gonna let this one sit for a little bit to see if anyone has comments to add but i'm okay with trying this. personally i am often either exhausted or bored by the time auto-evac comes but i know theres a lot people want to get done thats hard to fit into the 90 minute schedule

i don't usually have the patience for full 1h30m rounds so i'm a little wary about this, 2 and a half hours is a long ass time for a game that is already pretty time consuming. if there were better ways to get players back into the round as new characters other than just hoping for ghost roles i'd be way more supportive of this, but right now sometimes you die 20 minutes into an hour and a half long round and the only ghost roles that pop up are mice, which doesn't feel very good. i'm still willing to try it, though, i might be an outlier and maybe it'll be fine.

nothing really stopping crew from calling the shuttle before the automatic shuttle so i think this is fine to attempt. however i do think we need to do more than just increase the shuttle time; like doop voiced, at the very minimum, ghost roles need to be rebalanced so there is something more interesting to do if you get round removed early. but i think theres going to be some interesting knock-on effects with how the game currently expects rounds to be 90 minutes long. for example we are almost certainly going to see more zombies

i don't usually have the patience for full 1h30m rounds so i'm a little wary about this, 2 and a half hours is a long ass time for a game that is already pretty time consuming. if there were better ways to get players back into the round as new characters other than just hoping for ghost roles i'd be way more supportive of this, but right now sometimes you die 20 minutes into an hour and a half long round and the only ghost roles that pop up are mice, which doesn't feel very good. i'm still willing to try it, though, i might be an outlier and maybe it'll be fine.

Beyond just extending the round length, we also would need to take into account other aspects of the round that are paced around the current 1.5 hr time. Things like when antagonists are rolled, how often and when events begin to trigger, and even factors like at what rate is Cargo able to make money, Botany to grow plants, Science to complete research, etc. because my other concern is that a lot of the big department goals end up being achieved too early in the round and then there's like a big solid chunk of time until evacuation where there's just nothing to do.

Another thing to consider is what late-joining looks like. After a certain point it makes more sense to wait for a new round to start, and there's a lot of reasons for having a good frequency of rounds ending and starting.

Overall, I think 2.5 hours is too long for a round honestly. 2 hours should be the maximum we're considering, but even so with things like "science isn't able to frequently reach research end-games" is a problem with causes rooted more in the department's mechanics being underbaked and shallow rather than rounds simply just not being long enough, and this can be a problem with longer rounds is that departments that are lacking in mechanics and things to do will get really boring really quickly. I think there's a lot to be considered and developed when we make a decision like this that goes beyond just increasing the time limit.

Im against this, for the record. two and a half hours is an extremely large time investment, and if you die twenty minutes in thats potentially a whole two hours that youre just not allowed to play the game. I get five hours of free time a day after work and the concept of my entire afternoon being able to fit two space station rounds is crazy

I'm also against this, for what it's worth. Things are balanced around our current round length, and players are always free to extend a round by delaying the shuttle.

All fair points.