[Decision] Standard Round Time

[Skull132]

During an admin meeting, the topic of having the standard round time upped from two hours to something larger. We discussed doing this conditionally, dependent on round, but the idea was scrubbed, as it would imply favourtism towards certain modes and types of antags. Instead, we would like to present you the idea of upping the standard timer, for every round.

The decision in question:

• Increasing the "No-vote" period from 2 hours to 3, regardless of round type

Reasons to consider this:

• 3 hours would provide certain roundtypes, such as Cultist, Heist, more time to get things going and create an atmosphere, instead of being afraid of the relatively short two hour deadline
  
  
• It may also do something about situations where extended is voted out of at the two hour mark, only to enter another extended round that gets voted out of another two hours later

Feel free to discuss the matter below. The poll will run for a week.

 

What about modifying the crew transfer vote so that it takes a 2/3 majority to call the shuttle before 3 hours? That would reduce the frequency with which the shuttle's called early, but still allow players to leave if enough want to.

Or make it always take a 2/3 majority. Nothing sucks like having your RP pulled out from under you by people who're bored 'cause they can't find anything to do.

 

This will be placed into effect. It's an effective compromise in the following fashion:

• If the round has no promise, or is shit, majority will vote out, and the shuttle will tick over.
• If the round holds promise for the majority, then it'll continue, leaving only a minority without their wish.
  
• After the 3 hour mark, it becomes the old, one-swing-vote-winning spiel that we know and love.

 

Sound good?

[EvilBrage]

If more than half of the crew can't find interest in the round and wants to change it, I really see no reason to put a restriction on round time at all, let alone three hours. If a round is slow and people want to call a vote, it's because something is not being done right on the antagonist side of things - from all the times I've been every type of antagonist, I can safely say that if you don't have people engaged within two hours, you're doing something wrong enough to warrant the round coming to a close. A round timer is, in my opinion, a form of favoritism towards the small clique that's actually receiving RP while a majority of players could very well be bored and uninvolved (and again, an antag who does not make a reasonable effort to involve everyone isn't doing something right.)

What I would support, however, is a thirty minute minimum between crew transfer votes. If one fails, then yes, there's a reasonable amount of expectation that another one shouldn't be called five minutes later, and while we do have administrators to cancel votes, that seems like something that should be streamlined instead of a hard minimum round time (sans an emergency shuttle being called.)

[Skull132]

There isn't a single way to antag, though. I have seen antag rounds with promise take about 2 hours to get rolling, but despite the wait period, they had potential to be good. And then a vote gets called, and the prep-work and potential is gone.

 

What I would support, however, is a thirty minute minimum between crew transfer votes. If one fails, then yes, there's a reasonable amount of expectation that another one shouldn't be called five minutes later, and while we do have administrators to cancel votes, that seems like something that should be streamlined instead of a hard minimum round time (sans an emergency shuttle being called.)

 

This is already enforced. 30 minutes between valid votes.

[EvilBrage]

This is already enforced. 30 minutes between valid votes.

 

Well, yeah, but what I meant was that it wasn't coded in.

Personally, if a round goes on for too long without something happening and then something finally does happen, it's really sort of a sudden and unwelcome shift in mood. You're enjoying a nice, relaxed chair RP and then suddenly a bomb goes off in medbay, and it's like you're putting everything that's happening on hold in order to deal with that (if you're a department required to do that sort of thing.) My point, though, is that it's not like a vote is a sure-fire way to kill a round. If a vote for a transfer passes, that means that half of the players at very least want a new round for whatever reason.

 

And then a vote gets called, and the prep-work and potential is gone.

 

At the risk of sounding pretentious, if you need more than two hours to set something up and execute it, then that's probably the wrong way to go about antagging. If you're so meticulously careful that no one else has anything to do for two hours, then I think people are well within their rights to call for another round. Think about why a round would take two hours to begin with - a changeling is trying to be perfect and undetected, a traitor is stealing things and covering his tracks very well, or a cult is busy researching words and generally avoiding everyone. That's all well and good, but if it takes two whole hours to do it, that's where the problem comes in, if you ask me.

I see what we're trying to do, but bumping the minimum round time up an hour won't lead to higher quality rounds, because the issue with those rounds with potential lies with player behavior and not an inherent flaw with the way the server works. Some rounds are good, some rounds are not, and it's not so much a "problem to be addressed" as a fact of the game.

Edited December 16, 2014 by Guest

[LetzShake]

If more than half of the crew can't find interest in the round and wants to change it, I really see no reason to put a restriction on round time at all, let alone three hours. If a round is slow and people want to call a vote, it's because something is not being done right on the antagonist side of things - from all the times I've been every type of antagonist, I can safely say that if you don't have people engaged within two hours, you're doing something wrong enough to warrant the round coming to a close. A round timer is, in my opinion, a form of favoritism towards the small clique that's actually receiving RP while a majority of players could very well be bored and uninvolved (and again, an antag who does not make a reasonable effort to involve everyone isn't doing something right.)

 

I disagree wholeheartedly. Even if you're not the center of antag action, doesn't mean something's not going on. Not everyone can be around the antag unless it's a bad antag who's going around blowing everything up. Antags should create fun but some antags like changelings and vampires are inherently stealthy. And if you make it so bored players can just go "fuck the round" in two hours or less, you'll end up creating more chucklefucky antags. Like cultists who use bombs.

[EvilBrage]

People don't call votes because they're not interacting with an antag; they call votes because they're not doing anything they couldn't do in an extended round. Something simple like giving medbay a body to catalog and autopsy, the detective a pool of blood to investigate, or an engineer a suspiciously broken APC to fix can make all the difference. Some antags are afraid to do these things because their focus is on being a perfect antag, not on making a round fun. Accomplishing your objectives perfectly was inherently flawed, which is why we have objectiveless antags now; even that is a double-edged sword in that instead of performing a task with medical precision, now an antag doesn't have to do anything they don't want to, especially risky operations like stealing the nuke disc or assassinating the captain.

[Frances]

I'm siding with Brage - if you can't provide the round with something to do in two hours as an antag, you probably don't know what you're doing.

Let's think about it - what does raising the limit to three hours do? Prevent people from transferring because they're bored? Because that's generally the reason why people call a crew transfer - because they want to do something else. I don't see why we'd want to prevent them from doing that, and force a majority of the server to wait an extra hour they don't want to wait, in the off-chance that somebody, somewhere, is planning something (that they haven't been able to execute yet in the first two hours of the round).

 

There isn't a single way to antag, though. I have seen antag rounds with promise take about 2 hours to get rolling, but despite the wait period, they had potential to be good. And then a vote gets called, and the prep-work and potential is gone.

How often do we get these rounds, versus boring rounds where everybody is ready to transfer at two hours? Because that's something to consider before enforcing a policy that unilaterally favors the former.

[Guest]

I'm kind of in the middle. Whilst I agree with Brage and his points, I do see an issue that we currently have. I've noticed a fair amount that people vote exactly on the 2 hour mark because they dislike the round type. Now whilst some may be bored, there are some that literally just dislike the round type and vote for the sake of not playing that round type. They could simply play another game or simply put up with it.

I'm not trying to say voting on the two hour mark is bad, sometimes I support those votes to transfer myself (because there is literally nothing happening in the round). More so; how do we stop/prevent people from voting on the two hour mark because of the round type.

[Guest]

Note that the votes are 16-10 at this time. Making a decision without any sort of compromise could provoke a bit of an outrage.

[Alicia Jewel]

I voted Yes, but I'm starting to have second thoughts. I'm biased towards longer round types since one of my mains is a xenoarchaeologist, which is a job that takes a while if you properly set everything up and bother to analyze your samples, but I can understand the concerns with having rounds that are too long if the antags aren't making it interesting. On the other hand, it makes zero sense to transfer out of an extended round at the two hour mark and then start another extended round. I wanna say only add the three hour rule to extended, but that seems like it'd cause another set of problems.

This really seems like an issue that needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis, but even that seems like it'd be tricky. I honestly don't think there's a solution that'll make everyone happy.

[Lady_of_Ravens]

What about modifying the crew transfer vote so that it takes a 2/3 majority to call the shuttle before 3 hours? That would reduce the frequency with which the shuttle's called early, but still allow players to leave if enough want to.

Or make it always take a 2/3 majority. Nothing sucks like having your RP pulled out from under you by people who're bored 'cause they can't find anything to do.

[Frances]

What about modifying the crew transfer vote so that it takes a 2/3 majority to call the shuttle before 3 hours? That would reduce the frequency with which the shuttle's called early, but still allow players to leave if enough want to.

Or make it always take a 2/3 majority. Nothing sucks like having your RP pulled out from under you by people who're bored 'cause they can't find anything to do.

Yes yes yes.

This is brilliant. Great way to compromise right here, I agree 100%.

Puts damper on people transferring to transfer, while still letting rounds where people are really bored end. (And no, I still don't believe in the excuse that antags need two hours of setup to do something. You can try, but if you haven't done anything after two hours and people start to lose interest, you don't really have a right to complain if the round gets transferred).

[Guest]

What about modifying the crew transfer vote so that it takes a 2/3 majority to call the shuttle before 3 hours? That would reduce the frequency with which the shuttle's called early, but still allow players to leave if enough want to.

Or make it always take a 2/3 majority. Nothing sucks like having your RP pulled out from under you by people who're bored 'cause they can't find anything to do.

Yes yes yes.

This is brilliant. Great way to compromise right here, I agree 100%.

Puts damper on people transferring to transfer, while still letting rounds where people are really bored end. (And no, I still don't believe in the excuse that antags need two hours of setup to do something. You can try, but if you haven't done anything after two hours and people start to lose interest, you don't really have a right to complain if the round gets transferred).

 

Democracy's the way to go at this point. Having 21 say yes and 20 say no pretty much screws over a very, very slight minority. Not fun for anyone.

[Lady_of_Ravens]

Democracy's the way to go at this point. Having 21 say yes and 20 say no pretty much screws over a very, very slight minority. Not fun for anyone.

 

My thoughts exactly. Waiting a little longer for a transfer isn't a huge pain (at least, not for those of us with some modicrom of patience), but having your RP interrupted by a transfer is.

[Guest]

And if we do this, could we have 20-30 minute restrictions on being able to call another crew transfer?

Just to halt vote call stacking and give people time to wrap up what they're doing even if it's "Continue the Round."

[Lady_of_Ravens]

And if we do this, could we have 20-30 minute restrictions on being able to call another crew transfer?

Just to halt vote call stacking and give people time to wrap up what they're doing even if it's "Continue the Round."

 

It's my understanding that the policy, if not the code, is for a minimum of 30 minutes between transfer votes. Though this ought to be coded, 'cause sometimes people don't know and the admins don't catch it.

[Guest]

And if we do this, could we have 20-30 minute restrictions on being able to call another crew transfer?

Just to halt vote call stacking and give people time to wrap up what they're doing even if it's "Continue the Round."

 

It's my understanding that the policy, if not the code, is for a minimum of 30 minutes between transfer votes. Though this ought to be coded, 'cause sometimes people don't know and the admins don't catch it.

 

I was referring to a policy, I'm not sure if it's possible to code.

[Guest]

It's policy to have 30 minutes between each vote, sometimes we let the 5 minutes before the mark go.

Currently it's 2 hours into the round before we have a vote, this thread is about extending that to 3 hours.

I'm not going to add a hard limit into the voting system in case there are times when a vote maybe needed. I recall one of the fist times I played on the server, we had a grief attack that left most of us dead. An admin came on dealt with them and rejuved us, and gave us a choice on if we wanted a restart or not then went to sleep. We tried to continue, unfortunately the atmos was gone, so we had to call a vote 20 minutes into the round.

[Skull132]

What about modifying the crew transfer vote so that it takes a 2/3 majority to call the shuttle before 3 hours? That would reduce the frequency with which the shuttle's called early, but still allow players to leave if enough want to.

Or make it always take a 2/3 majority. Nothing sucks like having your RP pulled out from under you by people who're bored 'cause they can't find anything to do.

 

This will be placed into effect. It's an effective compromise in the following fashion:

• If the round has no promise, or is shit, majority will vote out, and the shuttle will tick over.
• If the round holds promise for the majority, then it'll continue, leaving only a minority without their wish.
  
• After the 3 hour mark, it becomes the old, one-swing-vote-winning spiel that we know and love.

 

Sound good?

[Guest]

I think that works.

[Guest]

Works for me.