If you had two competent teams, chances are Marines would be able to overpower the Aliens. Due to the excessive buffs from reinforced and the alien nerfs.
You are aware that NS2 has been on sale like non-stop for the past few weeks now. If you find yourself losing over and over again as marines, look at what you and your team is doing wrong instead of taking the easy route and blaming the game. Defensive play favors the alien team greatly, which is why on low skill pubs, aliens tend to have the edge.
aeroripperJoin Date: 2005-02-25Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
Of course team play is everything in this game, that is a great plus for the game IMO. But the question remains. Why is the "marine team" getting rocked so much now? And what can be done about it?
There has to be just as many alien noobs. All the time I see new players walk on the ground as a skulk straight at the marine. It doesn't take a lot of skills to kill him. Look at Fades. That class is very hard to play. You overcommit you are done and you lose all that res. The examples of how hard aliens are as a new player can go on and on. Yet, aliens are winning, noobs or not. Marines basically need to point and shoot. As a team, yes, but still point and shoot.
Most of the marine games I see lost are because the commander isn't a prominent actor on their team. Having a good hands-on comm who is comfortable in the chair is the single biggest variable in team success. Same goes for aliens, but not as pronounced as marines. You can even get rookies and lower skilled players to be successful by individually directing them and issuing waypoints consistently.
This is odd, because looking at either or both of builds 261 and 262, NS2stats shows aliens winning the majority of short games (for obvious reasons), but once the game gets over 10 minutes, marines are winning 60% of the time. And this ties in with my own experience in game.
So while I can't offer advice or explanation for your more limited dataset, I can dispute your assertion that marines are losing non stop. Because they just aren't.
I can dispute your assertion that marines are losing non stop. Because they just aren't.
NS2stats actually shows a 39.43% winrate...
Also something weird is going on with ns2stats or maybe i'm not reading it correctly but it shows that by a large margin the most frequent round length is 10-15 minutes.. yet that exact time frame is when marines have a 60% win rate.. so you'd think that would greatly impact the overall poor marine winrate occurring?
Aren't marines still the dominant competitive side atm?
NS2stats or any stats recording for that matter in pub games are not accurate representations without detailed critical analysis.
Here is my hypothesis. Aliens appear to win more games at the public level than marines due to aliens being more capable of executing all-in or rush strats.
Evidence to suggest this hypothesis is indicated by the length of time of a typical match and the winner of the match. We can see on ns2stats that aliens win more than 80% of games under the 5:00 mark and win more than 60% below the 10:00 mark. At the 10:00+ mark at almost every timeframe, marines win approximately 60% of their games. We can also see that ns2stats also has timeframes that seem to be have 0 marine wins but thousands of alien wins, this is also inflating the win rate.
My conclusion is that at the level where the game is taken seriously and becomes more equal (> 10:00) marines have a significantly higher win rate even taking into account the frequency of alien all-in rushes but the < 10:00 games are inflating the win % inappropriately due to marines being incapable of achieving a rush as easily and with as much success on a frequent basis.
Terran, Zerg and Protoss in Starcraft all have a variety of powerful early game all-in or rush tactics designed to outright kill the opponent and some rushes that are less economically viable than a expansion opening but allow pressure to be applied early and also have the capability of ending the game quickly vs a greedy opponent. This is not the case in NS2, aliens are more likely to achieve a successful early game rush than marines are by a huge margin thus inflating the w/l ratio.
Wait you mean the colossal shitshow of servers allowing 20+ players (also affectionately known as "trying to play in a populated pub") leads to imbalanced games? Surely you jest.
Sound:
Aliens are incredibly loud.
With a decent headset you hear them from 2 or more rooms away.
However, many people fail to play with sound - or simply like to listen to music while playing.
Not using sound takes away one of the biggest advantages marines habe.
This seems to be the case for many people.
Grenade Launchers are super effective for their price, however many players fail to use them correctly.
Being -I don't wanna say "too bad"- , but inexperienced to use those hinders a lot of players to fullfill their role.
Jetpacks:
Jetpacks crush 4/5 alien enemies when used correctly.
Once your enemy has jetpacks the game becomes hell, however many commanders get those much too late.
I think those deserve top priority.
I think marines are easier to start with - for the first few games - however, then there's a big leap in difficulty.
Aliens become easier to use after a few hours of play and therefor casual players usually perform better with them.
Taking those things into account one can say that the main problems marines have are based on a huge part of the community not being able to improve their play a little bit further.
i'm also guessing there is something with wrong NS2stats currently, it shows rounds with negative length on the front page (lol), which I'm told is an display bug only, but I've also selected some servers +b262 to check on the winrates, and they are closer to 40-60 on the endgame on the ones I've selected (Kingkahuna & german slaughterhouse & survival of fattest) which make up like ~45% of the rounds played on ns2stats; must be servers which are feeding marine wins like crazy (modded possibly?) if that is really 60-40 on avarage for all servers in lategame.
So perhaps this is an issue with ns2stats ? @GhoulofGSG9
AiorosJoin Date: 2003-03-24Member: 14850Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
in starcraft 2 more "casual" players win with Terra and Toss.
Zerg for example needs more makro to stay on equal terms.
Still no one is crying to change the balance just because "new" players cant handle zerg.
1. On a rookie server, its possible for the alien commander to win the game solo. Just drop crags, whips use drifter abilitys and slowly take the entire map.
As a marine commander you need your marins to build stuff and defend rts, while the alien commander can defend it with moving structres arround the map.
2. On your 30 games .. let me guess you had alien players with at least 30-3 stats or even better?
When the Server is full of new players, its much easier to win aliens as a solo good alien. You do not need the commander to drop meds/ammo to win the game solo. Still that doesnt mean you need need to change the game balance because of that.
You can't balance any game arround casual / new players, because even they become good over time playing the game. Which results in flamethreads about unbalanced games for "good" players. You can copy that example with starcraft 2 into any other game.
But there are always the "casual" players who will instantly flame any kind of balance when they think its unfair, without looking at the overall numbers and reasons why the games had this kind of results.
There may actually be an imbalance where Alien commander can't so readily waste team resources, whereas a Marine commander can.
How many pub games will you play where marine comm buys observatory first building, robo factory wihtin 3 mins, upgrades phase gates but buys none, shotguns before any a1/w1, no medpacks/ ammo dropped.
Alien commander cant so easily sink his resources into uselessness.
No game balance can stop commanders from wanting to buy useless stuff and wasting their money.
i'm also guessing there is something with wrong NS2stats currently, it shows rounds with negative length on the front page (lol), which I'm told is an display bug only, but I've also selected some servers +b262 to check on the winrates, and they are closer to 40-60 on the endgame on the ones I've selected (Kingkahuna & german slaughterhouse & survival of fattest) which make up like ~45% of the rounds played on ns2stats; must be servers which are feeding marine wins like crazy (modded possibly?) if that is really 60-40 on avarage for all servers in lategame.
So perhaps this is an issue with ns2stats ? @GhoulofGSG9
Odd post to see after all the games I've been playing for the past week.
I've been playing on Hyperion Servers (NA West) for the past week and have been experiencing a pretty even winrate for both races, at all points in the game. (for the non-teamstacked games). All sorts of strategies being done on both sides.
It's also been mentioned that there was the Humble Bundle and Steam sale which brings in a lot of fresh blood. We know how high the learning curve is for this game, so don't get your panties in a bunch that your supposedly seeing Marines "never win games..."
Do your best to support the Greens and point them to Youtube for helpful videos and such.
Ok. YES, I agree there are a ton of new players right now and that is much more of a factor in the current trend than any recent patch. The last patches have had little balance changes done.
The conclusion I read is this:
Even though aliens are harder to learn for a new player, it is not the primary cause of the trend. A new marine team cannot compete with a new alien team. This implies a better, smarter marine team effort is required, commander included in order to win when most are rookies. On the surface you'd think aliens should be getting owned because they are far different than the FPS-based marine. But the imbalance in required good team work is the cause of this problem.
I can buy this conclusion for now. And I would never want to change NS2 to make it less of a teamwork game. I think that is a cornerstone to why its a great game. OK, I'll shut up for a few more weeks.
Honestly guys, I don't see a problem. This game is so difficult for new players and even experienced pub players like myself that you shouldn't be looking at the next potential imbalance to blame on that might not even be relevant. Look at yourself and your team and see how you can improve. Most people don't like looking at themselves and admitting they suck but the majority of the time, it is down to you rather than some superficial imbalance that you conjured up.
The game isn't 100% balanced, no asynchronous game truly is but those aspects that you believe are problems are likely out of your expertise and out of your experience to debate on.
When playing Alien I think, Marines are OP (JP, Arcs, OneShot-Gun, GL spam,...). When playing Marines I think Aliens are OP (Fades, Lerk, Whips, Drifter Abilities,...). => It should be more or less balanced
There may actually be an imbalance where Alien commander can't so readily waste team resources, whereas a Marine commander can.
How many pub games will you play where marine comm buys observatory first building, robo factory wihtin 3 mins, upgrades phase gates but buys none, shotguns before any a1/w1, no medpacks/ ammo dropped.
Alien commander cant so easily sink his resources into uselessness.
No game balance can stop commanders from wanting to buy useless stuff and wasting their money.
Do you mean shift or crags in locations that are no use to the alien's push? Also, the Alien comm doesn't sink his res into "useless" structures because everything cost so much. You want an upgrade structure that's 20 res thanks, you want bile that will be 50+30 (2 biomass + gorge upgrade) or 60 + 30 (hive + biomass + gorge upgrade).
Any game that isn't asynchronous will be 100% balanced between teams. There are probably more FPS games that are 100% balanced (identical teams and weapons on mirror image maps) than not.
This is my experience in pretty much every pub game (unless it's a huge marine stack):
As a alien, your commander cysts and drops harvesters at your natural and starts upgrades. At least one or two go gorge and get tunnels up at surrounding tech points so further expansion is easy. The rest of the braindead alien team thinks aliens are doing well, and they are... So far minimal skill is required.
As a marine, your commander drop extractors at your natural and you build them but nobody can push up any farther without meds, ammo, or decent aim. Maybe one or two good shooters know what's up and try to bypass and harass the alien's natural harvesters but without backup from teammates/comm, it could take a couple spawn attempts to get it down. Meanwhile, aliens continue to expand and are up to 5 harvesters now (4 if you did manage to kill a natural which didn't really matter tbh). At this point, a lerk or 2 is up and unless they are completely green, you will need meds/ammo to fight them. It's much tougher to harass harvesters now. Meanwhile, you comm has dropped an obs and is researching phase gates so they can get what they believe is a "crucial PG to the closest tech point". At this point, most of your braindead team has overloaded one side of the map to get that tech point (I cringe everytime I see 7 marines grouped together on the minimap). They might even kill some hydras and a gorge on the way! Meanwhile, you have probably lost your other natural extractor by now, but your team is like "Hey we got 3 extractors and 2 tech points with a PG at each. That's good, right?". If you try to eject the comm, they will defend him and say he's doing fine.
Aliens will shoot up to 5-6 havesters and a second hive easily at this point. If the marine comm didn't go robo and turrets at this point, you might get an arms lab (yay!). It's not uncommon to get w1 or a1 at the 10-12 minute mark, which against an alien team with that much economy is a joke. The game is already over but we are forced to play it out as defensive marines with no chance to win. You will probably frag some shitty fades/lerks once you get some upgrades but it doesn't really matter at this stage. If you can convince your team to find the concede button, consider that a victory.
Then it's back to the ready room and do it all over again. Now who wants to go pub?
Cannon_FodderAUSBrisbane, AUJoin Date: 2013-06-23Member: 185664Members, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
@PaLaGi
Mostly true, but I have seen also really good come backs from either team, when the opposing team doesn't coordinate to finish the other team off. Though I think it might be the best player on the opposing team left. But they still feel epic. With so many newer players playing, sometimes they don't realize when a game is lost. I generally try not to concede too early as it does rob the other team of the satisfaction of a game well played (stacked teams aside - ie. when the top player on the opposing team has more kills than the entire opposing team put together, you kind of know where you lost).
Any game that isn't asynchronous will be 100% balanced between teams. There are probably more FPS games that are 100% balanced (identical teams and weapons on mirror image maps) than not.
Well that's a given, my error for not limiting it to asymmetry. My point still remains though, even Starcraft: Brood War (known for it's exceptional balance) despite being almost perfect was still relying on maps being balanced appropriately for each race.
not true, a handful of builds back I jumped into a game where supposedly it had been going on for 2 hours. memory leaks or whatnot had increased the latency to something like a full half second to phase through a gate. im convinced that the only thing that could kill anything reliably was turrets. I can also imagine that an eight hour game might just end in a server crash and nobody wins.
@PaLaGi
Mostly true, but I have seen also really good come backs from either team, when the opposing team doesn't coordinate to finish the other team off. Though I think it might be the best player on the opposing team left. But they still feel epic. With so many newer players playing, sometimes they don't realize when a game is lost. I generally try not to concede too early as it does rob the other team of the satisfaction of a game well played (stacked teams aside - ie. when the top player on the opposing team has more kills than the entire opposing team put together, you kind of know where you lost).
Oh it's very rare yes but you are right. If you want to talk about the 5% of games like this, they are interesting I guess. I played one on biodome a couple days ago where our commander fell into the noob trap like I described and we were very far behind so he left the game. A guy that said it was his second time commanding ever jumped in (he also had a mic and told me right away he didn't know what to do; this is so important). It was cross spawns and I immediately taught him how to respond to med and ammo requests by pressing spacebar/clicking on the text. He had no ill-conceived notions on what to do and I was able to clear out the gorge tunnel and platform harvester (purely due to his med/ammo drops) and get him a lucky PG up in filtration. From there, I almost berated our team to take back Falls and get a PG in center of the map. I fragged some lifeforms due to our newly acquired AL upgrades as we were eventually able to push back the 2-hive aliens and pin them to just their hive harvesters.
It still took an extremely long time to win since every time I left a PG to attack a harvester, one skulk would miraculously kill 4 marines and almost take down a PG. But once anyone decent gets 3/3 sg/jp, there's pretty much no way you should die to anything on a pub. So we won. Our new comm had alot of fun and I wish more people like him played this game. It was refreshing. Granted I ended up with almost 100 kills that game and noobs got mad, but what else is new....
Whats funny is someone with absolutely no comm experience but listens can be so much better than the majority of these shitty pub comms who think they know what they are doing. For me, if you have a mic and tell me you are new, I will be nothing but helpful to you. If you don't communicate and just start dropping bad structures, I will shit on you to no end.
There may actually be an imbalance where Alien commander can't so readily waste team resources, whereas a Marine commander can.
How many pub games will you play where marine comm buys observatory first building, robo factory wihtin 3 mins, upgrades phase gates but buys none, shotguns before any a1/w1, no medpacks/ ammo dropped.
Alien commander cant so easily sink his resources into uselessness.
No game balance can stop commanders from wanting to buy useless stuff and wasting their money.
Do you mean shift or crags in locations that are no use to the alien's push? Also, the Alien comm doesn't sink his res into "useless" structures because everything cost so much. You want an upgrade structure that's 20 res thanks, you want bile that will be 50+30 (2 biomass + gorge upgrade) or 60 + 30 (hive + biomass + gorge upgrade).
So you have two points:
1. Alien comm can waste resources.
2. Upgrades for aliens are expensive.
To the first point, I will agree that early game shades and shifts can be somewhat lackluster, but a crag certainly is not. Additionally these things have some potential value at least, whereas an obs/phase tech combo at 2 min mark is not valuable if the marines never manage to set up a pair of gates (due to lack of money or lack of skill). Same with robo labs and sentries in base. These arent valuable when you compare to other options at equal cost.
Random crags and shades are far more useful than random robo factories.
To the second point, thats how the game is balanced. For gorge upgrade you get 3 new spells, babbler, bile and webs. You can argue the merits of each of these, but thats a lot of upgrades in 1 package. It costs a lot of money, but thats what resources are for.
@PaLaGi
Mostly true, but I have seen also really good come backs from either team, when the opposing team doesn't coordinate to finish the other team off. Though I think it might be the best player on the opposing team left. But they still feel epic. With so many newer players playing, sometimes they don't realize when a game is lost. I generally try not to concede too early as it does rob the other team of the satisfaction of a game well played (stacked teams aside - ie. when the top player on the opposing team has more kills than the entire opposing team put together, you kind of know where you lost).
Oh it's very rare yes but you are right. If you want to talk about the 5% of games like this, they are interesting I guess. I played one on biodome a couple days ago where our commander fell into the noob trap like I described and we were very far behind so he left the game. A guy that said it was his second time commanding ever jumped in (he also had a mic and told me right away he didn't know what to do; this is so important). It was cross spawns and I immediately taught him how to respond to med and ammo requests by pressing spacebar/clicking on the text. He had no ill-conceived notions on what to do and I was able to clear out the gorge tunnel and platform harvester (purely due to his med/ammo drops) and get him a lucky PG up in filtration. From there, I almost berated our team to take back Falls and get a PG in center of the map. I fragged some lifeforms due to our newly acquired AL upgrades as we were eventually able to push back the 2-hive aliens and pin them to just their hive harvesters.
It still took an extremely long time to win since every time I left a PG to attack a harvester, one skulk would miraculously kill 4 marines and almost take down a PG. But once anyone decent gets 3/3 sg/jp, there's pretty much no way you should die to anything on a pub. So we won. Our new comm had alot of fun and I wish more people like him played this game. It was refreshing. Granted I ended up with almost 100 kills that game and noobs got mad, but what else is new....
Whats funny is someone with absolutely no comm experience but listens can be so much better than the majority of these shitty pub comms who think they know what they are doing. For me, if you have a mic and tell me you are new, I will be nothing but helpful to you. If you don't communicate and just start dropping bad structures, I will shit on you to no end.
I feel really sorry for you, that you can't have fun on pubs (beside stomps). I know I can.
Whats funny is someone with absolutely no comm experience but listens can be so much better than the majority of these shitty pub comms who think they know what they are doing. For me, if you have a mic and tell me you are new, I will be nothing but helpful to you. If you don't communicate and just start dropping bad structures, I will shit on you to no end.
^ This a thousand times over. The commander is obviously a crucial role but I still think this applies to any player.
In my pub experience on games where im stuck with a rookie heavy team, the games that go well are the ones where people communicate and rookies listen. If I have a new player just at least talking to me I wont be mad if he cant do something if its clear hes trying. Too often I find myself in pub games with marines who have no plans on employing any form of teamwork, and blatantly ignore calls for teamwork e.g "Weld me *RandomPlayerName*", "*RandomPlayerName* stick with me we will push to *RoomName* and take it". To then have them at the end of the game being all "COMMANDER WHERE ARE EXOS?" when we are sitting on a single RT because they were useless for the entire game.
Even if I lose the game if the team was at least listening and communicating 9 times out of 10 both me and the majority of my team seem to have a great time playing.
So yeah as @PaLaGi has said, anyone willing to make the basic effort of just communicating that they are new and want help will receive exactly that. People who are rude enough to ignore everything the people they are playing the game with say I am far less tolerant of. Sadly its rather difficult to find the former in my experience.
First off all im one of the rookies (9.7h). For me the marines looks like a little op but who cares . I played atleast 7-8 rounds or more with the aliens and i won only twice while with the marines i played only three times and i won twice. Oh and without a good commander both faction is a piece of ... for example i joined the game and what i see?? we don't have any upgrades or anything else only 1 base while the marines gave me a full face shoot with exos and lvl 3 shotguns . And the best commander so far: who know what is he/she doing and try to teach the rookies(if he/she is a vet ).But this is only a rookie opinion.By the way I think that's will be off but i have a question why almost the whole community(not everyone) thinks the rookies are some kind of infestation in this game ?
PS:.sorry for my terrible english.
Comments
If you had two competent teams, chances are Marines would be able to overpower the Aliens. Due to the excessive buffs from reinforced and the alien nerfs.
You are aware that NS2 has been on sale like non-stop for the past few weeks now. If you find yourself losing over and over again as marines, look at what you and your team is doing wrong instead of taking the easy route and blaming the game. Defensive play favors the alien team greatly, which is why on low skill pubs, aliens tend to have the edge.
Also, happy new year!
Most of the marine games I see lost are because the commander isn't a prominent actor on their team. Having a good hands-on comm who is comfortable in the chair is the single biggest variable in team success. Same goes for aliens, but not as pronounced as marines. You can even get rookies and lower skilled players to be successful by individually directing them and issuing waypoints consistently.
So while I can't offer advice or explanation for your more limited dataset, I can dispute your assertion that marines are losing non stop. Because they just aren't.
Also something weird is going on with ns2stats or maybe i'm not reading it correctly but it shows that by a large margin the most frequent round length is 10-15 minutes.. yet that exact time frame is when marines have a 60% win rate.. so you'd think that would greatly impact the overall poor marine winrate occurring?
NS2stats or any stats recording for that matter in pub games are not accurate representations without detailed critical analysis.
Here is my hypothesis. Aliens appear to win more games at the public level than marines due to aliens being more capable of executing all-in or rush strats.
Evidence to suggest this hypothesis is indicated by the length of time of a typical match and the winner of the match. We can see on ns2stats that aliens win more than 80% of games under the 5:00 mark and win more than 60% below the 10:00 mark. At the 10:00+ mark at almost every timeframe, marines win approximately 60% of their games. We can also see that ns2stats also has timeframes that seem to be have 0 marine wins but thousands of alien wins, this is also inflating the win rate.
My conclusion is that at the level where the game is taken seriously and becomes more equal (> 10:00) marines have a significantly higher win rate even taking into account the frequency of alien all-in rushes but the < 10:00 games are inflating the win % inappropriately due to marines being incapable of achieving a rush as easily and with as much success on a frequent basis.
Terran, Zerg and Protoss in Starcraft all have a variety of powerful early game all-in or rush tactics designed to outright kill the opponent and some rushes that are less economically viable than a expansion opening but allow pressure to be applied early and also have the capability of ending the game quickly vs a greedy opponent. This is not the case in NS2, aliens are more likely to achieve a successful early game rush than marines are by a huge margin thus inflating the w/l ratio.
So no OP, you're wrong.
Sound:
Aliens are incredibly loud.
With a decent headset you hear them from 2 or more rooms away.
However, many people fail to play with sound - or simply like to listen to music while playing.
Not using sound takes away one of the biggest advantages marines habe.
This seems to be the case for many people.
Grenade Launchers are super effective for their price, however many players fail to use them correctly.
Being -I don't wanna say "too bad"- , but inexperienced to use those hinders a lot of players to fullfill their role.
Jetpacks:
Jetpacks crush 4/5 alien enemies when used correctly.
Once your enemy has jetpacks the game becomes hell, however many commanders get those much too late.
I think those deserve top priority.
I think marines are easier to start with - for the first few games - however, then there's a big leap in difficulty.
Aliens become easier to use after a few hours of play and therefor casual players usually perform better with them.
Taking those things into account one can say that the main problems marines have are based on a huge part of the community not being able to improve their play a little bit further.
@IronHorse
i'm also guessing there is something with wrong NS2stats currently, it shows rounds with negative length on the front page (lol), which I'm told is an display bug only, but I've also selected some servers +b262 to check on the winrates, and they are closer to 40-60 on the endgame on the ones I've selected (Kingkahuna & german slaughterhouse & survival of fattest) which make up like ~45% of the rounds played on ns2stats; must be servers which are feeding marine wins like crazy (modded possibly?) if that is really 60-40 on avarage for all servers in lategame.
So perhaps this is an issue with ns2stats ? @GhoulofGSG9
Zerg for example needs more makro to stay on equal terms.
Still no one is crying to change the balance just because "new" players cant handle zerg.
1. On a rookie server, its possible for the alien commander to win the game solo. Just drop crags, whips use drifter abilitys and slowly take the entire map.
As a marine commander you need your marins to build stuff and defend rts, while the alien commander can defend it with moving structres arround the map.
2. On your 30 games .. let me guess you had alien players with at least 30-3 stats or even better?
When the Server is full of new players, its much easier to win aliens as a solo good alien. You do not need the commander to drop meds/ammo to win the game solo. Still that doesnt mean you need need to change the game balance because of that.
You can't balance any game arround casual / new players, because even they become good over time playing the game. Which results in flamethreads about unbalanced games for "good" players. You can copy that example with starcraft 2 into any other game.
But there are always the "casual" players who will instantly flame any kind of balance when they think its unfair, without looking at the overall numbers and reasons why the games had this kind of results.
How many pub games will you play where marine comm buys observatory first building, robo factory wihtin 3 mins, upgrades phase gates but buys none, shotguns before any a1/w1, no medpacks/ ammo dropped.
Alien commander cant so easily sink his resources into uselessness.
No game balance can stop commanders from wanting to buy useless stuff and wasting their money.
And fixed.
I've been playing on Hyperion Servers (NA West) for the past week and have been experiencing a pretty even winrate for both races, at all points in the game. (for the non-teamstacked games). All sorts of strategies being done on both sides.
It's also been mentioned that there was the Humble Bundle and Steam sale which brings in a lot of fresh blood. We know how high the learning curve is for this game, so don't get your panties in a bunch that your supposedly seeing Marines "never win games..."
Do your best to support the Greens and point them to Youtube for helpful videos and such.
The conclusion I read is this:
Even though aliens are harder to learn for a new player, it is not the primary cause of the trend. A new marine team cannot compete with a new alien team. This implies a better, smarter marine team effort is required, commander included in order to win when most are rookies. On the surface you'd think aliens should be getting owned because they are far different than the FPS-based marine. But the imbalance in required good team work is the cause of this problem.
I can buy this conclusion for now. And I would never want to change NS2 to make it less of a teamwork game. I think that is a cornerstone to why its a great game. OK, I'll shut up for a few more weeks.
The game isn't 100% balanced, no asynchronous game truly is but those aspects that you believe are problems are likely out of your expertise and out of your experience to debate on.
100% of the time, every time.
Do you mean shift or crags in locations that are no use to the alien's push? Also, the Alien comm doesn't sink his res into "useless" structures because everything cost so much. You want an upgrade structure that's 20 res thanks, you want bile that will be 50+30 (2 biomass + gorge upgrade) or 60 + 30 (hive + biomass + gorge upgrade).
Any game that isn't asynchronous will be 100% balanced between teams. There are probably more FPS games that are 100% balanced (identical teams and weapons on mirror image maps) than not.
As a alien, your commander cysts and drops harvesters at your natural and starts upgrades. At least one or two go gorge and get tunnels up at surrounding tech points so further expansion is easy. The rest of the braindead alien team thinks aliens are doing well, and they are... So far minimal skill is required.
As a marine, your commander drop extractors at your natural and you build them but nobody can push up any farther without meds, ammo, or decent aim. Maybe one or two good shooters know what's up and try to bypass and harass the alien's natural harvesters but without backup from teammates/comm, it could take a couple spawn attempts to get it down. Meanwhile, aliens continue to expand and are up to 5 harvesters now (4 if you did manage to kill a natural which didn't really matter tbh). At this point, a lerk or 2 is up and unless they are completely green, you will need meds/ammo to fight them. It's much tougher to harass harvesters now. Meanwhile, you comm has dropped an obs and is researching phase gates so they can get what they believe is a "crucial PG to the closest tech point". At this point, most of your braindead team has overloaded one side of the map to get that tech point (I cringe everytime I see 7 marines grouped together on the minimap). They might even kill some hydras and a gorge on the way! Meanwhile, you have probably lost your other natural extractor by now, but your team is like "Hey we got 3 extractors and 2 tech points with a PG at each. That's good, right?". If you try to eject the comm, they will defend him and say he's doing fine.
Aliens will shoot up to 5-6 havesters and a second hive easily at this point. If the marine comm didn't go robo and turrets at this point, you might get an arms lab (yay!). It's not uncommon to get w1 or a1 at the 10-12 minute mark, which against an alien team with that much economy is a joke. The game is already over but we are forced to play it out as defensive marines with no chance to win. You will probably frag some shitty fades/lerks once you get some upgrades but it doesn't really matter at this stage. If you can convince your team to find the concede button, consider that a victory.
Then it's back to the ready room and do it all over again. Now who wants to go pub?
Mostly true, but I have seen also really good come backs from either team, when the opposing team doesn't coordinate to finish the other team off. Though I think it might be the best player on the opposing team left. But they still feel epic. With so many newer players playing, sometimes they don't realize when a game is lost. I generally try not to concede too early as it does rob the other team of the satisfaction of a game well played (stacked teams aside - ie. when the top player on the opposing team has more kills than the entire opposing team put together, you kind of know where you lost).
Well that's a given, my error for not limiting it to asymmetry. My point still remains though, even Starcraft: Brood War (known for it's exceptional balance) despite being almost perfect was still relying on maps being balanced appropriately for each race.
not true, a handful of builds back I jumped into a game where supposedly it had been going on for 2 hours. memory leaks or whatnot had increased the latency to something like a full half second to phase through a gate. im convinced that the only thing that could kill anything reliably was turrets. I can also imagine that an eight hour game might just end in a server crash and nobody wins.
Oh it's very rare yes but you are right. If you want to talk about the 5% of games like this, they are interesting I guess. I played one on biodome a couple days ago where our commander fell into the noob trap like I described and we were very far behind so he left the game. A guy that said it was his second time commanding ever jumped in (he also had a mic and told me right away he didn't know what to do; this is so important). It was cross spawns and I immediately taught him how to respond to med and ammo requests by pressing spacebar/clicking on the text. He had no ill-conceived notions on what to do and I was able to clear out the gorge tunnel and platform harvester (purely due to his med/ammo drops) and get him a lucky PG up in filtration. From there, I almost berated our team to take back Falls and get a PG in center of the map. I fragged some lifeforms due to our newly acquired AL upgrades as we were eventually able to push back the 2-hive aliens and pin them to just their hive harvesters.
It still took an extremely long time to win since every time I left a PG to attack a harvester, one skulk would miraculously kill 4 marines and almost take down a PG. But once anyone decent gets 3/3 sg/jp, there's pretty much no way you should die to anything on a pub. So we won. Our new comm had alot of fun and I wish more people like him played this game. It was refreshing. Granted I ended up with almost 100 kills that game and noobs got mad, but what else is new....
Whats funny is someone with absolutely no comm experience but listens can be so much better than the majority of these shitty pub comms who think they know what they are doing. For me, if you have a mic and tell me you are new, I will be nothing but helpful to you. If you don't communicate and just start dropping bad structures, I will shit on you to no end.
So you have two points:
1. Alien comm can waste resources.
2. Upgrades for aliens are expensive.
To the first point, I will agree that early game shades and shifts can be somewhat lackluster, but a crag certainly is not. Additionally these things have some potential value at least, whereas an obs/phase tech combo at 2 min mark is not valuable if the marines never manage to set up a pair of gates (due to lack of money or lack of skill). Same with robo labs and sentries in base. These arent valuable when you compare to other options at equal cost.
Random crags and shades are far more useful than random robo factories.
To the second point, thats how the game is balanced. For gorge upgrade you get 3 new spells, babbler, bile and webs. You can argue the merits of each of these, but thats a lot of upgrades in 1 package. It costs a lot of money, but thats what resources are for.
I feel really sorry for you, that you can't have fun on pubs (beside stomps). I know I can.
^ This a thousand times over. The commander is obviously a crucial role but I still think this applies to any player.
In my pub experience on games where im stuck with a rookie heavy team, the games that go well are the ones where people communicate and rookies listen. If I have a new player just at least talking to me I wont be mad if he cant do something if its clear hes trying. Too often I find myself in pub games with marines who have no plans on employing any form of teamwork, and blatantly ignore calls for teamwork e.g "Weld me *RandomPlayerName*", "*RandomPlayerName* stick with me we will push to *RoomName* and take it". To then have them at the end of the game being all "COMMANDER WHERE ARE EXOS?" when we are sitting on a single RT because they were useless for the entire game.
Even if I lose the game if the team was at least listening and communicating 9 times out of 10 both me and the majority of my team seem to have a great time playing.
So yeah as @PaLaGi has said, anyone willing to make the basic effort of just communicating that they are new and want help will receive exactly that. People who are rude enough to ignore everything the people they are playing the game with say I am far less tolerant of. Sadly its rather difficult to find the former in my experience.
PS:.sorry for my terrible english.