Indicate experienced players to end ridiculous comm blaming
null_pointer_exception
Join Date: 2012-03-29 Member: 149634Members
Join Date: 2012-03-29 Member: 149634Members
I love NS2. I have been playing since beta, close to 600 hours, but there's one infuriating thing that I can't stand. I can win 5 tough games in a row as comm, and then all of a sudden there's a bad player shuffle, my team gets crushed in the first 2 minutes, and i find myself on the receiving end of a "tutorial" briefly before there's a vote to eject me. This happens even if I'm playing with the same people, since people often don't pay attention to who is in the chair/hive (on many servers, you can't even see who the enemy comm is). If a person wants to comm, "tutorials" are effective -if manipulative- strategy to get rid of the current one in a bad game. We have no way to indicate experienced players, and our culture pretty much just blames the comm for everything, so people who join are going to assume that if someone is telling the comm how to build spurs, (s)he must be bad, so they join in on the tutorializing and ultimately vote to eject. Trying to defend yourself just leads to getting kicked since there's no way to prove your experience. One solution is to just play with a group of people that you know, but it's a small community, and I don't want to join the insular, "decision tree," pro community that resembles SC2 or counterstrike. The unpredictable, creative pub matches are where NS2 shines.
Color names:
Green players indicate fresh ones, so there should be a way to indicate experienced ones. If not through the game, through a mod that checks anything possible, like steam API etc. Maybe tiers of like 10 hours, 50 hours, 100 hours, 500 hours.....or to keep it simple, just one for 100 hours. Even if this can only work through steam, I think it's a just reward for buying the game early (I preorded).
Maybe like this?
green: whatever the intro hours are. I can't remember.
yellow: 100 hours
red: 500 hours
End Game:
At the end of every game, there could be a thing that shows the commander of the winning team and the top X (5?) players. This would help reinforce in everyone's minds who is not being new or a troll.
Color names:
Green players indicate fresh ones, so there should be a way to indicate experienced ones. If not through the game, through a mod that checks anything possible, like steam API etc. Maybe tiers of like 10 hours, 50 hours, 100 hours, 500 hours.....or to keep it simple, just one for 100 hours. Even if this can only work through steam, I think it's a just reward for buying the game early (I preorded).
Maybe like this?
green: whatever the intro hours are. I can't remember.
yellow: 100 hours
red: 500 hours
End Game:
At the end of every game, there could be a thing that shows the commander of the winning team and the top X (5?) players. This would help reinforce in everyone's minds who is not being new or a troll.
Comments
win = awesome field player
lose = bad comm
Get over it. reg player will quickly know if you know how to comm or not.
If someone could take that and still blame me for loss I think we would all be surprised. Try being more communicative?
Perhaps, more than anything, this attitude demonstrates why this common-sense feature has not been implemented.
"Tutorial trolling" mostly occurs at the beginning of morbidly one-sided and often short games. All the time invested, all the interaction from previous games is lost, partly due to a shuffle of new players and the fact that not everyone knows who commanded the previous games. What's unfortunate is that you might be on a really good server when this happens. All it takes is a tutorial troll, someone to join in, and you have a scarlet letter starting with the next round. At this point it's probably best to just try to find another server or else face further harassment. The real problem is a social one, but NS2 modders can't do anything about the maturity levels and personalities of NS2 players.
As reflected by the first reply, this issue is recognized as a "just so" thing in pub games, but it shouldn't be necessary to abandon every time this kind of behavior reveals itself.
A solution could be as simple as:
Green = inexperienced
white = normal
Red (edit: blue? black?) = experienced
Surely someone else agrees with this.
Alright. Fair enough.
I guess what bothers me is that all it takes is one or two people to control the game in this way, which I have had happen twice this week. My theory is that xp color would deter this kind of behavior since it would risk the blamer looking like a troll/whiner, especially if they are hudreds of hours under the comm / other player. How we act around people has a lot to do with their perceived status. In a ultra-competitive environment, people will quickly kick an unknown player who gets killed a few times in a row, but they won't if it's someone that they know is good. With everyone white, this element of social interaction is largely removed (edit: this phrasing is poor, but you know what I mean), and everyone becomes "probably a few hours out of green."
Whenever someone jumps in the chair, there's an element of uncertainty. I had one guy give me a detailed, 40 minute tutorial on tram just because I didn't have my mic plugged in. He was cool, though, so I just played along, and in the end he realized and even apologized, but it was obvious that people can't know and don't always give the benefit of the doubt.
Looking at the code, GUIPlayerNames.lua is probably the target. If I have some time, I might try to get something accepted into shine or otherwise appropriate mod. The Steam API seems to provide a "hours played" feature, at least judging from the existence of wastedonsteam.com. I haven't found the parameter in the API yet.
edit: shine, not shrine
@ OP: I disagree with the suggestion since it will just make stacking worse than badges and skill-badges mods (if that is even possible).
1. Praise the commander for his glorious insight.
2. Remind the commander that now would be a good time to research the "mech".
3. Question the commanders skill, eject if needed.
What is a khammender?
1. A pokemon.
2. King Halitosis as Manifested Magotty Ecofreak, Elected Naturally for the sole purpose of Dandling Egoistic Rats.
3. The alien commander.
It's nice sometimes. I mostly like the intel updates like "we're down a spur", "recyst c12 harvester", or "my gorge is on fire!" Sometimes small things can escape your notice when you're busy with a dozen other things going on during a hectic game.