Uwe should however consider implementing a server setting to limit life form distribution, so that you won't end up with 50% gorges at the start of the game OR have the players announce what life form they intend to play before the match start (see OW).
Would be better if commanders can set the limits on Guns and life form distribution.
PS. Shuffle needs !ready system to prevent afk players joining from ready room.
Uwe should however consider implementing a server setting to limit life form distribution, so that you won't end up with 50% gorges at the start of the game OR have the players announce what life form they intend to play before the match start (see OW).
Would be better if commanders can set the limits on Guns and life form distribution.
PS. Shuffle needs !ready system to prevent afk players joining from ready room.
Not sure about either... even now, you have to wait quite a bit to start a round.
It would also be much simpler to automatically ignore AFK players in shuffles.
Again, don't make the game easier. Make it easier to understand what is a better way to play. That should be the direction of ns2. Teach, don't make the test easier.
I would really love to hear your suggestions on this matter, as it's something we often discuss. We already have improved tutorials and visual indicators, what else would you suggest?
What about in-game perks / innate abilities that trigger automatically when more than one alien is present in a room together, say for example 3 skulks would benefit from a slight increase in bite damage, movement speed and health, this would encourage players to work together in the early game when they are at their weakest.
Pack mentality / hive mind if you will, which fits in nicely with lore.
Challenge for you now is, how do you convey this effect in a player friendly manner.
Yojimbo, no. This is exactly a form of dumbing down the game.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
I am the only one that has to deal with smurfs in nearly every round?
Cant you see that these players are the reason for the win/loss shift?
Its nice that you discuss new ways to help the rookies but this is kinda useless when a 600 elo player is shifting the balance heavily in one direction.
And in times with such a low playercount and maybe 4-5 servers available the chance to play against this cancer is very high.
Just make a mod that check score per minute/kdr/gametime on hive/accuracy and ban these players automatic.
If the win/loss ratio has not changed THEN we can discuss possible changes again.
I am the only one that has to deal with smurfs in nearly every round?
Cant you see that these players are the reason for the win/loss shift?
Its nice that you discuss new ways to help the rookies but this is kinda useless when a 600 elo player is shifting the balance heavily in one direction.
And in times with such a low playercount and maybe 4-5 servers available the chance to play against this cancer is very high.
Just make a mod that check score per minute/kdr/gametime on hive/accuracy and ban these players automatic.
If the win/loss ratio has not changed THEN we can discuss possible changes again.
Erdogan would be proud of you x)
In all seriousness, this is a terrible idea. Algorithms can almost never make proper decisions like this. (OK, maybe DeepMind does. Let's integrate that to the game!)
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited July 2016
In this case they can.
A player with 20hrs CANT have a score per minute around 13, a KDR >2 and a accuracy constantly over 25% as rine and over 60% as alien.
It a terrible idea to ignore this fact.
No sound assistance can save new players from players like this:
I don't see why can't a veteran FPS player achieve 25%+ accuracy when first playing the game... (alien side is different ofc)
Sure, he needs to have a balanced round to start with, but extreme mouse-eye coordination is not that rare
EDIT:
Also, why the hatred towards them? After a few days, they will have the ELO rating they deserve. You can't police people because they are good, even if having multiple accs
I am the only one that has to deal with smurfs in nearly every round?
Cant you see that these players are the reason for the win/loss shift?
Its nice that you discuss new ways to help the rookies but this is kinda useless when a 600 elo player is shifting the balance heavily in one direction.
And in times with such a low playercount and maybe 4-5 servers available the chance to play against this cancer is very high.
Just make a mod that check score per minute/kdr/gametime on hive/accuracy and ban these players automatic.
If the win/loss ratio has not changed THEN we can discuss possible changes again.
I don't see smurfs very often, but I always see 2500+ rated players winning a round on their own almost every game. If they join marines, marines will win.
That's my main reason for quitting, not so much team imbalance, just one player ruining it for the rest. At least when I'm on a server with lesser players, I'll go gorge or something and take it easier, but not these dicks. The funniest part is that when rating the game 1/2 stars it's not even an option in the list of reasons.
Now someone will come along and 'splain to me how to deal with these guys, even though the teamwork required never happens.
I don't see smurfs very often, but I always see 2500+ rated players winning a round on their own almost every game. If they join marines, marines will win.
That's my main reason for quitting, not so much team imbalance, just one player ruining it for the rest. At least when I'm on a server with lesser players, I'll go gorge or something and take it easier, but not these dicks. The funniest part is that when rating the game 1/2 stars it's not even an option in the list of reasons.
Agreed! I'd love to see a mod that forces players to alternate between teams every now and then... These 2500+ players exclusively play on the marine side
I almost gave away your secret
This game suffers Major from not having any sort of basic match making, fire up the game, join a server, wait for round to end or round to start, wait another 10-20 minutes on either a map change, people joinning teams and trying to balance.
We all agree that there is a low playerbase and therefor it wouldnt matter.
But i would rather wait 10 minutes in a queue that i am able to select what ever side i want to play on / lifeform / command / max player count - get on a server and play.
Take all that basic info on KDR SPM WL etc etc and average it out for a very basic ELO score, so smurfs and others wont matter as everything else is taken into account.
It would also be much simpler to automatically ignore AFK players in shuffles.
Some server had that and it kind of worked. The problem was that it can not detected afk players early enough.
Therefore it shuffles some afk players in, then throw them back to readyroom.
This game suffers Major from not having any sort of basic match making, fire up the game, join a server, wait for round to end or round to start, wait another 10-20 minutes on either a map change, people joinning teams and trying to balance.
We all agree that there is a low playerbase and therefor it wouldnt matter.
But i would rather wait 10 minutes in a queue that i am able to select what ever side i want to play on / lifeform / command / max player count - get on a server and play.
Take all that basic info on KDR SPM WL etc etc and average it out for a very basic ELO score, so smurfs and others wont matter as everything else is taken into account.
Am i far off this? or just talking garbage ?
No idea how this would improve on round quality... I'm also an old-fashioned dude, I like to check the perf and latency of the server that I'm about to join... Sure, that's purely subjective.
Also, isn't there a "JOIN GAME" button in the main menu already that does something like that?
This game suffers Major from not having any sort of basic match making, fire up the game, join a server, wait for round to end or round to start, wait another 10-20 minutes on either a map change, people joinning teams and trying to balance.
We all agree that there is a low playerbase and therefor it wouldnt matter.
But i would rather wait 10 minutes in a queue that i am able to select what ever side i want to play on / lifeform / command / max player count - get on a server and play.
Take all that basic info on KDR SPM WL etc etc and average it out for a very basic ELO score, so smurfs and others wont matter as everything else is taken into account.
Am i far off this? or just talking garbage ?
Well, everything else aside, with our player base, 10 minutes is very optimistic in my opinion. And it only gets worse the closer you are to the extremes of the skill ladder (which you are). You're probably looking at upwards of 30 minutes (basically the time it takes a round to start and end) to never, and that is during peak times. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but using the time you need to queue for a gather should be a good gauge (I've never did one, so I don't know).
This game suffers Major from not having any sort of basic match making, fire up the game, join a server, wait for round to end or round to start, wait another 10-20 minutes on either a map change, people joinning teams and trying to balance.
We all agree that there is a low playerbase and therefor it wouldnt matter.
But i would rather wait 10 minutes in a queue that i am able to select what ever side i want to play on / lifeform / command / max player count - get on a server and play.
Take all that basic info on KDR SPM WL etc etc and average it out for a very basic ELO score, so smurfs and others wont matter as everything else is taken into account.
Am i far off this? or just talking garbage ?
No idea how this would improve on round quality... I'm also an old-fashioned dude, I like to check the perf and latency of the server that I'm about to join... Sure, that's purely subjective.
Also, isn't there a "JOIN GAME" button in the main menu already that does something like that?
We are talking about the massive increase in marine wins based on either:
Smurf accounts
high rated players
stack?
something like what i said above would improve round quality as it would remove all 3 of those issues (No system is perfect tho) create more balaced games, and have rounds starting quicker as everyone will have already selected what role / team they want to play on.
Or
Same as above but you play both sides on one map before needing to queue again.
I remember the good old CS days, I wrote one of the first plugins to swap teams after N rounds.
Well, people just left when they got swapped to the harder side (cs_prodigy for eg)
After matchmaking, would you force players to stay on the assigned role? What if someone leaves?
I do sympathize with the devs on topics like this, because these problems are practically unsolvable... =/
EDIT:
It boils down to how each player perceives the game and the community, and how cooperative they are. I usually switch teams if I see a shitty alien team, not because I'm a good melee player, but at least I know enough to give good gameplay advice. But the aforementioned 2500+ players just join to stomp. And btw, who are we to deem their fun to be the wrong kind? :P
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited July 2016
I dont get it.
The graphs of Supafred are saying "With 305 wich had zero balance changes there is a huge shift into marine favor"
This alone is strange isnt it?
One of the smurf accounts i posted is playing on TTO most of the time. Remarkable coincidence that the shift to marines is higher there? Dont think so.
We had skill based shuffles before, its nothing new. And even with an >2500 elo player in the marine team we had wins on both sides with ends in around 50% wins for each side.
With alot of servers these dumb smurfs are annoying but not that huge problem. Now with only a few servers up to play its obviously a problem.
Its also strange that people seem to have more problems with players playing under there real acount and elo but have no problems with players ruining the sense of skill shuffle.
And about the argument that a good shooter player can have >25% accuracy.
Sure he can, but he cant have perfectly positioning, knowledge of the maps, knowledge of when where to attack or defend, etc.
It took me around 100hrs to become an feeling for BF4 and the needed mapknowledge to play at a similar level like the good playera @ Infantry only while aim never was an issue.
@dePARA you forget the official UWE balance mod... I don't know if they meddled with it, but that's a possible reason too.
And yes, you do have a point with smurfs, I just don't think it's a good idea to ban them because of that. If they are that obviously pro players with low ELO, give them a handicap...
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
A handicap would motivate this cancer even more. Even with half damage they would destroy the skulks in early game.
Whats the problem with banning them?
One argument from some pro players was always:
"Hey, sometimes i want to play commander or gorge but i cant cause my high elo."
With the said mod from above they still can do this.
And btw. i NEVER saw a low elo player as com that had the experience of an pro player.
They doing it to stomp the other team, nothing more.
Morally, imo, pple like you describe are scum. But they payed for an account, however cheap that may have been
50% damage and movement handicap would very much limit their abilities to stomp...
But the core problem is the low player count. And I blame @Hugh for that! Srsly, there was a sound reason for that vote to kick him from the staff...
I agree with you that we have a few smurfs lately.
My fear of a system that bans smurfs is that it could be wrong in some cases.
You could ban a new player that just have good aim and had some killing streaks against a bad alien team. Or a NS1 veteran that has come to NS2 recently, or an old NS2 player that left before hive appeared. It is none of these players fault to not have a representative hive skill.
The solution to this problem is having active admins that ban smurfs. But seems that currently most servers never have any admin around.
My suggestion would be to set a minimum hive skill according to the average KDR for new players. So if someone has an average kdr of 2 with only 15 hours, then he gets automatically a hive skill of 1500. If he has an average kdr of 3, then he gets a hive skill of 2000.
This would help fixing their wrong hive skill much faster without banning the wrong people. Although in principle Hive2.0 is supposed to converge much faster.
MephillesGermanyJoin Date: 2013-08-07Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Well maybe hive 2.0 could help here (not sure when finished though)
AFAIK hive 2 won't be able to get rid of smurfs but it should be faster at determining the correct skill of the players than the current hive is. Meaning a smurf will rise to it's correct skill faster (unless he loses on purpose to lose skill)
Comments
PS. Shuffle needs !ready system to prevent afk players joining from ready room.
Not sure about either... even now, you have to wait quite a bit to start a round.
It would also be much simpler to automatically ignore AFK players in shuffles.
Yojimbo, no. This is exactly a form of dumbing down the game.
Visual effects would be adequate, it's only a help for new players.
Or add this sound when there are more than 3 aliens in a group xD
Cant you see that these players are the reason for the win/loss shift?
Its nice that you discuss new ways to help the rookies but this is kinda useless when a 600 elo player is shifting the balance heavily in one direction.
And in times with such a low playercount and maybe 4-5 servers available the chance to play against this cancer is very high.
Just make a mod that check score per minute/kdr/gametime on hive/accuracy and ban these players automatic.
If the win/loss ratio has not changed THEN we can discuss possible changes again.
Erdogan would be proud of you x)
In all seriousness, this is a terrible idea. Algorithms can almost never make proper decisions like this. (OK, maybe DeepMind does. Let's integrate that to the game!)
A player with 20hrs CANT have a score per minute around 13, a KDR >2 and a accuracy constantly over 25% as rine and over 60% as alien.
It a terrible idea to ignore this fact.
No sound assistance can save new players from players like this:
http://hive.naturalselection2.com/profile/355797688
Sure, he needs to have a balanced round to start with, but extreme mouse-eye coordination is not that rare
EDIT:
Also, why the hatred towards them? After a few days, they will have the ELO rating they deserve. You can't police people because they are good, even if having multiple accs
As far as I can tell, yes, you are.
That's my main reason for quitting, not so much team imbalance, just one player ruining it for the rest. At least when I'm on a server with lesser players, I'll go gorge or something and take it easier, but not these dicks. The funniest part is that when rating the game 1/2 stars it's not even an option in the list of reasons.
Now someone will come along and 'splain to me how to deal with these guys, even though the teamwork required never happens.
Agreed! I'd love to see a mod that forces players to alternate between teams every now and then... These 2500+ players exclusively play on the marine side
I almost gave away your secret
This game suffers Major from not having any sort of basic match making, fire up the game, join a server, wait for round to end or round to start, wait another 10-20 minutes on either a map change, people joinning teams and trying to balance.
We all agree that there is a low playerbase and therefor it wouldnt matter.
But i would rather wait 10 minutes in a queue that i am able to select what ever side i want to play on / lifeform / command / max player count - get on a server and play.
Take all that basic info on KDR SPM WL etc etc and average it out for a very basic ELO score, so smurfs and others wont matter as everything else is taken into account.
Am i far off this? or just talking garbage ?
Therefore it shuffles some afk players in, then throw them back to readyroom.
No idea how this would improve on round quality... I'm also an old-fashioned dude, I like to check the perf and latency of the server that I'm about to join... Sure, that's purely subjective.
Also, isn't there a "JOIN GAME" button in the main menu already that does something like that?
nope
There's nothing to see, move on! x)
Well, everything else aside, with our player base, 10 minutes is very optimistic in my opinion. And it only gets worse the closer you are to the extremes of the skill ladder (which you are). You're probably looking at upwards of 30 minutes (basically the time it takes a round to start and end) to never, and that is during peak times. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but using the time you need to queue for a gather should be a good gauge (I've never did one, so I don't know).
We are talking about the massive increase in marine wins based on either:
Smurf accounts
high rated players
stack?
something like what i said above would improve round quality as it would remove all 3 of those issues (No system is perfect tho) create more balaced games, and have rounds starting quicker as everyone will have already selected what role / team they want to play on.
Or
Same as above but you play both sides on one map before needing to queue again.
Well, people just left when they got swapped to the harder side
After matchmaking, would you force players to stay on the assigned role? What if someone leaves?
I do sympathize with the devs on topics like this, because these problems are practically unsolvable... =/
EDIT:
It boils down to how each player perceives the game and the community, and how cooperative they are. I usually switch teams if I see a shitty alien team, not because I'm a good melee player, but at least I know enough to give good gameplay advice. But the aforementioned 2500+ players just join to stomp. And btw, who are we to deem their fun to be the wrong kind? :P
The graphs of Supafred are saying "With 305 wich had zero balance changes there is a huge shift into marine favor"
This alone is strange isnt it?
One of the smurf accounts i posted is playing on TTO most of the time. Remarkable coincidence that the shift to marines is higher there? Dont think so.
We had skill based shuffles before, its nothing new. And even with an >2500 elo player in the marine team we had wins on both sides with ends in around 50% wins for each side.
With alot of servers these dumb smurfs are annoying but not that huge problem. Now with only a few servers up to play its obviously a problem.
Its also strange that people seem to have more problems with players playing under there real acount and elo but have no problems with players ruining the sense of skill shuffle.
And about the argument that a good shooter player can have >25% accuracy.
Sure he can, but he cant have perfectly positioning, knowledge of the maps, knowledge of when where to attack or defend, etc.
It took me around 100hrs to become an feeling for BF4 and the needed mapknowledge to play at a similar level like the good playera @ Infantry only while aim never was an issue.
And yes, you do have a point with smurfs, I just don't think it's a good idea to ban them because of that. If they are that obviously pro players with low ELO, give them a handicap...
Whats the problem with banning them?
One argument from some pro players was always:
"Hey, sometimes i want to play commander or gorge but i cant cause my high elo."
With the said mod from above they still can do this.
And btw. i NEVER saw a low elo player as com that had the experience of an pro player.
They doing it to stomp the other team, nothing more.
Could replace the missing player with a bot of approx equal skill
50% damage and movement handicap would very much limit their abilities to stomp...
But the core problem is the low player count. And I blame @Hugh for that! Srsly, there was a sound reason for that vote to kick him from the staff...
I hope that's meant to be a joke :]
My fear of a system that bans smurfs is that it could be wrong in some cases.
You could ban a new player that just have good aim and had some killing streaks against a bad alien team. Or a NS1 veteran that has come to NS2 recently, or an old NS2 player that left before hive appeared. It is none of these players fault to not have a representative hive skill.
The solution to this problem is having active admins that ban smurfs. But seems that currently most servers never have any admin around.
My suggestion would be to set a minimum hive skill according to the average KDR for new players. So if someone has an average kdr of 2 with only 15 hours, then he gets automatically a hive skill of 1500. If he has an average kdr of 3, then he gets a hive skill of 2000.
This would help fixing their wrong hive skill much faster without banning the wrong people. Although in principle Hive2.0 is supposed to converge much faster.
AFAIK hive 2 won't be able to get rid of smurfs but it should be faster at determining the correct skill of the players than the current hive is. Meaning a smurf will rise to it's correct skill faster (unless he loses on purpose to lose skill)