Antag Polling / Weightings Overhaul

[ExusA]

Basically:

Antag voting (putting the roundtype up to a vote) is an interesting feature some servers have. The general premise is to maximize fun by maximizing the number of people who get to see a roundtype/antags that they like and enjoy on any given round. That sounds pretty reasonable, but there's a few glaring issues with implementing it here:

1. People with preferences for antags others don't like never get to see their favourite antags, which is no good.
2. If people vote for the same antag type every round, there'd be less variety and thus arguably less fun.
3. Players can get metaknowledge of the antag type by looking at the vote stats. Having metaknowledge of the round type takes away from the classic SS13 uncertainty, and ultimately leads to metagaming.

How antag voting could be implemented on paradise:

Antag voting has the potential to improve overall fun for everyone IF it's done right. Instead of a majority vote determining the roundtype, every vote for a roundtype increases the weight of that roundtype. The votes would also be hidden from players, to keep meta at a minimum. Antag votes would be polled on a per-round basis and not picked in the game preferences tab, and would be optional. You'd get a dialog at the start of the round prompting you to pick 1-3 roundtypes you'd like to see this round, for instance, then those choices would be added to the weightings to determine which roundtype gets picked. Ultimately players' preferences shouldn't be everything in determining roundtype; even if EVERYONE voted for blob, there'd still be a 40-50% chance blob wouldn't be picked, generally keeping variety high and metaknowledge low.

Extra - midround polling:

This is slightly harder to get right: Allowing players to influence which major/minor midround events fire. This should probably be restricted to unrespawnable ghosts, that is, ghosts that either: 

1. Have AHud enabled and would like to spectate a particular midround,
2. Have been removed from the round permanently in some way or another, either through cryo or having their body destroyed,
3. Have been dead for a particular amount of time, IE bodies thrown into lava or into space or otherwise made unlikely to recover.
4. Have joined the server in the middle of a round and would like to participate in some way.

Why unrespawnable ghosts only? Because it'd have the potential to promote metaknowledge in the case of a player deliberately dying, voting for a midround, then resurrecting again.

Alternatively: All players could be polled at the START of the round as to which midrounds they'd like to see, with the same system as with roundtype voting.

Why?

Being able to influence the roundtype will naturally lead to more players seeing more of the roundtypes and antags they like, and less of the ones they don't like, while still allowing the less popular ones to be rolled for variety's sake and for the sake of the players who do like those antags. Generally, the goal is to have more players having more fun on more rounds, without having to fine tune antag weightings and balance them accordingly to their rarity: The playerbase will pick, in some capacity, what's most fun for them.

[Kyet]

Thoughts:

1. I like the idea of player preferences influencing what antags we get.
2. I also like the idea of admins being able to tell what antags players on the live server prefer.
3. I'm skeptical about polling all ghosts. I feel like they'd just choose the most powerful antags in the hopes of playing as them.
4. I'm even skeptical about polling non-respawnable ghosts. I feel like they'd choose whatever is most fun for them to watch, rather than what is most fun for players actually in the round.
5. I'm also skeptical of polling every round. I feel polls every round would quickly become annoying.
    

Instead, let me offer an alternative proposal:

1. Every player can set "what antags appear in the round" preferences, similarly to how they can set "what antag I am eligible to become" preferences.
2. These are persistent, saved to the database, but can be edited any time in the preferences screen.
3. Because every player (or at least, most players) will eventually have these saved, at any time, the server can poll connected players' preferences to determine what antags would be most popular with players online right now.
4. But, because the preferences are set beforehand, when the player doesn't know what role they will have, it largely eliminates the bias towards "most powerful" antags or "antags that I'd most like to play as personally". Because when setting the preferences, you don't know if you'll get to play as them or not, you're just showing your preference for whether they are in the round at all or not.
5. This sort of system would also allow for things like silently checking living players' preferences for antags, then spawning that antag.... without alerting living players to the fact that this was happening. It would reduce the scope for meta, and also prevent issues like ghosts' preferences influencing what living crew has to fight.

 

[MattTheFicus]

I really, really like the Preferences based polling. Having it be a passive rather than active "vote" seems like a better way to manage it overall too, it seems from what Kyet is saying. 

Would the polls include Nukies/Wiz as well? Or would it just be the basic Tator/Vamp/Cling set? 

[Rythen]

I disagree with the passive preference based polling and think it would cause things to become stale.  Expecting people to keep their favourite round type list preferences up to date is just extra effort and people would likely just set it and forget it.

I feel like right now we get a really good variety in round types.  My concern with this would be that we get less variety if people don't frequently update their preference rankings.  Say when the feature comes out a bunch of people set up their preferences.  It works out to 75% of people ranking traitor as their favourite round type.  Traitor starts coming up more often which is the intended effect.  People enjoy the more frequent traitor rounds initially but start to slowly get bored of the repetition.  We now rely on a majority of these people to actually update their preferences to reflect this fact otherwise nothing changes.

It creates a situation where, if what you enjoy is variety, you are forced to keep updating your preferences constantly and hoping that other people do as well.

My preference would be no polling at all but if we were to have polling I'd prefer it be active.  With active polling you are given the opportunity to think to yourself, what types of rounds have just come up, what am I sick of, how am I feeling right now, do I currently feel like a calm round or a chaotic one, etc.  These preferences (for me anyway) change on a round to round basis and there's no way I'd want to be updating this rank list constantly after every round.  If you just polled what my current preference is though, I wouldn't mind telling you.

Edited August 28, 2020 by Rythen

[ExusA]

I kind of agree with Rythen on this, I think preferences polling would be really bad for variety for all the same reasons. On the other hand, I do find the current variety a little lackluster as it is, with vamp, cling, tator and all the combinations of those three taking up a vast majority of rounds.

Alternative idea: Poll every round, but add a toggle in preferences that lets you opt-out of being polled to avoid the whole "annoying" aspect of it if it's not something players are interested in.

Also, the polls would ideally include every antag in rotation, so wiz yes, tators yes, borers yes, anything and everything.