Lurker alpha is 25
Pred and scout are 10
Sniper is 15
There’s a pretty big difference between 25 alpha and 10 alpha. Lurkers are way easier to spot than preds and scouts
I literally cannot see anything besides the lurker in that picture
Tonight I learned walking into invisible preds decloaks lurkers too, because obviously a check for whether the mob’s a yautja wasnt included. Absolute state.
And we’re still plagued by overbuffed incin mortars, overbuffed SGs and req having pretty much infinite budget/asrs goodies WO tier FOB If only someone went and reverted these instead of the pile constantly growing.
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I’ve been watching the discussion for a while, and while I’m no veteran, I’ve played a decent bit these past three years; which I think is enough to share my point of view.
In my honest opinion, I just can’t understand how these changes keep getting merged again and again even with the constant backlash and complaints against them. Sure, the xeno playerbase is substantially smaller than the marine playerbase; that is a fact and we can’t deny that we just have less people overall who play xeno instead of marine, and even less who play both. If we think of playerbase as a whole, the grand majority will just agree to these changes since weaker xeno means more kills, which is more fun. This, however, does not justify the complete lack of regard by the devteam on how poorly it is affecting gameplay.
I am not referring to a single PR that nerfed my favourite caste, or a stat change from X to Y that slightly annoys me; the lack of positive changes, complete disregard of player’s opinions, unjustified or poorly executed nerfs, literal removal of strains: it’s all been going downhill for a long time now.
Let’s use the latest change as an example: Invisible lurker decloaking after contact; can I ask how much time did the devteam/maintainers take to sit back and think about possible gameplay consequences, community backlash, less intrusive alternatives or at the very least something to compensate for this nerf? Because god damn, if you thought of all of that in 3 days that’s some quick fucking thinking: PR was made in July 11, then Merged in July 14 (Could be mistaken due to timezones, even then the timeframe between PR made and PR merged is small). Suuure, you can argue that the whole development process took place before the PR was posted, and honestly that’s a fair argument, but anyone with a working pair of braincells will quickly notice during that process that NO ONE who actively plays xeno will like this change.
Let’s put that aside, let’s assume that all this planning did take place and that, in paper, it seemed like a good idea. Was it even tested? How long did we even have this on testmerge before it was merged? Were opinions from players even heard during the testing process? I agree that a bias will always be there, and that if you like to play something you are against it being nerfed; even if there is a sort of bias in the opinions of the playerbase, we should at least discuss these changes and try to come up with a change that satisfies everyone, just like we are doing on the last few comments (Lurker’s invisibility flickering instead of outright being decloaked, a mere example).
I understand that we can’t have longterm discussions or player feedback for every single PR we get since otherwise we’d be dealing with oceans of salt and 6 months of back-and-forths just for a single PR to get merged or rejected, but can we at least try? It’s clear that the xenomorph side of the playerbase is not happy; it’s been nerf after nerf with nothing positive coming out of it. The dissatisfaction is somewhat clear, yet the situation shows no improvement whatsoever, with even dumber nerfs with even less testing dropping week after week. Do the people making these changes just not give two shits about what people think? This thread shows that people are capable of coming up with decent ideas to fix current issues coherently, and not with outright removals or brutely arranged nerfs, so why can’t we try?
In short, situation’s been a bit stupid. I don’t really care about particular devs/maintainers, and to be honest we can’t point fingers at someone and drop all the blame on them; and besides, I’m pretty much a nobody in the community to really say anything about anybody. The only positive change to xenomorphs I’ve seen in a while is an Eggsac buff, and it’s still a PR so it has all the odds of being outright rejected. I just want a bit of thought being put before changes are made; otherwise we’ll be getting 30 minute rounds sooner or later.
Sorry for the rant, that’s all.
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@Morrow If you’re willing to read anything in this post, make it this. At the very least please just read this one message if nothing else.
Sorry for the ping, and I agree with this:
But you’re the headdev and I can’t think of a better person to push feedback to, so idk who else to ping.
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Hint: Morrowbeno and now morrowmarine does not care
morrowbeno is a thing? I thought it was just morrowmarine
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He was first morrowbeno and removed all cool marine features, and now he is morrowmarine removing all cool beno features. Aka “when everyone is nerfed nobody is nerfed we only have M41 riflemen and drones left getting a perfect 20 minute railroaded round because no fun allowed”
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Why doesnt’ somebody start a “What’s with all the marine overhauls lately?” cope thread so we can compare and contrast the amount of marine nerfs to xenos. Morrow initially replied to this thread saying both sides were getting nerfed equally and that complaining about the xeno nerfs was ignorant.
But looking at worst marine nerf, IB, vs worst xeno nerf, larva nerf, idk if there’s really a fair comparison. And that’s just a 1:1 comparison, not counting all the other nerfs, buffs and general development received relative to each faction.
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Just like the movie
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The nerfs are not spread similary, but morrowwhatever is in fact nerfing everywhere possible and then calls harryob to speedmerge the nerfs before feedback can get posted. Also, about the marine nerfs, I’m pretty sure morrowwhatever is trying to add some system similar to broken bones (?) permasleeping burn damage patients until surgery
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morrow’s gonna find the salt sock… what have you done…
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I think part of the biggest problem is the fact that with this larva nerf we undid a core balance that was going on.
Xenos have always been based on smaller numbers, stronger individuals, and when you die as a xeno you respawn as a larva and evolve again.
Meanwhile marines were numerically far superior and far weaker individually. To compensate for this and the fact xeno players respawn into new bodies, marines were given increasing lenience on revival. Once upon a time we had cloning, but that was removed. Now we have defibs. Delimbs were made harder to reduce shipside surgery time. Decaps were made much more difficult to reduce the odds of being randomly permakilled.
It was ugly, but it worked, xeno players could get in a few lives as long as the beans made some effort to capture and marines provided they didn’t get dragged to brazil could be revived when they slipped up.
Now we have so few larva you often get a single life, maybe two if you’re lucky, before the queue condemns you to observing for the rest of the round. But marines… Still have all their protections, and still can get revived after being hit with a literal orbital warhead.
Attrition has swung firmly in favor of marines, hilariously enough.
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Let’s try something new: thinking past one move forward.
There’s a few of you who are complaining about how marines function. I agree. Marines can generally carry too much, riflemen have been babied for way too long, and punishment for playing poorly has steeply dropped as a marine over the years.
Now, about a month ago (you’ll notice it lines up nicely with all these xeno changes) xenos were at about 70% win rate. Over the next two weeks it was dropped down to 52% win rate for xenos. It sucks to be balanced.
But let’s think one step further: now that things are slightly more balanced maybe we can actually touch marines.
Every single time marines or xenos get a new fancy toy or buffed in some way someone comes along (usually one of you copers in this thread) and goes, “wa wa we need something back since they got X” and we’ve slowly but surely power creeped our way into fairly land where a lot of shit is frankly GOOFY. There’s no better way to state it: goofy.
The people here who have stated, “the community should have more of a say over these things” while simultaneously raging against nerfs are the problem. This is why you do not have a say. It does not feel good to be nerfed. The community will complain like crazy the whole time. Someone has to be able to sit down and go, “alright nerfs just need to happen to make the overall game better” and sadly you all are (currently) stuck with me.
A final note: this thread is rapidly reaching just yelling at each other and place to spew toxicity. Do what everyone else does: create a meta discord and echo chamber so hard you become a being of pure spite and hatred and then go insane and get permabanned. This is a game. No one paid to play it. I’m certainly not getting paid and am not going to put up with toxicity aimed at me. Take a breather man.
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Have you thought about taking criticism not as raging/malding/whining about nerfs, but as… legitimate criticism? I get that it it’s easier to just wave it all away as «hate bandwagon». But then it’s you who is in the echo chamber at the end of the day, merging stuff that gets backlash/criticism just out of spite I suppose.
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I don’t think Morrow is in an echo chamber considering how the community reacts to any change he and the developers put in.
Personally, I just go with the flow and hope we develop our way to a good place. If I have to tank nerfs to my preferred role/faction then so be it, the pendulum swings both ways and if you have played CM long enough its guaranteed you’ve gone through nerfs.
I mean if you listen only to your neverplayer dev friends it’s the definition of echo chamber.
I don’t really mind nerfs and I’ll be somewhat fine with 30/70 in favor of marines, but the way some of the nerfs are handled is disappointing. You can nerf nodes without making it annoying for builders. You can nerf invisible pushing (in 100 hours as lurker I used it like twice, so I can take it) without punishing lurkers for bumping into invisible preds. And so on.
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???
???
???
Reading these threads is a wild experience. I learn all sorts of things about myself and my apparent design goals.
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I don’t know chief. I’ll acknowledge some of this is just coping and malding, which happens any time people get nerfed, as you stated, but there’s also plenty of valid criticism.
Heavyhanded and poorly executed nerfs aren’t exactly ideal, and a couple people even popped off a few ideas of their own in place of them that seem like they’d solve the issue without being as incredibly annoying. LURKER STEALTH CHANGES
If your goal is to convince people to let you cook for a bit, then telling everyone they’re just malding and don’t have a valid opinion isn’t going to do that, even if that’s what you think. You’re just going to drive people deeper into ‘Morrow hates fun and doesn’t care about the community.’
I may not like your changes, but I respect that you are working on a game out of passion for it for free. I never believed you’re out here intentionally trying to make the game worse, even if I believe you might make missteps.
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This. Its even more true than I expected with the current playerbase, possibly even more so than the players of old.
Although, the things most people complain about isn’t really related to balance as you mentioned, but to poor handled changes like the lurker cloak and weed nodes/wall interaction, so as much as I agree with the above it doesn’t really excuse and address these. Its just handling an issue in a way that creates more issues.
I utterly fail to comprehend why’s it currently being done that way, since CM did successfully avoid these kinda problems throughout the years with very few exceptions. It just feels disconnected from the goal of fixing the gamestate if you’re knowingly introducing things someone in the future will similarly have to fix. Though I dunno maybe no one actually brought up the alternatives to you and we mistakenly assumed it was done - unsure how much you lurk.
The above is also true in regards to half assing changes, like lurker tackle nerf via crippling strike (doesnt solve no counter solo cap) or warrior nerf (encourages more unfun permastun via tackle and overnerfs it).
50/50 balance also aint worth much it if it means removing fun, in fact I’d bet many players would rather lose than deal with OT sadar/sniper/mortar spam/SG ball/prime warrior/screech cap/lurker cap/acid runner amongst others.
giwtwm 
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I thought the aim was for 60/40 win rate in favour of the aliens?
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