competitive vs public balance
clankill3r
Join Date: 2007-09-03 Member: 62145Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2007-09-03 Member: 62145Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
NS2 is a really hard game to balance.
Aliens win around 54% of the games atm which seems quite balanced.
However in the world championship the game seems quite off balance when it comes to pro players.
Marines seem to win about almost everything.
I really hope that in WC2015 ns2 is more balanced for competitive play without hurting public play to much (having 2 versions seems like a bad idea).
Does anyone know the current changelog of the balancemod? I'm quite interested in it.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130391092
Anyway, i wondered if people here had ideas of how to make aliens stronger / marines weaker without affecting it public play to much?
And do people think servers are to big in public play? I know 6 vs 6 is not good in public play since people are coming / leaving all the time. But there are a lot of big servers. The good thing is it averages good players out so they don't have to much impact. But it also makes gorge rushes extremely deadfull.
Aliens win around 54% of the games atm which seems quite balanced.
However in the world championship the game seems quite off balance when it comes to pro players.
Marines seem to win about almost everything.
I really hope that in WC2015 ns2 is more balanced for competitive play without hurting public play to much (having 2 versions seems like a bad idea).
Does anyone know the current changelog of the balancemod? I'm quite interested in it.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130391092
Anyway, i wondered if people here had ideas of how to make aliens stronger / marines weaker without affecting it public play to much?
And do people think servers are to big in public play? I know 6 vs 6 is not good in public play since people are coming / leaving all the time. But there are a lot of big servers. The good thing is it averages good players out so they don't have to much impact. But it also makes gorge rushes extremely deadfull.
Comments
I am curious if we will ever see netcode variables like tick rate exposed so that server owners can modify them themselves. And if that will actually make a difference.
NS2WC:
Snails alien rounds were probably the closest thing to how alien games are played off-lan even though I felt their play was different as well. I do know that we (Titus) played our alien rounds like shit for whatever reason.
*shrug*
As for gamebalance... there are some changes coming in the near future. Go find the other thread that was hinting at it.
As for changes, that's really a mixed bag IMO.. While numerical 'balance' may not seem that far off, many parts of the game are still quite imbalanced... The problem with those imbalances is that they are consequences of lower level issues, and as such are probably beyond the realm of changes at this point. There are changes that can be made within the current game structure however which could resolve some of the ping/skill discrepancies.
The game is really quite balanced, The ping is a huge factor. Titus, who are great shots became a lot better & snails were regularly winning 1 v 3, 2 v 4. Which probably doesn't happen that much online with the ping variation, server performance.
Given the 4 teams a week to play on lan, I think the win rate of aliens & marines would seriously balance out. It's to hard to judge from 1 event.
I kept insisting aliens be nerfed by buffing marine economy or nerfing alien economy, not fucking up the combat dynamic we had. It was a bit more fun, aliens had a higher skill ceiling and so did marines due to more tracking difficulty.
Suggestion already made but idea already excluded from UWE.
Since the balance will never be effective on both sides, i don't really understand this.
- 3x veils, shells, spurs => 9x Evolution chamber
- 3x veils, shells, spurs => 3x Evolution chamber
- 3x veils, shells, spurs => 1x Evolution chamber
- Something else
What is it?
As far as I know it's just moved the gorge/skulk/fade/onos/lerk upgrade onto one structure instead of having it on the whip crag etc
Of course, I liked the idea of Biomass unlocking things automatically, but I guess there was cost issues (too cheap?) It just felt much more organic than clicking on an unrelated support structure to upgrade your units.
Here's what it looks like (I assume it's a temporary look until they get something new made)
And the "mutator" is just a drifter that is killed as soon as it is born, giving each player 1 pres.
Pls no. I do not like seeing 4 min fades.
@CCTEE Ugh that living turd thingy cries to be killed. I guess its some llama type sitting around?
Maybe the cost of Tres eggs should come down, and the biomass levels adjusted to only have lifeform eggs available AFTER they would naturally be available under average conditions (3-4 harvesters).
In order to make this work, perhaps the effectiveness of support structures and cost of upgrades should be adjsuted to make it impossible to just spam lifeforms (killing a fade should still feel like a big win)
Things like bone wall and cyst explosions feel like they add so much to a battle in a meaningful, enjoyable, sometimes just the right amount of annoying way to a marine.
But whips are just plain boring, as are turrets. Very unnecessary parts of this game that I think should be remedied by empowering player and commander active abilities and power instead. I also think that this would bring a closer balance between public and competitive balance.
I mean, why do we need a whip defending an rt if our regen upgrade wasn't so shitty. It's why fades aren't as effective early game as they should be versus decent marines, because the marines aren't as forced to burst down lifeforms like they could be.
Turrets do way too much damage versus lifeforms whose health has been downgraded to compensate for pvp concerns.
What if a commander could just spawn a whip temporarily instead of keeping them. Why is everything so reliant on infestation, why isn't it more of a choice?
Such a boring game this can be
Each one costs 15 tres. If you can afford to do a lot of these, the other team won't have much hope anyways.
I would assume this is mainly to help aliens in the very late game stages, where marines have all their upgrades and start that slow-but-sure grind to victory.
Idk... historically speaking nothing has justified or been as strong as life form timings..
Remember the initial impact of lower cost lifeforms? The assumption was that you wouldn't go X lifeform without Y upgrade... that turned out to be incorrect because of what X lifeform could still accomplish. (not really surprising, given that the lifeforms were designed to be viable without upgrades from the beginning..)
Lifeform timings now are really not all that much different from pre B250 (at similar RT counts).
Comp vs pub balance is actually a relatively easy problem to fix, in a general sense. The more complicated issue is the varying playercount, and the impacts that has on every single facet of the game.
Oh, I wasn't saying that was the intention of that..(iirc it was for consideration of "fun" gameplay by playing more higher lifeforms in a round.) But the cost of the lifeforms were also justified and balanced at one point - in part - by the costs of the upgrades. Which were definitely intended for disrupting tech explosions.
I was just expressing concern over any justification for earlier lifeform timings.. historically speaking its seemed that no matter what, its always been worth whatever downside. (4 min onos comes to mind as just one example of this)
I am thinking from pub experience where there always seems to be that one guy with 100 res.
That thing was around a few months ago already in the old Balance mod.
I assume that making new assets is anything but trivial, so a completely new structure needs to prove its necessity first in plenty of playtesting before you would even consider to assign an artist to that job.
And I think the cost reduction for upgrade chambers from 20 to 15 would be offset by a slight health reduction, to make them easier to snipe. That would give lone marines actually a little more reason to venture into an alien base in order to do some economic damage, similar to how lone aliens can pretty successfully cause disturbance in marine bases in just a few seconds if left unchecked.
Overall the trend seems to be that aliens require less tRes (which makes sense, since they were always intended to be more reliant on pRes).
Though it raises the question what aliens are going to do with that additional tRes. Nowadays I often find myself with plenty of spare res as comm (unless the game is progressing so well that I get Hives up in no time and are basically just waiting for the res to flow in in order to get all the upgrades and the team can end the game). If there will be even more spare res, then we might see even more lifeform eggs and more structure spam.
A bit more elegant than simple Tres to Pres Conversion since it would be an obvious and up front trade off between expanding/tech and generating more lifeforms.
Since the norm is that Marines need more RTs that Aliens, this lets aliens specialize their their smaller number of RTs to generate more of what they need, and less of what they don't.
No more spamming whips cause there is nothing else more useful to spend it on, cause all those Extractors are given over to prodcing Pres for your team! Yay more decisions for Kahmm!
It's a "llamaggot" ("Lamasticot" in French)
I agree. Bone Wall at 2 Biomass, cheaper Drifters (5 TRes?) old Nanoshield back, easier Cyst Explosion, CatPacks at 2 Tres, cheaper alien upgrades ... The Evolution Chamber sounds good to me too.
I thought the old one was push a button to buy Pres for your team when you had free Tres?
The Idea was to remove the Tres from the Kahmm completly so its not just a "well, I have spare Tres, so might as well give all my money to my team" scenario. It would be more like Kahmming on one RT, while your team gets twice the benefit from the other two.
IDK, it might be horrible. But if the kahmm couldn't afford upgrades/lifeform research/new hives (due to him only getting Tres from a smaller pool of RTs), it might balance out.
Maybe shutdown all resourse generation for 20-30 sec while "switching" resource generation type to balance it out?