Every job needs an intern, and new players should NEVER be someone's kill target

Development Feedback
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The first few games in a role is make or break for a new player. This game is ENTIRELY knowledge based, and if you interrupt someone while they’re learning, but doing some methed up assassination, you may literally ruin it for them, forever.

I know as a new player I almost quit after being a kill target back to back, when just starting out.

The counter I hear to this is always something like “they’ll learn not to die”.
Can we be real here? Do you remember when you were a new player?

Your head was full of all this new information, but oh suddenly throw it all out and slowly walk away as someone runs at mach 10 and “psssh psssh pssh”'s near you, and your character is now SLEEPING???
You were just about to harvest your first set of berries, after learning how to do that.
Now they’re dragging you into this dark hall? Why are they punching you so fast. Oh my god you turned into organs, and you’re dead…
Well. This sucks, I’m gonna go play something else.

This experience should be avoided as much as possible. Sure, sometimes it’ll slip through, but there is no world where someone who isn’t competent at a role, should have to learn the role, while ALSO being hunted to death.

The reason why command is locked behind play time, isn’t just because they have to pick up the slack of their department, its beacuse they’re hunted so often by antags.

If the roles requiring the most experience get hunted, then the roles specifically for “I don’t have any experience” should obviously, 100%, without question, be exempt.
It’s hard enough learning your role before something inevitably goes wrong. Make it a crossfire death though, not an assassination.

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That is with the actual space station experience that makes the game popular.

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You made up a story about how being a kill target feels for new players, here’s a real story that happened to me when I was a new player.

On one of my earliest games of SS14 I was playing an engineer, and I was extremely busy fighting meatzu that was robusting me because I am very unrobust. On my second trip to med to get fixed up from the meatzu damage, a paradox clone ambushed me and took me down without much of a fight since I was already injured, and I was angry and frustrated.

I kept spectating my clone the rest of the round (initially with the motivation of finding something I could ahelp to punish them - sorry I suck) and my frustration turned to wonder as I was just watching the interactions that happened as the clone tried to integrate themselves into engineering which mainly involved playing “no he was the clone” games and then attacking and gibbing everyone who was suspicious of them, spiralling into ever more crazy violence while trying to keep up “it was self defense” or trying to blame their victims for their own deaths.

It filled my head with so much new information that I didn’t understand and it was great!

Is every instance of “oops you’re dead now and no longer get to play the game” actually good? No, probably most aren’t. But I think you’re overstating how bad it is.

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Honestly this is why we need a grasshopper like server.. I recall grasshopper was stopped as antag experianced players stomped on new players.. i feel this could be resolved by rolelocking our the white listed experianced players and adding a special role called synicate advisor who has synicoms with antags and can advise them but its on there own satalight.

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If dying randomly puts someone off, this game is probably not for them.
There is no experience that will prevent that and it will happen a lot.

The real issue is that when a major antag happens, no one can learn anything as everything else in the station has to be halted to deal with the antag. But that is a different issue.

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I agree with Nancok. if people cant deal with their plans/rounds randomly bursting into flames ss14 is probally not the game for them.

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i totally agree with the last two posts. If SS14 is star trek, we’re random red shirts, or star wars, we’re that clone in the Venator that explodes, or Stargate, and we’re that SG team that ends up on a planet with a blackhole.

We’re all side charaters with no plot armor. We can and will die, it’s how it is. It’s what makes it fun to survive. And come on, rounds are 1 hour long, it’s not like losing a 15 hour save in a roguelike like Qud or CDDA. And even if you get RR, there is still ghost roles and spectating. Yeah it sucks to die sometimes, but “it is what it is” and there is still ways to keep having fun in the same round

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I think this highlights a bigger problem, which is a lack of interesting post-death gameplay (and also lack of tutorial, buuut whatever, it’s a different can of worms).

Once you die, you either wait for a round to end or you get a ghost role. Ghost roles are either (most of the time) extremely low-impact to prevent kill-grudging (killing an antag that killed you while being a ghost role), or they’re antags. Antags are very limited, and low-impact roles have limited capabilities to the point where they’re simply boring and don’t get picked.

Providing the game with a solution to this (for example, better ghost roles and improvements to old ones) would solve the “new players quit too much upon getting killed” problem.

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Learning by winging it is one of the best parts of starting out. The game and the rules are built around this idea (within reason ofc).

During a round there are plenty of ghost roles. Rat kings, slimes, spiders, dragons, ninjas, lone ops, etc.
If your suggestion is to spawn MORE, remember the crew can barely deal with the current antag plus late spawns. It is not feasible to just spawn more.

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I never said “just spawn more”. I said “improve the old ones and add better ones”.

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there is always starlight’s approach via the new life system. but that kinda also punishes you by making it so if you dont have spare characters you are infact dead.

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I trust next to none of our usual playerbase to not abuse the shit out of this system, but I do like the concept.

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Ah, that would be the goal ofc.

Altho idk what is your definition of “better”?
Ninja and lone op are already more fun than the other starter antags. Dragon is also pretty cool.
Spiders where getting a rework with a caste system, but it got abandoned.
The terminator ghost role could probably be added back if it got revised.

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Antags are mostly fine, the improvements should go towards other roles. Correct me if I am wrong regarding some of those (havent played upstream in a while):

  • Mice. The only thing you can possibly do is annoying the chef, because your hunger is the enbodiment of Gluttony for some reason. Sure, you could say that mice are supposed to be expendable, but when I pick a ghost role, I want to actually play the game as that ghost role.
  • Hydroponics trays. Your gameplay is a chat with a single person at best. It is straight up more interesting (at least for me personally) to just spectate a round. Not sure if they got removed or not.
  • pAIs. Glorified trays, but as items, and you get MIDI+map. Still really depends on how proactive your owner is, buuuut… eh.

In general, anyone can just log on a big server mid-round, open the ghost role menu and see the roles hanging there - those are the ones that need love.

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hey I annoy medical by drinking all their chems

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Sure, but you can watch that happen to someone else, and still get to harvest your berries. Let them harvest their berries a few times before it happens to them.

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but we don’t need to over force it. new players will still die yes, but they should never be the target of an assassin that basically means they aren’t allowed to play a round.

New players don’t have many rounds before they’re make or break. Why are we intentionally making it harder for people to get into the game? What benefit does being an assassination target add to the new player, or experienced player experience, that outweighs the harms?

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Sure, but when was the last time you saw one of the aliens or enemies in star trek break into the ship specifically to kill 1 red shirt?

This is my point. If you’re on command or an experienced player, ok you’re no longer a red shirt, you’re a named character and you’re free game.

Redshirts should die to station destruction, not to individual assassins.

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How is new players being removed from the antag rollable target list abusable?
Like someone makes a bunch of new accounts or something? For what purpose?

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I’m starting to think the real reason why y’all want interns to be on the menu is cause you just suck at antagging and want easy targets every now and then…