Are you sure your sentence doesn't prove the point that you cannot in practice predict the win rates of an asymmetrical game? You acknowledge the need for empirical evidence for hoverboard rugby. Would you also acknowledge it for:
Football where one team has stun guns to shoot the other team?
Tennis where one player has a robotic super-fast arm and the other shoes with infinite grip?
American Football where one team's armour is electrified and the other team has super speed robotic legs?
And if you would acknowledge it for those sports, why not NS2, which is orders of magnitude more asymmetrical?
But at the same time, I think it's pretty frikkin' awesome we've achieved this with such a complex, asymmetric game. And that's worth a blog post.
I think this is the kind of sentence that scares some of us - you could achieve 50/50 remarkably easily by adjusting just one variable. I'm not saying you don't know that, just that these "go us!" sentences are scary :P. 50/50 isn't worth a dime, let alone a blog post, if the second of Hugh's criteria isn't satisfied.
I have never written a description of how to balance Natural Selection 2 and don't pretend to have the knowledge or skills to do so. The post you are referring to is a discussion of two important elements of balance: The probability of victory in a randomly sampled game, and the quality of experience that comes from all the little variables that feed into the balance whole.
Balance changes must be made carefully and subtly, lest they upset the delicate equilibrium that keeps the incredibly complex system that is Natural Selection 2 from crashing down into an ‘Aliens OP!’ nightmare. As the move from 239 – 240 shows, subtle changes can have big positive effects.
...but that's pretty much as far as it goes. Maps, gametimes, number of players... this can be done by anybody with relative ease and only shows us that you're looking at statistics/graphs and thinking that they're important. Citing these doesn't exactly instill confidence in (at least some of) the community that UWE has identified really crucial elements of balance - not just within the game, but within the round - that they are actively addressing, irrespective of W/L outcome (which should be the final parse check, especially considering the plethora of areas to visit).
Paying lip service to our ideals without any proper demonstration to support this falls short of what I think the critiques of this article are craving; a genuine insight into at least one or two aspects of NS2 and how that may be approached - hopefully an insight that shows that you are insightful! The worry at the back of peoples' minds is that these insights may not exist and that too much of the mental operations occur from a distance using aggregates and so forth and perhaps that's why fewer grand-scale blogs and more detailed-phenomenon blogs would be appropriate. It's been a frequent concern throughout the beta that many ideas are just slapped on the wall to see which will stick and this fear could probably be appeased relatively quickly.
I hope this isn't treated as some mortal wound to your ego (grow thicker skins, at least in public!) because the feedback is sincere, even if you do think otherwise. It's completely your prerogative whether you want to devote some of your 1500 words to that or not but I personally think that this would be far more interesting, enlightening, engaging and ultimately productive.
It feels like you took the conclusion you wanted "NS2 is balanced" and then picked out an easy statistic parameter (damn it) to show that conclusion. It's all backwards!
Once the details are out regarding where the game is and isn't balanced then we can clearly see who is right and who is wrong. Why not make that a priority since balance is so important, rather than hiding it under the rug and parading the least useful parameter (!) in terms of balance that exists.
Are you kidding me? So if the win ratio overall was 99-1 that wouldn't be so bad because it's the least useful parameter in terms of balance that exists? Do you actually expect UWE to respond to these absurd hyperbolic statements?
It feels like you took the conclusion you wanted "NS2 is balanced" and then picked out an easy statistic parameter (damn it) to show that conclusion. It's all backwards!
Once the details are out regarding where the game is and isn't balanced then we can clearly see who is right and who is wrong. Why not make that a priority since balance is so important, rather than hiding it under the rug and parading the least useful parameter (!) in terms of balance that exists.
Are you kidding me? So if the win ratio overall was 99-1 that wouldn't be so bad because it's the least useful parameter in terms of balance that exists? Do you actually expect UWE to respond to these absurd hyperbolic statements?
You didn't get it. Just read the post by Tweadle above, he explained the significance of the overall winrate pretty well. Also, no I don't care whether or not UWE responds, just putting my opinion out there.
There are 3 crucial areas that need to be looked at when citing win/loss ratios in NS2.
Time
Number of players
Map (and to a lesser extent spawn locations)
These are the 3 most important features that you must look at when regarding win/loss ratios if you want a truly balanced game.
If you are going to cite that "NS2 is fundamentally balanced", then you need to cite these factors as well to determine if your game really is balanced.
All other things that can affect win/loss ratios are of much less significance.... and if you can't see that... then I don't know what to tell you.
Game length is great and all, but i don't think its a very good way of describing quality of gameplay. There is hardly a strong relationship here at all and by own admission e.g. long back and forth games also being fun.
1) A level 0 skulk could be better than a level 0 marine. But a marine with armour upgrades could be better than a skulk with carapace. Etc, etc, etc.
However, overall the win/lose rate is 50/50. You could even nerf the aliens something awful, but then make the Onos 20 res, and the win/loss ratio might even be 50/50.
Here is another problem:
2) I am new to the game, I don't really want to spend a lot of time learning about all the stats/nuances. I keep dying as Fade, the Fade is underbalanced.
I complain on the forums.
To be successful at this game, you have to know EVERYTHING. You also have to have an idea from the start of the game what you are going to do. Are you going to save for Fade? Are you going to save for Onos? This gets much deeper with pro play.
Most great games (not saying NS2 is not a great game) do not require this. The fundamentals of which lie in simple FPS v FPS gameplay. All the popular games are built around this simple premise.
Half-Life/BF3/COD/CS/L4D/Etc... (Melee + Secondary + Primary + Throwable / Kill guys + Complete basic objective = Simple AND you make a difference.)
Ok. To make sure we're clear: Because some individuals 'know' what is wrong with the game, Unknown Worlds should turn off Sponitor completely until that 'known' thing is changed. The corollary of course is to ignore all forum, social media and anecdotal feedback until that 'known' thing is fixed.
I would like the input of others on this point. Who else agrees that Unknown Worlds should stop collecting all other information about Natural Selection 2 until one issue that some individuals 'know' is wrong with the game is fixed?
Appreciate the effort and I get your point, I didn't say shit can all the stats in my post, I said shit can everything 20p+. This known thing is a spawn rate, take rugby for example since if I try to argue stats you and bob will take a shit on me from a great height, 7v7 rugby all players are on the field at all times, no dramas, this is competitive NS2.
Now lets look at a standard rugby union game, 15v15 but for reasons unknown to the vast majority of people 2-3 members of one team constantly get dragged out the field of play for 13-30-43 seconds at a time during the first 5 minutes, that's what is effectively happening with alien egg/spawn rate, people in UWE much smarter than me have acknowledged the problem exactly and listed the times people have to stay alive to prevent this and noted they're not reasonable at all, one side is literally playing at a disadvantage unless they outright stomp every early game engagement. By design. Lifeforms are delayed by up to minutes, by design.
This isn't some perception, tears for fears or complaint held by a forum troll it's a fact identified by UWE themselves and is being addressed in due time I'm aware, I still personally don't see the point of including high player count servers towards balancing statistics while it exists.
The most probable cause being the alien egg-spawning not keeping up with the number of deaths suffered early on in the game - this has long been known, but upto 239, the alien commander could patch it by going shift and building extra eggs.
The increased death rate among skulks have probably meant that aliens in 241 and larger servers, aliens risk going bankrupt trying to compensate.
A plausible explanation for why teamsizes didn't matter in 239 and matters so much in 240/241 is just that the biggest influence is the sub-optimal egg spawning algorithm; when skulks starts to die a lot more, alien egg spawning starts to dominate the win/loss ratio, as the aliens can't afford to buy enough eggs to offset their death rate anymore.
that's not true runteh...once you start playing against better players, if you don't have a plan in those other fps games, you are screwed.
Yeah of course, but essentially in most games it is all about killing the other guy. There is a metagame, but NS2's metagame is a huge part of it.
Also the alien team is very unique in how you play it.
I could pick up and of the games I listed and be very good at them in a short period of time. With NS2 that is a lot harder, and also is very reliant on not just your teams ability to kill the opposition, but their understanding of the game.
Been playing NS2 for a few months now and the biggest problems in regards to unbalanced game play are the following:
1) Noob Commanders
2) Rookie players
3) Players being AFK
4) Players refusing to join the team with the least amount of players and instead of quitting or manning up, they just stand around in the waiting area for ages denying other people the ability to join the server and balance the teams.
Here's what i would do to address these issues:
1) On non rookie servers, the vote system to eject commanders needs to go back 50% (even 60% would do) and a training video needs to be implemented during spawn to tell people how to vote.
Since the increase of voting to 75% in the last patch, hardly any votes actually pass anymore and it's really ruining the game.
I mean seriously guys, it's getting silly now, you had the voting just right on the previous builds!
I now find myself playing the Combat mod more often than the original game play as i don't have to worry about noob commanders that are pretty much impossible to eject.
2) Rookie players should only be allowed to join rookie servers until they have played a good 10 hours at least and people should not be able to remove rookie status.
3) AFK kick should be on by default (at least on official servers).
4) After a period of a couple of minutes of not joining a team, players in the waiting area should be forced onto the team that requires more players, if they don't like this, they will leave and allow others to join in instead of clogging up the server with their selfishness and stupidity.
Comments
Oh my god, these examples.
These examples.
Paying lip service to our ideals without any proper demonstration to support this falls short of what I think the critiques of this article are craving; a genuine insight into at least one or two aspects of NS2 and how that may be approached - hopefully an insight that shows that you are insightful! The worry at the back of peoples' minds is that these insights may not exist and that too much of the mental operations occur from a distance using aggregates and so forth and perhaps that's why fewer grand-scale blogs and more detailed-phenomenon blogs would be appropriate. It's been a frequent concern throughout the beta that many ideas are just slapped on the wall to see which will stick and this fear could probably be appeased relatively quickly.
I hope this isn't treated as some mortal wound to your ego (grow thicker skins, at least in public!) because the feedback is sincere, even if you do think otherwise. It's completely your prerogative whether you want to devote some of your 1500 words to that or not but I personally think that this would be far more interesting, enlightening, engaging and ultimately productive.
Are you kidding me? So if the win ratio overall was 99-1 that wouldn't be so bad because it's the least useful parameter in terms of balance that exists? Do you actually expect UWE to respond to these absurd hyperbolic statements?
You didn't get it. Just read the post by Tweadle above, he explained the significance of the overall winrate pretty well. Also, no I don't care whether or not UWE responds, just putting my opinion out there.
Time
Number of players
Map (and to a lesser extent spawn locations)
These are the 3 most important features that you must look at when regarding win/loss ratios if you want a truly balanced game.
If you are going to cite that "NS2 is fundamentally balanced", then you need to cite these factors as well to determine if your game really is balanced.
All other things that can affect win/loss ratios are of much less significance.... and if you can't see that... then I don't know what to tell you.
1) A level 0 skulk could be better than a level 0 marine. But a marine with armour upgrades could be better than a skulk with carapace. Etc, etc, etc.
However, overall the win/lose rate is 50/50. You could even nerf the aliens something awful, but then make the Onos 20 res, and the win/loss ratio might even be 50/50.
Here is another problem:
2) I am new to the game, I don't really want to spend a lot of time learning about all the stats/nuances. I keep dying as Fade, the Fade is underbalanced.
I complain on the forums.
To be successful at this game, you have to know EVERYTHING. You also have to have an idea from the start of the game what you are going to do. Are you going to save for Fade? Are you going to save for Onos? This gets much deeper with pro play.
Most great games (not saying NS2 is not a great game) do not require this. The fundamentals of which lie in simple FPS v FPS gameplay. All the popular games are built around this simple premise.
Half-Life/BF3/COD/CS/L4D/Etc... (Melee + Secondary + Primary + Throwable / Kill guys + Complete basic objective = Simple AND you make a difference.)
Appreciate the effort and I get your point, I didn't say shit can all the stats in my post, I said shit can everything 20p+. This known thing is a spawn rate, take rugby for example since if I try to argue stats you and bob will take a shit on me from a great height, 7v7 rugby all players are on the field at all times, no dramas, this is competitive NS2.
Now lets look at a standard rugby union game, 15v15 but for reasons unknown to the vast majority of people 2-3 members of one team constantly get dragged out the field of play for 13-30-43 seconds at a time during the first 5 minutes, that's what is effectively happening with alien egg/spawn rate, people in UWE much smarter than me have acknowledged the problem exactly and listed the times people have to stay alive to prevent this and noted they're not reasonable at all, one side is literally playing at a disadvantage unless they outright stomp every early game engagement. By design. Lifeforms are delayed by up to minutes, by design.
This isn't some perception, tears for fears or complaint held by a forum troll it's a fact identified by UWE themselves and is being addressed in due time I'm aware, I still personally don't see the point of including high player count servers towards balancing statistics while it exists.
Not trying to play mum vs dad but it is 'known'.
Yeah of course, but essentially in most games it is all about killing the other guy. There is a metagame, but NS2's metagame is a huge part of it.
Also the alien team is very unique in how you play it.
I could pick up and of the games I listed and be very good at them in a short period of time. With NS2 that is a lot harder, and also is very reliant on not just your teams ability to kill the opposition, but their understanding of the game.
1) Noob Commanders
2) Rookie players
3) Players being AFK
4) Players refusing to join the team with the least amount of players and instead of quitting or manning up, they just stand around in the waiting area for ages denying other people the ability to join the server and balance the teams.
Here's what i would do to address these issues:
1) On non rookie servers, the vote system to eject commanders needs to go back 50% (even 60% would do) and a training video needs to be implemented during spawn to tell people how to vote.
Since the increase of voting to 75% in the last patch, hardly any votes actually pass anymore and it's really ruining the game.
I mean seriously guys, it's getting silly now, you had the voting just right on the previous builds!
I now find myself playing the Combat mod more often than the original game play as i don't have to worry about noob commanders that are pretty much impossible to eject.
2) Rookie players should only be allowed to join rookie servers until they have played a good 10 hours at least and people should not be able to remove rookie status.
3) AFK kick should be on by default (at least on official servers).
4) After a period of a couple of minutes of not joining a team, players in the waiting area should be forced onto the team that requires more players, if they don't like this, they will leave and allow others to join in instead of clogging up the server with their selfishness and stupidity.