Aurora's Security Dilemma - A Cautious Balancing Suggestion Regarding The Armory

[Fluffy]

3 hours ago, Susan said:

[...]

Ganking is against the rules, and seeing 4 unexpected dudes with assault rifles and armor around the ship and going "hey they might (very likely, are) hostile let's get tools to fight them in case we're right" isn't powergaming, that leaves a neat space in which it's possible to acquire the things without being rolled over by the antagonist(s)

[Faye <3]

i used to play a lot of head of security. i really, really don't think anyone who recommends you order from Ops or ask a scientist for a research weapon understand the kind of time constraint placed on security, and in particular the HoS. you cannot arm pre-emptively, that is powergaming and you will get into trouble. once trouble starts, even getting all of your officers to the armory and equipped can feel like forever especially if the antagonists are actively pushing an objective or hurting people, let alone moving to respond. the hypothetical situation of 'there are heavily armed people aboard who are unknown to the ship but also aren't causing problems' is, to be honest, a very far-fetched idea. security in general barely has time to get equipped with their regular stuff that's already there waiting for them, let alone waiting for RnD or Ops (who may not even be there, in the case of RnD) to produce or order things for them. additionally, antags will 9/10 times have radio channel access. the second the HoS says 'maybe we need ordered weapons', the antagonist will be able to respond and it's just as likely that those weapons are intercepted. in either case, security now has to wait for either RnD or operations to produce the equipment without interference, then go get that equipment without being stopped. to re-iterate, a lot of the time, even equipping in the armory with things that are already there waiting for you can take too long.

additionally, who the hell is proposing research weapons as an effective alternative to the armory guns? if you think the armory kit is  overpowered for security, you're forgetting the kind of things that RnD produces. I've turned down many, many, many research guns on HoS rounds because they're so laughably hyperlethal it's ridiculous. 

 

Edited May 9 by Faye <3

[Omicega]

18 hours ago, Nol4 said:

I've never once seen a shortage of volunteers at the crew armory, or of engineers already volunteering to point emitters at things, for example. There's a whole thread up right now expressing frustration about how non-sec departments swarm what little tasks they have.) This gives those players who do want to be involved the option to participate, whereas now they simply don't have it short of joining the already highly competitive sec roles.

Regarding the thread about non-sec players not having enough stuff to do, I'd really rather the focus there stayed on giving those departments more things related to their actual jobs to do (the engineering busywork stuff being a great example; just let me open random panels on the floor and play a totally cosmetic 'channeling' animation to represent fiddling with wires or something) than shifting focus to any crew armoury stuff. I loathe few things on the Horizon more than the crew armoury, actually, since it's right up there with the ship guns as a big bright indicator of the hardline shift away from casual corporate roleplay that Aurora ended up taking. When rounds do go to enough of a red alert to cause a crew armoury rush, it usually just feels like all hope of roleplay left in the round has gone out the window because everyone is frothing at the mouth to play a really shitty TDM game instead. I can count the number of people who feel like they stay fully in-character after the crew armoury opens on the fingers of one hand.

This might also be a hot take, but I don't think security is as popular as it is just because it leads into fighting the antagonist. Security just has a pretty comfy feel relative to other departments -- to echo a sentiment I raised in that other thread, it's one of the few places on Aurora where I feel like I'm working with my co-workers rather than against them. Engineering and medical both have far, far too many cooks in them for all but the most extreme rounds, and most of the time you just end up tripping one another up trying to double-up on tasks that really don't require more than one person at a time; conversely, I'm pretty much always happy to take someone else along to any security call that comes in when I play officer, since the potential for bouncing more roleplay around is there even if it's not antag-related, and if it is antag-related then it's also nice to have backup and some insurance against being left dead in a maintenance tunnel.

Even on extended, I think security offers a vibe that other departments tend to miss out on sometimes. There's a very natural soft impetus to wander the ship, poke around, check in with people and just generally do stuff that other departments seem to lack -- the same thing that keeps engineering and medical in their respective glass boxes staring at consoles. That natural popularity doesn't help matters when it's combined with the added draw of fighting antagonists and having added gameplay beyond that, although why exactly anyone in their right mind would want to fight antags on Aurora in its current state is something I really can't answer.

[Fluffy]

37 minutes ago, Faye &lt;3 said:

you cannot arm pre-emptively, that is powergaming and you will get into trouble

Science routinely (when there's someone around) builds weapons for range testing, the Machinist can make a mech/hardsuits without weapons (or with shitty weapons) installed and keep it parked in the machinist bay, that's not powergaming, that's doing your job, it's in your job description that you do those things, it's part of your role, that you're playing; miners aren't powergaming because they mined a fuckton metric of minerals, and neither are the two examples i gave because they did their jobs, that's what they're supposed to do, powergaming would be like an engineer starting to make a 5-depth stack of walls around the department, or medbay doctors living inside a spacesuit with internals, or the barman ordering an heavy armor and bullets for his shotgun, things that would not make sense to do for a character that is doing a certain role

And when the threat do show up? Print those guns and put them in the mech/hardsuit, get those firing range pins out, slap the good firing pins in and give them to security, equip and hand out those hardsuits you already made, get the engineers to come to the bridge and build a bunker out of it because you suspect the 4 himeans would try to hijack the ship, and so on

 

50 minutes ago, Faye &lt;3 said:

antags will 9/10 times have radio channel access. the second the HoS says 'maybe we need ordered weapons', the antagonist will be able to respond and it's just as likely that those weapons are intercepted

A conflict to get those weapons, having a variation between the different rounds is precisely the point against the gameplay being boring. Things need to vary and have a wide range of possible approaches, and that includes having a wide range of things that can go wrong, that's a necessity for the game (and gameplay, and consequently roleplay) to be engaging and entertaining

If most of the rounds are a choreography of the same 5 or so scenarios, you end up with the game being boring, you don't want that because most people want to play something that is entertaining, and will either not play here or play few rounds per unit of time, both of which are obviously bad (though one is worse than the other)

As much as RP is entertaining in its own way, it is insufficient to sustain the server by itself, it becomes very hard to justify playing more than a few rounds per week of the same thing and there's only so many things you can chat about, this leads to low pop, high character turnover rate, having 60 people connected in the lobby and barely 15 people connected and playing, etc. etc.

The game needs to be entertaining around the clock, to do that it needs variety, to have variety it needs many "components" (be it mechanics, approaches, plans, you name it) that interact with each other and can go wrong in different ways

If they get to Science to intercept, get the Operations order instead; if they get to the Operations order, get the Engineering flamethrowers or emitters, open the crew armory, get that mech, get that hardsuit instead, send a distress beacon and get those ghostroles to help you solve the issue, and so on, you have many options, SS13 is a game choke-full of options and interacting systems, that's the whole selling point of this platform after all

I can probably write 10 pages about this topic, but I'll leave it at this fairly coincise summary

 

1 hour ago, Faye &lt;3 said:

additionally, who the hell is proposing research weapons as an effective alternative to the armory guns? if you think the armory kit is  overpowered for security, you're forgetting the kind of things that RnD produces. I've turned down many, many, many research guns on HoS rounds because they're so laughably hyperlethal it's ridiculous. 

If they are unbalanced, they need and will be balanced, that's a development concern whose solution isn't ignoring the mechanic existing; to know how to balance them, we need to see them used, we need to experience them, we need to see what and how they interact in rounds, on either side, then they can get tuned

[Rabid Animal]

This sense of over preparedness seen throughout every department in every role for every situation has made the game very boring. Security is the worst because they directly change how a round will go. It's like people forgot teamwork and interaction are part of the gameplay loop. Fluffy makes a good argument above; and I don't think a single post around has really disproved all I've been rambling on about either. I can't really articulate more than what I've said without just repeating myself, so I'll leave it at that.
 

[Omicega]

25 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

As much as RP is entertaining in its own way, it is insufficient to sustain the server by itself, it becomes very hard to justify playing more than a few rounds per week of the same thing and there's only so many things you can chat about, this leads to low pop, high character turnover rate, having 60 people connected in the lobby and barely 15 people connected and playing, etc. etc.

The game needs to be entertaining around the clock, to do that it needs variety, to have variety it needs many "components" (be it mechanics, approaches, plans, you name it) that interact with each other and can go wrong in different ways

As long as these 'components' aren't all necessarily related to violent confrontation or conflict, I can agree with this. The increased depth in many away sites I've noticed since I came back is a good start, but I still don't think moving back to a style of gameplay where all departments are soft-encouraged to prepare for it potentially being nukies is the way forwards. I think a step towards more involved and interesting away sites that can engage people in exploration is far more of a promising direction to move in than trying to repair the fundamentally broken problem with antagonists.

I've played in a few of those rounds @Faye <3 is talking about and she's right -- heads of security were (and are?) routinely nudged against overpreparing or overescalating against antagonists, even ones as round-defining as mercenary. A single traitor who knows what they're doing can bring the Horizon to its knees unless the security game aggressively 'counter-metas' everything they do; a merc team who makes good use of the intercepted radio can do so much more besides that.

High character turnover isn't necessarily related to this issue, either -- if you ask me, it's more a symptom of it being very difficult to 'break in' to more established circles sometime, and then character concepts wind up being cycled out and scrapped as they're not really having the desired return on investment.

[Jaeger Brothers]

I think the main point is time even if the trade off is us being More Powerful I perfer being able to respond to Mercs and whatever the fuck in a good amount of time and wouldn't you think the admin team would find it a bit suspicious that you convieniently havd four combat hardsuits sitting in the corner unfinished or and entire combat mech in a box also convieniently Unfinished? 

But I don't like the incredibly High lethality we have already with the only drawback being we sit in medical for a good while if we do escelate to a big firefight people should be more careful, we aren't walking tanks, using cover and suppression should be feard like a good mechanical combat system that's realistic would serve this really well sicne everybody would think twice before escelating to a gunfight.

science guns just essentially deleting the antag in one shot isn't fun for anyone well maybe for the scientist because they made somthing cool but that'll whine off when they make it every round just in case.

and even if we keep it like this I'd like some good non and less lethal options just so we could have antags survive and have the possibility of breaking out to keep their gimmick going or have a good interrogation and actually give the warden something to do, I know it's maybe a stupid Idea or Just straight up a bad one but its Disheartening to have Five hostiles announced and then only being able to process one and only being able to hear their a bit which is not always the case because the one that survived convieniently surrendred..

Edited May 9 by Jaeger Brothers

[Fluffy]

6 minutes ago, Omicega said:

I think a step towards more involved and interesting away sites that can engage people in exploration is far more of a promising direction to move in

Barely anyone wants to come to those expeditions, unless they know it will be the pirate or cult base or the likes, and that's because they're the closest thing to having a nukies experience that you can get besides tower defense and (at times, sometimes) mercs

Or the gremorian site, which is more of a CM experience

 

But yes, if it was nukies all the time, it would likewise get boring, variety is key, but that variety includes the nukies experience, and have to include it with some regularity, it also has to include some sort of ship to ship combat for example; it has to give things where you'll talk and things where you'll have a frenzy and your choices, and presence, will actually matter and can be the deciding factor between the ship greentext or redtext

It has to make the player feel like his presence matters, "I need to be in the round, my friends need me", and on the other side "Thank GOD that another engineer joined there's 3000 things to do" instead of "Ugh another guy, I better run at the first problem that pops up because it might be the only thing I get to do in this 4 hours I played today"

Then, there has to be the time where you slap down projects, you try new things, you explore the characters, you share and teach tricks, and so on

Because, variety is key, and your presence in the ship should matter for the round. Not always, but not uncommonly, and currently unless you're Sec or Med, it rarely does; it's not a coincidence Sec and Med are the fattest departments in the usual manifest, it's because you have things to do, and what you do actually matters for the round

[Sparky_hotdog]

1 hour ago, Fluffy said:

If most of the rounds are a choreography of the same 5 or so scenarios, you end up with the game being boring, you don't want that because most people want to play something that is entertaining, and will either not play here or play few rounds per unit of time, both of which are obviously bad (though one is worse than the other)

I... Like, I agree with the actual fact here, obviously. But what you are proposing is just swapping out the current choreography of equipping security at the armoury with equipping at either Ops or Research. Which is barely adding much variety (Again, given how rare the research option is, it will almost always be Ops). And while in theory there could be conflict over getting the weapons... If security NEED the guns to stand a chance against the antags, they can't fight them to get said guns.

13 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

Barely anyone wants to come to those expeditions, unless they know it will be the pirate or cult base or the likes

There are a few things you've brought up in this thread that honestly make me question how different two people's experiences can be of this game (I don't mean that to sound like I'm accusing you of not playing or making anything up, it's just really jarring to read), but this is probably the one that stood out to me the most. As someone who's been playing a lot of a xenoarch lab assistant, I have filled the Intrepid manifest with at least five people on almost all the high-pop rounds I played. That might not be loads of people from a manifest of 30, but the Intrepid only has a crew capacity in the region of 10 now anyhow, so half full, and a sixth of the Horizon, seems like more than "barely anyone".

18 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

Because, variety is key

I agree here, which is precisely why I think all these suggestions miss the point. Nerfing the armoury, or making security rely on another department, doesn't add more variance. It just changes what "normal" is for a week, before it becomes the new normal. Adding options is the way to solve gameplay feeling stale, not a band aid change to numbers or who can give you a gun.

[Fluffy]

5 minutes ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

But what you are proposing is just swapping out the current choreography of equipping security at the armoury with equipping at either Ops or Research. Which is barely adding much variety (Again, given how rare the research option is, it will almost always be Ops). And while in theory there could be conflict over getting the weapons... If security NEED the guns to stand a chance against the antags, they can't fight them to get said guns.

16 minutes ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

Nerfing the armoury, or making security rely on another department, doesn't add more variance. It just changes what "normal" is for a week, before it becomes the new normal. Adding options is the way to solve gameplay feeling stale, not a band aid change to numbers or who can give you a gun.

It isn't, research can build a metric ton of different configurations, no two guns are the same, as there's a network of dependencies: Research level? You got the mats? Someone made some chemical warcrime compounds or not? Custom circuits? Xenobio got anything interesting to use? Xenobotany? Maybe you get a chemical gun that throws acid instead? What is on the orderable manifest today? Bounties completition? Any xenoarch artifact that gives things to use or can itself be used as a weapon? Do you have the Machinist that made the mech to install the science mech weapon into? Did the atmos tech made that nerve agent to use? Did Engineering managed to make this thing that can then be used to make this other thing that can then [...]?

Of course any finite discrete system will have a finite number of combinations that it can archieve, but it won't be a choreography; sure there will be combinations that happen more often than others, but it would still be leagues beyond "go into the armory, wear one of the 3 options, take one of the 2 options for rifles, go out", and we're talking only about what you wear

 

Adding options is work, as a Dev, I like to add options, that's about half of my role

I can tell you, bar people crying and screaming that it doesn't work perfectly or how they want it to work, nothing else is more demoralizing than adding things that noone or next to noone will use; eg. I vividly remember adding an oxygen regenerator for Engineering, capable of breaking CO2 back into oxygen and carbon bars; I don't think I have ever seen it built or used once, we have an entire tank of oxygen and barely any venting ever, so that option might aswell not exist, the only thing that it archieved is taking 10 hours of my life for no return of satisfaction or fun in exchange

To make adding options be a satisfying things to do, there need to be an use for the option, if Sec or the Crew arm from a predetermined locker with a predetermined content and is expected to use that, and only that, then what am I adding an option for? It won't be used anyways, they already have the approved tools to use™

With getting those from other people, not only you give other people (roles) things to do, you give a reason and a chance for those options to be used, and if options are used, it is worthwhile, good and satisfying to add options

 

13 minutes ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

That might not be loads of people from a manifest of 30, but the Intrepid only has a crew capacity in the region of 10 now anyhow, so half full, and a sixth of the Horizon, seems like more than "barely anyone".

I mainly play Sec currently, when someone request an escort for an away site, it's more often than not that the Captain or HoS has to send someone at virtual gunpoint than finding a volunteer in my experience