rfk creates a conflict of interest between individual goals and team goals
this isn't an issue in competitive play, because team goals will always take precedence
1) To win the game, you must kill the hives/ccs. 2) To kill the hives/ccs, you must kill the enemy players. 3) a. To kill the enemy players, you must get tres and map advantage in order to atleast match their RTS conferred power. b. To get tres and map advantage, you must kill enemy players
Please point out the conflict of interest for me. How do you win the game without killing players?
Structures cost money. Players don't.
Players respawn for free. Structures don't.
Structures help the good players on the enemy team. Killing a bad player does very little in comparison.
There are lots of choices in this game. RFK encourages some choices over others.
What's best for your team isn't always best for your pres, and now players will have to make the choice
I'm sorry. I really tried my best to make sense of what you are saying here several times over, especially the first part, but it remained beyond my understanding. Here are some questions I have for you that I hope you could perhaps clarify.
Yes, what is best for the team is not always best for your pres: if you are not spending your pres, that is obviously not good for your team. But we're not talking about pres in general are we? We're talking about pres from killing other players.
So, how is killing other players a bad choice to encourage? How does this work to the detriment of the team? Does this not encourage players to work together to maximise their chances of rfk and minimise their chances of giving away rfk? Does this not encourage commanders to pay more attention to how they are directing and supporting each and every player in their team?
Is discouraging players from killing other players bad for the team? Because this is effectively what you are suggesting when you say that rfk is worse than no rfk.
Killing structures is often more important than killing players. Do you not see this?
Players already have it engraved in their mind to kill enemy players. This behavior doesn't need to be taught or reinforced.
ah yes, a game where there aren't equal benefits to 2 choices and instead has one clear and obvious good choice is obviously the much better and more cerebral game.
ah yes, a game where there aren't equal benefits to 2 choices as opposed to having one clear and obvious good choice is obviously the much better and more cerebral game.
rfk creates a conflict of interest between individual goals and team goals
this isn't an issue in competitive play, because team goals will always take precedence
1) To win the game, you must kill the hives/ccs. 2) To kill the hives/ccs, you must kill the enemy players. 3) a. To kill the enemy players, you must get tres and map advantage in order to atleast match their RTS conferred power. b. To get tres and map advantage, you must kill enemy players
Please point out the conflict of interest for me. How do you win the game without killing players?
Structures cost money. Players don't.
Players respawn for free. Structures don't.
Structures help the good players on the enemy team. Killing a bad player does very little in comparison.
There are lots of choices in this game. RFK encourages some choices over others.
What's best for your team isn't always best for your pres, and now players will have to make the choice
I'm sorry. I really tried my best to make sense of what you are saying here several times over, especially the first part, but it remained beyond my understanding. Here are some questions I have for you that I hope you could perhaps clarify.
Yes, what is best for the team is not always best for your pres: if you are not spending your pres, that is obviously not good for your team. But we're not talking about pres in general are we? We're talking about pres from killing other players.
So, how is killing other players a bad choice to encourage? How does this work to the detriment of the team? Does this not encourage players to work together to maximise their chances of rfk and minimise their chances of giving away rfk? Does this not encourage commanders to pay more attention to how they are directing and supporting each and every player in their team?
Is discouraging players from killing other players bad for the team? Because this is effectively what you are suggesting when you say that rfk is worse than no rfk.
Killing structures is often more important than killing players. Do you not see this?
Players already have it engraved in their mind to kill enemy players. This behavior doesn't need to be taught or reinforced.
How do you kill enemy structures without killing enemy players? How do you kill enemy players without killing enemy structures? Pretty sure I already made it abundantly clear in my very first post that rfk does not diminsh the RTS aspect because RTS advantage feeds into FPS advantage and vice versa.
It's ridiculous to suggest that rfk is going to cause players to ignore attacking and building rt's. RT/harvester advantage means more fps power for you, less fps power for them, thus more probability of rfk for you. *The benefit of rfk (as TFF is also suggesting i think), is that you can now make a considered decision about whether you want to tradeoff the long term for the short term, and in what intensity. This is a good thing.
Do you really think players will find it in their best interest to consistently 'ignore the team', only to find they can't get any rfk because their going against fades with no upgrades? Do you really think rfk implementation is going to be so extravagantly rewarding that the overwhelming utility maximising decision is to ignore the team game? Because you'd be dead wrong on both counts if you thought yes.
You got one thing right though, players do not need to be taught or encouraged to kill enemy players. But this was never the point of introducing rfk? Sewlek very clearly defined 4 solid and compelling benefits that did not involve this. The specific effect of encouraging player killing may not be necessary, but neither will it cause a 'conflict of interest' as you seem to believe.
the problem is it's primary effect will be psychological because the quantity of res involved is trivial, especially for the bad players.
they will just think they get resources for killing things, and then continue failing at +forward +attack.
people that can handle themselves in combat will just get more res... they can even be more aggressive since repurchasing their weapon/lifeform will be easier
the game needs to reinforce playing the team vs. team, not the player vs. player
RFK might work for organized games, but will be horrible for public games. Competitive players will consider the benefit that the enemy team gets if they run out and die. Pubs won't. You'll have feeders on your team going 0-8 and giving the aliens some very fast fades. It's already frustrating enough having dead weight players, but now they'll actually be helping the aliens instead of just being useless. Yadda yadda matchmaking/similar-skill-servers is quite a pipe dream and is an unrealistic solution to this fact.
Also, pres-based RFK will always be advantageous to the aliens because alien power comes from pres while marine power comes from tres. How do you reconcile this? Have RFK give pres for aliens, but tres for marines? This change will require a complete rebalance of the marine and alien economies. And even after this rebalance, there is no guarantee that the new system will be fix the problems it set out to fix in the first place.
It seems as though RFK (or RFS) is an attempt to fix tech explosions by staggering alien lifeforms. The conundrum is that in order for it to fix tech explosions, it needs to be a major source of alien pres income. If RFK is a major source of income, then it will cause extreme problems in pubs with respect to feeding, early lifeforms, and widening of the skill gap. If RFK is a minor or negligable source of income, then it won't fix tech explosions because all the aliens can simply wait the extra seconds until the slowest is ready to evolve.
RFK (or RFS) is a bad idea. It won't work for NS2 pubs.
If RFK is a minor or negligable source of income, then it won't fix tech explosions because all the aliens can simply wait the extra seconds until the slowest is ready to evolve.
No it won't fix tech explosions by itself. Nor should it. But when you try to fix something like tech explosions within the confines of ns2's tres/pres system, you really want to get 'help' where you can. I think it would be unwise not to do so.
I've personally always thought of rfk as a minor complementary system when it comes to easing tech explosions.
The entire proposed benefit of RFK is that it fixes tech explosions. Everything else is a downside.
The hole thing about RFK is to see if it could work in future as the mechanics for it already exist. Fixing the tech explode somehow by this ways was just a hope which is in my opinion proved as wrong at the current state. Same goes for my RFP system its just a try, to see if such a system could work or could work with some little changes.
The entire proposed benefit of RFK is that it fixes tech explosions. Everything else is a downside.
The hole thing about RFK is to see if it could work in future as the mechanics for it already exist. Fixing the tech explode somehow by this ways was just a hope which is in my opinion proved as wrong at the current state. Same goes for my RFP system its just a try, to see if such a system could work or could work with some little changes.
If team A is better than team B, team A should steamroll team B and that is absolutly the case in NS2 RFK or not.
What Roobuba said! The better team should win, yes. But it should never ever be a steamroll. Steamrolls are boring to play and to watch. It is 1000nd times more interesting to work for your win. Even if the enemy isn't as good as your team.
This is not true and unjustly colours rfk as an elitist mechanic - rfk actually helps the newb fade more than the pro fade. As with your example, the 50/0 fade has nothing to spend his rfk pres on. He could have 0 or 100 pres, it makes no difference. Only the newb fade who dies benefits from this added rfk cushion.
As you can see, the 'skill bias' of rfk only comes into effect when the skill levels between teams are already somewhat even enough to result in the death of the 'pro fade'. And so this often repeated arguement in my opinion is kind of a red herring.
I agree a res for point, res for action kind of system is most likely better than rfk though.
This is simple denial of what we know from RFK in NS1. You can't say it helps new players more than elitists and at the same time I have a clear memory of all the grief that happened because of those elite fades that were so good, that even when you had the luck to kill them, they had enough res to buy a new one at this time.
You talk about the 0.1% extreme cases of the super hero fade that simply never dies (not even out of bad luck) and therefor doesn't need more res. And you talk about the 5% cases where a noob / mediocre fade can miraculously collect enough kills to go fade again shortly after he died.
The truth is, it is an elitist system. The players that are very good fades right now will profit even more from it. If they have 100 pres they can even play with more risks without worrying. They will make even more damage and if they die, the result will be the same. They will come back directly after gestation. They even profit from the system because they are mostly very good skulks too. And this will just reduce the time until they get a fade. And this is not theory crafting. That happened.
The issue with experienced players playing with players that are not good enough to compete is a separate issue and can be connected to every mechanic in the game.
I think it is a general issue, not a separate one. The main problem of this can be described as "Slippery Slope" or "How easy should early wins decide the result of the game?" And in my opinion we should do everything to lessen the slippery slope to create matches that are exciting and thrilling to the very end. And every new mechanic should never increase the slippery slope as this will only lead to more boring games that are decided way to soon. As RFK has the potential to do that, I don't like it.
I read it... whoever wrote that (Sewlek?) wasn't very convincing and was often making incoherent or illogical leaps.
He says:
Advantages:
1) It rewards individual players, which is cool for the individual.
2) The second most obvious problem RFK would address is the so called "tech explosion".
3) RFK will also improve the situation where its hopeless for a team to have a come back, when they are way behind in economy.
4) As a commander, you can indirectly transform team resources into personal resources.
1) I think this is a downside of RFK due the problems it will cause in pubs. The skill-gap is already huge in NS2 -- increasing it in this way is not a good thing for the game. Every server I've tried RFK on has had fades coming out far too early. You can't balance around this skill difference and this is a fact of life for pubs.
2) The only way RFK does anything to the tech explosion problem is if it a major source of income for the player. If RFK is a major source of income, then it makes the problem in 1) a lot bigger because good players will get good stuff (ie fade) much too fast.
Fixing the tech explosion is a noble goal, but this may not even do that. Any application of RFK where RFK is a minor source of income (ie 10:1 score:pres reward) will be impotent at breaking up fade timings. Alien teams will simply wait the few extra seconds until the slowest alien has the 40 pres to fade. Then they will pop out 3-4 fades anyway. Also, this will do nothing to stop lifeform explosions in pubs, which is mainly an exosuit problem and is pres-independent.
3) There is no reason to believe that RFK will improve the rate or chance of comebacks. In fact, I will argue that it will do the opposite. If aliens are winning early on, then they are likely winning because they have an above normal kdr. If aliens have an above normal kdr, then they will have faster fades. If they have faster fades, then they will likely win even harder.
4) This whole section was incredibly incoherent. Commanders always want to maximize their player's effectiveness with or without RFK. RFK is unnecessary for this because winning fights is how you win the game -- for both factions. Somehow the author of this document tried to tie in the addition of RFK with the removal of tres drops and then argue that this makes your choices more strategic? None of that really ties in together. You'd never choose to evolve to a fade because you can get more pres from RFK. You'd be a fade because it is the best at killing things... RFK is irrelevant in your individual strategic choices. If you want to argue that RFK constrains team choices by punishing aggression... well, isn't that a bad thing? Why do you ever want teams to play more defensive? Especially, why would you want marines to play more defensive? Marines dying to aliens, and thus aliens getting faster pres is much worse than aliens dying to marines and marines gaining more pres.
And some constructive ideas to mitigate the damage of adding RFK to the game:
A) RFK should be RFS (score) and the score system should be revamped. There should be allocations for player damage, structure damage, player healing, structure healing/building, and kills varying with lifeform/tech. This all needs to be balanced and tested then a simple conversion of something like 10:1 implemented and tweaked.
RFK should give marines tres and aliens pres because those are the primary sources of each respective faction's power.
TL;DR
Overall, that entire google document seemed to ignore public play which is where RFK will cause the most problems. I don't think RFK is a good idea for either competitive or public play, but it is at least an arguable solution to a problem in competitive play. It doesn't do anything positive for public play yet will clearly create some problems.
How do you think it will improve the general game play?
People love rewards for being good, but if you read my other posts you would know that im mostly your opinion, thats why i tried to create a RFP system which rewards teamplay.
As others have said, a very minor RFP system would probably work the best - just a little "good job for doing something useful" cookie, and not really something to impact game timings/ flow.
IMO though there are bigger fish to fry, because a proper RFP system would take a significant score system rework, and for something that would really not ultimately solve any gameplay issues I don't think it should be regarded as a priority.
How do you think it will improve the general game play?
People love rewards for being good, but if you read my other posts you would know that im mostly your opinion, thats why i tried to create a RFP system which rewards teamplay.
There is a big problem with this.
I agree, that rewarding a player if he does good, is satisfying for the player. It feels good to get rewarded. But the downside of this is always, that you increase the slippery slope:
With every reward that you give to a good player, you increase his power over a bad player.
Every reward makes an already skilled player even more powerful.
Do you really need to increase the power of a player that is already better than the others?
Is a mechanic worth it, that gives you a good feeling of reward but indirectly punishes the worse players even harder and will lead to more boring and early decided games?
In the end you will get more and more games that are predictable. If you play on a server and see the KD of that one or two players be very high, you probably know already what team will win. RFK will make this happen much more often. To a point where even watching a stream of a comp match gets boring after the first minutes. Because you know, that the team that won those first engagements will most likely win in the end.
RTS games are notorious for this problem. You killed 5 units of the enemy? Nice, you now have a bigger army than your enemy. You also can tech up more faster, because the enemy needs res to replace its troops.
What do many RTS games to counter this problem? They implement an upkeep-mechanic. This simply punishes the player with the bigger army, by giving him less resources. So it also rewards a player for losing his troops.
Sadly, every FPS player would burn you in flames if you suggest such a mechanic. Despite it is built on a logical premise: Reward the weaker player to keep games interesting to the end.
And to write it again: RFK doesn't fix the tech-explosion. It is a band-aid. The problem of the fade-splosion is NOT that they all appear at the same time. The problem is, that having multiple fades on the battlefield is so damn effective. Even with RFK there will be the same amount of fades in the game exactly at the same time as now. It only changes the time of appearance of the first fades. Maybe some of the early fades will die before. So there isn't the same amount of fades when everybody can evolve one. But how likely is it, that a player that is skilled enough to go early fade by his RFK, that he loses his fade so soon again?
RFK will not work in pubs. The savvy will hang back, let the newbies soak damage before killing the weak ones. They will be rewarded for this. Plus having faster tech/lifeforms will increase this. Get an exo and it may well be permanent on some pubs. Same with fade/onos.
Newbies will also see it as a kill kill kill. Why should *I* build, weld or gorge? Im not getting kills and I want that shiny shotgun.
1) I think this is a downside of RFK due the problems it will cause in pubs. The skill-gap is already huge in NS2 -- increasing it in this way is not a good thing for the game. Every server I've tried RFK on has had fades coming out far too early. You can't balance around this skill difference and this is a fact of life for pubs.
Then every server you've tried rfk on has set it too high. Too early fade by definition is the result of too much rfk.
2) The only way RFK does anything to the tech explosion problem is if it a major source of income for the player. If RFK is a major source of income, then it makes the problem in 1) a lot bigger because good players will get good stuff (ie fade) much too fast.
Fixing the tech explosion is a noble goal, but this may not even do that. Any application of RFK where RFK is a minor source of income (ie 10:1 score:pres reward) will be impotent at breaking up fade timings. Alien teams will simply wait the few extra seconds until the slowest alien has the 40 pres to fade. Then they will pop out 3-4 fades anyway. Also, this will do nothing to stop lifeform explosions in pubs, which is mainly an exosuit problem and is pres-independent.
Incorrect. The magnitude of it's effect is > 0. Whether a few seconds or half a minute, this is an effect that does something to tech explosion. Looking at the big picture, when we have many small factors >0 they add up to something larger. This is obviously not a golden bullet by itself and absolutely no-one in their right mind is pretending that it is.
3) There is no reason to believe that RFK will improve the rate or chance of comebacks. In fact, I will argue that it will do the opposite. If aliens are winning early on, then they are likely winning because they have an above normal kdr. If aliens have an above normal kdr, then they will have faster fades. If they have faster fades, then they will likely win even harder.
Incorrect. Rfk mathematically equalises the pres incomes between teams with lots of rt's and teams with not many rt's. This is irrefutable.
Say you have a ratio of 7:1 (7) in terms of some standardised pres income power due to map/rt dominance. When you add rfk this becomes something like 8:2 (4). You've gone from a pres income ratio between teams of 7 to 4. That is the improved chance of comeback. The more rt dominance a team gets, the higher their 'kdr ratio' requirement becomes in order to keep the same level of comeback chance.
If you don't believe the mathematical proof, just use your common sense. There is currently only one method of res comeback and that is through rt's (the RTS aspect). rfk simply adds FPS as another method of comeback. Taking all possible situations, adding rfk only increases meaningful comeback chance. 1) Team x is winning both FPS and RTS over Team y Current
Team y is being completely outplayed and will eventually lose. With rfk
Team y is being completely outplayed and will eventually lose. 2) Team y starts winning FPS, Team x still winning RTS Current
Team y is being res starved. They will eventually lose With rfk
Team y has increased chance to come back off FPS play.
Also, this oft repeated snowball arguement is like saying we shouldn't have rt's give tres and pres because they improve the 'winning' teams chances of winning, making it more likely for them to 'win harder'. 'win harder' is a relative term and is not necessarily a bad thing. If I am outplaying you both RTS and FPS wise, should i not 'win harder'? Why are we drawing the game out? The meaningfulness should be in that struggle for RTS and FPS dominance, and if it is not, drawing out the game is a poor substitute.
4) This whole section was incredibly incoherent. Commanders always want to maximize their player's effectiveness with or without RFK. RFK is unnecessary for this because winning fights is how you win the game -- for both factions. Somehow the author of this document tried to tie in the addition of RFK with the removal of tres drops and then argue that this makes your choices more strategic? None of that really ties in together. You'd never choose to evolve to a fade because you can get more pres from RFK. You'd be a fade because it is the best at killing things... RFK is irrelevant in your individual strategic choices. If you want to argue that RFK constrains team choices by punishing aggression... well, isn't that a bad thing? Why do you ever want teams to play more defensive? Especially, why would you want marines to play more defensive?
This is pretty bad reasoning. Commanders already wanting to maximize their player's effectiveness does not mean rfk is unnecessary. This is like the guy that said rfk is bad because there is no need to encourage players to kill other players more. It's like saying you don't want a pay raise because you're already being paid.
I don't think you've really understood this point. Tres egg drops are currently by design intention the way for commanders to do something with excess tres i.e. late game tres sink. Obviously the mechanic is broken and problematic, so you remove it. But now that you've removed it, you're back to the situation of a lack of late game tres sinks. The idea of direct tres to pres conversion was tried in early bt and it was obviously broken as well.
Which brings us to rfk. You spend tres via support abilities that convert to pres via rfk, as long as you win that fight. This is more elegant than either tres eggs, or a tres to pres conversion button. For example, you enzyme a skulk to kill a marine. You have spent tres for pres.
As for rfk punishing aggression, read: rfk punishes rambo, and overaggression that abuses things like spawnwaves/passive eggspawn and mass IP/weapon recycling for high potential reward with low risk. That is, mindlessly suiciding over and over again. This is effectively the exact same thing as rfd, and we saw no harmful consequences like this for pub play from that for a very long time.
Marines dying to aliens, and thus aliens getting faster pres is much worse than aliens dying to marines and marines gaining more pres.
what?
Jp/sg/welder + early game welders + maybe an early/midgame sg = 40-60+
fade + free skulks = 40-55
Even if rfk significantly biased towards aliens due to their pres being more effective, it's very simple to just apply a modifier that decreases the pres per kill for one team, or change it to tres for marines. If it ever comes down to this, the solution is pretty simple and effective with very little 'unintuitiveness' cost. This is not a real anti-rfk arguement that holds water.
if you make RFK low enough number as to not get a fade in 4 minutes in pubs and at the same time make it high enough where it offsets the fade explosion in competitive just a hair you may find a happy medium.
It could benefit comp as to not have to face 4 fades all at the same time while pubs not needing to kill a good fade at the 4 min mark with a/w 0 and no shotguns.
if you make RFK low enough number as to not get a fade in 4 minutes in pubs and at the same time make it high enough where it offsets the fade explosion in competitive just a hair you may find a happy medium.
It could benefit comp as to not have to face 4 fades all at the same time while pubs not needing to kill a good fade at the 4 min mark with a/w 0 and no shotguns.
Thats a problem about RFK you can't really calculate it. E.G my RFP - System generates avg. 0,5 -1,5 extra pres / min depending on player skill. And it worked at ns1 because there was no splitted res pool
FrozenNew York, NYJoin Date: 2010-07-02Member: 72228Members, Constellation
I was talking about it with someone yesterday.
Goals:
-Extend Early Game
-Extend Mid Game
-End Lifeform Explosion
-Shorten average round length
Ideas
-Significantly slow res flow, both tres and pres
-Increase research time across the board (ex: Shotguns should take several minutes to research, so should Biomass)
-Implement RFK. Marines get tres, and aliens get pres.
By slowing down the early and mid game significantly, I believe that round times would get cut back down to 15-25 minutes more consistently.
By using RFK with significantly slower pres and tres flow, the lifeforms will actually be staggered. It could even create siutations where a team actually tries to feed kills to a specific skulk to get ONE early fade. This will also make it so exos are not coming out so often so early. It will however increase tres weapon drop viability, which I think is a GREAT thing. (10 kills = shotgun? cool)
Frankly I want to be fighting un-upgraded skulks with un-upgraded marines for a significantly longer period of time than is happening now. I want mistakes and deaths in this time to be meaningful on top of making winning engagements meaningful. (I know death loses map control, but that's not the point. It's also a bad point.). I want lerks to come up and be faster and more agressive and to have more crowd control (because now w1a1 is coming up), I want shotguns to maybe be out at this time, BUT ONLY 1 OR 2 TO BE VIABLE, and the lerk could do this with projectile spores. I want aliens to be thinking about getting that first fade out, and it to be worth it that this fade comes out to play by himself, just to control the map to take pressure off the next hive location. I want a second fade to come up and then they can contest the marine pressure. I want 2nd hive abilities to be a serious step forward, in such a way that it can be considered the most meaningful push/defense in the meta of every round. I want the aliens to essentially lose if they lose that 2nd hive, and essentially win if they get the second hive securely. I want the 3rd hive to be absolutely game ending. I want the 3rd and 4th fade only coming up only when and if the marines have established positioning for the 2nd hive push. They need something else to do. Remove autobuild, remove drifters, remove macs, remove whips, remove turrets being useful, remove all the other things that sound neat but make the players matter less
What I don't want is the marines capping 5 nodes, dropping phase gates and turrets until fully upgraded and having no other option of how to progress through the round. I love the build 250 changes because I think they've given the game the ability to evolve and change without making anymore mechanical changes that everyone need cry about. But we can't be done making radical changes to the game progression, can we? Are we?
I've written about the possibilities of RFK a dozen times. If someone actually hasn't bunkered down with their opinion yet, it might be worth going through some old threads.
Meanwhile a bit more general RFK related gameplay thingy:
The issue with experienced players playing with players that are not good enough to compete is a separate issue and can be connected to every mechanic in the game.
I think it is a general issue, not a separate one. The main problem of this can be described as "Slippery Slope" or "How easy should early wins decide the result of the game?" And in my opinion we should do everything to lessen the slippery slope to create matches that are exciting and thrilling to the very end. And every new mechanic should never increase the slippery slope as this will only lead to more boring games that are decided way to soon. As RFK has the potential to do that, I don't like it.
The slippery slope is a tool as much as it is an issue. Often too little slippery slope makes a horrid game.
Good rounds keep going because both teams are fighting equally, not because the game is designed so that any team can pull off a long slowly losing game with any halfway there play. Once it's obvious that one team is consistently outplaying the other, the round really shouldn't go much further anymore.
One of the good things about well designed RFK system is that it can set things up so that the underdog either fights itself back to the game or goes down fighting. Either you get your RFK, maybe field a big gun or lifeform earlier to open things up - or the enemy team gets their res and snowballs to a decisive victory. Both are pretty desirable options even if one doesn't necessarily make the most memorable round - You still need those quick and nice lighter rounds to make the good and awesome ones stand out properly.
I don't think RFK is the only way to build up such system, but I'd like to think it as a viable option when done right.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
The funniest part to me is that the only actual issue that rfk plans to address : tech explosion... Can and will, still happen.
At most, even with obscene values, it would naturally stagger the pres on a team.. (bringing with it the laundry list of downsides) But it would in no way prevent said team from coordinating to intentionally recreate the same exact effective fade ball.
Fix the problem through a better method, one without so many downsides.
Now, after reading the last 10 pages - back to the 250 release - I thought I would share my opinion on changes and features that should be addressed. Yes, I joined the forums this week, but I've been playing since gorgeous and have about 300 hrs. I am no pro, but I know my way around. Much of this has been posted already; see this as an extended summary.
1. Marines
Sentries: Sentries are in a better place now, imo. I've seen them more in recent games. Still, I think a deployable, at the armory purchasable version of the sentry for marines which doesn't require a battery would be a great idea. I don't want to go into detail, though; There are more important things right now.
Infantry Portals: In larger games, aliens start with more eggs/hives spawn more eggs. Likewise, a second IP on 22+ servers would be helpful, I think.
Arms Lab: Make higher Upgrades require more Arms Labs (1 for a/w1, 2 for a/w2, 3 for a/w3). Also, a second CC should be required for a/w3, to make turtles easier to break.
Advanced Armory: GL and FT still feel to powerful. They are supposed to be support weapons, right? Why don't we make it like this: Leave them like they are, but increase their weight. You can run faster if you drop your rifle. Likewise, if you wear a heavy weapon, you can't run as fast, are less mobile, and more depending on your teammates. Now, the real problem lies in the combination with a jetpack. How about forbidding the jp+gl/ft combination? (Lore explanation: The weapons are to heavy.) Maybe we can even buff their power again, then. Summary: Make Advanced Weaponry immobile and disallow jetpacks, but keep them powerful - truly support weapons!
Prototype Lab: Exos at one CC seem to cause a lot of trouble. I like the idea about having only Railgun Exos at one CC. However:
In general: The importance of the second CC should be strengthened. As lots of people mentioned before, marines only require the second CC for the goodie Dual Exos or for beacons. By shifting Tech from 1 required CCs to 2, we can prevent these horrible marine turtles and make the second CC worth something again.
Actually, I think Marines are in a good place now, if we manage to solve the turtle and AW problems.
2. Aliens 2.1 Lifeforms
Skulk: I think Xenocide is not worth it. For a Tier 3 ability it's impact on the game is just too low. Parasite, though, is incoherent. Why can I parasite RTs and CCs, but no other buildings? Either one should be able to parasite all buildings or none. Too many hidden mechanics!
Gorge: Fine. Nothing to say here.
Lerk: Spores seem a bit underused; I will address this later.
Fade: Now, we're getting there. I don't mind the hopping; In my opinion, though, the skill ceiling doesn't feel as high as before, but that's just my opinion. I think shadowstep and vortex are utterly useless, though. Instead of shadowstep I rather use short blinks; SS just doesn't go in the flow with fade movement. Vortex, on the other hand, has a too short duration and is too tedious to be useful. Also, it doesn't affect Arms Labs (btw, if we use arms labs like above but keep vortex, a vortexed arms lab would reduce every upgrade by 1). Personally, I like the friendly-fire vortex as described here (post by twiliteblue, at the bottom of the page). Basically, it says: Vortex enables friendly fire on the vortexed unit, and makes it vulnerable to alien attacks. He even gives us a lore explanation! Sounds way better than the old vortex. Sadly, I don't know what to do with SS. Maybe revert it to the old one, and let fades chose how they want to move... Also, apart from abilites: Fades take way too much damage. There have been threads about it before. My favorite solution: Nerf Fade HP by a third (or sth) and instead increase the biomass scaling. This would allow fades to scale properly with the game.
Onos: The HP are just too low. Either let them like this, and increase biomass scaling, or buff the HP.
Skulk, Gorge and Lerk are fine; Fade and Onos need tweaking, though: Nerf Fade and buff Onos.
2.2 Upgrades
Shade Upgrades: I love them! I like to go shade first since 250, both phantom and aura are really useful abilites. The 95%-cloak with three veils can be annoying, though.
Shift Upgrades: The new adrenaline is way better, celerity is fine, too. Usually my first or second choice.
Crag Upgrades: Not so good. Usually my last choice. They were really overpowered before 250, now they aren't worth it. Regen is way to slow and carapace doesn't give you enough HP. Also, the upgrades are not very creative. I suggest buffing both of them and maybe merging them like phantom; Ideas for another upgrade exist already, we only need a little brainstorming. Crag is the only chamber that feels like you don't get a real benefit from it.
The chambers are fine. Crag needs a buff.
2.3 Structures
Crag: The Crag's healing is too slow. Almost always it's better to go back to the hive.
Shift: Echo is awesome, but a bit tedious - First selecting echo, then which structure should be echo'd. Also, why can't we echo upgrade structures? And we were told that we would be able to echo gorge tunnels. We aren't.
Shade: Is fine.
Whips: Please give us the possibility to toggle between only bile/only hit/do both.
Same for Cystem: Please to give us the possibility to turn it off with a key. It's great if you have to place lots of cysts, but if you want to hide them or want to place a single cyst, it can be annoying.
Not much to do here. Buff crags a bit, add toggle-functinos. Echoing can be annoying, but we have more important stuff to do.
2.4 Alien Commanding
Drifters: I'm fine with drifters building. The drifter ability are cool, too. But they are underused, because they are hard to use. It's tedious. You can select the nearest drifter with a hotkey, and you can select the drifter ability with a hotkey. But the drifter has to move there first. This is tedious and makes it less effective than it could be. Also, drifters on the frontline die fast due to this. Also, I'd like to see drifter upgrades (Regen/Crag, Phantom, Celerity).
Researching abilities: We all got used to research stuff like leap at chambers. It still is unintuitive, though, especially for new players.
Eggs are really expensive: Double gestation time AND high res cost. I'm fine with the res. But the other one is just an inconvience that could be removed.
Biomass: Based on the idea of MisterNubs (but with a twist). Make Biomass a Slot-based system. You research biomass slots just like before, but you can decide what you want to fill them with by yourself. So, let's say, I want fast gorge tunnels and leap. I research to biomass slots and fill the first one with gorge tunnels and the second one with leap. This could lead to imbalancing, though. Therefore, abilities would not only cost res, but slots as well. Let's say, leap costs 20 res and 2 slots, while gorge tunnels are 10 res and 1 slot. Umbra 1 Slot, Spores two slots, etc. This would add variety and complexity to the game and feel less like a corset. Also, we would have a comeback of abilites like Spores, which you see rarely recently. Would need some tweaking, of course, but that's what this is all about, isn't it?
I think this change to biomass would enhance the game a lot.
3. General Stuff
In explore, the map and the biomass-progress overlaps as alien.
Lots of tutorial vids and texts in explore mode are utterly outdated. I recently met a rookie who asked me why the game told him to press shift as fade, because nothing happened.
Game length and turtles: We all have seen a lot of turtles recently. 250 didn't add "great comebacks" for marines (rare exceptions granted), but horrible, boring turtles. With a shortened Early and Midgame games often last 50 minutes recently, without the aliens being able to finish it. I don't think it's up to the aliens, but to the marines. With my proposed changes about the 2nd CC we should be able to fix this, though.
I think the changes that could most improve the game are 1, 2.1 and 2.4, especially the alternative biomass.
I may add something later, if I think of it or read of something somewhere that sounds like a good idea (and mark it in a different color).
Thank you for reading this.
I spent an hour writing this post, it's your turn now to tear it apart.
See you in-game.
In 249, shadow-step would give you momentum, but now in 250/251, they don't and are, like you said, utterly useless. Instead of having multiple arms labs, they should just remove the multiple veils/shells/spurs and just give a solid bonus. Also the fact that you need 1 CC in 250/251 to get exos is bad, as it increases turtling (in the past u needed 2 cc for proto lab). I also agree with the fact that fades don't require skill anymore, as now they are more tanky and less evasive. I also agree with you that early games are way too short, flamers/GL should go back to being support weapons, and crags healing too slow. However, I will have to disagree with you for drifter building, since even before 250 alien buildings get built slowly and we should need to get a bunch of drifters to build what used to be normal speed.
Comments
Killing structures is often more important than killing players. Do you not see this?
Players already have it engraved in their mind to kill enemy players. This behavior doesn't need to be taught or reinforced.
It's ridiculous to suggest that rfk is going to cause players to ignore attacking and building rt's. RT/harvester advantage means more fps power for you, less fps power for them, thus more probability of rfk for you. *The benefit of rfk (as TFF is also suggesting i think), is that you can now make a considered decision about whether you want to tradeoff the long term for the short term, and in what intensity. This is a good thing.
Do you really think players will find it in their best interest to consistently 'ignore the team', only to find they can't get any rfk because their going against fades with no upgrades? Do you really think rfk implementation is going to be so extravagantly rewarding that the overwhelming utility maximising decision is to ignore the team game? Because you'd be dead wrong on both counts if you thought yes.
You got one thing right though, players do not need to be taught or encouraged to kill enemy players. But this was never the point of introducing rfk? Sewlek very clearly defined 4 solid and compelling benefits that did not involve this. The specific effect of encouraging player killing may not be necessary, but neither will it cause a 'conflict of interest' as you seem to believe.
they will just think they get resources for killing things, and then continue failing at +forward +attack.
people that can handle themselves in combat will just get more res... they can even be more aggressive since repurchasing their weapon/lifeform will be easier
the game needs to reinforce playing the team vs. team, not the player vs. player
Also, pres-based RFK will always be advantageous to the aliens because alien power comes from pres while marine power comes from tres. How do you reconcile this? Have RFK give pres for aliens, but tres for marines? This change will require a complete rebalance of the marine and alien economies. And even after this rebalance, there is no guarantee that the new system will be fix the problems it set out to fix in the first place.
It seems as though RFK (or RFS) is an attempt to fix tech explosions by staggering alien lifeforms. The conundrum is that in order for it to fix tech explosions, it needs to be a major source of alien pres income. If RFK is a major source of income, then it will cause extreme problems in pubs with respect to feeding, early lifeforms, and widening of the skill gap. If RFK is a minor or negligable source of income, then it won't fix tech explosions because all the aliens can simply wait the extra seconds until the slowest is ready to evolve.
RFK (or RFS) is a bad idea. It won't work for NS2 pubs.
I've personally always thought of rfk as a minor complementary system when it comes to easing tech explosions.
Could work.... to do what?
To improve the generell gameplay ofc. .
What Roobuba said! The better team should win, yes. But it should never ever be a steamroll. Steamrolls are boring to play and to watch. It is 1000nd times more interesting to work for your win. Even if the enemy isn't as good as your team.
This is simple denial of what we know from RFK in NS1. You can't say it helps new players more than elitists and at the same time I have a clear memory of all the grief that happened because of those elite fades that were so good, that even when you had the luck to kill them, they had enough res to buy a new one at this time.
You talk about the 0.1% extreme cases of the super hero fade that simply never dies (not even out of bad luck) and therefor doesn't need more res. And you talk about the 5% cases where a noob / mediocre fade can miraculously collect enough kills to go fade again shortly after he died.
The truth is, it is an elitist system. The players that are very good fades right now will profit even more from it. If they have 100 pres they can even play with more risks without worrying. They will make even more damage and if they die, the result will be the same. They will come back directly after gestation. They even profit from the system because they are mostly very good skulks too. And this will just reduce the time until they get a fade. And this is not theory crafting. That happened.
I think it is a general issue, not a separate one. The main problem of this can be described as "Slippery Slope" or "How easy should early wins decide the result of the game?" And in my opinion we should do everything to lessen the slippery slope to create matches that are exciting and thrilling to the very end. And every new mechanic should never increase the slippery slope as this will only lead to more boring games that are decided way to soon. As RFK has the potential to do that, I don't like it.
He says:
1) I think this is a downside of RFK due the problems it will cause in pubs. The skill-gap is already huge in NS2 -- increasing it in this way is not a good thing for the game. Every server I've tried RFK on has had fades coming out far too early. You can't balance around this skill difference and this is a fact of life for pubs.
2) The only way RFK does anything to the tech explosion problem is if it a major source of income for the player. If RFK is a major source of income, then it makes the problem in 1) a lot bigger because good players will get good stuff (ie fade) much too fast.
Fixing the tech explosion is a noble goal, but this may not even do that. Any application of RFK where RFK is a minor source of income (ie 10:1 score:pres reward) will be impotent at breaking up fade timings. Alien teams will simply wait the few extra seconds until the slowest alien has the 40 pres to fade. Then they will pop out 3-4 fades anyway. Also, this will do nothing to stop lifeform explosions in pubs, which is mainly an exosuit problem and is pres-independent.
3) There is no reason to believe that RFK will improve the rate or chance of comebacks. In fact, I will argue that it will do the opposite. If aliens are winning early on, then they are likely winning because they have an above normal kdr. If aliens have an above normal kdr, then they will have faster fades. If they have faster fades, then they will likely win even harder.
4) This whole section was incredibly incoherent. Commanders always want to maximize their player's effectiveness with or without RFK. RFK is unnecessary for this because winning fights is how you win the game -- for both factions. Somehow the author of this document tried to tie in the addition of RFK with the removal of tres drops and then argue that this makes your choices more strategic? None of that really ties in together. You'd never choose to evolve to a fade because you can get more pres from RFK. You'd be a fade because it is the best at killing things... RFK is irrelevant in your individual strategic choices. If you want to argue that RFK constrains team choices by punishing aggression... well, isn't that a bad thing? Why do you ever want teams to play more defensive? Especially, why would you want marines to play more defensive? Marines dying to aliens, and thus aliens getting faster pres is much worse than aliens dying to marines and marines gaining more pres.
And some constructive ideas to mitigate the damage of adding RFK to the game:
A) RFK should be RFS (score) and the score system should be revamped. There should be allocations for player damage, structure damage, player healing, structure healing/building, and kills varying with lifeform/tech. This all needs to be balanced and tested then a simple conversion of something like 10:1 implemented and tweaked.
TL;DR
Overall, that entire google document seemed to ignore public play which is where RFK will cause the most problems. I don't think RFK is a good idea for either competitive or public play, but it is at least an arguable solution to a problem in competitive play. It doesn't do anything positive for public play yet will clearly create some problems.
How do you think it will improve the general game play?
IMO though there are bigger fish to fry, because a proper RFP system would take a significant score system rework, and for something that would really not ultimately solve any gameplay issues I don't think it should be regarded as a priority.
There is a big problem with this.
I agree, that rewarding a player if he does good, is satisfying for the player. It feels good to get rewarded. But the downside of this is always, that you increase the slippery slope:
With every reward that you give to a good player, you increase his power over a bad player.
Every reward makes an already skilled player even more powerful.
Do you really need to increase the power of a player that is already better than the others?
Is a mechanic worth it, that gives you a good feeling of reward but indirectly punishes the worse players even harder and will lead to more boring and early decided games?
In the end you will get more and more games that are predictable. If you play on a server and see the KD of that one or two players be very high, you probably know already what team will win. RFK will make this happen much more often. To a point where even watching a stream of a comp match gets boring after the first minutes. Because you know, that the team that won those first engagements will most likely win in the end.
RTS games are notorious for this problem. You killed 5 units of the enemy? Nice, you now have a bigger army than your enemy. You also can tech up more faster, because the enemy needs res to replace its troops.
What do many RTS games to counter this problem? They implement an upkeep-mechanic. This simply punishes the player with the bigger army, by giving him less resources. So it also rewards a player for losing his troops.
Sadly, every FPS player would burn you in flames if you suggest such a mechanic. Despite it is built on a logical premise: Reward the weaker player to keep games interesting to the end.
And to write it again: RFK doesn't fix the tech-explosion. It is a band-aid. The problem of the fade-splosion is NOT that they all appear at the same time. The problem is, that having multiple fades on the battlefield is so damn effective. Even with RFK there will be the same amount of fades in the game exactly at the same time as now. It only changes the time of appearance of the first fades. Maybe some of the early fades will die before. So there isn't the same amount of fades when everybody can evolve one. But how likely is it, that a player that is skilled enough to go early fade by his RFK, that he loses his fade so soon again?
Newbies will also see it as a kill kill kill. Why should *I* build, weld or gorge? Im not getting kills and I want that shiny shotgun.
Then every server you've tried rfk on has set it too high. Too early fade by definition is the result of too much rfk.
Incorrect. The magnitude of it's effect is > 0. Whether a few seconds or half a minute, this is an effect that does something to tech explosion. Looking at the big picture, when we have many small factors >0 they add up to something larger. This is obviously not a golden bullet by itself and absolutely no-one in their right mind is pretending that it is.
Incorrect. Rfk mathematically equalises the pres incomes between teams with lots of rt's and teams with not many rt's. This is irrefutable.
Say you have a ratio of 7:1 (7) in terms of some standardised pres income power due to map/rt dominance. When you add rfk this becomes something like 8:2 (4). You've gone from a pres income ratio between teams of 7 to 4. That is the improved chance of comeback. The more rt dominance a team gets, the higher their 'kdr ratio' requirement becomes in order to keep the same level of comeback chance.
If you don't believe the mathematical proof, just use your common sense. There is currently only one method of res comeback and that is through rt's (the RTS aspect). rfk simply adds FPS as another method of comeback. Taking all possible situations, adding rfk only increases meaningful comeback chance.
1) Team x is winning both FPS and RTS over Team y
Current
Team y is being completely outplayed and will eventually lose.
With rfk
Team y is being completely outplayed and will eventually lose.
2) Team y starts winning FPS, Team x still winning RTS
Current
Team y is being res starved. They will eventually lose
With rfk
Team y has increased chance to come back off FPS play.
Also, this oft repeated snowball arguement is like saying we shouldn't have rt's give tres and pres because they improve the 'winning' teams chances of winning, making it more likely for them to 'win harder'. 'win harder' is a relative term and is not necessarily a bad thing. If I am outplaying you both RTS and FPS wise, should i not 'win harder'? Why are we drawing the game out? The meaningfulness should be in that struggle for RTS and FPS dominance, and if it is not, drawing out the game is a poor substitute.
This is pretty bad reasoning. Commanders already wanting to maximize their player's effectiveness does not mean rfk is unnecessary. This is like the guy that said rfk is bad because there is no need to encourage players to kill other players more. It's like saying you don't want a pay raise because you're already being paid.
I don't think you've really understood this point. Tres egg drops are currently by design intention the way for commanders to do something with excess tres i.e. late game tres sink. Obviously the mechanic is broken and problematic, so you remove it. But now that you've removed it, you're back to the situation of a lack of late game tres sinks. The idea of direct tres to pres conversion was tried in early bt and it was obviously broken as well.
Which brings us to rfk. You spend tres via support abilities that convert to pres via rfk, as long as you win that fight. This is more elegant than either tres eggs, or a tres to pres conversion button. For example, you enzyme a skulk to kill a marine. You have spent tres for pres.
As for rfk punishing aggression, read: rfk punishes rambo, and overaggression that abuses things like spawnwaves/passive eggspawn and mass IP/weapon recycling for high potential reward with low risk. That is, mindlessly suiciding over and over again. This is effectively the exact same thing as rfd, and we saw no harmful consequences like this for pub play from that for a very long time.
what?
Jp/sg/welder + early game welders + maybe an early/midgame sg = 40-60+
fade + free skulks = 40-55
Even if rfk significantly biased towards aliens due to their pres being more effective, it's very simple to just apply a modifier that decreases the pres per kill for one team, or change it to tres for marines. If it ever comes down to this, the solution is pretty simple and effective with very little 'unintuitiveness' cost. This is not a real anti-rfk arguement that holds water.
It could benefit comp as to not have to face 4 fades all at the same time while pubs not needing to kill a good fade at the 4 min mark with a/w 0 and no shotguns.
guess what happened
good players got on alien side and completely stomped harder than before
rfk was pretty minor too, like .5 or 1 per kill
in general it's fucking horrible design and the people defending it are clueless
Goals:
-Extend Early Game
-Extend Mid Game
-End Lifeform Explosion
-Shorten average round length
Ideas
-Significantly slow res flow, both tres and pres
-Increase research time across the board (ex: Shotguns should take several minutes to research, so should Biomass)
-Implement RFK. Marines get tres, and aliens get pres.
By slowing down the early and mid game significantly, I believe that round times would get cut back down to 15-25 minutes more consistently.
By using RFK with significantly slower pres and tres flow, the lifeforms will actually be staggered. It could even create siutations where a team actually tries to feed kills to a specific skulk to get ONE early fade. This will also make it so exos are not coming out so often so early. It will however increase tres weapon drop viability, which I think is a GREAT thing. (10 kills = shotgun? cool)
Frankly I want to be fighting un-upgraded skulks with un-upgraded marines for a significantly longer period of time than is happening now. I want mistakes and deaths in this time to be meaningful on top of making winning engagements meaningful. (I know death loses map control, but that's not the point. It's also a bad point.). I want lerks to come up and be faster and more agressive and to have more crowd control (because now w1a1 is coming up), I want shotguns to maybe be out at this time, BUT ONLY 1 OR 2 TO BE VIABLE, and the lerk could do this with projectile spores. I want aliens to be thinking about getting that first fade out, and it to be worth it that this fade comes out to play by himself, just to control the map to take pressure off the next hive location. I want a second fade to come up and then they can contest the marine pressure. I want 2nd hive abilities to be a serious step forward, in such a way that it can be considered the most meaningful push/defense in the meta of every round. I want the aliens to essentially lose if they lose that 2nd hive, and essentially win if they get the second hive securely. I want the 3rd hive to be absolutely game ending. I want the 3rd and 4th fade only coming up only when and if the marines have established positioning for the 2nd hive push. They need something else to do. Remove autobuild, remove drifters, remove macs, remove whips, remove turrets being useful, remove all the other things that sound neat but make the players matter less
What I don't want is the marines capping 5 nodes, dropping phase gates and turrets until fully upgraded and having no other option of how to progress through the round. I love the build 250 changes because I think they've given the game the ability to evolve and change without making anymore mechanical changes that everyone need cry about. But we can't be done making radical changes to the game progression, can we? Are we?
Meanwhile a bit more general RFK related gameplay thingy: The slippery slope is a tool as much as it is an issue. Often too little slippery slope makes a horrid game.
Good rounds keep going because both teams are fighting equally, not because the game is designed so that any team can pull off a long slowly losing game with any halfway there play. Once it's obvious that one team is consistently outplaying the other, the round really shouldn't go much further anymore.
One of the good things about well designed RFK system is that it can set things up so that the underdog either fights itself back to the game or goes down fighting. Either you get your RFK, maybe field a big gun or lifeform earlier to open things up - or the enemy team gets their res and snowballs to a decisive victory. Both are pretty desirable options even if one doesn't necessarily make the most memorable round - You still need those quick and nice lighter rounds to make the good and awesome ones stand out properly.
I don't think RFK is the only way to build up such system, but I'd like to think it as a viable option when done right.
At most, even with obscene values, it would naturally stagger the pres on a team.. (bringing with it the laundry list of downsides) But it would in no way prevent said team from coordinating to intentionally recreate the same exact effective fade ball.
Fix the problem through a better method, one without so many downsides.
In 249, shadow-step would give you momentum, but now in 250/251, they don't and are, like you said, utterly useless. Instead of having multiple arms labs, they should just remove the multiple veils/shells/spurs and just give a solid bonus. Also the fact that you need 1 CC in 250/251 to get exos is bad, as it increases turtling (in the past u needed 2 cc for proto lab). I also agree with the fact that fades don't require skill anymore, as now they are more tanky and less evasive. I also agree with you that early games are way too short, flamers/GL should go back to being support weapons, and crags healing too slow. However, I will have to disagree with you for drifter building, since even before 250 alien buildings get built slowly and we should need to get a bunch of drifters to build what used to be normal speed.