Metagaming

Metagaming is a cardinal sin in round-based, role-playing games like SS13. It come in several flavors:

Out-of-game communication

Don't communicate with other players outside of the game.

A huge part of the gameplay of SS13 hinges on lies and deception, and that goes all to hell when you've effectively got two pairs of eyes and ears. If you want to communicate with another player, use the radio, PDA messaging or the mail system (nobody uses the mail system).

Sure, we don't know what other programs you're running, but when one player starts getting robusted and another one immediately comes to their rescue when not a word was spoken and the second person had no way to know the attack was happening...yeah, it's not hard to tell what's up. If you are caught doing this, you will likely receive a permanent ban.

In-Game Stuff

Don't use information you shouldn't have or otherwise break the round.

This kind of shittery occurs in many different scenarios. It mainly entails doing preemptive actions to make the lives of antagonists harder, which is widely considered to be a dick move and can make the round boring on top of everything else. Takes this into consideration when dealing with special facilities:

• Listening Post: Going there at the start of the round 'just in case' is not welcome. You are free to pursue and engage known operatives, and may follow them in if you have an agent card, but don't camp there, make it inaccessible, lie in ambush with your pod, or the like. If a reasonable amount of time has passed and nuke can safely be ruled out as the current round type, non-antagonists are also allowed to visit the station under those circumstances. These restrictions don't apply to other antagonists.
• Syndicate Battlecruiser, Wizard's Den: Always off-limits.

Other examples of what not to do:

• As a security officer or detective, you immediately roam around the maintenance tunnels to sniff out traitors and scream your brains out, describing what's occurring. Generally, give things at least a few minutes to brew or wait for radio calls to respond to.

• As an AI, you find a suspicious person walking around and decide to lock them into a room and scream for security to arrest them, refusing to let them out for any reason. This one is most definitely not okay, and will be violating your laws if that person or anybody else orders you to open up. Your laws can be stretched but not broken like this, and it's just really shitty anyway.

• As a head of staff, you decide to take all of the AI modules and hide them to prevent people from using them. Obvious antagonists can be targeted with laws, but only if they're already causing havoc or the AI and cyborgs are getting in your way.

• Antag Fishing: When you continuously log in at roundstart and then leave the round by suiciding/logging out if you are not an antagonist. Everyone has to log out near roundstart from time to time and that's fine, but if we notice that you are consistently logging out every round except when you are made an antagonist there's a problem. Antag fishing may lead to an antag ban.

• Using custom emotes to talk. If you can't talk, don't abuse custom emotes to bypass that.

Overall, this generally boils down to the fact that you shouldn't talk about the current round outside of the game and you shouldn't start off the round by doing things whose only purpose is to screw over the bad guys. Doing reasonable things like an AI bolting its upload is okay, but otherwise acting as though you're not expecting to be brutally murdered in four minutes will make things more enjoyable when things do start to happen. Use your judgement and if most people think it's metagaming, then don't do it or risk everyone's wrath. People really hate this.

Lots of people on the Goonstation servers like to keep a persistent name, character and/or gimmick running round after round. It may be easy to target them for actions taken in previous rounds, but don't do it. That's metagaming too. If the person is a shitlord for ten straight rounds, adminhelp it instead of trying to deal with it in-game.