Has anyone else noticed the slight stacking, lately?
The_Janitor
Join Date: 2013-03-24 Member: 184320Members
Join Date: 2013-03-24 Member: 184320Members
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false on both accounts
no
Made a habit of going spectate to shame veterans into evening out the teams. Should be evenly balanced in terms of new players.
Then they complain stack, when we had no choice in teams to begin with.
Yeah. Our server has that problem quite often.
At first I tried helping out the new players by commanding and giving them general tips, but it became painful to continue so I just put my music on and started killing them all.
This. Almost every game I play all the Greens flock to Marines because it is understandably familiar, leaving all experienced players to join Aliens.
I designed a system for this but there are a few problems in implementation, the largest being that effectiveness is based largely on having a very continuous group of regulars. I hope that my server does get more regulars going because with regular players a lot of problems in things like this become solvable.
I also have a shuffling option where it takes data from the the previous games on the server with the current players and applies a very, very basic algorithm to try and come up with semifair teams. The steam servers can be too slow to respond sometimes though for things like grabbing NS2 playtime for unknown players so there is an annoying delay. The problem with this approach is that it needs players to train it as I feel that game length is not purely indicative of balance because of turtling.
So from my own point of view, I know that at least one guy is working on solutions to stacking. You'll always have steamrolls though even with "fair" teams, and in a game with as many variables as this it's tricky on all counts.
additionally, skulks don't really scale well with skill in terms of combat effectiveness either. it's not "fun" like it is to play a lerk or a fade where you can actually have an impact on the flow of game. it relies on teamwork, too, which is where the entire concept falls apart in pubs. I'm not saying skulks can't be effective of course; it's just that most of that time is spent biting structures and on small-level tactics (such as baiting or teamwork) which pub players are for the most part not interested in.
ns_combat wasn't popular just because it was a fragfest, it was popular because you could actually have these super-scaled lifeforms so that it wasn't even rare to see someone go fully upgraded skulk (carapace, regeneration, focus, leap, etc) in a lategame combat scenario. or lerks with celerity and adrenaline. the lifeforms were fun to play, and scaled well so you could dictate the flow of the game.
solution would be to make skulk fun to play again. skill movement (bunnyhop, walljump), no "no res while dead", more lategame relevance (joining a 20 minute losing game as alien with 20 res and 2 RTs is just obnoxious), hell - even making Leap less terrible. these have all been issues for as long as we've been playing NS2 and they have not been addressed.
The only way to remedy it would be to make skulks more powerful than marines, which would obviously be terrible for balance.
I think this was less of a problem in NS1 (or we perceive it to have been) because what most of us remember of NS1 involves players who had played the game for 2 to 3 years or more. After that much playing you simply accept each team as different and play them in varying amounts as not to get bored of either one.
Except... you're incorrect. On our server using vote random we've actually had a long series of very good matches with fairly even teams, with a few steamrolls interspersed between. Once you get some regulars onboard with randoming and some people that actually communicate this issue dilutes.
There is no end-all solution to team stacking, and there never will be. That doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try to get good matches in.
Your scenario doesn't show that anything is being solved. All it shows is that players were forcibly assigned a team, potentially a team which they did not have fun playing. Force random will not solve their lack of fun.
Check the title of the thread? It's about team stacking, which is exactly what was being solved.
You're trying to redefine the problem that I attempted to solve to something that I wasn't aiming to do. None of my efforts were to change the fun value of skulks - I can't do this without a mod anyway. My efforts were to get better, fairer matches going - and they have worked.
I agree that skulks need to be made more fun again, but in the meantime, I'm not just going to sit around and let the stacking go on like it was before. There's no point when I can actually make a difference where I like to play.
I don't know about you, but I personally find the game much more fun when the teams are balanced.
If that is what you were referring to, then you probably shouldn't quote someone who wasn't referring to team stacking at all, and then tell them that they are incorrect. It can be misleading.
It is the late game skulks gets "boring"/less effective, since you have to hit the marines 5 times with bites, while they can still kill you with 9 bullets. And I bet you, not all of those 5 bites will do 50 damage! Since if you're aim is off by just a little, it will do 25.. Which means one bite is less effective than 1-2 bullets.
Anyone else struggling to take this post seriously? Just want to make sure it isn't just me over here.
In case it is, skulk bites do 75 damage, and 50 if your aim is off. Hope this helps to further your prowess with the lifeform.
He said that people stack marines for fun (which is a reference to team stacking) and that you can't solve this with randomization and shuffling.
I pointed out that in my experience this is incorrect, as our randomized games have been very fun for both sides generally. Even those marine-preferential players getting put on aliens are having fun with it and become the ones to initiate the voterandom at the start of new rounds later on.
The devs are working on the momentum issue. Even when that's tweaked you'll run into stacking anyway. It goes deeper than one mechanic.
His implication was that the problem cannot be solved with things like force random scripts, the problem being that aliens is potentially not as fun as marines, and its manifestation being the stacking of the marine team.
The idea that players purposefully choosing to join one team over the other cannot be circumvented by disallowing players to choose which team they join is obviously absurd.