♫ Guess whos back. . . back again. . . 60-40's back. . . tell a friend. . . ♪
MaximumSquid
Join Date: 2010-07-20 Member: 72593Members
Join Date: 2010-07-20 Member: 72593Members
So basically if you toss out the wins from the skulk rush Marines instantly go to a 58.5% win rate over aliens
Why am I tossing them out?
I really don't have to. . . if you weight the graph based on time played Marines would be awarded a much steeper percent
(basically it will "feel" like the marines are winning much more than aliens because the players will log more hours in games won by marines)
We aren't there yet, but I feel like a 60-40 is right around the corner
So why is it so awful?
Aliens are mostly melee so players will often feel like trapped, wounded animals waiting to die instead of being able to have a glorious last stand in base like Marines get
(there's exceptions obviously like if your whole team goes Gorge to wall off the last room, but this rarely happens)
Since this will likely transition into a balance discussion anyway I'd like to talk about 3 separate issues: Weak Onos, Weaker Ambush Tactics, and Weaker Map Control
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Weak Onos:
I played a 6on6 yesterday and the Alien team rolled into the Marine base with everyone which including 2 Onos when we had only 3 of our players there
Can you guess what happened next? If you guessed "Marines kicked them out" come claim your prize!
No jetpacks online yet either. . .
Nano-Shield and Distress Beacon was enough to trump it and I truly felt that we got outplayed and should of lost
That's probably best case scenario too; worst case is that Marines have JPs and your team is stuck on 2 hives when 1 is a Shade
You might as well just throw that 75 res in the trashcan because 2 Marines can easily solo you; probably wouldn't be hard to find stories where someone beat a 1on1 as well
Suggested Changes:
● Nano-Shield only effecting structures has been discussed many times; I don't agree with it, but I'd be willing to try it out if it gets a sidegrade buff along with the change
● Shade's 3rd evolution that is perfect for an Onos planning on assaulting a tech point; Surprise us UWE. . . make it a must have for non-stealth play
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Weaker Ambush Tactics:
Cloak was dumbed down, bile bomb nerfed, and unintelligent and expensive NPCs/Structures
I'm actually fine with the cloak change, but I'll see 5 or 6 games where players don't know how to use it before I see one game where it gets results
That alone is enough to make me think it still needs some more tweaks, but we'll get to that later
Gorge /w adrenaline up on the ceiling Bile Bombing down the power while 9 Babblers are also attack the node
Marine comes over with a shotgun and welder; 8/9 Babblers go down in 2 shots, welds standing on medpacks, and the commander comes over and pops me
This scenario wasn't just getting unlucky. . . this repeated 3 or 4 times. . .
Lastly are the expensive structures that almost never get played because their effect on the game is so low
Even worse are the abilities that require too much skill to operate
Suggested Changes:
● Moving with 100% cloak still allowed while on infestation; Lerk doesn't uncloak while gliding regardless of speed
● Babblers need a damage increase on structures. . . how about a major attack speed increase if they cling to them; would also cap the number that can cling
● Autocast toggling system; Ink goes off if scanned, Cysts can rupture when walked over, Crags automatically boost heal if a lifeform/structure is <50% life near them
● Mature structures sprayed with mist will very slowly transform into their advanced version and/or transform with a lot of help from Gorges
● Normal structures can use their advanced abilities for a premium (double the cost) and also puts stress on the structure (scaling damage based on % of maturity)
● Immature cysts can be ruptured, but the rupture will sacrifice the cyst and cost 1 more if we go along with the previous suggestion (so 3 res total. . . very fair)
● Whips can be toggled to reach up, grab, and attach ceilings (if low enough); they will then curl up to try and hide more for marines passing below them
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Weaker Map Control:
Most of the major map imbalances are due to Marines punishing unmanageable starting hive locations and vulnerable/long cyst chains
Refinery and Docking are the biggest culprits of this with Decent being a close 3rd due to it's distance between nodes
If Marines start off next to a hive and lock down the natural resource or hive expansion on the other end Aliens are basically finished
Gorge tunnels do nothing when you have to sneak the Gorge back across what is essentially no mans land to get it online
Trying to ninja drop a hive that maybe only 1 or 2 lifeforms can sneak over to is also incredibly risky
2 Marines can drop in all the equipment they need before putting down the chair, but without the cysts Aliens can only rely on a few hydras or guards that can't heal
Pretty much an instant lose if you factor in med drops
Suggested Changes:
● New map mechanics added; a limited number of doors/vents that can be damaged by aliens or welded to keep them open or closed (Courtyard's access to Stability *cough*)
● Being able to place cysts chains through areas that cannot traversed by players (grates, debris, or other natural obstructions)
● New cyst autobuild mechanic; Automatically builds a cyst chain to a nearby resource tower for 5 res regardless of distance (Marine killing one cyst will stop spread)
● New cyst ability "Oversaturate"; Costs 3 res, will completely fill a room with infestation (requires at least 5 mature cysts in the room)
● Being able to build cysts through a vent (requires that one of the connecting rooms is in the "Oversaturated" state)
● New Drifter Researchable "Acid Secretion" - lets them attach to structures to deal better damage
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Honorable Mention (Marines):
● EMP usable by default on MACs, but disables Marine structures and Exos for a short time if caught in blast
● New MAC Researchable "Electrify" - lets MAC reroute power to itself and up to one other structure dealing weak damage to nearby enemies and each time it's attack with melee
● +15% move speed to Exos or allow Exos to use jet jump fuel to sudo-dash forward for brief time (maybe Tribes style ski-ing down ramps?)
● Exo researchable that upgrades Fists to Flamethrowers (Requires flamethrower tech from AA as a prerequisite first)
● A new, expensive, Marine deployable that can be bought from a Robotics Factory after it has been researched
● Arms Lab required before Marines can research Shotguns
● An inexpensive personal distress beacon purchasable at an Armory after it has been researched from an Observatory
● Tier 1 equipment pres cost reduced by 5 when bought from an Advanced Armory (free welders from AA in other words)
● Additional upgrades for advanced weapons researchable from the Prototype Lab (these will not be cheap)
-- Proximity Fuses for GL (nades blow up when near a target increasing chance to hit, but reducing damage)
-- High Pressure Canister for Flamethrower (increases range and slight increase to damage; violently discharge when damaged by bile on the ground)
-- GPS Slugs for Shotgun (all damage in one spot, Aliens/Structures hit by slug that are still alive will be tracked until they die)
-- High Explosives for Mines (Mines deal much more damage, but are unstable and will blow up on their own 1 minute after purchase or when shot)
-- GL attachment for LMG (I thought it was good. . . I want it back even if it's only for late game)
● Mines can be thrown a short distance with alt fire (Still blow up instantly when they land on infestation, toss them a short ways ahead of you, or tossing into high vents)
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Also. . .
As a last word can someone explain to me how to get a 33% win rate on only 2 games?
Maybe I'm not reading the charts right. . .
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Oh well. Game isn't perfect, but I still find a way to have a great time with it.
241 + pub and competitive and everything checked for mods I get 49.22 / 50.78 marines.
No mods: 54.55 / 45.45 aliens.
Also I'm not sure it's fair to remove all 0-5 minute games. We certainly didn't do that when talking about the 60/40 alien winrate before. And the reason the alien winrate dominates those games so much is simply because pub marines almost never hive rush, and it's almost impossible for them to accidentally transition into an early win like aliens can, but that doesn't make the alien wins invalid.
Its like were back to saying Ns2 stats is accurate, lol.....
That's actually great to hear. Aliens are just spoiled. :P
Although I do think there may be a balance issue with respect to large slot (20+) servers, and marines are rolling them lately. I'd like to see some kind of dynamic spawn balancing for Aliens on large servers, and maybe Marine as well.
The point is more that a 5 min game does not hurt you if youre on the loosing and and is not more than a short lol if youre on the losing end.
I mean, you spawn, you die you lost before respawn. quick and painless. If all stacked matches would be like this I bet we'd have 5000 concurrent players and not 2000.
The unfun loosing which therefor actually is bad for the overall fun people have with the game starts at I'd say 10-15 minutes. There are 20 min games where aliens lost at like minute 2 when that one marine guy went 6-0 and killed a harvester while khamm went shade first. Thereafter come 18 minutes of unfun something then you loose. If a game like this happens to be in my last round of the day I usually don't feel like playing NS2 for 2 or so days.
So concluded: It's perfectly alright to neglect the <5 min games when talking about PUB and FUN related balance.
His point, though, is that people didn't neglect the <5 min games back when they were complaining about aliens being OP in b238 and b239, even though they had the same level of dominance.
Aliens: 50.66
Marines: 49.34
28,000 games
Care to explain how a significant sample size like ns2stats is not accurate?
If you can do so, you should be teaching at a university and schooling all those silly statisticians on why what they do is completely bogus.
KKG: 320 games, 37% alien winrate
Non-KKG: 700 games, 50.35% alien winrate
So what it shows is that for one reason or the other, KKG 24 player servers have become really unbalanced.
In 239, the KKG servers had the same winratio (55%) as the other ns2stats servers. So 241 seems to have made the game balance much more sensitive to large teamsizes.
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.
Or the KKG servers are running some weird mod, though I don't think so.
All servers:
All servers except KKG:
Only KKG servers:
Basically, tons of alien losses on the KKG servers are skewing the overall numbers towards marines. Maybe someone who plays on the KKG servers regularly can provide some insight why alien teams seem to be so much worse on those servers than all of the others?
KKG is usually where I play, but I played on a few other places to see if things were any different
When they weren't I then decided to check NS:2 stats
What would be really interesting is to see what the KKG stats would be without the alien rush wins
Some maps are completely unplayable on the server right now with Marine Commanders knowing exactly where to get troops
This is even with Admins forcing All-Random
5-6 Minute ARCs rolling in well before Aliens can secure Bile Bomb is also becoming a common sight
It's like some of the old uncounterable strats Marines had access to during alpha/beta
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Angry Child:
I expected criticism so I tried to do my due diligence before posting this by gathering info from 3 separate sources
Plus interviewing a recent player that quit. . .
Maybe I just got really unlucky with my sources, but I'm sure plenty don't think the game is 100% balanced yet
I mean I think content is still going to be added
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Squeal_Like_A_Pig:
I'd love a link to the source. . .
I wouldn't have posted all of this if I thought there was a simple solution or was unnecessary
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ScardyBob:
KKG isn't running any balance mods
I've seen large number of incredibly lucky late game Alien All-Ins on the Chair where Marines forget to drop a 2nd one in time when they could have
Usually followed by lots of swearing and testimonials about how badly Aliens got outplayed the whole game
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I don't usually jump into these, but while your "stats" might show balance, the route you took to achieve that balance was wrong. Well maybe it was a design decision by you guys, therefore not "wrong", but I'm going to try to argue that it was possibly the wrong direction.
The problem originally was a 60-40 alien imbalance, everyone can agree on that point. The issue that is muddied is figuring out why. From the changes in the skulk, I'm going to assume that you guys believed the issue was that skulks were too powerful and allowed the aliens to gain too much territory in the start game. While that was somewhat of a problem, and your skulk changes would be the natural fix to that, I don't think that was actually the "real" problem. The real problem, in my opinion, is that the alien economy was and is too strong. I saw it a lot in comp matches I watched, and more so in pubs, that if the aliens are able to hold more than 1/3 of the map, the game generally ends in alien victory due to mid-game lifeform explosions. While the game is asymmetrical, there should be some symmetry in game play in that equal map control should equal overall power, and give an equal chance to win. That is just not the case, and the aliens only need to hold 1/3 the map and rts to get out a strong enough mid-game to have at least 50% chance of winning. If the aliens hold half the map, it was generally always skewed in the aliens favour. While the old skulks aided by pushing strong map control in the start game, they were definitely not superly overpowered (at least not warranting a 50% nerf in the accel), and even in comp matches rarely held more than 4 rts in the start game. But if you held 4 rts long enough, you had a sufficient p-res gain to achieve a heavily favoured alien mid-game life form explosion. (2 lerks, 2 fades, 1 onos, or a mixture of that)
The big issue I have with the skulk change is the life form is just not fun anymore. This is wildly subjective obviously, but I think the outcry you're seeing is a result of this. While I personally have adapted as much as I can, normal players are really struggling with it, and some are just getting majorly frustrated with it. No one likes to go into a fight knowing that there is little hope that they will win 1v1. While I can understand asymmetrical balancing, the base unit should be "fair" to most people. The previous skulk was actually pretty fair in that once you were good enough aimer as a marine, most skulks were easy to kill, and a skulk at the same level as you would generally be a good fight. Now, once you've passed a certain skill level as a marine, pretty much no skulk can touch you, no matter how good they are at flanking you. Previously, skill being equal, in a 1v1 fight marines would usually win the engagement, but you would at least get a bite or two off. Now, even on a perfectly executed flank, against a good player, you're going to go down usually without even getting a bite off in a 1v1 fight. So now you're forced to use fodder in order to get them to waste enough ammo to get them into a reload. Forcing this sort of team work mechanic is just generally not going to work well in a pub sense. It definitely works in comp (and is forced now, in that they need to do attack countdowns etc), they basically had to do that before this change anyway.
Anyway, my suggestion for a solution to this problem is forcing aliens to hold 50% of the rts in order to have a chance to get off their super powerful mid-game. And if they don't, they still have a chance to come back, but it progressively gets harder as they hold less of the map, instead of taking nerf bats to life forms. So basically my suggestion is, bring back the old skulk (with the hitbox/smoothing fixes still in obviously) and slow down the alien economy a bit so that they are forced to hold more of the map.
I hereby retract my earlier comments challenging the notion that ns2stats is not representative of NS2 overall.
I also encourage all server ops to run ns2stats so that the results become more representative of NS2 overall.
The people who play on KKG can actually aim as Marines.
Then how do you explain the 54% alien winrate in Competitive? The more reasonable answer is that KKG servers are all 12v12.
6on6 plays out different than 12on12
Situations that are amusing in 12on12 like the commander dieing with power on might be your team on the brink of defeat in a 6on6
Map expansion is also lightning fast on 12on12. . . probably the biggest shock if you haven't done 6on6 is how common place "Slow-Roll" strats are
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ScardyBob:
I had more time to look at your findings I have to say that the difference is pretty glaring
I think on week nights or weekends that the number can actually go as high as Aliens losing 3/4ths of their games
The info has been posted on KKGs forum to see if anyone has any unique angle on the situation
Servers have dealt with high population egg lock for a number of patches now so that can't be the only contributor
Either way others have been wondering why the balance has felt so off so at least now I can tell them
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I guarantee that for every person who dislikes the change, there will be another that likes it. Any commentary on these changes is entirely subjective, but I think people need to accept that UWE will be moving forward and not backwards on this. While they did correct an unintended bug in 240, they won't be rolling back the game to where it was before when aliens were winning 60% of the games.
Knowing what I know about game development, I can tell you that they just didn't whip this change up on a cocktail napkin and toss it in the next build. (Well maybe they whipped it up on a napkin, but they would have given it a lot of thought.) Seriously though, these changes came after weeks/months of hand-wringing. If this was the change they made, then they made it since they felt it was the best change for the game.
The real problem, IMHO, is what I said way back in the fall. Whenever you have a situation where one side is too strong, the end result of any change is going to bother people. No one likes nerfs. (or opposing teams buffs that are effectively a nerf) When you get a nerf people will complain about it since they had grown accustomed to the game as it was, and they don't like change. Honestly, I don't blame them.
However, change is going to happen.
What should be noted is that nothing is forever. The game will evolve and grow as the developers fine tune it.
Yeah looks like it was obvious and the devs did it for me, *shrug*.
As the stats posted by scardybob show from the completely opposite win percentages in the first 5 mins, it is probably a lot easier to egg lock very early game on larger servers, when it really only takes a few players to kill eggs until the rest of the team arrives.
The differences in win percentages on those servers vs all other servers is pretty crazy. Would be nice to see if other 12v12 has similar differences in win rates.
Also, I'm singling out KKG not because I think their doing something to mess with the underlying game, but because they represent a large proportion of the data in ns2 stats. Problems, such as playercount scaling issues, will show up much more clearly with the KKG servers than others (though I'd love it if I could filter ns2stats by playercount directly). I suspect that if we could get a lot of data from other popular 24p servers (e.g. Monash, HBZ, etc), it'd show the same issues.