remiremedy [blu.knight]Join Date: 2003-11-18Member: 23112Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester
edited May 2014
Yes, I just checked. Welding an unbuilt structure constructs at the same rate as building normally. It does it 0.2 second worth increments every 0.2 seconds (fire rate of the welder).
The design of this mod was to not change the gameplay mechanics, but just to make the game lightly enforce doing it the right way by making the primed state actually be a different state rather than just being "most of the way to fully built".
Having it be indestructible does have other game ramifications. When you go to build the power, if the power node has never been built it takes 8 seconds to build. If it has previously been built and destroyed, it takes 13.7 seconds with a welder, or a whole 27.3 seconds without. Even if we made it so without a welder you could fix it at the same speed, there is still a disparity in the timings between the first time you get there or if it is has never been socketed, not to mention primed... So removing the ability to prime altogether would have pretty wide-spread effects. Currently priming the power telegraphs future intent to the other team, which I believe adds something to the experience. It also reduces the time to set up in that location by the amounts I mentioned above. I'm not going to argue whether those elements are altogether good or bad for the game, but there is more to it than just the amount of time it takes to repair a node, and these are elements of the game which I did not want to change.
Don't forget, blueprints are built faster with welders, too.
I believe that one is false. There was a big thread on that a little while ago. Its always a good idea to use your welder, but it does not speed it up.
the problem with this is that marines leave power nodes unfinished too much. when you're first getting into higher level ns2 often people get the impression that you should never finish a power node, but really not finishing is only a good idea probably less than half the time. i'm assuming this is a server-wide thing, and not something each user gets to choose in their own game options? this seems like it would be an inconvenience, and i wouldn't want to play on a server where it's forced upon me.
this whole not finishing power nodes thing really is overblown. maybe i'm just too out of touch with pub play.
I totally agree. Any time priming leaves you with increasing your travel time to the next objective, it's not worth it imo. In comp play, people usually don't have the time to munch the powernode anyway, cuz there's probably either another rt you can destroy or marines pressuring you on the opposite side or something.
A few players do take the time to kill powernodes in comp, but I really don't know if it's worth it.
Anyway, I'd hate to see this forced on me as well.
- 3-4 marines get to a TP.
- Comm drops power, then gets distracted by something else.
- Marines start to build the power, waiting for structures.
- 1 of those 3-4 marines keeps repeating "dont finish the power if theres no buildings in the room! Power nodes are invincible until they are built!"
- They all complete the power
- 5 skulks run into the room and wipe the marines
- Skulks take the power down and delay marines for free
remiremedy [blu.knight]Join Date: 2003-11-18Member: 23112Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester
Yeah this was to address the pub scene, and designed to not impact comp too much nor change the game design.
It's almost entirely a server-side mod, so there are no options in it... although it would be possible to add. Although with the current override mechanic, I don't believe an option is necessary as it isn't adding any additional time to building a power node. You just double tap your flashlight as you hit 100 and it finishes.
This has been running for almost a month on TGNS and has been a successful transition for the community there. People do still finish the power early using the override, but only the people who know what they're doing (as less experienced players wouldn't have learned about the override yet).
remiremedy [blu.knight]Join Date: 2003-11-18Member: 23112Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester
edited June 2014
@SupaFred I'd love to hear why you pulled it off your servers and what feedback you received / have. @ZEROibis Similarly I'd love to hear how it goes with your server.
I removed the mod because I got a lot of requests to do so. There are a lot of regular players on my servers and they thought the priming of nodes was a distraction. I think they would have gotten used to it over time though. People tend to always dislike new stuff (everyone hates the latest map). There hasn't been a sale for a while but if a new green wave is coming I'll consider getting the mod back up.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Personally, I get annoyed by the prime-able power nodes, because it does not take into consideration all possible alternatives.
The most common scenario I encounter with the mod is - A team of 4 move into a room. An Extractor and a Power node are dropped, half the team build, other half cover. Now power node is completed first, but it cannot be finished so I have to wait by the node for the harvester to be finished, before clicking the power node to finished.
This means players now don't bother building the power up until after the structure is built, so they don't go through the hassle of priming it. Except now, because they are not priming a node, they are building the extractor, when the rush comes in 3 secs after you start building, instead of losing nothing but an extractor blueprint and leaving an unfinished and indestructable node, you now have a completely unbuilt power node and you lose a partially built extractor.
This is a direct consequence of the mod, and one of the reasons I'd rather play on servers that don't have it.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
edited June 2014
Unfortunately, your posts discussing the mod do not appear in-game, and the vast majority of players don't come anywhere near the forums.
Yes, flashing my flashlight twice while building it is a possibility, but why should I double click my flashlight, when if I play on a server without the mod, I don't need to.
My point is for every problem it solves, it creates another one. To me that is not a solution. Adding to the difficulty of the game by requiring people to learn even more than is already in the game, just to get the basics working is never good design.
I'd rather yell at people for building the power to full, than try and explain why the powernodes are broken on this particular server.
But that is just ,y personal point of view, and for every me, there is probably someone who finds this a godsend. I whole-heartedly hope this doesn't end up in vanilla though and remains a mod.
Unfortunately, your posts discussing the mod do not appear in-game, and the vast majority of players don't come anywhere near the forums.
Yes, flashing my flashlight twice while building it is a possibility, but why should I double click my flashlight, when if I play on a server without the mod, I don't need to.
My point is for every problem it solves, it creates another one. To me that is not a solution. Adding to the difficulty of the game by requiring people to learn even more than is already in the game, just to get the basics working is never good design.
I'd rather yell at people for building the power to full, than try and explain why the powernodes are broken on this particular server.
But that is just ,y personal point of view, and for every me, there is probably someone who finds this a godsend. I whole-heartedly hope this doesn't end up in vanilla though and remains a mod.
But you ONLY need to flash if you're trying to override. If there's already structures built in the room, it goes back to normal. If they've done it in the correct order anyways, it wouldn't be a problem!
Frankly, I'm sick of people defending others' unwillingness to take half a second to READ. It says in the game "Flash to override". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what it's talking about, and they can always ask. If they're not willing to read the directions for why the power node isn't behaving "normally" or ask for help, they're not likely to listen to any explanation of why they shouldn't complete the power node before completing buildings.
We're talking about quite possibly the tiniest imaginable amount of responsibility here, and if they can't handle that, I'm more than happy to play with a mod that takes that away from them.
DecoyJoin Date: 2012-09-11Member: 159037Members, Super Administrators, Playtest Lead, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Silver, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts, Retired Community Developer
I like the mod a lot. I think it'd be a little less clunky if instead of having to flash your flashlight, it would stop building the power node and you could just hit E again to finish it. There are situations where I'd like to finish it.
To be honest, when I first ran into the mod my reaction was just WTF WHY CAN I NOT FINISH THIS. I was too irritated with the fact that I had to go build the structure first and I just didn't read the override. I'm bad. In reality though, I feel like a lot of players will do that
Insofar as this clues the uninitiated into the idea that there's /cause/ for not finishing the power node yet, but requires /no/ education about how to finish the power node, this is a good compromise between stock's Pit of Failure and the mod's already minor learning curve.
And, yet, even so, there would be choruses of "wtf. why did I have to build twice to get the power node finished?"... but at least the uninitiated feels more in control, as he can have his way with the power node in illiterate isolation.
FWIW, TGNS has acclimated fine to the mod's current implementation. Took 3-4 days (maybe a week, tops).
I think it'd be a little less clunky if instead of having to flash your flashlight, it would stop building the power node and you could just hit E again to finish it.
decoy today you have finally earned my respect. not just as a member of the cdt, but as a woman.
Insofar as this clues the uninitiated into the idea that there's /cause/ for not finishing the power node yet, but requires /no/ education about how to finish the power node, this is a good compromise between stock's Pit of Failure and the mod's already minor learning curve.
The problem with this solution, and the reason I didn't do end up with it this way (even though it was my original intent), is two-fold.
First, it introduces an additional delay which would mess with balance and piss people off even more. I designed the flashlight toggle to work in such a way so that you can override and finish the power with absolutely 0 delay. If you flash as you get to 99, it will never lock.
The other issue with doing 'e' to override is that if the power node locks down, many players will think the game bugged out for some reason and just try again (this already occurs when trying to build some times). When it works to override, it reinforces the belief that the game was just bugged and that it was not an intended mechanic. As it is, the banner only shows up if you try to build it after it locks with a sound to indicate it didn't work, which is the best I can do to communicate this to a player in game. The override mechanic needs to be different from the normal build mechanic in order to have this opportunity to attempt to communicate the information.
Just wanted to give my down vote to this whole idea. I get it, and when I first saw it I thought well at least the "try hards" wont have this to complain about in game. The problem is if you are alone and in a safe part of the map it adds to the time needed to get the money flowing. Run over to the power node build build bui..STOP run run run run over to the extractor build build build, roll your eyes, run run run back to where you were to finish the node. I see from this thread there is a way to override it with a flashlight but that's silly and makes no sense technically. Does the flashlight have nanites?
Can someone point me to a thread, or take the time to reply with an explanation of why un-built nodes cant be destroyed by aliens. Am I right that this is the whole point of delaying full construction of the power node until it is needed? What would happen if it was changed to allow half built power nodes to be destroyed?
I see from this thread there is a way to override it with a flashlight but that's silly and makes no sense technically. Does the flashlight have nanites?
There are a limited number of keys on the keyboard and actions I can use. I was trying to make this as non-intrusive as possible and potentially another approach could be used like an alt-fire for the welder and the build tool. The flashlight toggle doesn't make perfect sense but that's always a silly argument to me given how little does make sense in this game.
I thought it would be fun to tap into the flashlight flickering nostalgia from NS1 and it does make me smile to see people toggle their flashlight on and off when running towards a powernode. I've actually seen people doing this just for fun, not just because they actually needed to unlock it.
Can someone point me to a thread, or take the time to reply with an explanation of why un-built nodes cant be destroyed by aliens. Am I right that this is the whole point of delaying full construction of the power node until it is needed? What would happen if it was changed to allow half built power nodes?
This is a very different discussion as this mod was built under the assumption that we (the community) like the current design of the power nodes and don't want to nor have a need to change it. This may very well not be the case, but I wasn't going to try to change so much all at once. It would be very good to open another thread to discuss changing the power node design completely, feel free to take the lead on this.
The premise of this mod is:
The game as it stands (without this mod) actively teaches/communicates the wrong lesson to players. It is best to have mechanics and tactics work harmoniously. The more a player new to the game can "do the right thing" by accident, the better. Doing so sets up good habits and makes them have less to learn. Esoteric information should only be necessary for advanced players. On its simplest level, this mod swaps out the esoteric info of "only build the power to 95 unless you need the power" to "double tap the flashlight if you want to complete the power early". The first is necessary information for all players, and so should be supported by the game. The second is situational and requires knowledge of the game to know when it is appropriate to do so, so is more appropriate to be framed as an advanced mechanic.
The game's design sans-mod also has the unfortunate aspect of not only hiding away information that all players need to learn, it actually does so in a mechanic that has large ramifications to your team and so screwing it up in ignorance causes a lot of yelling, which is a really terrible experience for the players that are still learning all the ins and outs of the game. We need to be supportive to those players to keep the community alive and to help it grow, and doing what we can to make the experience better can only help NS2's longevity.
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
By your reasoning remi.D you need to make a few more mods as well.
You need to make a mod that locks the hive build orders, so commanders can't pick the wrong first hive chamber. You need to make a mod which doesn't allow Marine commanders to drop too many items in base and spend all the res at round start.
Your intention is to take away the possibility of making a mistake. This kind of nannying is a symptom of what is wrong with the world in general and gaming specifically. Oh, we can't allow the person to make mistakes and screw things up.
Bollox, you learn from mistakes. How can you ever learn anything if you don't make mistakes? Anyway, who says it is a mistake? Just because the 'preferred' way of doing it is priming the node first, doesn't mean it is 'right'. We could all make mods which change the core gameplay of NS2 to get people playing the game the way we want them to. But is that the game anymore?
I might be getting off topic now but why is it that power nodes are indestructible the first time they are socketed but not later on? I can't see the logic in that and neither can rookies. How about rethinking that game mechanic instead of trying to find ways around it?
I might be getting off topic now but why is it that power nodes are indestructible the first time they are socketed but not later on? I can't see the logic in that and neither can rookies. How about rethinking that game mechanic instead of trying to find ways around it?
Yeah, that is off topic (see my previous post). Although it would be good to start a thread to discuss that.
I agree with your post and appreciate your attempt at improving NS2. I was just curious about the reasoning behind the current game mechanics. To get it back on topic, is it possible to, through modding, change the behaviour of the power nodes? Perhaps they should never be immune to attacks? Blueprints of structures aren't.
remiremedy [blu.knight]Join Date: 2003-11-18Member: 23112Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester
@SupaFred Yeah, the entire game is written in Lua so there is very little that can't be changed.
I don't know the reason we came to the current game mechanics, but I'd be hesitant to change them given how long they've been like this and that they do seem to work well (as long as people know not to finish the power nodes).
One of the things I like about the current system is that it creates anticipation. One of the bits of information that aliens need to communicate is if power is primed in an area, and it makes that area a bit more of a threat and a location that needs to continue being scouted. It also telegraphs the marine's intents which can be good for the meta game. Marines can opt to prime the power earlier (and often do) so that they can get structures up quicker when its time to do so, but this is a trade off because after it is primed it will be under extra alien attention and aliens will be more likely to respond quicker to marines trying to set up there as well.
A room's power goes through many states of ownership: neutral, primed (a little more dangerous, but still a neutral room), marine (powered), and alien (unpowered). When it is powered or unpowered, the team that controls it holds an advantage in continuing to hold it. As com I often will pick a room that hasn't yet had its power destroyed (a neutral room) for the PG because I can get it up faster. Marines require power to hold a room, but aliens can hold a room even if the power is active. There is a nice progression here, and having a way for aliens to transition a room from primed to unpowered would be disastrous to marines.
Even if attacking the blueprint power node only unbuilt it (still inconsistent with other structures), it would remove that telegraphing/anticipation/suspense part of the experience which I like, and eliminate one of the interesting decisions marines have to make. (IANACP, so take the following with a grain of salt.) In the comp scene for example, I don't think they really ever prime power early because they can't afford having a man off the field for the time it takes. Similarly Decoy was saying they almost never kill power nodes for the same reason. In pub play the games tend to go longer and there are more players so it can be good to spare one player in preparation, but in either case this is a decision that is being made. For comp play it may be an "optimal choice", which effectively means there is no choice, but for the game community as a whole there is an "interesting decision" to be made that I wouldn't want to remove.
Would it be possible to have an option where it lets them build to 100% as long as there is a blueprint in the given room. In its current implementation it appears to do more harm than good for marines and everyone was asking for it to either let you finish when there is a blueprint or just have it removed.
Would it be possible to have an option where it lets them build to 100% as long as there is a blueprint in the given room. In its current implementation it appears to do more harm than good for marines and everyone was asking for it to either let you finish when there is a blueprint or just have it removed.
@ZEROibis : You can finish it by double tapping the flashlight.
I know this but they do not as the in game notice for this does not appear to work.
But the real issue that people are complaining about is that while it is supposed to help noobs it ends up just making things more complicated for them. This is why I have players requesting that it just work as normal when there is a blueprint. This way it stops noobs from building a powernode when there is nothing dropped for it to power but otherwise does not prevent normal behavior.
I know this but they do not as the in game notice for this does not appear to work.
Please define "does not appear to work". I wouldn't consider people failing to read the notice that does come up as it not working; but if there is a bug I'd like to know about it so I can fix.
I'm not going to be nerfing the mod in any way because there is already an override that is communicated visually and can be communicated socially as well (which has been tested to great success on TGNS), and reducing the scope of the mod is contrary to its purpose.
The first time I got a personal wall of text. Thank you!
I had to Think about it for a while and I agree with you that the state of the Power node give the Alien team some information about the marines' intentions. I still Think it's a difficult and non-intuitive game mechanic for rookies but I can't Think of a better system than yours to fix it.
Comments
The design of this mod was to not change the gameplay mechanics, but just to make the game lightly enforce doing it the right way by making the primed state actually be a different state rather than just being "most of the way to fully built".
Having it be indestructible does have other game ramifications. When you go to build the power, if the power node has never been built it takes 8 seconds to build. If it has previously been built and destroyed, it takes 13.7 seconds with a welder, or a whole 27.3 seconds without. Even if we made it so without a welder you could fix it at the same speed, there is still a disparity in the timings between the first time you get there or if it is has never been socketed, not to mention primed... So removing the ability to prime altogether would have pretty wide-spread effects. Currently priming the power telegraphs future intent to the other team, which I believe adds something to the experience. It also reduces the time to set up in that location by the amounts I mentioned above. I'm not going to argue whether those elements are altogether good or bad for the game, but there is more to it than just the amount of time it takes to repair a node, and these are elements of the game which I did not want to change.
And apparently there are bugs in the implementation. According to code, it should take 8 seconds for either.
I totally agree. Any time priming leaves you with increasing your travel time to the next objective, it's not worth it imo. In comp play, people usually don't have the time to munch the powernode anyway, cuz there's probably either another rt you can destroy or marines pressuring you on the opposite side or something.
A few players do take the time to kill powernodes in comp, but I really don't know if it's worth it.
Anyway, I'd hate to see this forced on me as well.
Heres the common scenario:
- 3-4 marines get to a TP.
- Comm drops power, then gets distracted by something else.
- Marines start to build the power, waiting for structures.
- 1 of those 3-4 marines keeps repeating "dont finish the power if theres no buildings in the room! Power nodes are invincible until they are built!"
- They all complete the power
- 5 skulks run into the room and wipe the marines
- Skulks take the power down and delay marines for free
Its very frustrating.
It's almost entirely a server-side mod, so there are no options in it... although it would be possible to add. Although with the current override mechanic, I don't believe an option is necessary as it isn't adding any additional time to building a power node. You just double tap your flashlight as you hit 100 and it finishes.
This has been running for almost a month on TGNS and has been a successful transition for the community there. People do still finish the power early using the override, but only the people who know what they're doing (as less experienced players wouldn't have learned about the override yet).
@ZEROibis Similarly I'd love to hear how it goes with your server.
By the way, I can't tag you in this post remi.D.
The most common scenario I encounter with the mod is - A team of 4 move into a room. An Extractor and a Power node are dropped, half the team build, other half cover. Now power node is completed first, but it cannot be finished so I have to wait by the node for the harvester to be finished, before clicking the power node to finished.
This means players now don't bother building the power up until after the structure is built, so they don't go through the hassle of priming it. Except now, because they are not priming a node, they are building the extractor, when the rush comes in 3 secs after you start building, instead of losing nothing but an extractor blueprint and leaving an unfinished and indestructable node, you now have a completely unbuilt power node and you lose a partially built extractor.
This is a direct consequence of the mod, and one of the reasons I'd rather play on servers that don't have it.
Yes, flashing my flashlight twice while building it is a possibility, but why should I double click my flashlight, when if I play on a server without the mod, I don't need to.
My point is for every problem it solves, it creates another one. To me that is not a solution. Adding to the difficulty of the game by requiring people to learn even more than is already in the game, just to get the basics working is never good design.
I'd rather yell at people for building the power to full, than try and explain why the powernodes are broken on this particular server.
But that is just ,y personal point of view, and for every me, there is probably someone who finds this a godsend. I whole-heartedly hope this doesn't end up in vanilla though and remains a mod.
But you ONLY need to flash if you're trying to override. If there's already structures built in the room, it goes back to normal. If they've done it in the correct order anyways, it wouldn't be a problem!
Frankly, I'm sick of people defending others' unwillingness to take half a second to READ. It says in the game "Flash to override". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what it's talking about, and they can always ask. If they're not willing to read the directions for why the power node isn't behaving "normally" or ask for help, they're not likely to listen to any explanation of why they shouldn't complete the power node before completing buildings.
We're talking about quite possibly the tiniest imaginable amount of responsibility here, and if they can't handle that, I'm more than happy to play with a mod that takes that away from them.
To be honest, when I first ran into the mod my reaction was just WTF WHY CAN I NOT FINISH THIS. I was too irritated with the fact that I had to go build the structure first and I just didn't read the override. I'm bad.
And, yet, even so, there would be choruses of "wtf. why did I have to build twice to get the power node finished?"... but at least the uninitiated feels more in control, as he can have his way with the power node in illiterate isolation.
FWIW, TGNS has acclimated fine to the mod's current implementation. Took 3-4 days (maybe a week, tops).
decoy today you have finally earned my respect. not just as a member of the cdt, but as a woman.
congratulations.
First, it introduces an additional delay which would mess with balance and piss people off even more. I designed the flashlight toggle to work in such a way so that you can override and finish the power with absolutely 0 delay. If you flash as you get to 99, it will never lock.
The other issue with doing 'e' to override is that if the power node locks down, many players will think the game bugged out for some reason and just try again (this already occurs when trying to build some times). When it works to override, it reinforces the belief that the game was just bugged and that it was not an intended mechanic. As it is, the banner only shows up if you try to build it after it locks with a sound to indicate it didn't work, which is the best I can do to communicate this to a player in game. The override mechanic needs to be different from the normal build mechanic in order to have this opportunity to attempt to communicate the information.
Can someone point me to a thread, or take the time to reply with an explanation of why un-built nodes cant be destroyed by aliens. Am I right that this is the whole point of delaying full construction of the power node until it is needed? What would happen if it was changed to allow half built power nodes to be destroyed?
I thought it would be fun to tap into the flashlight flickering nostalgia from NS1 and it does make me smile to see people toggle their flashlight on and off when running towards a powernode. I've actually seen people doing this just for fun, not just because they actually needed to unlock it.
This is a very different discussion as this mod was built under the assumption that we (the community) like the current design of the power nodes and don't want to nor have a need to change it. This may very well not be the case, but I wasn't going to try to change so much all at once. It would be very good to open another thread to discuss changing the power node design completely, feel free to take the lead on this.
The premise of this mod is:
The game as it stands (without this mod) actively teaches/communicates the wrong lesson to players. It is best to have mechanics and tactics work harmoniously. The more a player new to the game can "do the right thing" by accident, the better. Doing so sets up good habits and makes them have less to learn. Esoteric information should only be necessary for advanced players. On its simplest level, this mod swaps out the esoteric info of "only build the power to 95 unless you need the power" to "double tap the flashlight if you want to complete the power early". The first is necessary information for all players, and so should be supported by the game. The second is situational and requires knowledge of the game to know when it is appropriate to do so, so is more appropriate to be framed as an advanced mechanic.
The game's design sans-mod also has the unfortunate aspect of not only hiding away information that all players need to learn, it actually does so in a mechanic that has large ramifications to your team and so screwing it up in ignorance causes a lot of yelling, which is a really terrible experience for the players that are still learning all the ins and outs of the game. We need to be supportive to those players to keep the community alive and to help it grow, and doing what we can to make the experience better can only help NS2's longevity.
You need to make a mod that locks the hive build orders, so commanders can't pick the wrong first hive chamber. You need to make a mod which doesn't allow Marine commanders to drop too many items in base and spend all the res at round start.
Your intention is to take away the possibility of making a mistake. This kind of nannying is a symptom of what is wrong with the world in general and gaming specifically. Oh, we can't allow the person to make mistakes and screw things up.
Bollox, you learn from mistakes. How can you ever learn anything if you don't make mistakes? Anyway, who says it is a mistake? Just because the 'preferred' way of doing it is priming the node first, doesn't mean it is 'right'. We could all make mods which change the core gameplay of NS2 to get people playing the game the way we want them to. But is that the game anymore?
I don't know the reason we came to the current game mechanics, but I'd be hesitant to change them given how long they've been like this and that they do seem to work well (as long as people know not to finish the power nodes).
@SupaFred, I dedicate this WoT to you:
One of the things I like about the current system is that it creates anticipation. One of the bits of information that aliens need to communicate is if power is primed in an area, and it makes that area a bit more of a threat and a location that needs to continue being scouted. It also telegraphs the marine's intents which can be good for the meta game. Marines can opt to prime the power earlier (and often do) so that they can get structures up quicker when its time to do so, but this is a trade off because after it is primed it will be under extra alien attention and aliens will be more likely to respond quicker to marines trying to set up there as well.
A room's power goes through many states of ownership: neutral, primed (a little more dangerous, but still a neutral room), marine (powered), and alien (unpowered). When it is powered or unpowered, the team that controls it holds an advantage in continuing to hold it. As com I often will pick a room that hasn't yet had its power destroyed (a neutral room) for the PG because I can get it up faster. Marines require power to hold a room, but aliens can hold a room even if the power is active. There is a nice progression here, and having a way for aliens to transition a room from primed to unpowered would be disastrous to marines.
Even if attacking the blueprint power node only unbuilt it (still inconsistent with other structures), it would remove that telegraphing/anticipation/suspense part of the experience which I like, and eliminate one of the interesting decisions marines have to make. (IANACP, so take the following with a grain of salt.) In the comp scene for example, I don't think they really ever prime power early because they can't afford having a man off the field for the time it takes. Similarly Decoy was saying they almost never kill power nodes for the same reason. In pub play the games tend to go longer and there are more players so it can be good to spare one player in preparation, but in either case this is a decision that is being made. For comp play it may be an "optimal choice", which effectively means there is no choice, but for the game community as a whole there is an "interesting decision" to be made that I wouldn't want to remove.
@ZEROibis : You can finish it by double tapping the flashlight.
But the real issue that people are complaining about is that while it is supposed to help noobs it ends up just making things more complicated for them. This is why I have players requesting that it just work as normal when there is a blueprint. This way it stops noobs from building a powernode when there is nothing dropped for it to power but otherwise does not prevent normal behavior.
I'm not going to be nerfing the mod in any way because there is already an override that is communicated visually and can be communicated socially as well (which has been tested to great success on TGNS), and reducing the scope of the mod is contrary to its purpose.
The first time I got a personal wall of text. Thank you!
I had to Think about it for a while and I agree with you that the state of the Power node give the Alien team some information about the marines' intentions. I still Think it's a difficult and non-intuitive game mechanic for rookies but I can't Think of a better system than yours to fix it.