TLDR: No Queen isn’t fun, it sucks. Someone in the Xeno team is forced to play Queen or the game goes back to “200 seconds until start”
Queen is an important role, arguably the most important role, because the Hive is not a swarm faction. Queen dictates the entire game for the entire lobby, frankly.
One issue at lowpop is no one picking Queen at round start, and very often no one picking Queen at all even after Marines land.
Solution is to force the Queen as an important role. In the style of Vanderlin, IS12 - if there is no Queen the game doesn’t start. This is better than the current situation, because instead of forcing one of the 10 Xenos to be Queen, you have the whole lobby of 50 people to roll for Queen, this means there’s more choice for Queen (and higher likelihood a more experienced Queen is picked) while preserving match quality at lowpop (whatever little there is).
reminds me of the time I accidently rolled CE in low pop and had to command. It wouldnt be bad you could step down in the same way but if i gotta beg forever id rather just ghost
The solution is to make playing queen fun without it being a crutch xenos have to rely on to beat the ungaball. If it was fun, people would play it. But no one knows how to make it fun.
forcing a roundstart queen fixes nothing, you just sit in the lobby doing nothing (which is far less fun than playing a round with no queen). you cant force someone to take queen, if nobody’s taking queen by the time marines drop nobody’s taking it roundstart either
if it’s completely random who would get it of the eligible players from the lobby even if they don’t have prefs set, you have the potential to not end up with no queen (which i see as sort of a net zero, i suppose. it’s tough as xeno but i’d hesitate to say it makes it necessarily unenjoyable for me. i can still use abilities and do the core Xeno Things, just without all the good bonuses); instead you would have A queen at the cost of someone having an even worse time than they would’ve sitting in a lobby for 45 minutes or playing sentinel without a queen. and those people then have the capacity to make the round significantly worse for everyone else. instead of a net zero, you might actually wind up in the negative if the wrong person gets the role or gets it at the wrong time. i would be the wrong person, and i would be the wrong person most of the time, fwiw. commanding stresses me out, and the result is that my abilities to lead exponentially suffer for it and make everyone else’s time worse off than if there hadn’t been a commander to start and we all sort of figured it out or subdivided bits and pieces of commanding so it wasn’t so overwhelming.
People don’t want to go Queen for the same reason people don’t want to go XO. And I don’t often see XO’s at roundstart on lowpop rounds either, and sometimes it’s even come to a point where brand new IO’s or GP’s had to go aCO. There’s nothing wrong with noone wanting to go Queen. But forcing the round to restart because noone wanted to go for the hardest xeno role is only going to create more problems in lowpop than fix them. I think it’s best to let people work it out themselves and trust that they’ll find a way to adapt. And if noone goes Queen for long enough, the round is automatically declared a marine major anyways.
Main antagonist of the game has no teamwork, no healing, no leader, no screech (unironically a positive)? You don’t need an XO or CO, anyone can be a leader. Queen has abilities tied to her. There is something wrong with no one wanting to go Queen, it means Queen sucks to play and is also unfortunately 100% necessary for a Hive.
You can force someone to take Queen:
And no one enjoys stomps, even on lowpop, and Queen is such an important role for Xenos that gearing up for 20 minutes to stomp a Hive who have no radio isn’t fun for anyone.
If no one picks rolls Queen, timer restarts. It could be someone rolling Weapon Spec High | Queen Low.
I remember a round where xenos didn’t evolve a queen at all and a round end was just declared even though the xenos were still alive. Did they change this?
if people dont want to play queen, forcing them to play will either make them ghost, or be bitter and that will shine through and make it a more negative experience for everyone else
If someone doesn’t pick queen at round start then make it so that ghosts can chose to play as queen because more often than not there will be xenos who didn’t get to roll xeno and would rather play queen than wait an hour+ to play as xeno it’s so stupid that its not already a thing to be honest.
B) what stops people already forced to play Queen because no one rolled for it? What’s the effective difference between “Fuck someone has to go Queen otherwise we’re fucked” and “Fuck someone has to go Queen because Xenos are fucked without a Queen”?
This should definitely be a feature at minimum, but you can also extend this out to the entire lobby to get Marine players who might not otherwise be playing Xeno but would be okay with Queen / switching to Xeno for the betterment of the team.
Make ghosting as queen put you 1st in Larva queue. An SSD Queen who set leaders and recovery pheroes is 70% of what roundstart xenos need, but if I want to do this currently I risk round-removing myself.
It also opens the ability for players to learn the Ovi stage of Queen without having to be good at combat, as you can ghost before the front needs you. The skill set, ping requirements, and ability to spot SADAR are very different between the two phases.
The only issue (two minutes of consideration brings to mind) would be xenos pressuring bad Queens to ghost, but that’s so obscenely toxic its gotta be rulebreak/banishment worthy at minimum.
I can’t think of any xeno players who would be that rude.
Edit: Italics insuffiencent. Let me stress that last sentence has my tongue so far in my cheek I need surgical assistance.
mfw I learn how to play xeno and suddenly FORCED to play queen. I’d rather have what we do now. If you don’t like playing without queen go queen, simple as.
Getting forced will lead to situations such as people just ghosting because they really don’t want to be the Queen. And now someone who could of gone queen won’t be able to.
