Here’s an idea: prevent huggers or lessers from talking for the first 2 minutes or so upon spawn. This would reduce meta risk but also allow them to have some fun if they stay alive.
I do eyeroll when you see a brave scout near queen or a bold hive flank going and suddenly dozens of lessers/huggers spawn. Maybe consider limiting lesser/hugger spawns if a living and free marine is in a certain proximity to hive or queen or something, may help.
This defeats the point of this being an online multiplayer game, where teamwork is essential. Not being able to communicate with other players (your teammates) makes you essentially useless.
What should actually be happening are player reports and ahelps about such rulebreaks to decrease the amount of metagaming. The problem of metagaming can and still happens with dead that respawn as normal xenos too.
Removing the speaking ability of facehuggers and lesser drones does not solve the inherent issue of people breaking the rules because they know they’re highly unlikely to get reported or ahelped.
We have the necessary tools to investigate during the round the possibility of someone metagaming while being a ghost. Just ahelp it.
Then you need to give xenos TOTAL control of the eggs that they plant, I’m very tired of filling a morpher, planting every single egg and then what I can only assume is bad faith dead marine players choose the ones placed by doorways to warriors to get hugs on a lunge and just suicide, I’m not a fan of them and never have been. For everyone saying ahelp, i’m never done ahelping huggers, hugging scouts/ratting scouts out/calling out flanks/backseat gaming a xeno really bad. The players who want to get good hugs, wouldn’t need to speak to get the fun good well timed hugs. With the “A host has been facehugged at bozo central” alert I think the facehugger has done its job its on xenos now. Last thing I wanna do is remove a gameplay style someone likes entirely, I just don’t see the need for them metatargeting players from dchat then getting other xenos in on it, lessers are worse because they have hivemind.
Because as Anuv said above, “I think even a limit for speech like you spoke took soon, keep your mouth ready for infecting” or something, the best Vets/Banefuls/Royals are respawning nonstop barely talking hugging over and over rarely talking and I don’t think they deserve to lose the fun they have, but the players who abuse it nonstop and the lack of control we have as drones is a pain to me, I don’t like them coming out of my eggs QM dammit.
How are new queens going to learn how to play when the lesser drone mentors are banned from speaking? This is a massive xenos nerf, you’re basically muting the xeno SEAs.
They can use Mhelp? Most of the time its not mentorship, its just telling them to do something without explaining it “MORPHER” “CLUSTER” “SET LEADERS” now why or how just the same abuse thrown, they aren’t xeno SEAs though and i’m almost sure there is an imaginary drone role for just this occasion, and players learned just fine before huggers and lessers so I’m not accepting the “they’re the xeno SEAs analogy” unless you mean how SEA always time their joining with shipside hijinks so they can join the meta fun.
There’s an imaginary friend option for seas, which is basically the SEA in a ghost form.
Mentors can imaginary friend as an SEA IF or as a “helpful drone” XEA IF
Yeah but mentors are not always present and most of the time regular players have to teach newbies. This is a good point actually.
Yes but how do you constitute regular players, before we just taught eachother xeno to xeno, now a facehugger sees a young xx doing something “wrong” and just screeches meta terms that the facehugger gets but are lost on the learning gamer, I do think some facehuggers are great, emotionally support bald xenos and help them out but I’d say give those players XEA instead because I find the argument we don’t have XEAs but we have facehuggers sorta weird, if you want to join just to help a new xeno you would go XEA wouldn’t you?
Taking away hivemind from lessers is fair, but not allowing communication from facehuggers and lessers is a bit silly. This isn’t going to fix metagaming, which is probably not even that prevalent to begin with.
gonna necro this thread but have to mention that ever since lessers and huggers had their ability to speak removed for some period of time after spawning, there have been pretty much zero cases of lessers immediately spawning to yell in hivemind chat “GUYS SCOUT IS COMINGGGGGG”, this has been a good addition
The idea made in the OP was coded and merged, so the thread has run its course.