With the Implementation of time-locked xeno castes, survivors and especially CLF survivors have all the time in the world just to cover their entire base in Rwalls and do so quite often. On an incredibly rare occasion, they might leave a Rimworld-esque murder hole, but usually don’t, and if they have a synth surv, they can do this in a minute or 2 without issue and even when the Rwall is breached at like minute 25-30, they just hop in their van and get to do the same thing for another 30 minutes.
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R-wall into total safety has and will always be, very lame. THERES å reason why they blew open the secure bunker on LV.
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or you could, y’know, contest the builders
it’s really not that hard
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Sorry but I am legally not allowed to know where they are, and be there before they build the r-walls. Seen it ready built at 00:08, and had no way of knowing where they even where.
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While I absolutely agree its lame to just wall things off completely you can atleast bring them down when T2s arrive thanks to the power of defender teamwork.
There’s also something to be said where some people feel that rwalls are their only hope to survive. With other options being nerfed (some justified of course) people will naturally gravitate to what works because unsurprisingly they want to play the game for more than 15/20 minutes.
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I think dev issues deserve dev solutions. Which is just mechanically restricting survs from building rwalls or something tbh
A rule is excessive
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You still need t3 to break the R walls
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I curse you with the worst part of game design:
Is the root of the issue here the fact that r-walls are being made?
Or is the root of the issue why survivors feel the need to make r-walls to have a chance of surviving?
Mind you I don’t play Survivor cause I really don’t feel the desire to giga-sweat to maybe possibly get a chance to do some neat RP, but there seems to be a lack of hard options to deal with large hive pushes (or queens coming off of ovi) other than putting up big olde walls or other “slimy” things.
If you’re going to attack a problem, hit the root of it, not a bandaid fix.
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Survivors need a huge rework overall as most of their survival techniques and just…any survival rates depend on B-lining loot before drones do so, reaching a protectable spot or roaming, and so on.
But this is yet another thing survivors do to survive, and sometimes there’s not much to be done. It’s not like those 3-5 survs that could’ve been capped wont be compensated by marines, as they tend to get capped (obviously), so I don’t think this won’t change unless thwompers hackMDs survivor rework becomes a thing and hopefully changes how the survivor loop goes
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They hated him because he told the truth.
I almost exclusively play survivor and R-walling is already uncommon but there are times where just attacking the single person that is able to actually build the r-walls (the engineer, or the synth, very rarely do you have both doing it at the same time) works in ensuring it doesn’t get built.
Not a lot of us actually enjoy sitting behind an r-wall and waiting for T3s but there are a lot of circumstances where you NEED that to even have a chance of playing the game for more than ten whole minutes because quite frankly AFKing in a locker is just as bad and it’s likely to get you captured anyway because of UAVs or bad luck.
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Yeah, thats on me. I always thought T2s could make a hole and then a defender could open it up but I think I’ve been baited by Solaris ridge with its funny “reinforced colony walls” that are actually normal walls which I think has been fixed for a while. Technically I guess you could spitter a wall down? but that might take an actual year and CERTAINLY isn’t any kind of counter. So yeah, my bad on that one. You are stuck waiting on T3s to get through the reinforced walls.
I do stand by my point other tho that people will do whatever they have to survive, if its not Rwall cheese it’ll be something else, we’ve had molotov spam, shocked doors to the point of getting nerfed, shocked crates, probably some other things before my time. People don’t hide in lockers or in thermal tarps for the fun of it, they do it because they want to make it to the RP they’re after but that’s a whole different discussion. Point is you’ll have this whole discussion again with the next cheesable thing.
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Survivors are not really meant to survive. They are meant to be a dynamic set piece on the maps that tells a story. They are not a rifleman+ thats survives every round and frags out.
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Survivor always has been a high risk high reward role and is meant to be something that xenos get to do early game R walls put another arbitrary time lock on xenos getting to play the game now if R walls only delayed xenos until like 10 minutes that would be fine but R walls delay xenos to the point where it makes it so that interacting with survivors isn’t worth it because marines just insta land by the time you start breaching.
Also I have over a hundred hours in survivor I agree they should be buffed in a way that makes boozeomats, incend, r walls and van not necessary but surviving should be a reward not a hand out.
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I thought fully rwalling WAS against the rules? Im fairly sure someone got warned or banned for it before.
i’d like to point out, on this round, where this screenshot is from, there was more than ample time to stop/attack the synth (me) from building these walls
you sat outside of the walls, watching me put plasteel in them for 3+ minutes straight while only attacking me 1-2 times that i can recall, not even trying to melt the girders (which completely prevents any and all building, and also gets rid of any committed plasteel) and then when i finally did finish them you scurried off to presumably make this post
there are plenty of ways to stop this from happening. you could attack the person building the wall directly, push them or pull them out of the way to cancel their windup, melt the girders to prevent them from being interacted with, or attack the girders
on most occasions, these things do happen, even on LV when the xenos finally find the CLF or survivor hideout usually they’re only just finishing The Great Wall™ and still have opportunity to be attacked.
Certified skill issue, my friend. I don’t think this needs staff enforcement as there’s plenty of time to stop them and survivors are (supposedly) getting a rework in the near future anyways.
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I’d like to address several of your key points here.
Survivor not only has always been a high-risk high-reward role, it still is. You only need to play it to understand that: It can range from braindead easy to impossible to survive alone.
Also while it might be true (I’m not sure if it is myself, but regardless I’ll agree for the sake of my point) that survivors are ‘there for xenos to interact with’, we all need to remember that survivors are players who want to play the game as much as everyone else, and while dying really early is apart of that, a fighting chance if you’re well-equipped or skilled should be what we’re aiming for, so it should be seen as less ‘survivors are there for xenos to interact with’ and more ‘survivors and xenos are there to interact with eachother’.
Onto r-walls.
You require materials to even build r-walls in the first place, and xenos tend to rush loot all the time, so I’m really not sure why you can’t just do that with plasteel? It’d still be a gamble but that’s the price you pay for trying to kill or capture human players: They fight back because they want to play the game. It’s not much different than survivors trying to go get loot on Solaris. I think I remember engi spawning with 30 plas or so, but that’s enough for about 2-3 walls (or one more I’m not sure) and most locations to hold in require more than that.
R-walls are already easy enough to pre-empt by just rushing loot, but what about when they’re being built? Well, it’s still quite easy to stop. You just have to melt the girder being used to build and it can’t be built on anymore, to say nothing of the resource investment now wasted, or the fact you can hit the incomplete girder to destroy it if you don’t want to melt it for some reason.
If that doesn’t work you can just attack the person building the wall like tallerfission or I said in a previous post. This almost always, if not always works, because being directly attacked with a limited ability to heal is a power motivator to back off.
Only then do you have to get T3s to break through. Keep in mind, all of the previous is just for one girder (except the gathering mats part). It doesn’t happen every round for a reason: It’s risky and often falls through at the first hurdle, to say nothing of the 2nd or 3rd.
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The root of this issue is people assume survivors are meant to have a fair route to survival, mechanically. It’s meant to be unfair, but fun. Things that hurt the fun =/= intended design. But things that make it unfair are often intended design.
You can go on and on about how unfair it is. It is unfair. But if you remove complexity of interaction to make it “fair”, that is going to remove depth of the role and make it less fun for both sides - while if you add complexity of interaction to make it “unfair”, it is adding depth to the role (irregardless of outcome) and thus creating a more fun gameplay loop
I think it’s silly when people say survivor must be fair. No, but it should have X, Y, Z… etc qualities that define the role and result in good gameplay. Things to create tense, risky combat and high stakes, like low TTK, high speed, dangerous enemies (on both sides), and skill+timing-based interactions/counterplay. Unfairness is simply a design choice to make it feel more tense and immersive.
It’s a gamble and those who gamble the best will win more often. That’s all there is to it.
Sometimes ya sometimes no. Either way it’s bad for the game, just like molotovs.
Reducing interaction between xenos and survivors =/= good design for an objective reward. Even if it’s good gameplay to have neutral objectives that reduce risk of death for survivors if they succeed - the means do not automatically justify the ends. The ends should be justified on their own, too. Because if you have a faulty roof you should replace it even if the walls are good.
Not saying there’s anything wrong with playing the game to win. But the design is wrong imo, and I think removing rwalls from survivors will add more to the game then it takes away.
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I’ve been anti R wall for a long time your Rwalls just made for a good screenshot on the case of that round there was 5 xenos and 3 surv so don’t think me attacking the survs with flamer incend and a synth that takes no damage and deals more than me was the right call so I just went and played with the colony 
.
But if you think that having the survivor role be that of afking behind an Rwall for 20 minutes clearly survivor isn’t the role for you I was there in the survivor dark ages and we didn’t have to resort to Rwalls.
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But if you remove complexity of interaction to make it “fair”, that is going to remove depth of the role and make it less fun for both sides - while if you add complexity of interaction to make it “unfair”, it is adding depth to the role (irregardless of outcome) and thus creating a more fun gameplay loop
I fundamentally disagree. Adding depth (whatever that may be) does not automatically equate to more fun and the vice versa is also not always true either. It’s not one or the other, it’s far from it. Not to say that what you’ve posited isn’t true, it’s just not ALWAYS true.
But even if this was the case, in the current state of things, what exactly is wrong? Nobody really rebutted what was said prior: Xenos have all the chances in the world to stop an r-wall from being built, it’s really not that hard, it’s happened to me a LOT before and I’ve done it before, If there were such an argument I think it’d be alot easier to agree with you.
I just don’t understand the issue. I’d understand if r-walls were impossible to stop, but they aren’t, and if they ARE stopped which again happens quite frequently (at least in my experience, I’m not sure about many others but I’m sure I could ask around) your resource investment is lost.
Being blunt and this may come across as really single-minded but I don’t see the input of the people playing survivor getting taken into consideration very often whenever survivor is brought up, but are expected to consider the needs of people who don’t. I see it all over the forums and it’s painting a pretty unfair, lopsided picture.
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Some people have already aired pieces of what I want to say, but I don’t think its been said in its entirety.
Survivors are stuck between several crossroads of conflicting gameplay loops.
On the one hand you have approximately 4/5ths of the xeno playerbase who aren’t currently building the hive/melting all the things/breaking stuff for the builders, who need something to do else they AFK for 20 minutes. Survivors are their entertainment, their risk for reward, their purpose for the hive
Then you have the marines who need something to actually be timely for. These days I really dont see the effort being made to be there on time quickly to rescue the survivors. Like a year ago, and especially when you could launch earlier, there was an active effort by commanders to rescue the survs, going for super early launches. Theres an argument to be made that rescuing survs gives you a whole 5 extra people with a range of skills, some critical like builders, or surgeons that aren’t rule limited to the almayer. I don’t know if this is still a thing with the research rework but I know survivors and researcher survivors are much needed by research. But its more of a moot point these days as theres an increasing sentiment by commanders to launch later.
Then you have the actual survivors themselves. As I see it theres 3 types of survivors. You have survivors who are completely in it for the after survival RP. I find it quite funny that one of the most RP friendly roles is locked behind a role that has the most powergaming gameplay loop. Not only do you need to know where the exact locations of good loot is, you also need to use every trick in the book to have a chance at surviving. Its super fucking sweaty. The alternative is being dead and waiting for foxtrot/erts, or playing xeno which has limited roleplay opportunities. Then you have the people who play it for the challenge, the powergamers, you know the type. They’re the people who after surviving run straight to CIC, get their IFF, get more ammo, and they’re straight back down to style on xenos with their fancy equipment and skills. Finally you have synths, an outlier. They’re almost guaranteed to win, nothing much to speak about them.
Really we’re at an empass. Two of the factions, the survivors themselves and the xenos are at a loss for fun if one or the other gets buffed. I’d argue that as it stands, xenos have more of the fun than survivors currently do in their respective gameplay loops as xenos have obviously the marines to fight afterwards while the survivors have to wait 5 minutes for a chance at larva or just logout.
This is a game where players have to set aside a good 2 hours aside to play. If I have 2 hours to play before I need to make dinner I can either play a role where I know I will be engaging with the game for at least an hour, or I can play survivor and flip a coin if I will have fun in CM today, or if I’m going to have to fuck off elsewhere. Survivor is really shit for this reason alone and is the reason I’m not touching survivor again.
So going back to the original point. I think rwalls are emblematic of the race to the bottom for survivors to be able to have more fun than just 20 minutes of gameplay. I think as others have said, its not that rwalls are a problem, they’re just the current step in whats most effective to be able to survive. I think survivor could use some buffs that tread the line between not being able to fuck over xenos and kill them or roam on them, but allow them to survive better with skill. This could be stuff like increased availability of defensive structures that arent walls like portacades or sandbags or buffs to sandbags. This could be stuff like more availability of armour.
Awful points IMO. I’m here to have fun. If I wanted to play something thats unfair and a game of chance, I might as well join all the old people and press a button for a chance at cash.
I get where your coming from. Loosing is fun and all. But theres a huge difference. Loosing all my pawns/dwarfs in rimworld/df is often because of something hilarious/a challenging run, and I can immediately go back to main menu and generate a new world in a minute if I wasn’t so picky about starting location. Roguelikes are the same. I’m almost certainly not going to succeed in this run but those games are optimised so you can restart almost instantly. Loosing is fun.
If I loose as survivor its often not fun. Now I can wait in hive for 5 minutes for a chance at playing a weak xeno and play a further 10/20 minutes to become something stronger, or I can sit dead and wait for ERTs or foxtrot. That’s awful. That fucking sucks. I don’t play survivor for that reason. I hate short rounds for that reason.
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