Nesting Gameplay 2020 Discussion

[CABAL]

Ok, now that I have slept a bit and not behaving like an asshole, an honest question to ya: in cases where you were captured, how fair was your capture in your mind?

Invisible traps under every piece of garbage are pretty bullshit captures in my opinion. The fact that every beno gets magically notified and shit like that. They should be like Claymores, small, but noticable without glancing over with mouse.

[Heckenshutze]

I think it's important to understand that now nests can be built only near queen, which limits the cases of escaping. You cannot nest humans somewhere far away from the hive and hide. Marines will try to kick them off the hive grounds sooner or later, and if queen moving from location to location is an issue - you can be certain that queen feature will be the thing we change.

Didn’t know this. I think I can work with it.

[PogoMarimo]

Something to keep in mind Neth, as I'm sure you already know, is when a poll is run on something like this that's a nerf for marines is always going to poll poorly no matter how much it makes sense in game design terms.

I'm curious what percentage of marines actually successfully unnest AND actual free another marine, destroy an egg, or kill a xeno. I would imagine that number is extremely low, and it's a percent that's driven solely by how inattentive or bored the nest guards are. It several minutes of marines clicking resist and sentinels renesting. It's not a good gameplay loop. It's something I would expect from a bad 90s adventure game, not modern game design.

Ditch it, fill in the balance issues with more engaging gameplay mechanics. Marines will continue to whine about "the good ol' times" where they unnested, slashed a sentinel with their boot knife, then got renested. Ah, the good ol' times. They'll never consider the hundreds of hours of sentinel drudgery that go into make that 20 seconds of memories possible, and how unbalanced that "fun deficit" is for their sake.

[Boersgard]

Something to keep in mind Neth, as I'm sure you already know, is when a poll is run on something like this that's a nerf for marines is always going to poll poorly no matter how much it makes sense in game design terms.

I think a big issue is that so many players see this as a marine nerf/xeno buff, when it's really just attempting to fix an issue with nesting mechanics not being very fun in general.

It's not fun for xenos who have to babysit marines and be on the ball to prevent grenades/shotgunners getting out and killing or escaping
It's not fun to be the marine stuck in a nest who resists out and gets instantly sentinel stunned/warrior grabbed/drone tackled and stuffed back into the nest without a fight

Functionally, not being able to escape the nest at all is no different from how things go for marines most of the time they're nested anyways. I agree that we've gone from maybe 10-20% of marines being able to get a grenade off or fight, to 0%, and there's more people bursting etc. as a result, but it still hasn't changed the way things work for the majority of players the majority of the time.

Mostly what changed is perceptions and feelings. It's cathartic to break out of the nest and get a grenade off that kills you, even if you burst anyways. It's that last little 'fuck you' that I think people are missing the most, not the fact that they're inescapably dead anyways.

There is a gitlab suggestion: https://gitlab.com/cmdevs/ColonialMarines/issues/8885

That I believe mitigates some of the issues. I think this change - removing the devour mechanic - would go a long way to giving marines the fighting chance they want, while making it much tougher for xenos to simply cart someone across the entire map to an unbreakable nest the marine will never be rescued from.

Combined with shorter stun times on facehugging, and it should force xenos to either build nests closer to the front line, where marines can conceivably free each other, or else expend effort and take some risk, tackling and dragging a marine all the way to the main nest while potentially getting shotgunned or grenaded for it by a conscious fighting player.

Altogether, I prefer this new mechanic than the continual nerfs to breaking free of nests that we were going down. Rather this than the little modifications that are functionally approaching this but not taking it the whole way.

[Swagile]

people vote for the original nesting mechanic due to nostalgia, the overall bad handling of this addition, and because 3 second self stun in nests is terrible due to how bad nest mechanics are in general.

most of this thread has already explained why they don't want this new system; its not because the system is bad, but because for this to work, you need a wide array of changes put in to balance:

A) more frontline xenos (no one needs to guard anymore)
B) guaranteed larvae (no suicides / SSD larvae get killed anymore by escapee's)

there is probably other issues, like how easy it is to get captured due to current hugger + stun mechanics, but thats a discussion for another time. the above two are critical issues that need to be looked into, as its a major shift in how the game is played. with xenos being able to be at 100% while marines are still stuck at 80 or even 70% effectiveness (due to having to guard FOBs), while having constant reinforcements due to no suicides or deaths of larvae by escapee's, means xenos have to be braindead to lose

especially since xenos are balanced around small, hard to replenish numbers but being individually strong with fast regeneration rates while marines are balanced around large, hard to replenish but easy to recover numbers (defibs) with good blitzkrieg potential but bad sustain (hence why xenos have to play the stalling game till they are Mature, to out out sustain)

but with this update breaking that dynamic, we're back to marine steamrolls till its fixed

[kooarbiter]

I see that this makes people frustrated, and obviously EVERYONE will pick option three, because oh all the memorable times they were able to escape! Oh that 1% that is remembered forever.

But it is shit.

It is unfun for you as nested, it is even less fun for you as sentinel. The less fun you have as sentinel, the less fun is whoever was nested has.

I am ready to revert this change if queen can spawn AI controlled sentinels from the larva pool queen has that would just stand over you, as another player would, and it will neuro you as normal player would (hell, I even add a 0.5 second delay for AI reaction so you feel like you ALMOST achieved something), it will renest you as normal player would, and then after you burst, it will dissolve into free larva for next ENGAGING GAMEPLAY MOMENT.

Sometimes I look at pool results and I get why I don't collect feedback

Sometimes I feel like a dick and want to listen to feedback and show how many flaws it has

But maybe sometimes I'm wrong and behave like a dick. Who knows.

Here goes neth telling people that they dont enjoy a thing, because I guess the multiple people that said they did enjoy that gameplay loop dont exist. This is such a huge change I'm surprised dev's added it without a proper community poll or something before adding it. The votes for revert aren't all muh nostalgia at least some are legitimate criticism neth. Adding the sleep gas thing that was suggested would have honestly been a better idea since it adds things to the game rather than taking away shit to fix a problem that didn't exist.

[Nymphrena]

Putting in my two cents.

Not a huge fan of perma-nesting. It does remove the escape factor, even if that escape factor is only for popping a grenade and taking yourself out. Only once have I successfully escaped and made it back to the lines, and that was because I was left in the hive when the Queen and entourage moved out, and a path was left open. The rest of the time, it's usually die, or try to get out the grenade and still die.

That being said, I also didn't like how nesting was previously. It might have been before there was a change to the delay on escaping, but I've been on the receiving end of being in the doorway watching a nested host, and having them escape, wield their Mag Harn shotgun, and PB me before I can tackle them once. Dead Sentinel. It got to the point that I was actively killing Mag Harn Shotties rather than trying to capture them, because I felt we would lose more xenos trying to keep them captured than we would get in a burst. Losing proposition.

Another case is just being unlucky in tackle spam. Try to tackle, miss. Try two, miss. And try three is about the same time they're wielding their gun with the delay. Hope you hit that one, or you're dead. Again. Maybe I just suck, but there were a lot of times that the nest guard was a warrior simply because the grab is, honestly, OP, and can counter all the escape shenanigans. Any other caste, and you run the risk of Murphy eyeing you for some fun.

Couple ideas for things to consider for fixing things. All of these rely on reverting it back to escaping. That being said, I also haven't ever been able to play a structures test round, so it's without knowledge of what those will be.

Idea one: Remove Mag Harn from shotguns. I'm all for this idea, but I will admit I am extremely biased against the shotgun being the be all, end all weapon. It would mean that bad luck or a failed attempt to guard doesn't mean an instantly dead xeno, or more. I also know, Marine mains would riot, and it's probably not a good path for the game to go.

Idea two: Strengthen walls/membranes/doors to explosions. That is another thing. Marine gets free, drops a grenade, and their nest...the next nest over, and the one after that are all gone. Why not make it so that it will destroy the walls it comes against, but go no further? You can take yourself out, but if you want to take your buddy with you, you gotta make a hole. This may be a healthier way to go. It still allows for suicide, and if you can get out into an open area, you can still do significant damage. This would make it take more than just waking up, grabbing a grenade, and priming it all in the time for the resin door to open for the guard. The downside to this may be in strengthening the front lines against explosions, with xeno walls and doors being stronger there, but hell. What if it applied only to the membranes? Not only are they see through, but they're also somewhat elastic! For balance reasons, maybe make have less HP and easier to damage from slashes such as knives and punctures such as bullets so they aren't used on the front, but resistant enough to make grenades an option for the marine, and only that marine.

Anyway. My thoughts.

[Rekrul]

Personally I think it makes little sense as to why Marines were able to get out of nests in the first place. It's like the xeno lovingly strapped the marine into the baby nest and they were able to wiggle themselves out of it no problem??

That being said I am quite surprised an update/change of this magnitude was not discussed more with the community and you're seeing the reaction. This update is a massive xeno buff in quite a few ways.... dedicated xeno castes for guarding marines no longer required, xenos guarding captured marines are no longer required at all so hive is automatically stronger on every round and map then before... Drones no longer need to stress and waste time about making "secure hives" that might not even be used both inside the main hive and out in the wild at temp nests. This saves both time and plasma to do other things like weed the map more or build more walls/sticky. Marines can no longer have a chance of grenade killing themselves and denying the larva inside them from spawning. They also don't have a chance to whip out their magharn shotgun and point blank two xenos to death, a medal worthy achievement that really puts a sense of accomplishment into a captured marine. I've seen marines escape from their nest cause the xeno guarding them was alt tabbed watching a youtube video or whatever and the marine managed to nade and kill a ton of Larva and force the queen to deovi simply to deal with it..

The list goes on but you get the point.. It's almost as big a change as if you were to add the ability that metal bucket helmets prevent a hugger from stunning you, giving you a chance to kill it and move on with your day like nothing happened. Adding that in randomly would have lots of people freaking out just like this.

I low key think it's an update heading in the right direction but it should of been delayed and added in with something else in my opinion with a bit more community discussion perhaps. Seems kind of just thrown out there and hope for the best deal, though I know that isn't the case because I'm positive the dev team has a whole plan going into the future and this is just a small part of it. Looking forward to future change logs, especially in relation to this update.

[Nichodemius]

Killing an alt tabbed player watching YouTube because nesting is dull. It may give the marine a ooh yeah but in all honesty meh.
Also everybody just self nades. More Xenos being free sure is a buff but well more pressure decreases push and rush. The drone Plasma is minor because really it's only weeds and a few sticky. Something a hivelord or hive drone combo can outperform.
Also with population increase but maps staying the same size marines are always close to other ungas so capping becomes harder as pop increases. Then they self nade. This caused underground larva to be needed. And people complain Xenos don't cap but kill? It's a circle

[kooarbiter]

That's an entirely different direction. We chose to remove the mechanic because xeno numbers were low, xeno players were going frontline and forgetting about guarding, etc.


I know, dev xenomain, etc etc, but, I never had fun when nested

If xenos choose not to guard hosts, tell them to git gud, dont coddle them with braindead nesting.