overly-balanced game = boring
rein4ce
Join Date: 2008-07-05 Member: 64567Members
Join Date: 2008-07-05 Member: 64567Members
<div class="IPBDescription">randomness + often updates = fun</div>hello!
there is a trend recently in game design to make the gameplay perfectly balanced, every even the smallest addition that *might* ruin the whole equilibrium is dreaded like nothing else. this leads to extremities like in Day of Defeat: Source where maps are more or less symetrical and the opossing teams have exactly the same weapons.
Dumbing down, I'm sure you all have heard of this and can agree that is not the way to go, nor is it the intention of NS2 developers
I also see the reason behind making games balanced - players these days tend to quickly work out the game mechanisms and come up with the most efficient gameplay style, exploiting every map irregularity, thus intimidating new players and dominating the battlefield. Giving every player the same chances is obviously the solution to this, but it fnally ends up with symetricallity. And even then, the smallest difference in time makes a certain game tactic the best and repeated to death.
I offer another approach to consider however:
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tsa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::tsa::" border="0" alt="tsa.gif" /> <!--coloro:#FFA500--><span style="color:#FFA500"><!--/coloro-->randomness<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> - glorifying not only personal skill but teamwork, randomness (for example weapon recoil) makes single players less confident but it also has minor affect on the group of players. it also applies to the map design, more interactive elements (completely taken out by Valve in their MP games) aafecting the game flow, indirect ways to fight, less predictability
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tsa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::tsa::" border="0" alt="tsa.gif" /> <!--coloro:#FFA500--><span style="color:#FFA500"><!--/coloro-->often updates<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> - put one strategy in favor this time, force another strategy next time etc. - constant balance-shifting small updates, can be weapons udates, can be game logic updates, but never let players get used to a given elaborated strategy making the gameplay stale
what this gives us? freedom to implement more features! for example istead of 4 solicitously configured and balanced weapons we can have 15 to choose from, after 3 weeks good players make 3 of that better than the others, and a week after an update comes, rebalancing the whole set. <b>personal skills wont be lost</b> - players will just have to put it again to use instead of blindly practising one and only strategy
please discuss
there is a trend recently in game design to make the gameplay perfectly balanced, every even the smallest addition that *might* ruin the whole equilibrium is dreaded like nothing else. this leads to extremities like in Day of Defeat: Source where maps are more or less symetrical and the opossing teams have exactly the same weapons.
Dumbing down, I'm sure you all have heard of this and can agree that is not the way to go, nor is it the intention of NS2 developers
I also see the reason behind making games balanced - players these days tend to quickly work out the game mechanisms and come up with the most efficient gameplay style, exploiting every map irregularity, thus intimidating new players and dominating the battlefield. Giving every player the same chances is obviously the solution to this, but it fnally ends up with symetricallity. And even then, the smallest difference in time makes a certain game tactic the best and repeated to death.
I offer another approach to consider however:
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tsa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::tsa::" border="0" alt="tsa.gif" /> <!--coloro:#FFA500--><span style="color:#FFA500"><!--/coloro-->randomness<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> - glorifying not only personal skill but teamwork, randomness (for example weapon recoil) makes single players less confident but it also has minor affect on the group of players. it also applies to the map design, more interactive elements (completely taken out by Valve in their MP games) aafecting the game flow, indirect ways to fight, less predictability
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tsa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::tsa::" border="0" alt="tsa.gif" /> <!--coloro:#FFA500--><span style="color:#FFA500"><!--/coloro-->often updates<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> - put one strategy in favor this time, force another strategy next time etc. - constant balance-shifting small updates, can be weapons udates, can be game logic updates, but never let players get used to a given elaborated strategy making the gameplay stale
what this gives us? freedom to implement more features! for example istead of 4 solicitously configured and balanced weapons we can have 15 to choose from, after 3 weeks good players make 3 of that better than the others, and a week after an update comes, rebalancing the whole set. <b>personal skills wont be lost</b> - players will just have to put it again to use instead of blindly practising one and only strategy
please discuss
Comments
I liked how TF2 did this with criticals. Sure, the purist "professionals" often were sent into nerd rage hysteria over this, but I found that for public play (e.g. playing for fun), this made the game more unpredictable. It did this without reducing skill's contribution to overall success, and overall, I think it made the game more fun. Not to mention, it just plain feels good to "bust a crit."
The randomness factor seems to go hand-in-hand with the dynamic focus for NS2, so hopefully it will play a part in the game.
if I remember properly, Diablo II multiplayer was working quite similar (don't know if it was planned though), very often you could see updates that tweaked skills to weaken the uber character builds, only to be changed again some time later after people managed to come up with another overpowered build, it might be one of the reasons why people are still playing it...
While not all of the asymmetry of NS1 will be in NS2, that mostly relates to the resource system which will be changed but remain. The combat styles will still be very asymmetric.
The randomness factor seems to go hand-in-hand with the dynamic focus for NS2, so hopefully it will play a part in the game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Crits in TF2 have gone too far towards randomness. They do not scale well for smaller teams, and I have seen several games decided by crits. I have also seen games where crits have not been prevalant in beating back a team on the last capture point, and I have seen that team re-organise and come back to win. I know which scenario I enjoy more, even if I'm on the losing team.
Crits make those instances far less likely because of the way TF2 is structured (with the defending team spawning a full 10 seconds slower than attackers). Add fewer defenders (because of spawn time disadvantage) plus crits means the team with more enemies in an area has the advantage, because it has more likelihood of random crits outdoing the smaller team trying to keep them at bay while they wait for their team to respawn.
Crits favour larger player numbers where they have less of an overall impact. They also reduce the impact of one very good player carrying their team, because it's much harder to gauge how much damage you are likely to sustain before withdrawing from an engagement. Two Engies at close range shouldn't be a problem for a Soldier, but if one of them gets a crit at any time that lands, the Soldier is suddenly on the back foot. That's the positives of crits for large player numbers, but they don't scale downwards well. Just look how horrendous crits are on TF2 Arena servers.
For a game like NS2 a similarly random feature with as much of an impact as crits have is unlikely to work well because the team sizes are generally a bit smaller. This may change for NS2, but going on NS it would not work well. To draw a comparison, randomised RFK (res for kills) would be a far better implementation of the random element, because this would narrow the extra bonuses given to a very good player versus a less skilled player, without having a notable impact on deciding games in an instant.
While not all of the asymmetry of NS1 will be in NS2, that mostly relates to the resource system which will be changed but remain. The combat styles will still be very asymmetric.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
^ agree
I'm also against randomness. The 'often updates' is also weak. Do you really want to spend time learning and mastering a game, then have the core balance disrupted so you have to re-learn it? No. DiabloII fixes were to <b>fix</b> broken builds. Same thing with StarCraft. All updates in the recent years were to <b>fix</b> something. Not to create variety, but to re-balance the gamebreaking features.
What I think you're aiming for is as locallyunsauce points out asymmetry. However, I also postulate you're looking for varied gameplay. Playing the same game over and over is boring. Playing the same game, but with different strategies is fun. Look at StarCraft. Extremely well balanced, but the variety of strats are amazing and continuing to develop. Also, each strat isn't necessarily better than another, it also relies on certain skills of the player to bring out the best parts and minimize the worst parts of the strat. StarCraft also takes advantage of asymmetry.
So yes, perfectly symmetric games in perfectly symmetric maps can be boring. Wait. TF2 is perfectly symmetric. Ah, there's the varied gameplay again. All Scouts is a viable strat. However, it can get taken down by proper skill and opposing class choices. A Heavy+Medic combo is powerful, but can be countered by a good Sniper or ambushing Pyro. The variety from the chosen classes and skills keeps it fun. Chess is also pretty darn close to symmetric, except for the whole White goes first part.
So, you've pointed out something that we want in our game, but attributing it to the wrong variables.
Somewhat OT but is this the goal of randomized RFK? I thought the randomization was due to some math ideal of what it should average out to(ie: 2.3) because of the asymmetry between the two teams. Also it doesn't really do the above. For that it would need to have diminishing rewards.
I have nothing specific in mind, but throwing that out there.
The proper word is depth.
I'm sorry you're an idiot.
I don't know about the actual purpose, but in smaller games it mixes up the timing nicely. Without random rfk most comms could for example tell almost the exact moment when the player can afford a lerk, hive or fade. Now it's impossible to tell the exact moment.
I've lost numerous marine rounds to early hives, when the hivebuilder gets high end RFK and plants the hive way before the first fade. It takes some extra caution to be checking the hive a minute earlier than you'd expect it to be built, but things like that also give some extra challenge for the comming.
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When it comes to strategical variation, I'd prefer a style somewhat similar to starcraft:
The core gameplay is well balanced, allowing many variations and approaches to any part of the game. Some strategies are risky, some are more safe and solid overall. The risk comes from the fact that you're not going to know what your enemy is doing. For example going all LMGs works against an early mass capping, but doesn't work against DCs healing the alien nodes. That's the 'randomization' I'll want to see from the game. Then again early double SG might counter the DC. That multiplied by a few hundred and you've got the basic idea of starcraft risk-payoff gameplay.
Later on, the limited information the teams get are the risk factors. They aren't going to be aware of everything, thus they need to take risks and partitially predict what the enemy is up to.
As for the keeping the strategies fresh, Starcraft has the easily renewable map pool. I don't know if NS can have one, but I still feel even a new A-quality map once in 4 months or so could help a lot. It's also nice if the existing maps are easily modifiable to some extend.
Globally speaking, criticals lend you nor your opponent any particular advantage (it's random). In fact, as the number of players in a game increases, you receive a disproportionate number of criticals over your less-skilled teammates (after all, you are killing more people per unit time, and receiving a higher probability bonus).
Criticals punch random holes in the skill ceiling so that the people who play a few hours a week can still have fun with those who play hours a day (e.g. high schoolers vs. 35-something dad). You still end up scoring higher, and still get those same "unfair" criticals for your own use.
Forgive me for not wanting an entirely deterministic game that's 100% dominated by the elite -- I am indeed an idiot.
That said, upon further consideration, NS2 probably won't need much added in respect to a randomness factor. It will already have random hive placement, which serves pretty well to keep people from falling back to a set of stagnate strategies that make games play out too similarly each time. As locallyunscene has said, asymmetry already serves to keep games interesting. I just hope more as transparent and impacting as hive placement is added to NS2.
<b>Criticals punch random holes in the skill ceiling</b> so that the people who play a few hours a week can still have fun with those who play hours a day (e.g. high schoolers vs. 35-something dad). You still end up scoring higher, and still get those same "unfair" criticals for your own use.
Forgive me for not wanting an <b>entirely deterministic game that's 100% dominated by the elite</b> -- I am indeed an idiot.
That said, upon further consideration, NS2 probably won't need much added in respect to a randomness factor. It will already have random hive placement, which serves pretty well to keep people from falling back to a set of stagnate strategies that make games play out too similarly each time. As locallyunscene has said, asymmetry already serves to keep games interesting. I just hope more as transparent and impacting as hive placement is added to NS2.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You are an idiot.
That's all I wanted out of you.
Forgiven.
In this respect, you can't compare to tf2. All classes in tf2 are parallel and can be choosen freely by the player at his or her own pace, meaning if you play badly with one class, you simply switch to one you play better with. Your team doesn't gain any loss. No frustration (at least no more than you'd expect to have dying often).
In natural selection as it is now, if you choose to go lerk, you invest your resources for a class which is hard to learn. Then when you get shotguned down, you say "this is dumb, I hate this class." Naturally, you switch to the less costly alternative to skulk, the gorge. When you plant a sensory chamber in a part of the map as the first hive ability which is hardly ever frequented and everybody on the team cusses you out for making such a newbie mistake, you say "this is dumb, I hate this game." Not only does the newb ruin the game, but he tells all his buddies what an awful mod it was and goes back to playing tf.
To reiterate my point, comparing tf2 and ns2 is like comparing apples to oranges, and in this mod, elitism is great if you're goal is to keep new players from joining.
So, how do we get people to the point where they go 'Oh, I did a mistake, I'll better remember that next time.' A friendly community is probably a part of it, but what else it takes?
TF2 has never given me any of that 'What if' feeling. I felt there's nothing that keeps you getting back to the game unless you've got 5 active teammates ready to play the game. Meanwhile in NS I still find quite a lot of new things to try. I guess I should try organised TF2 before giving the final judgement for the game though.
First of all, who are the elitists you are talking about? Second of all, if you don't like skill differences, go and play The Sims Online or something.
<!--quoteo(post=1694541:date=Nov 28 2008, 05:25 AM:name=Radix)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Radix @ Nov 28 2008, 05:25 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1694541"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->No he's right. We should add crits to football so that every once in awhile more than one of Dallas' players can break through the opposing defense.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Alternatively, Pats without their star player to carry them are going to need a lot more than crits to beat NY now. We should completely make it illegal for any player to be better than any other player. It might discourage new recruits from joining the NFL!
I think you're missing the whole point here. Skill difference is normal in any game. Natural selection doesn't just have skill difference. It has skill 'gaping-hole-the-size-of-the-grand-canyon'. I suppose if you were the one of the elitists, it wouldn't make much difference to you either way how easy it is for newbies to play. I'm talking about natural selection for your typical average player here. Nobody wants to ruin the game for another, but then if there's an elitist jumping all over them for messing up, in the end it isn't the newb that's the problem frankly.
It's like showing up to the special olympics before they do a relay race with a motorcycle. Not only do you beat them, but you literally beat them, as you grab your baseball bat and beat the crap out of them after you've won the race, laughing the entire time. Gets to be a bit much after a while, and it makes it so that it is no fun for anyone else.
If that doesn't bother you, if you like, I can start giving you reasons on how it would affect you personally.
I've tried really hard to stay out of this thread, since it's just so blatantly wrong and I would just call people stupid, but seriously... what the ######?
I've never played Starcraft. Can you believe that? It's true. Whenever SC2 was announced I went and bought the battlechest. I logged onto battle.net after doing some skirmishes with the AI and I got destroyed. I played another game and got destroyed.
Why? Because I had no idea how to play and that game is as old as hell. People had been playing for years. Now take the same scenario and apply it to NS.
These "gaping grand canyon" skill differences you're referring to were not around in NS's "golden days." The majority of players out there were average, and the highly skilled ones commonly filled vet/clan servers (such as HAMPTONS).
I mean, everything you're saying is just so wrong and sounds so stupid. Randomness in NS2? Intentionally encouraging certain strategies by overpowering them one week then nerfing the next? I mean, the OP and anyone agreeing with him sound like 12 year olds or people who are trying to troll us all.
Did you vote for Obama?
I think its not even funny how many people were unable to handle the the NS1 gameplay. The whole learning curve has kept me puzzled, as its still easy to learn as long as you think a little by yourself.
Bring on the change, as long as it keeps my brain going as much as NS1 does here and there.
Oh, and I'd still like to hear more about those elitistist that don't play the game for fun. They've been mentioned so often that someone has to have a very specific description on them.
They are the most elusive demographic, sort of like bigfoot.
As for randomness, I don't understand how this would somehow foster teamwork. It has been my experience that increasing randomness, in general, creates novelty which wears off and leave frustration.
As for randomness, I don't understand how this would somehow foster teamwork. It has been my experience that increasing randomness, in general, creates novelty which wears off and leave frustration.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hmm, by the way you describe it and by the way I've seen it on pubs, the competetive scene isn't even that elitist then. Most elitist people are those who've just learned to go 15-7 on pub marine or know the supersiege inside out and eject everyone new to the map.
Meanwhile most competetive players have got pwned by better players so much that they don't really think they're that good at the game. They may rage here and there, but very few of the actually try to throw insults at 'inferior' players or anything.
Whats even more hilarious is the very fundamental group you are trying to defend is actually affected more by that statement than the diehard fans.
Anyways
The best way to address the skill balance issue to continue testing for extreme strats (NS team does this already) and to segregate both the competitive and casual communities. For more information on a potential suggestion for this please read the following post:
<a href="http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=104062" target="_blank">http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index....howtopic=104062</a>
Adding it randomness to a game with this much dynamics will kill the playerbase before it even has a chance to develop.
Bottom line: In any game where there are two opposing teams competing for 1 victory, there were always be players that are more effective than others attempting to achieve said victory.
Segregating the playstyles as best as possible will minimize the headache that casual players experience when a dominating player takes control of the game. It will also minimize the headache for a competitive style game that can be ruined by a bad non-competitive player.
I worry about that word "segregate". Doing such creates the gap between high level and lower levels players, making the transition that much harder.
I would rather there be a magical way to have a perfectly smooth learning curve where the noobs don't get pwned and the pros don't get mad, and moving from noob to pro doesn't require taking a deep breath and disappearing into a secret training facility for a week. I would rather be able to improve myself against players of my own skill range, but still see the potential of higher level play, thus pushing me to get better, or be satisfied with my current level of skill.