Marines buying own weapons
Zamma
Join Date: 2004-05-04 Member: 28458Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2004-05-04 Member: 28458Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">views</div>What's everyones view on this?
Personally I can't see how this fits into the RTS format of natural selection. Players buying their own wepaons just means that their is no forced organisation by the comm.
If a phasegate needs mining then who's gonna spend res on mines when they could get a brand spanking new shotgun! It just seems to take a more "combat" approach then the typical RTS gameplay of ns.
I think if you implement it how this sounds it will not go down well. However I don't know if you, the UE team, have any concepts or methods of making this work.
Peoples views?
Personally I can't see how this fits into the RTS format of natural selection. Players buying their own wepaons just means that their is no forced organisation by the comm.
If a phasegate needs mining then who's gonna spend res on mines when they could get a brand spanking new shotgun! It just seems to take a more "combat" approach then the typical RTS gameplay of ns.
I think if you implement it how this sounds it will not go down well. However I don't know if you, the UE team, have any concepts or methods of making this work.
Peoples views?
Comments
I think some items (mines) should be drop-able by the commander while others (weapons) can be purchasable.
In normal NS, you'd just stop dropping him that HMG, and instead focus on your other, better players. Under a stocking system, you would have no control over how many times he would get one.
Maybe a better implemented request system, where Marines could preferentially request a certain weapon, which could then be aye'd or nay'd by the Comm??
As others already suggested, donations may be part of the res-system, which means both commanders can donate res to (good) players, who hopefully will invest the res in things needed like mines.
In the current ns you already have the chance that the dropped mines are picked up by a noob, who doesn't use the mines correctly or even by a good player with a "serious buisness" attitude, who's just going to toy around with mine ladders or other crap.
So I don't see an in-/decreased risk with res-donations going to be abused like mines are.
If at all, the comm has more control, because he can remember, which players abuse res donations.
I don't like the stocked weapons idea, because bad players and rambos loosing their weapon aren't punished as necrosis already mentioned.
Let's assume that res-income by rts, res for kills and res-donations are part of the res-system, which means players receive a very little part of the res-income, get res due to frags and donations in addition to spend on equipment.
This way better players will get better weapons more often to make an impact and in general players learn to care about their equipment just like aliens have to care about their expensive lifeform.
Merging their res systems may be counter to that goal.
I understand the objective, but I fear that it might be outside the scope of the game.
That said, how do you allow marines to buy their own weapons, but in such a way that their Comm still has overall control and thus prevents them from going Shotty when he wants to tool up for a HA train?
Being stuck with what the Comm gives you has always been part and parcel of NS, and its certainly helps keep the troops in line when they know they can earn a better weapon for following orders.
As for mines making their way into the hands of nubs, most canny Comms will specify who is on mine duty, and anyone who screws it up will likely find themselves kicked, or at the very least completely ignored by their commander.
Maybe it's better to leave res-donation to the alien commander and replace it with the currently used equipment drop for the marine commander.
This way the commander has some more control and moves like shotgun-rush or beacon sg-rush through a phasegate are still possible as well as giving marines the needed equipment to perform a certain strategy or just to help them out, if they are all on low res and guns are needed.
If not anything else, it puts enormous pressure to the communication. It has to be smooth as anything if the marines are about to buy their own guns. They possibly need to know the lifeform count, the amount of time before something like 2nd hive goes up, chambers, OCs, res tower locations. Its sometimes a pain to keep marines informed enough in 6v6 with comm dropping the stuff. Now if marines are the ones getting the guns: Comm informs marines that he needs RTs down quick, tells them the locations, routes and possibly the alien buildings around. After that the marines need to make sure they've got a few welders, a gl, some HMGs and a sg or something while not having 2 GLs, all HMG or all welders and a newbie with something like mines. That's a lot of chat and time wasted on setup comm could've done in 2 seconds and then informed the marines to go.
... And it doesn't work properly even nowadays since people are confused of the fast game tempo. At worst, they will be flooding the voice chat for a long period of time and nobody on the field is going the hear the skulks coming and the commander can't use voice chat to keep the rest of the groups going. I'd say its a bit of a challenge for the lower end competetive team, not to speak of pub servers.
So this change may add balance, but adds chaos and makes it more difficult to establish teamwork and a needed "workflow" on the marine side.
Which leads to the question, if there are ways to make the alien teamwork and communication more ns1-marines-like and thus easier to learn by making the necessary changes to the alien commander and res distribution, instead of increasing the learning curve and difficulty for marine teamwork.
In addition the teams have to stay as unique as possible with all changes necessary.
Aliens play a bit of different. They can often sit back and fight when they've got the opportunity, while marines are forced to push for alien hive locations and nodes. Also, aliens pick lifeforms one by one mostly. So you've got gorges at start, lerks a bit later on and fades at some point. It's easy to check how many people are getting nodes, if its not enough, go ahead and gorge. The same goes for lerks and hive, while the rest can go fade or something. Marines on the other hand have to pick most of the stuff simultaneusly and its quite situational. Obiviously the gameplay is going to change more or less, but I think you need to keep the marines on the aggression to keep the game interesting.
Personally I can't see how this fits into the RTS format of natural selection. Players buying their own wepaons just means that their is no forced organisation by the comm.
If a phasegate needs mining then who's gonna spend res on mines when they could get a brand spanking new shotgun! It just seems to take a more "combat" approach then the typical RTS gameplay of ns.
I think if you implement it how this sounds it will not go down well. However I don't know if you, the UE team, have any concepts or methods of making this work.
Peoples views?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->I think it would work better as unlockables if I'm honest. We looked at the system long and hard for Nuclear Dawn and for us the best way to integrate in individual weapon purchases with an RTS system was unlockable tiers.
Basically the Commander pays resources to unlock a tier of weapons. In that tier there would be 1 weaker basic gun that all Marines would be able to use for free, then there would be 1 or 2 better guns that they would have to work towards unlocking on their own. If you just went for a '1 weapon and a pistol' setup, you could also allow players to pick up better weapons and carry them until they die. When they die, if they don't have that weapon unlocked, they would switch back to their old weapon setup. If they were already carrying it, they would respawn with that weapon. This would also allow someone who is experienced at the game to gift their more advanced weapon to a friend who might be new to the game or just not as good.
This way Joe Public always has access to new weapons and the Commander is involved with the weapons research (and can take it in different directions, i.e. <i>shotguns</i> would be a different tier to <i>explosives</i>, so the Comm would choose to research one over the other based on his strategy). It also means that even if a newbie is never good enough to unlock the Shotgun Mk II, they can still pick it up off a corpse and try it out for a bit. <i>Unlike the TF2 unlocks, this is not skill prohibitive.</i>
The big question with this system is how the unlocks work. Fitting these in with a resource system is tricky, because it means when you're balancing how much techs, weapons and so on cost, changing one thing at one end of the tree will affect all the other tech at the same level. E.g. balancing shotguns to unlock for less and it could mean there is more res for quicker Motion Tracking. It's a ###### to get right.
One of the proposed solutions we had for this was to split resources into 'personal' and 'team' res pools, with various actions contributing to both personal resources and team resources. There was an element of 'res for kills', but mixed in with points for teamplay like 'health points healed', 'ammo given', etc.. So, building a structure would cost team resources, but it would give you a small amount of personal resources, based on how many 'points' you built. It might cost the commander a bit of team resources to unlock 'support' items, like a healing device, ammo replenishment device or a welder, and it would cost the individual some healing device you a bit of personal resources, but that would then mean the individual would gradually recuperate the cost by healing his team mates or repairing structures.
The beauty of this system is that the personal resources are completely separate from the team resources, so balancing something for the FPS game doesn't affect the RTS resource model.
(those support items are obviously open to friendly-fire exploits, so would be set to give only very small amounts of personal resources, but you get the picture)
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Your example about the mines is solved with this system, since the comm would unlock 'explosives', and every Marine would be able to carry perhaps 1 mine per life by default, and perhaps upgrade to 2 or 3 mines per life using their own personal resources (how does this scale for larger teams? - just give each map a minelimit so only a certain amount of default mines can be placed at a time).
Merging their res systems may be counter to that goal.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm not entirely sure whether that was the model that Crispy just described, or not. But I think it could be good.
Also, for those <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=103418" target="_blank">with the time...</a>
I suggested a representative currency system, where guns will still cost the team resources, yet allow players to purchase their own weapons with what they've earnt. I think this might be good also, if it is felt that it is necessary to keep gun costs (for the team).
edit: you know, I was thinking... in the podcast they mentioned two resources.
if say, one resource is a 'personal' resource (for alien lifeforms, upgrades; marine equipment), and the other was a 'team' resource (for marine research, buildings; alien structures); wouldn't this solve most of the problems? you wouldn't even need an alien commander, gorge will do the job fine.
edit: err, was this mentioned already? did i miss it?
<!--quoteo(post=1677606:date=May 4 2008, 08:28 PM:name=Crispy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crispy @ May 4 2008, 08:28 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1677606"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->(click the arrow)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i think it might be different.
just have to decide how the 'personal' resource is earned/produced, and whether it has to be taken into account since it affects the overall strategy; or if it's simply just a 'personal pool' system, which doesn't sound nearly as good an idea to me.
In normal NS, you'd just stop dropping him that HMG, and instead focus on your other, better players. Under a stocking system, you would have no control over how many times he would get one.
Maybe a better implemented request system, where Marines could preferentially request a certain weapon, which could then be aye'd or nay'd by the Comm??<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think devs will avoid obvious exploits. Give them a little credit. It's possible marines have their own res(25 res for a shotgun seems to indicate this, maybe it's cheaper for the comm to buy it but at he cost of his attention, or maybe the "second resource"). Also, a cooldown timer to prevent a marine from "looting the stocks" seems a simple and easy solution.
<!--quoteo(post=1677598:date=May 4 2008, 07:17 AM:name=Crispy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crispy @ May 4 2008, 07:17 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1677598"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Basically the Commander pays resources to unlock a tier of weapons. In that tier there would be 1 weaker basic gun that all Marines would be able to use for free, then there would be 1 or 2 better guns that they would have to work towards unlocking on their own. If you just went for a '1 weapon and a pistol' setup, you could also allow players to pick up better weapons and carry them until they die. When they die, if they don't have that weapon unlocked, they would switch back to their old weapon setup. If they were already carrying it, they would respawn with that weapon. This would also allow someone who is experienced at the game to gift their more advanced weapon to a friend who might be new to the game or just not as good.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is the way Savage worked, and although I'm not against the system in theory, it tends to lead to hard counters, ie exoskeletons up one path ans jps up another, flame throwers another. The flamethrower add on could go either way, being at the very top of the tech tree or being near the bottom for easy access, so I'm not going to hazard a guess which way the devs are leaning toward.
Not to say all hard counters are bad, but generally they decrease the FPS-fun aspect of the game for some strategic variety. IMO they should be used sparingly and strategic variety should be increased by having more options(as hard as that is).
I raised the issues I did, because a serial looter is hard to distinguish from someone frantically trying to defend the base. A cooldown timer is a good idea, yes, but if you're spamrushing a hive you could easily hit the cooldown limit, despite making legitimate use of your weapons.
I try to think of potentially negative overlaps when considering changes. That is by no means a slur against the devs.
I raised the issues I did, because a serial looter is hard to distinguish from someone frantically trying to defend the base. A cooldown timer is a good idea, yes, but if you're spamrushing a hive you could easily hit the cooldown limit, despite making legitimate use of your weapons.
I try to think of potentially negative overlaps when considering changes. That is by no means a slur against the devs.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sorry if I offended you, I didn't mean for it to sound that harsh. Either giving the comm the ability to drop weapons and have a cooldown timer with a shared resource system, or a personal resource system without a cool down timer would avoid the problem you pose(in the latter case if the marine has enough res to loot he's probably a) giving them to the team or, b) a really dedicated greifer). There is just so much up in the air that there're a lot of potential pitfalls and solutions.
I retract my statement.
Comm "authorizes" weapons to the stock
Players use their own res to buy these weapons from the stock
Granted, a system like this does have its flaws, and would need some way of preventing the comm from authorizing an infinite amount of each weapon. A couple of ways to deal with this would be:
1. Comm uses res to authorize weapons (I don't like this idea, but it could work)
2. Weapons are each worth a certain amount of points (a mine is 1 point, a shotgun is 3 points, or something like that) and the stock has a maximum point value it could reach (which perhaps goes up with the amount of armories you have)
3. A limit on how many of each weapon can be authorized in a certain time frame (something like, 10 mine packs a minute or 3 shotguns a minute)
This would allow the comm to control which weapons are available, yet would prevent rambonoobs from taking all of the good weapons. Well, in theory.
Personal res system does sound like the route they're going to take, and does make a bridge between CO and Classic in terms of how you spend your res bounty.
The difference of course being that in Classic, there is no autoComm and you won't have complete upgrade autonomy.
So you can assume that, nano res will be the comm's private res, and used for the usual stuff, and also unlocking weapons and abilities, and gear in the tech tree.
Then power will be the players pool resource that is used to manufacture those weapons/gear/abilities.
I'd say it will be like this for both teams.
that way the comm can keep researching items, and its up to the players if they lose the weapons - but atleast this way it won't completely cripple the team if weapons are lost.
<!--quoteo(post=1677613:date=May 4 2008, 10:03 PM:name=Harimau)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Harimau @ May 4 2008, 10:03 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1677613"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->edit: you know, I was thinking... in the podcast they mentioned two resources.
if say, one resource is a 'personal' resource (for alien lifeforms, upgrades; marine equipment), and the other was a 'team' resource (for marine research, buildings; alien structures); wouldn't this solve most of the problems? you wouldn't even need an alien commander, gorge will do the job fine.
edit: err, was this mentioned already? did i miss it?
<!--quoteo(post=1677606:date=May 4 2008, 08:28 PM:name=Crispy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crispy @ May 4 2008, 08:28 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1677606"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->(click the arrow)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i think it might be different.
just have to decide how the 'personal' resource is earned/produced, and whether it has to be taken into account since it affects the overall strategy; or if it's simply just a 'personal pool' system, which doesn't sound nearly as good an idea to me.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i think the key difference is this part:
"you wouldn't even need an alien commander, gorge will do the job fine."
that is, when dropping structures/hives, the gorge can spend team resources; but when evolving, or upgrading onesself, you'd take from the personal pool.
i'm still iffy about how you earn 'credit' towards taking from the personal resource, and how the team would gain the personal resource. maybe each res node produces 1:1 of team:personal?
edit: oh yeah, i'd have to disagree with one thing though. if it were nano/metal and power as resources, then I would think that power would be the team resource, while nano/metal would be the personal resource.
but, i have a feeling that UWE aren't even going in this direction; maybe taking a CnC style approach?
I would personally just like to see the buy menu used for upgrades and maybe items, such a welder and mines but, they have a plan in mind so if this ends up working out for the best, on what they envision then I'm fine with that to. Again seeing they made NS, and did a great job with it, so why wouldn't they on this.
As people have said, players in the competitive scene would still purchase equipment they're meant to, and players in the pub scene would just have more fun with weapons they can or want to use. And that's what it's all about right? Fun?
As people have said, players in the competitive scene would still purchase equipment they're meant to, and players in the pub scene would just have more fun with weapons they can or want to use. And that's what it's all about right? Fun?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i think you've really hit the nail on the head <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
Everybody knows it's all about stripping the visuals to minimum in favor of area of visibility and fps, re-texturing player models to bright pink and pumping up one's e-penis and the measure of one's worth in general
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/nerd-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::nerdy::" border="0" alt="nerd-fix.gif" />
As people have said, players in the competitive scene would still purchase equipment they're meant to, and players in the pub scene would just have more fun with weapons they can or want to use. And that's what it's all about right? Fun?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That is true, I am all for encouragement over enforcement. I guess I have this predetermined notion, from past game experiences that used the self buy system and how... horrible they turned out to be. But then again I'm sure it wasn't from the weapon buying selection, that made those games as bad as they were.
Also you are right about what games are about, fun, and that should be priority number 1.
fun, teamwork, community, and balance.
As people have said, players in the competitive scene would still purchase equipment they're meant to, and players in the pub scene would just have more fun with weapons they can or want to use. And that's what it's all about right? Fun?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It seems we can't get the teamwork working even if its enforced. I can see your point, but it might take the game to even more disorganised state. Whether its a worthy sacrifice for the fun of some players is another thing. At least I'd hate to comm if I lost the remaining bits of tactical power I have in pub games. It's like watching an ongoing catastrophe and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Hmm, don't jump the gun just yet, we still don't know just what Commander/Hive Mind "spells" will do yet - my guess is that it will be something like how scan from the observatory is now, lay down a circle of helpful goodness within limits so its not spammed all the time; and just like we want to stay where we can see the cloaked Kharaa, perhaps these helpful bits from the Commander will be something teams will want to group together to get benefit from, possibly even tied to the squad grouping and/or way points. Of course, I'm just speculating, but it would be another way to use encouragement rather than enforcement/punishment - a follow the carrot approach if you will that doesn't restrict either side's options.
Also, if research were expanded to a greater branching tree, you could get a lot of play value for the Commander encouraging his team out of that as well, which could be tied into the equipment loadout of the grunt marine.
Just letting you know, its not doom and gloom, these things can be implemented well and completely circumvent the problems that other games have found with weapon selection individually.
Personally, I think instead of just blurring the background during weapon selection, it occurs to me that a marine might spend some time in there choosing, while his body stands around vulnerable to attack - I would think that stepping into the armory for a bit of protection while making selection would alleviate a lot of frustration at not being a interface speed hack just to not get munched on while picking/switching/loading out a piece of equipment to your marine's kit. If the model of the armory doesn't support that, give the marine a force field (thus the blurring) while they tweak their kit. If armory (or whatever hands out equipment in NS2) is destroyed, protection is removed, interface goes away and back to being munched on.
TBH that's my fear too. Of course it's not all doom and gloom, but it is a concern.
I wouldn't give the dev team directly that much credit. I think the PT and vets system had alot to the game balance. I mean its version 3.1 now and NS is only just as balanced as it's ever been. It took them a really long time to get it so refined.
In my honest opinion I would happy with a port of the current NS gameplay (especially the marine RTS style of things) to the source engine with ofc a few added effects and gameplay changes such as dynamic infestation.
The more crap the dev team adds the harder balancing gets. As a competetive player this worries me as I can see the game being fine for a 24 man nub fest on a public server.
YET I still may be wrong... perhaps having a team of 12 marines buying their own guns is a bad idea?
This is the thing... I can not see this working...
The best you can hope for in public games, is to encourage both communication and cooperation in order to facilitate better team offensives/tactics; but that's true regardless of whether players buy/choose their own weapons or not.
Anyway, JP/HA is very important in terms of tactics, because they provide other means of transportation, with different speeds (I know that HA in NS2 might be faster), which might cause a hive-rushing squad to split up, due to the fact that HA will go down the corridor, new players in JPs will do the same route but 3 times faster and players who discovered the map will choose a different route through the vent...