Rules Rewrite discussion

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1

After giving it some time and testing, I can honestly say that the rules rewrite has some very large issues, and most everyone I speak to on it agrees. The rules would work quite well for an MRP server, but most LRP players I have spoken too dislike them greatly, the issues that have been discussed with me are listed below, without names of course.

1.4 - Shock content is an extremely vague term, an individual claimed to be banned for “threatening to shoot up evac” - an action that regularly happens in game.

1.8 - Administration has brought up the problems with this rule in particular, namely that you are allowed to bug test / use bugs as long as it doesn’t give you an advantage over other players. I find this particular rule problematic because It is borderline impossible to tell what an admin considers an exploit / feature. One personal example was myself constructing a disposal loop and releasing a holoparasite before entering it, disconnecting the parasite from myself for a gimmick, I was warned that I would be banned if I continued such actions. There is no consistency.

2.4 - The metashield is quite lacking in certain areas while being great in others, prime example is that revs have zero interaction with meta shield at all, despite being an extremely secretive game mode, while nukies are protected extensively. Ask any player if “meta” was more of an issue for nukies or revs pre and post rule rewrite and they will tell you it was more of an issue for revs.

2.7 - Completely unenforced. Prime example is crew hiding the nuke during warops, then complaining when the nukies cannot find it and choose instead to murder every living creature they can find.

2.9 (oh god) - This is the one I have had the most people bring issues up with, both players who tend to align more with crew and antagonists. I believe this rule had good intentions, and I think I can see what the goal was, but the execution is extremely flawed. I am going to list issues with it below:

  • There is no definitive administration take on it, I have asked if antagonist gimmicks I enjoy such as borg factories and maints slashers are allowed and have been answered in both the affirmative and negative for both.
  • There exist items within the traitor uplink that have bannable intended uses as per rule 2.9, examples include: the power sink, (situationally) surplus crate, syndicate hardbomb, and the (situationally) singularity beacon.
  • Singuloosing is allowed 3 minutes into shift with DAGD objective, I can confidently say this will ruin the experience for every single person on the server except the looser. I can also think of numerous ways to make everyone on the stations life a living hell for no reason other than DAGD, it shouldn’t be a token to go absolutely insane.
  • The round removal of witnesses is banned despite no existence of an NLR on LRP, one user explained it great with; “you can remember up until death on LRP… you kinda have to gib them unless you trust them not to be a piece of shit”
  • Revisiting an earlier point, the gambling crate is now a terrible purchase and you could end up completely screwed;
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  • This rule disallows quite a lot of creativity when it comes to antagonist gimmicks, before its establishment I was planning on kidnapping and forcing crewmembers to participate in a death game, this is no longer allowed, on top of the aforementioned factories and slashers. I have had several members of the community reach out to me personally saying that some of the rounds with extreme antagonist gimmicks were among their favorite rounds, and others saying that the videos on those rounds got them into SS14 in the first place.
  • This rule forces antagonists to abide to their objectives to an extent, which i recall being said is a massive issue that we do not want to have in the past, this is unfun for both antagonists and crew.
  • Antagonists drive the round, this game is a disaster simulator as per the steam page and community opinion. We should allow the driving force of a round to do interesting things, not just kill a random passenger and use thieving gloves to get their objectives, there is no drama or stakes in such things. Extreme antag gimmicks provide opportunity for unique and terrifying roleplay and gameplay. Traitors should not be a minor / insignificant issue. This is not only my opinion, but the opinion of the overwhelming majority of players I’ve spoken too, including both players who primary enjoy antagonist and primary enjoy leadership roles.
  • This simply limits the chaos of LRP, people come to this game and these servers because they love that chaos, its the appeal of it. Taking it away from a community that enjoys it is without reason.
  • Finally, the common response of “its fine because traitors can roll Die a Glorious Death” is not valid. The objective is incredibly rare and the more interesting antagonist gimmicks require numerous rounds of practice and development of the strategies that make them possible.
  • This rule is absolutely fantastic for revolutionaries in its current implementation, as well as for zombies, it falls short for traitors, which is the “sandbox” antagonist.

12.2 - It is completely allowed for players to suicide out of roles such as zombie as well as revolutionary, despite the often very high cost of conversion. A prime example is a warden who suicided when nukies injected him with zombie virus, this action was deemed acceptable by administration. “If players are not allowed to antagroll, they should not be allowed to crewroll, stick with what you got, this game isn’t always a happy story.”

N/A - This is more of a personal gripe, but it should be stated somewhere in the rules that you are not allowed to kill people with their consent, as I have a note for doing so.

This is an open discussion, and I will be happy to respond to any issues taken up with it, I am sure other users I spoke with when writing it will be as well, though I will not put them on the spotlight and they can choose to participate as they see fit.

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I agree, sadly it’s not like in ss13, fun is not allowed here

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an individual that was banned for saying “i’ll shoot up evac” cound easily be lying - there are tons of cases when players say there were banned for X, yet they were actually banned for Y

gimmicks you mentioned were not allowed even before rules rework - i definitely remember someone doing maints slashing before and getting bwoinked

also, no one enforces you to do objectives - you are just not allowed to go on a station-wide rampage unless you get DAGD, and it makes sense, because otherwise you can just say that this is your gimmick to murderbone the whole security department every round, which is simply unfun for most players

5

For context, it’s a reference to this appeal. Without commenting on anything in the appeal itself, I was playing that round and the Nukie did indeed announce that.

gimmicks you mentioned were not allowed even before rules rework - i definitely remember someone doing maints slashing before and getting bwoinked

This is true, and something I learned from personal experience. The main issue is randomly attacking someone with basically no way to fight back (Northstars + Syndie soap = dead cargo tech before the stun ends) and leaving people to rot. With a twist to the gimmick, like only attacking Security/only in self-defense/giving clear warnings it may be more permissible.

also, no one enforces you to do objectives - you are just not allowed to go on a station-wide rampage unless you get DAGD, and it makes sense, because otherwise you can just say that this is your gimmick to murderbone the whole security department every round, which is simply unfun for most players

I do think there is a point to be made that objectives should not allow for what is otherwise rulebreaking behavior; it introduces inconsistencies and is not very intuitive for the player. You can DAGD without attempting to round remove half the station.

All this being said, I think OP has some strong points; some antag items very much enable murderboning and it is not clear what constitutes a valid use of an antag item and what doesn’t. Bulldogging Medbay? Not allowed. Pulling out an e-sword and slaughtering everyone on Evac? Maybe allowed? Syndiebombing Evac? Perfectly fine. Syndiebombing Medbay? Allowed, maybe, but if you don’t have an objective there the admin might get pissy despite objectives being optional.

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I’m not familiar with the case you cited, but do you have a clearer proposal for the wording?

I’m not sure if it was the same situation you were referencing or how much you know about it, but someone linked an appeal in a reply. I haven’t looked into the details and don’t want to comment on the appeal while it’s open, but I do want to point out that the ban reason they provided includes two separate things and referencing school shooters isn’t something that regularly happens in-game.

We’ve had this problem for as long as I’ve been on the team, how do you clearly define what is and isn’t a bug/exploit without knowing what all the bugs/exploits are?

Revs, in my opinion and I think in the opinion of the admin team, is currently an unfinished and severely flawed game mode. When we tried to enforce metaknowledge under the old rules, it was a mess of both inconsistency and high admin load due to the work required to try to figure out if someone could reasonably have thought IC that there were revolutionaries.

People regularly complain to me and others that the rules are either too restrictive or too lenient. Something people who believe that the rules are too restrictive often say is that things should instead be enforced mechanically, and generally I agree that’d be much more ideal. The problem is that they aren’t, but that’s the problem that people who complain to me see, if they did, then it wouldn’t be the rules that they were complaining about. They feel that by addressing something with the rules, we are preventing it from ever being addressed mechanically.

Personally, I do not think that’s the case. I don’t think that not enforcing something that can be mechanically solved with rules that a mechanical fix is receiving any sort of significant delay in implementation. The other issues are why there’s currently no metashield related to revs, but this happens to be one of many perfect opportunities for someone to demonstrate just how quickly a mechanical fix is implemented for something when rules don’t try to address it. An entire game mode is fairly broken, I’m not sure that anyone contests that it has significant flaws, and to my knowledge multiple different mechanical fixes have been discussed without any significant opposition.

If any admin gets a proposal to add a rev specific shield to pass, it will be added, but I’m not personally going to push for that change and I think if a change like that does happen this will become an example cited anytime someone says something should stop being enforced by admins so that it gets fixed.

Honestly with the coverage we have right now I wouldn’t be surprised if people said and both genuinely and reasonably believed this about any rule.

We’re currently discussing if changes should or need to be made to this rule, but I think that this version is much clearer than the old one.

The only alternatives that anyone has proposed to this rule are to either have no restrictions at all on antags, or to have none after a specific round time. Both of theses have the same issue except it expands beyond people with the die a glorious death objective and into any antag. The only possible way that I can think of to address this is to try to explain to around 40 admins and thousands of players what our official definition of “boring/miserable/whatever to other players” is, and how many players can be affected in that way before it becomes a rule issue.

Introducing a NLR into LRP was brought up relatively early in the rewrite process but didn’t get wide support from the admin team.

The current rule doesn’t have a blanket prohibition on round removing witnesses. In every case where round removal is mentioned by the rule, it is followed by “many people” and then further qualified. The rule allows both for round removing witnesses to some degree and round removing many people in certain cases, what it doesn’t allow is round removing many people under the guise of round removing witnesses.

Any rule that limits antags will also limit antag creativity. The problem with removing antag restrictions in the name of antag creativity is that you can’t rely on enough players having a good enough sense of what is and isn’t fun for the rest of the players to balance out all the ones who don’t. For every player who can come up with and execute an engaging antag gimmick, there are countless others who would take the freedom they were given and kill everyone in the easiest and most boring way that they can think of, and there’s no clear way to define what is and isn’t boring/exciting/engaging.

It limits them to a degree of disruption proportional to their objectives, but explicitly does not limit them to their objectives. There’s currently absolutely no mechanical encouragement for completing objectives aside from greentext, and no mechanical discouragement of any antagonist from going far beyond their objectives. Without some sort of restriction, nothing prevents a robust player from destroying the entire station every time they roll antag. That wouldn’t be fun for the non-antags or the other antags.

While I agree that players and their choices are a big part of the game, if the game isn’t fun when players follow their objectives, then it sounds like the game is bad and relying on the crutch that interesting players provide to be fun. The game should be fun regardless of who is playing it, getting great people playing it should add to that fun, not be a requirement for it to exist.

LRP, and all the RP levels, are incredibly poorly defined. I don’t think people come to WizDen for the chaos, I think there’s a lot more that sets SS14 apart from other games and those things are probably what new players are coming for. Some players like roleplay, and they don’t like when chaos disrupts that roleplay. Some player just want to play a job simulator. Some want to complete objectives undetected and with minimal impact. Some want to solve a murder and capture the criminal. There’s all sorts of other reasons and combinations of reasons that people want to play the game or on a specific server, and no single server is going to be able to offer every player what they want. One of the great features of SS13/14 is that if enough people want an experience that’s entirely different than what’s available, they can start a server that gives them exactly what they want.

If it’s too rare then I’d suggest either making a PR to make it more common or one that adds more objectives that give more freedom to antagonists and convincing maintainers to merge it.

I get and agree with the sentiment behind this, but it’s difficult to tell people that they need to play a role that they get converted into if as antagonists they aren’t required to follow their objectives, especially if antagonist restrictions were to be loosened to essentially allow antagonists to do whatever they want. Ideally if you suicide or ghost out as a converted antag, your character would be opened as a ghost role or something, and maybe there’d be some other type of mechanical discouragement, but that’s unfortunately a development solution.

I wasn’t able to find the note for this and I’m not familiar with the situation so I’m hesitant to comment on it

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Fun is allowed, administration has been great in making exceptions, I just think rules are difficult for everyone and with the PC tide this was likely a bit rushed, which has to happen.

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Yes I was referencing the one he mentioned, them having two reasons and being open right now is why I didn’t go too into this, the main issue is that shock content is very vague and somewhat a person by person experience. Force borging someone is absolutely horrifying but allowed? Stuff like that is just somewhat confusing.

Yeah this one is very difficult, I genuinely believe the solution is to let players find stuff, report it in ahelp, make a GitHub issue if possible, then not use it after the shift they are in. It’s a strategy that works very well in SS13 servers such as TG. I was operating this way prior to the rule rewrite for a while until it got me into trouble. I was told “these are not bug testing servers” and I think that mentality is pretty bad to be honest. I know I’ve reported quite a few extremely dangerous bugs that simply never would have been reported by bug testing. It’s also interesting for other players seeing insanely wacky things happen. The best solution I think is players who know reporting it and when it’s an issue otherwise a friendly ahelp and the admin reporting it.

12

I completely agree with everything you said here.

I think the majority of players know that the admin team is doing a good job with enforcement with the majority of rules. The issue with this one in particular is that I’ve not seen it enforced at all in my playtime, even adding the hiding the nuke example would fix it. Additionally it could be mechanically enforced my making nukies always use their own nuke.

The overwhelming majority think this one needs work, which I agree with. there has been countless confusion and discussion in SS14cord over it. I have drafted up a few ideas with several groups of players if you would be interested in hearing them.

I would like to request it be brought up for reconsideration, a large amount of the playerbase wants such a thing, and while the admin load would be high at first, once players got used to it it would not be as bad.

This is something that is very true, I have observed however; the players who are not considerate of others oftentimes are also not robust enough to do exciting gimmicks without being caught by sec / crew. I go into this a bit in a few of the rewrite proposals on top of actual solutions

You’re completely correct here, though I think I was somewhat misunderstood, the game is fun for players following their objectives the first few times. But the lack of variety and freedom has with them makes the experience somewhat lackluster after a few antagonist rounds. With the people I have spoken to at least, rolling traitor with more experience in the game is an opportunity to spice the round up for everyone, not just yourself. Great people want to add to the fun, but are not required to have it in the first place.

This is fair, I have noticed a very large trend of players coming to lizard in particular for the chaotic and wild rounds, but it is not the only draw by any means, just something I have noticed.

This is something I will look into.

I should have mentioned this but the team antagonist rules are in a fantastic place and should stay in their current state. IIRC team antagonists are required to work with their team.

It is my most recent note, people volunteered to be fired upon by a massive glass shard cannon for testing purposes.

13

I understand that it’s not exactly a clear line, I’m definitely open to trying to clarify grey areas in the rules wherever it’s possible, but when someone is force borged, the intention isn’t to cause the actual player behind the character any distress. When someone tells someone “kill yourself irl”, or descriptively emotes deification, those are things that are likely to make the person behind the character extremely uncomfortable.

The biggest flaw with this is that what makes people uncomfortable can vary, someone may genuinely be made uncomfortable by their character being forcibly borgged while someone else may hardly be bothered by anything. Without a way to clarify the rule, I don’t know how to address this other than to trust that admins will use good judgement and that, if they make a mistake, that the appeals process will correct it.

Reporting bugs and exploits through the proper channels is definitely ideal, but to require them to report it and then not use it falls back into the same issue of them needing to be able to figure out what is and isn’t a bug/exploit. They could be overly cautious and overreport, but they can do that now too. I don’t think there’s much benefit to allowing players to exploit a bug once as long as they report it compared to not allowing it at all.

During the voting on the rules, we had two candidates for the bugs/exploit rule. One of them excluded the current point #2 from the rule, which would have removed a lot of grey area, but iirc the current version was favored by a very wide margin.

Have you reported the issues you’ve seen related to it via ahelp, and if you did were you told that it wasn’t an issue or did you just not receive a response?

Regarding your point on mechanical enforcement, I agree that nukies could use some dev attention specifically targeted at preventing stalling. Off the top of my head:

  • Nuke hiding you mentioned
  • Running off on a shuttle with the disk
  • Nukies deciding to kill everyone instead of go for the disk

All of these could probably fairly trivially be prevented mechanically.

Yes, feel free to post them. I’m not entirely sure because people haven’t ever really done it, but proposed changes are probably better than just an argument that there should be a change. While I doubt any version of rules would be widely considered perfect, the current rules are very much “the best I could come up with in the time I had that I thought would pass a vote” rather than anything close to perfect.

I created a topic with a quick poll to gauge current admin opinions.

I don’t have any statistics on this or anything, but to give an anecdotal example: Sosa is an extremely robust player, from what I’ve seen he could easily kill everyone on the station by himself if he wanted to, probably without having to use any TC meaning he could probably do it as almost any antag role. Whether or not Sosa intended to make things interesting or fun for everyone else, I know for a fact that there were many people who didn’t like the way he played antag. That’s fine to some extent, not everyone is going to have fun every round, but if most people aren’t having fun every time, or most times, when certain people roll antags, then something probably has to be done.

Sosa is currently banned, so from a certain perspective this isn’t relevant to WizDen, but there will always be players who are significantly more robust than the rest of the player base. Something that can mitigate that is game balance, which I think is important, but that’s outside the scope and ability of game admins. The game in it’s current state doesn’t do anything to address these sorts of things mechanically, so we need™ some way to address it until it does, assuming it ever will.

Lizard I think has a reputation for being more chaotic, and so I can imagine that people who choose to play on Lizard compared to other WizDen players are looking for a more chaotic experience. I don’t think it’s great if we have significant inconsistency in experience between different WizDen servers at the same RP level, but I think this kind of points to the benefit of different communities starting their own servers.

WizDen won’t be perfect for everyone who wants to play vanilla SS14, but hopefully other communities can form to fill in the gaps that WizDen can’t, and maybe WizDen will learn from those communities as they try new things and get them to work that we previously weren’t willing to try at WizDen.

To an extent, yes they are, I’m glad you like them.

That note says it was a deathtrap. If that wasn’t the case then it might be worth making an admin message to get a second opinion on the situation

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Tbh nlr should be a core rule of the game. There is literally no ic reason for captain to suddenly claim x stole they stuff with gloves while they were crit the whole time just because “critical condition doesn’t mean i am unconscious!” (It does). Before the rule rework the lrp community used to follow nlr even if it didn’t exist and the game was 10 times more enjoyable since i don’t have to gib every single person at knows my crimes or i may just lose the game to borderline nrp behavior.

1 Like
15

I may also add at escalation rules are incomplete and don’t cover neutral parties like ratking or skeleton and crew are using this for validhunt them on sight. That rule needs to be update since it is sad to see someone get a fun ghost role and want to play a fun friendly gimmick only for sec to just rush the ratking with a shotgun and murder them in cold blood and pretty much on nrp behavior too.

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I’m aware, I think another admin is looking at it right now but I’m going to try to fix it if they’re not anymore or if what they’re doing is going to be a larger refactor that takes more time

17

This makes so much better sense now, thank you! I would like to suggest potentially putting an example or two of what would be considered shock content in the rules, a good example would be a revs round where a player created a “torture chamber” for command.

The reason I suggested this is it leads to some very interesting situations, an example being when I was playing RD I found a way to send players to nullspace and we RPd it as a black mesa style incident.

I have two times IIRC, there was no help though that could have been due to no admins being online.

The first could be fixed with the station nuke being bolted in the vault and immovable, which could also be interesting as it allows the crew to make a defended position there

The second could be fixed using the disk teleportation that happens when it is destroyed, there are very few if any reasons for the captain to go into space anyways.

The third would be fixed by the first two being fixed imo

Would it be alright if I sent them to you via DMs first to fix any glaring issues?

This is a very good point I did not even consider, you likely know far more than I on that side of things so I’ll take your word on it.

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Will do, there are two right now but there’s no harm adding more if it helps clarify the rule.

I agree that there can be interesting effects and experiences that result from bugs, but to only allow a bug to be exploited once would require tracking every time that a player uses it, which I think would add quite a bit of admin burden.

It’d also introduce the issue of copycats. Once you discover the bug and use it, now tons of other players want to try to use it too. We’d either have to find some way to communicate to all other players that “the bug was already discovered so no one can use it now” or risk having situations where the bug is used so frequently that it’s essentially not against the rules to use it.

Additionally, there are many uses of bugs that are just frustrating or feel unfair to other players. If someone gets sent to nullspace, they might think it’s interesting or funny, but someone else who gets killed by an antag and is sent there to make finding or reviving them impossible might think it’s a cheap move by the antag and get frustrated.

If you didn’t get a response, I’d suspect that it was probably due to no admins being online. Like I said before, our coverage is really poor right now. I’d encourage you to keep ahelping stuff that you think is an issue unless you are told that it isn’t an issue. Feel free to message game admins on the forums if you notice something like a player regularly causing issues or a major issue in a round where an ahelp from you went unanswered.

Sure

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i didn’t read though this whole thing, but the find-word function didn’t find anything about this.
my main complaint that i can think of right now, it that there are no rules against powergaming like bolting every single door (that i can think of off the top of my head)

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I am pretty sure thks falls under the metagaming rules because something haves to happen for justify bolting every door at may lead to objectives.

21

Bolting doors falls under the alert procedure
Alert Procedure

22

Yes but alert procedure is not longer being used

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