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Thread: Just another predator rant

  1. #21
    Member MymindisBlank's Avatar
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  2. #22
    Yautja Council Member Joe Lampost's Avatar
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    Trust me bro i know more about your wl than you bro!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    That was a good read forwardslashN and Fewher. I feel like history like that should be put on the wiki somewhere.

    If the server really changed that much from RP focus to team death match, I could see how predators back then could be seen as a welcome change in the flow of typical games. I could also see predators as admins just trying to balance the game or try something for RP purposes. I can see a casual admin needing buffs to fight a sweaty 3 shotgun marine.

    Thinking more of the preds and why I was so mad with them, I believe it is more along the lines of they can kill whenever they want and I have no say in the matter. It is like they have no clear goals in my mind except to be murderhobos. The unjust feeling of dying and not knowing why. If there was some goal I was aware they were doing like a xeno swallowed an artifact and we have to protect them, or they are protecting their temple and xenos/marines siege it from time to time, I wouldn't mind as it wouldn't be a seemingly random murderhobo event. This sort of unjust feeling stems off the fact that it is more of a team deathmatch rather than something to RP though. If there wasn't a strong desire to have my team win and was more just RPing the events that come, I don't think I would have the same reaction.

    As the rules are in RP rather than ingame mechanics as you said it would take a strong whitelist council which I feel would fade as time progresses. I wonder if there are rules/goals that can be set up to better integrate them into the deathmatch feel. Either that or a stronger push to make the server go back to an RP feel.

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    Are you schizophrenic?

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    Quote Originally Posted by forwardslashN View Post
    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.
    Quote Originally Posted by Fewher View Post
    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.

    This was a very interested read but someone with a rather huge love for Aliens and Predator thinks that, the Predator in this game... It's not good.
    It's so meta-gamey it's not even fun to spot a Predator ingame. All they do is stand around waiting for someone to either attack them, or issue a challenge.
    They can open doors, they can open alien corridors, but they don't fulfill any reason for existing.

    All the lore and backstory for them written here is borderlining on gibberish - Needless to say, I don't... like it.
    It's like I have to question if those who wrote and decided on them even knows what a Predator does...

    vlcsnap-2021-12-28-05h44m27s209.jpg vlcsnap-2022-01-09-10h08m48s621.jpg vlcsnap-2022-01-09-12h01m32s982.jpg
    Screenshots from the game: Predator Concrete Jungle

    They hunt, and they kill anyone holding a weapon. They'll wipe out entire armies to get worthy trophies. They'll even go into hand to hand combat with a Queen for honor.
    And yes, there are some that perform dishonorable actions. Scarface above faced great dishonor and was punished for it, and then had to reclaim his honor.
    Other ones become known as 'Bad Blood' as they kill anyone simply for the joy of it, and they get hunted by other Predators.

    As it stands right now... The Predator is only here to make some unga scream " COME OOOOOONNN! " and then try to show what big swinging tree he is.
    It is the epitome of disappointment and misunderstanding, I find.

  6. #26
    Whitelisted Synthetic Unknownity's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zeithri View Post
    This was a very interested read but someone with a rather huge love for Aliens and Predator thinks that, the Predator in this game... It's not good.
    It's so meta-gamey it's not even fun to spot a Predator ingame. All they do is stand around waiting for someone to either attack them, or issue a challenge.
    They can open doors, they can open alien corridors, but they don't fulfill any reason for existing.

    All the lore and backstory for them written here is borderlining on gibberish - Needless to say, I don't... like it.
    It's like I have to question if those who wrote and decided on them even knows what a Predator does...

    vlcsnap-2021-12-28-05h44m27s209.jpg vlcsnap-2022-01-09-10h08m48s621.jpg vlcsnap-2022-01-09-12h01m32s982.jpg
    Screenshots from the game: Predator Concrete Jungle

    They hunt, and they kill anyone holding a weapon. They'll wipe out entire armies to get worthy trophies. They'll even go into hand to hand combat with a Queen for honor.
    And yes, there are some that perform dishonorable actions. Scarface above faced great dishonor and was punished for it, and then had to reclaim his honor.
    Other ones become known as 'Bad Blood' as they kill anyone simply for the joy of it, and they get hunted by other Predators.

    As it stands right now... The Predator is only here to make some unga scream " COME OOOOOONNN! " and then try to show what big swinging tree he is.
    It is the epitome of disappointment and misunderstanding, I find.
    The reason why the majority of predators don't attack people on sight (which they can) is that it's not fun for the people being attacked. We already have people reporting predators for doing this multiple times and of course, the reports are denied since it is an OK thing to do but you will be disliked by the community for doing it. Movie Predators are different from our predators for the sole reason that if we ever tweaked our honor code around movie predators, EVERYONE except the preds in the game would hate it.
    We already had experimental rounds of movie preds and nobody enjoyed it on the side of xenos and marines.

    You have to think about the people you're attacking too you know, it might be fun for you but what about them? That's why we wait for others to initiate the attack or we taunt them to initiate a duel.
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  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Unknownity View Post
    The reason why the majority of predators don't attack people on sight (which they can) is that it's not fun for the people being attacked. We already have people reporting predators for doing this multiple times and of course, the reports are denied since it is an OK thing to do but you will be disliked by the community for doing it. Movie Predators are different from our predators for the sole reason that if we ever tweaked our honor code around movie predators, EVERYONE except the preds in the game would hate it.
    We already had experimental rounds of movie preds and nobody enjoyed it on the side of xenos and marines.

    You have to think about the people you're attacking too you know, it might be fun for you but what about them? That's why we wait for others to initiate the attack or we taunt them to initiate a duel.
    Well that's true enough but how about spicing things up in that case?

    Have specific Marines vs Predator rounds where it's maybe 3 Predators against I guess a lowpop round?

    After all there's already plenty of people that say they want HvH rounds ( say, doesn't mean anyone would like it but, you know ).
    Just throwing it out there, it'd go a long way to making the Predator less.. Well what it is now.

  8. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zeithri View Post
    Well that's true enough but how about spicing things up in that case?

    Have specific Marines vs Predator rounds where it's maybe 3 Predators against I guess a lowpop round?

    After all there's already plenty of people that say they want HvH rounds ( say, doesn't mean anyone would like it but, you know ).
    Just throwing it out there, it'd go a long way to making the Predator less.. Well what it is now.
    We've done that, mostly just devolves into marine hunting parties chasing cloaked Preds down hallways and FF each other 90% of the time. It's less fun then it sounds

  9. #29
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    Personally at this point with Predators and the way the game has evolved I'd just turn Predators into a third faction.
    Remove the RP elements of them, remove the whitelist and time-lock them to something high.
    Re-Balance them so theyll fit in and let them just run around fighting and killing stuff.


    No need for this whole charade of a whitelist or roleplay position as it's not that anymore.

  10. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fewher View Post
    Personally at this point with Predators and the way the game has evolved I'd just turn Predators into a third faction.
    Remove the RP elements of them, remove the whitelist and time-lock them to something high.
    Re-Balance them so theyll fit in and let them just run around fighting and killing stuff.


    No need for this whole charade of a whitelist or roleplay position as it's not that anymore.
    what are u on about

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