Since practically the invention of the predator whitelist, we’ve been on a first contact rule where nobody knows anything about them other than sparse rumors. This has tied people’s hands in a way where instead of bothering to roleplay the aforementioned first contact, everyone acts like they know what they are.
The word Jamaican, whilst not racist or LRP per say has been the biggest example.
When Commanding Officers or any form of command sees preds on the ground, they immediately make an announcement on how theres “Jamaicans groundside, be careful”
There has been clear disregard of the rule and frankly I’m tired of dealing with it, and I’d like opinions on how we can expand the first contact rule to allow marines to have more information but keep them as the secretive faction that it was supposed to be.
Faction reports, lore documents, and other suggestions are very much welcome.
this is pretty much the same issue with normal xenos when they had first contact. first contact made more sense for the setting and was a lot more atmospheric but there was only so many times you could go “Man that thing that latched on my face sure was weird! I better go to the medbay and get it checked out!” before it got old and a lot of people stopped playing along.
To make matters worse, CM has a community of sweaty tryhards doing their best to optimize the fun out of the game, which requires concise callouts and understanding of mechanics and the game state and the ability to transmit these things to one another. I die a little inside every time I hear someone say “T3” in character, even if you abstract it away as “oh it’s a T3 bioform in x random classification system”, it still just feels like goofy CSGO callouts.
Predators are stuck trying to fill two roles, as both a roleplay WL of terrifying advanced hunters who make humans (and xenos) their prey, to some people, and to a lot of others, a boss fight with a loot drop at the end. (everyone remembers how in predator arnie immediately strips the pred’s mask off for his xenohud before it SDs itself.) These two concepts are for the most part in opposition to each other. The more preds become a boss fight for loot the more people will optimize the mystique out of them in order to effectively coordinate to kill them.
the fact it’s often XOs and sometimes even COs using the weird LRP terms is kinda disappointing.
To be honest, I don’t think this problem will get fixed, no matter what.
Some people here are just here to shoot xenomorphs and PvP. Nothing else. Predators being in the light of “Wow! A rare event with exclusive and useful loot!” inclines players to forego RP-friendly predators and use that opportunity to pulverize the shit out of them, and go to the fourms to complain about how running away and healing is suddenly a sprit of the WL breach, and get HC changed so they can kill the predators more easily while giving them less breathing room to do anything about it.
The only solution I really see for an issue widespread like this is just straight up the nuclear option… An crackdown from the moderation team, but I believe everyone here knows just how awful that will be for the entire community. Let me say that again for dramatic effect: ENTIRE.
I’m going to throw this hail mary suggestion and say: What if we foregone first contact? Make it so Marines/Xenomorphs have an idea what predators are, but not the shit they can pull?
Weyland-Yutani/Megacorps* should know they exist, but not the Governments themselves of TWE, UPP, or the UA.
Weyland-Yutani - along with other Megacorporations that exist in-universe - have a vested interest in even faster faster than light travel. Something the Yautja have. My long-term plan with my CO character and staff position was that the reason Nina Hange ended up in the Neroid was to an Agent of one amongst many subsidiary Company’s that have been tasked with acquiring, researching, and reverse-engineering Yautja Technology on Behalf of Weyland-Yutani in secret. Similar to how in Rimworld (good video game) different powerful interests from the Imperial Core “Glitterworlds” are actively seeking out remnant technology.
During a round on LV-624 - with Greg Lauffer - I RPed out “receiving a fax from my brother” and attempted to achieve a special objective groundside. I deployed with in a Powerloader and wanted to loot and extract every piece of Yautja gear in the Sand Temple on LV-624 that wasn’t nailed down with Charlie acting as my fellow Tomb Raiders. Sadly the best laids plans didn’t work out, and I had to bail out the failed push into inflatables (still won the round (xenos BTFO)).
My suggestion would be to alter certain maps to have more Yautja tombs. Not all obviously, but more would be appreciated. And on top of that, The Liaisons themselves would be allowed to have rudimentary Knowledge. They could along with that information, could do certain things if certain parts of the Yautja tombs were secured for Weyland-Yutani - like a form of Intelpoints/Defcon (but a different overall stat, or maybe special defcon unlocks). Frankly, I really like the idea of adding more neutral objectives for the Factions to fight over - like the relays. Giving IOs/Command/Squads something more to smash and grab. Giving Xenos a reason to defend Tombs, and for character conflict between Marines/Preds to exist would all be 10000% funsies.
Edit: Oh and also, fuck calling them Jamaicans, it’s cringe and I hate it.
But I’ll give a bit of perspective from someone new to the whitelist and how I’ve been gauging interactions recently. First thing to start with is that as soon as Jamaican is mentioned in an interaction with a group of players, all the air is immediately sucked out of the roleplay. It’s jarring, and sets a terrible tone for what could have been a great, atmospheric moment.
Secondly, when people don’t immediately claim to know what you are, you have a lot more flexibility, as a predator, to set the course of the interaction, and get more unique engagements out of it. Anything else usually is a fast track to someone metagaming the honor code, and being killed for it. That’s a dead end street either way.
Moral of the story is, I like roleplaying with people more than I like beating them with hammers. Good first contact roleplay is a great segway to a lot of different interactions that may or may not end in violence, but I find it’s enjoyable either way when you’re able to extract the most roleplay from it.
edit//
With OWLF coming, I think we might get more options with how predators interface with marines, and humans as a whole.
I mean it seems to me 90% of pred/marine interactions fall into 4 categories.
Oh a pred, ima just pretend it’s not there/avoid interaction because I ain’t here to roleplay, im here to kill xenos and do my thing.
“hey bitch you’re ugly and I think I could fuck you up, 1v1 me ya scrub ass jamaican/native”
“SARGE SARGE SARGE THIS REALLY FAST MOVING THING JUST VANISHED INFRONT OF ME AFTER DOING SOME SPOOKY LAUGH WTFBBQ???”
Some odd person actually tries to interact with the pred properly and displays some sort of fear rp and ends up a thrall or something
I appreciate you trying to address this issue but quite frankly the server is way too low roleplay to have an overall fix not only pred first contact roleplay but xeno first contact roleplay for reasons people have already listed. The roleplay chat/radio standards and meta knowledge for both marines and xenos is at a super low state right now. I’ve seen some totally blatant meta and/or low rp announcements that no staff members seem to care about whatsoever and this has been happening for quite some time now. It’s becoming the overall norm now and isn’t going to be fixed by the players themselves.
I don’t even think there is a solution besides some sort of host mandate that staff gotta start cracking down on low-rp/meta garbage.
I feel we’re retreading the same discussions we had for xenomorph first contact.
My position to take is to introduce a similar level of IC knowledge to Predators the same as we did for Xenomorphs all those years ago. Essentially, replicate current Xenomorph knowledge and apply it to Predators, meaning the Marines are aware that Predators, as a species and a known threat, exist, they have a codename (room for debate here, layman terms of ‘Predator’, perhaps a more unique military codeword could also be created), and that they know they possess advance technology, but that is the limit.
Marines are always going to want to refer to Predators as something. Right now, its Jamaican, or Cloaker, or Dreadlocks guy, or whatever. We had this very same issue with Xenomorphs where we were calling Xenomorphs fairly weird/cringe names such as Red Dogs.
If you don’t institute an acceptable in-character name for a concept, people are going to create their own, you can’t then be surprised people come up with terrible or cringe names, if anything I’d actually argue the term of Jamaican might be sadly far more likely to become an actual nickname for Predators if they existed in reality.
the thing about W-Y having knowledge about Yautja, it would only be tied to the higher echelons to avoid leaks. There is an entire secretive department that probably only exists because of the Yautja. So it wouldn’t be expected for just any employee (especially a low class liaison) to have that knowledge, leaving to only it being applicable in admin events. You wouldn’t be able to exploit W-Y knowing about preds in regular rounds without some kind of admin intervention and trying to implement it in regular rounds through the roundstart CL would be lore breaking as it becomes more and more ridiculous to explain on how is it still a secret.
I think first contact has failed, just like it failed with xenos over time. We should let humans know about their existence BUT that’s it, nothing more. Only that they exist and are hostile. Becuase it became apparent that the majority of the playerbase are fed up trying like they became fed up with “red dog red dog screecher!” and trying to enforce the rules the draconian way will just put everyone in a bad mood.
Literally this. Every time this discussion pops up, I just point to the fact that this is the exact same issue we had with xeno first contact, yet people seem to desperately keep trying to pretend that predator first contact is actually ‘unique’ in some way and thus we need to use some other, more convoluted approach.
It’s not. People don’t RP with pred first contact for the same reason people didn’t RP with xeno first contact. Just do the same thing we did with xenomorphs- Give marines knowledge that predators exist, so everyone eventually starts saying ‘pred’, ‘predator’ instead of ‘jamaican’.
In my heart I wanna say like, the CO has a document in the safe regarding potential contacts, and information that can and cannot be disseminated to the troops, but that’s just plain not the game anymore. I know part of the soul of predator is “le epic secret space guys who no one knows about,” but Jesus Christ we have had this same damn argument every month for years now. Just say a name that marines have kinda heard of, doesn’t have to be Jamaicans, could be Hunters, or even just Predators, and call it a wrap.
I know my beloved RP is being sacrificed at the hands of muh TDM meta, but I’m tired of having to hash out this utter non-argument.
It’s inherently different because preds aren’t the core enemy of the game and interactions are kinda rare.
But yeah I do agree that it’s annoying to have to say “What the hell are you?!!” everytime you see a predator. It feels so insanely forced.
But it’s also good that it causes roleplay interactions. Removing the necessity to sort of talk to your enemy (as stupid as it is) before shooting them will gameify the interaction IMO. I don’t know a different solution that could work, I don’t think removing it without replacing it with something else is good though.
you’re just generalizing players who u don’t know.
This. Every single interaction with a pred is infinitely cooler the second the word Jamaican doesn’t exist. There is absolutely zero wiggle room for a good RP with pred to occur.
I earnestly wanna see just how much better it would be if we just enforced “no calling preds Jamaicans.”
holy shit theres at least 5 laurencia beck accounts in thjs thread
I don’t see why the word is a problem. Castes have names like these as well. They are named maybe through official classification, but probably through marines themselves giving them nicknames. I don’t see any issues with marines giving preds a nickname based off their appearance.
Indeed, the preds may as well be a xenomorph caste too, and may be treated as such when lacking information on their species.
I said this before in the other thread, but it needs repeating, command is really stuck in a no-win situation regarding the Yautja. You just don’t have any IC ground to stop anyone bellow you from using “Jamaicans”, because for that you need to know what those really are. If you even acknowledge the term, and go “PFC what’s a Jamaican”, you risk getting slapped for LRP. You cannot use any lore descriptive terms like “Yautja”, because you simply don’t know them.
I think the best solution here would be introducing some kind a CIC lore computer that would receive emails ever so often. So, for Yautja rounds, after the first bioscan the CIC gets a tip about the presence of Preds in the AO and what little USCM knows about them. Then they can actually disseminate some of that information to the troops when appropriate and on aCOs discretion. Hence a CO would be able to instantly jump in and get marines to treat the Yautja more seriously if they get the intel that say on XX-123 one Yautja took out a platoon of marines.
The very same computer can also be used to provide more lore about the particular maps, so you won’t need to meta it. Like knowing how to open locks on Hybrisa.
Have it be that the marines have heard rumors of them, in the first movie the woman calls them “demons who make trophies of men” but they’re folk lore, in AVP 2, the former marine PMC leader survived an encounter with one but he’s dismissed by most people (probably OWLF covering it up)
People would probably have heard SOME rumours about them but not know enough to actually consider them real, or pin them down as particular thing, like the border bombers in Alien the RPG actually.
Edit:also i feel like HC would know about the predators, given that in lore they brainwiped a whole bunch of people who fought xenos in the betelgeuse campaign (the system not the character from the movie beetlejuice)
Man, what is in this word that makes preds and some players so mad and salty?
I call preds “Mutants”, “Tribals”, “Forgotten”, “Demons”, “Beasts” and such, yet none has the same impact on crybabies as “Jamaican” has. I really do think it is about racism thing, but we were discussing it so many times, that you can no longer claim it is racist, so you have to find something else to be mad about in this word and you either state no reason that this word boils your blood, or you just say that it is:
No, RP doesn’t disappear magically because marine called pred that one specific name out of hundreds others. John Marine can call you whatever and it is only their and your (as a pred) intention of when RP happens, or not. If John Marine wants just to shoot, murder and kill pred loot piniata, then he will do it no matter if he describes pred a “jamaican”, or “cloaker”. He will fucking shoot without speaking much more with the word, or without.
And if Pred gets offended because he was called the dreaded word he might as well not have a concept of at all (come on, preds might know a lot about humanity, but knowing that one specific term describing people living, or comming from Jamaica with a stereotype of them having dreadlocks and smoking weed) then he will initiate hunt, or whatever and won’t RP.
What if I will call preds “Visigoth” in plain english, they will suddently recall that it is describing Roman-allied barbarian military group during late antiquity?
What if I will call them “Silesians”, will they know that I am calling them a specific real-life ethnic group inhabiting Silesia? Will the get mad about it and all RP will vanish because of it?
The term that marines are allowed to use should be fucking “Predator”, it is a fucking nickname after all and that stupid ban on knowing it is stupid. “Predator” is a nickname given to Yautja by humans who encounter them and then spread rumors.
But I guess preds will get mad that we call them Preds, right? Go back to your stupid fucking planet and fix that damned climate change and stop wearing fishnets you pervs.
