Yeah tho this isn't a TDM sadly. It's -supposed- to be RP.
Even if I agree it narrows strategical options, that's just how it is; a mix up of weird repetitive RP.
Yeah tho this isn't a TDM sadly. It's -supposed- to be RP.
Even if I agree it narrows strategical options, that's just how it is; a mix up of weird repetitive RP.
Originally Posted by dauntasa
Once more the following is my opinion and not that of the entire team.
First, many of the suggestions are stuff loads of people want but we do not want to implement. There is loads of people advocating for CL, Queen, CMP whitelists. I feel confident in saying that we as a team had that discussion and do not want to implement those. Having it suggested again when we already have a position on it is not constructive. I do not want to spend my time arguing about if we should have X Y or Z and how it can be adjusted to still address the concerns we have.
The idea does not have to be bad, it might just be a perspective or priority thing. The second I make an essay about why we are unwilling to do X, Y or Z I get attacked on 3 out of my 10 points. The other 7 still stand and I am not there to go back to those other 3 points 5 times. And even so all points are often not facts but opinions. As frustrated you are for feeling devs do not listen to you we, feel 100% the same and not listened to when we voice our opinion.
That brings me to the next part. Almost anything you put here is an opinion. It is even mostly an opinion I can 100% disagree with. (Not that I do.)
Next up if I list the things said shorthand:
- In terms of implementation, it's free.
- Functionally, it wouldn't change anything about the actual gameplay.
- Xenos are around the DS and know marines are stronger than survivors.
- After first contact marines get/have all info anyways.
- Marines powergame by taking the best gun.
- It would add to the RP.
- People dislike repetition.
- It would improve rp and strategy.
- You could have background with other characters.
1. It is not free in implementation at all. And functionally, it wouldn't change anything about the actual gameplay.
I bundled these 2 because most can be said about both.
Everything in the entire game made so far has had to abide by this premise.
We have rules and mechanics in place to aid with this. Aliens need time to grow. When marines (meta) rush too hard, aliens have a hard game.
This is because the game was not made for it. It is called a (meta) rush because guess what, marines should not have the info on the hive. Making it a valid strat means an entire rebalance on the game is required.
And that is just stuff that is already fully implemented.
We are busy implementing an entire objective system based upon the premise of finding out what happened to the colony.
What you call a small change I call 6 months of development wasted. (Objectives were started before Spook's retirement.)
This is not the only thing in development and yes, it can be adjusted 100%.
2. Xenos are around the DS and know marines are stronger than survivors.
It has been stated again and again that the xeno's have a hive mind.
Now the hivemind is not limited to that planet. Guess what we have queen mother on another planet.
Xeno's have encountered humans before. A huge chunk of humanity is not part of the USCM.
Heck, the entire sector here is contested. AND LORE WISE XENOS HAVE ENCOUNTERED MARINES BEFORE. But all of those marines died.
So, yeah somehow lore wise this can be explained.
(Side note: Xenos hanging around the lz might be poor roleplay but I honestly think poor roleplay will not be solved by enacting this change. But more on that later.)
3. After first contact marines get/have all info anyways.
I think this is a moot point. It is a point about the roleplay standards of the server.
I am going to go into the roleplay a bit more at the end though to explain what I mean.
4. Marines powergame by taking shotguns with buckshot. (A weapon good against aliens)
Honestly we are a medium rp video game.
I expect no marine on this server to pick weapon A or B for roleplay reasons.
I even encourage people to pick what they think is strong because we track that.
And all the change would do is give them an ic reason to powergame. (At least you might think.)
But here is the next thing. The entire premise of the game is that the colony went dark.
The distress signal is a normally on signal that gets broken.
No one pressed a button to send it. All you know is that something is going on.
This means that at the time of deployment even with the change you do not know what caused this.
You still do not know if you will be facing clf/upp/xeno's.
5. It would add to rp.
This one is an opinion, and it is an opinion I disagree with.
It would indeed remove a lot of metagaming because that info would now be IC.
That would actually make for less metagaming indeed.
But it would not add to the RP.
You cannot metagame in Call of Duty but I would certainly not call it a High RP game.
Someone who can metagame and chooses not to is roleplaying.
When we make the game so you cannot metagame you are removing the chance to metagame and thus removing the option to roleplay.
Thus, removing the chance for someone to roleplay IMO decreases the overall roleplay.
Because someone no longer has the option to fail rp does not mean you increase rp.
6. People dislike repetition.
This one is also opinion.
Yes, it would likely make some rp less repetitive.
But in general we also have people coming here just for that.
You are also not limited by the setting and still have loads of ways to deviate each round.
You yourself make the argument gameplay won't change that much.
This is based upon personal preferences.
7. It would improve rp and strategy.
See my earlier point about forcing people to have a chance to fail rp.
In general improving strategy is also something not measurable.
And if strategies get that much better, we need that much more rebalancing.
I myself am someone who does not even want improved strategy.
What I like is to see variation in strategy rather then the one optimal one.
8. You could have background with other characters.
Part of roleplay is making up a background.
Having to make a background without knowing what aliens are should not be a problem at all.
I do not mean to insult anyone here.
Even if we did this previous rounds are still ooc. You cannot just explain away someone dying.
Every round is a round in it's own tiny universe.
Thus swapping stories ic is not about previous ops anyways and if they are you should be able to rp well enough to do it now anyways.
I could understand it if it had an RP benefit at the cost of gameplay. But it has become an RP detriment as well. It just strangles it at this point. Forcing it into this confine just makes people say and do the same things over and over again. Rather than fostering good RP, the rule now does the opposite: it forces people into awkward, immersion-destroying RP scenarios over and over again. The conflict between the necessities of gameplay and what we're supposed to know about IC destroys any believable RP in the early game.
Let's go over the start of a typical LV round and what effect the First Contact Rule has on it. The marines deploy. 1 squad stays to fortify the LZ. 2 squads head straight to Hydro and fortify it until the fog goes down, the last squad probably does power and then joins them at Hydro. Why do they do this? How do they know that the threat is beyond the fog, and that hydro is the best place to fortify? They don't. There's not a single thing they know IC to indicate that this is the case. So, why don't the admins declare this strategy meta and crack down on it? From where I can see, 2 reasons: First one is that if you don't do this, the marines pretty much lose, and the admins don't want to essentially force the marines to lose in order to satisfy this rule. This points to the fact that this rule is largely incompatible with the current game balance and things only work because in a lot of cases it gets completely ignored. As for the RP, that's covered by reason number 2: People don't have fun wasting their time doing things that they know OOC are totally useless, even if IC they would seem like a good idea. If you're a marine investigating a ruined colony, and there's a sealed off dome full of weird research specimens, you'd probably check it out to see if it had anything to do with the disaster. So, why don't the marines check the secure domes? Because OOC, they know there's nothing in them, because the xenos always spawn across the river. If you waste your time checking out the secured domes, knowing full well that there's nothing in them, you feel like an idiot. You don't RP it because the exact same situation has played out thousands upon thousands of times and all possible interesting RP has been extracted from it. If you're ordered to check the secure domes, you sullenly pick through the rubble until command orders you to do something useful. However, if nobody goes and investigates the domes, and you all move directly to hydro and start setting up for the river crossing without even mentioning them, you're constantly reminded of the fact that this is a game, you are not a marine, you are a guy sitting as his computer playing a videogame where you shoot aliens. The conflict between what your character should think and what you, the player, are thinking kills the immersion, and immersion is necessary for RP to be enjoyable. This conflict is one of two big problems which currently prevent CM from being a good RP experience. The other one is the fact that stomping xenos doesn't provide a lot of opportunities for good RP, but if you put the marines at an inherent disadvantage to prevent them from stomping the xenos then instead what you get is everyone being too focused on not dying to RP about anything. The second problem, as I see it, is a complicated thing and fixing it would require incredibly precise game balancing and I can completely understand why the devs haven't managed to get it quite right yet. The first one, however, could be solved instantly and with no effort at all, which is why I'm so confused as to why it hasn't been.
Gotta agree with that. But hey, it's CM. People don't want to RP they just want to unga.
Also you described metagame and people just don't care about it. Not pointing out few people really knows what meta is...
Sad stuff right?
Everyone thinks its stale RPing the same thing over and over and having the same interactions over and over and that knowing about xenos some how will magically change that (it wont all the new interactions will become repetitive in the same way it will just make things fresh temporarily). Heres an idea to freshen things up. Make every marine have a random name and no ooc tag so no one knows anyone then you will have new interactions every round.
Xenos have already received massive roundstart evo bonuses. The dropship is mechanically unable to drop until 12:15 and by that point the xenos typically have T3s up and rolling. I will also point out that Metarushing currently is the strat that marines actually use on Prison and Big Red anyway. They don't use it on LV because it's mechanically restricted and they don't use it on Ice because trying to rush the underground just kills everyone. And if, despite the fact that it's already the thing that people do anyway on maps where it works, it suddenly became a massive problem after this change, that could be fixed by appending one sentence to the end of it. "PS: Metarushing rules still apply, just because you know xenos exist doesn't mean that you're allowed to sprint to the hive immediately, you don't necessarily know exactly where it is". Worst case scenario you might have to change one line of code so that the dropship is restricted until 12:25 instead of 12:15. And other than metarushing, I can't think of a single mechanical thing this would actually affect at all.
As for your proposed objective system, without knowing the specifics I can't comment on it exactly. I would hope and expect that the basic code and ideas behind it could survive such a change without too much effort.
If xenos are a hivemind who have encountered marines before and know how they work, they should be able to understand what landing zones are for, and predict that some kind of armed response will probably show up in them at some point. If they don't know what landing zones are and have never encountered the concepts of armed responses or aircraft, they probably shouldn't be so concerned with hanging around them.It has been stated again and again that the xeno's have a hive mind.
Now the hivemind is not limited to that planet. Guess what we have queen mother on another planet.
Xeno's have encountered humans before. A huge chunk of humanity is not part of the USCM.
Heck, the entire sector here is contested. AND LORE WISE XENOS HAVE ENCOUNTERED MARINES BEFORE. But all of those marines died.
So, yeah somehow lore wise this can be explained.
(Side note: Xenos hanging around the lz might be poor roleplay but I honestly think poor roleplay will not be solved by enacting this change. But more on that later.)
It's really not a moot point, it kind of displays the fact that everyone's kinda tired of the whole thing better than anything else. Nobody RPs slowly discovering the alien threat and its characteristics, which is presumably the idea. Instead, everybody uses the first possible excuse they can get their hands on to discard this rule and move on with their game.3. After first contact marines get/have all info anyways.
I think this is a moot point. It is a point about the roleplay standards of the server.
I am going to go into the roleplay a bit more at the end though to explain what I mean.
Everybody knows that they'll be fighting xenos. Everybody acts like they'll be fighting xenos. By your own admission, the staff is not going to force them to act like they aren't going to be fighting xenos, because people would hate it and it's basically unenforceable. So, then, what is the purpose of forcing everyone to TALK like they aren't fighting xenos? To avoid powergaming? What powergaming would this allow? I mean, test runs have been done with this rule. I've played them. They typically included 2 caveats, which were "don't goo up the LZ before the marines arrive" and "don't instarush the hive", and they went just fine. I didn't see much in the way of powergaming at all, or at least no more than I saw without it.4. Marines powergame by taking shotguns with buckshot. (A weapon good against aliens)
Honestly we are a medium rp video game.
I expect no marine on this server to pick weapon A or B for roleplay reasons.
I even encourage people to pick what they think is strong because we track that.
And all the change would do is give them an ic reason to powergame. (At least you might think.)
But here is the next thing. The entire premise of the game is that the colony went dark.
The distress signal is a normally on signal that gets broken.
No one pressed a button to send it. All you know is that something is going on.
This means that at the time of deployment even with the change you do not know what caused this.
You still do not know if you will be facing clf/upp/xeno's.
The problem is that people do continuously metagame. All the time. Constantly, with every action they take, they metagame. They do not get punished, because if they were to be punished for it the game would be unplayable. In its current state, to not metagame is to die. For example: If you are infected by a facehugger, you know that without surgery, you will die. IC, you know nothing of the sort. IC, you feel basically fine and nothing much seems to be wrong with you. And yet, everybody goes to get surgery. The doctors have no idea what that foreign body in you is. IC, if the patient appears to be basically fine, leaving them for observation and seeing whether the object needs to be removed or not is the standard procedure. But they always pull it out immediately, because they know OOC that the patient will die. Similar examples appear throughout the game. 95% of the actions people carry out in this game are willful metagaming. This fact creates distance between people and their characters, and hinders their ability and desire to RP. It makes it all too obvious that it's a game.5. It would add to rp.
This one is an opinion, and it is an opinion I disagree with.
It would indeed remove a lot of metagaming because that info would now be IC.
That would actually make for less metagaming indeed.
But it would not add to the RP.
You cannot metagame in Call of Duty but I would certainly not call it a High RP game.
Someone who can metagame and chooses not to is roleplaying.
When we make the game so you cannot metagame you are removing the chance to metagame and thus removing the option to roleplay.
Thus, removing the chance for someone to roleplay IMO decreases the overall roleplay.
Because someone no longer has the option to fail rp does not mean you increase rp.
Also, you can still fail RP in a number of ways even without metagaming. That's not the only way to fail RP in this scenario. We're supposed to be RPing as a marine, marines act in specific ways and we have roleplay guidelines which indicate the staff interpretation of what that is.
Go observe a round, and read what people say, and listen to their conversations and watch their actions. I'm talking mostly about the start of the round here, where this rule causes the most problems. Try to find people who are really into the first contact RP. Now, you'll find a couple, no doubt. But these people are generally new players, for whom the first contact RP stuff is all fresh and new. I'm talking like, "started playing in the last 2 days" new here. By the end of the first week, if that, they generally burn out on it. You can maybe find a couple of non-new players who are still into it, but the vast majority of players are gonna fall into the "desperately looking for the first excuse they can find to ditch it for the rest of the round" camp. Now, I don't like repetition in my RP, and that is certainly an opinion. But observation of how people act and talk in actual rounds has shown me that this is definitely not a rare opinion. I haven't done a survey or anything, but I THINK it's probably shared by most of the players.6. People dislike repetition.
This one is also opinion.
Yes, it would likely make some rp less repetitive.
But in general we also have people coming here just for that.
You are also not limited by the setting and still have loads of ways to deviate each round.
You yourself make the argument gameplay won't change that much.
This is based upon personal preferences.
Variation in strategy is exactly what we DON'T see under the current rule. 9/10 times I can predict exactly what the CO is gonna order us to do without going to briefing. The only variables are what squads do what assignments. When I say improving, what I mean really is "expanding". I don't want to see a singular optimal strategy either. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we have! Early game strategy within the constraints of this rule is mostly a solved problem. When you say you can't measure variation in strategy, I disagree. When it's this poor, you can absolutely measure it. Go copy down the briefings from 10 rounds, with 10 COs, on the same map, and see how different they are from each other. And if you get an oddball strategy or two, ones that aren't like the others, did they work?In general improving strategy is also something not measurable.
And if strategies get that much better, we need that much more rebalancing.
I myself am someone who does not even want improved strategy.
What I like is to see variation in strategy rather then the one optimal one.
I mean this wasn't really meant to be a salient point in the first place when I said it but you responded to it so whatever. When I say you can incorporate previous experiences, yes, you'd have to edit them to make them fit in with the current round's timeline. But at least it'd be an option. If a guy talks about the CLF battles he was in, you know he's bullshitting because that's not the game. But if someone were to regale you with the time he was trapped between a queen and 3 crushers with nothing but a pocket knife and managed to slip his way out and make it on the dropship just as it was taking off, well he may well be telling the truth even if he had to edit out the part where a ravager decapitated him 20 minutes later.8. You could have background with other characters.
Part of roleplay is making up a background.
Having to make a background without knowing what aliens are should not be a problem at all.
I do not mean to insult anyone here.
Even if we did this previous rounds are still ooc. You cannot just explain away someone dying.
Every round is a round in it's own tiny universe.
Thus swapping stories ic is not about previous ops anyways and if they are you should be able to rp well enough to do it now anyways.
Alien do not get t3 until around the 12:23 mark. And T3 are not that strong you want t3 to grow. Then we also have the extra hosts that burst. Those will burst later.
The amount of larva that get populated is mechanicly restricted so even if all monkeys burst there is still time between larva unborrowing.
Marines metarushing is the exact thing we are making randomization in maps.
And the fact that this would validate meta rushing makes it only worse of a problem not better.
I am not going to bash the administration team but in my opinion meta rushes are a administration team problem (as well.)
Moving the timer is also not something I see as a solution.
And the entire idea is that these are research colonies/stations where an outbreak happened.
If they know about the aliens why not protect these stations way better.
The code would the idea behind it less.
The specific incident I am refering at is Whiskey Outpost.
Whiskey Outpost has a (crashed) dropship. Aliens likely saw it crash. The only thing they likely don't know is where the lz is.
Nothing is defined about where those aliens came from. But marines look enough alike to know they are dangerous.
And the militairy has enough protocol to be doing almost the same things.
But once more that has always been an accepted fact and a dropship technicly has to fly overhead in a noticeable way.
You would see it land it would not appear suddenly.
So because we have people who rp poorly we should change our premise to give them an excuse to do the things they rp poorly?
Like I said that is not raising rp standards that is lowering the max bar and then yelling your average is higher.
That's rp. Having a system where people have to follow resist the urge to meta and such is how you get rp.
A XO/CO/we who gives a briefing and says Today we are fighting aliens..... gets a pm from staff.
That is 100% enforceable. And the point is immersion. Once more if you say people get this wrong so we remove it your rp does not increase you just lower the bar.
Tests going fine is also not a point. Almost any test goes fine. Even if tests go wrong there is still the urge to do it anyways.
Nearly all tests are watched and I complained in the past already that tests are ill evaluated.
Our sample size is almost nill. During a test where you are almost always ready to intervene (and everybody knows it.)
We are medium roleplay not high roleplay. There is no set definition for this. (People even disagree how to roleplay.) If I compared this to other games we are low roleplay. The days I spend on wow they would not even call us roleplay. We have 100% defined exactly what actions are not ok. This is the naming rule, outside of the game sharing of ic info, erp and smilies/emoticons. That is just part of the list. If you get attacked you have all reason to swing by medical. Double when you get coughs and shivers. The onset of symptoms is less then 15 minutes. We do not force people to roleplay themselves into suicide that is gameplay over roleplay. We do not force this for aliens either. That is a standard that only really fits the higher roleplay interactions. Bullets also show up as a foreign body so they got enough of a reason to operate.
Yes, but removing a question the majority get wrong on an exam as a proffessor and then saying your class scored higher then last year is not a valid comparison to make.
You cannot say RP improves because you remove a part of it. In general less mistakes will be made but that does not improve the RP.
It might even lead to less RP because of people who are lax not being confronted with their mistakes.
Honestly marines should in each case have 0 idea what is coming before drop. And after the drop it is already quite obvious this is not upp or clf.
I never said the system is perfect. I say that we as a dev team are likely to reject suggestions that change the game premise.
The entire discussion has been had. The second we have it and vote for it we as a team are supposed to stick behind it.
So what do you suggest? We have the discussion we get our position and then even though we are not going to do it. (Because that is what the team choice was.) We press accepted on the suggestion anyways. Even though we are not going to do it?
Sorry, but I find it quite hard to belive changing the first contact rule will expand tactics.
If every round is that much the same it would mean you can still optimize your tactic.
With my statement: In general improving strategy is also something not measurable.
I mean that if the meta strategy is improving that is not measurable.
If we see new tactics yes it is.
I do not want to be a negative nancy but you won't see many new tactics.
There is already only a small amount of CO's who are willing to try something new.
The only thing I will expect to see is more optimization and you cannot measure that in numbers.
[/QUOTE]
Well, as people stated in the past we follow the aliens lore. And to keep in line with the lore the USCM should not know about aliens.
All our weapons and tech is based upon the tech that the USCM has at this time.
Even in the lore we wrote the USCM has almost no marines fighting the CLF or UPP.
The UPP has a truce (something people always forget.)
The CLF are terrorists only really active in this sector. The only major battle was between the CLF and the Dust Raiders.
None of the current marines should be part of the Dust Raiders.
A Dust Raider could have been part of the Falling Falcons before becoming a Dust Raider though.
Again, there's no reason it needs to validate metarushes. There is no reason why such a new ruling could not include the words "still don't metarush though", and there are a few very simple(as in, literally someone with no coding experience could do it in 5 minutes maximum) mechanical tweaks which would render it an impossibility. I don't actually think there is anything to indicate that rushing would be worse than it is now.
Any number of reasons! Maybe they only know about the aliens from the Whiskey Outpost incident and didn't expect them to return. Maybe WY has been covering up the fact that they're doing research on these things and have only told about it now that they need their help. Maybe they underestimate the threat that they pose. Hell, maybe having a battalion of marines ready to drop in and shoot them IS their way of protecting these stations.And the entire idea is that these are research colonies/stations where an outbreak happened.
If they know about the aliens why not protect these stations way better.
So the galactic hivemind understands dropships but not the concept of landing them? The xenos have only had one incident of contact with marines, who were wearing different uniforms, but instead know that they're dropping as soon as they hear an engine noise? Is that not a more convoluted and unbelievably line of thought than just "the xenos could probably figure out what LZs are for"?The specific incident I am refering at is Whiskey Outpost.
Whiskey Outpost has a (crashed) dropship. Aliens likely saw it crash. The only thing they likely don't know is where the lz is.
Nothing is defined about where those aliens came from. But marines look enough alike to know they are dangerous.
And the militairy has enough protocol to be doing almost the same things.
But once more that has always been an accepted fact and a dropship technicly has to fly overhead in a noticeable way.
You would see it land it would not appear suddenly.
Let me just cram all these together because they all display a very flawed understanding of the concept of RP. This is not an RP Academy. People do not come here to be graded on their level of RP. People come here to RP because they enjoy it. It is a recreational activity. The goal of it is to provide people with entertainment. They're not here to get an RP certification so that they can apply for a 2-year RP apprenticeship before starting their own RP business. They're here to RP because they like to RP. This idea that, by making it easier to RP, you inherently reduce the quality of it because you're not held to a high standard anymore is flawed. Removing this rule would not reduce the standard of RP on the server, it would simply allow more varied situations to fit within the RP. The quality of the RP is not based on some objective standard where, the harder the scenario is to RP, the better the RP that comes out of it. It is a subjective thing, based on the enjoyment of those who participate. The standard exists not as an objective measure of quality, but as a guide marker which the participants generally agree upon to be the level at which they enjoy most. The reason that someone can "fail to RP" is not because they have failed to meet some quantifiable goal, but rather because RP is a collaborative effort, and their contribution has been detrimental to the enjoyment of the others. When you see a marine buck naked, screaming and hooting and hitting himself with a fire extinguisher, he is punished not because he has failed to meet some external measurement of quality, but because seeing such a thing reduces the immersion of the other players. Such a change in rule would not reduce the quality by making it easier to fit within the framework. It would expand sideways, and possibly upward, not downward as you suggest.So because we have people who rp poorly we should change our premise to give them an excuse to do the things they rp poorly?
Like I said that is not raising rp standards that is lowering the max bar and then yelling your average is higher.
That's rp. Having a system where people have to follow resist the urge to meta and such is how you get rp.
A XO/CO/we who gives a briefing and says Today we are fighting aliens..... gets a pm from staff.
That is 100% enforceable. And the point is immersion. Once more if you say people get this wrong so we remove it your rp does not increase you just lower the bar.
Tests going fine is also not a point. Almost any test goes fine. Even if tests go wrong there is still the urge to do it anyways.
Nearly all tests are watched and I complained in the past already that tests are ill evaluated.
Our sample size is almost nill. During a test where you are almost always ready to intervene (and everybody knows it.)
We are medium roleplay not high roleplay. There is no set definition for this. (People even disagree how to roleplay.) If I compared this to other games we are low roleplay. The days I spend on wow they would not even call us roleplay. We have 100% defined exactly what actions are not ok. This is the naming rule, outside of the game sharing of ic info, erp and smilies/emoticons. That is just part of the list. If you get attacked you have all reason to swing by medical. Double when you get coughs and shivers. The onset of symptoms is less then 15 minutes. We do not force people to roleplay themselves into suicide that is gameplay over roleplay. We do not force this for aliens either. That is a standard that only really fits the higher roleplay interactions. Bullets also show up as a foreign body so they got enough of a reason to operate.
Yes, but removing a question the majority get wrong on an exam as a proffessor and then saying your class scored higher then last year is not a valid comparison to make.
You cannot say RP improves because you remove a part of it. In general less mistakes will be made but that does not improve the RP.
It might even lead to less RP because of people who are lax not being confronted with their mistakes.
Why exactly do you think COs are unwilling to put forward new strategies? I believe there are 3 reasons behind it. The first is the simple, unavoidable fear of failure. It is always easier to go with the tried and true than the new. This will not change. However, I see 2 other reasons which WOULD change. One: COs are afraid of being accused of meta for coming up with plans which display excessive foreknowledge of the enemy. Two: COs cannot explain complex strategies without talking about xenos, rendering them incapable of employing them. The reason strategy is always the same is because you cannot go in with a plan which requires any explanation involving your actual opposing force. You have to pretend that you're going in blind, and keep your strategies simple. And, within this limitation, we have reached stagnation. Workable strategies have been devised, and they are what is repeated time and time again. If you go listen to any given briefing, this is what you're likely to hear:Sorry, but I find it quite hard to belive changing the first contact rule will expand tactics.
If every round is that much the same it would mean you can still optimize your tactic.
With my statement: In general improving strategy is also something not measurable.
I mean that if the meta strategy is improving that is not measurable.
If we see new tactics yes it is.
I do not want to be a negative nancy but you won't see many new tactics.
There is already only a small amount of CO's who are willing to try something new.
The only thing I will expect to see is more optimization and you cannot measure that in numbers.
Big Red:
One Squad FOB. One squad check ETA. One squad check Lambda. One squad goes to the bar or power or something, but mostly just hovers vaguely between Eta or Lambda to prepare to assist whichever squad uncovers the hive.
LV:
One squad FOB. One squad power(and then probably Hydro). 2 Squads Hydro or "scouting", which means "do a lap and then go to Hydro".
Prison:
One Squad FOB. 2 squads Crash Site. 1 squad either goes to Research or also goes to crash site.
Ice:
Unsolved because the underground is so dangerous and the xenos have variable hive locations so nobody knows where to rush. Mostly the strategy for Ice is: don't vote for it.
Without this limitation, who knows what you could see? Imagine the CO being able to actually discuss what we all know about the aliens with the marines and come up with an actual strategy by talking about it. Imagine being able to call the SOs around a table and actually workshop out a new strategy using actual words which relate to the things everyone knows you have to actually deal with. You can't tell me there isn't at least a possibility that we'd see some new stuff here.
The mod said the "main" antag is xeno. I said it would be a good idea to "occasionally" have rounds against UPP or CLF. Chill out.
There was a suggestion like that long ago. And its a long gone. It would be nice, would break meta a bit, but for some reason it's just flat out "no". I guess benos have to be in every rounds, so it is very rare to join the game as xenomain and didn't get to play beno.
If xenos are supposed to be main antag, then change marines to UPP, CLF, or PMC's from time to time also.
New RP opportunities.
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