Try playing around with cheats, the hit box isn't so much a box as it is the skulk... Shooting through a skulks legs and missing just makes me sad... Darn having to actually shoot the skulk not just near its center of mass.
Necro is correct, asmodies is wrong - sorry.
Interpolation is universally applied.
There's still the problem of melee for JP and strafejumping and needing to essentially collide with the marine to get a hit to register while they're moving/accelerating that fast, and even if melee is run through interp it's too high for hitscan and starts to get out of control anywhere past 70 or so ping. In a game where the survivability of one entire side is based around dodging with really narrow room for error, something has to be done to assure that the client trying to dodge can do so based only on the visual information the game is giving them.
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
Necro is correct, asmodies is wrong - sorry.
Interpolation is universally applied.
There's still the problem of melee for JP and strafejumping and needing to essentially collide with the marine to get a hit to register while they're moving/accelerating that fast,
You mean just like there's the problem of a rifle marine needing to essentially track and stay on target while the fast moving leaping/blinking/flying/charging alien moves around?
Because the enemy on the screen is delayed by roughly the same amount for both teams..
In a game where the survivability of one entire side is based around dodging with really narrow room for error, something has to be done to assure that the client trying to dodge can do so based only on the visual information the game is giving them.
Something also has to be done to ensure that the client can react in time and shoot the fast moving alien who came around the corner to bite you 400 ms before you had any visual indication of it....
Oh i know the solution! Make both teams have to deal with the same system! oh they do already?... oh good... :-P
Lag compensation favors the aggressor / the one who moves into position to see the enemy first - its a natural byproduct of the implementation used in every online game.
The good news is that its a fair treatment to both sides - but fast melee is actually slightly favored over hitscan in lag compensation environments, if the poor performing NS2 Alpha didn't already highlight this. (this mind fucks for you right now, i'm sure) This is because the fast skulk is coming around the corner to bite you and is generally the aggressor out of the two teams. (How often are aliens immobile on the ground as the marine rounds the corner?) This obviously isn't the case when they flee - so use your encounters wisely and remember that if you plan on fleeing you are at the disadvantage so plan ahead!
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
Vents in no way become irrelevant just because marines get jetpacks. In many cases, entering vents is even more dangerous for the jetpacker himself since it negates or otherwise severely hampers the mobility advantage they initially gained with the jetpack in the first place because they'll not be able to even be able to fire up the jetpack if they stop thrusting (because of the new 'jump first' addition to the JP they made with Reinforced), and if he screws up or gets outplayed, that's a shotgun he's never going to see again.
Besides, if you're a gorge in a vent, you can make your own cover. That's what clogs and hydras are for, and if a marine wastes their ammo clearing out your stuff, you can just spit them to death while they reload since they can't exactly just jet away.
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
How much does that jp+shotgun combo cost? 35 res.
How much does a skulk cost? 0.
It wouldn't make any sense at all if jp+shotguns didn't make Skulks vulnerable.
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
How much does that jp+shotgun combo cost? 35 res.
How much does a skulk cost? 0.
It wouldn't make any sense at all if jp+shotguns didn't make Skulks vulnerable.
Completely agree. JPs aren't early or even MID game marine tech, they're late game tech that gives a significant boost to marines' firepower and survivability. The aliens need to focus on delaying marine tech upgrading. This is in no small part an economics game: win the resource war and you have a good shot at finishing off your enemy provided you don't throw away the game. That works both ways.
Jetpacks already out? Better cripple the marine economy and chip away at pres by killing jp/sg marines. Better still, delay the onslaught by taking down extractors and protecting harvesters in the early and mid games. And with the delay to actually get moving with a jetpack, you're much more vulnerable than before, tbh.
@asmodies go play on an overseas server where your ping is 200-300 higher then everyone in the server. Gameplay won't change (although not being able to understand the language may hurt team work).
The lag compensation may be obnoxious but it is fair...
@asmodies go play on an overseas server where your ping is 200-300 higher then everyone in the server. Gameplay won't change (although not being able to understand the language may hurt team work).
The lag compensation may be obnoxious but it is fair...
Gameplay absolutely changes. There's a reason one of the few cheats for NS2 is a lagswitch for use on the marine side.
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
How much does that jp+shotgun combo cost? 35 res.
How much does a skulk cost? 0.
It wouldn't make any sense at all if jp+shotguns didn't make Skulks vulnerable.
And what helps me a free skulk, if i can't do squat with it against any jetpacked shotty? I'm just wasting time respawning and dying. And we come back to the moronic marine dodge jumping. If this wasn't in the game, i wouldn't even complain at all over jetpacked shotties or anything else in that matter. At early stage, aliens would have advantage which would get bogged down later with jetpacks (which really don't come that later in the game as some say if your build priorities are set right). But now, aliens have NO advantage from the start unless playing against total noob marines at which point it doesn't really matter even if marines get jetpacks and exos later. I'm talking pro vs pro gamers. And there aliens are handicapped badly.
Few minutes ago i was playing on Tram map and something kept on rolling in my mind. Why the fuck am I as a superior agility creature chasing fuckin marines instead the other way around? They were bunny hopping and jumping like crazy and comm was spamming them shitloads of medpacks and it was a real miracle if we managed to kill any even in packs. Completely illogical and idiotic. And in the end you get a whole room of players, everyone jumping like crazy hoping to pretty much randomly score a kill. Do you know how retarded fights look that way?
I don't get it why can't UWE get it in their thick skulls that it's just totally retarded and should be fixed/changed like yesterday. I wouldn't even care about it if it was some random thing, but since it's consistently pissing me off and hundreds of other players as well and seeing this bullcrap every day on every friggin server, well that just does it.
If it's a balance issue, fix it some other damn way, not in such stupid way that makes the whole game feel like they don't even have a clue what they are doing. It's just pathetic. They made a whole new game from scratch and then they fail and making combat system properly, instead they just use some lame shortcuts to make some fake balance. It's equally idiotic as the catch up Ai in racing games. It's so easy to make some artificial boost to the Ai players instead of actually making them a capable driver. It's the same here. Instead of making combat system feel right, they made some stupid shortcuts (crazy ass mega jump dodging for marines) to make some fake balance. C'mon, you can surely do better than this UWE...
I've said many times and a lot of players agreed in the game. Marines can have their crazy dodge jumping until alien can score the actual bite. When that happens, disallow marines to make further crazy jumping for a very short time (talking hundreds of milliseconds most likely). This way nothing really changes until aliens actually manage to bite them. So they can still evade with jumping all they want unless it should already be too late for them. Which now rarely happens with all their crazy jumping all over the place.
Damage in contact should reduce victims mobility (like in l4d2). Reduce acceleration and height of jumps, disable dash, and reduce slighty speed for some small amount of time (maybe 0,5 - 1s). Problem solved, everyone happy.
More isn't possible because of physics no matter how much you argue about it.
You can still optimize on what you send, packet size, number of packets, server calculation vs client calculation...
Heck you could write your own optimized protocol, instead of using UDP.
More isn't possible because of physics no matter how much you argue about it.
You can still optimize on what you send, packet size, number of packets, server calculation vs client calculation...
Heck you could write your own optimized protocol, instead of using UDP.
and still, you will ever have a latency between the clients.
Ya, the game is broken. The piss poor alien experience is responsibly for about 90% of the player bleed, in my experience. All of my friends that I got to play during the last sale/free weekend had the same general storyline when they quit less than a week later:
1. Marine is boring and typical.
2. Alien is interesting so lets play that.
3. Crap we are getting face stomped.
4. Ok 10 games in a row where I went 0-16, time to quit,
Note seldom does the outcome of a given match enter into their feelings about this game. People just don't care if they win or lose; its irrelevant. They care whether or not they are having fun playing the game. Granted, all else equal, you have more fun when you win than when you lose, but all else isn't equal. If one or two decent fades carry your alien team to victory, but you die repeatedly as skulk until you finally get enough res to evolve, only to be 1-shotted by some guy with a shotgun (often as much the fault of terrible network lag as anything else), and basically contribute nothing except a distraction of marine bullets all round, you're not going to care. You will quit.
And they do. But UWE listens only to the complaints of a tiny minority of the player base that are already invested in the game, and tries to balance the game around a 50-50 win rate. This has basically meant hand holding marines such that in any pub, going marine is roughly easy mode (again regardless of match outcome; win or lose I basically never go below 2:1 marine kd on any skill-rating server), due to asymmetric disadvantages marines inherently have against competent alien teams. Congratulations - your competitive matches now have approximately a 50-50 win rate. Of course, there's not enough players to make any competitive teams anymore, but that wasn't the point, right?
I don't see how any new player could get enjoyment out of playing a skulk. In fact I don't even enjoy it most of the time, even though I can usually keep a positive k/d ratio. Just feels like losing even if you're winning, especially in the late game if you're forced to skulking against shotguns.
I'm not sure what can be done about this, other than that reverting the recent alien nerfs/marine buffs (AV, jumping..). This might have negative side effects on the comp balance though, but I agree that the most important thing is to keep the game accessible to new players.
Its not unfair that aliens need to either outnumber or out-'reinforce' marines... the superior mobility (speed, vent/window/shortcut access) means that marines would get absolutely torn apart without phase gate.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
How much does that jp+shotgun combo cost? 35 res.
How much does a skulk cost? 0.
It wouldn't make any sense at all if jp+shotguns didn't make Skulks vulnerable.
And what helps me a free skulk, if i can't do squat with it against any jetpacked shotty? I'm just wasting time respawning and dying. And we come back to the moronic marine dodge jumping. If this wasn't in the game, i wouldn't even complain at all over jetpacked shotties or anything else in that matter. At early stage, aliens would have advantage which would get bogged down later with jetpacks (which really don't come that later in the game as some say if your build priorities are set right). But now, aliens have NO advantage from the start unless playing against total noob marines at which point it doesn't really matter even if marines get jetpacks and exos later. I'm talking pro vs pro gamers. And there aliens are handicapped badly.
Few minutes ago i was playing on Tram map and something kept on rolling in my mind. Why the fuck am I as a superior agility creature chasing fuckin marines instead the other way around? They were bunny hopping and jumping like crazy and comm was spamming them shitloads of medpacks and it was a real miracle if we managed to kill any even in packs. Completely illogical and idiotic. And in the end you get a whole room of players, everyone jumping like crazy hoping to pretty much randomly score a kill. Do you know how retarded fights look that way?
I don't get it why can't UWE get it in their thick skulls that it's just totally retarded and should be fixed/changed like yesterday. I wouldn't even care about it if it was some random thing, but since it's consistently pissing me off and hundreds of other players as well and seeing this bullcrap every day on every friggin server, well that just does it.
If it's a balance issue, fix it some other damn way, not in such stupid way that makes the whole game feel like they don't even have a clue what they are doing. It's just pathetic. They made a whole new game from scratch and then they fail and making combat system properly, instead they just use some lame shortcuts to make some fake balance. It's equally idiotic as the catch up Ai in racing games. It's so easy to make some artificial boost to the Ai players instead of actually making them a capable driver. It's the same here. Instead of making combat system feel right, they made some stupid shortcuts (crazy ass mega jump dodging for marines) to make some fake balance. C'mon, you can surely do better than this UWE...
I've said many times and a lot of players agreed in the game. Marines can have their crazy dodge jumping until alien can score the actual bite. When that happens, disallow marines to make further crazy jumping for a very short time (talking hundreds of milliseconds most likely). This way nothing really changes until aliens actually manage to bite them. So they can still evade with jumping all they want unless it should already be too late for them. Which now rarely happens with all their crazy jumping all over the place.
i only agree about medpacks... and nano shield to a degree. simply because you have to commit to an attack and when they get spam healed/nano you usually can't escape - which basically leads to an i-win button for the marines.
HOWEVER - without medpacks, marines would get obliterated. i don't like it, but it's necessary.
The problem might be that fights are over too fast. The fact that Skulks get one-shotted, bites don't register, jump spam, etc. is aggravated by the fact that one "misstep" means the fight is over.
Just imagine, for example, Marines/Exos/lifeforms had double HP but with current damage values. So basically, you need to land double the shots/bites to kill the enemy. More micromanaging in fights would be possible, and the mediocre state of Marine vs. Skulk would be alleviated a bit. At least it would be less frustrating.
Related, here's a lengthy post which compares Starcraft 1 and 2. In short, SC1 fights last longer so micromanaging and skill matter greatly and can turn a fight around. In SC2, fights are faster and basically run automatically/the outcome is predictable, so pre-fight positioning, map control etc. matter more (but fights can be frustrating).
Seeing that most people agree that SC1 is better than SC2, prolonging fights (e.g. via higher HP to damage ratios) might improve NS2 gameplay as well.
Honestly the best idea I've seen (all credit to the guy for coming up with solutions rather than just complaining) is the new thread suggesting the inversion of shadowstep and leap in the tech tree. Thats genius.
That and a reasonable nerf of the jetpack would probably go a long way to fixing the current problem of skulk v marine.
Its not alien survivability thats the issue; its skulk vs marine. Buffing skulk health by any reasonable amount wont change the dynamic. Buffing it enough to make a difference would be overkill. Mobility is the problem - the marine is basically as mobile as a skulk, but has a huge advantage in firepower and survivability.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
if marines have JP aliens should either have lifeforms or leap.
non lifeform non leap skulk team vs JP tech marines is probably gg as you lost 15mins ago.
I've been very patient with NS2 since 2008, but I've lost hope and patience.
The game has been reduced to poor quality gameplay, they neglected what the community was asking and did things nobody else can agree were in the best interests of the community.
They failed, despite given so many chances. Giving up on further feature development due to not being able to raise a huge amount of money on a patch nobody wanted, is the last straw.
This game is a poor sequel to such a brilliant game, it used to be better.
Comments
Interpolation is universally applied.
Try playing around with cheats, the hit box isn't so much a box as it is the skulk... Shooting through a skulks legs and missing just makes me sad... Darn having to actually shoot the skulk not just near its center of mass.
Solution, bigger bullets! Ahaha!!
There's still the problem of melee for JP and strafejumping and needing to essentially collide with the marine to get a hit to register while they're moving/accelerating that fast, and even if melee is run through interp it's too high for hitscan and starts to get out of control anywhere past 70 or so ping. In a game where the survivability of one entire side is based around dodging with really narrow room for error, something has to be done to assure that the client trying to dodge can do so based only on the visual information the game is giving them.
You hit what you aim at. As alien and as marine. More isn't possible because of physics no matter how much you argue about it.
almost every game comes down to a series of key engagements over a phase gate position - if aliens can commit at the right time; destroying the phase and clearing up the marines, then it's a massive blow for marines etc...
interp doesn't really come into play at all, unless you're standing still as a marine comes into view - which you have no reason to do.
Because the enemy on the screen is delayed by roughly the same amount for both teams.. Something also has to be done to ensure that the client can react in time and shoot the fast moving alien who came around the corner to bite you 400 ms before you had any visual indication of it....
Oh i know the solution! Make both teams have to deal with the same system! oh they do already?... oh good... :-P
Lag compensation favors the aggressor / the one who moves into position to see the enemy first - its a natural byproduct of the implementation used in every online game.
The good news is that its a fair treatment to both sides - but fast melee is actually slightly favored over hitscan in lag compensation environments, if the poor performing NS2 Alpha didn't already highlight this. (this mind fucks for you right now, i'm sure) This is because the fast skulk is coming around the corner to bite you and is generally the aggressor out of the two teams. (How often are aliens immobile on the ground as the marine rounds the corner?) This obviously isn't the case when they flee - so use your encounters wisely and remember that if you plan on fleeing you are at the disadvantage so plan ahead!
All that superior mobility goes out the window when you're facing a jetpacked marine with a shotgun.
At early game stages you have some advantage in vents, especially for a bile bomb bombardment, but as soon as they get jetpacks, vents become pretty much irrelevant since you have no cover in them and with jetpack+shotgun, you are actually even more vulnerable since you can't move anywhere.
Besides, if you're a gorge in a vent, you can make your own cover. That's what clogs and hydras are for, and if a marine wastes their ammo clearing out your stuff, you can just spit them to death while they reload since they can't exactly just jet away.
then you would really hate NS1
How much does that jp+shotgun combo cost? 35 res.
How much does a skulk cost? 0.
It wouldn't make any sense at all if jp+shotguns didn't make Skulks vulnerable.
Completely agree. JPs aren't early or even MID game marine tech, they're late game tech that gives a significant boost to marines' firepower and survivability. The aliens need to focus on delaying marine tech upgrading. This is in no small part an economics game: win the resource war and you have a good shot at finishing off your enemy provided you don't throw away the game. That works both ways.
Jetpacks already out? Better cripple the marine economy and chip away at pres by killing jp/sg marines. Better still, delay the onslaught by taking down extractors and protecting harvesters in the early and mid games. And with the delay to actually get moving with a jetpack, you're much more vulnerable than before, tbh.
The lag compensation may be obnoxious but it is fair...
Gameplay absolutely changes. There's a reason one of the few cheats for NS2 is a lagswitch for use on the marine side.
And what helps me a free skulk, if i can't do squat with it against any jetpacked shotty? I'm just wasting time respawning and dying. And we come back to the moronic marine dodge jumping. If this wasn't in the game, i wouldn't even complain at all over jetpacked shotties or anything else in that matter. At early stage, aliens would have advantage which would get bogged down later with jetpacks (which really don't come that later in the game as some say if your build priorities are set right). But now, aliens have NO advantage from the start unless playing against total noob marines at which point it doesn't really matter even if marines get jetpacks and exos later. I'm talking pro vs pro gamers. And there aliens are handicapped badly.
Few minutes ago i was playing on Tram map and something kept on rolling in my mind. Why the fuck am I as a superior agility creature chasing fuckin marines instead the other way around? They were bunny hopping and jumping like crazy and comm was spamming them shitloads of medpacks and it was a real miracle if we managed to kill any even in packs. Completely illogical and idiotic. And in the end you get a whole room of players, everyone jumping like crazy hoping to pretty much randomly score a kill. Do you know how retarded fights look that way?
I don't get it why can't UWE get it in their thick skulls that it's just totally retarded and should be fixed/changed like yesterday. I wouldn't even care about it if it was some random thing, but since it's consistently pissing me off and hundreds of other players as well and seeing this bullcrap every day on every friggin server, well that just does it.
If it's a balance issue, fix it some other damn way, not in such stupid way that makes the whole game feel like they don't even have a clue what they are doing. It's just pathetic. They made a whole new game from scratch and then they fail and making combat system properly, instead they just use some lame shortcuts to make some fake balance. It's equally idiotic as the catch up Ai in racing games. It's so easy to make some artificial boost to the Ai players instead of actually making them a capable driver. It's the same here. Instead of making combat system feel right, they made some stupid shortcuts (crazy ass mega jump dodging for marines) to make some fake balance. C'mon, you can surely do better than this UWE...
I've said many times and a lot of players agreed in the game. Marines can have their crazy dodge jumping until alien can score the actual bite. When that happens, disallow marines to make further crazy jumping for a very short time (talking hundreds of milliseconds most likely). This way nothing really changes until aliens actually manage to bite them. So they can still evade with jumping all they want unless it should already be too late for them. Which now rarely happens with all their crazy jumping all over the place.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Heck you could write your own optimized protocol, instead of using UDP.
and still, you will ever have a latency between the clients.
1. Marine is boring and typical.
2. Alien is interesting so lets play that.
3. Crap we are getting face stomped.
4. Ok 10 games in a row where I went 0-16, time to quit,
Note seldom does the outcome of a given match enter into their feelings about this game. People just don't care if they win or lose; its irrelevant. They care whether or not they are having fun playing the game. Granted, all else equal, you have more fun when you win than when you lose, but all else isn't equal. If one or two decent fades carry your alien team to victory, but you die repeatedly as skulk until you finally get enough res to evolve, only to be 1-shotted by some guy with a shotgun (often as much the fault of terrible network lag as anything else), and basically contribute nothing except a distraction of marine bullets all round, you're not going to care. You will quit.
And they do. But UWE listens only to the complaints of a tiny minority of the player base that are already invested in the game, and tries to balance the game around a 50-50 win rate. This has basically meant hand holding marines such that in any pub, going marine is roughly easy mode (again regardless of match outcome; win or lose I basically never go below 2:1 marine kd on any skill-rating server), due to asymmetric disadvantages marines inherently have against competent alien teams. Congratulations - your competitive matches now have approximately a 50-50 win rate. Of course, there's not enough players to make any competitive teams anymore, but that wasn't the point, right?
I don't see how any new player could get enjoyment out of playing a skulk. In fact I don't even enjoy it most of the time, even though I can usually keep a positive k/d ratio. Just feels like losing even if you're winning, especially in the late game if you're forced to skulking against shotguns.
I'm not sure what can be done about this, other than that reverting the recent alien nerfs/marine buffs (AV, jumping..). This might have negative side effects on the comp balance though, but I agree that the most important thing is to keep the game accessible to new players.
i only agree about medpacks... and nano shield to a degree. simply because you have to commit to an attack and when they get spam healed/nano you usually can't escape - which basically leads to an i-win button for the marines.
HOWEVER - without medpacks, marines would get obliterated. i don't like it, but it's necessary.
Just imagine, for example, Marines/Exos/lifeforms had double HP but with current damage values. So basically, you need to land double the shots/bites to kill the enemy. More micromanaging in fights would be possible, and the mediocre state of Marine vs. Skulk would be alleviated a bit. At least it would be less frustrating.
Related, here's a lengthy post which compares Starcraft 1 and 2. In short, SC1 fights last longer so micromanaging and skill matter greatly and can turn a fight around. In SC2, fights are faster and basically run automatically/the outcome is predictable, so pre-fight positioning, map control etc. matter more (but fights can be frustrating).
Seeing that most people agree that SC1 is better than SC2, prolonging fights (e.g. via higher HP to damage ratios) might improve NS2 gameplay as well.
Just an idea, what do you think?
Honestly the best idea I've seen (all credit to the guy for coming up with solutions rather than just complaining) is the new thread suggesting the inversion of shadowstep and leap in the tech tree. Thats genius.
That and a reasonable nerf of the jetpack would probably go a long way to fixing the current problem of skulk v marine.
non lifeform non leap skulk team vs JP tech marines is probably gg as you lost 15mins ago.
The game has been reduced to poor quality gameplay, they neglected what the community was asking and did things nobody else can agree were in the best interests of the community.
They failed, despite given so many chances. Giving up on further feature development due to not being able to raise a huge amount of money on a patch nobody wanted, is the last straw.
This game is a poor sequel to such a brilliant game, it used to be better.