"Marine Metarush"

[KittyHawkpilot019]

Yeah, but there's, I think, a subtle point to it that a lot of players use that first incident of the round and staff's response to it (or lack thereof) to determine which side the staff that are online have a bias towards. If Marines run into a literal block of thick resin walls filling a room they absolutely need to go into to get power (and therefore lights) on while playing the Prison Station, they know that if it gets ahelped and the walls aren't removed, the benos will basically get away with almost anything they do that round and they themselves will probably have to walk on eggshells in case it's someone that's also strict on Marines for metagaming. If someone gets crabbed by a hugger trap less than a minute after getting off the dropship while following the most commonly-taken path from the LZ and then finds out that someone on the clear other side of the map had the exact same thing happen to them? It's going to be ahelped and if the admin is super dismissive or feels the need to give an ic justification on the benos' behalf without doing anything else? Yeah, kind of makes it clear to the Marines what they can expect from the round if the benos do anything really nasty.

On the other side of things I've played as xenos and, on at least one or two occasions, noticed that the xenos by unspoken rule will actually lean heavily on doing certain things because they know someone's coming down, with a rare few openly discussing it before being told to shut up. For instance, Spitters or Boilers that melt through the podlocks on Big Red will get a massive amount of salt thrown their way and the xenos will actually make it clear they're angry because it makes it obvious to some icly unknown entity that may or may not be coming where the hive is, which is reasonable I guess, or benos that spend too long trying to get that lone tallhost near Nexus get screamed at for still being there as the 12:20 mark rolls around. Why would this time be so important to the hive? ICly there's no reason for it to be any more significant than the 12:10 mark, but OOC that's the earliest that the Marines should generally be ready to drop unless req is on top of things and Command gives an early/quick briefing.

Then, again, there's the fact that we have confirmation that the hive occasionally sees nothing wrong with making a Hivelord spend the entire pre-drop period filling rooms that are useless to everyone except the Marines with thick resin walls for seemingly no reason while drones block off the LZ behind a 1-2 tile-deep resin wall before the Marines even show up on Prison Station, which requires blatantly admitting that you know someone is coming and this is where they're going to show up, this is where they're going to go, this is when they're going to arrive, and this is what they're going to look for.

I know some staff that will delete it and more that are fine with it, its situational but its very meta. And hugger traps in anywhere within 50 tile radius of the LZ is a scum thing to do.

[DefinitelyAlone0309]

And honestly, because all of this is unwritten, it's just up to each staff to ignore/punish it. You can get away with putting like 5 eggs in nexus, just not directly near the LZ. You can get away with completely blocking tfort with layers and layers of walls, even before marines even get down planetside; and you can completely wall off the SD room as a Hivelord, even though nobody ever gets in that room. But sometimes, you get hit with the stupidest thing. Symb got hit with the surgery table melting even though he could've directly seen doctors helping marines with the table. Jules recently got noted for calling the DS Alamo, and warning the hive about the humans on the Almayer (his note got removed after the staff report though).

So really, that's the biggest problem. A lot of our rules are simply up to personal interpretation of each staff. Some may be chill, some not so much.

[Avalanchee]

Better than 16:00 delayed bullshit rounds

[Drevenshekel]

meta rushes are annoying but atleast it's a quick death, unlike when you have 4 ancient drones delayyying for 40 minutes in the caves of LV while even the other xeno mains curse them in dchat

[KittyHawkpilot019]

meta rushes are annoying but atleast it's a quick death, unlike when you have 4 ancient drones delayyying for 40 minutes in the caves of LV while even the other xeno mains curse them in dchat

this

[lurkermain]

meta rushes are annoying but atleast it's a quick death, unlike when you have 4 ancient drones delayyying for 40 minutes in the caves of LV while even the other xeno mains curse them in dchat

I'm not sure those are exclusive, actually during rushes you might get more errant drones than otherwise.

[Vitoras]

So, I was that CO who lost his whitelist for "metarushing". Just to mention: Nearly every map has an IC explanation to go to "meta" points like Crashed Ship and such.

1)Prison: There is a damn crashed ship in the station, yes. You don't know the kind of vessel and such(It can be CLF, UPP or whatever else), so it's obvious that you need to check it out considering that you have not much space to scout because of podlocks.

2)Big-Red: W-Y actually supports you with money, so it's kinda wise to retrieve their research data to get more money for good job(Marines usually scout out all other parts of colony while moving to Lambda/Eta).

3)LV-Hydro is the best place to set up an outpost to scout out the caves after the fog falls.

4)Ice Colony - well, there are no reasons to stay either only on surface or in undergroung, so you are free to choose ICly.

Anyway, the main problem of this recent metarushing thing is that devs moved Dropship timer to 12:15. There is actually no point in delaying a drop, but there is a point in deploying as fast as you can(This is a distress and people are possibly dying every second). This is only my opinion and you actually can have different view on this.

[Madventurer]

I can confirm that metarushes actually exist in the form of command just saying all squads to Civ Residences etc. on briefing, and it really tends to suck a lot.
Other than that, it's really really hard to tell for sure if it's a metarush or not.

[Reuben Owen]

the thing about metarushing and eggs and whatever else is that no one can really set a hard limit on it, because as soon as you say "you can't place x 5 tiles away from y" or "you cant approach the caves til 12:20" then you have people skirting as close to possible "but i placed x 6 tiles away from y" or "approach the caves at 12:21", the way it is now everything is kinda deterred deterred deterred but its hard (impossible) to set actual limits without giving people a easy way to powergame... at the same time those actions need to happen at some point to progress the game

[FGRSentinel]

I mean, people already skirt the rules as much as possible: the xenos that are aware they can't camp the LZ to swarm the marines on first drop or put eggs/hugger traps there will on occasion, loophole abuse that vague requirement: as stated, on Prison I've seen xenos get away with walling in LZ1 and filling engineering with thick resin walls before first drop (implying that at least one hivelord and maybe a drone were spending a large amount of time setting that nonsense up), but I've also seen a round where the benos had a group of xenos, including a boiler I believe, parked at the intersection where the path from the LZ branches off (when ahelped, they apparently claimed that they were trying to get some hosts in the Marshal/Warden's office, but I'm not exactly sure why they'd stick around after they saw the Marines land if that was the case) and on Big Red they've been given a pass for putting hugger traps down along the paths 90% of Marines take from both LZs and nowhere else around them (LZ2 to engineering, LZ1 to I think Marshal's) without any real investigation.

Likewise, the Marines will rarely do things that look like or outright ARE metarushing. I know a round where I was an SO under Carson where the two of us were basically playing Xanatos Speed Chess with the benos from the moment we spotted benos retreat into the Civilian area of Prison Station that ended with the Xenos relocating their hive 2-3 times and us having a squad waiting for them at the next squad they picked, SIMPLY BECAUSE we realized the hostiles were moving clockwise around the station and sticking near the edge as they fled. On other occasions, though, I've seen Delta just swarm into the caves on Big Red at the first sign of xenos running in there against orders and locating the hive within a pretty short duration after first contact.

The trick is, Marine metarushes are harder to prove and therefore pin down as legitimate metagaming than a lot of xeno antics that go ignored because Marines can and will scream out the location of the hive at any opportunity, which causes the other squads to swarm the location in short order. SOs will sometimes OW captured Marines that still have a helmet to see where they're taken, but that's icly justified by the fact that these murderous bugs just took someone alive and you want to know why. The fact is, Marines often need to attack the most easily-defended location on the map to destroy the hive, which means they need to make their number advantage count.

[sw4gbag]

I mean, people already skirt the rules as much as possible: the xenos that are aware they can't camp the LZ to swarm the marines on first drop or put eggs/hugger traps there will on occasion, loophole abuse that vague requirement: as stated, on Prison I've seen xenos get away with walling in LZ1 and filling engineering with thick resin walls before first drop (implying that at least one hivelord and maybe a drone were spending a large amount of time setting that nonsense up), but I've also seen a round where the benos had a group of xenos, including a boiler I believe, parked at the intersection where the path from the LZ branches off (when ahelped, they apparently claimed that they were trying to get some hosts in the Marshal/Warden's office, but I'm not exactly sure why they'd stick around after they saw the Marines land if that was the case) and on Big Red they've been given a pass for putting hugger traps down along the paths 90% of Marines take from both LZs and nowhere else around them (LZ2 to engineering, LZ1 to I think Marshal's) without any real investigation.

Likewise, the Marines will rarely do things that look like or outright ARE metarushing. I know a round where I was an SO under Carson where the two of us were basically playing Xanatos Speed Chess with the benos from the moment we spotted benos retreat into the Civilian area of Prison Station that ended with the Xenos relocating their hive 2-3 times and us having a squad waiting for them at the next squad they picked, SIMPLY BECAUSE we realized the hostiles were moving clockwise around the station and sticking near the edge as they fled. On other occasions, though, I've seen Delta just swarm into the caves on Big Red at the first sign of xenos running in there against orders and locating the hive within a pretty short duration after first contact.

The trick is, Marine metarushes are harder to prove and therefore pin down as legitimate metagaming than a lot of xeno antics that go ignored because Marines can and will scream out the location of the hive at any opportunity, which causes the other squads to swarm the location in short order. SOs will sometimes OW captured Marines that still have a helmet to see where they're taken, but that's icly justified by the fact that these murderous bugs just took someone alive and you want to know why. The fact is, Marines often need to attack the most easily-defended location on the map to destroy the hive, which means they need to make their number advantage count.

Exactly. Most metarushes I see are just marines chasing the general direction the xeno went, like, I've seen a crusher lead 3 squads to Lambda and the whole hive was killed within 20 - 30 minutes after that crusher led literally all marines to the hive.

[chocolate_bickie]

Marine meta rushing is map specific and generally involves meta gaming that has become acceptable. A classic example of this is to ignore Virology entirely whilst sending squads to ETA and Lambda. In theory Virology should be just as important as ETA and Lambda but is ignored because marines know that xenos rarely nest there.

This comes to the heart of meta rushing, it' s not that marines can't IC justify their rushes, it's that they selectively choose as a group to 'logically' choose points of importance such as ETA and Lambda whilst ignoring other points of importance which they know OOC probably won't have xenos.

[FGRSentinel]

In fairness I feel like subtle instances of metarushing shouldn't really be as much of an issue as people make them out to be. I remember a round last night or the day before on Big Red where we had contact first drop almost before the Marines stepped out of Alamo due to a Crusher and I think a Spitter deciding to smash down the wall to Tcomm and wander into the LZ, setting off the Alamo's turret. The xenos obviously got chased off after attacking the Marines, running most of the way back to the hive from what I gather, while the survivors explicitly told the Marines about the Queen (calling it a "Shrieker" obviously) and begging them to prioritize it. Alamo wasn't even up yet and we now knew the hive was somewhere in the caves, the xenos were hostile, and that there was a big one that needed to die quickly. Even with all this, the xenos players declared it a "metarush" because the round ended within ten minutes of first drop.

On the other hand, I've ahelped an incident in the last week where an alien on Almayer that melted a third of the CAS rocket stockpile when Normandy never fired off a single shot and the beno obviously never saw the missiles get loaded into the Normandy's pods, so they wouldn't know what they were meant for. Even though I said it was probably a stupid question in the ahelp, the staff that responded said, and I quote "if that actually happened, it'd probably be the grandest of metagaming" and said that most likely nothing would have been done about it under the current policy.

That, right there, is the double standard: a single Marine squad pushing ahead into the hive within ten minutes of landing is called a metarush and can get a CO in trouble, but benos can literally melt 1500-1750 points worth of CAS rockets without having any ic idea what the rockets are or that they're a threat.

[Renomaki]

To be honest, Marine metarushes can hurt marines as much as they hurt xenos.

Mainly due to the fact that, more often than not, Command is not going to be aware of a metarush, or able to prevent it from happening to begin with. I can't tell you how many times I got pushed into large scale combat WAY TOO EARLY because someone decided to rush across the river immediately, or hit Lambda the second they get a chance, or etc etc.

Commanders are supposed to be tacticians, so how the hell are they supposed to conduct an operation when their plans go to hell and half, if not 3/4ths or more, if the marine force is already suddenly engaged in heavy fighting despite the operation barely starting? The pieces are not in place, the squads are not properly rallied and ready, and the marines that blindly charged in are getting killed needlessly: It is chaos.

If marines had more self control and tactical sense, marine wins would be stupidly more common due to the organization of marines, actually using TACTICS like proper flanks, basic formations, securing their flanks during advances and etc etc etc.

But no... Instead, as Angry Joe himself would call it, we get nothing more than heavy metal mosh-pits of blood-thirsty marines who constantly over extend WITHOUT even informing command, dying in droves because smart xenos exploit weaknesses in the offense, and then blaming command for a bad assault when it wasn't even their idea to do a full scale assault to begin with!

[Ketrai]

To be honest, Marine metarushes can hurt marines as much as they hurt xenos.

Mainly due to the fact that, more often than not, Command is not going to be aware of a metarush, or able to prevent it from happening to begin with. I can't tell you how many times I got pushed into large scale combat WAY TOO EARLY because someone decided to rush across the river immediately, or hit Lambda the second they get a chance, or etc etc.

Commanders are supposed to be tacticians, so how the hell are they supposed to conduct an operation when their plans go to hell and half, if not 3/4ths or more, if the marine force is already suddenly engaged in heavy fighting despite the operation barely starting? The pieces are not in place, the squads are not properly rallied and ready, and the marines that blindly charged in are getting killed needlessly: It is chaos.

If marines had more self control and tactical sense, marine wins would be stupidly more common due to the organization of marines, actually using TACTICS like proper flanks, basic formations, securing their flanks during advances and etc etc etc.

But no... Instead, as Angry Joe himself would call it, we get nothing more than heavy metal mosh-pits of blood-thirsty marines who constantly over extend WITHOUT even informing command, dying in droves because smart xenos exploit weaknesses in the offense, and then blaming command for a bad assault when it wasn't even their idea to do a full scale assault to begin with!

Nononono. You see sir, metarush is when command says so. "Squad X gear up with full attachments from req, and deploy at 12:10, skip briefing. The rest go to briefing." or once everyone is on the ground. "I want every marine to immediately check lambda, follow any suspicious signs immediately." which would give the marines an IC reason to just unga on into lambda, then immediately go south in the caves, find the hive, shoot it up. A more extreme example would be ordering two squads to push in at filtration/ETA, then two at lambda, to try and pincer the xenos before they have any T3's.

Even when there isn't a metarush, normal rushes are still devestating and should be considered. Never before had the hivelord/drones played a more important role than before. Even a prae early is pretty damn vital. IF you don't cover every cave entrance in a 20-40 layer deep slog of sticky resin, you can bet those marines will push in as soon as they can some times. If you don't have drones that want to spam sticky. If you don't have any boilers, or if you don't have any praetorians that even know about sticky, you can bet your ass you'll loose many xenos early. Besides, without a carrier the losses can be incredibly hard to replace if you have a murderbone hungry team of xenos.

That's what I'm trying to point at. There's way less the marines have to fudge up to fudge an early push than a bunch of xenos have to. The main thing the marines can fuck up with, is FF grenades/rockets. If anything, RPG's unironically slow down rushes as marines wait for them to try and take out T3's singlehandedly, much like the tank used to. Heck, I've played rounds as queen where the RPG had no regard for any xeno that wasn't the queen, or a T3, and no marine wanted to rush out to deal with the problem themselves, lest they get shot by the rpg.

[kastion]

I don't know why people are like "Oh well atleast rushes end the game fast better than waiting 40 minutes for delayliens". Why cant we fix both? they both suck. I have literally hid under a bed as a runner to run out the 20 minute queen timer as the last alien just to troll marines when they rush. Its like when one person is a dick the other person is gonna be a dick back. How bout we all stop being dicks?

However with all that said, its the devs fault 100% this didn't happen until they put in stupid fog holes on lv and lowered the deploy time to 1215. So its really neither sides fault.

[Gnorse]

However with all that said, its the devs fault 100% this didn't happen until they put in stupid fog holes on lv and lowered the deploy time to 1215. So its really neither sides fault.

You've registered in 2016, so I'm sure you know the following, but :
in the sulaco days, there was no fog and no deployment timer, queens were weak as shit and yet we had a large amount of xeno wins.
If you ask me, this is a question of skill. xenos staying back in the hive AFK until they hear shooty tooty instead of actually scouting, finding and fortifying the fog holes.

[kastion]

You've registered in 2016, so I'm sure you know the following, but :
in the sulaco days, there was no fog and no deployment timer, queens were weak as shit and yet we had a large amount of xeno wins.
If you ask me, this is a question of skill. xenos staying back in the hive AFK until they hear shooty tooty instead of actually scouting, finding and fortifying the fog holes.

Aliens as a whole were WAY stronger and queen didn't ovi they could go combat queen any time they wanted back then. Those were the days when crushers straight up deflected ap rounds. There was a reason the fog was put in though back in the day. I agree xenos can get better but we have had these changes for over a month and they haven't gotten better so far so I don't know if they will.

[Dolth]

They really cant be fully enforced..

They were fully enforced, just like every meta and powergame, years ago.