People simple refuse to follow orders, briefings are pointless

[c4xmaniac]

It would be fun if we had a dedicated HvH round with auto team balance and actual maps.

CM became like league of legends and dota 2 patching numbers, adding more skills and champions but its still the same HvX formula.

no it wouldn't CM combat is bad.

[Mightbearetard]

The questions comes down to, how to break the 'boring stalemate' part without forcing a certain behavior?

Removal if pylons was one solution as much as I hate it, it does the job. My only beef is the occasional (5-10%) mute CAS or mortar. ...No. Not direct fire...No I did not run if off-screen with runner. No I did not disable warning messages middle of fight. No it was not spammed away I checked chat after I died. It's a rare bug that happens to this day...

Anyhow, it does the job and the front can move. But we need the same for the marine side.

I already proposed a solution for this: Make cades cost half and half their HP. This will do a few things: Spice up engi gameplay is normally 2 minutes in you are our of mats and it's horribly boring to deconstruct shit for mats and it yields nothing anyway.

Marines can push it, cade up, hold for few minutes. Xenos can still push as they are weaker cades and don't need boiler to break it, but they are still cades. And forget foldables, they are shit to carry and shit in general. Devs who say use that at frontline for this job never played a full round as engi.

EDIT: just remembered the usual: you should code it. True. So to avoid this, why not make normal cades come with barb automatically, let it cost 3 metal total, fast build time. Than make reinforced cade extra durable, make it as a standalone cade not as an upgrade and make the build time and material cost double. Now you have the 2 extremes. One for fortifying a position at a heavy slow cost and a fast, cheap solution for pushing. No spiting or other thing needed just a few changes in code.


TLDR: why is game stale? Defenses too strong. Weaken defenses but make them rewarding to build up fast once front moved.

[ChainsawMullet]

Game's stale because most high profile players have been playing for years and cut corners in terms of how things are "meant" to happen (ignoring briefing, not caring about orders, etc.), and then they serve as the example for newer players who will follow suit, there's no overarching complex reason. The game has been going for six or so years at this point, and in many ways has been watered down from what it originally was.

If the game's stale for you, take a break and come back with a different mindset to approach it from. Either it'll still be alive and you might enjoy it again or it'll be dead and your reason for leaving was justified.

[CABAL]

Dude this is how we save CM, add in gamemodes poggers!!!!!!!!!!!

No, this won't do anything. Why is CM stale? Is it just because of the same 'boring ass xenos' to fight, or is it because nothing ever changes? When a marine wakes up, he can gear up, and then walk to the DS and AFK until he drops. Why is this? It is because every round you will do the same exact thing ad nauseum. On LV you will walk to containers, Trijent to eastern labs, and BR to filt. Sometimes there are tiny variations on these walks, but they're not relevant. You could quite easily delete CIC and just automate OBs by having ARES accept coordinates given by RTOs. Very little would change. CM is completely enslaved to the meta.

Adding funny hvh or some other gamemode will not change this. You will always have meta places to hold/build your base and people will zombie walk to these areas. If you add hvh as a standard gamemode, instead of walking to containers and getting warrior grabbed then flung to brazil, you will walk to containers and get off screen headshot and killed. Nothing has substantially changed. You will have a short term relief as 'something new' (its not new at all) has come up, then we will return here because the zombie meta will form.

We should, instead, turn our gaze to why exactly it is that normal SS13 is incredibly engaging. The gamemodes are usually dogshit, who actually enjoys rev rounds or gangs for instance? Despite traitor being the most vanilla out of all the gamemodes, its by far my favorite (and I think most people will agree the best) game mode. Why is that? Being a traitor offers you huge amounts of ways to complete your objectives or just do something cool/funny. With those gadgets, you also have a lot of mechanics with which to abuse as well. You have engines, power grids, AIs, chemistry, xenobiology, and more. This opens up huge amounts of creativity and replayability, because its so varied and entirely player driven. One round you could have to deal with a murder boning robusto with an esword, and the next it could be a conspiracy of traitors trying to stealthily undermine the departments and AI until they strike.

So you just shut down your own arguments too. Just as "new gamemode" (which I'm not proposing, I'm proposing new factions to fight once in a while instead of old) will quickly get stale, boring and meta, new stuff for people to do will get meta also.
Just because you dislike gangs, or revolution rounds, doesn't mean other people do. I for once enjoy those rounds as they break the monotony of casual SS13 rounds. The only type of round of normal SS13 that I dislike is a wizard that isn't friendly.

Also guess what: Humanoid factions bring us closer to that vanilla SS13 possibilities. Marines fighting CLF/UPP/Mercs would offer more ways to fight them. Currently you can either chase and shoot a beno till it dies, or stun a beno and shoot it till it dies. You could capture human enemies and put them into PoW camps, interrogation RP, sabotage of electrical grid, etc.

How atmos/mining/powergrid/research would break with marine routine of going prep, going req, going DS, going to kill benos? Other factions won't either, but you say that like new "features" will suddently fix everything. I say that new factions would make CM fresh for a while.

What do we have for mechanics to produce creative solutions to problems or drive player interaction? We have medical, req, and OT to force player interaction. Yet, we have no mechanics. Our last fun thing to do (disposal pipes) was removed. There is nothing to do in CM to overcome the challenge of killing xenos other than walk to the xenomorph and kill it. There is no engineering in CM, there is no research in CM, there is no mining, no atmospherics, no powergrid, nothing. CM is mechanicless outside of medbay's surgery and shooting things. However, CM's surgery is braindead easy to do, and the shooting mechanics in CM are fucking awful.

The lack of mechanics, the lack of player driving abilities (which are what create and sustain RP) are why CM is stale. No additional gamemode is going to magically solve this crisis. Genuinely new content is very sparse, in 6 months we have gotten two new irrelevant roles (MP Cadet and DCC), a TM for rappelling, a TM for a new gun, and a TM for the old crusher (that seems to have been abandoned) along with removing tech webs. Take a look through the merged tab on gitlab, and then the merge requests (113 at the time of writing.)

Research, mining, atmospheric, powergrid, this will also be shortly meta'ed, stale and boring. On top of being hard to balance. How do you balance atmos/mining/research/powergrid existing when the other side can't use it? You either assume everything works perfectly every round and balance it on that and this rarely if ever would happen, or you don't and the game is impossible to balance (and I'm not talking 50/50 winrate "balance", even 30/70 would be impossible).

New factions would be easier to balance, easier to introduce, easier to menage while atleast as fun as atmos/powergrid/mining/research combined. There is also another adventage to other factions in favour of those "mechanics". EVERYONE CAN EXPERIENCE OTHER FACTION in equal ammount. Be it lowly PFC, trough MT, to CO. Who can experience powergrid? Engineering, nobody else. Who can experience mining? Miners. Nobody else. Who can experience research? Medical. Who can expierience atmos? Engineering.
What PFC and benos (vast majority, bulk of the players) can experience from that? They can get zapped from power grid, they can get farted on with atmos, they can get killed with a pickaxe with mining and they can eat a pill from research. Oh boy, what a loads of fun and RP.
Lets not forget that other faction would not lag already laggy server, unlike atmos, or power grid.

Pick a direction. Go full TDM or go RP. Stop being this awkward middle child where your gameplay is dogshit compared to TGMC and your player driven interactions and continuity/lore is non-existent and what is - is ignored.

CM is primarly combat server and this should be the main goal. Making shooting/slashing fun should be a priority, no doubt. And CM doesn't have to be subjectively "better" than TGMC in terms of gameplay either. It just has to be good and different with cohesive story flavoured by xeno atmosphere. Not a saturday morning cartoon.

New factions to fight with on semi-regular basis is the way to go. Easy to do, fast to do, fun to do. And lets not act like it can't be balanced. All that scream about off-screen hits, invisiblity and darkness can be easly fixed by removing scopes (or giving everyone ability to "scope-in" with any gun that works like mini-scope), by removing invisibility and removing darkness (maybe leaving it in few small buildings that require power to light up).

Other factions to fight with will provide RP opportunities, you can talk about warcrimes, you can capture and interrogate people, you can surrender, you can cease-fire, you can reenact christmast truce, hostile human factions truly provide player-driver RP. Not some bullshit mechanic where you press "A" to have "fun", arrange pipes to have "fun", research bullshit combat stims to have "fun".
What brings RP to vanilla SS13? Genetics? Science? Surgery? Or maybe bar and outside of bridge where people gather to stare at captain? I think the latter.

[c4xmaniac]

Didn’t read was too long, I assume you agreed with my points. Have a CM day .

[Jeether]

Just gonna leave this here, adding new mechanics to CM wont make it fun. It will just get metad into oblivion as people learn the optimal way to use them to win no matter what, this happened multiple times before, however people were less inclined to win and more to interact back then. Not gonna go into a wild rant about "old cm better!!!!!", but CM in the current state cannot consider itself a RP game. Just go full TDM, balance it around HvX and try and patch the horrendous long term effects that HvH has on the server. RP will still exist in some way or another and its there, optional for when you get bored of shooting bad guys.

We should, instead, turn our gaze to why exactly it is that normal SS13 is incredibly engaging. The gamemodes are usually dogshit, who actually enjoys rev rounds or gangs for instance? Despite traitor being the most vanilla out of all the gamemodes, its by far my favorite (and I think most people will agree the best) game mode. Why is that? Being a traitor offers you huge amounts of ways to complete your objectives or just do something cool/funny. With those gadgets, you also have a lot of mechanics with which to abuse as well. You have engines, power grids, AIs, chemistry, xenobiology, and more. This opens up huge amounts of creativity and replayability, because its so varied and entirely player driven. One round you could have to deal with a murder boning robusto with an esword, and the next it could be a conspiracy of traitors trying to stealthily undermine the departments and AI until they strike.

What do we have for mechanics to produce creative solutions to problems or drive player interaction? We have medical, req, and OT to force player interaction. Yet, we have no mechanics. Our last fun thing to do (disposal pipes) was removed. There is nothing to do in CM to overcome the challenge of killing xenos other than walk to the xenomorph and kill it. There is no engineering in CM, there is no research in CM, there is no mining, no atmospherics, no powergrid, nothing. CM is mechanicless outside of medbay's surgery and shooting things. However, CM's surgery is braindead easy to do, and the shooting mechanics in CM are fucking awful.

Pick a direction. Go full TDM or go RP. Stop being this awkward middle child where your gameplay is dogshit compared to TGMC and your player driven interactions and continuity/lore is non-existent and what is - is ignored.

CM combat is terrible and laggy alot of times, while im inclined to agree with this suggestion, i just dont see it being put in practice.

Is combat focused gameplay the easy way out? Yes, but i dont see any blessed soul descending from the sky, bringing forth law and peace, completely changing how the current mute playerbase sees the game they are playing. For them, it will just be another shooter in a weird engine that is probably older then them. CM will cease being "Colonial Marines" and will just be "CM", but we cant stay in this weird limbo the game is currently in forever.

[Freshguac]

orders stopped having meaning after tcomms were replaced with the tower tcomms. there is no longer a reason to have any kind of sustainable presence on the map anymore, either kill or fall back FOB be damned. marines will not respond to big brain orders because the only purpose now is to kill the funny meta hive core and the related buildings (haha dude just like in stercraft lmaooo xddd zerg rush)
i don't think devs realise how much they FUCKED UP when they replaced tcomms

[Decker100]

Problem: CM boring and more like TDM

Solution: Give Marines the firepower to be effective as individual squads and make map based objectives more important: Restoring power, taking and defending TCOMMs, finding survivors/company assets.

Why this doesn’t happen: Devs work what they want to work on instead of overall gameplay.

[BIgboyyo]

So you just shut down your own arguments too. Just as "new gamemode" (which I'm not proposing, I'm proposing new factions to fight once in a while instead of old) will quickly get stale, boring and meta, new stuff for people to do will get meta also.
Just because you dislike gangs, or revolution rounds, doesn't mean other people do. I for once enjoy those rounds as they break the monotony of casual SS13 rounds. The only type of round of normal SS13 that I dislike is a wizard that isn't friendly.

Also guess what: Humanoid factions bring us closer to that vanilla SS13 possibilities. Marines fighting CLF/UPP/Mercs would offer more ways to fight them. Currently you can either chase and shoot a beno till it dies, or stun a beno and shoot it till it dies. You could capture human enemies and put them into PoW camps, interrogation RP, sabotage of electrical grid, etc

New factions to fight with on semi-regular basis is the way to go. Easy to do, fast to do, fun to do. And lets not act like it can't be balanced. All that scream about off-screen hits, invisiblity and darkness can be easly fixed by removing scopes (or giving everyone ability to "scope-in" with any gun that works like mini-scope), by removing invisibility and removing darkness (maybe leaving it in few small buildings that require power to light up).

Other factions to fight with will provide RP opportunities, you can talk about warcrimes, you can capture and interrogate people, you can surrender, you can cease-fire, you can reenact christmast truce, hostile human factions truly provide player-driver RP. Not some bullshit mechanic where you press "A" to have "fun", arrange pipes to have "fun", research bullshit combat stims to have "fun".
What brings RP to vanilla SS13? Genetics? Science? Surgery? Or maybe bar and outside of bridge where people gather to stare at captain? I think the latter.

Fighting against other factions is the same boring awful shit every time. I don't understand how anyone enjoys fighting other humans in CM the game is not balanced for it and it shows. Even when you remove snipers/fog/darkness/etc It's always awful. Marines always have the advantage and unless some major admin fuckery happens they always win. Marines have CAS, Specialists with actually good weapons (UPP Minigun fucking sucks), OBs, better guns, a major numbers advantage, OTs and funny grenades, they have SL beacons, multiple organized comms channels, requisitions, smartgunners, etc. There are no human factions that can even stand a chance. UPP guns suck ass and are far outmatched by marine ones, CLF has purposely garbage tier items, PMCs are the only one who you can argue have a chance against marines. Factions that fight against marines are on the defensive on maps that are designed for XENO defenses, all humans have are sandbags and barricades which are shit when you're fighting people who have bullets and grenades. You can't meaningfully balance it because the game just isnt made for it and thats not a bad thing, arbitrarily adding other modes to make up for the main one being unfun just makes things worse.

UPP/CLF/PMC/ETC are all ERTs for a reason, the only impact they can meaningfully have is a surpise attack against random shipside crew and murdering CIC. Even they get their ass beat once marines know about them and come up from the ground to fight them (unless DS's get camped)

POW and Interrogation RP is meh, from all I've seen you're either yelling at a brick wall or the guy you're interrogating has completly switched sides and gives you everything, there's no meaningful "interogation" mechanics to do anything with and not much to do to fuck with them other than russian roulette with a revolver. Cease Fires never happen unless admins make it happen or they add xenos to the mix which would give the two factions a common enemy (xenos would get instantly owned after that, much fun). Meaningful RP with other factions can happen when you place them in the middle of a typical round and I've seen that be successful before but that's not what we're talking about.

Adding other factions isn't going to make people listen to breifing by the way, orders are going to be the same regardless of whether you're fighting xenos or not because thats just how the meta currently is and there's a lack of interesting mechanics to do interesting things.

[CABAL]

snip

I think you are simply wrong.

You just took the current experience of admemes doing (once in a blue moon) HvH poorly and applied it to potential new and balanced HvH that run itself.
Yes, marines have CAS/Mortar/OB/etc... But that doesn't mean the other faction can't have specific counters against that. You know, new "gamemode" would have to be somewhat balanced, why we all pretend like it would be literally exactly like removing xenos and spawning other faction?

How the "game isn't made for that"? You mean SS13 isn't made for HvH combat, or maybe CM isn't made for HvH combat? Because I don't see the problem with the former as combat HvH servers existed for a long time and the latter can be made for HvH and that would be much easier than add whatever the fuck mechanics that will get metaed in a week and won't add anything meaningfull.

There even shouldn't be some fucking "interrogation" mechanics. Thats the beauty of it, "interrogation" is full RP experience with 0 mechanics (however it would benefit from some fluff devmeme stuff like pullling out finger nails, teeth and stuff).
I also like how you treat the concept of interrogation. Yeah, if the other party won't cooperate, it will be shit. GUESS WHAT?! EVERY FUCKING ATTEMPT ON RP WILL SUCK IF THE OTHER PARTY WILL NOT PLAY ALONG! THATS THE FUCKING POINT OF RP! NO MATTER WHAT DEVS/ADMEMES/WHOTHEFUCKEVER DOES, RP WILL ALWAYS DEPEND ON ATLEAST TWO PEOPLE PLAYING ALONG AND YOUR ARGUMENT AGAINST SOMETHING PURERLY RP BASED IS THAT THE OTHER SIDE SURERY WON'T PLAY ALONG!
The irony of that is stunning.

Cease Fires did happen when benos were present, but it was usually benos and the other faction fighting together against marines.There was even a rule in the past prohibiting xenos from making cease fires/alliances with anyone after a round where some other faction traded some monkeys in exchange for that and benos agreed.
Look right there, natural RP was created, better to shut it down, cover your ears and sing "la la la".

And I never said that adding new factions once in a while would make marines attend brieffings and such. Maybe there is a chance that since its new, people would be excited enough to try.
People who just go to DS after gearing up fall into two categories. First is the soft-powergamer, who just wants to fight and win and he gets fun by fighting and winning. No idea why the fuck he plays janky, old, laggy, 2D, 15x15 grid, shitty SS13, but he does, nothing short of admeme intervention would force him to sit in brieffing, he would watch YT anyway.
The other player just got bored. He played long enough to know everything and in standard round nothing excites him anymore. Its all stale and boring. Untill something atleast slighty fun and interesting happens, he won't say anything outside asking req for some gear. But if something does happen, he will get excited again and maybe will care enough.

Decide which side should be encouraged and which side should be left alone.