Ns, From The Playtester Point Of View.
Grendel
All that is fear... Join Date: 2002-07-19 Member: 970Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, NS2 Playtester
All that is fear... Join Date: 2002-07-19 Member: 970Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, NS2 Playtester
<div class="IPBDescription">Why a simple suggestion, ISN'T.</div> We are looking for a game where tactical skill will carry the day, moderated by "decisive action" by players, e.g. Efficiently killing enemy expansions, taking out key objectives, resource control etc.
I rather like balance (broadly speaking) as it stands. We will try not to deviate too far from the current scenario. Costs may be increased/power of said abilities may be reduced, but overall we'll be striving to keep a similar dynamic balance.
It should be noted that balance is made up of two things. Terrain and ability to dominate it. Some issues (sieging two places from one spot) are a map issue. This is not to say that the map creator has made a mistake. Most of NS's core maps were made PRIOR to a lot of balance changes. Please bear this in mind whilst playing. NS offers a lot more problems than most other games when we change things.
Let's exemplify a situation. Many people claim that X weapon should do more or less damage. Let's now take a scenario where we have in fact increased the damage capacity of, say, the skulk's parasite, a relatively minor component of the game.
Firstly, rapid fire parasite suddenly useful? Well that makes movement chambers a little more important. Of course, increasing one person's damage capacity can reduce another's ability to build structures (less overflow), reduces the other team's ability to fight, possibly increases their overall spawn queue time, and will increase their "time taken to do" most things if they take heavier damage and thus heavier losses.
Hence they will take longer to say, develop Level 3 armour or an HMG. Result? The marines die more. Thus aliens control more nodes. Result? Marines are screwed at the start. Result? Nice "balance suggestion". Think it through in future.
Essentially, NS isn't a game of X+Y=Z
It's more of a X * X +Y/(XF*XT) - R/F(XY-F) +L*N/Y + R(D+L/Y) = Are you getting the idea yet?
Remember when you come up with ideas or feeling like chewing out PT's or Devs for problems, that a lot of things have been tried and a lot of things have a much bigger impact on the game than you appreciate. We welcome suggestions, only asking that you read the FAQ, THINK and at least to a small degree, appreciate that real people with feelings devoted a large amount of time to the game you now play.
e.g. A TINY error during testing made Lerk's carapace take ALL damage before they lost health. Result, aliens slaughtered marines constantly. That, when you think about it, only gave (Then) Lerks about 180 HP. Not a HUGE increase from what they can currently take. But enough of an increase so that marines were lucky to last 5 mins.
INTERESTING FOOTNOTE:
Throughout testing, Kharaa were almost always the stronger side. Currently, in PTs, the games are usually even. Game balance may not be perfect. Neither are the people who play the game. Imagine balancing an RTS where sometimes your best unit is answering the phone. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
I rather like balance (broadly speaking) as it stands. We will try not to deviate too far from the current scenario. Costs may be increased/power of said abilities may be reduced, but overall we'll be striving to keep a similar dynamic balance.
It should be noted that balance is made up of two things. Terrain and ability to dominate it. Some issues (sieging two places from one spot) are a map issue. This is not to say that the map creator has made a mistake. Most of NS's core maps were made PRIOR to a lot of balance changes. Please bear this in mind whilst playing. NS offers a lot more problems than most other games when we change things.
Let's exemplify a situation. Many people claim that X weapon should do more or less damage. Let's now take a scenario where we have in fact increased the damage capacity of, say, the skulk's parasite, a relatively minor component of the game.
Firstly, rapid fire parasite suddenly useful? Well that makes movement chambers a little more important. Of course, increasing one person's damage capacity can reduce another's ability to build structures (less overflow), reduces the other team's ability to fight, possibly increases their overall spawn queue time, and will increase their "time taken to do" most things if they take heavier damage and thus heavier losses.
Hence they will take longer to say, develop Level 3 armour or an HMG. Result? The marines die more. Thus aliens control more nodes. Result? Marines are screwed at the start. Result? Nice "balance suggestion". Think it through in future.
Essentially, NS isn't a game of X+Y=Z
It's more of a X * X +Y/(XF*XT) - R/F(XY-F) +L*N/Y + R(D+L/Y) = Are you getting the idea yet?
Remember when you come up with ideas or feeling like chewing out PT's or Devs for problems, that a lot of things have been tried and a lot of things have a much bigger impact on the game than you appreciate. We welcome suggestions, only asking that you read the FAQ, THINK and at least to a small degree, appreciate that real people with feelings devoted a large amount of time to the game you now play.
e.g. A TINY error during testing made Lerk's carapace take ALL damage before they lost health. Result, aliens slaughtered marines constantly. That, when you think about it, only gave (Then) Lerks about 180 HP. Not a HUGE increase from what they can currently take. But enough of an increase so that marines were lucky to last 5 mins.
INTERESTING FOOTNOTE:
Throughout testing, Kharaa were almost always the stronger side. Currently, in PTs, the games are usually even. Game balance may not be perfect. Neither are the people who play the game. Imagine balancing an RTS where sometimes your best unit is answering the phone. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
Slap those crappy threads in Suggestions right in the face!
You == Truth Sayer!
'This game is balanced.... NOW STOP FKIN WHINING!'
<!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
So it makes you think a bit before you ask for hand grenades, for instance. How would that not screw with the balance? As it is now marines must buy a very expensive gun to have indirect fire and around corner fire. A hand grenade could really mess up stuff, though it seems harmless at a glance.
eg, jep rushes or variations,
just to add nothing is EVER fully balanced, ESPECIALLY if in a rts/fps like this, the "units" are real people.
If you include too many factors or make it too complex it's bound too have unforeseen effects on other parts of the game and before you know it, the entire game ends up out of kilter, as per Grendel's example.
At one point, playtesters were concerned that combat was too fast - there were seldom large-scale firefights, because it usually took only a matter of seconds for one of the two combatants to die after first spotting each other. As a fix, Flayra decided he would reduce ALL damage by 20%. Such a broad change that affected both sides exactly the same should have had a negligible effect on balance.... except it ended up grossly unbalancing the game in the aliens' favor. With the lower damage from LMG and pistol, skulks could survive long enough to close ranks and start dishing out their (now 3-hit-lethal) bite attacks.
Ideas are seldom as simple in practice as they are in the S&I forum.
While even the slightest change can totally affect gameplay, sometimes major changes can make it for the better. For example almost at the end of PTing v1, there was a major overhaul of the RP system due to the suggestions of some of the PTers. In the begininng, it was horrible and lead to some of the worst games in terms of speed and balance (wait 5 years to build second node). However, things were worked out, yielding the current better RP system. Sure it must have extended PTing by months, but the end result was a better game. So remember while a slight suggestion can widly impact a game, in the end it might be the better.
But yes, sometimes I do feel like banging my head on my desk after reading the Suggestions forum, some ideas are just... not very well thought through at all.
I'm sorry, but that has to be the most hillarious line I've read all day.
The meat of the post is well thought out and expressed. I expected no less. We all have to remember what a huge undertaking all of this has been from the beginning. I too drop my head and shake silently after reading the suggestions of someone who has played three games and contends that he or she knows everything about balance. Realize many of the things being suggested small as they may seem will have a huge reaction much like a small stone thrown into a large stagnant pool. All changes WILL radiate out into all other aspects of the game. I personally would like to thank the people who have thought out their suggestions and presented them in a well formated post with supports for the balance changes they would like to be instituted. Secondly, I would like to thank the NS team for their years of hard work on this project, because balance this close in a game is sometimes not accomplished until five or six versions have been released, and I would hope all other players of ns are thankful for that as well.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Murphy's Corollaries:
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->3. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
4. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->8. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->12. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
<b>13. Every solution breeds new problems.</b><!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--><b>If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
...
The only perfect science is hind-sight.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hopefully people will take note of this and make smarted suggestions.
Grendel, perhaps you should put a sticky of this on the suggestions forum?
STOP taking some of those threads in the suggestion forums so seriously! You DON't need ot bang your head, you just need to lock the thread!
...
The only perfect science is hind-sight.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
---Edsger Dijkstra
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
---C.A.R. Hoare
It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.
---Bruce Tognazzini
so i'm not alone...once i clicked on the s&i forum on accident...blood was spilt...lots of it :o
<!--emo&:0--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wow.gif'><!--endemo-->
Anon.
You must have forseen the inevitable when you created it, to be perfectly honest im surprised there aren't more posts asking for jeeps, helicopters and spaceships.
I hope you guys realize that actual people play this game too, not just computer science majors (like me) and people who have played video games since age 4 (also me). Some people also post things while stoned. Either way, you're going to get lots of suggestions that aren't useful for anything except upping your post count. Yay.
Wait, we already have spaceships! Some of the levels are spaceships!
Of course, I suspect they wanted to fly a battlecruiser in refinery? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
From this we can assume that as long as the FAQ is in place, there will always be someone (the something in the quote) will do wrong and post a useless or near-useless post according to the FAQ.
Remove the FAQ however, and people will request one so they can better concentrate on their ideas; and that FAQ will never be read by some people.
----
So no matter what you do there will ALWAYS be the person whom always posts a useless or near-useless idea on the S&I section. <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
-edit- also, if there are no "Rocket Launcher" or similar posts for awhile then someone will obviously post one.
Thought Process
1) Wow... I am creative... I just had a great Idea!
2) Will this benifit the game?
3) Do I play in a Public environment or a Clan environment
4) What might some chain reaction consequences be? (E.G will more poeple want to evolve to Lerk?)
5) What do a few others people on my server think about my ideas (Other people are great at belittling you and telling you why you are wrong)
6) Can I defend why a change should be made?
7) I might just post this in the S&I forum!
Then go and post your idea and give some reasons why it should be implemented and some consequences of your idea. (not all consequences are bad)
I think the problem is that people just post any old idea that pops into their head. The S&I forum (to the best of my knowledge) was put there so that the Devs could get another source for some potential gameplay enhancing ideas.
If you are thinking of posting something for the devs to read, try getting it by some people in your server first.
<edit> Spelling <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->