Whats the problem with Extended?

[Jboy2000000]

I know this is probably going to cause some kind of argument, but I want to know, what is some people's problem with extended? Why is it so stigmatized, even on a heavy RP server? If extended gets voted in, which is rare, in and of itself, people always have little complaints and urgs and ughs, in fact, they are the same kind of complaints that get people told "don't complain about the votes" when nuke or something else gets voted, but thats not what we're here about.

Its gotten to the point where, its been two months between the times Ive seen extended rounds, the last one being in the middle of March, and the newest one being the other day. Nuclear, the gamemode thats only in our code because its an artifact from TG, has passed extended by leaps and bounds, same with cult in how often its voted into. The stigma is even noted in the server's code, until the last update, extended has the same change of getting pick in secret rotation of nuclear, a rating of one. All other game modes were three, and auto-traitor being the most likely with a rating of 5. What the ratings mean or do is beyond me, but I just quoting Skull from stuff thats been said in OOC.

[Cassie]

Okies, digging into this.

Because it's a time where chair RP is at its highest. If you don't have chair RP partners, or don't do chair RP; prepare to be bored out of your mind. If you -do- have chair RP partners, you won't have too much of an issue, until you eventually burn out from talking to the same people every day. When I ask people to branch out and dynamically cause things to happen they don't get it, "Whaaaat? Chair RP with five people? But that's haaard!", and don't realize that there's other forms of RP that aren't chair RP and don't include shutting yourself in a secluded part of the station and whispering every single damn shift.

If you're new or unrecognized, you will definitely have a hard time with this gamemode as people tend to shut themselves into their departments as if a station tsunami was on its way. Sometimes you might have a stroke of luck and find someone to RP with, then what? Well, time to introduce yourselves and go over the cliches. How exhilarating.

Another fun thing about this gamemode is that you OOC'ly know nothing dramatic is likely to happen* (*unless you're sec/command, then you will eventually find some LRP scum griffing somewhere to put to justice), so you will go and do your job. I hear the perfect ratio approved by Aurora command is 8:2 (Work to Social Interaction).

Doing your job is the most exciting thing to ever happen. Imagine the thrill of mixing the same pills, putting them in bottles and placing them in the fridge as chemist every shift. Imagine the excitement of doing the same research levels as scientist! Imagine the awe of growing the same plants as botanist. It doesn't end there! Here's the best part! You get to call crew transfer and do it all over again! YES! The same thing!

In fact, do you even need 32 other players to rock this amazingly non-repetitive mechanic? NO! We can start our own server and do it on our own, who needs anyone else. That's how amazing doing your job on a HRP server is! You see, the thing that makes the game fresh is having varied rounds, unpredictability (which needed on both LRP and HRP servers to have fun, just in different ways), and some element of how each job will have fun - the reason why sec, medical and engineering get stacked the most on extended is because of the former, they have variation each round whereas many job roles such as science do not (and only often get stacked as a chair RP role).

Other job roles often do not become useful until they are needed often (hint: not extended, unless an event is happening), otherwise you are often finding yourself standing for hours until a rare request comes in. IE: Geneticist, xenobiology, virology.

In all seriousness, this is coming from someone who actually doesn't mind extended. Just giving some insight of how extended can often be.

[Tainavaa]

I joined an extended round as Warden earlier today. Since it was nearing prime time, I was fully expecting chucklefucks, griefers, and little shits galore. Instead, throughout the whole round, literally no prisoners came into the brig. I had NOBODY to deal with. It was an entire round of chair RP. Thankfully I had someone to RP with. If I didn't, it would have been a pretty bad round.

I want to emphasize the lack of prisoners in my brig that round. Literally one person came in, and that was for questioning. And he was SSD so he sat in the holding cell the entire time.

[Frances]

Nuclear, the gamemode thats only in our code because its an artifact from TG

You can't really say this. Nuclear has stayed in our code because enough people like it to keep it. It wouldn't get voted in so often if no one had any interest in it, and there is a marked difference between HRP Nuclear and LRP Nuclear.

(Also, I'm pretty sure several gamemodes being treated the exact same way in the code is not a stigma)

Anyway, if I had to guess why Extended rarely happens, it's because there's a fair amount of Secret rounds that are uneventful for most people. If anything, I'd say roughly 50% of my time playing on Secret, under any role (including a lot of security and medbay), I end up making it to the transfer shuttle with little to nothing interrupting my RP. Antags rarely go all-out, and it pretty much caused Secret to become the new Extended.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, especially with the code changes increasing the chances for Extended to appear in Secret.

[mrimatool]

This has come up so much that it's become tedious to talk about, but basically. Not everyone has time to sit and play four hours of work and would much rather have a more exciting round. I like extended sometimes, but the lack of extended doesn't mean there's a lack of RP. It takes more skill to RP being terrified then it does to rp writing a register for patients.

[Hackie]

Thee's a simple reason why I don't like extended, I'm burned out.

I can not enjoy extended, or hell even SECRET. I have been playing this game for a long time, I used to be able to enjoy eight hour rounds but, I'm not in the mood for it anymore. I don't have the time, nor the patience to wait for a subtle, and perhaps fulfilling conclusion. Chair roleplay is boring. To simply put it, if I want Nuke that actually has some semblance of roleplay, I choose Aurora. If I want anything else, there is a nice selection of other servers that do everything else well, better, or puts a spin on the concept.

[Jakers457]

Extended is when I ERP in the Warden's office, for reals.

[Guest]

Extended is when I ERP in the Warden's office, for reals.

 

Ban he.

In all seriousness, Cassie put it very nicely. Variation is the spice of life, no? Then it is spice of RP as well. I wish to see events have a comeback, as they have been weak and far between by my count. It doesn't need to be an insane special scenario, just something different. For example, admins spawn a special object for scientists to study, special visitor, official, laxed rules on crime or special antagy roles during extended. All of these would help make the gamemode fun and less chair-RP oriented.

Extended shouldn't mean it's workday, it should only mean that the round won't end in a violent and abrupt way.

[Jamini]

I will maintain a simple fact:

"Most people are unimaginative."

This isn't a jab directed at anyone in particular. It is simply something I've noted over a long time playing. Unless given a push, or a suggestion, or a wild card to go hog-wild, people tend to just... not do anything.

I personally rarely get bored in extended. Be it chair RP, building a supermatter engine in place of the PA, playing around with high-level tech, or trying a department I'm unfamilier with: I can always find some way to occupy myself.

That said, most people simply don't.

[Guest]

I enjoy Extended quite a lot, since I main Captain, I can actually give my Heads projects I want completed and such.

[Jboy2000000]

So basically what I see is, most people see extended, as most people see nuke. The problem isn't the mode, its the people playing the mode. If done right, they could both be very inciting, fun rounds. I don't know if general or suggestion would be the right place, but maybe we could start pooling ideas together, stuff for people to do during extended, keep it fresh. Like Xander said, there is stuff you can do.

[Skull132]

Let me take you on a ride in my Delorian. We'll go back a year.

It is now 2014, summer. YeahChris is the Head Admin, I'm the Head Developer, and we have cupcakes and stuff. At that point, Extended became overly prevalent on Aurora. Chris and I didn't really mind at first, we rolled with it, letting the community play out their decision as was fitting. But. After a good few months of this, we noticed something going sour. There was... Literally nothing going on on the server. It was all just, "Sit down and talk", rinse and repeat. And there was no conflict.

We had nearly 24/7 extended, but it was extended without any meaningful RP involved. It turned into a highschool simulator for kids. It was boring, ridiculous, unexciting.

At that point, Chris and I came to a conclusion: antagonists are necessary for the interaction between characters. Now, something else to consider, for the sake of added perspective, is the fact that we did not want people to rely on events to create that conflict and to foster that interaction. Our admins were not selected for that purpose. As such, we chose to rely on what the players themselves could do, with assistance when needed.

But, back to the decision. We made our choice, and we started introducing antagonists into gameplay again. After 3 months of active work, this included the addition of antagonists into extended rounds, we finally crawled out of that pit, and went to where we are right now. The present situation, a mix of extended and antagonist rounds, has persisted ever since November 2014.

That's the history lesson part of why the staff strive of have a mix of extended and antagonists.

Let's look at another view point: storytelling.

SS13 is all about storytelling. At least, on a HRP server. On other servers, maybe not so much, or in a different way. But, besides that. What does a story need to actually function? It needs a source of conflict. It needs an antagonist in some form, it needs antagonistic action to be the driving force. And no, an antagonistic force doesn't need to be a brutal serial murderer, but they need to be someone who creates conflict. Back when we flipped to near 24/7 extended, we lost the driving conflict from the server. There was none, and the roleplay suffered. Heavily. When you flip onto extended only, you'll start seeing puppetmaster stories (where one player controls everything, as he's the storyteller -- these stories rarely have resolution to them, an end), and a repeat of sobstories by insecure characters or something like that. It gets boring. Uninteresting. It did get there.

Antagonists are the easiest way of adding conflict into a situation. As such, they are one of the most readily accessible tool to create an actually meaningful story. And even better, anyone (minus banned folk) can be one! So, the chance of playing out their story is offered to everyone, and not just people picked by admins (if we were to rely on admin events).

But, that is not to say that Extended doesn't have a place. It does. Extended is neat for allowing people to recover. Basically, it's what should come after a climax (an antagonist round), so that the interaction had in that round doesn't lose meaning. You need both to have a functional story. So, again, a balance is required. And as it stands, Extended is still the most often logged round (according to database statistics).

TL;DR: You need both modes of play to have a functional heavy roleplay environment.

[VoltageHero]

As Skull stated, Aurora used to have tons of extended RP. Sadly, it got to the point where some players were even hostile OOCly, if you disturbed their chair-RP even a little.

There were a few players, before the huge increase of players, who would go off in a corner and roleplay with three or four other players, and remove their headsets.

There is a reason the medbay used to be joked about, and that's because a good deal of the time, you had four people sitting in the lobby talking, and not really doing anything.

That said, if you're really into servers that do extended twenty-four-seven still, you can find them and look at them. Deathtrap, I believe, used to run constant extended, and it was as quiet as a mouse all the time, because everybody was off with their RP partners.

[nanotoxin]

What about like every odd weekend we have an Extended Saturday or something along the lines of that?

[Guest]

I really need to say something, so I would ask you people to read this. Your responses seem like tiptoeing around the problem and saying that there is none. Here it goes.

Okay, so, you've finally reached and skimmed above the conclusion; There is nothing wrong with the gamemodes, it's about the players. Yes, players on Aurora are unimaginative and suck. Yes, everyone is subtly aware of that.

However, there is no way to fix this, because this is up to everyone. Not unless you intend to purge the player population, which has been a topic among the players for a while now. The whole concept of one group of players pushing out other players they don't like or whose RP style they don't agree with *cough cough* complaint boards *cough cough* spits in concept of creativity. Conflict is punishable, mistakes are punishable, stepping on toes is punishable, having a snowflake is punishable. There is no way to be creative when you have to fear being overly creative. It's simple psychology. You can either have strict control over player choices and character design, or you can have creativity. Pick one, because, you can't have both.

With that out of the way, considering Aurora has opted for the former long, long ago, something I kept warning about, it is now up to people who implamented it to be creative and produce the much needed story. Saying that it's up to the players is just ignoring the obvious problem that most players don't want to bother. So, either change the gamemodes, extend the level of freedom players have or work on events. This is not fixing itself.

[Tainavaa]

To be honest, I think the extended weight change in Secret is fine enough. Extended's been more prevalent but we've also been getting a lot of antag rounds. Not necessarily GOOD antag rounds (read as: vampire, changeling) but we've been getting them and have also been getting a fair share of extended.

Skull's right as well. The server NEEDS antags. During an extended round, medical and security have NOTHING to do. I've historically been primarily a medical player, and the lack of things to do was astounding. So we sat in the medbay lobby chatting and gossipping, waiting for someone to die. Which I'll admit, I did enjoy because I knew everyone just saw whisperwhispergigglewhisper-lookatthatpersonandgiggle-whisperwhisper and it made people curious and suspicious. However it gets old when done way too much. I'm very glad antag rounds are much more prevalent however I also missed extended being so prevalent because it was just antag after antag.

I think it's stabilizing more with the weight shift in Secret though. It's a better balance in my opinion.

Also you can balance regulation and freedom in creativity. For a long time I felt I couldn't fucking do anything without getting in trouble with the administration because of the - admittedly blown way out of proportion - hardsuit issue. It felt like they were just trying to control everything and it just wasn't fun. I didn't do anything I wanted to on any of my characters because I thought, "I'm gonna get a bwoink for this." and it's made me want to stop playing, and I did end up playing a LOT less. Because honestly, it's such a small thing. If they're going to get on my ass about that, what's to stop them from getting on my ass about anything else they just don't particularly enjoy? But they've allowed it and since that I've felt a lot more comfortable just doing whatever I feel my character would do without any undue consequence. I DON'T FEAR THE BWOINK ANYMORE. I'M FREE.

tl;dr I think the admins are working to allow people more freedom without consequence without letting it go overboard.

[Guest]

Also you can balance regulation and freedom in creativity. For a long time I felt I couldn't fucking do anything without getting in trouble with the administration because of the - admittedly blown way out of proportion - hardsuit issue. It felt like they were just trying to control everything and it just wasn't fun. I didn't do anything I wanted to on any of my characters because I thought, "I'm gonna get a bwoink for this." and it's made me want to stop playing, and I did end up playing a LOT less. Because honestly, it's such a small thing. If they're going to get on my ass about that, what's to stop them from getting on my ass about anything else they just don't particularly enjoy? But they've allowed it and since that I've felt a lot more comfortable just doing whatever I feel my character would do without any undue consequence. I DON'T FEAR THE BWOINK ANYMORE. I'M FREE.

tl;dr I think the admins are working to allow people more freedom without consequence without letting it go overboard.

 

Extended is currently means that some people get to chair RP, and whatever Xander says he does, you know it's the case for vast majority of players agree with that statement. No matter how many times you avoid the topic, it will still came around and will continue to come around. Because people are unimaginitive shits. It has plagued both extended and other gamemodes for a long time. It will not get fixed without drastic changes.

Now, I received three complaints in a span of three weeks. Two of them was because I dared piss on the annoying, restricting metarules and do something interesting for a change, step away from the bland bureaucrat cookiecutter captain. No, I don't fear the "Bwoink", I fear this shit community. It's the complaint boards and their promotion that has fucked the community into changing. It has sucked out all enjoyment for the game for me. Only joy worthy RP I've gotten in months is social RP, nothing else. Very rarely anything remotely creative.

As for the staff, the repression has been curbed down a bit, sure, but staff still responds to every attack log and anything remotely antagy, especially during extended. I'm not saying that extended turns into FFA, but making it so that you're actually allowed to do something remotelly illegal without OOC repercussions will go long way into making extended enjoyable for all departments.

If not that, just force some true variety into the server via events, simple ones, Because extended + secret is not variety.

[Jakers457]

For me, extended is having a breather. You can relax knowing that you won't get violated by a proboscis, gunned down by terrorists or have a Fucking wizard bothering you.

[Guest]

Well, I am gonna yell about people's characters right now, again. You know, in case I didnt look like enough of an asshole already.

So, if anyone gets offended by this sort of thing they might just want to skip my post. Sorry for any hurt feelings, I recognize my criticism could be more constructive and less hostile but I literally experience physical pain whenever I dont act like a complete asshole about something.

So, the question is, what's the problem with extended?

There's lots of those from my point of view, let me list some of them down.

One.

The cliques.

We dont have as much of those as we did back in the dread month of December, but people generally like to roleplay with people they already know.

People they OOCly know.

After I made an effort to reach out to new players, I found at least 4 relatively new players who were all very good roleplayers with interesting characters and were generally cool dudes. They were all, at least in my knowledge almost entirely ignored for the duration of most rounds.

People have these year old personal plotlines they only want to advance with the right people at the right time at the right place, and they seem to be quite unwilling to at least put some trust in our fledgling roleplayers. (Some of them are not even new to roleplay, they're just new to the server.)

Beyond that, I am lately noticing a LOT of immersion breaking and metafriending when it comes to clearly evil/unlikable/asshole characters and their players. Characters who literally ignore evil characters doing awful things because they OOCly like the player and the character. Dont do that, it ruins immersion. Do not break your character just so they can befriend someone they really shouldnt be befriending.

I wont beat around bushes, like usual. I am talking about Phoebe Essel and the odd cult built around her. Let me clarify here - I love Essel as a character, I voted for her in the ol' 2014 character awards, Nursie is a proverbial cool guy who isnt afraid of anything, no complaints about Essel's player. However, I do have a lot of complaints about characters who shouldnt like Essel, characters who shouldnt protect Essel, protecting her and liking her for some reason. Enjoying a character OOCly is fine, I laugh when I see Jade Rathel call someone a nerd, but that doesnt mean I am willing to ICly break out of character and protect her from slander or something similliar.

Some characters are here to cause conflict on the station, if you just bend over and have your characters give in to their increasingly ridiculous demands just because you OOCly like the player and the character, you're metagaming and ruining the immulshun.

I am looking at you, people who decided to make Essel the acting captain based on an ion law and people who gave Essel a nobel prize and removed the DO decision to keep her out of surgery due to an attempted castration(s?).

I will clarify again, I love Phoebe, I like Nursie - I do not have problems with the player or the character. However, I do have problems with the people who randomly and for no reason seem to go at insane lengths to ICly protect and befriend the character when they shouldnt. This extends to all unapproachable/evil/asshole/so forth characters, keep your OOC enjoyment of them out of character.

Two.

Ridiculously badass characters.

"Did you hear about the terrorist attack in Tau Ceti?"

"I killed a terrorist, once."

"Did you hear about the bombing on Mars?"

"I killed a bombing, once."

"According to this, there's famine in the border worlds."

"If I ever see a famine, I am going to kill it an put its head above my fireplace."

"What's your opinion on cybernetics?"

"I killed an opinion, once."

You cant interact with these characters. Literally all they do is make a smug comment about how they dont have a problem about whatever they're talking about, their whole backstory is built around them winning all the things.

The story of "I won all the fights in fighting land" is rarely interesting to anyone but the person playing the character. Head manifest characters, particularly Heads of Security are often guilty of this. Having the same "I am going to punch that thing because I am the best at punching things" reaction to literally everything your character encounters makes them extremely boring to interact with during extended rounds where punching things is often not needed.

If you're going to have badasses, at least think of some stories in which they dont absolutely kill all the baddies all the time but have to retreat or something.

Three.

Unoriginality. Supression of originality.

"This unit has played the Mass Effect series."

"H-Hello w-would you l-like to scis-sor a bit...?"

"AH' LOST ALL MAH' LIM'S IN DA' WAH'. NOW AH' HAVE HOOKS IN'SEAD O' ARMS AN' LEGS."

"Let him tell you how sassy he's feeling today..."

"Im going to sssort of sssasssy too."

"I killed a sassy, once."

Same characters, different players. I dont know who started these fads, but I dont like them. Feels like I am reading the same story over and over. We're all creative people, here. Can we sort of shake our stale acceptable archetype list away and do our own things, creative unique and so forth?

No, instead of that we randomly deem something to be too snowflake-y and attempt to burn it at the stake in an effort to protect our glorious stale acceptable character archetypes. I sometimes feel like we're playing Diamond League of Legends and we have their awful, stale mandatory meta.

Not everything new is good, I understand that. What I ask here is for people to try to think a bit more before pointing their finger at something new and yelling "Snowflake shit RP ban forever" at the top of their lungs.

People dont seem to be concerned about having creative fun, they're concerned about having the most brownie points to the point where they'll outright copy what they consider the most popular current fad so they can ride with the cool club. Are we honestly going to P2W, even in a pure RP scenario?

Four.

People who wait for the RP to come to them.

If you want to RP during extended, and imagine that this will happen while you're silently waiting in the deepest least visible part of your department waiting for someone to actively come after you and RP, you're going to end up very disappointed.

Aint nobody got time for that. Leave your department, go to the bar, PDA a buddy, organize a fucking tea party -- do something, find your own RP. Nobody will do it for you, for the most part. Especially if you spend your round locked in virology, or something.

Generally speaking, Extended rounds end with some people having fun roleplay, If you're new and you're not online at the same time as the rare few veteran players who make it their goal to try to include the newbies/new characters into the Aurora scene, your chances of scoring interaction are quite low. Things have festered to a point where people might actually need a veteran to introduce them ICly into the game so they're allowed to roleplay. It's all rather pompous and silly, can we not do it?

Really, I spent a large ammount of time trying to get into the established metacliques (unsuccessfuly, in my eyes) when I first came, only to realize that so many good players were left out of them.

Can we not do this? Can we not slice and dice everything to small isolated groups which hate each other?

[Tainavaa]

I lol'd. That was a great post.

The meta-friending and the sort is something that also really pisses me off. The Essel cult is a big part of that problem. People just don't want to hurt her for some reason. I'm going to back Inverted here and say that it isn't Phoebe as a character or Nursie as a player. They are completely fine and I have literally zero issues OOC with the character and the player. Who I DO have a problem with, are those security officers that dragged nigh-innocent people into my brig as a Warden for insulting an officer but Phoebe's over there making death threats and no matter how hard I fight to arrest her, I'm met equally with "It's just how she is" and literally nothing being done about it. Who I DO have a problem with, are the people that made Phoebe Essel acting captain because of that ion law. If it were anyone else, would it have been okay with the crew? No. Absolutely fucking not, unless it was someone just as popular or renowned and that turns into the same example except with X, Y, Z where the variable is a renowned veteran player/character. Who I DO have a problem with are the people that fought to overturn a Duty Officer's decision to disallow her from medical duty because "lel its phoebe its how she is." It's ridiculous, and it renders my immersions: broke.

The other things are good points as well, I guess, or something.

I don't fear player complaints because I'll be ready to defend myself should one ever come up to me. If I get a bwoink, it doesn't matter how well prepared I am to defend myself. I know it's going to be "I don't care. It doesn't matter. Stop or ban." Secret + Extended is probably the most variety we can get, because you can't force creativity on the players. Events, to be good, require a lot of planning and a good balance between admin control and allowing players to control the situation. If there's too little control, things go very awry, very fast and it just ends up being stupid. If there's too much control, the story is railroaded and boring. It doesn't matter what you do or did, the conclusion is going to be the same or similar to the original idea rather than letting it go its own course. I don't like it, because it's usually too much control.

[Guest]

I don't fear player complaints because I'll be ready to defend myself should one ever come up to me. If I get a bwoink, it doesn't matter how well prepared I am to defend myself. I know it's going to be "I don't care. It doesn't matter. Stop or ban." Secret + Extended is probably the most variety we can get, because you can't force creativity on the players. Events, to be good, require a lot of planning and a good balance between admin control and allowing players to control the situation. If there's too little control, things go very awry, very fast and it just ends up being stupid. If there's too much control, the story is railroaded and boring. It doesn't matter what you do or did, the conclusion is going to be the same or similar to the original idea rather than letting it go its own course. I don't like it, because it's usually too much control.

You seriously don't need to plan anything. You maybe think that, because you're keeping massive events in mind. That is not what I'm talking about. Sometimes it's enough to put a gimmick in and it will produce a lot of RP. This is even better when the gimmick is an actual competant player. It doesn't really need a lot of moderation as long as it doesn't disbalance the game or gives a murder free card.

Let's put an example. A team of journalists comes to the station. Security has to keep their eyes off the high security stuff and civilian gets to RP for once. No one will attempt to murder the journalists. Admins don't need to watch over it and control. You can't even meta since there is nothing to meta at. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would like to be part of the team or in the interview.

[Tainavaa]

Okay maybe gimmicks would be interesting. Something simple - planted, even - on the station and just let the crew go nuts with it. I can definitely see that working out. No admin control or intervention (unless rule-breaking). My experience however, has mostly been with admin-controlled events and it's just not fun for me.

I did enjoy the quota gimmick for a bit, it definitely gave us something to do while at least making us feel like it had some meaning in lore.

[Guest Menown]

The people that have a problem with extended have no idea to have fun with the game in itself. They need an antag or some sort of conflict to enhance it.

Myself, I try to RP it as an average work day. And even when it is an antag round, my choice of job /never/ gets involved, other than a casual message to Command asking them if they'd like me to message Central. Every round is an extended round with some jobs.