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General Acid Goop
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You are currently awaiting assignment in the larva queue. The ordering is based on your time of death or the time you joined. When you have been dead long enough and are not inactive, you will periodically receive messages where you are in the queue relative to other currently valid xeno candidates. Your current position will shift as others change their preferences or go inactive, but your relative position compared to all observers is the same. Note: Playing as a facehugger or in the thunderdome will not alter your time of death. This means you won’t lose your relative place in queue if you step away, disconnect, play as a facehugger, or play in the thunderdome.

Why does this exist? Why does it only appear half the time? Just tell me where I am in queue please, I need to know if I should go do dishes or not.

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Because Drathek hates us.

There is a lot of things that can be changed to make the queue an actual queue with your number assigned to you the way it only goes down and never up. But

Guess you don’t have to play the game to play the game.

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Larva queue is bad. Late joining as a xeno is nigh impossible unless you get a hug as a facehugger. It needs to be reworked slightly

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Don’t know if it has gotten worse even. Because now i join, get put in like 5th in queue, then I go to 1st, then to 7th, then to 1st again, and then 3rd, and then I get a larva. It’s like its being juggled way too much.

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I’m doing my part by getting capped every round and never joining as xeno, goodluck sisters o7

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I think part of the issue is also the actual larva pop nerfs. Xenos get way fewer larva than they used to. Xenos NEED to cap a ridiculous amount to actually get any new sisters, so unless GRUG or ENA or some prime capper is carrying the fuck out of the round people will literally never get to respawn.

The xeno pop balance is still fucked though, seems disproportionately against marines, especially on lowpop. Idk how to fix it, maybe somehow buffing both xeno and marine numbers?

Letting marines get way more foxtrot riflemen way more easily; wiping the entire front in 10 seconds isn’t fun for anyone. And if you let marines respawn more, than you can add a mechanism to give more burrowed larva to xenos over the round so people on both sides can keep respawning and playing. (and maybe delay roundend mechanics so a round actually has time to unfold with several pushes/fronts, but that’s a different subject).

Also please let people know where they are in queue from the lobby menu, I’m tired of ghosting, seeing you are 78th in larva queue when the round literally started 2 minutes ago, and pestering admins to send me back to lobby.

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Xenos get the same amount of larva that they used to get for most of CM, not counting double/triple+ infections which were removed due to being a bug (though double infections are canon…).

I may be mistaken but as far as I am aware, the pop balancing is constant, you get as many xenos per marine at lowpop as you do on highpop, of course this doesn’t really make sense and is probably why we see the correlation between winrates and players playing (xenos dominate lowpop, marines dominate highpop).

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Wasn’t it nerfed a while back? Cause before you used to be able to get 2 larva from a single cap.

I thought the overall larva obtained was also rebalanced since it was giving xenos way more than they should have had due to counting shipside marines or something, can’t quite remember…

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ermmmmmmm, mods, check this man, i caught him playing facehugger yesterday, and last i looked, those are xenos

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Because prior to it, the selection was purely RNG and provided zero feedback to the player when they could expect to be a candidate. For the best probability of ever having a chance to ever get offered a larva, you would have to be glued to the game, never able to go afk, forever stuck in observation. And even then, its still RNG so even if you are never inactive, you could wait indefinitely and never get a slot.

After the larva queue, you are now prioritized based on how long you have been waiting regardless of whether you are present, logged in, or not. Additionally, you are given an approximate position regularly to give you an idea of how long it can be.

Every observer has a recorded time of death. Every valid candidate (one that has been dead long enough, isn’t job banned, isn’t banished, isn’t inactive for the last 5 minutes, and has special candidacy enabled for xenos) is put into a list and sorted by that time of death. Ever there is a burst the first person in that list is given the larva (or is asked if they aren’t a nested larva).

The message you quoted is given when you currently aren’t a candidate so you are taught about the queue. See the code here: cmss13/code/game/gamemodes/cm_initialize.dm at 7ce846c199c24c67ee1b306292e6bd6a18b7f3d1 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub

Your position is displayed in the Status tab when you are an eligible candidate to be a xeno (namely you need to have been dead for 5 minutes, and not be afk). You can also use the join as xeno verb or action and it will display in chat your current place in queue if you have a place in queue.

You know this is false, and you have been present in every thread that I have to explain this concept to people. I stand by that I created a fair system, and have been very receptive to feedback with it. I participate in threads about it to gather feedback and explain it. I answer ahelps and mhelps about it. And I have opened several PRs with improvements and fixes to it.

Did you not read the OP when they stated: “I need to know if I should go do dishes or not”? The larva queue allows them to freely leave without fear of wasting their time. They can go off and do whatever they want and come back and it is no different than a person that sat there glued to the screen as an observer praying to get a larva.

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I think what OP is saying is often times when you try to join as xeno, it doesn’t actually tell you where you are in the queue or how long you’re expected to wait, just spams that paragraph for quite a while at times.
Why not show the paragraph once, or keep it displayed, but also immediately have queue assign/show people what spot they’re in?

IDK the mechanics behind it or how long it takes to actually assign players to queue, but I’ve had times where I get like 32nd place or somethin, so it seems like there’s a pretty large accommodation. Why not just immediately assign people to the queue so they don’t have to spam join as xeno and wait until it deigns to tell them what spot they’re actually in?

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There isn’t any “assignment” of position really. Your position in queue is just the index number at that moment if you are a candidate when the list is sorted by time of death for all the candidates. That’s also why the message is trying to explain that the number will fluctuate. When you aren’t an eligible candidate (e.g. you died too recently) you don’t have a number so it explains it instead.

As far as frequency of sending the message, afaik it is only sent if you click the button to join as xeno. I do not see code where the explainer message would ever be sent to you repeatedly automatically. Its only sent if you are manually pressing the button. The periodic messages are only sent to currently valid xeno candidates.

So to elaborate: There’s no point to pressing the join as xeno button as far the the larva queue. Spamming it won’t make you have a position in queue any faster. Every press just looks for afk xenos, and then gives you a to_chat message of your last queue message (the exact same one displayed in your status tab)

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Problem here is that you have to wait and sometimes quite a while (usually until next larva spawns, from my experience, which can happen instantly, but can take 10 minutes or more if the hive isn’t doing hot) just to find out that your place in queue is 32th and you better go do something else. This is very frustrating. It would be much more convenient if it showed you your approximate position right away, when you request it by clicking join as xeno. It’s strange to wait to find out how much longer you have to wait.

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Drathek, I was told by a more experienced player that players in lobby are also getting the dead time, so if you’re in the lobby as soon as the server starts and then observe 30 minutes later, you’ll be placed first infront of the people that died and are trying to respawn.

I don’t actually know where most of the shuffling comes from but I think this is a reasonable explanation as roughly 25% of the players are in the lobby at all times so it’s very possible for one to come back and take your spot over after AFKing in the lobby.

It is extremely annoying to be 1st in the queue and then get bumped several places back with no explanation.

Perhaps when someone takes you over in the queue it should give an explanation.
Like “you are being overtaken by a player that has spent dead and reconnected.”
Or maybe showing the absolute position, including those that aren’t eligible but their timer is still ticking so that you never get overtaken, though that would make the number much more meaningless.

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Here is my take on how to fix the queue:

I think the larva dibs should also be removed from both the hugger and the hugged player. Because we don’t need multiple systems for this. We need one system that works with constancy. The mechanics that allow you to skip the queue destroy the very idea of ​​a queue.

Yeah you’ll have to be glued to the screen. Or you can just wait for the next round. But I think people who are more engaged, more invested in the round’s outcome, who observe and participate in dchat deserve the larva more than someone who just leaves for 2 hours to go walk their dog, watch TV, wash their dishes and w/e. It makes a lot of sense that you need to be connected to the game to continue your participation in the round. If you don’t wanna be glued to the screen, then alt-tab or just wait for the next round. Why (basically) punish players who want to play the game to appease players who don’t?

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The larva dibs should stay, gives an incentive to facehuggers to do their job, and hugged marines can play as xeno immediately, which I think helps newer players. Dunno, don’t think that’s a big problem.

Also I think adding an ETA or something for the queue would be useful, even if it was rough.

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Well, this is a huge problem. You can do what you are supposed to do (wait in the queue) and literally never get the expected result (getting the larva). Because people will keep getting larva instead of you via huggers or by getting hugged. It breaks the very idea of a queue.

You can argue that “yeah well you should play hugger instead of waiting” and that’s true but why have a queue then? Make your mind already how do you want it to work. Also even if you do play hugger, there is a huge chance that the marine you hugged will roll xeno and make your hug pointless. Or you can try to hug several people and miss the burst because you were playing hugger at the exact moment. This system is a huge mess and let’s stop pretending it is not.

Even without dibs, it still will be profitable to play huggers, since you help capping and influence the queue, essentially moving it with caps.

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Afaik huggers have priority over the hugged marine
The dibs are there to be a guarantee essentially I think, though one could say that if you get one/two hugs you can stop being a hugger since you’ve made a guaranteed spot for yourself.

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nah they only get second dibs

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yea and we give first pick to the hugged marine (read:noob) because they HAVE to get first pick on playing the game again right after they got capped

we literally have to remove hugged marines getting dibs on their own larva, what is this? Being hugged is worse than being permakilled, and yet we encourage getting hugged.

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