So people apparently hate long rounds. I get it. What I hate a lot more is admins interfering to end the round, ruining the game for everyone. Imagine wasting 2 hours of your life just for an admin to give other side something dumb to easily win and end the round. You can look up staff reports, this is a genuine problem. Most of the time admins interfere on behalf of marines as it’s a lot faster and less amount of people get mad, but neither of that make it fair.
I think a much fairer solution would be to simply limit the time of the rounds. For example either just hard end the round at 3 hr mark or like at 3 hr mark marines get evacuation announcement and have to pull back to Almayer (at this point xenos cannot call the dropship down), at 3:10 round ends in a draw, marines leave the orbit and that’s it.
Yeah maybe this is not perfect but I think this would be a lot better than biased admins doing unfair stuff arbitrarily with little to no limits.
Perhaps a tool for staff to force a round to end in a more streamlined way might be useful? As it stands, there is no codified way for staff to break a stalemate and end a round that is past 2.5 or 3 hours, we just decide off the cuff what to do, and this can range from spamming HEAP magazines to spamming 30 larva. Or just spawning a nuke.
(I also want to point out that xeno-sided tiebreakers have the issue that mandatory hijack extends the game for 10 to 30+ minutes, since it is extremely rare for staff to authorize skipping hijack even if the round is past 3 hours, at least marine tiebreakers end the round)
Perhaps, for example, the tool that admins can use starts a 10-minute timer wherein after that time ends, the Almayer leaves low-orbit and ends the operation. So at any point the admins can start the process to end a round that has gone on for too long, but the manner of ending it is fair and warns both sides.
(fluff it that HC has decided that the Almayer is not equipped to deal with the issue, so they are sending a new and better equipped ship to take over in a few weeks)
Force marine evacuation out of the planet, making hijack impossible and redeployment also impossible. Makes sense RP wise, since after wasting budget for 3 hours with no improvement on the frontlines HC would find it a waste continuing funding the operation further.
done the low-orbit-leaving thing before as CO thanks to you, I believe. saved us the headache of a FOB purgatory where neither side can push at the 2:30 mark. worth every mald from chungus marines
I think it’s a gamemode fault versus something staff should handle
Part of why xenos are scary is because they had a huge amount of numbers ready to throw themselves and suicide into marines.
So many rounds get dragged out because xenos will wipe marines but then their numbers begin to stagnate then fall off. It makes the hives feel apathetic and lame versus something to be feared.
For marines, they have no incentive other than waiting for nuke since if xenos can’t get caps and can’t get comms, their numbers will plummet hard, rewarding the attacking side for not attacking
Fair point, however, the fact is our game struggles with closing out the ending.
Marine and Xeno nukes have a lot of point of failures that mostly reserve these as something the winning team uses to speed up the end, and there is no natural draw/neutral ending that occurs normally.
TF2, for example, has a hard time limit which ends the game if it runs out, usually a win for the defender or a draw otherwise.
I like the idea of it just being “the Alamo leaves, it’s a draw” as an admin option. It would also give the option of a sorta round “winddown.” I’ve ahelped before about “hey can we just RP out losing, and not do hijack.”
Giving a biotitan to nuke the Almayer or a Nuke-nuke to the marines always ends with butthurt from one side or the other.