Reinforced can't come quickly enough. The state of balance right now is at best very frustrating.
Idleray
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
I've been playing marine games all day for the past few weeks since getting my new rig and honestly though the game is fundamentally fun in its basic mechanics it's infuriating to lose game after game and have nothing to blame it on except balance.
I'm sure this has been discussed to death but I would like to implore the balance team (if one exists) to make sure the state of balance doesn't get swung so wildly out of whack before releasing.
I'm sure this has been discussed to death but I would like to implore the balance team (if one exists) to make sure the state of balance doesn't get swung so wildly out of whack before releasing.
Comments
But being egg-locked is an unfun mechanic. So I dunno whatever it is the team has to do. People say fades are op. I personally think gorges are too cheap and bile bomb comes too early.
Also, aliens rush way more often than marines, so your numbers are a little off, probably
If you spent a day playing only as marines you will know what I mean (and probably quit in frustration).
* make gorges unable to get into vents, as this is has no real counters until jps, or except if a team is smart enough to boost into some of the few vents where this is possible (smart gorges will still clog and hydra
*Nerf hydras
*Move bile bomb back to 2 hives
*flamethrowers drain more energy to counter early fades & lerks for eg.
And onos need to be unfucked in the same hotfix, there is literally no counter play at all to having half a team of exos in 18-24p servers, I'd rather triple onos ruin comp games forever more then deal with this shit for another week.
skulks > marine
gorge > marine
lerk > marine
fades > marine
alien spawn rate > marine
rushing > building
of the 30% marine wins, marines are probably heavily stacked in 95% of those games
the true alien win rate for fair games is probably around 98%, and it gets slightly lower in comp play
-remove or fix the vent overlook/skylights, there is always a gorge camping there since he can kill 2rts with little issue and yes, I know you can boost up in overlook but it requires two marines and is not a certain win. With nano being easily taken by aliens they should not have a walk in the park killing marine rts. Most maps have rts placed safe from bile bombing gorges I mean come on. It should also not be possible to place gorge tunnels in vents. Also fix placeable tunnels above to the entrance to terminal. Marines can't reach it and barely shoot it.
And yes I agree gorges are too cheap for the massive boost they bring. Two gorges can lock down most exposed places (good example being crossroads) early game.
Pre-250 we saw a good rt take down between the teams even in public but wall jumping skulks with celerity are a little too quick to respond to an harassed rt. Not sure what to propose. Unlimited sprint is not an equal benefit.
It's also almost impossible to egg lock aliens now with the increased egg spawn rate, I think I've seen it 2-3 times and even then it was around 5-6 minute mark. The amount of times I've seen skulks rush the ip within 1 minute if the round and succeed is worrying
While I don't see fade balls as the biggest issue, it is worrying that the most effective and preferred/selected counter is a2 and shotguns, a2 being extremely important, something that most public commanders are unaware of.
With all the power Gorges have now in their spit attack and babblers, Hydras are now taking it over the top: you often now see a race to clog off key rooms at the very beginning of the game and these blocks are very difficult to overcome for average groups of marine players, if not impossible depending on the number of gorges involved or skulk reinforcements.
This basically means that in the FIRST minute of the game the outcome can be largely decided by the number of Alien players who are simply savvy enough to block access to res.
Clogging up a small entrance and placing hydras takes NO SKILL(or very little if you count the gorges jumping around spitting to complement defense), yet for the inordinate effect it has on the game it's overpowered.
In high player count servers this effect is especially acute, since TWO gorges defending a room essentially makes it impossible to take for however long before marines get shotguns.
However.....
Since I love playing gorgies as much as the next guy, I have a few novel idea in mind to fix this: make ARCs recyclable, so they can be deployed early with little investment.
I would also suggest making mines cheaper since the window of time in which they are useful is very small now with all the early game lerks and gorges.
Some did, i didn't, game was fine then imo. Aliens were a bit strong in terms of win% but it was acceptable. But atm balance is just disgusting. in competitive games marines win about 1 round of 4. So all that bullshit about blaming the noob marine commanders etc for the imbalance in pubs is just that, bullshit, Coz the game becomes even more imbalanced higher the skill goes. Making lerks and fades cheaper was the dumbest thing ever among multiple other retarded changes.
Yea the sample sizes aren't the best but when numbers are so disgusting as atm u don't need very big sample to tell something's wrong badly.
The problem with balance is that you cannot just look at win/loss ratios alone, however, they can give you an overall general idea about the state of the game.
To truly balance this game though, you have to look at win/loss ratios in regard to early game balance, mid game balance, late game balance AND you have to look at map/spawn balance and balance for different amounts of players (IE: 12 players s vs 24 players.)
Interestingly enough, NS2stats DOES give all those stats mentioned, but almost no one references them.
Well there's the problem, marines require coordination and that's already asking a lot.
even if the balance in a game is horrible, team-stacking will still result in a win
if you observe 100 games and measure 55 alien wins and 45 marine wins, it doesn't mean the balance is 55-45
80 of those games probably had stacked teams that resulted in 40 alien wins & 40 marine wins.
In that case, the observations of unstacked games would be more like 15 alien wins and 5 marine wins
for a game like NS2 where the vast majority of games have stacked teams, even a 52-48 ratio is absolutely horrible from a balance perspective
The significance of the data would be much easier to read over a much larger sample which I imagine UWE has at their disposal whereas we do not. The only time I would consider team stacking a statistical confounding variable would be during the steam sales where "pros" like to crush "noobs" but that is a time where balance is also not taken seriously since most people have no clue on how to play the respective sides properly.
This of course, answers to the balance percentages but it doesn't attribute to actual balance. I don't see most games being team stacked tbh, just one or two players just dominating as fade or really good marine play. You did imply that balance percentages are very difficult to measure and that is true in NS2's case on a large scale. NS2 is too difficult to reliably consider using balance percentages as an indication of a balance issue but that doesn't mean it's not possible to use percentages.
Aliens have a 70% win rate atm, that is definitely an indicator of a balance issue though, something like 55-45, not so much.
I would expect some marine buffs from that name, basically "reinforcing" them. It's more of a mechanical term, so it hints more at marines than aliens (IIRC "Gorgeous" was focusing more on aliens than marines in terms of new features (Babblers, Gorge Tunnels, Camouflage shader update), so the name was kinda fitting).
You could argue that they are just getting reinforced by the female marines, but I doubt that they would name a whole update after just that.
(Based on Hugh's blog posts thus far, I dare to say that he and UWE in general are not the guys who would do such a thing. It wouldn't fit their style, they like to have things fit together in a bigger picture and so these update names are preferably ambiguous to multiple contents of the update, so Hugh can point that out in a blog post that he's likely going to write about it.)
Plus the blog post about the update also said:
And when they say "lots", then I am sure they mean it. And the fact that the name of the update doesn't fit that well with the content revealed thus far makes me just even more confident about the unrevealed stuff.
Yeah, it's getting to the point where we'll likely be seeing fewer and fewer small patches. Effective balance tweaks would also be a pretty huge update on their own right now.. it's not like you can go from 30/70 to 50/50 by just changing some damage values or something. The weapons and lifeforms are for the most part balanced against eachother, the reason for the imbalance is that Marines require much more coordination, and right now in pubs aliens can basically all go fade and rambo and they will still win.
There's not a damn server in this game that runs 6v6 aside from private pugs.
1CC Protolab. Mass Exo trains. Shit Fades and lifeforms in general with little to no effective ability of crowd controlling that many players and MACS/turrets defending those Marines, LET ALONE EXOS. Flamethrowers completely rendering hive structures and Gorge structures useless within seconds.
I'm starting to realize why a game like COD no longer allows people to host servers anymore due to people creating servers with rules the game didn't originally intend (*cough*, 24slot ns2 *cough*)
Abilities like Focus bite/swipe in NS1 made even crowd-controlling in 32 slot servers tolerable, with acid rocket and xenocide being the ultimate turtle breakers being splash-damaged based abilities.
WHAT IS UWE (sewlek) DOING TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE? 6v6 is not the reality here. Go open NS2 right now and look at all the 24 slots. Don't even get me started on that ridiculous 32 slot server. I dont want to resort to 6v6 pugs to play what the actual game intended, and neither should regular pubbers.
Yet people wonder why this game loses players on occasion. Maybe because it's not FUN.
I don't care how much people stress this game is balanced for 6v6 or 8v8 or whatever.
I like my NS big and crowded and rowdy. And that means at least 9v9 and preferably 12v12. 'Sides here in Aus the best server to play on is the Monash 24 player server anyways so....
2. As others have confirmed, ns2stats does not have enough of a sample size.