Why is security so miserable to play? What can be done about it?

[Chief_Engineer]

@postcarcinization

We have LRP Space Law to look forward to, but is there anything else in the works?

A full™ rule rewrite is being worked on so that might have some impact too, though I’m not sure how much

@postcarcinization

Do sec players need to change the way they play? Does the wider player culture need to get better before anything can change? What would that look like? How do we get there?

These are the things I think can affect the security situation atm:

• Security player behavior
• Non-security player behavior
• Rules
• How the rules are presented
• Game admins
• How people learn the game
• Game mechanics

I have no idea which of these have the most impact on creating a change, but I think each of them can probably contribute to a change somehow. To focus on what players can do, I think the more players follow the Leviathan PSYOPs guide, the better the situation will get, though again I’m not trying to say this is the only thing that can improve things, that it can do it by itself, or even that it’s the most effective thing that can happen. All I really know for sure is that for a while, even when it was high pop, Leviathan had a really good server culture, and players seemed to really enjoy it in all roles.

The problem is that following those guidelines can feel draining when it doesn’t feel like other people are too. It doesn’t even matter if everyone else is actually doing their best, when players start feeling like that’s not happening, they start to feel like it’s pointless to hold themselves to a high standard, and they start either burning out or just stop playing the game. I have no idea what can be done about this.

@postcarcinization

What will happen when the game levels up from early access on Steam?

Based on my experience with Leviathan, new players pretty much mirrored what the rest of the player base was like. New players on Leviathan would very regularly use LOOC or ahelp to ask questions about how to do things or what they were and weren’t allowed to do, and they were very rarely an issue. With way more new players, “passenger is RDMing because they don’t understand the rules or the game” was less of an issue than on Lizard, even when Leviathan had as many or more players than Lizard.

Unless the new players come from a somewhere that biases them to act a certain way, good or bad, then new players are probably just going to give more of the same of whatever already exists