Pros and Cons of Extended rounds (Spoiler: mostly cons)

Pros: Allows you to do your own mini-events (Like in the thread about the HoP)
Allows the Admins to do admin controlled custom events.

(More to come when I am actually awake and functioning)

Woo, a thread for me to slam on the plague of 8-hour extended rounds.

Pros:

Good for admin-hosted events, since there's no antags needing space.
Occasionally have blobs, something to do!
Sometimes fun for engineer construction or rushing out mechs, though these are generally tasks done for the case of at least doing something since they'll never actually be required.
Awesome for botany, xenobiology, anomaly, and other mostly pointless jobs to get their holy grails of dumb things like killer tomatoes or hundreds of silver cores.
Good for hugging in lesbay, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Cons:

Since our server is good at keeping free of grief, they tend to last between 4 and 8 hours by which point the playerbase has plummeted resulting in SSDs by the barrel.
Pretty much every core job is pointless since all deal with combating some form of hazard.
Nothing exciting can occur without admin interaction.
No panic, excitement, development, crescendo, lull, finales, loss, desperation, or any of the other things that come with antagonists and are cornerstones of stories.
'That was a good long shift, guys, our only death was an engineer who went to sleep with his internals on!'.
Rarely if ever memorable despite the larger time investment.
SS13 ceases to be a game and becomes an IRC chat with a graphic interface.
Spess Carp by the shed-load.
We got rid of the Portal which was the one interesting thing to use on Extended.

You get enough passive RP even during antag rounds. I dunno about you, but a good Cult round tends to take at least an hour before things go to hell, and the transition is slow and interesting, especially if you're security or a cultist. Same goes for Malf rounds, revolution rounds, and Changelings. All assuming the antags actually play fair and don't just go power-win ganking around, which is against the rules.

I do enjoy extended because you can just do whatever, but the lack of a gateway and proper things to explore and do mean we have little if nothing of note to do. Security arrests maybe two people a round, if we are lucky and we have some ijits.

I'm having issues with security turning into a group of guys in black and red doing nothing but talking to other people. In fact, I kept doing random custom events because I watched players just plummet in number when the round got quiet, so I'd toss in a player as a convict or something.

Pro: Character and Lore Development

With the preposterous, mind numbingly retarded events that occur during your average round, it’s no surprise that most rounds aren’t considered cannon, not only in terms of lore but in player’s character development. This can lead to a little confusion about what interactions you have or haven’t had with another player; maybe you think the dinks you guys had in the last round really happened but they disagree because of the facehugger super-happy-fun time that occured later that round.

Extended rounds provide a fuckaboutery free round for everyone to work on their characters, their character relationships and character development in general; maybe it was a boring shift but you finally roleplayed getting that training your character has been undergoing for a while, or maybe you’ve developed a stronger relationship with another character through events that don’t have to be retconned.

Extended rounds are also a good way for lore development, it doesn’t even have to be through a large, over the top event.

Personally, I like extended rounds, it’s part of the reason why I quite like playing on Hypatia (Yes I know, I’m a traitor, defector and a whore) and I, along with a pretty large player base, can all play extended rounds and have a fun time. I dunno why you guys are so allergic to extended.

Here's my point.

During extended, you get Raieed attempting to build a laser tag death course.
During secret, you get Raieed inside a mech fleeing from a wizard while screaming MAN IN DRESS WITH FIREBALLS.

"Was sold," is this not the present reality? The only times I see an 8 hour round is during the "void" time, which is usually early evening/late afternoon GMT wise. After that, most rounds usually last for 1-3 hours, and have antags present and active.

Fuck it, I'm in a shit mood anyway so why not rant here too?
I joined Aurora because of the one thing that is in the title... "Heavy Roleplay". When I end up getting cult rounds, unless there are skilled role player's who are taking the role, its ether going to end up as an extended round as they have died out (What I like) or a kill fest where even characters who would never hurt anyone get involved as the killers, or victims.

It's the same with normal traitor rounds. I am going to take one example that has happens before. Both of my main characters I play (May Izumi and Anna Rose) have no connection to any crime, nore do they have any connection to any important people that would make them good targets. When you have a big crime organization go after some unknown who would never harm or interfere with their operation... where is the sense in that?

This is why I like Extended. There is no bs objectives for people who only play to win. I have only ever seen two or three people lose their objectives on purpose because it would make better RP. So unless if we go through, tweaking how the objectives work, I still think that Extended is better.

Nikolai is the most lawful good character you could get and it was really easy to create reasons for his traitoring. They kidnapped his daughter for example, or they've offered to relocate him where nanotrasen won't be after him. Real easy, don't make it 'I'm a bad man'. Make it 'I've got no other choice'