Nicboone's Ship-to-Ship combat event feedback

[Emeraldblood]

Keep it constructive. While there is no promise we'll do this exact event again, we're looking for feedback on how everything went for you all. What do you want to be improved and what problems did you have with it? Also, everyone give a big congratulation to Nicboone for hosting the event and all the staff who helped make it work!

[Cpkeyes]

Don't spawn xenos. Just don't. They brought nothing to the round and kind of just made it a normal round with a gimmick.

The round would've been perfect without them.

[Winter]

The ayys kinda threw the pacing off.

Also, it was cool to have the event - it was nice to play a part as an MT, but I didn't dig being poked at OOC for not fixing things while I laid on the floor for an hour blind and in pain crit. At least Rain went down fixing floors.

I appreciate that many roles got to play a part, it was very inclusive.

[Byosfeer]

>trusting the CM playerbase to fix a bunch of hull breaches in a timely manner before everything becomes completely depressurized and then throwing in xenos to the already hellacious mixture

why tho

[dannykz]

Awesome event, you guys should do this more often!

[Zilenan91]

The xenos were kinda dumb and detracted from the rest of it.


Also UPP guns are OP and aren't fun to fight against unless you cheese them because 2 bursts kills a marine. Maybe do the next event against PMCs or CLF or something.

[Omicega]

I don't know why xenos were included. They felt wholly out of place, and having three squads deployed planetside when everyone is (obviously!) interested to play with, see, and otherwise participate in the actual shipside end of things is a curious choice to say the least.

[Steelpoint]

As everyone is saying. My main two criticisms I had are...

• The Aliens brought little to the game, they just spent most of the round building up and forced the admins to spam a giant PMC wave to keep them contained. I guess this is a issue more that without Xenos it's harder to keep the majority of the Marine force occupied doing something, the main issue was the massive cheese the Aliens started doing towards the end (littering entire hallways with nests and combat nesting everyone who walked by)
• The UPP are fun to play as, unfun to fight. All their weapons will instantly ruin a Marines day. This is fine for standard ERT calls since its oft 6 UPP v a entire crew but in this event you have a lot of regular UPP who take forever to kill and deal massive damage on sight.

If anything I'd suggest a alternative UPP ERT that spawn ERT with different UPP guns that don't use 'heavy bullets'.

[WinterClould]

I wish I'd had been part of the engineering team. I'd have been so down to fix the hull, but I got PFC and it just felt like mostly a normal round but with other REALLY COOL SHIT going on that I was completely missing out on. Then I got trapped in maint, suffocated, and got even more depressed. Real big let down for me but shit happens, cant make everyone have a good round every time.

Round was a cool idea. I hope to see it again, hopefully with better luck for me next time. Xenos were also super dumb, felt super out of place.

[svord]

Don't spawn xenos. Just don't. They brought nothing to the round and kind of just made it a normal round with a gimmick.

The round would've been perfect without them.

Seconded. Any round with xenos makes it a xeno round. The round stopped being 'fight UPP and PMC conspiracies and battleships and FUN' and became 'Xeno round #200000" the second Xenos came onboard. Never add xenos to a non-xeno event. Or zombie for that matter.

[OatzAndHoes]

Overall very enjoyable round. I spawned in as a Wey Yu PMC sent as part of a team to clean up evidence of company involvement and secure a xeno sample. Things started going to shit and I ended up being the lone survivor of the team. I met up with a colony survivor, and ended up demanding his silence when the marines arrived. I then confiscated the sample from the marines who had it, and brought it to the CL. Once with the CL we began planning our next steps. The survivor would have to be silenced, permanently, and the sample would have to be extracted. The marines weren't to happy about us having a live xeno sample, and began to grow more and more hostile. This concerned us and WY told us that they would send 2 PMC ships in as backup. However before the ships could arrive, some marines started gathering outside the liaison doors. I tried my best to keep them away peacefully, but a random PFC opened fire at us and I was forced to shoot back. The CL was captured.
After this is where the round kind of fell apart in my opinion. There had been a lot of role play and build up to these next moments, the CL had called for backup but was shot at by marines, the sample was now unsecure, and wey yu was sending in the big guns. However as far as I know nothing came out of this. The PMCs arrived, had a little bit of a confrontation with the marines, and then were told to stand down by WY. The CL was evaced, and all the hostilities were blamed on him, even though the marines had shot first. The sample disappeared, and didn't play any role in the rest of the round. The PMCs just resorted to the typical hurr kill xenos objective.
I enjoyed the first part of the round, but was pretty disappointed that the WY-marine conflict didn't play out any further. An entire round of buildup to some sort of big fight over this sample just kind of got dropped. I would have rather the PMC response team get a little more background on why they were called so players who didn't know about the sample and murder of a PMC by marines would have an idea of whats going on, and maybe focused more on securing the sample and less on killing xenos.

[OatzAndHoes]

Seconded. Any round with xenos makes it a xeno round. The round stopped being 'fight UPP and PMC conspiracies and battleships and FUN' and became 'Xeno round #200000" the second Xenos came onboard. Never add xenos to a non-xeno event. Or zombie for that matter.

Xenos were pretty integral to the PMC/WY plot. If xenos hadn't been involved it would have just been a UPP vs USCM.

[Steelpoint]

Once the xenos came into play all the drama and tension between WY and the Marines dropped instantly. Hence why many think the Aliens kinda soured the latter half of the event.

[Renomaki]

I was the local synth that round, and I do have some things to say that haven't been said yet.

1: If we do this event again in the future, I feel that using something other than nukes for the missile pods would be nice. Maybe something that the power-loaders can carry, so we can carry 2 at a time instead of one. Maybe the dropship missiles could stand in better?

2: during the round, I wasn't sure what the original plan was, but at some point it appeared that we developed a new system. Instead of a pair of gunners, it appears that, along with a pilot, we had a gunner AND a scanner. I found this system to be kinda interesting and helped reduce the general workload of a single person by allowing someone else to handle the seeking while another focused on aiming. If we do this again, I think we should go with this system, both for gameplay and roleplay's sake.

3: I think scanning could be made a little less complicated. instead of having some kind of 3D chest-ish system of X, Y and Z, maybe something more akin to classic Battleship (AKA using simple number/letter grid system to spot targets, such as A1, E7, C3, etc) would make it more accessible so the scanner and gunner won't feel stupid. Trust me, during that round, I really felt embarrassed when the staff had to start throwing me hints as to where the UPP ship was after making so many random guesses due to not understanding the system all that well... Feltbadman.

[Nicboone]

I actually agree. The xenos werent meant to get as powerful as they did, and were supposed to feel much more like escaped creatures than their usual force. I would have been fine with them getting as strong as they did, had it originated in the later game, or on the ship from the sample container failing. Unfortunately, the early round PMC's got trounced, with only one survivor.


Im glad to see the feedback seems to align- and that enjoyment seems high though!

[Wubs4Scrubs]

I actually agree. The xenos werent meant to get as powerful as they did, and were supposed to feel much more like escaped creatures than their usual force. I would have been fine with them getting as strong as they did, had it originated in the later game, or on the ship from the sample container failing. Unfortunately, the early round PMC's got trounced, with only one survivor.


Im glad to see the feedback seems to align- and that enjoyment seems high though!

Unfortunately it's really hard to predict the power level of a xeno force given that a lot depends on where they're encountered. The PMCs were in a small room and the aliens were able to get close immediately. It was pretty hilarious seeing how thrashed those PMCs got though lmao. I don't know if they killed a single one.

[Emeraldblood]

@OatAndHoes I'm glad you enjoyed the Sample collection part of the round (which was one thing I was in charge of) and while I would have liked to have made it a larger part of the round, I didn't want make the sample too overshadow the main event as the round was mostly focused on Nic's side. While I did have some more plans for it, the round did get shut down short by the impact of the Xeno. If I ever make it out of Trial-Admin, this would be an event I may run one day so keep an eye out.

Overall, while I am in no way saying this is 100% confirmed, the staff has overall agreed that the Xeno will be reworked in a future round of this mode. It's possible we'll do another event of/like this in the future building off what we learned today. This event really was a test for the server as this was the first time we've ever tried to pull off something of this type and the first event Nicboone has ever run, and as such, we expected a lot of bumps in the round. All of this will be used for future events Nic hosts. While I'm not going to say how often things like these are going to happen, it's going to be a more rare thing that we'll make sure to telegraph the upcoming arrival for.

We're sorry for the problems that did come up and we're going to be working hard to make sure the next event is going to be even more amazing than this one!

Edit: I should add that we planned for Xeno to be part of the round all along, however they did get a little out of hand and we had trouble really controlling them in the later part of the game. Any Xeno in future events (in this line) will be made sure to watched closer and kept more in balance with the round. One of the biggest problems was letting the Xeno be strong enough to not get steamrolled by the Marines but weak enough to not steamroll them in return.

[Winter]

Also, for some reason, the MTs all got ganked fast and hard. Not sure if UPP knew to target them to stop breach repair or what. It was fun, though.

[Emeraldblood]

@Winter Ya, sadly we didn't realize this (as we had a lot going on) and it was just bad luck more than anything else.

[Nicboone]

things I plan on fixing if I do this again:


metal foam will be standard issue, marines will be taksed with emergency repair.

Less or no xenos. Too power too quickly. wanted them to be a more "down low" force picking off stragglers

MORE Space suits, and mt staff.

unique sprites

CLF.

[SeniorScore]

I liked the general idea, and for the most part the execution, I didn't get to experience too many qualities of it, but the fact that on the ground work was a smash and grab instead of a slugfest with xenos was nice.

I also love HvH,but UPP was definitely stronk compared to most people it was engaging(also got a throwing knife lodged into my groin after throwing it at filthy commies invading medbay 0/10)

So I think this has a lot of potential.(also xenos were defnitely a bigger factor than I would've liked but everyone's said that by now

[XSlayer300]

I really love this event, but is Ship boarding possible...? I mean, it really needs a new map if one's gonna impliment that as an actual gamemode or sort. Where after softening the defenses of the ship, one can board the enemy ship and hopefully kill anyone inside.

[Heckenshutze]

9/10.

I survived the whole thing and made the last xeno kill but I'd rather die fighting humans than having to watch my ass from the xenos while the UPP board us.

Aside from that, I loved it

[Nubs]

things I plan on fixing if I do this again:


metal foam will be standard issue, marines will be taksed with emergency repair.

Less or no xenos. Too power too quickly. wanted them to be a more "down low" force picking off stragglers

MORE Space suits, and mt staff.

unique sprites

CLF.

Sounds good.

1. instead of multiple xenos, why not spawn a single, ancient drone in the vents and buff them so they have higher health and resilience? A lone super tough xeno picking off the crew 1 by 1 would be fun and atmospheric, just like the original alien.

2. Clf, they are scrappy underdogs with varied equipment. I thought the idea of spawning small groups of upp for ambushes was pretty fun and kept the marines on their toes, so you could just do that with clf instead.

3.dedicate set of people tasked with ship/hull repair. Early on the mt's were gibbed in a missile hit, so none of the hull breaches ever got fixed. More spacesuits and oxygen tanks would also be nice.

Thanks for the work and event, and we all look forward to the improved version soon.

[Mobius_None]

I was the Chief Engineer during the event, one of the biggest issues I encountered was: a) the lack extreme lack of vents in the ship if one vent is destroyed then it becomes impossible to refill the area b) the emergency airlocks lacking flashing lights to indicate where the actual source of the breach is c) the compression suit cannot equip O2 tanks into the suit storage which severally limited the amount of repair items we could carry d) the air pump doesn't appear to function well e) the Station Alert console is useless and does not indicate areas that were depressurized f) no remote control for atmospheric consoles, this being a ship of the line you'd think it would have basic RCON systems g) lack of basic internals for people caught in breached areas to equip, there are maybe 2 total O2 Closets in the entire ship. Overall in my opinion the ship is not capable of dealing with breaches effectively regardless of the skill of the crew given the time we had.