It’s best era is every round where I’m on the winning team.
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Heian era
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Hard to say. Probably 2022-23 or so. Around the time of this video.
I miss mostly the more lax attitude the admins and community had, today things are too restrictive, too much handholding and strict rules.
But I also miss the time where there was 8+ hour rounds 
, when the tech tree thing was for both sides, that shit made rounds so long, but it was rewarding. Drop-pods dropping Incend rounds for the MK2, buckshot, stims, amazing stuff. Also Xenos having it too was cool, but yeah it was very unbalanced, but fun.
The current marine tech-web is boring in comparison, needs some cooler stuff.
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CM is kind of peak right now? but 2020 was a good year there was Yautja versus Xeno hive drama it was fun as hell. 2021 there was a surge of players unlike any other time the server was genuinely hitting like 250 concurrent players for a good month or two, dunno if that’s unusual. 2018 was a good year for CM cause a lot of new things were being added to the server namely moving away from box station. Dunno CM is just kind of timeless imo. Sure I’m not nolifing it like getting a Prime status in a month but there really isn’t another game as immersive and fun. Started playing this game heavily to replace the itch to go play Starcraft Broodwar Custom Game, forgetting the name, where you are a marine and you get equipment slots and you have to engage in a military Operation against Zombies but it’s all covert ops.
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Honestly, i liked pre nuke/resin pylon CM. Pre larvaqueue when i could spam out lives and not care abt dying as beno. Doubleburst and unnerfed ROF on weapons
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I quite liked 2020 CM where it felt more like a slow siege game a-la foxhole where you were just a small cog in a big machine, xenos had a lot more HP because of maturity, and armor was a much bigger factor (armor served as a second HP pool that barely got depleted by non AP ammo; a crusher had something like 1600 effective HP (their armor pool took like 20 minutes to regen to full though).
The game was also a lot more obfuscated, there was a wiki with a fairly basic quickstart guide, but nowhere near the amount of info you have now to minmax (though again, part of this was just being new at the time and so having the joy of not already having learned everything.)
Overall the game just played a lot slower then, esp. with the addition of the classic slideshow lag on top of it. There were significant downsides too though, stuff like double shotgun memes that meant the top players could absolutely stomp while the avg player was just kinda fodder-- this is still a thing but it’s been lessened to an extent over time.
modern CM is a pretty different beast it’s more of an asymmetrical squad shooter, more Squad than Foxhole, It’s better in any measurable way but I do miss that old experience-- it’s why I’m a bit of a whiskey outpost enjoyer because it has a taste of that; esp. now with it’s rework, though it’s also very flawed (people complain about standing behind a wall shooting but that’s just what the game was when WO was created.)
re: techwebs, the fundamental idea is good it’s just the implementation that struggled, especially the actual things you got and the objectives.
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Maturity and armour shredding mechanic AFK sim 
I sorely miss the old round times though. I know the push for shorter rounds is intentional, but man do I fucking hate it. These shorter rounds just feel bad, spend half an hour AFK or gearing up just to spend half an hour playing the game 
Ammo and resource scarcity? Never heard of it. Woe, infinite mats and AP ammo upon ye.
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I don’t think its particularly had a best era yet. Atleast nothing stands out in my mind as “when it was good“ and nothing stands out as “when it got bad.“
CM is an enjoyable game and my enjoyment of it has been consistent during my time playing.
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I think there are many eras which often had some high-quality aspects of it, but people don’t often remember the negatives as clearly.
An example:
Sulaco having atmos, custom telecoms, hidden doors, MTs in spacesuits trying to fix the breach from the dropship to try normalising the pressure and oxygen. This was all very soulful. Having marines passing out from oxyloss wasn’t great however, nor was the rounds restarted due to the griefers flooding ship with plasma during briefing.
I think my favourite era of CM, there’s many examples over the years of features I love, gameplay wise as a marine was when the game was more punishing but also had some depth to amend punishing aspects.
Helmet Decaps: Being able to be decapped with helmets, but if a surgeon was nearby and they were EXTREMELY quick, you could do head reattachment surgery.
Combat Amputations: Cutting off someone’s arm on the field to turn an otherwise unrevivable person alive, but then they had to go shipside.
“Blind Paradrops”: Being able to jump with a parachute without a flare, landing somewhere on the colony. It truly like a campaign in an old Brothers in Arms campaign, trying to link up with your squad, finding them alive, dead, wounded, or merely just missing.
Old Research Botany: Cutting up xeno bodies to upgrade armours (more acid proof, etc), the botany was still RNG but wasn’t RNG for a medicore chemical you needed to make every round, growing from the same 5-6 plants you had to grow every single round.
Working Joes actually being seen “Pre WL purges,” you’d see people as Working Joes quite a lot, it’s rare, I’d argue extremely rare, to see people as a WJ outside of hijack now, which is a shame as they can make the setting more…. ambient, like it’s a lived-in world, rather than a player.
Just a few things which I did really enjoy over the years, I could go on and on. Theres a lot of features I personally miss, but we also have many great QoL features in the game, and things which encourage roleplay and set the ambience. Fax Responders, Liaison Bodyguards, slightly more things for shipside engineers to do. All good stuff.
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2018-2020 was my favorite era, I liked the idea of techwebs, and plus there was still fun stuff like disposal cannons, dipping cigarettes into medicine to smoke it, and I think E grilles were still a thing. Things had more depth it felt like, and if you knew how to do something not told to you directly (or had someone teach you) it was always to say you had some kind of hidden skill/tactic under your belt. Also we had Atmos to worry about, power was something to actually manage, we had working airlocks, and cloning. I remember one time for a short while where we had plasma vent objectives we could control for defcon on both sides, why did we just abandon that? Also I hope I’m not going senile but I remember some nights there was movie nights in the discord, which was also cool.
CM now feels very cookie cutter and almost corporate. Something cool in the code you discovered? Bug exploit, patched. Made a cool disposals cannon or a plastic explosive strapped to a rolling chair? No no no, that’s now been fixed, have a CM day! Plus the discord doesn’t really build “community”, like what happened to the town halls? Or game nights? Or movie nights?
Currently in game CM feels like “spawn in, get your shit, listen to the same “push probable xeno location” plan or the suicide split drop plan (or sit in the dropship), chungus, die or win, rinse and repeat. Removing fun engineering things you could do also kills MT too, hell they’re practically replaced at this point by working joes save for the occasional bar they make.
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I agree man. Some of the spark has gone missing. Some of the soul is gone. Feels more sterile and corporate.
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It’s not the game that matters the most, it’s the people you’re playing with.
A good solid fun group of people can make even a really boring game a lot of fun. Especially when it comes to the staff and admins running things.
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I first starting out learning CM in like 16/17. But I am one of those weird guys who play for a couple of weeks and then lurk for a year. Come back again, rinse and repeat. The best part is I forget half of what happened. Sometimes there’s brand new stuff like back with the tank, then the tank was gone, for example. I used to be better at writing some notes for funny shit that happened each round. So I guess maybe I don’t have a favorite era, just favorite moments from each. Then sometimes I get lucky recording hilarious shit like this one around two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqZGztyN9Nk
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I like the era when devs played and tried to buff their side, which led to a mess but funny mess. But then like in life, when it hits a peak it’s gonna go down and I feel like we’re unluckily in a downfall era. Not to say devs not doing anything about the downfall but… yea idk.
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Being completely honest, mechanically I don’t think CM is much better or worse than it was back in the first few years started playing (2022-2023ish). There’s parts of the game that were removed that I miss, but there’s been some neat additions too, and tons of tiny QoL improvements that I don’t think I would notice until they were gone. Mostly I just miss playing with my friend. We would hop on CM everyday after school, and when it was summer, we played non-stop. It was stupid, it was silly, and I miss it terribly. I’ll never miss a game mechanic as much as I miss having a terrible twin to play CM with.
TL;DR: The best era was when I started and made the most amount of friends
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I miss Tater as well.
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I miss the era where we had buildable comms in the FOB and the Comrade Sentry which was pretty much a laser death ray for the xenos. Around 2020s or so.
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deployable comms dead and comrade sentry for FOB added during morrow era so your era should be around pre 2023.
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2018-2021 is when it was best since the rounds can go very slow.
If everyone gets 2x the HP + 2x the resource the game would be in its best again.
Like shootouts can actually happen where everyone just doesnt die instantly.
and xenos/marines would be punished less for mistake + have more staying power. (just keep the same damage values). It would be fun to slash away and shoot guns away nonstop.
Let CAS get 2x the point generation
Let marines get 2x req points
What makes the game fun is when factions feel like the win is actually worth and not some zoomer <30-40 minute rounds.
Not gonna lie i miss the old 3-4 hour rounds (actually 5-7 hours) depending on time dilation.
Nowadays it just feels speedrun slop rounds
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