Rookie status & servers
Synyster
Earth Join Date: 2016-03-22 Member: 214672Members
Earth Join Date: 2016-03-22 Member: 214672Members
Is there a way I can actually get my rookie status back?
I love the game, but quite frankly I feel pretty disheartened whenever I play on a regular server and just get demolished by someone (or a group of people) who are pretty much professional NS2 players. I can't bash them; because they're good players, but I can bash the system for deeming me too 'experienced' to not be able to play on rookie servers.
Even though I have a grasp of NS2 mechanics, I would still consider myself a rookie simply for the fact that the gameplay involved in NS2 games is just so radically different from anything I've played. These people going through games with insane KDr's have been playing NS2 since its inception and I don't really see how I can learn and improve my gameplay let alone compete when they just rinse you down before you even have time to realise what it is you've done wrong.
I don't really feel like I'm learning anything (least of all enjoying anything) when I get gunned/bitten down in half a second, furthermore it's also frustrating considering the fact you often have to wait on the server browser for up to 15 minutes just to find a populated server.
On rookie servers, I felt more evenly matched, and I felt that I was actually learning useful engagement techniques because I stood at least half a chance against the players I was fighting against, but on regular servers the game can be decided very frequently by whatever team a specific player (or players) decide to join. This doesn't give any incentive to new and inexperienced players to actually engage with the community and gameplay.
I love the game, but quite frankly I feel pretty disheartened whenever I play on a regular server and just get demolished by someone (or a group of people) who are pretty much professional NS2 players. I can't bash them; because they're good players, but I can bash the system for deeming me too 'experienced' to not be able to play on rookie servers.
Even though I have a grasp of NS2 mechanics, I would still consider myself a rookie simply for the fact that the gameplay involved in NS2 games is just so radically different from anything I've played. These people going through games with insane KDr's have been playing NS2 since its inception and I don't really see how I can learn and improve my gameplay let alone compete when they just rinse you down before you even have time to realise what it is you've done wrong.
I don't really feel like I'm learning anything (least of all enjoying anything) when I get gunned/bitten down in half a second, furthermore it's also frustrating considering the fact you often have to wait on the server browser for up to 15 minutes just to find a populated server.
On rookie servers, I felt more evenly matched, and I felt that I was actually learning useful engagement techniques because I stood at least half a chance against the players I was fighting against, but on regular servers the game can be decided very frequently by whatever team a specific player (or players) decide to join. This doesn't give any incentive to new and inexperienced players to actually engage with the community and gameplay.
Comments
However this has been brought up a lot in the past, probably you could increase the time new players are allowed to play on rookie servers.y
but what else would be an alternative, but reasonable way to scale or measure a player's skill or comprehension of the game?
a) Have a server with blacklisted players that are deemed "too good", i.e professional players, high ranking clans etc.
Yeah it sucks, yeah it seems a bit excluding, but new players simply don't have any incentive to come back and play when they don't feel like they're improving at the game at all. This comes back to Welsh Wizards point about not having the playerbase to support something like this, but with the current dwindling playercount it seems that the worst thing we can do is to do nothing.
b) Make the rookie tag dependant on hive skill rather than hive level.
This to me seems like the better idea, perhaps anyone under x hive skill is considered rookie or is at least allowed to join rookie servers. It could be exploited, but I don't think the professional players would purposefully lower their hive score just to play on rookie servers, since they dominate on regular servers already making the issue a moot point. Obviously this method would require some discussion as to how low a player's hive skill needs to be to be considered 'rookie'. Personally I would say under 2000, but I'm not 100% sure as to how the hive skill works so someone with a better understanding could provide a better suggestion.
Very few players are professional in NS2. Competitive NS2 has always been a very small part of the population. A lot of the so called pro players as you called them are pretty far from it.
Rookies are players below level 5. Players used to increase as their total score earned in game increased. Now you increase in level based on XP which you earn by simplying playing the game, with a 750xp bonus if you win, or 250xp bonus if you lose.
Just curious what X skill value you might find acceptable. Any player below the 25th percentile, so the bottom 25% of skill could stay on rookie only servers. Maybe the 33rd percentile and below?
As of November 8th, this is what distribution of skill looked like in NS2.
10% = 36 hive skill
15% = 56 hive skill
20% = 82 hive skill
25% = 120 hive skill
30% = 206 hive skill
35% = 449 hive skill
40% = 739 hive skill
45% = 831 hive skill
50% = 883 hive skill
55% = 916 hive skill
60% = 943 hive skill
65% = 964 hive skill
70% = 982 hive skill
75% = 999 hive skill
80% = 1023 hive skill
85% = 1068 hive skill
90% = 1190 hive skill
95% = 1555 hive skill
Even if the devs decided to make rookie servers for player, it is not easy to know where to draw the line. If you do it even as low as 35%, many rookies would be forced out early. If you do it too high, maybe even as high as 50%, you could cut the playerbase in half. There is no sweetspot.
To be fair, those numbers I have in that spoiler are wildly outdated at this point. On November 8th, hive 2 was released. How hive skill updates was changed for the better. I don't know what the actually distribution looks today.
Hence rookie only server have nothing directly to do with the personal skill. I have seen rookies that can easily compete against the average ns2 player after playing 10 hours. On the other hand there are players with over 1k hours who are still defeated by players with only 100 hours.
In that matter personal skill isn't correlating that much with personal skill.
The issue that high skilled players get mixed up with low skilled players makes the game indeed frustrating for everybody involved. The only solution at this point might be too directly match players with each other.
As that is not part of the game at the moment I would recommend everybody to use the play now function as much as possible. Play Now takes your skill into account when picking a server for you. That might end with you being put on a empty server but as long as enough players start using play now those empty servers should fill up very quickly.
In theory as soon as more than 50% of the current player base start using mainly play now to join servers the quality of games should improve drastically.
I think you meant "hours played doesn't correlate to skill"
Hive skill and hours played a correlation coefficient of 0.56. The closer the correlation coefficient is to 1 or -1 shows the strength of the relationship. 0.56 shows there is a relationship, but it is not all that strong.
Maybe it can be your next NS2 home.
It looks like people these days cant invest the needed time to seed a server (cause important option trading for sure).
Seeding is great for training and to discuss parts of the game btw (aka learning).
I cant remember any successfull low skill restricted server. They where up for a while, empty most of the time and disables restriction, change name or go offline after that.
If people want these servers so much, then tell me why above happened to all these servers.
It was russian
It seems a lot of people view the term 'casual' as a satanic sin that should never be uttered least of all implemented. But in actuality, the most successful games will have some casual aspect implemented in one way or another because whether you want to accept it or not the 'elitist' community are the minority.
Something separate from the main game, a training ground of sorts, and players will still have the option to join the regular servers whenever they please. The singleplayer training is a poor representation of online gameplay simply for the fact that it is played with AI opponents, which can only teach you so much.
Wrong, in the most succesful shooter aka CS:Go the best and the worst playing in the same environment.
The only difference is the skill segregation based on the ammount of players but both playing the exact same game.
Sure, you can play other gamemodes or with more people, but you have to search these "hidden" servers via the steam serverbrowser and all these servers are unranked. (oh my god, other games doing this also? *shocking*)
And most of the last changes where made to please the casuals (healthbars, larger hitbox on aliens, Boneshield changes, rookie only servers, more tutorials, ...)
Ah... thanks for Combat, UWE.
FLG wanted to make their own game, called Xenoswarm, which was not going to be related to NS2 at all. (But inspired by their Xenoswarm mod.) UWE then approached them and basically said "hey wouldn't it be awesome if you do a standalone Combat, we'll publish you". So they did, figuring that the support from UWE would make things easier than doing things all on their own. Only, UWE basically left them standing in the rain. They did pretty much nothing to market the game, for starters. Hell, on Combat's release Hugh released a video that was basically 2 minutes saying "Yeah I don't get why any NS2 player would need this in addition to NS2", then the rest of the video gushing about the latest NS2 patch.
That is only the tip of the iceberg; there's some really ugly stuff hidden there. Money stuff. I don't know exact details and even if I would, I wouldn't share them here. If you want to know more I suggest asking FLG directly; the only one of them that is really still around is Chris afaik. However, for obvious he doesn't exactly like to talk about it and has become quite jaded about this, NS2 and the NS2 community in general.
The fact that most people think their work should have been free and basically treated Combat like shit is a big part of it. Not saying that everything on the FLG side was perfect... but that was a big part of why they quit.
Chris is doing some modding for Fallout 4 now. I don't know about the others.
Oh, and at some point FLG wanted to give their game away for free (as in make it free on steam), but UWE wouldn't let them.
Nowadays there's semi-regular organised combat games (every one or two months or so), organised by Chris and Wooza. If you ask nicely up to a day before the game, you'll even get a free key to play.
I just find it hilarious that Combat as a standalone was such a failure whilst having the potential to make NS2 huge would it have been free. With player skins shared over both games.
But as a paid game? Naah we already had the Combat mod for free, the standalone idea was going to split the small community and it was way too expensive for a rehash. It was doomed to fail maybe FLG didnt chose the pricetag tho.
By the way you dont need to quote me when Im literally the comment before
As far as I know, literally everything you are complaining about is mainly due to UWE's fault, not FLG's.
And yes, UWE invested money. Apparently, sketchy stuff happened. I won't say more because I haven't heard both side's versions. (In fact I have only heard half a version.)
I don't want to disclose any information that I was trusted with in private. I suggest you go ahead and ask them themselves.
It's more then you've shown. If you've got some big issue with combat then why don't you get on flg's discord and ask the devs themselves instead of making false claims here.
Entitled much? God forbid somebody gets paid for the work that they do. Oh and the mod was gonig to die regardless. The mod copyright was owned by flg and they weren't going to update it anyway since they had moved on from ns2 as a whole. For their sake they should have kept working on their other project, but I am glad they made combat SA since that's the game that brought me to ns2.
As @F0rdPrefect mentioned, some of the devs are still working on combat despite all the shit thats been thrown at them so I highly respect their dedication, misplaced or not. Maybe you should show a bit yourself before making baseless claims.
And yes, touching on what @F0rdPrefect said, there's a Combat discord channel thru which combat games are organized periodically. Sad to have to be organized this way, but it's fun when they happen. https://discord.gg/cARC87G
@Synyster
I've seen you on pubs and, imo, you weren't actually doing that bad.
If you want to improve yourself and not get demolished, then do the following:
1) read through this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RIVwXTN9G9NEfTkcou-x_cqL6sxThqlHJA7ptX_ccwU/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PqnAuicnfMN9hU-253q32IYWWE2qIWVimuLqK9ONYEY/edit
2) practise your mechanical skills with someone who is better than you.
Join a private server and practise 1vs1s.
As an alien you want to practise to not lose speed / never remain stationary while doing damage.
As marine you want to practise your dodge movement and aim.
Both is about proper timing. Start slow, but try to do it right.
3) watch streams of clan wars and/or gathers, eg here:
4) if you really want to get better fast, then signup at ensl.org and play gathers.
There are things that you will not learn on your own in pubs. Mainly knowledge about where and when to fight.
You will learn bad habits in pubs. Especially as alien, you will often take fights that you shouldn't.
For example, when you're a fade, you may try to engage a lone shotgun in an open room and that shotguns knows you're coming. 9 out of 10 times, you may kill that shotgun, because that shotgun may not be very good, but that 10th guy will tear you apart and you will lose your lifeform.
The problem then was not that that he was a professional shotgunner, but that you engaged a shotgunner all by yourself. Even though you may win this kind of engagement 9 out of 10 times, you should not take it and always play like your opponent will hit every shot. This means you need to utilize corners and other life forms to make it impossible for the marine to apply enough damage to kill you.
Don't commit to engagements too much. If you miss your swipes, leave and don't try too hard to kill a marine. Not winning an enagement is not as bad as losing your lifeform.