Lowpop is not being taken into consideration when balancing the game. This is extreme lowpop with two xenos.
Nobody in CM expected for playercount to drop this low and it did because of outside factors, which is DDOS.
It is common now, but wasn’t in the past multiple years and most likely won’t be in the future.
What you are seeing now is not standard, not common, etc.
Don’t act like devious CM dev thought about it and set survivor pop limit in 1:1 ratio with xenos on lowpow.
Ultimately I am going with this solution because it merely makes it so queen can actually defend her hive from early game rushes. I didn’t want to just give early queen free maturity though so we don’t have the opposite problem of queen rushing survivors.
Insinuating that one specific round that has a whopping 2 xenos vs 2 survivors is somehow an ‘everyday occurrence’ is straight up bait and extremely disingenuous. I’ve played mainly lowpop for almost a decade and pop literally doesn’t drop anywhere close to that level outside of exceptional circumstances. Shit, during the worst of the DDOS the dead pop average was 40 players online (20-25 actively playing).
I am deeply concerned about more experienced queens abusing this PR by putting the hivecore in the areas survivors commonly go for loot, causing the survivors to be suddenly screeched and dragged into an egg without any idea. Thank God that 60% of the map areas are uncoreable, but areas like scout cloak on Chances and ETA labs on Solaris are gonna suffer massively from these queen ambushes. Hell, CLF on both Solaris and LV might get hive core rushed by queens putting the core just close enough to assist xenos with screeches and neuro spit.
I will settle for a rule “Don’t attack the main hive spot” but I feel it’s ambiguity would cause problems.
also JUL only the scout cloak is a real issue. The rest would have an immature queen dragging along the typical larva potentially long distances, only to core and scree from survs who can hear the queen coming anyway and shouldn’t be fighting her in the first place.
I feel like if playing drone is so unfun and not wanted that tons of people would rather straight up not play the game than do it, that maybe speaks design wise to something that could be changed.
Either make droning fun so people will actually want to do it (people like playing comstech and frontline hivey, so I know it’s not just building being unfun) or add something fun for xenos to do that isn’t droning in the first minutes of the round
Just remove evo restrictions. That way nobody is forced to drone for 5 minutes.
Personally I think a portion of the AFK xeno gaming is no one wanting to play drone and building up is becauae of the amount of flak they get if something isn’t made right.
Bravo suffers the same thing where the one newbie comtech gets bullied to high heaven because the FOBs low quality.
Overall survs aren’t gaming the hive often so it doesnt seem like too much of an issue but moving loot outside of the hive spots would probably help.
Like Shivas has lots of metal by the main hive spots then theres the scout cloak and all the armour being so close to the hive on chances, its all a recepie for trouble and not to mention camping larva.
Hi, professional xeno afk observer
The main reason why people afk is either because they find absolutely no joy in interacting with survivors in any phase of the game either due to potentially losing out on T2 evo because they’re 20 damage under the maximum HP value or because fighting survivors especially when they cade and molotov spam can legit be the most tedious, most annoying experience possible.
Another reason is because they legit don’t care and just want to T3 snipe ( Hate that btw teehee )
Are you saying you think 1 minute is too long or are you overlooking the “Temporary” aspect?
As I understood the PR’s description, the Queen gets constant temporary maturity as long as she’s near the hive core, and only way to keep that maturity is to be near the core or being shot. You can just put core near some important stuff and just sit there being temporary mature indefinetly, until the actual maturity kicks in. If that’s not what the PR does, tell exactly how that system works, because it just looks like a queen near the hive core has ‘temporary’ maturity, while the hive core itself can be placed anywhere in caves\whatever is counted as hive space on other maps?
When the game starts, for the first 25 minutes queen is restricted to certain areas for hive core and ovi - primarily caves on most maps. (mechanic from Better Control of Weeding and Areas - Landing Zone edition. by Nanu308 · Pull Request #7363 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub).
The new PR makes it where yes a queen during the first 20 mins of play if she is in the area w/ the hive core or within 10 tiles from it (so it also handles a core on an area border) she is mature and refreshes a 1 minute timer. If she leaves that range the timer counts down. If she takes damage while the timer is running, it’ll extend the timer by 15s up to its maximum of 1 minute. If the timer expires, she loses maturity. Normal maturity timer is still running.
The only thing I really feel like is up in the air is if 1 minute is too long for queen to feel like she can assault survivors and keep maturity long enough to assault them. The intention is just for her to be mature when defending her hive and a small window to give chase or to keep it when being attacked.
As someone who has repeatedly afked at the start of the round as larva, you do NOT get kicked after 80 seconds of afk. It’s 5 minutes. If it’s 80 seconds somewhere in the code, then that timer is overrided by some other code.
I honestly feel 1 minute is actually to much. With a burrower tunnel right next to queen or any pre tunnels.it will not only used to give chase. Give it the time by entering and teleport to a place, she would become immature, if not i am afraid we will just see queen tunnel back and forward. People are asshats, they will abuse any mechanic if they can.
I mean. What’s the game plan of the cheese. Tunnel to an area which already has a tunnel (queen matures around burrower evo anyhow), which takes about 30 seconds to travel to said tunnel, and then hope you meet a survivor in that 30 seconds and then shooting you, otherwise you lose maturity and become a big target that cannot fight back.
On chances claim you can tunnel at first minutes to lz1 engineering hold, a popular surv hold spot to scree and your drones can cap survs.
I dunno, queens deoving to murder survs the second they reach maturity is fairly rare despite being a guaranteed surv wipe 95% of the time so I don’t think it’ll be much of an issue
Rushing to find survs (who likely wont even be at the holds yet, rather looting for mats and gear) seems like such a risky and dumb move considering if you don’t cap/kill them in 60 seconds flat you lose all temporary maturity privileges for the rest of the round (while probably earning the ire of a lot of players).
if it becomes an issue you can just make it that entering a tunnel turns it off lmao
Im just saying before immature got added, Queen rushing survs was not that rare at all. Specially at LV too. South central tunnel and survs didnt even have time to place a cade at secure dome and queen comes and screech and all got capped. Thats all i am saying, and 1 minute for that to happen is easly done.
It is maby fun for the xenos but its very boring and unfair for survs.
Thats all i want honestly. Why not add it before it get into a issue yet again. History will repeat itself
Reading a bit in the comments here, honestly something like a full respawn for anyone who dies to survs could clear alot of issues. When marines land and you are dead, you get a new larva and get to restart.
It would encourage rushing a bit yeah, but you would still be out until landing to t3/t2 slots would be missed out on so it does still not come for free. You would also get the majority of the hive to actually get going on survs since currently many of them wait it out as they know that getting back into the game will take quite some time.
It might effect balance too much, but allowing risks to be taken against the survs will less of an impact on a player basis, ie just loosing their evo timer instead of getting into que, tho it might end with more surv caps total.