There's a typo in the latest blog update, one sentence is broken and continues after a new bullet point
Balance
。Reduced Robotics Factory build time from 40 to 30 because very boring as marine 。Players are slowed somewhat when they take damage (not gas or flame damage). This is an experimental change, please be sure to let us know what you think!
<!--quoteo(post=1859627:date=Jul 11 2011, 04:09 PM:name=ZycaR)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ZycaR @ Jul 11 2011, 04:09 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859627"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->It looks like cysts do an only one way trail !!! What about cysts to be more connected? not just one link, but many between each other nearest. And also links between cysts will works in both ways.
That will prevent from broking whole link when just one cyst is destroyed.
<a href="http://is.gd/cRjJv7" target="_blank">Here is updated prototype, to see what I mean.</a> <img src="http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/7120/ns2cysts.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Recent games I do Khaa commander. I was create path of infestation from one hive to another, and marine kill just one cyst near by source hive ... the result was .. that whole path of infestation die :(<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> This is what I asked for all those weeks ago! And <b>now</b> you deliver? >:(
Got a pretty hectic network going, I think it looks great. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/efCSk.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Reduced medpack cost from 2 to 1 to help address marine comm running out of res problems<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't know if anyone's suggested this already but would it be better to either allow marines to donate personal res to the comm through the armoury or maybe have a levy on personal res gained that goes to the comm or both?
<!--quoteo(post=1859707:date=Jul 11 2011, 10:23 AM:name=Harimau)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau @ Jul 11 2011, 10:23 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859707"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->This is what I asked for all those weeks ago! And <b>now</b> you deliver? >:(
Got a pretty hectic network going, I think it looks great. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/efCSk.png" border="0" class="linked-image" /><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> loooooooooooooooooooooool
I'm very confident in UWE architect / programers quality. :) I hope they will see the value of multiply "link/vine" design and use it.
.. as marines got power pack (unconnected from CC/power nodes) they can be well defended as centric source of energy for building. .. the Khaa needs count to survive ... (it reminds me starcraft's "ZERG RUSH")
Rines long range , 1shoot1kill all weaps, Flamezhitter (AKA games killer) never gona like it in none game.
Aliens close range 3bites no kill. Joke energy in general + flamezhitter its joker 9000. Fade slow hit rate + joke energy. Lerk i hav no words for lerks... etc.
As skulk/fade when want kill a flamezhitter , surprise !! u cant bite/hit cause of joke energy + drain :D funny zhit like my english. As skulk u get killed from corners cause the skin its more large than the cam position , so marines see u and u cant see the marine and im not talking about flamethrower , they see your legs sticking out corners , in NS1 this happens a littel too but no like here... I donth like u cant leap in the air like NS1 , im used to jump and leap or leap in a fall. :(
I know this not the final product , but if ppl cry without knowing a zhit about ns1 i can cry too whit arguments cause im not a skilled fade player in NS1 (i really sux) but some skilled fade players are barely "inmortals" and none cry about it along this 5 years.
Worst patch ever (forme) , best patch ever for TF2-CoD cry rines players.
I've had about 10h of playtime in b180 now (both sides as player/com), this is how it feels for me:
<b>Fade:</b> I like it a lot and think it does what it should do, kill single rines. What I actually like quite is, that I have to have a close look on my energy to not die. Sometimes SG hurts very much and I can't hit anything because of a rine hopping around and blink causing me some weird lag at the end of blink.
<b>Lerk:</b> Also like it quite much. Short range forces me to have pretty close range battles, I flap a lot, I kill a lot, lot of adrenaline. Pretty cool. What I do not really like about it is the slow movement on hit. Makes it a) harder to get close b) way harder to escape if close. So I'm forced to battle it out once I'm close. This feels kinda wrong to me since I can't really do any flyby attacks. So my play-options as lerk currently are: a) snipe, which is ok but I don't enjoy it that much b) slow marine movement by sporing while retreating, needs me to get closer so I have to maneauver more but that's ok (and I was totally fine with the new flight model once I got my head around it, think I enjoy it more than the old one because of more capabilities) c) attack solo rines by getting close + sporing and battling it out. Flyby attack would be nice really so remove slow on hit for lerk pls. :)
What I find a bit awkward is, that currently Lerk is the perfect Building/Node killer. I find bilebomb still kinda unusable since aiming is hard because the gorge sight is so obscured by the gorges mouth. I always shoot a lot but have no idea if I'm actually hitting anything. And rines kill me in no time due to slow on hit. Also gorge is slow. With lerk I've got a 1 Hive building killer that's incredibly fast. And it brings down any building so extremely fast. I like the Lerk a lot for flying around and killing nodes, sentry farms (if you aim high you can get quite some range :) ), RTs and stuff.
<b>Rines</b> Weaponry is a bit cheap or res are too much or picking up weapons saves too many res.. I don't know. But as soon as SG tech is done (so almost from start of the game) I'll never use my rifle which I find a bit sad. Havn't had the opportunity to lerk-golf yet.
What I think generally why people don't like b180: Slow on hit makes your death as alien often frustrating because you feel like you couldn't have done anything better to not die. As a Gorge/Skulk/Lerk I often felt like I had no chance to escape/get closer to kill after I catched the first bullet. Death without (felt) option to do anything better = loss of control which is no fun.
Lerk, though he's got some better movement options (imo) it needs some getting used to, which ofc is frustrating for a while. Also the close range needs huge getting used to. I see lots of Lerks still trying to spike rines from great distances and hardly hitting anything. I use hive sight almost all the time (so I can't really see where my spores are exactly) and I didn't notice for a long long time, that my spores didn't even reach the Rines. I was just wondering how they could survive so much spores without medkits. Also if I switch out of hivesight, I just see huge clouds of spores, but I dont know if there are any spores behind the cloud as well. I often thought.. well.. this one spore cloud is very close to me, must have hit something on the way to the Rine I was aiming at => back to hive sight and shoot more spores ;)
Fade needs much more attention on Energy <b>and</b> HP now, especially when engaging Flamethrowers this needs some very good timing => again getting used to this takes time and is frustrating first ofc.
The cysts are kinda weird because they die so fast and need so much hive energy + res to rebuild. Being able to only use the energy of the hive I'm in only makes me hop from one hive to the next.. well.. not exactly.. more like hopping in a hive, using up its energy, playing as lifeform, hopping in the next hive when I see that there's need to (still/again) and I come across a hive. This makes alien progress kinda chaotic and slow since I don't really stay com and I can't just respond to requests like "more crags here pls".
<!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro--><b>Notification System</b><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> I've had quite some bad experiences with the notification system. I've had my IPs go down by a single Lerk/Skulk (Lerks rock now for this kind of thing) as Rine Com because I just didn't notice it was attacked, also as Alien Com I've seen my whole Cyst network/a hive getting killed by a solo ninja rine. This was true in previous builds as well and I kinda like the idea that the com has to communicate a lot with his team + multitask a lot like in SC (i.e. watch minimap a lot :) ) + it's possible to distract the com from all this by doing some hard attack at one position and solo attacking some other position. But for aliens, crysts + 1 hive energy com makes this very frustrating. The notification system doesn't really feel accurate (e.g. sometimes it takes very long until I recognize a solo rine attacking my hive). Also the "alien terrain" isn't really infested that much because I try to use as few cysts as possible because they cost so much energy (and pres). So rines on their way to my hive aren't really visible to me most of the time, because they aren't walking on infestation that much as in 179. And their damage done is way higher because of the whole cyst network thing (slays 3 important cysts which takes him some seconds, kill whole cyst network including RTs). So again I have the problem that I try to improve by (as in SC2) trying to look at the minimap more. But I'm not able to spot solo rines any better because they just don't walk on infestation that much at all. Multiple rines I usually can spot because they slay everything down on their way. And ofc also my alien teammates can't really react on "red circle moving closer" because he just disappers in the next second because he's leaving infestation again.
Though the downsides of the current build seem to give a very high frustration level I'm quite happy with where the game is heading with this build. The problems need to be sorted out ofc, but the Lerk and Fade roles make quite a lot of sense to me currently. I think Bilebomb needs to be improved a lot, because currently I'd rather choose a Lerk for killing buildings than a Gorge (apart from very few nice bilebomb-spots on the maps). Marine weapons need to be balanced out more somehow. Minor bugs (not able to place crysts/alien buildings, drifter/arc-ai) sometimes hurt a lot but I guess problems are known.
I played for about 8 hours on Friday and Saturday night. Just a couple things stood out to me; 1- it always comes down to team work. no matter what team I played on it took a good 15-20 minutes for the other players to really work together to push out and attack or defend in a group. I will concede the occasionally a lone player or even a group of two can accomplish a lot while everyone else is distracted but event still this game is very much team based (unless of course you are the TeamF player we ran into on Friday who seems to be the most incredible player ever taking out 5 marines with one hit each in a matter of seconds :)) 2- Cysts, I would say some of the things I read are true with the fact that if you kill one or two in the chain and the comm isnt seeing anything then everything dies is a little much considering it doesnt take long to kill it, at least before the flame thrower took awhile to burn it off. Maybe the Cysts can have a little more health? 3- Marines need better Armor, armor upgrades are good and all but you can still get drained in a matter of seconds if that. 4- NOTIFICATION SYSTEM!!!!!! as COMM for marines are had to keep going back to marine start to listen and see if thigns were being attacked because god forbid I get warned by my chair. I did notice I got a comm chair is being attacked audio once and a while but this still needs more improvement. I like the idea of being able to place either a sensor or a device that specifically creates a warning parameter up around itself to detect alien life forms.
Also big cudos on the changes to Summit, it looks cool!
Some of my thoughts after reading few pages there and playing some games:
1) Emergency lightning could be turned on by a marine commander. After destroying the power node, the room would be just black. Then it would be up to commander (new responsibility) to turn on emergency lightning in the rooms he sends other marines to. It could also take some time before it goes up after commander turns it on. 2) As for a skulk being stopped by (afaik) single bullet from any direction: It is a death sentence and also it is just simply annoing. This is nothing else than UX problem. The game experience for skulks just got worse with this. 3) Long living cysts could (slowly) replicate themselves for free. That would mean that in alien start room and nearby spaces it would be much more difficult to kill them all. 4) And also maybe older cysts' range (where they detect if they should die because there are no other connected cysts around) could get wider as time passes. 5) And maybe because cysts are a living organism trying to survive -- when disconnected from the the network, before they die, they could start to try to spread in the direction they would "feel" other cysts are still connected. That would mean that a chance that the networks is automatically regenerated would exist and marines would have to stay on the "cleaned" ground for a while. 6) When cysts, hydras and infestation are on walls too, it looks cool. 7) I did not try this but if it is true that I have to be in the hive I want use the energy from: IMHO it destroys pretty much the advantage of having more hives (and eg. spread infestation more quickly).
For the most part here I am just reading senseless jibber jabber from people that don't know how to play aliens properly. People need to learn as a fade you run in, Swipe(DON'T MISS! - this is key!) and then let go of the swipe button until your aim is back on the marine, then swipe again. Don't hold it.
As for cysts yes they are a bit easy to handle, I find it more appropriate to use the longest line of site single path for the cysts works best for incredibly fast expansion(unreasonably fast) to capitalize on early rt's for a quick game win. I think the vine idea would work wonders to counteract both these issues. it would encourage us to put more cysts everywhere giving a more natural feel to the alien realm, and would slow down how some people place cysts(not me of course ';..;')
Also as a side note, I think a 4 hive/CC should have some kind of extremely debilitating move that would greatly hinder the enemy. It would make for a more offensive action game, where there is a reason to push hard and fast and get into the action, instead of sitting around and turtling a base up. It would also encourage marines to actually build cc's instead of where as of now it's just a waste of resources.
that is all for now. <3
Thank you for giving me a wonderful game that I have played for probably well over 9 years now, and is the only thing that compared to my WoW addiction.
maybe just Gorges need to learn to play -- put cyst everywhere they go so it would be difficult to kill all the cysts in the way. And glowing hive, hydras and three dozens of cysts in black heliport would look awesome :).
-Lerk seems really gimped now -Cysts are adding nothing and tend to clutter up the battlefield, they are also way too easy to kill -Sentry spam is almost unstoppable, especially with the lerk and fade nerfs
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's really helpful.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
Just played 20 mins or so of 180. For me its the first time in several patches where it was unplayable.
Was on a UK server (where i am) and the SA was on saying that the Server itself was at 75% capacity and NS was only taking 25%. Had fairly consistent warpyness the whole time and I couldn't really experience the positives. Experienced similar symptoms on another eu server as well.
Couple of things I did like, New sounds, Kill Icons, Cysts (to an extent) were really cool. With the Cysts they feel a bit too intrusive, if they were flatter then they would be fine but I find myself walking around them which they shouldn't be forcing me to do. Like the implementation though.
I noticed one bug, ST was on 56% health (if that helps) but was looping the firing sound.
Overall, lots of nice aesthetic improvements but a massive drop in playablilty for me - something I know you guys will fix as you have consistently done in the past.
I think it's not just about knowing who wins or lose, you should also watch the time it takes to actually end a game, I haven't been able to stay till the end of a winning alien match on build 180 yet (although I haven't played that much) In my opinion, it's very hard to take control over marines. especially because in the build 180, the fade is totally powerless in destroying structures, the only thing it can do is kill, and so defend. You should probably make his second attack be more deadly against structures, since killing structures doesn't require to move, and since it's not use that much anyway. Currently, if marines build enough sentries correctly, it's very hard to take them down, the skulk gets killed before reaching it, the fade doesn't do lots of damages and the lerk's flight makes it hard to hit then run away (Sorry to say that but in my opinion, the lerk is a lot more difficult to fly than in last builds, I tend to push forward all the time when I fly, because it makes sense when you want to go forward, but doing this, I can't go up anymore).
Things are getting better and more balanced - and bug fixes/features will come with time :)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I honestly think we have to be very careful when using this kind of data even if the sample size is large. The metagame changes, performance is still a factor at this stage, and balance and fun are not necessarily correlated either. Data can support and feedback to balance development, but as the twitter feed suggests and i commend, actual discussion is crucial. A game can always be balanced but it has to be done in a way that doesn't detract from the 'fun' factor. For example, i could make aliens super strong and then give marines a random cointoss chance to obtain a nuke which automatically wins them the game. 50/50 balanced in the sample sure, but it probably wont be very engaging or fun.
My own personal experience is that i'm finding 180 alot less <b>fun</b> compared to 179 as both marines and aliens 1) A large part of that is due to <b>alien slowdown</b>. Its frustrating, artificially creates advantage for ranged weapon users and basicaly boils down to an indirect reduction of the effective hitpoints of skulks and lerks. For one, if im going to die i dont want to do it slowly and ineffectively crawling towards marines. I loved skulk skirmish play and surely there must be another way to balance other than with slowdown.
2) The second is with cysts. While the idea is nice, how you place them is unintuitive (shows circle range but no indication of LOS restriction). Another thought is that overall as a pattern of lots of dots it just doesn't look very natural? I dont know how to explain it but it seems to somehow take away from the organic feel of infestation for me. And then there is the hp problem. 180 gameplay to me feels too fragile and random in deciding the winner early/mid game with the probability of a long drawn out siege on sentry central. If you lose a skulk/marine battle in one wing of the map e.g. surface, the risk and cost of marines quickly pushing to kill one cyst seems too high..
3) Medpacks are also way too cheap with there now being no other real use for commander pres. There isnt any tradeoff decision here and i think that detracts from the commander game somewhat. Pooling res and then carpeting the 2nd hive room as your assaulting seems too effective. A good strategy game i think involves resource investment decisions that have more complex tradeoffs than now or later.
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't think that the balancing is the problem with this build, it's much rather frustration emerging from recurring situation of disadvantaged encounters that leads to all those harsh opinions. Having a fight with an opponent can be fun even if you lose. Losing fights often and very quickly without much chance to change the track of the fight however spoils the fun in the encounters. In 179 I had much fun both as marine and alien even though I was killed more often than not. Now it feels less like an achievement to win and on the other side rather frustrating to lose as the fights are over very quickly. No longer am I fighting with one opponent for nearly a minute, there is no pursuit of wounded bait or even successful escape, nor is there much time spent thinking that you could win this one if you would just place that next shot. What there is are encounters that end shortly after one opponent saw the other and usually this very attacker is the winner. If you are up against the odds of multiple marines you stand a much lesser chance to win even if you play good as you are handicapped much more by every lucky hit. I am not a very good at NS2 (yet), as I never played NS1 and I started playing NS2 only a few weeks ago, so this might look very differently from the perspective of a better player but for someone who is rather new to the game it seems as if it doesn't matter if I play good or bad (in the range of my possibilities). This observation is entirely based on comparisons to B179.
In a nutshell: Combat <b>seems</b> a lot less skill-based with 180 to me.
It's a bit glitched (It uses the viewmodel of a random marine weapon when you use it) anyway, <a href="http://i.imgur.com/xyvRp.png" target="_blank">this</a> is what it's supposed to look like.
<!--quoteo(post=1859794:date=Jul 11 2011, 03:04 PM:name=Flayra)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Flayra @ Jul 11 2011, 03:04 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859794"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's really helpful.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<!--quoteo(post=1859794:date=Jul 12 2011, 07:04 AM:name=Flayra)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Flayra @ Jul 12 2011, 07:04 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859794"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's really helpful.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> I wouldn't pay to much attention to those stats ther are very miss leading...
Given that the pathing isssue the arc is pretty much an ineffective unit and it's a major game ender for marines, then you have the lack of alerts which means 1 sneaky skulk can do major damage and last but not least there is no tier 3 game enders that means most game don't have a deciscive win once they have some advantage and the game stalemates for sometime which usually the aliens prevail...
<!--quoteo(post=1859820:date=Jul 11 2011, 04:12 PM:name=elodea)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (elodea @ Jul 11 2011, 04:12 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859820"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->My own personal experience is that i'm finding 180 alot less <b>fun</b> compared to 179 as both marines and aliens 1) A large part of that is due to <b>alien slowdown</b>. Its frustrating, artificially creates advantage for ranged weapon users and basicaly boils down to an indirect reduction of the effective hitpoints of skulks and lerks. For one, if im going to die i dont want to do it slowly and ineffectively crawling towards marines. I loved skulk skirmish play and surely there must be another way to balance other than with slowdown.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So my regular group of players all play Battlefield Bad Company 2 a lot, when we arent play NS and NS2 and this type of gameplay is extremely common in the newer FPS titles trying to add some form of realism to the gameplay. As a marine I like it of course cause if you are low on life I still have a chance at killing you before you running away. As an alien its a little frustrating, but I have seen players coming up with a lot of new tactics with gorge rushing along with other evolves in order to support their attacks. Aliens at the start of the game are very powerful on their own, but then just as marines they need to work together to be effective later on in the game. I will also say this there are some amazing players out there especially alien ones, sometimes it just takes time to learn the effectiveness of how to play.
<!--quoteo(post=1859794:date=Jul 11 2011, 11:04 PM:name=Flayra)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Flayra @ Jul 11 2011, 11:04 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859794"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's really helpful.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> That kind of depends on how you define balanced. Strictly speaking if you mean round-wins and nothing but that, you might be right, but personally when I read 'balanced' I'm thinking of a myriad of gameplay-elements (economics, melee-combat, map-control and whatnot), and anecdotal evidence suggests this build is far from balanced, perhaps less so than previous builds.
And I do wish people would stop quoting those ###### BORDERLINE USELESS statistics.
watched the NS2hd video, looks really good actually - i can see the ping issues are still there, but, cysts look neat and skulk knockback looks like a great gameplay element that adds a bit more skill to close combat on the human side. Knockback looks like its too far, but im sure it will be tuned for balance later. Oh and having camera shake with the rifle is a huge improvement for that animation.
Two 180-related questions
1. fades were announced to have a blink "trail" in 180, did that not happen? 2. framerate looks smooth, maybe time to add the volumetric lighting back into the engine? please?
<!--quoteo(post=1859832:date=Jul 11 2011, 11:54 PM:name=kabab)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (kabab @ Jul 11 2011, 11:54 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859832"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I wouldn't pay to much attention to those stats ther are very miss leading...
Given that the pathing isssue the arc is pretty much an ineffective unit and it's a major game ender for marines, then you have the lack of alerts which means 1 sneaky skulk can do major damage and last but not least there is no tier 3 game enders that means most game don't have a deciscive win once they have some advantage and the game stalemates for sometime which usually the aliens prevail...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, I agree. I think the lack of alerts and stalemates have a big influence on those stats. I just won a game as aliens because all the marines left and it ended up 3v7 (and by that point people would rather start a new round than join a losing team and drag it out). There's also games like 1v1 or 2v2 that favour aliens just because it is so much easier to take out an IP than it is to take down the hive whilst killing the eggs. Taking that into account I don't really think you can use those stats as anything more than a very rough guide.
I feel like one reason why marines are better this build is the fades inability to take down buildings. In 179 fades were really the only class that could take down sentries effectively, but now they aren't very good at that. (I'm not saying that fades should be able to take down lots of buildings, but it was really the only thing aliens had in 179). Aliens need a good way to deal with sentries or they need to be limited for now until they have a proper counter.
From a balancing standpoint you really need to look at 6v6 games with players of equal skill. Or you at least need some way to sort through the stats and find out "Which team is winning games that last more than 30mins?" "How many players were in each team when they won?" "How many games last less than 5 minutes and who wins?" etc. Just looking at the total wins per team is kind of meaningless.
With that said I think the focus should be on individual balance between the players rather than team balance right now. With so many changes to the alien movement etc. it will take a while before that is finalized and then you can really look at team balance. It's no good saying the game is balanced if everyone is just playing shotguns vs skulks.
Also, does the skulk play a sound on biting a marine? If it does I think it needs to be louder. It's sometimes hard for me to tell if I'm actually landing a bite or not.
The slow on hit for aliens (especially gorge) and lerk turning into a sissy has sucked the fun out of build 180 for me personally. Cysts do need to be tweaked with more HP. Hoping build 181 will follow quickly to tweak or remove the pain. Statistics have to be taken with a huge grain of salt as these include games that the teams rage quit or stalemate quit or teams got stacked etc.
<!--quoteo(post=1859794:date=Jul 12 2011, 12:04 AM:name=Flayra)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Flayra @ Jul 12 2011, 12:04 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859794"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's really helpful.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I simply had to make an account after reading this, now I might or I might not get a response but hopefully you'll end up considering the following:
How is this in any manner relevant? I don't know how optimized the game is for running on the rigs you use for developing, but from talking to friends and following the chatter in random games, marines in majority seem to observe skulks "warping" whenever they engage in melee range making it immensely more difficult to actually predict their movement vectors, thus making aiming tedious and difficult. Yes the slowdown combat effect combined with the pustule highways being extremely fragile against lone ranger assaults does give marines more of chance, but viewing game wins as guidance for balance in an incomplete game is completely absurd as all they show is <b>how the <i>current</i> content as a whole balances out</b> with the current playerbase (say the kharaa having access to fades and marines not having access to JP or HA) and not how current content balances amongst the current available content (i.e. how good skulks are against a marine equipped with a particular weapon).
Just because the current end game numbers are a bit better than before, that doesn't mean that the individual content is balanced. Infact it's horrendously unbalanced, as marine players who have correct rigs to avoid the "warping" effect/are just good enough to predict movement regardless are completely untouchable by skulks after they get access to shotguns. Currently these players are very few in number, but if you don't balance the game according to their capabilities the game will never have a long lifespan as once people start getting good at it they will start to notice that it simply does not offer high quality gameplay. Now adding the whole slowdown to the equation and one can't claim with a straight face that when it's ranged vs. melee that it's in any manner or form balanced after the game code gets more optimized. Then there's the whole pustule issue, a single marine can with only at the cost of risking his life rush into alien pustule highway and kill a pustule next to the hive, taking down the whole highway and then obviously the buildings that were supported by it. Now in order to fix this the commander has to expend the same resource pool that provides drifters for building material, which is already in short supply until later stages of the game OR you have to have a gorge in maintenance duty just dedicated to fixing these. There have been willing gorges to provide creep access to early RT captures, but I can't imagine "creep duty" being very enjoyable gameplay experience for the said player.
My recommendation would be to turn the pustules cloaked and flat, with possibly only taking damage from ARCs(AoE)/Flamethrowers/GLs during this state but with a scan a commander could turn them visible and vulnerable to all all kinds of marine weaponry. And as fine tuning, link scans heavily into "support energy pool" used for medpacks and ammo (and/or perhaps MACs), thus making creep highway harass to have at least somekind of a cost to balance against the upkeep cost that aliens face to maintain it. This would provide marines with ability to remove creep with personal resources and some ingenuity OR by commander support, but neither tactic would be completely free of cost. Also possibly consider changing creep so that instead of keeping the alien buildings alive, it enables placement for them and provides "energy", so that when a pustule gets removed from the middle of the highway, the following pustules retract their creep but stay alive and the buildings turn dormant instad of taking additional damage.
Another thing I'd like to address is that there seems to be a current design "theme" around movement impairing for the benefit slower and easier gameplay, such as the slowdown when hit, and discussion on forum about penalizing marines for jumping. I guess having movement as an important part of combat requires a bit more skill and doesn't fit with the whole CS, CoD, and BF "zeitgeist" of gameplay, but it's still infinitely more engaging to play rather than stoicly standing around or trying to find exploits in the "movement impairing mechanics". It's something that you can constantly hone by playing which makes it interesting, and yes somewhat old school-ish, but looking with disdain at the mainstream gaming industry, indie companies seem to be the only glimmer of hope for those who still like games that are unique and actually take skill and dedication to play. Another thing is that having more things to hone your skills in opens possibility of properly skillful players creating some sort of an edge for their team in combat, thus making the matches slightly less reliant on commanders and so creating more diversity in the whole experience (either as a player or for a viewer).
A competitive game doesn't require absolute balance, but it does need properly good mechanics to work.
Frag me if I'm wrong but why put so much time into balance already? There's no point in balancing it until every feature, weapon and all tiers are available IMHO. It would be like crash testing a car before you've figured out where to put the engine. As I understand it, every bit about the balance and small tweaks such as hit-slowdown or weapon range can be configured using LUA later on (by anyone so inclined to boot). Balance at this stage is a waste of time. When NS1 came out most of the game features were in place and the balancing changes were relevant from day one. I feel it isn't in this case.
As a stepping stone to test features and ideas (like the hit-slowdown, it "bugs" me) just use NS1 configurations for the time being (since that's what people refer to anyway. All efforts and energy should be put to completing the games different parts instead of correcting balance issues at this stage or else UW is in effect creating a complete game with every second build. We as players should react to the features and ideas as a whole and not complaining about balancing issues. It is -not- a completed game yet, beta it says, I'd rather say alpha, a beta is for final tests and balancing.
Having competitive play this early is fun but a bit unfortunate since that demands some balancing issues to be solved which, again, shouldn't be the focus right now. I'd rather see all bits in place and off balance rather than coming to build 945 that introduces the heavy which requires everything in tier 2 and 3 to be rebalanced - see my point? One needs the whole picture before you can understand the system. It just doesn't come across as effective game development based on a tight budget (I could be wrong here :)! We, the players, have a responsibility here - we need to focus on the relevant bits. When the game is released there will be mods to everything anyway! Just get the "platform" out there and we can balance the vanilla version from there instead.
Of course this balance only applies to the build as is. Are some of yall stupid? I see people "Uh the game isn't balanced, marines don't even have everything." Well of course not, neither do aliens. They didn't claim the entire game is balanced, but just getting more towards it, AS IS. Why not have it balanced as much as possible in its current state, with its current features?
Someone said its horrible balanced because marines have to deal with warping. Regardless if its a fact or not... Given that the win percentages are close, that would be that marines have been given a buff in some way that counters this. That's what balance is after all. How can you claim its unbalanced because of something, but the wins are close. You just don't get balance. Each side will have its advantages and disadvantages. Sadly, at the moment, some disadvantages are because of technical issues (Read: Beta).
Total wins is a big indicator of balance. Unless, by some very very small chance, all of the best players were on the winning team every time.
Comments
Balance
。Reduced Robotics Factory build time from 40 to 30 because very boring as marine
。Players are slowed somewhat when they take damage (not gas or flame damage). This is an experimental change, please be sure to let us know what you think!
What about cysts to be more connected? not just one link, but many between each other nearest.
And also links between cysts will works in both ways.
That will prevent from broking whole link when just one cyst is destroyed.
<a href="http://is.gd/cRjJv7" target="_blank">Here is updated prototype, to see what I mean.</a>
<img src="http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/7120/ns2cysts.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Recent games I do Khaa commander. I was create path of infestation from one hive to another, and marine kill just one cyst near by source hive ... the result was .. that whole path of infestation die :(<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is what I asked for all those weeks ago! And <b>now</b> you deliver? >:(
Got a pretty hectic network going, I think it looks great.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/efCSk.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
I don't know if anyone's suggested this already but would it be better to either allow marines to donate personal res to the comm through the armoury or maybe have a levy on personal res gained that goes to the comm or both?
Got a pretty hectic network going, I think it looks great.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/efCSk.png" border="0" class="linked-image" /><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
loooooooooooooooooooooool
I'm very confident in UWE architect / programers quality. :)
I hope they will see the value of multiply "link/vine" design and use it.
.. as marines got power pack (unconnected from CC/power nodes) they can be well defended as centric source of energy for building.
.. the Khaa needs count to survive ... (it reminds me starcraft's "ZERG RUSH")
BTW: 4 hive constellation ... for fun:
<img src="http://imgur.com/J8Sww.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Rines long range , 1shoot1kill all weaps, Flamezhitter (AKA games killer) never gona like it in none game.
Aliens close range 3bites no kill.
Joke energy in general + flamezhitter its joker 9000.
Fade slow hit rate + joke energy.
Lerk i hav no words for lerks... etc.
As skulk/fade when want kill a flamezhitter , surprise !! u cant bite/hit cause of joke energy + drain :D funny zhit like my english.
As skulk u get killed from corners cause the skin its more large than the cam position , so marines see u and u cant see the marine and im not talking about flamethrower , they see your legs sticking out corners , in NS1 this happens a littel too but no like here...
I donth like u cant leap in the air like NS1 , im used to jump and leap or leap in a fall. :(
I know this not the final product , but if ppl cry without knowing a zhit about ns1 i can cry too whit arguments cause im not a skilled fade player in NS1 (i really sux) but some skilled fade players are barely "inmortals" and none cry about it along this 5 years.
Worst patch ever (forme) , best patch ever for TF2-CoD cry rines players.
<b>Fade:</b>
I like it a lot and think it does what it should do, kill single rines. What I actually like quite is, that I have to have a close look on my energy to not die. Sometimes SG hurts very much and I can't hit anything because of a rine hopping around and blink causing me some weird lag at the end of blink.
<b>Lerk:</b>
Also like it quite much. Short range forces me to have pretty close range battles, I flap a lot, I kill a lot, lot of adrenaline. Pretty cool. What I do not really like about it is the slow movement on hit. Makes it a) harder to get close b) way harder to escape if close. So I'm forced to battle it out once I'm close. This feels kinda wrong to me since I can't really do any flyby attacks. So my play-options as lerk currently are: a) snipe, which is ok but I don't enjoy it that much b) slow marine movement by sporing while retreating, needs me to get closer so I have to maneauver more but that's ok (and I was totally fine with the new flight model once I got my head around it, think I enjoy it more than the old one because of more capabilities) c) attack solo rines by getting close + sporing and battling it out. Flyby attack would be nice really so remove slow on hit for lerk pls. :)
What I find a bit awkward is, that currently Lerk is the perfect Building/Node killer. I find bilebomb still kinda unusable since aiming is hard because the gorge sight is so obscured by the gorges mouth. I always shoot a lot but have no idea if I'm actually hitting anything. And rines kill me in no time due to slow on hit. Also gorge is slow. With lerk I've got a 1 Hive building killer that's incredibly fast. And it brings down any building so extremely fast. I like the Lerk a lot for flying around and killing nodes, sentry farms (if you aim high you can get quite some range :) ), RTs and stuff.
<b>Rines</b>
Weaponry is a bit cheap or res are too much or picking up weapons saves too many res.. I don't know. But as soon as SG tech is done (so almost from start of the game) I'll never use my rifle which I find a bit sad. Havn't had the opportunity to lerk-golf yet.
What I think generally why people don't like b180:
Slow on hit makes your death as alien often frustrating because you feel like you couldn't have done anything better to not die. As a Gorge/Skulk/Lerk I often felt like I had no chance to escape/get closer to kill after I catched the first bullet. Death without (felt) option to do anything better = loss of control which is no fun.
Lerk, though he's got some better movement options (imo) it needs some getting used to, which ofc is frustrating for a while. Also the close range needs huge getting used to. I see lots of Lerks still trying to spike rines from great distances and hardly hitting anything. I use hive sight almost all the time (so I can't really see where my spores are exactly) and I didn't notice for a long long time, that my spores didn't even reach the Rines. I was just wondering how they could survive so much spores without medkits. Also if I switch out of hivesight, I just see huge clouds of spores, but I dont know if there are any spores behind the cloud as well. I often thought.. well.. this one spore cloud is very close to me, must have hit something on the way to the Rine I was aiming at => back to hive sight and shoot more spores ;)
Fade needs much more attention on Energy <b>and</b> HP now, especially when engaging Flamethrowers this needs some very good timing => again getting used to this takes time and is frustrating first ofc.
The cysts are kinda weird because they die so fast and need so much hive energy + res to rebuild. Being able to only use the energy of the hive I'm in only makes me hop from one hive to the next.. well.. not exactly.. more like hopping in a hive, using up its energy, playing as lifeform, hopping in the next hive when I see that there's need to (still/again) and I come across a hive. This makes alien progress kinda chaotic and slow since I don't really stay com and I can't just respond to requests like "more crags here pls".
<!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro--><b>Notification System</b><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
I've had quite some bad experiences with the notification system. I've had my IPs go down by a single Lerk/Skulk (Lerks rock now for this kind of thing) as Rine Com because I just didn't notice it was attacked, also as Alien Com I've seen my whole Cyst network/a hive getting killed by a solo ninja rine. This was true in previous builds as well and I kinda like the idea that the com has to communicate a lot with his team + multitask a lot like in SC (i.e. watch minimap a lot :) ) + it's possible to distract the com from all this by doing some hard attack at one position and solo attacking some other position. But for aliens, crysts + 1 hive energy com makes this very frustrating. The notification system doesn't really feel accurate (e.g. sometimes it takes very long until I recognize a solo rine attacking my hive). Also the "alien terrain" isn't really infested that much because I try to use as few cysts as possible because they cost so much energy (and pres). So rines on their way to my hive aren't really visible to me most of the time, because they aren't walking on infestation that much as in 179. And their damage done is way higher because of the whole cyst network thing (slays 3 important cysts which takes him some seconds, kill whole cyst network including RTs). So again I have the problem that I try to improve by (as in SC2) trying to look at the minimap more. But I'm not able to spot solo rines any better because they just don't walk on infestation that much at all. Multiple rines I usually can spot because they slay everything down on their way. And ofc also my alien teammates can't really react on "red circle moving closer" because he just disappers in the next second because he's leaving infestation again.
Though the downsides of the current build seem to give a very high frustration level I'm quite happy with where the game is heading with this build. The problems need to be sorted out ofc, but the Lerk and Fade roles make quite a lot of sense to me currently. I think Bilebomb needs to be improved a lot, because currently I'd rather choose a Lerk for killing buildings than a Gorge (apart from very few nice bilebomb-spots on the maps). Marine weapons need to be balanced out more somehow. Minor bugs (not able to place crysts/alien buildings, drifter/arc-ai) sometimes hurt a lot but I guess problems are known.
Keep on coding, you're doing great :-)
1- it always comes down to team work. no matter what team I played on it took a good 15-20 minutes for the other players to really work together to push out and attack or defend in a group. I will concede the occasionally a lone player or even a group of two can accomplish a lot while everyone else is distracted but event still this game is very much team based (unless of course you are the TeamF player we ran into on Friday who seems to be the most incredible player ever taking out 5 marines with one hit each in a matter of seconds :))
2- Cysts, I would say some of the things I read are true with the fact that if you kill one or two in the chain and the comm isnt seeing anything then everything dies is a little much considering it doesnt take long to kill it, at least before the flame thrower took awhile to burn it off. Maybe the Cysts can have a little more health?
3- Marines need better Armor, armor upgrades are good and all but you can still get drained in a matter of seconds if that.
4- NOTIFICATION SYSTEM!!!!!! as COMM for marines are had to keep going back to marine start to listen and see if thigns were being attacked because god forbid I get warned by my chair. I did notice I got a comm chair is being attacked audio once and a while but this still needs more improvement. I like the idea of being able to place either a sensor or a device that specifically creates a warning parameter up around itself to detect alien life forms.
Also big cudos on the changes to Summit, it looks cool!
1) Emergency lightning could be turned on by a marine commander. After destroying the power node, the room would be just black. Then it would be up to commander (new responsibility) to turn on emergency lightning in the rooms he sends other marines to. It could also take some time before it goes up after commander turns it on.
2) As for a skulk being stopped by (afaik) single bullet from any direction: It is a death sentence and also it is just simply annoing. This is nothing else than UX problem. The game experience for skulks just got worse with this.
3) Long living cysts could (slowly) replicate themselves for free. That would mean that in alien start room and nearby spaces it would be much more difficult to kill them all.
4) And also maybe older cysts' range (where they detect if they should die because there are no other connected cysts around) could get wider as time passes.
5) And maybe because cysts are a living organism trying to survive -- when disconnected from the the network, before they die, they could start to try to spread in the direction they would "feel" other cysts are still connected. That would mean that a chance that the networks is automatically regenerated would exist and marines would have to stay on the "cleaned" ground for a while.
6) When cysts, hydras and infestation are on walls too, it looks cool.
7) I did not try this but if it is true that I have to be in the hive I want use the energy from: IMHO it destroys pretty much the advantage of having more hives (and eg. spread infestation more quickly).
As for cysts yes they are a bit easy to handle, I find it more appropriate to use the longest line of site single path for the cysts works best for incredibly fast expansion(unreasonably fast) to capitalize on early rt's for a quick game win. I think the vine idea would work wonders to counteract both these issues. it would encourage us to put more cysts everywhere giving a more natural feel to the alien realm, and would slow down how some people place cysts(not me of course ';..;')
Also as a side note, I think a 4 hive/CC should have some kind of extremely debilitating move that would greatly hinder the enemy. It would make for a more offensive action game, where there is a reason to push hard and fast and get into the action, instead of sitting around and turtling a base up. It would also encourage marines to actually build cc's instead of where as of now it's just a waste of resources.
that is all for now. <3
Thank you for giving me a wonderful game that I have played for probably well over 9 years now, and is the only thing that compared to my WoW addiction.
(and no, I'm not fat!)
Dan / Autoshot|DSA
maybe just Gorges need to learn to play -- put cyst everywhere they go so it would be difficult to kill all the cysts in the way.
And glowing hive, hydras and three dozens of cysts in black heliport would look awesome :).
-Lerk seems really gimped now
-Cysts are adding nothing and tend to clutter up the battlefield, they are also way too easy to kill
-Sentry spam is almost unstoppable, especially with the lerk and fade nerfs
-The shotgun just doesnt feel right
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.
Build 178:
Marine Wins: 213 (21.30%)
Alien Wins: 787 (78.70%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=178" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=178</a>
Build 179:
Marine Wins: 333 (33.30%)
Alien Wins: 667 (66.70%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=179" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=179</a>
Build 180:
Marine Wins: 365 (42.69%)
Alien Wins: 490 (57.31%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
Things are getting better and more balanced - and bug fixes/features will come with time :)
Was on a UK server (where i am) and the SA was on saying that the Server itself was at 75% capacity and NS was only taking 25%.
Had fairly consistent warpyness the whole time and I couldn't really experience the positives. Experienced similar symptoms on another eu server as well.
Couple of things I did like, New sounds, Kill Icons, Cysts (to an extent) were really cool. With the Cysts they feel a bit too intrusive, if they were flatter then they would be fine but I find myself walking around them which they shouldn't be forcing me to do. Like the implementation though.
I noticed one bug, ST was on 56% health (if that helps) but was looping the firing sound.
Overall, lots of nice aesthetic improvements but a massive drop in playablilty for me - something I know you guys will fix as you have consistently done in the past.
In my opinion, it's very hard to take control over marines. especially because in the build 180, the fade is totally powerless in destroying structures, the only thing it can do is kill, and so defend.
You should probably make his second attack be more deadly against structures, since killing structures doesn't require to move, and since it's not use that much anyway.
Currently, if marines build enough sentries correctly, it's very hard to take them down, the skulk gets killed before reaching it, the fade doesn't do lots of damages and the lerk's flight makes it hard to hit then run away (Sorry to say that but in my opinion, the lerk is a lot more difficult to fly than in last builds, I tend to push forward all the time when I fly, because it makes sense when you want to go forward, but doing this, I can't go up anymore).
Build 178:
Marine Wins: 213 (21.30%)
Alien Wins: 787 (78.70%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=178" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=178</a>
Build 179:
Marine Wins: 333 (33.30%)
Alien Wins: 667 (66.70%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=179" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=179</a>
Build 180:
Marine Wins: 365 (42.69%)
Alien Wins: 490 (57.31%)
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
Things are getting better and more balanced - and bug fixes/features will come with time :)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I honestly think we have to be very careful when using this kind of data even if the sample size is large. The metagame changes, performance is still a factor at this stage, and balance and fun are not necessarily correlated either. Data can support and feedback to balance development, but as the twitter feed suggests and i commend, actual discussion is crucial. A game can always be balanced but it has to be done in a way that doesn't detract from the 'fun' factor. For example, i could make aliens super strong and then give marines a random cointoss chance to obtain a nuke which automatically wins them the game. 50/50 balanced in the sample sure, but it probably wont be very engaging or fun.
My own personal experience is that i'm finding 180 alot less <b>fun</b> compared to 179 as both marines and aliens
1) A large part of that is due to <b>alien slowdown</b>. Its frustrating, artificially creates advantage for ranged weapon users and basicaly boils down to an indirect reduction of the effective hitpoints of skulks and lerks. For one, if im going to die i dont want to do it slowly and ineffectively crawling towards marines. I loved skulk skirmish play and surely there must be another way to balance other than with slowdown.
2) The second is with cysts. While the idea is nice, how you place them is unintuitive (shows circle range but no indication of LOS restriction). Another thought is that overall as a pattern of lots of dots it just doesn't look very natural? I dont know how to explain it but it seems to somehow take away from the organic feel of infestation for me. And then there is the hp problem. 180 gameplay to me feels too fragile and random in deciding the winner early/mid game with the probability of a long drawn out siege on sentry central. If you lose a skulk/marine battle in one wing of the map e.g. surface, the risk and cost of marines quickly pushing to kill one cyst seems too high..
3) Medpacks are also way too cheap with there now being no other real use for commander pres. There isnt any tradeoff decision here and i think that detracts from the commander game somewhat. Pooling res and then carpeting the 2nd hive room as your assaulting seems too effective. A good strategy game i think involves resource investment decisions that have more complex tradeoffs than now or later.
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't think that the balancing is the problem with this build, it's much rather frustration emerging from recurring situation of disadvantaged encounters that leads to all those harsh opinions.
Having a fight with an opponent can be fun even if you lose. Losing fights often and very quickly without much chance to change the track of the fight however spoils the fun in the encounters. In 179 I had much fun both as marine and alien even though I was killed more often than not. Now it feels less like an achievement to win and on the other side rather frustrating to lose as the fights are over very quickly. No longer am I fighting with one opponent for nearly a minute, there is no pursuit of wounded bait or even successful escape, nor is there much time spent thinking that you could win this one if you would just place that next shot. What there is are encounters that end shortly after one opponent saw the other and usually this very attacker is the winner. If you are up against the odds of multiple marines you stand a much lesser chance to win even if you play good as you are handicapped much more by every lucky hit.
I am not a very good at NS2 (yet), as I never played NS1 and I started playing NS2 only a few weeks ago, so this might look very differently from the perspective of a better player but for someone who is rather new to the game it seems as if it doesn't matter if I play good or bad (in the range of my possibilities).
This observation is entirely based on comparisons to B179.
In a nutshell: Combat <b>seems</b> a lot less skill-based with 180 to me.
It's a bit glitched (It uses the viewmodel of a random marine weapon when you use it) anyway, <a href="http://i.imgur.com/xyvRp.png" target="_blank">this</a> is what it's supposed to look like.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
agreed, and thank you again for all the hard work. I wonder when people will realize its still a BETA?
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I wouldn't pay to much attention to those stats ther are very miss leading...
Given that the pathing isssue the arc is pretty much an ineffective unit and it's a major game ender for marines, then you have the lack of alerts which means 1 sneaky skulk can do major damage and last but not least there is no tier 3 game enders that means most game don't have a deciscive win once they have some advantage and the game stalemates for sometime which usually the aliens prevail...
1) A large part of that is due to <b>alien slowdown</b>. Its frustrating, artificially creates advantage for ranged weapon users and basicaly boils down to an indirect reduction of the effective hitpoints of skulks and lerks. For one, if im going to die i dont want to do it slowly and ineffectively crawling towards marines. I loved skulk skirmish play and surely there must be another way to balance other than with slowdown.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So my regular group of players all play Battlefield Bad Company 2 a lot, when we arent play NS and NS2 and this type of gameplay is extremely common in the newer FPS titles trying to add some form of realism to the gameplay. As a marine I like it of course cause if you are low on life I still have a chance at killing you before you running away. As an alien its a little frustrating, but I have seen players coming up with a lot of new tactics with gorge rushing along with other evolves in order to support their attacks. Aliens at the start of the game are very powerful on their own, but then just as marines they need to work together to be effective later on in the game. I will also say this there are some amazing players out there especially alien ones, sometimes it just takes time to learn the effectiveness of how to play.
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That kind of depends on how you define balanced. Strictly speaking if you mean round-wins and nothing but that, you might be right, but personally when I read 'balanced' I'm thinking of a myriad of gameplay-elements (economics, melee-combat, map-control and whatnot), and anecdotal evidence suggests this build is far from balanced, perhaps less so than previous builds.
And I do wish people would stop quoting those ###### BORDERLINE USELESS statistics.
Two 180-related questions
1. fades were announced to have a blink "trail" in 180, did that not happen?
2. framerate looks smooth, maybe time to add the volumetric lighting back into the engine? please?
Given that the pathing isssue the arc is pretty much an ineffective unit and it's a major game ender for marines, then you have the lack of alerts which means 1 sneaky skulk can do major damage and last but not least there is no tier 3 game enders that means most game don't have a deciscive win once they have some advantage and the game stalemates for sometime which usually the aliens prevail...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, I agree. I think the lack of alerts and stalemates have a big influence on those stats. I just won a game as aliens because all the marines left and it ended up 3v7 (and by that point people would rather start a new round than join a losing team and drag it out). There's also games like 1v1 or 2v2 that favour aliens just because it is so much easier to take out an IP than it is to take down the hive whilst killing the eggs. Taking that into account I don't really think you can use those stats as anything more than a very rough guide.
I feel like one reason why marines are better this build is the fades inability to take down buildings. In 179 fades were really the only class that could take down sentries effectively, but now they aren't very good at that. (I'm not saying that fades should be able to take down lots of buildings, but it was really the only thing aliens had in 179). Aliens need a good way to deal with sentries or they need to be limited for now until they have a proper counter.
From a balancing standpoint you really need to look at 6v6 games with players of equal skill. Or you at least need some way to sort through the stats and find out "Which team is winning games that last more than 30mins?" "How many players were in each team when they won?" "How many games last less than 5 minutes and who wins?" etc. Just looking at the total wins per team is kind of meaningless.
With that said I think the focus should be on individual balance between the players rather than team balance right now. With so many changes to the alien movement etc. it will take a while before that is finalized and then you can really look at team balance. It's no good saying the game is balanced if everyone is just playing shotguns vs skulks.
Also, does the skulk play a sound on biting a marine? If it does I think it needs to be louder. It's sometimes hard for me to tell if I'm actually landing a bite or not.
But keep up the fine work. Doing awesome job!
However, when talking about balance (and saying that it's "CRAP" or that aliens lose every game, etc), please note that, no matter what problems are in 180, the game has never been this balanced:
<a href="http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?version=180" target="_blank">http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/disp...ats?version=180</a>
It's not as balanced as NS1, but it's a LOT better than 179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I simply had to make an account after reading this, now I might or I might not get a response but hopefully you'll end up considering the following:
How is this in any manner relevant? I don't know how optimized the game is for running on the rigs you use for developing, but from talking to friends and following the chatter in random games, marines in majority seem to observe skulks "warping" whenever they engage in melee range making it immensely more difficult to actually predict their movement vectors, thus making aiming tedious and difficult. Yes the slowdown combat effect combined with the pustule highways being extremely fragile against lone ranger assaults does give marines more of chance, but viewing game wins as guidance for balance in an incomplete game is completely absurd as all they show is <b>how the <i>current</i> content as a whole balances out</b> with the current playerbase (say the kharaa having access to fades and marines not having access to JP or HA) and not how current content balances amongst the current available content (i.e. how good skulks are against a marine equipped with a particular weapon).
Just because the current end game numbers are a bit better than before, that doesn't mean that the individual content is balanced. Infact it's horrendously unbalanced, as marine players who have correct rigs to avoid the "warping" effect/are just good enough to predict movement regardless are completely untouchable by skulks after they get access to shotguns. Currently these players are very few in number, but if you don't balance the game according to their capabilities the game will never have a long lifespan as once people start getting good at it they will start to notice that it simply does not offer high quality gameplay. Now adding the whole slowdown to the equation and one can't claim with a straight face that when it's ranged vs. melee that it's in any manner or form balanced after the game code gets more optimized. Then there's the whole pustule issue, a single marine can with only at the cost of risking his life rush into alien pustule highway and kill a pustule next to the hive, taking down the whole highway and then obviously the buildings that were supported by it. Now in order to fix this the commander has to expend the same resource pool that provides drifters for building material, which is already in short supply until later stages of the game OR you have to have a gorge in maintenance duty just dedicated to fixing these. There have been willing gorges to provide creep access to early RT captures, but I can't imagine "creep duty" being very enjoyable gameplay experience for the said player.
My recommendation would be to turn the pustules cloaked and flat, with possibly only taking damage from ARCs(AoE)/Flamethrowers/GLs during this state but with a scan a commander could turn them visible and vulnerable to all all kinds of marine weaponry. And as fine tuning, link scans heavily into "support energy pool" used for medpacks and ammo (and/or perhaps MACs), thus making creep highway harass to have at least somekind of a cost to balance against the upkeep cost that aliens face to maintain it. This would provide marines with ability to remove creep with personal resources and some ingenuity OR by commander support, but neither tactic would be completely free of cost. Also possibly consider changing creep so that instead of keeping the alien buildings alive, it enables placement for them and provides "energy", so that when a pustule gets removed from the middle of the highway, the following pustules retract their creep but stay alive and the buildings turn dormant instad of taking additional damage.
Another thing I'd like to address is that there seems to be a current design "theme" around movement impairing for the benefit slower and easier gameplay, such as the slowdown when hit, and discussion on forum about penalizing marines for jumping. I guess having movement as an important part of combat requires a bit more skill and doesn't fit with the whole CS, CoD, and BF "zeitgeist" of gameplay, but it's still infinitely more engaging to play rather than stoicly standing around or trying to find exploits in the "movement impairing mechanics". It's something that you can constantly hone by playing which makes it interesting, and yes somewhat old school-ish, but looking with disdain at the mainstream gaming industry, indie companies seem to be the only glimmer of hope for those who still like games that are unique and actually take skill and dedication to play. Another thing is that having more things to hone your skills in opens possibility of properly skillful players creating some sort of an edge for their team in combat, thus making the matches slightly less reliant on commanders and so creating more diversity in the whole experience (either as a player or for a viewer).
A competitive game doesn't require absolute balance, but it does need properly good mechanics to work.
It would be like crash testing a car before you've figured out where to put the engine. As I understand it, every bit about the balance and small tweaks such as hit-slowdown or weapon range can be configured using LUA later on (by anyone so inclined to boot). Balance at this stage is a waste of time. When NS1 came out most of the game features were in place and the balancing changes were relevant from day one. I feel it isn't in this case.
As a stepping stone to test features and ideas (like the hit-slowdown, it "bugs" me) just use NS1 configurations for the time being (since that's what people refer to anyway.
All efforts and energy should be put to completing the games different parts instead of correcting balance issues at this stage or else UW is in effect
creating a complete game with every second build. We as players should react to the features and ideas as a whole and not complaining
about balancing issues. It is -not- a completed game yet, beta it says, I'd rather say alpha, a beta is for final tests and balancing.
Having competitive play this early is fun but a bit unfortunate since that demands some balancing issues to be solved which, again,
shouldn't be the focus right now. I'd rather see all bits in place and off balance rather than coming to build 945 that introduces the heavy
which requires everything in tier 2 and 3 to be rebalanced - see my point? One needs the whole picture before you can understand the system.
It just doesn't come across as effective game development based on a tight budget (I could be wrong here :)! We, the players, have a responsibility
here - we need to focus on the relevant bits. When the game is released there will be mods to everything anyway! Just get the "platform" out there
and we can balance the vanilla version from there instead.
Someone said its horrible balanced because marines have to deal with warping. Regardless if its a fact or not... Given that the win percentages are close, that would be that marines have been given a buff in some way that counters this. That's what balance is after all. How can you claim its unbalanced because of something, but the wins are close. You just don't get balance. Each side will have its advantages and disadvantages. Sadly, at the moment, some disadvantages are because of technical issues (Read: Beta).
Total wins is a big indicator of balance. Unless, by some very very small chance, all of the best players were on the winning team every time.