Apply Rule 8 to Xenomorphs - No more inactivity at the Hive

[Orleans]

Right, here we go.

As it stands, admin rulings have consistently upheld that Xenomorphs being willingly inactive until minute 20 is fine, meaning they won’t weed, they won’t fight survivors, they won’t build, they won’t find smalls to cap. They won’t play their slot.

This is one of the worst issues that plagues the Xenomorph side of this game, as showcased by this recent post: Evo changes Pre-Marine Drop . We have Xeno players inactive until minute 20, only to come back to steal a T3 slot (often from a player who has been working for the past 15 minutes) and ONLY THEN start to play. Just so you can see there’s no exaggeration, you can see responses to that thread like:

@eluxor

I think you don’t understand what AFK means.

If I am sitting sleeping at hive, I am doing other things. Reading this forum. Talking with a friend, watching a movie. Perhaps even doing something IRL and perhaps truly being ten meters away from the keyboard. If I heard a weird sound, I return to the PC. I have been playing this game so long that I have an internal clock that tells me when the evo timer is coming close. So I return to evo T2 and then do something else for 5 minutes to get T3.

If I wanted to play, I would be doing whatever you are saying. The thing is, I dont want to.

This type of attitude severely impacts Xenos in a very negative manner, and its somehow currently protected by admins, who take action against Queens who banish Xenomorphs that refuse to play their slot.

The rule discussion - suggestion is simple. Enforce Rule 8 for Xenomorphs. Xenomorphs should NOT be allowed to be inactive for 15 minutes while there’s plenty to do in the game. Allow Queens to order Xenos to get to work (if there’s work to be done) rather than sleeping at the Hive, and if they refuse, allow the Queen to banish (and then punish the Xenomorph based on Rule 8).

I will further cement my point quoting who probably is the most known Xeno player and definitely most known Queen, WAR:

@Chimera

As I said in my opening post.

Without staff actually enforcing rule 8 this is a moot issue. I cannot do anything as queen to remedy the problem. They won’t let you banish afk larva, they will not bwoink people to violating rule 8, and when survivors are rushing the hive and the queen dies it’s equally the afk larva’s fault.

They can rush currently after T1s, which is 60s into the round. Larva refusing to evolve and queen being a fat drone with no combat capabilities and 500 health means you’re gambling on the 2 tap when there are larva around that can come help that are just refusing to help or play the game.

I’ve said this before but I have never seen any other game where you can afk for 20 minutes and not be punished. It’s even worse because critical roles like Queen and your other teammates are dying around you and the person is just doomscrolling tiktok or w/e as the round collapses.

_

In response to @vendingmachine who I appreciate responding here:

@vendingmachine

rule 8 is applied to xenos

I will utilize one admin action from over 6 months ago, in a respectful manner, to illustrate where this comes from. This ruling is also mentioned by another party in the thread that I initially linked:

@forest2001

People do need to use their role and slot. That does not entitle queens to be hyper-micromanaging and kick off a fuss just because people step away from their keyboards, particularly prior to the actual conflict part of the game.

Marines have pre-drop PR things to do, including gearing up. Xenos have survivors and hive construction. You do not require 100% of the hive to deal with survivors, nor can every xeno build the hive.

So long as people are not causing an active detriment by their absence, and I see no evidence here that they were, have some patience.

I believe this ruling has historically encouraged certain part of the Xeno community to have this attitude. Maybe that was not Forest’s intention, I am not saying it was, but that’s the effect it had, and therefore we may require some clarification.

The quote I attached to my OP is quite a show, that comes from a Prime Xenomorph player (nothing against ARG, this is widespread, it would be incredibly unfair to make it about him, he just happened to be the one that posted in the other thread).

[vendingmachine]

rule 8 is applied to xenos

[ihatethisengine]

It’s just a game man, people don’t have to be glued to the screen.

On LV, for example, there is virtually NOTHING to do until 00:30, so it’s the best time to go AFK for a few minutes (we all have IRL needs and chores).

Yeah you can spend some time hunting survs, risking losing your roll completely, by dying, and who knows if you will be able to rejoin. Not everyone can frag on drone by the way. Maybe I am only good at boiler, so I’d rather wait in the hive for evo than die as a sentinel (the caste that has higher skill floor than boiler, btw). Yeah, you can do some other things useful for your hive, like I dunno breaking fences. But do you think it’s adequate to require people to do something like this? There is not much people playing xeno already, if you turn the role into a huge chore, well, it won’t improve the player’s experience.

You already can’t just afk for 15 minutes straight, you will get auto-ghosted (and honestly I think the auto-ghost timer, especially as larva, is way too harsh). If people join the game to frag as ravager you shouldn’t expect them to build as drone, to melt stuff as sentinel, etc.

It’s good that some people are willing to do small things for the sake of the hive, I think it should be rewarded: people suggested to allow wounded xenos evolve pre-drop, so fighting survs won’t rob you of your slot. But making playing drone mandatory, making hunting survs mandatory (imagine yourself as a young xeno who tries to figure out the game and you are forced to attack survs as a drone, great experience), making building mandatory (what if I just don’t like building, xeno is a lot more than just that) is simply not a good idea and, again, will only discourage players from playing xeno. I can speak for myself, as a person with tons of xeno hours, if the drone tax becomes mandatory you won’t see me again on xeno.

People have already tried fighting windmills by forbidding afking in the Alamo, but it didn’t work. Why do you think it will work better for xenos?

[RainbowStalin]

@ihatethisengine

Yeah you can spend some time hunting survs, risking losing your roll completely, by dying, and who knows if you will be able to rejoin. Not everyone can frag on drone by the way. Maybe I am only good at boiler, so I’d rather wait in the hive for evo than die as a sentinel (the caste that has higher skill floor than boiler, btw). Yeah, you can do some other things useful for your hive, like I dunno breaking fences. But do you think it’s adequate to require people to do something like this? There is not much people playing xeno already, if you turn the role into a huge chore, well, it won’t improve the player’s experience.

To respond to this specificly. Do people also AFK evo when marines arrive? Because otherwise they might risking their T2 slot or T3 slot to some marine fraggers because you are bad at T1.

Like, I get people who AFK and stuff, but people join the game, to play it. Insentivizing people to not do so makes it worse for people who do want to play it. If you have tasks to do, or need to spend 15 minutes doing AFK shit, why don’t you just rejoin later? Why essentially steal a slot just to AFK and do nothing, while it can be used for literally anything else?

[BasilHerb]

@RainbowStalin

If you have tasks to do, or need to spend 15 minutes doing AFK shit, why don’t you just rejoin later? Why essentially steal a slot just to AFK and do nothing, while it can be used for literally anything else?

Because if you rejoin later you have to wait in larva queue which can be a pain even with the first come first served policy, + you have to start as larva and wait a million years to evolve, whereas you could’ve become T2-T3 way faster if you stayed in-game.

@RainbowStalin

people join the game, to play it

People play the game to have fun, not for the sake of playing it. If a section of a game is ass, its sometimes more fun to just not play, and wait for it to become worth playing again. Why would they hand over their fun to some random guy observing if they know they’ll be back? Early game is undoubtedly boring if you dislike paying the tax or can’t robust survs. You can’t force people to do something that’s boring, what’s the point of them playing the game if they aren’t having fun?

[detectivegoogle]

genuinely afk xenos get autoghosted, so AFK isn’t really the right term.

as far as 'but they’re not contributing to the team!!!" genuinely who cares, winning does not matter that much and I dont think anyone wants to get yelled at by staff because they’re not drone rrushing survs/spending 20 minutes straight every single round smashing window frames.

afking for t2 is kinda cringe but is a flaw of the tier system imo

[masterhavoc (Vincent 'PeriKing' Frontiers / MHVO)]

I get the frustration. Taking LV-624 as the example map. It is me and 2 other xenos trying to hunt the survs with 5 other xenos doing nothing in the hive. No one tried to help in cargo at the very start to beat the survs to the flamers. I am always the one who has to melt the tool vendors above corpo and in engi, destroy the limb printer, destroy the autolathe and synth stations, melt synth key, melt surg tray, melt booze o mat. There are also plenty of nice to dos like set up a backline capping station, build up beach, weed the colony, double smash the APCs for comms and medical. Random guns, ammo, tools to be melted. Racks and tables to be destoryed and melted to deny extra metal. All fences destroyed to again deny potential metal or prevent getting trapped later. Those 5 sitting at the hive, why arnt’ they doing any of this? even as defender or runner line there are plenty of window/window bottoms to break, apcs and individual lights to break, the LZs to watch, the forests need to be searched for smalls…it is a checklist that never seems to get fully completed.

This just isn’t the way though. At the end of the day, while from xeno’s side this is pretty much a TDM game, it is not a competitive style game. We are not aiming to win a tournament. You get nothing for having your team win. Hell, even the concept of ‘your team’ is off when marines switch sides/go lesser after getting capped/killed. As such, forcing someone going larva/defender/warrior/crusher path to destroy the colony or hunt survs on LV or be xeno banned is just too much.

You want systems that reward players with good behavior, not punish those who didn’t do what you wanted. Also, among all the systems of punishment for a game, administrative punishment is the harshest you can do. It is like banning a spy in TF2 because he wanted to only use his gun. I know I cannot put this into words that everyone will agree with, but what you are putting forth is a dark mindset. A mindset of you have to do this or else….I guess. For a video game where you are supposed to have fun, no one wants to be forced to perform in unsatisfying ways. Leave the rules to places where lack of would ruin the game, like safeguarding against M2Cing the req line.

[distracded]

Seems like we are all on the same page (roughly.) The same people don’t contribute to the chore list (which we all agree is a determent overall) and they get rewarded with the sweetest T3 treat. This isnt about punishing players who afk, its about not incentivizing poor team behaviours. Its noticeable on every pop. The Xeno faction was given the ability to evolve out of drone at round start into any caste for the purpose of easing the burden of the few/nearly extinct builders already. Just sound like a lotta people who don’t like the idea of sharing their toys, selfish. Gonna make it harder for people to stick to the faction than it already is

I’m more afraid/impressed by xeno mains that play T1/T2s anyways

[Taxman (Bo 'Jo' Jansen / BOJ0)]

There’s a lot of responses in this thread that are emblematic of why I stopped playing

[detectivegoogle]

@distracded

chore list

the difference is in how you view these tasks.

Like, lets look at something kinda benign, the limb printer. The limb printer provides a benefit to the marine team if left intact, it is a relatively benign impact which on the average round will maybe help, generously, 3 people, assuming the FD hasn’t pre-prepared any limbs.

If you are playing to win, you will increasingly find breaking things like this as ‘essential’ to your play, they are a requirement because they make it easier to win, so you spend all your time doing these, as you admit, ‘chores’ because you value the contribution to the overall goal of ‘winning’ above your own fun in that moment.
(Some of these ‘chores’ are kinda unavoidable and have a much more negative impact if not performed, for example not breaking basic holes in the LV fences can get a lot of xenos killed later on, so not all are quite on the level of something like the printer of effect vs that.)

If you’re just playing to have fun casually like most people are, the improvement to your team of going around and smashing/pre-melting every possible valuable item to the marine team isn’t particularly interesting especially when you ‘have’ to do it every single round, so you simply don’t, you wait until the fun part starts and then you play.

To use a more marine sided example, you could spend every minute pre drop packing extra ammo, breaking barrels, packing spare meds, spare flares, spare guns, etc, optimizing your inventory, getting the best gear from req, getting specialty items from OT or research or medical, but most players don’t really consider that optimization or contribution to the win worth the cost in terms of attention or tedium or missed opportunity, so they go to brief or talk to people or go sit on the alamo until the fighting starts.

---

These are both just opposite ends of the scale of instrumental play, and I think generally obligating people to participate in unfun chores for your sake-- because you feel compelled to do them to optimize isn’t really fair. Other players do not owe you optimal play, We don’t PM marines for taking silly builds with revolvers or M2Cs instead of mk2 m37, after all.

[distracded]

I’d agree more if I thought we were hitting the same point, but it isn’t about forcing anyone to do anything. It’s about a system that encourages selfish behaviour, that also happens to give them a large influence on the rounds outcome. I personally enjoy “chores” if it wasn’t obvious by my playtimes (OT, comtech, burrower, carrier to lesser degrees) but I also enjoy cooperation/fairness. You generally get to pick your roles on the marine side, that are then rolled (I think spec vendor race is as close as it actually gets), but its first come first serve on Xeno unless you have some arrangement with the queen you’re likely to remain whatever you are once marines land till the end of the round (only assuming its the average 1 hour one faction dies on contact round, which isnt uncommon at all)

lurkers, runners, defenders exist. Its not about punishing, its about not rewarding

[gitbirb (birb)]

Heres the thing you must realize

If the queen doesn’t care, the hive has no reason to care. So that’s why. If you want people to stop afking, just randomly call out Larva (914) (371) (234) in announcements and order them specifically to survrush. If they don’t, banish, and call a different number. Don’t let ppl walk over u as queen. Do that every round and u will never have not enough ppl survhunting. Larva (914) (371) (234) are random examples, just replace the number with some random mix of players b4 first evo (so that you don’t know who the larvas are, and thus aren’t making a biased decision)

you could make exceptions for ppl who wanna build tho :3, i would probably do that bcus building as queen is a pain in the butt…

I don’t think there is any ruling against this and if ther was that’s kinda just silly…

But yeah theres nothing wrong with afking the beginning of the game, theres only like 2-4 survs, a single beno can handle it most of the time (although with a somewhat high casualty rate). It is safer to have 2 or 3 benos at least. But you can do a lot as a solo and that’s a lot of da fun of survhunting imo. Not getting farwas sucks but noone rly cares bcus the game isn’t about winning or forcing urself to be bored (but people will ALMOST ALWAYS get farwas of their own volition, at least if pop is high enough). Not having enough builders is not a problem, the queen will build if she must (or not if she’s fine with losing). Many t2 players will complain about no builders and not pay the drone tax, take the opportunity to find out who they are and order them specifically to never complain about no builders (jk but that’d be silly).

Something i’d like to see is queen build indicators which she can use to automatically build at a start of round. Like staggered 2 by 2 she can just spam literally everywhere and fill the map with build indicators (which will slowly fill up automatically, maybe at a slower rate then normal building) so she can focus mainly on hive defense. If she could clickdrag that, she could literally fill up everything then have enough time to collect the tea she has been steeping, instead of being forced to sit thru middle click for 20 minutes cutscene. That way there’s a way to speedrun building for lazy queens and lazy hives - bcus code issues deserve code solutions :3.

U could even extend this to drones, let them place tons of build indicators everywhere before 20 minute mark. let them sit around as the weeds slowly build up so long as they or someone else puts plasma into the indicator (which would turn the indicator from orange to green).

[DukeofCagliostro (Archibald V. Cartwright)]

@masterhavoc

You want systems that reward players with good behavior, not punish those who didn’t do what you wanted. Also, among all the systems of punishment for a game, administrative punishment is the harshest you can do. It is like banning a spy in TF2 because he wanted to only use his gun. I know I cannot put this into words that everyone will agree with, but what you are putting forth is a dark mindset. A mindset of you have to do this or else….I guess. For a video game where you are supposed to have fun, no one wants to be forced to perform in unsatisfying ways. Leave the rules to places where lack of would ruin the game, like safeguarding against M2Cing the req line.

You make a very good point.

@detectivegoogle

These are both just opposite ends of the scale of instrumental play, and I think generally obligating people to participate in unfun chores for your sake-- because you feel compelled to do them to optimize isn’t really fair. Other players do not owe you optimal play, We don’t PM marines for taking silly builds with revolvers or M2Cs instead of mk2 m37, after all.

Also really good point.

[Vaikas (Jonas Ward)]

Yeah guys lets force people to do stuff surely this won’t evovle into other people being extra scummy by documenting your every infraction and making player reports on you 24/7. There are quite a few sick individuals in this community who if angered will do everything in their power to get you bannaned.

And then theres the other kind of people who just complain about you ordering stuff cuz they wana have fun. Who either just leave or dont perform after you tell em what to do.

From my expierience micromanaging at this level is bad for overall morale. You want people to stop afking give incentive or boons for actual work put in

[onetoughcreampuff (Romayne Mens)]

I mean just hop on a shivas round and see how many xenos willingly click snow for 20 minutes.

Remember when you had to click to remove every single fucking touch of snow meaning you had to click upwards of 5 times on each fucking tile. That shit genuinely made me avoid xeno on shivas like the plague, or actively not participate for fear of actual carpal tunnel. Even now clicking snow is the peak of the pre 20 minute buildup tedium.

Anyho im falling for ragebait on the forums again, we’ve discussed this, many time before and the afk timer is a lot shorter now so idk what to say.

[Ammoniacres]

making building mandatory (what if I just don’t like building, xeno is a lot more than just that) is simply not a good idea and, again

Letting hivelords evolve into T3s predrop would honestly solve this I think. Or just in general. Hivelord tax shouldn’t be round-long.

[amazingdragons]

Admins have ruled over and over again that the Queen can’t banish for not obeying orders pre-drop, especially when it comes to larva.

Also, as a Queen main, I appreciate it when people tax, but I am not going to spend my time screaming at each individual player to do chores, and threatening them with round removal for refusing. That’s a MISERABLE experience for everyone involved, and fuck anybody who encourages that.

[DukeofCagliostro (Archibald V. Cartwright)]

@amazingdragons

Also, as a Queen main, I appreciate it when people tax, but I am not going to spend my time screaming at each individual player to do chores, and threatening them with round removal for refusing. That’s a MISERABLE experience for everyone involved, and fuck anybody who encourages that.

Good mentality.

[gitbirb (birb)]

@amazingdragons

Admins have ruled over and over again that the Queen can’t banish for not obeying orders pre-drop, especially when it comes to larva.

It’s survhunting, it’s the same game as the normal game. Calling out larva names is just so it’s completely unbiased and random who you pick, and also simpler since ur just calling out numbers.

I have not seen a single ruling like that either. Like i can get it if you’re making the whole hive do it, but if you’re just telling a few ppl to survhunt then it’s not actually a bad thing for anyone. It’s just part of being a beno to fight the enemy.

@amazingdragons

Also, as a Queen main, I appreciate it when people tax, but I am not going to spend my time screaming at each individual player to do chores, and threatening them with round removal for refusing. That’s a MISERABLE experience for everyone involved, and fuck anybody who encourages that.

Someone has to do it. And it’s not miserable, because noone will die if there is 3 or more people hunting survs roundstart.

Survhunting =/= building, melting, doing chores, etc. It’s literally just gameplay.

[ihatethisengine]

@gitbirb

Someone has to do it

Questionable. You can win with zero walls. Ignoring survs can be (and often is) a viable strategy. Heck, even afking in hive can be a viable strategy. A few years ago people were complaining about prime queen CHI forcing them to afk in hive and wait for evo, so the hive will not lose slots.

Yeah, fighting without walls is a lot harder (though the queen can build if she wants walls so much). But, again, are we going to punish players for sub-optimal plays? Sorry man next time I see you on marine I am reporting your ass (to admins or to your overwatch officer, whatever) for not dismantling fences to get more metal for your local commtech. Kidding, obviously, but the point stands.

@gitbirb

noone will die if there is 3 or more people hunting survs roundstart

There are people who like hunting survs. There are people that don’t and maybe even can’t. In fact if someone sucks at hunting survs, if you force them, it’s very likely that they will do more harm than good, by bodyblocking, dying, killing caps, etc.