- abolute rookies who play the 1st time:
These players tend to run around clueless in large Lemmingpacks and have no aim.
If you dont drop sentrys everywhere and give them fast exos you are a bad commander.
- average wannabe pro player
They believe they have understanded the game and yelling useless stuff most the time.
Things like: "com, drop a pg in locker. we need this room secured" while you say to them "go maintanance, locker is fine. I want a more aggressive PG"
No PG, armory and obs drop in locker=bad com
- the clanplayers
While these players carry your team, they yelling for meds nonstop.
And if dont med in that milisecond they pressed the request button, you are a bad com.
You have all of these 3 types in every round most of the time and if the game is lost its the coms fault for sure.
Its not the fault of the rookies running around clueless with 3%aim, not the fault of the average pseudo pro who want unneeded or useless stuff while teammates are dying or RTs going down and not the clanplayers fault who think he can win the game alone vs 20 aliens with enough meds.
I remember a game on Veil.
Aliens had 2 hives in sub and cargo and 3 harvesters. We had 6 RTs, a PG in nano and system and i was about to pump out arcs to siege sub. Also W2, a1 shottys around 7 min mark.
Then people start to eject me.
Why, cause they died to much cause no meds in that moment i was saving for arcs.
The ego of some is just amazing.
I know the frustration if you die against a lerk or fade cause no meds and you know "With 1 or 2 meds the lifeform would be down", but in a situation like above where you have everything you need for an easy peasy win, these reactions are only stupid.
I was going to say "I don't fit into any of those types" but then I remembered I don't play NS2 anymore. So I guess that list is probably accurate.
I often request medpacks and ammo via microphone. Usually when I'm expecting commander is keeping an eye on us anyway (because we coordinated a strike or something).
For some reason I was having a really hard time remembering what key I've bind for ammo and which one for medpacks so I often requested the wrong thing. Now I have them bind to PLUS and MINUS. Which is easy to remember. Minus button is meant as defensive aka medpack. Plus is meant as offensive aka ammo. This seems to be the only way for me to remember which is which XD And yeah I play with arrow keys, decades old habit, fuck it.
Its not just you. I don't fit any of those categories either yet I play fairly often.
These categories are the ones that drives coms away.
Sure you have players out there who make there job, communicating and dont complaining that much.
But the playercount who dont want or cant command and complaining about the com after the game is lost is beyond them.
These categories are the ones that drives coms away.
Sure you have players out there who make there job, communicating and dont complaining that much.
But the playercount who dont want or cant command and complaining about the com after the game is lost is beyond them.
I can agree that all 3 of those player catagories exist, and are as you describe.
I feel like an AI commander would not be complicated but very time consuming to code. I don't code so I would not know. I could see value in voting in an AI commander. Such a commander would follow 1-3 basic tech paths chose at random.
Commander AI?! Wh.....what?! I'm not saying it's a bad idea,it's actually pretty good! But you know 100% for sure opposite teams are gonna whine about "AI comms break the game!" or "Team has AI comm,no skill." I am literally picturing this in my head right now.
I'm just worried that they'd glitch out mid-game because they can't place something,so they just stop. REALLY changes the tide of the game! I've had that happen with NPCs in games before. They're told to do some tasks,and they stop on one because they're either stuck,glitched,ect.
Commander AI?! Wh.....what?! I'm not saying it's a bad idea,it's actually pretty good! But you know 100% for sure opposite teams are gonna whine about "AI comms break the game!" or "Team has AI comm,no skill." I am literally picturing this in my head right now.
I'm just worried that they'd glitch out mid-game because they can't place something,so they just stop. REALLY changes the tide of the game! I've had that happen with NPCs in games before. They're told to do some tasks,and they stop on one because they're either stuck,glitched,ect.
I guess with AI commander, you'd have to have both teams go AI commander and not just one team because it might be unbalanced if only 1 team has AI Comm and the other team has a real comm.
Commander AI?! Wh.....what?! I'm not saying it's a bad idea,it's actually pretty good! But you know 100% for sure opposite teams are gonna whine about "AI comms break the game!" or "Team has AI comm,no skill." I am literally picturing this in my head right now.
I'm just worried that they'd glitch out mid-game because they can't place something,so they just stop. REALLY changes the tide of the game! I've had that happen with NPCs in games before. They're told to do some tasks,and they stop on one because they're either stuck,glitched,ect.
I guess with AI commander, you'd have to have both teams go AI commander and not just one team because it might be unbalanced if only 1 team has AI Comm and the other team has a real comm.
If the team votes to have a AI commander because no one wants to be a commander, then they obviously do not care about balance. I could imagine an AI commander vote requiring 75% of all players on the team to vote it in.
The real question though, is it worth the development time?
KatzenfleischJoin Date: 2014-03-21Member: 194881Members, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Community Developer
edited December 2015
I am not really for an AI commander since a good one would cost a lots of development time (in order to truly react from the other team actions) and will only be able to give order via way-points. I see a bot team with a human commander (RTS), I see a bot com with bots but this combination sounds wrong.
At least I agree that this can be a good solution for low/mid skills pub game for an easy game-play (simply place rt if marine ask or nearby, quota for med per marine, slowly walks throw the tech tree one item at a time, beacon in emergency, etc). At this point it's more like a fixed state automaton than a real AI, except that instead of serving soda it serves medpack, RT and upgrades.
--
About the com jobs itself the main issue I saw is the energy needed (I mean IRL). It's an exhausting jobs to do it correctly (Talking to players using their name is world changing but needs practice and memory to be used in large pub games).
What I saw also (from the second group type of players (com haters)) is how easily you get kicked if you do not do a specific list of stuff or do one in particular: a good example are sentries. When I was starting to com with them in mind I got kicked around 70% of the time (because: "Robotics ? noob com sentries are useless, etc, etc, etc") without even the chance to give it a try or explain myself. Now, things are better and while I think reputation helped a lot it's still hard to get out of the used way. I played them on a lots of game, made mistakes but finally get better and won games with them (with the reward sometime to be on the top of the kill/assist list), but they are clearly not easy to use if we want not to slow down researches.
I find myself an average commander but back in the day when I was willing to improve myself with more exotics oriented gameplay (sentries / rush pg / exo rush / early W3 / second CC with half IP reloc / etc) that was truly hard to get confident. Then, the rookie "easy" way to com/start to com is unfortunately to shut itself up and apply blindly order given on the wild by a random marine. At least that's how I started (since a single mistake or slow com reaction was heavily punished with an invisible ban from the chair (you get instantly kicked if you dare to try again)).
While it might not be the place for this I am thanks full for every vet who helped me on this, in particular field coms. In my opinion that was the best way to quickly learn how to correctly command since you get to do the mandatory stuff and learn from what is planned by the field com to be able to do it by your own latter. I am not used to rookie friendly servers but I am curious on how things are done there (headless chicken everywhere ? or a vet train them all ?)
At least I agree that this can be a good solution for low/mid skills pub game for an easy game-play (simply place rt if marine ask or nearby, quota for med per marine, slowly walks throw the tech tree one item at a time, beacon in emergency, etc). At this point it's more like a fixed state automaton than a real AI, except that instead of serving soda it serves medpack, RT and upgrades.
That is exactly what I imagine it would be like. I just do not know if it is worth the time cost.
I feel like an AI commander would not be complicated but very time consuming to code. I don't code so I would not know. I could see value in voting in an AI commander. Such a commander would follow 1-3 basic tech paths chose at random.
You already have AI Commanders in the training section. Rudimentary but enough to play with robots.
It doesn't have decision making either which is the fondations for real AI. Decision or not it will be unsatisfactory for one player or the other or both.
Alien comm - Boring but at least you can get out and chew stuff sometimes to help the team. Placing useful crags etc usually very appreciated by team.
Marine comm - Boring + stressful and if you can't med fast enough all the time, for example both sides of the map get engaged simultaneously, you're screwed
This picture kinda sums up how I feel about being a good marine comm:
In a general sense at least.
Really what I'm saying is marine and alien comm need to be much more symmetric in terms of the workload required to be 'adequate'
One way to achieve this would be reducing the dependency on the comm for stuff like HP through medkits. Healing over time anyone? (just for base HP, not armour) Just a thought.
I often request medpacks and ammo via microphone. Usually when I'm expecting commander is keeping an eye on us anyway (because we coordinated a strike or something).
For some reason I was having a really hard time remembering what key I've bind for ammo and which one for medpacks so I often requested the wrong thing. Now I have them bind to PLUS and MINUS. Which is easy to remember. Minus button is meant as defensive aka medpack. Plus is meant as offensive aka ammo. This seems to be the only way for me to remember which is which XD And yeah I play with arrow keys, decades old habit, fuck it.
I got only experience of commanding pubs and as a pub comm I had a marine in the team who did that too (telling he wants meds instead of pressing the shortcut). I found that a very bad mechanic because as a comm it took way longer to medpack that marine because you have to much longer reaction time and you have to get to his position first with the camera. The second problem is that with answering a shortcut medpack request as a comm your camera is perfectly above that marine. When you have to go manually over the marines heads, usually you haven't got the time to adjust the camera so it is often in a worse position and it can happen that medpacks do not find their target (walls and ceilings eating them).
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited December 2015
Its fine when a marine is using mic for request.
Depend on situation.
If he say "Fade is in warehouse, im going to trap him in north tunnel", this marine should have top prio with meds after the fade retreats , cause he is the one that can kill this fade.
For me its more annying when people dont do this.
They running around alone, everyone is requesting. And everyone is thinking he is super important while you medding like shit to keep your arcs alive for example.
In an clanwar everyone knows where the others are and they communicate to trap lifeforms.
So you dont have to be everywhere as com.
In pub some awaiting the same without any communication.
The thing about NS2 is that for most players 90% of the time it's an FPS. Nobody buys NS2 who doesn't want to play an online FPS. The player who enjoys online FPSes and also enjoys RTSes commanding live (and usually critical/uncooperative) people is a pretty rare breed, it's a subset of a subset. Finding someone who is all that and also is actually good at commanding is like striking gold. I've been playing this franchise for a decade and have never spent any serious time commanding because I simply don't enjoy it and nothing can change that.
I don't have a suggestion, just making an observation... The commander role is what makes NS2 so unique, but it's also a difficult job to fill. If I were UWE and I wanted to make a new NS game that would reach a broader audience, I would probably remove the commander role first. Obviously I'm not suggesting such a thing for NS2 though, and we certainly wouldn't want a repeat of NS: Combat so it might never work.
I enjoyed comming NS1 though I started playing for the FPS.
In NS2 I despise playing as comm for both teams. It's boring.
So for all the people who think cysts and power nodes should stay the same, I don't think they think about the effect that has on this topic
It's because you have to tell people what to do (as the all basic little things).
It never happened to me on NS1. People knew what to do and just waited for me to give the "Go" for the last rush or something big. We even had time to [negotiate / seduce me for] a Shotgun. Kind of fun actually.
Here is a typical day for a commander in NS2 public game:
Wait for 5min for commander to sit down on comchair, still noone. wait another 5min for a commander.
Ok commander sit down in chair.
*game start*
P: I want mines give me mines,
P: no I want shotgun give me shotgun,
P: build ip commander,
P: no nades commander,
P: nonono give us upgrade
P: MEDPACK medpack me commander,
P: why dont we have upgrades?
P:I just medpacked you all
*if no medpack and go straight for upgrades:*
P:why dont we have medpacks STUPID fucking commander med me I save the game for you.
C: I went for upgrades
P: Why dont we have upgrades?
C: well we dont have any RT I told you we need to protect the RTs.
C drops arms labs
C: Build arms lab guys *say in mic*
10min noone build arm lab
P: why do you have 50res, commander AFK kick him.
C: Build arms lab
P started votekick
C *Sigh*
C: GO to location A guys, *pinging map* im gonna do this and then this.......
P goes to location B, dies
P goes to location C, dies
P goes to location D, dies
C: *sigh*
P: spread out in 7locations
P: Medpack me commander *over mic*
C: where are you?
P: MEDPACK ME COMMANDER
C: where are you use keybind request
P dies P STUPID COMMANDER
huge assault going on at hive:
C medpack player at hive, while building arc, and upgrades, while checking map for bile rush.
P at location B, E, H requesting medpack, P at location H requesting RT
C managed to do request 3places,
P: stupid commander start exo
Marine win: yeah good teamwork veyry good teamwork from the players
Marine loose: AWWW STUPID COMMANder I blame the commander we didnt get medpack, we didnt get upgrades.
next round start: wait 5min no commander
old commander: why dont you guys that complained sit in the chair?
P: Nonono I cant command
P: Nonono I cant command Im to valueble
P: .....
*wait another 10min no commander.
The logic is you cant win as commander. please all of you that complain all the time, go sit in the comchair and try out how easy it is to handle 20different player strategies they are trying to convince you to do.
I just wanted to post how it is to be a commander. I recently decided to drop commanding on one particular server, cause it was just to frustrating player never listen and then complained about com. No team was actually winning, so I decided to jump out and switch team, since noone listen anyway. votekicked.
Now Im def not the top 10commanders in NS2 and I wouldn't have a chance against the SC2players. but I say Im def above average as Ns2 commander. well enough to used the keybinds, shift. Different com got different tactics, and depending on what players are on the server, map etc.
Feel free to add more ironic commander experience
Where are you playing? Thirsty onos?! And why are you comming pub? You're honestly asking for cancer with the level of play in the documented game...
Commander AI?! Wh.....what?! I'm not saying it's a bad idea,it's actually pretty good! But you know 100% for sure opposite teams are gonna whine about "AI comms break the game!" or "Team has AI comm,no skill." I am literally picturing this in my head right now.
I'm just worried that they'd glitch out mid-game because they can't place something,so they just stop. REALLY changes the tide of the game! I've had that happen with NPCs in games before. They're told to do some tasks,and they stop on one because they're either stuck,glitched,ect.
I swear to you, I was once playing with an AI marine commander. His fucking med accuracy... (100 % easy)
Why are there no commanders?
New players are not encouraged to go comm because they are bad. Where will the good commanders come from if new commanders are not allowed to fail without getting backlash from experienced players everytime they try to learn it?
And lets be serious, I have played this game a long time and I am still not a good com. Only Hera believes in me since everytime I perform like shit he says "Good job comm".
Got to love French sarcasm.
(Thanks to the Russians, Bubba and all the commanders who do different build orders than usual.
It makes me rethink how I play the game and makes it exciting for me. )
That's what worries me about AI Commanders,what if they're to accurate? A human Comm has to use skill and reflexes to aid his team,an AI is programmed to "do X when X happens." Atleast with human Comms you can fool them,you can't fool an AI. There's no hiding from an AI,imagine if there was an AI Kharaa comm and it had to use bonewalls to stop enemies? It would always get the enemy spot on,no delay,no mistakes,it would be VERY annoying to have a Comm you can't even hear feedback from.
But that's just me,plus I don't know how much we've improved on AIs.
I agree that a comms Sill Rating should not affect the balancing of a round, but in order to remove the commander from the equation, the commander would have to be picked before the shuffle vote, which doesn't normally happen on a pub server.
If players could choose to be a commander from the ready room, just like joining teams, that would solve that problem.
Comments
I was going to say "I don't fit into any of those types" but then I remembered I don't play NS2 anymore. So I guess that list is probably accurate.
For some reason I was having a really hard time remembering what key I've bind for ammo and which one for medpacks so I often requested the wrong thing. Now I have them bind to PLUS and MINUS. Which is easy to remember. Minus button is meant as defensive aka medpack. Plus is meant as offensive aka ammo. This seems to be the only way for me to remember which is which XD And yeah I play with arrow keys, decades old habit, fuck it.
These categories are the ones that drives coms away.
Sure you have players out there who make there job, communicating and dont complaining that much.
But the playercount who dont want or cant command and complaining about the com after the game is lost is beyond them.
I can agree that all 3 of those player catagories exist, and are as you describe.
I'm just worried that they'd glitch out mid-game because they can't place something,so they just stop. REALLY changes the tide of the game! I've had that happen with NPCs in games before. They're told to do some tasks,and they stop on one because they're either stuck,glitched,ect.
I guess with AI commander, you'd have to have both teams go AI commander and not just one team because it might be unbalanced if only 1 team has AI Comm and the other team has a real comm.
If the team votes to have a AI commander because no one wants to be a commander, then they obviously do not care about balance. I could imagine an AI commander vote requiring 75% of all players on the team to vote it in.
The real question though, is it worth the development time?
At least I agree that this can be a good solution for low/mid skills pub game for an easy game-play (simply place rt if marine ask or nearby, quota for med per marine, slowly walks throw the tech tree one item at a time, beacon in emergency, etc). At this point it's more like a fixed state automaton than a real AI, except that instead of serving soda it serves medpack, RT and upgrades.
--
About the com jobs itself the main issue I saw is the energy needed (I mean IRL). It's an exhausting jobs to do it correctly (Talking to players using their name is world changing but needs practice and memory to be used in large pub games).
What I saw also (from the second group type of players (com haters)) is how easily you get kicked if you do not do a specific list of stuff or do one in particular: a good example are sentries. When I was starting to com with them in mind I got kicked around 70% of the time (because: "Robotics ? noob com sentries are useless, etc, etc, etc") without even the chance to give it a try or explain myself. Now, things are better and while I think reputation helped a lot it's still hard to get out of the used way. I played them on a lots of game, made mistakes but finally get better and won games with them (with the reward sometime to be on the top of the kill/assist list), but they are clearly not easy to use if we want not to slow down researches.
I find myself an average commander but back in the day when I was willing to improve myself with more exotics oriented gameplay (sentries / rush pg / exo rush / early W3 / second CC with half IP reloc / etc) that was truly hard to get confident. Then, the rookie "easy" way to com/start to com is unfortunately to shut itself up and apply blindly order given on the wild by a random marine. At least that's how I started (since a single mistake or slow com reaction was heavily punished with an invisible ban from the chair (you get instantly kicked if you dare to try again)).
While it might not be the place for this I am thanks full for every vet who helped me on this, in particular field coms. In my opinion that was the best way to quickly learn how to correctly command since you get to do the mandatory stuff and learn from what is planned by the field com to be able to do it by your own latter. I am not used to rookie friendly servers but I am curious on how things are done there (headless chicken everywhere ? or a vet train them all ?)
You already have AI Commanders in the training section. Rudimentary but enough to play with robots.
It doesn't have decision making either which is the fondations for real AI. Decision or not it will be unsatisfactory for one player or the other or both.
Marine comm - Boring + stressful and if you can't med fast enough all the time, for example both sides of the map get engaged simultaneously, you're screwed
This picture kinda sums up how I feel about being a good marine comm:
Really what I'm saying is marine and alien comm need to be much more symmetric in terms of the workload required to be 'adequate'
One way to achieve this would be reducing the dependency on the comm for stuff like HP through medkits. Healing over time anyone? (just for base HP, not armour) Just a thought.
I got only experience of commanding pubs and as a pub comm I had a marine in the team who did that too (telling he wants meds instead of pressing the shortcut). I found that a very bad mechanic because as a comm it took way longer to medpack that marine because you have to much longer reaction time and you have to get to his position first with the camera. The second problem is that with answering a shortcut medpack request as a comm your camera is perfectly above that marine. When you have to go manually over the marines heads, usually you haven't got the time to adjust the camera so it is often in a worse position and it can happen that medpacks do not find their target (walls and ceilings eating them).
Depend on situation.
If he say "Fade is in warehouse, im going to trap him in north tunnel", this marine should have top prio with meds after the fade retreats , cause he is the one that can kill this fade.
For me its more annying when people dont do this.
They running around alone, everyone is requesting. And everyone is thinking he is super important while you medding like shit to keep your arcs alive for example.
In an clanwar everyone knows where the others are and they communicate to trap lifeforms.
So you dont have to be everywhere as com.
In pub some awaiting the same without any communication.
I don't have a suggestion, just making an observation... The commander role is what makes NS2 so unique, but it's also a difficult job to fill. If I were UWE and I wanted to make a new NS game that would reach a broader audience, I would probably remove the commander role first. Obviously I'm not suggesting such a thing for NS2 though, and we certainly wouldn't want a repeat of NS: Combat so it might never work.
In NS2 I despise playing as comm for both teams. It's boring.
So for all the people who think cysts and power nodes should stay the same, I don't think they think about the effect that has on this topic
It's because you have to tell people what to do (as the all basic little things).
It never happened to me on NS1. People knew what to do and just waited for me to give the "Go" for the last rush or something big. We even had time to [negotiate / seduce me for] a Shotgun. Kind of fun actually.
Where are you playing? Thirsty onos?! And why are you comming pub? You're honestly asking for cancer with the level of play in the documented game...
I swear to you, I was once playing with an AI marine commander. His fucking med accuracy... (100 % easy)
Why are there no commanders?
New players are not encouraged to go comm because they are bad. Where will the good commanders come from if new commanders are not allowed to fail without getting backlash from experienced players everytime they try to learn it?
And lets be serious, I have played this game a long time and I am still not a good com. Only Hera believes in me since everytime I perform like shit he says "Good job comm".
Got to love French sarcasm.
(Thanks to the Russians, Bubba and all the commanders who do different build orders than usual.
It makes me rethink how I play the game and makes it exciting for me. )
But that's just me,plus I don't know how much we've improved on AIs.
I agree that a comms Sill Rating should not affect the balancing of a round, but in order to remove the commander from the equation, the commander would have to be picked before the shuffle vote, which doesn't normally happen on a pub server.
If players could choose to be a commander from the ready room, just like joining teams, that would solve that problem.
A basic and advanced commander video tutorial in the NS2 main menu sure would be helpful. Hopefully they can get someone to do it.