We really need metagame rules

[nikuzo]

 

First of all. GZ for the server its awesome but have 1 big problem that happens everyround.

 

 

Im talking about the metagame knowledge. I allways looks how Civilians, clowns etc Acts like enginers-medics-scientists. This is pretty boring. A big part of the server allways take medical supplies and then just ignore the medbay. Or take glass metal etc and ignore the enginers. This abusive conduct make the game anoying for the people who take his job seriously.

 

[SpaceTimeNow]

Agreed

[Renomaki]

 

This is something I can agree with to a degree.

 

Yes, it is annoying when you take a certain job, only for a clown to barge in and suddenly start doing your job for you.

 

As a moderate RP server, it is expected that there would be a slightly higher RP standard while still allowing some freedom to take it easy. But when I go engineer, I expect people to be asking me to help build them things, rather than them just grabbing some tools and suddenly becoming experts in construction and modeling. It is understandable for agents, yes, but non-antag assistants being able to pull off incredible feats despite their position? A little excessive, I believe.

 

On the other hand, there are a lot of IC reasons why you can get away with certain things that you normally don't expect them to do. Medical patches, for instance, are like super bandaids.. You just apply and BANG, you done.. Don't really need much training to use a patch. Tables are of the fold-up type, so assistants building tables is not totally unbelievable. And cooking and drink brewing? Well, I assume everyone knows how to cook IC, and there are probably lots of people IRL who can mix their own drinks with little issue.

 

It is only a problem when you have people like mimes setting up the engine or gardeners doing surgery. Unless they have a good reason as to WHY they can do this, it is kinda bollocks and takes the job away from others who joined TO do that job..

 

[SomanB]

 

Restricting someone's ability to do something they know how to do because job role is a little bit silly. With some outlying exceptions, most people stay within job unless lack of crew or incompetence are preventing a vital station job from being done.

 

Think like this...let's say you've finally rolled an antag you really want to play. There's only one engineer, and they promptly run off to maint to chill with their buddies rather than set up the engine. 15-20 minutes into the round shuttle gets called for lack of power, and the fun gimmick you were going to pull is over. It would suck even more so if you saw, say "Nova Z., Roboticist" on the manifest, when you know Nova is an extremely good engineer who can have power up in less than 5 minutes.

 

Paradise is medium RP at best. We don't do HRP things.That means that RP type things like "restrict job knowledge" take a backseat to "maintain fun for the most people". It sounds fun in abstract, but trust me, it'd be annoying as all get out to have it happen in reality. "Hay man, sorry you died in medbay lobby where I dragged you but I'm just a mime lel I'm not allowed to do medicine. Yah I know I normally play CMO and fixing you to keep you in the round would have taken me 5 minutes of surgery but ~just a mime~. Enjoy dchat."

 

[Fox McCloud]

 

We're not high RP and never will be. This isn't "metagaming" by any stretch of the imagination as its defined on Paradise.

 

Paradise is medium RP at best. We don't do HRP things.That means that RP type things like "restrict job knowledge" take a backseat to "maintain fun for the most people". It sounds fun in abstract, but trust me, it'd be annoying as all get out to have it happen in reality. "Hay man, sorry you died in medbay lobby where I dragged you but I'm just a mime lel I'm not allowed to do medicine. Yah I know I normally play CMO and fixing you to keep you in the round would have taken me 5 minutes of surgery but ~just a mime~. Enjoy dchat."

 

This is very well stated. Essentially, when you have rules that limit knowledge based on your current job, it leads to a lot of scenarios of "welp, you're screwed because server rules says 'lulz, no helps for you.' despite the fact that you know how to perform the actions necessary to save the person's life and you're literally 4 tiles away from cryo/the cloner/a defib.

 

Literally the only person who benefits from a situation like that is the antag , so he can do a quick cheese-kill and laugh as "I KEN NO DO SURGERY I BE MIME NA MEDIKAL IS DEDZ I 2 DUMM".

 

It doesn't generate any particularly interesting roleplay scenarios and it doesn't really make the game any more fun (except for those who like to lord it over with things like: ">>>I<<< am a well educated >>medical doctor<< and >>>I<<< save people with my >>>GENIUS<<< skills").

 

This goes hand in hand with blatant antag coddling of lack of antag knowledge---whereby a single changeling and kill off the entirety of security, he's the only "security officer" left, lacks an implant, but you're not allowed to act against him because "whut uz uh chunglyng?! THEY NO REAL!". It doesn't make things more interesting, it just coddles the antag and allows him to play really stupidly and obviously but still get away with it.

 

It makes everything really forced and, even worse, scripted. Roleplay is best when it's dynamic and voluntarily engaged in by two individuals--it allows for far more creativity and diversity in situations and scenarios that can and better allows those with similar RP styles to engage in that roleplay manner with each other rather than being shoved into a die-cast mold and forced to act like a moron purely because the server rules say so.

 

[SpaceTimeNow]

 

Every time you guys talk about metagaming you somehow ingore the fact that we indeed had knowledge limited and it worked fine. It was not to strict and nobody cared if a doctor did set up the engine because there was nobody in engineering, or if a civilian stepped in and helped in medbay when it was helplessly overcrowded, but those were exceptions in which those rules were bend in order to progress the round. A general knowledge of everything is just stupid, what's the point of being a doctor if everyone just runs passed you and picks the right medicine out of the fridge and leaves. It discourages interaction with other players, which is almost ever a bad thing!

 

@Fox: I am kinda shocked, but mostly dissapointed to see this being posted by you.

 

[Farya]

 

On Tau Ceti server(russian Baystation) its okay to do things outside of your job if there is just nobody to do them and thats mostly will improve the fun for everyone playing the round. However its not a greencard to be an instant expert in anything. Assistant could probably set up engine, but he would probably do it "by the book" of manual or/and with the help of AI unit.

Paramedic could probably do emergency surgery without surgeons around, but will do it slower. And paramedic will NOT do plastic and other fancy surgery. Brain surgery would be replaced with doses of mannitol.

 

[Earthdivine]

 

Every time you guys talk about metagaming you somehow ingore the fact that we indeed had knowledge limited and it worked fine. It was not to strict and nobody cared if a doctor did set up the engine because there was nobody in engineering, or if a civilian stepped in and helped in medbay when it was helplessly overcrowded, but those were exceptions in which those rules were bend in order to progress the round. A general knowledge of everything is just stupid, what's the point of being a doctor if everyone just runs passed you and picks the right medicine out of the fridge and leaves. It discourages interaction with other players, which is almost ever a bad thing!

 

@Fox: I am kinda shocked, but mostly dissapointed to see this being posted by you.

Everytime I see this I think people remember a different game. The Limited Knowledge rules were really bad, as bad as the loyalty implant forced RP was. We constantly were getting complaints to no end about how "X couldn't have known this!" or "Y said his cousin said this, its against the rules". Not to mention when say a Civvy stepped in to help medbay, we would get reports saying such, "An assistant shouldn't know how to do surgery" and would often also try to remove them with CH, which often times resulted in death if the medical player was new.

 

[GelatinousGlob]

 

Limiting job knowledge is something I don't want to see and I think would create more problems than it fixes. Yes in some scenarios it could prompt more RP and such but unless you have a fully stuffed crew of people in all positions all the time it becomes extremely clumsy and frustrating for players. It would also turn the low-pop rounds into no-pop rounds because no one wants to play if there isn't enough doctors or there isn't enough engineers or whatever other vital job and they can't take over as needed.

 

There is an argument to be given for limiting specific metaknowledge to help RP and reduce valids however I think the most and best changes are going to come down to space law changes and possibly some controversial antag knowledge limits. I think the future planned space law changes that can allow antags to only serve minor charges for some minor crimes and civilians being able to occasionally find minor traitor items will be the best change we can hope for.

 

[SpaceTimeNow]

 

Everytime I see this I think people remember a different game. The Limited Knowledge rules were really bad, as bad as the loyalty implant forced RP was. We constantly were getting complaints to no end about how "X couldn't have known this!" or "Y said his cousin said this, its against the rules". Not to mention when say a Civvy stepped in to help medbay, we would get reports saying such, "An assistant shouldn't know how to do surgery" and would often also try to remove them with CH, which often times resulted in death if the medical player was new.

So you are saying it's better to change the rules instead of enforcing them? You can't have RP without playing a role because that is literally what RP means. However you call it, hardcore, medium or low RP, you can't escape the fact that people need to have different defined roles and such roles come with certain skillsets, responsibilites and restrictions. The only roles on paradise that have at least some from of character left are the Head of Staff position, the rest ist just one grey mush of everyone doing everything. You were already allowed to change your role ingame pretty easy, you just need to head to the HoP, it is really not that difficult. It is not only unrealistic but most of all it is fucking disrespectful to run into medbay and go and heal yourself or your friend while there are like 4 Doctors waiting to do their job.

 

It is kinda sad that admins on this server join more and more to the powergaming crowd.

 

 

Edit:

On Tau Ceti server(russian Baystation) its okay to do things outside of your job if there is just nobody to do them and thats mostly will improve the fun for everyone playing the round. However its not a greencard to be an instant expert in anything. Assistant could probably set up engine, but he would probably do it "by the book" of manual or/and with the help of AI unit.

Paramedic could probably do emergency surgery without surgeons around, but will do it slower. And paramedic will NOT do plastic and other fancy surgery. Brain surgery would be replaced with doses of mannitol.

This is in my opinion the sane way to go, do stuff if there is actually nobody else who would do it and don't go over the top with it.

 

[Dumbdumn5]

 

-snip-

More often than not, the players who do know each job and could do them don't end up doing them until the department they're helping out either has their hands tied down and needs some extra assistance, or everybody in said department is inactive/dead/SSD/etc. and the job needs to get done quickly. I don't often see people running in and taking jobs from people in the field when they are of a different and unrelated job themselves. Placing additional limits on players if the limits haven't been there for an extended amount of time is going to both raise eyebrows and cause major discomfort among some players, some of which might jump ship if they feel the change would be too far against their playstyle.

 

In regards to the second part, while much more moderate than some suggestions of complete and total negation, it still might not work out for the better. Yes, the circumstances for it come up more often than not, but reducing the speed and efficiency at which the job is completed is going to bog down the game and extend the time in which something is not happening in the standard 2 hour round. The more people active in the round and doing something, the better it might end up due to increased player interactions.

 

About the comment of admins joining a more powergamey perspective, it's not that admins are jumping on to that bandwagon, but more that some of the administration, specifically the ones who have commented here already, have seen Paradise with those types of changes already in place and enforced, and they've stated how they didn't work out for the larger participating part of the community.

 

In terms of powergaming itself, we've actually discussed a number of preventative measures in the staff discord channel, and some of them might have been implemented while I've been on vacation from the 21st on to July 8th, 8 days from today.

 

[Earthdivine]

 

 

It is kinda sad that admins on this server join more and more to the powergaming crowd.

 

 

Please take the time to think out your responses, as this comes off as uninformed. We have been pushing tons of anti-meta and powergaming things through as we can without tearing things apart, not to mention our constant posts on powergaming/lowered RP and how we're working on it.

 

The biggest problem with proposing and going through with something like this is the loss of community. SS13 is honestly a stagnated community. We don't get new players coming in unless some big name decides to give us publicity. We can't just brute force this stuff or ban out the playerbase because there's so little players to ask to adjust to this. We already are down to 50 from 100 players since the listing to decrease the amount of greytide and attempt to help what roleplay we still had left. Changing the rules to such would probably push that player count to 30 or lower, making the station into a ghost town and lowering the productivity and more. That's not even to mention the fact we have attempted this in the past and there's a reason we do not have the rules anymore.

 

[Cobradude]

Medium RP. 'Nuff said.

[SpaceTimeNow]

 

More often than not, the players who do know each job and could do them don't end up doing them until the department they're helping out either has their hands tied down and needs some extra assistance, or everybody in said department is inactive/dead/SSD/etc.

I cannot confirm this at all, my experience is way different. After years of playing SS13 i can probably safely say that basically know what i am doing. It's going so far that even other doctors grap people away from me without a single word and run them of to cryo or god knows where. Simply because i stood infront of the patient that approached me and was typing a greeting. This is not on single incedent people do that all the time, they see a bar that is not green and grab the person, throw them in a machine and force feed some meds and then drag them out of the medbay without a single word. This is the kind community you foster here.

 

Placing additional limits on players if the limits haven't been there for an extended amount of time is going to both raise eyebrows and cause major discomfort among some players, some of which might jump ship if they feel the change would be too far against their playstyle.

If you can move slowly away from RP why does it not work the other way around?

 

In regards to the second part, while much more moderate than some suggestions of complete and total negation, it still might not work out for the better. Yes, the circumstances for it come up more often than not, but reducing the speed and efficiency at which the job is completed is going to bog down the game and extend the time in which something is not happening in the standard 2 hour round. The more people active in the round and doing something, the better it might end up due to increased player interactions.

It is not all about speed and efficiency, i can remember some extremly long rounds which were probably some of the best rounds i have ever played. SS13/ Paradise does not come with a ton of actual content out of the box. Research and mining are the only real real jobs that have some sort of built in progression and the end of this progression can also be reached fairly quickly. The actual content of the game is the RP and you don't need to be the best and most robust player in order to RP with other people. This git gud mentallity is nothing short but toxic, i mean just read this thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=8103. He or she is basically being told, here read the entire wiki until then, we don't really want to have to deal with you. Well, i just saw you comment in it so i guess you read it already and do you see anything wrong with that?

 

About the comment of admins joining a more powergamey perspective, it's not that admins are jumping on to that bandwagon, but more that some of the administration, specifically the ones who have commented here already, have seen Paradise with those types of changes already in place and enforced, and they've stated how they didn't work out for the larger participating part of the community.

I am not sure i can see the difference. What you are saying is that you changed the rules in order tailor them to the people who prefer powergaming. It is not suprising that RPers are a minority, it's like that in every game. Mostly because people are kinda scared of RP or they have been told that RPers are weirdos, many people just don't give it a fair chance. If you give people the freedom to completly ignore RP then they probably won't try, especially if the enviroment is so toxic to RPers.

 

[SpaceTimeNow]

 

The biggest problem with proposing and going through with something like this is the loss of community. SS13 is honestly a stagnated community. We don't get new players coming in unless some big name decides to give us publicity.

Twitch is the way i found this game, so i am acutally curious about this. Have you every tried contacting some youtuber or twitch streamer and invited them to the Server? I allways though that the few that know about this game would not show it because of the fear that server owners won't like it.

 

[Dumbdumn5]

 

-snip

I cannot confirm this at all, my experience is way different. After years of playing SS13 i can probably safely say that basically know what i am doing. It's going so far that even other doctors grab people away from me without a single word and run them of to cryo or god knows where. Simply because i stood in front of the patient that approached me and was typing a greeting. This is not on single incident people do that all the time, they see a bar that is not green and grab the person, throw them in a machine and force feed some meds and then drag them out of the medbay without a single word. This is the kind community you foster here.

Understandably, our experiences differ, but on the subject of fostering this attitude in the community, we don't do anything to actively encourage powergaming behavior. While the rules do state that it is acceptable in some cases to act in the way that you define powergaming as, we have been recently and are talking about this issue in staff chat, as it is no surprise that this kind of issue came up in the suggestions forum just about the same time some of the staff started talking about the issues themselves.

 

-snip-

If you can move slowly away from RP why does it not work the other way around?

 

It's not that it's impossible to ween people off of the more action-y side of things rather than the RP aspects of the game, but it's that, personally, I don't see this as a small enough step in the right direction where such a push would need to be.

-snip-

It is not all about speed and efficiency, i can remember some extremely long rounds which were probably some of the best rounds i have ever played. SS13/ Paradise does not come with a ton of actual content out of the box. Research and mining are the only real real jobs that have some sort of built in progression and the end of this progression can also be reached fairly quickly. The actual content of the game is the RP and you don't need to be the best and most robust player in order to RP with other people. This git gud mentality is nothing short but toxic, i mean just read this thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=8103. He or she is basically being told, here read the entire wiki until then, we don't really want to have to deal with you. Well, i just saw you comment in it so i guess you read it already and do you see anything wrong with that?

I am not supportive of the mentality of "here use this tool" or "here, use the wiki", as it sucks the fun out of the main parts of the game. Sure, you can turn to the wiki in order to find out something you would never figure out, but it should definitely be left in the hands of the player to figure out exactly how to do the more basic or unnecessary components of the shift, such as R&D. That said, I do not deny the existence of this mentality, as I myself have left most science jobs, barring roboticist (Yes, there are only 3 if you count genetics as a medical job), due to the idea that "MAX ASAP OR U SUK AT GAME!" . I myself am a fan of the absolutely despised Vox Trader and Extended roundtypes, and actively enjoyed a particular RP Rev round involving a bunch of Mingles, the CE, and a rebuilt assembly line.

 

-snip

I am not sure i can see the difference. What you are saying is that you changed the rules in order tailor them to the people who prefer powergaming. It is not surprising that RPers are a minority, it's like that in every game. Mostly because people are kinda scared of RP or they have been told that RPers are weirdos, many people just don't give it a fair chance. If you give people the freedom to completely ignore RP then they probably won't try, especially if the environment is so toxic to RPers.

The balance was shifted to that view a bit more because the staff believed that it would better suit the balance of the server in terms of what is and what isn't our definition of Med RP, Medium RP is a very shifty playing field, as finding the middle between Low RP and High RP is very different for a number of people, as evidenced by the drastically different and sometimes out right opposing viewpoints of multiple people, not only in the community, but also in the staff as well. I'm fine with being considered an oddball for RPing; I don't think that the issue stems from fear, but more an issue of dislike or discomfort. Some of the more LowRP players might dislike RP and think that it sacrifices too much on their part to give them reason to do it as often or even at all as much as people from High or other Med RP servers. While we can attempt to direct the flow of players towards what we want to have in a community, each player is going to act on their own, and while we can place rules in place to eliminate players who are actively disruptive to the game, there's a lot of grey area to cover due to the marginal difference in High and Low RP styles. We encourage roleplay, but I'd hazard a guess that we're not up to enforcing RP due to the attitude of the staff and rulesets prior. There are times where players shift a bit from side to side, going for more action or RP oriented viewpoints, and I enjoy giving people the ability to do that, so long as, again, it doesn't disrupt the usual round. In my opinion, I think we have it pretty good where we are, and that we do need a few tweaks here and there, but not too much one way or the other.

[Purpose2]

 

Medium RP. 'Nuff said.

O----------------------------------------------X

 

O = low

 

X = High

 

Every single point inbetween is medium. It certainly isn't in the middle.

 

Which is likely the source of a lot of peoples contention with this, some people see medium much more to the left or right than everyone else, whereas when you are on one end of the defined spectrum or not, it is easy and clear to define.

 

[necaladun]

 

ITT: A lot of generalizations, anecdotes, and misuse of the term metagame.

 

For a start - restricting knowledge to a specific job can be quite frankly ridiculous. I work IT, but I know how to build a table, cook food, do minor chemistry stuff, and have some first aid certification. My flatmate doesn't freak out when he sees me cooking food because I'm in IT not a chef. When I'm unemployed I don't suddenly lose my IT knowledge either. Why can't a civilian know surgery? Maybe they're a doctor who just isn't employed today. If that is part of their backstory, then they are roleplaying a specific character.

 

So we could make a guide as to what skills are reasonable to be known by everyone, and what requires you to be a specific job - in this case, we tried, and it was pages and pages before even getting to specifics. I don't want to enforce a set of rules that are more detailed than most wiki pages.

 

This is only "HRP" because it's more rules. More rules does not mean "more" RP or "better" RP. In this case it means people are more strictly forced to roleplay a specific set of knowledge based on the job they took. Restricting so heavily the knowledge and/or background of your character doesn't make for "higher" levels of roleplay. RP is hard to quantify or qualify. But more rules and restrictions does not necessarily make for a higher, better, or more pure form of roleplay.

 

A skill system would be great here. Assign points to specific areas. Require a certain amount of points in an area to play a specific role. Have a sec officer with 10 points of robusting easily beat up a nerd with 0. Require at least X Points in genetics to use the console. Plenty of ideas thrown around here.

 

Coding a system that would change basically every single machine/mob and mob/mob interaction is an insanely difficult project. That's not even counting actually balancing it, either.

 

As for generlizations like "RPers are a minority" or that the "environment is so toxic to RPers"....then I'm not sure what server you're on.

If people aren't seen as playing a character on a spacestation run by NT, then admins contact to them. So I'd be happy to say that everyone is at the least roleplaying to that degree. Making an "us and them" mentality between the people who RP and the people who "don't" is more of a toxic environment to me, especially when it's all one big elitest no-true-scotsman fallicy. Some people aren't going to RP at the same level of depth as you, get used to it. It doesn't mean they're not roleplaying.

 

[GelatinousGlob]

A point system would be nice if there was a generous amount of points. But its still not going to help much if it becomes a simple job restriction or unlock. There would need to be additional benefits or disabilities for having only a few points or a lot of points in something. And that would take a significant amount of coding spread through nearly every job.

[Farya]

 

Why dont we add possibility for people to set their characters employment records not only security and medical one? HoP office would fit such a console much better then security laptop.

We also could maybe implement skill system with points where people show how much their characters knows different fields of work. And that would not change the mechanics of the game. That would be just roleplay matter. Maybe part of employment records or some kind of new database HoP could access to search for people who would probably would like to fill in jobs needed right now in emergency.

We should better make possibilities for roleplay to encorage it rather then force it on people. Forcing would never work just because there is lots of other servers.

 

[nikuzo]

 

I agree with you about the skill points on info.

 

This could help to restrict the things one can do and report if someone its abusing the system.

 

 

Im so tired of see how clowns are Aerospace Engineers and can destroy the sec wing with the tool belt