Marines can have a hard thought victory with a 50/50 win-rate

[Grungler The Bungler]

After trawling through multiple posts on this forum about the balance of CM in its current incarnation, I have decided to make this post. I have seen on more than one occasion the idea that "I don't mind the devs pushing for a 70/30 because it makes the victories for marines more hard fought" - I believe this to be a fallacy. There is a xeno bias on the admin or dev team for CM, I think this can be stated without argument; I have, multiple times, seen admins say "I don't play marines because they aren't fun to play" - or something to that affect. When the developers implement a feature that increases the strength of the xenos, or decreases the strength of the marines, this means that skilled marine players ability to affect the round is reduced, whilst unskilled xeno players ability to influence the round is massively increased. Anyone who has played CM will understand that as a xeno you have multiple chances to recover from huge mistakes, whilst also having the power to do massive damage on marines who may not have made any mistakes; on the other hand Marine players often have no chances to recover from a mistake, however small it is, for example, if a marine gets left behind by his squad and is pounced by a runner, that runner can instantly do damage that will require 20-30 minutes of waiting time to fix, if not worse.

Marine nerfs and Xeno buffs artificially inflate the Xeno win-rate, and make marine victories less hard fought; this is because, more and more often as marines nerfs increase, a marine victory won't be down to incredible skill and co-ordination from the marine's, it'll be because the xenos managed to fuck up with all of the powers awarded to them.

I fully expect to see someone say "the marines get nerfed so that the 70/30 win-rate can be achieved" - I understand why marines are nerfed and xenos are buffed, and I am saying that its poor design philosophy. Instead of one sides powers being artificially inflated, and the other side's artificially deflated, features should be implemented on both sides that reward skilful play, rather than rewarding unskillful play from xenos, like a spitter being able to stunlock its opponents with relatively little skill. This would ensure that the side with the best players win.

Do not get me wrong, I am not against changes being made for balance, but when marines basic abilities like being able to shoot a weapon, or swallow a pill are so drastically messed with, it makes me question, what possible help could it be to the balance to make it so marines can't shoot their gun once they've pulled it out for 2 seconds.

Another thing i fully expect to see is the argument that "CM is an RP server, its part of marine RP to lose to the big scary xenos". Correct me if im wrong, but i cannot remember the last time I saw an "RP feature" added. With the way the CM server is currently set up, it is a PvP server, not an RP server. The scenario would be much much different if the server was based around RP, for example: marines do not have to fight the xenos, if the situation was realistic and the marines were RP-ing as human beings, they would evacuate the survivors, then leave the planet and call for a biological containment team to take and study the xenos. There is no motivating reason for the marines to stay on the planet, like one of the drop ships crashing and having no way back to the ship. There is a reason why most of the players on CM treat it like a PvP server, being up to date with the meta, in order to survive and fight better.

I am saying non of this a slight to any coders, spriters or developers, I am merely saying that the design philosophy of the game may be slightly fallacious.

tl;dr: Marines having basic abilities debuffed, and aliens being given many many chances to escape their mistakes whilst marines get practically none makes it so that marine victories are often not hard fought, and cases where marine's victories being caused by the skill of marine players are reduced. Instead, more marine victories will be caused caused by the incompetence of Xeno players.

[Sulaboy]

Marine strength is at an all time high. I only real the TLDR, but marines have pretty good odds in a fight right now. Coordinating as a marine with a few other marines makes a strong fighting force.

[spookydonut]

This is more fitting for the updates thread.