preds are in the weakest state they’ve ever been in outside of two tap foot frac meta, they are incredibly easy to kill as a marine and you can very, very consistently win against them if you know what you are doing (less so as xeno)
you can also take scalps and all of these methods involve permakilling people
do you want preds to be permakilling more people (because nothing stops preds from doing that right now except for the people who play it having self restraint)
you dont need to be robust to play pred and people do roleplay as the role (usually with other preds) or by simply fucking with marines
most predators do not even actively hunt they just walk around and larp and try to scare people, which is fun - most people who get killed usually attack first or instigate
why you miss the point
i think a lot of you though are missing the point of what roleplaying with preds entail and what they are
ya you can talk to marines ya you can larp with them but at the end of the day you are the equivalent of a rich dentist going to hunt a lion
most of the ‘roleplay’ with predators as a marine (xenomorphs effectively cannot roleplay with a predator) is that you react to their existence and what it means to your character or what you think of it, it’s not walking up and saying ‘hi’ to them that starts rp it’s the pred seeing you and deciding to rp with you based off what you do and how they see you act
how you react to seeing 20 skinned bodies hanging upside down in LV engineering
how you react to seeing a predator lodge and NOT immediately shooting it (entering peacefully means you aren’t dishonourable and you might get to actually talk)
how you react to fighting and WHAT YOU DO in the fight
how you react to the actual predator itself
i’m not going to give a trophy to a guy who wordlessly walks up to me and tries to fucking plab me with an m37a2 into agrip mk2 im going to give a trophy to the guy who was trying his heart out but still lost and tried to make an interesting interaction with me by doing something, begging for their life insulting me in a way that makes sense being afraid being brave
something that isn’t just wordlessly killing or walking up and trying to be friendly with me
my favourite interactions as pred is the people i interfere with reacting to that interference, asking what the fuck is going on
that motivates me to try and interact with them more, to talk to them, to roleplay with them outside of just insulting them, to take them to the pred ship and be rude to them as i have done and seen done with oh so many people both post-hijack and pre-hijack
and my favourite interactions with predators are those exact same ones, reacting to their presence and existence
the unfortunate reality of all of this, though, is that unless i know for a fact i am a 1000x better than the person who i want to pull up and rp with or abduct, i need to be on my guard 24/7 and prepared to fucking kill everyone and hpc them lest i die and be relentlessly mocked in dchat because i died as the ‘overpowered whitelist’ when most of those aforementioned players have probably never even killed a predator before
what am i supposed to say to people who walk up to me and say ‘wow scary alien dude!!!’ or just stare at me and say ‘Erm.’ or any of the infinite variations of things that people think is going to make me want to rp with them when it does the exact opposite, especially considering the people who think that they NEED to typebait you to win in some form of weird mexican standoff
i’ve had tons of good and bad interactions with preds
and i think they add a lot more to the game than they detract right now, roleplay wise and gameplay wise
it is fun to have a cool fight even when you lose
it is funny to watch people get hpced and blow up
and i think there’s issues because every single whitelist has issues, every single role in this game has issues
TL;DR: pred is a freeform roleplay role
i think it is one of the best whitelists as it stands in terms of current player quality, yes it has issues every whitelist has issues
i dont blame preds for not wanting to interact and being cautious because all it takes is one semi-decent player who knows how to walk and doesn’t just stand still and you die
i dont blame them for not wanting to interact with thralling when its a clunky, dogshit mechanic and you dont know who wants to be thralled, because people who beg for it do not deserve it and you dont want to fuck a guys round over if he doesn’t want to be thralled (you can ask in LOOC, i suppose, but it removes the mystery and cool factor of it imo)
there is good pred roleplay, you can have good pred roleplay - you are not always going to and the best way to encourage it is to let it happen rather than trying to force it. you do not have to be friendly to a predator to make it roleplay with you but you also don’t have to walk up and immediately call them a ‘jamaican’ the moment you see them and act like you are chill with the 7’ alien lizard creature with fucking fishnet, ornate plate armour, a fucking cannon on its shoulder and a mask on
and then there is dying to the pred
that is also perfectly fine, it does not make the round worse
it sucks when it happens and you get a fracture, it sucks when you get skinned and permakilled
but i have not seen a single member of the whitelist in any of the pred rounds i have played, against any of the preds i have fought in almost 6 years, try to permakill me or anyone else who doesn’t slime them or be a fucking annoyance
my personal best interactions, though:
walking up to a pred and telling him to halt as sg, trying to understand his motives as to why he is hostile to marines because this was when preds were unkillable without AP and i had none
i start asking him why he’s doing it and tell him to stop or the uscmc will turn its attention onto him
i talk to him for a bit, he tells me he is here to hunt so i start shooting at him as an SG (i die ofc)
he beheads the two people who did nothing but watch and who told me not to fight and throws me back to the FOB for revival
another round i am playing as medic, i am larping being afraid of it and trying to run away
meanwhile im getting chased down like a rabid fucking dog and plinking with my l42a as the pred is decloaking after me, blowing up random shit around me
i get dragged to LZ2 and think i do well, i really dont but i get saved by a few marines
they act lrp but nothing happens, we talk for a bit and they kill an IO
it would have been an awesome RP opportunity if not for people walking up and saying ‘wow it’s a lost jamaican’ and shit
watching j.d bishop fight a pred on the LZ with only a double barrel shotgun after it had killed all his friends, cinematic standoff with a dagger, both of them falling into crit next to eachother and dying
i truly do hope that what i do as pred has made at least one persons day better, too, which i feel it has considering some people have spoken to me about it
and there’s so many other interactions, too
there’s so much more i could say and so much more i wish i had the patience to type but im lazy and just repeating myself
preds are good, and more often than not have a ‘positive’ rather than neutral impact
sometimes it goes wrong
sometimes bad things happen
nothing ever happens…