I’d just make rolling for roundstart Spec akin to rolling in the larva queue to a degree.
The game prioritizes people who have not played spec yet, then it selects people based on who was the last person to play spec.
So if you have 20 people rolling Spec the game would assign it as such.
The 2 people who have never played Spec get the first pick and second
Person X who played Spec 14 days ago gets the third pick
Person Y who played spec 9 days ago gets the fourth pick
I’m not hung up on the specific of the system but I do think introducing some fairness and equitability to high value role selection would be ideal instead of the RNG fest we have now where you can legit go months without getting a role based on bad luck.
me on my way to permabrig a marine i dont like so he cant get spec before the crushing pressure of a ban seconds afterwards cracking my ribs and pulverising my flesh sends my soul to the afterlife
Sure, taking risks might not work out, but what if two sides are deadlocked at a choke point? As an example: how many times has the front been surrounded and destroyed by a xeno flank, A LOT of times, the xeno took a risk to split their forces[or not], and from what i’ve seen in the years of playing it it works out most of the time[a good 60% of the time].
This is the same for marines, like with the CO Juro, he would always do some high risk OP from the start to hit the xenos hard and fast, sometimes it falls flat and we lose early[that is actually fine, you get more rounds to play and less ghosting time between rounds], and sometimes we get a great attack and pulverize the xenos. That is just how Juro does it with his CO role, other COs are different.
This is actually WORSE if you DO get SPEC.
As a spec you are a marine with a great set of powerful guns, you are a initiator of certain attacks in certain areas of the battlefield. This would make it harder for a Spec to have fun, because people wouldn’t want to push after a Spec if he made a good attack initiation. Example: Gernade spec knocking over 3 xenos on a choke point flank But the marines see a T3 and get scared and start running away to be safe with more marines. If the marines had pushed, sure they would have been in danger, but the prospect of getting upto 3 xeno kills is very good, and will most likely get the xenos to fallback[if you know that the flank is not immediately reinforcable] into the choke point and make even more opportunity after breaking the xeno front in that area. This would not happen if the marines are scared they would lose their spec tokens, they would rather lose groundside and immediately take the first escape pod out of the almayer to save there token count if they want to roll Spec later.
MPs that have grudges against someone can manipulate this system.
If all you need to do is get permabrigged to loose your Spec tokens, I am very sure that the issue of grudge holding people[to you specifically] will just roll MP and try to arrest you if you do anything that is warrentable as an arrest[i have seen this many times before with “certain people”]. This should just be removed, but if not, you could just not add a Spec token to someone who is permabrigged in a round, but keep there current Spec tokens as a nice compromise.
In short, this would be VERY BAD for marine gameplay. This would induce Fear-RP WAY easier on the marines to know that they would loose something valuable if they died in round.
Now for revisions[if this is going to get added in some capacity], I agree with Steelpoint just have a variable that is checked if you are going to roll for Spec, the variable is just the last time you successfully rolled for it, the longer you haven’t, the better your odds are that you will roll it. Very simple and does not give something the marines would Fear-RP for because of loosing something valuable.
TBH I agree spec needs some kind of weighting. I’m in favour of it being pop/hours based. I.E. low hour spec players are more likely to roll low pop spec. High-hour spec players are more likely to roll high pop spec. This would still have issues but would mean low-hour spec players are less likely to fuck up majorly on high pop. And also give them more opportunities to practice on lowpop.
The main point of this post seems to be “I don’t care about lowpop and the people playing during it, so we exile the bald specs who are likely to fuck up there and grab the good specs for the only people who matter, the highpop-players”
I mostly play on lowpop. The point of this post is I’m a bald spec and I want to roll during a time where if I fuck up, it doesn’t fuck over quite as many people.
This is one of my personal gripes with how the community is heading. I don’t care whether the marines win or lose ground side, I don’t care how many xenoes/marines you killed. I care about how much fun you can have while down on the ground.
And making it so only “good” players can play a certain role at certain times of the day completely ruined it for me, as it’s seen as a “I wanna win more and I need better teammates to do so”. Let bald players play their role and have as much of a chance at getting said role. Gatekeeping roles because you wanna win ain’t the answer.
if a player is less experienced at spec and wants to get better at it, it will become harder to roll spec during high pop hours. But if this hypothetical bald spec only has enough time to play during high pop hours, they will become less likely to be able to play specialist, making their problem of being inexperienced worse. A person who can only play during high pop will be less likely to get spec than players with a higher playtime on spec.