Is a lot of the contribution of Xenos being unfun is due to nerfs on their fun abilities?
Additionally, does "risk vs reward" play a huge factor in terms of fun gameplay and was that taken away from Xenos?
Medtech (and the general simplification of medical more broadly) is real problem. There are a lot of small balance things, but those always exist and are kind of insignificant by comparison.
The main issue with xeno right now is that it almost always feels like you're not achieving anything. You cannot kill marines fast enough to even slow them down, taking out specs or other important marines doesn't matter because they'll be revived in seconds. Risk reward does not even exist and the "correct" way to play xeno is to be incredibly conservative, have no interest in kills and just block bullets for the queen while she captures because that's the only way to secure perma-kills. On the marine side, it's the reverse. There is absolutely no reason not to suicide at the slightest opportunity because dying literally means nothing. To an extent, it's always been that way and you just have to accept that it's how the game works, but there are degrees, and right now it's ludicrous. Ending a round with no marine casualties should not be a routine occurrence. Medics should not be frontlining because there's genuinely nothing for them to do.
Honestly, I started out saying this as a joke, but now I'm not sure it's a joke any more. Just remove medical. Give marines regenerating health and respawns and either come up with an alternate win condition or use a ticket system.
keep in mind techweb was implemented because defcon didn't offer enough choice and lacked variety. it also fail to solve any of those issues
Techwebs didn't change that much, it just aggravated the existing problems.
One problem on the xeno side is capping. One of the design goals of MOBA was making capping irrelevant: xenos should be able to fight off marine force without capping much. Of course that failed and xenos now have to rely on caps again, but only their tool set is much more limited. So it's up to the queen, prime runners and sentinels now.
Xenos can secure kills, but they have to give ground, counterattack, kill a part of the marine force, then defend the corpses until they expire.
Anyway, the main game loop is OKish, the frustrating part of playing xeno is free bullshit that marines get.
During the defcon the spec kits and the nuke were such bullshit, with, oh xenos managed to beat back marines by 13:00, well IOs got a nuke now! Or admins giving the nuke at 13:30, when it's a really back and forth round.
Now I think the xenos mostly adapted to techweb bullshit and the main pain is research stims, and I've been seeing those a lot lately.
One of the main techwebs goals was making it more fair in that the bullshit tech would be available to both sides and would be limited to stalemate breaking. You control the points, you get tech and tech lets you finish up the opponent. But currently everyone gets their bullshit tech for free and you have to adapt to it.
Control points are supposed to fix that but I really fear that it would result in too much streamlining of gameplay akin to MOBA lanes. Maybe the alternative could be giving tech points for simple tasks, like X points per each xeno killed, X points for every xeno body recovered, X points for each marine killed, X points for every cap.
Roman 'Fire' Kacew