Question about welding scores
2d0x
Join Date: 2013-03-16 Member: 184030Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Join Date: 2013-03-16 Member: 184030Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Hello guys! I've just played a 92 minutes round as a marine, and all i did for ~80 minutes is weld peoples/structures/exos/arcs etc. I did that almost nonstop for whole 80 minutes, mostly because we dont have any MAC's till ~82 minutes and game was crazy intense, so i literally played for 80 minutes with my welder on and left mouse click pushed down.
Aaaand i ended as a third worst marine players out of 10 marines total.
So, is there a reason why welding rewarding so low scores? I mean huh, thats reparing - very helpful for the team! Almost a battlefield game medic/engineer, but in NS. Why rewards are SO low?
Obviosly i don't want welding to be top-score playstyle (like it is in battlefield games, where medics usually are top scored players), but i don't want to be one of the worst either.
What do you guys think?
P.S. I used search, but didn't find anything on that matter - sorry if there is one already (link it for me please)
Aaaand i ended as a third worst marine players out of 10 marines total.
So, is there a reason why welding rewarding so low scores? I mean huh, thats reparing - very helpful for the team! Almost a battlefield game medic/engineer, but in NS. Why rewards are SO low?
Obviosly i don't want welding to be top-score playstyle (like it is in battlefield games, where medics usually are top scored players), but i don't want to be one of the worst either.
What do you guys think?
P.S. I used search, but didn't find anything on that matter - sorry if there is one already (link it for me please)
Comments
Ultimately you gotta look at the actions that result in a team winning games. We can all look at individual actions and value them high or low in any fashion we want. Like I'd love a score addition to well performed trickjumps?? But at the end of the day, we should just perform what ever ultimately results in victory for our team, not points.
As i said, it was a very intense game, and teams were almost equal, so we stucked for a loooong time without any progress (same for aliens side), but with constant attacks on all directions.
Don't get me wrong, im not chasing points, that was just my pure observation and obvious question occurs in my head, because i thought im doing something very useful here. I just can't imagine this game last so long without such intense welding, second attack at any base could ruin the pg or powernode and game might be over for marines 50-60 minutes earlier.
Welding gates & rts is really good and if what you are doing is useful then you will end up winning more games, simple as that
Last example: snipers, not doing much but killing a single guy here and there, but in the long run this is what makes to difference or in NS2, pinching low health lifeforms or keeping your teammates alive. Try to see the big teamwork picture and don't be fooled by the scoreboard.
And again, i don't care about scores - i just wonder what logic are used in score calculations for heavy welding activities.
Each moment can be very rewarding, when you realize you just saved that crucial structure from going down or that Exo from dieing or you kept that ARC alive for its final killing shot on the Hive, because you were the only one welding it instantly.
On another note I agree that some support abilities, on alien-side too, should give more score points.
Repairing/constructing structures gives very few to no score point because those activities just don't fit into that system. Maybe we could reward some more points based on the time a player spent repairing and constructing structures using the current avg. score points/min value, so it's a little more rewarding. But we need to avoid adding a reward that allows one team to gain significant more score points than the other because at that point the score system wouldn't be usable to compare the teams progress anymore.
The proper alternative that would make most people happy without borking the score system's balance would be to include more robust end-of-round stats / round trophies. Weld time and/or armor welded, hp healed (for gorges), damage mitigated (umbra), etc.
People who doesn't weld their hard carries lose more often and their team get less kills.
Most players don't weld each other between fights, they just run around and get one-swipe killed by a mediocre fade with focus.
Marines welding each other during the appropriate times is part of the kill
I don't care about the score, but marine welding time (only welding marines, not structures) should appear on the end-of-round stats
Don't get me wrong, i understand the importance of killing enemies and its bindings with necessity of expand, but repairing is way too underrated in comparison to killing.
You shouldn't obsess over the score, it is just a guideline. It doesn't mean much.
There is not a single decent player who tries to maximize his score during a game.
Some of the most fundamental actions in the game doesn't award any score at all. Like laneblocking or saving extractors. You just do them because it is the optimal play
. To give little context to the rest of this comment, I am one of the few people who has access to certain NS2 datasets. I have done quite a bit of exploratory analysis of NS2 data.
Let me put it a different way. Kill/deaths has a much stronger correlation to hive skill and wins/losses. It has a higher correlation than any other metric that I have checked. This includes score per minute, player damage a minute, structure damage a minute.
Now you might say that this is not very scientific, and it is not. I can not say conclusively that getting kills is the most important skill in the game. It is just my opinion based on the stats.
If you think about it, almost everything you need to do on the rts side is either dependent or assisted by the ability to get kills.
I am not saying that mechanical skill is the only skill that you need. There are some very mechanically skilled players that don't win very often despite being very good at killing other players. The most skilled players in this game have a combination of high mechanical skill, what I will call the ability to field comm well, and other skills. Rts style decision making is extremely important but is even stronger if accompanied by high mechanical skill.
To wrap this back around to the subject at hand, support roles in NS2 are not as important as they are in other games. Welding makes a big difference, but it is not necessary to win. I have played way too many games at all skill levels where nobody welds
@Nordic are you sure? I don't see it mentioned on GitHub.
I am not home so I can't look at my files, but I am certain that I have data on weld time by player. My player data is NS2+ based.
At least i get some explanations over this, for which im grateful!
Welding structures is not always the most useful thing.... wenn you weld every single rt which is low on veil for example like overlook and skylight you might waste your time there.
The trick is to prevent skulks from biting like covering west junction from skulks which slip through system or nano vents. This job is a thousand times more useful than welding the rt while the other rt get's bitten down while you weld yours
I've spend quite some games with over 4k hiveskill by camping west junction and got topscore
I only did 3 things
a) covering nano vent and skulks who tried to slip through system..
b) when a skulk came through sub I jumped into the overlook vent from westjunction (easy trickjunp) and covered overlook
c) when system was getting crushed I rotated into system to cover / flank our pg
I never spent a single second welding but rather held the lane, our rt's and our ressflow.
Even with bad aim you can cover a lane by playing smart. Don't give up your position, give your enemy a surprise and at an angle where you have tons of time to empty all your clips before he has a chance to bite you or an rt... and preaim exactly where the skulk might pop im your view... that alone increases you acc by 5%
That 5% acc increase doesn't do a whole lot when your acc is only 5% to 10% in the first place. lol
Even when I have near perfect positioning and can survive long enough to empty 2-3 whole clips at a lone attacking skulk, I'll often fail to get the kill.
Marines wouldn't be so bad if it had a support role similar to the role Gorge plays.. By that I mean on Alien if you're not good at killing you can go Gorge and build stuff, heal aliens, bile stuff, get tunnels up, etc, and feel like you're contributing to the team effort (near the top of the scoreboard) On Marine if you're not good at killing you can run around, build stuff, weld stuff, and die feeling like you accomplished nothing (on the bottom of the scoreboard)
That's what it feels like anyway.
Idc about score points, but there should really be player and structure welding stats to help emphasize it to players.
Or yeah, don't touch the scores and just add additional tab to game results, showing how much damage healed/repaired. Isn't that nice?
However, there is an opportunity cost for prolonged weldings. You gotta weigh the value of welding a structure vs. taking territory and killing lifeforms.
A game where you did nothing but weld does reflect accurately on the scoreboard. You do have a powerful impact, but not as much as another player who prioritized their time to the most important welds and still kept up the aggression.
Take a damaged RT, for example. Ideally you would weld it just enough for it to be alive while another marine respawns behind you and follows your lane. You weld a little bit, then scout/push ahead and trust your teammate to close the gap and finish the weld if need be. Lane coverage is often more important than 100% health of your buildings.
Even if a rookie is waiting near the vent my chances of surviving without leap are kinda bad
In my opinion it's like I'm talking to an adult who is still calculating with his fingers to do some math even though ppl always recommend learn calculating in your head or JUST USE A CALCULATOR.
Actually this is what happened and ruined us - i wasnt able to repair too much damage, we lost an important room and game ended in a few minutes after.
P.S. And about killing lifeforms - i have played 512 hours since the release in 2012 (most of the time played on 2012-2013), ~at 2015 i stopped playing and havent played for 1-2 years. Even back in 2012-13 i was bad at shooting but it wasn't THAT bad as it is right now. Im rusty and surrounded by players with thousands of hours played. Killing a skilled lerk or fade is literally impossible for me, no matter what. Im trying to relearn things with all that crazy alien movements, acceleration, trajectories, but it still very-very hard. Also it starting to be frustrating, because sometimes i want to play alien (im a bit better on skulking in the ceilings or playing gorgeous gorgie), but im getting shuffled at marines again and again and again for hours. And im dying dying dying all the time. Welding and mines (spending lots of moneys on them, protecting vents+extractors) is all satisfaction i can get at this moment.
The real question is, is this worth development time? Opportunity cost is the the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Would their time be better spent elsewhere?
I'd be cautious to increase rewards like that for the reason you mentioned. Time spent welding RTs is mostly time that could be spent somewhere else proactively.
Although not everyone who chooses to not weld an RT actually goes on to do something proactive...