Devs hate lowpop case #329034

General Discussion
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I’m going to start this with a

BIG PRETEXT

I think the announcement garble is fine as it is. I really don’t like the idea of making commanding harder as its already pretty awful to get information across compared to the xenos. But I do think punishing marines for not doing a proper job in holding comms is a good thing and might even psychologically benefit marines as there will be more incentive to build comms better which will benefit the comms siege aspect of longer rounds.

BUT

This makes lowpop commanding utterly soul wrecking. That’s for the good 4-5 hours of sub 75 players.

In highpop you have guaranteed a good 2-4 people on comms, and a healthy bravo population that’s only gotten stronger recently from a select group of people hopping on to frag backliners. Comms is almost always on and you generally have disposable marines to spare for it, including in emergencies.

Provided the new encryption stuff becomes reality as it stands then you also generally have spare SOs who can sit and try their luck on the terminal. Highpop generally suffers from low comms blackouts and this is basically a minimal nerf.

On lowpop on the other hand, as it’s fairly obvious to anyone who plays then, individuals matter a lot more. Its not unheard of for there to be less than one handful of people in the entire round with construction skills, much less actual commtechs and maint techs. This isn’t even accounting for the fact that you have hardly any marines you can spare to guard it. You need every marine in lowpop on the front that isn’t on fob. Comms can often be entirely uncaded on lowpop and that’s not marines/command being lazy that’s them making a tactical decision on where to put their resources where it can make more sense.

Furthermore command is very understaffed on lowpop. More often than not its some schmuck forced into the role who could be of dubious (more often shit) competency. This won’t be solved by just leaving this on for a few weeks for people to get used to. Not to mention people really don’t have time to learn how to use the punchcards, let alone people who know how to, to do it while solo running a lowpop operation. This is a change that just further makes bad commanders even worse as they have to fumble with a mini game that’s not intuitive and actively requires reading a forum guide (which IMO i think is shit game design to require a wiki to do the bare minimum but I guess that’s SS13 for you).

It takes literally one runner or lurker to pop a single layer of cades thats most likely unguarded and now you have to organise someone to get it fixed from bravo, distracting them from valuable time spent building fob solo, potentially without escort and at risk of the same backliners taking them out and snowballing into much more.

So I’m going to propose some alternative changes for lowpop only.

  • Have the effectiveness of punchcards be increased with low command pop/marine pop

  • Negate comms garble altogether when under a certain number on the ground. Call it bandwidth limitation or some other half truth scifi bullshit.

This is a change that once again hurts lowpop most than anything and I really think we should stop making lowpop as shit as it is. I know that’s a difficult balancing act but we could start by not making it worse than it is?

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It’s space. Send a solar flare at the Almayer. We’ve yet to defeat the sun in combat and that will not have changed in 150 years.

If anyone knows someone who has defeated the sun, please speak up.

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yeah that pr is dumb

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Just let a spare one time use comms constructor spawn in the CO prep room when the population is less than 75 players then you can just make comms at FOB and be done with the comms issue.

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I love the cipher machine and the consoles, reminds me of the highfleet message decoding mini game. Thankfully I know my HEX and its fairly straightforward to understand IMO.

What I don’t like about it is when you have comms up its totally useless. And its even worse on lowpop, where like you mentioned it takes like ten - fifteen minutes on average for comms to go back up, and that’s if your average Chief Engineer or Dropship Pilot aCO notices that its down while trying to understand how the OW consoles work for the first time ever.

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The solution truly is to give up on Rules and SOP and ML in lowpop and leave us to our fate. It’s the Wild West down here, Houston!

No CIC, no FOB, no tyrants, no decorative Butterbars needed to command half a platoon. Give PVT Jimmy a Megaphone and it’ll sort itself out!

I call ‘em sunnies; good ol Sol has nothing on these eyeballs :eye::eye:

Obligatory “erm ackshully the Almayer is nowhere near the Sun" :nerd_face::index_pointing_up:

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Frankly i also do like the idea of Garbling. But fact is that much to harsh as it is. After all like you said Command is understaffed and many times in-competent (not that i blame them Lowpop is where newer players try there hand at command while aCOs tend to not have played XO or know they are bad at command…hense why they don’t roll XO)

But i have even seen comms get recked on highpop and command never bothing to do the puchcards. The system is much to complex and few lads are going to even bother to try.

The very fact that the garbling can go below 60% clarity is extremely harsh. As the amount of garbling needed to make a message unreadable is not a lot.

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But if we get rid of the garbling how will I push for extra features on the comtech laptop like aligning telemetry or something via pong?

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Im glad I finally found a take of yours I agree with

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The sad reality is that people already pay very little attention to command announcements. A lot of people already just ignore the wall of text. It’s silly to expect people to care THIS much about announcements to try to decipher them when garbled. Thus, people will outright ignore garbled announcements. And this will lead to more and more people ignoring regular announcements simply out of habit. Because the game basically teaches you to ignore announcements.

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Yeah I legit don’t even bother, if I can’t understand an announcement I’m just going to do my own thing.

At this point, since no one bothers with punch cards on lowpop announcements are basically just background noise.

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If there’s only XO in CIC on lowpop, who’s actually going to do these? More likely, if there’s only GP aCO who’s going to do this?

Are they going to sit in a chair with the tablet by the 3 decryption machines? You need to do 1 card every 2 minutes to keep 95% clarity.

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Some people have told me that even at higher clarities of 30% and upper its still readable if you take a moment to look at it.

Um, english isn’t everyones first language here. I can imagine non native or translator proficient people aren’t going to have the mental skills to figure out words as easily from piecing together the information presented to them.

Also I dm’d a mildly dyslexic pal of mine a range of the announcements from one round and they were struggling even at low percentages of 15%. I understand that accommodating for people with epilepsy and dyslexia isn’t exactly a priority of SS13 as a whole, at this point we’ve probably gotten an epileptic killed from flashbang spam somewhere in the ss13 community but its food for thought.

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GP aCO picks their least favorite rifleman to not deploy and read punchcards all round. Origin story for a rifleman choosing their MOS in intelligence whoa ……..

Maybe there needs to be another role for it to make any sense, I don’t know. Task prioritization for existing jobs wouldnt have to be such an issue if the quality of everyone’s round didnt suffer as a result of making a decision between punchcards and req.

My half-assed solution would be to add a built-in Enlisted Baby IO role; if it’s highpop, they can escort and if it’s lowpop, they can do punchcards. This either pulls One Rifleman out of a squad, or it deters One Rifleman from taking Intel training and being swapped into the squad, so the net round impact/redirect is low??? I don’t know how to make punchcards work.

Edit: RainbowStalin is right…… estimated time to stim deployment…………never…..we finally have the workings of a way to kill stims once and for all.

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Punchcards need 1 intel level to be used. So you of course conscript the solo researcher to do it.

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Will I get admin noted for metagaming/powergaming if I throw a flashbang towards an epileptic…? :thinking:

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My first thought seeing punch cards was unironically “I wish I could take a pamphlet as a RFN to work this and shit about on comms without being aCO on lowpop” it just sounds fun to do

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this is the kind of thing an ensign would be doing in star trek, but we usually have 0-2 SOs at any given time

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We love old navy ranks in this house.