As an alien I feel like the hunted and NOT the hunter
Antikaratekid
Join Date: 2013-03-04 Member: 183688Members
Join Date: 2013-03-04 Member: 183688Members
I am a new player. But I find marines to be the hunters and aliens to be the hunted. Now I have played many FPS's before so I already understand the "dont rush at them" suggestions so lets just drop those now. Skulks feel like bricks. Shotguns counter a majority of our lifeforms. Camo is useless. And come late game, the marine commander is inevitably going to spam arti and exos for a ridiculously low price no matter how much we harass.
These are my impressions of the game and it really puts a bad taste in my mouth. Another point about shotguns, the alien commanders I've worked with shit their pants from early game to late whenever shotguns make an appearance. It is pathetic.
These are my impressions of the game and it really puts a bad taste in my mouth. Another point about shotguns, the alien commanders I've worked with shit their pants from early game to late whenever shotguns make an appearance. It is pathetic.
Comments
Fades/Lerks are very easy to play once you learn to be patient and hit and run. Also remember that half of the game is actually gaining res, so the threat of death to marines is just as good as the deterrent of actually attacking. I.e. they know you are round the corner and need to get past you to build rts, so use that against them and take up good ambush positions. There is more, but best to see for yourself.
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Neither side with equal numbers and tech should feel "hunted" or "hunter". It should be more akin to "warriors".
Anyway, post Gorgeous ns2stats says balance is around 52/48 marines. Which is better than the 60/40 aliens that it used to be. So far so good if you ask me. Maybe the skulk momentum bug fix will nudge that closer to 50/50.
That statistic is irrelevant if they didnt reset it after the gorge patch. If they DID you would be correct. If they didn't, it shows a steep drop in alien wins that is not guaranteed to stop at 50/50
Though, people are still learning to use the new mechanics so this will all change.
It's a shame your first impressions were not that great, but don't make the mistake to judge balance on just those experiences. Aliens can be as much the hunters as marines, depending on which team has the better players/commander. Most likely you ended up playing a series of one sided games which do not portray the bigger picture. You could have easily played a stacked alien team, stomping a marine side into oblivion a few games in a row, and then made a thread on how aliens are too strong.
Nobody is "mucking around with the changes" after 4 days. Tunnels are overpriced and the very last thing I upgrade AFTER getting everything from the 2nd hive (unless hive is delayed and I'm sitting on tons of res at 1 hive). All this "people are learning the new mechanics"...umm, what new mechanics? Being slow? Thats a "new mechanic"? Or buggy Babblers, which are 100% useless and a complete and utter waste of p.res. They are great at taking about 50 years to drop a power node, woohoo. There was 2 new things to learn for 1 alien class...and the railgun exo. Thats all these is as far as "new mechanics", and most people don't play gorge either.
The win/loss ratio for marines and aliens post patch sits officially at 55% marines, 45% alien. In practice however, it certainly FEELS a lot more like 70-30 or even worse.
Of the legit games I played yesterday, (legit = 2 hives and an actual mid-game), aliens won 1 game out of over 25 I played in yesterday alone. This was across multiple servers with many different players and with myself sometimes being alien and sometimes being marine. Yes, I won every game I played as a marine yesterday...every, single, game. So that 55/45 is probably full of early concedes and rushes on both sides which represent incorrect filler data into the mix. If it could ONLY track games post 2nd hive, I bet we'd see a massive difference.
Aliens simply suck right now. Skulks are bad, upgrades are bad, competitiveness against 100% upgraded marines is seriously lacking (and considering how easy it is to tech to 100% as marine this is a major one).
Marines have upgrades that straight up boost damage and health. Aliens have 1 health upgrade and 5 other upgrades that are useless at countering the marine upgrades. What does the celerity out of combat get you against W3 exactly? Silence is actually useful, but its not good enough by itself to straight up beat Carapace, combine with how bad camo is now...and you have an entire upgrade tree that almost EVERYONE avoids...or you get the comm who wants to try it...and that teams gets trapped in their 1 hive all game long because they don't have carapace and can't stand up to W1 upgrades.
I'm getting really annoyed with all the defense of this patch. People clearly want to wtfpwnstomp with marines and want aliens to always lose the game. Aliens should be winning on pubs the vast majority of the time. The marines should be required to work as a proper team to achieve victory. Right now, 1 lone marine running harass is more effective than an entire group of skulks attempting to do the same thing.
The devs always go crazy in patches, that's why. The problem: skulks were too strong. UWE's solution: make them weak and slow. Actual solution: make them weaker.
I don't know why we have a designated test team, just have a Natural Selection 2 Beta that's downloadable for NS2 owners so that we can all test the upcoming patches. Clearly a lot of the community dislike what the test team is coming out with, that is, if they have an influence on what's put out there.
Good lawd that's a lot of games in one day! lol. I'm jealous.
lol, it was sunday, I woke at noon and I went to bed at 4 am and I played NS2 pretty much the entire time in between. I even stopped and talked NS1 with another player for 2 hours in the ready room, lol, we talked nostalgia and about all the things we both didn't like much about NS2.
I thought the same thing. I think he is exaggerating some. Just feels like hyperbole.
If we assume an average "good game" goes about 20-30 minutes (25 for math), thats about 10-11 hours of play. I just mentioned I played for basically 14 straight hours.
as it is, you can hear a skulk from 3/4 rooms away, predict its location, and snipe it from a distance.
So yeah, marines are hunting, not aliens.
There's immense drama in every "competitive" game that patches. This really isn't that bad, it's mostly aliens who have become so accustomed to a specific style of gameplay that doesn't work now, so the first instinct is to demand it be returned to the way it was. If the new winners don't learn to be flexible, they'll complain next patch.
Sorry for Off-topic Antikaratekid,
Skulks are only a tiny bit weaker, more like they have a different playstyle from before and people need to adapt... The weaker feel of the Skulk is just because of the sudden slowdown bug, when you even dare to touch the floor. Doesn't change the fact that people are severely overreacting to these so called "brick Skulks".
And trust me, you really don't want UWE releasing the extremely buggy and sometimes downright unplayable incremental internal builds. If they did that, it will kill this community faster than you can jump into Crevice and come to the conclusion that wasn't such a good call
Just an FYI btw... Something you should already know, what with being part of the community for so long now, I mean it has been mentioned many times before... The feedback and stats gathered from the public build is what UWE uses. We as Playtesters do talk with the devs about certain changes and give feedback and suggestions, but the bulk of the feedback comes from the public.
Antikaratekid, watching some of the suggested competitive games on Twitch and the YouTubers will give you a very good idea how to deal with those pesky marines. The alien team is quite a bit different from other games (the marines are quite different as well though) and if this is the first time playing a melee heavy team vs a ranged team, chances are you will get killed a lot during your first few games. After you've learned to adapt and use the potential of the aliens abilities, it will be a lot more fun. It's just one of those games that overwhelms new players and this can be either frustrating or give you that epic feeling of "last stance", it's all about how you approach the game, while still learning things.
The new tipvids (even if they are annoying at times :P) are a good step to aid new players. UWE is definitely working on easing in new players, but it is still a game dependent on player knowledge and using that in combination with skill. If you're facing off against experienced players who have no intention of teaching you, it can be a bit of a downer though...
*glares at the experienced pub stompers, shame on you! Help them, don't destroy them*
A little bit more agility would go a long way to resolving this feeling.
As marines, people seem to feel suddenly MUCH more confident (now that their shots actually register on skulks, which is a GOOD thing!), and it's actually helped marines to play how they always should have been: aggressively. The downside is that they are stronger than skulks in the early game now to the extent that, with approximately evenly skilled teams, the marines really should be dominating the early game.
I didn't agree with the 'skulks are not fun to play' comments - they're different to play, but there is definitely an added fear now as a skulk against even average pub marines whereas before I wouldn't have thought twice before piling into 2 or 3 pub marines confident that I could take most/all of them, even on my own (as sucky as I am). That's not a criticism of the change, it was pretty ridiculous before. I can still go 9-1 as skulk on occasion though muahaha (yeah they were derps).
I will wait for the hotfix to come out for the skulk bug before panicking, though I'm not sure that's going to give a much more agile skulk overall. Walljumping is an absolute requirement now (it was always worthwhile before, too), but in some cases you really can't get the speed up in a combat situation that you used to be able to, and I don't think this will change when the specific floor bug is fixed.
The combination of improved ability of marines to land scoring shots on skulks and the reduction in movement speed/agility for skulks has definitely also swapped the hunted/hunter status for me!
I dislike the brick Skulk because I enjoyed the Zergling-like Skulk that we had before. I always complained in-game that the Skulk was too powerful, but always recommended that it just have lower health to encourage moving in groups and make them fearful of travelling alone. (1 marine > 1 skulk.) I absolutely hate the current Skulk. It ruined the fast-paced behaviour of the aliens.
I know that UWE say they listen to the community, but I haven't experienced it first-hand except for fixing a bug I once posted regarding UI messing up at lower resolutions, although there are still many more bugs related to it. They also only seem to respond to technical and comical comments, rather than ideas and suggestions. And anyway, when did the public ask for the Skulk to become Mr Brick Skulk? It would be just fine for UWE to have a separate release for testing, just like how Counter-Strike: Source has a Counter-Strike: Source Beta that you can play if you want to. More bugs will be detected and feedback will come from a larger share of the community. I've cut down a lot on NS2 since B240 because I just don't find the game enjoyable anymore. (I normally play as marines btw, in case anyone tries to throw the "alien fanboy" card.)
It can be utterly draining, can't it?
Why don't you guys just discuss here on the forums what you're planning for the next realease so that you can get feedback rather than shrouding each one in secrecy? It's not like some competitor is going to steal the ideas for the next patch causing UWE to go bankrupt...
then the whiners voice their concerns before even trying it?
not to mention the fact that many features will be withdrawn after unsuccessful testing phase. so you'd also have new whiners who whine about things being removed which were never actually added.
it's an impossible scenario.
They released the changes before Gorgeous went live. The forum was filled with people complaining about them. Most were positive that it would only make aliens more powerful and hurt balance even more. The railgun was going to be worthless, etc...
The content is released and many start complaining that marines are OP and many love the railgun.
I wouldn't discuss them here either. It only leads to kids making a bunch of assumptions that are completely wrong. They don't do it because your feedback is worthless at that point. That isn't meant to be mean, it's just the truth. You can't know what the changes will do to the game until you have played with them.
Not the double nerf that we got to the skulk.
They should have left the skulk alone until they ironed out the bug rather than releasing a patch that made skulk so bad to play.
This is because there was nothing in the change log that was going to indicate just how much different skulk movement was going to be and how useless babblers would be and etc... etc.....
Not because peoples assumptions were wrong, but because there were changes in the patch not listed or clarified or just turned out to be functionally bad.
+1
It certainly feels like skulks are having to chase marines down to get a few bites in, and after the first bite then the leaping dance of the marine begins (apparently they all learnt from Riverdance). Now because skulk hitbox and movement has been changed, skulks feel a little too easy to target mid-hop.
With a LMG, marines should be good at ranged but be at a distinct disadvantage close range. The counter to this is more marines or shotguns. At this point Aliens get lerks.
What feels missing is that disadvantage a LMG marine has at close range. This could be looked at a few ways, reduce a marines agility/accuracy after a bite from a skulk, or buff skulk movement after a successful full damage bite. Enzyme can help skulks but that's an expensive/complex ability to have available.
With marines on the march towards victory it's a complete stomp-fest with marines progressing to a3/w3 and aliens being stuck as skulks with no hope for reprieve. This isn't fun either so probably contributing to the mass early-concedes.