Penny Arcade: Extra Credit
Rokiyo
A.K.A. .::FeX::. Revenge Join Date: 2002-10-10 Member: 1471Members, Constellation
A.K.A. .::FeX::. Revenge Join Date: 2002-10-10 Member: 1471Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Season 5, Ep. 15 - Balancing for Skill</div>Wow, this one seems fantastically relevant to Natural Selection universe and the community at large.
I think this commentary does a very good job of explaining what happened to the NS1 community, and why we as a community need to get behind the devs and support them in balancing for public games, and balancing for skill.
For anyone interested in game balance, I strongly recommend you watch this episode and I welcome you to post your thoughts below.
<a href="http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill" target="_blank">http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill</a>
I think this commentary does a very good job of explaining what happened to the NS1 community, and why we as a community need to get behind the devs and support them in balancing for public games, and balancing for skill.
For anyone interested in game balance, I strongly recommend you watch this episode and I welcome you to post your thoughts below.
<a href="http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill" target="_blank">http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill</a>
Comments
But it sounds pretty logical
The reality is, NS2 dies if it doesn't work as a competitive game. It dies the same way Gotham City Imposters or Super Monday Night combat did. No amount of fudging around in the reviewer bump will fix that, because no one sticks with a game for 500 hours if it doesn't work at the upper levels.
That being said, I found it very interesting regarding what it said that related to NS1. In NS1, we had this thing called bunnyhopping. In order to master bunnyhopping, you had to rebind many of the keys on your keyboard so you were performing movement commands with both your right and left hands, because the density of movement input commands required to be good at bunnyhopping was so high that you couldn't effectively practice the skill using entirely your left hand. To this day, I still prefer binding jump and duck on the mouse for every game, weather I can bunnyhop or not. Regardless, the skill wall to climb to master bunnyhopping was exactly what he's talking about, a FOOS strategy, in that, NOT bunnyhopping was a mid level FOOS strategy. Bunnyhopping was a required leap in going from good at the game to great at the game, yet it legitimately took weeks of practice to make it actually better to use in game than not using bunnyhopping. There was literally a mountain to climb retraining your hands in order to effectively get what was about a 40% speed boost for skulks, and somewhere along the lines of a 10-15% speed boost for marines, as well as quite minor speed boosts for all the other alien life forms except the gorge (who was hard as hell to spit things with if you were trying to bhop with him). Bunnyhopping was FAR FAR from a x = y power boost in terms of the skill one put in vs the gains one got, and that's why experienced players loved it. We worked SOOOOOO frigging hard on the damn thing, and we saw there was so much more work still to do, but the difference of bhopping badly vs not bhopping, the bad bhopping was actually worse, and the different between bhopping well, and bhopping supremely godly, was maybe a 20% power advantage for an 800% increased skill requirement. It was EXACTLY the skill curve you want from a game right up into a virtually infinite skill ceiling. There was no point at which you perfected bunnyhopping and there just wasn't anything else to learn and master. It got to the point of mastery similar to professional pianists, where your fingers just had to do magic in order to execute it perfectly. All this made it, after you got over the initial hump, one of the most fun and most brilliant things many of us had ever done in any game. And that's why we mourn it's loss. But there is little argument that the FOOS segment of 'normal' play when approaching the level at which bunnyhopping should start to be learned for the first time created a huge split in the community, and caused people on both sides to quit the game.
So yeah, NS2 needs a new version of bunnyhopping, the skill ceiling in the game right now is inconsistent over the different abilities and roles required out of the different classes, and it leads to problems balancing between the high end and the low end, when some things have such a strong linear curve up to some low ceiling maximum, and others do not. but we need something that doesn't have as big a skill gap and doesn't as evidently lead to a FOOS situation as bunnyhopping did in NS, something where the early levels of skill improvement more naturally lead into an immediate, but fair, in game advantage. The density of movement input and task requirements needs to be higher for elite level players than it currently is in NS2 right now.
I also think NS2 has done a good job with the noob tubes for the most part. Grenade launchers, Exo suits, Gorge nests... Onos is a problem right now, because it's built like a noob tube in terms of skill requirement, but it's dominating every facet of the game. There either needs to be things that require more skill in order to use the onos properly, or the onos needs to begin to go the way of the dinosaur more at the top levels of play because more skilled options are more powerful when mastered. I prefer the former, because otherwise the onos becomes a pretty huge FOOS build. But regardless, there are a lot of things bad players can do that will some times allow them to pwn a pro in NS2. They might not objectively be the most advantageous things in the game, but gorge nests and walker GL spam make you feel like a badass, where you get to make a bunch of kills and no one can mess with your ######. Sure, they collapse terribly 70% of the time, or you start working them in an area that's completely useless and they don't really help the team at all, but they sure feel nice.
Skill caps in most modern games, shooters specifically, are pathetic. What i wouldnt give for developers to have some balls and give us a skill dominant shooter (UT, quake etc)
Amazingly good representation of skill and designing around skill
I'm actually going to bookmark that link as I am certain I will have to show others it in the future
To put it in an NS:2 light the fade is devastating once upgraded
A small group of 2 or 3 fades can over time widdle down a sizeable marine force and stand little chance of being killed with good blink pancaking
Many complain about fades being terrible though and this is because you need to get up to that skill where you will feel comfortable taking on 3 marines alone as a fade without dieing
Feign Death, while it was around, greatly lowered the skill required to play fade and I for one am glad it hasn't made a comeback yet
One could argue that though an evolution like Feign Death is required for people to play different lifeforms more regularly until they get good at them
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For example for me they end up doing the opposite than what they're supposedly trying to do. They make it impossible for me to enjoy games at lower levels.
I'm fine with getting destoryed by better players, that's no problem at all. However, whenever I start learning a game, I have to dig myself up from the level where 85% of my opponents rely on noobtubes. That means that I very rarely get to have any proper toe-to-toe skill-vs-skill fights until I've climbed up the ranking and gained immense amounts of skill in the game. In short I have to spend loads of time before I can have any gameplay that satisfies my need for less gimmicky plays.
Some of my best gaming memories are playing Brood War with my friend. We are both quite horrid at the game, but it's amazing because the game still allows us to fight our puny and horridly flawed fights rather than providing some instantly effective tools. It feels like an honest brawl rather than a rigged boxing where both have horseshoes in their gloves.
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And to clarify: I don't consider exos or onos to be a noobtube. They definitely give advantage to a certain player regardless of the individual skill, but it all happens because of gameplay events. It's both tech and res investment and so on.
What I'd consider a noobtube is something like random crit hits. Those have little or no relation to anything that you could really prepare apart from hoping that the things don't occur at the wrong moment.
Last UT and Quake were both terribly low skill cap compared to their previous titles. Felt like someone tied sandbags to my feet.
Yeah, the perfect game is always going to be a vanilla clone of some humanoid person who can jump shooting at other humanoid persons who can jump, add more guns when necessary. This is clearly the best game ever, and any attempt to do anything different for the sake of variety and enjoyment is a waste of time. Well guys, looks like that's /thread. Thanks for playing.
Do you have one single fact to back that up, or is this more anti-pub everyone-loves-competition-because-I-do assumptions?
<!--quoteo(post=2040409:date=Dec 5 2012, 05:20 PM:name=RobustPenguin)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (RobustPenguin @ Dec 5 2012, 05:20 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2040409"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Skill caps in most modern games, shooters specifically, are pathetic. What i wouldnt give for developers to have some balls and give us a skill dominant shooter (UT, quake etc)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not happening. Fun games sell better and do better overall than skill games. Just about every attempt to monetize a skill shooter has failed. 80% of CS fans are still playing CS 1.6 and haven't adapted to the sequels. ET:QW was a high-skill game and it failed. Brink was a decently high-skill game and it failed. UT3, fail. Dystopia was probably the last shooter I played that had a pretty high skill ceiling, and it didn't take off at all, even though the game was solid in just about every way and it was extremely creative all around.
There's zero market for them. While I generally dislike it's ambiguous, overly-simplistic labeling, this is very much a case of an extremely vocal minority who is far, <i>far far far</i> more irrelevant than they'd like to believe they are. People care more about fun games than ****-waving contests.
<!--quoteo(post=2040405:date=Dec 5 2012, 05:10 PM:name=NeoRussia)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NeoRussia @ Dec 5 2012, 05:10 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2040405"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->no bhop = no skill required. NS2 is very much a complete failure for skulks for not balancing skill to lifeforms other than the lerk and almost the fade. Skulk, the most important alien lifeform, has no depth to it so there is 0 difference from a new player and a experienced player as long as the new player is smart enough to know to run on walls instead of the floor. Definite proof of a developer that doesn't know what he needs to achieve.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm curious as to why every time skill comes up in NS2 is it the alien team people prioritize as being the 'skill side'. Marines team is piss-easy to play, and it's got far more to do with the god-awful mind-bogglingly terrible design direction in the game than it does with smashing your spacebar pretending some party trick you've been using for the last decade still somehow qualifies as skill.
And in case you're too dense to understand that - if everyone can do something, it no longer qualifies as skill. In competition, everyone can bunnyhop, so I'm curious as to why one feels that bunnyhopping represents some sort of skill-based advantage that's required for competition, when all it is is part of the status quo.
If you people seriously think that this game's biggest problem is bunnyhopping and skill and that's what it's dead, then you know even less than nothing and really shouldn't be taking a part in these discussions. You have a hardon for competition and bunnyhopping. We get it already. We can put the tiny violins away now. Jesus Swiftspear you make it sound like UWE drove a lawnmower over a box of puppies.
PS: Calling bunnyhopping "brilliant" might be one of the more comical things I've read.
kthnx bye.
kthnx bye.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm sure the other two guys who didn't buy it to just play mods would agree with you.
That is not true, first of all nobody wants to play as a "RTS unit" because NS2 is a RTS/FPS hybrid, so one part of it should not suffer because of another. Imagine being a starcraft marine. Starcraft is a skill-based game right? Well all you could do is shoot at things within a certain attack radius and you need to stand still to shoot. Boring. NS2 DOES have this problem, with gorges being a rather awkward unit as they are boring to play and alien commanders are the same, but NS1 did not have this problem. Second of all, the onos is a unit that like the ultralisk in SC2 is not something you want all the time, in fact the exosuit is best avoided entirely unless your team is composed of newbies. The lerk is the only lifeform with a high skill ceiling on the alien team. It's the only one that requires more knowledge than "jump from ceiling to wall to fall really fast" or "shadowstep is actually useful but completely brainless once you learn it, blink actually takes effort but it's not as useful". There are actual techniques to flying and it's the only unit that the developers didn't manage to casualize and remove good mechanics from NS1.
Substantiate that claim, show me 3 fps games in the last 5ish years that did well purely because it was made with "the competitive scene" in mind. CoD4 is the only one t hat comes to mind. This game might not be a strict fps game, but the players fps skills are what determine who wins and who looses in this game. (I don't care how great your commander is, if the people he is commanding cant kill the enemy they loose)
only 3?
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/tg1NK.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
all of these games aside from skyrim and Civ 5 have competitive communities and all have been made with a competitive community in mind. Now you may say that having comp play is different from having a lasting game, but I disagree as in an FPS the main thing that makes people stick around is the skill required to play them, as is true in all of the shooters in the top steam stats rankings. NS1 was one of the top half-life mods played competitively and NS2 does not come close. Need I say more?
kthnx bye.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
^ Pretty much this, at least for it's genre.
There were several reasons why UT3 could not catch up:
-GameSpy account required.
-Player's mobility felt like he was in cement shoes.
-Vehicles were made OP against infantry (in UT2k4 ONS could a decent player on foot always take on any other vehicle (maybe except for the Leviathan, but that one could be taken out by a single good Manta driver) and still succeed. In UT3 does the vehicle win in most matches and you can only zerg it down.)
-Map design, especially in WAR compared to ONS, was linear and lacked strategy and felt in general more like it was designed to showcase the new Kismet system with some fancy mechanic quirks that didn't add much to gameplay.
-It seemed harder to mod it than UT2k4, which was basically a messiah for community-created content.
-UT3 had some of those "low skill/high power" stuff. Stinger Minigun was OP due to lack of movement abilities, Rocket Launchers were often insta-kills due to lack of movement. Shock Rifle got nerfed as defence against vehicles. Orb ruined a lot of nice pushes. Invincibility power up - 'nuff said.
-Pseudo-serious story as opposed to the old tournament flair.
-Postprocessing removed 30% of the color to make the game look brown-greyish for "atmosphere".
-Characters looked again like they had anabolika for breakfast, since this is obviously the only character style for Epic since GoW 1.
There's zero market for them. While I generally dislike it's ambiguous, overly-simplistic labeling, this is very much a case of an extremely vocal minority who is far, <i>far far far</i> more irrelevant than they'd like to believe they are. People care more about fun games than ****-waving contests.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is a shame,in my view, that people dont find hard games fun any more. I still play UT, quake and tribes 2 to this day. Dystopia was also pretty good, especially for a mod. And the teams new games looks decent (blade symphony) assuming its not vapour ware, which i have a feeling that it is
The problem with those systems is that it rapidly entrenches people in a skill bracket and becomes harder for them to get better, what made me get better at NS2? Playing vs eagleye and such in beta.
There were several reasons why UT3 could not catch up:
-GameSpy account required.
-Player's mobility felt like he was in cement shoes.
-Vehicles were made OP against infantry (in UT2k4 ONS could a decent player on foot always take on any other vehicle (maybe except for the Leviathan, but that one could be taken out by a single good Manta driver) and still succeed. In UT3 does the vehicle win in most matches and you can only zerg it down.)
-Map design, especially in WAR compared to ONS, was linear and lacked strategy and felt in general more like it was designed to showcase the new Kismet system with some fancy mechanic quirks that didn't add much to gameplay.
-It seemed harder to mod it than UT2k4, which was basically a messiah for community-created content.
-UT3 had some of those "low skill/high power" stuff. Stinger Minigun was OP due to lack of movement abilities, Rocket Launchers were often insta-kills due to lack of movement. Shock Rifle got nerfed as defence against vehicles. Orb ruined a lot of nice pushes. Invincibility power up - 'nuff said.
-Pseudo-serious story as opposed to the old tournament flair.
-Postprocessing removed 30% of the color to make the game look brown-greyish for "atmosphere".
-Characters looked again like they had anabolika for breakfast, since this is obviously the only character style for Epic since GoW 1.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
x2 for bf3
Additionally, the only way to make it work is to force it on players, as there are always "trolls" who would pit themselves against newbies "for the lulz". The problem with forcing brackets is that suddenly you are often no longer able to play with your friends as their skill bracket may be different.
The response to this is typically unranked and rank games. However, typically the players who take the game serious enough to play are all in ranked, so if you are wanting to play with friends, you're at the mercy of playing with other players who just play casually.
Basically, that entire episode of Extra Credits reveals exactly where NS2 will be in six months. That is, a veritable ghost town with lots of pro players. NS2 will have alienated and drove off new players through lack of viable new player strategies and getting owned by knowledgeable teams that know how to work the resource model <i>and</i> kill players in merely a few minutes. (Not because the community is bad, rather because the game is frustratingly difficult for newer players.) The worst part? This problem will actually get worse as time moves on, inevitably locking new players out of the game entirely.
There is no low skill ceiling unit or tactic for the Marines, and one for the Aliens (Gorge, specifically). You die as a Marine, you lose whatever gun you had unless you're close to a spawn and as an Alien you lose your life form on your first death.
Guns should be permanent until changed out and life forms should be permanent until you change to another. That would require NS2 to not be NS2 however, and it will never happen, but it would be the only way to allow new players to quickly learn the game mechanics. Not in one game, no. Not even in twenty, perhaps. But I can't think of any games that require you to buy weapons that you will lose upon death, then respawn with diddly.
Certainly there are games where you 'buy' guns, but generally if you die you stay dead until the next game, where you will be offered to buy a gun again a la Counter Strike. Sure you'll have less money and no gun, but you will always <i>always</i> be able to buy at least a DEagle. Also, in many of these games they include a RFK model to help people build up to getting a gun faster, especially if it's easy to lose that gun.
Just my two cents, I'm sure I'll get flamed for this though. I'm not even playing at the moment, yet I can't stop myself from checking the forums once a day.
(This should not be taken to mean that I want RFK necessarily, because I don't. Merely stating a comparison that is perhaps invalid at the end of the day.)
Basically, that entire episode of Extra Credits reveals exactly where NS2 will be in six months. That is, a veritable ghost town with lots of pro players. NS2 will have alienated and drove off new players through lack of viable new player strategies and getting owned by knowledgeable teams that know how to work the resource model <i>and</i> kill players in merely a few minutes. (Not because the community is bad, rather because the game is frustratingly difficult for newer players.) The worst part? This problem will actually get worse as time moves on, inevitably locking new players out of the game entirely.
There is no low skill ceiling unit or tactic for the Marines, and one for the Aliens (Gorge, specifically). You die as a Marine, you lose whatever gun you had unless you're close to a spawn and as an Alien you lose your life form on your first death.
Guns should be permanent until changed out and life forms should be permanent until you change to another. That would require NS2 to not be NS2 however, and it will never happen, but it would be the only way to allow new players to quickly learn the game mechanics. Not in one game, no. Not even in twenty, perhaps. But I can't think of any games that require you to buy weapons that you will lose upon death, then respawn with diddly.
Certainly there are games where you 'buy' guns, but generally if you die you stay dead until the next game, where you will be offered to buy a gun again a la Counter Strike. Sure you'll have less money and no gun, but you will always <i>always</i> be able to buy at least a DEagle. Also, in many of these games they include a RFK model to help people build up to getting a gun faster, especially if it's easy to lose that gun.
Just my two cents, I'm sure I'll get flamed for this though. I'm not even playing at the moment, yet I can't stop myself from checking the forums once a day.
(This should not be taken to mean that I want RFK necessarily, because I don't. Merely stating a comparison that is perhaps invalid at the end of the day.)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The problem with this is that making the gameplay casual means having a casual RTS as well, which is really hard to do as no casual RTS games have been successful and for a good reason, RTS games need to require thinking and skill and that means sacrifices and losing resources from bad plays. I guess it could be possible if they had a resource for kill mechanic that was a lot bigger than it was in NS1 but it would also mean completely rebalancing the game. If NS2 had taken the Dota 2 or CS route of just remaking the game exactly as it was with better graphics, a good tutorial and noob server setup for new players and matchmaking and ranking for the experienced players, and releasing small changes after release that actually improve the game, it would have been much better off than it is now, but it's a little too late for that.
It's not people that don't find hard games fun anymore. The same people still think hard games are fun. The gaming market has expanded into a casual gaming market where people just would rather have fun, that overcome a challenge. It's much better for a business to develop a fun game that can be easily picked up and played at least a moderately good level upon 5-20 hours of investment.
I think the current wall hopping system is a beautiful way of handling skill based movement. It does need some tweaking, smoothing over, and a clearer notification of it being executed, but it allows for degrees of seperation in skill and reward and requires critical thought to know when best to use it in order to engage a marine.