More Slots during Oddysey rounds

[wowzewow]

Either that, or make it so Command has to add them. (Even then, I'm unsure, since they'll probably be busy at the oddysey stuff)

 

I don't think this'll mess with balance too much, since basically half or more of the ship's down on the away site. Kind of sucks to be locked out of a round because you missed roundstart. Also kind of sets a hard cap on the amount of players we can really have (because who the hell wants to play Off-duty?) Can't really top the server charts even though we literally are getting the most amount of players interested as possible.

Edited Saturday at 01:37 by wowzewow

[Melariara]

More slots doesn't equal more work stations, more gear, more anything so on and so forth to support those additional roles.

[dessysalta]

A more feasible idea could be to alter the regulations regarding off-duty crew and volunteers. Some sort of stipulation that off-duty volunteers are still covered by insurance and may receive bonuses, but have some kind of increased scrutiny (AKA "if you do this outside of Odyssey you better have a really damn good reason"). I dunno what exactly would or could go into that, but it feels like a pleasant middleground. 

That said it still relies on an XO, but we've relied on XOs in the past during canon events anyways. I doubt it'd be a huge deal.

[Shimmer]

13 hours ago, Melariara said:

More slots doesn't equal more work stations, more gear, more anything so on and so forth to support those additional roles.

Not all that big of an issue if Operations are given additional funds in an Odyssey round to order whatever equipment is necessary. Bounties aren't really a focus anyways, so I feel like it should be a thing already.

 

Even then; the slot scarcity only ever really applies to security and medical, especially paramedics. With the latter, you already have 2 extra paramedic belts in storage, and there's enough hyposprays in medical to outfit the entire ship.

Edited Saturday at 16:36 by Shimmer

[Mr.Popper]

22 minutes ago, Shimmer said:

Even then; the slot scarcity only ever really applies to security and medical

I'm against increased slots for this exact reason. No other department has this problem, so really it'd just be raising the amount of sec and med characters, emphasizing their gameplay loops even more than they already are. Just look at planetary events where sec typically make up like half the manifest. It sucks not getting your roll, especially if you only have one character, but I think encouraging players to branch out to underplayed jobs is an overall positive. 

If Aurora's pop reaches the state of every department being regularly filled during Odyssey I would support this, though even then it should probably depend on the amount of actors/server pop.

[wowzewow]

I definitely think we shouldn't be kneecapping ourselves to a hard limit. I think we should definitely rethink how we handle our playercount.

The fact our server just starts falling apart once we're out of this "goldilocks zone" of 20-50 players is not particularly healthy for growth.

[Shimmer]

26 minutes ago, wowzewow said:

I definitely think we shouldn't be kneecapping ourselves to a hard limit. I think we should definitely rethink how we handle our playercount.

The fact our server just starts falling apart once we're out of this "goldilocks zone" of 20-50 players is not particularly healthy for growth.

As it stands the only departments that I see benefiting from this (and having the slot competition to warrant such a change) are security and medical (paramedics to be extra precise), and neither of those need additional encouragement for playing.

People should be discouraged from playing them on Odyssey rounds, at least so that other departments are filled. If we cut out a hard limit you will see an extreme lean towards Security as a department.

[wowzewow]

12 hours ago, Shimmer said:

As it stands the only departments that I see benefiting from this (and having the slot competition to warrant such a change) are security and medical (paramedics to be extra precise), and neither of those need additional encouragement for playing.

People should be discouraged from playing them on Odyssey rounds, at least so that other departments are filled. If we cut out a hard limit you will see an extreme lean towards Security as a department.

Well. Can't we just increase every *OTHER* job other than Medical and Security?

[Triogenix]

I've barely played odyssey rounds so I won't participate much in the discussion about them specifically, instead just do the thing I always do and bring up experiences running events and how that relates to this situation.

So - we've run events with basically uncapped departments and roles, the ones I'm most familiar with being Silicon Nightmares. I generally think they're nice - I won't comment on the ratio of people per department or whatever, since frankly, that's irrelevant; what's more relevant is that people could play the game in the role they wanted to have fun. That's the end goal of the game, and this type of thing works towards that end goal. I think where the issues begin to arise, though, is handling that many people. Not in a technical capacity but on command members. I remember one of the Silicon Nightmares events saw command spend more than the first hour of the event just trying to wrangle and organize everything in-round (though there's no other real way to organize things since you don't know the command roster till the rolls are in but anyway) - I can easily see similar situations developing with odyssey's, where command needs to spend a significant amount of time wrangling kittens before things start, resulting in overall less fun rounds.

There's probably a ton of ways to implement this without issue, I just wanted to highlight this specific issue since it's something I remember clearly and had five minutes to type up.

[hazelmouse]

As others have said, the Horizon is mapped with a particular maximum number of each job in mind, so simply increasing the number of slots wouldn't work very well.

I think the best solution in the long-term would be a dedicated expeditionary department to sort people into for expeditions with equipment dedicated specifically to volunteers. There may be only two paramedic slots, but you may be sorted into an expedition's roster as a medic, with medical supplies sourced from expeditionary storage, if you have first-aid training and more medics are required.

Edited yesterday at 17:44 by hazelmouse