In the last few rounds of CM, I have noticed EXTREME levels of disbalance in the xenos to humans ratio; There is almost a 1:1 xenos to humans ratio in the last 15 or so rounds of CM where at round start there is 30-40 xenos and about 50-60 marines on lowpop and even 40 marines to 20-25 xenos at round start. The last round I played there was about 85 marines (Excluding any shipside + non combat roles and there was around 45-50 xenos on first drop. I don’t know what it is but there is something wrong with how xenos spawn and they have insane amounts of xenos for 0 reason. It almost is a xeno major every round. I’m not complaining but this is not normal.
I don’t see any recent PRs involving extra larvas or anything but it is kinda annoying having rounds only lasting 35 minutes at most especially since there have been some cool events that got cut short because of it. Any ideas why?
Honestly, I think it’s the “metacord” being banned, with all these c-bans going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if marines are trying xeno now that it’s… easier?
I think this is because of newer survivors, sometimes I start off my totally sane survivor rounds by seeing 4-5 people talk in the radio, then at the meetup point there is only 1-2 people, people who are clearly not new since I see they play the role somewhat occasionally. I guess that combined with smallhosts should give them like 8-10+?
Anyways, just like the way smallhosts are a way to give xenomorph’s more larvae and not to stunt the round or to make the round ridiculously biased for marines, the fact that there are so many survivors who dont even know what the tiles of the floor represent or literally nothing about a map is like tripling the amount of tallhosts.
This should be a temporary issue only though, since everyone starts somewhere but as of now, especially a few days ago and even in the present that there are some people who I dont even recognize as a marine, on survivor.
Also this probably has something to do with it as well since a bunch of marine mains got banned,
I think there’s a few things really causing it but I’m not entirely sure its anything to do with balance.
I think the first issue is just an influx of newish players, It’s not super rare to see a new player out there lately and its even less rare to see players who are new to vital marine roles like Medic or engineer. I think this is just an issue that will sort itself out with time as they learn more and play around a bit till they find roles they like and adjust.
Second is very probably the recent banning of a good chunk of players, losing a good amount of seasoned players will inevitably shift the balance in favor of the xenos just because marines that didn’t have to pull as much weight now have to do so. This compounds as well with the new players issue but will sort itself out eventually as well, just gonna take time is all.
Lastly I think some of the medical changes have really hurt marines a fair bit as well, I don’t know if its still merged or not I haven’t played in a little bit but the new IB changes including the broken bones IB change severely hinder marines. You can bleed out super fast and because of the bone breaks just trying to get away from whatever broke your bone can cause you to make the issues so much worse. I’m not in favor of dumbing down medical much but I think marines probably need another tool to help with the IB changes, a reworked Quickclot maybe or just removing the bones giving IB if that’s still in the code.
Edited a post that was deleted by mistake, my display is a little messed up.
I’d definitally fall on the side of newer survivors boosting early numbers than the metacord: maybe 15 people got banned out of the typical 60-80 we see each round, and it’s not as if those played every round every day.
More than anything, I have been seeing the “murderball or bust” strategy going a lot lately. I wouldn’t be suprised of there’s some burn-out at the prospect of a round lasting three hours when 75% of SLs, SGs, and specs die in the first half-hour, and 30% of the riflemen eat it with them.
Yeah, I have seen way more small hosts happen, one round there was 3 small hosts in lambda, literally three in lambda, I don’t know if theres more, but that’s literally so much larvae that xenos… really don’t need? I’ve been joining late-round recently and theres almost always a xeno slot.
Newer survs acting as free Xenos alongside some pretty oppressive marine nerfs have probably compounded to cause more Xenos than usual. If this doesn’t naturally balance out I would like to see some changes to marines as fighting 40 xenos with 60 marines is EXTREMELY tough, even more so if half of those marines have less than 20 hours. Maybe we get the tank back, please?
I am extremely doubtful that the banning of a dozen or so players has caused such a massive shift in the games balance to the degree being noted here. Maybe it is a contributing factor but this issue noted in the OP has been present for a while now.
The lower pop a round goes, the more likely I’ve found that there will be an imbalance in numbers towards the xenos.
I am perfectly fine with the game being weighted against the Marines, losing is fun. But when the ground fight lasts only 15 to 30 minutes with the Marines being overrun from the very first Xeno attack, the game is simply not fun for anyone. Marines don’t want to be killed in the first half an hour and the aliens don’t want to just roll over the marines.
As I have said before though, I am not a captain of balance nor do I know what a solution to this is. This may ultimately just be a case of competence or bad luck?
Im refferring to the banwave which targeted cheaters and metacommers who ‘coincedentally’ with the use of cheats and metacomms prior or in present were a lot of robust marines who’d consistently kill a lot of xenos.
A lot of xeno players got banned as well but I think that those players made a considerable impact, that and the new survivor thing.
IB for broken bones has been terrible from the start. Most people who break bones in real life doing fucking die from internal bleeding, at least not within such a short amount of time. A counter would to simply bring back the limb removal we used to have to replace it.
Other than that, we can’t do anything about the survivor issue. I don’t know much about the smallhost numbers problem.
And I’ll take another swipe at hijack infinite xeno spawns. Please remove it, this does not contribute to the natural flow of a round or encourage any meaningful plays from USCM and Xenos. This is adding to the stale outlook when it comes to end of rounds, as Xenos can just bumrush anything without worrying too much about dying, and the humans know they can’t just hold out somewhere unless it’s lifeboats.
We used to have many different places we’d hold before the infinite spawns, 90% of the time the marines simply don’t have the numbers to try and push the dropship.
Marines mostly lose cause xenos spam the Tier 3’s one round there was 4 boilers and 3 ravangers. Marines didn’t stand a chance. It was 40 xenos against 100+ marines
I think right now after the warrior nerf its in a pretty good place (relatively). From what I’ve seen is a lot of bald marines getting robustos killed and just general skill issue from marines. Its also summer so there might be a lot of newer players.
This is absolutely a real thing and I’ve noticed it too. Also I find rounds starting to get a lot longer in general (not a bad thing). 3 hours rounds were rare, now they’re seemingly common.
I think it’s a large shift of players for various reasons (more robust xenos than Marines on lately, the ‘playmakers’ if you will), an increased emphasis on caps, various PRs to slow things down.
3 years ago, rounds could easily go on for 3 hours. 4 hours were rare, and 5 hours were still not unheard of but I think I only saw 1 of those. So I think we’re on the road to being where we were back then.