Predator Related LRP

[SandersdeKFC]

But marines OOC knowing that pred has to fight benos will not engage him for this reason. No ammount of DEFCON points will be better than pred with purpose to kill Queen.
Preds should hunt both sides, preds should RP with humans and preds should not reveal themself to benos.
If preds would get objective to kill the Queen, then hive would be busted at every pred round currently. Instead, they should have objective to make Queen run away for her life, or to put her in crit. The ultimate insult to Queen. Make her drop fluff royal jelly after being put into a crit and preds will have their trophy and Benos won't be busted.

I had few nice RP encounters with Preds and I like every pred round. It's much more fun to fight with preds, than it is to fight benos.
Preds can be easly killed and it often happens when they try to RP. No wonder why they don't do it often. There is always some unga that want to kill them when they type. Give them some sort of force field generator to activate only during conversation as it would be great dishonor if used in combat, even against unworthy prey, or to save its life.

Become a better know player as a marine, show that you are not murderboing beno main in disguise and preds will be more likey to RP with you.

But it doesn't make sense in the context of the franchise. Marines shouldn't be sitting outside of FOB just chatting with an alien lifeform. They shouldn't be challenging Preds to honor duels in a warzone. If your going to include Preds, you have to give them a reason to get into conflict. Otherwise they'll just troll until they get a fight they can easily dominate. Take them out if all people want to do with them is circle jerk about how cool they are.

[Boersgard]

Yet you're only furthering my point. The fact that 'nobody' wants to fight them isn't because they're 'unkillable overpowered', it's because they think they're unkillable, without even attempting to fight one and see how mortal they actually are. We have a lot of unrobust Predators who get killed every round without Self Destructing nor killing a single thing (eg literally 85% of the 3413849 preds who have been accepted in the past month), but one average player, who is in your own words, a retard, should not be able to comfortably 1v1 your average pred (who, if they went through the effort of even applying and getting accepted, they are most likely more competent than your average marine). There's four predators in a round. There's 100 marines and 30 xenos.

1 random baldie will not be able to kill a competent player, regardless of what role the player is playing. Your average marine will not be able to kill a competent xeno, a competent UPP in HVH, nor a competent Predator. Why? It's not because 'unga dunga me can't win cause xxxx is super ridicously op', it's because they aren't skilled enough. Like I said, even if Predators were nerfed to your liking, the average marine still won't be able to kill the average Predator. Skill is a heavy factor in this. An unrobust Predator will die regardless, and they can't randomly HPC things like you claim they will do.

Things shouldn't be nerfed into the ground because 97% of the server isn't robust, that literally won't change the fact that 97% of the server still sucks, and when they inevitably still fail to kill your average Predator in a 1v1, the reason won't be because they're 'Over Powered'. The reason is what it is currently - they suck skill-wise?.

Then get rid of the RP restrictions and let predator players go full ham on marines and xenos at will.

My ASS they aren't OP. You damn well know what would happen. Or hey, maybe I'm wrong and predators will die every round to a lone PFC, lmao.

The RP rules SHOULD be removed just to show you and everyone else what a load of bullshit this "Predators aren't actually OP" argument is. You have too many easily abusable tools at your disposal and the ONLY reason predators aren't trashing everyone else in every round is because they have RP restrictions forcing them to be lame duck gentle giants. Come the fuck on.

Predators are played nothing like actual predators because of the RP restrictions, and the RP restrictions themselves lead to grossly overpowered abilities and weapons with the excuse being that you must abide the dumb RP rules to get them so you don't abuse them. I mean, isn't just the very fact these rules and the whitelist restriction existing a tacit admission that predators are too strong to just let any random joe play it?

Or maybe your idea of high roleplay predators isn't skillfully hunting down xenos and marines for trophies, but fighting another predator over a sandwich in front of a half dozen marines.

I'm just gonna say, I think predators right now are lame as shit. I don't want to interact with them and when I do see predator RP it's incredibly out of place. Why are predators even calmly chatting with marines? It should be gunfire at first sight with taunts being thrown around and unlucky marines or xenos getting picked off, with coordinated efforts of either the hive or marines killing predators handily. Getting something like a predalien shouldn't be ridiculously difficult, nor should a predalian be an OMGWTFBBQ machine that singlehandedly ruins rounds.

I don't expect ANYTHING will change about predators. The predator council players like them how they are, and frankly I can live with being able to just completely ignore them every round.

[Boersgard]

The topic is Preds currently don't contribute to the game aside from derailing that. How do we fix that?

The intrinsic issue to bringing predators into the meta as an antagonist like xenos, is that you have to get all three sides fighting each other relatively fairly, and predators are not balanced for that. People don't want to engage them, and they don't want to do that for two reasons:

1. Honor rules so if you ignore a pred, the pred has to ignore you (or else he loses his whitelist from killing you for no raisins)
2. Predators are strong enough that fighting them is a losing prospect. We can even go with the previously argued assessment that this is just a 'perception' and not how predators actually are; whatever, it still remains an issue.

So if you want predators to be more of an actual antagonist you have to tackle these two things.

And, I said before, I'll say it again:
Remove the predator roleplay restrictions and let them murderbone at will.

You don't even have to do anything balance-wise. The calls for balance changes will happen automatically without MY input, at least IF the predators are genuinely unbalanced and unfair to fight. I think they are, evidently a few people here don't think they are. Anyways - with the RP restriction lifted and predators being able to murderbone however they like, they FORCE marines to engage. Players will quickly learn, if you see a predator, you fucking kill it or it kills you; just like happens with xenos.

And then that nicely solves the RP problem where predators chillax with their marine/xeno buddies.

Aside from letting predators murderbone, it would also be ideal to give them an actual antagonistic objective to strive towards, so they're not just the robusto fuck-everything-up-annoy-everyone faction, and their murderous efforts are more directed to some gameplay mechanic that is fun/engaging for marine and xeno players as well. What this mechanic might be, I can't tell you. All I'm arguing is that the biggest roadblock to making predators an actual part of the CM meta right now, is their roleplay restriction.

I think someone should actually playtest a few rounds where predators have their RP restrictions rescinded and see how it goes. It'll be a good way for all of us to learn how it actually ends up playing out, and we can make better informed arguments and suggestions from there.

---

Edit: Actually I thought about an antagonist objective for predators - Each can collect ONE trophy (and is then essentially out of the fighting and goes back to the ship), best trophy amongst the predators 'wins' their internal contest. Maybe morph or nudge that basic idea around so it fits. Just throwing something out there to get ideas rolling.

[SandersdeKFC]

The intrinsic issue to bringing predators into the meta as an antagonist like xenos, is that you have to get all three sides fighting each other relatively fairly, and predators are not balanced for that. People don't want to engage them, and they don't want to do that for two reasons:

1. Honor rules so if you ignore a pred, the pred has to ignore you (or else he loses his whitelist from killing you for no raisins)
2. Predators are strong enough that fighting them is a losing prospect. We can even go with the previously argued assessment that this is just a 'perception' and not how predators actually are; whatever, it still remains an issue.

So if you want predators to be more of an actual antagonist you have to tackle these two things.

And, I said before, I'll say it again:
Remove the predator roleplay restrictions and let them murderbone at will.

You don't even have to do anything balance-wise. The calls for balance changes will happen automatically without MY input, at least IF the predators are genuinely unbalanced and unfair to fight. I think they are, evidently a few people here don't think they are. Anyways - with the RP restriction lifted and predators being able to murderbone however they like, they FORCE marines to engage. Players will quickly learn, if you see a predator, you fucking kill it or it kills you; just like happens with xenos.

And then that nicely solves the RP problem where predators chillax with their marine/xeno buddies.

Aside from letting predators murderbone, it would also be ideal to give them an actual antagonistic objective to strive towards, so they're not just the robusto fuck-everything-up-annoy-everyone faction, and their murderous efforts are more directed to some gameplay mechanic that is fun/engaging for marine and xeno players as well. What this mechanic might be, I can't tell you. All I'm arguing is that the biggest roadblock to making predators an actual part of the CM meta right now, is their roleplay restriction.

I think someone should actually playtest a few rounds where predators have their RP restrictions rescinded and see how it goes. It'll be a good way for all of us to learn how it actually ends up playing out, and we can make better informed arguments and suggestions from there.

---

Edit: Actually I thought about an antagonist objective for predators - Each can collect ONE trophy (and is then essentially out of the fighting and goes back to the ship), best trophy amongst the predators 'wins' their internal contest. Maybe morph or nudge that basic idea around so it fits. Just throwing something out there to get ideas rolling.

I agree with everything put forward here, except the edit. Again, I think the best way to encourage A v P v M conflict is through giving the Predator (notice I'm using singular tense here intentionally) having the objective of hunting the Alien Queen, and giving the Marines a huge benefit for killing the Predator. The entire game shouldn't just be based around the Predator being able to kill whatever he wants, because that's boring. All three factions should have a reason for confronting each other.

The conflict between the Aliens and Marines is easy to reason. The Aliens are trying to take over a human world.

The conflict between Aliens and the Predator is also easy. The Alien is the Predator's prey. But to balance this conflict the Pred shouldn't be able to slice through Aliens like they're nothing. A group of Aliens should be able to take out the Pred easily. Every good hunter knows that timing a kill is the most important factor, and the Predator bidding his time, and systematically weakening the hive should be the crux of his strategy.

The conflict between the Marines and the Predator is the tricky one. Both the Marines, and the Predator have to have a reason for fighting each other. Again, the logical one would be that Marines gain a huge Defcon boost by capturing the Pred, his corpse, or his equipment. This makes it so that the Marines are highly encouraged to pursue combat with the Predator as it means they can win quicker through Defcon victory [which imo should be the primary crux of the gameplay]. The Predator is forced to treat them as interrupting in his hunt, and act as such.

[CABAL]

But it doesn't make sense in the context of the franchise. Marines shouldn't be sitting outside of FOB just chatting with an alien lifeform. They shouldn't be challenging Preds to honor duels in a warzone. If your going to include Preds, you have to give them a reason to get into conflict. Otherwise they'll just troll until they get a fight they can easily dominate. Take them out if all people want to do with them is circle jerk about how cool they are.

But we abandoned franchise long ago. Xenos are smarter than humans for some reason, xenos don't evolve like in any Alien entry, marines don't obey orders as they should, xenos can tank multiple shoots and heal be just standing on some black shit etc.

Preds have a reason to get into conflict. They are supposed to hunt worthy preys by honorable means. Both benos and marines. It's not marines that challenge Preds to honor duels, but preds challenge marines, since it's OOC knowledge to speak with pred about "duels" before your character will learn about it.

Survs don't have reason to be in conflict either. Just kill randomly three benos every round and give them 4-10 larvaes and it will be it.

They are never "just chatting", but it's part of RP. Single greatest example of RP: Chatting. Learing few things from them and about them and shit. I can say that preds give 100000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more RP than benos and that would be a lie, not because it's too much, but because 0 multiplied by any number still equals 0.

The point of predators being in a round is to give RP opportunity, some challenge with material rewards and variation to the round. Every pred round is just like little event not run by admemes. It's great, every round with preds around is better.

I have never spotted pred that would "just troll until they get a fight they can easily dominate.". There are some jerks in pred ranks, it's obvious, but I will take 4 jerk preds over no preds at all.

Then get rid of the RP restrictions and let predator players go full ham on marines and xenos at will.

My ASS they aren't OP. You damn well know what would happen. Or hey, maybe I'm wrong and predators will die every round to a lone PFC, lmao.

The RP rules SHOULD be removed just to show you and everyone else what a load of bullshit this "Predators aren't actually OP" argument is. You have too many easily abusable tools at your disposal and the ONLY reason predators aren't trashing everyone else in every round is because they have RP restrictions forcing them to be lame duck gentle giants. Come the fuck on.

Predators are played nothing like actual predators because of the RP restrictions, and the RP restrictions themselves lead to grossly overpowered abilities and weapons with the excuse being that you must abide the dumb RP rules to get them so you don't abuse them. I mean, isn't just the very fact these rules and the whitelist restriction existing a tacit admission that predators are too strong to just let any random joe play it?

Or maybe your idea of high roleplay predators isn't skillfully hunting down xenos and marines for trophies, but fighting another predator over a sandwich in front of a half dozen marines.

I'm just gonna say, I think predators right now are lame as shit. I don't want to interact with them and when I do see predator RP it's incredibly out of place. Why are predators even calmly chatting with marines? It should be gunfire at first sight with taunts being thrown around and unlucky marines or xenos getting picked off, with coordinated efforts of either the hive or marines killing predators handily. Getting something like a predalien shouldn't be ridiculously difficult, nor should a predalian be an OMGWTFBBQ machine that singlehandedly ruins rounds.

I don't expect ANYTHING will change about predators. The predator council players like them how they are, and frankly I can live with being able to just completely ignore them every round.

Again, in honor duel they are not OP. IN A HONOR DUEL! IN DUEL! I N H O N O R D U E L!
If you never shoot at pred, if you never hugged him, if you never insulted him, if you never helped a marine that he was currently fighting, you are a honorable pray and he can't use his full potential.
He might want to hunt you, but he has to do it honorably. During honor duel/hunt, he can't use ranged weaponry (he can throw shit) and he can't fight you while cloaked.
To be challenged, or just choosed as hunting prey, you have to be perfectly healthy, be armed, or issue orders to kill, or you have to insult pred/challenge him yourself. Pred have full control if he wants to hunt you, or not.

Predators without cloak and ranged weaponry are fairly easy to kill. Don't let him get close, fill his chest with slugs.
Killing a pred during hunt/duel is fairly easy and you can use your brain to adventage. Any choke points, hallways and rooms filled with obstacles will do the trick.

Preds are playing nearly as actual predators would. Watch AvP movie, or any Predator movie at all besides the newest one.
Preds are supposed to be better than single beno, or marine because of their strenght and gear, but there is no honor in hunting something that have no chance of fighting back. This is why they restrict themselfs from going ham on everything. But they need it, when their gear is stolen, or when group decides to gang bang them.

Please, tell me exactly what is OP in pred that hunts single honorable pray?

Instead nerfing cool things like Preds, synths and survs, take this initiative/hatred and put it on benos. Preds are OP, but fucking 65% +/- 5% winrates for benos isn't? Preds are OP, but neurospam chain stun isn't? Preds are OP, but screen stun isn't? Preds are OP, but mature lurker that can kill you way faster isn't?

[SandersdeKFC]

But we abandoned franchise long ago. Xenos are smarter than humans for some reason, xenos don't evolve like in any Alien entry, marines don't obey orders as they should, xenos can tank multiple shoots and heal be just standing on some black shit etc.

Preds have a reason to get into conflict. They are supposed to hunt worthy preys by honorable means. Both benos and marines. It's not marines that challenge Preds to honor duels, but preds challenge marines, since it's OOC knowledge to speak with pred about "duels" before your character will learn about it.

Survs don't have reason to be in conflict either. Just kill randomly three benos every round and give them 4-10 larvaes and it will be it.

They are never "just chatting", but it's part of RP. Single greatest example of RP: Chatting. Learing few things from them and about them and shit. I can say that preds give 100000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more RP than benos and that would be a lie, not because it's too much, but because 0 multiplied by any number still equals 0.

The point of predators being in a round is to give RP opportunity, some challenge with material rewards and variation to the round. Every pred round is just like little event not run by admemes. It's great, every round with preds around is better.

I have never spotted pred that would "just troll until they get a fight they can easily dominate.". There are some jerks in pred ranks, it's obvious, but I will take 4 jerk preds over no preds at all.



Again, in honor duel they are not OP. IN A HONOR DUEL! IN DUEL! I N H O N O R D U E L!
If you never shoot at pred, if you never hugged him, if you never insulted him, if you never helped a marine that he was currently fighting, you are a honorable pray and he can't use his full potential.
He might want to hunt you, but he has to do it honorably. During honor duel/hunt, he can't use ranged weaponry (he can throw shit) and he can't fight you while cloaked.
To be challenged, or just choosed as hunting prey, you have to be perfectly healthy, be armed, or issue orders to kill, or you have to insult pred/challenge him yourself. Pred have full control if he wants to hunt you, or not.

Predators without cloak and ranged weaponry are fairly easy to kill. Don't let him get close, fill his chest with slugs.
Killing a pred during hunt/duel is fairly easy and you can use your brain to adventage. Any choke points, hallways and rooms filled with obstacles will do the trick.

Preds are playing nearly as actual predators would. Watch AvP movie, or any Predator movie at all besides the newest one.
Preds are supposed to be better than single beno, or marine because of their strenght and gear, but there is no honor in hunting something that have no chance of fighting back. This is why they restrict themselfs from going ham on everything. But they need it, when their gear is stolen, or when group decides to gang bang them.

Please, tell me exactly what is OP in pred that hunts single honorable pray?

Instead nerfing cool things like Preds, synths and survs, take this initiative/hatred and put it on benos. Preds are OP, but fucking 65% +/- 5% winrates for benos isn't? Preds are OP, but neurospam chain stun isn't? Preds are OP, but screen stun isn't? Preds are OP, but mature lurker that can kill you way faster isn't?

Again, it's not about Preds being OP. It's about them being boring. In what world is a Predator cool or fun if he doesn't get to use his high tech toys? The whole reason Predator 1 is a great movie, and Predator became a monster icon is because it's about a group of hardass army guys being thrown into this horror scenario where they are massively outmatched technologically by this one terrifying foe. That's what people want out of a Predator round. Not some jerk off session where one Marine gets to mud wrestle a Predator while he waxes philosophically about the "D4 H0n0r of D4 Hunt," in l33t sp3ak.

[CABAL]

Again, it's not about Preds being OP. It's about them being boring. In what world is a Predator cool or fun if he doesn't get to use his high tech toys? The whole reason Predator 1 is a great movie, and Predator became a monster icon is because it's about a group of hardass army guys being thrown into this horror scenario where they are massively outmatched by this one terrifying foe. That's what people want out of a Predator round. Not some jerk off session where one Marine gets to mud wrestle a Predator while he waxes philosophically about the "D4 H0n0r of D4 Hunt," in l33t sp3ak.

It depends on pred player. Whitelist is supposed to bursh off those who can't write interesting story and invent a gimmick.
I don't know about you, but I was pretty entertained when pred first picked me to hunt. Underestimating "Enlightened" slugs was his last mistake.
I was pretty entertained when pred picked me to duel, but was interrupted by crushers. I got rammed, infected and nested. He came to my nest, said that he considered me as a great warrior, said "goodbye" and left.
I have many memories with preds and I can't call even one as "boring". "Dickish", "Unhonorable", but not "Boring".

Preds gets to use all of their gear in every round. In every round one of them dies and rest have to take back stolen goods.

Even in first movie, pred was greatly outnumbered by many "great warriors". He had to pick them one by one, but he didn't tried to kill the girl and he was fighting with unarmored Dutch as preds have to with marines. No ranged weaponry and no cloaking.
I'm sure it's not "whole reason why Pred 1 is a great movie", otherwise it would be a bad movie. Movie is cool, because it shows how stereotypical "Army Chads", who kill dozen of enemies with ease, with cheezy one-liners and with "no time to bleed", being hopelesly slaughtered by superior being. And it has Arnie in it.

Wait... He didn't killed that girl and fought Dutch up close and personal? It's almost... Almost... Almost like he had an HONOR CODE. Interesting indeed.

For just going ham with it's full potential you have benos, they are using everything they can do kill you, no wrestling in mud because of some rules, just pure murderboing.
Basically I get feeling that you want make Preds, the next benos. That wouldn't be boring at all, I'm 65% +/- 5% sure it won't be boring.

My advice: Observe the round with preds (by ghosting after being killed early for example) and watch their RP and how they react to more known marines. Watch and experience good RP with neat fights between. 100000000000000000000 times more entertaining that watching any beno, but it's still a lie and not enough, because we now know that 0 multiplied by any number still equals 0.

[SandersdeKFC]

Okay, so it's cool for like 1 guy in the whole match. Wow. Totally worth it. Not.

Again, if your going to introduce Predators, you need to have a reason for Marines as a team to be confronting them. The Predator being in total control of when, and where, and who he fights is not good RP, and it's definitely not good gameplay. It's Mary Sue, "I'm d4 st0nk w4rri0r, f1ght m3h" level of bad RP, and boring gameplay for 99% of the server. Worst, if the Marines or the Xenos do manage to kill the Predator, then it's just an excuse for the other Pred players to hop on and grief the team that did it, punishing them for achieving a great feat, or for defeating a poor player who shouldn't be a Pred in the first place.

I mean if your mindset is really the mindset of the people playing Pred, then I agree with others that they should just be removed from the game, because they're only playing to your infantile power fantasy, which is ruining an otherwise great game.

[CABAL]

I mean if your mindset is really the mindset of the people playing Pred, then I agree with others that they should just be removed from the game, because they're only playing to your infantile power fantasy, which is ruining an otherwise great game.

By this quote alone I know it's not worth to argue with obvious Xeno Main.

[SandersdeKFC]

By this quote alone I know it's not worth to argue with obvious Xeno Main.

Except I'm not. I'm a marine main, and as I stated in OP I'm tied of getting torn to shreds while my squadies watch because I'm actually treating the Pred as it should be treated, another Alien in a war against Aliens. Nice try though bud.