Post
by Wickedtemp » 20 Dec 2015, 05:53
Yeah, pretty much.
This has been my experience:
Runner: Run around, catch a lot of hosts at first. Then the marines come. Avoid them because if you get shot three times or so, you die. Become a hunter, pick off the few stragglers, there are normally at least one or two, sometimes die in the process. Dying is frequent, normally inevitable at the hangar fortress.
Sentinel: Stay in the hive and watch any hosts, especially the marines. Evolve. Watch the nested marines... Evolve. Watch the nested marines... Attack with all the other aliens when ordered, die at the impenetrable hangar fortress.
Drone: Fill in empty spaces with walls, doors, hallways, sticky resin. Sticky resin everywhere. Make a checkerboard nest because it's easy and it works. Listen to marines cuss me out in LOOC because they're stuck in the checkerboard nest. More sticky resin. If Hivelord, even more sticky resin. If Carrier, weeds. Weeds. Weeds like Colorado's got weeds. Also throw huggers. Normally survive for quite a while and infect a good number of marines until you reach the hangar fortress and get massacred.
Sentinel, while I feel like it'd be my favorite caste, is basically "Babysitter Simulator".
Runner, which has a few good options in terms of fucking up marines, is either a "High Speed, Low Health" or a "Insanely Low Speed, Medium Health" choice. There is no in-between. If you play as a Ravager, you can be outrun, out-maneuvered, and then killed. Crushers are good at fleeing until they have to turn a corner. Any pursuing marine can then kill it while it's stunned.
Drone is probably the more... balanced class, I think. With the option of Carrier, you have a chance to REALLY hurt the marines. Every marine infected is a kill unless they get the larva out. If it's not a kill, you put someone out of the fight for half an hour.
Then there's the fact that high-pop is almost always a marine victory. Guess which hours I'm normally only available to play? High-pop hours. So if I joined as a xeno, I already know that, odds are, I'm on the losing team and there's very little I can do to change that. The win-win ratio might be close to 1:1, but that doesn't mean it's balanced. If it was balanced we'd see an almost alternating pattern. But instead we see marine victories up until most of the marines log out to sleep, then the aliens win a few rounds, and then the rest of the marines wake up and it's back to marine victories. That's not balanced, that's having the marines so tough that the aliens can rarely beat them because of the sheer number advantage.
Also, Xenos DO take more teamwork and practice to play correctly. As a marine? Grab gear, rifle, ammo, knife, click whatever you want to kill. Don't stop clicking. There ya go. But for the Xeno, it's a stealth game. If you get caught, you might just get gunned down because the survivors already told the marines literally everything, since the survivors holed themselves up with metal girders again. (I know, I do it as well, but I don't think I will anymore.) So the fact it's a bit of a steeper learning curve may be off-putting.
And then you have the fact that whenever a Xeno does something like nest a marine, hug a marine, pounce a marine, tackle a marine, you'll often be met with an LOOC message. "wow xeno meta", "fuckin checkerboard nests", "saltysaltsalt", etc. Literally anything a xeno does is bad to them. Why? Because in this game, the xenos are seen as the antagonists. So who do people join? The protagonists.
Last but not least, we have the fact that some people have flat out said they feel like they're "playing against their own team." if they play as a xeno. If you regularly play as a marine, you don't want to die and then turn around to start killing marines, those are your squad-mates and pals. So there's yet another reason not to play xeno.
Whereas there's literally no reason to not choose marine. Winning side? Check. Shoot guns and explosions? Check. Sure, you have to deal with idiots, but you can just shoot and kill them on the battlefield and blame it on FF later. Did you die? Don't worry, you might be cloned. Not getting cloned? You had a good run, log out. Cause fuck playin' as a xeno.
