do. We've always had officers have 4 people and a warden respond to a minor argument in the kitchen. We've constantly had every command member turn up to every single problem.

My last round a 'lil bit ago now was playing investigator and an intern grabbed up basically every task (not an issue on its own) and then just vanished off, didn't talk to the other investigators about what was going on, didn't report anything, then would just rush off to the next thing. All very annoying. It was the kind of round I'd just cryo on if I didn't have solid RP from the rest of the manifest. I suppose things like this feel a bit more common now, but they've unfortunately never been rare. There's a reason certain jobs (bartender, chef, consular/liason, investigator) are often straight up annoying to play with non-OOC friends due to how often someone will have a 'I would like a-" out of their mouth before your teammate is practically frothing at the mouth, brick in hand, ready to smash your brains out so they can press the drinks machine buttons first. 

However I think that's less your main point here? More that the departmental cohesion and actual 'job RP' has kind of faded away from aurora? As in that case I agree quite a lot. Teamwork is certainly down. I don't play very often right now due to time but I've definitely noticed that communication is pretty much dead. Very rarely will command announcements tell people what's going on. Few people will pick up their radio and actually report back. Which is strange as the easy pick-up RP is really quite solid at the moment - better than it has been for a while - so it's a strange disconnect to the interdepartmental side where people will just vanish to the four corners and usually not even mention they've fixed the vending machine or treated the broken arm. 

It can also be quite frustrating to try and enable other people - such as above with the investigator intern - only for them to decide that means they get a free pass for a big 🖕to run all over you and do whatever they'd like.

I don't really know what the fix to this is though other than to somehow mechanically enforce teamwork, but how is that going to be done? It likely won't slow people down to RP out what the disaster is, or to sort out who's going to what call, ect. There might be an argument that the setting change away from the 'just another working day' has pushed this a bit more, but even then it's just not new. I do find it a 'lil funny that people jump to 'let antags blow shit up' to the fix for absolutely everything however; as if that's going to make my engineering coworker fluff RP out the fix to a window/discuss how we've lost the screws or whatever.

[Omicega]

11 hours ago, hazelmouse said:

One thing engineers in particular can do to help with this problem is to delegate tasks throughout the department when they start getting gameplay. Instead of scouting maintenance, finding the blob, and immediately bolting to hard storage to kill it by your lonesome, you can ask another engineer to fetch the emitter for you. In the meantime, you scout out a good position, prepare the wires, and coordinate where you need the emitter. Now at least two people get gameplay, not one.

Engineering is mechanically always going to be most efficiently completed by just a few people working silently with optimized loadouts. Roleplay slows you down. If you want it done as quickly as possible, that's how you do it, but it's not a particularly inclusive or enjoyable way to play the department. I'd like to see people communicate and delegate tasks, and consciously try to give everyone in the department something to do even when it slows things down a little.

This is kind of the ideal and something that tends to only happen when you actually have a CE on capable of coordinating the department. Some of them are better at this than others, but it's really noticeable how the 'too many cooks' in engineering situation starts to fix itself with only a bit of hierarchy and delegation entering the equation.

Personally I think part of the issue stems from the server having too many slots for some departments as well as there not being enough gameplay to go around, but I'm not sure targeting those would really fix the core parts of the issue.

 

39 minutes ago, Peppermint said:

However I think that's less your main point here? More that the departmental cohesion and actual 'job RP' has kind of faded away from aurora? As in that case I agree quite a lot. Teamwork is certainly down. I don't play very often right now due to time but I've definitely noticed that communication is pretty much dead. Very rarely will command announcements tell people what's going on. Few people will pick up their radio and actually report back.

Drawing the CM comparison again here (I've been playing it a lot, sue me), what really strikes me is that doing literally any task in CM (medic, doctor, field engineer, whatever, you name it) feels like a cooperative activity where I'm working as part of one big team to accomplish a goal. Whether it's putting up some barricade to cover an inconsequential flank or scavenging for material or defibrillating someone or just firing a few stray shots to ward off a xeno coming in, everything you do feels more or less like you're working towards the same goal. By contrast, Aurora gameplay feels almost entirely competitive in its current state -- you honestly very rarely work with other players unless you're security trying to bring down an antag, or medical working on a very tough patient. Most of the time it's just a scramble for whoever's fastest on claiming something to get to do whatever it is, and I think people have genuinely just fallen into that autopiloting rut for a long time now.

 

12 hours ago, rrrrrr said:

I'm actually kind of struggling to understand what the real problem you're getting at is. The reason people fix minor problems so quickly is because they are minor problems and the map is not very large.

The problem I am getting at is that it's genuinely exhausting to try and keep on top of the race to accomplish anything relevant. I'll be the first to admit I don't know why people still jump at the chance to go and fix rampant brand intelligence the second the announcement goes out; if anything, that only confuses me more why there can't be a quick 'anyone gonna get that?' on engineering radio rather than someone frothing at the mouth to cut and mend a wire as fast as possible. I think the majority of players approach the game in a selfish and gameplay-first mindset that is pretty much the antithesis of what you should be on Aurora for -- the game barely even supports it considering there is very little to actually do in these rounds, so having everyone fall into the mentality of 'fuck you, I'm going to get mine' by jumping on every minor detail as quickly as possible only ends up making it feel worse.

Furthermore, by having every single problem jumped on as soon as it presents itself (or before it even presents itself when you pre-optimise something to make sure it can't go wrong), people actually strangle their future gameplay in the cradle. In the same way that security are encouraged to leave antagonists alive so they can come back later in the round for a second go at things via an escape with spare TC or something, I think engineers could gain something from not trying to failsafe every single thing. Literally on my third round back or something I had an apprentice stroll up to me and suggest some way to failsafe the gyrotron on the INDRA even further (beyond the already accepted hotwiring stuff which has become the standard), and to be honest all I can really think at this point is why people are so adamant that nothing should ever go wrong. If there's already not enough gameplay to keep people from scrambling all over each other to try and get whatever scraps they can (and fuck you if you're a second too slow, it's mine now), why are people always so desperate to keep it that way?

 

15 hours ago, Sheeplets said:

But with Medical you constantly toe a line between your cases being either non-issues capable of being handled by a single person while five more patiently wait for their opportunity to play, too, or immediate life or death scenarios that offer zero opportunity to pace yourself and RP things. In one of those latter cases where everything's falling apart? It makes it unimaginably hard to prioritize playing your character over playing the game without also feeling like you're placing a burden on your teammates and jeopardizing other peoples' rounds. I share your frustrations and I wish we could roleplay things out in the way you've described without patients dying at our feet while we're trying to play out the scene, either from injuries or boredom.

I know things work differently in medical. I'm leery of wading too much into that quagmire because, like any SS13 server, talking about medical optimisation and how gameplay relates to roleplay there tends to veer into a weird sort of quasi-OOC argument where people start trying to justify anything and everything in the name of medical being the altruistic extends-your-round and keeps-people-playing-the-game department. Personally I think a lot of that tends to come across in bad faith and people inflict a martyr complex on themselves then start whining about it -- the exact attitude that burnt me out of playing first responder so much, actually. Again, I still think whatever department you play in, Aurora has a strange culture of either soft or hard shaming you for not being 'good enough' at your job (and the people who grind the hell out of the game always have higher and higher expectations creeping up on you as to what 'good enough' entails). This can be not setting RCON to the 'correct' (read: subjectively correct) values, or failing to fill the air tanks at round start like @Desven said, or essentially any minor thing that diverges from being as good as the players are allowed to make it within the boundaries of the rules.

[rrrrrr]

I think a major part of this is that on CM, every task is for "your team." Every task works towards a tangible goal. This is not how things are on Aurora, at least not most of the time. Each department has a different set of skills and these very rarely overlap into a "team effort" when it comes to dealing with problems --- the only real example I can think of that would require teamwork are a hivebot beacon.

I can only think of one time where I went out of my way to check vending machines for rampant intelligence before anyone called it out. I did this because I was extremely bored and sort of tired. That's the mindset here, really. I don't see it as a "rat race" so much as "extreme boredom." People want things to do. When there is something to do, they will do it. The solution here, I guess, is to add more things to do, make mindless tasks more engaging/complex, but I'm not a coder and I'm not someone who comes up with good ideas.

[Omicega]

The solution is for people to view the extremely light gameplay Aurora offers as just a background element to the character interactions and roleplay on offer, I think. Actually effecting that is a whole different ball game, though. Adding newer, shinier, and more exciting stuff to do is addressing the symptom and not the root problem. All you'll see in that instance is more competition within departments to monopolise the new content available for their own enjoyment.

[Rabid Animal]

The fact that this doesn't happen on a server that is primarily gameplay focused should be some indication that this isn't a policy issue.

[Menroka]

I believe this is one of the fundamental problems the server is facing, so I will also lay out some thoughts in the hopes of inspiring someone smarter than me.

Competitive people will seek competition. On some servers its crew vs antags or marines vs xenos. Where do you find competition on Aurora?
For sec officers it might still be crew vs antag, but I dont play that department, so I can't really comment on that situation. In medical and engineering, you only deal with the aftermath of the antags actions. So the analogy of validhunting the broken window is actually pretty fitting.

Besides competition, there is also the element of boredom and conscientiousness. The higher you are in conscientiousness, the more agonizing the feeling of boredom is. Making a conscientious character is even encouraged by the setting, since everyone who is unfit for duty will quickly be booted.
How do you align a highly conscientiousness character with the slow pace of HRP? Thats difficult and I sadly dont have a complete answer. From an idealistic and unrealistic viewpoint, the way this is solved by creative people in the real world is through innovation and creative problem solving. Making up these 'ready for anything' routines is actually an implementation of innovation. We face a problem in one round and try to understand what we could have done better to achieve a better outcome. Thats how innovation works, but I'm not saying that implementation is a good solution.
Presenting problems to all of the departments, which constantly require this creative problem solving is an impossible task, which we have put on the shoulders of antags and later it will be the storyteller, who is faced with the same problem.
Typically restrictions are what breeds creativity, but I dont know how to implement that in a fun way. Just applying a randomized removal of stuff seems to fall a little bit flat.

So how do we deal with the conflict of boredom and conscientiousness/industriousness?
Authority is one solution. A conscientious character will be happy to follow the orders of a CE, even if they are boring.
The optimal outcome would be to apply that consciencious effort in a manner which stimulates RP, but how to achieve that in a generalized manner is unclear to me.

[Boggle08]

It is hard to actually make fun for yourself here.
Seriously, most of the departments here get their gameplay from reacting to shit that happens around them. This would be fine if we were as batshit as MRP, but as Menroka put succinctly, we’re playing highly conscientious characters that don’t cause trouble.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the lore team, an antag, or a vetted story teller role: they all exist to give everyone something to do, but you can’t guarantee quality, consistency, or uniform satisfaction with any of those. Because all three are humans that are Fallible and can’t be online 24/7.

It feels like, it feels like the ship needs to have some kind of generic goal or purpose to work towards, because almost every single role aboard the ship is so passive in nature.
 

On 04/05/2024 at 15:34, Omicega said:

The solution is for people to view the extremely light gameplay Aurora offers as just a background element to the character interactions and roleplay on offer, I think. 

RP alone isn’t the solution when we have two threads up complaining about character retention/turnover, and the fact engineering’s population crashed when we tried to start the round with a fully charged main battery. I don’t think we have to give every department an overhaul, just something that’s worth working towards that doesn’t need some special third party to spoon feed us all the fun. 

Edited May 6 by Boggle08

[NothingNew]

3 hours ago, Boggle08 said:

Seriously, most of the departments here get their gameplay from reacting to shit that happens around them.

This is very much an issue with the game design of space station 13 - Things are designed to go wrong, with specific departments such as security, medical and engineering built to react and respond to the destruction of the station, each in their own part with some minor roles which have gameplay loops non-reliant on an antagonistic force - The issue with these jobs however, is that a lot of them are disconnected, meaning they do not require interaction with other players to engage with the mechanics of that job role (think Machinist, Science Department, Mining, etc). Random events such as those giant insects and space carp are designed to act as an antagonistic force which cause damages to people and the station allowing for the gameplay loops of Engineering, Security and Medical to come into play during the round, but aren't generally liked for their disruptive nature.

3 hours ago, Boggle08 said:

RP alone isn’t the solution when we have two threads up complaining about character retention/turnover, and the fact engineering’s population crashed when we tried to start the round with a fully charged main battery. I don’t think we have to give every department an overhaul, just something that’s worth working towards that doesn’t need some special third party to spoon feed us all the fun. 

Yeah, I think what Aurora would need is something for these departments to work or co-operate on that isn't reliant on an antagonistic force and is consistent throughout each round. Preferably something co-operative rather than competitive. (I don't have any ideas for that though, get the eggheads on it.)

3 hours ago, Boggle08 said:

It doesn’t matter if it’s the lore team, an antag, or a vetted story teller role: they all exist to give everyone something to do, but you can’t guarantee quality, consistency, or uniform satisfaction with any of those. Because all three are humans that are Fallible and can’t be online 24/7.

I do wish Aurora had a more OOC-ly lenient culture when it comes to dying in-round or getting injured, especially considering how Aurora is one of fairly few servers permitting re-spawns, sure waiting twenty minutes isn't all that great, but there are plenty of other servers that are more lenient towards having your character die that don't offer re-spawns at all, instead requiring you to wait until the next round. It would provide more opportunities for the big three to perform their job throughout a round.

[maniacalFowl]

I feel like for a lot of people the reasons why we all stick to SS13 as a roleplaying platform are because it's free, easy to run, an interesting setting, and interesting mechanics. Obviously we can all argue about this until the end of time but we're all coming back for beautiful mating between mechanics and the RP. I think what you'll see a lot from people in this thread (I see you engi mains) is that people like doing things

On 03/05/2024 at 11:33, Omicega said:

It feels a bit like some kind of switch trips the second people detect 'gameplay' cropping up in any sense, a bit like someone just flicked their roleplay switch off and replaced them with a weird, semi-IC caricature of what the character used to be. Watching the full engineering department stampede towards a breach that only needs one person to fix it until six people are crowding the hallway with inflatables and voidsuits

As someone that works on a submarine you will see that this is true even in the real world, an environment very similar to the games in that we're isolated to a giant metal tube. Casualties are exciting, casualties are frightening, people will just default to what they know. Maybe even a bit of standing around in the most inconvenient places. All the time between those moments are you talking to some other guy in a chair five feet away about how Mormons live inside the walls of your house. And for me that's okay? That's why I'm an engi main. My problems are generally simple and easy to solve with only slight variation so I can RPmaxx, but sometimes the grind gets old.

On 05/05/2024 at 20:19, Boggle08 said:

Seriously, most of the departments here get their gameplay from reacting to shit that happens around them. This would be fine if we were as batshit as MRP, but as Menroka put succinctly, we’re playing highly conscientious characters that don’t cause trouble.

 

What I think a lot of people will find is that players will find rounds more interesting when they either have to deal with a problem within their normal gameplay loop that they have to handle differently or they get involved into another departments loop. I'm going to cry for buffing antags or nerfing sec here because it mechanically allows for the gameplay lasso to ring in more departments. You'll find more people talking constantly about a round that went completely wild when the entire server is involved. You can see this very clearly when a Rev round actually pops off with something other than pay-cuts or a Merc-round that rolls over Security. Sure Security is probably going to mald about it in D-chat but you're never going to have a round that everyone will be happy about. Force Sec to actually use their two collective brain-cells to formulate a strategy that isn't storming the bridge and shooting the hostage for the boarders and chances are it will be more memorable for all players involved.

On 03/05/2024 at 12:28, Rabid Animal said:

Game design is hard and I wont claim to be any good at it, but I consistently see development decisions that seem somewhat backwards to me that are made in the name of 'RP' not 'gameplay.' So, as the gameplay becomes more and more stagnant, people look for more and more ways to have 'fun' by actually playing the game. There's a balance to be had somewhere

I also think that Aurora as a server has culturally shifted in a way to neuter antags for RP. Sure, there are weapons or items that do things a little too funky like with Punji sticks giving level 3 infections but goddamn did I laugh my ass off when I stepped on one and then watched another engineer come running to help me only to step on the exact same trap. This is the stuff I keep coming back for. Sure I died, but I think it was worth it.

Edited May 8 by maniacalFowl

[Bejewledpot]

I think a lot of the optimization for engineering comes from the fact that it’s a major pain in the ass to fix anything when they do break. The supermatter or INDRA breaking does massive damage that can require anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half to fix. On top of creating a lot of hot gas that bleeds into medical and now the machine shop. A lot of bombs do pretty painful damage to the ship. And the damage that gets done is hard to fix, impossible to fix, or is trivial but painfully repetitive. I think of all of the various consoles and such that get broken that are impossible to fix. And even when they are, they’re not  pixel shifted anymore. Because things are a pain in the ass, fluff rp fixing them would take ages, so people just don’t. This is especially a problem for low department pop. Disposals is painful to try and fix because of how many steps it is and it being fickle with its directional travel over Just Works.

 

All of this to me is stuff that takes away from my ability to roleplay. I have to stop what I’m doing and go fix a problem. 
i don’t know how to fix it either, but I’m tired of every role coming with the stress of a job. It feels bad. 
i think maybe a lot of it comes with the fact that doing good and doing all of the preventative stuff makes it so i don’t get yelled at by particularly aggressive command characters.