I think getting a bunch of glancings and being uncertain of damage dealt or how much more is required is much more frustrating than missing a bite.
To a vet maybe, but newer players don't even register such things.. they just hold down the left mouse button and try to look in the general direction until the marine falls down.
Most new players don't even register that marine armor increases throughout a round.
I think glancing bites are very simple to comprehend, for everyone including veterans: if the marine is alive, you haven't done enough damage!
An analogy would be a marine shooting a shotgun. If the Skulk is alive, it was either too far away, or you missed. Try again.
Glancing bites just need better visual and auditory feedback: different hit markers/blood and and sound effects.
Totally agree on that front, there needs to be more of an indicator (other than turning on damage numbers) but that should not an overly hard thing to implement and would make sure that the skill floor for new players can remain at a level which they can still play and get some enjoyment (and more kills).
I think an different audible sound would be a big help, as often the screens very chaotic (also any visual would need to work with alien vision on as most new/newer players rely on this a lot).
I don't see any reason for crags/shifts/shades to be associated with abilities. The upgrade structures were added specifically to remove that type of association - using both approaches at the same time is very confusing. Would make more sense for a new type of structure to unlock abilities... But not much.
What if you could upgrade a crag/shift/shade into a more advanced form that would act as the tech path unlocker and tier counter (like the hives do now), but specific abilities would still be researched at the hive. This way, the marine team would have more to shoot at and would be able to hurt the tech of the aliens without having to take down a whole hive, but the basic structure of the alien tech tree would still be the same.
Is the 75 bite cone as big as the 25+50+75 bite zones are in vanilla?
This is, from what I understand (and other have indicated) not the case so it is harder to land a hit (all be it a 25 hit).
Therefor its harder for new players to get kills, missing bites all together is far more frustrating than glancing bites doing less damage.
Marginally increasing the 75 bite zone is of no real value if the overall bite zone is smaller.
If you're hitting 25s you're not getting kills in a million years.
Is the 75 bite cone as big as the 25+50+75 bite zones are in vanilla?
This is, from what I understand (and other have indicated) not the case so it is harder to land a hit (all be it a 25 hit).
Therefor its harder for new players to get kills, missing bites all together is far more frustrating than glancing bites doing less damage.
Marginally increasing the 75 bite zone is of no real value if the overall bite zone is smaller.
If you're hitting 25s you're not getting kills in a million years.
Unless other players have already damaged that marine and he is on low health.
But without glancing bites then I will miss entirely and that marine will live and I wont get the kill.
Seriously you dont have to get 75 hits every time to kill marines...but by narrowing the hit zone you will reduce the number of kills new players (and casual players) get...which reduces the area that most of us derive fun from when playing online games (killing other players).
Being challenged is not fun if you dont get some reward (ie kills)...and players wont stick around.
This community will simply stagnate and die a slow death without being able to attract and maintain new and casual players.
Is the 75 bite cone as big as the 25+50+75 bite zones are in vanilla?
This is, from what I understand (and other have indicated) not the case so it is harder to land a hit (all be it a 25 hit).
Therefor its harder for new players to get kills, missing bites all together is far more frustrating than glancing bites doing less damage.
Marginally increasing the 75 bite zone is of no real value if the overall bite zone is smaller.
If you're hitting 25s you're not getting kills in a million years.
Unless other players have already damaged that marine and he is on low health.
But without glancing bites then I will miss entirely and that marine will live and I wont get the kill.
Seriously you dont have to get 75 hits every time to kill marines...but by narrowing the hit zone you will reduce the number of kills new players (and casual players) get...which reduces the area that most of us derive fun from when playing online games (killing other players).
Being challenged is not fun if you dont get some reward (ie kills)...and players wont stick around.
This community will simply stagnate and die a slow death without being able to attract and maintain new and casual players.
You won't get kills... then you'll start to learn to look at the marine to hit them. Then you'll do 75 damage every bite, and you'll kill people!
Honestly, glancing blows probably harm rookies by reinforcing poor aim.
AsranielJoin Date: 2002-06-03Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
Glancing bites where introduced at a time when performance wasn't great, the hitreg was not perfect and animations where strange. At that time glancing bites made skulk play much more enjoyable.
I think with all the improvements now, glancing bites can go away now, they served their purpose.
performance are still bad sorry but it's the truth, so removed completly the glancing bite just give noob aliens kills, ok why not ? because i see most noobs people strungling on marines > aliens.
Just removed this (ridiculous) 25 hits for the skulk and give fade and lerk only the full damage hit. End of story! why unknow worlds always balance this game too radically ? just try to do things gradually and see what happen..
If glancing blows go I dont see that ns2 will have much left in it for a player like myself...who does not have massive amount of time to dedicate to playing games and refining my ability to track, predict and time bites.
I am hardly a rookie...but I am far from the worlds best player...and have no intention of trying to be.
I liked the fun and different game play that NS brought to the table...and was happy to put my money into the beta many years ago now.
Just a shame that the skill floor is being raised beyond point where most casual players can have fun.
I guess there is a minimum level of skill that this game requires before you can enjoy playing it and I am seemingly slipping below that level....even after around 800 hours of gameplay.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
edited June 2013
I landed 6 bites and the marine didn't fall over. How many bites does it take? Frustrating.
I landed 3 good bites in a row and the marine died, I think I'm getting better at the skulk. How rewarding! Let's keep playing!
Now that I'm landing higher damage bites more often, these lower damage things are really annoying. I can't tell how much damage I am doing reliably during a fight and I have to choose my fights around it.
That has been my experience with the glancing bites. I won't pretend that I play multiplayer games for casual fun every now and then, but I do think that glancing bites are annoying to the experienced player and new one alike.
performance are still bad sorry but it's the truth, so removed completly the glancing bite just give noob aliens kills, ok why not ? because i see most noobs people strungling on marines > aliens.
Just removed this (ridiculous) 25 hits for the skulk and give fade and lerk only the full damage hit. End of story! why unknow worlds always balance this game too radically ? just try to do things gradually and see what happen..
I was talking about the 249 beta, where performance greatly improved and should be good enough for most people (not saying it can't and wont be improved, but its in a different cathegory now)
Rookie players probably don't even realise there are diminishing returns on the bite cone.
1) No bite cones make it easier for rookies/new players to understand the game. It reinforces basic gameplay such as landing 3 bites on A0/A1 or para-2bite on A0. Once someone has that explained to them they GET IT. It's better then trying to explain to a new player that there are three different levels of damage they can do, based off of a hidden bite-cone, especially when you consider player lag/interp. I know I regularly bite people 3 times and keep moving, only to realise they are still alive when I swear I should have landed 75's.
2) It doesn't take a massive amount of time to learn to time your bite, or delay your bite until you feel confident it's going to hit. With your 800 hours of NS2, I'm sure you don't immediately hold LMB as soon as you see a skulk, let alone aim at one. I'm confident you don't spam LMB when you have a SG and a skulk is running at you from 50 meters away.
3) Rookie players who have been given tips/advice by more regular players will now beable to communicate effectively what they have done to help the team. Now when they have a simple system explained to them they know they can confidently say "I bit the marine in C12 twice he is low" and feel like they are contributing accurate information to the team. Instead of relaying misinformation or, worse: not relaying information because they think they might be wrong. It actually has the potential to bring a bigger team aspect to new players.
Talking about numbers, I don't know the bite cone radius on the current build, I don't know it on the BT mod and I don't know what UWE plan for the future.
Just like I don't know how many 50dmg bites it takes to kill an A3 marine, or if I land 2x25dmg bites on an A2 marine how many 50 or 75's I need to land on him to finish him off. I don't know if parasite helps on reducing bites of any type past A0 either. I've got 1000hrs in this game and that kinda stuff I just don't even care about. It would be MUCH better for me personally if I could know exactly what I am doing when I do it, rather than having to google some maths on ns2 skulk bitecones in my spare time.
New players already have to deal with parasite mechanics, wall-jump, shift walking, ctrl to drop from a height, evading marines, baiting marines, etc etc. Surely you would agree that removing bite cones for one single damage bite that is larger in area of effect than the current version only aids beginners?
@Hakenspit
Removing glancing bites in the current bt implementation does not exactly raise or lower the skill floor at all with all things considered. The 75 bite cone is now much larger, but the overall cone is only slightly smaller. There is no reliable way to say whether or not bite spamming is significantly harder or easier as we cannot accurately compare the tradeoff here.
If you either don't want to, or don't have the time to refine tracking/timing bite and just spam mouse 1, your combat result is still going to be the same whether or not glancing bite is implemented. Dead.
@Ironhorse
The idea of glancing bite is fundamentally flawed, and any implementation has to deal with trying to cover those same flaws. Its entirely obvious when you look at the difficulty ns2 vanilla has had in implementing it in a way that provides clear and intuitive feedback. For those arguing only that glancing bite implementation is flawed, i challenge you to come up with a viable implementation solution that is superior to a clear cut 75 bite cone.
---
*edit*
To preclude any 'viable implementation post', that challenge i mentioned was actually to get people to actually think about glancing bite and realize that it is a problem with no viable solution.
Because hit registration is confirmed server side, any feedback is always going to be too late to do any good (as we see with damage numbers, which btw is pretty much the optimal feedback solution to glancing bites). Different hit sounds is stupid with how saturated the incombat soundscape already is, and doing stuff like colour coding instant feedbacks is so silly and 'unimmersive' that you know something with your underlying mechanic needs to change instead.
---
Because i am almost sure it is impossible to get glancing bite advocates to see the flaw in their reasoning, let's argue this from another standpoint. UWE's design mantra is to 'connect the world through play', so quite clearly any mechanic should be acid tested by seeing how the associated gameplay experience changes with latency.
Glancing bite fails this test abysmally since it is both impossible to bite count (as skulk), and to avoid a 25hp bite killing you from 10 meters away. The issue was compounded by fall acceleration and drop bear skulking which has also thankfully been removed. Glancing bite scales incredibly badly with higher ping relative to a proper cone that has been balanced for 75 damage only.
TL;DR
Contrary to popular belief, glancing bite adds nothing of benefit for low skill level (it actually hinders people who actively want to improve out of beginner), and adds a whole lot of annoyance for any skill level but beginner.
The gameplay cannibalism (more than zero) from intermediate/vet levels is not worth the 'benefit' (Less than or equal to zero) added for beginner experience. I know this is not the opinion of many, but i trust that given enough time and game experience you will eventually see the light of day.
@elodea
Disagree, have said it enough that I shall not bother repeating myself.
Ironhorse is able to see the point I am making..shame others are unwilling to look at a game from a casual players perspective and with retaining casual players in mind think about the impact these changes will have.
I read your post, it just didn't strike me as a very good alternative.
Imagine having this system in pub play. What do you think will happen when people reach 50 res and realize they still can't go fade? What when the first capacity for a fade is ready, who will take it? What if you got half the team sitting on +50 res but stuck on playing skulk because you're waiting for the capacity to increase? I can see this causing a lot more frustration and problems than the current fade explosion does. I also don't see how this lifeform delayment mechanic would make the game any more dynamic. There's already the need to save up pres, having an additional delaying factor would only make gameplay more limiting than vanilla.
Imo, one of the big issues regarding the vanilla fade explosion are the tres egg drops, as it simply circumvents the pres system. As marines, once you passed the 10 min mark, and you were not able to deny the second hive or leave the early game with a massive advantage already, you're gonna have to kill multiple fades in a short time span to make a real difference. Killing just one fade every few minutes doesn't really impact the game all that much, as they can be easily replaced with tres eggs. The ability as alien commander to start mass expanding everywhere while the marines are busy dealing with the fades only adds to the snowball effect.
Also, the ability to drop tres eggs means that people who are, for example, saving up for onos don't actually have to stay skulk until they get 75 res. They can just save their pres and get a tres fade egg in the mean time.
So I think adding a timer is a really poor way of trying to solve the problem. Increasing tres egg costs (maybe even getting rid of it altogether) and limiting the easy mass expand potential for alien comm (by having to need gorges to build for example) would be a better choice imo.
I always had the impression removing the glancing bites was an alien buff. I'm still unceirtan if it's better with or without it, but like mentioned above, glancing bites were always missing distinguishable hit sounds. With clear audio feedback every new player would understand that he didn't hit good enough.
Imo, one of the big issues regarding the vanilla fade explosion are the tres egg drops, as it simply circumvents the pres system.
People always talk about pres sinks to break up x explosion, but tres sinks are just as important. The alien commander has very few of these compared to the marine comm. Once one upgrade path is finished and blink researched, there's very little incentive to do much more than drop fade eggs, as that's usually a better use of res than building crags and such. Some way to encourage more use of forward structures and drifter abilities would be good here.
i think the whole 'glancing bites dont allow me to calculate how many hits i need' argument is contrived - in any decent game, marines will receive meds in an engagement, rendering that calculation impractical anyway.
i agree with the general consensus that the feedback mechanisms werent fully developped though and could do with some work if glancing bites are to come back.
i feel that alot of the opposition to glancing bites is that its wrong to reward misses or otherwise less than skillful play. which of course it is to a way, but ns2 is meant to be a game, not a job...
i personally hope they come back, because to lower skilled players, doing 25 damage is better than none at all. raising the skill ceiling is acceptable, but not so much the curve or the floor imo, as these already pose problems when it comes to player retention.
I'm sad, that noone gives my post (page 71) the slightest attention.
Even if you don't like it, tell me atleast why.
i thought the idea was worthwhile, but represented such a completely different approach to tres/pres system, that at this point in the games life and particularly this mods development, its simply wasnt productive to discuss because it would never happen. to have had a chance to see it tested, it would have been best to suggest at the earliest possible time, rather than this very late stage in the mods development.
Comments
Most new players don't even register that marine armor increases throughout a round.
An analogy would be a marine shooting a shotgun. If the Skulk is alive, it was either too far away, or you missed. Try again.
Glancing bites just need better visual and auditory feedback: different hit markers/blood and and sound effects.
Totally agree on that front, there needs to be more of an indicator (other than turning on damage numbers) but that should not an overly hard thing to implement and would make sure that the skill floor for new players can remain at a level which they can still play and get some enjoyment (and more kills).
I think an different audible sound would be a big help, as often the screens very chaotic (also any visual would need to work with alien vision on as most new/newer players rely on this a lot).
What if you could upgrade a crag/shift/shade into a more advanced form that would act as the tech path unlocker and tier counter (like the hives do now), but specific abilities would still be researched at the hive. This way, the marine team would have more to shoot at and would be able to hurt the tech of the aliens without having to take down a whole hive, but the basic structure of the alien tech tree would still be the same.
So I guess we should just go ahead and remove them until a better implementation can be thought of
Unless other players have already damaged that marine and he is on low health.
But without glancing bites then I will miss entirely and that marine will live and I wont get the kill.
Seriously you dont have to get 75 hits every time to kill marines...but by narrowing the hit zone you will reduce the number of kills new players (and casual players) get...which reduces the area that most of us derive fun from when playing online games (killing other players).
Being challenged is not fun if you dont get some reward (ie kills)...and players wont stick around.
This community will simply stagnate and die a slow death without being able to attract and maintain new and casual players.
You won't get kills... then you'll start to learn to look at the marine to hit them. Then you'll do 75 damage every bite, and you'll kill people!
Honestly, glancing blows probably harm rookies by reinforcing poor aim.
I think with all the improvements now, glancing bites can go away now, they served their purpose.
Just removed this (ridiculous) 25 hits for the skulk and give fade and lerk only the full damage hit. End of story! why unknow worlds always balance this game too radically ? just try to do things gradually and see what happen..
I am hardly a rookie...but I am far from the worlds best player...and have no intention of trying to be.
I liked the fun and different game play that NS brought to the table...and was happy to put my money into the beta many years ago now.
Just a shame that the skill floor is being raised beyond point where most casual players can have fun.
I guess there is a minimum level of skill that this game requires before you can enjoy playing it and I am seemingly slipping below that level....even after around 800 hours of gameplay.
I landed 3 good bites in a row and the marine died, I think I'm getting better at the skulk. How rewarding! Let's keep playing!
Now that I'm landing higher damage bites more often, these lower damage things are really annoying. I can't tell how much damage I am doing reliably during a fight and I have to choose my fights around it.
That has been my experience with the glancing bites. I won't pretend that I play multiplayer games for casual fun every now and then, but I do think that glancing bites are annoying to the experienced player and new one alike.
I was talking about the 249 beta, where performance greatly improved and should be good enough for most people (not saying it can't and wont be improved, but its in a different cathegory now)
Rookie players probably don't even realise there are diminishing returns on the bite cone.
1) No bite cones make it easier for rookies/new players to understand the game. It reinforces basic gameplay such as landing 3 bites on A0/A1 or para-2bite on A0. Once someone has that explained to them they GET IT. It's better then trying to explain to a new player that there are three different levels of damage they can do, based off of a hidden bite-cone, especially when you consider player lag/interp. I know I regularly bite people 3 times and keep moving, only to realise they are still alive when I swear I should have landed 75's.
2) It doesn't take a massive amount of time to learn to time your bite, or delay your bite until you feel confident it's going to hit. With your 800 hours of NS2, I'm sure you don't immediately hold LMB as soon as you see a skulk, let alone aim at one. I'm confident you don't spam LMB when you have a SG and a skulk is running at you from 50 meters away.
3) Rookie players who have been given tips/advice by more regular players will now beable to communicate effectively what they have done to help the team. Now when they have a simple system explained to them they know they can confidently say "I bit the marine in C12 twice he is low" and feel like they are contributing accurate information to the team. Instead of relaying misinformation or, worse: not relaying information because they think they might be wrong. It actually has the potential to bring a bigger team aspect to new players.
Talking about numbers, I don't know the bite cone radius on the current build, I don't know it on the BT mod and I don't know what UWE plan for the future.
Just like I don't know how many 50dmg bites it takes to kill an A3 marine, or if I land 2x25dmg bites on an A2 marine how many 50 or 75's I need to land on him to finish him off. I don't know if parasite helps on reducing bites of any type past A0 either. I've got 1000hrs in this game and that kinda stuff I just don't even care about. It would be MUCH better for me personally if I could know exactly what I am doing when I do it, rather than having to google some maths on ns2 skulk bitecones in my spare time.
New players already have to deal with parasite mechanics, wall-jump, shift walking, ctrl to drop from a height, evading marines, baiting marines, etc etc. Surely you would agree that removing bite cones for one single damage bite that is larger in area of effect than the current version only aids beginners?
Removing glancing bites in the current bt implementation does not exactly raise or lower the skill floor at all with all things considered. The 75 bite cone is now much larger, but the overall cone is only slightly smaller. There is no reliable way to say whether or not bite spamming is significantly harder or easier as we cannot accurately compare the tradeoff here.
If you either don't want to, or don't have the time to refine tracking/timing bite and just spam mouse 1, your combat result is still going to be the same whether or not glancing bite is implemented. Dead.
@Ironhorse
The idea of glancing bite is fundamentally flawed, and any implementation has to deal with trying to cover those same flaws. Its entirely obvious when you look at the difficulty ns2 vanilla has had in implementing it in a way that provides clear and intuitive feedback. For those arguing only that glancing bite implementation is flawed, i challenge you to come up with a viable implementation solution that is superior to a clear cut 75 bite cone.
---
*edit*
To preclude any 'viable implementation post', that challenge i mentioned was actually to get people to actually think about glancing bite and realize that it is a problem with no viable solution.
Because hit registration is confirmed server side, any feedback is always going to be too late to do any good (as we see with damage numbers, which btw is pretty much the optimal feedback solution to glancing bites). Different hit sounds is stupid with how saturated the incombat soundscape already is, and doing stuff like colour coding instant feedbacks is so silly and 'unimmersive' that you know something with your underlying mechanic needs to change instead.
---
Because i am almost sure it is impossible to get glancing bite advocates to see the flaw in their reasoning, let's argue this from another standpoint. UWE's design mantra is to 'connect the world through play', so quite clearly any mechanic should be acid tested by seeing how the associated gameplay experience changes with latency.
Glancing bite fails this test abysmally since it is both impossible to bite count (as skulk), and to avoid a 25hp bite killing you from 10 meters away. The issue was compounded by fall acceleration and drop bear skulking which has also thankfully been removed. Glancing bite scales incredibly badly with higher ping relative to a proper cone that has been balanced for 75 damage only.
TL;DR
Contrary to popular belief, glancing bite adds nothing of benefit for low skill level (it actually hinders people who actively want to improve out of beginner), and adds a whole lot of annoyance for any skill level but beginner.
The gameplay cannibalism (more than zero) from intermediate/vet levels is not worth the 'benefit' (Less than or equal to zero) added for beginner experience. I know this is not the opinion of many, but i trust that given enough time and game experience you will eventually see the light of day.
Disagree, have said it enough that I shall not bother repeating myself.
Ironhorse is able to see the point I am making..shame others are unwilling to look at a game from a casual players perspective and with retaining casual players in mind think about the impact these changes will have.
that is all for todays post, folks
Even if you don't like it, tell me atleast why.
I read your post, it just didn't strike me as a very good alternative.
Imagine having this system in pub play. What do you think will happen when people reach 50 res and realize they still can't go fade? What when the first capacity for a fade is ready, who will take it? What if you got half the team sitting on +50 res but stuck on playing skulk because you're waiting for the capacity to increase? I can see this causing a lot more frustration and problems than the current fade explosion does. I also don't see how this lifeform delayment mechanic would make the game any more dynamic. There's already the need to save up pres, having an additional delaying factor would only make gameplay more limiting than vanilla.
Imo, one of the big issues regarding the vanilla fade explosion are the tres egg drops, as it simply circumvents the pres system. As marines, once you passed the 10 min mark, and you were not able to deny the second hive or leave the early game with a massive advantage already, you're gonna have to kill multiple fades in a short time span to make a real difference. Killing just one fade every few minutes doesn't really impact the game all that much, as they can be easily replaced with tres eggs. The ability as alien commander to start mass expanding everywhere while the marines are busy dealing with the fades only adds to the snowball effect.
Also, the ability to drop tres eggs means that people who are, for example, saving up for onos don't actually have to stay skulk until they get 75 res. They can just save their pres and get a tres fade egg in the mean time.
So I think adding a timer is a really poor way of trying to solve the problem. Increasing tres egg costs (maybe even getting rid of it altogether) and limiting the easy mass expand potential for alien comm (by having to need gorges to build for example) would be a better choice imo.
People always talk about pres sinks to break up x explosion, but tres sinks are just as important. The alien commander has very few of these compared to the marine comm. Once one upgrade path is finished and blink researched, there's very little incentive to do much more than drop fade eggs, as that's usually a better use of res than building crags and such. Some way to encourage more use of forward structures and drifter abilities would be good here.
i agree with the general consensus that the feedback mechanisms werent fully developped though and could do with some work if glancing bites are to come back.
i feel that alot of the opposition to glancing bites is that its wrong to reward misses or otherwise less than skillful play. which of course it is to a way, but ns2 is meant to be a game, not a job...
i personally hope they come back, because to lower skilled players, doing 25 damage is better than none at all. raising the skill ceiling is acceptable, but not so much the curve or the floor imo, as these already pose problems when it comes to player retention.
i thought the idea was worthwhile, but represented such a completely different approach to tres/pres system, that at this point in the games life and particularly this mods development, its simply wasnt productive to discuss because it would never happen. to have had a chance to see it tested, it would have been best to suggest at the earliest possible time, rather than this very late stage in the mods development.