Making the game easier to understand
Bacillus
Join Date: 2006-11-02 Member: 58241Members
Join Date: 2006-11-02 Member: 58241Members
So, basically many of the balance and gameplay issues originate from the fact that people are unaware of the counters, timings and the metagame whatever in general. Most of the top players on public could be easily countered with some teamwork and there would be way more viable tactics if the average players could form groups and act according to the situation quickly. That's probably partitially because of the old game that people don't want to take seriously/really get into it, but its also because NS attracts people not familiar to the rts styled mechanics and quick gameplay.
Its not really about hitting a pancaking lerk 9/10 bullets or bhopping at max speed, but more like realizing that aliens are humping at 5 nodes right from the start and you need to act quickly or running past the OCs to get a pg up before the 2nd hive goes up.
There have been quite a few suggestions already for making the whole mess more understandable, but they're spread around in random threads all over the forum. I'll try to list a few I can remember, feel free to add more and comment.
<b>
Improved communications</b> Basically giving both the comm and the marines better methods of communicating via voice, text and signals. A squad voice comm could be useful for warning the others from the nearby skulks and ect. The commander should be able to both communicate with a small group of marines separately and set up more exact waypoints (phase to dome, walk to cargo, shoot the res node as one set of orders).
<b>Improved spectator.</b> Allowing the commander(s) to be spectated. Giving the spectator good access to statistics, map and team communications.
<b>
Statistics.</b> A little same as the awards plugin, except focusing on the whole team. The amout of res used on various choices, the number of parasites, the average amount marine nodes have stayed up. Maybe even awards for people doing the right thing (Most marines parasited, most cappers taken down, time welded, number of alien nodes destroyed, ect.)
<b>Fact placement.</b> The loading screen and readyrooms could have 'Did you know?' boxes.
<b>
Squads.</b> Giving squads some priviledges and useful information from the squadmates. Maybe you could see the line of sight of your squad in your minimap, armor/hp somewhere on your screen and so on.
Its not really about hitting a pancaking lerk 9/10 bullets or bhopping at max speed, but more like realizing that aliens are humping at 5 nodes right from the start and you need to act quickly or running past the OCs to get a pg up before the 2nd hive goes up.
There have been quite a few suggestions already for making the whole mess more understandable, but they're spread around in random threads all over the forum. I'll try to list a few I can remember, feel free to add more and comment.
<b>
Improved communications</b> Basically giving both the comm and the marines better methods of communicating via voice, text and signals. A squad voice comm could be useful for warning the others from the nearby skulks and ect. The commander should be able to both communicate with a small group of marines separately and set up more exact waypoints (phase to dome, walk to cargo, shoot the res node as one set of orders).
<b>Improved spectator.</b> Allowing the commander(s) to be spectated. Giving the spectator good access to statistics, map and team communications.
<b>
Statistics.</b> A little same as the awards plugin, except focusing on the whole team. The amout of res used on various choices, the number of parasites, the average amount marine nodes have stayed up. Maybe even awards for people doing the right thing (Most marines parasited, most cappers taken down, time welded, number of alien nodes destroyed, ect.)
<b>Fact placement.</b> The loading screen and readyrooms could have 'Did you know?' boxes.
<b>
Squads.</b> Giving squads some priviledges and useful information from the squadmates. Maybe you could see the line of sight of your squad in your minimap, armor/hp somewhere on your screen and so on.
Comments
I personally love the way Empires does it.
- At any time in the game a player can join a squad
- If they join an empty squad and a second player joins that squad, the first player becomes the squad leader (SL)
- The SL is given certain basic abilities, like squad waypointing and squad messages
- The SL is also given certain 'squad powers' based his class that use points accrued based on how well the squad performs
- The locations of squad members are shown prominently on the HUD, the map and the minimap
- If a SL leaves the squad or the game for any reason a new SL can be assigned by everyone except 1 member leaving the squad. The remaining member then becomes Squad Leader and inherits any points the previous SL had
Here is my summary of the system's main plus points:
<b>Voluntary</b>
The great thing about this system is that it's totally voluntary on both sides; no player is forced to have anything to do with squads and there is very little room for griefing. You volunteer to be an SL, there are even enough squads that every player could try to start a squad if they wanted to. If you don't like the way your SL is performing (giving you stupid waypoints, failing to use his squad powers) you join a different squad or start your own.
<b>Distributes Leadership</b>
The Commander does not have to worry about teaching every newcomer what to do at the beginning of a round, the SLs can take care of this by giving them waypoints themselves. It also allows players who enjoy commanding to still play a leadership role in the game.
<b>Teaches newcomers</b>
By putting yourself forward as an SL, you are implying you understand the game well enough to lead by example. A new player will see this and may decide to follow a SL's lead to get a better understanding of the game.
<b>Incentivises and promotes teamwork</b>
Gives players reasons to stick together as small, versatile groups.
<b>Gives the Commander a more reliable squad system</b>
With SLs helping out the Commander, the idea is that the Comm will have to do less work to get his players to obey direct commands.
---
Now, in Empires the system is incentivised by giving player upgrades and spells and so on. I think there is an element of exploitation in this to be had from griefers, so an alternative is to have the incentives as stats. Imagine if within your squad you could see a list of members with "Top Gun", "Demolitions Expert", "Sawbones" etc. as their stats depending on how they ranked respectively for total kills, explosives damage, total HP healed, etc.
I spin so darn much using "o'clock" would just get me killed.
On rts games 12 o'clock is north, 6 south and so on. Basically its just a little more accurate and quicker than saying south-southwest or something like that.
How about if it put a temporary HUD marker up pointing to where the calling player was aiming?
Think about how Starcraft did it. NS doesn't have a single player tutorial like Starcraft did.
You don't need an epic storyline, just some really rudimentary B rated skulks ambushing around corners, and some marines with good aimbots that teach skulks to ambush, and a requirement to finish the marine side to unlock the alien side of the SP game so that players didn't just go skulk, straightline aimbotting marines, and rage.
At the very least, you could give players a server browser option for "bots servers" and "competitive servers" where competitive means "played with other humans".
It's not fair to newbies to put them immediately up against good or even reasonably good humans because they'll get dominated and leave. This is why I was advocating skill locked servers awhile ago, and although now I think that a soft matchmaking system is better than a hard lock, this issue still needs to be addressed, if not in matchmaking, then in something else.
NS is probably somewhere little above the Warcraft 2 when it comes to the pure RTS part. I'm not really worried if its slow to learn, but most public servers still play like there's no way to predict or prevent anything going on in the game. Of course there's nothing you can do if people just refuse to try to understand the game, but at least I'd enjoy commanding more public games that actually involve some timing, shotgun pushes, decisions and so on. Right now its possible maybe on those few 18 plr servers at max. Most of the time it takes organised play (which I've been doing for years on lower levels btw :>) to even get the shotgun to the rt you wanted.
The tutorial plays an important role, but I don't know if it can address the metagame enough.
The tutorial plays an important role, but I don't know if it can address the metagame enough.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, i couldnt agree more, its so frustrating commanding, when your team are oblivious to what they should actually be doing.
The only thing i haven't really tried is COMing for a few reasons.
1. Its not something you can learn on the fly in a game with out being ejected in like 5mins tops.
2. Its not very helpful to just monkey around by yourself in a self run test server.
3. Being the General isn't my thing I'm more of a line officer.
But to be honest i think a small tutorial kind of like what they did for Dystopia would be a good idea to get the basics of each side down. Nothing fancy mind you and not long or anything. And another nice feature I encountered was in Eternal Silence where they had a basic overview of some common tactics for each map that you can tab through when you load in (might not work as well in this depending on the size and complexity of the maps).
Anyways that is just my two cents on it.
What you're noticing is the obfuscation of knowledge that comes with learning from a bottom-up perspective. In Warcraft and Starcraft players are shown a map view and told "kill the enemy base", NS is deceptive in its depth because players must glean from "I'm killing little skinned-dog things." the fact that "These things are coming from somewhere, that <i>where</i> must be their base, maybe if I go there I can dom me some galiens."
Granted the clarion calls of "Kill the ive!" from the commander should be a clue, but it still puts people in an awkward stance to be suddenly given a gun, given the <!--coloro:lime--><span style="color:lime"><!--/coloro-->exact FPS interface of every other FPS game<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->, not being told about their minimap, and then suddenly telling them "Yeah, well, you got a positive ratio but you still lost because the game you thought you were playing is really not all that important. You didn't press E enough."
Incidentally, if you solved that problem, you would also solve "COMM DROP ME A SHOTGUN SO THAT I CAN DOM!!!"
Well, except for Fairy. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/asrifle.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::asrifle::" border="0" alt="asrifle.gif" />
First, the player spawns as marine, gets a few squad mates who follow him around, and the CPU zergs with dumb little skulks. Player builds resource nodes and kills a hive. Easy.
Then player is switched to alien, and has to kill the resource node and rebuild hive. Also easy.
Then maybe a commander tutorial, which they can skip if they want.
Then they can go online.
Heck, give the player a "switch sides" button, a bunch of bots who just zerg each other, and let them play with all the toys. Then when they know how everything works, they can go and get slaughtered. But at least they will realize that skulks die rather a lot, and know HOW to use stuff, whether they actually do it or not.
I'd rather have it so that you can pinpoint the direction before the hostile lifeform is in the actual sight. For example I could make sure the covering marine heard the same skulk as I did before I start to build a tf/pg. Maybe it could be used through popup menu if the surroundings of WASD are stacked with commands. Most mouses have some unused buttons too.
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=EvilSmoo)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(EvilSmoo)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Having a small requirement to get on live servers would really help. Having bots, even dumb ones, on a simple map, might really help.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm more worried about people and their ability to understand decisions and their consequenses than the very basic stuff, but some tutorials there wouldn't really hurt either.