Xeno identification

[CABAL]

Yeah well, as long as it's on gitlab you can be sure devs won't care. Also there is a QaA on the thread "counselors" something which isn't public yet. (Well, still waiting on their answers)

Fixed

[awan]

Ya that's about the extent of the argument against it.

It is way stronger.
Well, ill give you the reply once more.

I've put this suggestion, adding Ckey into benos Hivemind or names in every suggestion topic, xeno improvement, what xenos need and how to improve xenos topic. But, it still gets ignored and brushed over. If any of you haas a github account please post it there and everyone give it a thumbs up. I think that's the only was we're getting it.

I say once more because it has been adressed. I know I have, I know spooky (who said in discord he is not against it.) has and I know it was brought up during a town hall.
And it will be put into the mailbag for sure. It's just that people don't accept no and just keep on going and that is easy for me to get sick off.
I am also going to address why it is a no for me.
Having staff enforce guidelines or rules on this is not a good idea. And I will explain later why I do not see that as a solution to any of the points I am going to make here.

It is not new player friendly at all.
Marines get assigned roles at random. This is not the case for xeno's. There is no way to stop people from using this information to promote certain people over others.
First off all unless a player complains staff will never notice. Unless the queen blatantly stated they promote A over B because of their ckey it is impossible to do anything about it for staff.
If the queen is even half smart they can find any arbitrary reason to promote a over b when in fact they just know B better. That is not new player friendly.
Or the opposite can happen. You deny a promotion because player a is not a good runner. Now, in your mind that might seem like a good thing but that also means player a never gets the chance to become a better runner. In the long term this is bad.

Now the "solutions" to this issue that have been proposed are 1. Only non queen can see it. 2. It is only optional. 3. Make aliens roll for roles.
Now for 1.
This is not a solution. Drones can become queen and remember who the good players are that is not hard at all. Ghosts can become the queen as well so even without the queen doing anything to fishy it already means we can still end up in this situation. Now if the queen is fishy and out to meta their friend can just give over the list (even when observing.) it is almost impossible to enforce anything about that. I do not see this as a solution as in my opinion it creates another advantage for people who (secretly) metacommunicate.

2. Even if it is optional it would not change the scenario listed above. Because if I am a new player and I turn the feature off I still don't get crusher. It is even worse because if I have to turn it on (and I am new and don't know this.) it means I won't be recognized until I turn it on. Making it optional changes nothing because the fact that regulars get recognized is the problem.

3. To get that mapped out is a development task. Implementing that for this system or even suggesting we do that is showing you have no idea how development works.
It is not that it is too much effort more that in my opinion our efforts are better spend elsewhere.

It discriminates against certain playstyles.
There are a lot of people who disagree with others on how to play cm. There are not many aliens however who ghost at round start because of the queen they get. The second people see the name of the queen or xeno's they pair up with you risk people ghosting/leaving or disobeying the queen. In general we want to encourage new strats and idea's if you see it is symb queen and you already think you are going to lose because of it it means the strat has a lower chance to succeed because of your mindset. It will lead to queens giving orders based upon specific people their playstyle. Lurker 1 can go harrass marines lurker 2 has to sit in the hive until mature. In general forcing people to play a certain way is not fun. One of the big pro's of aliens is player freedom. You are not punished for trying something new at this time. But the second everyone knows who you are you will be punished if your new plan does not work out. And punished for all future rounds because people will remember your name.

Why I would not want staff enforcement on this.
In general, it is bad to have to have staff enforce anything. I do not mean to insult any staff members but there are huge issues that every staff team has.
In general we should not be creating features and letting staff enforce rules about how to use the features that is a horrible idea.
Making additional rules because of this has cascading extra enforcement times. It means more conversations, warnings, bans, appeals and thus more work.
In general this is bad because even staff time is better spend dealing with griefers and macro issues. I would rather not create another issue/rule staff have to enforce.

!	Message from: awan
	For the record. I am against this idea. Neth is neutral I do not know the position of other staff members on this. I did ask the dev team for a combined opinion on this.

[Dolth]

I mean 95% of my xeno games are like :

Queen : Okay only 3 luker out of the 6 runners 3 spitter 1 hivelord.

Hive status : 6 lurkers 1 spitter 0 hivelord

No one gets devolved.

I don't think any queen is really able to say this xeno only will evolve to t3. She can try. But it rarely happen.

Then regarding leadership favorizing, idk, is it really much of a big deal?

[CABAL]

I'm not playing xeno much, but I ghost much and I've never ecountered situation where Queen wanted to deevolve someone besides those reasons:
1) Hive have too much of that caste already.
2) Xeno is disobeying Queen's will.
3) Hive reached limit for that T2/T3 and there is big need for another, more usefull caste.

Is it really hard to see when Queen would deevolve one player, to allow another evolve in the same place?
Those three reasons stated above are the only reasons Queen should deevolve. Any other reason would greatly hint "issue" with "softmetabudding".
Queen would be more likey to deevolve bald/new player, but when there is three Ravages and one of them is bad while Hive needs boiler, then it's nothing bad.
Queen doesn't have control over evolving, she don't decide who will evolve and who will not. Bald/New xeno took the Lurker spot? Oh well, he will die anyway
Slap Queen with big 10/15 minutes cooldown for deevolving and there you got it. No staff intervention requied. Was there even a round where Queen needed to deevolve two xenos in span of 10/15 minutes? I doubt that Queens deevolve atleast xeno a round.

[kastion]

remove queen devolve and make a rule that queens cant tell who gets to evolve. It will make the hive less organized caste wise but I am willing to lose that for usernames. the rule against saying who evolves doesnt even have to be enforced just put it on the books so when a queen bitches that they werent following orders you can just tell them they can do it. no extra work for the staff.

[lurkermain]

remove queen devolve and make a rule that queens cant tell who gets to evolve. It will make the hive less organized caste wise but I am willing to lose that for usernames.

This unironically. It barely adds anything to the game, people are already playing to the best of their ability to help the hive win.

An actually useful function would be a "Mandate" skill where you can set a caste like boiler as priority and the game would reserve the last t3 slot for it, so if the last slot is reserved then non-spitters could not evolve to t3.

[kastion]

This unironically. It barely adds anything to the game, people are already playing to the best of their ability to help the hive win.

An actually useful function would be a "Mandate" skill where you can set a caste like boiler as priority and the game would reserve the last t3 slot for it, so if the last slot is reserved then non-spitters could not evolve to t3.

yes or a way to limit how much of each caste you want. mandate sounds cool though

[LittleBlast]

One problem that was discussed earlier is that think about how so many COs who dont have a huge reputation just have their orders ignored. Now apply that to queen. It would lead to people really only actually listening to orders from well known queens and basically ignoring other queens.

[kastion]

One problem that was discussed earlier is that think about how so many COs who dont have a huge reputation just have their orders ignored. Now apply that to queen. It would lead to people really only actually listening to orders from well known queens and basically ignoring other queens.

Ya but queen has ooc rules behind her. She can report people for not listening, I do it all the time and people will get bwoinked. Queen also has the ability to point leaders. Smart queens will delegate to players that can get other people to follow them inot battle.

[kastion]

One thing I keep hearing is stuff like "newbies will get treated badly" and things like that. I know ive gone off on xenos for blowing it before. Then I found out they were a newbie and I apologize and completely change my attitude. I think if I knew they were a newbie I would be way more lenient and helpful. When everyone anonymous I assume everyones a veteran and so then I hold them to a way higher standard.

[Butlerblock]

i like how almost every single one of awan’s arguments could also be argued for the marine side

[kastion]

I get some of the arguements, but I think the having no respect cause you arent well known works both ways. I think being anonymous as it is now is the equivalent to being not well known if we had usernames. People dont have any faith in new ideas or new plans already. People already dont follow orders. All these problems already exist. I cant count how many times I tell people not to build at tfort on lv 46 and to fight in the caves and they completely ignore me even as im yelling at them constantly. I see the opposite happening iwth usernames. You will still have people not listening to unknown players but atleast they will listen to well known players more often. I dont think things will get worse in that regard I think they will get slightly better. Unknown players can prove themselves over time too its not like they are forever gonna be unknown.\

It sucks to be a new player and get told you suck and you blew it. Thats a fact. But how about when someone tells you you kicked ass and did good. Thats matters way more to a new player I guarentee it. Everybody craves recognition and respect thats a human need. Being faceless is lame cause you never feel acomplished cause no one ever knows what you did.

[kastion]

https://gitlab.com/cmdevs/ColonialMarin ... _120771461

[kastion]

Make some kinda of system where it randomize who has the ability to go to t2 at round start. That way its basically randomized who gets to evolve. it takes 200 ticks to get to t2 so after like 300 ticks anyone can go to t2 incase there were t2 able xenos that didnt want to go to t2. The 100 tick advantage would allow the t2 to make it to t3 over the ones that couldnt go t2 too. This makes it semi random who gets to be t2 and t3 like spec roles and sg roles and things like that without breaking the game.

[DefinitelyAlone0309]

If they are too hesitant on having optional ckey in Hive Status for everyone, then make it so that only queen's ckey is shown to test out for like 2 weeks. Just have a pref in your character creation page that says "Ckey shown in Hive Status as Queen?", and we let queens sort themselves out as a test to see if it'll be useful. I guarantee you it will, but hey, what the fuck do I know right? I just want to be able to identify my hive so that I know who'll be good at what job and who'll be more comfortable doing this or that.

[kastion]

Ok so if xenos cant have usernames then why can marines?

As already pointed out COs get judged by how experienced they are so people will straight up ignore new COs orders and will balk at any kind of creativity they come up with that deviates from the norm.

I have personally had req officers deny me attachments then give the next guy in line the exact same thing I asked for, that's obvious ooc bias. I know req will ignore orders or be slow to get them for specs that they don't know but the robust players get everything they need asap.

I have literally seen and been told to ignore healing an unrobust player for a robust player as medic. This is a grevious example of ooc bs.

I get ridiculed and told im stupid if im engineer and build a fob in an unconventional way to experiment on effective strategies.

If I end up in bravo I know im probably going on fob duty for ooc reasons.

I know if I don't pick delta then I will be left behind as they charge and either win the round or lose the round because they cant work as a team. I will literally have rounds where I don't get to play because of this.

I have noticed command and POs will straight ignore me when im saying I need evac or supplies but when a robust well known player does those things they get responses and actions. For example I spent 10 minutes calling for evac after being face hugged before anyone would respond.

People have bullied me on OOC because they know my IC name or because I fucked up during the round. People have straight FFd me because I did something they didn't like but they do it in a way that it seems like an accident so I cant report it.

This is just my personal experiences. As a new marine player I don't feel welcome and I feel like im discriminated against. That's why I think we should randomize all names, randomize all squads, and remove all identifying flare like headbands from the game so we all look uniform and cant tell who is who.

[Ketrai]

Can we just fucking implement this, and see how it goes for a few weeks? Gosh, test and reap results.

[kastion]

Can we just fucking implement this, and see how it goes for a few weeks? Gosh, test and reap results.

They aren't going to, all of the devs that have said something except one are against it.

[Ketrai]

They aren't going to, all of the devs that have said something except one are against it.

A lil experimentation is always a good thing. I wouldn't call the devs "masters of balance" So seeing them test stuff more would be nice.

[kastion]

A lil experimentation is always a good thing. I wouldn't call the devs "masters of balance" So seeing them test stuff more would be nice.

Just read Deans post on the gitlab I linked earlier in the thread, we have no chance. He is head dev and he says we have no argument what so ever.

[spookydonut]

I had planned to add ckeys to hivemind messages but never got round to it.

[Dolth]

I had planned to add ckeys to hivemind messages but never got round to it.

I am not trying to be a dick here but how long/difficult do you think it is to do that? Just wondering where's the gap between planning and doing. Curiousity.

[kastion]

I am not trying to be a dick here but how long/difficult do you think it is to do that? Just wondering where's the gap between planning and doing. Curiousity.

its not that difficult, it depends on how they do it but if its usernames its pretty much copy and paste from marine code. if its ckeys its copy and paste from what admins see. Im sure spooky just had 15 other things going on at the same time so it was low priority.

[Dolth]

At work, when I have different tasks but one 10 to 50 times longer than the other, I prioritize the small task.
Doing so, the users have their tiny requests fullfiled, they feel listenned and supported and do appreciate the reactivity.

Now everyone works the way they want.

[spookydonut]

I am not trying to be a dick here but how long/difficult do you think it is to do that? Just wondering where's the gap between planning and doing. Curiousity.

Take about 5 minutes to do.