That PR is working as intended; its not that ghosts are constantly pushed back to last place. When they join the server they get their queue time set rather than being 0. I originally wanted it so late joiners get priority but see all of above.
Regarding your position changing, see all my responses in this thread. I can only repeat myself so much. Your position in queue is effectively your time of death. The counts printed out are who are valid candidates in that exact moment. Maybe the real 1st in queue went afk so now 2nd in queue is currently 1st in queue. Should that other person come back from being afk, then they are back first in queue because once again your position in queue is just the time of death.
It sucks, but then you will legitimately have people bumping up to first spot in queue just because they couldn’t manage to find a way to survive a difficult spawn.
Wait in that burst as long as possible until you see an opening (an open cade or whatever or somewhere thats a bit a ways away that you can attempt to hide like a tent). Don’t speak, don’t move when in your host. At worst, try to get them to friendly fire themselves.
Otherwise work on hugger to get a 2nd dibs pop and or pass the time as a lesser drone when the queen is on ovi.
You can’t find your way out of anything when you’re put in a pre-shaking body, which is in a caded 3x3 square, all cades are closed, and marines drag the body in front of a turret and light it on fire. Literally had that happen to me yesterday after 30 mins waiting in queue.
It’s not that they "
" it’s that they’re literally being put in an impossible situation.
You still don’t seem opposed to this idea judging from the aforementioned PR. And they’re not bumping up to it, they were already there, they just got cheated out of a fair chance to actually respawn and play the game after waiting their turn.
If you spawn into a larva that immediately gets killed, it’s the same as having never spawned in at all. I don’t see why somebody should be punished for complete RNG if it can be avoided.
Initially you said “it sucks but somebody has to spawn into that larva if it is to have any chance of survival”. Which is true, but now I’ve suggested a solution that gives the larva a chance at survival, and doesn’t punish the player if they spawn in a completely unsurvivable situation, which I think is still better than your initially proposed solution of “don’t play xeno”
Yes in the original PR I intentionally put late joiners ahead of people who have died because I think death should be penalized in favor of giving it to someone who hasn’t played at all. People didn’t like that, and it was exacerbating the numbers moving around more than they already will, so that’s no longer the case.
Allowing a window that death is not penalized to me seems ripe for exploitation so I am not interested in it. Yes you would be in your right to ahelp people intentionally dieing in that window and then keeping their spot so they can try it again, but there will be situations where it just looks like they’re unlucky or inexperienced or lagged out or something.
I’d sooner consider the option of a preference of disallowing unnested bursts for xeno queue, but then queue positions will be more inaccurate, and I still see games where there just simply aren’t enough xeno minds to take larva.
How would this be exploited? This would only really affect larva that are born on the front and die instantly. If you made the window 10-20 seconds for instance, it’s unlikely a griefer would be able to make their way from hive all the way to the front. And even if they do, they are usually reported because most of the time xenos take note of suicide larva. No amount of lag or luck or inexperience can help you explain to an admin why you left the hive and ran across half the map into the nearest cadeline the second you bursted.
Either way, the amount of potential griefers that may abuse this mechanic are far outweighed by the amount of actual players who’s QOL would be greatly improved by it.
There are ALWAYS enough minds to take over larva. Unless you have a game with like 11 burrowed roundstart, in which case larva queue isn’t even relevant. But those burrowed get used up quickly when marines start dying. Either way if there “aren’t enough minds” then I wouldn’t be bringing this up, since once I’m born in a cadebox and instantly die I’d just be right back to first in queue anyways since there’s nobody else waiting. That is never the case.
We initially thought the larva queue was made to help xeno mains who’d ghost roundstart and never get a spawn due to the larva nerf. People didn’t like it because it was punishing in practice, and then you just openly admitted to wanting to penalize players for dying when they play the faction that’s supposed to rely on constant death and respawns to function. Xenos don’t get revived or anything, and xeno already has a higher skill ceiling, why would you go out of your way to try and punish xeno players even more?
As someone who plays xeno frequently and interacts with the queue mechanic often enough, I’m just telling you how you could improve it to make playing the game more enjoyable overall for the people who spend the most time in queue. If you actively want to go out of your way to intentionally make death a more miserable experience for xenos, then we have completely different agendas, and I guess you shouldn’t be taking feedback from me.
wouldn’t it be a matter of simply checking if someone died as bloody larva and giving them prio the same way observer ghosts had before? That doesn’t seem particularly hard.
Waiting 30+ minutes to get to play the game, only to get unlucky and spawn in a closed FOB in front of a sentry gun and then be thrown back into the 10th position to wait another hour without a guarantee that this exact situation won’t happen again doesn’t sound like something that should be kept if it can be avoided.
Also by this same enlightened logic you could stop fixing bugs as long as they’re sufficiently rare - if someone died to one that’s just bad luck afterall, isn’t it? Not worth fixing it. lol
We actually have a rule against spawn killing marines if you are a shipside xeno (unless it’s hijack)
And even if you do get spawn killed as a marine you can be revived anyway unless nobody realises you died there.
Getting spawn killed at cryo as marine is much more equivalent to getting spawn killed as a larva. Getting capped after landing would be equivalent to a xeno dying after evolving and leaving the hive, which nobody is saying shouldn’t be allowed. The reason we don’t allow spawn killing marines is, I assume, because it’s very unfun to die right as you spawn in while you have no chance to fight back and then being potentially out of the round. This same reasoning applies to larva getting spawn killed.
Oh also, nobody has said that larva shouldn’t be able to die right after bursting, the argument being made is that the player shouldn’t have their queue reset. The larva would still die. So again not equivalent to giving marines a shield from getting capped.
Getting capped the second you land is a skill issue. I’ve had it happen to me several times, and literally 100% of the time it was my fault, and could have been totally avoided by the decisions I chose to make. There was nothing RNG about it. Waiting 40 mins in queue just to be forced to spend the rest of the game as a ghost is RNG, it’s sometimes completely out of your hands regardless of what you do.
That’s like a xeno complaining they got ambushed by scout when they left the hive. That’s not equivalent to literally being trapped in a box of cades while the corpse you burst from is lit on fire while you spawn as a larva with no way of defending themselves.
Considering I can consistently roll Queen ten rounds in a row, there aren’t really enough serious Queen players to justify the need for them to have a queue.
