I think that people put too much blame on the game mechanics rather than a lack of creativity. Of course if you rush the same spot for the billionth time in a row you are bound to get two tapped or fracture tailstabbed by a drone.
The norm of molotov spam and cadehug was never the case untill the start of 2023-ish period, not because of the countless of ‘surv-nerfs’ people throw around that actually turned survivor into a non-deathsquad role, but because the old playerbase left almost simultaneously after some of us got banned, controversies, and burnout. I know this because I saw this happen first hand.
What happened to people having fun on survivor, trying funny things out, just going away and people being surprised that they are not having fun and that the role has turned into a geniune toxic sesspool?
Because every time you scream “Guys, let’s hold hydro shitter!” on Kutjevo or smth like that - other survs will give you the most condescending look known to man and thoroughly explain that they’ll hold LZ1 storage or whatever they’re holding nowadays, and you can go die alone if you don’t wanna cadehug
Survivor playerbase plays to either get gamer skills and gamer loot (which they can reliably receive by playing a damn FTL - same skills, almost same NVGs and same lack of responsibility), or for ShIpSiDe RoLePlAy (that they’ll never get)
Nobody enjoys the process of surviving (goofy holds, meme loadouts, fistfights with drones and etc) - people just want this first 20 minutes to end so they can start fragging/roleplaying. Survivors don’t have fun with the very concept of surviving, so they cheese and optimize it as much as possible
Hyperoptimization and meta on surv part leads to hyperoptimization and meta on xeno part, and as a result - everyone plays the same meta shit over and over, and nobody has fun
I partly disagree with this, nerfs have caused the role to become stale, but not all directly survivor nerfs, engineering nerfs from way back and small changes here and there are mainly to blame (like making literally everything breakable) and I say this from the point of view as a survivor main from way back in 2016 that doesn’t play survivor anymore.
Like let’s take Solaris for example, I loved the day’s of engineering holds or Marshalls holds, but changes rather than holding a tiny corridor in a cave above a LZ.
But you got to contend with literally a majority of the T2 being able to open up map walls(Powercreep change), Tail stab Existing Who thought it was a good idea to give a primarily melee faction extra range?(also invalidates shock dooring).
R-walls are also way too easy to make now, but either way I’ma stop complaining here though because frankly CM in general an’t the CM I used to enjoy.
Man it sucks so much that xenos are allow to open up flanks rather than faceslamming into the cades so we can shoot them, I hate that they are able to damage shocked doors rather than being permastunned so we can instakill them.
To be fair to the point Listless is making, 2016 survivor was BRUTAL.
Runners appeared at 1 min into the game and were unnerfed runners; they had old speed + tackle chance, and did a LOT of damage. If I remember correctly this was when you hit on actual limb way more than the current RNG of hitting everywhere but the limb you intended.
So survivor was an actual skill role since you spawned with no inserts like now, most maps had limited loot unlike a lot of maps now that even have NVG’s for survivors, so you had to abuse a lot more tricks like shock doors, r-wall holds such as secure storage or security in LV, etc.
TL;DR xeno was a LOT stronger back then, so survivors had to use tricks to survive that would feel cheap for them to have now.
It’s a bit of a toss up, maturity also existed so runner speed and the like was lower if we just talking pure xeno balance, but on the flip side, loot was also much lower, PEOPLE craved that single box of buckshot.
I don’t quite get the xeno grievances against the survivor sidequest. For the past month I’ve been playing about one round every day on average, and like 80% of the time marines find survivors totally wiped out, with maybe one survivor with a flashing red defib line. Y’all seem to be managing just fine.
Cause it’s usually costly to wipe them, even if just one xeno dies, nobody wants to be the one xeno that has to sit out the round for basically nothing.
But to that end there isn’t really any grievance, since xenos aren’t forced to fight survs at all. So really they’d just rather not most of the time. Which is part of what prompted OP’s original question I think
Well as stated before above, there used to be more leniency when fighting survs. Sure you could die, but there was more monkeys / yurin to capture so you could come back without much trouble.
Now, though, there is a LOT less room for error so fighting survs is a annoying side quest, which is bad game design; nothing in the game should be “just there” it should all have a purpose.
Make survivors mechanically unable to harm themselves, (add a timer that prevents harm intent on self till XX time?) and remove molotovs so they can’t suicide. Ensures xenos at least get something in return, unless you ask the other guys to shoot you (cinematic as fuck).
Also do the same thing for barricades and sentries, either remove their relevant skills or make them unplaceable early on. No one likes assaulting FOBs especially if you’re doing that 5 minutes into the game.
Sieges = not fun, so survs = not fun. Simple.
No, you don’t just get to survive. Earn it or stop playing the hardcore role. Would make the RP better since it’d be a rarer occurence, too.
Only possible if survivors were always a special roll like inserts where you get full skills and special items, such as full PMC armor and weapons, or your a UPP squad stranded on the planet like Dam, or even a nerfed MARSOC commando or UPP team thats scattered across the entire planet with limited resources but special equipment like UPP cloak or MARSOC heavy weapons.
Otherwise survivors will always die the moment T2’s happen if you remove their ability to make cades / turrets / molotovs unless they locker hide and do not get UAV’d by the obnoxious hugger / lesser drone metagame mechanic.
Skill issue. I see nothing wrong with that. If they could survive in the first place the colony wouldn’t be needing marines. It’s not exactly a role you play to live long.
Or wasn’t at least - then people wanted to have fun or what have you and look where that got us.
You have a habit of doing this in every thread. You make some stupid argument saying how we could ‘balance’ a role / mechanic by limiting it in some arbitrary way, and when somebody points out how that would be impossible, you admit that you have no intention of balancing it and just want it removed. I don’t think that’s very productive.
I’m not saying to remove survivors nor is balancing them as I suggested impossible.
I’m just saying it’ll remain unfun as long as it will be a siege slopfest. Sieges being unfun is something you can’t fix because you’re forcing engaging static PvE objects in a PvP game, with the other side safely shooting at you. Cope around this all you want but the only way to make survivors fun is removing sieges.
Will it mean they have a lesser chance of surviving?
Yeah, probably.
Is that bad?
Afaik no, it isn’t. They’re an extra role.
Can this be fixed somehow?
Yeah, it probably can.
Do I care to come up with ideas as to how to fix this?
No I don’t.
Maybe if devs were interested in doing something about it I would be interested in coming up with ideas. Edit: if dying bad just give them free marine or xeno respawns lol, there’s ur fix.
Extrapolating me saying stims should be removed via king onto all of my posts is rather silly. But.
It’s not that “I want it removed” or have “no intention of balancing it”. It’s just that no one is interested in making survivors a fun or balanced role.
If you proposed removing barricade and sentry spam, you would be coped out of the discussion by “surv mains” or whathaveyou, and yet that is the only way to fix it and one of the main changes between survivors of old and now - old survs were roaming, new survs are holding.
Really makes one wonder why is the role not fun to engage with if the engagement is the most unfun activity in all of CM.
Now it’s even worse because of bigger unweedable zones made to prevent fob from being rushed. The issue that was kinda mostly solved with gas now is back — you have to travel several screens to rest on weeds after hitting a cade twice. Honestly this sucks so much I am going to ignore survs from now on.
A solution to this particular issue would be removal of unweedable zones until marines land, it shouldn’t be hard to destroy weed nodes/walls/even traps in a specific zone after.
