Proposed Problem: Specialist’s are a high popularity role with extremely limited slots available. A player’s ability to play the role is entirely contingent on RNG being in their favour. There is no consistency regarding how often someone can expect to play this role, theoretically someone could play for months and never receive a Specialist selection, just as someone could consistently get a Specialist selection back-to-back.
Proposed Solution: When someone is selected to play as a Specialist (excluding Foxtrot late join Spec selection) they are assigned a token, or some other metric, that would place them in a lower priority to be selected as a Specialist the next time they roll for it. This token would track the day/round number they had played as a Specialist.
Every time the Specialist roll is performed, the system would check every person rolling for it and would prioritise selecting players who either have yet to play as a Specialist, or whose last time selected for it is oldest compared to everyone else’s.
Possible Benefits
- This system would introduce fairness and equitability towards Specialist selection.
- Players can expect to reliably be able to play as a Specialist on a more regular basis.
- New players would be able to quickly gain experience as a Specialist. This might be viewed as a negative in terms of fairly new players getting a Specialist pick on their first attempt, but a player can only gain experience in a role if they can play the role.
- The system could be expanded to cover other high popularity/low number roles, including the Alien Queen.
Possible Negatives
- Someone would have to code and maintain such a system.
- Tracking last Specialist play time may well not be feasible code wise, or be too system heavy/difficult to implement.
- People with negative intentions may be able to game the system by creating new byond accounts just to play as a Specialist far more regularly. This may or may not demand Staff time to resolve if it is found this is being abused. The time lock would somewhat counter this.
- Players would likely never gain a Specialist pick if they do not select it as a “High priority” (though I suspect no one ever got a Specialist pick on “Medium” priority outside of extreme low-pop).