But currently there is a rule stating that survivors cannot rush the hive until the first larva have a chance to evolve to T1. This rule works in theory until its low pop and the hive is made up for 5 xenos vs 2 survivors. Also the wording of this rule changes nothing since during high pop/mid pop survivors don’t rush the caves anyways unless they spawn in them (LV-624 or BR SW caves for loot.) During mid-high pop its 15 → 30 xenos depending on the pop; so the rewording is really just to correct bad behavior that ruins it for other people.
[ Suggestion ] Survivors should not be able to rush the caves.
I would say “They shouldn’t be able to rush the hive.” But there is no way to know where the hive is unless you walk straight into the hive core & the queen and the builders need to be able to build up the caves. The game is marines vs xenos. The hive being wiped by survivors should not be a thing. People prepping for 20 minutes and seeing no combat because 2 or 3 people want to frag the young queen, young drone, and 2 larva and ruin it for 56 other people is criminal.
A lot of xenos afk for the first twenty minutes.
I have been trying so hard to get xenos to actively play the game from when they queue → when they are dead and rule 8 also exists but isn’t enforced.
I have had xenos actively getting shot at as ‘mature larva’ that refuse to evolve while running around going “what’s happening” as bullets wiz past them. Once again, this should in theory be handled by rule 8 but I digress.
Xenos need to be able to build up the caves.
Most of the time it’s 3 afk larvas and 1 drone. The one drone is getting ran down by 2 survivors while it’s trying to build up the caves for when the marines land and it just can’t because it doesn’t have support from other xenos.
“Just tell the other xenos to-”
I have tried. I have had this discussion multiple times. “What is the point of rule 8 if it’s not enforced.” Queen cannot banish afk larva so active players can take them. For the first 20 minutes the AFK timer does not kick them within 2 minutes of being afk so people in dchat can’t take them. As the queen your hands are tied unless staff is willing to enforce rule 8.
What’s rule 8?
That’s the rule that says you aren’t supposed to be afking and you’re supposed to use your slot. It also says for the first 20 minutes this is strictly enforced. :c
[ Notes ]
I have personally had survivors rush my hive spot multiple times on Strata, Big Red, and LV. I might be forgetting some other times, but really this should not be happening. It was the first 60s of the round too, the core wasn’t even filled and larva where getting shot at. Sure I cap them, but I just watched a round where they rushed and killed the young queen, a young fendy, and some larva and the round ended.
Dev team feel sorry for survs, remove t1 and
only evo to only drone. People don’t want to forcefully play drone so they afk larva until their slot is finally unlocked. You cannot force evolve, thats in the rules. This changes is easly seen at lowpop that people honestly dont want to play drone. Simply revert the evo changes.
If i am forced to play drone and forcefully do it when i hate it, i will honestly late join or play marine instead. Make changes and make rules about you have to forcefully like it. Ridiculous.
But in summary, there’s now been one round in the last 90 days that’s under 40 minutes (was 27.3 minutes) because two survivors during low pop rushed hive and the xenos were unsuccessful dealing with them.
I think it unlikely a hive could be caught off guard once ghost restrictions is in place because essentially anyone in larva queue would be a hive observer that can communicate in hivemind.
I’m not terribly keen on requiring players to keep meta-knowledge like how long its been since xenos evolved, or what castes they have access to, and even if the rule was to never engage hive w/o the marines, then its awkward regarding resisting capture not to mention needing to prove you were shooting up hive because you were being captured not because you were assaulting it.
A mechanical solution to this I was considering was something along the lines of temporary maturity for queen if there’s unnested survivors in the hive location area. Temporary because I don’t want encouragement of then assaulting say the rest of the survivors w/ queen just because a survivor wandered or was captured at the hive.
A simple short term partial solution is to move/remove gamer loot from hive locations to remove some of the reasons a survivor player might want to go to these spots in the first place. Mining on Solaris and the scout armor on chances are probably the worst offenders, often resulting in afk larva getting gunned down and/or survivors getting wiped out in the hive immediately, which isn’t really fun for anyone involved.
In any case, the kind of “I win” behavior involved in fishing for surv majors by hive rushing repeatedly isn’t the kind of behavior most players are interested in, but at a certain point you can’t prevent bald queen players from skill issuing themselves into a surv major by just being bad. I’ve personally borne witness to a queen getting off ovi before maturity to attempt to walk down survivors. Inexperienced players are going to lose to experienced players, whether they do it at 0:10 to survs or 0:25 to a sadar doesn’t actually make that much of a difference.
what if the hive hives in ETA but the guns are in ETA
or what if the hive hives in SW caves in solaris but you want to get the awesome stuff in SW caves.
And im 90-100% sure that we already have a rule that if you stumble to the hive with no T1s and only larva is that you cant shoot them but if the larva went out to the colony to rush survs its free game (and larva is banned)
You cant expect survivors to be mind readers. They wont know where the hive would be.
Never understood why that when certain people rush loot they ALSO find the urge to have to kill larvas.
Just got to amend the rule that no killing larva’s outside immediate colony before 00:15. Of course larvascouting is free game (albeit that stuff basically never happens anymore). By 00:15 all AFK larva will have ghosted and/or have returned to hive.
I’ve been playing survivor for about six years now and never felt the need to gun down every larva I come across in caves unlike some people do. Its a bad sport. Even though 9/10 of my rounds includes rushing loot cause I like shooting bad guys. Sometimes larvas are cool and do a little spin for you, sometimes larvas run up to you yell MOMMY MOMMY BAD GUYS only for 5 billion xenos to kill you.
There’s been a lot of times however in where the larvas i’ve left or ones that I thought were running away have evolved into drones or other castes and got me killed enmasse. That is, also pretty bad especially when larvas are rushing go-to spots. This is just being sportsmanlike, some survivor players are just too toxic to care other than to go “fuck xenos” whereas some xenos are the same.
Only way I can see this reasonably happening is making larva spawns either more condensed near the queen or spawning together (as some spawns are quite nonsensical), prohibiting killing larvas pre 00:15 barring exceptional circumstances (like larvascouting which never happens anymore).
I do think that good loot being in caves is good as it is then high risk for survivors to engage in retrieving such loot but survivors shouldnt be massacing AFK larva on their way for it either.
Maybe this is a case of me despising the idea of just AFKing, but shouldn’t people just not AFK?
I get that playing drone is boring for some people, but you can become any T2 pre-drop from a drone. You really don’t have an excuse to sit around as a larva.
Run around and break some windows or something I don’t know. If Survs killing larva is a huge issue (which very anecdotally I’ve seen maybe once) give them more dodge-chance or something early on so you can’t just gun them down.
Making rules around people AFKing (which is an OOC choice that you can just not do - you control the buttons you press/don’t press) seems a lil silly IMO.
larva queue fucking sucks and people getting xeno roundstart would rather wait for defender/t2 than risk dying as a drone (dies in 2 pbs btw)
just add a function to burrow as larva that doesnt kick you out of the game but makes you invulnerable until slots open up or something (disable it post 15 minutes)
Yeah but observers like that wont be relevant in a very lowpop situation anywho, the main issue here is loosing the entire, or large parts of the hive, generally at lowpop to survs rushing the hive.
As for the post in whole, yeah i agree with chimera, just disallowing the survs from rushing the caves is a decent workaround, no one wants an early game end, but doing it OOC is a bit boring, and rules are hard to work with if not enforced as well.
IMO this feels like a mapping problem, just remove the guns/interest survs would have in getting anything there, and replace it all with IO stuff, its decently hard to push as marines, xenos cant melt it and survs dont give a shit about it.
Also, with the changes to capping you remove the evo restrictions on xenos, make the survs spawn together and give them actual limited class choices like how marines work, instead of being randomized which would lead to earlier fights and less rushing for gear. However thats still optional, IMO would play better.
I played that round, and it was an abysmal experience. Nobody wanted to go queen, and survs essentially rushed down hive after drones got unlocked (it was shivas where the strat is to rush hive for loot anyhow). Survs died, but only about 2-3 xenoes were left to fight the 40 marines that went down and died in the reported 20 minutes since marines had to hunt them down.
All in all, you can mostly blame it on two thing.
Queen is so unfun to play that people would rather die to survs than play it
Survs with incentives to rush items near hives will clash with said items against a hive, with an unprecedented killing rate (on low pop).
I personally don’t see the observer fix proposed will fix it if the same conditions were to happen again, as there were no observers other than dead xenoes and survivors (also hivemind went down after 200 total evo).
Edit: It might have actually been another round than i experienced in the last 90 days, since there was 3 total survivors in my case, but it still happened and it essentially had the same result.
Lowpow is not considered for balance. Just because we have DDOS now and low numbers, doesn’t mean that will be a problem in the future.
Neat solution for all of your problems without touching mapping and rules?
Make a special xeno caste that spawns alongside Queen and “dies” (turns into either T1/T2/T3) when marines arrive, or goes too far from a Queen (dies actually, but off-ovi queen has much less “range” than ovi one) that is super strong.
Like you know, the actual in lore Preatorian which essentialy act as Queen’s honor guard.
It is soulfull, makes cave loot even bigger of a risk, but still something survs can attempt if they want to play with this.
TLDR just spawn a King roundstart that can’t go far away from Queen and goes to “sleep” when marines arrive.
You could disallow entry to at least the deeper parts of caves by putting up some sorta invisible barrier that tells you it’s definitely a bad idea to go inside. Maybe make a message appear that tell you something like “this place smells of death, I should leave”
