Natural Selection 2 Balance
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Natural Selection 2 Balance
What is the state of Natural Selection 2 balance, and what is Unknown Worlds doing about it? Find out in this dev blog post.
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Balance is a topic that causes forum etiquette to disintegrate. Please keep this thread friendly, on-topic and explosion free, or Comprox will nuke you, and then nuke me for posting about such a sensitive issue!
In Starcraft it's easy to say, you're in the bronze league, you are not good enough to discuss balance. You still have so much to improve upon that your opinion on balance hardly matters. Although this sounds harsh, and in a way it actually is kinda harsh, it is also true... As a novice player in a game like Starcraft 2, there is SO MUCH you can improve upon before you start losing due to things that may or may not be imbalanced. Only at the absolutely highest level of play (around the grandmaster league, top 200 per region) will you see the significance of balance design of the units or maps come into play as a big factor.
Usually there are a lot of things you can improve upon before commenting on balance, for instance in NS2 you can optimize your hiding spots to close in faster on the marines as aliens. Or as a marine you can simply aim better or conserve your ammo better, multitask better, communicate better... It's hard to recognize something as imbalanced if you are making mistakes, did you not win because it's imbalanced, or did you have too many flaws in your play that lead to your defeat?
Some things are stronger in the early game, others are better in the mid game. In fact, this is something people often confuse with balance. It can be intentional game design to give races or strategies advantages at certain points in the game. You can go for a shotgun rush and take down their hive early, but if it fails you will have a weaker lategame.
Sometimes it comes down to the amount of time people have had to figure out what is going on. The "metagame" could be getting a fast second hive, but if marines have a tactic that counteracts this very effectively, aliens need to adapt and change the standard play (the metagame) to something that can deal with the marines standard manuever. This can take up a lot of time.
What this all comes down to is... balance is not to be taken lightly. A small change can make a big impact because it opens up entirely different ways of playing out tactics. Sometimes all a game needs to balance out is time.
What I was disappointed not to find is a combination of the last two types of diagrams, that would show the win rates of both races for each game lengths. That should certainly show something.
Keep up the good work!
However, I do have to quibble with one statement: NS2 may by asymmetrical in many ways, but the core is still the FPS standard two-sides with even numbers of players. Presuming the intent of the game is to not be biased against either team, the theoretical probability of victory should be 50%.
Natural Selection isn't CounterStrike and I think it would be reckless to try and shorten the matches to that kind of length.
Are you aware of this issue? My best guess is that marines get stronger in larger groups early on and aliens get relatively less higher life forms in larger games, possibly due to player res imbalance or not gaining res while dead.
20 games is not a meaningful sample size. NS2Stats shows that KingKahuna is closer to 60% marine wins. And yes they're aware of that. I think the most plausible explanation is that the alien spawn system is responsible.
Really, you should just skip servers with 22 players or more. It's never been fun and never will be. Even 10v10 is pushing it. I know UWE can't limit server sizes nor should they, but I would appreciate if they would "strongly recommend" to the community server sizes which in their mind provide the optimal experience.
Completely agreeing with Menohack.
Are these Balance Stats recorded from 16 players Servers? Aliens are way too weak when it comes to a big group of marines.
And i'd still like to give the ns1 "focus" ability for aliens into discussion since marines now already have 2 abilities which can kill with a skulk with 1 hit - Shotgun and Railgun.
Afair - back in beta times - in a dev "diary" on twitch the devs said that they did not want to get focus or devour into the game because of their ability to take an enemy out of the game with a single successful hit. But then I keep wondering why marines are given those abilities. Even a full hp carapace skulk does not withstand 1 successful hit.
Ok. You might argue that a 0 resource lifeform shouldnt be strong enough toto take down a railgun exo (50 res) or sg (20res & recycable). But honestly on the other hand even an Onos needs 3 to 4 hits to kill a armor 3 marine (0res) lategame afaik.
While Aliens have the disadvantage of being only melee units (which is fine for me due to the great asymmetrical gameplay) they still do less damage in relation to health/armor of each side, and thus amount of hits needed.
Maybe you might tell me now, that aliens shouldn't stop moving and keep evading bullets. Yes. Sure. That's a great idea and really worked out in the last couple of builds. Now you are most likely only able to hit a marine a single time before he notices and then quickly jumps out of range which cannot even be compensated by a celerity skulk.
And at last I'd like to mention one additional point in terms of balance. This should rather be seen as an exception.
There are several really good players out there - especially when one of those play marine, he can dominate a whole alien team due to 1 hit ability with Shotguns.
This is a teamgame. There shouldn't be the possibility for a single very good player to kill 3 or 4 units of the other team just by jumping around and hitting perfectly.
I'm sure I've forgot some things, but this should be it for the very moment.
Looking forward to your comments.
PS: Nevertheless NS2 is just a great game but imho needs more balance polishing. I don't agree with the balance only beeing achieved by looking who's won without taking other aspects in consideration.
For example long games are mostly won by rines. I once played a match which was very very even at the 40 or 50 minute mark with exos and onoses. Both sides losing some and gaining new, but then suddenly the rine team just started building arcs and protected/camped those behind a wall next to a hive with 4 Exos. No chance to get them. Tried Onoses+umbra and bilebombs.
for example, marines joining after a round starts are almost at full strength (upgrades, access to weapons)
a comparable alien late join still has to save up for a life form (no pres accumulated)
2 main reasons: expansion and spawn rate.
Expansion: marines require players to expand, so more players means faster expansion, whereas alien expansion is a default at the sole discretion of the khammander. As such, the smaller the game, the greater the relative expansion speed of the aliens compared to that of the marines, and vice versa.
Spawn rate: marines can manipulate their spawn rate from the beginning by building more infantry portals, and very rarely you need more than three to accommodate the rate by which your marines die. Aliens, on the other hand, have no way of boosting their in the early game apart from spending resources on a shift which has the following problems: 1) you have to spend 5 res every time you want two eggs (and 10 res for the shift itself), which will in time be much more than the marine 15 res for an infinite amount of respawns 2) it forces the khammander to go for a shift hive first every single time, reducing strategic variance, and shift is arguably worse than crag in way of upgrades.
Aliens getting relatively less higher life forms in larger games is not true, since personal res flow does not scale according to the amount of players, so you would get 10 fades in a 10vs10 just as quickly as you would get 2 with 2vs2.
I don't want to side-track this thread though. Nice to see the official numbers on b240 and b241 balance, and I must say I was pretty surprised at how much they differ from the NS2stats numbers.
Far too often I see suggestions that involve taking a sledgehammer to game mechanics in an effort to swat a fly. It can't be understated how even a small change can have a huge balance ripple effect.
For example Blizzard never ever even talks about overall winrates. The very first thing they do to statistics is to sort them into various leagues and then probably measure various maps and game lengths from there.
There's awfully lot of obsession with 50/50 considering how little it actually tells about anything without a well detailed context.
And 50/50 actually seems a bit of an odd goal. That assumes that all players are equally skilled on both teams, but because the teams use different skill sets, that isn't something that can be taken for granted.
My personal opinion is that new players especially should be more competent at Marine than Alien, and thus that the ratio should be in favor of Marines. That's just my thoughts on the matter though.
When build 241 came out only 1 week later, you called the "Skulk movement issue" a bug and I was very angry thnking there goes my one week of great NS2 play. We will go right back into an alien OP nightmare. But I was wrong. A few weeks have gone by. Again my personal stats and my gut feel, say BALANCED.
Good job UWE.
P.S. My personal build 241 stats as of now. 64 games, 32 alien wins, 32 marines. Ratio: 50.0%. I kid you not.
This is what I've been bashing my head against since this latest patch. I've been experiencing 90%+ marine wins which made all the dev posts about how balance was 'improved' extremely jarring. One moderator even told me off quite rudely on the subject, so all this time I've been wondering what naive magical dimension the staff are living in.
I never considered map size. Unfortunately, the majority of servers are 24p for some obscure reason. It's not even fun, but my most favourite maps (mineshaft > refinery > summit) are almost always only available in max player size.
We should get a server list filter to narrow the server serch by match size:
"Filter games under [textbox] number of maximum players and over [textbox] number of maximum players"
So that we can avoid 20-24 and 8 player servers.
Do I understand correctly that you're saying the 'theoretical probability of a win' should be 50% for either side, just because there's an even amount of players on each team? As we both know, UWE strives to reach the 50/50 winrate as close as possible. However, due to the asymmetrical nature of the teams, it's nigh impossible to get an exact 50/50 winrate, without making weird design decisions. That's what I take from that message - the best way to be sure would be to force all players to play 1x marine and 1x alien and call those two games "one round". And as it stands, that would yield a theoretical 50% winrate.
I'm not sure how that would be classified as an opinion, but I understand your sentiment. If UWE does things right, skulk will feel about as logical as a marine. Sure, it takes some getting used to, having to run up there and chomp at something at melee range. On the other side, there's only very few games that require twitch-aiming and tracking fast-moving targets like is neccesary in NS2. It's very difficult for me to judge since I've been involved in NS for so long, but I feel like there's not a large difference for the average FPS player.
Pro FPS players, on the other hand, will definitely play a better marine game.
EDIT:
I've seen that suggestion before and I agree that it would indeed be a great addition. Many people simply don't realize that the game was not designed around 12v12 teams.
Having played 1000 hours of NS2, I can pretty easily go 30:1 on either side against people with <100 hours of play. On the other hand, competitive players can probably go 30:1 against me (i mean lmg vs skulk). This radically shifts the balance when there's an imbalance of skills, especially since a single player can very often ruin the entire opposing team's strategy on a pub.
I love that UWE cares about balance and is willing to talk to us about it, even when I don't always agree with the changes.
There is no sample size: They're not statistics, they are parameters. (that is a very important distinction!). Yes, they are extremely granular, and go very deep into the game.
That's not true, have you read David Kim's posts about balance? For example: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/5202424/Talking_Balance_with_David_Kim-4_26_2012
In this post, I defined two ways of talking about balance. When talking about the probability of a win in a randomly selected game, I discussed both the importance and limitations of striving for a probability of 0.5 across all games. Making that clear was the hardest part of writing the post, and where most people are fixating.
Very vaild concerns. Long games can be fun... But we have to 'balance' (Geddit?) the fun long games provide with the effects they can have on the broader game. A median game time of around 10-15 minutes and mean of 20 minutes would probably be ideal to mitigate a variety of issues long games cause.
Count me amongst those who love long games! We just have to all be calm and recognise the issues with too many of them.
This is impossible to determine when both sides use completely different tech trees, methods of movement, attack dynamics... Imagine a rugby game where one team runs and one team uses hoverboards. What is the theoretical win rate? You can't determine it.
Very wise!
Anyone coming from TF2, CS:S, or any similar game will be much more comfortable tracking and shooting targets with a firearm than learning how to use Skulk movement, in my opinion. I think Aliens are also hit harder by no-res-while-dead and res-loss-on-death than Marines, along with mobility issues, the fact that Lerk/Skulk/Fade/Onos skills don't transfer between lifeforms, and various other punishing factors that all come together to make a day one (and after) Marine player better on average than a day one (and after) Alien player.
I think for people to agree that the game is balanced you need to have the same probability of winning a game in a 24 slot server as you do in a 12 slot server. Currently, this is not the case due to the fact that NS2 doesn't scale very well with player sizes. One of the design goals was to fix the resource system to allow the game to scale better and this was addressed by adding in personal res for the marines and team res for the aliens, however most of the other systems are based around static systems (alien egg spawning, p-res gain, structure health, etc...) which in turn makes NS2 scale even worse than NS1. Until these are changed to be dynamic, then the game will never truly be "balanced".
This way we could see the detailed nuances of the statistics, like it already happens with ns2stats, but with the sample size being 100%
This would be cool. The reason it's not public ally available is not because we don't want it to be, but because Sponitor just has no front end, nor the capacity to deal with a high volume of database requests. Perhaps one day we can get a front end put together for it!