.... Really?? Do you not understand even remotely that different coders do different parts of the logic? They are working on performance and it is a real topic that needs to be addressed, but that is by no means a reason to completely ignore the major gameplay flaws, nor is it a reason to have someone spend countless hours a week to find another 0.05% performance increase from optimizing lua code, only to have them change the low level lua handling which completely nullifies all that work.
If your issue is performance, why make a topic titled as this was, with the tone and direction of the initial post?...
I don't see any major game play flaws currently... Which is why I do not feel balance mod is viable... I didn't mean to rustle your jimmies brah
Also you are speaking extremely circumstantial, I don't know anything about lua, but I do know that if all this time the community was more pressed on testing a performance mod rather than balance it would be over all more beneficial...once again sorry about those jimmies
It's not a matter of "stay with vanilla" or "go with balance mod". Many of you are being too black and white. Nearly all of us want to see some changes regarding balance and gameplay. Right now, there's all these rumors of those changes coming in a sweeping manner that is the "Sewlek's balance mod" and this worry a LOT of people. This is because the balance mod isn't just some minor, simple changes that tweak balance around. It's sweeping changes across every aspect of the game. The most worrying is movement of nearly every lifeform.
Anyone who is competitive has gotten used to every life forms movements and how they play it. If this mod becomes vanilla with movement changes to all life forms, that's going to hurt more than help. You can't just change that much of the game in one update. Think back to beta. Small changes to movement here and there. Minor tweaks. Not complete redesign of how to play a fade, skulk, lerk, AND onos.
Everyone keeps saying "play the balance mod, give feedback". I don't want to play the balance mod because I want to keep practicing and staying competitive with what real matches will be - vanilla. I don't want to spend weeks relearning every life form to get to the meta game and then be able to provide reasonable feedback to a lifeform's movement changes. Then when my team has a scrim, I'm used to a bt fade and not a vanilla fade and I might fumble.
Right now, it seems that there are only two options. Vanilla, or the balance mod. Both are so drastically different I might as well be loading up a completely different game.
There are a lot of things about sewlek's balance mod that I do like. The revamp to alien economy is great. I think it is a mistake to make it SO different from the game. Balance changes need to be done in baby steps. There needs to be a version of the balance mod that offers only a few of the changes. That gets tested, then it gets implemented. One patch every two to three weeks. Don't take 4 months revamping the entirety of the game and then implementing it, only to drive off a lot of people who liked a lot of the current vanilla ns2 changes.
A fundamental flaw with "play the balance mod and give feedback" is that I want to be competitive and practice trying to get better at movement, aim, prediction. It's hard when all of that keeps changing every few days with a new update. This game shouldn't be in a beta, and it shouldn't have this split between balance mod and vanilla.
The current live build is extremely stale and flawed. There really isn't much to it. Aliens grab 1 RT, go cara, then hold off till the 3-4 man fade ball rolls the field. That's just one of the issues in live build. There is a 60 page thread about the different issues balance test attempts to fix. This thread really doesn't need to reiterate that. Is current BT perfect? No. The "don't want to learn new game" argument doesn't really help anyone either. Play the mod, address issues you actually experience. That way we can all have input into the mod and hopefully revitalize this dying community.
Edit in response to Simba:
No one is asking you to not play vanilla at all. Keep playing vanilla. Keep practicing vanilla. We all are still doing that to stay competitive. All we are asking when we say "play the balance mod and give feedback" is to jump in a game every once in a while and comment on what you like and dislike. That way, you DO have some input on the changes that are coming to the game. I am fairly positive that the movement will be implemented eventually. Getting at least a taste of it might help you "stay competitive" once competition is forced to use the new movement.
I'm the one being circumstantial, but your the one posting that a mod to fix performance would be a better investment of time, but you (of your own admission) do not understand anything about lua or how the performance can be improved?
I'm the one being circumstantial, but your the one posting that a mod to fix performance would be a better investment of time, but you (of your own admission) do not understand anything about lua or how the performance can be improved?
That doesnt make any sense...
Seeing as how 90% of the people who purchased this game don't play it because they don't have a good time playing with terrible performance...I think it makes perfect sense.
I may not know how to fix it from a technical standpoint. but I am glad to put my time forward and help those who know how too.
News flash, you don't need to be an expert to know that something is flawed (and also offer a helping hand at doing whatever is needed). If someone fell onto the street and was having a heart attack, I wouldn't walk away because, "by my own admission I did not understand what is happening".
Not sure where that 90% figure comes from, but its irrelevant. The main point is that I would expect if sewlek spent all the time he has dedicated to the balance mod on a performance mod, the gains at most would be 1%.
If you don't need to be an expert to see something is flawed, I have no idea how you cannot see the flaws in vanilla. In the end people need to comment on the balance mod changes, if you fail to do that, then really your doing nothing useful. I find it amazing how many people can complain about movement or balance changes, but when asked what specifically is wrong, they have no answers or just say it sucks. Quality feedback.
It really comes down to if you are willing to help improve the gameplay and the movement (which needs massive improvement over LIVE, there is no denying that), or just act as a roadblock to any changes. The latter being the stance many people have taken without even playing a single BT game.
If you don't see flaw in the live build I don't know what to say..
Just to touch on one small part, do you not see issue with the fact that every game is carapace first? Is that not stale gameplay to you? (especially when the developers intend all upgrades to be used)
Not sure where that 90% figure comes from, but its irrelevant. The main point is that I would expect if sewlek spent all the time he has dedicated to the balance mod on a performance mod, the gains at most would be 1%.
If you don't need to be an expert to see something is flawed, I have no idea how you cannot see the flaws in vanilla. In the end people need to comment on the balance mod changes, if you fail to do that, then really your doing nothing useful. I find it amazing how many people can complain about movement or balance changes, but when asked what specifically is wrong, they have no answers or just say it sucks. Quality feedback.
It really comes down to if you are willing to help improve the gameplay and the movement (which needs massive improvement over LIVE, there is no denying that), or just act as a roadblock to any changes. The latter being the stance many people have taken without even playing a single BT game.
The 90% is just a rough estimate from seeing how many of my friends picked up the game and put it down due to performance, definitely not irrelevant.
I wasn't saying Andi should spend his time on a performance patch, I was saying the community needs to shift focus away from balance so much and over to performance, because balance is not the game killer.
Like I said I am giving BT a fair chance and have given my likes and dislikes about it, and many of the people you think just dismiss it have done the same.
Sorry if I came off a tad trolly earlier, but it seemed to me you were just arguing for the sake of arguing (with points that were already addressed earlier).
The 90% is just a rough estimate from seeing how many of my friends picked up the game and put it down due to performance, definitely not irrelevant.
I wasn't saying Andi should spend his time on a performance patch, I was saying the community needs to shift focus away from balance so much and over to performance, because balance is not the game killer.
But the community has nothing to do with performance... unless there are tons of Lua programmers I don't know about. The only thing we, as players, can do is assist Andi with BT.
The community cannot really help with performance is my point. They do not need massive testing to confirm FPS increases, outside of specific hardware bugs/optimizations generally a few people can do all the needed testing. Balance however is something the community can help with, which is the intent of the balance mod and its thread(s).
IMO balance (more importantly, gameplay) and performance are game killers for NS2, I know many people that would not keep playing even with a perfect 200 fps all game at this point.
As someone who used to play competitively quite a few nights and week and now might play once, I find the game to be extremely boring. It is clear and obvious to me and I imagine many other players exactly what to do in nearly every situation, and what strategy to use in every game. Thus every game comes down to merely mechanical skills and predicting your enemy, which although it is fun for a while is not enough to maintain my interest.
The balance patch is pretty cool in that it helps address these issues, but at the same time it majorly revamps other parts of the game such as movement. Is there something wrong with current lerk/fade movement? I would say no. Skulk, maybe. Is it necessary to revamp movement in order to add depth into the game? I would say no, but obviously many other people would say yes.
TLDR; fixes too strategy elements necessary, fixes to movment maybe not
IMO balance (more importantly, gameplay) and performance are game killers for NS2, I know many people that would not keep playing even with a perfect 200 fps all game at this point.
Pretty much. At this point even with performance increases I would not both continuing with the gameplay as it current is. I would continue if bt were implemented but no performance improvements. Plenty of people echoing this also.
I think I'd be done with NS2 if a big part of the BT will be used for Vanilla.
Some of it could go in, but overall the mod makes me puke.
Far more useful to post why than just to complain and say you won't play anymore.
Quite simple, really.
90% of the mods changes are bad.
lmao.
I like a lot of the stuff that's going in to the mod, I think the fade movement is less fun than the current live build but I also feel like I'm capable of doing more with it in combat. I think bunnyhopping is a really dated and unnecessary change to the movement system and would much rather see it go back to the way it was pre-240, but the BT movement is definitely more fun/better imo than the live build.
"why balance mod"
ns2 was released too early
ns2 needed balance changes
ns2 was released and these changes could not happen weekly as the game was live and had a much larger playerbase which is a lot more difficult to have a constantly changing retail game due to keeping users playing and tournaments etc (I believe there was a thread asking for less frequent patching in this forum)
balance mod is developed as a method for addressing these changes with an entirely voluntary community at first who can actively contribute to the testing and feedback process so that the changes can be rolled over in the same way to the live build
"I don't see a problem with live build"
lack of deep strategy, tactics, and skill required to play the game well. zero evolution in these same elements since release.
snowball RTS aspect that's determined almost exclusively by initial split-second engagements (not unlike CS in the worst kind of way)
skill ceiling for marine much higher than skill ceiling for alien - this is something that affects pubs the most so this mod is just as much for public players as much as competitive players. "I want to pubstomp so I will join aliens," said no pub stomper ever- that's because playing Skulk in live is atrocious and doesn't scale at all with skill
"wahh bunnyhopping"
video of b229 walljumping:
the concept is not actually not that different at all from the balance test (just chaining multiple jumps along walls), where were the people whining about "SO UNINTUITIVE" then?
oh thats right they were praising walljump as the alternative to the ever hated bunnyhopping.
bunnyhopping is just a consistent for maintaining speed in between walljumps, which is GOOD because it makes walljumping more congruent with skill and not just planning map routes - seriously it's not like everyone is fucking doing defrag maps everywhere it's just a combination system of walljumping and bunnyhopping that's pretty much objectively better. I'd rather be going a consistent 150% faster in BT, instead of in live hovering around 7-10 speed depending on what part of the map geometry I'm getting stuck on. although I can't speak for the lerk and the fade.
it's been tried and tested in multiple competitive environments and esports as the skill-based movement system (maybe not this exact physics but the concept of strafe accel at least)
oh my god whty are you even bothering to complain about this this is like the worst possible thing you could be complaining about since you can directly influence it lmao
"why balance mod"skill ceiling for marine much higher than skill ceiling for alien - this is something that affects pubs the most so this mod is just as much for public players as much as competitive players. "I want to pubstomp so I will join aliens," said no pub stomper ever- that's because playing Skulk in live is atrocious and doesn't scale at all with skill
Lold pretty hard at this, it is true that the skulk ceiling and floor are way to close together.
As far as bhopping goes, I don't hate that they're introducing bunnyhopping because of what it was, I hate them introducing it in a way that has it dumbed down to the point of anyone being able to use it to ~80% of it's best use in about 3-4 hours of practice. I understand that it's more about "when to use it" not how to use it, but it seems like such a useless mechanic if EVERYONE can do it. You might as well just make the skulk move that fast when jumping period.
Solely strafe jumping with no wall interaction does increase your speed but only to a point. If you want to reach crazy fast speeds like 14+, you need to use the wall jump mechanic.
As far as bhopping goes, I don't hate that they're introducing bunnyhopping because of what it was, I hate them introducing it in a way that has it dumbed down to the point of anyone being able to use it to ~80% of it's best use in about 3-4 hours of practice. I understand that it's more about "when to use it" not how to use it, but it seems like such a useless mechanic if EVERYONE can do it. You might as well just make the skulk move that fast when jumping period.
There currently isn't a speed cap so I would be willing to bet that the best BT skulks are only using 70-80% of the mechanics potential. Yes, it's fairly easy to pick up but that's the point. The purpose of the new movement is to increase the skill ceiling, not increase the skill floor along with it. Played a couple hours of scrims/pugs on it last night and you could clearly see the skill difference in the skulk movement (and all of us had more than 3-4 hours of BT)
Yeah, currently there isn't really a hard cap, but people have said that its max is about 40 as a speedcap, but its not possible to ever reach unless if someone made a jump map specifically made to reach that speed. I've been practicing the current walljump quite a bit now and usually a consistent 13.7-14 speed and when i'm hitting the walls properly and getting the right combination i get to about 15.7~. Which is WAY too high. For a good example:
Comments
I don't see any major game play flaws currently... Which is why I do not feel balance mod is viable... I didn't mean to rustle your jimmies brah
Also you are speaking extremely circumstantial, I don't know anything about lua, but I do know that if all this time the community was more pressed on testing a performance mod rather than balance it would be over all more beneficial...once again sorry about those jimmies
Anyone who is competitive has gotten used to every life forms movements and how they play it. If this mod becomes vanilla with movement changes to all life forms, that's going to hurt more than help. You can't just change that much of the game in one update. Think back to beta. Small changes to movement here and there. Minor tweaks. Not complete redesign of how to play a fade, skulk, lerk, AND onos.
Everyone keeps saying "play the balance mod, give feedback". I don't want to play the balance mod because I want to keep practicing and staying competitive with what real matches will be - vanilla. I don't want to spend weeks relearning every life form to get to the meta game and then be able to provide reasonable feedback to a lifeform's movement changes. Then when my team has a scrim, I'm used to a bt fade and not a vanilla fade and I might fumble.
Right now, it seems that there are only two options. Vanilla, or the balance mod. Both are so drastically different I might as well be loading up a completely different game.
There are a lot of things about sewlek's balance mod that I do like. The revamp to alien economy is great. I think it is a mistake to make it SO different from the game. Balance changes need to be done in baby steps. There needs to be a version of the balance mod that offers only a few of the changes. That gets tested, then it gets implemented. One patch every two to three weeks. Don't take 4 months revamping the entirety of the game and then implementing it, only to drive off a lot of people who liked a lot of the current vanilla ns2 changes.
A fundamental flaw with "play the balance mod and give feedback" is that I want to be competitive and practice trying to get better at movement, aim, prediction. It's hard when all of that keeps changing every few days with a new update. This game shouldn't be in a beta, and it shouldn't have this split between balance mod and vanilla.
Edit in response to Simba:
No one is asking you to not play vanilla at all. Keep playing vanilla. Keep practicing vanilla. We all are still doing that to stay competitive. All we are asking when we say "play the balance mod and give feedback" is to jump in a game every once in a while and comment on what you like and dislike. That way, you DO have some input on the changes that are coming to the game. I am fairly positive that the movement will be implemented eventually. Getting at least a taste of it might help you "stay competitive" once competition is forced to use the new movement.
That doesnt make any sense...
Seeing as how 90% of the people who purchased this game don't play it because they don't have a good time playing with terrible performance...I think it makes perfect sense.
I may not know how to fix it from a technical standpoint. but I am glad to put my time forward and help those who know how too.
News flash, you don't need to be an expert to know that something is flawed (and also offer a helping hand at doing whatever is needed). If someone fell onto the street and was having a heart attack, I wouldn't walk away because, "by my own admission I did not understand what is happening".
If you don't need to be an expert to see something is flawed, I have no idea how you cannot see the flaws in vanilla. In the end people need to comment on the balance mod changes, if you fail to do that, then really your doing nothing useful. I find it amazing how many people can complain about movement or balance changes, but when asked what specifically is wrong, they have no answers or just say it sucks. Quality feedback.
It really comes down to if you are willing to help improve the gameplay and the movement (which needs massive improvement over LIVE, there is no denying that), or just act as a roadblock to any changes. The latter being the stance many people have taken without even playing a single BT game.
Just to touch on one small part, do you not see issue with the fact that every game is carapace first? Is that not stale gameplay to you? (especially when the developers intend all upgrades to be used)
The 90% is just a rough estimate from seeing how many of my friends picked up the game and put it down due to performance, definitely not irrelevant.
I wasn't saying Andi should spend his time on a performance patch, I was saying the community needs to shift focus away from balance so much and over to performance, because balance is not the game killer.
Like I said I am giving BT a fair chance and have given my likes and dislikes about it, and many of the people you think just dismiss it have done the same.
Sorry if I came off a tad trolly earlier, but it seemed to me you were just arguing for the sake of arguing (with points that were already addressed earlier).
But the community has nothing to do with performance... unless there are tons of Lua programmers I don't know about. The only thing we, as players, can do is assist Andi with BT.
IMO balance (more importantly, gameplay) and performance are game killers for NS2, I know many people that would not keep playing even with a perfect 200 fps all game at this point.
As someone who used to play competitively quite a few nights and week and now might play once, I find the game to be extremely boring. It is clear and obvious to me and I imagine many other players exactly what to do in nearly every situation, and what strategy to use in every game. Thus every game comes down to merely mechanical skills and predicting your enemy, which although it is fun for a while is not enough to maintain my interest.
The balance patch is pretty cool in that it helps address these issues, but at the same time it majorly revamps other parts of the game such as movement. Is there something wrong with current lerk/fade movement? I would say no. Skulk, maybe. Is it necessary to revamp movement in order to add depth into the game? I would say no, but obviously many other people would say yes.
TLDR; fixes too strategy elements necessary, fixes to movment maybe not
Some of it could go in, but overall the mod makes me puke.
Far more useful to post why than just to complain and say you won't play anymore.
Pretty much. At this point even with performance increases I would not both continuing with the gameplay as it current is. I would continue if bt were implemented but no performance improvements. Plenty of people echoing this also.
Game is already dead, big changed bury things.
Lol do you ever have anything positive to say? Maybe this owl will cheer you up
90% of the mods changes are bad.
lmao.
I like a lot of the stuff that's going in to the mod, I think the fade movement is less fun than the current live build but I also feel like I'm capable of doing more with it in combat. I think bunnyhopping is a really dated and unnecessary change to the movement system and would much rather see it go back to the way it was pre-240, but the BT movement is definitely more fun/better imo than the live build.
ns2 was released too early
ns2 needed balance changes
ns2 was released and these changes could not happen weekly as the game was live and had a much larger playerbase which is a lot more difficult to have a constantly changing retail game due to keeping users playing and tournaments etc (I believe there was a thread asking for less frequent patching in this forum)
balance mod is developed as a method for addressing these changes with an entirely voluntary community at first who can actively contribute to the testing and feedback process so that the changes can be rolled over in the same way to the live build
"I don't see a problem with live build"
lack of deep strategy, tactics, and skill required to play the game well. zero evolution in these same elements since release.
snowball RTS aspect that's determined almost exclusively by initial split-second engagements (not unlike CS in the worst kind of way)
skill ceiling for marine much higher than skill ceiling for alien - this is something that affects pubs the most so this mod is just as much for public players as much as competitive players. "I want to pubstomp so I will join aliens," said no pub stomper ever- that's because playing Skulk in live is atrocious and doesn't scale at all with skill
"wahh bunnyhopping"
video of b229 walljumping:
the concept is not actually not that different at all from the balance test (just chaining multiple jumps along walls), where were the people whining about "SO UNINTUITIVE" then?
oh thats right they were praising walljump as the alternative to the ever hated bunnyhopping.
bunnyhopping is just a consistent for maintaining speed in between walljumps, which is GOOD because it makes walljumping more congruent with skill and not just planning map routes - seriously it's not like everyone is fucking doing defrag maps everywhere it's just a combination system of walljumping and bunnyhopping that's pretty much objectively better. I'd rather be going a consistent 150% faster in BT, instead of in live hovering around 7-10 speed depending on what part of the map geometry I'm getting stuck on. although I can't speak for the lerk and the fade.
it's been tried and tested in multiple competitive environments and esports as the skill-based movement system (maybe not this exact physics but the concept of strafe accel at least)
oh my god whty are you even bothering to complain about this this is like the worst possible thing you could be complaining about since you can directly influence it lmao
Lold pretty hard at this, it is true that the skulk ceiling and floor are way to close together.
As far as bhopping goes, I don't hate that they're introducing bunnyhopping because of what it was, I hate them introducing it in a way that has it dumbed down to the point of anyone being able to use it to ~80% of it's best use in about 3-4 hours of practice. I understand that it's more about "when to use it" not how to use it, but it seems like such a useless mechanic if EVERYONE can do it. You might as well just make the skulk move that fast when jumping period.
That's pretty much my point, it's not bunnyhopping, it's a weak version of it that is supposed to appeal to old competitive players, it's a joke.
I'm not up to date on the most recent BT build, so if it has changed then sorry, ignore if it's not relevant.
There currently isn't a speed cap so I would be willing to bet that the best BT skulks are only using 70-80% of the mechanics potential. Yes, it's fairly easy to pick up but that's the point. The purpose of the new movement is to increase the skill ceiling, not increase the skill floor along with it. Played a couple hours of scrims/pugs on it last night and you could clearly see the skill difference in the skulk movement (and all of us had more than 3-4 hours of BT)
http://www.twitch.tv/ns2soz/b/412767588?t=57m
lol silly Soz...
I used to be positive, until UWE released the ultimate useless content patch.