Thrid faction approach won’t work. It will be heavily xeno-sided. Slower preds can’t keep up xenos who can run away easly, so preds focus would be marines who are static in their gameplay due to LZ being unmovable, cades and such, unlike xeno hive who spends no resources on every single kind of structure they have.
Queens with half a brain will sit deep in caves till triggerhappy marines and preds wipe eachother out, then they will pounce every time.
How you will balance that? You won’t, shit impossible.
Preds are literally just an automatic server event without any intervention from admins. Sure, fighting them is fun, there is RP potential, that loot after killing one is nice and such.
It will be stuck with “improve, don’t remove”. So might as well relegate them solely to hunting games
i’ve mentioned this a couple times on cord, but do we have a timeframe on when hunting games/grounds will be finished?
it seems like it won’t be finished anything soon, and imo, a TM should be made until then to hardcap predators so we aren’t getting 20 predators every pred roll all wanting to make an impact on the round.
If preds were restricted somehow and there was an actual benefit to interacting with them, then they’d be kino.
Make them the Nuke Ops equivalent; their task is to either take out hivecore and then teleport out, or take out LZ on Marine side, but they get limited slots (tops 4) and they lose some of their power. In return, xenos that capture them or at least kill 2 get a Abomination, if marines bring back the corpses they get a Dutches ERT and/or Intel points on top of it to compensate for having to fight them.
Would make a interesting dynamic whenever pred rounds happen, though it would require a lot of nerfs, like their cloak not being infinite so they can’t just cloak HPC either side to death, etc.
Something like this feels more appropriate. Make them closer to a CM version of Nuke Ops where they are spawned in as a random event, with limited numbers, with a clear and tangible objective, Their gear and equipment can then be balanced better around these tasks instead of them just being super overpowered.
I think that with preds current state they would indeed be better suited for a game where they are the main focus/greatest enemy. I feel there is great potential to expand on such concept. For example they could expand on trapping and ambushes. Maybe have them spawn in before the pray to have time to prepare. Hell, maybe even add new traps and the sort. Maybe make the HPC more lore accurate being a focused high damage projectile rather than a shoulder mounted nuke.
edit: will the new hunting grounds be a new map of it’s own?
So the problem will persist. That is kinda funny when something we know would never be added now is kept because it was added in the past.
Conservative Marines Space Station 13.
Nerf predators to be less Looney Tunes. Buff their stealth aspects; in fact, instead of supersonic speed, give them a teleport-dash sort of like a hand teleporter.
If we nerf preds, they are more killable. If they are more killable, following the Honor Code & being a stealthy hunter then becomes de facto (as following Honor Code is a pretty good way to stay alive)
From there, remove most of the rule restrictions surrounding them. If preds are more killable, I don’t want them to have to walk on eggshells. I’m not a pred player myself, but I don’t believe in taking away fun and not giving fun back.
From there, give preds kill objectives - “hunt PFC Snuffy Killfuck, his actions prove his scalp would be a worthy prize”. They can re-roll the name 3 times. There are no rules on how they achieve this hunt, but, again – they are more killable, so charging into the marine front isn’t likely to succeed.
Likewise, give preds an antag role. If round hits the 2 hour mark, a single pred can optionally spawn on the Almayer to take out a specific fucker or two/create chaos. Speeds up the round end too!
If devs approve, when my permaban is lifted, I’d like to draft some code for this.
If there’s issue with my line of reasoning here, tell me, but I think this is all pretty well thought out
I dunno about kill objectives… if they need you to scalp and perma the poor marine, then it opens a really awful can of worms. I don’t wanna be the guy who gets their name drawn and dragged into the jungle to perma 15 minutes post drop.
I can’t really give feedback on preds. I rarely get to see them unless I’m dead. They happen so rarely and then people have to actually decide to play them and THEN they have to actually decide to interact with you.
I can count on one hand the amount of pred interactions I’ve had, always as xeno because I hate groundside marine roles, and usually they just say some kind of derisive remark or decide I’m a good trophy.
I also never get to fight preds unless I’m a T1 since killing a T1 is the least impactful…and a T1 is also the least likely to win that fight, so usually any actual fight ends with me dead.
Unironically the majority of my knowledge of them comes from spectating after I die which really isn’t enough to give feedback…but in a way I think that’s telling in itself; preds are generally so scarce that the average player barely gets to interact with them, and what little interaction they do get either doesn’t make sense (Preds talking to them, even if only to mock them like a schoolyard bully) or is just a brief fight that will most likely end with the pred winning and the xeno/marine scalped or thrown back like a piece of garbage to be healed and play the rest of the round as normal.
I do also know I want to play them really badly, but that basically demands I play roles I hate just to ‘make a name for myself’ in the community and it’s just not worth it at that point.
Preds clearly can’t agree on this because every time someone complains about a pred randomly killing them the response is “preds are antagonists, they’re allowed to hunt you”
You guys need to make your mind up already instead of the constant back and forth between “preds won’t kill you if you don’t do anything” and “what, you really thought the pred wouldn’t kill you if you don’t do anything?”
Also I feel like this is just blatantly not true. If you see a pred and open fire on them you are probably getting permad if they kill you even if no words were spoken at any point. If a pred challenges you to a duel and you accept there’s maybe a chance they don’t perma you but not something you can rely on with 99% certainty. If they attack you unprompted you are almost certainly getting permad. Even more so if you are a xeno, sometimes preds will leave you crit on weeds but that’s exceedingly rare. To be honest I don’t know how anyone who has put a good amount of hours into this game could really think that preds don’t perma people outside of LRP.
