Staff Report - Podrick Equus

[Sakuyoi]

Staff Report

Your BYOND Key

Sakuyoi

Date of Incident

October 26, 2021

Your Character Name?

Lily Izayoi

Their BYOND Key

Podrick Equus

Approximate time and date of the incident

11:00 PM CST - 12:30 AM CST (oct 27)

Which Staff Protocols (//showthrea...-and-Protocols) were broken

Remain Professional, no matter what happens
- Constantly stay cool. Regardless of what a player says to you do not act unprofessional and get angry with them.
Preserve the RP and enjoyment of the server
- Heavily influencing a round

Event Standards

Description of the incident

Xenos were given defensive techweb structures when marines landed(?).
I dont know if the defensive structures were given out roundstart and ASRS has prompted that plates are available to buy at req.

Fast forward marines UNGA to the hive. We didnt expect for them to have structures. No plates were sent down by admins and marines started getting killed one by one by FF because of the reflective walls which could've been prevented if we had plates.

We only had one medic in the front and they got swamped very badly because of the structures.
Pushing the hive/flanking was not an option and it was a death sentence due to the walls around of the hive being invincible(skeletal resin walls), acid pillars, reflective walls in multiple chokepoints.
If we shot them and tried to push we were heavily punished since we were forced to tank the bullets without plates.

Ordering plates from req was not an option too since the frontline was mostly metal roofed and we couldnt drop any supplies.

After that podrick told us in dchat that this would've not happened if marines didnt bumrush the hive like hes blaming us for playing the game normally in an event we didnt expect.

I think the event was poorly planned or the event was made in a haste. I felt like there was no preparation made at all.

Evidence

msay logs with connection to the event
dchat logs about marines pushing the hive.
ARES/ASRS/QM with connection to the event.

How you would punish the accused

Up to the admin manager.

[ito726]

Xenos from part of the round here.

In the playbook of marines on annex there is this situation where marines rush hive, marines fail to take out the hive, marines complain about metarushes when a counter push happens that wipes them out because the overextended without a fallback point. This round started out the same, and I do think the premade structures were of consequence and did stop the hive from being actually wiped out before 12:30. This on its own is a way to have rounds be longer, not to buff up one side unfairly. You cant claim marines don't know how to fight against Techweb stuff either. Given the xeno 'buff' consisted of premade structures that were not replaceable or movable, there really was nothing forcing marines to engage into them repeatedly in bad situations. Similarly, xenos failed to actually make any progress against the cadelines in rifle range of the hive, but instead xenos just flanked through the uncaded lines to the hive and just barely held it together, until the marine front collapsed, and they pushed all the way to the LZ. I died at this point by getting careless thinking the round was over but somehow marines managed to salvage it and win. I think too many xenos died trying to push into the FOB before they were ready or without boiler support. I then ate a bit of food irl and focused on shipside events involving a survivor and CL, waiting for the inevitable hijack that never happened, as somehow marines won.

I don't know how much was announced and to who as I was alt-tabbed for most of the first 20 mins, but i do recall that Pods intention was to give tech gradually in an effort to maintain balance. During the time I was active as Xeno, other than premade structures I don't think Xenos received anything else.

I don't see how marines cant simply send the equipment a bit further back where there is not a metal roof either.

Overall sentiment among dead chat tended to be among the marines that xenos were buffed unfairly and there was nothing they could have done about this. Pod did say something to the effect that marines kept pushing into well-defended areas without any second thought and died as a result. An analysis I agree with.

Given the random nature of how far marines manage to push on annex, I don't see how you can have a more concrete plan than something flexible, and I do think starting the event with a defensive tech esp on the Xeno side was a good choice by Pod as that ensures some extra time to rebalance the round as need be, given the relatively volatile nature of techwebs era rounds.

I found the event to be a nice change of pace and it was nice to see some stuff from techwebs era again, and I don't see why anyone would expect an Admin to balance techwebs better than the devs managed to, yet the round was more back and forth and longer than the typical techwebs one. Scope of event imo seemed to be primarily nostalgic and combat mechanics focused. There was a minor RP event that happen shipside but had no real relation to the techwebs one as far as I could tell.

The only issue id try to adjust, but this really is a dev issue as this has been the case during techwebs era, is that the sprite for reflective walls are similar to skeletal rasin found on annex. however the reflective walls were surrounded by spikes and there were acid pillar and shield pillars that really did give clear visual feedback that 'hey guys there is techweb era defensive structures around here', so its a bit hard to say marines had no visual warnings, and equally im sure Xenos could infer marines probably had some techweb stuff too form their existance, even if they latejoined.

[Sakuyoi]

The cycle logistics of telling requisitions to send down plates is already very absurd.
Running backlines just to find a glass roof to send req stuff which only the skilled players would know where to look for, req spending points to get plates.
The fact that marines had to do this just to get our own techwebs is already pretty hard to do. When xenos just straight up got themselves their premade defensive structures for free.

Xenos didnt win the push in the hive because they flanked. Its because we suffered a lot of FF from the reflective walls and our medic was swamped with 5-6+ people to heal.
GL spec was straight up killing people because of reflective walls getting hit with airbursts. And we had a very competent engineer who actually built cades and deployed two sentries in the front.

Xenos had a defensive line with a hostile sentry to the west of the hive too which killed at least 3-4 marines including me.

Also how could you even claim that podrick did techwebs to balance the round when the announcement for marines getting plates was before the combat?

My only question here is that was this event planned beforehand? or this was just an event that they felt like running this round without any some sort of preparation?

[Podrick Equus]

Ito726's reply was a fairly spot on analysis of the round.

I had received permission from the Community Manager to do this event, and I believe that I followed my initial request fairly well. Here is what I asked permission to do before the round had started:

pseudo techwebs:
xenos will get some preplaced techweb structures around the hive and their frontline (reflective walls, shield pillars, acid pillars, etc)
marines will get some armor plates and then med tech/other things after around 30 minutes into the round

I got permission to do this shortly after the round started, so I decided to go along with it anyways. I first decided to give the xenos a set of irreplaceable defensive structures scattered around their hive and their frontline, and afterwards I had given the marines some armor plates that ended up arriving in Requisitions at around the time they had deployed. I also said that the marines would receive some additional toys after a certain amount of time, which ended up being 10 of each implant + 3 upgraded defibs.

What I believe was the biggest source of salt among marines was that they never actually received the armor plates... somehow. There was a new person manning Requisitions that round, so it is entirely possible that they had mistakenly sent the crate containing them back down the shaft. I don't know, I was not looking at the time. I did make an ARES announcement saying that I did in fact deliver plates to Requisitions, and that whatever happened to them after that point was not my doing.

I'm any case, I made a comment in deadchat saying something to the effect of the typical marine bumrush backfiring due to the xeno defensive structures scattered around the hive, mostly meant as a poke towards the typically brainless strategy of deathballing the hive locations shortly after landing. Something that these defensive structures were *specifically* meant to counter. I did make quite the blunder for not realizing that the reflective walls shared the same sprites as Fiorna's skeletal resin tiles, so I apologized in both deadchat and MOOC for that mistake.

[Sakuyoi]

After hearing podricks reply id like to withdraw the report since they were given permission.
I cant really them for making an honest mistake and i might have tunneled vision because i was part of the marines who got killed and things just felt unfair but still it could've gone better but it happens.

Sorry for taking your time.

[ThesoldierLLJK]

Report withdrawn,

FYI if anyone has valid critiques or questions about an event you can always reach out to the person running the event for clarifications or discussion.