dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
More smurfs? yes.
Since when are the healthbars in the game? a pre 300 build? I forgot it.
So the bars are not the reason of the win/lose shift in 305.
Myself and others have mentioned that adagrad is a planned feature for hive 2.0. If you don't know what that is, I trust you know how to use the search function of these forums. Google may work also, but lack context.
Adagrad will significantly speed up the time it takes a player to rise in skill. Theoretically, adagrad would give a smurf a obscenely high hive skill in the first few rounds, and soon after it would quickly bring them down.
Smurfing will still be an issue, but it won't be as serious an issue when the skill system pegs their skill in a handful of games instead of hundreds of games.
Agreed! I'd love to see a mod that forces players to alternate between teams every now and then... These 2500+ players exclusively play on the marine side
Ah yes a mod that forces me to play on a team that requires teamwork early game or you get rolled, but its fine because that happens so often!
So you find it thrilling to stomp unorganized players instead of taking on a challange and exlusively play marine side? You must be the special kind of daisy who's poisoning pubs.
Sorry mate, but in that case you're one of the scum why new players leave after a few round of alien
Myself and others have mentioned that adagrad is a planned feature for hive 2.0. If you don't know what that is, I trust you know how to use the search function of these forums. Google may work also, but lack context.
Adagrad will significantly speed up the time it takes a player to rise in skill. Theoretically, adagrad would give a smurf a obscenely high hive skill in the first few rounds, and soon after it would quickly bring them down.
Smurfing will still be an issue, but it won't be as serious an issue when the skill system pegs their skill in a handful of games instead of hundreds of games.
Is the algorithm going to factor in KDR then? Because a few of these alleged smurfs have a KDR of 2+ while only having like a 1.2 win rate or something. And the ones with a higher win rate might adapt and go for kills only, possibly resulting in a lower win rate.
I am the only one that has to deal with smurfs in nearly every round?
Cant you see that these players are the reason for the win/loss shift?
Smurfs are a problem but it's not a new problem and most suspected smurfs play both as aliens and marines so I don't think they are causing the recent shift in balance.
I have looked at the profiles you and others have linked here and on the Steam forums and I will ban a lot of them today. I am using the Shine option to check for family sharing accounts so all of their accounts will be banned. There is a possibility that I'm banning "innocent" accounts so if anyone feels they have been banned wrongly you should contact me here or at thirstyonos at gmail.com.
So you find it thrilling to stomp unorganized players instead of taking on a challange and exlusively play marine side? You must be the special kind of daisy who's poisoning pubs.
Sorry mate, but in that case you're one of the scum why new players leave after a few round of alien
Never said i wasn't, never said i found it thrilling, i play ns2 to relax and kill time, don't make assumptions sir
Sitting around stomping is boring as fuck, id rather play with players of my skill, unfortunately comp is dead.
Teamwork requires both players to listen and effort in attempt to coordinate players while hoping they do listen, witch they rarely do
Personally i'd argue the fact that i can stomp an entire team really bad mechanics but nah blame it on the players
At this point (because of the size of the player base) your starting to dictate how good players can be in this game, all i'm reading is "we need to ban people who are good players".
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
@dePARA
I am 100% with Fred on this, as I often am.
While smurfs can cause issues, we should not instant ban new accounts, and they are NOT the reason why the balance is off.
I was not joking about my explanation for the balance being of. Skill level around the board has taken a huge nosedive.
Personally I do think its due to too many high level players leaving. (more played pub then I imagined it seems)
Average skill scores of around 1200 are also fairly low even on popular veteran servers like TTO.
The issue of this problem lies firmly in the ballpark of having not enough experienced players to carry the rounds for the rookies. (Note I am not making any comments on rookie only servers as I expect such play there.)
There is a huge difference between 'half your team being clueless' or 'all of them minus one or two'.
Now sadly I do not have realistic solutions. I see the problem, I do not know HOW we can fix it. Else I would be spamming devs with it right now.
Buffs again are not the answer. It would overbuff the few experienced players who already are the main carry of any team.
I do think any small detail to push them to play correctly is smart. Achievements would not hurt indeed.
"Pack play: damage a marine while close to 3 other aliens."
"Low eco is no eco: damage x RTs for y damage and destroy z RTs while lerks, fade or onos are up."
Add more tutorials for the few who indeed run them. (dodging, etc.. I did not play them so sorry in advance if its already in.)
At this point (because of the size of the player base) your starting to dictate how good players can be in this game, all i'm reading is "we need to ban people who are good players".
That's not true.
Well maybe 1 guy said that. The rest of us are just pissed at good players that create a new account just to have easy wins. Which is lame and pretty sad.
We have nothing against pro players who use their main account.
Look at Wob: he has 4300 skill points and no one wants to ban him, because he has the balls to play with his main account.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited July 2016
Wtf @G_Lock
Noone has problems with good players.
But these "good players" are hiding behind low elo only to make every attempt of balancing useless so they can roflstomp another team.
They doing this cause this seem the only way for them "to have fun". Who cares about the others aslong you can have nonstop easy wins.
Another argument "I want to relax after work". Sure it can be very relaxing to shred trough a horde of groundskulks and walkerfades.
But most use cheats for the same reason, so its the same mindset.
Its in german, but this guy is telling exact that @ 11:30 mark:
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
I don't think smurfs in pubs are as much of a problem as they are for Rookie Only servers.
When a vet uses an alt account to play in Rookie Only servers to get that 7 KDR it's defeating the purpose of Rookie Only and hurts retention.
Hopefully a better skill system will help push these players out of Rookie status much more quickly.
Haven't read the whole thread, sorry, but I did hear someone suggest widening the skulk bite. What is its range/shape, anyway? It's the singular most important ability to the alien team, but I don't even know exactly how it works. Is it a short range cone of hit scan? Is it a short ray? Some other system? It would be nice if there was a visual somewhere, too. I've learned to live with the fact that a marine has to be pretty damn centered for a bite to work, but a slight change might make all the difference in the world. Skulks have plenty of teeth, after all.
If the current hive skill is so broken (and it is) then why is it even in the game atm and being relied on to balance games, it should be disabled completely until hive 2.0 comes out, pretty sure most people with 3k+ skill got that with abusing the fuck outta the leave a game before its done to join another server so your hive skill doesn't drop exploit, that is not their true hive score never was..
Haven't read the whole thread, sorry, but I did hear someone suggest widening the skulk bite. What is its range/shape, anyway? It's the singular most important ability to the alien team, but I don't even know exactly how it works. Is it a short range cone of hit scan? Is it a short ray? Some other system? It would be nice if there was a visual somewhere, too. I've learned to live with the fact that a marine has to be pretty damn centered for a bite to work, but a slight change might make all the difference in the world. Skulks have plenty of teeth, after all.
Above is an estimated cross-section of the old and new bite zone at the distance of the marine in the image. The 3D shape is a rectangular prism, so from the side you would again see a rectangle. Because of the way the world is mapped to your screen it appears smaller for distant targets.
When you bite, the server takes successive cross sections starting from your end of the prism. (Actually the area is divided into a few smaller squares but the idea is the same.) If something intersects a section, you register a hit. Otherwise it gets to the end of the volume and stops.
All of this is second-hand knowledge from devs. I know of no way to personally visualize the bite volume, aside from Crazy's Bite Aid—which to my understanding is not very accurate and not much easier than just biting from different angles.
Again, don't make the game easier. Make it easier to understand what is a better way to play. That should be the direction of ns2. Teach, don't make the test easier.
I would really love to hear your suggestions on this matter, as it's something we often discuss. We already have improved tutorials and visual indicators, what else would you suggest?
Ok well there has to be more advanced tutorials for this game. A huge focus has to be marine shooting accuracy and skulk biting. If you can do those 2 things well, it helps you learn other things. There are plenty of informative things you can teach skulks to do to hit bites better and to be more effective. Also, how to stay alive and when they should arrack marines and when they should attack rts. You have to break the game down and make it very easy to see the path to get better. Some players may have no idea why they are missing so much or how they can play better.
In tutorial there should be WAY more emphasis on skulks having to bite res towers and avoiding 1v1 vs marines.
As for smurfs, just as I already said, add a smurf report function, once 1 player receive enough he cannot join ranked server, simple.
I would like to see a report function. but the smurf should be reported to the server admins and not be banned instantly. the report function could be abused.
In tutorial there should be WAY more emphasis on skulks having to bite res towers and avoiding 1v1 vs marines.
As for smurfs, just as I already said, add a smurf report function, once 1 player receive enough he cannot join ranked server, simple.
I would like to see a report function. but the smurf should be reported to the server admins and not be banned instantly. the report function could be abused.
Way to go if you want your system to be slow and ineffective.
There are way to avoid eventual group trolling, like I said before you can remove a smurf report every day and/OR compare the amount of smurf report to the playtime of targeted player, so that if someone is reported a lot but has over say 1000hours, he cant be considered as a smurf.
In this case they can.
A player with 20hrs CANT have a score per minute around 13, a KDR >2 and a accuracy constantly over 25% as rine and over 60% as alien.
It a terrible idea to ignore this fact.
No sound assistance can save new players from players like this:
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
@Handschuh
So trying to tell me that you had these stats in your 1st lets say 30hrs.
60% bite accuracy right away without any knowledge of the map or the game. A KDR of over 2 in these 1st 30hrs in an game you never played before and so different from any other shooter.
HandschuhJoin Date: 2005-03-08Member: 44338Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Community Developer
edited July 2016
@dePARA Well, at first yes, since I played comp in ns1 div1 for several years about 2008-2010..even won ensl.. but thats something hiveskill cant know.. ns2 feels actually kinda slow compared to ns1..
later I've gotten worse Internet (UMTS till september) and I've decided to lower my mouse sensitivity since I couldn't hit well on really high distance..(and some other settings)
How many times do we all have to explain that it is not that simple @RevanCorana?
As I've shown multiple times there are solutions and there is a mild difference between camping on your position and "explaining"
So you know, this suggestion is mostly aimed at a future f2p evolution of ns2 with thousands of players coming in where the smurfs cant just all be reported to all the many ops.
For the record your current system of "report smurf to ops" can already be abused and already struggle with 100 people.
Comments
Since when are the healthbars in the game? a pre 300 build? I forgot it.
So the bars are not the reason of the win/lose shift in 305.
Adagrad will significantly speed up the time it takes a player to rise in skill. Theoretically, adagrad would give a smurf a obscenely high hive skill in the first few rounds, and soon after it would quickly bring them down.
Smurfing will still be an issue, but it won't be as serious an issue when the skill system pegs their skill in a handful of games instead of hundreds of games.
(there is a good reason this post is the first in google)
Yeah no, never play gayliens.
So you find it thrilling to stomp unorganized players instead of taking on a challange and exlusively play marine side? You must be the special kind of daisy who's poisoning pubs.
Sorry mate, but in that case you're one of the scum why new players leave after a few round of alien
There are legitimate reasons to create a new account. It wouldn't be right to automatically ban everyone who did.
This is an option in Shine and I'd recommend all server ops to use it.
Smurfs are a problem but it's not a new problem and most suspected smurfs play both as aliens and marines so I don't think they are causing the recent shift in balance.
I have looked at the profiles you and others have linked here and on the Steam forums and I will ban a lot of them today. I am using the Shine option to check for family sharing accounts so all of their accounts will be banned. There is a possibility that I'm banning "innocent" accounts so if anyone feels they have been banned wrongly you should contact me here or at thirstyonos at gmail.com.
Finally a "real" admin with balls. Aweseome.
Never said i wasn't, never said i found it thrilling, i play ns2 to relax and kill time, don't make assumptions sir
Sitting around stomping is boring as fuck, id rather play with players of my skill, unfortunately comp is dead.
Teamwork requires both players to listen and effort in attempt to coordinate players while hoping they do listen, witch they rarely do
Personally i'd argue the fact that i can stomp an entire team really bad mechanics but nah blame it on the players
I am 100% with Fred on this, as I often am.
While smurfs can cause issues, we should not instant ban new accounts, and they are NOT the reason why the balance is off.
I was not joking about my explanation for the balance being of. Skill level around the board has taken a huge nosedive.
Personally I do think its due to too many high level players leaving. (more played pub then I imagined it seems)
Average skill scores of around 1200 are also fairly low even on popular veteran servers like TTO.
The issue of this problem lies firmly in the ballpark of having not enough experienced players to carry the rounds for the rookies. (Note I am not making any comments on rookie only servers as I expect such play there.)
There is a huge difference between 'half your team being clueless' or 'all of them minus one or two'.
Now sadly I do not have realistic solutions. I see the problem, I do not know HOW we can fix it. Else I would be spamming devs with it right now.
Buffs again are not the answer. It would overbuff the few experienced players who already are the main carry of any team.
I do think any small detail to push them to play correctly is smart. Achievements would not hurt indeed.
"Pack play: damage a marine while close to 3 other aliens."
"Low eco is no eco: damage x RTs for y damage and destroy z RTs while lerks, fade or onos are up."
Add more tutorials for the few who indeed run them. (dodging, etc.. I did not play them so sorry in advance if its already in.)
That's not true.
Well maybe 1 guy said that. The rest of us are just pissed at good players that create a new account just to have easy wins. Which is lame and pretty sad.
We have nothing against pro players who use their main account.
Look at Wob: he has 4300 skill points and no one wants to ban him, because he has the balls to play with his main account.
Noone has problems with good players.
But these "good players" are hiding behind low elo only to make every attempt of balancing useless so they can roflstomp another team.
They doing this cause this seem the only way for them "to have fun". Who cares about the others aslong you can have nonstop easy wins.
Another argument "I want to relax after work". Sure it can be very relaxing to shred trough a horde of groundskulks and walkerfades.
But most use cheats for the same reason, so its the same mindset.
Its in german, but this guy is telling exact that @ 11:30 mark:
When a vet uses an alt account to play in Rookie Only servers to get that 7 KDR it's defeating the purpose of Rookie Only and hurts retention.
Hopefully a better skill system will help push these players out of Rookie status much more quickly.
Above is an estimated cross-section of the old and new bite zone at the distance of the marine in the image. The 3D shape is a rectangular prism, so from the side you would again see a rectangle. Because of the way the world is mapped to your screen it appears smaller for distant targets.
When you bite, the server takes successive cross sections starting from your end of the prism. (Actually the area is divided into a few smaller squares but the idea is the same.) If something intersects a section, you register a hit. Otherwise it gets to the end of the volume and stops.
All of this is second-hand knowledge from devs. I know of no way to personally visualize the bite volume, aside from Crazy's Bite Aid—which to my understanding is not very accurate and not much easier than just biting from different angles.
Ok well there has to be more advanced tutorials for this game. A huge focus has to be marine shooting accuracy and skulk biting. If you can do those 2 things well, it helps you learn other things. There are plenty of informative things you can teach skulks to do to hit bites better and to be more effective. Also, how to stay alive and when they should arrack marines and when they should attack rts. You have to break the game down and make it very easy to see the path to get better. Some players may have no idea why they are missing so much or how they can play better.
As for smurfs, just as I already said, add a smurf report function, once 1 player receive enough he cannot join ranked server, simple.
I would like to see a report function. but the smurf should be reported to the server admins and not be banned instantly. the report function could be abused.
Way to go if you want your system to be slow and ineffective.
There are way to avoid eventual group trolling, like I said before you can remove a smurf report every day and/OR compare the amount of smurf report to the playtime of targeted player, so that if someone is reported a lot but has over say 1000hours, he cant be considered as a smurf.
So trying to tell me that you had these stats in your 1st lets say 30hrs.
60% bite accuracy right away without any knowledge of the map or the game. A KDR of over 2 in these 1st 30hrs in an game you never played before and so different from any other shooter.
later I've gotten worse Internet (UMTS till september) and I've decided to lower my mouse sensitivity since I couldn't hit well on really high distance..(and some other settings)
As I've shown multiple times there are solutions and there is a mild difference between camping on your position and "explaining"
So you know, this suggestion is mostly aimed at a future f2p evolution of ns2 with thousands of players coming in where the smurfs cant just all be reported to all the many ops.
For the record your current system of "report smurf to ops" can already be abused and already struggle with 100 people.