Marine spawn times
AurOn2
COOKIES! FREEDOM, AND BISCUITS!Australia Join Date: 2012-01-13 Member: 140224Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Forum staff
COOKIES! FREEDOM, AND BISCUITS!Australia Join Date: 2012-01-13 Member: 140224Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Forum staff
<div class="IPBDescription">WAY Too fast.</div>I'm impressed nobody seems to see this as a problem, but anyone with a head on their shoulders can tell you guys that the main problem with marine turtling was never turrets, armories, or even map design.
Its how frigging fast they spawn. Turning back an alien assault is piss easy, but when it comes to marine assaults? they just meek comming back. attacking a fortified last base when you are alien is darned impossible, but finishing off aliens is too darned easy. ALL BECAUSE OF SPAWN TIMES. MArine spawns need to be doubled, seriously, they spawn in way too fast.
Its how frigging fast they spawn. Turning back an alien assault is piss easy, but when it comes to marine assaults? they just meek comming back. attacking a fortified last base when you are alien is darned impossible, but finishing off aliens is too darned easy. ALL BECAUSE OF SPAWN TIMES. MArine spawns need to be doubled, seriously, they spawn in way too fast.
Comments
Now, marines definitely have a distinct defensive advantage with such fast respawn rates, so much so that the Marine base is usually unmanned, as marines vanish into the PG seconds after popping out of the IP.
I never tried to.
Now, marines definitely have a distinct defensive advantage with such fast respawn rates, so much so that the Marine base is usually unmanned, as marines vanish into the PG seconds after popping out of the IP.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Every aspect of Marine technology and mechanics is designed to further this imbalance. IPs allow Marines to flood back into the fight at rediculous rates. PGs allow Marines to stream across the map in seconds, faster than any alien can even approach, and all with no risk of mid-travel ambush. Weapon pickup allows Marine investment to be recovered at any time, for free, and immediately re-activated so long as the loss does not occur in a heavily alien-controlled area.
Aliens have no parallel in any regard. They spawn slower, move slower, and and must pay the full cost of every death in both heavy resource loss and major time investment.
Tweaking spawns won't change this. At this point, the whole game is designed around the conservative aliens holding back the Marine hordes.
As can the Marine team if you have enough IPs. Usually two unless your entire team wipes at the exact same instant. Beacon just makes the process easier, fast-tracking your spawns to instantaneous levels and automatically returning any over-extended forces you have in the field.
Also, "respawning at once" doesn't mean respawning instantly. Wave spawns take their share of time, often more than Marines need.
I say set marines to 12 seconds, this will make them conservative, and that way losing a battle for marines, is actualy losing a battle, instead of a minor setback.
Marines are crazy because everything about them is designed to be crazy. A numbers tweak can't change that.
edited to add for clarity: i disagree <b>with the op</b> , marine spawn times are fine.
I've never said it wasn't fine, myself. Marines sort of need to be crazy to keep up with the rediculous amount of teleporting-Fade-death and ultra-Onos-tank they have to deal with.
<!--quoteo(post=1988058:date=Oct 7 2012, 01:20 AM:name=Imbalanxd)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Imbalanxd @ Oct 7 2012, 01:20 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1988058"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Rather try find another way to remedy the problem. The shorter the time spent in limbo the better, in all games.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This, I disagree with. Lower respawn times mean quicker instant gratification, but they also mean death has less meaning and is often devaued. I'd be happy to wait 15-20 seconds for a respawn if I knew my death was meaningful, fair, and not likely to happen again 5 seconds after I spawned. In fact, I have waited that long in TF2 many times.
No more 3 IPs in the last base spamming and respamming grenade launchers. Most marine teams don't need more than 2 IPs anyway, and it will be more of an incentive to get that second chair down, as well as make it a little more difficult.
Tweaking the time to respawn is indeed the wrong way to go about it IMO. It will just cause an additional IP to be made earlier in the game.
No more 3 IPs in the last base spamming and respamming grenade launchers. Most marine teams don't need more than 2 IPs anyway, and it will be more of an incentive to get that second chair down, as well as make it a little more difficult.
Tweaking the time to respawn is indeed the wrong way to go about it IMO. It will just cause an additional IP to be made earlier in the game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That's just bad scaling. In a 4v4, 1 IP is enough for your team. In a 9v9. it's woefully inadequate. Aliens don't have to worry about team size when spawning, because they're almost never egg locked. Forcing Marines to expand in order to get a 2nd IP will just lead to all Marine games above a certain size being lost early on.
Also, if marines are dying so much at the beginning of the game to need two IPs, they will probably lose the game anyway, two IPs or not. It will just remove the stupid 20-25 minute siege on their base which sometimes occurs on pubs at the moment - until aliens get fades, onos, umbra, and stomp, especially if the commander makes 3 IPs around the chair.
In my experience of comming on 12v12 games, I've never had to make the second IP before we had secured another tech point location anyway. IMO a second IP before you have phase tech and at least 3 extractors + a phase gate link to another tech point is a waste of res and a detriment to your team anyway. If you can't secure a second tech point without 2 IPs in a 12v12 game, I'd say that you've got a pretty bad team ^.^ .
The IP scaling would probably work best with the egg spawning that I suggested elsewhere in the "always base rush" thread I think, where the hive(s) spawn eggs more slowly at the beginning of the game, and it escalates (linearly or exponentially) to some ceiling (probably where it is right now) by about 5:00-7:00 .
Then again, limiting egg spawning isn't very meaningful because of shifts - but at least shifts are snipe-able and have really low health :-) . Speaking of which, I think the "spam eggs at shift" ability needs a cooldown. You shouldn't be able to instantly and repeatedly create a hatchery of eggs around a shift, res or not. A cooldown, or the eggs "growing" before they can be spawned in.
In general, as some others were saying, the game really lacks a consequence to dying, especially as marines. With aliens, you lose your life form. With marines, you just run back to your weapon and lose nothing except the 7 seconds to respawn (or whatever it is). If you're a skulk (which is most of the time), there's also little to no consequence.
There needs to be tension and a consequence to mass dying, more than just losing map control or an RT or a cheap PG.
This repetitive, predictable metagame of baserush vs baserush followed by hollow drawnout midgame 2 cc/pg vs 2 hive into t3 siege breaking is getting just a tad boring. Games are either 2 minutes long through cheese (yes there is such a thing flayra), or 25 minutes through long drawn out stalemates where one team wins due to some sort of end point imbalance.
Increased spawn times have been needed for a fair while now.
This stupid, repetitive metagame of baserush vs baserush followed by hollow drawnout midgame 2 cc/pg vs 2 hive into t3 siege breaking is getting just a tad boring. Games are either 2 minutes long through cheese (yes there is such a thing flayra), or 25 minutes through long drawn out stalemates where one team wins due to some sort of end point imbalance.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This has been <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=121566&view=findpost&p=1985765" target="_blank">well hashed out</a> in the competitive forums, but at the end of the day it comes down to instant gratification vs strategic depth. The more complicated and meaningful you make something, the more ways you add to do things wrong and wind up feeling disadvantaged. Empowering death means magnifying lethal mistakes. Multiple strategic directions mean teams can lose because their com guessed (read, to be more precise) wrong.
At the fundamental level, ADHD shooters and meaningful RTS mechanics are incompatible. Generic ADHD shooters sell a lot more than RTS games; they have a bigger audience, which means more fans and more people satisfied by catering to that extreme. NS2 has always been a shooter first. UWE has stated many times that FPS is a priority because it is the game that the majority of their players experience.
Granted, you can have skilled, non-ADHD shooters that fit neatly within RTS mechanics, but that instant-gratification-desiring base is a biggun. Just look at CoD sales. UWE has stated many times in their removal of mechanics like Devour that they want to remove as many "not fun" parts of the game as they can, which severely limits the negative consequences they are able to enforce upon players.
At the fundamental level, ADHD shooters and meaningful RTS mechanics are incompatible. Generic ADHD shooters sell a lot more than RTS games; they have a bigger audience, which means more fans and more people satisfied by catering to that extreme. NS2 has always been a shooter first; UWE has stated many times that FPS is a priority because it is the game that the majority of their players experience.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You're right they are incompatible. It's just that I think people will get bored eventually of this constant wall of pressure vs wall of pressure the more they play the game, and the unique strategic aspect that NS2 brings to the table is getting lost in the noise. If people want to play an addictive adhd silly fun fps, I feel like they'll most likely be playing COD or even combat mode, not ns2.
I mean, i don't think you even need super long spawn times to improve the health and variety of the metagame significantly. 10 sec marine spawn and 6 or 8 sec skulk singular spawn queue per hive would probably be a good place to start.
Those super long spawn times should also occur on marine side when the last chair is being sieged :-) .
And honestly, if this game is being "dumbed down" on purpose to appeal to run'n'gunners that's just sad because I don't think they'll like it anyway, except maybe combat mod as mentioned above. Trying to get 12-year-olds to switch from COD to NS2 is a lost cause from the onset IMO.
A fair concept, in the right settings. I love me some DayZ, where death is very permanent and very meaningful. However, the gameplay suits it. The juxtaposition of almost COD paced gameplay, and then artificially lengthened spawn times, is simply too glaring and jarring. I suppose the "in all games" parts is not entirely correct, but in the case of this game, I definitely think it holds.
The rush/rush/rush happens because of the little to no consequence of dying over and over as a marine and skulk.
Right now, it's rush, and if we die it's ok because we can respawn and rush again.
It's the same concept as the fade energy management IMO. Before adrenaline was nerfed, energy management didn't exist. Blink in, hit, blink around, blink out to heal. Now you actually have to manage your energy: use shadowstep, air momentum, double-jump, get out sooner, and then you actually have to wait for your energy to recharge as well as your health. With adrenaline, I've found myself looking for/asking for shifts sometimes to fill up faster.
While some people initially didn't like it (obviously, because it made gameplay for fade more difficult), I find that I enjoy learning how to conserve energy for when I need it most, and play against non-ridiculously-blinking fades as marine.
If the respawn timer in quake 3 was set to 20 seconds, people would not run and gun less, and the game would not become more tactical. It would simply become broken. NS2 is made to be played fast and on the move. Guns have no recoil, teams start incredibly close to one another (relative to their travel speed). Players die in an exceptionally small number of hits. The entire game is based around fast, largely unstructured gameplay. I would love the gameplay to be slower and more tactical, but simply increasing spawn times won't accomplish that. Not when the entire rest of the game is going in the other direction.
Waiting to respawn for 15-20 seconds gets annoying. 25-30 is bad, and higher is simply unacceptable (unless the game is about to end or you have made a really bad strategic mistake).
Granted, there should be some kind of consequence to a large number of people dying at the same time. Right now rushing is okay, because even if the entire team dies, the entire team respawns very quickly.
IDK though, the problems with respawning are pretty interesting and I don't think the "flat" solutions that there are right now scale well mid, early, and late game with 6, 8, or 12 people on a team. It seems to work OK though; one particular problem that I've noticed is cheap and spammable IPs on marine side which with phase gates make them come back for their weapons a little too often late-game, and enable 15-minute last chair turtling stupidities.
This.
Here, me and eagleye pull off something amazing; we kill five skulks rushing us at the same time with just our machineguns and pistols, outnumbered 2 against 5, while we are right outside their growing second hive. That's not something that happens every day in a tournament final -- even the very best players would be lucky to see it happen once in their "career" (I'll probably never see it happen again). So what's our reward for pulling off this amazing feat? Just enough time to run in and kill one hydra, before they all wavespawn and swarm us again.
The wavespawn/eggspawn system has a terrible duality of not rewarding great actions by the marines, while at the same time instantly ending the game should the marines mange to egglock. Compare it to the old spawn system in NS1, which received a lot of critique for the ease of spawncamping -- at least with that you had a chance to end the spawncamp, since you could still spawn. With the egg system, you won't even get to spawn if the marines have you egglocked.
The marine spawn system, on the other hand, spawns marines like rabbits on crack once you have 2+ IPs. I don't know if the spawn time from an individual marine from one IP is a problem -- it could be -- but the biggest problem is the enormous boost in spawn times from building more IPs. Each IP gives you an immediate +1 spawn, for a very cheap cost. When you combine this with the sprint feature, suddenly marines are almost as mobile as the aliens. An alien that kills a marine on the far side of the map, then runs to heal and then back again, will have to expect that the marine he just killed will be waiting for him, essentially meaning nothing was gained from killing the marine (other than a symbolic +1 on the scoreboard, yay...).
Edited a bit out: Checking some facts to make sure.
You think that because you got lucky (essentially your own words), your rambo attack of two individuals, on a heavily fortified and reinforced central alien base, should deal substantial collateral damage? Oh lord, please bring back NS1. Please lord.
I mean, i don't think you even need super long spawn times to improve the health and variety of the metagame significantly. 10 sec marine spawn and 6 or 8 sec skulk singular spawn queue per hive would probably be a good place to start.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
They are incompatible, the whole idea of mashing "CoD gameplay" with "competitive" and throwing "RTS" in between is just mind boggling enough.
It ignores why people actually want to play the game, they want to hunt down giant space cows with flamethrowers and Jetpacks. Joe Regular gamer couldn't care less about the deep tactical nuisances during a match of NS as long as he has action on the screen.
That's why in NS1 siege mode had been so popular, it gave people a chance to play with the "cool stuff" and as much of it as possible. It's NS sandbox gameplay in it's purest form.
Competitive gameplay can't do that, due that by it's pure definition because gameplay is always min-maxed for the "Play to Win" mentality and not for versatility in gameplay.
How often will you see a couple of onos, fade, gorge and lerk fight a Marine force with JP's, Exo's and ARC's in an competitive match? Not often, simply because it's limited in scale by the 6v6 player limit. But it's exactly these kinds of epic, spammy fights that people want in an public gameplay environment.
Trying to sell the game on it's "competitive side" and "perfect balance" is just the wrong way to go, people are not looking for a Sci-Fi CoD to replace their CS needs, people are looking for something completely fresh and unique.
Here, me and eagleye pull off something amazing; we kill five skulks rushing us at the same time with just our machineguns and pistols, outnumbered 2 against 5, while we are right outside their growing second hive. That's not something that happens every day in a tournament final -- even the very best players would be lucky to see it happen once in their "career" (I'll probably never see it happen again). So what's our reward for pulling off this amazing feat? Just enough time to run in and kill one hydra, before they all wavespawn and swarm us again.
The wavespawn/eggspawn system has a terrible duality of not rewarding great actions by the marines, while at the same time instantly ending the game should the marines mange to egglock. Compare it to the old spawn system in NS1, which received a lot of critique for the ease of spawncamping -- at least with that you had a chance to end the spawncamp, since you could still spawn. With the egg system, you won't even get to spawn if the marines have you egglocked.
The marine spawn system, on the other hand, spawns marines like rabbits on crack once you have 2+ IPs. I don't know if the spawn time from an individual marine from one IP is a problem -- it could be -- but the biggest problem is the enormous boost in spawn times from building more IPs. Each IP gives you an immediate +1 spawn, for a very cheap cost. When you combine this with the sprint feature, suddenly marines are almost as mobile as the aliens. An alien that kills a marine on the far side of the map, then runs to heal and then back again, will have to expect that the marine he just killed will be waiting for him, essentially meaning nothing was gained from killing the marine (other than a symbolic +1 on the scoreboard, yay...).
The NS1 developers learned that this was a problem during testing and instituted a system to prevent it: Diminishing returns from each additional IP built. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like +1 spawn for the first IP (the one that is currently pre-placed in NS2). +0.75 spawns for the second IP and +0.5 spawns for the third IP. I don't know why this wasn't brought over into NS2, but hopefully it was just an oversight.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
well your 3 other teamates got time to do important stuff during that time period. I think the alien spawn is fine and interesting, it adds a new vulnerability to the aliens, since the hive doesnt go down as fast in ns2 and adds to the depth.
For the marine spawn I think I agree, deminishing returns on additional IPs would be interesting to see, because right now if there is no marines in base and 2 are respawning and you have liek 2 skulks biting on the IP, chances are, its gonna be an easy defense for marines, but I think marines should be punished in those times for not foreseeing the rush.