Best Of
Gorge Hydra Suggestion - Hydralions
What if Hydras were more like their mythical namesake, and also more plant-like; akin to dandelions?
What if the base/root of the hydra was the weak point, while the stalks and flower segments were destructible, but regrew?
Gameplay / Balance Changes:
-Hydras built on walls / ceilings / behind boxes with their roots out of line of fire may have their tops destroyed from a distance, but will regrow if left alone or until the root is destroyed.
-Hydra stalks have lower HP than their root. Stalks should be easier to destroy than the root.
-Clogs may be used to surround the root, making it more difficult to destroy and giving clogs additional utility.
-Increase the length of hydra stalks slightly.
-Hydra stalks regrow faster on infestation.
-Hydra roots have more HP on infestation and are harder to see on rich infestation settings.
-Research Hydralions could be an evolve upgrade, much like how Metabolize for Fades may be upgraded a second time into Advanced Metabolize.
These are just some ideas on making hydras more interactive and resilient.
What if the base/root of the hydra was the weak point, while the stalks and flower segments were destructible, but regrew?
Gameplay / Balance Changes:
-Hydras built on walls / ceilings / behind boxes with their roots out of line of fire may have their tops destroyed from a distance, but will regrow if left alone or until the root is destroyed.
-Hydra stalks have lower HP than their root. Stalks should be easier to destroy than the root.
-Clogs may be used to surround the root, making it more difficult to destroy and giving clogs additional utility.
-Increase the length of hydra stalks slightly.
-Hydra stalks regrow faster on infestation.
-Hydra roots have more HP on infestation and are harder to see on rich infestation settings.
-Research Hydralions could be an evolve upgrade, much like how Metabolize for Fades may be upgraded a second time into Advanced Metabolize.
These are just some ideas on making hydras more interactive and resilient.
Re: Officially supported ability to play old versions
to many problems with what you are saying from a development side.
First the community split which you mentioned, that can and will kill the game. This isn't a most prefer the old thing like you are making it out to be. No this is a pretty even split with some liking asspects of both old and new.
Second there is the dev hell it will create. Any officially supported version would have ot have tech support for bug reporting. IF you say oh well tehy can just ignore the old, it isn't that simple if they ignore the old then it is pointless to have it there, but if they pay attention to it and patch things it causes a problem as they may have to redesign a patch meant for the new versions to work with the old version.
Third, the new update are not that bad, now I wish the health bars had a toggle, but they can be helpful. The new updates are breathing some much needed life into the game.
The problem is more the smaller update sets tehy are doing, this may sound strange but adding items one at a time or in slow trickles can actually kill balance, especially if you add an item and are unable to add its counter for 2 or 3 updates.
What the team needs to do is simple pick a theme and do a major content update for one of the patches, hype it up and show it off with open testing.
First the community split which you mentioned, that can and will kill the game. This isn't a most prefer the old thing like you are making it out to be. No this is a pretty even split with some liking asspects of both old and new.
Second there is the dev hell it will create. Any officially supported version would have ot have tech support for bug reporting. IF you say oh well tehy can just ignore the old, it isn't that simple if they ignore the old then it is pointless to have it there, but if they pay attention to it and patch things it causes a problem as they may have to redesign a patch meant for the new versions to work with the old version.
Third, the new update are not that bad, now I wish the health bars had a toggle, but they can be helpful. The new updates are breathing some much needed life into the game.
The problem is more the smaller update sets tehy are doing, this may sound strange but adding items one at a time or in slow trickles can actually kill balance, especially if you add an item and are unable to add its counter for 2 or 3 updates.
What the team needs to do is simple pick a theme and do a major content update for one of the patches, hype it up and show it off with open testing.
Re: Update 305 Live on Steam! - Natural Selection 2
Good in theory but what it mostly did was extend games needlessly by preventing the winning team from finishing the game once the losing team started to quit.
Re: Why spoon-feeding game mechanics won't increase player count
Well.. then.. they were neither playing perfectly or lane blocking well enough were they?Marines are playing perfectly and lane-blocking? who cares, lets have a stupid sneaky tunnel and resbite the whole map from there or make a base rush.
Sorry just had to say that. Everything else you said was gold, and I of course am no fan of early game tunnels.
(I don't mind late game since it would be our fault for not foreseeing something so predictable and counter-able.. but I get the soured reception it receives from many)
Re: Update 305 Live on Steam! - Natural Selection 2
I hope when hive 2.0 comes out, you change it so people cant leave a server if their in a terribly loosing game just join another server before the match they left is over and get no negative hive penalty because of that. Leaving a said game should result in negative gains and there should be NO WAYS around this. Its retarded and you should feel retarded for doing it.
I believe this is already the case for most situations, but we are making absolutely sure for hive 2.0. Even if you switch teams during the match, our plan is for hive to give you both a win and a loss for the match, and the skill updates will be weighted based on which team you played longer on during the important parts of the game (the beginning primarily). So once you've joined a team, and played for any significant portion, there's nothing you can do to avoid it affecting your hive score. The current implementation mostly handles this, but has some hacks that we are fixing.
For the first rollout we are planning on keeping the skill algorithm mostly the same as the current one, with two important differences:
1. We'll use adagrad for updating the skill values. This is a state of the art learning method that is commonly used for training deep neural nets that is still simple to implement. It will give players very large skill updates initially, and smaller updates once their skill value has converged. This should make hive both learn faster and be more stable once it has learned. This should help the overall system perform better, but will also help particularly with smurfing. New players that win several consecutive games will find their skill value going up substantially.
2. We are going to adjust the current hive skill values to correct for the skill discrepancy between players that joined at different times and got different initialization values. This is an implementation issue with the changes that have happened to hive over time, and results in players that haven't played much having essentially a random skill value that can throw things off.
Re: Just coming Back, Looking for server Recs
As an EU guy I had the best experience on Tactical Freedom, out of all US servers.
Re: Why spoon-feeding game mechanics won't increase player count
Comps gone? Time to make the maps darker. 
Re: Feedback
We're aware of the Xbox issues and are working hard to address them ASAP.
Re: New Alien Models
There is a memory cost for it also. NS2 is already straddling the limits of having a 32bit exe. It would be an extensive months long job just to get ns2 onto a 64bit exe let alone have it work well.
Yea but that would be a useful and good change in the end.
