This is mostly regarding the events of a recent round, would it be “griefing” or against the Spirit of the Rules to grow/(or order as such) Greenos, just to kill them for points/stim chems?
This is both really scummy towards whoever rolled it, since they now go ALL the way back to the queue and missed a rare roll/had their round ruined, and borderline powergaming.
AFAIK there is no official ruling on this, so I am requesting this to be reviewed.
Pretty sure hippy dropped the standard saying it is power gaming in that round as an announcement towards everyone and warning about doing it in the future. It just falls under power gaming
I was just in the match where this happened and it falls under rule 4 of no griefing and possibly even rule 5 of mechanical exploits.
It’s rule 4 since what smelly roughly said was," It puts players who are in the larva queue into a greeno, only to be instantly shot up and sent to the back of the queue with a 5m cooldown on respawning.
I’ve never played research myself but from what I was told, it could be rule 5 as well since marines aren’t intended to farm greenos for intel or for stims.
It’s also not fun just to spawn into a rare first burst greeno. Become the greeno queen. Attempt to RP. Only to have your fate pre-determined before you ever bursted.
The Smelly hates it if you do that. And any kind of farming, me and Tyrone once tried to farm Charlie queen and no joke, The Smelly spawns a Charlie king on us, when we kill them he just despawns them
Although, The Smelly despawned a red queen thinking we farmed it, after investigation he respawned the corpse for us
Safe to assume you have to RP with it first (when you know damn well they’re exclusively hostile) and then possibly kill them
Funny thing, for the cost of the CIP drug, and increasing point prices from hearts by the time you get greenos, I dont even know if you could get enough heart biomass to make up for the drug cost. At least without CL’s creatures too. Unless you are using the biomass for something other than points.
It costs 15 credits to make CIP2, scanning a queen heart gives 14 credits worth. Each queen takes 10 minutes to hatch, assuming the greeno doesn’t know what you’re doing and refuse to go queen, and what’s the cooldown between queens? 10 or 20 minutes?
Literally just a pointless waste of time.
Abominations are worth it, only costs 25 to make those, they scan for 45 credits, but the jamaicans will come and get you first, and you need eggs for them, egg plasma won’t do.
The last time I had this discussion it was ruled to be a non-issue, as it was considered appropriately in universe to grow and dissect your own xenomorphs.
Perhaps that opinion has shifted but I can’t comment on it.
I think this mechanic should be patched out because it creates unfun play patterns for researchers and the greeno players. Not only does it kill greeno RP, it makes real greenos trade off with simply farming bio points for stims, white flame, etc. Currently, other mechanics that trade off with research credit prioritization (all the other items in the bio printer) are hardly ever used. It also is a horrible situation for any player unlucky enough to have their larva que spot wasted on the greeno queen who has no chance of survival. Maybe preventing any xeno that results from a shipside infection pre hijack from having blood or a heart could fix this problem. You could add an exception if a carrier that started planetwide is somehow on the ship for those rare cases.
With that being said however, I believe that the spirit of the rules, and the rules as they are written in their current form do not prohibit this behavior. Until such a time that a change is implemented in the code to prevent this strategy, I think the rules should be amended to explicitly state that ‘greeno farming’ is prohibited. For example, in the round being discussed the staff member stated that it was a violation of Rule 4 - Griefing. Rule 4 states:
Griefing is the intent of one player wanting to cause grief or annoyance to other players or the server without a valid roleplay reason. If Staff believes that a player’s intent is to grief, action can be taken regardless of claimed intent. Any damage caused by griefing can be repaired at the handling staff members discretion. If you are being griefed, don’t retaliate - Adminhelp it and you’ll get healed. Shooting a griefer can cause you to get in trouble as well, and the combat logs you’re generating make it harder for Staff to prove who the real griefer is.
I don’t see how you can claim that gaining a chem to create a powerful stim, or farming bio points to make a stim, is not a valid roleplay reason. If it is valid to roleplay the creation of corrupted xenomorphs to send them into battle, even letting these extraordinarily dangerous creatures loose on the ship and on the ground, it seems impossible to justify that creating the same xenomorphs but in a contained and controlled environment is not valid roleplay.
The other potential rule that would apply is Rule 5 - Mechnical Exploits. The staff member as far as I am aware did not invoke this rule, but I think you can head off hypothetical invocations of this rule. It is not at all clear to the average player, let alone a newer one where the line between “clever thinking” and “mechanical exploit” is. Is it a “mechanical exploit” for scouts to load a single incendiary round in the chamber? Is it a “mechanical exploit” to paradrop greenos knowing they will only go into crit, and the queen will only take half max health damage? This is a game of many niche interactions that can be manipulated for player benefit. Research is a role that is particularly based around this kind of thinking, so it is extremely difficult, I would go so far as to say impossible, for players to successfully navigate this murky boundary on their own. If you can’t expect most players to successfully interpret and understand a rule, the rule should be changed to be more clear. I think there are many players who would make their genuine best effort to avoid breaking rules, but because of the lack of clarity on rule 5 cross the boundary of what a particular staff member could consider “mechanical exploits”. Given that this situation has come up multiple times and presents an especially significant impact (ruining the greeno players larva que, potentially getting research admin bombed and the CIC staff involved arrested), a specific mention in the rules is justified.
I think the collective confusion and disagreement seen from just one round of ‘greeno farming’ is a strong indication that the rules as they exist now, do not sufficiently make it clear that this behavior is prohibited.
I would like to suggest an addendum: if staff are unclear about the enforceability of this, a policy clarification is necessary.
Rules are indeed only effective and fair if they are clear and understandable, ensuring that everyone knows what is expected of them and can act accordingly.
Many individuals, including a well respected major and a fairly competent researcher, seem to doubt the clarity of the situation.
Additionally the rule of Rule 5: Mechanical Exploits states that:
Do not abuse bugs or unintended features to gain an unfair advantage for yourself or your team.
I believe that the mechanics involving greenos dying and providing a heart, blood, or pheromones are intentional; otherwise, this could have been easily fixed in the code with just a simple one-line adjustment.
One possible interpretation of greenos is that they should either target marines or the prime hive. This aligns with your experiences in the game.
Although:
If you are a researcher who has never played the research role or encountered greenos before and you come across the concept of them, you might conclude that you can utilize them for pheromones or bio-points.
In no way do I believe this isn’t bullshit for the xeno who sat in queue.
Unrelated to this post:
I firmly believe that greenos are detrimental to the gameplay loop. When players enter the xenomorph queue, they naturally harbor a vendetta against marines, which only incentives them to go against marines.
It’s annoying that greenos will often deploy and immediately choose to engage humans. There should be a clear incentive for greenos to ally with humans rather than siding with the prime hive.
Furthermore, the amount of role-play you get from a green queen is far too dependent on that queen’s playtime. Xenos exist on the fine line between low-roleplay and mid-roleplay, and that needs to be addressed.
Honestly, many found this situation as a sort of fuckyou to greenos for all the times they’ve fucked over marines.
Edit:
I want to make it clear that the issue I am bringing up is that someone could misconstrue how this could be a rule 5 break.
In all honesty we should make the greenos get their own queue so they don’t end up losing their slot on the prime hive queue.
Also with that implemented the thing of xeno farming would be a non-issue.
And before someone says that there are additional arguments for forbidding xeno farming: It’s not really powergaming and you should actually wear the labcoat or check the code before saying stuff out of gut feeling. It’s time intensive, it’s dangerous, it requires the thumbs up from CIC and the CMO and it requires an initial investment of the very thing that you want to save up.
And MedSci should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want with their own creation once the queue issue is sorted out.
Also shipside marines only get one life, and how is it even fair that when you join in as a shipside marine (a role that should NOT face imminent death at the hands of xenos) it’s perfectly fine that green xenos that unironically behave and think like resentful tweakers use their second or even third life to murder you (remember, there is no foxtrot for shipside staff) but the second you treat them in a coherent manner (i.e. a barely modified world-ending bioweapon) YOUR faction gets the stick?
Ok but power gaming isn’t a rule on CM, right?
(Also I’m not saying people should be able to do this - it’s shitty for the person spawning as the greeno. I’m only bringing this up because I keep seeing people say “power gaming” over and over when AFAIK it’s only a rule on other servers. Exploits are separate from power gaming IMO.)
This is the natural evolution of the ambiguous ruleset around Greenos in general.
For months now, greenos can betray or ally at anytime with no regard at all for any side. They are a true freelancer faction that all depends on the whim of a single Queen player deciding to be nice or evil today, and can even change it mid game for NO reason at all.
Because of this, it is now in the best interests of marine players to farm xenos; to treat them just like certain greeno queens treat marines. Kill them for their points and nothing else since the chance of betrayal and round ending the marines is ever present outside of a few Queen tags such as WAR (and even they will betray if given a good reason).
If administration wants Greenos not to be farmed, they need to give marines assurances that Greenos MUST choose a stance; either be hostile from the getgo, or ally from the getgo, and CANNOT change their stance midway for any reason once they have set their preference. Otherwise it is more effective to simply farm greenos, even if its not fair to the greeno player, than it is to treat them normally.
I say this as the person who got fucked over by stims and decided to ghost as prime queen because of said queen farming since I didn’t want to deal with more marine slop. I can see from both perspectives and see this is a natural conclusion of administrations indecisiveness around Greenos in general.
I feel the greeno betrayal could be fixed by having tamed xenoes cheaper. Albeit not so that you can do both gods stimms and tamed like you can with base greenos.
That way it’s actually impossible for the tamed xenoes to rebel without admin intervention, and it’s not too risky (albeit it walls off stimms).
And for farming xenoes, it is just a big grief on the side for researchers. Unless we can somehow make AI xenoes that they can farm, that shit is just toxic.
Farming greenos is actually extraordinarily compliant with the setting of Alien, but it would fucking suck to be sent back 5m and through the entire queue for it. Could code in greenos yielding blood too diluted to use for chems, and hearts that don’t grind for biomass or whatever— or even a separate greeno queue. But, at the end of the day, this that type of shit Wey-Yu would have going on in their labs, so we oughta just make the player experience of it less impacted because it’s not like it’s NRP or anything.
On one hand, I see how annoying it’d be OOCly to get spawned in as a greeno and die instantly for funny researcher shenanigans.
On the other hand, it doesn’t feel that much different than greenos deciding with absolutely zero reason to betray and make it a 2x Queen fight for the Marines.
I’d be curious on the data for WHY greeno queens betray (maybe code in a box that pops up when you betray that gives a logged reason for why you decided to betray) and if the reasons are logical at all or if it’s more of a “lmao I feel like killing talls” kinda vibe.
idk how most people dont notice 90% of betrayals are caused by marines in some way either through outrageous demands, non compliance or threats against the corrupted hive, the other 10% are just evil and wanna be evil
either way keep this slop out of cm id rather not have greenos as a concept ruined because some losers wanna monopolise the fun of others to fund stims so they can post in their metacords how they made NST, hardening, lvl 10 brute heal, lvl 10 burn heal and anti neuro with 60 OD made up of carbon, potassium and water by 1:30 into the round by doing this
Difference being, if you betray as a xeno, you KNOW you take the risk of dying. (And if you are non-queen, you can go Renegade Hive assuming you remembered to bug humans for IFF Tags)
In this scenario, you literally don’t know nor have a say.
Numbers pulled out of ass.
My theory:
Most of the betrayals come from greenos being bitter against marines. Because great majority of players who end up as greenos either died as a marine to some kind of FF, so they want revenge, or died as a xeno from a robust marine, so they also want revenge.
There should be no rules against. It should be fixed mechanically, if it is unintentional, remove greeno blood and organs (if they die allied to marines from guns/explosions). If it is intentional, then fix the problem with xeno queue.
The rest is fine lorewise and shit.
You can actually farm xenos because you can do larva removal surgery on monkeys. If you do it correctly, larva will burst without killing the monkey. So you can re-use the monkey infinitely. Which is vile as fuck but also should fall under powergaming rule as well.
to be fair your analysis is also pulled out of ass (not quality, you’re just making assumptions too)
I agree this should be a mechanical solution like removing xeno organs from greenos. I personally see no issue with having greenos be able to betray, it’s extremely RP flavorful, they are capricious (like 90% of players on the server), and possibly even stronger than stims when used properly.
When I have played greeno, I have definitely felt more inclined to betray based on the actions of the marines after hatching as opposed to anything based on the round beforehand.