Aurora Needs More Slots

[wowzewow]

This is tangentially related to the Engineering Slot reduction PR - I'm just opening a discussion.

Clickbait title is clickbait.

 

Aurora is growing. It's been a long while since we've got new faces.

Now here's the thing : we currently have no systems in place to accomodate more people.

Our mapping is extremely poorly designed for any alternatives too.

A lot of our current procedures are to turn people away from playing the game, which is pretty abhorrent.

 

Example 1 : Oddyseys - especially during events. Our server regularly hits the limit during them, and if you miss a roll, tough luck.

You're stuck playing Off-duty, which is essentially for the most part a "cuck" role. And you can't really go up to the XO for a job assignment,

nor have the XO open up more job slots which is a standard feature on other servers.

 

Example 2 : Regular rounds. On Highpop, it's pretty common for people to be fighting over slots. Lose the roll, and you miss your chance of playing the game.

Off-duty for you. You are literally locked away from your friends. You can go up to them, but it feels horrendous. You just watch as they get to play the game. Might as well play observer.

It can be argued that you can fill in less played departments (Science, mainly), but I feel that's just Off-duty with extra steps.

 

Example 3 : Let's say, you win the roll. Unfortunately, you're a new player.

Aurora's gotten really good at being inclusive, but still - it's pretty insurmountable to break into the scene against established characters.

It's just human nature. If, say, you were also paired up with other new players, it's a lot less daunting.

 

I can't particularly give any concrete solutions other than "map more stuff" and "add more roles"... (that's up to you)

But the matter of the fact is, that if we don't take these growth periods seriously, we aren't taking Aurora's sustainability seriously either.

Food for thought. I just wanted to start a discussion.

Edited Friday at 14:14 by wowzewow

[greenjoe]

More slots would be interesting to see, I agree. The implementation of it is tricky however. There may also sometimes be the situation of there not being enough for that many people to do. This came up when talking about the idea of a 4th hanger tech slot, there might not be enough for 4 hanger techs to do?

[ASmallCuteCat]

I'd like it if there were more slots. As you posted in the other thread, being off-duty sort of walls you off from interacting with your friends within the department.

Personally, I would rather have idle downtime or long stretches where I'm on-call and waiting for action than to have no opportunity at all to hang out with my departmental buddies, or to feel like I'm being an obstruction by coming over to hang out and chat.

[NekoMarbles]

I feel like this is something that should be addressed, especially as our slot amounts are so tiny compared to other servers! More people being able to play the game is always good, and also opens up more opportunities for teaching (can't tell you how many times I was due to teach someone and didn't roll my slot). 

[VeteranGary]

I feel like a decent compromise was used during the Moghes arc, where job roles were entirely unrestricted especially when the crew was going into or expecting known danger or objective. I haven't seen this used since then and it's kind of a shame. It should be the standard for canon events and maybe an option for odysseys. Personally I think it worked really well, it didn't really detract from the event arc to do it this way, and it just allowed a lot more people to participate in general. One of the first few events only had two poorly armed pirates and they still managed to stir chaos for over an hour. Security didn't really steamroll them despite there being about around 10 of us. So I don't agree that it's any balance concern. 

Forcing the Horizon into this restricted manifest when they are in life-or-death scenarios is very silly. The one advantage the Horizon has literally anywhere is it's massive crew size, but generally during canon events about a third ends up not being able to take part because of job limits. 

[MattAtlas]

It is not as easy as "increase the slots to let everyone have more fun", because at the end of the game SS13 is still a game where there's only a limited amount of gameplay to go by. While on Battlefield games, for example, you can theoretically always expand the maximum size of the server to something ridiculous like 1024 vs 1024 and still have enough gameplay for everyone to go by (there's one enemy per person) provided that you can make a map big enough, it does not work way on SS13. Primarily because of a few reasons.

• The balance reasons being that if you add one officer slot, this is going to completely destroy the balance of antagonist gamemodes. Four security officers, despite being objectively underequipped compared to mercs, still end up winning most of the time. Add a fifth officer slot and it is essentially overkill. This is also why we don't allow investigators or wardens to join fights unless things are going to shit, it's just unfair. To keep things fair you would have to increase merc slots by one, but now you also have to buff traitors, buff changelings, buff whoever else because the entirety of the game is balanced around four officers with a certain amount of guns. It is essentially a neverending slippery slope that will never stop, because if you legitimize "add more slots to get more gameplay", you end up in an ouroborous race where you have to keep adding to keep the gameplay fair.
• The fun-sharing reasons are that while some people are content with rolling their job and not doing anything, there comes a time where you have to do things because the round demands it. If there are ten engineers and only so many things to do, eventually you will be intruding on someone else's fun because everyone will be fighting to who is first to the scraps of gameplay. Aurora is already a server that is very poor on standalone gameplay, adding more slots only serves to segregate the existing gameplay away. This is partly why I divided Medical Doctor and Surgeon (used to be an MD alt title and thus you usually had 3-4 surgeons per round) into Physician and Surgeon with the original brainmed update in 2020. What happened is that since you could have an unlimited amount of surgeons, two of them would instantly claim the ORs, and any other ones would be banished to never doing their job and basically only taking care of GTR duties. And no, a "good faith" system is not enough of a guarantee here to be a reasonable solution.
• For gameplay development, I do not know about you guys, but developers have limited time to implement things. I physically do not have the time to implement gameplay for 7 engineers or however many slots people want to give to a certain role. If I have to rework a department's gameplay then I have to carefully calibrate the gameplay to the amount of slots, this is why medical is the way it is regarding some things being easier or harder to treat, it's because the expectation is that there are 2 physicians in the GTR. If I add more gameplay to medical, more things to keep track of, then I would consider raising the slots. But doing it before means that I have my work cut out for me already, which is not ideal. The more slots you add, the more work someone has to do to make sure that as many people in a department can have fun, and I do not wish that position on anyone.
• For events, any major event that is guaranteed to have gameplay/roleplay for everyone already uses the extended manifest with security/service/engineering personnel and whatever else. If an event does not use it then it is because the event runner did not think they could put that many people on the map or give that many people gameplay. I will not speak for kermit here but from my observations on the last event both of these were the case, there was simply not enough to go by for most people.

Admin-wise we are already discussing rules that are more clear on involving off-duty crew in off-map roleplay on events and on Odysseys, it is just a matter of deciding what wording works best.

That said, this suggestion is going to be dismissed because, as described earlier, I don't want and will not encourage a slots arms race. Any change will be made to specific slots and it will be discussed specifically for that slot.