Professional game-balance

korvo

<div class="IPBDescription">Atm: Counting the victorys</div>Regarding to a <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=114099&st=180&p=1859794&#entry1859794" target="_blank">Forum-Message</a> by Charlie Cleveland, UWE counts the victorys for balancing the game.

This may work with an huge amount of players - but in my opinion for NS2 (beta) this is to abstract away from the points that determine the balance.

What do you think?

player

That stats-remark was a pretty ###### dumb thing to say, and I think he realized that. Round-winning stats _might_ play a very tiny role very far down the line, but it's borderline useless right now.

Bacillus

The pie chart posted has no visible filters. All we know it could be aliens winning all 1 on 1s under a minute and it nicely balances out the chart.

It also takes a lot of time to adapt, especially for a public community that doesn't have the ability to make decisive changes in gameplay or strategy instantly. By my guess the vast majority of NS2 community is still playing the 180 based on what 179 was and are only starting to figure out how to abuse the alien early game weaknesses (and aliens only starting to figure out how to make up for those weaknesses). Even if the game seemed absolutely balanced I wouldn't call it this early after a patch.

Typhon

Yeah there needs to be some constraints on what constitutes a real game. I'd say any game with less than 8 players or under 3 minutes should be rejected by the stat logging system.

ScardyBob

I think the unfiltered win stats is a crude, but not terrible, estimate of balance. At the very least, it can identify trends between builds (if not what caused the change).

Rico5559

<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=114099&view=findpost&p=1860398" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t&p=1860398</a>

RTV

Sure but if you read the tweets say say something diffrent:
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Btw, to those saying that aliens lose every game, here are the game stats from the last 100 games: <a href="http://bit.ly/qpOx84" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/qpOx84</a> #fb<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So they give a big notice to it.
But i guess its wrong, i mean there a lot of factors for Example:
The game length, the player if they are good or noobs, the commander of the team.
If you would record a game where very good marines fight against very good aliens, the marines will everytime.
Right now its like that, lets count what

marines have:
1. Long-Range weapons
2. Shotguns, instantkill on contact
3. Flamethrower, drains down the energy and health of aliens a lot, also kills alien buildings very fast.
4. Grenadelauncher(spam), kills everybody with 1-2 hits with splash damage
5. Knockback, every alien get slow down to like its freezed, easy target so.
6. ARC, through wall shooting strong Siege
7. weak turrets, not very good but better then a expensive hydra which can killed by distance.
8. Portals, in 1 second through the whole map...
9. Medpacks are like instanthealing

aliens have:
1. Mostly short Range weapons
2. Lerk Spores, which only have a short range, it got mutilated to like 3 meter range
3. Spikes from lerk, which is good, same with lerk sniping mode
4. Fade, which is a very easy target, if marines got flamethrower, shotguns or grenade launcher(explode on contact...now)
5. Knockback, not important on targets which shoot in range and doesn't have to be fast.
6. Hydras, easy to kill
7. Whips, much more easy to kill, no danger if ARC, Flamethrower, Shotgun, Grenade Launcher or rifle used.
8. Gorge, is a joke, no risk for marines to kill him

So you see, if marines just play right and play together, the aliens have not even a big chance.
The flamethrower drains the energy of all aliens which make them more vulnerable then a chicken.
If they spam nades, use shotguns and on, aliens have not a big chance.

Of course the aliens can win, but only if the marines act like idiots...
Shotguns instantkill aliens, aliens can not do that with marines in that fast way.

Taxen0

I wouldn't say its that bad, Aliens can beat marines of equal strength too. but I agree that its harder.
this is because aliens no longer have a good siege unit, and the marines usually have a lot of turrets near the end.

turrets are also a lot more powerful now with the slow on hit.

Chris0132

Stats are useful things to have, far better than player experience for a lot of things, so relying on stats for hard fact is a sound strategy.

It starts to fall apart though when the stat data isn't very good, which the NS2 one isn't, it doesn't track enough info about the game to allow you to discard non-useful cases, or to see what's actually happening in the game. If say 20% of the marine victories occur after a 1 hour stalemate and the entire alien team leaves, that isn't balanced, and you have another serious problem on your hands. It also doesn't track balance of game elements against each other, for example a game where victory is determined primarily by who rushes what at the start is a very unbalanced game, as the starting rush is the most important feature and none of the other features are worth having.

So, stats are important, and you should rely on them, provided you can get good stats and practice good statistical analysis, and you make sure to address the things you can't really address with stats such as whether the game is 'fun'. Someone on the team mentioned they're improving the stat tracking which is good, as it will give more helpful data. But using statistics to discern the truth is science, and science can do everything.