Lesser of 2 evils frankly, I'm sick of reading in game "omfg bit 6 times and he didn't die" or seeing 1-2 skulks engage 1-2 marines and dying, coming in to mop up and still having to bite marines 2 times each because they only managed to land 25's.
It's obviously confusing as fuck because people still need to get it explained to them 6 months down to release, there's no XHAIR to even remotely line up what a 75 cone is to where 50 cone starts to what you can get away with on a 25 cone, it's just crap.
Just because the marine is on your screen does not mean you deserve to land a hit... You need to atleast put him somewhere near the centre of your screen.
Did your parents not play 'here comes the aeroplane' by putting food on a spoon and flying it around till it went in your mouth. Imagine if they had the expectation that putting it 30cm to the left of your mouth and you're still meant to be able to eat it.
Just because you had no issue with the bite zone after the nerf and before the addition of the glancing does not mean the rest of the world is at your same calibre (from memory you were one of the people saying it was fine at the time).
tbh mf...you would mostl likely still rack up kills if they halved the current 75 bite zone and removed glancing all together....but you're one of the players who is the exception and far from the norm...your level of skill is certainly well beyond those of most players...more so new ones.
This game should be accessible to players at all skill levels...that means new players deserve to get kills..even on the alien team.
Narrowing the bite zone will do nothing to help make this game fun for new players...unless you believe fun should be solely based on a challenge...and not a reward (getting kills is the reward most of us play for...not to spend hours challenging ourselves to be good enough to get a kill).
Sure my parents played that game...but they did not have to get it over my front 2 teeth...which is pretty much what it feels like from a skulks view.
If they were 30 cm to left or right I would no see the spoon if my eyes were in teh back of my mouth as they are for the skulk.
@xao Well it will take even more bites if they remove glancing as they will miss totally instead of hit those glancing.
The issue that most new players have is that marines get tougher to kill as the game progresses thanks to armour upgrades...glancing bites actually mean that new players get rewarded with more kills as misses are now partial hits.
fyi, I actually find glancing bite makes it more difficult because of not being able to count hits and not relying on what damage cone I will receive. Atleast with 75 I can bite confidently and not keep chasing a dead marine due to latency, and go for the next one. It also makes fading extremely frustrating because counting hits is even more important
Actually removing glancing bite seems to have reduced the frustration for newer players and allowed them learn to hit 75 damage bites much faster. You can really feel the difference when playing the BT.
fyi, I actually find glancing bite makes it more difficult because of not being able to count hits and not relying on what damage cone I will receive. Atleast with 75 I can bite confidently and not keep chasing a dead marine due to latency, and go for the next one. It also makes fading extremely frustrating because counting hits is even more important
Does not surpirse me that you say that....surely you would not say you are a casual player though.
At the time that glancing blows came in there was a chorus of "clan/pro" players who said that no change was needed...and that new players needed to learn to aim.
Being a casual player who maybe gets an hour or two a week to be able to play I dont have the time to dedicate to learning to play with such tight hit zones and having a mental picture in my mind of where the hit zone is.
Considering all the other issues in first closing the gap and tracking a marine all this does is make the game unaccesible to a lot of people....and turns off people who have invested large amounts of time in the past to getting down some of the basics to even get close enough to engage.
@Grissi I have experienced both BT bite zone and the ones back in beta days when the cones (at the time) got nerfed...the whole learning to hit argument was garbage back then and is garbage now.
Really its more an argument for increasing the 75 zone back out to what it was (which used to cover all 3 zones) as this would reduce their frustration and increase their enjoyment from an earlier point...thus retaining more casual players.
Casual players who struggle to close the distance to engage, track a marine whilst he is jumping like a rabbit on crack get frustrated at not landing hits just because the marines not exactly dead centre between the two front teeth.
Its fine to have a really high skill ceiling for "comp/clan" players to learn to get to...but not fare for the floor to be beyond the realms of casual players.
Running around getting shot and not getting kills is hardly going to entice casual players to invest time in a game...theres plenty of other options out there and the different approach alien gameplay takes is enough of an obstacle to begin with.
Why not trying something like remove the 25 damages hit, remove the less one for the fade and the lerk? And see what happening, i believe it's would be better then just remove glancing bites. I think this actually change is too radical u would see 90% of pubs marines loose.
I actually liked the idea of glancing hits initially, but imo its goal of making it easier for newer players didn't work as well as it should have. Newer players did constant glancing bites and had hard times understanding why they did different damage. I have seen the question rise quite a few times on servers what causes different damage and often seen the answer that headshots do more damage. This is how confusing the glancing bites actually are.
I also seen few newer players start in bt and had a small chat to them. All who I talked to up to now agreed that they liked the bites better in bt because they actually did damage when they hit. They also agreed that it took less time for them to adjust because they knew that when they hit it did full damage.
Its really hard do compare this to the beta days when performance was much much worse and the bite cone had few bugs with it, like not hitting targets when you were to close to them.
I actually liked the idea of glancing hits initially, but imo its goal of making it easier for newer players didn't work as well as it should have. Newer players did constant glancing bites and had hard times understanding why they did different damage. I have seen the question rise quite a few times on servers what causes different damage and often seen the answer that headshots do more damage. This is how confusing the glancing bites actually are.
I also seen few newer players start in bt and had a small chat to them. All who I talked to up to now agreed that they liked the bites better in bt because they actually did damage when they hit. They also agreed that it took less time for them to adjust because they knew that when they hit it did full damage.
Its really hard do compare this to the beta days when performance was much much worse and the bite cone had few bugs with it, like not hitting targets when you were to close to them.
Not really as my K:D rate changed massively when the cone got reduced in the beta...then bounced back a bit once glancing came in.
Also as I said have played on BT and found it was as frustrating as before.
I guess I just must be shit and not capable of playing aliens...despite easily playing over 400 hours on aliens alone.....I do know that I am far from the worst gamer out there though...so I am certainly not alone in falling into this bracket.
Yeah grissi but for me it's almost more frutrating to be kill by a guy not aiming at all as the skulk !! Just shaking is mouse left and right(unskilled). Like it was a long Time during the beta and so boring for marines.. i hate the fact : skuk get close before u kill him = death if ur are not medspam. With all this pubs comm don't how to med proprely. I see coming the same alien rise then before the glancing bite was put into this game.
Just... give marines dodging skills !? It's kind of a must-have now... AND, it's skilled-based. You see a skulk jumping in a direction, you must react fast and dodge in the good direction. It trains a lot, imo, and makes people enjoy more the fights.
Just... give marines dodging skills !? It's kind of a must-have now... AND, it's skilled-based. You see a skulk jumping in a direction, you must react fast and dodge in the good direction. It trains a lot, imo, and makes people enjoy more the fights.
Movement changes in the BT were partly because in vanilla it's too easy for marines to outmaneuver skulks at close range. You can still strafe and jump about just fine, don't need built in specific dodge mechanics.
Played the mod for the first time in a long while last night. With little experience on it the only thing I can really comment on is the fade's travel movement mechanics are easier to pick up then the skulks. I actually found it quite enjoyable. It was FUN to move around the map as fade. Skulk was still a bit of a pita, more then a few places I would get stuck in a few 2-4 jump patterns where i wasn't going any were and felt like I had a parachute on.
I think maybe that comes from the fact I had blink to get movement started again any time i wanted where the skulk I didn't have such a feature since I didn't have leap.
EDIT: I streamed my play so if you wanna watch me flail around as a newbie skulk skip to 56 min the scrim starts shortly after that too - http://www.twitch.tv/current1y/b/413177677
I also forgot to mention that I still believe the LMG spread is too wide. Shooting at skulks at medium range will cause you to miss a fair amount of bullets which is unacceptable imo. I would like the spread reduced closer to that of the live build.
one thing ive found is that phase gates are alot more susceptible to harass - for several reasons. 1. the marine you leave in position to defend it the phase gate(s) is notably weaker - though an armoury is often dropped to spare the comm's 'attenergy' and Tres, a lerk obviously strips him of his armor extremely quickly at which point he is alot more vulnerable and finds himself hugging the armoury even more. 2. the speed of the skulk allows them to gank phase gates so quickly, despite having been completely out of position only a moment ago and 3. the phase gates have lower HP iirc?
Until now i was a silent reader, awaiting the BT mod to begin to play ns2 more actively again.
I'm not up to date at the current changelog, but that's besides the point of this post anyway.
I want instead throw an idea in the room, i got from a post a few days ago in this thread:
It was often stated, that the higher lifeforms can't be too impactful to the game due the notorious lifeform explosion.
On the other side, hardcaps like X Fades max, wouldn't have a good effect on the game.
How about for Lerk, Fade and Onos capacity are produced by hives in the following manner:
- After X minutes, hives start producing capacity (for example 0mins lerk, 4mins fade, 8mins Onos (later to encourage not to save for onos the whole game)
- It takes Y minutes to produce a capacity(for example 3mins Lerk, 4mins fade, 8mins onos)
- If someone evolves a lifeform the capacity reduced by 1 (or not!, see "small scale alternative")
- Special treatment if the capacity is 0, then Y is halved (so first Lerk possible 1,5mins, fade 6mins in this example)
- It could be intuitive shown in the evolution menu (numbers and progress until next)
- There should be a way to speed up the progression by X % for Y tres/10sec, so you can rush lerk/fades/onos at the start of the game and when you lost all of them
(A little bit like tower wars creep spawn in the wc3 map)
What would the effects on the gameplay be (in my opinion)?
- With the right numbers, the game could have a longer ever changing midgame (With very late avaible Onos the game could revolve around a growing amount of fades/multiple fade waves)
- Lerk and Fades especially could be revamped into more "core" units
- 3rd, 4rd Hive has more impact
- More options / surprises(!) So much possibilties, you could invest your tres for fades so you can field 3 fades after say 8 minutes, but your onos/upgrades/hivecount will be delayed
There could evolve special strategies like "2RT's into fast lerks to expand to more RT's"
- In certain stages of the games, there are could be now enormous temporary shifts:
Think of the alien team loses all their fades and the capacity is 0.
Thats a huge win for marines and the aliens now are on the defense until a new fade is ready - a very tense game moment
- Skulks more important, when Lerk gets a more supportive role (ranged/more HP spores+umbra) , when all higher lifeforms died and due limits
What about Marines?
As said I'm not really into the actual stage of the mod, so i don't know if the cheap, weak exo is desirable.
But also for marines the exos (and shotguns/JP) could be a strong powerhouse but limited by time and money
Negatives:
- Fighting for the only avaible evolution: It's like in BF3 everyone wants that jet/heli after respawning.
But in contrast the next fade is only 2mins away and it's a team game (And also can be speed up by the khammender).
- Rookie dying in fades over and over again.
There should a system hindering player to do so, for example a player who died in the last minutes as a Fade have to wait 30sec longer to use the new capacity (so other have the chance to fade if they wish)
- "Spawn camping" People hanging in the hive waiting for an evolution
Since evolution is possible everywhere and you always can fall back for an semi save location, i hope that's not a huge problem or admins handle it
- Individual have high impact on the team game.
You can set your team very far behind when you lose for example that first fade(-egg). Possibility to troll your team. But in the end you primary wasted your pres and marine comms can ruin their team even more and easier. If problems arise, admins/modder can step in, in creative ways like player voting for that precious first egg or something, doesn't need to be hardcoded in the game.
You have an excellent fade in your team, but some egoplayer snaps that first egg. it will happen, but the NS2 community is so incredible constructive communicative in games (MOBAs anyone? ) i think discussing who gets it will, will be the norm
Small scale alternative
Alternative would be that the capacity is persistent and never decreasing, so solely to deactivate lifeform explosion (after 6mins 1 fade, after 10mins 2fades and so on)
Just... give marines dodging skills !? It's kind of a must-have now... AND, it's skilled-based. You see a skulk jumping in a direction, you must react fast and dodge in the good direction. It trains a lot, imo, and makes people enjoy more the fights.
im guessing you want strafe/aircontrol for marine jumping? the marines hopping around to dodge was already a source of ridicule in vanilla, i dont think making it a bigger part of the game would give a good impression...
@Locklear I hope that glancing removal is not something that will flow through and as such am accounting for the welder changes to be factored into vanilla as a stand alone/
Removing glancing bites without changing hit zones simply makes getting kills as a new player harder, after all glancing bites came about as the narrow bite zone was too unforgiving and not "logical" for new players who only have the teeth as a reference (no x-hair).
That its been removed in the BT simply re-affirms my belief that most of these changes are aimed at the comp scene rather than the casual player and dont factor in the fun element.
He removed glancing but he made it easier to get 75. Please know what you are talking about.
But doesn't that just throw us back to weeks before launch when we had the "lawn mower skulk"??
Easier, not as easy. The 75 bite cone, the only cone, is not as big as the full 25-50-75 cones.
Right, right.. but that's exactly what we had just before launch, and it was deemed to be too much in favor of aliens /contributing to alien win rate far too much??
I mean i've been playing it.. and i don't have a problem landing my bites really, i just seem to be fighting against the movement system mostly, so something tells me if we had pre launch movement plus this bite cone itd be a problem somehow.
@Apostrem0: First of all, welcome! I'm new to the forums myself, so it's nice to see a fellow newbie.
As far as your idea, I like it, though I feel the negatives you point out are pretty serious. As it is now, if you're a new player and you grab a quick fade only to die 30 seconds later, well, you've lost all your pres which yes means your team has lost the possibility of you going, say, onos for a long time, but at least you haven't completely gimped your team by stopping someone who IS a good fade from providing that valuable mid-game support. Someone earlier had a similar suggestion for shotguns and I had the same reservations. And the possibilities of trolling just makes it worse. Troll comms are bad enough. We don't need even more avenues for this to occur.
However, that being said, I like the "small scale alternative", where if you do immediately die as fade, we're basically back to the vanilla situation. But the system still helps tone down the lifeform explosions. In fact, for added depth, what if we made the capacity be research-based, so that a team could choose to either focus on getting lots of high level lifeforms up OR go for that second or third hive. Scaling all this to team size might be tricky though. That would have to be worked out somehow.
Cap max speed at 12 for skulks and 14 with celerity plz. It's unplayable. I don't know if you made changes about spawning time, but vanilla's was quite good. It was way too long with 10 seconds.
AiorosJoin Date: 2003-03-24Member: 14850Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
edited June 2013
king_yo'S post says everything.
from all the PCWS we played over the last week, it was alien wins only.
biggest issues are:
- the skulks movement speed and low hp rts of the marins. both got different impact to the game, so you would need to change one of them and see how the other part plays out. i would try to boost the HP of marin rts first.
- umbra / frenzy / armor heal of drifters umbra itselfs is to powerful in the early game, it would need to scale with biosmass. so i could stay useful overtime, but wouldnt be a game breaker if u upgrade it instantly. also it could help aliens to finish the game if u reach 3 hives and maxium biomass.
the other drifter abilitys are way to powerful if u combine them. they should have a longer CD, so that u can use one of these abilitys at a time and not all at the same second. you need to consider multi drifter use for that issue, that ppl cant keep spamming everything if they use 2 or more drifters.
- upgrade explosion (carapace) you should reduce the starting res for both teams, because aliens can get carapace level 3 instantly and biomass short after. its like breaking the game to much with that HP explosion. if the starting res for both teams would be lower, the game would play out diffrently.
i cant say anything else to the other parts of the game, since if the early game is still unbalanced, the midgame like it should isnt possible.
I don't agree with the upgrade explosion, its 70 tres to get full carapace, and considering dropping 2 rts and some cysts would ~30 and the first bio is 15, thats 115 res and you only start with 60. If you get those 2 rts up quickly I could see all that done by 3 minutes, but more realistically its 4 minutes atleast.
Biomass is back. It works for upgrades now, costs 15 + 25 res in the Hive as upgrades and is not increased by structures anymore!
Very nice. This adds some delay to the initial Umbra havoc (Biomass 3) and this delay can afterall be easily adjusted by tweaking the research time of the upgrade as well as the Biomass itself.
I don't have enough experience with comp play to say if Umbra or Leap is the more powerful upgrade of the two and thus comment on which of them should require the second Hive.
Experimental: upgrades are no longer researched in the Hive but in the respective chambers once the necessary Biomass level is reached.
A Shift can research Gorge Tunnels, Leap and Xenocide.
A Crag can research Bile Bomb, Umbra and Stomp.
A Shade can research Shadowstep, Vortex and Spores.
If you lose all chambers of the respective type, you also lose the associated upgrades (but keep them until you die) until you rebuild the chamber.
Implications of this change:
+ Marines have more targets to attack.
+ Aliens are forced to invest into specific chambers if they want specific upgrades. (Though this is something that would probably have been done anyway)
+ Marines can deny specific sets of upgrades through other means than killing the Hive…
- …though not very effectively, since it's not easy to kill all structures of a type in the entire map and it doesn't take much to rebuild a chamber somewhere in the map and the loss only takes effect when the lifeform dies.
- The more chambers you have, the more stuff you can research at once. This takes away one time aspect of Biomass and limited numbers of Hives since committing to a Biomass research meant that you could not research an upgrade at the same time. (Basically this allows aliens to go "Double Arms Lab", but it's way more cost effective for them because they need the structures anyway)
There would be other means of tying structures to upgrades, but I am afraid that most of them won't yield any positive results:
- You could make it so that one structure of a type can only house one upgrade. That would force you to build more of them across the map (also to confuse marines about what structure actually houses an update). Marines could the take out upgrades one at a time and would not have to worry about taking out every single of those structures across the entire map. You could either make it so that the actual research cost for the upgrades is pretty low (and compensate with a higher Biomass cost) so that you always have to re-research the upgrade when the associated structure dies. Or you could make the re-research free after researching the upgrade for the first time, so you just tie it to a new structure after losing it.
Drifters got nerfed hard.
- The have less HP (I think with armor they have 270 hitpoints against bullet weapons now. But they have plenty of armor instead of HP, so they are better protected against Pistols and GLs).
- Drifters are spawned next to the Hive and vulnerable there while they are "constructing" before they become active. (Sewlek already mentioned that he does not like this mechanic. It was just tried out because someone complained about Drifters being OP)
- Drifters are no longer cloaked by default.
- However, they still don't gain any passive abilities from Hives again. Which means that they are actually never cloaked unless in range of an actual Shade.
I am fine with reduced HP to make them less powerful. The removal of default cloak is good too, but they should gain their passive upgrades back then so that you can still get the scout with a Shade Hive or the agility of a Shift to increase their chances of survival.
I don't see any reason for crags/shifts/shades to be associated with abilities. The upgrade structures were added specifically to remove that type of association - using both approaches at the same time is very confusing. Would make more sense for a new type of structure to unlock abilities... But not much.
@Locklear I hope that glancing removal is not something that will flow through and as such am accounting for the welder changes to be factored into vanilla as a stand alone/
Removing glancing bites without changing hit zones simply makes getting kills as a new player harder, after all glancing bites came about as the narrow bite zone was too unforgiving and not "logical" for new players who only have the teeth as a reference (no x-hair).
That its been removed in the BT simply re-affirms my belief that most of these changes are aimed at the comp scene rather than the casual player and dont factor in the fun element.
He removed glancing but he made it easier to get 75. Please know what you are talking about.
Is the 75 bite cone as big as the 25+50+75 bite zones are in vanilla?
This is, from what I understand (and other have indicated) not the case so it is harder to land a hit (all be it a 25 hit).
Therefor its harder for new players to get kills, missing bites all together is far more frustrating than glancing bites doing less damage.
Marginally increasing the 75 bite zone is of no real value if the overall bite zone is smaller.
@Ironhorse I personally never felt the skulk was lawnmower material, unless playing against someone like mf...but even when they nerfed the bite cone (before they added glancing) he still killed marines just as easily.
But he is a very good player and as such should not be used as a measurement.
During this supposed lawnmower skulk times I was struggling to maintain a slightly better than 1:1 K:D ratio...new players had an even harder time.
Sure top players could cause all sorts of havoc...but thats more a reflection on their skills than any inherent issues with the bite zone.
Just because good players can be devestating does not mean you need to increase the skill floor (which is what has happened).
Hit reg and FPS issues had greater impact on alien win rates than the bite zone size (as its no longer a cone shape (one of the better changes)).
With both of those being massively improved from the period in the beta when we saw these changes I dont think we can use the win/loss rates as a good guide.
Besides...even when losing marines is fun to play...aliens is not...if its not fun ppl wont play...you cant have a game where ppl dont want to play 1 side as its less fun...win/loss rates are secondary to fun for casual players.
Comments
It's obviously confusing as fuck because people still need to get it explained to them 6 months down to release, there's no XHAIR to even remotely line up what a 75 cone is to where 50 cone starts to what you can get away with on a 25 cone, it's just crap.
Just because you had no issue with the bite zone after the nerf and before the addition of the glancing does not mean the rest of the world is at your same calibre (from memory you were one of the people saying it was fine at the time).
tbh mf...you would mostl likely still rack up kills if they halved the current 75 bite zone and removed glancing all together....but you're one of the players who is the exception and far from the norm...your level of skill is certainly well beyond those of most players...more so new ones.
This game should be accessible to players at all skill levels...that means new players deserve to get kills..even on the alien team.
Narrowing the bite zone will do nothing to help make this game fun for new players...unless you believe fun should be solely based on a challenge...and not a reward (getting kills is the reward most of us play for...not to spend hours challenging ourselves to be good enough to get a kill).
Sure my parents played that game...but they did not have to get it over my front 2 teeth...which is pretty much what it feels like from a skulks view.
If they were 30 cm to left or right I would no see the spoon if my eyes were in teh back of my mouth as they are for the skulk.
@xao Well it will take even more bites if they remove glancing as they will miss totally instead of hit those glancing.
The issue that most new players have is that marines get tougher to kill as the game progresses thanks to armour upgrades...glancing bites actually mean that new players get rewarded with more kills as misses are now partial hits.
Does not surpirse me that you say that....surely you would not say you are a casual player though.
At the time that glancing blows came in there was a chorus of "clan/pro" players who said that no change was needed...and that new players needed to learn to aim.
Being a casual player who maybe gets an hour or two a week to be able to play I dont have the time to dedicate to learning to play with such tight hit zones and having a mental picture in my mind of where the hit zone is.
Considering all the other issues in first closing the gap and tracking a marine all this does is make the game unaccesible to a lot of people....and turns off people who have invested large amounts of time in the past to getting down some of the basics to even get close enough to engage.
@Grissi I have experienced both BT bite zone and the ones back in beta days when the cones (at the time) got nerfed...the whole learning to hit argument was garbage back then and is garbage now.
Really its more an argument for increasing the 75 zone back out to what it was (which used to cover all 3 zones) as this would reduce their frustration and increase their enjoyment from an earlier point...thus retaining more casual players.
Casual players who struggle to close the distance to engage, track a marine whilst he is jumping like a rabbit on crack get frustrated at not landing hits just because the marines not exactly dead centre between the two front teeth.
Its fine to have a really high skill ceiling for "comp/clan" players to learn to get to...but not fare for the floor to be beyond the realms of casual players.
Running around getting shot and not getting kills is hardly going to entice casual players to invest time in a game...theres plenty of other options out there and the different approach alien gameplay takes is enough of an obstacle to begin with.
I also seen few newer players start in bt and had a small chat to them. All who I talked to up to now agreed that they liked the bites better in bt because they actually did damage when they hit. They also agreed that it took less time for them to adjust because they knew that when they hit it did full damage.
Its really hard do compare this to the beta days when performance was much much worse and the bite cone had few bugs with it, like not hitting targets when you were to close to them.
Also as I said have played on BT and found it was as frustrating as before.
I guess I just must be shit and not capable of playing aliens...despite easily playing over 400 hours on aliens alone.....I do know that I am far from the worst gamer out there though...so I am certainly not alone in falling into this bracket.
Movement changes in the BT were partly because in vanilla it's too easy for marines to outmaneuver skulks at close range. You can still strafe and jump about just fine, don't need built in specific dodge mechanics.
I think maybe that comes from the fact I had blink to get movement started again any time i wanted where the skulk I didn't have such a feature since I didn't have leap.
EDIT: I streamed my play so if you wanna watch me flail around as a newbie skulk skip to 56 min the scrim starts shortly after that too - http://www.twitch.tv/current1y/b/413177677
I also forgot to mention that I still believe the LMG spread is too wide. Shooting at skulks at medium range will cause you to miss a fair amount of bullets which is unacceptable imo. I would like the spread reduced closer to that of the live build.
I'm not up to date at the current changelog, but that's besides the point of this post anyway.
I want instead throw an idea in the room, i got from a post a few days ago in this thread:
It was often stated, that the higher lifeforms can't be too impactful to the game due the notorious lifeform explosion.
On the other side, hardcaps like X Fades max, wouldn't have a good effect on the game.
How about for Lerk, Fade and Onos capacity are produced by hives in the following manner:
- After X minutes, hives start producing capacity (for example 0mins lerk, 4mins fade, 8mins Onos (later to encourage not to save for onos the whole game)
- It takes Y minutes to produce a capacity(for example 3mins Lerk, 4mins fade, 8mins onos)
- If someone evolves a lifeform the capacity reduced by 1 (or not!, see "small scale alternative")
- Special treatment if the capacity is 0, then Y is halved (so first Lerk possible 1,5mins, fade 6mins in this example)
- It could be intuitive shown in the evolution menu (numbers and progress until next)
- There should be a way to speed up the progression by X % for Y tres/10sec, so you can rush lerk/fades/onos at the start of the game and when you lost all of them
(A little bit like tower wars creep spawn in the wc3 map)
What would the effects on the gameplay be (in my opinion)?
- With the right numbers, the game could have a longer ever changing midgame (With very late avaible Onos the game could revolve around a growing amount of fades/multiple fade waves)
- Lerk and Fades especially could be revamped into more "core" units
- 3rd, 4rd Hive has more impact
- More options / surprises(!) So much possibilties, you could invest your tres for fades so you can field 3 fades after say 8 minutes, but your onos/upgrades/hivecount will be delayed
There could evolve special strategies like "2RT's into fast lerks to expand to more RT's"
- In certain stages of the games, there are could be now enormous temporary shifts:
Think of the alien team loses all their fades and the capacity is 0.
Thats a huge win for marines and the aliens now are on the defense until a new fade is ready - a very tense game moment
- Skulks more important, when Lerk gets a more supportive role (ranged/more HP spores+umbra) , when all higher lifeforms died and due limits
What about Marines?
As said I'm not really into the actual stage of the mod, so i don't know if the cheap, weak exo is desirable.
But also for marines the exos (and shotguns/JP) could be a strong powerhouse but limited by time and money
Negatives:
- Fighting for the only avaible evolution: It's like in BF3 everyone wants that jet/heli after respawning.
But in contrast the next fade is only 2mins away and it's a team game (And also can be speed up by the khammender).
- Rookie dying in fades over and over again.
There should a system hindering player to do so, for example a player who died in the last minutes as a Fade have to wait 30sec longer to use the new capacity (so other have the chance to fade if they wish)
- "Spawn camping" People hanging in the hive waiting for an evolution
Since evolution is possible everywhere and you always can fall back for an semi save location, i hope that's not a huge problem or admins handle it
- Individual have high impact on the team game.
You can set your team very far behind when you lose for example that first fade(-egg). Possibility to troll your team. But in the end you primary wasted your pres and marine comms can ruin their team even more and easier. If problems arise, admins/modder can step in, in creative ways like player voting for that precious first egg or something, doesn't need to be hardcoded in the game.
You have an excellent fade in your team, but some egoplayer snaps that first egg. it will happen, but the NS2 community is so incredible constructive communicative in games (MOBAs anyone? ) i think discussing who gets it will, will be the norm
Small scale alternative
Alternative would be that the capacity is persistent and never decreasing, so solely to deactivate lifeform explosion (after 6mins 1 fade, after 10mins 2fades and so on)
im guessing you want strafe/aircontrol for marine jumping? the marines hopping around to dodge was already a source of ridicule in vanilla, i dont think making it a bigger part of the game would give a good impression...
He removed glancing but he made it easier to get 75. Please know what you are talking about.
Or is the movement system somehow aiding in lessening this impact?
I mean i've been playing it.. and i don't have a problem landing my bites really, i just seem to be fighting against the movement system mostly, so something tells me if we had pre launch movement plus this bite cone itd be a problem somehow.
As far as your idea, I like it, though I feel the negatives you point out are pretty serious. As it is now, if you're a new player and you grab a quick fade only to die 30 seconds later, well, you've lost all your pres which yes means your team has lost the possibility of you going, say, onos for a long time, but at least you haven't completely gimped your team by stopping someone who IS a good fade from providing that valuable mid-game support. Someone earlier had a similar suggestion for shotguns and I had the same reservations. And the possibilities of trolling just makes it worse. Troll comms are bad enough. We don't need even more avenues for this to occur.
However, that being said, I like the "small scale alternative", where if you do immediately die as fade, we're basically back to the vanilla situation. But the system still helps tone down the lifeform explosions. In fact, for added depth, what if we made the capacity be research-based, so that a team could choose to either focus on getting lots of high level lifeforms up OR go for that second or third hive. Scaling all this to team size might be tricky though. That would have to be worked out somehow.
from all the PCWS we played over the last week, it was alien wins only.
biggest issues are:
- the skulks movement speed and low hp rts of the marins.
both got different impact to the game, so you would need to change one of them and see how the other part plays out. i would try to boost the HP of marin rts first.
- umbra / frenzy / armor heal of drifters
umbra itselfs is to powerful in the early game, it would need to scale with biosmass. so i could stay useful overtime, but wouldnt be a game breaker if u upgrade it instantly. also it could help aliens to finish the game if u reach 3 hives and maxium biomass.
the other drifter abilitys are way to powerful if u combine them. they should have a longer CD, so that u can use one of these abilitys at a time and not all at the same second. you need to consider multi drifter use for that issue, that ppl cant keep spamming everything if they use 2 or more drifters.
- upgrade explosion (carapace)
you should reduce the starting res for both teams, because aliens can get carapace level 3 instantly and biomass short after. its like breaking the game to much with that HP explosion. if the starting res for both teams would be lower, the game would play out diffrently.
i cant say anything else to the other parts of the game, since if the early game is still unbalanced, the midgame like it should isnt possible.
Very nice. This adds some delay to the initial Umbra havoc (Biomass 3) and this delay can afterall be easily adjusted by tweaking the research time of the upgrade as well as the Biomass itself.
I don't have enough experience with comp play to say if Umbra or Leap is the more powerful upgrade of the two and thus comment on which of them should require the second Hive.
Implications of this change:
+ Marines have more targets to attack.
+ Aliens are forced to invest into specific chambers if they want specific upgrades. (Though this is something that would probably have been done anyway)
+ Marines can deny specific sets of upgrades through other means than killing the Hive…
- …though not very effectively, since it's not easy to kill all structures of a type in the entire map and it doesn't take much to rebuild a chamber somewhere in the map and the loss only takes effect when the lifeform dies.
- The more chambers you have, the more stuff you can research at once. This takes away one time aspect of Biomass and limited numbers of Hives since committing to a Biomass research meant that you could not research an upgrade at the same time. (Basically this allows aliens to go "Double Arms Lab", but it's way more cost effective for them because they need the structures anyway)
There would be other means of tying structures to upgrades, but I am afraid that most of them won't yield any positive results:
- You could make it so that one structure of a type can only house one upgrade. That would force you to build more of them across the map (also to confuse marines about what structure actually houses an update). Marines could the take out upgrades one at a time and would not have to worry about taking out every single of those structures across the entire map. You could either make it so that the actual research cost for the upgrades is pretty low (and compensate with a higher Biomass cost) so that you always have to re-research the upgrade when the associated structure dies. Or you could make the re-research free after researching the upgrade for the first time, so you just tie it to a new structure after losing it.
- The have less HP (I think with armor they have 270 hitpoints against bullet weapons now. But they have plenty of armor instead of HP, so they are better protected against Pistols and GLs).
- Drifters are spawned next to the Hive and vulnerable there while they are "constructing" before they become active. (Sewlek already mentioned that he does not like this mechanic. It was just tried out because someone complained about Drifters being OP)
- Drifters are no longer cloaked by default.
- However, they still don't gain any passive abilities from Hives again. Which means that they are actually never cloaked unless in range of an actual Shade.
I am fine with reduced HP to make them less powerful. The removal of default cloak is good too, but they should gain their passive upgrades back then so that you can still get the scout with a Shade Hive or the agility of a Shift to increase their chances of survival.
Is the 75 bite cone as big as the 25+50+75 bite zones are in vanilla?
This is, from what I understand (and other have indicated) not the case so it is harder to land a hit (all be it a 25 hit).
Therefor its harder for new players to get kills, missing bites all together is far more frustrating than glancing bites doing less damage.
Marginally increasing the 75 bite zone is of no real value if the overall bite zone is smaller.
@Ironhorse I personally never felt the skulk was lawnmower material, unless playing against someone like mf...but even when they nerfed the bite cone (before they added glancing) he still killed marines just as easily.
But he is a very good player and as such should not be used as a measurement.
During this supposed lawnmower skulk times I was struggling to maintain a slightly better than 1:1 K:D ratio...new players had an even harder time.
Sure top players could cause all sorts of havoc...but thats more a reflection on their skills than any inherent issues with the bite zone.
Just because good players can be devestating does not mean you need to increase the skill floor (which is what has happened).
Hit reg and FPS issues had greater impact on alien win rates than the bite zone size (as its no longer a cone shape (one of the better changes)).
With both of those being massively improved from the period in the beta when we saw these changes I dont think we can use the win/loss rates as a good guide.
Besides...even when losing marines is fun to play...aliens is not...if its not fun ppl wont play...you cant have a game where ppl dont want to play 1 side as its less fun...win/loss rates are secondary to fun for casual players.