You (as in, you guys, the devs) always seem to assume that everyone is at full hp before the engagement. In that case, yeah, it's the same and the rookie gets the information. But that's not the case; if I see an alien is already halfway down going into an engagement, or flying past me, I'm going to focus on that, even though in other cases I would have done something else. I think this "misunderstanding" is where the criticism/conflict here is coming from. Personally, I have to agree with the criticism.
I don't see how it would be broken, if it helps decision making. What would it break exactly?
I would agree that it would lower the team play skill ceiling, since you wouldn't necessarily have to call what lifeform you've damaged, or that marine X is a 2 bite, but the benefit could be that everyone improves their play, and makes better decisions. Especially on pub. Life forms that should have died, will die, and it would have been the fault of the life form, since it made the wrong decision to engage or overcommit.
Also, I think that rookies should play exactly the same game as everybody else, because otherwise they will not learn the game properly. Not to mention that the 5 hours play on rookieservers won't make you a nonrookie.
edit: too late, I guess
There are two types of alien players. One who strategically thinks about which target he will go after in a team fight and one who yolos into the room. I can guess which one you are.
All jokes aside, the information the change would give you is extremely important (especially on alien). Giving it out freely is not a good idea. Smart player will abuse it and tip the battles in their favor. Like I said before... the change would not have much effect on marines.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2016
Um wait, so this is now implemented into 297? Before actually waiting for feedback on how to best implement this idea... Obviously there are issues with how it is implemented now... Oh well, didn't expect any change of how things are handled in terms of pushing features before they are done. Seems like a feature of NS2 nowadays, good show, I guess o/
Ya gotta keep in mind that Dirty Bomb is a symmetrical class based game, so this extra information about your enemies in NS2 will have a bigger impact on information flow than in a Symmetrical game... As @joshhh indicated:
@Kouji_San I know what you are trying to convey but it isn't at all what I was referring to in my post. A skulk could run into a room, para each marine once and tell his team which one has armor and which one doesn't. This type of knowledge doesn't have anything to do with hidden damage numbers. Its simple information that can tip the battle in your favor by quickly dispatching hurt marines. This knowledge had to be purchased via aura previously... but the change makes it readily available for a skulk or lerk to exploit.
You are correct in the sense that the change wouldn't affect marine play. Aliens are all typically at max hp before a team fight so it really wouldn't matter.
Which would be a third concern added to the ones I highlighted in shiny orange...
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2016
@F0rdPrefect I ain't no dev or CDT lad They don't take my advice anyway otherwise this game would've had much less hidden crap. I'm just looking at it from an outside perspective. I'm not for or against it. All I am for is streamlining information to the newbies to add to the retention factor and fun factor for new players. But they have to keep in mind certain issues, like more than 1v1 engagements and other than FullHP encounters (starting from 0 so to speak) and many more issues mentioned in this thread.
Right now, it has been implemented to "test" in a live version of the game. Once again BEFORE it was properly fleshed out. This is a game which has gone gold lads, this ain't no BETA/ALPHA. Yet they are treating it as such, I find that the most annoying about how this "quick iteration" is handled... Testing it on a separate "retention NS2" build, that somehow seems out of the question for some reason...
I don't see how it would be broken, if it helps decision making. What would it break exactly?
I would agree that it would lower the team play skill ceiling, since you wouldn't necessarily have to call what lifeform you've damaged, or that marine X is a 2 bite, but the benefit could be that everyone improves their play, and makes better decisions. Especially on pub. Life forms that should have died, will die, and it would have been the fault of the life form, since it made the wrong decision to engage or overcommit.
Also, I think that rookies should play exactly the same game as everybody else, because otherwise they will not learn the game properly. Not to mention that the 5 hours play on rookieservers won't make you a nonrookie.
edit: too late, I guess
the information the change would give you is extremely important (especially on alien). Giving it out freely is not a good idea. Smart player will abuse it and tip the battles in their favor. Like I said before... the change would not have much effect on marines.
Of course it is important information, but the information is available to everyone.
How exactly would you abuse it as a smart player? Hit every target until you find a two-swipe target?
Well, you may, but you might just as well not find a two-swipe target and you would have wasted your time checking every health bar.
In any case, the problem was that the marine wasn't being welded.
I don't see how it would be broken, if it helps decision making. What would it break exactly?
I would agree that it would lower the team play skill ceiling, since you wouldn't necessarily have to call what lifeform you've damaged, or that marine X is a 2 bite, but the benefit could be that everyone improves their play, and makes better decisions. Especially on pub. Life forms that should have died, will die, and it would have been the fault of the life form, since it made the wrong decision to engage or overcommit.
Also, I think that rookies should play exactly the same game as everybody else, because otherwise they will not learn the game properly. Not to mention that the 5 hours play on rookieservers won't make you a nonrookie.
edit: too late, I guess
the information the change would give you is extremely important (especially on alien). Giving it out freely is not a good idea. Smart player will abuse it and tip the battles in their favor. Like I said before... the change would not have much effect on marines.
Of course it is important information, but the information is available to everyone.
How exactly would you abuse it as a smart player? Hit every target until you find a two-swipe target?
Well, you may, but you might just as well not find a two-swipe target and you would have wasted your time checking every health bar.
In any case, the problem was that the marine wasn't being welded.
>>Lerk spikes everyone once from a distance. (Takes approx. 2 sec.) Tells team critical info
>>Skulk paras a few marines in a room. (Takes maybe 5 seconds if he is playing smart). Relays info to his team.
To put it into a more common scenario... you have a 2 or (4 man cuz pub) marine pressure team pushing your rts/hive and only have a few aliens available to defend. One skulk manages to para each marine once and notices 2 have no armor. The aliens you have to defend dive specifically on these weak marines due to this info... hence greatly increases the chance of success. Cutting the strength of a pressure team in half is one of the goals of countering it. If there is a good marine in the group, chances are you will not clear the pressure team in the first go... but weaken it enough to easily clean it up next spawn. Knowing which marines are low is extremely important info that usually isn't available unless aliens went the shade tech path.
The same scenario can be applied to large team fights... etc.
I don't see how it would be broken, if it helps decision making. What would it break exactly?
I would agree that it would lower the team play skill ceiling, since you wouldn't necessarily have to call what lifeform you've damaged, or that marine X is a 2 bite, but the benefit could be that everyone improves their play, and makes better decisions. Especially on pub. Life forms that should have died, will die, and it would have been the fault of the life form, since it made the wrong decision to engage or overcommit.
Also, I think that rookies should play exactly the same game as everybody else, because otherwise they will not learn the game properly. Not to mention that the 5 hours play on rookieservers won't make you a nonrookie.
edit: too late, I guess
the information the change would give you is extremely important (especially on alien). Giving it out freely is not a good idea. Smart player will abuse it and tip the battles in their favor. Like I said before... the change would not have much effect on marines.
Of course it is important information, but the information is available to everyone.
How exactly would you abuse it as a smart player? Hit every target until you find a two-swipe target?
Well, you may, but you might just as well not find a two-swipe target and you would have wasted your time checking every health bar.
In any case, the problem was that the marine wasn't being welded.
>>Lerk spikes everyone once from a distance. (Takes approx. 2 sec.) Tells team critical info
>>Skulk paras a few marines in a room. (Takes maybe 5 seconds if he is playing smart). Relays info to his team.
To put it into a more common scenario... you have a 2 or (4 man cuz pub) marine pressure team pushing your rts/hive and only have a few aliens available to defend. One skulk manages to para each marine once and notices 2 have no armor. The aliens you have to defend dive specifically on these weak marines due to this info... hence greatly increases the chance of success. Cutting the strength of a pressure team in half is one of the goals of countering it. If there is a good marine in the group, chances are you will not clear the pressure team in the first go... but weaken it enough to easily clean it up next spawn. Knowing which marines are low is extremely important info that usually isn't available unless aliens went the shade tech path.
The same scenario can be applied to large team fights... etc.
You are completely right, but you've missed that it is
Only visible in short range and with clear line of sight onto the target
I haven't seen it in action yet, but I imagine it would be quite dangerous to get this information, if you have to get into close range to get it.
If it is so easy to abuse as alien, then those aliens might weld more often as marines, which is good.
AsranielJoin Date: 2002-06-03Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
Keep in mind, that yes, this change might change balance somewhat as well as how you play and do strategic decisions. But not all change is bad. The question is, does it make the game better or worse?
I need more testing, but from my initial experience, i liked the game more. It made it easier to track the enemy and i had a better idea of what was going on. On both sides.
Does it weaken higher lifeforms? Possibly. Does that mean balance changes are required? maybe? but way too early to tell.
So keep an open mind. Not all change is bad. I think this change, while it changes some aspects of the game, is overall positive. At least in my initial tests, and of course that opinion could change over time.
So keep an open mind. Not all change is bad. I think this change, while it changes some aspects of the game, is overall positive. At least in my initial tests, and of course that opinion could change over time.
I have kept an open mind, that's why this is a terrible idea and shouldn't even have been considered, the change is bad and you are right but using an example where something is not bad and then comparing it to this is like comparing moonlight delight to daylight blindness.
Surely some of you aren't just droning it by agreeing with what your peers CDT/PT/PDT are saying, i know that it's hard when you are trying to fit in, but you're not even thinking of the game itself, sad to say this is sort of like the direction NS2's friendly PR guy would take, change without basis other then to change something to make it look like he was doing something great or grand without any direction.
remiremedy [blu.knight]Join Date: 2003-11-18Member: 23112Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester
I already posted this in 297 thread, but it seems relevant to post here as well:
There is an incompatibility with the enemy health bars and the NS2+ option for server-side blood hits.
If you have server-side blood enabled you won't see health bars for any hitscan weapons.
Is there some particular reason why pain sounds aren't sufficient? Most games do very decent without having to display the actual HP bars. NS has wilder HP ranges, but I still find it a bit weird if the HP bars are actually necessary.
Also, one less visually intrusive way could be to have some HP sensitive parts in crosshair that go from green to red as the enemy HP decreases. The whole crosshair definitely shouldn't change, but for example small areas in inner crosshair can do that. You could also colour increasing area in crosshair red as the enemy HP decreases if that's more helpful visually.
I'd say anything that allows the damage numbers to be removed is still progress to the right direction. Crazy running numbers are part of the whole visual clutter issue that makes NS2 so difficult to comprehend.
One of the main objectives with the health bar change was to make the game more accessible to new players. A new player has no idea how many bullets it takes to get to the center of a chewy skulk, and NS2 is a HARD game. It can be frustrating to die over and over and feel like you are making no progress. Having health bars shown means that you may still die, but now you have a sense of progress. You know how close you were to killing the alien, and because of this engagements are less binary. It's not "live or die", it's "oh i almost got you". For experienced players, that is already how engagements feel, but that is because they have a general sense of the time it takes to kill a skulk (and competitive players know the same for all the lifeforms because they have studied it).
Showing health bars definitely changes up the game for moderately experienced to "veteran" players as well, which I am aware of. For the moderately experienced, fighting lerks and fades may be less frustrating because there will be less of a feeling of aliens being "bullet sponges".
Also as @joshhh pointed out, you will have more information to use for decision making. Previously this information was available, but required an attentive commander to tell you the information. The information flow, as I think @Kouji_San put it, is being turned on its head. The information is still only available to the person actually doing damage, but it opens up a lot more opportunity for communication between the field players to pinch lifeforms and do more of the tactics that high level players use.
The point about using parasite to scout is also a valid one, but I think that is in keeping with the intent of parasite, and is something that will encourage players to use parasite more (especially mid to late game) which is pretty central to the alien meta. Having game mechanics in place which encourage players to play towards the meta is a good thing.
Anyways, I am reading your posts in here and these changes were not just thrown in without a second thought. I have spent many hours on the feature itself, and many more considering the design of it and the ramifications of it. This definitely changes how NS2 is played on a fundamental level, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
@F0rdPrefect I ain't no dev or CDT lad They don't take my advice anyway otherwise this game would've had much less hidden crap. I'm just looking at it from an outside perspective. I'm not for or against it. All I am for is streamlining information to the newbies to add to the retention factor and fun factor for new players. But they have to keep in mind certain issues, like more than 1v1 engagements and other than FullHP encounters (starting from 0 so to speak) and many more issues mentioned in this thread.
Oops, my bad. You do have mod powers, though. So you're close enough. :P
Right now, it has been implemented to "test" in a live version of the game. Once again BEFORE it was properly fleshed out. This is a game which has gone gold lads, this ain't no BETA/ALPHA. Yet they are treating it as such, I find that the most annoying about how this "quick iteration" is handled... Testing it on a separate "retention NS2" build, that somehow seems out of the question for some reason...
Nice, now you probe each Onos and focus the right one.
You can't go back in fight on pure balls as a half-HP Fade, because now they see your HP. But I loved bluffing!
The thing that you don't understand is that the "absolute HP level" is completely different from "how many damage I've done". It has become an immediate information sharing.
Noble "save the rookies" cause doesn't work here. Because every rookie knows how to play CoD. The hard part is playing as a higher alien lifeform. And this change nerfs that by a lot.
Nice, now you probe each Onos and focus the right one.
Lit oni should retreat when they're lit. Without healthbars, you would've put your survival as onos on chance. If you were fighting 5 marines with 2 oni, you could've died just as well, if someone made the right call to focus one onos.
The thing that you don't understand is that the "absolute HP level" is completely different from "how many damage I've done". It has become an immediate information sharing.
Noble "save the rookies" cause doesn't work here. Because every rookie knows how to play CoD. The hard part is playing as a higher alien lifeform. And this change nerfs that by a lot.
KasharicHull, EnglandJoin Date: 2013-03-27Member: 184473Members, Forum Admins, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Judging by the scenarios some of you guys are bringing up as a complaint for the healthbars i'm going to say TEST IT BEFORE YOU CRITISIZE!!!!!!!
Some of the feedback so far is ridiculous, its not constructive, you're making assumptions about how it works and then going on a tangent about that.... TEST IT FIRST... 90% of your concerns are not even possible, and you can tell that within 5 minutes of testing.
I just quickly tested this on a listen server and shot at some aliens. For some reason, damage numbers were still active for me. I noticed that the HP bars appear at what can be described as medium range.
So, if damage numbers are supposed to be off, does this mean there isn't supposed to be any feedback on damage dealt at all on "high" ranges? (One end of ball court to the other would count as high range - roughly twice the hp bar draw range. For reference.)
Testing it, yeah sure i like it because it makes it far too easy for me to target and kill, but i am being unfairly targeted in a group of people knowingly my team-mates can't aim.
I don't like it, like just now, a couple of skulks decided to ignore the high HP marines and target low HP marines, the marines just pushed up from east wing with FULL hp and are now destroying a hive because of the HP Bars, this wouldn't have happened.
@Kasharic just because you like something, and it helps you in game doesn't mean it's actually good.
@Kasharic just because you like something, and it helps you in game doesn't mean it's actually good.
@Archie just because you dislike something, and it helps your enemy in game doesn't mean it's actually bad.
This raises the skill floor of the game, yeah, but is that actually a bad thing?... oh no, the rookies aren't going to get as quickly and easily rekt by you "pro" players.
Basically all i'm hearing is "this is a more effective way to display information and makes it easier to understand the game... so I don't like it!"
The change makes it easier for rookies to stand a chance... the skill ceiling isn't lowered because of this change, the skill floor is raised making it so that rookies actually stand a chance... and now people have to be more careful with their lifeforms, you can't make as many mistakes, you can't go in on ludicrously low health anymore, because you will die... so in theory this has raised the skill ceiling further than it was prior to the change.
so please, explain, what is it exactly that is BAD about the change.
I just quickly tested this on a listen server and shot at some aliens. For some reason, damage numbers were still active for me. I noticed that the HP bars appear at what can be described as medium range.
So, if damage numbers are supposed to be off, does this mean there isn't supposed to be any feedback on damage dealt at all on "high" ranges? (One end of ball court to the other would count as high range - roughly twice the hp bar draw range. For reference.)
The default was just changed for new players, for everyone else damage numbers will be set to whatever it was set to previously. They aren't "supposed to be off", they will just start out that way. Your point about damage feedback at distance is correct, past the health bar distance, if you don't have damage numbers enabled you won't know how much damage you did nor know the enemy health.
You shouldn't go back in a fight on pure balls in any case. If it educates to not do it, then its a good thing.
What? That's probably my favorite part of NS2... aggro Lerk from room to room on marines who previously had no idea of my HP because they can't communicate it fast enough, often bluffing entirely OR utilizing regen /crag/gorge to trick them to over commit.
The same can be said about the exciting decision of whether or not to risk swooping in for that last bite on the marine running away.. it's been turned into "Yup, hold Mouse1".
Lastly, I am the guy who turns off dmg numbers, minimap and utilizes the most minimal HUD that I can... and now I have floating multi colored bars (friends and enemies alike) down a busy hallway where I previously needed a clean shot to track properly. It's distracting and obscuring to me, and the whole goal of the feature : to know how much damage has been done - was something I had such a good bead on previously as a vet that I didn't need dmg numbers, I was able to determine the TTK close enough without them. If it trains rookies, keep it in Rookie Only servers as others suggest.
So as a veteran this does nothing for me but take away the engagements I found most exciting / interesting in the game and obscure my screen. :-/
I appreciate the problem it's trying to solve, but I do not like what it's sacrificing to do so.
It doesn't raise the skill floor for anyone other then for good people to become great and to dominate, like right now i had people avoiding me because i could destroy them, so they just ran away, you think that's okay?
so you think that the health bars don't help rookies at all? because the aim is to raise the skill floor, or "entry level" of rookies.
Sure this will adjust play, make people have to play differently and potentially have to relearn so old bad habits, but i'm yet to hear anything that says this is a BAD thing... we all want the game to improve, we all want the game to evolve and become better, we all want a shake up to stop the game feeling stale... how is that EVER going to happen if everytime the devs bring something in people just respond with "its not what i've played for the last 3 years so I don't like it"
Why are they a BAD thing? because now rookies can avoid the players that absolutely stomp them? yeah, they should be forced to run into you constantly... that'll learn 'em.
Hopefully having HP displayed teaches players to actively dodge bullet lines more times per second with higher lifeforms, since marines will know how long to keep their line segments aimed at a target. Instead of just traveling in directions for 1-3 seconds before changing spatial planes then getting mowed down by intrinsically one-dimensional objects and wondering why it happened, people should be changing directions 3 times a second, not 1 time every 3 seconds.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention this in the patch notes. I should add that.
@remi, mention what you've added to counterbalance that change and why do you think that playing as a higher lifeform is too easy for the new players. (and why do you think that bluffing isn't fun)
Health bar should really be removed no way as a Onos to bluff attacks as if you have full health. What marine will be afraid of a storming Onos when they can see it is at 20% health?
Comments
You (as in, you guys, the devs) always seem to assume that everyone is at full hp before the engagement. In that case, yeah, it's the same and the rookie gets the information. But that's not the case; if I see an alien is already halfway down going into an engagement, or flying past me, I'm going to focus on that, even though in other cases I would have done something else. I think this "misunderstanding" is where the criticism/conflict here is coming from. Personally, I have to agree with the criticism.
I'll try to play tonight and see how it feels.
There are two types of alien players. One who strategically thinks about which target he will go after in a team fight and one who yolos into the room. I can guess which one you are.
All jokes aside, the information the change would give you is extremely important (especially on alien). Giving it out freely is not a good idea. Smart player will abuse it and tip the battles in their favor. Like I said before... the change would not have much effect on marines.
Ya gotta keep in mind that Dirty Bomb is a symmetrical class based game, so this extra information about your enemies in NS2 will have a bigger impact on information flow than in a Symmetrical game... As @joshhh indicated:
Which would be a third concern added to the ones I highlighted in shiny orange...
Right now, it has been implemented to "test" in a live version of the game. Once again BEFORE it was properly fleshed out. This is a game which has gone gold lads, this ain't no BETA/ALPHA. Yet they are treating it as such, I find that the most annoying about how this "quick iteration" is handled... Testing it on a separate "retention NS2" build, that somehow seems out of the question for some reason...
Of course it is important information, but the information is available to everyone.
How exactly would you abuse it as a smart player? Hit every target until you find a two-swipe target?
Well, you may, but you might just as well not find a two-swipe target and you would have wasted your time checking every health bar.
In any case, the problem was that the marine wasn't being welded.
>>Lerk spikes everyone once from a distance. (Takes approx. 2 sec.) Tells team critical info
>>Skulk paras a few marines in a room. (Takes maybe 5 seconds if he is playing smart). Relays info to his team.
To put it into a more common scenario... you have a 2 or (4 man cuz pub) marine pressure team pushing your rts/hive and only have a few aliens available to defend. One skulk manages to para each marine once and notices 2 have no armor. The aliens you have to defend dive specifically on these weak marines due to this info... hence greatly increases the chance of success. Cutting the strength of a pressure team in half is one of the goals of countering it. If there is a good marine in the group, chances are you will not clear the pressure team in the first go... but weaken it enough to easily clean it up next spawn. Knowing which marines are low is extremely important info that usually isn't available unless aliens went the shade tech path.
The same scenario can be applied to large team fights... etc.
You are completely right, but you've missed that it is
I haven't seen it in action yet, but I imagine it would be quite dangerous to get this information, if you have to get into close range to get it.
If it is so easy to abuse as alien, then those aliens might weld more often as marines, which is good.
I need more testing, but from my initial experience, i liked the game more. It made it easier to track the enemy and i had a better idea of what was going on. On both sides.
Does it weaken higher lifeforms? Possibly. Does that mean balance changes are required? maybe? but way too early to tell.
So keep an open mind. Not all change is bad. I think this change, while it changes some aspects of the game, is overall positive. At least in my initial tests, and of course that opinion could change over time.
I have kept an open mind, that's why this is a terrible idea and shouldn't even have been considered, the change is bad and you are right but using an example where something is not bad and then comparing it to this is like comparing moonlight delight to daylight blindness.
Surely some of you aren't just droning it by agreeing with what your peers CDT/PT/PDT are saying, i know that it's hard when you are trying to fit in, but you're not even thinking of the game itself, sad to say this is sort of like the direction NS2's friendly PR guy would take, change without basis other then to change something to make it look like he was doing something great or grand without any direction.
Tell me how i am wrong to take this path.
Also, one less visually intrusive way could be to have some HP sensitive parts in crosshair that go from green to red as the enemy HP decreases. The whole crosshair definitely shouldn't change, but for example small areas in inner crosshair can do that. You could also colour increasing area in crosshair red as the enemy HP decreases if that's more helpful visually.
I'd say anything that allows the damage numbers to be removed is still progress to the right direction. Crazy running numbers are part of the whole visual clutter issue that makes NS2 so difficult to comprehend.
One of the main objectives with the health bar change was to make the game more accessible to new players. A new player has no idea how many bullets it takes to get to the center of a chewy skulk, and NS2 is a HARD game. It can be frustrating to die over and over and feel like you are making no progress. Having health bars shown means that you may still die, but now you have a sense of progress. You know how close you were to killing the alien, and because of this engagements are less binary. It's not "live or die", it's "oh i almost got you". For experienced players, that is already how engagements feel, but that is because they have a general sense of the time it takes to kill a skulk (and competitive players know the same for all the lifeforms because they have studied it).
Showing health bars definitely changes up the game for moderately experienced to "veteran" players as well, which I am aware of. For the moderately experienced, fighting lerks and fades may be less frustrating because there will be less of a feeling of aliens being "bullet sponges".
Also as @joshhh pointed out, you will have more information to use for decision making. Previously this information was available, but required an attentive commander to tell you the information. The information flow, as I think @Kouji_San put it, is being turned on its head. The information is still only available to the person actually doing damage, but it opens up a lot more opportunity for communication between the field players to pinch lifeforms and do more of the tactics that high level players use.
The point about using parasite to scout is also a valid one, but I think that is in keeping with the intent of parasite, and is something that will encourage players to use parasite more (especially mid to late game) which is pretty central to the alien meta. Having game mechanics in place which encourage players to play towards the meta is a good thing.
Anyways, I am reading your posts in here and these changes were not just thrown in without a second thought. I have spent many hours on the feature itself, and many more considering the design of it and the ramifications of it. This definitely changes how NS2 is played on a fundamental level, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Oops, my bad. You do have mod powers, though. So you're close enough. :P
A-yup.
I do give you guys credit for trying to change the game on a fundamental level with subtle changes, though. I think that's a good thing.
You can't go back in fight on pure balls as a half-HP Fade, because now they see your HP.
But I loved bluffing!
The thing that you don't understand is that the "absolute HP level" is completely different from "how many damage I've done". It has become an immediate information sharing.
Noble "save the rookies" cause doesn't work here. Because every rookie knows how to play CoD. The hard part is playing as a higher alien lifeform. And this change nerfs that by a lot.
Lit oni should retreat when they're lit. Without healthbars, you would've put your survival as onos on chance. If you were fighting 5 marines with 2 oni, you could've died just as well, if someone made the right call to focus one onos.
You shouldn't go back in a fight on pure balls in any case. If it educates to not do it, then its a good thing.
It buffs both sides.
Some of the feedback so far is ridiculous, its not constructive, you're making assumptions about how it works and then going on a tangent about that.... TEST IT FIRST... 90% of your concerns are not even possible, and you can tell that within 5 minutes of testing.
So, if damage numbers are supposed to be off, does this mean there isn't supposed to be any feedback on damage dealt at all on "high" ranges? (One end of ball court to the other would count as high range - roughly twice the hp bar draw range. For reference.)
I don't like it, like just now, a couple of skulks decided to ignore the high HP marines and target low HP marines, the marines just pushed up from east wing with FULL hp and are now destroying a hive because of the HP Bars, this wouldn't have happened.
@Kasharic just because you like something, and it helps you in game doesn't mean it's actually good.
@Archie just because you dislike something, and it helps your enemy in game doesn't mean it's actually bad.
This raises the skill floor of the game, yeah, but is that actually a bad thing?... oh no, the rookies aren't going to get as quickly and easily rekt by you "pro" players.
Basically all i'm hearing is "this is a more effective way to display information and makes it easier to understand the game... so I don't like it!"
The change makes it easier for rookies to stand a chance... the skill ceiling isn't lowered because of this change, the skill floor is raised making it so that rookies actually stand a chance... and now people have to be more careful with their lifeforms, you can't make as many mistakes, you can't go in on ludicrously low health anymore, because you will die... so in theory this has raised the skill ceiling further than it was prior to the change.
so please, explain, what is it exactly that is BAD about the change.
What?
That's probably my favorite part of NS2... aggro Lerk from room to room on marines who previously had no idea of my HP because they can't communicate it fast enough, often bluffing entirely OR utilizing regen /crag/gorge to trick them to over commit.
The same can be said about the exciting decision of whether or not to risk swooping in for that last bite on the marine running away.. it's been turned into "Yup, hold Mouse1".
Lastly, I am the guy who turns off dmg numbers, minimap and utilizes the most minimal HUD that I can... and now I have floating multi colored bars (friends and enemies alike) down a busy hallway where I previously needed a clean shot to track properly. It's distracting and obscuring to me, and the whole goal of the feature : to know how much damage has been done - was something I had such a good bead on previously as a vet that I didn't need dmg numbers, I was able to determine the TTK close enough without them. If it trains rookies, keep it in Rookie Only servers as others suggest.
So as a veteran this does nothing for me but take away the engagements I found most exciting / interesting in the game and obscure my screen. :-/
I appreciate the problem it's trying to solve, but I do not like what it's sacrificing to do so.
It doesn't raise the skill floor for anyone other then for good people to become great and to dominate, like right now i had people avoiding me because i could destroy them, so they just ran away, you think that's okay?
so you think that the health bars don't help rookies at all? because the aim is to raise the skill floor, or "entry level" of rookies.
Sure this will adjust play, make people have to play differently and potentially have to relearn so old bad habits, but i'm yet to hear anything that says this is a BAD thing... we all want the game to improve, we all want the game to evolve and become better, we all want a shake up to stop the game feeling stale... how is that EVER going to happen if everytime the devs bring something in people just respond with "its not what i've played for the last 3 years so I don't like it"
Why are they a BAD thing? because now rookies can avoid the players that absolutely stomp them? yeah, they should be forced to run into you constantly... that'll learn 'em.
Since there's no damaged alien textures or anything so the health bar helps a lot on seeing wounded enemies.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention this in the patch notes. I should add that.
Quite the contrary, all i've seen so far is w key and spacebar jumping into marine line of sight.
quote from some rookies
"can't bluff attacks anymore"
"hp bars are stupid"
"i can't pretend have low hp and jump around a corner to bait them"
same goes for lerks and other life forms which taunt to make it seem like they have low hp
@remi, mention what you've added to counterbalance that change and why do you think that playing as a higher lifeform is too easy for the new players. (and why do you think that bluffing isn't fun)