This is one of the reasons why Crits were added in TF2, so even the average joe can get lucky a lot and get kills.
Hah, what an absolutely horrendous idea to fix something. I'm truly glad I never spent more then a few hours playing that steaming dung pile of a game.
It's Super Effective!Join Date: 2012-08-28Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Certainly, people learn in different ways, and video's aren't the final answer.
I for one have only made my contribution because there was a demand for it, and it has helped push things in the right direction.
Looking back since NS2's launch, many additions to the game have been made improve new player introduction:
Explore mode, those little video popups when you're re-spawning, training mode versus bots (marine), the videos I'm working on...are now a reality. I would assume that the next logical step would be Player vs AI as Aliens, then eventually, an actual interactive training course that combine the efforts of the previously mentioned. This would bring it up to the level of most non-indie games today. There they can play, and try out stuff in a controlled environment.
You can see that the components towards this goal are being completed one at a time, meanwhile the DEV team also spend what little manpower and time they have evolving the core game play itself. Might I remind you how small their team is.
This goal could be achieved even sooner if a talented modder out there made said "training crash course". That would go to great lengths to helping out, otherwise we will simply need to wait until UWE gets there.
Don't know if any of you have been on a server where everyone is bad (maybe you guys are too good) but the response is generally positive. You don't need random kills to make bad players have fun. Just stick them together, and let people with different skillsets and playstyles (skulls vs. Gorge) feel useful for the team.
I am a seasoned veteran of Natural Selection. I've played this game from the beginning.
The original post has this guy complaining about balance. F-O about the balance, and focus on your strategy. This is the best game ever. Consistently tweaking balance or game variables is bad.
You have to re-learn how to play the game to figure out what works for you.
I shouldnt have to load up tic-tac toe and re-learn rules of engagement.
PS: Thanks for increasing skulk health from 70hp...thats all i ever wanted....12years ago..
Also, please re-add the vent in tram from mezzanine to server room..that is seriously messing up my flaking tactics...I will create a post on this. : P
What really needs to be focused on is performance and marketing.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
edited July 2013
Agree 100% about the tutorial videos Requiem. They will do very little for the average joe. They'd rather jump into the game and not have to sit through videos of someone else playing to learn how to play. I'm the same way myself. I'd rather jump in and learn as I'm playing.
I agree completely. Pure video tutorials are a bad way to implement learning mechanics in something requiring a lot of interaction from the user. A tiny fraction will take the time to watch and study a video of someone playing the game. A tutorial needs to be interactive or it is next to useless.
A competitive game doesn't equal a complex game, and a game doesn't need to be complex to be competitive. NS2 is ridiculously overly complicated without the depth to back it up. See NS1 or Quake.
Even when they do learn how to play, if they don't have the hand/eye coordination to keep up, they will never do well and will only just get frustrated. This happens a lot with casual players and they end up just getting frustrated from dying over and over with no chance of doing well themselves because of a high skill ceiling.
Seems true in any game. If you're not very good, you won't do well. Sorry. As for still getting enjoyment out of the game, I don't think you need to resort to randomness to achieve this. How about creating roles that are important and enjoyable but have an accessible skill floor. If we're sticking with TF2 I think the medic and engineer.
As for getting frustrated and dying over and over. I don't know what the solution is to this, I don't know if there is a good one. Most games just reward the player with some sort of progression stat. The population is too low to support match making. Emphasize use of rookie servers maybe.
edit: Actually, radman summed it up pretty well.
Bit on explore mode. It could be a nice supplement to a tutorial, but I don't understand why it needs to exist. Those tooltips should appear for a new player while they're playing the game. Not sitting alone in a listen server trying to remember what a shell does and why explore mode says you only need 1 for each upgrade. Engage people.
It's Super Effective!Join Date: 2012-08-28Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
I've created a separate post to consolidate both views FOR or AGAINST separating pub play from competitive league play, so that it can be found easier.
FlaterectomyNetherlandistanJoin Date: 2005-02-03Member: 39643Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
If UWE were to create interactive tutorials (like the Hazard Course in Half-Life) then that would likely mean they need to create more entities to the game such as trigggers and scripts, and that would excite me as a mapper. I know JimWest created the Extra Entities Mod, but the more functionality in the vanilla game the better; mods can break after new builds, and eventually modders can move on.
A competitive game doesn't equal a complex game, and a game doesn't need to be complex to be competitive. NS2 is ridiculously overly complicated without the depth to back it up. See NS1 or Quake.
I'd be interested to hear some examples of what you think could be simplified in NS2 without removing depth.
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
This is one of the reasons why Crits were added in TF2, so even the average joe can get lucky a lot and get kills.
Hah, what an absolutely horrendous idea to fix something. I'm truly glad I never spent more then a few hours playing that steaming dung pile of a game.
I actually thought it was a very clever way of countering the issue, tfc started to stagnate and the comp scene die, tf2 would have only had a short existence had valve not thought about how to attract and keep the casual pub player.
All crits did was damage the ego of the better players who occasionally died to a lucky shot thanks to crit.
It did not make a bad player good or a good player great, it just helped keep new players encouraged.
UWE really needed to think of how they planned to address the same issue...expecting ppl to watch multiple hours of tutorial videos is a cop out....and an ineffective one.
Well there are lots of problems with random crit other than the random element.
1. Scales so that players who are doing the most damage do crits more often. Which means bad players actually get less crits.
2. Too binary, that a random crit often decides an engagment on its own. The game playing the game for you.
3. In most situations, it can't be reacted to. This is what seperates rng that emphasizes adaptation and quick wits/reflexes, and rng that just makes the game more random.
I understand its just an opinion, but there are a lot of things I'd call random crits before "a good idea".
@Ironman, you are the first one to mention autobalance in this thread. The idea of a ranking system is for players to see the strength of themselfs and others in order to make fair teams BEFORE a match starts. Autobalance in NS2 is ridiculous.
This is one of the reasons why Crits were added in TF2, so even the average joe can get lucky a lot and get kills.
Hah, what an absolutely horrendous idea to fix something. I'm truly glad I never spent more then a few hours playing that steaming dung pile of a game.
I actually thought it was a very clever way of countering the issue, tfc started to stagnate and the comp scene die, tf2 would have only had a short existence had valve not thought about how to attract and keep the casual pub player.
All crits did was damage the ego of the better players who occasionally died to a lucky shot thanks to crit.
It did not make a bad player good or a good player great, it just helped keep new players encouraged.
UWE really needed to think of how they planned to address the same issue...expecting ppl to watch multiple hours of tutorial videos is a cop out....and an ineffective one.
I think the crits were a manageable solution for a huge mainstream title. TF2 does a good job on being very nice, accessible and polished in its mild, often a little bland, middle of the road way.
Could NS2 pull off similar? Probably not. You can't really go toe-to-toe with all the big mainstream titles in overcrowded casual market. NS2 stands a much better chance by being a bit smarter, demanding and rewarding gameplay experience.
Of course that doesn't make the pubstomping anything less of an issue, but I think it makes the TF2 solutions less viable for NS2.
@Ironman, you are the first one to mention autobalance in this thread. The idea of a ranking system is for players to see the strength of themselfs and others in order to make fair teams BEFORE a match starts. Autobalance in NS2 is ridiculous.
I hated autobalance when the game was released.
Then I realized how great it is.
Not because it directly balances the games (it doesn't), but because it punishes the winning team when teams are overly imbalanced.
The problem with many team games is that not only are teams more often than not unequal (which is just how things are without good matchmaking), but it is very hard for the winning team to realize how not-fun the game is for the losing team. As it is in NS2.
Autobalance fixes that by introducing punishment to the winning team.
When balance is bad enough, so people from one team leave, suddenly not being able to spawn is a pretty good reminder to better do everything you can to create better balance next time, because what was not your problem is now your problem. Like it or not, enforcing discipline this way works very well.
It also works for other problems. Just yesterday I had a game with an AFK guy that nobody wanted to kick, despite multiple pleas. Guess what happened when - due to autobalance -the first non-AFK player got trapped in the spawn queue, not being able to spawn, spectating the guy standing in base and doing nothing? All of a sudden, the AFK was kicked very fast.
Autobalance is great in how it indirectly does help with team balance and other problems )
TLDR: good matchmaking and "teammaking" would really help this game.
Maybe they should focus their effort to make the game actually fun to play and in order to do this they need to add some better sensations to the fight between marines and aliens. For the moment, imo, as a marine you are stuck with the rifle 90% of time with a shitty sound that repeats ad nauseam and no recoil at all. The only weapon that gives some thrill is the GL but common you can use it 2-3 maximum per games, it's not enough, same for the shotgun. As an aliens, it's a little better but still it lacks more blood and guts, the ragdolls are poors and doesn't give a good feedback of what you are actually dealing to marines.
Really, imo, this game need to improve on the FPS aspect and give more adrenaline with affordable weapons, faster gameplay etc.
Look at Savage 2, i have played a lot of it and it's very similar to NS2 in terms of mechanics, but what makes me stay in the end was the interesting gameplay when you are actually fighting an opponent on the battlefield because there is a lot of depth and an energetic gameplay behind the strategic aspect of the game ; can i say the same for NS ? definitely not.
Maybe they should focus their effort to make the game actually fun to play and in order to do this they need to add some better sensations to the fight between marines and aliens. For the moment, imo, as a marine you are stuck with the rifle 90% of time with a shitty sound that repeats ad nauseam and no recoil at all. The only weapon that gives some thrill is the GL but common you can use it 2-3 maximum per games, it's not enough, same for the shotgun. As an aliens, it's a little better but still it lacks more blood and guts, the ragdolls are poors and doesn't give a good feedback of what you are actually dealing to marines.
Really, imo, this game need to improve on the FPS aspect and give more adrenaline with affordable weapons, faster gameplay etc.
Look at Savage 2, i have played a lot of it and it's very similar to NS2 in terms of mechanics, but what makes me stay in the end was the interesting gameplay when you are actually fighting an opponent on the battlefield because there is a lot of depth and an energetic gameplay behind the strategic aspect of the game ; can i say the same for NS ? definitely not.
Recoil would make the LMG more fun? GL is the most thrilling weapon? Gameplay is not fast enough?
He's probably talking about the feel of the weapons, and in that aspect I would have to agree. The GL feels as it should. The LMG sounds quite crap for something that you'll still start off with near the end of the game as a default weapon, but I'd sooner accept flight simulator controls for the lerk and telefragging marines by the fade than recoil for the LMG.
Slow is probably not the word to use for the game's pacing. It's actually far from that. I'd say it feels static most of the time because people only ever do the same damn thing, and you'll only ever see aliens evolving the same way all the time in pubs, skulks -> fadeasplode with the token lerk -> gg. With a name like Natural Selection, one would expect to find the strategic aspect more fluid, sort of like how aliens would evolve specifically to counter marine strategies, and marines then have to counter said evolutions, resulting in a back and forth game until one side fails to adequately respond to new threats. But that's as much a map problem as it is a game mechanics issue (I'm looking at you, hydroanalysis).
Yeah exactly : feel of the weapons. You know before speaking about strategic stuffs and complicate things, the first thing to do is to make the game actually fun to play and i think it's something very important to attract new players and make them stay, look at chivalry this game is buggy as hell, don't have as depth as NS2 but still it's damn fun to kill some people and cut people in half with a sword or an hammer. In NS2 it's always too mathematical, you are against a Fade as a marine and you are basicely screwed, you start shooting with your rifle that makes that shitty sound and you know you are gonna die before the fight even starts... you play some matchs and this scenario repeats over and over again, there is nothing to learn about being better in combat because it's so mathematic and limited then you start to get bored and switch to another game that gives you some challenge and some reason to be better, a game that makes you feel you can be important for the team and/or you can improve to be better. In NS2 i was dying the first hours against a Fade in a couple of seconds, 15 hours later nothing has changed...
FlaterectomyNetherlandistanJoin Date: 2005-02-03Member: 39643Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
edited July 2013
I cannot speak from b250 or b251 experience, as I have none due to RL circumstances, but I also usually die as marine in a 1-on-1 fight with a fade (the exception being bad fades and already damaged fades), and I have over 1000 hours under my belt. That doesn't change.
Experience will teach you that being with your teammates and not running around in each other's firing lines (positioning, poitioning, positioning) creates the most likely scenario for taking them down. And, of course, close range shotgun hits.
EDIT: Oh, and jetpacks... erm, let's just settle for 'tech advantage'.
Yeah but still, that is not fun, the strategy side of the game must not restrict the FPS area that much...
Allow Fade to be killed more often and buyable more often, same thing goes for everything = faster paced game, more fun.
Make a system so the people that kill the most gains more ressource = candy for better players, real reason to improve and have the pleasure to deserve an exo by your skill and not by mathematic gain of ressource over the game, which is very slow btw.
Yeah but still, that is not fun, the strategy side of the game must not restrict the FPS area that much...
Allow Fade to be killed more often and buyable more often, same thing goes for everything = faster paced game, more fun.
So you want to be an unstoppable force of one? NS2 is a team game. If you like the Army of One, go play CoD and Battlefield to your hearts content. When you get bored of that like the rest of us, come be a TEAM player and you might start enjoying NS2.
edit* in response to your sneaky edit. Fades cost 40 res for a reason and should preform as a 40 res unit. This is also not TF2 where there are classes right off the bat. It used to be worse with Exos, onos, and fades. They were much more res and about the same effectiveness. The goal of the marines is to delay fades to get ahead in the tech race. There is a balance to this game. If you are getting swamped by fades in 4 minutes, your team is doing something very wrong.
You don't create a teamgame without giving players individual reason to play together, at the moment it's indeed a team focused game but there is no concrete value to play together. I am not a marine engaged by unknownworld to play their game, i am a player and what i want is having fun, if playing in team is forced for no apparent reason this is just weird, it's just a game after all...
You don't create a teamgame without giving players individual reason to play together, at the moment it's indeed a team focused game but there is no concrete value to play together. I am not a marine engaged by unknownworld to play their game, i am a player and what i want is having fun, if playing in team is forced for no apparent reason this is just weird, it's just a game after all...
What? I think your mind has been corrupted by the mainstream game type of the day =( If i were you, i would stay far away for MMORPGs.
Then again you might not find enjoyment winning through team play with others. I find soloplayer online games like CoD, Battlefield, and others to be fun for an hour or two but get uninstalled. Sure if i cared about achievements and levels i would play more, but for me it lacks that team element NS2 has. I am not trying to belittle you for your opinion on not liking team games, just that you want to turn NS2 into something more akin to the games i mentioned. please, just no.
The reasons to play together are what you are complaining about. A fade against 3 decent marines is a bead fade. Combine some tech choices.... instant win. On JP/shotgun, one lmg for distance, and a flamethrower to sap energy. Only the best of fades will get out of the alive.
On another note, if you do enjoy the lone wolf style of play, it can be accomplished with a lot better results on alien side. Not as much as NS1 but it is still there. It is why i like playing both sides. Refreshing even.
Well what i like the most is commanding because i like using mic, that's the real good part of this game ^^
I agree with everything you say but winning in this game is not even rewarding how can you force people to play together if there is no concrete value added (i can deal with it) and more : no reason to win (winning in this game means no difference with loosing). If i was a real marine i could deal with it, it would be my job obeying to orders etc. but no it's just a game and a game must give you some reasons to achieve victory or to play together in order to be fun !
Believe me i don't like CoD or those types of game, what makes me come to NS2 first was the atmosphere to be honest but that can't be the only thing that will makes me stay in the end! This game is really polished, i mean you look at a game how it looks, how it goes it's really thrilling like a good sci-fi movie, for me they did the hardest thing very well but sadly for the moment simple thing like the game being actually fun to play has been forgotten, now i see people talking about nerfing that stuff or the others one but i don't think it's because of balance or overcomplicated aspect that the game is not addicting.
I think i understand now. Once in the ready room there is no difference between the two teams. There are no achievements, levels, perks, or reasons to win other than to say "I won". There isnt even a round counter to see how many alien to marine wins. Every game is a fresh start and every end finite.
I completely agree with you when i join servers i know no one. It isnt that fun, beyond my own k:d e-peen. Truly the real fun is frequenting the same server or a community. The most fun i have ever had was when i was apart of Tactical Gamer in NS1. Not the best players but a great group of people. There was a lot of satisfaction beating the teams i knew i would struggle against or heal spraying to death a player i had a mock feud. My suggestion is to find a server that has admins present, a decent player skill level, and make friends. My new nemesis is CurryAllDay and he knows it. Im a decent player but he kicks my butt with his fade or shotgun (dont tell him that or anyone from Dn or Nxzl for that matter) but i enjoy killing him and going after only him lol.
TL:DR Join a community. I think you will find the satisfaction you are looking for and not through empty points or achievements but lasting and meaningful human interaction.
Comments
Hah, what an absolutely horrendous idea to fix something. I'm truly glad I never spent more then a few hours playing that steaming dung pile of a game.
I for one have only made my contribution because there was a demand for it, and it has helped push things in the right direction.
Looking back since NS2's launch, many additions to the game have been made improve new player introduction:
Explore mode, those little video popups when you're re-spawning, training mode versus bots (marine), the videos I'm working on...are now a reality. I would assume that the next logical step would be Player vs AI as Aliens, then eventually, an actual interactive training course that combine the efforts of the previously mentioned. This would bring it up to the level of most non-indie games today. There they can play, and try out stuff in a controlled environment.
You can see that the components towards this goal are being completed one at a time, meanwhile the DEV team also spend what little manpower and time they have evolving the core game play itself. Might I remind you how small their team is.
This goal could be achieved even sooner if a talented modder out there made said "training crash course". That would go to great lengths to helping out, otherwise we will simply need to wait until UWE gets there.
Cheers,
ISE
The original post has this guy complaining about balance. F-O about the balance, and focus on your strategy. This is the best game ever. Consistently tweaking balance or game variables is bad.
You have to re-learn how to play the game to figure out what works for you.
I shouldnt have to load up tic-tac toe and re-learn rules of engagement.
PS: Thanks for increasing skulk health from 70hp...thats all i ever wanted....12years ago..
Also, please re-add the vent in tram from mezzanine to server room..that is seriously messing up my flaking tactics...I will create a post on this. : P
What really needs to be focused on is performance and marketing.
I agree completely. Pure video tutorials are a bad way to implement learning mechanics in something requiring a lot of interaction from the user. A tiny fraction will take the time to watch and study a video of someone playing the game. A tutorial needs to be interactive or it is next to useless.
A competitive game doesn't equal a complex game, and a game doesn't need to be complex to be competitive. NS2 is ridiculously overly complicated without the depth to back it up. See NS1 or Quake.
Seems true in any game. If you're not very good, you won't do well. Sorry. As for still getting enjoyment out of the game, I don't think you need to resort to randomness to achieve this. How about creating roles that are important and enjoyable but have an accessible skill floor. If we're sticking with TF2 I think the medic and engineer.
As for getting frustrated and dying over and over. I don't know what the solution is to this, I don't know if there is a good one. Most games just reward the player with some sort of progression stat. The population is too low to support match making. Emphasize use of rookie servers maybe.
edit: Actually, radman summed it up pretty well.
Bit on explore mode. It could be a nice supplement to a tutorial, but I don't understand why it needs to exist. Those tooltips should appear for a new player while they're playing the game. Not sitting alone in a listen server trying to remember what a shell does and why explore mode says you only need 1 for each upgrade. Engage people.
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/131280/petition-develop-vanilla-ns2-separate-from-competative-scene#latest
Cheers,
ISE
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
All crits did was damage the ego of the better players who occasionally died to a lucky shot thanks to crit.
It did not make a bad player good or a good player great, it just helped keep new players encouraged.
UWE really needed to think of how they planned to address the same issue...expecting ppl to watch multiple hours of tutorial videos is a cop out....and an ineffective one.
1. Scales so that players who are doing the most damage do crits more often. Which means bad players actually get less crits.
2. Too binary, that a random crit often decides an engagment on its own. The game playing the game for you.
3. In most situations, it can't be reacted to. This is what seperates rng that emphasizes adaptation and quick wits/reflexes, and rng that just makes the game more random.
I understand its just an opinion, but there are a lot of things I'd call random crits before "a good idea".
Could NS2 pull off similar? Probably not. You can't really go toe-to-toe with all the big mainstream titles in overcrowded casual market. NS2 stands a much better chance by being a bit smarter, demanding and rewarding gameplay experience.
Of course that doesn't make the pubstomping anything less of an issue, but I think it makes the TF2 solutions less viable for NS2.
No, it's just used as an example.
Then I realized how great it is.
Not because it directly balances the games (it doesn't), but because it punishes the winning team when teams are overly imbalanced.
The problem with many team games is that not only are teams more often than not unequal (which is just how things are without good matchmaking), but it is very hard for the winning team to realize how not-fun the game is for the losing team. As it is in NS2.
Autobalance fixes that by introducing punishment to the winning team.
When balance is bad enough, so people from one team leave, suddenly not being able to spawn is a pretty good reminder to better do everything you can to create better balance next time, because what was not your problem is now your problem. Like it or not, enforcing discipline this way works very well.
It also works for other problems. Just yesterday I had a game with an AFK guy that nobody wanted to kick, despite multiple pleas. Guess what happened when - due to autobalance -the first non-AFK player got trapped in the spawn queue, not being able to spawn, spectating the guy standing in base and doing nothing? All of a sudden, the AFK was kicked very fast.
Autobalance is great in how it indirectly does help with team balance and other problems
TLDR: good matchmaking and "teammaking" would really help this game.
Really, imo, this game need to improve on the FPS aspect and give more adrenaline with affordable weapons, faster gameplay etc.
Look at Savage 2, i have played a lot of it and it's very similar to NS2 in terms of mechanics, but what makes me stay in the end was the interesting gameplay when you are actually fighting an opponent on the battlefield because there is a lot of depth and an energetic gameplay behind the strategic aspect of the game ; can i say the same for NS ? definitely not.
some are probably already dead
rip
Recoil would make the LMG more fun? GL is the most thrilling weapon? Gameplay is not fast enough?
:-?
Slow is probably not the word to use for the game's pacing. It's actually far from that. I'd say it feels static most of the time because people only ever do the same damn thing, and you'll only ever see aliens evolving the same way all the time in pubs, skulks -> fadeasplode with the token lerk -> gg. With a name like Natural Selection, one would expect to find the strategic aspect more fluid, sort of like how aliens would evolve specifically to counter marine strategies, and marines then have to counter said evolutions, resulting in a back and forth game until one side fails to adequately respond to new threats. But that's as much a map problem as it is a game mechanics issue (I'm looking at you, hydroanalysis).
Experience will teach you that being with your teammates and not running around in each other's firing lines (positioning, poitioning, positioning) creates the most likely scenario for taking them down. And, of course, close range shotgun hits.
EDIT: Oh, and jetpacks... erm, let's just settle for 'tech advantage'.
Allow Fade to be killed more often and buyable more often, same thing goes for everything = faster paced game, more fun.
Make a system so the people that kill the most gains more ressource = candy for better players, real reason to improve and have the pleasure to deserve an exo by your skill and not by mathematic gain of ressource over the game, which is very slow btw.
So you want to be an unstoppable force of one? NS2 is a team game. If you like the Army of One, go play CoD and Battlefield to your hearts content. When you get bored of that like the rest of us, come be a TEAM player and you might start enjoying NS2.
edit* in response to your sneaky edit. Fades cost 40 res for a reason and should preform as a 40 res unit. This is also not TF2 where there are classes right off the bat. It used to be worse with Exos, onos, and fades. They were much more res and about the same effectiveness. The goal of the marines is to delay fades to get ahead in the tech race. There is a balance to this game. If you are getting swamped by fades in 4 minutes, your team is doing something very wrong.
What? I think your mind has been corrupted by the mainstream game type of the day =( If i were you, i would stay far away for MMORPGs.
Then again you might not find enjoyment winning through team play with others. I find soloplayer online games like CoD, Battlefield, and others to be fun for an hour or two but get uninstalled. Sure if i cared about achievements and levels i would play more, but for me it lacks that team element NS2 has. I am not trying to belittle you for your opinion on not liking team games, just that you want to turn NS2 into something more akin to the games i mentioned.
The reasons to play together are what you are complaining about. A fade against 3 decent marines is a bead fade. Combine some tech choices.... instant win. On JP/shotgun, one lmg for distance, and a flamethrower to sap energy. Only the best of fades will get out of the alive.
On another note, if you do enjoy the lone wolf style of play, it can be accomplished with a lot better results on alien side. Not as much as NS1 but it is still there. It is why i like playing both sides. Refreshing even.
I agree with everything you say but winning in this game is not even rewarding how can you force people to play together if there is no concrete value added (i can deal with it) and more : no reason to win (winning in this game means no difference with loosing). If i was a real marine i could deal with it, it would be my job obeying to orders etc. but no it's just a game and a game must give you some reasons to achieve victory or to play together in order to be fun !
Believe me i don't like CoD or those types of game, what makes me come to NS2 first was the atmosphere to be honest but that can't be the only thing that will makes me stay in the end! This game is really polished, i mean you look at a game how it looks, how it goes it's really thrilling like a good sci-fi movie, for me they did the hardest thing very well but sadly for the moment simple thing like the game being actually fun to play has been forgotten, now i see people talking about nerfing that stuff or the others one but i don't think it's because of balance or overcomplicated aspect that the game is not addicting.
I completely agree with you when i join servers i know no one. It isnt that fun, beyond my own k:d e-peen. Truly the real fun is frequenting the same server or a community. The most fun i have ever had was when i was apart of Tactical Gamer in NS1. Not the best players but a great group of people. There was a lot of satisfaction beating the teams i knew i would struggle against or heal spraying to death a player i had a mock feud. My suggestion is to find a server that has admins present, a decent player skill level, and make friends. My new nemesis is CurryAllDay and he knows it. Im a decent player but he kicks my butt with his fade or shotgun (dont tell him that or anyone from Dn or Nxzl for that matter) but i enjoy killing him and going after only him lol.
TL:DR Join a community. I think you will find the satisfaction you are looking for and not through empty points or achievements but lasting and meaningful human interaction.