Every time a Lurker downs one guy who wandered off like a lobotomized housecat, you get 5 marine mains foaming at the mouth in dchat going “ugh lurker needs nerf.”
Lurker is made of wet tissue paper. If he messes up once, he’s paste. But marines will still cry about it because their precious PFC got pounced while doing his solo jungle RP. Meanwhile they’re out here with guns that stun, shred armor, and delete xenos in 3 seconds if they aren’t actively moving like a hummingbird on crack.
But no, tell me more about how “OP” the caste with 400 HP and no armor is.
Marine mains don’t want balance. They want to walk forward, hold left click, and never die.
Xeno gameplay demands awareness, timing, and actual movement. Marines just want to complain that something out there dares to punish them for being stupid.
I mean it’s to be expected one side will be harder in an asymmetrical game. I do agree Xenos are harder to play, but the benefit is they have way more agency over a round. Marines are much easier to play, but unless you are SADAR or scout, it is much more difficult to have any real agency over the average round.
There’s also the fact that it’s harder to be round removed as a marine due to revives, and being capped just means you get to respawn as a Xeno, so you’re not round removed in that instance. Theres also way fewer things that will typically instantly end you as marine when compared to Xeno.
At the end of the day there’s pros and cons to both. All things considered, I think the game is pretty remarkably balanced given its depth, even if there are certainly bullshit outliers.
Stop listening to those marine mains, they will whine constantly about anything that inconveniences them even slightly. There’s no winning with them. They will compare their delimb to your permadeath.
That being said, I cannot agree with your overall point. Playing marine takes all those skills you just listed for xeno gameplay, and they have the added pain of having to interact with an inventory system in order to use the tools/weapons that they’ve brought down to the ground. The pace of playing a marine if you’re using all the hotkeys available is just as frantic and possibly higher than playing xeno (and even worse if you’re moving your mouse for everything).
Playing a xeno is more punishing because of permadeath for making mistakes, while marines get far more leniency for making mistakes, as long as they’re sticking with the overall group. This is true somewhat for xenos as well since direct xeno teamwork is generally on a level above that of the marines and somebody might get you out of a pinch. This is generally not true for backline xenos except when there’s a good size squad.
I tend to play xeno when I’m looking for a chiller round and marine when I’m looking for a higher pace round (my perspective is biased though because I play a lot of drone castes).
It’s just stupid how unless you have 40 macros set up and 3 wifi routers, you can’t win as a MOBA xeno, combo gameplay completely shits on xenos and doesn’t work in SS13 at all. Especially when all marines have to do is ‘unga point and click’, 0 skill requirement. Most xeno strains now need a PhD in that exact strain and the sheer grace of god to do well with CM’s lag. These marine biased dev’s just keep fucking around with xeno’s meta thinking they can turn the gameplay into Smash Bro’s Ultimate without playing a single xeno round themselves. A year ago xenos actully had some weight to them but now I gotta do A+B+X+Y+Z+A+Y Combo move to fucking sneeze on a marine let alone do: any damage. This shit aint working on a 20 year old 2d space man game that turns into a powerpoint slideshow after 10 minutes of gameplay. Give us our fucking stuns and instant damage back dev’s otherwise xenomains will go on strike and you can have fun balancing a 100% marine winrate.
The average player will find playing xeno and doing “okay” to be much harder than marine, because the standard for marine competence is so absurdly low you tick all the boxes as long as you know how to press LMB and WASD.
Put a well-performing player in xeno, and they’ll tear ass and solo half the marines, carrying the hive with their bare hands relatively consistently. Put them in marine, and they’ll frag hard as PFC 15% of the time, perform competently 45% of the time, and eat shit and perma instantly the other 40% of the time.
It’s hard to stay alive as a marine, even if you’re pretty good at the game. Good xenos however, get to choose when to engage and disengage most of the time- Plus, stun gameplay counters any amount of skill- And xenos have stuns in higher supply.
I suppose you could sum it up as marine being the easy to play, hard to master faction, whereas xenos are the harder to play, easier to not-eat-shit-when-you’re-competent faction.
