Surv main here, gonna be honest: This is one of the few times I’ll actually be honest regarding the state of surv instead of shitposting about it, and chances are it will be the last time I take it seriously because of reasons I’ll explain now:
Chances are, it’s unfixable, at least with this current team, it’s destined to be slop or reworked into something that is ass and every discussion about it so far has been fruitless and tiring. I can’t really give you the TRUTH™ but I can tell you what is perceivable of others given their actions and behaviours:
Apparently very high in the staff hierarchy they want survs to exist but it’s not their job to fix it, everyone in the middle hates the guts of survs and on lower management you get a mixed bag of opinions.
Now, about everyone that is collaborating to the game as a maintainer, mod or whatever kind of volunteer: I’m really grateful about the fact that you decide to build something for us, a gang of misfits and socially innept people so we all can share it for free and have fun. But how the FUCK am I supposed to take you with the utmost seriousness when there is a clear issue, and you aggravate it with the intent of achieving a solution? How in the hell am I supposed to treat you seriously when some relevant people among you will whine about disingenuous arguments and yet you tolerate or remain silent when others use arguments that are just as shitty to subvert any serious discussion?
It’s not really a big take saying that there is an arms race between survs and staff/maintainers because how both sides suck at de-escalating the ever evolving cyclone of bullshit going on, and to top it off the answer of unrelated people (marine players and xeno players) is either filled with apathy or takes that are textbook examples of the Dunning-Krueger effect.
So in order to actually address the mess I should divide it into sections
MAINTAINER/DEV BEHAVIOUR
They barely engage with survs themselves and when they do it’s to beat them with a newspaper in the form of nerfs over a behaviour that they don’t like, and I won’t give details but apparently at times they enjoy kicking survs in the taint because of the powergame-y survs.
Now, this makes perfect sense should the newspaper come when it’s actually necessary, and yes, it used to make sense. Survs used to be obscenely strong, endurance 5 was apeshit insane, endurance 3 was still insane not only from a gameplay standpoint but also from an IC sense it is unreasonable how literal civilians had more physical endurance than actually trained marines. Also Thermals, while I miss them, they were lazy way of encouraging players to “explore” the map and “engage” with it.
HOWEVER, it’s exceedingly hard to take them seriously when they implement bandaid “solutions” that aggravate things on the grand scheme of thing while also being contradicting.
DO NOT HIVEDIVE EARLY ON! Implements rules on attacking xenos early on in the hive
DO NOT FRAG THEM ON THE COLONY EITHER! Nerfs endurance
DO NOT HOLD IN THE LZ ELSE MARINES GET FUCKED WHEN THEY LAND AND XENOS ARE NEAR! Creates the old LZ gas PR
oh you stopped being a hyperaggresive maniac? oh good, nic- WAIT- DO NOT FIND EFFECTIVE WAYS OF KEEPING YOURSELF ALIVE DEFENSIVELY EITHER Nerfs molly spam strat
ahhh… all is solved… after nerfing medical loot too we’re finally- WAIT NO! DO NOT FIND THE GAMER LOOT TO ACTUALLY HAVE A CHANCE! Removes a big chunk of the gamer loot
well, a big chunk of it is gone or it’s too dangerous to- WAIT, DO NOT GO AGAIN INTO THE CAVES, STOP IT! Implements an early queen maturity feature with so many oversights that it ends up getting abused even on defensive surv holds, leaves it for days before tweaking it into making it’s abuse inviable despite the fact that it was worthy of an insta-unmerge hours after it was implemented
ahhh… yes… they are finally not murdering half of the hive every once in a while… life is finally good… I can finally feel at peac- WAIT, WHY AREN’T YOU RP FRIENDLY, WHY ARE YOUR POWERGAMER TENDENCIES INTENSIFYING?! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE You are here
That thing I’ve written is maybe about 70% of the examples, maybe some of them are a bit out of order in the timeline and it’s ONLY about in-game stuff, no OOC stuff evaluated. HOWEVER, with those aclarations aside:
Have you ever thought: “Hm, I wonder why survs are like this…” or “oh wow, why they are doing this now”? Because maintainers fail at asking this to themselves on the regular when it’s about survs. Maybe they won’t jam it in their heads but maybe you, the reader, will.
We wanna live. Fuck being condemned on waiting for rolling an ERT on a 2 hour round because I wanna actually play the game. If you give me a choice between life or death and the former requires skill then you bet me and every sane person will start working to get that skill.
SURV BEHAVIOUR
Some of us wanna live to frag, some for le soulful arr pee, the surv playerbase has decent amounts of variety. But the common denominator is that we all wanna live.
And every time we find a strategy to actually play the game by merit of being alive maintainers remove it, the most simple and evident example is the offensive strat → defensive strat → hyperaggresive strat pipeline.
To boil down the previous quoted text, endurance used to let survs roam freely while fragging, this was objectively bad so it was nerfed, then they found a way to keep themselves alive defensively, this wasn’t engaging enough for anybody so it was nerfed, then they found out that if defensive strats didn’t worked then they had to go back into being aggresive, this is when the hyperaggresive robustos that roam together and mangle entire drone armies start to come by, and it causes continuous seething on everyone involved.
Everything that survs have been doing as of late has been literally a response to a previous nerf, an adaptation. Survs can be literally boiled down to the phrase “Life finds a way” because that’s what we’ve been doing as of late.
The regrettable part about this is the behaviour that it encourages. I heard plenty of marines and xenos complain about the fact that survs don’t RP at all, and I say that it is true and completely coherent.
How the hell do you expect people that play surv for the RP to cope with an environment that tries to round-remove them out of their desired playstyle for literally the rest of the round from the early early game while said environment gets increasingly more hostile? Well, there are two answers, either they don’t and they just don’t play surv, reducing the ammount of HRP surv players, or they lockerhide, which is a massive issue on it’s own (and the complacency of staff/devs regarding this being a thing is also incoherent as hell), and to top it off, the ones that DO remain become increasingly power-gamey just in an attempt to survive.
The trend of surv becoming more nerfed while it’s playerbase becomes increasingly powergame-y and toxic is very real and what frustrates the hell of me is that devs somehow can do complex as fuck development and coding, hinting at the fact that they ARE smart and that they HAVE good problem-solving skills, and yet they are incredibly blind to this trend of they literally aggravating the very problem that they apparently dislike (as presumable by their behaviour).
UNCLEAR GAME DESIGN
How much will we reward skill? How much will we punish the LACK of skill? Is there a limit in which we stop punishing/rewarding it and we start limiting it? Where do we draw the line? Should we even reward skill at all? Is teamwork optional or a MUST?
This are all questions that survs, from a game design standpoint, push into their very limits. This can be seen with concrete examples that are kinda divisive:
- If survs manage to quickly coordinate and they got good map knowledge: Should they be able to get good loot as a reward?
- If xenos suck and they lose half of the hive on an attempt to cap survs on their hold: Should the round be cut short because they’ve got themselves in an optional fight and they lost?
- If the survs are very skilled and they push onto the hive on their own: If the xenos lose, is it deserved? How much skill must the survs have before we recognize the xeno defeat as valid? Is this threshold even a thing?
- Survs don’t fight and instead they hide: Is this form of “engagement” between xenos and survs valid? What if not everyone hides? What happens to the rest of survs which now lack manpower? How do we solve this given that they were designed to work together?
This is (among other things) essentially a different form of the “Should OWL be able to wipe the entire backline given that he is skilled and he has the support of a drone?” kind of discussion. The answer back then was no and in the case of survs we have been getting the same answer for a big while. What answer is correct is up to discussion. But let it be known that said “no” is not really compatible with the current trend of balance changes.
DUMB ARGUMENTS:
Alright, gonna go in a lightning round of a list of responses to mediocre arguments that I might expand later, not gonna make each answer too long or else I’m going to crash out even harder:
A : Survs aren’t meant to survive!
R : Survs =/= colonists. It’s in the goddamn name, survs survive. Colonists didn’t, if you had eyes you’d notice the corpses of dead colonists in the colony. Survs are special because they managed to survive for god knows how long in a colony infested with THE apex predator. They are, you like it or not, special. And said specialness gets cemented or thrown out the window depending if they can survive for 15 more minutes until marines rescue them.
A : Survs aren’t weak! Posts the clip for the morbillionth time of some dude with thermals killing a ton of xenos with gamer loot while they are out of weeds, right after the entire surv team except one powergamer got wiped
R : Oh hi Stalkerino!
A : Survs shouldn’t be able to cut short the round by wiping the xenos!
R : Fuck sake man, can you REALLY, WITH YOUR HAND IN YOUR HEART promise me that you seriously believe that a hive that got wiped by a gang of 5 dudes without armor, with a severe lack of good gear and almost no AP options was going to yield an interesting round? Can you REALLY blame the low length of the round on survs when it’s very likely that marines were also going to kill the hive quickly?
Alright a brief intermision, because this one has some nuance. Yes, plenty of times the hive that survs fight IS different than what marines fight. Namely, survs tend to fight low tier xenos with little to no fortifications while marines tend to fight them in their strongest. How strong survs could get is greatly reliant on the precise map, FORECON survs are fucking insane, the recent re-arragement of the loot was a good call because it forces them to commit to a shitty LZ that might disuade marines from rescuing them, effectively working like a creative nerf, which is acceptable. Whoever, on most map survs are extremely weak to defenders and sents, and if you KNOW that this is the best you can get early on as a xeno, then you adapt to it. Survs have been adapting to a consistantly changing meta that tries to weaken them and you tell me that xenos can’t account for their initial weakness? Come on man.
Altough I will comment something more about this, recently I’ve been playing a good ammount of xeno and I’ve seen that this tends to happen on lowpow and another thing I’ve seen is that a really big problem is that there is a TON of burrowed larvas, plenty of times it hits the ~10 larva mark, most I’ve personally seen recently is like 18. I’d attribute a big chunk of the problems to that, because I’ve seen survs mangling the hive in the same lowpop hours in which this problem becomes real bad. An idea I’d have to make this less of a pain is letting the queen “Transmute” burrowed larvas into royal jelly in order to get upgrades for the few xeno players that ARE connected and playing. Aka let the queen convert unused xeno slots into buffs for the active players.
A : Just hide instead of fragging!
R : Molotov spam got nerfed because it wasn’t interactive enough for either side involved, explain to me how in god’s name I should consider staying AFK on a goddamn locker anything other than a rule 8 violation.
Also survs are balanced to be reliant on others you’d know the agony of said reliance if your fellow engi surv is bald, lockerhiding is objectively dropping the survival rate of your own team. Thus it’s griefing, it’s just that it’s not recognized as such.
A : Then everyone should hide!
R : Then what? The meta will be having 4 runners capping the equivalent of 1.5 naeras by slashing lockers around the entire colony, remember that you are stunned for ages after your locker is opened. Or in other words, if you are found, you are a cap, simple as.
“TL:DR, Ain’t gonna read allthat”
Survs are fucked from a design standpoint and the people that should fix it are failing at all levels at addressing the issues (Observation, Communication, Design and Implementation)
Survs are a hateable bunch by design and they don’t do themselves any favours, like me, right now.
I don’t know what is going to happen to survs, hell, this fat post could go into a powerpoint presentation of why survs are a cesspool as a playerbase and in-game faction and thus be used as an argument for the removal of survs.
But as long as the issues that led surv into being what it is right now remain then we’ll see these problems re-surface in other places.
My only hope is Steelpoint because he has reasonable takes and he actually communicates; Nivrak because they are the biggest advocates of keeping surv alive as a faction and hopefully Thwomper’s rework will be tweaked so the adrenaline rush thing won’t be implemented.
