I actually know what exact round led this post. Basically what happened there is xenos capped 4 survivors and this led to 82 groundside marines at deployment time vs 40 xenos. Then command wasn’t perfect at reacting to the most of the force getting ground down quickly.
But in general, yes, the rounds were kinda xeno favored for the last few weeks, but as someone who played a lot lately, here’s what seems to happen:
-On marine side, very few of the good experienced marines are playing right now.
-The xeno on the other hand is stacked. 2 of the best prime queens carrying the rounds every day, assisted by that core of veteran xeno players.
Anyway, hopefully all the new players would get experienced enough to actually start killing xenos, because it’s been kinda embarrassing.
As for anything the dev team could do - I personally always pushed for tighter numerical balancing. Like you can make the rounds a lot tighter if the number of xenos would be regulated periodicaly. And then you can even add some variety to that. For example Euro high pop(before 2200 UTC) always has the best odds for xenos, due to best players. Here the xenos can be limited in numbers by a few percents. NA high pop(after 2200 UTC) on the other hand was always very marine favored, so here xenos need more numbers. Then at low pop we can limit xenos somewhat too, to make it more competitive. Then we can add a random roll that makes the round hardcore, but randomly adding say 15% more xenos sometimes.
This is a really big thing yeah, from my personal experience lowpop even struggling to get a FOB going due to lack of engineering and guards while the xeno backline is having a field day when the queens can hold their caves.
Not sure about others but for me lowpop Bravo became so rough that I been playing a lot more xeno instead.
Currently several competent xeno players are consistently playing this has lead to many rounds being backlines hell where marines get picked off and captured endlessly as the competent marine players are busy trying to fight the frontline. Along with this more new players have arrived with the onset of summer, I do not think it’s too concerning but it can be frustrating that most rounds are hell sieges or marines routing en mass.
Balance seems pretty good right now. Actually my problems are only with poorly designed/unfun abilities and castes - queen screech/neuro and burrowers’ burrow and stomp + xeno tackle cap.
I don’t think these aforementioned are strictly balance issues but ‘this is not fun to play against’ issues and could be massively improved with honestly minor tweaks.
On the balance side of things - vamp lurkers and ravagers feel way too tanky; regaining health is extremely under-rated by people assessing balance imo. Also the infinite hijack larva is dumb, has always been dumb and will continue to be dumb without improvements.
And for castes that are really one-dimensional and kind of suck, it’s probably crusher right now. I don’t know why it was so much fun to play crusher like 3 years ago with its charge and now it’s nowhere near as much fun.
I think it would help if certain stats were published, like win rates. Because as-is, most of us can only judge for what it seems like for the rounds we’re online. Like for me, I still see a decent amount of marine wins, but I’m not getting the full picture cause I’m not online super often, so I would need to see stats to really say anything with confidence.
I noticed that marines lose a lot of blood now and I have to take an MRE into battles. IB is a lot more common now putting more marines out of commission. Harsh but I can work with it, HOWEVER my HPR was removed from squad vendors! I gotta get that a Req now, and Req has a limited number of those cases. I can only hope that the HPR is added back to the vendors.
Honestly speaking, not a bean main or nothing but I dont think the HPR removal has anything to do with the low winrate, id actually say its marine buff.
Marines are no longer being held back by 10 pfc’s with HPRs who hoarde firing lines from spec’s and SL flamers. They were also responsible for an insane amount of ff since most of them with 300 round magazine practiced absaloutely 0 trigger discipline, and hitting a bean meant everything to them even if it meant walking infront of them when they stop firing and getting shot at and being called nasty things by them. I notice now that rounds stagnate a LOT LESS, after the HPR removal. For once im able to play as a spec and not have to tell the dozen HPR shooters to stop firing so I can flame or GL, or even as an SL make some room with my flamer/hedps.
As if flamers have ever helped a push advance. Isn’t that almost exclusively used to stop the enemy from advancing? You flame, you either get a xeno or not, then to push you have to extinguish it. Now if you said SADAR and GL I would agree with you.
Cinematic how? A smart Queen will wait until most of the humans are within the radius, surround herself with the hive and then render the humans incapable of fighting back as the marines get torn up by the Xenos. The time between screeching is already rather low, and there is a reason marines run away when they see her coming.
If the Queen could charge into the centre of the marines, then scream, it gives the humans very little chance to actually get away.
I think there’s been a bigger emphasis on caps lately too, which is very much increasing xeno numbers (and round time by nature). Also more hives willing to pull back and ovi/let caps pop than suicide dive.