<!--quoteo(post=2057963:date=Jan 8 2013, 10:40 AM:name=butter)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (butter @ Jan 8 2013, 10:40 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2057963"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->It's clear as day that OP writes from a biased Alien perspective. Marines have a whole host of other problems that outweigh aliens at the moment. Egglock? Try the always winning tactic of the alien zerg rush to kill your portal or IP . The game is done at that point and has far more success than the rine rush to egglock.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's from the perspective of a mostly alien player in a 12v12 match yes. But Egglock is not the same thing as marines rushing the alien hive at 30 seconds into a game and winning. Rushing into the alien spawn, or the Marine spawn early game is an assured win if your team is better than the other, yes, but that's equal for both sides.
Egg lock refers to the 3:00-7:00 Marks, where aliens stop spawning because they don't have any more eggs, and it becomes very easy for marines to take the entire map and push into the hives. The appropriate marine comparison would be if marines could only have one infantry portal per comm chair, and at the 2-3:00 marks, players dying started stacking up and spawn locking your team, resulting in aliens being able to push and destroy your base without much resistance.
Yes they seem like the same thing, but they aren't.
I still don't understand the rationale of taking out devour as a bad mechanic and adding in the egg spawn system, where you can sit in spawn queue in upwards of a minute in a failed rush or a bad team.
<b>1.)</b> Do you have a video proving this occurs? I haven't heard any complaints in-game. I've never experienced this. Usually, this type of issue is purely player latency; 100ms will react slower than a 50ms. If anything, I'd assume this would be more related to server issues, which are linked to core issues through performance.
<b>2.)</b> I disgree. Skulks have speed, can climb walls, and can exploit all shortcuts. One alien is capable of keeping a stream (1-2 entering every 30 seconds) of marines out of areas for minutes; if they are a bit above decent. Yes, there are marines sharp shooters, but it's usually limited to 1-3 in pubs; unless the marines are stacked.
<b>3.)</b> In the 12v12 games I've played, it's usually the aliens teams fault for being egg-locked. Either they rush Marine start and failed, then lost from the counter rush, or aliens didn't fall back to base and protect the eggs.
It's similar to marines rushing with a single IP, failing, then losing that IP to few savvy skulks. Most games I've played, skulk rushing is extremely effective, even if it was only moderately successful.
A few skulks can stop 4-5 rushing marines, using the hive for healing and protection. Shotgun rush, with good shooters, is only early rush (I can think of) that might seem unfair.
Also, Khamm's can continue expanding with dead skulks. Comms require marines.
<b>4.)</b> a. Welders can get it back up in seconds. It works like a charm for Terminal last-standers; 4-5 welders and the powers back up, as if nothing happened. Power nodes are free and can be repaired.
Gorges can still attack the phase gates or the Command chair (in the case of cutting off jetpack/exo access).
b. I like that comms have the power to decide which nodes get used and when. Some are more useful later.
c. I like the idea of aliens stopping all power, through cysting the power node. Maybe gorge clogging it. That's a fun idea.
d. Nice idea. I wonder about balance issues. Marines teams would surely exploit this to the fullest.
e. ?
<b>5.)</b> ARCs are fine, in my opinion. They are suppose to be able to march in. If there really is a problem, a cost increase would resolve it. What exploits are people using with them?
<b>6.)</b> -I like bile bombs power. By the time the seconds hives up, it only takes one marine to stop one gorge bomber. The gorge can't even kill the marine with bile bomb.
-Gorges are not worthless at securing an area. One gorge (plus hydras and line wall) will always beat one marine (of equal skill). If more marines attack, it's up to the alien team to support that gorge and save area/hydra.
-Gorge spit hits lower marine visibility. If it was hit-scan, gorge would be more dangerous than a lerk early game and unstoppable late game. Spot an exo? Gorge it down. I've faced off with marines and killed them in less than 15 seconds as a gorge. It's not that difficult, especially with heal-spray and hydras, it's just not wise to pick a gorge as your killing machine.
-Gorge cysting sounds nice, but what effect would it have on balance?
I don't think gorges should be able to buy crags/shifts/shades at all, especially if they can lay their own cyst.
It's more practical to have Khamm's handle whips. You wouldn't want a Khamm grabbing your 15 pRes whip and marching it to its death.
In my opinion, uncapping Hydras with any change would be awful once aliens controlled 5-7 res nodes. Even though I assume there would be a soft cap, due to the res cap, this would make sneaking a hive late unbearably difficult. Hydras don't need cyst to fire, so a sneaking marine would have to take down each one and be babysat by a comm.
Gorges are more valuable early game. Just because mostly players play them one way doesn't mean they aren't effective in other ways. Check out some of the gorge topics. There are many ways to exploit gorges early game abilities.
<b>7.) </b>The flamer thrower is fine, imo. It's cost vs benefit is balanced. Your proposed changes would make it too powerful and leave it as the weapon of choice mid to late game.
<!--quoteo(post=2058002:date=Jan 8 2013, 12:32 PM:name=Kama_Blue)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Kama_Blue @ Jan 8 2013, 12:32 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2058002"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Egg lock refers to the 3:00-7:00 Marks, where aliens stop spawning because they don't have any more eggs, and it becomes very easy for marines to take the entire map and push into the hives. The appropriate marine comparison would be if marines could only have one infantry portal per comm chair, and at the 2-3:00 marks, players dying started stacking up and spawn locking your team, resulting in aliens being able to push and destroy your base without much resistance.
Yes they seem like the same thing, but they aren't.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
3:00-7:00 mark aliens should have a second hive or be placing one soon. Also, you're assuming aliens die frequently enough to run out of eggs. This doesn't happen when teams communicate and/or don't rush without thinking; making it players/team issue.
A marine team can be destroyed at any mark, through skulks eating respawns and then the IP. Three skulks can drop a power node in under 20 seconds. Similar to aliens, it can be stopped and resolved by teammates returning to base, and/or the K/Commander leaving their hotseat to defend.
Also OP, I hope you can detail how these changes would be balanced. Many of your proposed changes would have a big impact, but there's no information to how the matches would remain fair.
ex. "Increase the egg wave and egg spawn rate." - Now aliens can full swarm rush marine start more than 1-2 times. Or, they can rush once and have enough re-spawns to cover a Khamm's expansion. Meanwhile, the marines have to comeback from a weaken state, if they survived, and somehow keep up with alien expansion.
<!--quoteo(post=2059232:date=Jan 11 2013, 07:07 AM:name=Ciro)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Ciro @ Jan 11 2013, 07:07 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059232"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><b>1.)</b> Do you have a video proving this occurs? I haven't heard any complaints in-game. I've never experienced this. Usually, this type of issue is purely player latency; 100ms will react slower than a 50ms. If anything, I'd assume this would be more related to server issues, which are linked to core issues through performance.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> You haven't ever been instagibed by a shotgun pointing the otherway or been killed behind walls? Everyone on my friendlist that plays NS2 has experienced this, whether it's due to animation or lag comp or interp
<!--quoteo(post=2059272:date=Jan 11 2013, 06:29 AM:name=Makenshi)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Makenshi @ Jan 11 2013, 06:29 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059272"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You haven't ever been instagibed by a shotgun pointing the otherway or been killed behind walls? Everyone on my friendlist that plays NS2 has experienced this, whether it's due to animation or lag comp or interp<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No, I have not. If it's animation, that's a problem. If it's lag comp, that's either user issue (PC specs requirements), or performance issue. If it's interp, I'd check if it's connection or client/server system related.
I have seen players skip (due to high latency or weaker system specs), but I am still able to kill them and dodge their attacks/fire.
I think the instagib and behind wall kills comes from connection latency issues. If you have a 150ms as a skulk, a sub 50ms shooter will have an advantage in reaction time.
Note: I play on servers where I have a sub 80ms ping, and are at 100% performance.
Is that why strawberry. can have 4:1 K:D ratios at 270ms ping?
I've experienced what Makenshi (and many others) have described. Something isn't working properly. If this same thing happens in other games they have done it in a fashion that isn't blatantly obvious. I've been killed before I can even react to taking damage.
<!--quoteo(post=2059462:date=Jan 11 2013, 09:05 PM:name=Ciro)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Ciro @ Jan 11 2013, 09:05 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059462"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->No, I have not. If it's animation, that's a problem. If it's lag comp, that's either user issue (PC specs requirements), or performance issue. If it's interp, I'd check if it's connection or client/server system related.
I have seen players skip (due to high latency or weaker system specs), but I am still able to kill them and dodge their attacks/fire.
I think the instagib and behind wall kills comes from connection latency issues. If you have a 150ms as a skulk, a sub 50ms shooter will have an advantage in reaction time.
Note: I play on servers where I have a sub 80ms ping, and are at 100% performance.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I play almost exclusively sub-100 ping servers. This happens even when I have 30 ping. I don't know which of the above is the cause (or more than likely, a combination of the above), but it's really killing my desire to play NS2 seriously, or hell, at all.
I only skimmed through the replies, but as far as the DELAY goes:
It's high interpolation, simple as. This isn't even up for debate. The game uses a high interp for a smoother experience. An interp cvar or slider in the menus would help greatly. I do find it slightly annoying, but it's not quite game breaking.
As for 12v12; the server load on a 24 player server is going to be HIGH. You need a cutting edge machine with some great peering and bandwidth to counter act this, and even then it's not going to make that much difference. At mid to late game, there are just too many entities for the server to handle optimally. This again, is just a plain fact.
As for opinions; I do feel 20 players is the max I personally like to play. 24 man servers are just a mess, I find the whole thing just the lowest common denominator. Every game you see, the player counts just go sky high on single servers. 64 man COD servers, 32 man TF2 servers, it's the classic thing the general public will do to any game. However, I'm not bashing it, everyone has a right to play what they enjoy, and clearly there's demand for it.
I would however say most of the grips in these forums extend to issues that are mostly skill based grips of teams or misinterpretation of what entities true functions are, not game balance. I'm not denying there's issues; the interp for one, but generally I feel the game is balanced.
Also, the game is balanced for 6-10 players a side, any imbalance that arises after that should not asked of the devs to fix. Server/community mods could create the balance themselves on their own 24 player servers, It would seem highly unfair to make changes to the game based on 24 players servers when the game was designed around 6-10.
<!--quoteo(post=2059487:date=Jan 11 2013, 07:26 PM:name=Tom-R)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tom-R @ Jan 11 2013, 07:26 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059487"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->As for 12v12; the server load on a 24 player server is going to be HIGH. You need a cutting edge machine with some great peering and bandwidth to counter act this, and even then it's not going to make that much difference. At mid to late game, there are just too many entities for the server to handle optimally. <b>This again, is just a plain fact.</b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I play on 24 players servers and do not experience this issue, mid-late game. Can you record it, please? After reading all the post, it's still very uncleared when this issue occurs and it's impact on game-play. It seems like a client latency/performance or server performance issue.
<!--quoteo(post=2059490:date=Jan 12 2013, 03:41 AM:name=Ciro)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Ciro @ Jan 12 2013, 03:41 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059490"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I play on 24 players servers and do not experience this issue, mid-late game. Can you record it, please? After reading all the post, it's still very uncleared when this issue occurs and it's impact on game-play. It seems like a client latency/performance or server performance issue.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm not sure what you're referring to; You say it seems like a client latency server/performance issue, which is exactly what I was saying?. Well, the server performance part.
EDIT: To make it clearer. The high interp causes the hitreg round corners and reaction delay etc. Is this what you've never experienced?. I was merely mentioning some people are going to find it worse/longer mid to late game due to servers struggling. Clients being bad due to bad hardware or latency may well also contribute.
if you don't want to get egglocked try not letting marines walk into your hive
the reason eggs exist at all was because people whined about having marines shoot skulks as they spawned but instead of learning to prevent marines from walking in, they whined until developers gave in and made a game mechanism to soften the natural consequence of their poor decisions
I feel like most of these issues concern high-playercount servers only, and that, considering the extremely small development team size, we should not expect the devs to fix this. The egg-timer can easily be fixed by a mod, same for most of the problems that concern high playercount.
As for the netcode, it's to be expected. Even with 30 ms ping to a player you're still going to be 1 frame behind (33.3 fps), and with 90 ms that means 3 frames, which can be just moving into a corner. Although I feel like hit detection with jetpacks when flying backwards is particularly shoddy. I've been killed many times by enemies that I thought were out of range. Must have something to do with legs sticking out, but this is probably not a latency issue.
As for the suddenly dying to marine shots, correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't the marine gun fire at ~1000 rpm? You need 9 shots to kill a non-carapace skulk with wep lv0, so that'd be about half a second to respond. Average response time of a human is 0.3 seconds, so that leaves 0.2 seconds to aim away from the extractor you're probably munching on and to also press the spacebar. That's not a lot of time.
Skulk vs marine fight is simply because of the range advantage, and the fact that skulks are less intuitive to play.
Power nodes are absolutely fine, imo. The only thing they should fix is to notify the comm more explicitly of a power node being attacked in an unimportant location. I've lost power in my main base several times as a comm, simply because I didn't know it was being attacked until I got the notice that the power went out. Welders heal for 90 hp/s, bilebomb deals 25/s per bomb up to ~100 (correct me if I'm wrong). If your team gets welders (which they should), you shouldn't have too much trouble. I actually like the power node idea. It gives marine strongholds multiple weaknesses, and forces marine comms to think about their structure placement. Lava falls is a pretty ######ty map. I like the idea behind clogging up a power node, but to have alien-conquered locations be completely blacked out would be quite annoying. It's a good idea for a community mod, however.
20 arcs = 300 res. Do you seriously allow your opponent to have this much res? They're quite fine, imo.
Gorges, when played correctly, can completely shut down an enemy push. You can hold back 4 marines with 1 gorge and 1 skulk for plenty of time for your team to arrive. Sure, it's hard to win 1on1, but having 1 gorge in a group of 4-5 skulks can allow that group to survive multiple marine groups. It's a support unit, and it's damn good at what it does.
Flamethrower/jetpackers are reasonably balanced, imo. It costs him 35 pres to deal 50-60 tres damage? Doesn't sound all that imbalanced.
<!--quoteo(post=2059494:date=Jan 11 2013, 08:05 PM:name=Tom-R)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tom-R @ Jan 11 2013, 08:05 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059494"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'm not sure what you're referring to; You say it seems like a client latency server/performance issue, which is exactly what I was saying?. Well, the server performance part.
EDIT: To make it clearer. The high interp causes the hitreg round corners and reaction delay etc. Is this what you've never experienced?. I was merely mentioning some people are going to find it worse/longer mid to late game due to servers struggling. Clients being bad due to bad hardware or latency may well also contribute.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That is exactly what I wanted explained. I'd guess UWE is working on optimization. I don't think complaining about it further will make the process go any faster. I still haven't had any hitreg issues (I miss when I miss), or reaction delay. Even on low perfomance (sub 50%) servers, hitreg remains correct, everything just skips.
I skimped over 1, but I absolutely agree with the rest of your points. I think NS2 would be a vastly superior game with even these kinds of small changes.
Interesting ideas. Some of them anyway. Agree the delay needs to go. Btw aliens can gorge rush quite effectively and there is nothing marines can do against it. So marines are not the only ones that can rush a base.
Comments
It's from the perspective of a mostly alien player in a 12v12 match yes. But Egglock is not the same thing as marines rushing the alien hive at 30 seconds into a game and winning. Rushing into the alien spawn, or the Marine spawn early game is an assured win if your team is better than the other, yes, but that's equal for both sides.
Egg lock refers to the 3:00-7:00 Marks, where aliens stop spawning because they don't have any more eggs, and it becomes very easy for marines to take the entire map and push into the hives. The appropriate marine comparison would be if marines could only have one infantry portal per comm chair, and at the 2-3:00 marks, players dying started stacking up and spawn locking your team, resulting in aliens being able to push and destroy your base without much resistance.
Yes they seem like the same thing, but they aren't.
<b>2.)</b> I disgree. Skulks have speed, can climb walls, and can exploit all shortcuts. One alien is capable of keeping a stream (1-2 entering every 30 seconds) of marines out of areas for minutes; if they are a bit above decent. Yes, there are marines sharp shooters, but it's usually limited to 1-3 in pubs; unless the marines are stacked.
<b>3.)</b> In the 12v12 games I've played, it's usually the aliens teams fault for being egg-locked. Either they rush Marine start and failed, then lost from the counter rush, or aliens didn't fall back to base and protect the eggs.
It's similar to marines rushing with a single IP, failing, then losing that IP to few savvy skulks. Most games I've played, skulk rushing is extremely effective, even if it was only moderately successful.
A few skulks can stop 4-5 rushing marines, using the hive for healing and protection. Shotgun rush, with good shooters, is only early rush (I can think of) that might seem unfair.
Also, Khamm's can continue expanding with dead skulks. Comms require marines.
<b>4.)</b> a. Welders can get it back up in seconds. It works like a charm for Terminal last-standers; 4-5 welders and the powers back up, as if nothing happened. Power nodes are free and can be repaired.
Gorges can still attack the phase gates or the Command chair (in the case of cutting off jetpack/exo access).
b. I like that comms have the power to decide which nodes get used and when. Some are more useful later.
c. I like the idea of aliens stopping all power, through cysting the power node. Maybe gorge clogging it. That's a fun idea.
d. Nice idea. I wonder about balance issues. Marines teams would surely exploit this to the fullest.
e. ?
<b>5.)</b> ARCs are fine, in my opinion. They are suppose to be able to march in. If there really is a problem, a cost increase would resolve it. What exploits are people using with them?
<b>6.)</b> -I like bile bombs power. By the time the seconds hives up, it only takes one marine to stop one gorge bomber. The gorge can't even kill the marine with bile bomb.
-Gorges are not worthless at securing an area. One gorge (plus hydras and line wall) will always beat one marine (of equal skill). If more marines attack, it's up to the alien team to support that gorge and save area/hydra.
-Gorge spit hits lower marine visibility. If it was hit-scan, gorge would be more dangerous than a lerk early game and unstoppable late game. Spot an exo? Gorge it down. I've faced off with marines and killed them in less than 15 seconds as a gorge. It's not that difficult, especially with heal-spray and hydras, it's just not wise to pick a gorge as your killing machine.
-Gorge cysting sounds nice, but what effect would it have on balance?
I don't think gorges should be able to buy crags/shifts/shades at all, especially if they can lay their own cyst.
It's more practical to have Khamm's handle whips. You wouldn't want a Khamm grabbing your 15 pRes whip and marching it to its death.
In my opinion, uncapping Hydras with any change would be awful once aliens controlled 5-7 res nodes. Even though I assume there would be a soft cap, due to the res cap, this would make sneaking a hive late unbearably difficult. Hydras don't need cyst to fire, so a sneaking marine would have to take down each one and be babysat by a comm.
Gorges are more valuable early game. Just because mostly players play them one way doesn't mean they aren't effective in other ways. Check out some of the gorge topics. There are many ways to exploit gorges early game abilities.
<b>7.) </b>The flamer thrower is fine, imo. It's cost vs benefit is balanced. Your proposed changes would make it too powerful and leave it as the weapon of choice mid to late game.
<!--quoteo(post=2058002:date=Jan 8 2013, 12:32 PM:name=Kama_Blue)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Kama_Blue @ Jan 8 2013, 12:32 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2058002"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Egg lock refers to the 3:00-7:00 Marks, where aliens stop spawning because they don't have any more eggs, and it becomes very easy for marines to take the entire map and push into the hives. The appropriate marine comparison would be if marines could only have one infantry portal per comm chair, and at the 2-3:00 marks, players dying started stacking up and spawn locking your team, resulting in aliens being able to push and destroy your base without much resistance.
Yes they seem like the same thing, but they aren't.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
3:00-7:00 mark aliens should have a second hive or be placing one soon. Also, you're assuming aliens die frequently enough to run out of eggs. This doesn't happen when teams communicate and/or don't rush without thinking; making it players/team issue.
A marine team can be destroyed at any mark, through skulks eating respawns and then the IP. Three skulks can drop a power node in under 20 seconds. Similar to aliens, it can be stopped and resolved by teammates returning to base, and/or the K/Commander leaving their hotseat to defend.
Also OP, I hope you can detail how these changes would be balanced. Many of your proposed changes would have a big impact, but there's no information to how the matches would remain fair.
ex. "Increase the egg wave and egg spawn rate." - Now aliens can full swarm rush marine start more than 1-2 times. Or, they can rush once and have enough re-spawns to cover a Khamm's expansion. Meanwhile, the marines have to comeback from a weaken state, if they survived, and somehow keep up with alien expansion.
How are you going to balance that?
You haven't ever been instagibed by a shotgun pointing the otherway or been killed behind walls? Everyone on my friendlist that plays NS2 has experienced this, whether it's due to animation or lag comp or interp
No, I have not. If it's animation, that's a problem. If it's lag comp, that's either user issue (PC specs requirements), or performance issue. If it's interp, I'd check if it's connection or client/server system related.
I have seen players skip (due to high latency or weaker system specs), but I am still able to kill them and dodge their attacks/fire.
I think the instagib and behind wall kills comes from connection latency issues. If you have a 150ms as a skulk, a sub 50ms shooter will have an advantage in reaction time.
Note: I play on servers where I have a sub 80ms ping, and are at 100% performance.
I've experienced what Makenshi (and many others) have described. Something isn't working properly. If this same thing happens in other games they have done it in a fashion that isn't blatantly obvious. I've been killed before I can even react to taking damage.
I have seen players skip (due to high latency or weaker system specs), but I am still able to kill them and dodge their attacks/fire.
I think the instagib and behind wall kills comes from connection latency issues. If you have a 150ms as a skulk, a sub 50ms shooter will have an advantage in reaction time.
Note: I play on servers where I have a sub 80ms ping, and are at 100% performance.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I play almost exclusively sub-100 ping servers. This happens even when I have 30 ping. I don't know which of the above is the cause (or more than likely, a combination of the above), but it's really killing my desire to play NS2 seriously, or hell, at all.
It's high interpolation, simple as. This isn't even up for debate. The game uses a high interp for a smoother experience. An interp cvar or slider in the menus would help greatly. I do find it slightly annoying, but it's not quite game breaking.
As for 12v12; the server load on a 24 player server is going to be HIGH. You need a cutting edge machine with some great peering and bandwidth to counter act this, and even then it's not going to make that much difference. At mid to late game, there are just too many entities for the server to handle optimally. This again, is just a plain fact.
As for opinions; I do feel 20 players is the max I personally like to play. 24 man servers are just a mess, I find the whole thing just the lowest common denominator. Every game you see, the player counts just go sky high on single servers. 64 man COD servers, 32 man TF2 servers, it's the classic thing the general public will do to any game. However, I'm not bashing it, everyone has a right to play what they enjoy, and clearly there's demand for it.
I would however say most of the grips in these forums extend to issues that are mostly skill based grips of teams or misinterpretation of what entities true functions are, not game balance. I'm not denying there's issues; the interp for one, but generally I feel the game is balanced.
Also, the game is balanced for 6-10 players a side, any imbalance that arises after that should not asked of the devs to fix. Server/community mods could create the balance themselves on their own 24 player servers, It would seem highly unfair to make changes to the game based on 24 players servers when the game was designed around 6-10.
I play on 24 players servers and do not experience this issue, mid-late game. Can you record it, please? After reading all the post, it's still very uncleared when this issue occurs and it's impact on game-play. It seems like a client latency/performance or server performance issue.
I'm not sure what you're referring to; You say it seems like a client latency server/performance issue, which is exactly what I was saying?. Well, the server performance part.
EDIT: To make it clearer. The high interp causes the hitreg round corners and reaction delay etc. Is this what you've never experienced?. I was merely mentioning some people are going to find it worse/longer mid to late game due to servers struggling. Clients being bad due to bad hardware or latency may well also contribute.
the reason eggs exist at all was because people whined about having marines shoot skulks as they spawned but instead of learning to prevent marines from walking in, they whined until developers gave in and made a game mechanism to soften the natural consequence of their poor decisions
As for the netcode, it's to be expected. Even with 30 ms ping to a player you're still going to be 1 frame behind (33.3 fps), and with 90 ms that means 3 frames, which can be just moving into a corner. Although I feel like hit detection with jetpacks when flying backwards is particularly shoddy. I've been killed many times by enemies that I thought were out of range. Must have something to do with legs sticking out, but this is probably not a latency issue.
As for the suddenly dying to marine shots, correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't the marine gun fire at ~1000 rpm? You need 9 shots to kill a non-carapace skulk with wep lv0, so that'd be about half a second to respond. Average response time of a human is 0.3 seconds, so that leaves 0.2 seconds to aim away from the extractor you're probably munching on and to also press the spacebar. That's not a lot of time.
Skulk vs marine fight is simply because of the range advantage, and the fact that skulks are less intuitive to play.
Power nodes are absolutely fine, imo. The only thing they should fix is to notify the comm more explicitly of a power node being attacked in an unimportant location. I've lost power in my main base several times as a comm, simply because I didn't know it was being attacked until I got the notice that the power went out. Welders heal for 90 hp/s, bilebomb deals 25/s per bomb up to ~100 (correct me if I'm wrong). If your team gets welders (which they should), you shouldn't have too much trouble.
I actually like the power node idea. It gives marine strongholds multiple weaknesses, and forces marine comms to think about their structure placement.
Lava falls is a pretty ######ty map.
I like the idea behind clogging up a power node, but to have alien-conquered locations be completely blacked out would be quite annoying. It's a good idea for a community mod, however.
20 arcs = 300 res. Do you seriously allow your opponent to have this much res? They're quite fine, imo.
Gorges, when played correctly, can completely shut down an enemy push. You can hold back 4 marines with 1 gorge and 1 skulk for plenty of time for your team to arrive. Sure, it's hard to win 1on1, but having 1 gorge in a group of 4-5 skulks can allow that group to survive multiple marine groups. It's a support unit, and it's damn good at what it does.
Flamethrower/jetpackers are reasonably balanced, imo. It costs him 35 pres to deal 50-60 tres damage? Doesn't sound all that imbalanced.
EDIT: To make it clearer. The high interp causes the hitreg round corners and reaction delay etc. Is this what you've never experienced?. I was merely mentioning some people are going to find it worse/longer mid to late game due to servers struggling. Clients being bad due to bad hardware or latency may well also contribute.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That is exactly what I wanted explained. I'd guess UWE is working on optimization. I don't think complaining about it further will make the process go any faster. I still haven't had any hitreg issues (I miss when I miss), or reaction delay. Even on low perfomance (sub 50%) servers, hitreg remains correct, everything just skips.
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/127784/its-time-we-start-talking-about-the-real-culprit-behind-the-horrendeous-balance