Bleed damage to mitigate skill imbalance
nemo
Join Date: 2003-01-05 Member: 11908Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2003-01-05 Member: 11908Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Shadow
There is a problem I keep seeing.
A player with a skill average much higher than the server average joins and negatively impacts the experience for the other players.
There aren't enough players to split the users up based on skill, and segregation has its own problems like how do you mentor, or play with lower skilled friends? We need an in game solution that lets everyone play together.
Right now damage scales perfectly with accuracy. If you land twice as many shots you do twice as much damage. That concentration of double DPS in a single player actually makes you more than double as effective. Consider things like the difference between clipping an escaping life form or outright killing them. Then consider you can have players with 8% accuracy on the same server as someone with 30%.
You still want to encourage being better but does the impact of this one skill have to be so dominant? What if you could tweak it down slightly? The solution already exists in the lerk bite and the flamethrower.
If all attacks caused "bleed damage" that was a short damage over time you can bridge the gap. The key to this is to only allow one stack of bleed damage from one player to another. If you land an additional hit before the the first lot of bleed damage completes then you lose the remaining ticks, they don't bleed twice as much. In the same way that lighting up an already burning alien doesn't cause them to burn twice as much afterwards.
It is still more effective to land more shots, but your total damage output for 20% accuracy, might only result in say 50% more damage than a player who landed 10% instead of 100% more.
Lets look at some graphs and you can see how you can tweak it to get a desired result.
Player who achieves 10% accuracy, LMG as it is now, vs LMG doing bleed damage in red.
The player below will now output more damage than they would have.
Player who achieves 20% accuracy.
The player below will now output slightly less damage (this can all be tweaked to make the intercept point where old and new is the same to be anything you like).
Now a player who achieves 30% accuracy.
Clearly still doing more damage, showing its worth learning how to land your shots, but its more forgiving to the large typical skill range on servers now.
A 100% Accuracy example for lolls
Notes:
1. These are all randomly generated encounters
2. The flat lines in the graph are the reloading time
3. Bullets fired in the graph should really read as 'Time ticks'
4. The values for this example run was as follows;
LMG damage: 10
Bleed rounds initial damage: 5
Bleed rounds damage per tick: 1
Bleed rounds tick count: 7
Tick duration: The amount of time between normal LMG shots.
Other things to consider:
1. Onos would need a reduction in health as players typical achieve a high accuracy against them.
A player with a skill average much higher than the server average joins and negatively impacts the experience for the other players.
There aren't enough players to split the users up based on skill, and segregation has its own problems like how do you mentor, or play with lower skilled friends? We need an in game solution that lets everyone play together.
Right now damage scales perfectly with accuracy. If you land twice as many shots you do twice as much damage. That concentration of double DPS in a single player actually makes you more than double as effective. Consider things like the difference between clipping an escaping life form or outright killing them. Then consider you can have players with 8% accuracy on the same server as someone with 30%.
You still want to encourage being better but does the impact of this one skill have to be so dominant? What if you could tweak it down slightly? The solution already exists in the lerk bite and the flamethrower.
If all attacks caused "bleed damage" that was a short damage over time you can bridge the gap. The key to this is to only allow one stack of bleed damage from one player to another. If you land an additional hit before the the first lot of bleed damage completes then you lose the remaining ticks, they don't bleed twice as much. In the same way that lighting up an already burning alien doesn't cause them to burn twice as much afterwards.
It is still more effective to land more shots, but your total damage output for 20% accuracy, might only result in say 50% more damage than a player who landed 10% instead of 100% more.
Lets look at some graphs and you can see how you can tweak it to get a desired result.
Player who achieves 10% accuracy, LMG as it is now, vs LMG doing bleed damage in red.
The player below will now output more damage than they would have.
Player who achieves 20% accuracy.
The player below will now output slightly less damage (this can all be tweaked to make the intercept point where old and new is the same to be anything you like).
Now a player who achieves 30% accuracy.
Clearly still doing more damage, showing its worth learning how to land your shots, but its more forgiving to the large typical skill range on servers now.
A 100% Accuracy example for lolls
Notes:
1. These are all randomly generated encounters
2. The flat lines in the graph are the reloading time
3. Bullets fired in the graph should really read as 'Time ticks'
4. The values for this example run was as follows;
LMG damage: 10
Bleed rounds initial damage: 5
Bleed rounds damage per tick: 1
Bleed rounds tick count: 7
Tick duration: The amount of time between normal LMG shots.
Other things to consider:
1. Onos would need a reduction in health as players typical achieve a high accuracy against them.
Comments
Also tbh, if there are two things I despise in an FPS multiplayer game it's, interfering with player movement (stomp/web are a gameplay related odd exception to this in terms of crowd control) and damage over time. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I'd enjoy a game where all of the weapons have this effect...
I hope you are joking, or do you really expect me to spend the time to point out all the reasons why that view wont hold up to any amount of debate?
I don't like damage over time either, I was hoping with writing this post that someone would suggest a better idea that attempts to solve the same problem.
Here are some facts.
1. There are not enough players to split people up by their skill.
2. People do not like getting owned by a massive margin over and over and over.
3. You cannot avoid having a player with 30%+ accuracy on a server with players who typically get 15% or less accuracy.
Game experiences are designed experiences. NS2 works great when the server is full of similar level players. However this is not the case any more. Something needs to change because I keep seeing games with an average skill level of 1400, 1500, but with a player with a 3400 hive skill in the same game dominating.
As a server admin I don't have many tools at my disposal so I have two choices.
1. Do nothing: Situation as of now
2. Kick "pro" players: Feels wrong but for the cost of kicking one player I can improve the experience for the vast majority. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" keeps playing in my head over and over.
I would like the community to find a way of avoiding this entirely. I don't want a list of reasons why I should just endlessly tolerate the current situation, as its an argument for enjoying a video game less because of some vague concept of doing the right thing.
With NS2 all players have the same chance as any one to land the shots and get High Acc - BUT what changes this is the Exp of the player - Like there Postioning - Map awarness - this helps quite alot for landing those 1st few shots and there for helping improve that Acc.
I dont think having a bleed effect would improve anything really, as they would still need to land those all important shots to do the damage, so again you have to to into account your postioning and map awarness - Postioning / Map awarness > Acc all day long. And some players have a low Acc but a high PL damage output.
Whilst I agree that positioning and map awareness are vital, I disagree that changes to damage output would not improve anything.
In your response it is clear you are considering overall effectiveness, and indeed a highly skilled player would still be very effective overall. I think we agree on that.
What could change though is the perception of it from view point of the other players. I am quite happy to have the best players have a significant impact on bringing a team to victory, so long as the perception of it is more forgiving.
In addition I should really point out that my primary concern is not vets or pro players vs rookies who have no knowledge of such things like map awareness and positioning. I am talking about the typical players on a server such as Hellarious Basterds 7v7 4Spec which I frequent vs the absolute top players, the creme de la creme.
Its people playing at just completely different levels, wanting totally different things from the game playing at the same time and negatively impacting each others experience.
We are not allowed to name and shame on this forum, but I can describe a typical incident which inspires me to this kind of post.
1. Pro player joins and goes Marines.
2. They sprint to the alien naturals, kill them and kill anyone attacking them.
3. Aliens cannot afford (nor likely have the teamplay) to allocate over half of their team to killing this one player as they then are not res biting, or putting up a reasonable resistance against the other 6 marine field players.
4. Marines win
5. Repeat
After this occurred 4 times in a row yesterday the entire server just voted to change the map midgame as its tiresome. Effective, but tiresome. This is very far from those equally balanced games that everyone has fond memories where everyone on the server has a good time.
All of this for what? The expectation that marines shooting better than an arbitrary number should be penalised for "balance". Sorry, but this looks like a flat nerf to marines. Also, a slight boost to the least skilled likely won't tip the scales in any meaningful way but the extra salt from dying around corners might have a significant impact on the already fragile player count.
Like you said, if aliens worked a little more as a team, then this player may have never got to the RT's , if aliens had a little more coordination then who knows?
I guess it sucks that you have to think of this to try and balance rounds out, but i feel it would hurt everyone more than it would help, its bad enough dieing around corners - but now with this you could have escaped but still end up dead because a marine landed some good shots.
To the first point I would do similar for the aliens as well.
To the second point thats a damn good point, the extra salt from dying around corners would mitigate the merits. So I think that might put a nail in it.
As I scramble to find a counter the best I can come up with is if the bleed damage couldn't actually kill, it could drop you to 1hp and stop there. Yet thats still probably not enough to offset how annoying it would be.
+1 for persuasion to @Aeglos