This has been a diverse topic of discussion. Both on nay and yay. In the end if someone decides to spawn camp theres nothing the team getting camped can do but wait for the end. Yes it is a legitimate tactic for clanners and if you are in a clan match you have to win anyway you can. But pubs are usually out to have fun, win or lose, and to me personally I dont have much fun when I dont even get to move from spawn. If you are waiting for backup or a seige to be built so beit but if you are doing it just to do it I think that it is lame and with this final word I will leave this thread to go the way of the dodo (thx moo).
Nay. Spawn camping is lame and should not be considered a valid tactic.
Wait, before you start flaming, (and I can see from reading this topic it's already attracted several flamers) let me validate that by saying it depends on the circumstances.
Let's say you're in a clan match, FF on, experienced players, the works. So one of the marines is assigned to sneak into the alien hive and slow them down. In an arranged match you're playing to win - so I would call that a valid tactic. Besides - the other team probably has already considered what they can do to stop it from happening. So one clan wins, the other loses, game over.
Ok, now we're off to a random public server, with a bunch of people you've probably never seen before. A single marine who plays with a clan decides on his own to go spawncamp the aliens, for whatever reason. But a public game isn't about winning so much - it about having fun. The game is fun when both sides have to fight it out, not when one side has an unfair advantage. This single player has ruined the game for both sides, the aliens lose and the marines win. The aliens are upset because of the lame tactics. And the marines? so what if they won, some of them may not have even had the opportunity to shoot a single aliens. Game over - No fun.
<!--QuoteBegin--Toshax+Apr 18 2003, 03:55 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Toshax @ Apr 18 2003, 03:55 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> lol no you see, I am one of the people that most everyone is complaining about. Not because I sit in a hive and kill only spawning skulks... <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> Oh that's funny, because that's what this topic was about. :think:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I've played in a lot of pubs and everytime I end the game in such a manner, all the aliens begin to whine. There is a difference between your fragfest term and what we call a legitimate tactic.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
See... I think it's perfectly fine that you can and do this. But I think it's something of a courtesy issue here... if you go marine on a pub server and immediately rush and end the game in 2 minutes once, fine. If you can do it again the next game, fine. But after that, it'd be nice if you'd lay off your 'end the game f@cking fast' strat and let all the rest of the people on the server have fun. At the point where you've basically single-handedly killed the alien team a couple times, why would you continue to hive-rush in subsequent games? You've already proven your superiority over the aliens.. Rather than make yourself look better and better, you're just making yourself look like more of an @ss to the rest of the server.
I realize that it's a player's own perogative to continue hive-rushing or not... but it'd be nice to see these elite players try and make the games interesting and varied on pub servers, rather than continuing the same strat over and over again ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
I completely agree, it slows the aliens down if you can get in there quickly and start killin em as they spawn, so the marines can take over and win. Great, if its a clan game. If you're in a pub you have my everlasting scorn, because I dont boot NS up so that I can join a game only to plop out of the hive and become an oozing green mass on the floor only moments later, just like everyone else on the alien team. If its a decentways into the game, I don't concider it unfair, because while they attempt to kill me as I spawn they have to deal with my team. I've yet to join a game where someone set up camp at our hive more than 5 minutes into the game and didn't get wasted from behind within 2 kills. I've also been in more than a few games where within 20 seconds there are 3 skulks sitting at an IP killing anything that spawns, or a marine has set up shop outside our hive. While a legit base rush right away could work as a TEAM, a single marine has no ability to sit there and kill the single hive right away, only to tick off the alien team enough so that they F4 and get it over with. Doesn't sound like a whole heck of alot of fun to me.....
Spawncamping in a pub is just like cheating (although not to the same degree). All you do is ruin the game for other people, so why do it?
No matter how much we discuss this here, it wont stop to happen from time to time <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->. Come on, were humanbeings and we do what we want, when we want to, what ever it takes to get it done. Ah, that sounded very scary.
There are different ways to spawn camp, if the marines are attacking the hive and some poor skulks happens to spawn there, its not lame because its suppose to happen, just bad time to spawn <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->.
But if someone is crouching at the corner with shotty, or hmg, and just blasting away skulks only for 10 minutes, thats pretty lame <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->. But whining about it wont make any difference, just kill the camper and be done with it.
Kill or be Killed. Remember that the name of the game is Natural Selection. You've got to adapt or you lose...
Its like this:
We've got a man with his fists versus a man with a gun. The man with the gun is going to win obviously. The man with the fists may have been "more honorable (debatable)" but the man with the gun is still alive while the honorable guy is gone.
You don't have a like it, you just need to recognize reality. At the heart of any competition is the desire to win. People who have the skills and who have put in a lot of work aren't going to go easy. With the work they've done, they deserve to win. Public skulks still have a lot to learn about ambushs.
To you guys that say that alien teamwork is impossible on publics, I say bah. Its not only possible, its FUN.
its a perfectly viable and acceptable tactic in my opinion, and its nothing more than that, a tactic. It allows your team to gain map control, res points etc, while your ddistracting the aliens in their hive, if theres only a couple of people in a hive, taking that hive down with lmg's is obviously more or less impossible, so why not just kill the spawning aliens, it will cause the enemy team a lot more problems than if you just shoot the hive. After all the aim is to win, all the marines are doing is getting their team an advantage, if you dont want to be spawn killed, get organised and dont let them get into your hive.
I don't know any other game on earth in which spawnkilling isn't frowned upon... NS is quite an exception. This issue exists because the spawning place is by itself an objective. As for marines camping spawning spots with shotgun without shooting the hive , it's more torture than laming... never seen the gorges webbing IPs ? Never heard "don't finish them ! let's toy with them !" said on the alien side ? Spawnkilling is hardly counterable , but a skilled skulk can flee and jump on walls and survive for a while... if not then the hive is going to die fast anyway. I'm usually intolerant towards cheap tactics , and can't stop flamming the uncounterable ones. But I don't mind spawnkilling , it's the way the game is played... players are rewarded for their constructive behavior , if they build they have more weapons , if they destroy their ennemies have less , if they overwhelm the ennemy base they win. Buildings can be destroyed or rebuilt , marines can go back to their base to clean it , and skulks to their hive to backstab siegers.
Dunno, skulks rush the base...they kill spawning marines and then kill IPs or PG. Always killing never "waiting" for backup. And skulk risk a loss of res and a longer spawn. Whenever I see marines spawn camp they do just that....spawn camp. they hide in a corner and kill spawning skulks while the rest of their team is moving on an unoccupied hive.
I dont agree with any preventive measure for it (exept maybe equal spawn times for both teams) but I hate when people do it...and I never do. I kill the enemies I see and then attack the hive or chambers.
Slightly off topic, but related. The branding of a strategy as being lame amuses me.
From a commanders perspsective, I have been branded lame for locking down two hives, branded lame for teching up quickly to jp/hmg, branded lame for asking the marines to constantly pressure the alien hive. In fact anytime I am winning, someone on the other side is whining about how they don't like it!
I can see peoples points about playing to have fun. For myself and a lot of people I play with, winning the game is PART of that fun. Constantly using a tactic that the other team cannot defeat does wear thin after it has been done repetitively, map after map. Mix it up a little. Thats the only thing I can say with regards to what strategies people use. Once a team has perfected on tactic, move on to something different!
Direct attacks on the alien hive are a FUN way for the marines to get revenge over a savage thumping in the preceding game. I know thats what I enjoy when I just got onosed, spored, xenoed, webbed and babblered to death in the previous game. The next game you can settle down to a different strategy.
I do think spawn-camping for the sole purpose of torture (to **** people off) is lame. Obviously though, because hive-destruction is necessary for marines to win, at some point the hive will mostly likely need to be camped to a degree.
To me this seems to be somewhat of a tournament/public mode issue. If in public mode aliens can not be trusted to not use "lame tactics" - to the point that they die off if they no longer have any hives left - I don't see why marines should be trusted either. In public mode aliens should have some sort of emergency respawn system. I think as an evolutionary adaption a hive under stress (being attacked) or a threated hive (marines within a certain radius) should spit out multiple skulks at a slighty increased spawn rate in random directions. The balance key here would be that as the skulks are not fully formed they have less health/armor than normal skulks (until healed). Also, this would probably cost the aliens some of their res from the shared pool.
A lot of people compare skulks in marine base with marines in an aliens hive. Thats a bunch of bull in my opinion. Consider:
For marines: 1. The average spawncamper, assuming he stays alive will NEVER have enough ammunition to kill the hive - why bother shooting at it? 2. A marine spawncamper has a limited clip before he must reload: an alien skulk generally doesn't. If you shoot the hive in between spawns, you'll most likely be reloading when a skulk pops out. 3. The hive regenerates: any damage he does in between spawns will quickly be undone.
For aliens: 1. An alien skulk, assuming he paces his bites, will ALWAYS be able to continue attacking. 2. The alien skulk with proper pacing will never have to wait and 'reload' allowing him to attack the IP inbetween spawns. 3. Marine strutures do not regenerate: the marines will have to drop a welder and then manual weld the ips, something disorganized teams rarely do.
So you see, a marine in an alien hive spawn camps because he HAS to: to shoot the hive would be useless since he would never be able to do substantial damage and to leave the hive would be stupid because he would be wasinting an opportunity. Even though I have been on the recieving end many times, I vote Yay.
<!--QuoteBegin--Parasite+Apr 19 2003, 10:57 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Parasite @ Apr 19 2003, 10:57 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I dont agree with any preventive measure for it (exept maybe equal spawn times for both teams) but I hate when people do it...and I never do. I kill the enemies I see and then attack the hive or chambers. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> You kill the enemies you see and then attack the hive chambers. So then, wouldn't it make sense to kill the next alien when he spawns in a few seconds and then once again kill chambers of the hive until the next alien comes into view?
In trying to be an "anti-lockdown" person, you just proved that "spawncamping" is legitimate in your own eyes.
Comments
Sorry couldnt resist
Wait, before you start flaming, (and I can see from reading this topic it's already attracted several flamers) let me validate that by saying it depends on the circumstances.
Let's say you're in a clan match, FF on, experienced players, the works. So one of the marines is assigned to sneak into the alien hive and slow them down. In an arranged match you're playing to win - so I would call that a valid tactic. Besides - the other team probably has already considered what they can do to stop it from happening. So one clan wins, the other loses, game over.
Ok, now we're off to a random public server, with a bunch of people you've probably never seen before. A single marine who plays with a clan decides on his own to go spawncamp the aliens, for whatever reason. But a public game isn't about winning so much - it about having fun. The game is fun when both sides have to fight it out, not when one side has an unfair advantage. This single player has ruined the game for both sides, the aliens lose and the marines win. The aliens are upset because of the lame tactics. And the marines? so what if they won, some of them may not have even had the opportunity to shoot a single aliens. Game over - No fun.
Oh that's funny, because that's what this topic was about. :think:
Next!
See... I think it's perfectly fine that you can and do this. But I think it's something of a courtesy issue here... if you go marine on a pub server and immediately rush and end the game in 2 minutes once, fine. If you can do it again the next game, fine. But after that, it'd be nice if you'd lay off your 'end the game f@cking fast' strat and let all the rest of the people on the server have fun. At the point where you've basically single-handedly killed the alien team a couple times, why would you continue to hive-rush in subsequent games? You've already proven your superiority over the aliens.. Rather than make yourself look better and better, you're just making yourself look like more of an @ss to the rest of the server.
I realize that it's a player's own perogative to continue hive-rushing or not... but it'd be nice to see these elite players try and make the games interesting and varied on pub servers, rather than continuing the same strat over and over again ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
I completely agree, it slows the aliens down if you can get in there quickly and start killin em as they spawn, so the marines can take over and win. Great, if its a clan game. If you're in a pub you have my everlasting scorn, because I dont boot NS up so that I can join a game only to plop out of the hive and become an oozing green mass on the floor only moments later, just like everyone else on the alien team. If its a decentways into the game, I don't concider it unfair, because while they attempt to kill me as I spawn they have to deal with my team. I've yet to join a game where someone set up camp at our hive more than 5 minutes into the game and didn't get wasted from behind within 2 kills. I've also been in more than a few games where within 20 seconds there are 3 skulks sitting at an IP killing anything that spawns, or a marine has set up shop outside our hive. While a legit base rush right away could work as a TEAM, a single marine has no ability to sit there and kill the single hive right away, only to tick off the alien team enough so that they F4 and get it over with. Doesn't sound like a whole heck of alot of fun to me.....
Spawncamping in a pub is just like cheating (although not to the same degree). All you do is ruin the game for other people, so why do it?
There are different ways to spawn camp, if the marines are attacking the hive and some poor skulks happens to spawn there, its not lame because its suppose to happen, just bad time to spawn <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->.
But if someone is crouching at the corner with shotty, or hmg, and just blasting away skulks only for 10 minutes, thats pretty lame <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->. But whining about it wont make any difference, just kill the camper and be done with it.
Its like this:
We've got a man with his fists versus a man with a gun. The man with the gun is going to win obviously. The man with the fists may have been "more honorable (debatable)" but the man with the gun is still alive while the honorable guy is gone.
You don't have a like it, you just need to recognize reality. At the heart of any competition is the desire to win. People who have the skills and who have put in a lot of work aren't going to go easy. With the work they've done, they deserve to win. Public skulks still have a lot to learn about ambushs.
To you guys that say that alien teamwork is impossible on publics, I say bah. Its not only possible, its FUN.
(OMG I said the 3 letter F word )
Spawnkilling is hardly counterable , but a skilled skulk can flee and jump on walls and survive for a while... if not then the hive is going to die fast anyway.
I'm usually intolerant towards cheap tactics , and can't stop flamming the uncounterable ones. But I don't mind spawnkilling , it's the way the game is played... players are rewarded for their constructive behavior , if they build they have more weapons , if they destroy their ennemies have less , if they overwhelm the ennemy base they win. Buildings can be destroyed or rebuilt , marines can go back to their base to clean it , and skulks to their hive to backstab siegers.
I dont agree with any preventive measure for it (exept maybe equal spawn times for both teams) but I hate when people do it...and I never do. I kill the enemies I see and then attack the hive or chambers.
From a commanders perspsective, I have been branded lame for locking down two hives, branded lame for teching up quickly to jp/hmg, branded lame for asking the marines to constantly pressure the alien hive. In fact anytime I am winning, someone on the other side is whining about how they don't like it!
I can see peoples points about playing to have fun. For myself and a lot of people I play with, winning the game is PART of that fun. Constantly using a tactic that the other team cannot defeat does wear thin after it has been done repetitively, map after map. Mix it up a little. Thats the only thing I can say with regards to what strategies people use. Once a team has perfected on tactic, move on to something different!
Direct attacks on the alien hive are a FUN way for the marines to get revenge over a savage thumping in the preceding game. I know thats what I enjoy when I just got onosed, spored, xenoed, webbed and babblered to death in the previous game. The next game you can settle down to a different strategy.
camped to a degree.
To me this seems to be somewhat of a tournament/public mode issue. If in public mode aliens can not be trusted to not use "lame tactics" - to the point that they die off if they no longer have any hives left - I don't see why marines should be trusted either. In public mode aliens should have some sort of emergency respawn system. I think as an evolutionary adaption a hive under stress (being attacked) or a threated hive (marines within a certain radius) should spit out multiple skulks at a slighty increased spawn rate in random directions. The balance key here would be that as the skulks are not fully formed they have less health/armor than normal skulks (until healed). Also, this would probably cost the aliens some of their res from the shared pool.
For marines:
1. The average spawncamper, assuming he stays alive will NEVER have enough ammunition to kill the hive - why bother shooting at it?
2. A marine spawncamper has a limited clip before he must reload: an alien skulk generally doesn't. If you shoot the hive in between spawns, you'll most likely be reloading when a skulk pops out.
3. The hive regenerates: any damage he does in between spawns will quickly be undone.
For aliens:
1. An alien skulk, assuming he paces his bites, will ALWAYS be able to continue attacking.
2. The alien skulk with proper pacing will never have to wait and 'reload' allowing him to attack the IP inbetween spawns.
3. Marine strutures do not regenerate: the marines will have to drop a welder and then manual weld the ips, something disorganized teams rarely do.
So you see, a marine in an alien hive spawn camps because he HAS to: to shoot the hive would be useless since he would never be able to do substantial damage and to leave the hive would be stupid because he would be wasinting an opportunity. Even though I have been on the recieving end many times, I vote Yay.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You kill the enemies you see and then attack the hive chambers. So then, wouldn't it make sense to kill the next alien when he spawns in a few seconds and then once again kill chambers of the hive until the next alien comes into view?
In trying to be an "anti-lockdown" person, you just proved that "spawncamping" is legitimate in your own eyes.