Right, soo…
Everyone knows everyone else’s name from their voice and their appearance. It doesn’t matter if they’re the janitor, a visitor or a nuclear operative, everyone can immediately tell exactly who they are by looking at them or hearing their voice on the radio.
Crew knowing other crew makes sense and is really convenient for crew to crew rp/gameplay, but it really starts to show it’s limitations and flaws when it comes to antags and strangers.
Crew members should not be able to tell whether the outsiders voice over the radio is operator echo, or a visitor paramedic called the fern of hope. The same goes for seeing them in person. Sometimes reducing the amount of information players are given can improve the experience, and I think this is one of those cases.
Voice masks and face disguises are the current solution, but feel quite like a stopgap fix. They are also both very meta-able when used by any role that doesn’t use a hardsuit 24/7.
What other problems does the current system cause?
Is this a problem that we want solved?
What ideas for solutions do we have?
I’m in the opinion that “It doesn’t really matter honestly” unless maybe on a HRP server.
Does it suck/not make sense? Yes I agree on that, but this is a game not a real life simulator. Pretend you don’t know their name or something within rp until they introduce themselves if you want to.
The biggest issue I can see with “solving this” is “What happens if they eventually want to reveal their name”
Like a stranger cargo tech comes on the station and they appear as “Unknown” or something. They eventually introduce themselves as “John McHands”. We are not in a scripted game where we can change the players name after they introduce themselves, so even though you know their name. The chatbox/character info will still show “Unknown”. And there isn’t really a good way to detect such either, there’s so many different ways for someone to introduce themselves in so many languages, you can’t do this programtically.
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Putting my idea as a comments to keep the post consise.
Every role has a ‘known list’ that covers their department, command, sec and anyone who late joins those groups (or alternatively just all crew). Everyone else is in a ‘blank state’ where they show as unknown until they talk with a visible Id, or are seen un-disguised with a visible Id, at which point they are known and show up with that name going fourth. Clicking any name or unknown voice allows the player to type whatever name to recognise the person as.
You’re right that it doesn’t matter that much (bar any metagaming), the game already works well without changing this. However ss14 is a social deduction game at its core, don’t you think that making disguising and identification a fleshed out system rather than a blanket solution would be the right way to improve on and evolve the social deduction that makes so much of this game great?
This would turn common radio into a less-than-useless sea of "Unknown"s unless the entire crew gathers at the start of the shift to introduce themselves. Extraordinarily confusing
I disagree that SS14 is a social deduction game at its core. I believe it is a roleplaying game with some social deduction elements. And not being able to differentiate who’s talking makes roleplaying very, very difficult. Not to mention, SS14 uses text-based communication. In an audio medium, you can differentiate people based on their voices’ pitch, timbre, tone, accent, a dozen other little things, even if you don’t know the people who are speaking. In a text medium, you get none of that- so names are the best approximation.
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On MRP I ask what peoples name is when giving new ID as HoP. though OOC we can see names, I only use names of folks I remember like Tar~
If a server ever uses text to speech, they can (at the cost of alienating deaf users) opt to show anyone you have not seen as “Unknown” and letting you use the TTS’ modified voice to identify them by voice.
But that is the only solution i can think off.