Balance getting worse, not better. Why?
Savant
Join Date: 2002-11-30 Member: 10289Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
Join Date: 2002-11-30 Member: 10289Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
<div class="IPBDescription">Aliens now winning 66% of games - how do we fix this?</div>Despite the QQ of those who bemoaned the Onos egg changes a patch ago, the reality is that aliens are winning more than ever. Of the first 1000 games played on build 233, aliens have won ~66% of them. It used to be 60/40, now it's 66/33.
Before any ignorant individuals pop into the thread with their "marines need to learn to play" comments, it should be noted that competitive games have the same outcome. That tells me this is not a 'skill' issue. It also tells me that I should ignore anyone who suggests that pub game stats shouldn't be taken into consideration.
With that said, how do we fix this? <b> I'm not talking in specifics here.</b> While I think electrified res nodes would go a long way to restoring game balance, that's not what I'm looking to discuss - <a href="http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=2055e8&v=24" target="_blank">Google Moderator</a> can be used for specific suggestions. I want to try and figure out what - in principle - aliens are dominating to such an extent that it is skewing game balance.
In the 200+ games that I have played, I've noticed a number of things.
<ul><li>Aliens, by nature of their fast speed, are able to make significant early game progress because they can engage the marines on their 'side' of the map. Marines can drop an extractor and be at the second one and the first one is already going down. Then when they retreat to protect it the second one they put up is under attack. </li><li>Aliens are also outkilling marines to a marked extent. Without upgrades marines die very fast in the early game, and later game aliens are just as deadly. There is no one thing I can point to here to explain this, other than perhaps hit registration. Since hit registration seems to impact ranged shots, aliens are not nearly as impacted since they are typically a melee race.</li><li>Late game is also a loss for marines, due to lack of a viable counter against Onos. (No, EXOs are not a counter.) With the stunted resource flow crippling marine progression, once aliens get their third hive it's game over, whether the marines have a second tech point or not.</li></ul>So what is it? What is driving this balance spread? Where are marines falling behind? Resources? Upgrades? Survivability?
Before any ignorant individuals pop into the thread with their "marines need to learn to play" comments, it should be noted that competitive games have the same outcome. That tells me this is not a 'skill' issue. It also tells me that I should ignore anyone who suggests that pub game stats shouldn't be taken into consideration.
With that said, how do we fix this? <b> I'm not talking in specifics here.</b> While I think electrified res nodes would go a long way to restoring game balance, that's not what I'm looking to discuss - <a href="http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=2055e8&v=24" target="_blank">Google Moderator</a> can be used for specific suggestions. I want to try and figure out what - in principle - aliens are dominating to such an extent that it is skewing game balance.
In the 200+ games that I have played, I've noticed a number of things.
<ul><li>Aliens, by nature of their fast speed, are able to make significant early game progress because they can engage the marines on their 'side' of the map. Marines can drop an extractor and be at the second one and the first one is already going down. Then when they retreat to protect it the second one they put up is under attack. </li><li>Aliens are also outkilling marines to a marked extent. Without upgrades marines die very fast in the early game, and later game aliens are just as deadly. There is no one thing I can point to here to explain this, other than perhaps hit registration. Since hit registration seems to impact ranged shots, aliens are not nearly as impacted since they are typically a melee race.</li><li>Late game is also a loss for marines, due to lack of a viable counter against Onos. (No, EXOs are not a counter.) With the stunted resource flow crippling marine progression, once aliens get their third hive it's game over, whether the marines have a second tech point or not.</li></ul>So what is it? What is driving this balance spread? Where are marines falling behind? Resources? Upgrades? Survivability?
Comments
This makes it hard for marines to keep towers up.
You simply cannot kill an RT before the aliens react to it even if its across the map from their Hive. On the other hand, marines have a really hard time responding to a RT under attack before jetpacks.
Other than that, Refinery needs some serious Marine love. The other maps are all pretty standard ~60% aliens win, but Refinery is up at 74%. I think this is because of how many easily defended RT's the aliens start with. 3 on the north side, and normally the 2 in Lava. Marines can normally get their main, transit, and smelting up but the walking distance between either smelting or their main to transit makes that a supple target. Pipe almost never really secure, and if it is they might not have conduit. In my experience this leaves the marines with NORMALLY 3 RT's at any given time wheras the Alien team almost always is sitting on 5, 3 of which almost never go down (main, chasm, turbine). Marines have a back 3 that almost always lose at least one constantly (Transit) and two that are never secure (Conduit/Pipeworks).
I would suggest moving the transit RT closer to the marine main, in that room you can see from their main. The power can stay where it is, its really not that important. In addition, I would seperate the lava RT's to either side of lava, instead of the exact center. One on the east and one on the west. This makes holding them as aliens a lot harder. Other than that, making the hike from their main to smelting shorter would probably help as well.
Although it's difficult to actually prove I feel that Amb pretty well nailed it
If I get stuck on an alien team with a bunch of noobs I can still have a lot of fun, but being on marine with idiots is just nonstop pain
I won't go Marine team unless I know there are people on there I can trust <i>(usually all it takes is knowing who the good Marine Comms are)</i>
I'll come back when you link the relevant proof.
EDIT:
Last night I played in 5 games in a row with Marines winning. We were organised and consistent, 8v8 game, with groups of 2 at a minimum, and initial rushes depending on the map would send a group of 4 or 5 with a couple staying at base to clean out any skulk rushes.
We finally lost when half the marine team left and new players came in that were not aware of the team tactics and/or didn't listen.
After that it was a mix of alien and marines winning.
2. Hitreg and performance is a serious issue, and the release has seen an inflex of people with 'typica' computers - and are struggling. Melee is less dependent on accuracy than ranged, since your skill is in movement moreso than pinpoint aim.
3. Whoever pushes first gets the upperhand in this game. Currently aliens are pushing while marines are still setting up their first extractor. Games where I've seen marines win easiest have been with adjasent starts, so marirens can constantly push. So perhaps its a mobility issue early game.
To fix this. Let the obs be built without the armoury again. Perhaps reduce phase gates to 10 tres, and slightly reduce their health to compensate.
I'll come back when you link the relevant proof.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dont be such a ######.
Go to ns2stats.org and just look at all the build 233 games. Its at 66% right now aliens win pub matches
Then plug in build 232. Its 58% aliens win.
Yeah, he didn't spell out his methods, but reading his paragraph its pretty obvious what he's talking about.
Anyways, without mods/custom maps it was 58% build 232, 64% build 233
I dont think thats specifically aliens getting better, just getting used to the new mechanics in 232. And to be fair, it did drop from 62% after build 231 to 58% in 232.
There is still a marked alien advantage. Just need UWE to nudge marines just a little bit forward and should be enough to fix it.
Although it's difficult to actually prove I feel that Amb pretty well nailed it
If I get stuck on an alien team with a bunch of noobs I can still have a lot of fun, but being on marine with idiots is just nonstop pain
I won't go Marine team unless I know there are people on there I can trust <i>(usually all it takes is knowing who the good Marine Comms are)</i><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Funnily enough I just had a match where I got 4 rookie players and 3 normal players on the alien team. No idea how it was looking on the marine side, but they were already going for Nanogrid before my team even reached their first Extractor. Anecdotal evidence ftw!
reg
hitreg
Every comment from the pubstars along the lines of "vets play aliens", that totally ignores the fact that competitive games are also clearly biased alien side.
Go to ns2stats.org and just look at all the build 233 games. Its at 66% right now aliens win pub matches
Then plug in build 232. Its 58% aliens win.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
ns2stats has 2 or 3 servers out of the upwards of 20 I've seen filled at anyone time in AUS. So the stats are missing a LOT of games there.
It is also missing the games I won as marines. Playing on official UWE servers as they're not tracked on ns2stats...
That's also assuming all servers that upgrade to 233 are still running ns2stats.
There are a lot of factors and while it's showing 66% it is not a full-spread of playerbase.
I'm also fairly sure that UWE have some official reporting methods? It'd be nice if they had daily dumps of overall win rates or something based on official stats. Ofcourse that relies on those servers being standard and unmodified gameplay etc.
I'm not being ass, I'm being realistic. Using stats that include a subsection of the playerbase is not effective.
If you target that to remove all mods, then the player-count is EXTREMELY lower... looks to be about 150 players since the 10th? at peak?
That is not indicative of the average count of 1700 players concurrently playing at times.
EDIT:
Did a quick check and looks to be an overall lower playerbase count on 233 than 232 from ns2stats.
EDIT 2:
Just found a bunch of the top 15 servers are NOT in the ns2stats according to devicenulls server tracker.
There's a lot of game stats missing there.
Devicenull's server browser has it showing a bunch of servers in the top 15 NOT in ns2stats, it doesn't have ANY of the australian servers of which 8 were filled to max last night. 3 or 4 of those being official untracked servers.
tl;dr aliens are really easy to play because you just keep mindlessly attacking marines and you can snowball a small advantage that forces them to turtle to hold what little they have while your commander just expands everywhere cause he doesn't need your help to build.
Note: some doors are temporarily lockable by marines.
Know that onos that charges your base in Terminal or Locker? Yeah?
Go press E on the nearby doors that open. Shut them for a few seconds and trolol as the onos tries to escape back out those same doors to find it shut... while the marines pile in behind and clean him/her out.
I've had many a onos die in Terminal as a result and in turn, lose the game as the 75res is not easily recoverable.
Part of why I greatly prefer alien command is because I don't have to rely on derpy players to build all my stuff. (People running past unbuilt extractors is the BEST. Especially early game.) While the MACs could still be killed, it would give a bit of autonomy to the marine commander, while allowing marines to actually spread out instead of being a man or two down in the beginning while they build stuff.
I represented my country at NS1 yet I can barely overcome a decent skulk these days. On Alien however I feel just as good as I always was, or close to it anyway.
My FPS is pretty bad but it did get a bit better with the recent patch. I bet there are hosts of people out there in a similar position.
That's not to say Aliens aren't simply overpowered, I think that too.
Devicenull's server browser has it showing a bunch of servers in the top 15 NOT in ns2stats, it doesn't have ANY of the australian servers of which 8 were filled to max last night. 3 or 4 of those being official untracked servers.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
NS2 stats isn't comprehensive, but it's a decent sample. For NS2 stats to be signifignatly inaccurate your top 15 servers and Aussie servers would have to basically be WELL above 50/50 for marines to offset the larger data pool that shows an alien bias (and they're not, at VERY best they MIGHT be 50/50, which is quite doubtful)
You want to suggest this is a 'skill' thing? Then come back and talk to me when competitive games have a closer balanced win/loss rate. Until then your words are empty.
You want to suggest this is a 'skill' thing? Then come back and talk to me when competitive games have a closer balanced win/loss rate. Until then your words are empty.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
did I say anything about competitive play? I'm talking about pub games! Get a grip.
I'll come back when you link the relevant proof.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->If you don't know how to pull up stats from ns2stats then don't come complaining to me. I was very clear about what I looked at. I looked at build 233 ONLY, both pub and competitive games, and there was just under 1000 games played. The percentage was 66% wins for aliens. That's from the first paragraph of my post.
<b>You can try and spin it all you like, but it does not matter what servers were or were not included since this is an aggregate of 1000 games. </b>
If this was a 100 games I could see someone calling it a small sample, but a 1000 games is certainly enough to look at from a statistical point of view. As for your marine wins, good for you! However your 5 games do not hold a candle to the 1000 games in the stats.
Come back when you can qualify your remarks with more than 5 games worth of data. Until then, please don't take the thread off topic.
Competitive games had the same win/loss percentage as pub games. So you are <b>WRONG </b>when you suggest that pub player skill is a factor. If it was, then competitive games would have a more balanced win/loss ratio.
They do not. That's why you're wrong.
He's saying your reasoning doesn't hold through, because if it did the scenario would flip at the competitive level where there are no "COD scrubs"
Yes but you are pulling 1000 games from a subsection of the player base. Rather than everyone.
It's like going out on the street, asking the first 1000 people you see in your local city if they think the world will end on Dec 21st.
You are polling a set of users from a minority populous that does not give an overall shared view. I admit that there is some trend in that small subsector of stats you are polling, but you have to add some qualifiers to your stats. You are only getting a small number of the playerbase that is repeat players. If you have a game that the aliens win, and then those same players play 2 more games in a row, you already have some skewed results there as the same subset of players are potentially doing the same tactics thinking they did it wrong before and need to repeat themselves.
Much akin to the 5 games I played that won, because the aliens repeatadly failed to break our system, because they hunted solo and not as a group.
I would love to use ns2stats as a bible for reality, but it is only a base guide of a small portion of the overall playerbase.
As stated you had 1000 games on 233, from what I can tell in the time since 233 has been out... ns2stats has less than 10% of the potential playerbase recorded playing. So you are showing about 10 games per player... at rough estimates.
I'm not trolling, I'm not derailing, I'm trying to draw the fact the stats you are pulling from are not widespread enough to get the full community feel.
There are stats from combat mod in there... heck one of the monash servers had a test 64 player combat game... It ran fantastic even at 40-50 connect players. But that's a couple of games, run in combat mode, that will blow your stats wide and wrong, esp with playercount of valid standard gameplay.
Stats aside, I'm not sure you can say balance is getting worse, balance is swinging towards aliens, and also say its ignorant to consider L2P/evolving pub understanding of ns2 when we havn't actually had a real balance patch in many many weeks. Basically, the only factors i think you can pin balance swings on atm are changes in performance, hitreg (your second point), and marines L2P.
We have spammable mines, a skulk movement system that doesn't scale, or 'underscales' with aim, sprint which makes marines pretty much just as fast as skulks, and 2/3 serious maps that are slightly in marine favour because of ARCs and RT expand points respectively (tram/veil). For a while now the early game advantage has been very much marine when you talk about skilled/aggressive comp play, with the exception of vs equally skilled camo first aliens.
Your first and third points have always been the case for quite a long time even when winrates were close to 50/50. I don't think they explain balance swings, even though I disagree on the exo vs onos point.
As for how to fix it, hopefully we get some 'hit reg' and animation improvements to see where we stand then. I honestly don't think there is anything fundamentally 'wrong' enough with ns2 game balance that explains a 30% winrate difference (pretty huge) - there are imbalances on both sides but nothing aggregate or blatantly overpowered enough to explain this big of an alien swing.
*Historically throughout the beta to now, big winrate differences like this were the result of
a) a clear lifeform imbalance. e.g. ns1 fade hp with invuln blink, Super crazy skulk movement and/or lawnmower bites, super lerks notably during the period when they had bilebomb, crazy gorge bilebomb damage etc.
b) Some widespread imba alien strat or tactic. e.g. super crags, super shades/cloak, 6min onos, insta spawn skulks.
c) Performance or technical issues - this includes 'hit reg', responsiveness, smoothness, animations etc. Patches which saw big increases in fps etc. also generally saw big swings towards marines.
Granted, the sample size is small but I think it still stands as a pretty clear example of something very wrong with the game balance. (and/or hideous game breaking bugs, of which there are a few...)