I’ve seen preds do it to marines after duel, random fight or even gear carriers once gear been taken away. Personally if I am a marine and pred fights me for reasons like I got a lot of kills so I am very worthy, theres a big thrill and dopamine for me in a fight where if I lose my head ends up as a throphy and if I win I get to claim a prize and get to interact with more preds, fight or RP. and if I carry pred gear thats like asking for trouble so I should expect it. me being returned to be revived kinda kills the mood for me like I am savescumming or something like that.
Outside of things like interruptions or accidental hc breaks, I will mainly just do it if I feel like it [don’t feel like decapping them] or I came for them and they put up a good fight.
Most people don’t like getting round removed even though they should expect it to be a possiblity when fighting preds.
I return bodies because either its more healthy for the current round or because the person gave a good fight.
it’s in the spirit of the whitelist to contribute to the round rather than detract from it, and returning corpses (assuming they didn’t piss you off sufficiently to skin them and eat their livers) is a good way to let a player have a round that got enhanced by having their ass kicked, rather than a round where they got sat out for 2 hours for being a bad boy
though they’re not really obliged to do it and in the end it depends on the pred
most of them are nice enough to do it though, it’s kind of a dick move to leave a guy’s corpse in a jungle to perma because they decided to try their luck, that kind of stuff just incentivises people to completely ignore you and make you observer+
I was solo scraping on the far side of strata once and got full on baited by the audio of a marine calling for help. I walked towards the noises and had a pred uncloak on me. I couldn’t run before the beating, but I was thankfully returned to fob after my unfortunate encounter (it was super funny for me because I was unaware of the mimicry but wasnt ready for that level of heat.) Other than that I’ve only ever really seen it on low pop where people are usually messing around more anyways (usually in the spirit of fair play) it is rare though
If I choose to fight YOU, I’ll usually throw them back. If you crash out in LOOC or refuse to fight and throw down your weapons you get the funny decap.
If you’ve got the meta PredHunter 9000 loadout and instantly try to frag out before I even start hunting people you can also enjoy becoming a skinned art installation.
I live and die by the d20 too, sometimes I roll a dice just for shits and giggles on how evil to be.
I understand some people might not like getting targeted by a pred if they didn’t start the fight, so in those cases I will return their body (if they atleast tried fighting back), if they didn’t try then they’re getting skinned right before the step of becoming unrevivable, losing your hair and partially your skin is a worse fate than being perma’d
If they’re being outright LRP then that’s a decap.
For xenos I’d usually leave them alive in crit but since the fix of not being able to butcher living xenos/humans, it doesn’t feel as great anymore to fight them if you intend of keeping them alive, atleast before you could do the early butcher steps and gain some of their meat and then dropping them off to weeds.
I personally just don’t like to round remove people often. If you start the fight in a cool way and there’s an epic dramatic scene leading to your death, then you will be worth having a trophy of. If I’m the one who starts the fight, it really depends how long that fight went on for- If you died super quick there’s no real point to making a trophy out of you ICly or OOCly, but if we had an epic multi-part battle to see who is victorious? Then it’s fair game.
There are a few players who actively rush after you and try to kill you every chance they get. Those ones still apply to above, but depending on circumstance, I might choose to take the trophy anyways.
I typically return most marines I kill to avoid any sour grapes, especially if I start the fight. There are a couple of robustos who i never skip a chance to take a trophy of when I beat them though
