Players jacking up stats
Kobe
USA Join Date: 2014-06-03 Member: 196367Members
USA Join Date: 2014-06-03 Member: 196367Members
When I played basketball in high school, I remember my coach saying this to me:
10 years later, this is still true. Again and again in online multiplayer games, I see players jacking up stats. It's always the same "I don't care if we win or not, as long as I get my 40/5" mentality. The problem is not so much the fact that they are jacking up stats, the problem is what some people would do in order to get that 40/5.
So what I've done in the past week is speccing a couple of players in my community and this is basically how they do it:
* always avoid big battles such as raiding a hive or defend base from alien rush, always look for lone skulks around the map
* when base is getting bile rushed and comm drops a beacon, never aim for gorges or high life forms, always go for skulks (this result in onos/fades getting away from a chase down / structures being bile bombed)
* never waste ammo on RTs, let teammate do the shoot down while waiting for skulks
* never phase when PG is under attack, wonders off to find lone skulks
* goes into an undefended hive, has ample time to shoot down a upgrade chamber or 2, but instead wait for skulks to spawn to get that easy kill
* finds a gorge tunnel but won't shoot it down, waits on the other side for skulks to come out
Anyway, spec the some players in your ns2 community and you'd be surprised how many people actually do this. Note: the person actually need to be a decent shooter to do this.
Players need to be coached to play defense, because everyone wants to be the guy who puts the ball in the basket.
10 years later, this is still true. Again and again in online multiplayer games, I see players jacking up stats. It's always the same "I don't care if we win or not, as long as I get my 40/5" mentality. The problem is not so much the fact that they are jacking up stats, the problem is what some people would do in order to get that 40/5.
So what I've done in the past week is speccing a couple of players in my community and this is basically how they do it:
* always avoid big battles such as raiding a hive or defend base from alien rush, always look for lone skulks around the map
* when base is getting bile rushed and comm drops a beacon, never aim for gorges or high life forms, always go for skulks (this result in onos/fades getting away from a chase down / structures being bile bombed)
* never waste ammo on RTs, let teammate do the shoot down while waiting for skulks
* never phase when PG is under attack, wonders off to find lone skulks
* goes into an undefended hive, has ample time to shoot down a upgrade chamber or 2, but instead wait for skulks to spawn to get that easy kill
* finds a gorge tunnel but won't shoot it down, waits on the other side for skulks to come out
Anyway, spec the some players in your ns2 community and you'd be surprised how many people actually do this. Note: the person actually need to be a decent shooter to do this.
Comments
Anyway - what is your purpose with this thread exactly?
The players that are able to achieve these scores likely already know this, so I don't think it happens all that often.
1) Most of the time, going in to big battles will actually heavily increase your K/D as a good shooter, cuz you can let your mates take all the bites. The reason smart players don't join the big fights all the time, is because they know they are needed elsewhere. If everyone responds to all the big fights, you get nowhere as marines. You need to spread out and put pressure at multiple points, even if you're getting pressured in base.
2) The skulks are the real damage dealers, pick them off first. In reality, gorges are the easy frags, but it doesn't really help you win to kill them, neither in the short or long term. Focusing higher lifeforms vs skulks is all situational, but a lot of the time, it's the correct decision to kill the skulks first.
3) That's just bullshit. Obviously you preserve ammo if you know you're getting ambushed, but shooting rt's is exactly how you "jack up stats".
4) Obviously you don't phase in to meat grinders. Often times it's better to not use phasegates, because you get to 'sweep the map'. When you jump through the map, you get no information on wether there are aliens in between the gates.
5) Egg locking can often be more productive than killing a chamber or two, especially if you're alone.
6) If you're playing without comp-mod, it's very difficult to solo a tunnel anyways, especially if you waste bullets on anything other than the skulks.
Let me explain why these actions in and of themselves aren't necessarily kill farming, and are instead, rather actions that good players do that happen to lead to higher k/ds.
Everyone who joins a team game is there to fill a role. Players assume roles via expression of body language, i.e. what they do and dont do defines them and their place within that team. You building the RT? Unlucky, support class :P You rushing into the hive with W0 rifles blazing from the start of the game? Dead marine class! etc etc
* always avoid big battles such as raiding a hive or defend base from alien rush, always look for lone skulks around the map
- They are/ could be zoning to protect RTs rather than going 'oh crap it's flashing red!' running to the RT and getting ambushed. Good practice, you get lots of easy kills for doing this.
* when base is getting bile rushed and comm drops a beacon, never aim for gorges or high life forms, always go for skulks (this result in onos/fades getting away from a chase down / structures being bile bombed)
- Yeah dude, gotta make sure someone's killing the things that can do as much damage as the fades but are infinitely easier to hit.
* never waste ammo on RTs, let teammate do the shoot down while waiting for skulks
- If you're the kind of person that doesn't cover your teammate while they take down or build an RT, please reconsider your actions.
Ask yourself what's better- RT goes down as the alien response reaches you, and then you both die because you're reloading instead of watching the exits. OR the RT takes a little longer to go down, but any aliens coming 1-by-1 get shot in the face and die and have to wait to respawn. Dont be one of those guys that power build the armory, obs and arms lab with 5 teammates before leaving base at the start of the round.
* never phase when PG is under attack, wonders off to find lone skulks
Potentially being ignorant, potentially avoiding meat grinder PG. Que?
* goes into an undefended hive, has ample time to shoot down a upgrade chamber or 2, but instead wait for skulks to spawn to get that easy kill
-Shooting down an upgrade makes you super obvious, and a priority target for lifeforms. Because you're unloading all your bullets into a structure, you're much easier for a single lerk or fade to take down in seconds, usually before you can take out "1-2 structures". However shooting spawners is much less noticeable, and usually warrants a stronger response since you're only pumping out like 20 bullets every 8 seconds or so and therefore going to have more bullets for lerks etc.
* finds a gorge tunnel but won't shoot it down, waits on the other side for skulks to come out
-If you're by yourself, you dont want to go around making things flash on alien minimaps. Just stop them getting past you until buddies arrive. Situationally completely acceptable behaviour.
Bare in mind that all these things are things that most players over look completely when they're group-masturbating over the close hive all game.
A good deal of the actions you describe are simply playing well.
Your bottom line mentions aim, but bare in mind what a huge, huge element positioning is in engagements. I bet any money if you try to apply all these rules to your own gameplay, you won't be running 40-5 kd.
You will find if you position yourself properly both on the map and in the room you're in, you will suddenly find that skulks run into your bullets.
I'll give you an example: Veil. Great map for good zoning. If I spawn rines and end up going to topo, rather than run to C12, build the RT, run to pipline, build the RT, lose topo, die, lose C12 and pipe, it's very much worth having a single marine sit on the topo-c12 walkway in east junction. Reason? Skulks will leap happily across east towards topo RT or C12. You shoot them and they die because there's little cover in that area. You're also real close to C12 in case a skulk takes the route past pipe junction to C12. Look for points like this in maps - the places between RTs that allow you to cover multiple RTs at once. You will start racking up the kills like your favourite NS2 world champions and then start thinking everyone else is badly retarded for not having realised the same thing.
The only thing that is really patethic and you didn't mention, it's when some players (and it happens, sadly), with rifle and a welder, don't weld the teammates with a SG/GL, waiting for the poor sod to die so they can grab the weapon for free. Now that's unexcusable.
They don't weld because they are too busy defending teammates with SG/GL from alien attacks, and they pick up dead teammates' weapons because they are recycling them.
See what I did there?
As the people before me have demonstrated, there are perfectly good reasons for doing that which you are complaining about. It really all depends on the situation and the players.
It's also interesting to me that you seem to have started this thread with the soul purpose of complaining about this behavior. Not laughing at it or even trying to suggest remedies/strategies. Nor did you ask if there was a decent reason for doing this stuff, you just felt like complaining?
I actually like having 1 or 2 guys like that in my team. I can go about wielding RT's and they have my back. If the whole team would be k/d whoring however, they are likely to loose.
covering lanes is something that always needs to be done, because res is one of the most important things in the game.
when skulks hop around hive, prioritize the gorges if your comm built a gorge magnet, otherwise, gorges can't kill your marines, skulks can. Also, in most situations, you'll have very little opportunity to kill off a fade, lerks may be fair game, but fades have too much health, so might as well kill something that can be killed and then force the fades to retreat. Onos, i'll always focus the gorge then his onos, because onos's are big, fat and juicy. all that pres.
Yea I see what you did there. You're one of those guys who refuse to learn. You can recognize that someone has a huge score, but you dismiss it as if he's somehow abusing the game to make your self feel less helpless.
If you want to improve, take a minute to digest all of the advice you're getting from here. And rather than sticking to your presumptions, that people are just farming points, ask your self if there may be a legitimate reasoning behind their decisions.
Please recognize that almost no one here agrees with you in this thread. And it's not because we're all "jacking up stats".
-Get mines when they are available to mine up PG or positions you want to defend
-back cap when skulks are running rampant in your back line
-jump in the pg with lmg to give my team time to follow as aliens are swarming me
The game is very rich in strategies and deep (compared to other FPS on the market). There are many things that doesn't seem to make sense until the thought process has been explained. I would like to praise you @Kobe for putting forward something that bothered you, and have others comment on it without it turning it to the usual flame war or complaints thread. The CDT must be doing wonders to our mood in the forums. And congrats to everyone that replied so far for keeping things civil.
1) Your assumption is simply based on labelling players as kill-whores when in reality, they could be looking for gorge tunnels (I as marine comm a lot ask one player to scout around our base for tunnels when I need the Tres from scanning). They could be responding to RT harass, they might be attempting to pressure somewhere else, they might try to sneak by to get a PG up, etc.
2) Don't really see this happening tbh, if people are shooting skulks its not because they want easy kills because they can just kill gorges for that since skulks are much harder to hit when they bounce between structures, the reason is more because they shoot the first thing they see when they get beaconed or a skulk is personally attacking them.
3) Or they're covering their teammate, good skulks usually wait on the reload of a player attacking an RT.
4) Again something that is not easy to identify, some players might have a jetpack shotgun while the PG under attack has become a feed gate, not worth the 40res when you could either fly/run there with your equipment and attack from a more favorable position or wait for teammate in order to push through the gate, players who run off probably aren't aware of the attack or already responding to RT harass before the PG attack.
5) Spawn-locking is sometimes better that upgrade chambers especially solo on a pub server, they are quite tough to kill if they are planted around the hive as it makes you vulnerable to comm jumping out or respawners.
6) I have never seen this happen other than waiting for a few more marines to arrive to focus fire the tunnel
We might be singling out 1 type of selfish gamer here but there are many others and in the end its just a symptom of the bigger issue that is the lack of incentive to win.
i tend to go against the stack because you learn alot more fighting a tough team than stomping new players
Mean while marine put many balls in the Hive basket ( or Bronze candy)
The job of the first people through a gate, is try and draw the biters away from the meat grinder.
Perhaps instead of blaming or hating what they do and how they do it, you should attempt to emulate to their style of play or at least try to understand why they do certain things in certain scenerios. Use it as a learning experience to increase your level of play.
I've seen it happen the other way around too where a highly skilled player or two goes against the stack to try to help the rookie team causing the stackers in the other team to leave.
Man this pubstomping issue is sure pretty complicated
Since, we're on the meat grinder topic...I often get stuck on the PG during a meat grind. Am i jumping through the PG wrongly or am i suppose to spam spacebar or is it just my imagination?
BTW I know most people who might read this already know, but BITE THE BLUE SIDES OF PG (broad side), not the narrow sides, for a grinder this does not make.
About a year ago, I really considered streaming lots of pub games and calling it "NS2 Pubbing: Commentary on Where I go and What I do" and literally just talk about my thought process as I play the game and the decisions I make. I think it would be eye opening for alot of pub players that it's not all just spawn killing and lucky shots but mainly being able to read the map and being prepared for the correct situation at the correct time.