We just had a 3 hour long solaris round that after everything was said and done and the hive was wiped it ended in a 10 or so minute long chase for a single runner that frustrated everyone in the round by just delaying and barely attempting to fight.
Everyone on the field is just walking around listening to callouts or doing nothing because walking around an empty map searching for 1 xeno off of sparse callouts isnt fun. People were being directly OOC in IC on the radio that the admins had rejected all attempts of handling the runner and it was a very end to a long round
If it was like a 1 time occurrence thing, this wouldnt be an issue, but this happens so often when 1 xeno just decides to run from every encounter and delay the round end.
Before anyone goes ‘waaaa marines do this too during hijack’, yes they do and it should be handled similarly (admin intervention)
so there’s this thing where if the hive doesn’t have a queen for a while it collapses, so delaying isn’t a thing, but there’s a 3-minute window between the ARES All-Clear and the end of the round so you might think it’s because of the runner delaying but it isn’t
one xeno running around to max out the timer and getting in the occasional skirmish is literally delay. A runner that is the final xenomorph and clearly has no plans of ever going queen to continue the hive isn’t adding anything to the round except making the dead folk wait even longer for the next round and making marines walk around looking for something that will run away instantly when found.
how is the all clear even related, marines almost always know when the final xeno dies, thats not delay, thats just the end of round process.
This case in paticular was just a single runner doing multiple loops of the map (they got two kills while doing it) but running from every single fight. Marines were frustrated eventually just deciding they were going to leave the planet since the runner wasnt going to evo to queen (catchable) and d-chat just wanted the round to end.
if its something like a drone I understand, but when its 1 runner, it makes no sense
I used to play a game called Battletech (via megamek) pretty regularly. In that game one of the players could have a couple small light units running around that are virtually impossible to hit or catch yet couldn’t realistically win a fight against the opposing team either.
Some players, upset that they’d essentially lost their match, would purposefully try to waste time and delay the end for as long as possible - hoping to perhaps get a forfeit and free win from their opponent having to leave and do real life stuff.
It wasn’t very sportsmanlike, but it happened. So most servers adopted an auto-resolve rule, it typically worked like this: If the battle value of the remaining forces were less than 5% of the battle value of the opposition, the match would auto-resolve immediately in favor of the side with the 95% battlevalue advantage.
I don’t honestly see why something similar couldn’t be done for CM - when there’s 1 runner left and literally 35 marines and 20 shipside crew, I think the round should just auto-resolve. When there’s 1 marine left and 20 xenos on the almayer, I think the round should just auto-resolve.
Even when the round ends, it still takes some 3-5 minutes for the server to actually restart. I think that’s more than enough time for whatever to play out, and if it isn’t, well what are you really missing out on? A sick queen screech on the last doctor or some AHK pb on a runner? 15 minutes of xenos grinding through 30 autismcades by an MT in some corner of the almayer?
I think for the most part, what we lose isn’t actually much, and what we gain is collectively getting 90+ people back into playing some 5 to 15 minutes sooner.
end to a long round