My face when I came with Mandalore tide before SStide and left for years before rejoining to play ''new'' CM. kek.Originally Posted by lunarflu
My face when I came with Mandalore tide before SStide and left for years before rejoining to play ''new'' CM. kek.
wtf I love this player now?
Is he... The original?
Thead relevant, please change preds immediatelly, or ELSE.
It's funnier if you take it seriously.
Felix the Synth: hat fanatic, nice robot, one time double agent almayer synth executed for sedition. Occasional murderous mopbot.
EDIT: TLDR: Thanks for your insights, stay open minded.
I am not a fan of discriminating against people based on their time in a place anyway. (I know I am relatively new, bare with me). Just because a person is new does not mean that their logic is guaranteed wrong. Balancing mechanics, moral decisions, and player interactions are not just limited to CM. Many people have played literal thousands of hours of video games with some either being really similar to this game, or has common characteristics with portions of this game. Also, New people can often have insights that people who have played forever might have overlooked. I am not saying time has no factor though, as it clearly helps in understanding. That said, taken Mightbearetard's case:
-Has a predator EVER moved a marine to safety in this history of CM? I am 100% sure this has happened.
-Has Mightbearetard's case EVER happened in the history of CM? Still 100% sure this or something similar probably happened.
-Has his case happened multiple times? In recent times? Maybe not with admins but other predator friends? I don't know, and this is where play time does factor in. Other more experienced people in recent times can chime in if they have seen this or not, but don't have to throw out the case because his join date is October.
I created the thread for others to listen to my salty thoughts and let me hear their thoughts on the subject. I am relatively new so instead of just staying salty I got to hear other's side of the matter. I do believe having an environment viewed as fair is more entertaining to more players than unfair environments and so while nothing has to change, if people want to work on fixing that inherent unfair feeling it would probably be for the better.
That said: I honestly was not expecting these replies. After reading them I have...absolutely no clue what predators are for. So far I gathered:
-They are not to add RP elements or something to do in downtime, like my clown reasoning.
-They are a standalone faction without a win condition.
-Their code would seem to allow ANY solo hunting on either side without consequences. If you get caught by them, too bad, breath in some salt and wait for next round.
-They have a long standing history
I am starting to get the feeling from you guys what they are not, but I still cannot grasp: what are they? Why are they playable?
In just about any other team vs team games, having a chaotic third party a nightmare. You would never be able to balance it, and it would lead to negative feedback. Imagine a game like counterstrike where people can join as a cloaked spec ops guy with no real objecting and can kill either side. There would be nothing but hate over the random specs killing them and to hell knows if a map was balanced because the winrates no long mean anything. The game would go from competative to ragequitting and abandonment. Very few games can successfully pull off this idea. The only one that comes to mind that it worked for is Dark Souls 3, but even then the chaotic player actually still has a clear objective to accomplish.
A final thought on the matter: it is an extreme case but one that seems would have no consequence:
A predator who wants to pretend to be a SUPER SCOUT (not out loud, just in his mind) and from round start has his own internal goal of killing every single xeno who is ever alone. This includes the queen on ovi. There must be one xeno at all times near her or the predator will kill her on ovi. As a super sweaty predator he can kill over 10 xenos before the marines land consistently, and almost guarantee each round ends under a half-hour. He does this every single time he is on and can play predator.
As far as I can tell, the current game allows this, and no rules are broken. Anyone who is salty from this is told this game is unfair too bad, or the usual stuff, unless they too themselves gather salt.
I hope I described a scenario that most can agree something would change from this if it ever happened. Yet what is acceptable then? 4 xeno deaths each round? 3? Is it time based? Is this only allowed when xenos are perceived to be winning? I personally would vote 0 deaths.
New account made to rant about something in 90% of the time is a feweh alt.
Probably happens on regular basis. But there one situation where pred can move a marine to safety and its even encouraged. Its when said marine is engaged in duel/hunt with this pred and benos/other faction disrupts that. Hell, pred can even HELP said marine KILL those who attacked him during fight with pred and he can use ALL of his gear and abilities to do that.
Never heard about situation like that. This would probably make national CM news if it would be discovered. There was once a headadmin who spawned themselfs few incendiary mags for M4A3 and never used them, but still got caught and this had 0 impact on a game, while pred saving spec just because would have big impact.
Nope.
As stated before, new account basically equals to leafman on the run.
In theory they are to add RP, as stated before, if they get bored of slaughtering marines and T1 benos, they do RP a bit, sometimes admemes create mini-events with preds, like them making a thunderdome with prizes to win. However, to this day I have never seen a Pred making somebody his Thral, which really shows how much preds are willing to go with RP - Not much.
Yes, they are standalone faction, but they can't win, besides getting few trophies and can't lose in "mechanical" gameplay sense, but can lose in "fluff" RolePlay way, where their gear gets taken away and is never recovered, thus humanity wins via reverse-engineering that tech in the future, or if benos get abom that isn't killed when the round ends.
They can't just choose to hunt medics, fob engineers, drone branch of benos and such, so you are completly safe as those characters.
They are playable, because they were added long time ago and if one would remove them today, pred whitelist would cry so hard, that it would drown the CM server room.
In theory, preds aren't just an enemy that sometimes tries to kill you and is better equiped that you ever could. They are rare (not every round is a pred round), are forbidden to do anything that would tip the balance of the game and such. However, they provide incomplete, broken and unbalanced "buff" if one of the sides defeats them. In terms of marines its very easy and obvious, they get pred gear. From simple mask that gives additional head armor, integrated binocs and medhud for both benos and marines, trough cloak and stuff (requires synth), ending on very good melee weapons.
Benos can potentially try to cap the pred and get abom. The concept is fine, how it works in game is not.
Example you provided is very flawed. Pred is more akin to LoL creeps that are a bit hard to kill, but you get bonuses from killing them, but they also walk around the map and pick a fight with someone at random.
At the very least, preds provide some variation to your old stale as fuck marine vs xeno combat. Its also easier to kill a pred bound by honor code than it is to kill a lurker and that says a lot.
No, it would have consequences. First, preds aren't allowed to pick a fight with drone branch of xenos, so no drone hunting, no carrier, no burrower, no hivelord and yes, no Queen hunting (Boiler and Sentinel are probably off limits too, since they are weak as fuck against preds). They are consided "support" and not "combat".
Second, preds aren't allowed to directly affect the outcome of the rounds they are in. Killing too many xenos where pred is the one who innitiates the fight with each of them individually would bring the wrath of admemes.
Thrid, hive can band together and clap his ass. No matter his gear, abilities and skills, entire hive will kill him and with a bit of luck maybe even cap him.
Unless entire hive of smoothbrains would pick a fight with pred on their own, pred can't simply do what you described, or anything similar. Suicide by pred for the hive is not the preds fault. It would be preds fault if enough benomains would cry that pred is too strong, but thats hipotetical.
You have some interesting thoughts and I do appreciate the detailed replay cabal. Just to comment or clarify some things:
-In a...developer designer kind of way, I don't see the justification for having predators around, I guess. I get it, but I don't. I don't think I will get a better grasp as to why predators exist though, so it's fine.
-I do agree my game example is flawed. I tried to show a third party concept on a completely incompatible game to highlight problems, but it is a little extreme. The LoL one might be closer, but in my eyes only if they were intelligent mobs that could choose to hold players in place when they like, including times both teams are about to fight together. But shouldn't aim to do that normally even if they could. Also no reward (something meaningful to help win) for fighting them. Yea, any example is going to have some flaws in it.
-For thinking about different problems including balancing, I always like to take extremes and then dial them back and see if there is some kind of happy medium that makes sense. I was trying to point towards that with the, what is acceptable part of it. So given the hopefully extreme example and then dialing it back and only focusing on xeno side:
1) you can only kill Prae, Rav, Crusher, spitter, warrior, defender, lurker, and defender
A sweaty predator could probably kill at least the lone T1's and 2's and greatly disrupt games, easily. I hope we can agree if this rule was alone, it wouldn't be enough.
2) Preds aren't allowed to directly affect the outcome of the rounds they are in. Can not kill too many xenos.
This rule being up to interpretation is the heart of the problem. Again, what is too many? Did X action affect the results of the match or not? The game that lead to this rant had the predator kill at least 1 defender, with me as Old Crusher and at least 2 other xenos trying to stop the trapped defender from dying for a few minutes. The frontline aliens could REALLY have used our help but instead we were busy trying to save our sister and failed. I don't see how you can call that predator's actions not directly affecting the outcome of the game, and yet admemes couldn't do anything.
In fact, I don't see how you can kill a SINGLE xeno and be confident that you didn't directly affect the outcome of the round. Before marines arrive if you kill a sweatty runner, that runner might have later been a sweatty ravenger that would have lead to the xeno's win. A lurker that you killed might have later distracted some mortar marines, which would have lead to aliens not getting pushed back which would have lead to xeno victory. That warrior you killed might have capped a lone marine which would have lead to 2 more larva which would have helped on a flank which would have lead to xeno victory. That defender might have delayed a marine flank enough for xenos to notice, or messaged other xenos to it, which would have lead xenos to stop the flank and kill the flankers which would have lead to a xeno victory. Unless a round is basically a guarantee victory for one side, if you want to enforce that rule I would argue you can't have a single xeno die.
This is an interesting thing to answer.
Predators were added to the game because a certain someone with admin powers wanted to be absurdly powerful in-game and mess around without losing said admin powers. Maybe that's not entirely true, but that's how I understood it at the time. It was added without any long-term planning or foresight. The given justification was that predators are a third faction that sometimes appears to make the rounds more interesting, but they were never meant to directly affect the outcome of the round in a specific direction. That last bit is very important. Predators were added with the intent (more like compromise, but I won't get into that) of affecting rounds, just not murderboning one side in particular without a specific reason. Given that many of them were played by staff, it all came down to common sense. The people playing predator were also the people in charge of enforcing the flow and spirit of the game, so often if those people got robusted too much, you'd see predators get buffed. Ergo, predators became pretty beefy to counterplay marine or xeno robustness. After a lot of complaining from players, rules were put in to place preventing predators from just going ham on xenos or marines because they were so powerful. So, try not to fuck too many people up but still act like an antagonist became the mantra.
After some restructuring, CM high command considered scrapping predators all-together, but because a lot staff, and later on players, actually enjoyed playing the role, that never went anywhere. So predators remained; as new people joined and old people filtered out, the role naturally evolved. Many different people worked on the code, including me, all with their own ideas and thoughts about what constitutes the CM experience, and I'm sure all of them had their own ideas about what to do with predators, if anything. I left before I could make drastic changes to predators, but had I stayed, without changing the fundamental gameplay formula, the predator role never made much mechanical sense to begin with.
One thing to note though, CM was more of a military roleplaying environment back in its hayday, where things like deploying without a proper briefing or getting too much stuff on the dropship were viewed very harshly by staff. Predators worked better in that sense because they actually did add a lot of interest to the rounds--in the roleplaying aspect to be precise--because players had no solid idea what the faction was capable of as everything back then was very secretive and hush hush. Now you can just open up github and learn everything there is to know. There was also a sort of camaraderie between predator players too, where they felt like an actual third faction instead of individual hunters. One common practice was setting up a temple/hunting lodge and protecting it from trespassers. This was a pretty big deal and created a lot of round tension, where both the marines and xenos would attack the lodge repeatedly, and it wasn't uncommon to see entire squads getting wiped out because of it. I don't see that happening anymore, but who knows.
Fast forward five or six years, and there you are. The predator role is a relic from a different CM that has been kept on because it's...just a thing that CM has and nobody is willing to remove or drastically change it. Doing the latter is a ton of work and doing the former is going to be met with hostility. CM is so ingrained in the team deathmatch mentality at this point that the server is probably going to die on that hill rather than cross it, unless some absolute madman takes the server in a different direction. Which is ironic, in a way.
I can understand why you are confused. The predator role doesn't fit well into what CM is today, but I hope now you have a better understanding of why that is.
Last edited by forwardslashN; 11-26-2021 at 07:21 AM.
I think you’re giving kills too much credit. Evan and I killed 10 xenos including a prae as survivors two days ago (1/3 of the hive) and the marines still got pushed back to the fob and almost evaced, and eventually won after a 2:30 hour slog. If kills are the biggest factor, how did the marines not shitstomp when the xenos were down a third of their hive and down a t3?
Synth Gaming
This isn't too far off, but the actual creation of Predators stemmed from one of our first major Developers Abby.
During the early days of CM Abby one was one of the prominent, if not major CM Developers who really brought CM into it's own game-mode and away from being a re-skinned SS13 clone. This was during a period where Abby was basically the only Coder and Mapper so without her nothing was getting done and she was irreplaceable at that time.. However Abby was also SUPER abusive and was known for openly disregarding in-game rules, admin spawning gear and straight up griefing players for their own "fun".
Anytime Abby was disciplined by head-staff she'd stop working on CM, essentially holding the games development hostage until we restored her ability to play as a Predator again or whatever else she wanted to do. I can still remember Rahlzel losing his absolute shit over the near constant abuse and player-reports against Abby for her in-game antics.
Anyways long story short, eventually after months of reports, internal complaints and drama Abby was fired, her ability to play Predator was removed and we never saw her again really.
I believe for a good period of time Predators were actually a good addition to the game. They brought something unique to the rounds, spiced things up and overall I'd say we had relatively few issues with them. However, our requirements to become a Predator were so much stricter that it really helped our over-all end vision with Predators at the time. We even had discussions on adding Engineer into the game and other antags/creatures from the Aliens universe, we had even completed some basic sprites for them as well.
https://imgur.com/a/Q4RAYYc
ForwardSlashN pretty much summarized the issue with Predators though. They were an addition to the game with little to no far-sight, but they were such a unique experience that we decided to keep them at the time.
Rather than relying solely on mechanics to balance out Predators, we relied on a strong whitelist system and players themselves. The issue now is that CM has shifted more towards a Team-Deathmatch game and Predators need to be balanced heavily to fit into this new style of play. It also doesn't help that the whole whitelisting and whitelist council is an absolute joke so you not only have an imbalanced super Predator antags, but shitty players whitelisted players as Predators.
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