Allfd

The team is not that big and we know each others approaches. We see each others notes, and we see all PMs during the round. We for sure know each others thoughts and preferences and we read the notes accordingly. Why did you not ahelp it the second round? Why do you think the notes would have any context? If we allow something rulebreaking, its certain that we took round context into consideration. We are constantly tweaking things behind the scenes to control round flow, there is a reason we ask players to ahelp before performing certain actions. Because we don't all agree with them, and they are not staff decisions or an official record. They are not even always complete. This is going to get Reeed at (Which fits with this topic) but I (alffd, not staff) take into account player reputation and response to PMs when I make a note. If the warden says "Thx" in IC, and I PM them about it, and their response is something along the lines of "I knew it the moment I typed it, I am so sorry, it just came out, things where chaotic and my hands just responded without me thinking about it." I am probably not going to write that down as a note. We all make mistakes, and they know its a problem. If their response was "Fine, but dude, its a game, lighten up.." Well... they are getting a note, and their response is getting copy/pasted into the note. The difference being, in the first case, player knew the rules, knew they made a mistake as soon as they did it, and explained why it happened." They get it, and if it happens again it was probably an accident but the admin who PMs them can decide. The second case, the player is willing to stop, but just to get me off their back in the conversation. They are probably going to do it again, as the "Its a game" remark tends to be a good indication they don't take the rules seriously. All the other admins on see this interaction (and we tend to work in groups due to timezones) and know it occured. They know if a note was placed afterwords as we all see it announced in the chat window. We know how each other handle these things. We know each other, and we are often on at the same time and deal with the same players who share our timezone. We have a bunch of context, and yes, we also ASAY about what you did behind your back, since we all see the PMs back and forth, we will interject with our opinions on ASAY. You were not just interacting with a single admin, the rest of us may or may not have been discussing it with the person who PMed you. Everyone has notes. (any other admin reading this, check spacemansparks notes, they are amazing, you will lol.)

Disagree, because everytime we do anything thats not visible in the notes, or a player discovers they have an invisible one, they will go full badmin on us in PMs. My fear, is we are going to get a ton of note appeals, and then arguments about notes in ban appeals, and its going to make more work. So if I make a note like "talked to X about running around naked as captain, may not be captain material and require a headban." Am I going to get an appeal? An admin complaint? How does that work if its public and they know it exists? Will they demand any note that is invisible if another admin says "You have a previous note for this?" What are we getting into with this? Is this more work for me as an admin? Trust me, you have a great inventive for the answer to this to be "no." Probably more then half the reason for the "If this continues, ban them", is that its an inconvenience to everyone involved to actually ban someone, and deal with the appeal. So its essentially just kicking the can down the road and hoping the behaviour changes. If a note like that becomes greater then or equal to the inconvenience of banning, I am going to skip the note and just do the ban. I am not a super hero, I just want to run events and spessmen. If just banning without a complicated warning/note process is easier then dealing with notes, I am going for the bans. Sorry, I just don't want to have a two hour PM discussion about someones notes, or a "note appeal" on the forums, everytime I give a warning.

1) A ton of our game modes feature security heavily, yet they are frequently under/not staffed. Inexperienced security players have a massive effect on the round. Hence we have a actually need to fix the causes of the staffing issues. 2) When Tide breaks into science and needs to be removed, who gets called? Science is not usually the place people go to harass because its a slow shift. Security has to deal with antags, people harassing them, and people harassing other departments.

This. I have begun observing security regularly to try and get a understanding of the situation. A little more then half the people getting pulled in are greytide. Of the problem security officers we have, almost none of them are regulars or high time security/command. They do. The crew does not do that in return. Security players tend not to be mains, and tend to be less experienced then the tide they confront. If they don't insta taze and cuff, they are going to get disarmed spammed, robusted for all their things and flushed down disposals. Its too easy for your average tider to overwhelm a new officers, it happens once and they are never off their guard. This is just one of many examples. It sucks, but this is not an easy fix, the mechanics of our server encourage this behaviour. I unlocked Vox, IPC, NTRep, and Pod Pilot, all through security karma back in the day. As things changed I started playing blueshield, as I still saw a fair amount of action, did not have to deal with rando tide, and got to feel like a real bodyguard with a baton and laser pistol. (At the time it was a massive revolver, I miss that). I can't speak for other former mains, but I remember when security was more often armed, had webbing, and could switch out the power cells in their weapons. As things got more and more mall cop, I just stopped playing security. When that was the norm, we would not wear armour or helmets until at least blue. I don't bring this up to sound "Back in my day." but I do believe that if we are looking for why attitudes may have changed, we should look for causes.

My concern is that none of the suggestions make security more fun.

This is a bad idea and will have the opposite consequence of what you think. Most of the time I see people greytiding or LRPing, they are using random names. I have mentally come to associate random names with greytide. It takes time to flesh out a character. If they are actually a new character each shift, they will either never get defined, or people will treat it as the same. This has happened before on a smaller scale, back when Vox were first introduced as a race, they would get a random Vox name at the start of each shift. I always played it as "Other species can't understand Vox names." But it did not have a meaningful effect on much other then reinforcing the Vox clique. Without an individual identity, the Vox identified as a species. Which was really cool for the development of the Vox culture, but also created the Vox greytide hivemind. The effect both created higher RP, in the form of unique Vox culture, but it also created greytide birbs. The "Kin, Shitcurity has steel VOXYGEN! SKREEEEEE!" thing came from when that would be yelled, and all the Vox would swarm security to rescue their kin. So.. I guess mixed? It will stop the IC favouritism, and replace it with OOC favouritism, you are suggesting removing the IC component. We already talked about the group-greytiding aspect (Cappy is crappy, is demand Vox rights Ya ya! Kikikikikiki) It will not create a healthier role playing environment, it will create a healthier PVP environment, as we move from a repeated game to a non-repeated game. This has consequences in player behaviour that is going to focus very much on the round, and payoff to ones self. A non-repeated game is call of duty. More on this at the end on what I have seen in the past from players who make this argument. I don't view this as a problem. It is a problem, if that OOC friendship starts moving to other characters that did not become friends IC. First, from a community perspective, people will be more OOC friendly to each other if they have some sort of OOC bonds. SS13 does not always have the best community, but we are not the CS:GO or Call of Duty communities either. Second from an IC perspective, we are a MRP server. We can't really say "Everyone should try to RP realistic characters" while at the same time saying "Except for the most fundamental part of the human social experience." ]-----Endnote-----[ This has come up before, it essentially boils down to "People should not be able to know who plays a character or use information from previous experiences in the round." I have been around long enough to notice a trend. This argument is most frequently raised by players who are concerned with "Metagaming" which they define as "I am an ass to people, and people have started to react poorly to my characters in game. SS13 should really be each round being unique with no pre-existing relationships." I am not saying the OP is in this category, just that whenever this has been brought up before, its brought up by people in that category. The end goal is to not just have randomized character names that opt them out of the "meta-grudges" but to make everything randomized so that "meta-friends" do not exist as yes, that does provide an in game advantage. Characters who are known as being friendly and well meaning, get way more leeway with other station staff then those who are known to be anti-social or murdery who are treated with less mercy. What these proposals seem to come down to is "Anti-social behaviour should not have a negative effect beyond one round, and positive behaviour should also not have a positive effect for more then one round." Where people fall on this seems to be controlled by where they fall on that spectrum. This is essentially "Why do I get the bad ending in Prey/BioShock/MassEffect if I murder everyone? That sucks."

I don't see this as a problem. We actively monitor the rounds and add more antags, or alter the midround antag type or adjust when it occurs. What we don't have is a good way of doing is removing antags, other then disabling the mid-round event. Its easier for us to add antags, then it is to remove them or add security.

We already have shifts were almost nobody signs up for security. Cutting the pool of applicatints and raising the bar for command is going to make that significantly worse. I think we need to find ways for security to be fun, so that we retain experienced security players. I recently had an incident where security broke their electric chair from zapping a corpse for fun. So when they dragged in another antag for execution (who for sure had not commited a capitol offense) one of the officers yelled "harmbatton execution!" and they all went at it. Its not one or two new officers, its when most of the officers are new. I used to main security back in the day. I would not have authorized a harmbaton execution. However the role changed overtime, when I played it almost exclusively, we had more serious command, and security felt like security. We all had security webbing and a bunch of gear, more things were illegal, including harrassing security IIRC (and killing pets and desecrating corpses). We had laws to enforce and were better armed. Also rounds were slower so when things got bad, we had time to get the armory open. As that started changing, I started playing BS and kinda gave up on security. I unlocked Vox, BS, NT Rep, and pod pilot, all on security karma in very short order. It was a different time.

Another part of this, is its just not fun to play security. A lot of the gameplay is forced and repetitive. As a small example The station will always end up on red, and you will always need to convince the warden to hand out weapons that you can't be trusted with on green, because security are the mall cops. The appearance of being mall cops opens security to random acts of greytide (I am guilty of this). Random acts of greytide disarm spam leads to many security players, just being on the edge of calling it quits. Part of the reason for this appearance of being mall cops, is that most of our players are based in the United States. In the US, all police, even volunteer ones, are armed. While mall cops are not, corporate security is often armed outright, this is especially true at things like chemical plants, or research labs. The harder it is for the police to get somewhere quickly, and the more expensive/dangerous the thing in question is, the more likely security will be armed. The private security guard who watches the self checkout machines at my local supermarket is armed. For the country most of our players live in, if you see unarmed security, their job is to call the police if they see something and not get involved themselves. (Source: I worked my way through college in Florida as a security guard.) Security in SS13 are mall cops, they are therefore treated like mall cops, and it should not be surprising if they have the same turnover (burnout) as mall cops.

I think the larger problem with all this, is the chaos level is so high, that RP is very, very difficult. I am part of this, I love me some clown goblins. But yeah, its very hard to have any sort of downtime unless the round is extend.

Agree with FoS, KasparoVv, and Medi on all of this.

Sure, but its a very big cost and that cost would be felt likely before language was created. Staff chat has been talking about the cost, but um. I will leave players to determine what it is on their own.

Point 5 was super interesting as I had not thought of that. But yeah, if they are plantigrade why do they have tails? After walking upright, apes lost their tail, as it created problems. It actually created a bunch of problems, considering how skeletons work. A possible reason to keep the tail would have been balance, but we solved that with plantigrade feet. #removevulptails2019

A good portion of the staff wants to move the server back in a more medium RP focused direction. I think that will involve loosing some of the player base to servers that more closely mirror what they expect. I think we would be fine with that. Regardless of popularity, making any major PR changes in the future will be DOA if this does not happen. We are obviously hear and listening, but if the response is "No, everything is fine." Well, if I don't think its fine, then I disagree? We don't really need people to say "No" we need alternatives. Because otherwise the response to feedback of "No, everything is fine." is "Yes, its not fine."