For the sake of the game, please stop the stack
wangus
Funkytown Join Date: 2013-11-19 Member: 189453Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Funkytown Join Date: 2013-11-19 Member: 189453Members, Reinforced - Shadow
I want to start by saying that i have been playing NS2 for about a year an a half, and i love playing the game.
I would never call myself one of the better players. Occasionally i will have a good round or a good or a good night of gaming.
I'm not green, but i'm not pro either, just a casual gamer.
There are people i like playing on the same team with, but at the same time, i also like biting them in the back, or shooting them in the face.
I would like to bring up the serious issue of the team stacking in the public servers, especially since the recent fix of the hive stats.
No one wants to be on the team with the greens, and people know the names of the better players. No one wants to "lose points"
If you want the community to grow, and the game to be around for years, something needs to be changed.
The only thing that is happening is that new players are getting discouraged and quitting the game that they just payed $25 for.
A change is needed for the health of the community.
I don't know what the answer is.
Do we need to get rid of the badges?
or the skill ranking on hive?
or force random teams from the start of the round?
or make certain servers that don't track on hive?
maybe the community and the development team has some good ideas.
Some people may take this as my just bitching about losing, but really winning and losing and stats and all those things don't bother me.
It's entertainment as long as the teams are even and fair. I enjoy a good team strategy that results in a loss.
I really hope the CDT looks at this and thinks about what kind of community they want to have.
A growing, prosperous community, or a one that will quickly become extinct.
Lets have a good honest discussion on this.
- ~ - As a side note to the stacking i see the ever increasingly common late game team switch.
Enjoy those points, huggers!
I would never call myself one of the better players. Occasionally i will have a good round or a good or a good night of gaming.
I'm not green, but i'm not pro either, just a casual gamer.
There are people i like playing on the same team with, but at the same time, i also like biting them in the back, or shooting them in the face.
I would like to bring up the serious issue of the team stacking in the public servers, especially since the recent fix of the hive stats.
No one wants to be on the team with the greens, and people know the names of the better players. No one wants to "lose points"
If you want the community to grow, and the game to be around for years, something needs to be changed.
The only thing that is happening is that new players are getting discouraged and quitting the game that they just payed $25 for.
A change is needed for the health of the community.
I don't know what the answer is.
Do we need to get rid of the badges?
or the skill ranking on hive?
or force random teams from the start of the round?
or make certain servers that don't track on hive?
maybe the community and the development team has some good ideas.
Some people may take this as my just bitching about losing, but really winning and losing and stats and all those things don't bother me.
It's entertainment as long as the teams are even and fair. I enjoy a good team strategy that results in a loss.
I really hope the CDT looks at this and thinks about what kind of community they want to have.
A growing, prosperous community, or a one that will quickly become extinct.
Lets have a good honest discussion on this.
- ~ - As a side note to the stacking i see the ever increasingly common late game team switch.
Enjoy those points, huggers!
Comments
If players with less than 25hours or so could only play themselves, then it might be better, but with a community this small, it is hard.
Add to that that NS2 is RTS influenced, and it snowballs so that the team that is winning, gets more powerful, making it a game that is really harsh on you when you are losing.
For players switching teams, they don't get any bonus points, as the skill system is rated on many different factors including time spent on a team and you get more points for the beginning of the game. Players who switch to the winning team are not going to benefit from it as regards skill ranking.
Many high skilled players WILL.
I have 800+ hours in game, i understand RT system and the snowball effect.
We have all been on both sides of a stack, either on purpose or on accident.
It's not the winning or losing, its the attitude of the community that is going to affect how many new players keep playing and if the community is going to grow or shrink.
The stack is real and has been more flagrant since hive has been fixed.
The CDT can recognize they have an issue and do something to help change it, or they can choose to dismiss the concern and watch the game die.
That right there is the problem. God-like players who are so far above everyone else in the server they can dominate every game, making it no fun at all to play. (Even when on their team it's boring as hell!)
It's not so much about stacking, so much as it's about not wanting to play against a player who is SO far above you they may as well be hacking.
I don't know which servers you play on, but in my experience the community is overall quite positive. There are some more negative people. There are some people I am sure who stack blatantly. The community is so small now that only the enthusiastic people are left; people who want to see the game do well.
"The stack is real and has been more flagrant since hive has been fixed." Can you explain this better? Do you mean that people have been using the force even teams vote to cause stacks? If not I don't see a correlation here.
The CDT does recognize an issue. Including yours there has been multiple threads on this topic just recently. There has also been lots of related discussion on skill differences and player retention.
The force even teams vote was recently enhanced to use the new skill system. This should help somewhat for now, and more so later. Later because we need good data from lots of games for hive to have a good idea of a person's skill.
Sometimes there are very evenly matched long running matches that are fun, win or lose.
The force even teams is much better now, i agree.
Getting people to vote on it is another thing.
I say that it is more flagrant now because i join servers regularly and see a team full of greens, and the other team that is badged up.
Technically badges don't mean anything, but as a more general rule the people that will pay for a reinforcement badge care for the game and play more, and have higher skill.
The tie in to the hive is that clearly SOME people, not everyone, really seem to care about those skill points. and where they rank on the leaderboards.
I'm glad that the CDT recognizes the issue.
I hope to play NS2 for years.
100% true.
After playing on one, and playing back on my old 60hz, the difference is amazing.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-myths,3694-4.html
Edit by Ghoul: Wrapped a spoiler around the large image, please do this yourself in the future
1st: Spoiler tags, please.
2nd: We all know that this picture is out of context here. (People were messing with the rookie mode setting, this is NOT created by even teams, or even a regular stack.)
3rd: The fact that you mention that your post was deleted doesn't help context, either.
Please stop.
It could fire after each team has a comm, so people can join whatever team they'd like to be on (or camp in the RR if they don't care). People who really want to comm one side or the other go and trigger the force. They don't get switched but anyone else is open game.
It could at least be a serverside mod?
That visual difference is the whole point of 120/140hz monitors. You get over double the visual frames. This will give you superior target tracking and something crazy like 10ms+ of less motion blur/streaking. That is a huge advantage in fast paced twitched games. Instead of seeing blurring and streaking in those fast twitch movements, you have a clear picture. There is a reason why nearly every pro gamer use these types of panels.
And I don't get why you're linking an input lag article to try and prove your point that there is no advantage in high refresh monitors? Nearly every monitor has such low input lag values, most people won't notice. Even slower IPS panels have such low input lag nowadays.
I suggest you head over to http://www.blurbusters.com/
it will show that fighter pilots (who are trained to have good response times) have an average response time of 223 ms for visual stimuli. For auditory stimuli the average is 150 ms for fighter pilots.
As you can see, even for people who are trained to have good response time like fighter pilots, 10 ms wont make much of a difference for visual stimuli.
You are naive. Nobody goes out and buys a high refresh rate panel for the lower input latency. If people really wanted an advantage in input latency, they would buy one of the many CRT monitors that have the lowest input latency of all the monitors.
People buy these high refresh rate monitors for the motion clarity. That is where the advantage lies with such monitors. As I mentioned, input latency is so low on practically every monitor nowadays, most people can't even tell the difference from one monitor to another.
People that try and discredit the high refresh rate tech are typically people that have never used it and don't understand it. I personally don't have one, but I've demoed both the xl2411z and vg2428qe, and the advantage is a significant leap over 60hz, to the point where my play improved. But for me, I prefer the colors and viewing angles of IPS tech over the clarity.
And for some giggles, my average response time is around 185ms. I should be a fighter pilot.
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime
What we need is education that this is how it works, perhaps with the release of the next patch. After all it doesn't mean much if people don't know and operate on outdated information.
To my understanding, this is how it'll work when the skill levels have reached a point where they're actually representative of player skill, which will be a little while yet, depending on how many games people have etc.
- Input lag (the feature of 144hz monitors the page focuses on) isnt why people have 144hz monitors, and it's not why they're better for ns2. As someone mentioned above, its the motion clarity that confers the advantage (with more available visual information per second, your brain has to use less interp
- At the bottom there's the line in big, bold letters "Bottom Line: Input lag only matters in "twitch" games, and really matters only at highly competitive levels." - EVEN if you were to play devils advocate and go along with the assumption that input lag is the biggest advantage 144hz monitors give users, that line basically indicates that NS2 is the kind of game where such a thing would matter.
I had a game in which the player were all good but some were damn stupid (including the com this time). !nmate and me were trying to comply to the com orders. We practically had the game and alien were starving. After some back and forth. The worst was the order of "jet pack rushing Veil/cargo". they went C12 and Pipe (facepalm).
With some ppl it is somehow hard to make two neurons connect. Noobs are more suffering from that disease. I have no problem with newbies that listen but fail. The worst are the one that just front enemy get killed and try again, without listening to the guys saying : "hey avoid them, take this route, lets make em fall back on protecting their RT or base.
I clearly understand why ppl stack. It's not for stacking. It's just they hate dumb ppl. NS2 doesn't require PHDs to play.
It will be the case:
-As long as the new player can connect without a proper knowledge of the game.
-As long as ppl (not only newbies) won't enable teamwork functions in their brains.
The so called godlike people that are making the game are just taking advantage of the dumb behavior of others. No matter what, you never see them do that in comp play. Risk to loose that fade is too big and such things.
I'm afraid it's not working right now. I've seen weird balanced randomization.
yeah as other people brought up here, everything you mentioned in this post is either confused or false.
"The visual difference may be amazing in 60vs144hz"
not really
"for gameplay it has already been proven to not make much of a difference"
completely false
"A stable frame rate of 60 fps would have a negligible difference than a stable frame rate of 144 hz"
do you mean on a monitor capable of 144hz refresh rate? in terms of gameplay a 144hz refresh rate makes a huge difference when trying to track a target and in terms of spatial awareness in fast-paced scenarios. when objects are quickly flying around your screen in 3d space the higher refresh rate just gives you more information to judge velocity and trajectory with.
"Variable refresh rate displays at 60 fps trump fixed refresh rate displays at 120 fps"
false. variable refresh rate only makes a difference (any difference!) if you cannot pump enough fps to match your refresh rate. otherwise it has no effect whatsoever.
"http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-myths,3694-4.html"
your linking this seems to imply that you think we're discussing input lag or visual latency here. this is not the case. we're talking about fluidity of motion. this has nothing to do with visual latency. the higher your refresh rate is (as long as you can match that in fps) the more information about the objects on your screen and their motion gets to your brain. this will generally increase your ability to make instantaneous intuitive judgments about those objects positions in relative 3d space. in terms of ns2 this becomes most relevant in two situations:
1. tracking targets (a lerk flying at a distance and spiking)
2. fighting at close range (trying to track and shoot a skulk as it rotates around you, and vice versa)
if one were to make a list of general things the average player could do to improve their play in ns2, buying a 144hz monitor would not be near the top of the list (there are some premiere players who play the game at less than 60 fps). but it would definitely be in the top ten.
this is somewhat misrepresentative. keep in mind that at some point display manufacturers switched from measuring response time in black-to-black (BTB) the most accurate and logical measure to grey-to-grey (GTG), resulting in significantly lower figures. they did this for marketing purposes. 1ms GTG looks better than 8ms BTB.
@meatmachine, still considering your point, but I'm not sure that would provide noticeable difference in playing ability. Still, I cant wait till they make laptops with Variable Refresh Rate panels, would look so nice.
At full fps, you need v sync dont you? Variable refresh rate eliminates the main cause of tearing and doesn't provide input lag like v sync.
i suspect that i get some tearing. but at 144hz it's not generally noticeable. you definitely don't need vsync. basically the more often your screen is drawing the less of a difference tearing makes. the tears get smaller and smaller, and over a shorter and shorter interval until they make almost no difference. i idle at around 180 fps and i never see tearing in game. i suspect it's happening, but it's completely inconsequential.
don't get me wrong, if somebody were offering free g-sync monitors i'd take one off their hands. but generally speaking the better your hardware the less you're gonna feel any difference from g-sync.
This should put everything to rest right here:
http://www.blurbusters.com/faq/60vs120vslb/
They should travel around the world to visit every good players home and inspect there hardware.
Lets call them CFP (Community fairness police).
After the player check, he get an extra badge. Something like this:
Forbidden is everything that cost much money like:
- 120 to 240 hz monitors
- gaming mouse with the ablity to make own makros
- high quality soundcards and headsets
- overclocked cpu
On a more serious note: as long players dont care where they play (only joining servers with enough players on it) you will have a variation of all skill levels on that server: From rookie to premium division player.
Its in the hand of every player.
It's not "eye candy", you're actually getting more visual information your brain can process.
I might be wrong here, but, isn't that article referring to OLED's sample and hold?
Yes, you are wrong, yet again. There aren't even any 120hz OLED monitors on the market, let alone trying to even find a standard 60hz OLED monitor.