<!--quoteo(post=1988877:date=Oct 10 2012, 05:17 AM:name=Xarius)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Xarius @ Oct 10 2012, 05:17 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1988877"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Also sentries are being brought back to their former glory, but capped per sentry battery, and only 1 battery per room.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Who cares, if the marine commander can afford sentries the game is already over.
<!--quoteo(post=1989052:date=Oct 10 2012, 10:36 AM:name=Captain Ventris)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Captain Ventris @ Oct 10 2012, 10:36 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989052"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Male, just curious - is there anything you LIKE about NS2?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I love NS2, I'm just very critical because I'm so passionate about the series (ns1 & ns2)
Turrets were very strong in NS1, but they were never used due to priority (choosing tech / weapons over static defence). My my opinion the only people who care about turrets are pub players who like to build massive bases at every tech point.
<!--quoteo(post=1989037:date=Oct 9 2012, 06:05 PM:name=koewi)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (koewi @ Oct 9 2012, 06:05 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989037"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Drifters won't get nerfed in HP interests ... lets see how many drifterrushes we're going to see in the Tournament at the weekend<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
None, because drifters are weak, cost money and occupy hive time to make.
In pretty much all comp. games I've seen, you'd be much better-off placing a fade egg or researching leap/blink than making 17 drifters.
Like Charlie said, it might have happened in some odd game, but it's definitely not a trend that I've seen.
<!--quoteo(post=1989093:date=Oct 10 2012, 02:47 PM:name=HeatSurge)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (HeatSurge @ Oct 10 2012, 02:47 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989093"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->None, because drifters are weak, cost money and occupy hive time to make.
In pretty much all comp. games I've seen, you'd be much better-off placing a fade egg or researching leap/blink than making 17 drifters.
Like Charlie said, it might have happened in some odd game, but it's definitely not a trend that I've seen.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> lol, you wont see mass drifter use because the comp players are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies that also cause server lag in proper tournaments where their reputation is on the line. Push arc or duplex enough though and i'm sure they'll do it 'for the good of the game'.
I'm surprised Charlie doesn't understand the exploitative implications of 300hp drifters. If he wants more videos clearly explaining the problem step by step, i'm happy to make them (already made one a month ago hoping to get some changes rolling <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8AmDZSlGlw)" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8AmDZSlGlw)</a>.
@OP You can watch past broadcasts they do on the twitch channel. Here's a link to the QnA - <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/naturalselection2/b/334994045" target="_blank">http://www.twitch.tv/naturalselection2/b/334994045</a>. Would be nice if they were put up on the UWE youtube channel though.
I personally don't see anything disreputable or exploitable from building mass drifters.
That's like saying that clans are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies like continuously rushing the power node/IP/obs on Veil or dropping Fade/Onos eggs (especially when they were cheap a couple patches ago).
Building mass drifters isn't an exploit IMO. It's just stupidity. IDK though, I'm yet to see a game where aliens actually kill something with a drifter rush. It's been tried a few times, and every time I've seen the drifters destroy absolutely nothing and die to 1-2 marines...
<!--quoteo(post=1989099:date=Oct 10 2012, 02:59 PM:name=HeatSurge)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (HeatSurge @ Oct 10 2012, 02:59 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989099"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I personally don't see anything disreputable or exploitable from building mass drifters.
That's like saying that clans are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies like continuously rushing the power node/IP/obs on Veil or dropping Fade/Onos eggs (especially when they were cheap a couple patches ago).
Building mass drifters isn't an exploit IMO. It's just stupidity. IDK though, I'm yet to see a game where aliens actually kill something with a drifter rush. It's been tried a few times, and every time I've seen the drifters destroy absolutely nothing and die to 1-2 marines...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Understandable. The overall/general skill level of alien khammanders out there is pretty abysmal (in a role that doesn't really require alot of skill level anyway). Again, watch my video and you'll see lots of stuff dying to drifters - and this was when i was still learning the proper timings and how to fight the UI effectively
Watched the video (wasn't available when I commented).
Just a few observations: - the video doesn't show the skill level of the players involved. You can give fades or onos to a bad team and record them getting owned by shotguns and try to make a case that the shotguns are OP or that fades or onos are weak. I'm not saying that the games recorded showed bad players; I'm saying you can't really tell - the videos don't show the entire game. What happened before or after the drifter use? By spamming drifters for 5 minutes, you were for sure depriving your team of upgrades; be it leap, blink, chamber upgrades (celerity/cara/silence), or egg drops.
So you got a com chair (while everyone still beaconed), defended your hive, and ended a what looks like an already won game with an onos and 3-hive/res domination with drifters? Not a problem considering the investment of ~50+ res and the time involved in making the drifters. Personally, I would've dropped another onos or fade egg because I like persistent pressure rather than surprise tactics, because surprise tactics fail more :-) ... but all power to you if drifters are what you like.
If you'd like to make a stronger case against drifters, I'd suggest making a video recording of an entire game, with game/mic audio, and preferably with a screenshot of the players involved.
In other news, some number of ARCs can 1-shot a hive from pretty far away; unbalanced mkay?
<!--quoteo(post=1989109:date=Oct 10 2012, 03:24 PM:name=HeatSurge)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (HeatSurge @ Oct 10 2012, 03:24 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989109"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Watched the video (wasn't available when I commented).
Just a few observations: - the video doesn't show the skill level of the players involved. You can give fades or onos to a bad team and record them getting owned by shotguns and try to make a case that the shotguns are OP or that fades or onos are weak. I'm not saying that the games recorded showed bad players; I'm saying you can't really tell - the videos don't show the entire game. What happened before or after the drifter use? By spamming drifters for 5 minutes, you were for sure depriving your team of upgrades; be it leap, blink, chamber upgrades (celerity/cara/silence), or egg drops.
So you got a com chair (while everyone still beaconed), defended your hive, and ended a what looks like an already won game with an onos and 3-hive/res domination with drifters? Not a problem considering the investment of ~50+ res and the time involved in making the drifters. Personally, I would've dropped another onos or fade egg because I like persistent pressure rather than surprise tactics, because surprise tactics fail more :-) ... but all power to you if drifters are what you like.
If you'd like to make a stronger case against drifters, I'd suggest making a video recording of an entire game, with game/mic audio, and preferably with a screenshot of the players involved.
In other news, some number of ARCs can 1-shot a hive from pretty far away; unbalanced mkay?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> lol i dont think you understand the point.
1) 300 hp drifters are <b>skill nullifiers</b>. Please understand i am not talking about <b>damage output</b>, i am talking about <b>health points</b> mkay? Even if it somehow was balanced, they are still bad design simply because they nullify marine skill in the same way onos does (both aim and movement).
2) Drifter spam is never a waste of tres pre-gl for the following reasons <i>a)</i> It turns a co-ordinated skulk rush into a guaranteed win. Drifter rushes will usually have 19 drifters, which at 300hp means you now have a meatshield almost 3 times as much as an onos only for 25 less tres and 6 minutes earlier in the game. <i>b)</i> 1 hive locks mean the only rational choice left available to you ends up being drifter spam (dat 100 tres bank is looking awfully wasted now isn't it when you can't even secure a techpoint). You cannot drop fade/onos on 1 hive. <i>c)</i> I didn't show all the other tricks you can do with drifters because that video was pretty much day 1 experimentation. <i>d)</i> I cannot control who gets an onos/fade egg in a pub game and whether they are good players. This is a risk that makes drifter spam the safer preferred option. <i>e)</i> 75 tres of drifters beats dual exo. <i>f)</i> 75 tres of drifters has 7500 hp in total. Not only is this many times more than an onos, but gorge heal as a result is multiplied 25 fold.
In the end, i'm happy to make more videos. Its very hard to capture 'perfect condition' games as you suggest. People who can't see past their nose will always try to point out all the little things that mar the experiment. However, if one used their brain it isn't hard to extrapolate a bit and realise they are overpowered - that the marginal advantages they confer are much too high due to their ability to damage soak.
<!--quoteo(post=1989113:date=Oct 9 2012, 10:33 PM:name=Jekt)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Jekt @ Oct 9 2012, 10:33 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989113"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Thank you for ruining Australian public games for the next week HeatSurge. I'm sure Elodea will gladly prove his point to you.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm not from Australia and I'm not sure what you mean. I'd gladly have a drifter rush be done to me when I'm on a decent team; I just haven't seen a single successful drifter rush before, and I've been playing quite a bit the last 4 weeks, so the complaint is confusing to me. If I see drifter rushes which are clearly unbalanced, I'll obviously change my opinion :-) .
And yes, sure, you can infinitely spam anything that's not limited. You can confine marines to 1 chair and then fill the entire map with whips or crags or onos eggs or whatever you'd like. In RTS things aren't limited by artificial limits (except the total unit cap to prevent crashing the game by running out of memory); they're limited by cost and speed of construction. No RTS will limit how many fast assault units you can make early game just because "oh, they're spammed in games." They'll just make them (or their factories) expensive enough to not be unstoppable, or tweak the speed/cost of construction.
So, I think the questions that the developers and everyone should be considering are: are things unbalanced in early/mid/late game in a game of 6/9/12 players per side, considering their cost or speed of construction. However, I think the complexity of those questions is kind of painful, considering right now most of the game is "flat" i.e. structure and life form variables don't scale between game sizes at all, and in general I think even now the game has problems of different scale games playing somewhat differently. So, instead of trying to rescale and rebalance the whole game, they're making artificial "band-aid" limits like "one of this in a room, three of this per this, etc."
Oh, and by the way, in RTS you can also "troll" a game just like some games in NS2 are trolled. You can just confine the enemy player to low tech/low resources, and then you can choose how to win in most games. E.g. for example in supcom2, trolling would be effectively winning the game (confining/establishing tech and mass supremacy), and then using massive amounts of engineers to simply reclaim the enemy without firing a shot; then exploding your ACU into his on hold fire (if it's not assassination). That's why IMO it's actually better to quit when you know you've lost, rather than being trolled - it shows self-respect in a way. At a certain point, you become a toy in the hands of the other player(s); that's when usually teams/players surrender in tournaments in online games.
And, okay, I agree with most of your points. I'd like to go against 25 drifters as a dual exo as an experiment sometime though; might be a good thing to try in different situations (los: around a corner or in a longer corridor, etc.). And I still think drifters are an alternative strategy. OK, you're spamming drifters with huge health, ok... but maybe marines are getting better tech meanwhile, while your team doesn't (and won't) get leap/blink/spores or upgrades any time soon, because of the drifter spam. Maybe because of that your life forms are increasingly losing the game and eventually your drifter-spamming hive gets rushed, when your life forms could've won with upgrades.
endarJoin Date: 2010-07-27Member: 73256Members, Squad Five Blue
<!--quoteo(post=1989117:date=Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM:name=elodea)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (elodea @ Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989117"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->In the end, i'm happy to make more videos.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo(post=1989118:date=Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM:name=HeatSurge)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (HeatSurge @ Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989118"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'm not from Australia and I'm not sure what you mean. I'd gladly have a drifter rush be done to me when I'm on a decent team; I just haven't seen a single successful drifter rush before, and I've been playing quite a bit the last 4 weeks, so the complaint is confusing to me.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Please don't keep provoking elodea, drifter rushes are not fun for anyone. Just remember that, like you said, you don't play on the Australian servers, so you don't have to put up with it for the next week or so.
If they're not fun for anyone, that's a whole different discussion - and I agree, the parts which are not fun should be taken out of the game.
P.S. I was going to add to my previous post something I thought about on the way to the store. Some people ignore a very basic RTS101 principle: scouting.
For the RTS newcomers (I'm not saying elodea is; I have no idea what his background is), it's a pretty good idea in RTS in general to anticipate what your opponent is doing. No good RTS player simply does "this one thing" and hopes to always win. RTS that have an "always win" strategy are stupid RTS (maybe NS2 is one of those TROLOL - just kidding).
So, in RTS there's this very simple concept of scouting. There's basically two types of scouting: passive and active.
In passive scouting, you "scout" by looking at the edges of your fog of war, and knowing the approximate timings and cost of things by experience, you can usually by the method of elimination remove a few possibilities. Some possible general RTS deductions: "I see no resource structures, he must be teching or making a huge rush," or "I see lots of resource structures, he must not have too many units and is putting all his resources in expansion."
In active scouting, you scout by actually making radar/vision structures/abilities, and/or sending one very fast-moving, cheap suicide unit into the enemy's base in hopes of getting vision on what he's doing (either vision on units or structures).
In NS2, even though it's a very very simple "RTS"-type game, and in all honesty it's unfair to compare it to dedicated RTS products, both of those scouting methods are actually... available!
Passive scouting: You don't see alien RTs or structures = fast second hive or some kind of saving for an egg or... drifter rush!!! You see aliens getting lots of RTs = slow second hive/slow leap/slow upgrades. Something in the middle = who knows :-) .
Active scouting: Marines have a rather cheap (3 res) scan, which while not a very good idea to spam, is generally very very doable every minute or 30 seconds or so. It takes 2 hives a full minute (in my estimation) to make 15-20 drifters, and one hive double that, so with scans every minute the marines can know exactly what's going on in the alien hive(s). OK, so maybe scan is expensive? It's pretty easy to order a marine to drop all his weapons and ninja sprint into one of the alien hives. I do this sometimes myself. With the right timing, route, and of course lots of luck, you can even axe an upgrade or two in there - and you can certainly distract an entire alien team ;-) .
P.P.S. With marine turret changes in 222, they might provide another alternative to drifter spam defense, depending on how good they are.
<!--coloro:#FFC0CB--><span style="color:#FFC0CB"><!--/coloro-->There is no way turrets will help when they're capped to one battery per room and the drifters still have 300hp. As someone else said, the best solution is to simply put a cap on how many drifters you can have per hive.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
To be honest, in reality, it's probably best to put a cap on literally everything in the game, as the servers can't really cope with turtling late-game without the tickrate going to 20 or below - including macs, arcs, eggs, shifts/shades/crags/etc. I'm not talking about an overly restrictive limit but I've seen some really really badly laggy games, even on OCd servers. I can only imagine what atrocities there will be on release day as people start running servers on shared boxes with 1.5ghz cpu or less at 24 slots...
GSPs will probably learn pretty quickly that this game has... special... requirements.
With that in mind; sure - mac/arc/drifter nerfiage is a good idea. However, the "balancing" question is pretty complicated imo - not just for drifters but the entire game.
I went through a phase where I did a drifter rush every game for a week. I wouldn't even attack the command chair. I would just attack the people as they spawned. It was funny. Every once in awhile I do drifter spam again.
Comments
-NS2 release date is october 31st.
Synopsis end.
lets see how many drifterrushes we're going to see in the Tournament at the weekend
Who cares, if the marine commander can afford sentries the game is already over.
I love NS2, I'm just very critical because I'm so passionate about the series (ns1 & ns2)
Turrets were very strong in NS1, but they were never used due to priority (choosing tech / weapons over static defence). My my opinion the only people who care about turrets are pub players who like to build massive bases at every tech point.
lets see how many drifterrushes we're going to see in the Tournament at the weekend<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
None, because drifters are weak, cost money and occupy hive time to make.
In pretty much all comp. games I've seen, you'd be much better-off placing a fade egg or researching leap/blink than making 17 drifters.
Like Charlie said, it might have happened in some odd game, but it's definitely not a trend that I've seen.
In pretty much all comp. games I've seen, you'd be much better-off placing a fade egg or researching leap/blink than making 17 drifters.
Like Charlie said, it might have happened in some odd game, but it's definitely not a trend that I've seen.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
lol, you wont see mass drifter use because the comp players are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies that also cause server lag in proper tournaments where their reputation is on the line. Push arc or duplex enough though and i'm sure they'll do it 'for the good of the game'.
I'm surprised Charlie doesn't understand the exploitative implications of 300hp drifters. If he wants more videos clearly explaining the problem step by step, i'm happy to make them (already made one a month ago hoping to get some changes rolling <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8AmDZSlGlw)" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8AmDZSlGlw)</a>.
@OP
You can watch past broadcasts they do on the twitch channel. Here's a link to the QnA - <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/naturalselection2/b/334994045" target="_blank">http://www.twitch.tv/naturalselection2/b/334994045</a>. Would be nice if they were put up on the UWE youtube channel though.
That's like saying that clans are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies like continuously rushing the power node/IP/obs on Veil or dropping Fade/Onos eggs (especially when they were cheap a couple patches ago).
Building mass drifters isn't an exploit IMO. It's just stupidity. IDK though, I'm yet to see a game where aliens actually kill something with a drifter rush. It's been tried a few times, and every time I've seen the drifters destroy absolutely nothing and die to 1-2 marines...
That's like saying that clans are better than to exploit incredibly OP strategies like continuously rushing the power node/IP/obs on Veil or dropping Fade/Onos eggs (especially when they were cheap a couple patches ago).
Building mass drifters isn't an exploit IMO. It's just stupidity. IDK though, I'm yet to see a game where aliens actually kill something with a drifter rush. It's been tried a few times, and every time I've seen the drifters destroy absolutely nothing and die to 1-2 marines...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Understandable. The overall/general skill level of alien khammanders out there is pretty abysmal (in a role that doesn't really require alot of skill level anyway). Again, watch my video and you'll see lots of stuff dying to drifters - and this was when i was still learning the proper timings and how to fight the UI effectively
Just a few observations:
- the video doesn't show the skill level of the players involved. You can give fades or onos to a bad team and record them getting owned by shotguns and try to make a case that the shotguns are OP or that fades or onos are weak. I'm not saying that the games recorded showed bad players; I'm saying you can't really tell
- the videos don't show the entire game. What happened before or after the drifter use? By spamming drifters for 5 minutes, you were for sure depriving your team of upgrades; be it leap, blink, chamber upgrades (celerity/cara/silence), or egg drops.
So you got a com chair (while everyone still beaconed), defended your hive, and ended a what looks like an already won game with an onos and 3-hive/res domination with drifters? Not a problem considering the investment of ~50+ res and the time involved in making the drifters. Personally, I would've dropped another onos or fade egg because I like persistent pressure rather than surprise tactics, because surprise tactics fail more :-) ... but all power to you if drifters are what you like.
If you'd like to make a stronger case against drifters, I'd suggest making a video recording of an entire game, with game/mic audio, and preferably with a screenshot of the players involved.
In other news, some number of ARCs can 1-shot a hive from pretty far away; unbalanced mkay?
It's a shame cause I think that leaving drifters at 300 hp is fine, but perhaps have a max cap on how many you can have on the field per hive.
Just a few observations:
- the video doesn't show the skill level of the players involved. You can give fades or onos to a bad team and record them getting owned by shotguns and try to make a case that the shotguns are OP or that fades or onos are weak. I'm not saying that the games recorded showed bad players; I'm saying you can't really tell
- the videos don't show the entire game. What happened before or after the drifter use? By spamming drifters for 5 minutes, you were for sure depriving your team of upgrades; be it leap, blink, chamber upgrades (celerity/cara/silence), or egg drops.
So you got a com chair (while everyone still beaconed), defended your hive, and ended a what looks like an already won game with an onos and 3-hive/res domination with drifters? Not a problem considering the investment of ~50+ res and the time involved in making the drifters. Personally, I would've dropped another onos or fade egg because I like persistent pressure rather than surprise tactics, because surprise tactics fail more :-) ... but all power to you if drifters are what you like.
If you'd like to make a stronger case against drifters, I'd suggest making a video recording of an entire game, with game/mic audio, and preferably with a screenshot of the players involved.
In other news, some number of ARCs can 1-shot a hive from pretty far away; unbalanced mkay?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
lol i dont think you understand the point.
1) 300 hp drifters are <b>skill nullifiers</b>. Please understand i am not talking about <b>damage output</b>, i am talking about <b>health points</b> mkay? Even if it somehow was balanced, they are still bad design simply because they nullify marine skill in the same way onos does (both aim and movement).
2) Drifter spam is never a waste of tres pre-gl for the following reasons
<i>a)</i> It turns a co-ordinated skulk rush into a guaranteed win. Drifter rushes will usually have 19 drifters, which at 300hp means you now have a meatshield almost 3 times as much as an onos only for 25 less tres and 6 minutes earlier in the game.
<i>b)</i> 1 hive locks mean the only rational choice left available to you ends up being drifter spam (dat 100 tres bank is looking awfully wasted now isn't it when you can't even secure a techpoint). You cannot drop fade/onos on 1 hive.
<i>c)</i> I didn't show all the other tricks you can do with drifters because that video was pretty much day 1 experimentation.
<i>d)</i> I cannot control who gets an onos/fade egg in a pub game and whether they are good players. This is a risk that makes drifter spam the safer preferred option.
<i>e)</i> 75 tres of drifters beats dual exo.
<i>f)</i> 75 tres of drifters has 7500 hp in total. Not only is this many times more than an onos, but gorge heal as a result is multiplied 25 fold.
In the end, i'm happy to make more videos. Its very hard to capture 'perfect condition' games as you suggest. People who can't see past their nose will always try to point out all the little things that mar the experiment. However, if one used their brain it isn't hard to extrapolate a bit and realise they are overpowered - that the marginal advantages they confer are much too high due to their ability to damage soak.
I'm not from Australia and I'm not sure what you mean. I'd gladly have a drifter rush be done to me when I'm on a decent team; I just haven't seen a single successful drifter rush before, and I've been playing quite a bit the last 4 weeks, so the complaint is confusing to me. If I see drifter rushes which are clearly unbalanced, I'll obviously change my opinion :-) .
And yes, sure, you can infinitely spam anything that's not limited. You can confine marines to 1 chair and then fill the entire map with whips or crags or onos eggs or whatever you'd like. In RTS things aren't limited by artificial limits (except the total unit cap to prevent crashing the game by running out of memory); they're limited by cost and speed of construction. No RTS will limit how many fast assault units you can make early game just because "oh, they're spammed in games." They'll just make them (or their factories) expensive enough to not be unstoppable, or tweak the speed/cost of construction.
So, I think the questions that the developers and everyone should be considering are: are things unbalanced in early/mid/late game in a game of 6/9/12 players per side, considering their cost or speed of construction. However, I think the complexity of those questions is kind of painful, considering right now most of the game is "flat" i.e. structure and life form variables don't scale between game sizes at all, and in general I think even now the game has problems of different scale games playing somewhat differently. So, instead of trying to rescale and rebalance the whole game, they're making artificial "band-aid" limits like "one of this in a room, three of this per this, etc."
Oh, and by the way, in RTS you can also "troll" a game just like some games in NS2 are trolled. You can just confine the enemy player to low tech/low resources, and then you can choose how to win in most games. E.g. for example in supcom2, trolling would be effectively winning the game (confining/establishing tech and mass supremacy), and then using massive amounts of engineers to simply reclaim the enemy without firing a shot; then exploding your ACU into his on hold fire (if it's not assassination). That's why IMO it's actually better to quit when you know you've lost, rather than being trolled - it shows self-respect in a way. At a certain point, you become a toy in the hands of the other player(s); that's when usually teams/players surrender in tournaments in online games.
And, okay, I agree with most of your points. I'd like to go against 25 drifters as a dual exo as an experiment sometime though; might be a good thing to try in different situations (los: around a corner or in a longer corridor, etc.). And I still think drifters are an alternative strategy. OK, you're spamming drifters with huge health, ok... but maybe marines are getting better tech meanwhile, while your team doesn't (and won't) get leap/blink/spores or upgrades any time soon, because of the drifter spam. Maybe because of that your life forms are increasingly losing the game and eventually your drifter-spamming hive gets rushed, when your life forms could've won with upgrades.
<!--quoteo(post=1989118:date=Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM:name=HeatSurge)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (HeatSurge @ Oct 10 2012, 03:43 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1989118"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'm not from Australia and I'm not sure what you mean. I'd gladly have a drifter rush be done to me when I'm on a decent team; I just haven't seen a single successful drifter rush before, and I've been playing quite a bit the last 4 weeks, so the complaint is confusing to me.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Please don't keep provoking elodea, drifter rushes are not fun for anyone. Just remember that, like you said, you don't play on the Australian servers, so you don't have to put up with it for the next week or so.
I suppose it's for the greater good, but... oh boy haha.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
P.S. I was going to add to my previous post something I thought about on the way to the store. Some people ignore a very basic RTS101 principle: scouting.
For the RTS newcomers (I'm not saying elodea is; I have no idea what his background is), it's a pretty good idea in RTS in general to anticipate what your opponent is doing. No good RTS player simply does "this one thing" and hopes to always win. RTS that have an "always win" strategy are stupid RTS (maybe NS2 is one of those TROLOL - just kidding).
So, in RTS there's this very simple concept of scouting. There's basically two types of scouting: passive and active.
In passive scouting, you "scout" by looking at the edges of your fog of war, and knowing the approximate timings and cost of things by experience, you can usually by the method of elimination remove a few possibilities. Some possible general RTS deductions: "I see no resource structures, he must be teching or making a huge rush," or "I see lots of resource structures, he must not have too many units and is putting all his resources in expansion."
In active scouting, you scout by actually making radar/vision structures/abilities, and/or sending one very fast-moving, cheap suicide unit into the enemy's base in hopes of getting vision on what he's doing (either vision on units or structures).
In NS2, even though it's a very very simple "RTS"-type game, and in all honesty it's unfair to compare it to dedicated RTS products, both of those scouting methods are actually... available!
Passive scouting: You don't see alien RTs or structures = fast second hive or some kind of saving for an egg or... drifter rush!!! You see aliens getting lots of RTs = slow second hive/slow leap/slow upgrades. Something in the middle = who knows :-) .
Active scouting: Marines have a rather cheap (3 res) scan, which while not a very good idea to spam, is generally very very doable every minute or 30 seconds or so. It takes 2 hives a full minute (in my estimation) to make 15-20 drifters, and one hive double that, so with scans every minute the marines can know exactly what's going on in the alien hive(s). OK, so maybe scan is expensive? It's pretty easy to order a marine to drop all his weapons and ninja sprint into one of the alien hives. I do this sometimes myself. With the right timing, route, and of course lots of luck, you can even axe an upgrade or two in there - and you can certainly distract an entire alien team ;-) .
P.P.S. With marine turret changes in 222, they might provide another alternative to drifter spam defense, depending on how good they are.
GSPs will probably learn pretty quickly that this game has... special... requirements.
With that in mind; sure - mac/arc/drifter nerfiage is a good idea. However, the "balancing" question is pretty complicated imo - not just for drifters but the entire game.