I've been holding off from creating this thread for the past 4 years or so, ever since admins used to asleep marines who were found in the river of LV before the 12:50 mark or whatever arbitrary number they chose back then, but it seems that the issue has been more and more prevalent in the lastest meanwhile, to the point that i wish to bring it up for discussion here, on the forums, as i refuse to use the gitlab in the hopes that it won't get buried under hundreds of suggestions and bug reports and everything else.
The purpose of this thread is to discuss the issue of "metarushing" in any of its shapes and forms, including the admin / moderation intervention in its prevention.
I will preface my point with the conclusion and go through a heuristic process in order to prove it. Metarush did not, does not and will not exist.
No matter the map, no matter the situation, it is impossible to put a definitive definition to what counts as "metarush" and what doesn't. In fact, "metarushing" isn't even directly mentioned in the rules of the server, nor has it ever been, at least to my knowledge. Absolutely, it falls under the rule against "metagaming", but it's entirely up to interpretation as per rule 0.1, but it seems that recently administrators have been thinking of it as a highly set in stone rule that might as well be rule -1, which, in my opinion, is highly wrong. In the long, long past, i had this one round where the CO ordered us, the marines, to set up the FOB at the tablefort on LV, which was considered, by the admins of the time, entirely valid. So where did the shift in paradigm happen towards this "rule"? The first mention of the metarush issue on the forums is this post by toroic (massive respect, man) https://cm-ss13.com/old/viewtopic.ph...t=8524&p=90021, which asked the same thing that i am doing now, and even provided a good solution for it, but unfortunately the suggestion was ended with the addition of the LV fog and dropped forever. Metarush was never clearly defined and was never properly "handled" before the addition of mechanics to stop it (the fog on LV, the lockdown on prison). I personally do not believe that metarushing, as a concept, exists and should not be handled by moderators, admins, system administrators, staff or what have you.
Now, to reinforce my point, as a player on both sides and nothing more:
The roleplay standards of the server have massively fallen since i last played consistently, cca 2016. Even back then, i didn't believe that metarushing existed, taking both sides into consideration. If marines came to the north of the river too quickly, it meant that they would leave no defenses behind and it would be trivial for xenos to push them all the way back to retreating, as around then the fashion of "turtling" was a lot more popular than today. From the perspective of the marines, i didn't believe that it existed because people would constantly get captured because of the existence of hugger combat, and at some points we were even disallowed from rescuing our fellows by admins, simply because not enough time had passed. This was highly frustrating at the time, but thankfully most of the issues have been mechanically fixed now. However, i believe that if even back then, when the roleplay standards were slightly higher than now, the situation was frustrating, and detrimental to enforce for both sides, it's even more so the case now, when roleplay matters a lot less than back then.
This is NOT a suggestion, and i do not ask for rule clarification or addition of mechanics or anything; the purpose of the thread is simply to discuss the issue and what has been presented in this OP is entirely my own opinion. My conclusion, that metarushing did not, does not and will not exist, stands and i will continue to stand by it forever, no matter what direction the server decides to go.
Please, discuss this issue with civility.