The problem with balance isn't about balance at all
Savant
Join Date: 2002-11-30 Member: 10289Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
Join Date: 2002-11-30 Member: 10289Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
<div class="IPBDescription">The win ratios are skewed because of the players, not the game</div>Aside from the recent Onos change, I'm pretty happy with game balance right now. This is despite the fact I will freely admit aliens are winning far more often than marines. (For me it's been about 60/40)
The problem isn't balance though.
As it stands the marine team is always the one with people waiting to join it. Despite losing more often, people want to play marines more often. Why?
First and foremost, it's what they know. These people see NS2 as a FPS - plain and simple. They have no interest in being comm, they want to get their gun and go kill some aliens. OK, cool, whatever floats your boat. The problem is that these players have a distinct playstyle that doesn't lend itself to marine wins.
To start, these players don't understand that for the marines it is teamwork that must come above all else. Aliens don't have that issue for the most part. While aliens need to have coordinated pushes at times, the rest of the time they can go out and harass alone and never impact the team. With marines that same behaviour will cause a negative impact.
So this means you get more skilled players going alien - but I mean skilled in terms of the GAME and not skilled in an FPS. Some of these players are great shots, and rack up the kills as marine. However, you can have 100% accuracy and that won't matter for anything if you are losing your res nodes and the 'super soldier' is out doing his own thing. The problem is that many people want to balance the game around teams of equal skill playing NS2, when it is unlikely you will ever have equal teams in that regard.
I think a few things need to happen.
Right off the top, let's change how the game is scored. Remove 'deaths'. Leave in kills, but deaths are not indicative of player skill. I will often find myself dying repeatedly to attain a particular objective, something don't mind doing if it benefits the team. While I may be at the bottom of the scoreboard that game. I'm the one protecting resources and responding when players need assistance. Let's not penalize players who may 'sacrifice' for the team with a higher number in their death column.
Next, introduce a scoring system that puts less emphasis on kills, and more on teamwork. Give players points for building structures. Give players points for defending a teammate (killing an enemy attacking a player on your team). Give players points for kills that are in the vicinity of other players. Give players points for killing enemies attacking your res nodes. Give players points for following orders. Get the idea? Points should represent a player's contribution to the TEAM, not an indication of how good a shot he is. The guy with the most points on a team should be the one with the best teamwork ethic.
I could go on but you get the idea. What needs to be done is to foster an environment where players are encouraged to work as a team. If we can achieve this, I think there would be a marked decrease in the win/loss imbalance.
The problem isn't balance though.
As it stands the marine team is always the one with people waiting to join it. Despite losing more often, people want to play marines more often. Why?
First and foremost, it's what they know. These people see NS2 as a FPS - plain and simple. They have no interest in being comm, they want to get their gun and go kill some aliens. OK, cool, whatever floats your boat. The problem is that these players have a distinct playstyle that doesn't lend itself to marine wins.
To start, these players don't understand that for the marines it is teamwork that must come above all else. Aliens don't have that issue for the most part. While aliens need to have coordinated pushes at times, the rest of the time they can go out and harass alone and never impact the team. With marines that same behaviour will cause a negative impact.
So this means you get more skilled players going alien - but I mean skilled in terms of the GAME and not skilled in an FPS. Some of these players are great shots, and rack up the kills as marine. However, you can have 100% accuracy and that won't matter for anything if you are losing your res nodes and the 'super soldier' is out doing his own thing. The problem is that many people want to balance the game around teams of equal skill playing NS2, when it is unlikely you will ever have equal teams in that regard.
I think a few things need to happen.
Right off the top, let's change how the game is scored. Remove 'deaths'. Leave in kills, but deaths are not indicative of player skill. I will often find myself dying repeatedly to attain a particular objective, something don't mind doing if it benefits the team. While I may be at the bottom of the scoreboard that game. I'm the one protecting resources and responding when players need assistance. Let's not penalize players who may 'sacrifice' for the team with a higher number in their death column.
Next, introduce a scoring system that puts less emphasis on kills, and more on teamwork. Give players points for building structures. Give players points for defending a teammate (killing an enemy attacking a player on your team). Give players points for kills that are in the vicinity of other players. Give players points for killing enemies attacking your res nodes. Give players points for following orders. Get the idea? Points should represent a player's contribution to the TEAM, not an indication of how good a shot he is. The guy with the most points on a team should be the one with the best teamwork ethic.
I could go on but you get the idea. What needs to be done is to foster an environment where players are encouraged to work as a team. If we can achieve this, I think there would be a marked decrease in the win/loss imbalance.
Comments
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=117394&hl=" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index....=117394&hl=</a>
The key is to reward teamwork in any way possible, not just with scores.
The problem I see is that like it or not, teamwork is something marines have to handle better than aliens. At 50% win / loss somewhere buried in the game this asymmetry has a counter weight. As the game matures players will get better at it which will shift the balance again and again unless that counter weight is adjusted by the devs accordingly.
As to removing deaths and scoring team objectives, couldn't agree more.
i use my teammates deaths compared to my own in order to gauge why we're losing the match etc... it would just be super obstructive if i'm just meant to 'guess' that my team sucks.
i was on marine earlier and had 30 kills 1 death; it felt good knowing that any decent alien player would behave differently when they suspected that i was in the vicinity. they would be more cautious and try harder, breaking free of the "lolz nub mareens are ez!" shackles.
people should learn to not care about deaths, not have the deaths censored... otherwise we might as well just boycott the game entirely to stop people caring about deaths.
You should never be comparing your deaths to anyone else's. Context is everything and knowing WHY a person died is ten times more important.
I think a better solution would be rewarding players with points simply for GOING to where the commander tells them, whether its the "threat" or "expanding here" waypoints of the Aliens, or successfully completing their way point as a marine. Tying this into weapons or upgrades somehow might also be helpful, but that's another balance issue then.
What needs to happen is a close look at timings and when life forms appear vs tech, but it gets more complicated than that.
We do REALLY need a form of warm up on public servers, but as far as people go you can eradicate skill ability as this sort of thing averages out across the board.
You should never be comparing your deaths to anyone else's. Context is everything and knowing WHY a person died is ten times more important.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
deaths always tell a story. sure, you'd have to be obtuse to think that a poor KDR means you're bad - but it's still an essential indicator of why a game might be going wrong. say your team is doing poorly, so you press tab to bring up the scores and see everyone has 10-20 frags, it might not be apparent WHY you are doing poorly - they could be sitting on 20-30 deaths etc.
at the very least, KDR is the hard evidence to 'support' a claim that a player is skilled or not. if people don't see their awful 1:20 score compared to all the other players on their team who scored 20:1, they're often too stubborn to admit that they're playing the game wrong.
imagine you're the marine commander and need a good player to go kill an RT somewhere, do you pick the guy with 20 kills 30 deaths or the guy with 18 kills 0 deaths? because if it was my choice, my money is on the KDR guy having a better shot.
Ah, but many of the people that pay attention to their KDR are not generally the same people willing to take out that RT. Chances are just as good that the 18:0 guy will ignore the RT and keep killing aliens while the guy that is 20:30 has sacrificed himself numerous times to destroy key alien structures.
I used to play a lot of supcom2, and I was amazed of some players' lack of understanding of basic RTS principles even with many hours into the game. So, even a dedicated RTS isn't easy to learn. Where does that leave someone who's never played a RTS game?
You can't expect much from someone who's played COD/CS/BF/Unreal/Quake all their life, except kills - and that's what people who have that background deliver.
The overwhelming problem, as you pointed out, is that I've seen marine teams with amazing KDR, like 5:1 on half the team, and aliens with horrible KDR, like 1:5 on half the team, go to ridiculously easy wins to the alien team. How does this happen? Marines camping 2 tech points with 2 RTs for 10 minutes while aliens have the other 7.
The above problem also produces the other problem - then those people on the alien team, who are probably worse players in the FPS game, have to siege the last 1/2 command chairs. And because marines are actually better FPS players even though they lost the RTS game, it takes for EVER to break the last 2/1 chairs. Cue 30+ minute sieges and the great rambonos massacre of 2012.
So, in summary, people might be amazing shots, but in this game it may not mean much if it doesn't advance the RTS game. You have to not only know how to shoot, but where to deliver those shots and where you might be most effective. That knowledge comes from playing RTS games in general.
And IMO the best RTS experience is not gained from NS2. NS2's RTS game is grossly simplified and convoluted. I think if you want to be a great commander in NS2, you should play dedicated RTS like Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Warcraft, Supcom series, etc. - and not in "campaign" mode, but online or at least against an AI which stresses you for time. Unfortunately most RTS campaigns are often made easy and not time-stressed to cater to casual players. That is not an accurate representation of the online/human vs human type of gameplay.
IMO if everyone of those great shots coming from CS/COD/BF/Unreal/Quake spend even just 50 hours playing a dedicated RTS online or against a hard+ AI, they will emerge not only a better commander for NS2, but also a better player.
The commander can only do so much in NS2. He can't micro 8 people who are constantly dying and respawning, who don't always obey orders, who have personal preferences as to what they would rather do, and who might have better information than the commander (the commander doesn't hear footsteps that you do for example, or maybe he didn't see something that you did).
I was following you up until you brought score into the equation. Are you really arguing that changing scoring metrics are going to change balance? Removing deaths? If you don't want to see your deaths, then don't look at them. There's no reason for you to remove information from me because you don't like a number on the scoreboard.
Good players understand that kills, deaths, and score don't mean everything. They're all only part of the story. Good players know that you don't win by having a 85857 kdr. IMO, this whole thread is ridiculous. Balance is out of whack at different skill levels and game times for a number of varying reasons. I think a much more intuitive answer to the current pub imbalance would be cloak being 100% invisible while moving.
And all this is moot when you realize that pub winrates really don't mean ######. Anything can win in a pub and anything can lose in a pub. When UWE comes out with those 50/50 numbers and mention balance in the same sentence, please just throw that crap in the garbage. There are such varying differences in skill, team sizes, and strategy across the pub spectrum that it is impossible to draw any reasonable conclusion from win/loss rates. At best, the ratio of wins can serve to lead you to areas in which there may or may not be a balance issue.
For example: do aliens have a 30% winrate in the timeframe until the onos comes out and then it skyrockets to 80%? The overall winrate could be 50/50 in this scenario. Is it balanced? No. The aliens are <i>probably</i> too weak before the onos and the onos is <i>probably</i> too strong. Do we know that for sure from looking at it? No. Maybe the marines are too strong early and lack the firepower lategame. Or perhaps performance dies late game and marines are now unable to aim, therefore losing. But if you look at that 50/50 winrate, everything seems fine.
Kind of like the current 65/35 winrate in favor of aliens. If you look at the detailed time graph for pub games on b230&b231, you see marines tend to hold around 50% winrate (+/- 10) from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. What starts to happen about then?
TL;DR Score doesn't matter for balance. Win rates are misleading in balance discussions.
And lastly as a classic example from Yuuki & the intermediate value theorem: If an LMG does 0 damage, marines will win 0% of the games. If an LMG does 1000 damage, marines will win 100% of the games. By the IVT, there exists such a number between 0 and 1000 where marines will win 50% of their games. Now consider the impact this has on the rest of the game. If "balance" as defined by 50/50 winrate can be achieved without looking at 99% of the game, how can a 50/50 winrate be indicative of balance within different portions of the game (ie onos or fade or shotguns).
Goddamn aimbot skills on a Lan server also help though.
The metagame will shift though... Hard to say how much better or worse it will get. A lot of it comes down to good players choosing to play the race they have more fun with (because to some degree aliens are less frustrating as the soul good player on a team full of baddies. You can just go onos or fade and solo win the game if the other team is at a similar low skill level, where as a marine, even if you're doing everything right, you can't teleport back to the base to save the powernode if the comm doesn't even beacon)
(Plus marines have pistols, axes, gls etc, so IVT on LMG damage alone is an incorrect application of theory ... in fact marines *can* win without firing anything, aliens just have to f4)
Aliens' buildings make themselves, marines' buildings don't - for one thing...
IMO scoreboard isn't the problem. Understanding RTS is.
I have yet to see a pub game where the entire marine team spawns, and SPRINTS in groups in all directions. There's 2-3 minutes where the majority of the team is in base, touching each other, making buildings, and getting rushed repeatedly. Meanwhile aliens claim the map.
The majority of the marine losses I've seen aren't because of bad teams necessarily. They're because of EXTREMELY poor early game. Lose the early game -> lose the entire game. In RTS, it's very hard to come back from behind, I would say even impossible if players are evenly matched - unless one player makes an amazingly huge mistake.
Nothing will remedy this. Even in the face of the almost certain marine defeat of 230, players would still flood to the marine join portal. Nothing you can do will ever stop the vast majority of people only wanting to play what is familiar to them.
<b>Nothing.</b>
Aliens' buildings make themselves, marines' buildings don't - for one thing...
IMO scoreboard isn't the problem. Understanding RTS is.
I have yet to see a pub game where the entire marine team spawns, and SPRINTS in groups in all directions. There's 2-3 minutes where the majority of the team is in base, touching each other, making buildings, and getting rushed repeatedly. Meanwhile aliens claim the map.
The majority of the marine losses I've seen aren't because of bad teams necessarily. They're because of EXTREMELY poor early game. Lose the early game -> lose the entire game. In RTS, it's very hard to come back from behind, I would say even impossible if players are evenly matched - unless one player makes an amazingly huge mistake.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You can't just rush gorges to RTs anymore. It takes quite a while for the cyst network to get your nodes into full gear. In fact, in most cases if a marine simply sprints from MS to any of your closest hive nodes, it will arrive before the node finishes building (that's why you have skulks though)
That's what it really comes down to.
Camping in groups on marine side easily delivers the best KDR, and maybe even score? It's also hands down the easiest way to lose the game.
If you want the best KDR, never leave the marine base, stay near the armories in a group, and kill lifeforms until you get sieged by oni. That is also the easiest way to lose the game overall :-) .
<!--quoteo(post=2031603:date=Nov 21 2012, 03:51 PM:name=Swiftspear)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Swiftspear @ Nov 21 2012, 03:51 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2031603"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You can't just rush gorges to RTs anymore. It takes quite a while for the cyst network to get your nodes into full gear. In fact, in most cases if a marine simply sprints from MS to any of your closest hive nodes, it will arrive before the node finishes building (that's why you have skulks though)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If marines don't leave the base, you can claim the entire map without any resistance, even if not a single kill is scored on your team. Then you spam oni and gorges and a lerk or two and win. Easy pub recipe.
if only sheer effort and 'sacrifice' were enough to win. unfortunately if you can't follow through with the necessary skill then it's a waste of time. i want someone to kill the RT and be able to kill the 1-2 skulks who respond, not someone to try and fail 5 times.
on several occasions as a marine, i've managed to get 10-20:1 kdr and i'm the one doing ALL of the work. my teammates basically follow me around with aim so bad they're only useful as 'decoys'. when my team are engaging the aliens on one side of the map; i will sneak into the hive on the opposite side and snipe RT/tech etc or cut off reinforcements.
And if you're bad, you might not be able to kill skulks, lerks, or fades but you can do things like build buildings while better people cover you, drop your weapons and draw aggro by 100m hurdles Olympic running in a circle in front of your teammates while they shoot the skulks who attack you (All-In | Rusty did this sometimes moderately effectively in the beta), place mines, spam grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc. (i.e. things that don't require twitch aiming to do but are VERY valuable to your team), shoot stationary skulks attacking RTs or power nodes (doesn't take much skill to hit something which is not moving), repair your base, ninja-axe upgrades in the alien base, etc. etc..
There are MANY things to do which don't require twitch aim in the game. While having a few excellent twitch shooters is necessary to win any game in NS2, the entire team doesn't need to be twitch-shooting skulks, lerks, and fades. Whoever isn't good at twitch can do other things which don't require it.
And if you're bad, you might not be able to kill skulks, lerks, or fades but you can do things like build buildings while better people cover you, drop your weapons and draw aggro by 100m hurdles Olympic running in a circle in front of your teammates while they shoot the skulks who attack you (All-In | Rusty did this sometimes moderately effectively in the beta), place mines, spam grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc. (i.e. things that don't require twitch aiming to do but are VERY valuable to your team), shoot stationary skulks attacking RTs or power nodes (doesn't take much skill to hit something which is not moving), repair your base, ninja-axe upgrades in the alien base, etc. etc..
There are MANY things to do which don't require twitch aim in the game. While having a few excellent twitch shooters is necessary to win any game in NS2, the entire team doesn't need to be twitch-shooting skulks, lerks, and fades. Whoever isn't good at twitch can do other things which don't require it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
right... but more often than not the good players will have a good (way above average) KDR.
i also think that deaths are a valid stat for ego... you don't get proud of a score 60 frags 50 deaths, that's terrible - it basically shows that whenever an alien came along you could only beat him 55% of the time.
when you know that your team is exceptionally weak and you don't have a realistic chance of winning. wtf is the point in even playing unless you have that goal to at least achieve a 'good score' to show that you're not a bad player?? because i really don't like the thought of that.
I've seen aliens do the same. ESPECIALLY shade first.
I don't know if it's due to stacking on the server(s) I played on, or just the general perception/psychology that aliens move fast so they need to be more aggressive, or what... but I've seen aliens aggressive and marines defensive over and over and over the last few days, when it should actually be the opposite, or at least both teams should be aggressive.
If you play defensively in NS2 or an RTS, you generally suffer an economic loss. There can be viable turtling strategies, when there's unlockable tech which enables economic wins (such as energy -> mass conversion in supcom2 for example), but there's no such tech in NS2. There's no replacement for res nodes. No resnodes -> no win. NS2/RTS 101.
---------
Edit: Something else I also thought about on the way to the store just now is the general lack of appeal of shooting structures by "traditional" FPS players.
In traditional FPS, you NEVER win by killing structures (except the bomb in CS). Killing other players is what traditional FPS is all about. You win the game when the other players die. Sometimes control points or equipment is involved but you never actually shoot at buildings (at least that I can think of).
Conversely, in NS2, you NEVER win by killing players. You ONLY win by killing buildings. The win condition of the game is to kill a building. That's the ultimate goal, not attain awesome KDR or kill X skulks/marines before the timer runs out. The live players are just a distraction. Sure, you have to go THROUGH the live players to kill the buildings, but nevertheless, they are merely a distraction.
I think that might be one of the most challenging thing for newer people to understand.
If you killed 5 skulks with your pistol, you accomplished nothing if those 5 skulks weren't attacking your building, or you didn't kill the building they were defending.
I'm not really sure how this happened. I think I recall a harvester hp buff a few builds ago. A few builds ago, used to be aliens would only try to take adjacent RTs, because anything else would die too fast. Then they save for second hive.
Now they just expand like wildfire. Marines are too busy respawning and defending to do much.
In the beta, it was guns xD . Aliens charging at marines were dead aliens in most games. Not quite sure what changed since then...
And yeah, aliens expand like wildfire because marines aren't aggressive. If the team wasn't up to par in the beta, it was extremely challenging to hold more than 3 RTs as aliens. Sometimes, even 3 was hard. Now the par is like 5 RTs for aliens and 4 for marines. Guess who's going to win the majority of games...
<!--quoteo(post=2031703:date=Nov 21 2012, 05:11 PM:name=Xarius)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Xarius @ Nov 21 2012, 05:11 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2031703"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Don't forget poor performance and hitreg is a lot more manageable for aliens than it is for marines. I feel this is a HUGE element as a large amount of players, including myself, are still suffering frame-drops and outright disappointing performance as the game progresses.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree. Because of glancing blows it's almost too "easy" to play a skulk nowadays, and especially swarm players. If your bite doesn't hit, at least it'll do SOME damage, so overall if you have 2 skulks attacking it evens out and you generally win. Before, it took more aiming to land bites, and 2v1 were much less predictable. I welcomed the idea at the time, but as I've played with it more and more I'm starting to dislike it. I wonder if possible removal of glancing bites would make the game more enjoyable again, both as alien and marine.