Staff Report: Policy?

[Swagile]

Your Byond Key: Swagile

Your Character Name: Amira Young

Their Byond key: All of Staff on at the time

Approximate time and date of the incident (Central Us Time for best results): 5:30 to 7:00 ish, EST.

Which Staff Protocols (http://www.colonial-marines.com/viewtop ... =57&t=5647) were broken: Enforcement of the rules

Description of the incident: Basically, it was a "test round" where Developers added the Mutator system. Ok, fair enough, I roll Marine since I didn't want to try it out since I guessed that everyone would want to be xeno (and I guessed right). So I get Bravo PFC, load up on my attachies, head to briefing, yada yada. We get Normandy as our DS and after dropping...

We drop right into most of the Hive as they are all camping LZ-2. Which is against the rules. We barely survive and lose a quarter of us to being pulled away, and the rest that died got revived by doctors when we finally managed to evac from several T3's trying to rip us apart. I ahelp this during the fight and get a response when I finally die from Solomare, which essentially said "we can't do anything, its a test".

Can we get some policy going? Or is there some hidden policy that allows rules to be broken whenever a Developer decides to log on that I don't know about? My first report was on a dev and their event where they were "testing" Claymore spam on and near LZ's as a gameplay mechanic through a CLF event.

Now its a Xenomorph system test and suddenly Xenos are allowed to break rules?

Is it "no rules" during these "test" rounds? Can there be some clarification here?

Evidence (screenshots, logs, etc): N/A, logs can be pulled.

How you would punish the accused: A clarification for "test rounds" and the rules around them, as clearly there are hidden rules from my experience whenever Devs get involved.

[GenericUsername]

Actually, as one of the xenos, we went to LZ2 because someone told us a pred was there and we were all hunting preds; shortly after DS2 arrived. It's just that we had 3 ravagers and a boiler there. Nothing we could do with a 60+ xeno hive, makes no sense to hide in caves and send a runner to look.

[Swagile]

Actually, as one of the xenos, we went to LZ2 because someone told us a pred was there and we were all hunting preds; shortly after DS2 arrived. It's just that we had 3 ravagers and a boiler there. Nothing we could do with a 60+ xeno hive, makes no sense to hide in caves and send a runner to look.

We got pushed by several Ravagers, a Crusher, Lurkers, a Boiler and Defender that ran off, and I believe a few runners?

Don't know the exact count, as I was tunnel visioning on a Ravager who was trying to charge me.

[NethIafins]

There were 70-80 xenos ingame at that point.
Some of them were scouting LZ areas, some of them were hunting predators.
You can't control population of this size sometimes.
Especially now that we know there was a xeno join bug with larva

Also, we said that standard rules apply, devs are not here to police the server (unless there are mods/admins), and I think that admins and mods handled the round perfectly, to degree they were able to during messy round like this.

There is no hidden protocol. Devs do their thing, Mods and Admins police, we all work together for the betterment of the server

[Solarmare]

My response wasn't that we weren't doing anything. It was that it was a round that was testing something and wasn't a feature being implemented with the ongoing round as a reason, which you then decided to take a reason to ignore what staff was actually doing that round. Which was not one, not two, but at least three platoons sent to assist marines against the horde. Banning or bombing everyone in a situation isn't the only tool admins have to deal with a situation or have to use.

[forest2001]

I was one of the Lurkers involved, I forget the number but I attacked LZ2 with others. We had at the time of DS2 leaving again, 74 Xenos. This is half an hour into the game (15 minutes in we had 50) as the first queen (Ghosted right after) bought larva as a mutator. With those numbers we could not IV justify hiding or not attaching. As soon as we found the marines both at medical/lz1 and lz2 we had little choice but to attack. I was not present for the whole round as I had to depart shortly after my death, but it sounds like the admins did what they could to balance it.

Edit (I remember now, I was Lurker (1)

[MChosen]

I was a xeno that round.
Since everybody wanted to try out new mutator system, every ghost was joining as a xeno.
That resulted in xeno numbers being 60+ within first 20 minutes of round.
Of course with those numbers and with every xeno getting speed boost (as Queen ordered) hive knew that marines won't be able to win on colony, so as soon as somebody reported "bird at LZ2", we all went there to murder marines, who unfortunately weren't able to do anything at all against the swarm.
Not long after that LZ1 was attacked and every marine on Alamo got murdered.

Then admins balanced marine side by spawning 1 platoon of marines and 2 platoons of PMCs (there were 20+ PMCs).
At this point xenos outnubered marines only by 20 (~45 vs ~65).

Then marines fortified every ladder and after the first xeno push, they managed to cut xeno numbers from ~65 to ~15.

There wasn't any rule break from admins/devs. They wanted to test new features to balance and add them in future. Then when they realised, that it resulted in xenos numbers growing too fast, they balanced marines side.

[KennyTGuy]

Can confirm was one of the PMCs admins and devs did their best to mitigate an unforseeable consequence, the round ended up quite enjoyable in the end for me at least

[RobBrown4PM]

I was one of the Xenos this round. We had 75 Xenos, plus 10 or more buried larva before the Marines even touched down. No matter what the Marines did they were going to lose. I don't think anyone foresaw us having those numbers. It was a test round of a new mechanic that was and is still pretty raw and in the test phase. I didn't see a problem with it. The admins spawned in a ton of PMC's once we got ship side and they ate through out numbers real quick.

[Zelkova64]

I was a ravager at LZ2, I can confirm we were told to go to LZ2 for a predator. Marines happened to land at the same time we arrived there hunting it.

[Lumdor]

Was an Admin on at the time playing as a predator. As most people said from my IC knowledge and from what I heard in msay/asay the xenos went to LZ2 too kill a predator.

Just so happens at the same time the marines landed and got stomped by the test we were doing with the xenos.

I'd say no one is to blame here as the xenos were doing as they were told by hunting a predator in the area, and at the same time marines landed while they were in the area.

[Reuben Owen]

was a rav that round

I was in a group that was near eva blast doors when we saw some marines

now normally we wouldn't be able to immediately push them to get back but we had like 5+ t3s in our group (I think at one point there was 16 total T3) , we called out to other xenos there were marines there and even before they did, they were outnumbered

we rolled through them, they got hammered bad and ran back, we followed
reached lz2 and began slaughter

additionally i remember a pred getting destroyed by me and another rav just east of medical, poor guy

there was not any camping, it was just a really fast loss at first contact, normally you can't push like the xenos did that time but the numbers were just too high by xenos in comparison to marines
also they (xenos) were all eager beavers and wanted to test themselves which encouraged engaging early, which they could pull off cuz again, numbers

[NGGJamie]

Often during map-related development tests in particular, we attempt to not interfere with the round at all if possible, in order to get information on natural strategies each side will attempt to deploy on that map. It gives us good information on the sorts of things we need to look into counteracting before a final release state.

While I can see the connection to the claymore incident, which seemingly all involved agreed was a bad idea in post (Hindsight is always 20-20.) A different set of ideas come into play during map tests. We specifically look for things like this that players will attempt to abuse, usually even more-so than we are looking for actual map bugs. Attempting to stop all instances of abuse via rules or policy in such cases does not grant us information on the effects it would have in the wild, unabated.

Closed.