It seems that Salamander sees less and less people playing on it. One of the reasons for it is because the codebase is LRP-oriented - there are simply not enough CVars to regulate the gameplay mechanics. However, this is solveable - if people pinpoint the specific game mechanics that are in need of being changed specifically for MRP.
Perhaps there are also other issues that I am missing out on - this is why I would like to hear others’ thoughts.
I feel it’s because other MRP forks are more insular and can tailor their content towards their playerbase. Players on MRP forks usually get more choice of markings species and jobs.
Easy ideas:
Lowering the rate that “things” happen. Events ofc, but also how many points sci gets (or make things cost more), the babysitting of engie/botany jobs, the grind of chems, even roundstart power with engineering.
Then increase the “get together” aspects, make eating and drinking more frequent, take longer to preform, require you to be stationary (maybe you choke, trip or spill if you want to go further than just canceling).
More indepth stuff:
collision (ik im a heathen)
Make a “job of the day” for command to work towards occasionaly, not just because its life threatening, but because “this station needs more green space, please create an ‘outdoors’ room” order on command’s PDA or character menues as prior orders, or something to vote on.
Also encourage people’s play with a “pension” number that increases with hours spent in jobs (just job time X pay for each job or something).
Make the job request thing on the PDA something you can broadcast as a request with a pension transfer for satisfying the request, or a promised reward.
Provide (post round) ERT roles at CC that open when evac launches.
Provide more “moproach” like ghost roles that are useful, but unimportant. A medbot equivilent that syndicates could interact with could be fun.
Make a non NT aligned (but still “crew”) trader role that takes the place of the ATS, making requests instead of the cargo request board (even if they are literaly just an inbetween person). Perhaps with limited time deals, a small side cash income or something else entierly. They still have to come to the station for food+drink, and are in close contact with cargo, and maybe even salvage is part of his group.
Provide sub-jobs in departments that are not “restrictive”. EG how paramed is for med, as apposed to an atmosian in engineering. Round start people could chose “robotisist”, “anomolist” or “artifacer” as “sub jobs” to scientist. Or “mailman”, “trucker” and “runner” for cargo tech. They wouldnt have extra responsabilities, but would let you say “I signed up for fixing robots” or something and ensure you have the job your character is built to RP with.
Give science a “licence tech” passive income for the station, where the tech they research gives the station a small boost to passive gain. Perhaps at a larger research cost.
Throw a cheap, many use “quick fix” tool to atmos, where you can then upgrade the quick fix to real walls without spacing everything so it doesnt always take a whole rcd or a bag of mats to repair the same 3 shattered windows at evac every time. (Even a dedicated “tools and mats” belt, or suit-storage would be great)
Make some roles such as chaplin, psych, and lawyer have something in game to work for, even if its a semi-randomly generated paper they can ignore in their offices.
That doesn’t explain why that happens to MRP specifically: there are also LRP servers with more content, yet wizden LRP seems to be fine.
Feedback from someone: “Lack of content is the problem. Staff is a mess, maintainers cannot agree on anything, the PR backlog is increasing, etc”
That is not exclusive to MRP in the slightest.
I think the issue is simply what you already mentioned. Wizden was not made for MRP. Both servers need vastly different content, rules and maybe even staff.
They may finish porting all of SS13 content before that happens.
in my humble opinion, the server should just be re imagined to run on lowpop or simply be closed.
For example, making shifts that last like 8 hours so people can more easily drop in and out. Making it more of an MMO experience and making the pop less important.
Hey everyone,
I’ll speak from my personal opinion, so feel free to disagree or ignore or whatever.
I’m a “Lizard refugee”. I left Lizard because of the uncontrolled chaos, constant minor self-antag, and general feeling of dread. Salamander has a number of players that are doing that same behavior now, and that is what is turning me off from playing on Salamander.
I DO NOT believe that Salamander needs any new features, or anything like that.
I DO believe that ALL of Salamander’s problems can be fixed almost overnight with more game admin intervention.
The infamous “SalaMald” is also a huge issue that is holding Salamander back. I have seen 2 specific examples of a player playing on Salamander for the FIRST TIME, joining as a command member because they have it unlocked, and get bad talked and ripped in LOCC and OCC for being “LRP”. The new players played by the book, broke no rules, followed norms, but was still ripped by the experienced Salamander players with no usable feedback other than “Go back to LRP”. That is the equivalent of being told “Get gud, scrub”. Needless to say, I haven’t seen those players come back to Salamander
More and more over the last few weeks, the silicon/AI players have been going over board with their “gimmicks” or whatever. In my 700 hours of play time in Wizard, I have only seen the AI get carded twice. Both times was on Salamander in the last few weeks because of their attitude towards command members, not because they were playing mechanically wrong.
Low pop. 30 or 40 players is ok, but getting under 20, I don’t even bother trying to log on to Salamander. What is funny though, is that I’ll log into Wizard and observe to play a ghost role, and I’ll see 4 or 5 Salamander regulars playing on Lizard. If those regulars were on Salamander instead, it would be over 20.
Lastly, I think the definitions of LRP and MRP that players use are out of whack. My understanding is that in MRP, you should generally have an in character reason for doing the actions you are doing. You can’t just decide to unwrench all of the vending machines and line them up in front of the bridge, because there is no reasonable in character reason why a librarian or engineer or any crew would do that. My impression from playing on MRP however, is that most MRP players think talking is MRP, and taking actions is LRP. As a SecOff, me stunning a wanted suspect on Blue or Red alert IS MRP. If I point at you and you run, Of course I am going to disabler you. THAT IS ME ROLEPLAYING MY CHARACTER. This false expectation by some of the Salamander playerbase that I have to only talk and take no action is crazy, and then the LOCC/OCC mald afterward is killing the server by trying to make players feel bad for playing the game and character they way they envision it.
TL;DR: More Game Admin intervention. And Salamander players quit being raging jerks and malding non-stop.
I exposed similar points of view in a previous post about this but i agree with ZeroVoidSeeker that really what Salamander need is admin moderation and some players being checked in place because some attitudes are not healthy, and that stuff drive people away and poison the waters. People wants to be in a community with a good ambiance in the players ecosystem and this needs to be enforced by the moderation work from game admins.
Hell several times i opened ahelps weeks ago for blatant cases of powergaming, not enforcing space law correctly (God help this players if anytime they stumble upon a server with SOP on departments) or simple pointing cases of incredible low quality of RP, with no response.
I 100% agree with you on most parts, though I will point out some spots I just do not agree with.
Many features that are conductive to a good MRP environment, such as mechanical NLR, could improve Salamander. Fluff features such as character records, employment records, etc. could also help establish MRP as a setting where you indeed play your character. This is why many good and popular MRP servers are on a separate codebase that caters to MRP features - it improves the environment and clues people into what it should be. Of course, this is not “implement three features and the game will automatically get better”, it is a distinct attitude/vision that needs to be followed. Mander running on an LRP codebase isn’t really doing it any good.
I don’t really think it’s as simple as you say.
I am currently a head game admin/maintainer for a fork called Moffstation. Moffstation was created as a friends server between a small group of then-Mander regulars that wanted what everyone wanted out of MRP on mander:
This server grew over the course of a few months, and it is now a fairly healthy community.
Despite 100% admin uptime, we initially had problems with people being really annoying and not fitting in the environment. We also had problems with the server growing way too fast, watering down the environment and introducing behavior that we do not want.
Luckily, we mostly resolved those issues, but only for the following reasons:
Salamander deeply struggles with both points:
You can have as much admin uptime as you want, but as Bad Community Member 1 gets banned, one more will take their place. If the environment isn’t conductive to good roleplay, then the roleplay won’t be good.
The efforts that upstream admins made to improve the whitelist procedure were indeed very good, however they only filter out people who aren’t interested in being creative with writing three sentences. The roleplay quality did indeed improve over the course of a few months, however Mander still suffers from hugbox issues, which are hard to deal with if you don’t have a good community regulating itself.
Like I’ve said in other posts, Mander has faced issues for a while, and the people that are actually interested in MRP usually go to other servers like Harmony, Funky, Goob MRP, etc, which are all on dedicated codebases centered on catering for an MRP environment. Some of them have lax whitelist requirements, some of them are pretty extreme, however they’re better because the community that’s fostered there cares about each other and it’s been there for a long time. Yes, a component of that is admin uptime - but the big impact comes from how you set up the environment.
I feel like having the pass to play in Sally is similar to owning a membership to an exclusive place. I don’t use the access every day, but it is nice to have it. While the game environment remains the same, I have access to a group of players who are good at following the rules and at least willing to act like a nice person.
I have some speculation of why MRP is not as loved as LRP
This begs the question: How can we, as a community, help with transitioning from LRP to MRP? This question leads us to my next point.
I agree with calling out bad behaviors, but please say it in a way that provides helpful feedback to improve a player’s behavior. How can a player learn to behave like an MRP if they go back to LRP? Being a well-behaved citizen in LRP demands the ability to handle shittery behaviors from other players with grace and common sense, which does not come naturally.
While admin intervention keeps the shift interesting and peaceful, it is up to the players to shape the culture of the server. If the goal is to foster a peaceful environment, Sally regulars should practice patience, common sense and be firm when someone is not following the rules.
i will be honest, my main gripe with the increased whitelist standards was the elitism, something that people are currently voicing too about problem players policing how others should play (the whitelist is not the only reason ofc, but it contributes to the atmosphere)
Now, a voucher system is worse. If you just want to play with friends in a private server? Sure, you can police who can and cannot better with vouchers.
But for any sort of official server? It is tasteless to say the least.
It is also beyond obvious that the increased steps required to join mander have contributed to the sharper than ever decline that it is experiencing now.
As much as staff may want to believe more control over who gets to play makes MRP better, it is hardly so, and it comes at considerable costs.
People still do awful shit on mander servers so that has not changed. RP is still kneecapped by the LRP codebase, so the wuality has not really increased.
I think expectations of what MRP is supposed to be are different than what we actually have to offer due to nature of the codebase. As covered by the above, a majority of other MRP codebases have their own content that players can interact with that set them apart in their own way. We don’t, the only thing holding our server together is a few extra rules like NLR which is unreliably followed on Salamander too, and “no Powergaming” which frankly sucks to enforce as an admin.
There’s a few things we can do, today, as a trial to possibly influence the issues of MRP as a whole.
The game, in my opinion is currently geared towards ensuring that you win or lose. This works fine for LRP, but ends up causing a lot of friction on MRP, and also ends up with there being a noticeably small antagonist pool on MRP of people who are more or less dedicated to it.
I’m not sure if this is because of greentext chasing, or something else, but one thing that we can try immediately, is disabling the end of round greentext readout. Nobody needs to know if you “won” on MRP, people are there for the stories. It’s one cvar.
Separately, we could expand the medical/criminal records system and make it so people could have their own entries in there, however I personally don’t trust that to not be abused to some degree with how open our, even currently somewhat restrictive whitelist standards are. This system is easily ignoreable but can be something we can use.
One thing I see a lot on MRP is blatant LOOC abuse, as a player and an admin. There’s currently no developed good way to address that unfortunately short of killing LOOC entirely. I think other forks have added rate limiters on it, but an overwhelming number of messages used for LOOC can be said IC with some creative wording.
The final thing in regards to “unpleasant behavior” is extremely hard to nail down or enforce. Since the new MRP policy was added months ago, to my knowledge, there have been zero player reports using this system explicitly made to deal with these sorts of issues via the admin message function.
I’ve played Salamander since early 2024 mostly as an escape from the constant shuttle bombing and murderbone on Lizard, from well before 2.9 and the other rules were rewritten. The bones of Salamander are good, but there’s just nothing really there supporting the higher RP level.
disabling the end of round greentext readout. Nobody needs to know if you “won” on MRP, people are there for the stories. It’s one cvar.
now that you mention that, I completely forgot that I made it
The gates of Hell have been opened.
I made a separate discussion thread for your suggestion, so I hope we get some feedback on that idea from our salamander players.
Everyone on the forum can take part in that discussion, you need to get whitelisted for PR discussions, but that only takes a few clicks. I added the link there.
Mander ceased to have a point when space law got merged onto LRP.
Re-orient Wizden to be an LRP upstream, close Mander, open a non-US LRP server.
There is no reason to run an MRP server when there is no MRP content to test.
There is no reason to run an MRP server when there is no MRP content to test.
Salamander wasn’t intended to test anything, it was made to appeal to the MRP playerbase. I’m not sure I get this.
I’d like to offer that Pinktexting (assuming it would be filled during the end-of-round Centcomm time) could detract from MRP servers particularly - that period is always where I see the most character beats and attentive roleplay get played and wrapped up. I’d rather see the greentext hidden and hear any big reveals from the characters themselves.
If changes would be worked on for MRP’s sake, medical and legal records would be my biggest preferred routes (especially with how a busy medbay has few chances to roleplay otherwise).
Still, a much simpler change to offer would be giving players more nonsense items to pick from in their role loadouts (like the plushies, candles, cigarettes, etc). A bigger selection here is a feature I really appreciate in other MRP servers, and it offers the player more agency in fleshing their character’s personality out.
Legal records are a thing already in LRP. You can add a record of criminal activity from the sec console, separate from the wanted status.
Medical records are planned judging by the existence of a console for it, but it is a WYCI
As for round start trinkets. I would like to see stuff like:
You can add as many items as you want, but if you cannot modify said items in some way, it will always feel hard to feel like they are truly yours. And since adding a shitload of variations is unscalable, allowing minor modifcations like these would do wonders.