The ordering for players who all haven’t played yet is still based on when they became an observer. So if someone has not played but has been connected to this entire 3 hour match; they are before someone that just connected a moment ago. But that person that connected a moment ago is ahead of everyone with a time of death because their time of death is 0.
So is the person who’s been waiting for 3 hours ahead of them or not?
Cause presently if I latejoin a round I’m automatically first in queue
If I’ve been waiting for an hour, I’ll start seeing the queue move backwards as more people either join or die, or both, not sure which.
These are our observers in my example:
Person A: Time of death 0 (hasn’t played), started observing in the server 3 hours ago.
Person B: Time of death 0 (hasn’t played), started observing in the server 1 minute ago.
Person C: Time of death 1 (played as a facehugger and died; hasn’t played on the main z-levels yet), became observer 4 hours ago.
Person D: Time of death 1 (played in thunder dome and died; hasn’t played on the main z-levels yet), became observer 1 minute ago.
Person E: Time of death 3000 (died as marine at that time groundside).
Person F: Time of death 4000 (died as xeno at that time groundside).
Person G: Time of death 6000 (died as marine at that time groundside).
If all of the above set their xeno candidacy true, aren’t xeno banned, and have had activity in the last 5 minutes, and the time stamp now in deciseconds is 7000 (it can’t actually be this low if people been playing for hours but trying to explain this as simply as possible):
A, B, C, D, E, F.
G doesn’t have a position yet because they are still revive-able.
The ordering will shift around as people go afk, disconnect, reconnect, change their candidacy setting, play as a face hugger, etc. The “placement” in queue is just at that moment thats where you were.
We need a pop up when you are at the front of the line and about to be put into a larva where you click okay to take it. I don’t think it should give any information about the larva to meta game, just to avoid AFK players getting them.
i just had another idea when i joined a round.
Would it be possible, or reasonable, to add a dialogue for brand new players when they are at the join menu. So if they try to join xeno it would tell them how many people are in line ahead of them if they say observed to wait for a xeno? I play marine and xeno, and sometimes I will observe hoping to get a larva, and an hour later im still out of the game, and if I knew how many people were ahead of me, I would have went marine.
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That is a good idea.
Your inactivity is already checked when a new larva is about to pop where you can only have less than 5 minutes of inactivity.
It could be done, but as a new player for that round you’re already going to basically be the front of the queue. The only useful knowledge for you would be how many embryos there are and how many other players have yet to play are in queue. But I don’t think we should disclose how many embryos there are on the menu screen.
There was an issue I missed where players could force themselves to be considered new to the round when they actually weren’t, but that should be resolved now with Fix time of death persistence for larva queue by Drulikar · Pull Request #3781 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub (which is already TM’d). But you should still expect queue numbers to fluctuate for the same reasons as I explained before.
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I’m sorry to say this, but this has to be one of the worst designed changes the new larva que introduced.
Before, you had occasional facehugger players blocking your tackles, hugging marines too far from the hive [playable hugger stun is half the time of a normal one] and they wake up mid transport and overall just being annoying shitheads.
But now this change just further incentivizes them to mindlessly rush and get that hug just so they can get into the game faster. I’ve had multiple situations where a group of 3-5 huggers just swarm someone I’m tackling and block my tackles allowing the dude to either run away or kill himself.
Why should a player who’s waiting till someone else tackles a marine proceeds to run up 60% of the time blocks the tackles as he is unable to click a marine and doesn’t listen to a teammate telling him to fuck off have the priority to get back into the game before for example a player who alone captured 5 marines but once he dies he’s in the back of the queue behind 6 hugger players who annoyed him while he was actually contributing to the team.
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After a while of trying out the larva queue and with my most recent experiences of my position only going up even after an hour and a half of waiting… Excuse me but either the larva queue has to get changes or the caps to xeno ratio which has been fucked with severely has to be reviewed. I get the idea behind the larva queue but now it’s almost impossible to get a second revive as a xeno, making the xeno gameplay way more braindead than it should be, because if you take a slight risk and suddenly someone either had any sort of stun weapon, or hell you got BODY BLOCKED which happens VERY OFTEN, it’s game over for you. You might as well go play something else for the next who knows how long until the round actually ends so you can play again the following round, and bear in mind our current average is at least 2 hours, seeing 3+ hours very frequently recently as well.
I really don’t want to be the one to say “marines can respawn and xenos can’t” in such an argument because I’ve always found it stupid as fuck, but right now it’s genuinely so bad that it’s become an issue, if you get one kill on any xeno, no matter if they’re good or bad, it’s fucked. You need one cap to break it even, and even though caps aren’t hard to get, if marines use a singular braincell which they supposedly have, they can get more xeno kills than the xenos can keep up with.
Personally speaking one way to help with this is to remove new players being put into the start of the queue. Yeah the new guy hasn’t played yet but they can definitely still spawn as a marine, while the people that have been dead and waiting for a spawn for who knows how long get priority to play, since they’ve been waiting, and not simply joining and getting the larva on a silver plate, honestly if they join the marines, the hive will get more larva and more players will get to join as xenomorph so I think it’s an all ways win-win situation. 
Another would be to remove the priority you get by playing facehugger or by being hugged at all, the former for reasons Gachi already explained and the latter for more obvious ones… If a xeno player wants to play as a xeno, what stops him from getting capped? It won’t even be obvious. If we’re doing a larva queue it should be in FIFO, depending on the time of death/the time you became a ghost with no body, period.
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The problems larva queue is causing are bigger than the problems larva queue is solving
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Im bad with such ideas how to fix these problems but cant hurt to trow my brain goop in as well. What if you could still get xeno when you ghosted recently. Everyone has a cahnce to get picked. Just the longer it was since you ghosted the higher the chance gets for you to become a xeno. That way there would still be a chance for you to rejoin if you try to do some risky stuff.
But there definitly needs to change something. I recently had a talk in gme with someone that said they dont feel good about taking caps at all anymore as xeno. They would rather not risk capping when it means they could not play for the rest of the game. And thats like hte last you would want, that players feel discurage from trying support there team.
I mean, you could also ad some things to make your chance higher to larva spawn after death while you play. Just from the talk i metion before, you could get a higher chance for every cap. Yes i see the enormous problems with that, like figthing about who caps and shet like that. But it would be a good way to reward playrs doing well. You just have to be carefull about it, so it doesnt turn to “Good players prevent bad players from having the chance to get good” You know what i mean. But generally, an incentive to play good is always good. If handelt well. Wich i dont know how to.
But yeah, i think the best would be if there was more then one varibel that influenced your chance of getting larva. Maybe something you can influnce as well, A BIT, but who the feck knows. Just an idea, or ideas.
This all incentivizes tackle dragging instead of eating caps which multiple marines have complained about. When your ability to tackle and drag capped marines gets removed there will be no more reason to risk capping anymore because you can’t risk dying due to having to eat captured marines. You won’t get to play for the rest of the round because you tried capping someone.
Also you should not have to incentivize people to play hugger either as player huggers aren’t a necessary part of xeno gameplay. Let the people who want to play as a facehugger play a facehugger, players don’t need to be enticed into the role with larva slots.
Can we just make it a first-come first-serve lineup.
Click join xeno to spawn, if there aren’t any larva u get the last spot in line and wait there.
Nobody cuts in front.
On god this shit only moves backwards
(I am currently writing to you from the larva queue, every time I sit here for 2 hours waiting to respawn I come here to seethe)
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FIFO I don’t feel is in any way superior to what is already in place. You just return back to the same situation as before where you must be glued to the game to never give up your spot. If I allow people to keep their position even if they go afk or happen to disconnect, then you have the exact same situation as now where the queue number shifts around. If I just count every observer that could be a xeno candidate, then the number is just arbitrary (e.g. you could be 20th in queue and be the one to pop because all 19 people ahead of you with lower ToD don’t have xeno preference currently set or are afk).
If anything, the more complaints I get about the queue position will just convince me that I shouldn’t disclose that information at all to the player. Players didn’t get a count of how many potential candidates there were before, so if its only going to cause confusion or complaints then I just don’t need to give that information at all. I wanted to disclose it to give the player an idea of how long it might be. Sure I could try calculating an average wait time but I just don’t think that’ll ever be very accurate.
As far as prioritizing new players (because they have a ToD of 0) over a player who has played and died, I still think this is preferable. Marines have the luxury of being able to suicide push and potentially get revived. Xenos don’t currently have that luxury and thus need to value their lives more. They could if revival jellies were in some way back (or a similar thing like foxtrot spawns for xenos) - but at the moment revival jellies aren’t in. I would like them to be in some way though to promote more risky plays - but I think it is unlikely they’d be back any time soon, and just like before it would end up being used almost exclusively for T3s (how it broke the T3 cap was also a problem).
Though I still think the complaints about the queue are pretty small and I still think ultimately the problem is more a result of balance that has pushed the larva rates to what they are currently. If anything I’m happy we are in a situation where there actually are ghosts waiting to become xenos - about half a year ago it was the case some hives would just be starved of players even when they had ample larva that was only being used for respawns (if they could even manage to use them before the hive would fall).
Then let people keep their positions, but make it first come first serve. If someone’s been waiting for an hour and DC’s then comes back later, sure let them keep their spot. But stop letting people who just joined the round cut in front of people who’ve been waiting the whole round.
Nobody’s complaining about being able to see the queue position, we’re telling you that with the current queue setup we literally don’t get to respawn most games.
Again, the intention for it is good, but in practice it just doesn’t work, because you see your position as 1st, think oh I’m next in line to respawn, won’t take too long! Then you get pushed back to 7th because people keep joining the round and instantly cutting in front of you…that’s not gonna lead to an accurate time estimate no matter what.
Either way, not letting us see where we are in the queue isn’t gonna change the fact people are getting one life as a xeno.
Yea a big part of xenos being on hardcore mode right now is the larva nerf, but this queue doesn’t help either. Maybe if larva pop was rebalanced in the future this might be viable, but presently the current queue setup needs rework. Everything helps
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They can’t if they already ghosted…
If they ghosted that’s on them. In the lobby screen they can press the join xeno button and it will tell them there are no larvas like I think I said… And there’s unlimited marine slots so they can play it instead.
I personally have found Xenomorph less enjoyable due to the changes and have found myself rarely playing Xenomorph after my first death, if I can even stomach the wait.
Capturing many marines as a Xenomorph, to have, at high pop, and then having 0 chance of a second life isn’t the most encouraging experience, not to mention the aspect of having your place in queue be extended due to another player joining and wanting Xenomorph, being one of the most discouraging systems known to man. At the very least, I’d recommend moving the death timers for facehuggers or lowering them so it at the very least, keeps people within the game.
I like the intent behind this but the implementation needs some serious tweaking, be it a weighted model (Newer players have a higher chance in the RNG) or some other system, but as is, it’s difficult to want to stay on CM after death and not just play another game.
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No way RNG is a better system. Y’all complaining about the queue, but all of this is not queue’s fault. It just shows you how bad the larvae rebalance for respawns is. Without the queue, nothing in this regard would change, except that you would not notice anything. Ignorance is bliss.
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