A suggestion to change the concede function
Stoneburg
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8174Members
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8174Members
I think that trying to limit the ability to concede may be counter productive. If a majority of players on a team wants to give up and start a new round, you need to give them an option to do so, because if people don't want to play you can't force them to. And I don't mean as in you morally can't, I mean as in you can't actually do it. If you remove or limit concede, I will F4 if I don't want to keep playing. If you remove F4, I will disconnect from the server. The most basic understanding everyone needs of how games work is that you can't force someone to play with you (unless you're a movie psychopath). For a non-competetive game to work, both sides must want to play.
In the last patch the time limit for conceding was raised from 5 minutes to 10. I think this was a mistake and that instead UWE should do the opposite, remove the time limit altogether. In fact, you could even incorporate other ways to end the game before one sides last hive/cc has been destroyed, and I think the game would benefit from it.
The problem here is that we have two competing interests. Some players on one team think the game is lost and just want it to end. If they're aliens they don't want to be hiding in their hive, getting picked off by JP/SG marines as soon as they poke their head out. If they're marines, they don't want to desperately defend their base and one other RT while the aliens have the whole map and is waiting for everyone to be able to go Onos. It's simply not fun for them.
But some players on the other team will usually find it satisfying to more or less shoot fish in a barrel. And they don't want someone to take the fun away from them. The problem is that they are having fun at someone elses expense. Basically the other team is paying for the stompers fun with their boring or frustrating experience. And why would they want to do that? Especially when players who like to stomp the opposition very rarely exhibit likeable characteristics. You got a day off from work and you're going to spend some hours playing computer games. How many minutes of your time do you want to spend being target practise for some rude kid?
At the same time it IS frustrating when people concede "too early", if by "too early" we mean while the team still has a realistic chance of winning. And this can not be helped by making it harder to concede. It's really a culture thing arather than a game technical issue. However, there is perhaps something to be done about it by adjusting something in the game: The victory conditions
The problem at the moment is that with few exceptions, the game is effectively over several minutes before it is technically over. Sometimes it will be exciting up until the very end, when both teams are desperately trying to kill eachothers bases at the same time, but most of the games don't end like that. There is a big discrepancy between when the game is decided and when it is over. This could be helped.
The game is "over" for most people when there is no longer a realistic chance of a comeback for the team that is losing. Of course this is somewhat subjective, but there's also a lot of scenarios where most people can probably agree there is no longer a chance for a comeback. The game could simply allow for that and declare victory when those conditions are met. Either side getting a 4:th hive/cc could be such a condition. Or one side losing all their extractors/harvesters. Or you could look at certain ratios related to the economy. There are many measurable parameters that can tell you when one side no longer has a realistic chance of winning.
To appease the players who like to finish their opponents off somewhat, you could simply change the concede effect somewhat. For example so that once a team has conceded, the game doesn't end immediatly but rather gives a small window of time for the winning team to finish the remaining players. But the losing side stops respawning/healing and maybe isn't able to do any damage. That would make winning against a conceding team more fun for the winners, and less boring for the losers. Once again, you can not have a successful game where one sides fun is at the expense of the other side. A real "GG" is when the losing side thinks it was a good game.
In the last patch the time limit for conceding was raised from 5 minutes to 10. I think this was a mistake and that instead UWE should do the opposite, remove the time limit altogether. In fact, you could even incorporate other ways to end the game before one sides last hive/cc has been destroyed, and I think the game would benefit from it.
The problem here is that we have two competing interests. Some players on one team think the game is lost and just want it to end. If they're aliens they don't want to be hiding in their hive, getting picked off by JP/SG marines as soon as they poke their head out. If they're marines, they don't want to desperately defend their base and one other RT while the aliens have the whole map and is waiting for everyone to be able to go Onos. It's simply not fun for them.
But some players on the other team will usually find it satisfying to more or less shoot fish in a barrel. And they don't want someone to take the fun away from them. The problem is that they are having fun at someone elses expense. Basically the other team is paying for the stompers fun with their boring or frustrating experience. And why would they want to do that? Especially when players who like to stomp the opposition very rarely exhibit likeable characteristics. You got a day off from work and you're going to spend some hours playing computer games. How many minutes of your time do you want to spend being target practise for some rude kid?
At the same time it IS frustrating when people concede "too early", if by "too early" we mean while the team still has a realistic chance of winning. And this can not be helped by making it harder to concede. It's really a culture thing arather than a game technical issue. However, there is perhaps something to be done about it by adjusting something in the game: The victory conditions
The problem at the moment is that with few exceptions, the game is effectively over several minutes before it is technically over. Sometimes it will be exciting up until the very end, when both teams are desperately trying to kill eachothers bases at the same time, but most of the games don't end like that. There is a big discrepancy between when the game is decided and when it is over. This could be helped.
The game is "over" for most people when there is no longer a realistic chance of a comeback for the team that is losing. Of course this is somewhat subjective, but there's also a lot of scenarios where most people can probably agree there is no longer a chance for a comeback. The game could simply allow for that and declare victory when those conditions are met. Either side getting a 4:th hive/cc could be such a condition. Or one side losing all their extractors/harvesters. Or you could look at certain ratios related to the economy. There are many measurable parameters that can tell you when one side no longer has a realistic chance of winning.
To appease the players who like to finish their opponents off somewhat, you could simply change the concede effect somewhat. For example so that once a team has conceded, the game doesn't end immediatly but rather gives a small window of time for the winning team to finish the remaining players. But the losing side stops respawning/healing and maybe isn't able to do any damage. That would make winning against a conceding team more fun for the winners, and less boring for the losers. Once again, you can not have a successful game where one sides fun is at the expense of the other side. A real "GG" is when the losing side thinks it was a good game.
Comments
Instead of wasting our time with curing the symptom, we could try to change some fundamentals to cure the cause.
That would be:
- introducing more ways for comebacks
- decreasing the speed in which a winning team gets more and more of an advantage over the losing team.
Don't get me wrong. NS2 is part RTS, so early decisions should somehow affect the mid- and late-game. I only say, that they affect way to strong right now. Those leading to snowballing a winning team into an unstoppable team.
One way to lessen this effect would be some kind of upkeep cost that slows down the resource advantage of a winning team.
The trouble with that is it might end up being one of those hunt-that-one-tiny-little-creature-that-could-be-hidden-anywhere-in-this--huge-map-to-continue scenarios. One skulk hidden in the right place; one lerk perched in the right place could drag that end game out for years.
I think he means that you can go and kill the hive/cc as you can now, but without having to battle against waves of (mainly marine) respawners in a turtle defending their last CC without any hope of winning the game...
Look at the way TF2 ends a round for example.
As for the rest, I like these ideas, I might try to incorporate them into a mod once I am able... hopefully someone beats me to it.
Ah, the days of NS!
"Guys, game over, time to find a vent to hide in!"
As I suggested in another thread of the same flavor:
I like the ideas of showing the voting totals, and prompting the team when a concede vote has started. I also like the ideas of changing the concede into a mini game where one team makes an All or Nothing move that will end the game one way or the other. Such as the marine team prepping to "nuke the site from orbit; its the only way to be sure" or the alien version being some kind of bio-bomb that will infect the nanites and cause them to cannibalize the entire station; if the opposing team does not stop them.
I am also bothered by the 10 minute wait. . . all it's doing is forcing players to go to RR instead
By analogy to chess: the game is effectively over when one side is down several pieces, and in fact top-level players will often resign when they are down a single piece. But that doesn't mean that the game objective should be changed to "checkmate the enemy king or acquire a two-piece advantage". Why not? Because materiel advantage is not the only consideration in evaluating a game. Other factors such as position, influence, time remaining, and the strength of the opponent play a part as well. The only objective determination of a won-or-lost game is checkmate; anything else (even materiel advantage) is a subjective call requiring the player's judgment, and that judgment is in fact what is being tested by playing the game in the first place.
If the objective was altered to "checkmate or two-piece advantage", it would alter the play of the game. Players would actually play differently. We would see strategies arise which would be ineffective in normal chess but which worked in this new version, as players found ways to force a two-piece loss while risking (but still avoiding) their own loss via checkmate. It would be a different game, and not a better one at that. Furthermore, the determination of "two pieces" as the supplemental victory condition would have been completely arbitrary, and yet still influential. It could have just as easily been three pieces, but settling on three pieces rather than two would result in yet a different set of new strategies.
Adding new victory conditions to NS2 such as "get four tech points" or "get all but two resource nozzles" would do exactly the same thing to NS2. I'm against it.
With respawns for the losers disabled, sixty seconds should be more than enough time for an obviously winning team to get to the tech point, kill most of the defenders, and take down the chair or hive. And sixty seconds isn't that long for the losing team to wait for the next game to start.
I've made this point before in one of the many recent threads on concede. See here for a list of such threads. Most of what has been said here has been said before in those threads, although @Stoneburg's suggestion regarding alternate victory conditions is, I think, new.
Bottom line folks: You can't force people to play.
So any changes to concede will just have people doing what they used to do - hitting F4 and sitting in the ready room for a bit, and if enough people haven't quit they disconnect. Meanwhile you have a game that is 8 vs 5, and a few players who may be stuck dead because of autobalance. Lastly you have one team that is essentially rolling the other team because most of their team quit.
This is better? This is fun?
Concede is fine. It's the game putting people in the position where they feel they MUST concede that is the problem.
Agreed. Everyone just F4s anyway
I bugged 3 of my friends for some time until they finally bought NS2. The are all hardcore gamers playing SC2, BF3, WOW, CS:GO and what not. some of them have played WOW for more than a year (as in more than 8760 ingame hours), are >lvl 70 corporal in BF3 and so on. So they basically are THE target audience for NS2.
So we joined a server, went aliens on veil, got outskilled and were farmed inside Sub sector for literally 15 minutes. They built armories and sentries in system and overlook and all these fun things.
Next game we went marines and the same story happend, we waited for like 10 minutes until aliens finally killed us.
When we began to get owned again in the 3rd game my friends left the game and went back to whatever they usually play and never started NS2 again.
So what I'm trying to say here is that IF there had been a concede option at that point and if we just had conceded both games after 5 minutes, maybe we would have played one of these incredibly satifiying NS2 rounds that happen all to seldom and my friends would have learned what is so special about this game.
As it was they got the most frustrating hour of gaming for a long time.
Thats why the concede function is important and thats why it should not be limited to 10 minutes. Also, there SHOULD be winning conditions.
5:1 rt ratio -> win
A3 W3 against only one alien upgrade -> win
6 Alien upgrades against only W1 or A1 -> win
4:1 Tech points -> Win
Nothing against adding a timer to winning conditions like the losing team has 1 min to e.g. build another rt while it cant spawn anymore. The winning team has the same time to finish the losing team which cant spawn anymore.
But there need to be quicker endings to frustrating games.
I'd be happy if concede votes sent the game into a 30-second period where the winning team could run around and take out the losing team. TF2 does this after every game and it's always satisfying. It works out for both sides - the losers don't have to waste any more time fighting for a lost cause, and the winners still get the visceral excitement of finishing off their enemies.
I'm strongly opposed to the idea of winning conditions other than destroying all CCs/Hives, though. Comebacks may be rare but they are possible and they do occasionally happen, and a team should be given a chance even if they have fallen behind.
What's wrong with your friends? Can't handle something they aren't already good at?
And the game-ending "minigame" is an excellent idea. It makes winning by concede more fun, and might make the atmosphere in the ready room more pleasant since people get "closure" at the end of the game.
Especially the first one I think is a great idea and something that could really improve the excitement factor. Everyone knows comeback victories are the most fun.
My experience is not quite the same. I've lost marine games when I have had a big res advantage. Sometimes to a bile bomb rush or other "one shot" tactics, sometimes due to lack of co-ordination among the marine players. They keep wandering off and dying with exos until in the end the aliens manage to get enough for onos and turn the game. I've also lost as alien com once when we at one point had 3 hives up and 6 harvesters. Again due to lack of cordination. Of course comebacks like that are usually dependent on the team in the lead making a mistake.
it has nothing to do with winning or losing - it's just about wasting time
playing a game with no possibility of coming back is a waste of time, so people give up (f4 / concede)
but playing a game with no possibility of losing (eg. aliens vs. marine turtle) is the same thing
I would be careful with the winning conditions. 5:1 rt ratio could be hit if aliens are trying to drop hive fast and marines go for fast res. I think it should be 8:1 to be safe. I agree with your general point that there needs to be a faster end to lost games. I think we should assume that some people enjoy just getting a huge KDR and camping the poor skulks or W1/A1 marines. Definitely the concede option should be allowed way before 10 minutes. Too many games are decided before then and I've seen troll commanders prolong the game (eg, marine comm just drops turret farms everywhere and doesn't research SG or advanced armory/proto).
I really agree with a global vote to end the game. There are countless games where marines are turtling on 1 base while aliens are just waiting for half the team to go onos. I try to convince my alien team to concede so we can move on to the next match, but they're usually having too much fun owning the hapless marines. A global vote to end the game would help immensely. The global vote should definitely be an OR condition with the losing team conceding. We still need to assume that everyone on the winning team wants to prolong the losing team's misery, so the losing team should have sufficient voting power to concede.
I hope UWE do run with the end game idea, as long as you are not winning but "honorably losing" if you succeed in achieving your goal.
Short and quick..say 60-90 Sec with 0 tech tree for the conceding team (no weapons upgrades, SG',s or exo's)...nothing but skulks & gorges for aliens).
Aliens need to keep weakened hive alive and marines a targeting device (similar HP to an obs).
No evac ship for marines...your expendable and cost a lot less than those space craft.
You kill these aliens....but are not really sure you have wiped them out and how they got there to begin with.
Aliens get to send some bio bomb into orbit to be potential future infestations...that develop into the hives.
Think dandelion sending its seeds off on the gust of a wind.
Again you lost this battle but survived long enough to launch future attack sites.
Keeps the whole franchise going rather nicely I think.
Oh and the 10 minutes delay for concede is just broken.
5 Minutes I thought was verging on too long...10 is silly and results in people leaving the servers.