Dungeon Gaming <1800 hive <2.0 kdr server
MoFo1
United States Join Date: 2014-07-25 Member: 197612Members
United States Join Date: 2014-07-25 Member: 197612Members
Comments
Are you referring to me? I sincerely hope not. I always respect the rookie restrictions and frequently sit in spectate to watch out for any likely smurfs. The owner (profall) actually has a legitimate Rookie account too as he barely plays the game at all.
It's also not all the time, just frequently enough to where it's become annoying.. Joining a casual "low skill" server to get away from that "one player dominating everyone and carrying their team every round" scenario only to find one player who shouldn't be there, dominating everyone and carrying their team every round.
Now i know who to shoot a msg to.
As a returning player who started playing with 4 other friends, it's rare that we can ever play together between all these restricted servers and the STUPID " hive skill "team balance" "
You have to understand that the people who play this game the most have played it for hundreds of not thousands of hours by now. There have been issues with skilled players stacking and rookies stacking. This is when all the high skill or low skill players join the same team. This ruins game balance. As a rookie you probably can't tell the difference, but to veterans this makes the game less fun. Hive balance might be too strict currently, because it does not all players to switch teams or play with their friends much. Either way it is what we have.
As far as I know there are very few restricted servers like the one mentioned in this thread. Rookies are restricted to rookie only servers until they either complete the tutorial or reach level 5. In my opinion this is one of the better changes the game has gone through. Rookies no longer get stomped by players with thousands of hours when the first try playing. As a veteran I enjoy not having to play with rookies as often.
I started up the game again with some other buddies, and the minute we all hit level 5 was the minute it became IMPOSSIBLE to play together. We haven't been able to play on the same team in almost 5 days of trying, and when we do get to play together it's because it forced us on to the opposite team of what we wanted to play in the first place.
Then of course there's being expected to wait upwards of an hour in the ready room just so that the current match can end, because servers are allowing more connectors than are allowed players, and there's no other alternative. It's just very sad that at the end of the day, this is going to be the stuff to kill it for us.
NS2 is a really enjoyable game despite some of it's showing age, but having the game constantly dictating the terms is just a waste of time.
random shuffle would not have been kind to my main account.
apparently i forgot how to juke bad skulks too. and forgot how to bite properly.
need to get more time in to get it back
friggin 40% accuracy on my skulk first game. and 20ish on my marine. but slow and steady and it'll get back to normal i guess.
Actually these servers allow you to spec while waiting for a slot to open for your convenience. I don't think spectator slots are a feature of vanilla NS2 and there's certainly no one expecting you to hang around. And if you do you'll notice that NS2 is a great game to spectate, even pub matches. And you rarely have to wait longer than half an hour. (Usually more like 20 minutes, even if the full game plays out.)
This may be true, but his desire is legitimate and he is not alone. The player count and server browser set up makes playing with friends not a real possibility.
Back in the day not being able to be on the same team with your friends all the time was a non-issue.. Almost everyone looked down on team stacking, and in general games were much more balanced.. If anything people had more fun playing against their friends...
Then matchmaking with the party system (aka the teamstack 24/7/365 feature) was introduced and suddenly it's the end of the world if someone isn't stacked with their friends in every single game...
Nostalgia is great.
Yes it is, but this isn't just nostalgia...
Plus my point still stands.. Before matchmaking playing with friends 24/7/365 was called teamstacking and it was so frowned upon that it was a kickable (sometimes even bannable) offense...
Now if you were to suggest kicking people for stacking you'd be laughed at and ridiculed with childish "get gud" comments...
Nostalgia is great!
It was only called teamstacking if you and your friends were exceptionally good compared to the rest of the server. Of course it was a kickable offense, it ruined games.
As for nowadays, I haven't really heard teamstack accusations since shuffle was around. Which makes sense, really. Either people shuffle and "stackers" are going to be evened out, or people don't shuffle and don't expect a perfectly balanced match in return. I have never, ever heard anybody respond to stack accusations with "get gud", except from stackers themselves - and I don't ever expect to hear them. Instead I expect to hear "should have shuffled/shuffle sucks".
I could see that being an issue if we were exceptionally good at the game.
Besides, if 3 people joining the same team is enough to irreparably unbalance the game - what's stopping a different group of 3 friends from joining the opposite team?
Unless of course, no one else has any friends to play with. In that case, don't punish me.
It goes both ways. I have seen more games ruined from rookie stacks than skilled player stacks. A rookie stack is when all the low skilled players go to the same team.
(Followed by learning curve)
Now, shuffle takes into account your team preference by what team you joined first, and some servers even let you switch if someone on the opposing team is willing, and even then some servers don't restrict you from switching teams no matter what - but the experience of the many is more important than the experience of the few - and most of the time a server votes for this because of how it important it is to all of them.
A hypothetical question for you: would you be okay forsaking your team into an obvious loss / stomp so long as it meant you could play with your friends?
If yes, don't you think you would've rather played a more evenly matched and balanced round?
Isn't it fun to shoot /bite your buddies as well?
That's not what Star Trek taught me
Yes, I would rather get stomped or be stomping with friends than be doing any of that by myself. The thing is, we're middle of the line players. We're not bad, due to having played ALOT of NS1 back in the day, but we're not great either because we don't have maps memorized yet, tactics known etc. We're those guys who occupy somewhere in the middle of any team we're on. The point I'm trying to make is, we're not going to be the reason a team stomps or gets stomped.
The issue is, the 'balancing' doesn't really seem to matter anyways. Most matches I've played seem to be one team easily toppling over the other, regardless of this balance. The few even matches I've played, where we toil over objectives for what seems like forever, are matches with wonky hive numbers. It's made no sense so far.
It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't a continuous pigeonholing. It's like playing CSGO, wanting to practice your AK skills, but being unable to on a pub server because everyone is treating it like it's matchmaking. From the get-go this game seems to be addicted to dictating the terms and segregating the players.
I was actually considering hosting a server myself to get around these issues, but after having seen the ludicrous CPU requirements (4.4GHZ for a 20 player server, are you for real?), it doesn't look that I'll be able to do that either. Pretty funny, when I've hosted 32 player CSGO servers, and 48 player ARMA 2 servers without needing resources anywhere near that.
This is a logical fallacy. I've seen numerous games that appeared stacked (due to one or two highly skilled players) resulting in the more 'average' team winning, purely because individual skill will never beat team cohesion in NS2.
Its a long-standing and complicated issue, we know balancing isn't great at the best of times, but throw smurfs into the mix and it can seem that the numbers mean nothing. Still, that isn't a valid reason to disregard the shuffle and force yourself onto the same team as your friends. That mentality will guarantee a poorly balanced game.
Shuffle does what it can and it usually tries everything possible to keep you on your team of choice, but obviously it can't do that for everyone, or no-one would be shuffled...
Fair comment, however the Spark engine just isn't particularly efficient unfortunately, but the Devs are making changes all the time to attempt to improve performance. LuaJIT was just upgraded in a recent patch to attempt to improve performance slightly.
TL;DR
The game does what it can to attempt balance, but you can never account for all the factors. You should try the 1800 hive skill server. If you and your friends start a seed game with the bots you'd be surprised how quickly it can fill up and I always enjoy a pretty balanced game there.
Jesus fucking christ. I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was that bad o.O
While it's true that its so easily swayed to one side or the other due to snowballing RTS elements and a small playerbase... advocating for worsening this so that you can get what you personally desire, is probably not going to fly with many people.
Again though, there ARE servers out there that allow switching, so just find those and play on them?
Also, comparing the most popular engines that have had 12+ years of refinement with 100 man engine teams, made by the most notable game developers that don't have a single budgetary concern....... to a small indie gaming studio that averaged 3-5 people on staff for most of the development time, where the engine was by and large created mostly by one man... is not just unrealistic, but disingenuous if you are aware of the differences.
Last week I broke 3100 hive playing almost exclusively on DMD servers. Am I really the 90th best player... No. I play to win I don't care about K/D so I have an inflated Hive. Then I play against someone like ADHD who spends an entire round camping in a tunnel going 30-1, who has a hive skill of 2,000. Am I more "skilled"? No.
As such I think it's totally reasonable to restrict by both k/d and hive.
Side note I lost 200+ hive in one round where I 1v1 a player with 900 hive. Then after 1 hour a recycled. Boom much more friendly shuffle.