the argument is not about me beeing robust or not... its just those 2-3 forum warrior decided to talk trash on me...
but yhea.. overall tread still should be about CM. not about me.
the argument is not about me beeing robust or not... its just those 2-3 forum warrior decided to talk trash on me...
but yhea.. overall tread still should be about CM. not about me.
nooooo cureent cm bad revert the code (never says why it'd bad besides OMG ROUND NOT 3 HOURS???)
Gonna throw my two cents in as a long term player (4+ years, staff for 2 including being an admin) who stopped playing at the beginning of 2019 and is now getting back into CM.
First thing, I was amazed by all the new changes, the mortars are such a cool change and all the QoL stuff is brilliant, there's loads of flashy new stuff like the APC and the research update which is sick, getting ready and equipped as a marine without all that faff is just fun and less of a hassle and everything is more polished basically.
Those are the good things I have to say. I've got a whole heap of points I want to make since i've thinking about this for absolutely ages and I feel contribute to the feeling that the game is declining (also I want to get the thread back on track but hush hush).
MOBA/XENO CHANGES
From what I have played and seen, the MOBA changes were meant to streamline xeno castes and make it easier to play, giving each caste a more defined role hence upping the skill floor but decreasing the skill ceiling and getting rid of one trick ponies (like BOO). In theory that's an amazing idea since back when I played a good xeno could stomp on marines, killing dozens with just a mere T2 caste, à la Feweh on the hunter/Sailor dave on anything. But it seems that xeno has just become very boring to play unless you get a T3 where you then have to carry the hive, the balance of power in the hive seems to have shifted to the 4/5 players that get lucky enough to get T3, removing the agency of players that want to play lurker or runner, since all you can do is just help the T3s score kills and act as meat shields which is not fun (apart from goddamn macro warriors which is the most un fun thing i've ever fought against in this game). That's the kicker, as a marine its not that fun to fight weak xenos like runner or lurker and at the same time it's not fun to fight a single T3 that tanks bullets and can kill marines fairly easily, the balance of power in a fight is so weighed in one direction that its just not fun to play. A good example of old CM is when I reguarly played (marine 70% of the time) you could robust a T3 if you were good enough on your own (I remember i killed a crusher on my own with an AP SMG during the first iteration of Ice), and if they were bad and a T2 could demolish you if they were good (previous examples of Feweh and sailor dave). Now it seems that a good T3 will demolish a section of marines, while a good T2 can't really do much.
Sidenote: What happened to the brutallity in CM? there used to be a lot more blood and limbs could get chopped off easily and that aspect of it was really fun, but nowadays it all seems very sanitised.
FOBs
When I played the meta was definetly focused on defence for marines, and FOB's actually served a good purpose rather than just a fall back point that gets demolished by xenos in ten minutes, before the new cade sprites, (we're talking 2/3 years ago) you would have these massive FOB sieges in nexus and if you were good enough you could kill the xeno force enough for them to pull back and then you would push to hydro where the xenos had a forward hive, and this back and forth would go on for maybe a couple of hours and it was always fun and engaging. Some of my favorite moments in CM was when I was a medic in a nexus siege keeping all the marines healthy enough to fight off the xeno horde until more marines came or until we killed enough for them to retreat: it was really fucking fun. Now what I see is maybe one or two cade lines, engineers at the front just fighting since there isn't a use for FOBs, since they can't hold at all, the most effective marine tactic is just rushing the xenos before they mature (I know that mechanic is gone now) or have any defences set up, since if they fail that assault they're fucked since xenos can roflstomp any FOB and there's no point retreating. Also, the fact is meta-rushing has always been a problem i'm not saying it wasn't, it just wasn't as prevelent and the hive could defend against assaults well. There aren't any flavour to FOBs or rounds anymore, it's just rush and die or rush and kill all the xenos.
Diminished support roles
Support roles have always been important to CM, there's CTs who help supply an FOB and the marines on the ground, there's the doctors who heal injured who can't be healed fully planetside and there is the command staff who direct and order the squads. Now everythings been massively streamlined, CT's are there to vend attachments maybe if the squad attachment vendors don't have what someone needs, a doctor will shove someone into an autodoc if they get any patients back before the round ends, to be the command staff have actually been pretty buffed, it's never been easier to order squads about and have the all info you need, because you have the tacmap and helmet cams. But it feels to me like all the support roles have been diminished so marines can unga charge and just die asap, don't get me wrong i'm not the biggest fan of forced RP or any of that, I dislike adding RP for RP sake (like uneeded breifings) but it's fun to feel like you're in a well oiled military machine with doctors and CTs and such, but sometimes people complain when you get a newbie who doesn't know how to doctor and it ruins it a bit for everyone so features have to be streamlined I get that. It just feels like everything that's not a marine has been dumbed down to accomodate the marines, take the survivor for example, i've read in a couple of threads staff plan to remove the role, because it doesn't suit CM anymore but in old CM survivor was a fun little challenging role and provided the marines with some emergent RP.
This also does extend to combat roles, in the hayday of being medic, so around 2017 before the pill bottle changes (even just off the cusp of medics not being able to do surgery anymore) you had amazing medics like Alissa Reiss, Alex Crossman and katie prevatt (can't really remember her name) that could keep a marine team going, but then slowly medics were nerfed and streamlined and just like xenos, the skill cap was lowered and the skill floor was raised. I used to main medic and it was my favorite role and I remember just hating them streamline it and nerf it and just pound any flair or uniqueness you could have when playing the role into the ground. This feels like a microcosm of the problems with the other support roles.
Emergent RP Vs Forced RP
Emergent RP is when roleplay is naturally fostered through situations made by players, so lets say a survivor is found by the marines and he has been severely wounded by the xenos, so a medic patches them up and they have a dialogue and talk about what happened to him the survivor could talk about the traumatic experience or tell them the caste that attacked them, therefore creating a nice little situation for RP. Forced RP would be if a staff member or rule required lets say a commander to have a briefing every round, they can say the same thing or a different thing to previous rounds but the framework is already there, you are forced to have this interaction and it easily gets boring and there's no excitement to it, it's like being forced to sit through a presentation it's not fun. The point here is CM has cut out quite a lot of opportunities for emergent RP (planning to remove survivor, diminishing support roles etc) by streamlining and railroading the experience, 2 squads are always forced to build an FOB, 2 squads scout and fight the xenos, said squads always rush. There's not much room for tactics or moving beyond that established framework. I get that as devs to balance the experience you must railroad a few things, but the freedom you used to have has been crushed, research can't make grenades anymore (might of been updated so they can) roles stick to their framework and there's no room for exploration within it.
I love TGMC because it is CM thats 100% a TDM and a fun shooter, but the thing I absolutely adored about CM is the combination of fun gameplay with emergent RP and now it's been railroaded by the devs and just a general meta so now that both gameplay and RP just suck.
OOC vs IC and the conflict between the two/bitching about MPs for a paragraph
From the very beginning of when I started playing I used to speak to Apop (is his name forbidden here? idk) about the direction he wanted to take with the game, and he always told he wanted eventually to phase out mods and admins just so the game could be handled totally mechanically with IC solutions, that's one of the reasons why MPs were added (apart from Apop's boomer military experiences) to act as mini moderators in the round (also why he locked pill bottles and stuff like that, so people couldn't powergame and steal the medics job) and from what I can see now, is MPs act like shitlers that ruin rounds for people and are just a role to essentially soft grief players (CoronelJones/ that era of MPs but worse). The role itself has no use and no one knows how to implement it, especially since we have mods and admins to deal with issues ingame. There's just a conflict between the OOC and the IC solutions, and it's to hard fix it since you can't exactly remove moderators in the games current state and no one is willing to touch MPs because the whole culture around it is toxic as fuck (people have told me there is a meta discord of MP players that try and find new ways to brig marines). So it's really is up to the admins and devs to decide between OOC or IC solutions to in game issues instead of trying to combine the two since they are inherently incompatible.
Lack of Direction
Due to the various dramas and such which I won't get into, the game has switched from host to host, who all have a different direction and vision for the game. The one I know most about is Apop's, where he tried to enforce the 70% winrate meme, which sounds dumb until you consider what that actually means, because from his perspective, the marines were the main the characters and he wanted each round to be a triumphant struggle for victory against a superior xeno force, which admittedly was hard to pull off while still being fun. But, once he "left" the server switched from host to host and I don't know what the current direction for the game is, but it is definitely not the same one apop had in mind and implemented the core features around, the balancing is completely off, but then again when isn't it in CM. Are the devs trying to make it a Millsim or a TDM or an RP focused server, I don't know. It seems the game has been suffering from a lack of a clear direction and therefore you just meander through mediocrity until the game dies.
Conclusion
I didn't mean for this to become an effort-post but here we are, I feel like CM is declining due to all those things i've mentioned above, and most importantly it's just not that fun to play anymore, the magic and the spark it used to have has dimmed loads for me, it might be burnout (or the massive amount of lag you get a round seriously whats up with that?) but it also feels like the updates the game has had, has lessened the experience, I remmeber for april fools day the staff did a rollback of the code to around the beginning of 2018, and everyone LOVED it. I feel like if you were to start back from there, port over a few QoL features added from the previous year and start again with a sense of direction and purpose you could make this game a shining gem again. There's no reason why it can't, people flocked to CM for a reason and god knows it's not the community. It's like 2am now and I really want to sleep so i'm gonna finish this up quick. CM is not declining, from a gameplay point of view, its already declined, and I think the best option is rolling everything back to 2018 and restarting, the only people left are hanging on waiting for a better game to appear or are hopeful the game will pick up again.
Then again, that's just my 2 cents.
Obviously the main issue is the specific targeting of RP. For some reason the devs are literal pants on head retarded in this regard, and think they can forge a TDM out of a game designed almost exclusively for short term massive roleplay. God I don't want too bitch to much because they have done some very nice things (Defcon rework, the mortar, ect). But their insistence to make it a team based shooter in spite of what the fanbase obviously wants is silly. Now they want too remove the survivor roll because it doesn't "match their future vision of the game"? Hell when is every shipside role gonna be scrapped for vendors and AI, because it doesn't fit into their gameplay balancing. There hasn't been an admin CLF/UPP event in forever as far as I can tell, and everything just gets neutered. At this point, why even force the marines too not know what xenos are.
Contrary to popular belief I personally want to reform all the rules and get rid of the 500,000 unwritten rules and make it that more things are IC for MPs to handle.
Unhinged retiree boomer man
Get off my lawn you kids
+1 to thisOriginally Posted by ThesoldierLLJK
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE MPERINO'S GOTTA DO MY JOB FOR ME I'M SO BUSY TRYING TO FIND.....Uhhh......IC character breaks?
It doesn't help that events are overwhelmingly bad, and there isn't any good way to talk to staff about how the event could have been done better.
And yeah what Soldier said, just let MPs take care of most things IC and only bring in OOC enforcement for OOC rule breaks (Griefing, raiding, new player took an important role and needs help, etc)
That's kind of the point of security on SS13. They deal with things IC, but in a fun way. You can't make the security team overwhelmingly powerful or else you get the current iteration of MPs where they are untouchable IC and OOC if they aren't retarded.
I actually prefer the days when admin teams didn't give a shit about MP's (I say this as an MP main). It was fun seeing marines test what exactly they could get away with, and vis a vis doing your best to stop the station from coming apart at the seams.
that's literally what the point of security is on regular SS13
staff seem to have forgotten that entirely
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