HandschuhJoin Date: 2005-03-08Member: 44338Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Community Developer
If you would only lower the movementsound with the aspect that you could hear the skulk only from something like 1 meter range, then this could also improve gameplay.
Maybe it's not intuitive, but if you get crushed from a fast skulk from behind you still have the chance to react to it so you're not confused - even though you're probably dead
I want to see silence get removed, just so i can witness the astronomical amounts of complaints you'd get from alien players, then watch it get patched back in a week later. lol
I am assuming people knowing they can get silence every round to start the game, is leading to not a lot of good skulks. There isn't much incentive to attack marines at the right time or how to move as a skulk more effectively when you can crutch on silence each round. I think it's also leading to worse game-play. You have to force people to learn the movements of the game to get better (or help them). When comp mod recently changed skulk, we saw an adjustment period due to changes (smaller bite cone and other changes). It seems like over time people got better, as they learned how to bite accurately again, and how to be effective as skulk with good movement.
Also, it's not fun to play against silence, just like it's not fun to not be able to see. This needs a major nerf if you want better game-play. Ghoul's idea is a step in the right direction or just remove it completely. Even if you have to increase skulk speed for a momentary amount of time, so people can adjust to no silence...whatever it takes to get silence out of shift hive, and preferably out of the game.
Here is an idea to help people when you're removing silence...give all skulks celerity speed normally. And change celerity to something that gives skulks a small boost or a momentary speed boost. I don't think this is a good overall change, but I'm not against changes for an adjustment period to help skulks with no silence. Let's work together for a better game where we can hear the aliens. There is still a sneak button for skulks, lerks can still glide behind marines...we don't need silence.
I want to see silence get removed, just so i can witness the astronomical amounts of complaints you'd get from alien players, then watch it get patched back in a week later. lol
I am assuming people knowing they can get silence every round to start the game, is leading to not a lot of good skulks. There isn't much incentive to attack marines at the right time or how to move as a skulk more effectively when you can crutch on silence each round. I think it's also leading to worse game-play. You have to force people to learn the movements of the game to get better (or help them). When comp mod recently changed skulk, we saw an adjustment period due to changes (smaller bite cone and other changes). It seems like over time people got better, as they learned how to bite accurately again, and how to be effective as skulk with good movement.
Also, it's not fun to play against silence, just like it's not fun to not be able to see. This needs a major nerf if you want better game-play. Ghoul's idea is a step in the right direction or just remove it completely. Even if you have to increase skulk speed for a momentary amount of time, so people can adjust to no silence...whatever it takes to get silence out of shift hive, and preferably out of the game.
Here is an idea to help people when you're removing silence...give all skulks celerity speed normally. And change celerity to something that gives skulks a small boost or a momentary speed boost. I don't think this is a good overall change, but I'm not against changes for an adjustment period to help skulks with no silence. Let's work together for a better game where we can hear the aliens. There is still a sneak button for skulks, lerks can still glide behind marines...we don't need silence.
An unfortunate truth about new players skulking is that no, they do not use silence to often, many of them use celerity. The number of times iv heard "i need celerity to fight as a skulk, they feel too slow" from new players is a broken record at this point.
Another unfortunate truth is that no, you cannot force certain people to learn a certain play-style, no amount of telling somebody what to do will stop them from picking silence, straight lining the fist marine that comes into line of sight and dying. Only they themselves can learn decide when, where, how and why to engage a scenario for some sort of profitable outcome.
Don't say silence is making people skulk worse, that's just putting the blame on something else instead of realizing what the deeper problem is. You need to re-evaluate what kinda of game people are playing here, a melee unit that has to close distances to accomplish things vs ranged units trying to kill things before they get close to them (the latter of which is easier because a majority of people are used to games where you shoot things from a distance). So you don't want them to have silence, but you want them to close distances undetected. They can use the shift key more often to stealth around the map but this lowers map control because of slower rotations. You can hold down certain choke points for ambushes, possibly with a gorge fort, but again you limit map rotation playing like this. Holding points of interest is NOT map rotation. You can completely ignore marines and viciously attack res, but you need at lest one skulk that can clear your back-lines when they come for your naturals or just risk waiting until 3:10 when Lerks come out to rely on them for natural defenses, handicapping the first 3 mins of alien play.
Be increasingly careful how you limit the variety of play-styles available to aliens, at this point unless you have god tier Lerks and Fades on your team, you wont be doing much in a pub game on the alien team besides trying desperately to get a rush tunnel up or waiting for 6 or 7 Onos to pop.
If you truly have so much trouble with silence in game, you need to check your flanks/back more often or tell your com to place obs in better locations.. not advocating the removal of things you don't understand or want to deal with...
^I'm not telling people what to do, but there is less incentive to learn good skulk movement if you have the crutch of silence. Do you honestly believe people can't adjust to the game?
And where are you getting your stats that beginners don't use silence? You seem to be throwing out a lot of extreme examples here with no facts to back it up. Can I ask you, do you personally use silence a lot? More than celerity? Just curious. You are also making this way too extreme of a scenario. You are acting like if silence is removed, the game is too hard for aliens and they can't possibly win. Silence was on shade hive for a long time, and aliens could still win. That means silence was hardly ever being used early game, again the game wasn't broken. The point is when you are in a fight, silence enforces less good movement, and makes it very annoying for marines to play. I'm not the only one making this point either. As you can see from the person that started this topic.
Is the game better or worse with silence? Maybe more open to debate, I would argue worse. Is the game better or worse with silence on shift hive? I would say a lot of people including people that have commented on this thread, believe it's worse with silence on shift.
Personally as a skulk I love silence and feel that certain parties are just upset because now they can no longer run off on their lonesome and solo two dozen nooby skulks without any consequences. No one likes being shackled to nooby teammates, but this is a team game. Personally I've found most people to be pretty pliable when it comes to instructions, esp if you have a mic. Some sort of local voice chat (like they have in resistance and liberation mod for HL2) would go a long way towards letting you communicate with people around you without cluttering up the airwaves.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
Personally as a skulk I love silence and feel that certain parties are just upset because now they can no longer run off on their lonesome and solo two dozen nooby skulks without any consequences. No one likes being shackled to nooby teammates, but this is a team game. Personally I've found most people to be pretty pliable when it comes to instructions, esp if you have a mic. Some sort of local voice chat (like they have in resistance and liberation mod for HL2) would go a long way towards letting you communicate with people around you without cluttering up the airwaves.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
The problem never was how silence affects the skulks of bad players. The problem is how it affects the skulks of good players.
Which, really, is the problem with all abilities in ns2.
Personally as a skulk I love silence and feel that certain parties are just upset because now they can no longer run off on their lonesome and solo two dozen nooby skulks without any consequences. No one likes being shackled to nooby teammates, but this is a team game. Personally I've found most people to be pretty pliable when it comes to instructions, esp if you have a mic. Some sort of local voice chat (like they have in resistance and liberation mod for HL2) would go a long way towards letting you communicate with people around you without cluttering up the airwaves.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
The problem never was how silence affects the skulks of bad players. The problem is how it affects the skulks of good players.
Good players will hardly be affected by any changes though.. nerf it or take it away and they'll continue topping the scoreboard with insanely high kdr's...(hell most good players use celerity anyway)
On the flip side one of the few tools bad players can use to get the drop on good players will be gone. Can't crouch walk to sneak up on a good player because they're consistently checking their six.
I have to agree that it really seems like those who want it nerfed/removed are good players who only object because silence makes it a little harder for them to Rambo.
Quite the opposite. Silence makes it a lot, lot easier for me to rambo. As alien. Too easy, in fact. Which is one of the reasons (Plural! There are others. It also sucks to play against) I want it nerfed.
And it depends on the kind of changes. There's different ways to use abilities, and some of those are pretty exclusive to better players. If you nerf those, bad players will be a lot less affected.
A bad-ish but kindof example for this is the change in ghoul's balance mod where bites make full noise even with silence. This makes it significantly harder to tell when marines are approaching when you're biting RTs, which to me was one of the most useful applicaitons of silence.
It is reasonable to assume that bad players generally bite RTs less, and listen to their surroundings less. As such they are less affected by this change than me. The skill gap has been closed a tiny little bit.
It's a bad-ish exmaple because of that assumption, but I think you can see what I mean.
Some sort of local voice chat (like they have in resistance and liberation mod for HL2) would go a long way towards letting you communicate with people around you without cluttering up the airwaves.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
We had proximity voice before but it was half implemented and there wasn't any effort given on informing players about it so it was removed for lack of use.
Some sort of local voice chat (like they have in resistance and liberation mod for HL2) would go a long way towards letting you communicate with people around you without cluttering up the airwaves.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
We had proximity voice before but it was half implemented and there wasn't any effort given on informing players about it so it was removed for lack of use.
Well, it was also confusing for people rebinding keys, which commonly lead to people misbinding the wrong version and exclusively using that. The best implementation would be to merge the two, adding some sort of distorting or fuzz to non-local voices, and then having players closest simply using proximal. That's work, though, and more important things are being tackled.
Silence on shift is like the old boneshield: a crutch for low skill aliens that encourages sloppy play, gives marines headaches, and effectively removes any interesting choice of starting hive. The best thing that can be said in its defense is that aliens already feel weak and need all the help they can get. But to keep silence for that reason is really to just ignore more fundamental balance issues.
You know what might be a good compromise for both sides?
Reduce base skulk sounds across the board (movement, jump, leap, bite) to current level 1 silence levels and just remove silence entirely from the game.
Also might consider tuning down the noise of metabolise and blink a tad.
Silence on shift is like the old boneshield: a crutch for low skill aliens that encourages sloppy play, gives marines headaches, and effectively removes any interesting choice of starting hive. The best thing that can be said in its defense is that aliens already feel weak and need all the help they can get. But to keep silence for that reason is really to just ignore more fundamental balance issues.
Completely agree with this sentiment, and I think @Wob's suggestion is a good compromise to helping skulks in general, but I have a feeling that won't do much to alleviate aliens feeling weak.
Comments
Maybe it's not intuitive, but if you get crushed from a fast skulk from behind you still have the chance to react to it so you're not confused - even though you're probably dead
I am assuming people knowing they can get silence every round to start the game, is leading to not a lot of good skulks. There isn't much incentive to attack marines at the right time or how to move as a skulk more effectively when you can crutch on silence each round. I think it's also leading to worse game-play. You have to force people to learn the movements of the game to get better (or help them). When comp mod recently changed skulk, we saw an adjustment period due to changes (smaller bite cone and other changes). It seems like over time people got better, as they learned how to bite accurately again, and how to be effective as skulk with good movement.
Also, it's not fun to play against silence, just like it's not fun to not be able to see. This needs a major nerf if you want better game-play. Ghoul's idea is a step in the right direction or just remove it completely. Even if you have to increase skulk speed for a momentary amount of time, so people can adjust to no silence...whatever it takes to get silence out of shift hive, and preferably out of the game.
Here is an idea to help people when you're removing silence...give all skulks celerity speed normally. And change celerity to something that gives skulks a small boost or a momentary speed boost. I don't think this is a good overall change, but I'm not against changes for an adjustment period to help skulks with no silence. Let's work together for a better game where we can hear the aliens. There is still a sneak button for skulks, lerks can still glide behind marines...we don't need silence.
An unfortunate truth about new players skulking is that no, they do not use silence to often, many of them use celerity. The number of times iv heard "i need celerity to fight as a skulk, they feel too slow" from new players is a broken record at this point.
Another unfortunate truth is that no, you cannot force certain people to learn a certain play-style, no amount of telling somebody what to do will stop them from picking silence, straight lining the fist marine that comes into line of sight and dying. Only they themselves can learn decide when, where, how and why to engage a scenario for some sort of profitable outcome.
Don't say silence is making people skulk worse, that's just putting the blame on something else instead of realizing what the deeper problem is. You need to re-evaluate what kinda of game people are playing here, a melee unit that has to close distances to accomplish things vs ranged units trying to kill things before they get close to them (the latter of which is easier because a majority of people are used to games where you shoot things from a distance). So you don't want them to have silence, but you want them to close distances undetected. They can use the shift key more often to stealth around the map but this lowers map control because of slower rotations. You can hold down certain choke points for ambushes, possibly with a gorge fort, but again you limit map rotation playing like this. Holding points of interest is NOT map rotation. You can completely ignore marines and viciously attack res, but you need at lest one skulk that can clear your back-lines when they come for your naturals or just risk waiting until 3:10 when Lerks come out to rely on them for natural defenses, handicapping the first 3 mins of alien play.
Be increasingly careful how you limit the variety of play-styles available to aliens, at this point unless you have god tier Lerks and Fades on your team, you wont be doing much in a pub game on the alien team besides trying desperately to get a rush tunnel up or waiting for 6 or 7 Onos to pop.
If you truly have so much trouble with silence in game, you need to check your flanks/back more often or tell your com to place obs in better locations.. not advocating the removal of things you don't understand or want to deal with...
And where are you getting your stats that beginners don't use silence? You seem to be throwing out a lot of extreme examples here with no facts to back it up. Can I ask you, do you personally use silence a lot? More than celerity? Just curious. You are also making this way too extreme of a scenario. You are acting like if silence is removed, the game is too hard for aliens and they can't possibly win. Silence was on shade hive for a long time, and aliens could still win. That means silence was hardly ever being used early game, again the game wasn't broken. The point is when you are in a fight, silence enforces less good movement, and makes it very annoying for marines to play. I'm not the only one making this point either. As you can see from the person that started this topic.
Is the game better or worse with silence? Maybe more open to debate, I would argue worse. Is the game better or worse with silence on shift hive? I would say a lot of people including people that have commented on this thread, believe it's worse with silence on shift.
Also, unless the game has changed recently it is not as if silence stops skulks showing up on the minimap, which does a lot of the work in detecting aliens even if they are standing completely still in total darkness.
The problem never was how silence affects the skulks of bad players. The problem is how it affects the skulks of good players.
Which, really, is the problem with all abilities in ns2.
Good players will hardly be affected by any changes though.. nerf it or take it away and they'll continue topping the scoreboard with insanely high kdr's...(hell most good players use celerity anyway)
On the flip side one of the few tools bad players can use to get the drop on good players will be gone. Can't crouch walk to sneak up on a good player because they're consistently checking their six.
I have to agree that it really seems like those who want it nerfed/removed are good players who only object because silence makes it a little harder for them to Rambo.
And it depends on the kind of changes. There's different ways to use abilities, and some of those are pretty exclusive to better players. If you nerf those, bad players will be a lot less affected.
A bad-ish but kindof example for this is the change in ghoul's balance mod where bites make full noise even with silence. This makes it significantly harder to tell when marines are approaching when you're biting RTs, which to me was one of the most useful applicaitons of silence.
It is reasonable to assume that bad players generally bite RTs less, and listen to their surroundings less. As such they are less affected by this change than me. The skill gap has been closed a tiny little bit.
It's a bad-ish exmaple because of that assumption, but I think you can see what I mean.
We had proximity voice before but it was half implemented and there wasn't any effort given on informing players about it so it was removed for lack of use.
Well, it was also confusing for people rebinding keys, which commonly lead to people misbinding the wrong version and exclusively using that. The best implementation would be to merge the two, adding some sort of distorting or fuzz to non-local voices, and then having players closest simply using proximal. That's work, though, and more important things are being tackled.
Reduce base skulk sounds across the board (movement, jump, leap, bite) to current level 1 silence levels and just remove silence entirely from the game.
Also might consider tuning down the noise of metabolise and blink a tad.
Completely agree with this sentiment, and I think @Wob's suggestion is a good compromise to helping skulks in general, but I have a feeling that won't do much to alleviate aliens feeling weak.