Hive Rushing Rule Change

General Policy Feedback
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I got permission from Nessie to make this post.

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.

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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.

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Discussion on this topic started here Discord

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.

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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.

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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.

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Never understood why that when certain people rush loot they ALSO find the urge to have to kill larvas.
larvakiller

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.

4 Likes
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Honestly just remove or move loot from caves

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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.

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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)

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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.

2 Likes
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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.

  1. Queen is so unfun to play that people would rather die to survs than play it
  2. 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.

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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.

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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”

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I think defining surv rushes as losing in under 40 minutes isn’t a particularly accurate measure. I’ve had many xeno rounds where survs managed to cripple the hive early where the queen has held out for over an hour with the remaining xenos. It’s still a really shitty feeling, because it’s very difficult to find a path to win and everyone knows that they’re mostly just delaying the inevitable.

This is particularly problematic on shivas lowpop (and since shivas is only rolled on lowpop…) because survs are incentivezed to rush the hive immediately and kill off all the bald xenos. Then you’re stuck with the queen and one t3 vs. 40 marines.

In general I think survs need a FULL rework. Even when they don’t rush, it’s insane that a couple of colonists are the most robust and deadly humans in the game. Both IC and OOC it’s stupid, the USCM is an elite fighting force, a random w-y doctor should not be more dangerous. Survs need to be reworked as an entirely defensive role, with very few offensive capabilities. Lots and lots of roundstart materials, better engineering and medical supplies, and very little map loot. Their goal should be to SURVIVE until rescue, not to frag.

The opposite problem can also happen, where survs try to rush and all get capped, leading to a xeno steamroll. In general I think survs are far too impactful to the overall round and their skill level can put one side at a massive lead before the game has even properly started. Might be an unpopular take, but these are my thoughts.

Edit: I also think that we could consider refunding xenos that die to survs. Perhaps every second xeno that dies pre-drop is refunded to the hive as burrowed, so that way you don’t see massive losses. Had one round recently where xenos lost TEN pre-drop and managed to lose at around the 60 minute mark. That should never happen imo.

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As I said in my opening post.

Without staff actually enforcing rule 8 this is a moot issue. I cannot do anything as queen to remedy the problem. They won’t let you banish afk larva, they will not bwoink people to violating rule 8, and when survivors are rushing the hive and the queen dies it’s equally the afk larva’s fault.

They can rush currently after T1s, which is 60s into the round. Larva refusing to evolve and queen being a fat drone with no combat capabilities and 500 health means you’re gambling on the 2 tap when there are larva around that can come help that are just refusing to help or play the game.

I’ve said this before but I have never seen any other game where you can afk for 20 minutes and not be punished. It’s even worse because critical roles like Queen and your other teammates are dying around you and the person is just doomscrolling tiktok or w/e as the round collapses.

@Flatulent
I don’t know if you where here before larva queue but the alternative is RNG larva handouts. I and others hated this. Why? Because John Runner would die 8 times, take 8 larva before you had the chance to get one. It was RNG. The hive would run out of larva while you sit in dchat watching the same dude die eight times as you wait.

As for a burrow function, no. Just play the game. :sob:

Also I will side note and say that they aren’t rushing for loot. They where rushing with the intention to kill the Queen / hive. An admin even said in ooc when it happened that while it’s not a rule break, it’s super lame and they are right. it’s 100% lame behavior to ruin the round flow and for what? So they can shout “survivor major” in ooc? I don’t think that’s the type of players or behavior that should be being fostered, if I’m being honest.

Or another suggestion would be to add an addendum to the rule like the predator whitelist have to survivors.

“You are to take no actions that would heavily cripple the round flow without good reason.”

It’s one thing to kill xenos coming after you. It’s a whole different thing to actively walk into the caves/onto the hive core/hive weeds to try to kill the queen/larva. I added in without good reason for those situations with the CLF where they might hop in the van and kill the marines because that’s their intended behavior.

But really another suggestion would be:

Remove survivors under certain round start populations.

That way you don’t have CLF gunning down the 20 marines that are ground side or running into the caves to kill the young queen and her 3 afk larvas.

@Drathek
I don’t have access to the discord so I apologize that I cannot have that discussion there.

As I mentioned earlier and I’m certain that staff can attest because I have ahelped it before a survivor was walking on my hive core sub 60s on strata at bball. It’s not a matter of if the round ends or not. I only made the suggestion because the behavior was so poor sportsmanship/inconsiderate of the entire server that I thought it needed to be said.

The evo changes that where done where awful for the afk larva community; that much @Licon is right about. Young queen should have access to neuro at the very least so she isn’t just a walking frag or while young she should be as fast as a drone so she has a viable option to run away. Having her temporarily mature is also a good idea. The ghost restriction thing is a great idea by the way but it doesn’t do much for the situation at hand.

@Sakuyoi
Who cares? Gamer loot is not more important than round flow. The loot should just be deleted like all the incendiary ammo was, I don’t know why it was forgotten when they did the first sweep for incendiary ammo and the like a few years ago but also moving it is an option. T1 is 60s. After 60s of the round you can rush the hive. I feel maybe that you should re-read the opening post because that is why I said ‘say the caves’ because I do not expect survivors to be mind readers.

@medeelel18
I don’t either but the bad behavior of a few means the survivors that don’t rush the hive spot to try to frag the queen end up suffering. Unfortunately I can name a handful of survivor players that rush the hive to kill the queen, not even get loot. And yes, people are saying ‘larva rush’ but I don’t think they know that larva can spawn outside the reactor on Chances. Happened to me before.

@amazingdragons
This is a fair point but not the issue I’m trying to address right now because the issue your describing is self inflicted and a balance issue. The issue I’m describing is one where players are intentionally trying to screw over the round. (In short.) I do think it should be something that is ahelpable if you’re trying to ruin the round; though I don’t know what it would be under besides “don’t be a dick” in the spirit of the rule.

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I was the afforementioned Runner, WAR. Anyway, I wanted to play Warrior and I AFK’d in hive, doomscrolling news reel. I hate Queens that force me to fight survs. All I want is frags, girl. Can’t rack em up if I die to gaming gear.

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I mean AFKing is breaking the rules if youre doing it in a place that isnt safe at roundstart if you take Rule 8 - Use Your Slot to mean exactly that as early-game Xenos.

If people dont want to play early game Xeno, then they can observe and join later. It really truly isnt asking that much to just evo to drone and AFK near the Queen. Go watch Youtube/eat paint chips/whatever you want while being anything but a larva. But if you die AFK as a larva you should just get bonked IMO.

This just feels like a player issue trying to be solved by something other than telling people to stop being dumb. Just make it against the Rules to AFK as a larva at roundstart when you can very easily evo into a Drone with no cost at all (it doesnt even stop you from being a lurker/spitter/warrior).

I think an anecdotal outcome of one round should not haves Rules/code aimed at Survs. The fault lies with people choosing to AFK as larva. Thats a player issue. Smack those players for being big dummies.

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you dont really die unless you ask for it. Theres no way you wouldnt spot survs first before they spot you.

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I can promise y’all that this is not a single experience. If you ask ANYONE who plays roundstart xeno on lowpop they will mirror these exacts complaints. Survivors are some of the best players in the game, and they use can their skills to guarantee a marine victory before marines have even dropped. I generally prefer IC changes over OOC changes, because adding in a million rules tends to make playing the game less fun. However, a rule preventing this would be better than nothing. Removing survs on lowpop or nerfing their offensive capabilities in a meaningful way to prevent this would be the best solution IMO.

I also think that rule 8 absolutely should be enforced for afk larva. Even if you’re not fighting survs, there are MANY things that xenos need to do early on, and saying “game doesn’t start yet I wanna scroll” isn’t a good policy decision. A spec couldn’t afk for 20 minutes then start getting geared at first drop, why do we let xenos do that? Outside of exceptional circumstances where a person ahelps, or brief periods (washroom and the like), you should have to play the game. Especially when y’all are the ones driving the quality of the round. Queen could also be permitted to banish afk larva. Never really understood why that was considered an exploit tbh.

Rule 8 text:

Every role has a function, and the player taking the role is expected to fulfill it. If you have work to do that your job is expected to do, ignoring it to engage in other tasks violates this rule. Furthermore, wasting your slot - such as by suicide or logging out inappropriately - is punishable as you are removing a slot another player could be playing as correctly.

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touches a random airlock

oops! looks like you’re stunlocked!

gets flamed through the airlocks by survs running from beyond screen vision (theyre using that vest that has 0 slowdown but protects from neuro)

u asked for it clearly

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