All rookie players should be required to complete a skulk time trial before they can even join a server.
i have yet to see a game with a mandatory tutorial before you can play multiplayer. several games suggest that you start the tutorial first, but a player getting stuck there for some reason (e.g. not grasping walljumps) would be super mad about spending money for the game. what if the player only wants to play as marines? what if the player has a buddy waiting on a server who could teach the game, or 3 buddies who bought the 4-pack together?
making it mandatory for non-rookie-friendly-servers would be ok i guess, it's at least not denying the entire game experience. but in that case a tutorial should cover more subjects so when people are told "you are ready", they actually are.
could also be awarded with a badge to encourage people to actually finish all tutorial sections, this would also tell people on servers what level of experience they are dealing with. currently, i perceive the commander badge as just that, but people without it can be very experienced as well.
Pfff who needs tutorials just start the game, play with one eye open, 1 hand tied down, while running around in a mad panic, screaming "WHATS A SKULK?" "HOW DO I GET BETTER GUNS" "WHERE DID HE COME FROM?" "THAT GUY IS HACKING"
:P
NS2 is one of those games where you need to put the time in to either learn from playing, or learn from watching tutorials / videos
I think that might just result in wasted res b/c then your going to have them giving meds to every person who calls for them and most people who call for them will only hurt the team by having them.
I commanded a game a few days ago where all the meds came from mostly 3 people and they were always in a location I explicitly said not to go to. Guess if they got meds or not. In the mean time players who went where I wanted them to got meds and amo before they could make a request.
You gotta learn to med before you can learn when to med.
Once you get the hang of the action itself and can perform it with fluidity, you have much more time to think and thus begin to learn to make distinctions between meds you should drop and meds you shouldn't drop. Right now, new commanders find it difficult to make tactical decisions because they're swamped with requests and have no idea how to handle them without manually clicking on each one, and clumsily fiddling through the menus until they find a medpack, by which time the person who made the request is likely long dead. They can't even barely spare a thought towards anything else except madly scrambling to drop whatever needs to be dropped because they're so busy keeping up with the requests.
At least if a new commander is taught to quickly and effortlessly drop the thing that is requested most often, this would take a massive load off and give the commander the necessary room to breathe while they're still in the learning stages (and thus have to process much more than scrambling to meet requests if they ever hope to get better and learn from the game they just played). Personally I would rather deal with a new comm trying to learn, who is medding people but sometimes medding in the wrong situations, than one that does not know how to med at all with nearly the kind of efficiency that is demanded in ns2 engagements.
Besides, it is possible to implement a crude method of teaching these distinctions into the proposed tutorial. Just have a few instances where some of these med request scenarios has 4-5 skulks visably converging on the marine while the single skulk (the one you're baited to med) is biting. Likewise, if the commander does not choose to neglect these categorically hopeless scenarios, and does so for more than 1 of these, then the test fails.
Sure, it still doesn't teach people the absolute finer points of medding. But it's a start.
(I wrote all of that earlier and had it saved. Plz forgive if I was still in the process of editting it or something :P)
All rookie players should be required to complete a skulk time trial before they can even join a server.
i have yet to see a game with a mandatory tutorial before you can play multiplayer. several games suggest that you start the tutorial first, but a player getting stuck there for some reason (e.g. not grasping walljumps) would be super mad about spending money for the game. what if the player only wants to play as marines? what if the player has a buddy waiting on a server who could teach the game, or 3 buddies who bought the 4-pack together?
making it mandatory for non-rookie-friendly-servers would be ok i guess, it's at least not denying the entire game experience.
When you're right you're right. Making it mandatory for non-rookie-friendly servers is probably the way to go. Or entirely optional might even work. Either way, a walljumping tutorial could be good.
but in that case a tutorial should cover more subjects so when people are told "you are ready", they actually are.
Obviously the more subjects that can be made a tutorial for the better. I feel that this is just a small important thing, that isn't really intuitive, and never really explained beyond youtube - and more importantly, it can be covered with a tutorial that can be made EASILY. Other subjects like survivability and hit and run for higher lifeforms couldn't have a tutorial so easily constructed for. Or tutorials for laneblocking might be difficult aswell. Tutorials explaining counterplay might be difficult.
A walljumping tutorial is easy though, because it's just a time trial. And as long as it's easy to do, and as long as staying off the ground is so important as skulk (the first thing I do when I see a new player in aliens is tell them to jump more). You don't need to tell them "you are ready" because no tutorial would feasibly cover everything to tell them this. You still need experience in the multiplayer to learn the game. A small tutorial like that isn't MEANT to say prepare them completely, but instead just teaches them a small but fundamental skill - it's just a small stepping stone.
Obviously I'm not against more tutorials. But we shouldn't disregard the idea of adding a small and easy to make tutorial (comparitive to other tutorials) to the game just because it only covers one thing. Just cause a tutorial doesn't COMPLETELY prepare somebody for gameplay, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the current tutorial.
NS-"jumpingisOP"-Soldier is what happens to the kid you knew when you were younger who would throw a hissy fit and accuse you of cheating whenever you beat him at a video game.
Only he's older now, and has to find new inventive ways of behaving like a sore loser - like blaming "badge stacks" or marines not being superglued to the floor.
NS-"jumpingisOP"-Soldier is what happens to the kid you knew when you were younger who would throw a hissy fit and accuse you of cheating whenever you beat him at a video game.
Only now he's older now, and has to find new inventive ways of behaving like a sore loser - like blaming "badge stacks" or marines not being superglued to the floor.
You know, in the other thread I thought he was using witty sarcasm, and almost awesomed him. Then I read his post here.
@ZeroEarTh - we are trying to educate you that all of the rookies stacking the marine team is 100% not the fault of any of the non-rookies. The situation that you have accused other people of being "bullies" over is something they have no control over, so this is why some of the comments (including mine) may seem brash.
NS-"jumpingisOP"-Soldier is what happens to the kid you knew when you were younger who would throw a hissy fit and accuse you of cheating whenever you beat him at a video game.
Only he's older now, and has to find new inventive ways of behaving like a sore loser - like blaming "badge stacks" or marines not being superglued to the floor.
Nope I haven't seen a hacker in ns2 yet, I just see badge stacks playing on one side of team and marines constantly pressing jump without some sort of delay mechanism.
@NS-Soldier - as has been repeated to you many times on multiple threads (some of which were your own creation), there already is a penalty for spamming jump. It seems that you're completely ignoring this information, and have been here for over a year and a half now, so you should know better anyway. Are you a troll? Or can you offer a logical reason why you are continuing this behaviour?
It is actually more effective not to jump at all and all the good players will tell you that.
Badges also don't mean anything.
So please, explain why you're reviving old threads with this bullshit, or GTFO of these forums for good, because you are contributing absolutely nothing except crappy threads and crappy posts and wasting moderators' time by randomly abusing the flag button (unless there's a reason you flagged ZeroEarth's latest post for abuse?).
Badges do mean a thing, but people are misunderstanding what they mean.
It's the difference between correlation and causation.
Ignoring the stupid commander badge, badges either mean a player has voluntarily invested money into the game even though he already owns it (Reinforced badges and World Championship badges), or he has contributed to the game in a special way (basically, every other badge. Again, ignoring the comm badge. Ignore that badge.).
Now, the first badge means a player was willing to pay money for it. Thus, I say, he must have some emotional connection to the game (or he wants to support the developers, but again, this is more likely if he has a emotional connection, because people (usually) don't run around supporting random developers). This means he has more likely spent quite some time with the game.
And people who spend a lot of time with a game are usually - not always, but from personal experience at least significantly - better at it.
The second category is full of people who've either been around for a very long time (most of those badges are old), or are willing to contribute personal time to the development of the game. Again, emotional connection, playing for longer, bla, better at the game.
Ergo there is a weak correlation between skill and badges. (NO. CAUSATION.)
My experience confirms this, but on the other hand, people tend to pick the results they like and ignore everything else, so make of that what you will.
i think the com badge, while obviously overrated in terms of balanced teams, does mean something: the person usually knows the core mechanics of the game (tech tree etc.) which can lead to some better strategical decisions on the field. also, people usually gather experience on the field before starting to command (otherwise they often get ejected).
so in the end, i don't consider people with the com badge especially combat skilled or whatever, it's more like an upgrade to nick turning from green to white, like a really-not-a-rookie-anymore-and-i-can-trust-this-person-to-have-common-sense-and-make-reasonable-tactical-descisions-badge, e.g. trying to place gorge tunnels instead of spit-attacking lone powernode blueprints. you get the idea.
FFS Ford, we were just trying to shut the troll up.
Most of us understand such details. However, bringing them up may just encourage him and incorrectly cause him to believe that this proves some sort of point. "Badges don't mean anything" was just a conclusive way of trying to stop any more meaningless discussion from him on this topic. In any case, the fact remains that if there are a bunch of people with a badge on one team, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a skill stack. There may be a correlation, but as you said, it's a very weak one, but admitting there's a correlation at all to a person who can't even understand that spamming jump is bad despite being told why many many times will just cause him to think "badges=skill" cause obviously he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to see past his own confirmation bias.
You have done a good job of balancing your post by trying to be fair to both sides of the argument, and this would be welcome if we were dealing with a balanced individual. However, it is quite clear from this person's previous posting history that he will only consider the parts of the post that confirm his own warped view that a badged player is a skilled player, and that therefore the team with more badges is stacked. Can we just please go back to "badges don't mean shit" and be done with it, cause if you throw this guy even the tiniest bone, he will latch onto it like a rabid dog.
just because the op has a different and possibly limited view on things doesn't make him a troll. let's be fair here, he has a point in a sense that new players can easily get frustrated by imbalanced teams.
that said, i absolutely agree with you: i've seen matches that seemed highly stacked but the other team still totally dominated them. i think the reason badges are so overestimated is that there is not much else to use when it comes to estimating the skill of a player.
things like hours-played is not visible, same goes for hive stats regarding skill, winrate, etc.
so unless you have played with them before, you only have the nickname (green or white) and badges. well you might also know wether the person uses a microphone or not, but that can actually be quite a significant advantage for a team.
FFS Ford, we were just trying to shut the troll up.
...
Sorry
This thread has already been sinked, though. So I shouldn't have caused too much damage...
In my defense: People throw the "Badges don't mean skill" argument around a lot without ever thinking about it too much. It just had to be said somewhere...
Comments
making it mandatory for non-rookie-friendly-servers would be ok i guess, it's at least not denying the entire game experience. but in that case a tutorial should cover more subjects so when people are told "you are ready", they actually are.
could also be awarded with a badge to encourage people to actually finish all tutorial sections, this would also tell people on servers what level of experience they are dealing with. currently, i perceive the commander badge as just that, but people without it can be very experienced as well.
Go the other way around and give everyone a "warning" badge who hasnt completed the tutorial
:P
NS2 is one of those games where you need to put the time in to either learn from playing, or learn from watching tutorials / videos
You gotta learn to med before you can learn when to med.
Once you get the hang of the action itself and can perform it with fluidity, you have much more time to think and thus begin to learn to make distinctions between meds you should drop and meds you shouldn't drop. Right now, new commanders find it difficult to make tactical decisions because they're swamped with requests and have no idea how to handle them without manually clicking on each one, and clumsily fiddling through the menus until they find a medpack, by which time the person who made the request is likely long dead. They can't even barely spare a thought towards anything else except madly scrambling to drop whatever needs to be dropped because they're so busy keeping up with the requests.
At least if a new commander is taught to quickly and effortlessly drop the thing that is requested most often, this would take a massive load off and give the commander the necessary room to breathe while they're still in the learning stages (and thus have to process much more than scrambling to meet requests if they ever hope to get better and learn from the game they just played). Personally I would rather deal with a new comm trying to learn, who is medding people but sometimes medding in the wrong situations, than one that does not know how to med at all with nearly the kind of efficiency that is demanded in ns2 engagements.
Besides, it is possible to implement a crude method of teaching these distinctions into the proposed tutorial. Just have a few instances where some of these med request scenarios has 4-5 skulks visably converging on the marine while the single skulk (the one you're baited to med) is biting. Likewise, if the commander does not choose to neglect these categorically hopeless scenarios, and does so for more than 1 of these, then the test fails.
Sure, it still doesn't teach people the absolute finer points of medding. But it's a start.
(I wrote all of that earlier and had it saved. Plz forgive if I was still in the process of editting it or something :P)
When you're right you're right. Making it mandatory for non-rookie-friendly servers is probably the way to go. Or entirely optional might even work. Either way, a walljumping tutorial could be good.
Obviously the more subjects that can be made a tutorial for the better. I feel that this is just a small important thing, that isn't really intuitive, and never really explained beyond youtube - and more importantly, it can be covered with a tutorial that can be made EASILY. Other subjects like survivability and hit and run for higher lifeforms couldn't have a tutorial so easily constructed for. Or tutorials for laneblocking might be difficult aswell. Tutorials explaining counterplay might be difficult.
A walljumping tutorial is easy though, because it's just a time trial. And as long as it's easy to do, and as long as staying off the ground is so important as skulk (the first thing I do when I see a new player in aliens is tell them to jump more). You don't need to tell them "you are ready" because no tutorial would feasibly cover everything to tell them this. You still need experience in the multiplayer to learn the game. A small tutorial like that isn't MEANT to say prepare them completely, but instead just teaches them a small but fundamental skill - it's just a small stepping stone.
Obviously I'm not against more tutorials. But we shouldn't disregard the idea of adding a small and easy to make tutorial (comparitive to other tutorials) to the game just because it only covers one thing. Just cause a tutorial doesn't COMPLETELY prepare somebody for gameplay, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the current tutorial.
Only he's older now, and has to find new inventive ways of behaving like a sore loser - like blaming "badge stacks" or marines not being superglued to the floor.
You know, in the other thread I thought he was using witty sarcasm, and almost awesomed him. Then I read his post here.
I believe... Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you... Stranger... ;;)
Was waiting for that haha you get an awesome!
Whatever I do what I want!
Also who would join a team where a rookie called "noob-troll" went Marine comm first thing on the server?
Thanks SuperEffective and other part of comments that not being a "f..ing..ick" to new players
Im have gone through Trainning Comander and Yes >> I know A+D+SpaceBar to dodge skull
Nope I haven't seen a hacker in ns2 yet, I just see badge stacks playing on one side of team and marines constantly pressing jump without some sort of delay mechanism.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure if you try jump queueing to bhop as marine, your jump height suffers with consecutive jumps.
That's why you have to time your jumps as marine.
Which is why jumping isn't OP because if you jump like a retard, any skulk worth his weight in chips will destroy you.
It is actually more effective not to jump at all and all the good players will tell you that.
Badges also don't mean anything.
So please, explain why you're reviving old threads with this bullshit, or GTFO of these forums for good, because you are contributing absolutely nothing except crappy threads and crappy posts and wasting moderators' time by randomly abusing the flag button (unless there's a reason you flagged ZeroEarth's latest post for abuse?).
Badges do mean a thing, but people are misunderstanding what they mean.
It's the difference between correlation and causation.
Ignoring the stupid commander badge, badges either mean a player has voluntarily invested money into the game even though he already owns it (Reinforced badges and World Championship badges), or he has contributed to the game in a special way (basically, every other badge. Again, ignoring the comm badge. Ignore that badge.).
Now, the first badge means a player was willing to pay money for it. Thus, I say, he must have some emotional connection to the game (or he wants to support the developers, but again, this is more likely if he has a emotional connection, because people (usually) don't run around supporting random developers). This means he has more likely spent quite some time with the game.
And people who spend a lot of time with a game are usually - not always, but from personal experience at least significantly - better at it.
The second category is full of people who've either been around for a very long time (most of those badges are old), or are willing to contribute personal time to the development of the game. Again, emotional connection, playing for longer, bla, better at the game.
Ergo there is a weak correlation between skill and badges. (NO. CAUSATION.)
My experience confirms this, but on the other hand, people tend to pick the results they like and ignore everything else, so make of that what you will.
This is how I see badges and skill.
so in the end, i don't consider people with the com badge especially combat skilled or whatever, it's more like an upgrade to nick turning from green to white, like a really-not-a-rookie-anymore-and-i-can-trust-this-person-to-have-common-sense-and-make-reasonable-tactical-descisions-badge, e.g. trying to place gorge tunnels instead of spit-attacking lone powernode blueprints. you get the idea.
Most of us understand such details. However, bringing them up may just encourage him and incorrectly cause him to believe that this proves some sort of point. "Badges don't mean anything" was just a conclusive way of trying to stop any more meaningless discussion from him on this topic. In any case, the fact remains that if there are a bunch of people with a badge on one team, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a skill stack. There may be a correlation, but as you said, it's a very weak one, but admitting there's a correlation at all to a person who can't even understand that spamming jump is bad despite being told why many many times will just cause him to think "badges=skill" cause obviously he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to see past his own confirmation bias.
You have done a good job of balancing your post by trying to be fair to both sides of the argument, and this would be welcome if we were dealing with a balanced individual. However, it is quite clear from this person's previous posting history that he will only consider the parts of the post that confirm his own warped view that a badged player is a skilled player, and that therefore the team with more badges is stacked. Can we just please go back to "badges don't mean shit" and be done with it, cause if you throw this guy even the tiniest bone, he will latch onto it like a rabid dog.
that said, i absolutely agree with you: i've seen matches that seemed highly stacked but the other team still totally dominated them. i think the reason badges are so overestimated is that there is not much else to use when it comes to estimating the skill of a player.
things like hours-played is not visible, same goes for hive stats regarding skill, winrate, etc.
so unless you have played with them before, you only have the nickname (green or white) and badges. well you might also know wether the person uses a microphone or not, but that can actually be quite a significant advantage for a team.
Sorry
This thread has already been sinked, though. So I shouldn't have caused too much damage...
In my defense: People throw the "Badges don't mean skill" argument around a lot without ever thinking about it too much. It just had to be said somewhere...