Balance in NS2

puzl · February 2012

Well, your shotgun example illustrates the point perfectly, and I agree that in the above situation it is not correct to buff the shotgun, i.e., you have to maintain balance at high skill levels. But maybe there's a change that can be made that closes the gap somewhat. I don't know NS2 enough to comment.. but maybe you tweak rate of fire and spread so that a skilled player can still make those precise hits count, but an unskilled player can still land some damage. The point I'm making is you need to try to make the changes that help both styles of play - that improvements for casual and competitive play don't have to be mutually exclusive.

For example, take the fade changes in NS 3.2. You know, we struggle for a very long time on what to do with the fade. It was obviously godly in the hands of a very skilled player, to the point that only way to stop it was to give shotguns to equally skilled players.. and even then the fade player had to make a mistake or be ambushed ( which is really a special case of a mistake on the fade's part ). So we identified that the problem really wasn't the fade movement mechanics themselves.. but just how hard it was to juggle blink, swipe, air control and metabolism while maintaining situational awareness. The resultant change was the +movement ability and some minor tweaks to blink rate of fire. Now many "pro" players immediately lambasted us for nerfing the fade... but the subsequent renaissance in fade play on public servers vindicated our balance changes and I think it was one of the more important successes in NS gameplay changes throughout our time at the helm. It brought public play closer to competitive play... where the effectiveness of the first fade was one of the more critical inflection points in how a game played out. This isn't to say that all public fades were terrible before the change.. obviously a lot of players are both competitive and casual... and a lot of casual players reach reasonably high skill levels.. but when that average skilled player utilised +movement in their fade play they became a lot more competent and a lot less games ended when that precious 50 res evaporated 30 seconds after it was spent. And when all was said and done - many reasonable competitive players came out and said that the tweaks to blink ROF weren't really that impactful anyway.

Anyway, just to diffuse the air of narcissism in this post.. tankefugl was the person responsible for the blink changes discussed above.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>puzl, what is your take on 'how to balance NS2?" Being a retired developer you know what Flayra thought about game balance (pubs vs competitive) more than most. In NS1, Flayra seemed reluctant to embrace the competitive community. Am I remembering things unclearly?</div>

I'm not going to comment much on this.. I will say that the general impression that Flayra doesn't value the opinion of competitive players is 100% wrong.

Lets list two observations

1). NS1 developers didn't embrace competitive play
2). NS1 rewarded skill more than almost every other multiplayer game of its era.

Now, I think those two statements are mutually exclusive. Only one of them can be true. Which do you think it is?

If you don't think 2 is true, I'd like to hear your examples that aren't warsow.

edit: grammar

Bacillus · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 10 2012, 11:48 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901748"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I'm not going to comment much on this.. I will say that the general impression that Flayra doesn't value the opinion of competitive players is 100% wrong.

Lets list two observations

1). NS1 developers didn't embrace competitive play
2). NS1 rewarded skill more than almost every other multiplayer game of its era.

Now, I think those two statements are mutually exclusive. Only one of them can be true. Which do you think it is?

If you don't think 2 is true, I'd like to hear your examples that aren't warsow.

edit: grammar</div>
I think people are kind of touchy on these things exactly because they went into NS2 based on what NS1 did and now feel that connection has been lost.

There have been many features that kind of seemed wonky for any skilled play, people gave them the benefit of doubt. Later it turned out there wasn't any twist that would make the whole thing work. Such things happen of course, but when the development goes as long as NS2's has things start to add up and create tension.

puzl · February 2012

Absolutely.. I'm not trying to explain away any of the problems.. I'm just trying to explain that there is (still) no anti-competitive agenda. If you look at Cory's excellent reply in the topic on skill based movement he elaborates on this point. They have identified that there are issues.. they have expressed a desire to fix them.. but there are only so many hours in the day.

Papayas · February 2012

Skill < Frames Per Second

fanatic · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 10 2012, 12:48 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901748"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>For example, take the fade changes in NS 3.2. You know, we struggle for a very long time on what to do with the fade. It was obviously godly in the hands of a very skilled player, to the point that only way to stop it was to give shotguns to equally skilled players.. and even then the fade player had to make a mistake or be ambushed ( which is really a special case of a mistake on the fade's part ). So we identified that the problem really wasn't the fade movement mechanics themselves.. but just how hard it was to juggle blink, swipe, air control and metabolism while maintaining situational awareness. The resultant change was the +movement ability and some minor tweaks to blink rate of fire. Now many "pro" players immediately lambasted us for nerfing the fade... but the subsequent renaissance in fade play on public servers vindicated our balance changes and I think it was one of the more important successes in NS gameplay changes throughout our time at the helm. It brought public play closer to competitive play... where the effectiveness of the first fade was one of the more critical inflection points in how a game played out. This isn't to say that all public fades were terrible before the change.. obviously a lot of players are both competitive and casual... and a lot of casual players reach reasonably high skill levels.. but when that average skilled player utilised +movement in their fade play they became a lot more competent and a lot less games ended when that precious 50 res evaporated 30 seconds after it was spent. And when all was said and done - many reasonable competitive players came out and said that the tweaks to blink ROF weren't really that impactful anyway.</div>
I agree with you that the 3.2 changes to the fade were successful. The changes lowered the skill ceiling, but it was still high enough that it scaled well even for top level players. It's a good example of a change that marginally affected high level play, but benefitted low level play a lot; thus on the whole being a good change. Compare that to many of the changes from NS1 to the current NS2 -- you won't find many similar examples.

The "NS historian" inside me also feels compelled to point out the the pre-3.2 fade was perfectly balanced for high level play and certainly not as overpowered as you make it out to be. The "only way to stop it was to give shotguns to equally skilled players"? I guess you didn't watch the 2004 ClanBase Opencup final between EoD and Knife where some of the best fades in Europe died over ten times to lmgs in a single round.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 10 2012, 12:48 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901748"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I'm not going to comment much on this.. I will say that the general impression that Flayra doesn't value the opinion of competitive players is 100% wrong.</div>
This is actually a tricky topic. I don't think there can be any doubt that Flayra values input from competitive players. Any notion that there's some sort of anti-competitive agenda or conspiracy is also ridiculous. That said, it might as well be true for all the good it does us. Valuing the opinions of a certain part of the playerbase doesn't mean anything when game development decisions consistently favour casual play. As it stands, in a situation where the devs have had the option between the two, I can't think of a single game mechanic where the devs have chosen the "competitive option" over the "casual option".

Bunnyhopping is brought up so often because it happens to be the most egregious example. Not just because it's probably the single most important issue for "competitive players", but also because the developer's stated reasons for not including it don't make any sense. Prior to NS2 development starting, suggestions for making bunnyhopping more intuitive and lowering the learning curve were made en masse, some of them very good. So did the devs even consider the options available? I doubt it. One of the very first things we heard about the NS2 development was a blanket statement that bunnyhopping would never be included, no matter what. Instead they say they're going to do what nobody else has been able to do for the past 15 years; invent a wholly new movement mechanic that serves the same purpose. Nevermind that they might not be able to do that (which all signs point towards at the moment). Nevermind that they could've just tried fixing bunnyhopping in the first place instead.

It's telling that not even once has any of them replied to my posts on the subject, which tend to be on point as I like to think I know a thing or two about the subject. While the reason for it is unclear, it seems abundantly clear that the they've taken the stance of the "casual players" over the "competitive players" regardless of the arguments made for or against it. Does that mean there's a conspiracy against competitive players? No, but there's an obvious bias, and that bias leads to this:

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (fanatic @ Feb 8 2012, 08:23 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901047"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>NS1 had both great immersive aspects for casual players and great gameplay mechanics for more competitive minded players.

NS2 is currently almost solely focused on the immersive aspects for casual players. There's barely a single mechanic, outside of aiming, that truly rewards time spent practicing. I know for a fact that the overwhelming majority of competitive players I know from NS1, and there are a lot of them after eight years of playing it, find NS2 incredibly boring and will not play it when it is released, even though many of them have already bought it.

I don't think anybody really wants NS2 to be NS1 with better graphics, but there's no reason why it can't cater to both playerbases just as well as NS1 did.</div>

puzl · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (fanatic @ Feb 10 2012, 09:10 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901894"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>The "NS historian" inside me also feels compelled to point out the the pre-3.2 fade was perfectly balanced for high level play and certainly not as overpowered as you make it out to be. The "only way to stop it was to give shotguns to equally skilled players"? I guess you didn't watch the 2004 ClanBase Opencup final between EoD and Knife where some of the best fades in Europe died over ten times to lmgs in a single round.</div>

Well, my statement on fade balance was very much a simplification.. but I'd suggest that the scenario you outline is an outlier on any statistical representation of marine tech versus fades. I doubt any competent pro team would suggest that the counter to excellent fading is just really good aiming with lmgs. Still, I think it's valuable to note that a goal of NS1 ( as an FPS first and an RTS second ) has always been that in any situation, one should have at least a fighting chance against a dominant tech. LMGS should be able to kill a fade, but I sitll think you'd ask for shotguns when going up against them.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>This is actually a tricky topic. I don't think there can be any doubt that Flayra values input from competitive players. Any notion that there's some sort of anti-competitive agenda or conspiracy is also ridiculous. That said, it might as well be true for all the good it does us. Valuing the opinions of a certain part of the playerbase doesn't mean anything when game development decisions consistently favour casual play. As it stands, in a situation where the devs have had the option between the two, I can't think of a single game mechanic where the devs have chosen the "competitive option" over the "casual option".</div>
I'm not sure if you are specifically speaking about NS2, because, admittedly I haven't been paying as much attention to NS2 as I really should be, but in relation to NS1 I can list several examples; the two obvious ones that spring to mind are pistol-whipping and bunny-hopping. I'd probably also mention that a marine can reverse bhop away from a skulk faster than a non-bhoping skulk can chase him.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Bunnyhopping is brought up so often because it happens to be the most egregious example. Not just because it's probably the single most important issue for "competitive players", but also because the developer's stated reasons for not including it don't make any sense. Prior to NS2 development starting, suggestions for making bunnyhopping more intuitive and lowering the learning curve were made en masse, some of them very good. So did the devs even consider the options available? I doubt it. One of the very first things we heard about the NS2 development was a blanket statement that bunnyhopping would never be included, no matter what. Instead they say they're going to do what nobody else has been able to do for the past 15 years; invent a wholly new movement mechanic that serves the same purpose. Nevermind that they might not be able to do that (which all signs point towards at the moment). Nevermind that they could've just tried fixing bunnyhopping in the first place instead.</div>

I have a lot of problems with bunny-hop as it was in NS1, but I have yet to see an adequate replacement for it. What is essential is that someone can match a marine's aim advantage. Countless times I've seen, and vocalised myself, that there needs to be a more intuitive alternative that allows excellent players to scale proportionally with their enemy's aim. This skill needs to be accessible to the novice player too. In the absence of such a solution, I do honestly think that NS1 bunny-hop is better than nothing. So you're preaching to the converted on this specific point.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>It's telling that not even once has any of them replied to my posts on the subject, which tend to be on point as I like to think I know a thing or two about the subject. While the reason for it is unclear, it seems abundantly clear that the they've taken the stance of the "casual players" over the "competitive players" regardless of the arguments made for or against it. Does that mean there's a conspiracy against competitive players? No, but there's an obvious bias, and that bias leads to this:</div>

I still don't think there is bias. I just think, honestly, that the NS2 team have to just roll with their aspirations for the game and trust their intuition and vision. I know it's hard for you to feel the sting of being ignored; your article on the need for a skill based movement system pretty much sums up the situation for me, but I still am confident that the right decisions will be made once the game solves the performance issues. I guess my fear is that in NS1 we worked backwards from a completely quake-like movement system to a set of compromises, but for NS2, with completely new player physics, we have to work forwards to a compromise.

I guess my advice remains unchanged: Get cracking with LUA and show the way. Soon we'll have clients downloading lua from servers and maybe the threat of a fork of NS2 into causal-mode and pro-mode will motivate a compromise.

Anyway, yes it is a tricky topic, but I remain 100% behind my original statement - any perceived bias against competitive players is unfounded. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, but all I can offer is my humble assurance that, from my perspective anyway, I've never seen it. I do know that it is exhausting to engage in detailed design discussion with people who know the game mechanics better than you. If we had to follow all of the various threads and pressures on us for change, I doubt we'd ever have completed ns1 3.0, never mind 3.2. There comes a point where you just have to trust your gut and make the best decision you can given the limited knowledge. In my case, I often cited Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I.e. sometimes we didn't address problems properly or swiftly enough, but it was always due to our failings as developers and *never* because we harboured ill-will towards any subset of the community.

fanatic · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 11 2012, 01:25 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901961"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Well, my statement on fade balance was very much a simplification.. but I'd suggest that the scenario you outline is an outlier on any statistical representation of marine tech versus fades. I doubt any competent pro team would suggest that the counter to excellent fading is just really good aiming with lmgs. Still, I think it's valuable to note that a goal of NS1 ( as an FPS first and an RTS second ) has always been that in any situation, one should have at least a fighting chance against a dominant tech. LMGS should be able to kill a fade, but I sitll think you'd ask for shotguns when going up against them.</div>
Yeah, I wasn't arguing that you wouldn't prefer to have a shotgun or hmg when fighting a fade, just that it wasn't hopeless with the lmg. It probably wasn't your intention to say it was hopeless with the lmg, but that's just how it came off.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 11 2012, 01:25 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901961"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I'm not sure if you are specifically speaking about NS2, because, admittedly I haven't been paying as much attention to NS2 as I really should be, but in relation to NS1 I can list several examples; the two obvious ones that spring to mind are pistol-whipping and bunny-hopping. I'd probably also mention that a marine can reverse bhop away from a skulk faster than a non-bhoping skulk can chase him.</div>
I was referring to NS2, could've been clearer on that. Your NS1 examples make my point all the same though. Currently in NS2, you can't pistol whip, bunnyhop as any class or do any sort of acrobatics as marine, other than jumping up and down on the spot. I guess some might argue that pressing the sprint key to go faster for a few seconds might also count...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (puzl @ Feb 11 2012, 01:25 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901961"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I have a lot of problems with bunny-hop as it was in NS1, but I have yet to see an adequate replacement for it. What is essential is that someone can match a marine's aim advantage. Countless times I've seen, and vocalised myself, that there needs to be a more intuitive alternative that allows excellent players to scale proportionally with their enemy's aim. This skill needs to be accessible to the novice player too. In the absence of such a solution, I do honestly think that NS1 bunny-hop is better than nothing. So you're preaching to the converted on this specific point.

I still don't think there is bias. I just think, honestly, that the NS2 team have to just roll with their aspirations for the game and trust their intuition and vision. I know it's hard for you to feel the sting of being ignored; your article on the need for a skill based movement system pretty much sums up the situation for me, but I still am confident that the right decisions will be made once the game solves the performance issues. I guess my fear is that in NS1 we worked backwards from a completely quake-like movement system to a set of compromises, but for NS2, with completely new player physics, we have to work forwards to a compromise.

I guess my advice remains unchanged: Get cracking with LUA and show the way. Soon we'll have clients downloading lua from servers and maybe the threat of a fork of NS2 into causal-mode and pro-mode will motivate a compromise.

Anyway, yes it is a tricky topic, but I remain 100% behind my original statement - any perceived bias against competitive players is unfounded. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, but all I can offer is my humble assurance that, from my perspective anyway, I've never seen it. I do know that it is exhausting to engage in detailed design discussion with people who know the game mechanics better than you. If we had to follow all of the various threads and pressures on us for change, I doubt we'd ever have completed ns1 3.0, never mind 3.2. There comes a point where you just have to trust your gut and make the best decision you can given the limited knowledge. In my case, I often cited Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I.e. sometimes we didn't address problems properly or swiftly enough, but it was always due to our failings as developers and *never* because we harboured ill-will towards any subset of the community.</div>
I definitely can't say that my observations are any more true than yours. You probably have more distance to the situation than me, which is usually a good thing for obvious reasons. All the same, I've followed the development closely and I've seen the way each and every one of their gameplay decisions go, step by step, all moving in the same direction.

In the end I guess I'm just venting my frustration that NS2 isn't going to be the game I hoped it was going to be.

Wheeee · February 2012

right now the only movement skill for marines is to rebind the back button so it is never pressed. strafe-jump ftw.

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Zek @ Feb 10 2012, 04:41 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901578"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Balancing for pub play is absolutely a different beast than balancing for competitive matches, and it is equally important if you want a successful game.</div>

Uhm i thought that we allready agreed that you can't "balance" pub play, because of the high fluctuation in player skill and understanding of the games mechanics?
That's not what i'm trying to do here, i'm not arguing for an "perfect public balance" vs an "perfect competetive balance", i simply do not believe in such a thing because the motivations for every player inside a game can varry too greatly in an public enviorment. Which also means that there will never be the "perfect game" that instantly appeals to everybody, even the most competetive games don't appeal to every competetive player just because of their competetive nature.

But what you can actually meassure and calculate to a certain degree: Competetive balance, because it all comes down to crunshing numbers for the metagame. Because competetive players usually are at the same level of understanding the games mechanics, when they hit the skill ceiling for that game. So at that point it all comes down to tactics the indiviual player choses to "outsmart" his opponent, tactics in this example means simply the way he interacts with the different mechanics inside the game. Competetive players even do this in an intuitive way to a very big scale that's why sometimes things feel "off" to them without them beeing able to exactly pinpoint the reason for it feeling off.

They are basicly good at theorycrafting the flaws of an games mechanics and trying to apply that theory inside the actual game to see how it works against theorycrafted strategies of other players. But this is an constant process as failures lead to change in tactics and wins lead to optimization of tactics.

Competetive players are basicly very good at crowdsourcing problems on a very theoretical level, because if there is an mathematical advantage you can caculate somehow, they will find it. Because to competetive gamers this mostly is a game they play to win so they will allways chose the best method to play, if there is a heavy imbalance in your game mechancis then you will often see large parts of the competetive scene adapting a playstyle that abuses this imbalance and abuses it until everybody uses it, at that point your competetive scene dies if you won't change things quickly.

But competetive players are really bad at judging what makes a game "fun" to somebody who doesn't understand it's mechanics as deeply as them, because all their thinking processes revolve around gaming the systems involved inside the game to their best advantage. As that's their definition of fun, while a new player coming to the game might have a dozen different reasons for playing that game...

That's why i fear this whole "balance balance, competetive, new player shutup" talk in this community really has quite some negative influence on the game design process.
All the people around here allways think "competetive balance first" when imho competetive balance is actually one of the easier tasks to accomplish once the games "fun mechanics" are in place.

Because if there is something that will heavily imbalance the game down the line of the mechanics then the very competetive NS scene will discover it pretty quickly by simply playing the game. The "play to win" competetive players like the depth of gaming such systems so they lend themselfs naturly to solve such problems, but only <b>these</b>.

But that's also what kept NS partly back from beeing really successfull: It's depth prevented most types of players besides the one with the "play to win" mentality to see what's so fun about the game. Other player types couldn't hold interest in the game to the point where they finnaly understood all the involved "hidden" mechanics which would also allow them to turn into "play to win" players at some point and at that point the dynamics of that make the game "fun" to this player heavily change because his motivation to play it has changed.

Basicly other player types didn't manage to penetrate the "depth" of the game before they ran out of motivation. So if we don't want to repeat the same mistakes with NS2, shouldn't we focus a little more on making the depth easier to traferse for new players that don't understand the mechanics yet?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau @ Feb 10 2012, 09:09 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901634"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I liked the munching RTs example that rebirth wrote about, but then you have to consider that it's exactly the same for both teams and for every unit, so this is, inherently, balanced. Therefore, it's irrelevant in terms of balancing the game, because assuming that teams are equally skilled/knowledgable (a necessary assumption) and have the same motivations, both teams will either munch RTs or not munch RTs.</div>

You are forgetting that for each of these tasks, different mechanics are involved for both teams. Because the teamplay mechanics in NS are asymmetric, meaning that it won't be much use assuming perfect equality on that end.

It is what makes playing marines more "noob friendly" while playing Kharaa is usually considered a bad starting experience for new players.
Everybody who played NS for a while would agree with the above sentence, at least i hope so?

But why do we all agree with that? Because if you look at the individual mechanics for teamplay on these two sides you will notice that many on the marine side are way more self-explanatory and the whole marine-commander mechanics lead to a more natural occuring (compared to the khara side) teamplay if you try to apply the "play to win" and "play for fun" motvations for playing the game.

Let's look at the mechanics from the point of a player who never played NS before and who's motivation for playing is "fun" as in winning.
When he joins the marine team he instantly sees a few known concepts that directly affect his behavior:

- There is a commander, meaning he is not required to know all the rules, he can basicly shift the responsibility for winning or losing to the commander because obviously a guy with such an unique position in the team knows what he is doing.

This alone puts the player into an perspective that doesn't require him to think too much about all the things he is doing, he can basicly stop thinking and just follow orders and enjoy the feeling that he's working for the greater good (winning) without even understanding what he's doing.

- Besides the commander all other unit types are the same. There is no specialisation of any kind that's instantly obvious to a new player.

So if the player is looking for a helpfull role to play to reach the higher goal (still winning), he doesn't have to look far because he has not many different options. Everybody is a marine and looks the same to him, so the best individual role he can come up with is to just immitate the behavior of the guys who look like him and have the same options as him.

Because of this he will immitate teamplay behavior without knowing why, and because repetition is the best way of learning, after a while the player will naturally apply that behavior into his gameplay. This leads to a smooth transition trough many of the rather deep gameplay mechanics on the marine side of things.

Compare that with kharaa side of things that offers different unit types, this allready gives such a player way too many different impulses to follow that usually are also an disadvantage to the kharaa teamplay mechanics.

If a new player on the kharaa side trys to look for a rolemodel on the alien side he's suddenly faced with <b>5</b> different choices compared to the 2 on the mariens side (counting commander). This is allready overwhelming enough to somebody who doesn't understand the mechanics yet. Because this player still plays "to win" he knows that him taking any of these specialised classes he doesn't understand yet will probably have an bad effect on the overall game.

So he will chose a class who's specialisation is easy to figure out for him: The Gorge
Why is the gorge easy to understand? If the new player sees somebody else as a gorge he can instantly see one of the "fun looking" gameplay mechanics: Building things.

The other thing such an player realizes pretty quickly is that "building stuff" doesn't require much twitch skill. So a player with the motivation to win and the realization that he doesn't understand the game completly yet will naturaly end up picking the gorge because he thinks it's the best way he can help his game at tis low level of understanding the game. Building is an easy task right? And dropping stuff into the world is a fun gameplay mechanic :)

That's why there is this old running gag of newbies going gorge and dropping stuff in "useless" places. These guys don't to this to ruin "everybodys else fun", in their mindest they are trying to help the team "winning".

This happening so often and people raging at them is a result of the teamplay mechanics on the kharaa side beeing so unituitive to new players that don't understand the game yet. The problem is you can't simply fix this issue by telling people to "read up on the forums and l2p", that would require effort on the players side and nobody wants to invest "effort" into something he just paid money for to have some entertaiment time.

That's why it's allways important to consider the viewpoint of a player who doesn't understand any game mechanics yet, but at the same time you have to apply a model that helps you understanding how players discover and react to these mechanics.

I feel like all this has gotten awfully theoretical by now so i'm gonny try to wrap my theory (and just that) up in a somewhat short version so i still add to the topic:

Making mechanics easy to understand, fun to use and <b>unique</b> should be the very FIRST goal, because accomplishing this is the real creative part about game design that needs as much thinking freedom for innovation as possible to work, putting restrictions on that proccess (by always and always reconsidering perfect competetive balance trough all stages of game devleopement) will limit your point of view preventing you from discovering alternate solution that could lead to a result that's fun and still balanced.

Now if you throw such an "for fun" designed mechanic infront of the competetive "play to win" crowd they will crowdsource the ###### out of it to make the most obvious flaws visibile very quickly in a very detailed way. This allows you to change other mechanics to balance out the overall picture while still keeping the "fun" features inside the game.

But adding accessability and "fun" in the later stages of game design usually ends up with an counter intuitive effect, because now you try to compensate for the depth of the mechanics by plastering tooltipps all over the place and adding useless mechanics to the game that feel gimmicky "for fun" all this leads to a game that's even more confusing and overwhelming to a new player because it increases even more in overall complexity by these steps.

It's not a question of what kind of features/mechanics you use, but rather how you use them. And in that regards i believe one can design mechanics in such a way that players without knowledge about the games rules will naturally use them and because of the "learning by doing" effect will penetrate the depth of the game without even noticing it. The trick is to make the repetition not too obvious, because a player who doesn't understand the game yet usually doesn't like repetive tasks or patterns when he is in "exploring new game" mode ;)

Of course the final game should hit that unique spot with your meachancis right between "accessibility" (sucking in new players) and "depth" (keeping them) that leads to a successfull game with broad appeal.

edit@ puzzle: If you actually drag the Dunningâ€“Kruger effect into this discussion like this you should be aware enough that everybody can be a victim of this regardless of his status, experience or personality. The only thing to prevent this is to keep an open mind and constantly trying to self check thesis and theories trough fail saves or by understanding and accepting alternate viewpoints from other people even if they might look wrong at first glance.

Keeping an open mind and trying to understand each others thought processes also should help preventing this issue. But i get where you are comming from, "play to win" players are somewhat more keen to this effect because of their competetive nature they too often think too much in terms of "wrong and right" while nothing really is that simple as "wrong and right" because it allways depends on your point of view and situation what's "wrong and right".

internetexplorer · February 2012

I'm so glad you posted that IdrA vs Day9 transcript (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whjhZfguOT8" target="_blank">here's the video</a>), because it illustrates exactly what I'm talking about. At the time of that video, day9 was in 1v1 platinum and (by his own admission) was not going to stream himself playing or compete until he was "less awful at the game." He's still a pillar of the community known for his analysis and excellent approach to learning, but what's clear from the video is he doesn't have the same understanding of "terran dying scouting" that Idra does, and he fumbles around trying to a find a way around that with his high-level philosophical approach. I've never seen anybody actually address the concern Idra raises in that video, which leads me to believe at least someone else agrees with him. Is it easier to play against terran with their myriad technical all-ins and scout denial, just because Day9 disagreed with Idra? No. Did the discussion provide any new information to help Zerg players reacting to terrans in the early game? No. Did Day9 try to reason something out without having the experience to do it? Yes.

The same concepts apply to NS2 - somebody can come in my lerk thread and tell me the lerk is fine because when they play it seems okay, but if they can't refute my specific claims it's not useful. On the other hand, I play an obscene amount of lerk and everything I say is based on a real experience I've had time and time again, and thought about every time (adjusting my thoughts on it and forming them into a few clear simple ideas).

Idra's character is very polarized and it does show through in his BW and SC2 careers, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about. Sometimes being brash enough to come out and say "this is imbalanced and anyone who disagrees is an idiot" is what it takes to get people to stop sugar-coating the truth and notice. The reason the video in the OP is being referenced is that it explains two things which are not common knowledge: why games should be designed with a high skill level in mind, and how to analyze a perceived imbalance.

Tweadle · February 2012

*double post*

Tweadle · February 2012

I mostly agree with you rebirth. Games should, first and foremost, be fun. The problem in this instance, however, is more entrenched because the balance has to be factored in at the first stage of implementation or else it won't be reached at all. This is because of the massive improvements one can make with his aim and the very limited improvements one can make with his movement. The goal is to make both scale roughly similarly so that it caters to both your 'play to win' and 'play to fun' model which I personally think is an oversimplification but serves the purpose of this discussion well enough. To be totally honest, I think alot of your gripes about intuitiveness aren't hugely relevant to the discussion on balance.

As the marine-versus-skulk setup is overwhelmingly the most common setup, this needs to be treated very seriously and no amount of manipulating numbers is going to address imbalance, except at one skill-level. Sure, you could create some kind of balance by building in a dependency on other lifeforms/upgrades (and this happens to some extent) but the marine-versus-skulk encounters need to be fun and undecided above all.

Make no mistake, I could construct an argument for bunnyhopping (or its adequate replacement) on 'fun' alone but fun is subjective whereas balance is not.

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Feb 11 2012, 04:26 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1901995"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>The same concepts apply to NS2 - somebody can come in my lerk thread and tell me the lerk is fine because when they play it seems okay, but if they can't refute my specific claims it's not useful.</div>

And this is a perfect example of a "play to win" mentality at work :)

You do not realize that your issues with the lerk only result from your specific viewpoint, and only your understanding of the games mechanics allow you take on that point of view and put into words to break down the mechanics and as to why they do not work, at least in your point of view with your motivation of playing the game.

A new player will never be able to refute those specific points in the way you want him to, because he doesn't understand how the mechanics key into each other yet. He has a completly different point of view on the game compared to to somebody who knows all the involved mechanics. And that point is not "worse" or "less educational" it's only a <b>different</b> point of view that's just as valid and important for designing a game if you don't want to end up with a complicated deep mess of a game that drives new players away because of the high learning curve and no intuitive way for new players to beat that learning curve.

But the experience of a new player can help you figure out the where your mechanics are too complicated/confusing to people that don't know all of them yet.

So in your point of view a "new player" will never be able to add anything usefull to the discussion, because you have setup your way of reasoning in such a way that people can only disagree or agree with you when they see the game in the same kind of mindeset you do. When all this shouldn't be a simple process of "yes or no" but rather of sharing each persons subjective impression so you can find a mittle ground that makes all of them happy.

I also think there are also alot of missudnerstandings at work here, constantly i see Starcraft mentioned for an example to an "successfull competetive game with broad appeal" and then people keep on arguing about perfect competetive balance like the perfect competetive balanced had been the sole and lone reason for starcraft's mass appeal.

When the real reason for starcrafts mass appeal is that the game offers lots of different content options that appeal to lot's of different player mentalities. This starts with the entertaining singleplayer campaign, goes to the custom maps and ends with the very well balanced competetive options.

It's the combination of these things that gives starcraft his mass appeal and reputation, if starcraft would only have focused on delivering "the perfectly balanced competetive multiplayer RTS" leaving out all these other parts of the game then it would never have reached the cult status it has today. In that regards the competetive sides takes itself sometimes a little bit <b>too</b> important.

I don't pretend to know what makes a game "perfect" but i remember flayra saying that he wanted to set totaly different goals for NS2:
He didn't want NS2 just to be "NS HD"
He did want want to make the game more appealing to other player types besides the competetive one, by changing gameplay dynamic.

As i remember it flayra considered many of the current implementations of mechanics to be an disadvantage for the fun of an "non-organized public game", that's something i totaly agree with. But coming back here after all these months it kinds feels like everybody forget that and we are just busy building an perfectly balanced NS2 ASAP.

Looking at NS2 right now and how much it has moved in terms of design compared to the alpha makes it obvious that flayra had a very different game in mind but slowly over time is migrating back to just replicating the "NS gameplay" repeating all it's flaws for mass appeal once again. I don't think this happens intentional, but if you are out of options and viewpoints you usually tend to stick with what you know. Especially if you have a whole community that keeps on yelling at you about imbalanced in the metagame even when designing features in the alpha state of the game...

The current khamm/gorge implementation feels like flayra trying to prevent the game from just beeing "NS2" but all the competetive players and former NS player all just want "NS2" and just shut the whole idea down because it's not really fleshed out yet. When the whole khamm thing could lend itself to many mechanics that help in ease new players into such an complex game (see my post about the asymmetrical teamplay mechanics on the marine - kharaa team)

fanatic · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rebirth @ Feb 11 2012, 01:41 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902116"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>The current khamm/gorge implementation feels like flayra trying to prevent the game from just beeing "NS2" but all the competetive players and former NS player all just want "NS2" and just shut the whole idea down because it's not really fleshed out yet. When the whole khamm thing could lend itself to many mechanics that help in ease new players into such an complex game (see my post about the asymmetrical teamplay mechanics on the marine - kharaa team)</div>
It's amusing that you can construct a fairly well thought out theoretical argument, but then when you try to apply it to practice it falls apart because your initial assumption was incorrect. The assumption being that playing to win is opposite to playing for fun and that balancing for competitive play necessarily leads to the game being unintuitive for new players. I'll also mention the fact that not all "competitive players" "play to win", nor do all "casual players" "play for fun", and that one should be careful with using those terms to separate player groups because we're really talking about groups of individual players, both equally diverse.

With regards to the khamm debate, your fundamental misunderstanding is that "competitive players" want it gone, which is only true if (1) you treat us as a "majority rules" group and (2) you refuse to look beneath the surface of the arguments presented. For the players it's a process of noticing that a feature currently isn't working (the khamm/gorge), trying to figure out why it isn't working and then coming up with a suggestion for fixing it. In the end, the people saying "get rid of the khamm it sucks!" (full disclosure: I'm one of those people) aren't saying "get rid of the khamm no matter what!", they're saying "I don't have any ideas for fixing this broken feature that I noticed isn't working so great because of reason x, so I suggest falling back to what we knew worked in the first game". The correct interpretation of that is really "please fix this broken feature" not "remove this broken feature", as fixing it would also make people stop suggesting its removal.

Without turning this into a khamm/gorge debate, the problem with "fixing it" it is that you have to redesign the alien resource model and probably also how the different lifeforms work in order to make all the pieces fit together. You can compare it to a jigsaw puzzle, with the gorge building mechanic in NS1 being the center piece and all the other pieces being shaped to fit around it. Now if you swap out that center piece and put in one that's (for the sake of argument) twice as large (the khamm/gorge), the puzzle is never going to come together unless you change all the other pieces as well.

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (fanatic @ Feb 11 2012, 04:26 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902132"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>The assumption being that playing to win is opposite to playing for fun and that balancing for competitive play necessarily leads to the game being unintuitive for new players.</div>

That's not at all what i tried to explain here.
I'm still applying the principle that s "play for fun" player also plays to win but doesn't understand the whole ruletset yet in the same way the "play to win" player does. But with each game mechanic he activley understands (he knows the latter consequences of something he is doing right know) his total knowledge of the game increases moving him further into the direction of an "play for win" player.

I know why you thought i made the above point, because i use the stupid terms "play for fun" and "play for win" making it sound like it's either one or the other and them beeing so opposite excludes each other. But then you have to remember the last time i defined these both terms had been in another post, but i didn't want to repeat all that yada yada again.

You just have to assume that all players play to win but not all of them share the same level of knowledge about the whole workings of the games mechanics and how they key into each other. It's basicly a proccess that allways moves in the same direction:

I'm a new player, what is the first thing i do see? What are my possible options to react to that?

Because in a rough way you can at least guess in what order a new players is gonna encounter certain game mechanics. If you go trough that order and assume different "knowledge stages" for the player encountering each mechanic then you can create a somewhat smooth learning experience for very deep and complex systems.

It's basicly the principle of "Easy to learn, hard to master" that you can find in many Blizzard games for example.

But you are right, you can't apply this to NS very well if we keep clinging to the "competetive balance"level that so many former NS fantes want (and it's an passionate crowd :) ) while at the same time building an mass compatible video game experience. That's why we either gonna need to shut away the "competetive balance" in an extra config mode (i believe this could actually work), or create an seperate game mode for all this.

The extra game mode is out of the question if UWE want to release the game any time soon and still profit from the current wave of attention the gorrilla build generated.
But i believe seperating the "perfect competetive balance" away in another config mode that doesn't apply too drastic changes to the gameplay could be a viable solution.

I just fear that if we keep going down the current road (competetive balance above all) then flayra will have missed one of his big design goals for NS2. But i can't predict the future or what UWE is gonna change or how far ahead flayra has thought this trough. But releasing the game without an "ease in new players" mode would waste alot of possible market penetration.

So I do not pretend to know better or anything, i just wanted to point that out because NS as a game and community is VERY important to me. I wish for UWE and this game to have a huge success like flayra wants it to be, because god knows they deserve it the most in the current gaming landscape. This is an project of passion and not profit, but it still deserves profit, i just want to help with that :)

Harimau · February 2012

rebirth is right, and I will disagree with Tweadle on two points.**

It's a question of knowledge.
As you "progress", you gain knowledge, so what seems balanced at different levels up the skill ladder changes as your understanding increases.

The only reason that you can balance <i>easily</i> at the skill ceiling is because you're assuming that everyone has full understanding of the game.
Does that make that viewpoint any more right, does that mean that those players have "true" understanding of the balance, does that mean you necessarily balance at that skill ceiling?
No, that's just the upper limit. If you managed to further increase the "skill ceiling", then those players at the skill ceiling themselves would have an inadequate understanding of the game, and therefore have a "false" understanding of the balance.

So it's not so much a question of balance, as it is of understanding.
The solution is to educate the player so that they easily gain a full understanding of the game, but this can be difficult.
*And this is where "intuitiveness" (and "easy" mechanics, admittedly) comes into play: intuitive mechanics are mechanics that are easily understood. The more intuitive a mechanic, the less you need to educate the player:
Even if the <b>technical skill</b> between players is different, at the very least they understand how it sets them apart and how they can improve or even mitigate the disadvantage.

*The question of fun may be subjective while balance is not, but it cannot be denied that there are concepts of fun that are common to most if not all players. Even if something appears balanced at some skill level (e.g. the skill ceiling), if it's not commonly fun then it's only fun for "play to win" players. It's all well and good to have a mechanic that is perfectly balanced, but if it is either <b>boring</b>, <u>tedious</u> or <i>seemingly overpowered</i>, then it is not fun and is not beneficial to the majority of the game's playerbase.

An example of a seemingly overpowered though balanced mechanic: you are a shotgun marine and you come up against some super-alien that is worth
3 of you - although this may be balanced because being able to afford that super-alien means that all his teammates are skulks and so you can overcome him and their team with numbers, it is not fun for the single player, and that is where the perceived imbalance is.

An example of a boring or tedious though balanced mechanic: attacking RTs and building structures - players may not realise that they need to do this to gain their team an advantage, or they simply consider it boring. The "play to win" player understands that he has to do this to win, and winning is so fun to him that it overcomes any boredom from this mechanic; but this in no way validates it for all players.

In summary, the designer needs to prioritise:
-less boring, tedious mechanics
-more fun mechanics
-more intuitive mechanics
-less seemingly unbalanced mechanics
-include fail-safes and alternative strategies, "a way out"
-educate the player on unintuitive mechanics so that they come to appreciate them
-educate the player on seemingly unbalanced mechanics so that they understand that they are in fact balanced
-educate the player on these fail-safes and alternative strategies so that they always know their options
and only then:
-"balance" each mechanic at the top-level (mostly the numbers, at this point)

And this should lead to a game that is fun to play for all skill levels, regardless of motivation.

rebirth · February 2012

And for the sake of me not just preaching bull###### without actually delivering ideas and solutions, i want to present a little thought experiment for changing the whole Kharaa side of things.
It looks like most people agree that currently this is the biggest issue, competitive players see that the mechanics are all kinds of unfun and unbalanced and new players still feel frustrated because the current mechanics at work prevent kharaa teamplay from occurring naturally.

That part about natural occurring teamplay is important, because it helps easing in the learning curve that prevented the original NS from being easily accessible and thus it's mainstream appeal to a certain degree.

All this is imho and open to discussion as always!

I don't think i need to point out the flaws with the current implementation of the khamm - gorge for competitive play.
A turtling marine team will always win with the current stuff in place, but there are a lot of features missing so this shouldn't be a surprise.

But even with all the features in place, the gameplay would still suck and the current implementation of infestation growth - drifter building - chamber building - gorge gameplay is broken on a very basic level. Currently the Kharaa team in mid-late game heavily suffers from energy limitation on hives, this can only be compensated if a player goes gorge to use personal res to expand the infestation. But even then, the team res will still keep piling up because using up resources as khamm is tedious with all the micro involved building chambers with drifters, while constantly repairing infestation.

So the alien team will always be limited in it's expansion by hive energy or micro but not by resources. This makes a lot of potential strategies nonviable.

Only an ACTIVE cooperation of the gorge and the khamm leads to the kharaa team being able to compete with the well working marine mechanics in this case.
But the mechanics in place for that are boring as hell and not paying off very well for both players on the end.

The Gorge basically only has 1 option to act strategically mid-late game: Help spread infestation so the khamm can spent his hive energy on drifters to get rid of all the team resources.

Is spreading infestation fun? For a new player yeah sure, he will plaster that ###### all over the place! The problem is that the newbie player going gorge (we know they like that) lacks the understanding of all game mechanics, so he won't be spreading the infestation in a way that cooperates with the khamm as the khamm can only use voice/text chat for communication. But only "advanced players" use voice/text chat for coordination, so we shouldn't have to depend on those things for such an important interaction.

Instead the interaction should be visual and fun, that might sound cheesy but it's really that simple. But how can we do that?
I believe currently we have all the stuff in place we need, we just need to put it into the right order. And after we did that, we can hammer out the competitive balance issues by having an competitive thought process go over all that to figure out exact values for where they are required.

With all that said here are a few design points i tried to apply:

- Kharaa infestation looks and feels nice, spreading it should come natural to kharaa and not punish them. The rate and ease at which the infestation can spread should increase with the number of hives.

- Kharaa are evolving, always adapting but never in a too focused way. The concept of the "hivemind" is at work here, such an hivemind doesn't control individual units but rather accomplishes movement in a more natural "fluid" way by growing and regrowing depending on the situations needs. This also helps separate khamm gameplay from marine commander gameplay.

- Keep the Khamm and the Gorge, assume that in an public environment the new players will naturally flock to the Gorge class. Make the Khamm a role that a "play to win" player can take over to ensure overall teamplay flow of the alien team and give him options to "correct" newbie gorges mistakes and control the gorges overall tactical value on the field. This also has the added effect that you can make many khamm mechanics "unintuitive" without bothering too much about learning curve.

I think these 3 should roughly sum up my "motivations" for the following changes.

Gorge
- Minicysts cost XX energy, the gorge has an maximum of "XX" energy to prevent spamming. Energy should recharge rather slowly but at such a steady rate that it's visible to the new player.

- Make hydras cost XX pres and have them regrow after XX amount of time if the patch of infestation they have been planted on is not killed in that time. Flamethrower will always kill them in such a way that they won't regrow. Base the respawn rule on "%dmg taken from type flame" to prevent it from not working if a final LMG bullet kills it. Limit total amount of hydras per region, build in a mechanic to recycle/move them for the gorges.

This is a nice mechanic to have a tooltip pop up telling the new player "Planting hydras on infestation will make them regrow when not killed by fire!"

- Give the gorge the ability to build crags, shades and shifts. Depending on number of hives and chosen upgrade chamber by the khamm. He has to pay for these chambers with pres, each chamber costs XX.

Khamm

- Khamm starts with X drifters, drifters have XX energy. Drifters get the ability to plant a pustule, costing XX amount of energy. Make them "spit" the pustule in a limited range around them to prevent too many pathing issues when planting them as khamm. Drifters get build at the hive costing XX teamres.

- Pustules can be turned into upgrade chambers/whips. This idea is still is a "work in progress" as i feel the whole upgrade chamber thing is all messed up anyway at least in it's current implementation. There is room here to implement mechanics to have the khamm waste team resources. Suggestions welcomed!

- Drifters have the ability to turn into hive costing XX team res, or into an RT costing XX team res.

- Crags, Shades and Shifts gain the ability to unroot and move like whips, giving the khamm control over gorges mistakes and also giving him control over "overall movement" of the team in an very indirect natural way. This also helps the khamm to lead "new gorge" players in a very unique way. New players will be amazed by the stuff they build suddenly running off, following it to see what it's doing ;)

- Khamm can set a limit to team resources, all surplus resources go straight to the gorges in the team. Limit can only be higher then the current amount of team resources. This allows the khamm/"hivemind" to distribute flow of team resources. This gives an coordinated khamm/gorge team alot of interesting options in competitive play. But also giving an "play to win" khamm player the tools to control "newbie gorges" overall impact on the round in an public environment.

Now there are a couple of mechanics that still miss in this model to make it "complete" the following mechanics are meant to connect infestation growth rate to the number of hives. There is ONE complicated mechanic in here that i'm not sure how well it could be implemented, i think people will instantly notice that one.

Hives still have energy, XX amount.

1 Hive: Khamm uses Drifters to plant pustules in an very micro intense way, gorges can help out with minicysts limited by their energy.
2 Hives: Drifters gain the ability to "auto spread" infestation while moving, it should be an toggle the khamm can activate or deactivate, also add an "patrol" feature for them.
3 Hives: The khamm unlocks the ability to spread pustules in the same way he has right now, limited by all the 3 hives combined energy.

Khamm control changes

- Make them behave like current marine commander controls to allow khamm gameplay the same "spammy" feeling that the marine commander has. But the Khamm basically spams chamber abilities, pustules and other hive abilities.

The first page Hive abilities (need to figure out a way to select individual hives but at the same time make pustules spammable from all 3 hives?)
The second page selects all crags on screen
The third page selects all shifts on screen
The fourth page selects all shades on screen

This allows the late-game khamm to easily control alot of the action on the screen in a very contextual way. The problem with the current implementation of buildings and their abilities is that using them requires too much micro. This should help with that.

What do i hope to achieve with these changes in terms of khamm gameplay?

Early game: The khamm has to use alot of time on expanding infestation with his drifters, that's an more fun task then all the current early game of "drifter building micro hell".
He also needs this task because in this stage there is not alot more he can and should do because resource income is still low so there is not much "building" to do for the "hivemind" and the number of chambers on the field he could micro is still very limited.

Mid game: Now 2 types of chambers on the field, infestation expansion is now cut down in micro very heavily so the khamm has more time to micro all the chambers around the map.

Late game: At this point the khamm gameplay should kinda feel a little bit like playing a round of DoTa/mobile tower defense, 3 types of chambers to spam abilities with, lots of tactical options with moving them around and having the option for "infestation rushes" by spamming pustules.

The current issues i could see pop up with these changes:

- Not checked for exploitable behavior that could lead to a metagame advantage
- Not checked for behavior that could be used to grief other players
- Not considering the still missing abilities/features
- Not considering engine limitations

But i believe we shouldn't be too scared of those, if somebody wants to grief players he will always manage to do so if he invests enough time. And currently the marine side of NS2 feels like NS1 Marines on steroids in terms of balance compared to kharaa. So we shouldn't be scared of "overbuffing" the kharaa side of things once until they at least feel right gameplay wise. After that we can change values and mechanics depending on requirement to achieve competitive balance.

For example in the Onos thread Harimau suggested an very interesting mechanic of using resources on abilities, this could be applied to units abilities or khamm usable abilities to balance out metagame issues with the resource system these changes could lead too.

Last but not least: I do not take credit for "thinking" these changes up, many of them are inspired (or simply stolen ;) ) by other ideas and suggestions all over the forums by this very creative and smart community. So it's more of an crowd-sourced effort that i just try to keep on going as an open thought process, and i hope people will join in to improve it!

If anybody feels the need to see his name mentioned because i used his idea/suggestion then drop me a message and i will start adding credits for ideas if people desire something like that :)

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau @ Feb 12 2012, 05:37 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902232"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>An example of a seemingly overpowered though balanced mechanic: you are a shotgun marine and you come up against some super-alien that is worth
3 of you - although this may be balanced because being able to afford that super-alien means that all his teammates are skulks and so you can overcome him and their team with numbers, it is not fun for the single player, and that is where the perceived imbalance is.</div>

Love your whole post! Just makes me really happy when people manage to end up along the same lines of thinking.
But i just want to single that part out because i believe it's yet another example that promotes natural teamplay on the marine side of NS.

Because the next realization a new player will probably make after having died to that fade (and noticing how strong it is) is that he better sticks with the other dudes that look like him.
This is the direct result of the fade being unknown to him up to this point, encountering that "overpowered" fade puts the new player once again into a mindset of problem solving. He's gonna look for solutions around him and notice once again: Hey all those dudes look like me! That fade thing looks like it's pretty unique and alone, maybe i should stick with the other guys and gang up on that "boss"?"

And BAM the new player learned his place (once again) in the teamplay mechanics of the marine team just by encountering an teamplay mechanic (different unit worth on kharaa side) of the enemy team he doesn't even understand yet.

In that way the original NS has some very beautifully working mechanics on the marine side, but sadly the kharaa side ruins it all by not promoting teamplay in a very intuitive way and instead punishing the whole team for missdecissions of a single player.
So i think the key for a broad NS2 appeal is making the Kharaa team easier to understand and more keen to natural teamplay in public environments.

Bobo44 · February 2012

i guess different people play for different reasons.

some for fun
some for competition
some for fun with balanced competition.

problem is, this isn't soccer or counter strike. its not gonna be 10 humans vs 10 humans kicking a ball or 5 terrorist vs 5 counter terrorist both with the same hit box dimensions in death match mode and a balanced map to go with it (no hostage rescue or bomb planting, just only killing all of the enemy, was most balanced mode in counter strike).

this is alien vs marines. both with very different strategy of use for their own classes. if it was marine vs marine for example, it be extremely easy to balance out and winning/losing would be all about which team had the better strategy, tactics and personal skill. so how do we balance something like this game where the two opposing sides are so different? i still feel personally its easier to win as aliens then it is to win as marines. you need soo much more teamwork and skill to win on marines then alien, i can go fade and i'll be a marine killing machine always. but on marines side, it flutuates soo much.

also wasn't the gorge in natural selection 1 required to build the buildings. if yes, why has it changed soo much in natural selection 2.

Harimau · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rebirth @ Feb 12 2012, 01:58 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902255"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Love your whole post! Just makes me really happy when people manage to end up along the same lines of thinking.
But i just want to single that part out because i believe it's yet another example that promotes natural teamplay on the marine side of NS.

Because the next realization a new player will probably make after having died to that fade (and noticing how strong it is) is that he better sticks with the other dudes that look like him.
This is the direct result of the fade being unknown to him up to this point, encountering that "overpowered" fade puts the new player once again into a mindset of problem solving. He's gonna look for solutions around him and notice once again: Hey all those dudes look like me! That fade thing looks like it's pretty unique and alone, maybe i should stick with the other guys and gang up on that "boss"?"

And BAM the new player learned his place (once again) in the teamplay mechanics of the marine team just by encountering an teamplay mechanic (different unit worth on kharaa side) of the enemy team he doesn't even understand yet.

In that way the original NS has some very beautifully working mechanics on the marine side, but sadly the kharaa side ruins it all by not promoting teamplay in a very intuitive way and instead punishing the whole team for missdecissions of a single player.
So i think the key for a broad NS2 appeal is making the Kharaa team easier to understand and more keen to natural teamplay in public environments.</div>
I worry about this, however, because with NS2's resource system, there is no, or little, super-unit scarcity - unlike in NS1. So in NS2 we don't, in fact, have 1 super-unit + skulks versus a team of shotguns, we have a team of super-units versus a team of shotguns. The only solutions I see to such a problem would be to somehow implement super-unit scarcity, or to take a lot of the "super" out of super-units.
Even if we say that a homogeneous team of super-units is inferior to a heterogeneous team (arguable) and therefore we already are enforcing super-unit scarcity, this is not immediately (or even easily) apparent to teams of players, and so we realise that it is not necessarily a solution as we return to the problem of understanding. It also simply means that instead of an abundance of super-units, you simply have frequent super-teams.

Wheeee · February 2012

or we could make a super unit on the marine side. you know. exo + mini

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau @ Feb 12 2012, 07:30 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902264"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I worry about this, however, because with NS2's resource system, there is no, or little, super-unit scarcity - unlike in NS1. So in NS2 we don't, in fact, have 1 super-unit + skulks versus a team of shotguns, we have a team of super-units versus a team of shotguns. The only solutions I see to such a problem would be to somehow implement super-unit scarcity, or to take a lot of the "super" out of super-units.
Even if we say that a homogeneous team of super-units is inferior to a heterogeneous team (arguable) and therefore we already are enforcing super-unit scarcity, this is not immediately (or even easily) apparent to teams of players, and so we realise that it is not necessarily a solution as we return to the problem of understanding. It also simply means that instead of an abundance of super-units, you simply have frequent super-teams.</div>

Yes i also noticed this, and i've seen that quite a few people are aware of this issue just like UWE.
But i think the problem is we are trying to balance this issue mostly trough "competitive" means by changing around small stuff and trying to balance the individual "super units". We are basically trying to find a solution to a problem that's actually a symptom of much much deeper rooted problem inside the mechanics.

Or we just do not see the "complete picture" yet that flayra has in his head, but seeing the changes the kharaa side has gone trough so far feels like charlie knows what he wants to do but somehow got stuck too much with the Zerg concept of Starcraft for the details, but that simply does not translate very easily into the NS gameplay we all love.

Because he is messing with the very foundation that made NS so unique in the first place :/

The other issue i see is the misconception that success to a mass appeal game lies only in "instant personal gratification"game mechanics you can find in other less teamplay oriented games like CoD. At least i guess that is the intention behind making super-units "easier" to get for "everybody" that seems to be the current design goal. These mechanics can help make a game more appealing, if the ultimate goal is NOT "winning for the team". But adding such mechanics into a game that requires teamplay on a more complex level, will lead to the opposite effect.

New players will always follow the impulses that looks the most promising to them, in that regards "instant personal gratification" mechanics like "easy to reach super units" can have the opposite effect, because now you will have all the new players trying to flock to the "super units" thinking it's the single most important thing in the game when a new player without twitch skills could be way more useful as a gorge (if you implement mechanics that make good gorge gameplay natural).

I don't think that will work well, the kharaa side in NS1 might have been the one with the highest learning curve, but resulted directly from missing gameplay mechanics that promoted teamplay. Making super-units even easier to reach will have an even worse effect on "public gameplay" because then every "play to win" player who doesn't understand all the mechanics yet will instantly flock to the "super units" thinking he can turn around the round alone.

It promotes single-minded thinking and rambo behavior, this is an huge disadvantage to the mechanics at work in an public match.
Also it goes contrary to something many people loved NS1 for, it's asymmetric unit strength!

Might sound a little bit stupid at this point, but i believe the Kharaa model i described above has way more room to bring back "super units" in the way we loved them and at the same time give new players an good way to ease into the complex games mechanics. Because the Khamm being able to shift team resources to the gorges on the field, that build for him, will automatically lead to unit scarcity because the gorges in that situation have an resource income advantage over all the other players on the kharaa team.

But this opens up alot of exploitable options, still that's in the nature of adding such asymmetric mechanics. So we shouldn't try to "take the easy way out" by just sticking to mechanics that are easy to balance at first glance. Because things that are easy to balance at first glance are usually not very complex, meaning there won't be alot of depth for "competitive" play involved with these mechanics.

I fear if we keep going into the current direction, we might end up with a game that has lost all it's charme to the original fanbase and still won't manage to suck in broad masses.
And i really don't want to see that :/

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Wheeee @ Feb 12 2012, 08:29 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902274"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>or we could make a super unit on the marine side. you know. exo + mini</div>

So you are trying to fix an balance issue that results from asymmetric team mechancis by making both teams even more similar?

elodea · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rebirth @ Feb 12 2012, 08:10 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902176"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>That's not at all what i tried to explain here.
I'm still applying the principle that s "play for fun" player also plays to win but doesn't understand the whole ruletset yet in the same way the "play to win" player does. But with each game mechanic he activley understands (he knows the latter consequences of something he is doing right know) his total knowledge of the game increases moving him further into the direction of an "play for win" player.</div>

So instead of saying "amateur", "novice", "expert" you had to confuse us all with "play to win" and "play for fun" or am i missing something?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau)</div><div class='quotemain'>I worry about this, however, because with NS2's resource system, there is no, or little, super-unit scarcity - unlike in NS1.</div>
I actually feel with rfk gone, super-unit scarcity is back but more in the sense that pres is now valuable and tradeoff decisions must be made where you effectively have to decide what lifeform you want at gamestart. I like how it feels currently in that it strikes a nice balance between super-unit scarcity and new player frustration at not being able to experience the 'super-unit' for themselves. You cannot gorge + cyst and expect to then fade/onos in a timely fashion. Neither can you lerk and then fade/onos. And saving for fade definitely locks you out of going onos within a reasonable timeframe. Although the lifeforms come in waves, i certainly do not agree that super-units are too frequent.

Also, using the level of 'scarcity' in NS1 as a yardstick makes no sense when it was hugely tied to number of players.

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (elodea @ Feb 12 2012, 03:24 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902343"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>So instead of saying "amateur", "novice", "expert" you had to confuse us all with "play to win" and "play for fun" or am i missing something?</div>

Yes you are missing way more... you are still thinking i'm trying to group people in 2 different camps...
And after having given so many examples, written such extensive posts and going into so much detail trying to keep them all in a somewhat "steady thought process" it kinda frustrates me that you still seem to think this is a "competition". I've invested hours into all these posts and even more hours trying to think all this up in a solid way so it's understandable.

So if you want to add to this discussion you should at least try to follow the discussion by <b>reading carefully</b> what people write and <b>keeping your thoughts inside the discussion</b>. Instead of trying to see this as some kind of competition.

Stop assuming personal motives behind peoples actions you do not comprehend yet, because that's what you are trying blaming ME right now for... and after having invested so much work into this i slowly feel offended by your kind of mindset that seems to keep on missing my point on purpose. Because this type of behaviour seems to be getting more and more common among the community with new players flooding in...

assbda · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rebirth @ Feb 12 2012, 05:58 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902255"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Because the next realization a new player will probably make after having died to that fade (and noticing how strong it is) is that he better sticks with the other dudes that look like him.
This is the direct result of the fade being unknown to him up to this point, encountering that "overpowered" fade puts the new player once again into a mindset of problem solving. He's gonna look for solutions around him and notice once again: Hey all those dudes look like me! That fade thing looks like it's pretty unique and alone, maybe i should stick with the other guys and gang up on that "boss"?"

And BAM the new player learned his place (once again) in the teamplay mechanics of the marine team just by encountering an teamplay mechanic (different unit worth on kharaa side) of the enemy team he doesn't even understand yet.</div>

I think youre ignoring the fact that new players will attempt to fade and fail to kill 2 marines not knowing what went wrong. Denial in their abilities will grow as they witness other fades managing small tasks with ease yet they continue to struggle.

I really think the game is simple enough for anyone who has the patience to stick around and learn it.
Ive seen alot of players come and go because they simply dont like the idea behind certain mechanics and its not fair that a game should change to suit these ignorant people.
Then you have to remember that some gamers out there are seriously just stupid, i mean stupid like half witted, no understanding possibilities at all, in saying that we have to take a closer look at what kind of people *are struggling with the learning curve* and some of you people have put it.

rebirth · February 2012

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (assbda @ Feb 12 2012, 04:16 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1902358"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I think youre ignoring the fact that new players will attempt to fade and fail to kill 2 marines not knowing what went wrong. Denial in their abilities will grow as they witness other fades managing small tasks with ease yet they continue to struggle.</div>

It might sound stupid/ignorant at this point, but right now you are ignoring a whole concept i'm trying to apply here :)

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>I really think the game is simple enough for anyone who has the patience to stick around and learn it.</div>

On the marine side, yes...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Ive seen alot of players come and go because they simply dont like the idea behind certain mechanics and its not fair that a game should change to suit these ignorant people.</div>

Yes we don't want to make games for "ignorant people", we only want to make games for "open minded" people like you....

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Then you have to remember that some gamers out there are seriously just stupid, i mean stupid like half witted, no understanding possibilities at all, in saying that we have to take a closer look at what kind of people *are struggling with the learning curve* and some of you people have put it.</div>

Yeah better to keep all these ignorant people out of <b>our</b> game so they won't ruin <b>our</b> fun. Who cares if UWE and Flayra are trying to sell something to as many people as possible? Certainly not the very passionate competetive NS community! Because they only want "the best" for NS as an community, UWE as a company and Flayra as a game designer! And we all know there is an universal "best" and there is nothing like objectivity or subjectivity...

Sorry i consider myself usually a very nice and patient person, but you guys are slowly killing me here and i can't decide if i should laugh about all this insanity or just quit in frustration and keep you guys to yourself yo you can keep "fighting" each other and call this process a "beta test".

assbda · February 2012

Now whos the person assuming personal motives behind peoples actions?

Youre twisting everything i said and making it look like i dont care.
Im not saying i dont care for these people, im just saying that sometimes there is just not much else that can be done.

Theyve already put in hints such as "this is a enemy resource tower, kill it to deny the enemy resources!"
But then the person reading this is thinking "F**k this i wanna go kill sh*t"

You can make all the ###### readme's and wiki help guides and bullsh*t in the world for people, but what good does it do for the people who dont want to read it?
Just stop being so dramatic about the whole thing is all im going to suggest, a little tolerance never hurt anyone.

rebirth · February 2012

You are right, you win!

You gain +1 Forum Posts
You gain +50 Points of "competitive community fame"
You gain +50 Points of "personal ego"
You unlocked achievement "I won argument on NS forums"
You unlocked ability "tell friends how you told that newb"

Please collect your reward in the "Awesome unlocks for "best guys"" thread.
And leave us lowly "idiots" alone in this discussion?

Yes all this is rude and will offend people because they think i'm trying to "stereotype", but sometimes applying extreme examples helps people understanding certain concepts they otherwise wouldn't realize. That's the only thing i'm trying to do here :/

Once again: This is not about something or somebody being "better" then somebody or something else. There is no universal "better", everything is just a trade-off but not in a direct vertical way. Too much specialization will cut down on the ability to realize on a vertical level and directly impact objectivity.

And all this is derailing the topic so heavily from an thought process/experiment i wanted to start here.
My suggested Kharaa changes leave "pro competitive balance" mostly out of the picture, i would have hoped that some of the people here would actually "attack" these changes with their competitive mindset to hammer out some flaws that i overlooked by focusing on intuitive teamplay mechanics.

But so far nobody did try that... instead i'm having to constantly debunk statements that i never made...

zastels · February 2012

Played CS since the days of Won, and I've always noticed this same argument. Competitive opinion vs casual opinion. Apparently 'pro' trumps them all now days.

I would argue, it is the pursuit of balance that makes most games not fun.

Think about it.

-[420]-Papageorgio · February 2012

Correction. Depth and Balance. Good thing you don't have to worry about levels in NS2.

Balance in NS2

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