Talls who are stimmed will now Glow
(optionally in colour/opacity in relation to the type and strength of the stims.)
Lore-wise
Xenos can sense pheromones, Stims are made out of Xenoblood so it is therefore lore appropriate that they can sense humans who are stimmed.
Communicating to the Xeno why they can’t kill this person despite having slashed them 20 times reduce frustration with an essential game mechanic(stims) while not nerfing the mechanic.
In conclusion
Communicates to Xenos in a lore friendly way that a marine is modified in some way
Expectations reduce frustrations
I love killing Xenos and don’t want less Xeno players due to microfrustrations while still kicking ass high on Stims and Unga OORAH
Why do we keep doing silly yet shitty workarounds for stims instead of full on nerfing/removing them.
None of the following is going to make stims feel good to play against. They just balance the winrate while still ruining the enjoyment for xenos:
Increasing rarity, lowering OD/removing trait that prevents it, sentinels/queen screech reducing stims, increasing minimum time research has to spend before stims, and definitely not some glow that only matters when stim first hits.
Most of these have been implemented, some suggested. All of these still allow(even all together), an amount of marines to be full of godstims at some point within the round without a single ounce of micro counterplay or survivability. This is not enjoyable.
Contributors need to stop making excuses for maintainers to not nerf stims and just balance it already.
bad take incoming
same reason that we stil have screech, neurotoxin stun, warrior grapple, cap gameplay, CAS, orbital bombardment, OT landmines, shocked doors, shotgun stun, etc.
all of those things are shitty workarounds to actual problems(OB answering Delayliens just holding on a place and capping, OT landmines dealing with backliners, screech instastunning and allowing capture of marines, etc), none of those things are fun for the adversary, but if you remove them it just becomes a empty void, its very hard to explain, but the community likes features like stims because it takes a WHILE to get them, and sometimes you NEVER get them, someone has to actively work on getting dead xenos and chems and shit to research if they want stims, without this feature researchers are just useless.
I don’t feel breaking gameplay should be justify by filling a void. Because it just create a void for xeno who does not get anything even close to it.
And for the glowing sprites,it sounds very useful. But very lrp to see glowing marines running around radiated in the cm alien universe. Maby that’s just me.
As a xeno main: at first I thought this would do nothing. Most (I hope most?) can recognize the speed difference, or many of the stuns (stomp, lunge, leap) not working. Xenos call out stims, and just assume most are stimmed, as you would probably see if they glow.
The frustration is not because xenos don’t know you are stimmed. It goes all the way back to nethack and ‘Yet Another Annoying Death’ from the gnome with the wand of death. You die in some manner that no matter what you did, no matter how good you are, there was nothing you could do. When every marine pushes with stims that heals super quick, cannot break bones, and cannot be stunned, what are xenos to do? charge in and do no damage? stall and retreat to hive until that’s crushed too? That feeling of helplessness, that’s the frustration.
In game design, I like to think back to Valve’s example on TFC vs TF2. In TFC, they learned a lot of the frustration was the grenades that people would prime to half a second and lob at angles to instantly kill others, without them knowing why they even died. In TF2 they completely removed grenades, provided kill cams so you know where and how that enemy killed you, and turned down 1 hit full life kills to lucky crits, headshots, or a spy managing to get to your back. They added counterplay with for example medics overhealing and pyro’s airblast protection. All to give back that feeling that something could have been done.
The glow could add worth though: xenos can now tell sents to shoot slowing spit at the glowing guys as it removes a few units of drugs in marines. Most cases sents are too squishy and too few for it to matter, but it’s something.
if its just the xenos that see this i think this is great idea, many times the issue with stims is not the stims in of its self but the fact you get caught off guard.
like i am a roony player( very bad at it too lol) and many times anti-stun stims can and will catch me off guard leading to a Point blank shotty to the face. There is certain tempo to combat, and throwing it off is not particularly pleasant.
It could be helpful to new players i guess but i would love if there was a way to turn it off (if it ever gets introduced) because it might impact visibility of marines sprites (which to me is very important to metatarget specs).
Also not knowing which marine is stimmed is almost never a problem, unless they have revival stims (which then will probably lead xenos to camping glowing bodies for free caps), usually its just the fact that most xenos combos include stunning/slowing marines down with damage which most stims mitigate.
So tired of the argument for stims half the time boiling down to:
But muhh researcher role! I have to be able to do mindless guide following rng slop for an hour just to completely ruin any sense of gameplay and balance for the rest of the round, nullifying anyones sense of accomplishment.
This is just horrible design and researcher never should have been given stims ever.
Argument could be: “poo poo pee pee penis guamacole stims gotta stay” and would mean as much, there is a strict policy currently on “improve not remove” on everything.
The best we can get in possible future is completly RNG system where there is like 1/10 chance that marines just get godstims this round.
I think glowing doesn’t add much to xenos other than to fuck with scout spec’s cloak. There simply should not be such powerfull boons for anyone in a regular round.
The best and probably easiest way to balance stuff would be for stim effects to react harmfully if they effect the same human at the same time. So no more speedy and unkillable marines. You either pick speed, or health regen. If both are present, something bad happens to you.
Stims could also provide some kind of drawback, you get speed, you heal slower, you get hp regeneration, you are slower.
But we won’t get it.
Just as like with OT, shit is gonna be broken till CM head honcho changes.
I am still of the opinion that stims affecting stun resistance and speed should come with a hallucination side effect that randomly turns other marines into xenos, so that the player can never be 100% certain they’re not killing friendlies.
The xeno zip in the comics worked like this. It made you strong and insane:
Maybe we use not glowing, but we chance the modificator at the NST formula? If NST >2 there a 2 * Potensy modificator, maybe we can make it as usual, 1.5 * Potensy even if level bigger then 2
Edit: There a crying becouse queen after screech dont get caps or kills when there a NST stim, so maybe we use:
Stun duration reduced by 1.2 * POTENCY
Unfortunately, I don’t see any of these changes coming anytime soon as codebase changes relating to research aren’t being taken and I personally believe that if xenos are losing enough numbers to allow researchers to make an effective stim then at that point its just delayliens.
Now highlighting them is probably not a horrible idea but all the other mald unrelated to this post is kinda funny.
As a researcher player you’ll have to colour-code different stim reagents with different colours, and account for players using multiple stims at once - the inclusion of this mechanic would be incredibly informative but might also be counterintuitive depending on what the stim does.