A "True" Secret Mode, with a twist.

Alright, as much as I love mixed secret, I still feel like I'm missing something from my secret pool. Sure, there's that extended thrown in there to have the possibility for a quiet round, but it usually ends up with everyone disappointed there were no antags (much like on regular secret.) I want something TRULY random, but not in a ridiculous way that ends up with cult+merc+malf or something insane like that. The current mixed secret gamemodes are pretty good, but I feel like there are situations and gimmicks that are missing (such as vampire+cult for ultimate blood magic, or merc+ninja, etc). Vampire especially, being left out despite being one of my favorite antags.

So, I introduce: True Secret.

Each antag type would be "rated" on how strongly they typically influence the round, and an algorithm would randomly pick out antag types based on these values (which are WIP and can be very easily changed depending on dev/majority decision.

Values in question, 1 being lightest impact and 3 being highest impact:

Wizard: 1
Ninja:1
Vampire: 1
Traitor: 1
Changeling: 2
Heist: 2
Merc: 2
Malf: 2
Rev: 3
Cult: 3

Each round, the game would randomly pick a number between 0-5 (0 being extended, 5 being highest intensity). After this number is picked, the game would randomly select a combination of gamemodes that added up to said value. On lowpop, the algorithm would only pick a number between 0 and 3, instead of 0 and 5. Once the total server pop (NOT the readied up pop) reaches 35-40, intensity 4 gets unlocked, and once it reaches 45-50, intensity 5 can get unlocked.

I think this mode would allow a LOT more cool gimmicks to be created, as well as generally create a lot more unexpectedness in the game-mode rotation, while still steering clear of ridiculous, unfun game modes like merc+cult+malf or something like that. Some ridiculous modes are still possible, like wizard+ninja+ling+vamp, but these antags are all somewhat low intensity (usually), and would still be less chaotic than paranoia.

These values are very open to tweaking, as well as the algorithm the game will use to pick this "true secret" gamemode, but the general gist of this suggestion is what matters; more randomness, more gimmicks.

An interesting idea for sure, but I think it'd require a heck of a lotta work to pull off in a satisfying way.

I mean, it's not THAT complicated [mention]NoahKirchner[/mention], a basic algorithm could simply spawn the right antags depending on what the roll is.

There are probably some complications, but the base system is simple enough it wouldn't be that difficult to fix those problems.

I mean, it's not THAT complicated @ NoahKirchner, a basic algorithm could simply spawn the right antags depending on what the roll is.

There are probably some complications, but the base system is simple enough it wouldn't be that difficult to fix those problems.

I meant a heckofalotta work to get it to work satisfyingly as far as points go, cuz with this system you can get rev+cult for example which is cult with slightly lesser cult in the background, so it'd need to be a bit more intricate.

Simply making rev 3 points instead of two would fix that problem [mention]NoahKirchner[/mention]. In fact, I prolly should do that.

Alright, I'm just gonna highlight some potential gamemodes and gimmicks for each of them that aren't possible in our current pool, partially because it's fun to come up with gimmicks, and partially to show the potential of a system similar to this one:

Monster hunters: Merc+ling+vampire: The mercenaries are monster hunters, who have tracked the lings and the vampire to the station. Their goal is to exterminate this threat, and they aren't gonna take any chances: collateral damage is acceptable. Will the station work with the mercs and destroy the lings+vampires, despite the brutality and overkill methods of the mercs? Or will the desperate security force enlist one of the more "peaceful" lings/vampires to combat the mercenary threat?

Synthetic Sympathizers: Rev+malf: The revolutionaries are an anti-synthetic organization, and want to destroy/ban all artificial life on the station. Will the AI be able to trick command staff long enough that it can eliminate the revolutionaries? Or will command staff discover the AI's secret, side with the revs, and destroy it once and for all? How far will each side go to achieve their goal? Can a compromise be reached?

Thinning the Veil: vamp+wiz+cult: The barrier between the veil and the real world is weak here, attracting all types of magical entities seeking to harness it's power for it's own goals. However, all these magical creatures despise each other, and would see themselves the only rulers of this source of power. Who will the crew ally with? Will the vampires come out of the shadows, and proclaim themselves the grim lords of this station? Will the wizard recruit an undead army, or perhaps an apprentice, to grow his power? Will the cult gather a following of crewmembers scared by the other powers at work?

Quantity vs Quality: Ninja+heist: The raiders have looted a spider clan weapon, and incurred the wrath of their finest warriors. In their cunning, the Ninja decided to wait until the raiders were on another heist, so that he could strike at their weakest... However, the raiders are not fools themselves, and will frame the ninja as the villain. Who will the station believe? Will the ninja be overwhelmed, or will superior skill and technology prevail?

These are just a few examples of what COULD be possible with a suggestion like this. The implementation of this simple algorithm would multiply the potential gimmicks tenfold, and absolute destroy any notion of repetitiveness or staleness that existed with the current modes.

Let me just say a few things.

1. I like it.

2. The random number would have to not be true random, it'd have to be based heavily on the amount of people playing, but that said I think most of these gamemodes would be playable with highpop numbers of 30+, which means the random number could be anywhere from 0-5 when we have that many, but as the numbers go down so too should the maximum, but that unfortunately has the side effect of making things a little more predictable.

3. Heist should probably honestly be on the same level as Merc. I see what you're going for here, as this setup makes crossfire still possible, but good heisters can make just as much as, if not more, of an impact than good mercs. That's just from what I've seen, however--but if people want crossfire they can vote in Mixed or Crossfire instead.

4. Traitors/Autotraitors should probably be 1. Yes, with traitors you get more antags than the single non-crew wizard and ninja, but at the same time, if you were going for the 'numbers' argument, generally (though depending on the server pop) there are just as many lings or vamps as there are (non-auto)traitors. Traitors also highly depend on their own access and what-not to get things done, and have limited outside help.

5. That said lings and/or vamps should probably be moved to 2 instead. I'd say more than likely vamps as people like them a bit less and they do have a bit more to work with than lings, but then again, ling rework and horrorlings are also a thing...

6. This also gives the ability for the game to start with an 'antag pool,' spawning all non-crew antags and some crew antags, randomly assigning the other crew antags autotraitor-style throughout the round. This idea would ALSO allow for admin intervention in case of antags leaving/dying early, they can simply inject new antag types into the antag pool and let the game take care of that.

7. I prefer the name Top Secret.

Tl;dr: as has been already mentioned the numbers do need a bit of balancing but I like the idea behind it, introducing a way to make rounds absolutely unpredictable and making just about everything be possible.

Also: people need to just learn to shut up about extended, it's a thing for a good reason whether they like it or not, the point of SS13 is not the antags, especially here.

Alright, I'm just gonna highlight some potential gamemodes and gimmicks for each of them that aren't possible in our current pool, partially because it's fun to come up with gimmicks, and partially to show the potential of a system similar to this one:

Monster hunters: Merc+ling+vampire: The mercenaries are monster hunters, who have tracked the lings and the vampire to the station. Their goal is to exterminate this threat, and they aren't gonna take any chances: collateral damage is acceptable. Will the station work with the mercs and destroy the lings+vampires, despite the brutality and overkill methods of the mercs? Or will the desperate security force enlist one of the more "peaceful" lings/vampires to combat the mercenary threat?

Synthetic Sympathizers: Rev+malf: The revolutionaries are an anti-synthetic organization, and want to destroy/ban all artificial life on the station. Will the AI be able to trick command staff long enough that it can eliminate the revolutionaries? Or will command staff discover the AI's secret, side with the revs, and destroy it once and for all? How far will each side go to achieve their goal? Can a compromise be reached?

Thinning the Veil: vamp+wiz+cult: The barrier between the veil and the real world is weak here, attracting all types of magical entities seeking to harness it's power for it's own goals. However, all these magical creatures despise each other, and would see themselves the only rulers of this source of power. Who will the crew ally with? Will the vampires come out of the shadows, and proclaim themselves the grim lords of this station? Will the wizard recruit an undead army, or perhaps an apprentice, to grow his power? Will the cult gather a following of crewmembers scared by the other powers at work?

Quantity vs Quality: Ninja+heist: The raiders have looted a spider clan weapon, and incurred the wrath of their finest warriors. In their cunning, the Ninja decided to wait until the raiders were on another heist, so that he could strike at their weakest... However, the raiders are not fools themselves, and will frame the ninja as the villain. Who will the station believe? Will the ninja be overwhelmed, or will superior skill and technology prevail?

These are just a few examples of what COULD be possible with a suggestion like this. The implementation of this simple algorithm would multiply the potential gimmicks tenfold, and absolute destroy any notion of repetitiveness or staleness that existed with the current modes.

Okay, I love this. I prefer having a roundstart theme to it so people stop deliberating "OK wtf do we do as a gimmick" in AOOC and then falling off on a tangent discussing literally anything other than what they should be doing.

I believe RP scenarios like these will not stifle creativity but rather allow people to go off of a basis and be able to interact in varying different ways depending on the character, the situation and their motives.

I love this. the point system is amazing IMO, but my suggestion is simple; I'd suggest you scale the points depending on the player count, from 1-50, 1-10 giving 1 point, 10-20 giving 2 points, 20-30 giving 3 points, and so on.

This will make dead hour rounds playable. At the moment, without a limiter like that, and with 5 point as a literal definite, IDK if this would be playable without like 8 rerolls under 20 players. If you did it this way, you may not even need extended unless in the absence of any players whatsoever.

Maybe that's not a good thing, though, since it'd remove Extended completely. Any ideas on how to make room for Dead Hour and not remove Extended are welcome.

I love this. the point system is amazing IMO, but my suggestion is simple; I'd suggest you scale the points depending on the player count, from 1-50, 1-10 giving 1 point, 10-20 giving 2 points, 20-30 giving 3 points, and so on.

This will make dead hour rounds playable. At the moment, without a limiter like that, and with 5 point as a literal definite, IDK if this would be playable without like 8 rerolls under 20 players. If you did it this way, you may not even need extended unless in the absence of any players whatsoever.

Maybe that's not a good thing, though, since it'd remove Extended completely. Any ideas on how to make room for Dead Hour and not remove Extended are welcome.

Actually, it doesn't remove Extended at all.

The original idea is that the game would roll a random number between 0 and whatever the maximum is at the time, and randomly choose antags to fill up the number it gets. If the game rolls 0, then no antags can be chosen at all, and therefore, the round becomes Extended instead. I actually really like this, because with top True Secret, that means even with 100 players, choosing True Secret can still viably land you in Traitor/Autotraitor, or Extended, just as easily as it can land you in super-cult-crossfire-doom-hell-match.

Well, I meant with my suggestion on it 'Removing extended'. Yours it doesn't, but yours will probably have issues for lower pop time periods. That's what I was trying to address. At the moment, you may have to re-roll like 8+ times and go through multiple 'Gamemode' votes to get into one round of this if you're not in prime hour 40+ players.

I like the idea alot, but that's already a problem with current Mixed Secret, and the main reason it lands on Extended so much, it rolls a mode it can't do then defaults to Extended IIRC. The true unpredictability is something you'd lose to fix this problem. Remember, if there aren't enough players to play the Antags it will force you back to the Lobby and this doesn't seem like it can default to other modes in the absence of enough players. How would you address this?

I don't want to lose Extended but i'm clueless on how to fix this without setting point limits by population count.

I like this idea. So many multi-antag gimmicks I've been wanting to do, but aren't accomodated in mixed secret. More chaos, more fun.

Can't really see what the issue is with lowpop. Let's say that the maximum was set to 2 for 15 players. I don't really see the problem with the game then taking a random number 0-2, and basing the antag rolls off of that.

The only problem I CAN see is during absolute deadhour when only 4 people are playing, the roll is from 0-1, the game rolls a 1 and picks a wiz or ninja through there. Then you have 2-3 people against a wiz/ninja. That may be troublesome, but at that point it's only 50/50 you'll even get an antag, and at the point that you only have 3-4 people on the server usually extended or autotraitor is just voted in anyways.

If you mean it will have to reroll due to not being able to find anyone to be the antags, then that's not a problem either. The game already first checks to see if anyone has the specific antag turned on, and if not, it rolls for everyone who voted, and if nobody's ready that voted, then it just picks randomly out of everyone who is readied. If you mean it'll have to reroll to figure out what gamemode to put on, I don't see how it will--for example, if True Secret only has 2 points to work with, it'd exclude all 3-point antags from the rolls automatically, and roll once between all of the 1 and 2 point antags--if it finds a 1 point, then it rolls another out of the 1 points to fill the second point.

How Secret works is it takes all of the gamemodes in the rotation, cuts out all of the ones that the game does not have enough people ready for, and then rolls a random static gamemode out of all of those. Mixed Secret works the same way, which is why it always rolls extended when there's less than 20 ready--the mixed gamemodes that require the least amount of players requires 20, and if there's less than that, then the game thinks "We don't have enough for all of these modes, so we'll cut them out of the roll" and Extended is the only one left to choose from, as that has a minimum of 0. (This is also why Extended is in the Mixed Secret roll in the first place. If it wasn't, then every time Mixed Secret was voted in with less than 20 players, it'd go back to the beginning of lobby time instead.)

Ideally, True Secret would not work the same way. Instead of choosing a pool of gamemodes to roll from at round start, it would instead have its own roundstart code, where it sees how many people are ready, chooses a point maximum based on that, rolls to see how many points the game actually gets, and then rolls individual antags to fill up those points. It's a good idea, but I can also see that lagging up roundstart or having another problem. On the other hand, if it worked the same as (Mixed) Secret, then you'd might as well just make new Mixed modes and add them to Mixed Secret, because if we had it work the same then we'd have to individually put together every gamemode anyways instead of creating an easily modular system like the one proposed here.

There isn't any problem with randomisation between 0-2 in that case, but the 'Problem' with lowpop is the problem Mixed Secret has already been facing, the fact that most of the modes are completely unplayable at certain times of the day, which results in like 3/4 back to back forced Extended rounds.

After re-reading the OP I understand now. Backed by your post. Yeah, It would be fine, the 'System' I was talking about is already being suggested in the OP and I just didn't realise. I must have accidentally read over it, which made my entire previous argument invalid. Welp. Still in support, more than ever.

EDIT: Or maybe it was sneakily edited in judging from the lower post. No clue. Doesn't matter, all that matters is that the system should actually solve the problem!

Alright, I edited the post slightly to account for some of the very valid concerns brought about with lowpop. This should fix all concerns except those for EXTREME lowpop, which aren't addressed by our current system anyways (and besides, this wouldn't replace the other two secrets or all the other gamemodes; if the 3 people on at that time vote for true secret and get ninja, that's their fault).

I'm also considering switching ling and tator, but I'm resolute that vamp is a low impact antag and should remain one point. I have made merc 2 points though, on the argument that heist and merc have about the same impact.

@[mention]Scheveningen[/mention], that post was just to highlight some of the potential combos and gimmicks that could be done WITH this suggestion, not as a part of it. However, I do think creating a "Inspiration Gimmicks" page on the wiki, then linking that in the roundstart text of every antag, would be very helpful for people who have problems with gimmicks. I'd gladly help with such a page if it existed.

And what [mention]Mappel6[/mention] suggested pretty much summarizes the problems against the suggestion; the original system is so simple it can be easily edited and modified with code that already exists to fit any and all situations that come up.

I'm glad at all the positive feedback this is getting. I honestly think a system like this would take the server leaps and bounds in the right direction, by giving players more freedom through randomness as well as having a fair, balanced system that doesn't make ridiculous games unless it's sure there are enough people online to combat all the antags.

Actually, I was saying that the original Secret system sucked because of that.

With this system it would be REALLY easy to, when implemented, add new antags into the pool, or even remove problematic antags or antags in the middle of a rework. With the current Secret system, to be able to play all the possible rounds available here you'd have to tediously put together every single new round type possible with this system. And god forbid someone comes up with a new antag, because then, you'd have to make a bunch of mixed modes for /that/ antag, whereas here you can just put it in the pool, give it a point value, and the system makes itself work.

The only real problem I can see is that roundstart lag as it has to do a lot more stuff at roundstart, but I don't think we'll be able to say how MUCH of a problem that is until we get a prototype working. And if it works well? Great, we've got a nice, easily modular system for making unique rounds without having to make new roundtypes individually. Once this is done and working, I can see it being a real quality-of-life thing for the dev team.

EDIT: Also, can we just call wizninjavampling something like "Utterly FUBAR?" Because I have a feeling that's what the station will think when they realize they're being besieged by four different threats. XD

Alright, after having played a few ling rounds, I switched ling to 2 and traitor to one.

And honestly [mention]Mappel6[/mention] I still feel like "Utterly FUBAR" is still less hard to deal with than paranoia or siege lol.

Alright, after having played a few ling rounds, I switched ling to 2 and traitor to one.

And honestly I still feel like "Utterly FUBAR" is still less hard to deal with than paranoia or siege lol.

Hey can I recommend to make the suggestion on a 10-100 point system as opposed to the current? I feel like, if you do that you'd have more freedom with mode point values and give a larger randomized severity range, if you will. So at 60 pop you can get a flustercuck crazy round with 2 or 3 antags 2 of which have a high point value, an ever so slightly calmer round with 1 major antag or 2 minor ones, or a very calm round with 0-1 antags.

A bit scatterbrained atm so this is hard to explain but I think it would be better if you up the scale to 1-100.

I get the appeal of rating the antags from 0-100, but I feel like that would just make things more unnecessarily complicated. One of the main pros of this suggestion was making sure there was a limit on the crazy/clusterfuck rounds, so we wouldn't end up with cult+rev+malf+merc or something insane like that.

Shameless self-bump because I still really want this to be in the game.

+1 great idea!

+1 Good idea, Mixed Secret is honestly the best mode, but it also just feels like it is lacking things or feeling limited at times.

Self bump yet again.

Server needs something like this more than ever imo.

+1 Excellent idea!!

Still think this is a good idea and deserves consideration. I'd like an actually random mode.