NS2's Balance
Xarius
Join Date: 2003-12-21 Member: 24630Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Join Date: 2003-12-21 Member: 24630Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Hello everyone,
I know balance discussions have been pretty much off the radar ever since the CDT took over, but it is my understanding at least that sooner or later it may be given more attention once again. And in light of that, I wanted to share my perspectives on the current state of NS2's team balance.
I've been playing a lot of NS2 again recently, and one of the things I have been noticing is that, with relatively even teams, aliens generally seem to be having an easier time winning matches, with marines hard-pressed to dominate map control in the first 3 - 4 minutes of the game if they do not want to be playing catch-up with the aliens until their almost inevitable defeat once fades and onos' come around. As a result, both as commander and as a marine, I find myself having to hustle my teammembers to put extraordinary pressure on alien RTs. (With aliens sitting on anything beyond 3 RTs being almost a guaranteed gg). Now while there is a certain element of excitement that comes with having to race the clock to prevent aliens from getting several fades or onoses, it can also quickly end up being frustrating having to play an uphill battle simply because what happens in these exciting first few minutes of the game is that important to the marine team's chances later on. (With unconvincing performance in this crucial early game stage leading to a lot of disappointing early concedes)
Now I want to stress that it's not about aliens having an easier time winning engagements early on (if anything, this stage of the game probably slightly favours the better marine team), it's that aliens can be content sitting on much less map control (3 RTs being the sweet spot perhaps) than marines and still reliably and relatively quickly find themselves able to tech up to where they need to be to remain competitive with marines on 5 - 6 RTs later on.
I checked both teams win/loss rates on NS2stats (there's no official balanpce information available these days) and I found that for the last 6 months at least, the alien win rate has been stuck at a solid 55%, which is not too bad, I suppose, but at least supports the notion that aliens may be having somewhat of an easier time overall. I also realise that these statistics don't represent what happens during competitive play, but with so much of NS2 today and NS2's future now being in the hands of the everyday more casual players, I would at least hope that a little more importance is attached to pub play (with evened teams) just as well.
There's some solutions that I can come up with from the top of my head, prolonging the early game stage perhaps being the more exciting one, but before we get to that I'd very much like to hear some perspectives on this!
I know balance discussions have been pretty much off the radar ever since the CDT took over, but it is my understanding at least that sooner or later it may be given more attention once again. And in light of that, I wanted to share my perspectives on the current state of NS2's team balance.
I've been playing a lot of NS2 again recently, and one of the things I have been noticing is that, with relatively even teams, aliens generally seem to be having an easier time winning matches, with marines hard-pressed to dominate map control in the first 3 - 4 minutes of the game if they do not want to be playing catch-up with the aliens until their almost inevitable defeat once fades and onos' come around. As a result, both as commander and as a marine, I find myself having to hustle my teammembers to put extraordinary pressure on alien RTs. (With aliens sitting on anything beyond 3 RTs being almost a guaranteed gg). Now while there is a certain element of excitement that comes with having to race the clock to prevent aliens from getting several fades or onoses, it can also quickly end up being frustrating having to play an uphill battle simply because what happens in these exciting first few minutes of the game is that important to the marine team's chances later on. (With unconvincing performance in this crucial early game stage leading to a lot of disappointing early concedes)
Now I want to stress that it's not about aliens having an easier time winning engagements early on (if anything, this stage of the game probably slightly favours the better marine team), it's that aliens can be content sitting on much less map control (3 RTs being the sweet spot perhaps) than marines and still reliably and relatively quickly find themselves able to tech up to where they need to be to remain competitive with marines on 5 - 6 RTs later on.
I checked both teams win/loss rates on NS2stats (there's no official balanpce information available these days) and I found that for the last 6 months at least, the alien win rate has been stuck at a solid 55%, which is not too bad, I suppose, but at least supports the notion that aliens may be having somewhat of an easier time overall. I also realise that these statistics don't represent what happens during competitive play, but with so much of NS2 today and NS2's future now being in the hands of the everyday more casual players, I would at least hope that a little more importance is attached to pub play (with evened teams) just as well.
There's some solutions that I can come up with from the top of my head, prolonging the early game stage perhaps being the more exciting one, but before we get to that I'd very much like to hear some perspectives on this!
Comments
At least not in terms of gameplay. I think it has been a long lasting theme in the history of NS, that there are a low amount of players that more or less can decide the outcome of the game, no matter which side they are on. Based on that, I think that any imbalance is almost always based on the players and not the game design of NS2.
So if you want perfect 50/50 winrates - what you need is a matchmaking system. This is not happening any time soon afaik, so lets not go there (again).
When is balance important though? Well, you don't need perfect balance in an asymmetrical game - you just need to balance at the point where the better player can win with the weaker faction. (Again, I think NS2 achieves that for the most part) And you need to balance it in such a way that it is not so much of a struggle that it kills the fun of the game. (I think NS2 achieves that as well)
OP does make a valid point. The game is very much focused on the early game. NS2 tends to heavily snowball. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the RTS elements. And it will give the illusion to people that they are putting up a struggle to stay alive, when in fact they may have lost 5 minutes ago but the dominating team is simply teching up.
I wouldn't say the above is a balance issue. It is an issue non the less however.
In counter-strike when you get shot, you know immediately what your mistake was. To a new player in NS2, if he makes a mistake, but doesn't necessarily die and perhaps even have above 1 K/D and the game goes on for 5-10 minutes, it can be very difficult to pinpoint his mistakes. A lot of people even seem to have the kneejerk reaction to blame their team mates, and it's hard to blame them. It's a consequence of the game design. This, I think, is a huge culprit to the notoriously steep learning curve of NS2 as well.
But again, I don't think it's actually a problem with balance.
As for prolonging the early game stage, I'm not so sure. I'd actually rather try to make the mid- and endgame shorter.
There skulks out there who running nonstop on the floor straight into 5 marines again and again in long hallways ending with an 1-25 kdr.
Dont tell you want the game balanced for these players.
This would end in aimbot for marines and a wall infront of skulks.
I'm not sure how to respond to this...
The game is slightly unbalanced, or better word would be assymetrical, which has it's magic. On the start marines occupy everything, aliens have two hives and resort to RT harrasement and fortification. Then lerks appears and marines lose ground. Then armor, mines, shotguns and PGs appear and the marines get back to the game. Then fades appear keeping marine numbers in check. Then GL, FT, JP, onoses appear and actual TP sieges starts (marines usually shell and ARCs one TP untill it dies, aliens usualy maneuver and circle around map to cause beacons, untill they can actually clear one base).
Though the game needs some changes fast. For one you spend half the time in pregame (check your hive time aginst your steam gameplay time!). Secondly people stack (conciously or unconciously). The game needs quick matchmaking!
Two fades can simply kill whole your team - it's too much silver bullet solution to be considered skill. Then there is the flying marine thing. You spend too much time already sneaking around one marine, then when you get close he just outjumps you and kills you or stalls you long enough to get you killed by somebody else.
Bad ping and bad hitreg (for me it's already unplayable at 150 ping - I have to camp to get kills. Shooting moving skulk and biting moving marines fails half the time). Even in good ping game(50) I perceive only 1-2 bites or 5-6 rifle shots before I die. I don't know why I die often like with 2 seconds delay behind corner with such low ping(perhaps that you are not used to as human to manage your long ass that stick around).
Some games are just played by two people (there are usualy one or two on each team ideally, getting something like 25/3 K/D with no fade or onos or exo, just rifeling people down).
The RTS elements are just not sufficient. The structures are too easily defendable. Everyone goes against the PG, maybe power, if it is in favourable position. There's no strategical thinking going on in that. Armories, tech labs, and prototype labs need to be more destroyable(same for alien structures), to reset game to earlier stage, otherwise the commander cant strategize (think which abilities he needs to research/defend and which he needs to destroy in his opponent)
Oh and single techpoint is too defendable for marines, leading to those stupid last stands untill everyone gets onoses with stomp.
Sometime you chew all of your oponents RT and still they come at you with JPs and EXOs. That kinda infuriates me.
He probably ment, that you can easily rebalance, by getting more skilled players on the harder side(but which side is which?
One of the most imbalanced games I have ever played competitively is CS 1.6. It depends on the maps of course, as does any game, so lets look at de_nuke. If Terrorists are doing WELL, they have like 4/15 rounds. If that's not imbalanced, I don't know what is.
Never the less, it's not a problem in competitive play, hell even in public it's a popular map. The reason is simple; because you play both sides anyway (in comp at least). That's why balance is unimportant - as long as you get to play both sides.
Chess is a good example as well. Very imbalanced. White has starters advantage, yet the game is thriving.
Edit2: To illustrate this, and that I'm not only talking out of my butt. Here are the results of the chess championship finals of 2014 with Anand and Carlsen.
As you can see, neither player wins a single round as black (in a best of 12) and Carlsen still wins convincingly. This is a common theme in competitive chess.
Edit: A game like Starcraft on the other hand, is very different. Because you have 3 races and you cannot in a meaningful way force the players to play two opposing sides. So in that situation you have to use extreme amounts of effort on balance. NS2 does not have that problem.
Game should be fun to play for both sides. I would not drag competitive into the discusion. It is as any other pro sport kind of a degenerated (too small teams, never seen them use gorges, they rely too much on individual players - they actually wonder alone many times and get away with it). I agree though it would be beneficial to force players to play both sides, but others would consider it as too much restrictive and "removing fun from the game".
I point out the competitive side only to illustrate as clear as I can why imbalance isn't necessarily a problem. But in my first post I attempted to argue why I think balance isn't the issue in public either. Because the imbalance is created by the skill gaps of the players and not by any set of mechanics in the game per se - or so I argue.
I already conceded that the game should be balanced to the point where both sides have fun. I argue that NS2 is balanced to that point.
P.S. Chess is definitely not dying, it's growing - You'd think a NS2 player would recognize a dying game when they saw one lol.
game is already fun to play both sides..
there is no perfect balance in ns2, it can always be improved but i tihnk its at a point now were its good enough. Enough time has been spent trying to balance what we have its time for new stuff
With marines being harder to master in terms of team work and positioning, aliens generally have the upper hand in the larger portion of public games, whereas in the highest levels of NS2 competitive play marines are considered slightly stronger.
Most players sit in the big bulge of 'able to team up with others to kill stuff as alien, unable to coordinate/rotate effectively as marine' skill level, so that could account for a portion of the extra 5% of alien WR.
That said, 5% is what, one out of every 20 games technically skewed by "imbalance"? Even if it's an innate game imbalance thing that's basically nothing. While I would generally agree that it would be nice if teams were able to end GG games more easily, I think shortening the late-game would perhaps mean less of the crazy comebacks that I know we all love.
And if you were to shorten the end game, how would you do that? For aliens you could easily do something like give 3rd hive a bonus biomass research time reduction or reduce research time on xeno/stomp/contamination... But for marines with their flatter tech tree it gets more complicated. 3 CCs enabling W4/A4? lolol
@SantaClaws I don't follow chess pro scene much but I'm assuming that the 1/2 = a draw right? So why should this analogy apply to NS2?
Let's say its div4 finals, bo5 with relatively even-skilled teams. Everyone expects an alien win every round and so far its 2.2 tied but 1 of the 2 teams needs to play alien to find out who wins. So they decide to flip a coin to see which team gets to play aliens. The team that got aliens won the tournament. You see how absurdly broken this is?
Notice the word "win". There are no draws in NS2 that are feasibly planned or possible. They can happen but are never intended. In chess, a player can force a position where both players agree to a draw. That's what keeps the pace and spirit going. While playing black, they have that plan to get that draw and get a solid win in as white but they might still get a draw as a white player. This is what keeps the opponents going if they are black side, to at least try to force a draw.
With this NS2 design, YOU CANNOT DO ANYTHING AS MARINE BUT DRAIN THE STAMINA OF YOUR OPPONENT, YOU CANNOT WIN, YOU CANNOT DRAW. It feels completely pointless to play as marines. You might as well just try to GL or shotgun rush everytime, you might actually win a game then rather than playing against aliens late game where you are guaranteed to lose in 99% of cases.
So what about CS? People say that is imbalanced sure it is and it still works, why? Because the best you can do as T is try to gain a few rounds/15 to give you an advantage on the CT side. You can still force a greater advantage than the other team playing as the side that struggles on a given map. In some cases, some maps are fairly balanced to both sides.
This is what I hate about watching NS2 and why its kept me away from the comp scene as a whole, I've dabbled into it in practice but never committed to it fully because I don't like the way the game is designed in the competitive sense.
In a sense, the game isn't imbalanced or hugely imbalanced but that the design of the game as a whole is lacking somewhat and it reminds me of Terran in SC2. Terran are more difficult to play in general than the other two races but have the greatest potential in terms of micro and macro. Terran pros struggle at the lower competitive scene but they are very powerful at the highest level and currently the dominating race in top korean tournaments. They seem to be similar to marines overall which is why we see them "balanced" at the most skilled divisions.
TL;DR - Given fairly equal teams in terms of skill, aliens have a near 100% win-rate at higher divisions, equals out at around div 1 and becomes the opposite in premier where marines have an advantage but still not as drastic as the aliens have in div 4.
I think at the very least, we would need to look at a way to balance the two side's economies, so that the marines have a little more room for a slow start or fuck-up early on. Something like lower starting p.res could already help in this regard.
While I agree that the kind of lategame 40+ min stalemates you sometimes see in pub games are annoying, I think this is a different problem entirely, and something that would need to be addressed separately. Making mid- and endgame shorter will do very little to address the problem I laid out in my opening post.
But look at it this way instead; Each map is a single round. Now all of a sudden, since by your own admission aliens are heavily favored, you are very likely to get draws in NS2 correct?
So I submit, either way, the analogy is accurate imo.
I will admit, I do not watch div4 games. But this problem you raise is only a factor in the finals afaik (unless you get like a 6-way tie or something silly), because of the round-robin system.
Most of the time what you do is give one team the ping advantage and the other the faction advantage.
What you could also do, is play a full map until one team wins both sides, within a reasonable time frame of course.
Chess struggles with this exact same problem, again, it's thriving in spite of it.
You see an even higher winrate in low div comp games because here the teams play more organised, which makes their alien round a lot better, while still being held back by their aim on the marine side. Whereas in higher divs, marines have such good aim, even a strong alien side will have difficulties in the current meta. (yes, there's more to it than just aim, but aim is still the most significant difference)
That's always gonna be a problem for NS2, if you nerf aliens to balance out the casual play/lower divs, you'll make it worse for the mid/higher divs, and vice versa.
Now I believe part of the problem is the division system but I understand why it is in place. If we had a much larger pool of players then we could reduce the prevalence of the divisional split and just have the best of the best competing for first place rather than the best of "div 1/div 2" etc but its not possible in NS2.
im new to ns2 , but 1 thing for sure that developers need a system let players join-together in lobby and gather all in one server
Long waitting time cuase by dedicated server thats make new player like me dont have time to patient
Mareens 2 EZ for crackshoots
The easy solution would be for comp teams to bid res for the right to choose teams. The teams that bids the highest res gets to play whatever team they like, the loosers gets the extra res to start with.
Would also incidentially give you a good number for just _how_ unbalanced things are.
Also shotties being re-usable, only 20 res, with free arms lab ups has been a balance point that has always thrown off balance over the course of a round, i feel(and is notorious for extending marine turtles), but hey marines and aliens arent supposed to have the same economies.
But there are some games in mid-low pub where marine comm is so good (and has some good marines) that aliens with 3-4 bases and all upgrades are eventually crushed.
At high level pub, 2 solid tech points with surrounding extractors for aliens is a gg.
Lately even in 'high' level pub games the teams lack of ability to capitalise on an early/mid lead by taking down a 2nd hive frustrates me greatly.
Rhetorical question: Why isn't there a healthy chance of either team winning until the very last second of a round?
Seems like such a thing would be an optimal design, right? Fun and engaging until the last drop. The concede function wouldn't even be needed.
Imo, it was the one area where the RTS /FPS hybrid design implementation fell apart, by not considering what slippery slope / empowering mechanics can cause without proper comeback mechanics being used.* I understand that the fear is perpetual comebacks occur and therefore make the empowered mechanics unimpactful -- but that is so far on the other end of the spectrum (especially due to "game ending tech" like contamination etc) that at this point it would just spice things up at most, making early concedes unnecessary.
* The design parameters of BileBomb are a great example of a balanced, proper comeback mechanic.
Useful outside of the comeback use, free or cheap to acquire, available at almost all stages of a round depending on commander's strategy, not innately good at killing, rewards coordination / stacks, relatively easy to predict and to counter, easy to mechanically employ.
That's what tournaments are all about.
A gorge tunnel to marine start costs one player 10 res and does not otherwise disrupt the mobility of the rest of the team. Marine phase gates are noisy to build, cost 15 Tres and do not offer a safe hiding spot while the team regroups for a push in the way tunnels do for the aliens.
Due to aliens having far less reliance on tunnels at all stages of the game due to their superior mobility with all lifeforms, they are more likely to come across ninja PGs in their general roamings, and be able to respond to that threat.
Marines in the late game rely heavily on PGs for maneuverability and so often have less opportunity to, for e.g. 1v1 down anything hassling their naturals, or happen upon random tunnels springing up.
The commander can scan, but scans cost 3 tres that might not be available, time that players might prefer/insist spent being medded, and dont see infestation unless the tunnel is revealed directly.
2 gorges left unchecked for a couple of seconds can bring the marine team to their knees, whereas 2 marines still take forever and a day to do any significant damage to alien assets.
Just a few observations I'd like to make about the "comeback mechanics" in place and the inherant asymmetries surrounding them.
Since release balance has never been an issue, there's always one thing that will swing a game around or lead to a crushing defeat. That's what makes NS2 the jewel that it is, please don't change it. x
Just to add how much this is so true for pubs, as rine when we're winning I am paranoid as all hell about a last ditch rush or the next 3 after it. They don't even have to work just drag people away from the front to sway the game back to aliens. As an alien however once your in front you can pretty much switch off and wait for the inevitable, just being a meatsponge onos makes life easy for the rest when rines all have empty clips.
I'm pretty sure both teams enjoy the impossible turn-rounds. At least from my experience even the rine team comments how smart the play turned out to be. Sometimes the rines can make suggestions to their com about how to avoid the issue. Sometimes this advice is true, other times the play is timed so precisely that the rines might not be able to make a worthwhile suggestion. Those are the times you see me spamming voice chat to get our ale'd-e-ums to cooperate.